The Progressive Era
Preface by Murray N. Rothbard
The aim of this proposed book is to trace the origins of the current welfare-warfare state in America, in what is loosely called “The Progressive Period,” from approximately the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s. Briefly, the thesis is that the rapid upsurge of statism in this period was propelled by a coalition of two broad groups: (a) certain big business groups, anxious to replace a roughly laissez-faire economy by a new form of mercantilism, cartelized and controlled and subsidized by a strong government under their influence and control; and (b) newly burgeoning groups of intellectuals, technocrats, and professionals: economists, writers, engineers, planners, physicians, etc., anxious for power and lucrative employment at the hands of the State. Since America had been born in an antimonopoly tradition, it became important to put over the new system of cartelization as a “progressive” curbing of big business by a humanitarian government; intellectuals were relied on for this selling job. These two groups were inspired by Bismarck’s creation of a monopolized welfare-warfare state in Prussia and Germany.
The big government created by this business-intellectual partnership had important repercussions for all aspects of American life, in addition to the cartelized and regulated economy. For one thing, the drive of pietists and compulsory “moralists” could now be foisted on the American public in the name of the newly burgeoning medical “science.” The result: Prohibition, antisex laws, antidrug laws, and Sunday blue laws. Another result, which made heavy and effective use of the “morality” theme, was the business-professional drive to centralize and take over the nation’s cities, thereby reaping good government as against the wicked and corrupt old urban machines — which were responsive to poorer and immigrant groups. One of the major aspects of this urban centralization was to centralize the public school system, and force children into them, so that the immigrant Catholic groups would be “Christianized” and be inculcated in the values of the American State and the new system.
In foreign affairs, the new partnership of government and business meant a substitution of a new American imperialism for the older roughly “isolationist” and neutralist foreign policy. The U.S. government was now supposed to open up markets for American exports abroad, use coercion to protect American investors and bondholders overseas, and seize territory on behalf of these aims. It was to be willing to go to war on behalf of these aims. The increasing militarism also meant heavy government contracts and subsidies for favored arms manufacturers.
A third group, virtually created by the new system as a junior partner, was labor unions, which were weak until they were called to share the ruling power of the “collectivist planning” of World War I. Creating favored unions was an instrument of cartelization, as well as insuring worker cooperation in the new order. Partly to mold the immigrants more easily, and partly as a boon to labor unions, immigration was virtually abolished during and after World War I, fueled by the racism sponsored by American social scientists.
Thus, from a roughly free and laissez-faire society of the 19th century, when the economy was free, taxes were low, persons were free in their daily lives, and the government was noninterventionist at home and abroad, the new coalition managed in a short time to transform America into a welfare-warfare imperial State, where people’s daily lives were controlled and regulated to a massive degree. In this way, the coalition, inspired by Bismarck’s example and its success in World War I, was able to reach its apogee in Europe, in Mussolini’s “corporate state” and derivative political regimes. In the United States, its apogee was reached in Roosevelt’s New Deal and post-World War II America.1
The purpose of this projected book is to synthesize the remarkable quantity and quality of new and fresh work on the Progressive Era (roughly the late 1890s to the early 1920s) that has been done in the past 20 years. In particular, the object is to trace the causes, the nature, and the consequences of the dramatic shift of the U.S. polity from a relatively laissez-faire system to the outlines of the statist era that we are familiar with today.
The older paradigm of historians held the burst of statism in the Progressive Era to be the response of a coalition of workers, farmers, and altruistic intellectuals to the rising tide of big business monopoly, with the coalition bringing in big government to curb and check that monopoly.
Research in the past two decades has overthrown that paradigm in almost every detail. Gabriel Kolko, James Weinstein, James Gilbert, Samuel P. Hays, Louis Galambos and many others have shown that the essence of Progressivism was that certain elements of big business, having sought monopoly through cartels and mergers on the free market without success, turned to government — federal, state, and local — to achieve that monopoly through government-sponsored and enforced cartelization. Modern scholars of Herbert Hoover, such as Ellis W. Hawley, Joan Hoff Wilson, William A. Williams, and Robert F. Himmelberg, have confirmed the new view of Hoover as Progressive and proto-New Dealer.
Allied to these big business elements in imposing Progressivism were what Gilbert calls “collectivist intellectuals,” whose goals no longer seem that altruistic. Rather, they seem like the first great wave of the “New Class” of modern intellectuals out for a share of power and for the fruits of similar governmental cartelization. There has been a proliferation of research in the past two decades on these intellectuals, ranging from illuminating general studies by Gilbert, Christopher Lasch, and Arthur A. Ekirch, Jr., among others, to studies of particular groups of professionals, technocrats, or social workers. Much has been done on the history of medical licensing in this period, the rise of the eugenics movement, guild actions by engineers and social workers, and the imposition of the anti-sex laws — Donald K. Pickens, Allen F. Davis, David W. Noble, and Ronald Hamowy, are just a few of the studies that come to mind.
In the last decade, the “new political history” stressing ethno-religious determinants of mass political attitudes, voting, and political parties — notably the work of Paul Kleppner and others such as Richard J. Jensen, Victor L. Shradar, and Ronald P. Formisano — has added another important dimension to this story. Kleppner stresses the intense drive for statism from the mid-19th century by the pietist Protestant groups, particularly of the New England stock, as opposed to the laissez-faire and libertarian attitudes of the liturgical Christians, particularly Catholics and high Lutherans. For the remainder of the century, the pietists tried continually to impose prohibition, Sunday blue laws, and enforced public school education as a means of “Christianizing the Catholics”; the liturgicals resisted bitterly. From these personal, religious matters, the party leaders (Republican for the pietists, Democrat for the liturgicals) expanded the interests of their followers to the economic realm: the pietists tending to favor big government, subsidies and regulations, the liturgicals in favor of free trade and free markets. Kleppner explains that the triumph of the Bryan forces in the Democratic Party in 1896 marked the end of the Democrats as a laissez-faire party, and the subsequent lack of real electoral choice left a power vacuum for Progressive technocrats, intellectuals, and businessmen to fill.
Tightening public school control as a means of molding Catholic and immigrant children became important in the Progressive Era, which saw the completion of compulsory education in all the states. The research of Joel Spring, Clarence J. Karier, Colin Greer, and others have revised the older starry-eyed view of the growth of the public school system.
Many of the Progressive intellectuals can best be described as a fusion of supposedly scientific technocracy with a pietist background or pietist allies. As James H. Timberlake points out, the Prohibition movement finally succeeded when wartime was joined to the dictates of medical “science” and long-time pietist crusading.
Finally, Progressivism brought the triumph of institutionalized racism, the disfranchising of blacks in the South, the cutting off of immigration, the building up of trade unions by the federal government into a tripartite big government, big business, big union alliance, the glorifying of military virtues and conscription, and a drive for American expansion abroad.
In short, the Progressive Era ushered the modern American politico-economic system into being. Despite the spate of studies in the past two decades, no one has yet put all the pieces together into a coherent explanatory framework. That will be the aim of this book.2
