ABSTRACT
He was “goo goo,” to employ the phrase Charles A. Dana, former Brook Farm idealist, contemptuously used to describe such civil personages who refused to recognize the inevitability of special favors in public business. As applied to founders of Good Government Clubs, “goo goo” suggested childishness, goody-goody ethics, and an inability to cope with the real world. For one thing, they were premised on the expectation that goo goo critics of the left would accomplish more than did the goo goos. One of the greatest figures of the pre-Progressive era, Josephine Shaw Lowell, was closer to the despised goo goos than to any socialist or radical liberal complex. The two greatest accomplishments of the goo goos were undoubtedly social civility and civil-service reform. Civil service was uniquely an achievement of the genteel reformers. The most distinguished of civil-service reformers was Dorman B. Eaton, a Vermonter and graduate of Harvard Law School.
