The Progressive's Achille's heel - the tendency to adopt the role of the Philosopher King, imposing what they think is best on others despite their disagreement.

From Hot Time in the Old Town The Great Heat Wave of 1896 and the Making of Theodore Roosevelt by Edward P. Kohn.  Page 66.

The classic example of the progressive's Achille's heel - the tendency to adopt the role of the Philosopher King, imposing what they think is best on others despite their disagreement.  

After the violence among the striking tailors on Sunday, August 2, Theodore Roosevelt toured the precinct houses of the area. Newspapers singled out his Sunday saloon-closing crusade as the reason for the violence. Had the police not been preoccupied rousting Sunday drinkers, a larger police presence among New York’s laboring class might have kept the peace. Roosevelt, however, saw the Sunday closing law as in labor’s best interest.

Years before, Roosevelt had urged labor to make “war on the saloons that yearly swallow so incredibly large a proportion” of workers’ wages. Yet New York labor largely resented Roosevelt’s crusade against the saloons. The previous summer the Commercial Advertiser  had noted that at a meeting of the Central Labor Union, the attitude was, “The workingman wants his beer on Sunday, and what are we here for if not to benefit the workingman?” The American Federation of Labor may have believed that if saloons were “not permitted to adjoin the mansions of the wealthy neither shall they be permitted to intrude upon the wage earners’ precincts.” But trade unionists in New York did not agree and focused much of their resentment on Roosevelt personally. Labor leaders noted that while there had been over 8,000 arrests annually for excise violations under Roosevelt, there were only 104 arrests for violations of the factory law in 1895 and only 21 arrests for violation of the law in 1896. Roosevelt might say he was acting in labor’s best interest, but the slight enforcement of a law prohibiting minors from working more than sixty hours a week, and stopping children under thirteen from working in factories, seemed to show otherwise.