By trying to erase progressive history, he not only shows how it threatens conservatives but urges us to keep the fight going.

One thing you have to say for Governor Paul LePage of Maine is that he's an honest guy. Right-wing Republicans incessantly proclaim their reverence for the American past. But the Governor has made it quite clear that, contrary to their repeated claims, conservatives do not revere the nation's history but actually fear it and believe they must act to control what people remember and know of it.

Determined to make Maine ever more inviting to business executives and their investments, LePage not only has set out -- like many another Republican governors, such as Scott Walker of Wisconsin -- to weaken, if not destroy, public employee unions and workers' rights. LePage also has taken steps to "neutral[ize]" American history. He has ordered both the removal of a labor history mural from the walls of the state's Department of Labor Building and the renaming of its conference rooms so that they no longer bear those of 1960s farm-worker leader César Chavez, 1920s labor activist Rose Schneiderman, and President Franklin Roosevelt's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins (the first woman ever to hold a Cabinet-level appointment).

Three cheers for Governor LePage! Instead of denying what he's up to, he reveals all. He wants to wipe the walls of government clean of the progressive story of what has made America prosperous and ever more free, equal, and democratic. He wants a history that makes the rich and the right comfortable, happy, and ready to roll.

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Forget the blissful ignorance of Minnesota congresswoman Michelle Bachmann. History, historical memory, and imagination matter and the folks on the right know it. Pursuing class war from above for more than thirty years now, conservative and corporate leaders have persistently sought to harness the past -- or their strange renditions of it -- to bolster their own pro-corporate and reactionary ambitions and schemes. Following the lead of their champion, actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan, the unrivaled master of using and abusing history, Republicans and their ilk continue to conjure up their marble images of the Founders, wrap themselves in the American flag (if not the Stars & Bars on occasion), and talk of bygone eras and their desire to restore "the America we have lost." You can find them doing so from the halls of Congress and many a statehouse, from the studios of FOX News and many an AM radio station, and from the pages of innumerable books and periodicals.

But they really do not seek to redeem the past. Rather, they want to hijack it by variously and variably fabricating it, obscuring it, and burying it in favor of a tale that denies the power of "We the people" past and present and enhances their own power and wealth forever after.

We progressives have so much to do today. But in doing it we must not fail to challenge the right regarding American experience and greatness. We must do a better job of cultivating and speaking to American historical memory and imagination. We must re-engage America's past -- to defend it, to redeem it, to make it our own.

In 1939, when the Great Depression still stalked the United States and fascism and imperialism were threatening to rule the world, Max Lerner wrote in "It Is Later Than You Think: The Need for a Militant Democracy", "The basic story in the American past, the only story ultimately worth the telling, is the story of the struggle between the creative and the frustrating elements in the American democratic adventure."

In that spirit, we must never forget the exploitation and oppression, the tragedies and injustices, and the struggles and defeats that have marked our history. But we must also remember the victories of 1776, 1865, 1920, 1935, 1945, 1965. We must hear the encouraging words and inspiring ideals: All men are created equal... Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness... We the People... A new birth of freedom... Government of the people, by the people, for the people... Freedom of speech, Freedom of worship, Freedom from want, Freedom from fear... We shall overcome. And we must honor those men and women -- in all their American diversity -- who fought those battles, spoke those words, and progressively advanced America's historic purpose and promise.

Three cheers for Governor LePage -- not just for revealing all, but also for reminding us of what we need to do, especially now with the resurgence of America's democratic impulse emanating from Wisconsin!

Propelled by the memory and legacy of those who came before us, the yearnings and aspirations we ourselves feel, and the responsibility we have to those yet to come, we can pursue not only the imperatives of recovery and reconstruction, but also that of making a freer, more equal, and more democratic America. We too can both secure the past and make history. And perhaps one day our children will recall 2011, recite the words "This is what democracy looks like," and not only return the labor mural to the walls of the state office building in Maine, but also add their own historical panels to that work.

Harvey J. Kaye is the Rosenberg Professor of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay and the author of Thomas Paine and the Promise of America. He is currently writing The Four Freedoms and the Promise of America. Follow him on Twitter: www.twitter.com/HarveyJKaye

Their sacrifice can live on if we fight for the reforms sparked by their deaths.

The names of the of the victims of the Triangle fire mean more to me than most Americans. Having lived most of my life in Italian and Jewish neighborhoods in and around New York City, I feel as though I know these people. Their faces were faces I grew up with. Their names -- Caputo, Colletti, Levine, Kaplan, Maltese, Schneider and Uzzo -- are names I've known all my life; names that echo with the same Southeastern European cadences and rhythm as mine.

What do we owe the victims of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire? It is something I've thought long and hard about, especially on the one-hundredth anniversary of this great tragedy.

I remember once traveling by train through Southern Italy at night. I gazed out of the compartment window seeing mountain villages in the dark distance. Even then in the late twentieth century they appeared so isolated from the modern world. As I stared I thought about those who almost a century earlier had the courage and audacity to leave this then-still medieval world behind and risk the future in what was a totally alien culture of the industrial United States. I equally wondered in amazement at those who left behind their shtetls in Poland and Russia. They also took the same incredible gamble.

My great-grandmother, who came from Italy in the late nineteenth century, was a garment worker during the same period of the Triangle fire. My grandmother, Josephine, and her sisters Mary, Tessie and Rosie were also garment workers. And my mother-in-law, who came here from Italy in 1970, was also a garment worker. Like those who came before her, she spoke no English when she arrived. Yet just three days after coming to America she courageously got on a subway train, road from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and began work at a sewing machine.

As a boy, I vividly remember going to visit my grandmother in her work places, and in later years I remember going with my wife to pick her mother up at the end of her workday. All these shops were very much the same. Even with union representation they were dimly lit and cramped. Foremen still pressed for greater productivity. In the winter they would be chilly and in the summer, stifling hot. And yet they worked with the understanding that honest labor is a form of high honor.

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But what binds the victims of the Triangle fire to the garment workers I knew, and by extension, all of us? Any link I have to the 146 victims goes beyond ethnicity and neighborhoods. While many of the victims were Italian or Jewish New Yorkers, it is a greater link; indeed, it is a quality that goes to the heart of the American experience. What binds all of us is a concept of liberty that is almost too oblique to those who are now attempting to take away collective bargaining rights or gut job safety regulations. It is how many of these garment workers themselves could have defined liberty, not just as a means to accumulate massive wealth but "as a beacon of hope, shining out to oppressed peoples; it was the future teaching out to the present, to unchain humanity from the shackles of the past."

Part of that "beacon of hope" was the ability to earn their way into a better life. In exchange for giving their honest effort every work day, all they wanted was a fair wage and a safe place to toil. Those essential attributes of liberty were denied to the victims of the fire. And because they were so denied, they became reluctant martyrs for reform. Unwittingly, their burning bodies, tumbling through space, energized a movement that would lead to the creation of the modern American middle class. Their death and suffering earned a better life for you and me. And yet question still remains: What do we owe the 146 who perished that early spring day one century ago?

Frances Perkins, FDR's future Secretary of Labor, witnessed the fire. She was instrumental in the effort of progressive reform and was quoted as saying that March 25, 1911 was "the day the New Deal began." What she meant was that the tragedy of that horrible fire made Americans begin to truly realize that working people were not merely a means to wealth, but ends in and of themselves, worthy of being treated with dignity. It was the singular event that transformed Al Smith and Robert Wagner, Sr., from Tammany Hall hacks into champions of reform. It caused the Democratic Party to better live up to it moniker, "the party of the people."

Grover Norquist echoes the sentiments of many movement conservatives by saying that he wants to take the country back to the time before the Progressive Era, which began with the Triangle fire. At the very least, we owe the Triangle victims the task of reminding everyone what that world looks like. It bares the face of child labor and unsafe working conditions. And sadly we need not look to the past to be reminded; it now exists in third-world countries where far too many of our clothes are  being made. Beyond that, as advocates of FDR's legacy we owe the victims a promise that we will fight to keep the Democratic party from slipping back to its pre-fire days, when they catered to wealthy factions, by supporting those who still carry the mantle of reform.

We owe them that much. To fail to do so would dishonor their terrible sacrifice.

Frank L. Cocozzelli writes a weekly column on Roman Catholic neoconservatism at Talk2Action.org and is contributor to Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America. A director of the Institute for Progressive Christianity, he is working on a book on American liberalism.

Remembering Women’s History Month and the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, New Deal 2.0 tells the surprising story of how women became citizens — and how their economic lives have evolved along with their rights. Barbara Arnwine explains why we've not yet entered a "post-gender" world when it comes to women's status in the workplace.

Women's History Month is a very special time to reflect upon both the particular challenges that women continue to face in the workplace and upon the new opportunities that will arise for economic equity. It's also a time is to appreciate the struggles of the Sheroes who came before us who opened the doors of opportunity.

It is up to us to recognize the significance of being women and also the importance of being a part of a broader collective that lifts the stature of everyone - male and female. We must ask ourselves, how do we both acknowledge the persistent disparities and concerns of the past while also looking to the future for continued upward mobility for all? Gender-based issues of increasing unemployment, job silos, unequal pay, sexual harassment and the "Old Boys Network" continue to haunt the American workplace and denigrate the economic status of women. And this affects everyone.

The fact is, it's not quite time for "post-gender" thinking. Take the latest unemployment figures. While we added some 192,000 jobs in February, the overall scenario for women was not rosy. The National Women's Law Center notes that over the course of the recovery, women's overall unemployment rate increased from 7.7 percent to 8 percent, while men's dropped from 9.8 percent to 8.7 percent. Even more disheartening, between July 2009 and February 2011 unemployment rates increased for single mothers (from 12.6 percent to 13 percent) and African-American women (11.8 percent to 13 percent).

Recently, we witnessed the crisis facing public workers in Wisconsin. Governor Walker's actions are of immense importance to women and stand in direct contradiction to our continued progress. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women comprise 52 percent of state-level public sector jobs and 61 percent at the local level. The impact on state and local job cuts in the public sector will be especially devastating to women at a time when the recession has already disproportionately impacted us.

Women of color, already facing large pay gaps, are in danger of falling still further behind as bargaining rights disappear. Dr. Steven Pitts of UC Berkeley's Center for Labor Research and Education notes that black women in the public sector earn a median wage of $15.50 an hour, while the sector's median wage overall is $18.38 (white men make $21.24). This is not so surprising when you consider that African-American women comprise only 12.2 percent of labor unions. This data exemplifies the compelling need for workers to have the ability to bargain for equal rights in the workforce. The wage gap remains an important civil rights crisis for women. We have made gains in areas of education and employment, yet we know that we have not been fully acknowledged in the workplace when the paycheck arrives. This illustrates the distinction between the evolution of personal achievement and universal women's emancipation.

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Barriers still confront women in many professions and prevent us from achieving true equality. While we should appreciate the success stories, such as women's increased access to law firms, there are still challenges to overcome. The retention rate, for example, tells a bleaker story about how women fare in the legal profession. The attrition rate for white female attorneys within 55 months is 77 percent, while minority female attorneys at law firms have the highest attrition rate, at 41 percent within 28 months and 81 percent within 55 months. A Diversity and the Bar report notes that women of color often feel isolated in an "old boy's network" environment. It appears that white male attorneys share a greater opportunity for advancement, perhaps because often times those in power (white males) are connected most with people like them. While it is critical that law firms fulfill their responsibility to systemically address these barriers to women's achievement, women must also assist in advancing each other.

This year marked the 100th Anniversary of International Women's Day. The United Nations highlighted, as I have, that despite the gains made, much remains to be done to eliminate gender discrimination. Until these vast disparities are addressed and systematically dismantled, this country's economic viability for the future will never be fully realized. The time for a level playing field is long overdue.  As women, we must find our voices and be active in advocating for real equality in these times. And we must always look beyond the headlines to find "her" story.

Barbara Arnwine has been the executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law since 1989.

Shaping the future with today’s choices.

There is a standard Russian response to the question: How are things? Which is: "Worse than yesterday, better than tomorrow." That's roughly where I am. And let me be clear: I am not a Utopian. I think the glass now is 80% empty, not 20% full. I am well aware that in politics the inconceivably long-run is Friday and I think our politics is broken at both ends with a vacuum in the center.

But we have before us, occurring simultaneously, three new lows: Wisconsin, Congressman Peter King's anti-Muslim hearings, and the budget antics of the House Republicans. You know the details as well as I do. I want to extract and comment on a common element throughout each. I am even more pessimistic about what these episodes have in common than I am about the differing surface issues they involve.

Wisconsin: I mostly agree with the Republican Governor's budget stance and I am virtually certain we will see these same budget pressures play out in almost every state. But I am appalled at the mean-spiritedness the Governor and the Wisconsin Republicans have displayed toward the state's public employees unions. It is entirely possible to be ambivalent about public employees unions (FDR was ambivalent about public sector unions, though he was certainly not anti-union, as some have suggested) without trying to break them. And it would have been possible to say explicitly that all of the state's citizens were in this together. But this is not the path the Governor took. He did it out of "pure meanness," as we used to say in high school; he did it because he could.

Congressman Peter King: His hearings last week -- ostensibly to explore U.S. domestic Muslim radicalism -- were based on nothing and uncovered nothing. This is a time when our country ought to be pulling together, a time when one of the best things we could possibly do to counter terrorism would be to embrace our Muslim citizens as part of America's fabric. However, the Congressman chose to emulate some of the sorrier moments of American history. He did it out of pure meanness; he did it because he could.

House Republican Budget Antics: With a highly refined sense for the capillaries, the House Republicans are focusing on less than 10% of the budget to solve the whole problem. Moreover their "death by a thousand two week cuts" approach makes everything worse.

I believe -- as I have made clear -- that we have to change our debt and deficit trends. But we have to do this consistent with our economic health. We do, after all, have a close to 9% unemployment rate. And eventually we will have to look at everything -- new tax revenues, entitlements, and defense.

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But when we finish this we also have to have a strong and competent public sector. That is not the direction the House Republicans are taking. They are slashing wildly, taking out regulatory, oversight, and management budgets that might actually save money. There is not a scintilla of evidence that there is any actual thought here beyond a frenzied desire to hit a completely random number. As someone once said about a baseball player, "He can't hit, but on the other hand he can't field." In this case, these actions won't have any discernible effect on the deficit, but they will make a lot of programs worse. They are doing it out of pure meanness; they are doing it because they can.

The actual policies embedded or implied in these episodes are terrible. But what the episodes are saying about our whole system, and about where we are going, is worse. Think about "pure meanness," polarization, absence of compromise, and belief in magic.

Start with meanness. I've been in and around politics and government for almost 50 years. I have zero illusions about it. It is a hard game -- during my first White House experience, I was going through a very bad period and a friend said, "Shut up. This is the big leagues and they throw at your head." But at the same time, Lyndon Johnson and Everett Dirksen had a drink together every evening. Tip O'Neil played poker and golf with Jerry Ford. They were opponents, not enemies. The sense you get today -- on the right and the left -- is that it is almost as if the two sides don't share the same country. In each of the three examples above, the winners are acting with a degree of sheer meanness that says they don't think the other side has any legitimate interests.

The meanness, however, is just a symptom of polarization. In fact, the two sides do not share the same country. For my breakfast seminar, The Next American Economy, I asked Bill Bishop, author of a great book "The Big Sort", to speak. We are sorting ourselves and segregating ourselves by lifestyle and ideology. At a national level, we are roughly equally divided between Democrats and Republicans, but at the local level the division is much more a series of 80-20 splits. As a result, when someone wins an election, the result is due to the 80, the 20 is irrelevant, and the winner does not feel the slightest compunction to acknowledge its existence. As a result, our congress is more divided than at any time in the last 100 years. And it is a very widely known aspect of group dynamics that homogeneity begets more homogeneity: like groups become more like and drive out the dissidents. That is very clearly happening with both the right and the left in America.

Which means, as an immediate consequence, that both sides think compromise is evil. The Tea Party movement enforced a rigid purity in 2010 -- ask former Republican senator Robert Bennett, a deeply conservative man with an unfortunate proclivity for civility and bipartisanship. The Democratic Party's left is much the same -- look at how Erskine Bowles has been treated. But there is not a single major problem in American life that can be solved from only one side of our political spectrum. For two reasons: first, the votes aren't there; and second, the real ideas aren't there. Both America's right and left are mired in orthodoxies that serve to prevent the emergence of new ideas.

And as a result we get a politics dominated by a profound attachment to magic, or more prosaically, to problem avoidance. If you are part of a polarized political system, if you believe that your opponents are enemies and compromise is evil, then unless you are irredeemably stupid, you also know that you aren't actually going to accomplish anything. So you turn to magic and/or problem avoidance. Congressman King invents enemies. The House Republicans choose "trophy" cuts -- zeroing in on NPR. The left simply denies that there is a debt/deficit issue. It would all be fun to watch, except I keep thinking that the universe may not wait while we keep playing these games.

Roosevelt Institute Senior Fellow Bo Cutter is formerly a managing partner of Warburg Pincus, a major global private equity firm. Recently, he served as the leader of President Obama’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) transition team.