It helps us to see how the progressive movement became the means by which a lot of principles that had grown up in Europe took root in the United States, and in particular principles that were part of the German understanding of politics, and the German state, and the German understanding of history. And the influence of German thought, in German education, is evident not only from looking at the ideas of the progressives, but also just looking at the historical connections, at the pedigree of a lot of the most important progressive thinkers. Almost all of them were either educated in Germany or had as teachers those who had been educated in Germany, and this requires us to realize the real sea change that had taken place in higher education in the United States between say 1860 and 1900. This is at a time where most Americans who wanted a higher education, a graduate level education, went to Europe to get it and often went to Germany to get it. And thus by 1900, the faculties of American colleges and universities were populated with people who had been educated in Europe by and large in the German tradition.
One example would be, take a place like Johns Hopkins University. This was actually founded in 1876 with the explicit purpose of bringing the German educational model to the United States. And Hopkins was a place, not coincidentally, where some of the most important American progressives educated: people like Woodrow Wilson, people like John Dewey, and Frederick Jackson Turner, just to name a few.
