The Economic and Social Thought of the American Progressives

Thomas C. Leonard: Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016

 

Many political scientists and political historians have written on Progressivism. [1] Princeton University professor Thomas C. Leonard views the movement from an economist’s perspective that supplements the more usual approach. He takes the first forty years of Progressive thought and practice, 1877 to 1917, the years in which Progressives “founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and blueprinted and framed the American administrative state,” acting in the convictions that “modern government should be guided by science and not politics,” and that “an industrialized economy should be supervised, investigated and regulated by the visible hand of a modern administrative state.” In the first two centuries after independence, the United States could be described as a ‘liberal’ regime in the sense that it secured the unalienable natural rights of its citizens by institutions conducing to political and economic liberty; the following century and a half saw liberalism redefined as a commitment to a supposedly apolitical governmental apparatus presiding over a libertine, less-than-civil society in what Leonard describes as “an unstable amalgam of compassion and contempt.” While lending “a helping hand to those it deemed worthy of citizenship and employment while simultaneously narrowing that privileged circle by excluding the many it judged unworthy,” Progressive reform “at once uplifted and restrained, and did both in the name of progress.”

The decades of Progressivism saw a quadrupling of America’s gross national product, a doubling of living standards, a massive population movement from farms to city factories, accompanied by increased disparities of wealth and two serious financial crises. America’s population also increased substantially, with the immigration of “polyglot peoples with disparate cultural and religious traditions” who were admitted to meet “industry’s voracious but volatile demand for labor.” By 1910, 22 percent of the total labor force were foreign born, and more than 40 percent of non-farm workers were; nearly 70 percent of the immigrants were “Catholics, Jews, and Orthodox Christians from southern and eastern Europe”—very far from the mostly Protestant and northern European stock which had populated the country in its first century. This led not only to ‘cultural’ clashes but to the most violent labor disputes that had been seen or would be seen subsequently. At their peak, strikes averaged four per day, and in 1894, President Cleveland ordered U.S. Army troops to end a strike by Pullman workers that had crippled the railroad network, then the country’s economic lifeline. Both labor unions and major business corporations organized face off against each other. “The new industrial behemoths were of a scale Americans could barely comprehend, 100 or even 1,000 times larger than the largest U.S. manufacturing firms in 1870.” The leading philosopher of Progressivism, John Dewey, remarked that seldom if ever had “there has been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete.” Dewey’s very use of the word ‘history’ to mean the course of events, not the literary genre, bespoke the revolution in thought that predated the revolution in action. Historicism had replaced natural-rights philosophy in the minds of almost all members of the ‘intellectual’ class. This occurred as university enrollments quadrupled, opening ‘higher’ education middle-class Americans, who could now join the class of ‘professionals’ occupying the institutions of the administrative state, the corporations, the schools. “Progressives did not work in factories; they inspected them.” In doing so with benevolent intentions, they “romanticized a brotherhood [of workers] they would never consider joining,” conceiving themselves rather “as disinterested agents of reform” and “representatives of the common good, uniquely positioned to transcend personal, class, regional, and partisan interests.” They deprecated old-liberal individualism as selfishness while esteeming nationalism; they disliked industrial capitalism and monopoly, seeking to control it by administrative law—setting public bureaucracies against the private bureaucracies, the corporations. “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, whose techniques they promoted with “extravagant faith.” 

While many Progressives were ‘secularist’ devotees of science, particularly of administrative science and social science generally, most were not. The first generation of Progressives came from long-established New England families, often with clerical or missionary backgrounds. “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” under the ideational rubric of the Social Gospel, which turned Christian evangelism away from spiritual reform to “a scientifically informed mission of social redemption.” As an economist, Leonard understandably points to the formation of the American Economic Association in 1885, a professional organization “embod[ying] the social gospel’s distinctive amalgam of liberal Protestant ethics, veneration of science, and the evangelizing activism of pious, middle-class reformers” such as Josiah Strong, Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, and Richard T. Ely. “The good Christian should be concerned with this world, Ely said, not with the next.” For him and for many of his allies, love of neighbor now came before love of God. Among Ely’s students was the young Southerner, Woodrow Wilson, himself the son of a Presbyterian minister. Another Ely student at Johns Hopkins University, Edward A. Ross, argued that “sin was no longer a matter of inborn immorality,” no longer ‘original,’ but a socially constructed effect remediable by social reform. “Ultimately,” like all other Progressives, “the social gospel economists…turned to the state” to implement that reform. “A Kingdom of Heaven on earth could be built without Christ’s return,” they presumed. This initial zeal declined in the period’s last decade, as “the Great War’s slaughter and uncontrolled irrationality mocked the progressive idea of spiritual and social progress through enlightened social control” and the influx of non-Protestant immigrants diluted the New England Protestant stock. As a result, Progressives “recast their evangelical language in a more secular form,” even as they held on to their “evangelical idealism.” This “intellectual gospel” promoted “scientific inquiry as itself a kind of religious calling.” That is, a historicized science at the service of ‘History’ conceived as a course of events leading to ever more social and economic equality replaced natural right as the common denominator of a religiously plural civil society. “For the social gospel progressives at the forefront of American economic reform, science was a place of moral authority where the public-spirited could find religious meaning in scientific inquiry’s values of dispassionate analysis, self-sacrifice, pursuit of truth, and service to a cause greater than oneself.”

Historicism’s philosophic master was G. W. F. Hegel, and many academic Progressives made pious pilgrimages to German universities, studying historicist thought at its intellectual sources. The political-economic branch of Hegelian historicism viewed “state economic intervention” favorably, having implemented “compulsory insurance against sickness, industrial accidents, debility, and old age.” As historicists, German economists denied the existence of “natural economic laws, which they disparaged as ‘English’ economics, a swipe at the classically liberal tendency of political economy in Great Britain.” As the American Ely put it, “the dry bones of orthodox English political economy” deserve to be buried and replaced by “the live methods of the German school”—live in the sense that national economic activity is “historically contingent and subject to change” not only by private individuals and firms but also, and crucially, by the national state. The German economists additionally claimed scientific authority; “they were not mere bureaucrats but an elite uniquely capable of transcending politics and objectively identifying the public good.”

The young Americans wanted to be like them. “At the time of the Civil War, professional social science simply did not exist,” but the young academics quickly changed that in the twenty years prior to the turn of the century. An economics major, impossible before, became the second-most frequent choice among Yale undergraduates, often at the expense of enrollment in the liberal arts courses. Only English held its own. “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 administrative state, they argued, was the only institution capable of governing the bureaucracies established by industrial capitalists, the new oligarchs. “Industrial capitalism, the progressives argued, required continuous supervision, investigation, and regulation.” German historicism and its cousin, Darwinian evolution, held “that the individual’s inalienable natural rights were only a pleasant fiction,” that the individual could only be protected by a much larger “organism,” the state, whose ‘evolution’ could be guided by the new scientists. The economist Washington Gladden described “the tradition of respect for individual liberty” in the United States as “a radical defect in the thinking of the average American.” The industrial economy had disproven natural-rights individualism. Indeed, economist Edward A. Ross describe individual persons as “plastic lumps of human dough” rightly formed on the “social kneading board.” In this, Ross followed the arguments of “my Master,” Lester Frank Ward, a sociologist who served on the boards of both the American Sociological Association and the American Economic Association, whom he compared favorably to Aristotle.

Ward made two key assertions: “humanity was the agent of its own destiny”; “society, not the individual, was the proper unit of explanatory account.” Progressives “always gave the whole moral primacy over the individuals it subsumed” since, as Ely put it, the state, which rules society, is “a moral person,” indeed a more authoritative moral person than the corporations. What, then, did “society” want? And who would be charged with knowing what it wanted? “The second question was easy for progressives. The experts were charged with knowing what society wanted.” They were to be the state’s men. And, when it came to the corporations, now judged to be “legal persons” entitled “to some of the same liberties that protected natural persons from the state,” such rights could amount to nothing, given the judgment of the Progressive president of Princeton College, Woodrow Wilson, who dismissed unalienable rights as “nonsense,” and the assertion of Constitutional law scholar Roscoe Pound, who wrote that the protections of the Bill of Rights “were not needed in their own day” and “not desired in our own.” It is almost needless to say that historicism gave the ruling experts the right, indeed the obligation, not only to identify what “society” wanted but to identify what it should want and bring it around to wanting it.

Thus, the administrative state “was to be the great benefactor of twentieth-century economics.” In return, what economists could do for the state was to denigrate “laissez-faire economics” and to lend the state the authority of modern science, now that the authority derived from securing natural rights had been trashed, along with natural rights themselves. With the Panic of 1893 and the Pullman Strike of 1894, American politicians found themselves very much in search of a new source of authority. By 1899, AEA president Arthur T. Hadley could straight-facedly claim that economists served as “representatives of nothing less than the whole truth,” along with the common good; economists thus deserve to be the adjudicators and reconcilers of clashing socioeconomic classes. Against the sober warning of John Stuart Mill in his Principles of Political Economy, who had “warned that government was badly informed, its employees were mediocre and often corrupt, and, moreover, politics continually threatened the reform goals of efficiency and fairness alike,” the Progressives burnished an image of themselves as transpolitical scientists, surgeons of justice. “It was,” Leonard notes, “a bold claim,” adding that “Progressives of all types tended to venerate science, even or perhaps especially when they had little contact with it.” No matter: the ever-enthusiastic Ely borrowed from Thomas Jefferson, calling economists “natural aristocrats.” That was the one way in which nature could usefully be brought back into the debate on the side of what Ross called “intelligent social engineering.”

The administrative state was intended to replace the party bosses and common-law, constitutional-law judges, who persisted in understanding that “bureaucracy was political, too,” a form of politics that had no great regard for republicanism. The older labor union ‘bosses,’ with Samuel Gompers at their head, also viewed the new reformers with skepticism. Progressives viewed themselves unskeptically. New York City Comptroller Herman Metz intoned that while the practical man “knows how and “the scientific man knows why,” the “expert knows how and why.” That is, while science is the ultimate authority, it needs bearers of its Good News, apostles who bring the truth and justice of science not only to the masses but to the state that rules the masses—legitimately, if it ‘follows the science.’ Herbert Croly’s famous formula, that Progressivism brings Hamiltonian or ‘statist’ means to bear in a quest for Jeffersonian ends, turns out to mean not that Progressivism aims at securing natural rights—those putative fictions—but that it puts the natural aristocrats of scientific expertise in charge as the brains of the social organism, an organism rightly subject to evolution under the direction of the natural aristocrats.

With the Progressive (and Republican-Party) Governor Robert M. LaFollette at the helm, Wisconsin became “the first prototype of American administrative government,” appointing University of Wisconsin faculty, including its president and all of its economists, to government commissions. Somewhat fancifully, Progressive writer Frederick C. Howe titled his book on the subject Wisconsin: An Experiment in Democracy and, more accurately, describing the state as a “scientific laboratory of reform,” the American equivalent of Germany.  Wisconsin itself was a “German state,” another fan exclaimed, inasmuch as “so many Wisconsonites were of Teutonic stock,” their ancestors having been refugees from the failed European revolutions of 1848. As John Dewey saw, “Germany had subordinated its legislature to the bureaucracy, which conduced to the real business of government—administration” along Hegelian lines. Hence, as in Germany, state universities were elevated to compete with those old and still too-conservative private colleges dotted along the Eastern Seaboard. It wasn’t until the Wilson administration, beginning in 1915, that the federal government, now thought of as the ‘national state,’ began to establish and fortify an administrative state on that level of government, thanks in large measure to the income tax amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified in 1913. Progressive economists, led by AEA president Edwin R. A. Seligman, “played a pivotal role in laying the intellectual foundation for the US income tax.” As he put it, Americans pay taxes “simply because the state is part of us,” an entity which we have a duty to support, even as we are charged with supporting our families.” Taxes funded federal commissions, some established as early as the 1890s, designed to regulate the corporations. These included the United States Industrial Commission, the U.S. Bureau of Corporations, the National Monetary Commission, the Federal Reserve banks, the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Permanent Tariff Commission (later renamed the US International Trade Commission. “The bulk of the work was done by March 1917, the end of President Woodrow Wilson’s first term, and the eve of the United States’ entry into the First World War. The fourth branch of government was established—an extraconstitutional branch to be sure, but nominally part of the executive branch and overseen by the legislative branch. Previously, “judges and elected representatives, not bureaucrats, made the legal rules governing economic life,” primarily “on the state and municipal level.” But with corporations having made markets national, not only was market regulation nationalized but the administrative state absorbed many legislative, judicial, and executive functions into itself, very much with cooperation of the Progressive president and of Progressives in Congress and, to a lesser extent, Progressives on the Supreme Court. 

The income tax replaced the tariffs as the federal government’s principal source of revenue. This made eminent sense to Progressives. The tariff had been intended as pro-business, as a means of protecting domestic manufactures from foreign competitors. Similarly, “internal improvements” (roads, bridges, canals) were also understood as agents of economic development. “The national administrative state, in in contrast, never purported to be a friend of business. It intended to control business.” To do so, only experts could rule, as legislators “could not be trusted to advance the public good,” given their ignorance of the science of economics and the science of administration, to say nothing of their lowly moral standards and partisan heatedness. As to the judges, they too were incompetent, given their dependence upon legal precedent and their hidebound insistence on upholding “individual liberties, which progressives regarded as archaic impediments to urgently needed improvements in social health, welfare, and morals.” Not to worry: The Revenue Act of 1917 raised income taxes, increased the top level of taxation to 67% of income, taxed large estates “up to 25%,” expanded the “tax base”—i.e., the number of persons required to pay income taxes—and also increased inheritance taxes in an effort to discourage the formation of inherited wealth by a monied aristocracy or oligarchy. The revenues thereby raised were originally intended to pay for America’s intervention in the Great War, but “even after demobilization, federal spending, adjusted for inflation, was more than triple its prewar levels,” so most of the taxes stayed in place at the levels enacted by the Act. As important was the war effort itself, which enabled the national government (in War Industrial Board member Grosvenor Clarkson’s estimation) to bring a “combatively individualistic people into a vast cooperative effort in which the good of the unit was sacrifice to the good of the whole,” proving, as John Dewey had it, that the national economy could be managed as readily as a factory by expert central planners.

Progressives ardently maintained that their enterprise enhanced democracy by wresting control of the government by corrupt machine pols and the corporations that bribed them. The ability of corporations to insinuate themselves into the administrative state, too, was not yet apparent, but such anti-corruption reforms as voter registration in fact “reduced democratic participation, often by design.” For example, disenfranchisement of American blacks in the South was “regularly justified as an anticorruption measure.” Women’s right to vote and direct election of U.S. Senators became the constitutional law of the land; initiative, referendum, recall, and election of state court judges did democratize the regime, in some instances at the expense of republicanism, but “overall voter turnout in the former states of the Confederacy fell to 30 percent by 1904.” Wilson sniffed that black Americans were “a danger to themselves as well as to those whom they had once served,” and evidently that the menace extended to government paper-pushers, as he pushed “large numbers of lack federal employees” out of their jobs. As Professor Ross intoned, “One man, one vote does not make Sambo equal to Socrates.” (It isn’t clear that Ross himself was equal to Socrates but let us not be unkind.) And it wasn’t just Southern blacks who stopped voting. “Voter turnout dropped everywhere.” From 1896 to 1924, voter turnout in national elections dropped from 80 percent to less than 50 percent. “The more egalitarian progressives, such as Jane Addams and John Dewey, wanted more democracy and more expertise,” simultaneously, “but never really figured out how to get both.” With more real power going to the administrators, more commoners shrugged.

The Progressive economists were not among the egalitarians. They “never entertained the notion that expertise could work through the people.” Indeed, “it was high time, Ely said, to abandon the outmoded eighteenth-century doctrine that all men were equal as a false and pernicious doctrine”—a dictum that reveals nothing so much as Ely’s decidedly inexpert understanding of what the Founders meant by equality. [2] “The human rubbish heap,” as he put it, consisted of perhaps twenty percent of American citizens, and most of the remaining majority weren’t all that much better. In Edwin R. A. Seligman’s opinion, an economist should function as the modern-day equivalent of a priest, teaching the people what they should want and then showing them the way, the truth, and the light that would lead them to it. 

Progressive economists viewed markets with suspicion. “Market choices are decentralized, guided by prices, not by command,” leading to “unplanned” outcomes. “This, many progressives argued, was the source of economic disorder and waste.” Large-scale modern industrial corporations are centralized, however, and therefore good, manageable by administrators. Such corporations are, above all, efficient. They require “no cost-increasing transactions with middlemen”; they can arrange “lower-cost financing, provid[e] factory workers with technically superior capital equipment with attendant productivity increases; they often eliminate ‘cut-throat competition,'” inducing industries to constrain both profits for the capitalists and wages for the workers. Finally, big corporation would, they expected, reduce the sharp ups and downs of the market, moderate the jaggedness of the business cycle. Monopoly was bad because monopolists tend to “corrupt politics” (although never, of course, the members of the administrative priesthood), but sheer size wasn’t the problem; it was part of the solution. The capitalists, especially the most successful ones, happily concurred. John D. Rockefeller lauded “modern economic administration,” predicting that “individualism is gone never to return.” 

A priesthood will need a book. The Bible of the “gospel of efficiency” was Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911. Taylor argued that management efficiency would bring “labor peace.” Managers must first implement “efficient work techniques, enforced and calibrated by enhance surveillance of worker effort,” then wait for “the explosive increase of productivity that ensued,” which in turn would boost both profits and wages.” What much later would come to be called a ‘win-win’ outcome would eliminate the worst tensions between capitalists and workers, refuting the dire Marxian prophecies of socialists. As things turned out, workers resented being surveilled and subjected to discipline, even if by men who claimed scientific expertise. This hardly fazed Progressives, however, who introduced Taylorism to local, state, and federal government in the form of city managers who controlled budgeting and consolidation of state and local government, eroding the supposedly antiquated separation of powers. This was best articulated by Wilson, who deprecated the old “Newtonian” model of the Founders while praising the scientifically up-to-date “Darwinian” notion of government as an “organism.” And even churchmen got into the (Hegelian) spirit of the thing, with one earnest clergyman “call[ing] on the ‘ecclesiastical engineer’ to make church practices less wasteful.” Meanwhile, schoolgirls were given classes in ‘home economics,’ with the promise of greater efficiency among the homemakers of the future. The founder of that discipline was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, no less, who invented the term ‘euthenics,’ meaning “the science of producing more efficient human beings by improving living conditions.”

Most ambitious of all the Progressive theories was eugenics. In his seminal book, The Races of Europe, William Z. Ripley announced three distinct racial types: Teutons, Alpines, and Mediterraneans, identified by the shapes of their heads, the colors of their skins, and the heights of their bodies. Teutons were the very best of the breeds, and Ripley “could not disguise his contempt for immigrants without Teutonic blood,” for example those emitted from the “great Polish swamp of miserable human beings,” particularly Jews. Interbreeding with such degenerate kinds could only result in “race suicide,” whereby “future Americans” in the breathless words of the New York Times would become “swarthy.” “Anthropologists worldwide regarded The Races of Europe as a significant scientific advance,” and social scientists embraced it for its potential for giving their hitherto somewhat ‘soft’ sciences a firm biological foundation. “We census our farm animals and test our soils,” Ely observed. “Surely it was no less important to take stock of our human resources, ascertain where defects exist, and apply suitable remedies.” In his words, “we have got far enough to recognize”—historical progress, again—that “there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.” Progressives stopped short of genocide, but forced sterilization was not out of the question.

Efficiency and biological pseudoscience could, at least, rely on measurable criteria, however dubious. But labor relations, and especially the vexed question of wages, were not nearly so amenable to the scientific method. It is to the vexed question of the value of labor that Leonard turns in the second half of his book. Progressives pondered four questions: What was labor getting? How were wages determined? What should labor get? And if they were not getting enough, what should be done and who should do it?

What labor was getting was potentially determinable, although at the time “reliable data on wages, benefits, and hours were sketchy at best and were often misleading or nonexistent.” The second question was also an empirical one, a matter of surveying business practices to determine whether wages were “set arbitrarily, by convention or the whim of the boss,” or whether they bore “some connection to market forces of supply and demand.” The third question was not empirical and therefore not really amenable to scientific knowledge. The same was true of the policy question and the ‘Who should rule?’ question. 

The “ancient and still more fundamental question” underlying all the others was whether labor should be valued as commodities are valued, exchanged for money and other benefits in the ‘labor market,’ or whether it should be determined by what the laborer is—age, sex, race, nationality, class, legal status. “For nearly all of recorded human history, the notion of laborers selling their labor services for wages was nonsensical” since “labor was compelled agricultural toil of social inferiors in the service and under the command of their betters.” Oligarchy, usually calling itself aristocracy, prevailed in society and in politics alike, often in collaboration with, sometimes in opposition to, hereditary monarchy. 

Market exchange or command? “Hostility to trade is as venerable as trade itself.” Moneychangers and moneylenders, persons ‘in trade,’ bourgeois arrivistes aspiring comically to becoming gentlemen: such persons lacked the virtues of statesmen and even those of honest toilers on the land. The term ‘economics’ itself derives not from some Greek or Roman word for trade but from the Greek word for the household, oikos, and the word for law, nomos. Material life was to be ruled, and political life derived from the models of rule seen in the household: political (ruling and being ruled, husband and wife), command for the good of the commanded (parents and children), command for the good of the commanders (masters and slaves). Household being smaller and less comprehensive, less determinant of the common good than poleis, they were nonetheless superior to the market, “the dishonest domain of trade and credit,” hagglers and cheats. In antiquity, the “dirtiest labor” went to slaves, often war captives, market machination to free non-citizens, often immigrants and their descendants. None of these people were entitled to own land; none entitled to a share in ruling the polis. “Two thousand years later” in Europe, “an aristocracy still monopolized land ownership, ruled the polity and the economy, and claimed supernatural bases for its privilege.” As late as the eighteenth century in France, économie politique “referred to the principles of administering a large agricultural estate,” with France itself being the largest of all such holding, ruled by the king with the help of his “skilled administrators.” The vast civil-social democratization manifested in the American and French revolutions finally upended all of that, at least in those countries, with others to follow, quite reluctantly. 

The great theorist of economic democratization, Adam Smith, published his Wealth of Nations in that banner year, 1776. Smith criticized “the ancient prejudice that a persons’ economic and social value was fixed in an immutable hierarchy at birth.” Such hierarchy was both factually wrong (“the loftiest philosopher, he wrote, was no better than the commonest street porter, just better trained”) and “economically destructive,” preventing people “from specializing in the work they did best.” Better to be ‘liberal’—free to find and pursue your “own interest” in your “own way.” Such a civil society could exist only if markets were also free, enabling such “specializing workers [to] relay on others to supply the goods” they did not produce, to exchange your goods for mine. “A free people free to trade was no evil; it was, rather, the means for reversing two millennia of economic stagnation.” Smith applauded the Americans and their declaration of independence not simply from the imperial fatherland but from socioeconomic hierarchy. True, American republican liberty was built for a decentralized, sparsely settled agrarian republic with free land (for white men),” but even such limited liberty far surpassed the European orders, to say nothing of those on all the other continents. What Leonard calls “classical political economy,” by which he means modern liberal political economy, “said the value of a good was intrinsic to it, embodied in it during the process of its production, and in particular, determined by the labor that went into it”—a “labor theory of value” Locke was the first to enunciate, then by Smith, and finally appropriated by Marx for very different purposes. In its Lockean form, it comported with the overall ‘social contract’ by which civil societies themselves originated. Progressives, by contrast, “saw a wage not as the price of a contractual exchange, but as a worker-citizen’s rightful claim upon his share of the common wealth produced when the laborer cooperated with the capitalist to jointly create it.” This meant that “labor was not a commodity” to be determined by market exchange. It should be exchanged for a “living wage” whose level would be determined not by workers or capitalists but by expert governmental administrators—as seen, for example, in laws setting a ‘minimum wage’ for workers.

The Progressives’ stance on the value of labor obviously connects with their scientism. It is scientism that connected the Progressive stance on the value of labor to evolutionary, Darwinian or perhaps neo-Darwinian notions of socioeconomic progress. Although most students associate Darwinism with ‘Social Darwinism,’ the claims of unbridled free-market competition, in fact “there was something in Darwinism for everyone,” and American social scientists selected any number of things but not all things. [3] A Darwinian social scientist might be a capitalist or a socialist, an individualist or a collectivist, a pacifist or a militarist, a pro-natalist or an advocate of birth control, atheist/agnostic or religious. Progressives accepted Darwin’s evolutionism, it being compatible with their historicism. They also accepted Darwin’s argument that human beings originated in a common ancestor, that human beings were one species. His notion of the ‘survival of the fittest,’ borrowed from Herbert Spencer, seemed too harsh to many of them and the claim that evolution was slow, too pessimistic. The randomness of Darwin’s theory also bothered them; surely evolution was progressive, as Hegel had maintained, not merely a series of adaptations to a randomly changing environment. Darwin’s theory was insufficient as an ideational framework for ruling change. For this, they preferred the evolutionism of Lamarck, who argued that evolution was driven by changes in animal behavior—the famous claim that the giraffe gets its long neck from generations of straining toward the leaves near the top of trees. This gave Progressive warrant for campaigning against “race poisons”—such “unhealthy behaviors” as drinking alcohol (hence the Prohibition amendment), “smoking, meat eating, promiscuity,” all deemed injurious to the genetic material of the persons in their thrall and to their hapless offspring. “Socially planned improvements could improve the biological inheritance of an entire generation and all its descendants.” Not gradual but rapid improvement in the human racial stock was not only desirable but possible. Eugenics made sense, whereas nature, insofar as it resisted such efforts, must be conquered or at least hurried along in the right direction. Darwinian natural selection must be eschewed in favor of human selection, human governance of nature. So, for example, competition among corporations was acceptable, so long as it was properly guided by experts in the science of administration. Otherwise, competition would only ‘select’ for traits of “rapacity and cunning.” The liberation of women would enable them to select the biologically fittest men as their mates, unless they preferred those rapacious and cunning rich men. “Progressives said that regulation was the most efficient route to better heredity,” regulation guided by scientist who “will determine who is fittest” while “state experts will select them by regulating immigration, labor, marriage, and reproduction” in a process not of natural but of “artificial selection.” Society, Progressive and indeed socialist Frank Lester Ward insisted, “must protect itself against capitalism’s dysgenic tendencies” and against “wasteful, slow, unprogressive, and inhuman natural selection.”

“When Reform Darwinists,” Progressives, “wished to argue that society, not just the individual, could be purposeful, they portrayed society as an evolved organism, an idea many of them had first encountered as graduate students in Germany,” that is, from Hegelianism’s recent variants. Progressive atheists such as Ely “claimed the state was literally an organism,” not merely in some figure-of-speech sort of way, but so could Social Gospel Christians like Rauschenbusch, who wanted to take the organism and baptize it in a project of what he called “saving the social organism.” “Unlike a machine,” Progressives like Wilson, Ely, and Croly agreed, society “grows and evolves.” The advantage to be gained by this was that “if society really was a person—possessing a mind, interest, and a conscience—then the problem of determining what 75 million people wanted was vastly simplified.” Leonard calls the depiction of “society as an organism…a rhetorical masterstroke,” the “master metaphor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American social thought.”

As with any bodies, bodies foreign to it might well do it injury. “The social organism had a necessary unity, and it was not an inclusive one.” The Founders regarded immigration as open to “all who agreed to abide by the social contract’s founding principles”—a matter of consent. “But a biological conception of American nationality entailed some kind of evolutionary consanguinity.” No “uninvited parasites or microbes” wanted. Further, the existing racial stock could be improved by artificial selection of the most desirable elements within it. Ward called “the intelligent management of society [to] improve, direct and hasten social evolution” sociocracy. The important remaining question was how to do the selecting. For Croly, it was the national government; for Ely, it was society, for Henry Carter Adams and Woodrow Wilson, it was administrative regulation—for example, laws barring children and married women from work. These divergences notwithstanding, Progressives agreed that “the adverse selection of unrestrained markets could be turned into the beneficial selection of regulated markets.”

Eugenics, a term invented by the English polymath Francis Galton in 1883, became a major element in the Progressive version of the modern conquest of nature. Galton held that “differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament were due to differences in heredity”; that “human heredity could be improved,” rather quickly (“and kindly,” he generously added). Such improvement could not be left to chance, to nature, but “required scientific investigation and regulation of marriage, reproduction, immigration, and labor.” In line with these principles, the American Race Betterment Foundation was founded in 1906, the Eugenics Education Society in England in 1907. Indiana led the way with the first of more than thirty American states to pass a forcible sterilization law, “kindly” being a relative notion. New Jersey Governor Wilson got into the act in 1911, explaining that forced sterilization would eliminate or at least reduce “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.” Overall, “in the first three decades of the twentieth century, eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream.” Ross applauded, calling endorsement of eugenics “a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race,” especially in light of the white-on-white slaughter of the Great War, that “immeasurable calamity that has befallen the white race” because it destroyed so much of humanity’s best genetic material. American colleges and university eugenics courses saw some 20,000 enrollments between 1914 and 1928, and such literary notables as T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Eugene O’Neill, D. H. Lawrence, and Jack London endorsed the doctrine, with Lawrence adding euthanasia of inferiors to his recommended to-do list. [4] Among American legal notables, William Howard Taft, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes regarded forced sterilization as constitutional, concurring with Holmes’s mot, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Taft and Eliot were socially and politically conservatives; eugenics wasn’t only a Progressive hobby horse. The critics were either “classical liberals” or Catholics, erstwhile antagonists who rejected eugenics on the grounds of individual liberty and Christian natural law, respectively. Progressive economists thought of eugenics as thrifty, since “uplift was socially costly” while “eugenics was cheap.”

Leonard carefully distinguishes eugenics from “race science.” Eugenics was a policy, race science the discipline that provided one standard for the policy (others being stupidity, criminality, chronic disease). The standard was a ‘scientifically’ established racial hierarchy, with “Caucasians” at the top, “Mongoloids” in the middle, the “Negroid” race at the bottom, the latter two being drags on white progress. Racial hierarchy was quite compatible not only with Progressivism but with Socialism, making it “possible to bemoan the “idiots and cretins’ among the rich,” as Thorstein Veblen famously did in his Theory of the Leisure Class. In Veblen’s account, “the capitalist was able to exploit everyone else” not because he was genuine superior but because “he had inherited an atavistic, predatory race instinct.” On the other end of the social scale, in the emphatic words of the editorialist at The Survey, a leading journal of social work, “the feeble-minded woman at large is the most dangerous person the state can harbor!” Such inferior human specimens could underbid the capable people. The American Federation of Labor spent part of the union members’ dues on a pamphlet titled, Meat versus Rice: American Manhood against Asiatic Coolieism, Which Shall Survive? And in his History of the American People, then-professor Woodrow Wilson warned that white workers, who could not “live upon a handful of rice of a pittance,” could scarcely compete with Chinese workers, “who with their yellow skin and strange debasing habits of life seemed to them hardly fellow men at all but evil spirits, rather.” Jews were no better, their sweatshops “the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race,” in the words of John R. Commons. Socialist Party leader Eugene Debs took a more comprehensive view: “the Dago,” as he ungently put it, lives more “like a savage beast” than even the Chinese; Slavs, Huns, and other “pagan labor scourges” were no better. In this atmosphere, racial violence festered, free-market competition waned. Hence the minimum wage, which prevented underbidding by such parasites.

“The new discourses of eugenics and race science recast spiritual or moral failure as biological inferiority, making old prejudices newly respectable and lending scientific luster to the argument of critics and defenders of American economic life.” The Social Gospel demi-Christians were fully on board, with the theologian Walter Rauschenbusch as usual leading the way. The “cooperative commonwealth” he envisioned derived from the societies established by ancient Aryans in the forests of Saxony. When Rauschenbusch wrote of “fraternal democracy,” he meant “fraternal” biologically; shared property and social cooperation were “dyed into the fiber of our breed,” the Anglo-Saxons. Capitalism slithered into Anglo-Saxon America from the east and the south of Europe—Jews, Italians, and the like. The equally pious Francis Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union advocated immigration laws to prohibition of alcohol in her efforts to bar “the scum of the Old World” from entering the United States. Only then can we “weld the Anglo-Saxons of the New World into one royal family”—perhaps not so noble a prospect as she supposed, given the character of any number of Anglo-Saxon royals, before and since. Again, conservatives endorsed this stuff, too, as seen in the writings of Columbia political scientist John W. Burgess, U. S. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and historian John Fiske.

All of this culminated in the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act of 1924, capping immigration quotas at two percent of each nationality’s population in the United States in 1890. 1890 made sense to anti-immigrationists, Progressive and conservative alike, because that was the year when those distressing Catholic, Jewish, and Orthodox Christians from the inferior races of southern and eastern Europe had begun to arrive. In its effects, “It worked.” Immigration from those parts of Europe plummeted by 97 percent. As for Asians (“Mongoloids”), immigration from those nations was reduced nearly to nothing. Progressives peopling the administrative state-imposed literacy tests as a means of identifying and “rigorously excluding the plainly unfit,” as economist Edward Bemis explained. As for those undesirable immigrants and other defectives already here, they could be returned to their homelands, placed in institutions, segregated in remote areas, or sterilized. The administrative state was the indispensable tool for such minute surveillance and enforcement of laws against the ‘unfit.’ 

There were a few race egalitarians among the Progressives, John Dewey being the most important. He rejected the hierarchy proposed by ‘race science.’ But even he backed race-based immigration restrictions on the grounds that the introduction of certain races exacerbated social conflict. “The world is not sufficiently civilized to permit close contact of peoples of widely different cultures without deplorable consequences.” 

The first generations of Progressives are also remembered for what is now called ‘first-wave feminism,’ with its substantial achievement of the Constitutional amendment requiring the states to legalize voting rights for women—’second-wave feminism’ being the era of more exclusively socioeconomic reforms beginning in the late 1960s, including equal pay for equal work, legalization of abortion, and workplace quotas. But first-wave feminism had its share of economic reforms, too, especially in the realm of labor reform, in which “progressive women were at the forefront.” Not equal employment opportunities but unequal protections were their goal, however: “setting maximum hours, minimum wages, and pensions for mothers,” usually expressed “in the language of protection.” “The claim was that women, as the biologically weaker sex, needed (like children) special protection from the demands of employment.” In Muller v. Oregon (1908), the State of Oregon’s law setting maximum hours for women workers was challenged. The state’s Progressive attorney, Louis Brandeis, prepared a brief enabling defendants to argue not only from legal precedent, as had been standard up to that time, but from social science research—the findings skewed, as one might expect, to support the attorney’s clients. Oregon won, at the cost of “playing a dangerous game,” since “if their arguments for women’s inferiority succeeded, they risked inscribing into law the subordinate status of women in the economy and in the polity.” Progressives, including feminists, indeed considered a woman’s place to be in the home, adopting the original meaning of oikonomia, the rule of the household while putting women in charge of it, at least during the day, since men now worked mostly outside the home, returning only in time for dinner. Practically speaking, the argument intended to “return mothers to the home,” reducing the competition for jobs outside it; this would boost men’s wages “sufficiently to support a family.” As for widows and other women without “a male provider,” they would receive state pensions. These claims could be associated with “race progress.” Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who detested “the subjugation of women” as heartily as Mr. and Mrs. Mill had done in the previous century, and Theodore Roosevelt regarded motherhood as woman’s “primary and most essential duty.” Those who shirked it were “race criminals,” on the same grounds. The theme of protection for women “ran aground, calamitously,” when the Supreme Court reversed its Muller decision in a 1923 decision that rested squarely on the principles of contract law. This led some feminist Progressives to relinquish the women’s weakness strategy and propose the first iteration of the Equal Rights Amendment. 

The Great War spurred increased statism, in turn bolstering Progressives institutionally, but it didn’t help the reputation of German things, including ideas emanating from Germany. American Economic Association president Irving Fisher observed that the German economists’ willingness to serve ‘the state’ in fact meant subordinating themselves a bad regime, the Hohenzollern Dynasty. However, he bravely continued, America doesn’t have that sort of regime. Herbert Croly shared the revelatory moment, and although his confidence in statist measures was shaken, he remained certain that “expert social engineers” could do good if they worked within civil society, and with popular consent, while avoiding service in state administrations. And so, in the end, “Progressivism reconstructed American liberalism by dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism.” 

 

Notes

1. For an account of Progressivism by a leading Progressive, see Frank Goodnow: The American Conception of Liberty (1913); for a review, see “Goodnow’s Conception of American liberty on this website under the category, “American Politics,” on this website. For general accounts of Progressivism on this website, see “Educating the American Mind: The Progressives’ View”; “The Progressives’ Presidency,” and “The Progressives’ Critique of the Declaration of Independence,” all on this website under the category, “American Politics.” Among historians, see Arthur A. Ekirch: The Decline of American Liberalism (1955); for a review, see “Liberalism and Statism in America” and B. Anderson: Economics and the Public Welfare: A Financial and Economic History of the U.S., 1914-1946 (1949); for a review, see “New Deal or No Deal: American Economic Policies, 1914-1947.” Both of these reviews are on this website, again under the category, “American Politics.” Important studies of Progressivism by political scientists include Paul Eidelberg: A Discourse on Statesmanship: The Design and Transformation of the American Polity (1974); Dennis J. Mahoney: Politics and Progress: The Emergence of American Political Science (2004); Paul Marini: The Progressive Revolution in Politics and Political Science (2005); R. J. Pestritto: Woodrow Wilson and the Roots of Modern Liberalism (2005); R. J. Pestritto and William J. Atta, eds: American Progressivism (2008)
2. See “America’s Declaration of Independence” on this website, under the category, “American Politics.”
3. Leonard identifies the ‘Left’ historian Richard Hofstadter as the one who tied the term ‘Social Darwinism’ to “laissez-faire economics.” Hofstadter was polemicizing. In fact, market-oriented thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner were not “particularly Darwinist,” and the socialist Lester Frank Ward was “the most Darwinian of American social thinkers” in that era. What is more, when it comes to Darwin himself, he was indeed influenced by Thomas Malthus’s description of “the struggle for existence,” but Malthus “was a protectionist, a skeptic of industry, and unenthusiastic about immigration”—hardly a free marketeer.
4. As did the Socialist economist, Scott Nearing, in whose 1912 book, The Super Race: An American Problem, lauded the ancient Greeks for killing “defective children,” and deplored the perpetuation of hereditary defects as “infinitely worse than murder.” While killing such “scum” was off-putting to modern sensibilities, civil society could at least isolate defectives and prevent them from breeding more of their kind.