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Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era Hardcover – January 12, 2016
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The pivotal and troubling role of progressive-era economics in the shaping of modern American liberalism
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors but to exclude them.
- Print length264 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPrinceton University Press
- Publication dateJanuary 12, 2016
- Dimensions6.5 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- ISBN-100691169594
- ISBN-13978-0691169590
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Winner of the 2017 Joseph J. Spengler Best Book Prize, History of Economics Society
Finalist for the 2017 Hayek Prize, The Manhattan Institute
One of Bloomberg View's Great History Books of 2016
"Illiberal Reformers is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues."--David Oshinsky, New York Times Book Review
"A deft analysis. . . . [I]nsightful."--Amity Shlaes, Wall Street Journal
"Particularly timely . . . a superlative narrative about a pivotal era of American history."--American Thinker
"Compelling. . . . Leonard reveals the largely forgotten intellectual origins of many current controversies."--Virginia Postrel, Bloomberg View
"Excellent."--Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution
"Explosively brilliant."--Jeffrey Tucker, Foundation for Economic Education
"[A] brief, well written book."--Herbert Hovenkamp, The New Rambler
"Elegant and persuasive. . . . Read Leonard."--Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Reason
"Those puzzled by the ease with which contemporary progressive political movements have turned against liberal values such as free speech will find much material for reflection in Leonard's lucid intellectual history of early twentieth-century progressivism. . . . [Illiberal Reformers] illuminates one phase in the centuries-long American struggle between the quest for liberal values and the impulse to build a godly commonwealth on the back of a strong state."--Walter Russell Mead, Foreign Affairs
"Leonard combines rigorous research with lucid writing, presenting a work that is intellectually sound, relevant, and original."--Joseph Larsen, josephjonlarsen.com
"Illiberal Reformers is a great achievement and an important contribution to the revisionist historical literature."--Steven Hayward, National Review
"Illiberal Reformers is a downright frightening tale of how intellectual arrogance and a belief in one's own superiority leads to callous disregard for individual rights and dignity. Budding social engineers, whether the social justice warriors of the left or the theocratic conservatives of the right, should take note of this past and seriously reckon with it as they grope for state power to implement their messianic visions of the common good. But somehow I have a feeling they'll be too thoroughly convinced of their own moral rectitude to take seriously the lessons of the Progressive Era. Cautionary tales have a way of missing those who need them most."--Matthew Harwood, American Conservative
"To reflect on the significance of the Progressive era, Illiberal Reformers is a must read."--Pierre Lemieux, Regulation
"An excellent book and a cautionary tale for our own times."--Robert Whales, Choice
"Thomas Leonard has crafted an elegant, original, and cleverly argued account of core progressive ideas. Illiberal Reformers is deeply researched, and far ranging in the deployment of primary sources. Leonard has not just recycled material from the voluminous secondary literatures on eugenics, economics, immigration, race ‘theory,' labor studies, and Darwinism. Instead he has invariably read key thinkers' publications and quotes from these primary documents, often to devastating effect. The book is a major achievement."--Desmond King, Perspectives on Politics
"One hopes that Leonard's fine volume will put an end to the reflexive habit of many to defend the early liberals, who when it came to people unlike themselves were with rare exception not liberal at all."--Stephen Carter, Bloomberg View
"A very important book that deserves to be read by every economist and academic, particularly those interested in American history, and especially those interested in the history of economic thought and the economics profession."--Patrick Newman, Independent Review
"The work of patient and pathbreaking economists like Leonard has opened up so much critical territory for those studying the history of economic knowledge from other disciplinary vantages. Illiberal Reformers places the consequential alliance between economics and eugenics in the Progressive Era in clear focus and suggests exciting new lines of inquiry for scholars interested in the tangled history of race, state, and market in modern America."--Daniel Platt, Journal of Cultural Economy
"A well-researched and clearly argued work which effectively ties changes in political economy to changes in popular thought, and shows how those changes to thinking effected the very bodies of people living in that society. A very accessible book."--Wesley R. Bishop, Labour-Le Travail
"Illiberal Reformers represents scholarship of the highest order."--Braham Dabscheck, Economic and Labour Relations Review
"Illiberal Reformers is a tour de force."--Leslie Jones, Quarterly Review
"Illiberal Reformers admirably reconstructs the much-repressed 'dark side' of social science progressivism."--Guy Alchon, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas
"Illiberal Reformers is a masterly account of the intellectual currents that came to dominate American politics in the first half of the 20th century and, in many respects, dominate it still."--Michael M. Uhlmann, Claremont Review of Books
"In this fascinating book, Thomas C. Leonard explains how many leading progressives came to advocate for race-based immigration restrictions, eugenics, Social Darwinism, unequal pay for women, and even 'protecting women from employment' altogether."--Mark Joseph Stern, SlatePicks
"Illiberal Reformers tells a story that captures the mind, breaks the heart, and turns the stomach."--Art Carden, Cato Journal
"Required reading for anyone interested in the history of economics and U.S. politics."--Eric Scorsone & David Schweikhardt, Journal of Economic Issues
"Leonard's book offers a broad, forceful treatment and will have to be taken seriously by anyone seeking to understand and evaluate progressivism."--Kevin Schmiesing, Catholic Social Science Review
"Thomas Leonard's Illiberal Reformers is a significant contribution to the historiography of the Progressive Era, by one of the finest scholars working in the field."--Marco Cavalieri, Journal of The History of Economic Thought
"A masterly account of the intellectual currents that came to dominate American politics in the first half of the 20th century and, in many respects, dominate it still."--Michael M. Uhlmann, Claremont Review of Books
Review
"Economists like to think of their ancestors as heroic seekers of truth, each generation, as Newton suggested, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before. Thomas Leonard demonstrates clearly that the story of economics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was far more complex―and more interesting. He shows how the economists of that era combined their passion for social reform with religion, eugenics, and evolution theory in ways that seem incredible today. This book is an eye-opener."―Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics Emeritus, Duke University
"This untold story of how Progressive Era activists helped construct the extensive role of government in the economy sheds light on today's technocratic dilemmas. Which decisions need to be left to experts, the ‘social engineers,' and which require democratic participation? Thomas Leonard's book demonstrates that during the Progressive Era this question was resolved only by combining democratic reform with the exclusion of women, African Americans, immigrants, and disabled people as full members of society. It underlines the fact that the tension between ‘expert' economic administration and individual liberties remains at the heart of current political debates."―Diane Coyle, author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
"Illiberal Reformers makes a substantial contribution to the much contested history of U.S. progressivism by providing fascinating new evidence of what Leonard terms its ‘dark side.' This book's rich narrative will amply reward readers interested in the discrete histories of social science, science, politics, culture, industrial relations, and general U.S. history, and offers a wealth of new material on discrimination based on gender, race, and class."―Mary O. Furner, University of California, Santa Barbara
From the Back Cover
"Mythologies that arise around individuals, groups, and ideas of the past tend to mask many warts. Thomas Leonard's excellent book about American economics during the Progressive Era shows how progressives' efforts to champion reform drew on a vision of scientific development that would institutionalize the eugenic creed and, in the process, do great violence to the liberal project that had been at the heart of the American system. Illiberal Reformers provides a powerful lesson in the tensions that surround ideals of social progress, scientific expertise, and the democratic system."--Steven G. Medema, University of Colorado, Denver
"Economists like to think of their ancestors as heroic seekers of truth, each generation, as Newton suggested, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before. Thomas Leonard demonstrates clearly that the story of economics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was far more complex--and more interesting. He shows how the economists of that era combined their passion for social reform with religion, eugenics, and evolution theory in ways that seem incredible today. This book is an eye-opener."--Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics Emeritus, Duke University
"This untold story of how Progressive Era activists helped construct the extensive role of government in the economy sheds light on today's technocratic dilemmas. Which decisions need to be left to experts, the ‘social engineers,' and which require democratic participation? Thomas Leonard's book demonstrates that during the Progressive Era this question was resolved only by combining democratic reform with the exclusion of women, African Americans, immigrants, and disabled people as full members of society. It underlines the fact that the tension between ‘expert' economic administration and individual liberties remains at the heart of current political debates."--Diane Coyle, author of GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History
"Illiberal Reformers makes a substantial contribution to the much contested history of U.S. progressivism by providing fascinating new evidence of what Leonard terms its ‘dark side.' This book's rich narrative will amply reward readers interested in the discrete histories of social science, science, politics, culture, industrial relations, and general U.S. history, and offers a wealth of new material on discrimination based on gender, race, and class."--Mary O. Furner, University of California, Santa Barbara
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Illiberal Reformers
Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era
By Thomas C. LeonardPRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2016 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-16959-0
Contents
Acknowledgments, vii,Prologue, ix,
PART I The Progressive Ascendancy,
1 ~ Redeeming American Economic Life, 3,
2 ~ Turning Illiberal, 17,
3 ~ Becoming Experts, 27,
4 ~ Efficiency in Business and Public Administration, 55,
Part II The Progressive Paradox,
5 ~ Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get?, 77,
6 ~ Darwinism in Economic Reform, 89,
7 ~ Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform, 109,
8 ~ Excluding the Unemployable, 129,
9 ~ Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive, 141,
10 ~ Excluding Women, 169,
Epilogue, 187,
Notes, 193,
Index, 233,
CHAPTER 1
Redeeming American Economic Life
ECONOMIC REVOLUTION
When American economic life transformed itself in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the world had never seen anything like it. A furious expansion of railroad networks, fueled by government loans and land grants, opened a vast continental market. American business, powered by a transformative set of new production technologies, industrialized on a revolutionary scale. Interstate commerce grew so rapidly that hundreds of local clock conventions had to be replaced by a national system of standardized time in 1883.
In 1870, the last of the Civil War amendments to the US Constitution was ratified. Thirty-five years later, the US economy had quadrupled in size. American living standards had doubled. US economic output surpassed each of the German, French, and Japanese empires in the 1870s. It overtook the nineteenth century's global colossus, the British Empire, in 1916.
The industrial juggernaut propelled the American economy upward but did so undependably. Financial crises triggered prolonged economic depressions in the 1870s and the 1890s. Growth also distributed its copious fruits unevenly, creating vast industrial fortunes alongside disgruntled rural homesteaders and a newly visible class of the urban poor, a contrast journalist Henry George encapsulated as Progress and Poverty, a runaway best seller.
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. Just over half of American workers in 1880 worked on farms. By 1920, only one-quarter remained on the land. Crowded into tenements, urban workers confronted substandard housing, poor sanitation, and recurring unemployment.
Industry's voracious but volatile demand for labor was met by immigration to America on a grand scale, which introduced polyglot peoples with disparate cultural and religious traditions. Fifteen million immigrants arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1914, and nearly 70 percent of the new arrivals were Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians from southern and eastern Europe. Most congregated in the cities. In 1900, three out of four people in New York City, Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco were immigrants and their children. By 1910, the foreign born accounted for 22 percent of the US labor force and for 41 percent of non-farm laborers.
Industrialization and immigration gave rise to a labor movement whose growth was as fitful as the economy's. Labor unions grew explosively from 1880 to 1886, from a mere 168,000 to 1.2 million members. The violence of the 1886 riots in Chicago's Haymarket Square undid these gains. Organized labor then recovered its 1886 level in 1900, after which another surge doubled union membership to 2.4 million in 1904.
Labor conflict was rampant and sometimes violent. From 1881 to 1905, American workers organized an average of four strikes per day, more than 36,000 in total. Names like Homestead (1892), where steelworkers engaged in pitched battles with Carnegie Steel's armed strike breakers, and Pullman (1894), a strike that brought US railroads to a standstill until President Grover Cleveland deployed US Army troops to quash it, still commemorate the industrial violence of the era.
The turn of the century produced a new form of economic organization, the consolidated firm, or "trust." Between 1895 and 1904, a sweeping merger movement consolidated scores of American industries: 1,800 major industrial firms disappeared into 157 mergers. Nearly half of the consolidated giants enjoyed market shares of more than 70 percent.
The new industrial behemoths were of a scale Americans could barely comprehend, 100 or even 1,000 times larger than the largest US manufacturing firms in 1870. John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company was capitalized at $100 million in 1900. James Duke's American Tobacco Company reached $500 million in 1904, and the United States Steel Corporation was valued at $1.4 billion at its creation in 1901.
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." Those who lived through it recognized its revolutionary aspects.
Simon Nelson Patten, a pioneering progressive economist at Pennsylvania's Wharton School, saw in industrialization an age of material abundance so unprecedented as to form a new basis for civilization. Wisconsin economist Richard T. Ely, the standard bearer of progressive economics, cofounded the American Economic Association in 1885 to organize and promote the new political economy required, he said, to comprehend a "new economic world." Frederick Jackson Turner told his fellow historians they were witnessing nothing less than the birth of a new nation. One can hardly believe, John Dewey marveled at the turn of century, "there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete."
Patten, Ely, Turner, and Dewey were all progressive scholars making a case for economic reform, and none were strangers to hyperbole. But here they did not need to exaggerate. Conservative observers marveled no less at the speed and scope of the American industrial revolution. In 1890, David A. Wells, an influential Gilded Age defender of free trade and sound money, described the economic changes since the Civil War as the most important in all of human history.
* * *
Revolution, which suggests abrupt discontinuity or rupture, is an imperfect term for changes wrought over forty years. But revolution is not inappropriate when we recognize that the late-nineteenth-century American economic transformation launched the United States on a permanently different economic course, with profoundly far-reaching and long-lived consequences. Between the end of Reconstruction and the United States' entry into the First World War, the speed and scope of economic change was such that few Americans could be spectators only. Welcome or not, change was thrust on them, and there was no choice but to meet it.
Ordinary Americans met economic change with responses as different as their situations. Some responded by embracing new opportunities, freedoms, and identities. Middle-class women went to work outside the home, glimpsing the prospect of greater economic independence and, for some, even a vocation other than motherhood. Young people found the new pleasures of city life liberating. Former journeymen started their own businesses, and some met with success. University enrollments more than quadrupled, giving women and a burgeoning middle class their first chance at higher education. Immigrants did not find streets paved with gold, but many found refuge from starvation, pogroms, and peonage.
For other Americans, change offered not new opportunities but new constraints, not new freedom but new oppression, not new identities but new stigmas. The brutal reestablishment of white supremacy in the American South confronted African Americans with disenfranchisement, debt peonage, and organized racial terror. Native Americans, decimated when Europeans colonized America, were decimated again by coerced relocations, carried out by a postbellum US Army in need of new missions. Egged on by agitators like Dennis Kearney, white mobs attacked Chinese immigrants, accusing them of undercutting the American workingman.
Hard money and deflation punished farmers and other debtors. When they joined the migration to the cities, farmers and journeymen discovered their hard-won skills mattered less. They might command higher compensation at the factory, but employment threatened their republican self-identities. Having been raised to disdain the "hireling," they now accepted wages themselves. A boss told them what to do, and did not care whether his factory hands had once owned land or other property.
Those disenfranchised, damaged, and devalued during the Gilded Age met change individually and also collectively. Farmers formed cooperatives, skilled workers organized trade unions, men joined fraternal groups, women started clubs, and immigrant communities created a host of mutual aid societies, which provided credit, insurance, and other mutual services. Evangelicals founded youth associations, the Salvation Army, and other agencies organized to redeem the impressionable and the fallen.
Activists such as Ida Wells exposed mob violence against African Americans and organized antilynching campaigns, at home and abroad. African Americans chose to leave the South's racial caste system, their migration northward quickened by job opportunities created during mobilization for the First World War.
These grassroots movements were an essential part of America's many and varied responses to the economic, social, and political consequences of industrialization. American historical writing began telling the stories of ordinary Americans in the 1970s. Before this historiographic turn, Progressive Era histories were political and focused on those who made reform a vocation — the progressives. It is their story that Illiberal Reformers tells.
THE ECONOMIC PROGRESSIVES
The longstanding emphasis on politics and reform professionals was itself a progressive legacy. The earliest accounts of Progressivism, written by such historians as Benjamin Parke DeWitt, were self-portraits. They painted ordinary people into the background as passive victims of the rough winds of economic change. The progressives filled the foreground, a vanguard of selfless scholars and activists leading the People — if not any recognizable people — in a crusade against wealth and privilege.
To conceptualize the period as Progressive was to define it by its politics and to associate Progressivism with an elite class: political figures like Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, university social scientists, settlement-house workers, muckraking journalists, conservationists, Prohibitionists, and birth controllers. The protest of the progressives originated not out of personal suffering but rather out of moral and intellectual discontent with the suffering (and enrichment) of others.
Progressives did not work in factories; they inspected them. Progressives did not drink in saloons; they tried to shutter them. The bold women who chose to live among the immigrant poor in city slums called themselves "settlers," not neighbors. Even when progressives idealized workers, they tended to patronize them, romanticizing a brotherhood they would never consider joining.
The distance progressives placed between themselves and ordinary people was not the product of class prejudice alone. Some progressives came from privilege, but far more were children of middle class ministers and missionaries, a number of whom struggled before finding vocational outlets for their intellectual and reform energies. The few who had known real deprivation, such as Thorstein Veblen, never romanticized it.
The distance progressives placed between themselves and ordinary people instead had its origins in the progressives' self-conception as disinterested agents of reform. As they devised ways to make reform a vocation, the progressives found themselves poised between the victims and the beneficiaries of economic transformation. Most opted not to choose sides. Instead, they portrayed themselves as the representatives of the common good, uniquely positioned to transcend personal, class, regional, and partisan interests.
If progressives agreed that they represented the common good, they regularly disagreed on what the common good was. W.E.B. Du Bois and Woodrow Wilson, for example, held entirely opposed views of the proper role of whites and blacks in American life. Senator Robert La Follette vigorously opposed American entry into the First World War, while his one-time Wisconsin compatriot, progressive economist Ely, accused him of aiding the enemy.
Ely and his University of Wisconsin colleagues, John R. Commons and Edward A. Ross, campaigned to bar immigrants they judged racially inferior, while other progressives, such as settlement-house worker Grace Abbott, upheld the America tradition of openness to newcomers, as we shall see in Chapter 9. The same trio of Wisconsin academics crusaded against the evils of alcohol, while John Dewey believed progressives had causes more important than the saloon. Theodore Roosevelt preferred to regulate the trusts, while "the people's lawyer," Louis Brandeis, wanted to break them up, as discussed in Chapter 4.
The upshot was a pattern of conflict and cooperation that led to shifting political alliances and to a reputation for fractiousness. "The friends of progress," Benjamin Parke DeWitt lamented in 1915, "are frequently the enemies of each other."
As diverse and fractious as Progressive Era reformers could be, they all drew on a shared, recognizable, and historically specific set of intellectual understandings, what Daniel Rodgers has termed "discourses of discontent." First, progressives were discontented with liberal individualism, which evangelicals called un-Christian, and more secular critics scorned as "licensed selfishness." As we shall see in Chapter 2, the progressives were nationalist to the core, though they reified the collective using many names besides nation, such as the state, the race, the commonweal, the public good, the public welfare, the people, and, as discussed in Chapter 6, the social organism. Whichever term they used, progressives asserted the primacy of the collective over individual men and women, and they justified greater social control over individual action in its name.
Second, progressives shared a discontent with the waste, disorder, conflict, and injustice they ascribed to industrial capitalism. The furious pace of change had produced unprecedented economic volatility and social dislocation. Many believed the remedy was improved efficiency, the quintessentially progressive idea that the application of science, personified by the efficiency expert or social engineer, could improve virtually any aspect of American life, Efficiency, in business and public administration, is the story of Chapter 4.
Monopoly describes the third source of progressive discontent. Industrial capitalism had brought forth unprecedented and gigantic forms of economic organization — trusts, pools, and combinations. Antimonopoly rhetoric comprised a host of objections to big business — destruction of small business, monopoly profiteering, unfair trade practices, deskilling of labor, exploitation of workers — joined with the longstanding republican fear that centralized economic power corrupted politics.
Progressives used the language of anti-individualism, efficiency, and anti-monopoly for varying purposes. But nearly all progressives used this rhetoric. And nearly all agreed, moreover, that the revolutionary consequences of industrial capitalism required rethinking and reforming American economic life and its governance. As Ely put it, laissez-faire was not only morally unsound, it was economically obsolete, a relic of a bygone era. Whatever free markets had once accomplished, they now produced inefficiency, instability, inequality, and a tendency toward monopoly.
Few progressives were content merely to deplore the diseases of a modern industrial economy. America needed, they agreed, a new form of government, one that was disinterested, nonpartisan, scientific, and endowed with discretionary powers to investigate and regulate the world's largest economy, as well as to compensate those exploited, injured, or left behind — the administrative state.
Nothing was more integral to Progressivism than its extravagant faith in administration. The visible hand of administrative government, guided by disinterested experts who were university trained and credentialed, would diagnose, treat and even cure low wages, long hours, unemployment, labor conflict, industrial accidents, financial crises, unfair trade practices, deflation, and the other ailments of industrial capitalism. Chapter 3 tells the story of how a small band of scholars remade the nature and practice of their discipline, transforming themselves into expert economists in the service of the administrative state.
The progressives had different and sometimes conflicting agendas. But nearly all ultimately agreed that the best means to their several ends was the administrative state. In this crucial sense, Progressivism was less a coherent agenda of substantive goals that it was a technocratic theory and practice of how to obtain them in the age of industrial capitalism. The heart of Progressivism, as historian Robert Wiebe famously summarized it, was its ambition to "fulfill its destiny through bureaucratic means."
* * *
Illiberal Reformers tells the story of the progressive scholars and activists who enlisted in the Progressive Era crusade to dismantle laissez-faire and remake American economic life through the agency of an administrative state. Historians, just like everybody else, work with the tools they have at hand. I am a historian of economics, and Illiberal Reformers shines its narrative lamp on the progressive economists. But this is not their story alone, and had it been, they would not have recognized it.
American economic reform in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era featured a large, eclectic, and sometimes fractious cast. Most would not have called themselves economists, but nearly all were engaged with fundamentally economic questions — unemployment, low wages, long hours, workplace safety, industrial consolidation, immigration, and more. All of them, not just the academics, undertook social investigations designed to produce economic knowledge and to influence public opinion and policymakers.
(Continues...)Excerpted from Illiberal Reformers by Thomas C. Leonard. Copyright © 2016 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Product details
- Publisher : Princeton University Press
- Publication date : January 12, 2016
- Language : English
- Print length : 264 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0691169594
- ISBN-13 : 978-0691169590
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.5 x 1.25 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #1,141,966 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #973 in Economic History (Books)
- #1,606 in Discrimination & Racism
- #4,817 in Sociology Reference
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2016''Woodrow Wilson, on the campaign trail in 1912, told voters that it was time for the federal government to be liberated from its outmoded eighteenth-century scheme of checks and balances.''
Why 'liberate' government???
''Government, Wilson said, was a living organism, “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Since no living thing can survive when its organs work against one another, a government must be free to adapt to its times, or else it will perish. The adaptation Wilson had in mind was to neutralize Congress and consolidate power in a vigorous executive.''
What? Neutralize congress! Free will for officials and none for people?
''It was a plan he had been elaborating and revising for more than thirty years, an early version of which, Congressional Government, he completed while still a graduate student at Johns Hopkins.''
Freedom of humans to freedom for government. Wow!
How did 'liberal' (meaning allowing each human to manage and exercise his own free will) change to the demand that all individuals submit to the control of experts and government? Leonard provides a chilling answer.
This is a review of how the 'progressives' moved into the ruling class and removed freedom from American culture in the name of 'Science'. Fascinating!
PART I
The Progressive Ascendancy
Redeeming American Economic Life
Turning Illiberal
Becoming Experts
Efficiency in Business and Public Administration
PART II
The Progressive Paradox
Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get?
Darwinism in Economic Reform
Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform
Excluding the Unemployable
Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive
Excluding Women
Epilogue
From the prologue - ''The progressives combined their extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise as a reliable, even necessary, guide to the public good. They were so sure of their own expertise as a necessary guide to the public good, so convinced of the righteousness of their crusade to redeem America, that they rarely considered the unintended consequences of ambitious but untried reforms.
Even more so, they failed to confront the reality that the experts—no less than the partisans, bosses, and industrialists they aimed to unseat—could have interests and biases of their own.''
''It is important to understand that the progressive campaign to exclude the inferior from employment was not (merely) the product of an unreflective prejudice. Progressive arguments warning of inferiority were deeply informed by elaborate scientific discourses of heredity. Darwinism, eugenics, and race science recast spiritual or moral failure as biological inferiority and offered scientific legitimacy to established American hierarchies of race, gender, class, and intellect.
Economic progressives were profoundly influenced by Darwin and other evolutionists. Chapter 6 shows how the economic progressives (and their critics) drew deeply on evolutionary science’s conceptions of heredity, progress, competition, selection, fitness, organism, and the role of human beings in controlling nature. Chapter 7 shows the uses economic progressives made of race science and eugenics, the social control of human breeding.
Among other things, biological ideas offered Progressivism a conceptual scheme capable of accommodating the great contradiction at the heart of Progressive Era reform—its view of the poor as victims deserving state uplift and as threats requiring state restraint."
''Eugenics and race science are today discredited. But the progressive vision of how to govern scientifically under industrial capitalism lives on. Expertise in the service of an administrative state, what progressives called social control, has survived the discredited notions once used to uphold it. Indeed, it has thrived.'' Chilling.
''Government, Wilson said, was a living organism, “accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” Since no living thing can survive when its organs work against one another, a government must be free to adapt to its times, or else it will perish. The adaptation Wilson had in mind was to neutralize Congress and consolidate power in a vigorous executive.'' (65)
Government is alive in a more important way than individuals. Germany, Russia both adopted this belief at this time. Hitler, Stalin destroyed (30 million? 65 million?) in service to this concept.
A stunning theme - ''THE MENACE OF THE UNEMPLOYABLE''
''The term “unemployable,” popularized by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, was a misnomer, for many of the unemployable were, in fact, employed and others desperately wanted to be. The Webbs used the term to describe people incapable of work, as well as those who could work but who accepted wages below a standard reformers judged acceptable. The latter group posed the threat.''
Sacrifice people to heartless theory. What theory?
''Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites, the Webbs opined, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.” For the unemployable class, “unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” When New York state established America’s first industrial labor colony in 1911, it was applauded by the AALL as a scientific and humane method of keeping the unemployable out of labor markets, thus improving employment prospects for the worthy poor.''
This is done as ''Science''!
The last three paragraphs express Leonard's considered conclusions -
''Progressivism reconstructed American liberalism by dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism. The new liberalism discarded economic liberties as archaic impediments to necessary improvements to society’s health, welfare, and morals. It is well known that modern liberalism permanently demoted economic liberties. Few twenty-first-century progressives think that minimum wages or maximum hours or occupational licensing unjustly infringe upon a worker’s right to freely contract on her own behalf. But the original progressives’ illiberal turn did not stop at property and contract rights.''
This attack Liberty did not end.
''They assaulted political and civil liberties, too, trampling on individual rights to person, to free movement, to free expression, to marriage and to reproduction. The progressives denied millions these basic freedoms, on grounds that their inferiority threatened America’s economic and hereditary security.''
''They were wrong on both counts. That did not stop them, nor has it stopped those who, unaware of the history, repeat the same false claims today.''
Leonard writes in a rational, analytical style. Nevertheless, this history is stunning. The emotional impact can/should be profound.
Around seven-hundred footnotes. Provides insight into the present by looking into the past.
''The past is not dead, it is not even past''
(See also - ''The Sacred Project of American Sociolgy'' - Christian Smith; ''Progress and Anarchy in Modern America'' - Robert Nisbet; ''Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning'', by Jonah Goldberg; the New Work by Arthur Herman “1917 - Wilson and Lenin’’, great!)
- Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2016This is a 10-star book but only 5 were available. In reading this book I am finding so many connecting ideas and their origins, that I want to really take my time and read each page carefully and slowly so I can fully digest every new and fresh piece of information.
For example, the explosion of government bureaucracy was the brainchild of a handful of progressive economists born after 1850 and educated in German universities who then brought their newly-adopted ideas from the German Historical School of political economy. These men, brought up in pious Presbyterian homes, burned with a desire to proselytize and redeem society, since they already found themselves a superior bunch whose lives could only be better if everyone else was like them. They found their churches too slow in changing people's behavior so they transferred their hopes and energies to the state. They are the Progressives.
The idea of changing society (for what could be better than to try to change others so one doesn't have to change oneself) must be a very strong impulse in each one of us because we see it everywhere: from do-gooders of every sort telling us what to eat, to radical Islamists cutting heads off because of differing religious beliefs. Thomas C. Leonard does an amazing job in connecting the dots from the origin of an idea to its logical execution, whether it's the fall of laissez faire economics to Darwinism, eugenics, or the minimum wage laws.
But it's so much more. In college I learned about the origins of modern day academic tests such as the SAT, and I knew there was some connection to intelligence testing by the government just before WWI for "defective" soldiers and children by Progressive psychologists who gladly offered their services in return for permanent positions of power in government. I looked up the original study on the Internet and was shocked to see how similar those intelligence tests were to the SAT, or the previous version until not too long ago. Nice to know that every college-bound senior is basically following in the steps of those unfortunate soldiers who were being mercilessly tested to find out who were "the defectives trying to pass as normals" as they put it. No wonder Hitler looked to the shenanigans of the Progressives in the United States in learning how to formulate his perfect society.
You will be horrified at what these well-meaning Progressive thinkers from every field did in the name of advancing society. Heaven help us from those who want to help us be better people! But none of us is exempt from this desire, so this is a cautionary tale that we really need to think about.
Buy this book and read it slowly, stopping to think about what the author says in every page. Look up the original books online and check the facts for yourself. Most of the references are available for free through Google books. This book will open your eyes and you'll be able to make your own connections and conclusions on modern day world problems because you'll know where the ideas originate from. Thank you, Mr. Leonard, for this paradigm-shifting book.
- Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2019This book is great in that it shows the evil of Progressives with 'good' intentions who want to 'help' others by controlling them and forcing them to obey. More than anything else, the Progressives wanted the power to decide who would have children and who would be prevented from doing so. "The road to Hell is paved with good intentions." Unfortunately, there were many annoying typos throughout this book. They should have hired a proofreader to find and fix all the little things that make reading the book less enjoyable.
Top reviews from other countries
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木村 貴Reviewed in Japan on March 16, 2017
5.0 out of 5 stars 本当は怖い最低賃金
最低賃金は経済弱者を救うと、多くの人は思い込んでいる。もちろんそれは間違いだ。経済の原理上、最低賃金はむしろ技能や経験に乏しい非熟練労働者を市場から排除する。
本書によれば、そもそも米国で20世紀初め、左翼の政治圧力により最低賃金法が導入された際、その目的は、技能・経験に乏しい代わりに低賃金を強みに働く移民や非白人を排除し、白人労働者の賃金を高く保つことだった。排除の背後には当時流行の優生学思想があったという、背筋の凍るような事実も描かれる。以下は第9章より抜粋。(数字は位置ナンバー)
1910年代米国で経済学者たちは最低賃金について論争し、賛否は別として、次の点で意見が一致した。すなわち最低賃金規制が成功すれば、生産性の低い労働者は仕事がなくなる。非熟練労働者は雇うコストが上がると雇われなくなる。(3335)
米国の左翼進歩派知識人の多くは、最低賃金法を支持した。(移民や非白人など)生産性の低い労働者が職を失い、雇われなくなることは承知のうえである。彼ら改革者はそれを犠牲ではなく、社会への利益と考えたのである。(3356)
米国の左翼進歩派知識人は、能力の劣った者が最低賃金で仕事を失っても不都合はないと考えた。それによって他の労働者の賃金が高くなり、米国の賃金水準が守られるし、アングロサクソンの人種統合も保たれるからだ。(3359)
最低賃金は、劣った労働者を見つけ、科学的に取り扱う役目を果たすとされた。英国の社会主義者でフェビアン協会の中心人物であるウェッブ夫妻によれば、文明社会は最低賃金によって「産業上の病人」を労働力から取り除いたという。(3363)
最低賃金による隔離では不十分な場合、能力の劣った人々に避妊手術を強制せよとシカゴ大学の神学者兼社会学者ヘンダーソンは提案した。能力の優れた人々に子供をもっと多く生むよう求めるのは、不公正で非現実的だからという。(3373)
- RickyReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 12, 2020
5.0 out of 5 stars The superiority complex
What a very interesting and educative book this is. Given the preponderance of ‘progressive ideology’ in current UK culture and politics, I thoroughly recommend it to anyone that wishes to explore its origins and dangers. This book details what has become known as the ‘progressive era’ in American politics. In particular, it spanned the years 1890 – 1920, and saw a period of widespread social activism and political reform across the United States. The main objectives of the Progressive movement, were addressing problems caused by industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and political corruption.
Originally, it was an Evangelical movement, that wanted to do good in the world. “The protest of the progressives originated not out of personal suffering but rather out of moral and intellectual discontent with the suffering (and enrichment) of others.” This ‘do-gooder’ attitude had a superiority complex at its heart, as found in most religions. Later the movement became more associated with secular preferences, yet retained its religious zeal. “The progressives’ urge to reform America sprang from an evangelical compulsion to set the world to rights, and they unabashedly described their purposes as a Christian mission to build a Kingdom of Heaven on earth. In the language of the day, they preached a social gospel.”
It was a movement that saw a problem with the individual humanism that existed in the United states, and wished to replace it with a more German efficiency. Many in the movement were inspired by Darwinian theory, and the US President, Woodrow Wilson, saw the government as a living organism “accountable to Darwin not to Newton.”
The movement promoted ‘Economics’ as a ‘scientific study’, often requiring its students to study in Germany. “Germany exposed the young Americans to the ideas of the German Historical School of political economy, with its positive view of state economic intervention, quintessentially compulsory insurance against sickness, industrial accidents, debility, and old age. Most of their German professors…were hostile to the idea of natural economic laws, which they disparaged as “English” economics, a swipe at the classically liberal tendency of political economy in Great Britain.”
“John R. Commons said that social progress required the individual to be controlled, liberated, and expanded by collective action. Columbia progressive economist Henry R. Seager …declared that the industrial economy had simply obviated the creed of individualism. Individuals, Ross maintained, were but “plastic lumps of human dough,” to be formed on the great “social kneading board.”
“Economics, Seligman told his receptive confreres, was going to be the basis of social progress, and economists were going to be the creators of the future; indeed, they would be the philosophers of American social life. A grateful public would pay deference to the economist’s expertise.”
In essence, progressives had a mechanistic view of human nature, that abhorred free will and saw people as ‘human ants’, or cogs in an economic machine. On the whole, they despised democracy, promoting an aristocratic ‘expert’ governing elite of ‘betters’ on a second-class citizenry. They had little to no regard for individual people, preferring to substitute Social Darwinian attitudes. In a separate article, ‘Mistaking Eugenics for Social Darwinism’, Leonard distinguishes the original Darwinian theories from those emanating from Herbert Spencer’s ‘Survival of the fittest’. It was the latter that led to Eugenics, a ‘set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population, typically by excluding people and groups judged to be inferior and promoting those judged to be superior.’
The eventual destination of eugenics was found amongst Germany’s most infamous leader, Adolf Hitler. There, he adopted a racist ideology that saw the ‘Aryan race’ as the superior race, and led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Disabled, Gipsies and other groups deemed inferior.
The question that needs to be asked of today’s progressives is whether they still see themselves as morally superior? In adopting a creed, such as ‘hate speech’, do they view anyone who dissents as an inferior human being? Worse still, as a lesser person? If so, the racism, so evident in early progressive ideology, is still there (albeit camouflaged by adherence to the creed of ‘Critical Theory’, where the ‘whites’ have replaced the ‘blacks’ and ‘men have replaced ‘women’ as the underclass).
This book is a warning to all those who flock, without thinking, to a ‘progressive’ political ideology. Be careful that, in a wish to do good, you do not do irrevocable harm instead. For instance, look at the current deference being paid to the SAGE (Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies) group ‘advising’ government on its Covid-19 strategy. Are we becoming too reliant on ‘experts’ and their ‘scientific models’? Are epidemiologists the new economists? Have we lost confidence in ‘common sense’ and allowed ourselves to lose our liberties without debate?
- Monocled LibertarianReviewed in Canada on October 31, 2016
5.0 out of 5 stars this is a great resource to learn about it
If you want to know more about the origins of progressivism and its illiberal ideals and policies (from the over arching presence of eugenics to economic interventionism), this is a great resource to learn about it. People are increasingly and justifiably questioning the results of progressive policies. With this book, readers learn about the academic and political culture and mindset that gave way to such policies. If you care about such things, I personally highly recommended.