Il-liberal ReformersRace, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era by Thomas C. Leonard Princeton University Reviewed by Dietmar Georg
Table of Contents 1. Background (Why I read this book) 2. The Author 3. The Book • The Transformation of the US Economy 1870- 1900 • Who were the “Progressives”? • What was their “belief system”? • Their goal(s) – Social Engineering • Eugenics • Race/Immigration • Women • Minimum Wage
What I will NOT discuss…1. Today’s flavor of “progressivism”2. Differences between “progressives” and “liberals”3. Details of the early progressives “eugenics” policies4. How the progressive American Economists have shaped the teaching of “Economics” at American Universities over the last century
It was the year 1978…..
(German) Boy…. meets (American) Girl….
Improving my English…to pass the “TOEFL”, I • purposely elected not to live with the other German exchange students• watched American TVand • partied………….
Two terms in American Political Discourse baffled me:1. “liberal” which – in America – has the opposite meaning it has in the rest of the world (a fine topic for another day)2. “Progressive” (Movement) A term, which has no equivalent in the German/European political spectrum
So 38 years later, I read“Il-liberal Reformers” with much anticipation …. …and was not disappointed
The Author – Thomas C. Leonard
The Book –Critical Acclaim
The Book – Secondary Resources for Further Research• Wikipedia entries on author and on book• Author’s official Princeton University website• Author’s Slide Show• Podcast with author on Russ Roberts Show• Book reviews: • New York Times, David Oshinsky, March 14, 2016 • The New Republic, Malcolm Harris, January 21, 2016 Email me ([email protected]), if you would like to have the presentation
The Book –Table of Contents
…pretty strong stuff…
Why does the “The vital national issues of the late nineteenth century—economic • economic depressionprofession • financial panicfeature so • labor conflictprominently • money warsin Leonard’s • big businessbook? • immigration, and • “the tariff” were economic in nature, and public discourse placed economics at the center of a vigorous national debate over where and how government should respond to the consequences of an economic transformation that reached into the country’s remotest corners.”
Why does the “From 1880 to 1900, both fostering and economic benefiting from a revolution in American profession feature so higher education, the progressive prominently economists established economics in Leonard’s as a university discipline, book? transforming American political economy from a species of public discourse among gentlemen into an expert, scientific practice- economics.”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930)The US “[From 1870 – 1905]…the US economy had quadrupled in size. American Economy living standards had doubled. US economic output surpassed each of in the 4th the German, French, and Japanese empires in the 1870s. It overtook the Quarter nineteenth century’s global colossus, the British Empire, in 1916.” of the 19thCentury “The transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy— and from rural communities to a metropolitan society— produced social dislocations so unprecedented as to require new words, such as urbanization, a term coined in Chicago in 1888 to describe the migration from farm to factory and the explosive growth of America’s industrial cities.” “Historian Thomas Haskell described the American economic transformation of the late nineteenth century as ‘the most profound and rapid alteration in the material conditions of life that human society has ever experienced.’”
The basic “Free markets, to the extent they ever creed of the could, no longer self-regulated. Progress, progressive the economic progressives argued, now economists: required the visible hand of a powerful administrative state, guided by expert social scientists...”
The basic “…the economists joined their progressive belief of the allies in a crusade to reform and remake progressive American government. If an administrative economists: state were to be the new guarantor of economic progress, it would need to be built. By March 1917, the end of Woodrow Wilson’s first term, it was. Countless additions would later be made to the new regulatory edifice, but the “fourth branch” of government was established.”
The “Fourth “The US government now Estate” was • directly taxed personal incomes, corporations, and estatesestablished • dissolved prominent industrial combinations in steel, oil, by 1917: tobacco, and sugar • its new Federal Reserve regulated money, credit, and banking • its new Federal Trade Commission supervised domestic industry, and • its new Tariff Commission regulated international trade. • State and federal labor legislation mandated workmen’s compensation, banned child labor, compelled schooling of children, inspected factories, fixed minimum wages and maximum hours, paid pensions to single mothers with dependent children, and much more.”
The “Fourth “The establishment of the fourth Estate” was branch marked an epoch-making established change in the relationship of by 1917: government to American economic life.”
Who were the Progressive Scientists is America?Economists: Edward Bemis, John R. Commons, Richard T. Ely, Irving Fisher, Arthur Holcombe, Jeremiah Jenks, W. Jett Lauck, Simon N. Patton, Henry SeagerSociologists: Charles Horton Cooley, Charles Richmond Henderson, Edward A. Ross “Pioneering social Edward Devine, Robert Hunter, Paul U. Kellogwork professionals”: Charles Van Hise (Wisconsin), David Starr Jordan (Stanford)University Presidents: Hebert Croly, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roscoe PoundJournalists/Jurists Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow WilsonPoliticians/Presidents continued
Who were the Progressive Scientists is America?“It was the progressives who “Eugenics and race science are fashioned the new sciences of today discredited. But the society, founded the modern progressive vision of how to govern American university, invented the scientifically under industrial think tank, and created the capitalism lives on. Expertise in the American administrative state, service of an administrative state, institutions still at the center of what progressives called social American public life and still control, has survived the defined by the progressive values discredited notions once used to that formed and instructed them.” uphold it. Indeed, it has thrived.”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) The Late 19th Century: Historical Background - Summary • 1890s - “Political Economy” becomes a Science (“Economics”) • 1890s - The Progressives “hijack” the term “liberal” and turn its meaning upside down (but only in America) • Ascendancy of the American Economics University Professor, many of whom had studied in Germany (German Economics departments were dominated by members of the German Historical School, who opposed Adam Smith style “English Laissez-Faire” economics)
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar – The Connection with Bismarckian Germany “To obtain advanced instruction in political economy, which was all but unavailable from the sleepy, postbellum American colleges, American reformers traveled to the German universities, which, in the 1870s and early 1880s, were regarded as the world’s finest in political economy”.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar – The Connection with Bismarckian Germany The German economics professors were a. Bureaucrats, employed by the government (you don’t bite the hand that feeds you) b. Never accepted the wisdom of English classical economists such as Adam Smith or David Ricardo c. Rejected “laissez-faire” economics (which they derided as “manchesterism”) d. Believed “economics” was a science akin to “history”; there were no universally true – independent of time and place - economic laws. Hence they were called the “German Historical School”; their influence lasted until about 1914. (long into the 20th century, “economics” in Germany was called “Nationalökonomie”, or the “economics of the nation state”) e. They were equally opposed to “laissez-faire” and to “socialism”; they tried to stake out a position in between the two polar opposites. They supported the Bismarckian welfare reforms.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930)Sidebar –The Connection with Bismar-ckianGermanyLeading Economists of the German Historical School of Economics
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar – The Connection with Bismarckian Germany • “German university professors in the 1870s and early 1880s occupied a social space as yet nonexistent in the United States: the academic scientist of society, with political influence and social standing. The American graduate students who traveled to Germany met there a new and compelling idea: economic reform could be a vocation, even a distinguished one”. • “In 1880, the United States had three faculty members at the leading schools devoting most of their time to political economy” • By 1880 college courses in Latin outnumbered courses in economics by 10 to 1; 20 years later the ratio had shrunk to 2:1
On the Consequences of the German Historical SchoolOne economist most critical of the German Historical School has maintained that Germany’s economic and political disasters in the 20th century • two lost wars• the hyperinflation of the early 1920s, • the Zwangswirtschaft [controlled economy] and • all the horrors of the Nazi regime “…were achievements of politicians who acted as they had been taught by the champions of the Historical School”. (Ludwig von Mises, The Historical Setting of the Austrian School; my emphasis & bulleting)
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar II – The Formation of the American Economic Association • “The AEA [- to this very day, by far the most powerful association in American academic economics -] was formed to exclude other claimants to economic knowledge by making them outsiders and amateurs” • “The first generation of progressive economists had created, essentially ex nihilo, two new and influential vocations in America: the professor of economics and the expert economist in the service of the administrative state.” • “The progressives’ break with their classically liberal roots was one of the most striking intellectual changes of the late nineteenth century, one with far-reaching consequences.”
The policy leanings of modern day AEA membersWhat is the percentage of modern day (2003) AEA members, whoA: Support “free market principles”? 8%B: Strongly support “free market <3%principles”?Source
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar III – Turning “Il-liberal” Here is what 3 of the German schooled founders of the AEA wrote about individual liberties: • Washington Gladden…condemned individual liberty as “an unsound basis for democratic government, instead it was “a radical defect in the thinking of the average American” • John R. Commons said “that social progress required the individual to be controlled, liberated, and expanded by collective action” • Edward A. Ross maintained “individuals were but ‘plastic lumps of human dough’, to be formed on the great ‘social kneading board’”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar III – Turning “Il-liberal” (continued) • The New Republic portrayed Constitutional protection of individual liberties as “quaint and retrograde”. “What inalienable right has the individual”, its editors asked, “against the community that made him and supports him” • Woodrow Wilson, when president of Princeton University, dismissed inalienable rights of the individual as “nonsense” • Roscoe Pound said in 1913 that the Constitution’s Bill of Rights amendments, the core of American civil liberties, “were not needed in their own day, [and] they are not desired in our own.”
Sidebar: Richard T. Ely, founder of of AEA• To this day, the presidential address of the annual AEA meeting is called the “Richard T. Ely Lecture”• A historian of economic thought called him the “Paladin of the Welfare-Warfare State”..[he was a] “life-long militarist”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1930) Sidebar III – Turning “Il-liberal” The progressive scientists used different terms for “the social organism”: nation, state, society, the commonwealth, the public, the people, the race, and especially the social organism” If the “society” was more important than its individual members, 2 questions needed to be answered: 1. What did society want? 2. Who would be charged with knowing what society wanted? The second question was easily answered: They, the self-appointed progressive scientists, or – as Edward E. Ross put it – “the wise minority should be in the saddle”.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) • During the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, professional social science, the American research university, and the American welfare state all grew up together, of common origins. • All three institutions were founded or influenced by a pioneering band of progressive American economists, who made the case that administrative government should intervene broadly in voluntary commercial relationships.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) The men and women who made American economics into an academic, policy discipline, and who built the foundations of the American welfare state, were also partisans of human inequality, heirs to the American tradition of race thinking, and their justification for economic reform was deeply informed by evolutionary science, especially by the Progressive Era vogue for eugenics, the social control of human heredity.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) The Late 19th Century – Summary of the Book’s Part I • US Economic transformation (”urbanization”; from “farm to factory”) • “Economics” becomes discipline at American Universities • First generation of US professors of economics learned their trade in Bismarck’s German universities from the “German Historical School”, known for their rejection of theoretical economics, especially “laissez fair” economics • The term “liberal” was appropriated by the progressives and its meaning turned upside down. The individual became subservient to the state. • By the beginning of WW I the building of the administrative state (the “Fourth Estate” had been completed)
The Book –Table of Contents
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920)Part II: The Progressive Mindset and Policy Goals• “Social Control”: Darwinism, Eugenics & Race• The problem: The “Labor Question”• The solution: Policies of Exclusion • Foreigners • The Low Skilled (Undesirables) • Women • The Minimum Wage
Darwinism, Eugenics, and “Race Suicide”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920)“Social Control”: Darwinism, Eugenics & Race“…while progressives rejected survival of the fittest (natural selection), they did not reject selection. On the contrary, progressives departed only on the question of how selection was best accomplished.”For progressives, Darwin’s natural selection was too slow; true progress required (faster) “social” selection
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920)“Social Control”: Darwinism, Eugenics & Race“Eugenics” derives from the Greek for “well born” and describes the move-ment to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding. … The term was minted in 1883 by Francis Galton…a cousin of Darwin”. According to Galton:1. Differences in human intelligence, character and temperament were due to heredity2. Human heredity could be improved (and with reasonable dispatch)3. Human heredity was “almost as plastic as clay, under the control of the breeder’s will”
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) “In other words, eugenics proposed to replace random natural selection with purposeful social selection”. Galton: “What nature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly”.
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) • “American eugenic thought probably reached its high-water mark during the First World War and the decade after” • “Between 1914 and 1928 the number of American university courses dedicated to eugenics increased from 44 to 376” • Eugenicists tracts were bestsellers (a 1924 bibliography listed well over 6,000 eugenicist titles)
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920) The Eugenics “toolkit”: • Indiana passed forcible sterilization law in 1907, the first of more than thirty American states to do so. • In 1911 Governor Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey’s forcible sterilization legislation, which targeted “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes” • In 1915, Irving Fisher declared “…America must improve its hereditary resources by banning alcohol, barring immigrants, and segregating or sterilizing the unfit” • “Over 20,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized between 1931 and 1939..”
Darwinism, Eugenics, and “Race Suicide”Eugenics was pervasive and not just confined to progressivism:
Darwinism, Eugenics, and “Race Suicide”Eugenics was not confined to scientists: Some quotes (from the book):• Jack London “…his work was rife with eugenicist and white supremacist notions.”• “Eugene O’Neil brought hereditarian themes to the American stage, leaving a permanent stamp on American theater”.• “The human race, T. S. Eliot wrote, can if it will, improve indefinitely, ‘by social and economic reorganization, by eugenics….’”• “Virginia Woolf confided to her diary ’that imbeciles should certainly be killed’”• “D. H Lawrence, with horrible prescience, indulged in an extermination fantasy:” “If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile at me”
Darwinism, Eugenics, and “Race Suicide” Well-know supporters of eugenics included: • Theodore Roosevelt • Charles Van Hise (influential President of Univ. of Wisconsin) • Irving Fisher (America’s best known economist) • George Bernard Shaw • Sidney and Beatrice Webb (Fabian Socialists) • Margaret Sanger (opened the first birth control clinic in America)
The Progressive Movement (1890-1920)Part II: The Progressive Mindset and Policy Goals• “Social Control”: Darwinism, Eugenics & Race• The problem: The “Labor Question”• The solution: Policies of exclusion • Foreigners • The Low Skilled (Undesirables) • Women • The Minimum Wage
Search
