Trevor Burrus: Welcome to Free Thoughts from
Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute.
I’m Trevor Burrus.
Aaron Powell: And I’m Aaron Powell.
Trevor Burrus: Joining us today is Thomas
C. Leonard, research scholar at the Council
of the Humanities at Princeton University
and lecturer at Princeton University’s Department
of Economics.
He is the author of the new book, Illiberal
Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics
in the Progressive Era.
Welcome to Free Thoughts.
Thomas Leonard: Thanks.
Nice to be with you.
Trevor Burrus: So I’d like to start with
the title which says a lot by itself.
Why Illiberal Reformers?
Thomas Leonard: Well, everyone knows that
the scholars and activists who dismantled
laissez faire and built welfare state were
reformers.
They don’t call it the progressive era for
nothing.
But it’s my claim that a central feature
of that reform, central feature of erecting
the regulatory state, a new kind of state,
was the producing of liberties in the name
of various conceptions of the greater good.
Not just economic liberties, property rights,
contract and so forth, that’s sort of a
well-known part of the transition from 19th
century liberalism to 20th century liberalism,
but also I maintain civil and personal liberties
as well.
Trevor Burrus: And what time period, are we
talking about just after the turn of the century
or the turn of the 20th century or going back
further than that?
Thomas Leonard: Well, the idea is the architecture,
if you will, the blueprints were drawn up
sort of in the last decade and a half of the
19th century and they gradually made their
way into actual sort of legislation and institutions,
government institutions in the first 2 decades
of the 20th century.
Sort of—to use the usual scholarly terms
kind of late gilded age and then the progressive
era.
Trevor Burrus: So, who are these people, these
reformers?
Are they politicians mostly or are they in
some other walk of life?
Thomas Leonard: Eventually they are politicians,
but the politicians have to be convinced first.
So the convincers in the beginning are a group
of intellectuals or if you like scholars.
They are economists, sociologists, population
scientists, social workers.
Trevor Burrus: Population scientists, are
those basically Malthusians or—?
Thomas Leonard: No.
Today we call them demographers.
Trevor Burrus: We don’t use that term anymore.
We call them what today?
Thomas Leonard: No.
No.
Today, we would call them demographers.
Trevor Burrus: Oh, okay.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
It’s not quite—it doesn’t have to sound
that sinister.
But one of the interesting things, Trevor,
about social science in this kind of—in
its very beginnings in the late 19th century
is its—it’s only beginning to become an
academic discipline which is part of the book
story.
And a lot of social science kind of social
investigations, fact-finding, research reports,
a lot of that is being done outside the academy
in the immigrant settlement houses, to a lesser
extent in government administrative agencies,
in investigations funded by the brand-new
foundations and eventually in this brand-new
invention called the Think Tank.
Aaron Powell: Was this increasing influence
by— what these people are ultimately working
is largely academic, so is this new for academics
or academics this influential before this?
Thomas Leonard: No.
It is new.
It’s a revolution in academia.
If we could transport ourselves backwards
in time to Princeton, say, in 1880, we wouldn’t
recognize the place.
American colleges, you know, just after the
Civil War were tiny institutions.
They weren’t particularly scholarly.
They were denominational.
They were led by ministers.
In Princeton’s case, they would have been
finishing southern gentlemen and you wouldn’t
recognize it at all.
If, however, we could transport ourselves
back to, say, 1920, just at the end of the
progressive era, you would recognize everything
about the place.
The social sciences had been invented and
installed.
There’s the beginning of the physical sciences
in academia and it’s no longer just the
classics, theology and a little bit of philosophy
and mathematics.
Part of the story of the rise of reform is
the story of this revolution in American higher
ed which takes place between 1880 and 1900.
Trevor Burrus: In the book, you discussed
how Germany figures into this to some degree,
which I thought was kind of interesting because
Germany also figured into reforming our public
education below higher ed but Germany status
in the intellectual world was very influential
on Americans in particular.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah, that’s quite right.
The German connection is crucial for understanding
the first generation of economists and other
reformers.
In the 1870s and into the 1880s, if you wanted
to study cutting-edge political economy, Germany
was where you went and all of the founders
of American economics and indeed most of the
other sort of newly hatching social sciences
did their graduate work in Bismarck in Germany.
And it’s only sort of beginning in the 1890s
that American higher end catches up but, boy,
does it catch up quickly.
That’s why we use the term revolution.
But the turn of the century, you know, the
number of graduate students in the United
States getting Ph.D.’s is in the thousands.
You know, sort of after the Civil War even
as late as 1880, it would have just been a
handdful.
Trevor Burrus: So what did these people start
thinking about—I mean these illiberal reformers,
what did they get in their head partially
from Germany, partially from other sources
which we can talk about later?
But in the sort of general overview when they
looked at society, what did they sort of maybe—
not suddenly but at that moment, what did
they decide they wanted to do with it?
Thomas Leonard: Well, another thing to understand
is that most of them, in addition to sort
of having this German model of how an economy
works and also a German model of how an economy
should be regulated, there were also evangelical
protestants, most of them grew up in evangelical
homes, most of them were sons and daughters
of ministers or missionaries and they had,
you know, this extraordinary zeal, this desire
to set the world to rights.
And they looked around them during the industrial
revolution and they saw what really was extraordinary,
unprecedented, economic and social change
which we cannot gather under the banner of
the industrial or at least the American industrial
revolution.
And when they looked around them, they saw
injustice.
They saw low wages.
There was a newly visible class of the poor
in the cities.
They saw inefficiency.
They saw labor conflict.
They saw uneducated men getting rich and this
upending of the old social order in their
view was not only inefficient, it was also
un-Christian and immoral and it needed to
be reformed, and they were sort of—it’s
important to say unabashed about using evangelical
terminology.
They referred to— this is the first generation
of progressives.
They referred to their project as bringing
a kingdom of heaven to Earth.
Aaron Powell: Then how did they—so they’ve
got this project.
They’ve identified these issues that they
want to change.
How did they go about turning that concern
and the expertise that they thought they had
into control of the reins of power or influence
within government?
Thomas Leonard: Great question.
It wasn’t easy.
They understood that they had a tall task
in front of them.
They had to persuade those in power that reform
was needed and reform was justified.
And it helped that 2 other students, Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson went on too famous
as politicians and so did other progressives
at lower levels too.
Part of the idea of academic economics in
this sort of beginning stage was that you
didn’t just spend time in the library or
do blackboard exercises.
Your job was to go out and make the world
a better place.
So, I think the best way to think about it
was they, along with many other reformers,
wrote for the newspapers, went on the lecture
circuits, bent the air of politicians first
at the state level and then later at the federal
level and said it’s a new economic world.
The old economic ideas, laissez faire as they
called it, are not only is it immoral, it’s
economically obsolete and we need to build
a new relationship not unlike the model that
Germany provided between the state and economic
life.
And very gradually it happened.
Trevor Burrus: They were talking about also
the emergence of the administrative state
comes into this too because then they can
take over posts in government that are not
necessarily elected where their expertise
is supposed to be utilized.
Thomas Leonard: That’s exactly right.
The crucial point is that we think about the
progressive era as a huge expansion in the
size and scope of government and indeed it
is that.
But the progressives didn’t just want bigger
government.
They also wanted a new kind of government,
which they saw as a better form, as a superior
form of government.
Famously the progressives weren’t just unhappy
with economic life which was one thing, they
were also unhappy with American political
life and with American government which they
saw and rightly so as corrupt and inefficient
and not doing what it should be doing to improve
society and economy.
So they wanted to not only to expand state
power but also to relocate it, to move government
authority away from the courts which traditionally
had held quite a bit of regulatory power and
away from legislatures and into what they
sometimes called a new fourth branch of government,
the administrative state.
Trevor Burrus: And you’re right, you’re
right in your book which I think this is a
very succinct way of pointing it.
Progressivism was first and foremost an attitude
about the proper relationship of science and
its bearer, the scientific expert, to the
state and of the state to the economy and
polity.
And so these experts—I also want to think
we should make clear, this was not a fringe
group of intellectuals and academic professors.
This was—would you say it was the mainstream
or at least a kind of who’s who of American
intellectuals and all the great Ivy League
institutions?
Thomas Leonard: Absolutely.
It’s the best and brightest if I can use
an anachronistic phrase.
Now, we have to be a little careful with Ivy
League because the centers of academic reform
are at places like Wisconsin and to some extent
at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins and to some
extent at Penn.
But the old colonial colleges like Harvard
and Yale were a little late to catch up.
It took them a while to catch on to this new
German model of graduate seminars and professors
as experts and not merely instructors.
Trevor Burrus: So how did they conceptualize
the average worker that needed their help?
You have this great line in your book which
I think says something about modern politics
too.
“Progressives did not work in factories.
They inspected them.
Progressives did not drink in salons.
They tried to shudder them.
The bold women who chose to live among the
immigrant poor and city slums called themselves
settlers, not neighbors.
Even when progressives idealized workers,
they tended to patronize them.
Romanticizing a brotherhood that they would
never consider joining.”
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
I think it’s fair to say and it’s not
exactly a revelation that the progressives
were not working class, but neither were they,
you know, part of the gentry class.
They were middle class and from middle class
backgrounds, as I say sons and daughters of
ministers and missionaries.
So, they were unhappy when they looked upward
at the new plutocrats who were uneducated
and in their view un-Christian and potentially
corrupting of the republic, but they also
didn’t like what they saw when they looked
downward at ordinary people particularly at
immigrants.
If you don’t mind, I feel like I should
circle back to this fourth branch idea—
Trevor Burrus: Please.
Thomas Leonard: --as a conception of the administrative
state.
I didn’t finish my thought very well.
I think that the way that the progressives
thought about the fourth branch is very important
because the administrative state is as everyone
knows has done nothing but grow since its
blueprinting and its sort of first construction
in Woodrow Wilson’s first term.
I think the key thing—sort of these two
key components that make this a new kind of
government in the progressive mind.
The first is that the independent agencies
like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade
Commission and the Permanent Tariff Commission
were designed to be independent of Congress
and the president.
That was by design.
They were supposed to be in some sense above
politics.
They served for 7 years.
They had overlapping terms.
Oftentimes, they would be balanced politically
and the president could not remove one of
these commissioners except for cause and neither
could Congress impeach them.
So they occupied a kind of a unique place,
a new place did these bureaucrats.
The second thing that matters I think for
understanding the administrative state is
that administrative regulations have the full
force of federal law, right?
Regulations are laws no different than—
you know, Congress had passed one.
Moreover, the fourth branch, the administrators
are also responsible for executing regulations
and third, of course, they’re responsible
for adjudicating regulatory disputes.
So there’s this combination of statutory
and adjudicatory and executive power all rolled
up into one, which is why I think the progressives
called it the fourth branch.
And the growth of administrative government
I think is a much better metric for thinking
about the success, if you will, or the durability
of the progressive vision than simply looking
at something like government spending as a
share of GDP.
Aaron Powell: Can we decouple at least for
purposes of critique the ideology of the progressives
from the methods?
Because obviously they ended up— once they
had the power, ended up doing a lot of really
lamentable or awful things with it.
But the basic idea of having experts in charge
of things—I mean you can see a certain appeal
to that especially as, you know, science advances,
technology advances, our body of knowledge
grows.
We understand more about the economy and more
about how societies function just like you
would want, you know, experts in the medical
sciences overseeing your health as opposed
to just laymen.
Is there anything just inherently wrong or
dangerous about the idea of turning over more
of government to experts distinct from just
the particular ideas of this set of experts?
Thomas Leonard: I don’t think so.
I think the question is more a practical one
of what we think experts should do whether
they’re working in government or in the
private sector.
And the progressives had what you might call
a heroic conception of expertise.
They believed that they not only could be
experts serve the public good but they could
also identify the public good and that’s
what I mean by a heroic conception.
Not only do we know how to get to a particular
outcome, we know also what those outcomes
should be.
Now there’s nothing about expertise per
se that requires that heroic vision which
in retrospect looks both arrogant and naïve.
It makes good sense for the state to call
upon expertise where expertise can be helpful.
So I don’t think it’s an indictment of
the very idea of using science for the purposes
of state.
It’s more about what sort of authority and
we want experts to have.
Going as we sort of move into the new deal
era, which is another great growth spurt in
the size of the state, we get a slightly less
heroic vision of what experts do.
There’s—well, after World War I, that
sort of naïve heroic view of expertise is
simply outmoded.
Trevor Burrus: So they definitely—they’re
pretty arrogant as you mentioned.
They have—so I’m going to ask you sort
of a few things about the way that they’re
looking at society and what they think that
they can do with it and what they’re allowed
to do with it.
So, how did they view individual rights and
as a core layer, I guess, how do they think
of society as opposed to the individual in
terms of the sort of methodology of their
science or state craft or whatever you want
to—however you want to describe it?
Thomas Leonard: That’s a great question.
I think one of the most dramatic changes that
we see in sort of American liberal thinking
and its transition from 19th century small
government liberalism to 20th century liberalism
of a more activist expert-guided state is
a re-conception of what Dan Rogers calls the
moral hole, the idea of a nation or a state
or a social organism as an entity that is
something greater than the individual people
that make it up.
And I think this fundamental change is one
of the sort of key elements in this progressive
inflection point in American history.
Up until that point— if you’re willing
to call an era a point, forgive me.
Up until that moment, I think that’s what
we should say.
Trevor Burrus: I think that’s good, yes.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah, right.
We would have said the United States are and
after the progressive reconceptualization,
it’s the United States is.
Instead of a collection of states of federation,
now the idea is that there’s a nation.
Woodrow Wilson’s famous phrase at least
famous in these precincts was “Princeton
in the nation’s service” and this desire
to identify a kind of moral hole, a nation,
a state or a social organism.
They gave it different names.
I think the great impetus to the idea that
it was okay to trespass on individual liberties
as long as it promoted the interests of the
nation or the state or the people or society
or the social organism.
Trevor Burrus: So how does—and this is another
big factor because it’s kind of interesting.
We have a—we talk about them as evangelicals
and then progressives, which a lot of people
might be surprised, the people who call themselves
progressives now.
But we also have them as evangelical but with
Darwin and evolution having a huge influence
on their thinking which also seems to not
go with the way we align these things today.
How did Darwin and evolution come in to their
thinking and what did it make them start to
conclude?
Thomas Leonard: Right.
Well, remember the quote you had before about
progressivism as being essentially a concept
that refers to the relationship of science
to government and of government to the economy.
The science of the day or at least the science
that most influenced—the economic reformers
was Darwinism.
And there’s just no understanding progressive
era reform without understanding the influence
of Darwinism.
It was in the progressive view what made these
brand-new social sciences just barely established
scientific.
That’s one of the reasons we do history.
Economics today doesn’t have a whole lot
to do with evolution or with Darwinism and
has a lot to do with mathematics and statistical
approaches.
But at the turn of the century and until the
end of the First World War, evolutionary thinking
was at the heart of the science that underwrote
economics and the other new social sciences,
which were at least in the progressive view
to guide the administrative state in its relationship
to economy and polity.
Aaron Powell: What does Darwinian thinking
look like in practice for the policy preferences
of the progressives?
I mean I see we’re not just talking about
we need to breed out undesirable traits or
something of that sort.
How does the specifics of Darwin apply to
their broader agenda?
Thomas Leonard: Well, Darwin does many things
for the progressives.
Darwin by himself is sort of a figure that
they admire, sort of he’s a disinterested
man of science concerned only with the truth
and uninterested in profit like, say, a greedy
capitalist, uninterested in power like, say,
a greedy politician.
I mean Darwin is kind of a synecdoche if you
like for the progressive conception of what
a scientific expert does.
More than that, I think that, you know, the
progressives and—and by the way, many other
intellectuals too, socialists and conservatives
alike, were able to find whatever they needed
in Darwin.
Darwin was so influential in the gilded age
and in the progressive era that everybody
found something useful for their political
and intellectual purposes during the gilded
age and the progressive era.
Take competition, for example.
If you were a so-called social Darwinist,
you could say that competition was survival
of the fittest, Herbert Spencer’s phrase
that Darwin eventually borrowed himself and
that, therefore, that those who succeeded
in economic life were in some sense fitter.
The progressives could use other evolutionary
thinkers and say “Wait a second, not so.
Fitter doesn’t necessarily mean better.
Fitter just means better adapted to a particular
environment.”
So competition would be an example of Darwinian
thinking that was influential in the way that
progressives thought about the way an economy
works.
Trevor Burrus: But they weren’t particular.
I mean they weren’t laissez faire and I
know at one point you mentioned that the—I
think you said that it was either the American
Economic Association or maybe sociology was
started partially against William Graham Sumner.
Was it sociology?
William Graham Sumner was very influential
on creating counter-movements to him and he
is sort of a proto-libertarian or a libertarian
figure who was laissez faire but they were
absolutely not.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
That’s quite right.
Sumner is the bête noire of economic reformers.
He was of a slightly earlier generation, the
generation of 1840, and he was the avatar
as you say of free markets and of small government
and Sumner was the man Ely—Richard T. Ely,
sort of the standard bearer of progressive
economics said that he organized the American
Economic Association to oppose.
Yeah, Sumner was in the end the only economist
who is not asked to join the American Economic
Association.
So much was he sort of personally associated
with laissez faire.
Trevor Burrus: Now, of course, they were accused
and this is an important historical point
because you mentioned the social Darwinism
and I think I can almost hear your scare quotes
through the line because that idea of Sumner
and Herbert Spencer being Darwinists of a
sort of wanted to let people die is a little
bit overextended.
Spencer definitely had some evolutionary ideas
about society, but the social Darwinism doesn’t
only come in until the ‘50s if I understand
correctly.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
Social Darwinism is really an anachronism
applied to the progressive era.
I think we can safely, you know, ascribe the
influence of that term to Richard Hofstadter
who coined it in his dissertation which was
published during the Second World War.
It is true, of course, that you could find
apologists for laissez faire or you could
find people who said that, you know, economic
success was not a matter of luck or a fraud
or of coercion but was deserved, was justified.
There were lots of defenders of laissez faire
on various grounds and Spencer and Sumner
find they fit that description.
But neither of them were particularly Darwinian.
Spencer was a rival of Darwin’s.
He thought his theory was—well, it was prior.
He thought it was better and he coined the
term evolution.
And Sumner really wasn’t much of a Darwinist
at all if you look through his work, it’s
only dauded with a few Darwinian references.
I think what Hofstadter did, and he was such
a graceful writer, is he coined a new term
that sounded kind of unpleasant.
And if you look through the entire literature
which I’ve done, you will be hard-pressed
to find a single person who identifies him
or herself as a social Darwinist.
You won’t find a journal of social Darwinism.
You won’t find laboratories of social Darwinism.
You won’t find international societies for
the promotion of social Darwinism.
Trevor Burrus: But ironically, eugenics, you
will find all of those things.
Thomas Leonard: You will find all of those
things.
Trevor Burrus: Actually, could you explain
what eugenics is before we jump into the truly
distasteful part of this episode?
Thomas Leonard: Well, eugenics is just in
the progressive era what it meant, the period
of my book, is the social control of human
heredity.
It’s the idea that human heredity just like
anything else guided by good science and overseen
by socially-minded experts can improve human
heredity just like it can improve government.
It can make government good.
It can make the economy more efficient and
more just and so too can we do the same for
human heredity.
Trevor Burrus: And eugenics was—I mean I
think big is even an understatement of at
least the first two decades of the 20th century
and into the third and fourth decade but especially
the first two decades.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah, there was an extraordinary
intellectual vogue for eugenics all over the
world, not just in the United States.
Eugenics, it’s very difficult viewed in
retrospect that is viewed through the sort
of crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany
in the middle of the 20th century.
It’s very difficult to see how what is a
term that is a dirty word could actually be
regarded as sort of the height of high-mindedness
and social concern.
But it was, in fact, at the time.
And across American society, eugenics was
popular.
It was popular among the new experimental
biologists that we now called geneticist.
It was certainly popular among the new social
scientists, the economists and others who
were staffing the bureaus at the administrative
state and sitting in chairs in the university.
And it was popular among politicians too.
There were many journals of eugenics.
There were many eugenics societies.
They had international and national conferences.
Hundreds probably thousands of scholars were
happy to call themselves eugenicists and to
advocate for eugenic policies of various kinds.
There’s a book published in I think around
1924 by Sam Holmes who was a Berkeley zoologist
and there’s like 6000 or 7000 titles on
eugenics in the bibliography.
Aaron Powell: How did the eugenicists of the
time think about what they were doing or think
about the people that they were doing it to?
Trevor Burrus: Well, first we should ask what
they were doing.
We haven’t actually got to that.
Aaron Powell: But I mean in general—like
the attitude towards the very notion of this
because we can— even setting aside the horrors
of what Nazi Germany did from our modern perspective
looking back at this with the debates that
we have and the struggle we have to allow
people to say define the family, the way that
they choose and just the overwhelming significance
in, you know, the scope of one’s life and
the way one lives in that decision to have
children and become a parent.
And eugenics, no matter—I mean no matter
the details of it is ultimately taking that
choice away from someone or making that choice
for them and it seems just profoundly dehumanizing
and did they consciously or unconsciously
was there a dehumanizing element to it?
Did they think of the people that they were
going to practice this on as somehow less
and so, therefore, deserving of less autonomy?
Or was there a distancing from that element
of it?
Thomas Leonard: Well, it’s important to
remember—the answer to the question is yes.
The professionals, if you will, in the eugenics
movement sort of the professionals and the
propagandists certainly saw immigrants from
southern and eastern Europe, immigrants from
Asia, African Americans, the mentally and
physically disabled as inferiors as unfit.
There’s just no question about it.
But what we need—one important caution here
again is that there were very few people at
the time proposing anything like hurting inferiors
into death chambers.
Eugenic policies were much less extreme.
So when we encounter it in the context of,
say, economic reform, it comes up— In immigration,
for example.
If you regard immigrants from southern and
eastern Europe and from Asia as unfit, as
threats to American racial integrity or as
economic threats to American working men’s
wages, that’s a eugenic argument.
You’re saying that when you argue that they
will sort of reduce American hereditary vigor,
that’s a eugenic argument.
It doesn’t have to involve something as
ugly as, say, coercive sterilization or worse.
There’s many ways of which I think are,
you know, strange to us in retrospect of thinking
about the law, be it immigration reform or
minimum wages or maximum hours as a device
for keeping the inferior out of the labor
force or out of the country altogether.
Trevor Burrus: Yeah, let’s go—yeah, the
last third of your book kind of goes with
this.
We have a chapter called Excluding the Unemployable.
So can you talk a little bit about what that
entailed?
Thomas Leonard: Sure.
The unemployable is a kind of buzz phrase
that I think was probably coined by Sidney
and Beatrice Webb who were Fabian socialists,
founders of the London School of Economics
and whose work was widely read by American
progressives and with whom American progressives
had a very kind of fruitful trans-Atlantic
interaction with.
It’s a misnomer, of course, because the
unemployable refers to people who many of
whom were actually employed.
And the idea here is that a certain category
of worker is willing to work for wages below
what progressives regarded as a living wage
or a fair wage and that these sorts of people
who were often called feeble-minded when they
were mentally disabled or defectives when
they were physically disabled were doing the
sort of transgressing in multiple ways.
The first thing was by accepting lower wages,
they were undermining the deserving American
working men or American really means Anglo-Saxon.
The second thing is because they were willing
to accept low wages, the American worker was
unwilling to do so to accept these low wages
and so instead opted to have smaller families.
That argument went by the name of race suicide.
The undercutting inferior worker because he
was racially predisposed to accept or innately
predisposed to accept lower wages meant that
the Anglo-Saxon “native,” if you will—scare
quotes around native—had fewer children
and as a result the inferior strains were
outbreeding the superior strains and the result
was what Edward A. Ross called race suicide.
Trevor Burrus: Now that sounds like the movie
Idiocracy.
Have you ever seen this movie?
Thomas Leonard: I’m not familiar with it.
Trevor Burrus: Oh, well.
So, but I want to clarify something that might
shock our listeners that—and you mentioned
this briefly a little bit like for the economists,
for members of the American Economic Association,
at the time some of them thought of the minimum
wage as valuable precisely because it unemployed
these people.
So whereas now we’re actually having this
fight about whether or not the minimum wage
unemploys anyone.
It seems like there were a few doubts that
it did unemploy people and the people it unemployed
were the unemployable, unproductive workers
who shouldn’t be employed in the first place.
Thomas Leonard: That’s right.
There’s a very long list of people who at
one time or another just almost comically
if it weren’t sad, long list of groups that
were vilified as being inferior.
As I say, physically disabled, mentally disabled
coming from Asia or Southern Europe or Eastern
Europe, African American, although the progressive
weren’t terribly worried about the African
Americans, at least outside the south until
they started the great migration and became
economic competitors in the factories as well.
So, this very long list of inferiors creates
a kind of regulatory problem which is how
are we going to identify them and so you can,
if you think for example that a Jew from Russia
or an Italian from the mezzogiorno is inferior,
how are you going to know that they’re Jewish
or that they’re from Southern Italy.
Their passport doesn’t specify necessarily.
So one way, of course, is to take out your
handbook, the dictionary of the races of America
or another more clever way ultimately is to
simply set a minimum wage so high that all
unskilled labor will be unable to legally
come to America because they’ll be priced
out.
Trevor Burrus: And that was also true of—it
goes a little bit past your book but the migration
of African Americans north had some influence
on the federal minimum wage of the New Deal
if I remember correctly.
Thomas Leonard: Yes, it did, and also Mexican
immigrants as well.
The idea of inferiors threatening “Americans”
or “Native Americans” is a trope that
recurs again and again and again, not just
in the progressive era but also in the New
Deal.
And it is I suppose shocking and bizarre to
see the minimum wage as hailed for its eugenic
virtues.
But one very convenient way of solving this
problem of how do we identify the inferiors
is to simply assume that they’re low-skilled
and, therefore, unproductive and a binding
minimum wage will ensure that the unproductive
are kept out or if they’re already in the
labor force, they’ll be idled.
And the deserving, that is to say the productive
workers who were always assumed, of course,
to be Anglo-Saxon will keep their jobs and
get a raise.
It’s a very appealing notion.
And you’re quite right that today, you know,
most of the debate or a good part of the minimum
wage debate concerns a question of how much
unemployment you get for a given increase
in the minimum.
But there’s no question that any disemployment
from a higher minimum is a social cause that’s
undesirable.
The progressive era was not seen as a social
cause.
It was not seen as a bug.
It was seen as a desirable feature and this
is why progressivism has made a virtue of
it precisely because it did exclude so many
folks who were regarded as deficient—deficient
in their heredity, deficient in their politics,
deficient in many other ways as well.
Aaron Powell: What struck me when you were
running through the policies that they wanted
so the minimum wage in order to exclude these
people or the concerns about immigration is
how many of them maybe—I mean not in the
motives behind them necessarily, not in the
stated motives but in the specifics of the
policies and some of the concerns look very
much like what you hear today, you know.
There seem to be conventional wisdom about
the need to keep out unskilled immigrants.
You hear stuff about, you know, there’s
too many of them in the population and that
that will ultimately cause problems if they,
you know, tip over into a majority or the
existing minimum wage, but they don’t seem—they
don’t have the what we think of as terrifically
ugly motives behind them.
And so is there—like that historic change
because it seems odd that if the motives and
the desires and the attitudes have shifted,
we would have seen the resulting policy shift.
So how did that—how do we get that transition
from, you know, keeping the desire for the
policies of the progressive era but shifting
our attitudes, our sense of virtue to something
that would see the motives behind the policy
of the progressive era as so repugnant?
Thomas Leonard: Well, I think that, you know,
we teach freshmen in economics to make this
fairly bright distinction between the so-called
positive and the normative, right?
So the positive question is what are the effects
of the minimum wage on employment and what
are the effects of the minimum wage on output
prices and what are the effects of the minimum
wage on the income distribution.
And you can sort of think about these questions
without sort of tipping over onto the normative
side which is—is it a good thing or a bad
thing that a particular class of worker namely
the very unskilled are likely to be harmed
at all?
So you can—I think in a way it’s partly
a parable about, you know, the capacity of
sorting so-called scientific claims from so-called
normative or ethical matters.
You know, my own view is one can be a supporter
of the minimum wage, of course, without, you
know, having repugnant views about the folks
who are going to lose their job if we raise
the minimum wage too high.
Trevor Burrus: Yeah, of course.
That—
Thomas Leonard: Goes with— I think that
goes without saying.
Trevor Burrus: Well, that’s an interesting
question about what are the lessons—
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
Trevor Burrus: --from this.
But I wanted to ask you about one more thing
before we kind of get to that question which
is about—because there’s another one that
we didn’t touch on which might surprise
people, which is excluding women.
So we got—we went there—there were some
sterilization, which we’ve been talking
about much but you mentioned excluding unemployable.
We had about immigration and now we also have
excluding women and people might be surprised
to hear that progressives were actually interested
in doing this.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah.
This is a—well, all of these accounts are
complex.
The story of women’s labor legislation is
probably the most complex of all and that’s
partly because in the progressive era, most
labor legislation was directed at women and
at women only, not all but sort of the pillars
of the welfare state which is to say minimum
wages, maximum hours, mother’s pensions
which eventually evolved into AFTC and welfare.
Those pillars were—those pillars that legislation
was women and women only.
Now, there are different ways of thinking
about it.
I think that the thing to remember is that
a lot of these legislation to set a wage floor
to set a maximum number of hours to give women
payments— women with dependent children
payments at home were enacted not so much
to protect women from employment, the hazards
of employment but rather to protect employment
from women.
And when you look at the discourse, you do
find a kind of protective paternalistic line
where, for example, the famous Brandeis Brief
which was used in so many Supreme Court cases
in defensive labor legislation just sort of
boldly asserts that women are the weaker sex
and that’s why women as women need to be
protected from the hazards of market work.
They didn’t worry so much about the hazards
of domestic work.
Trevor Burrus: And Brandeis was a champion
of—I mean he’s considered a champion of
progressive era, but he did write this unbelievably
sexist brief in Muller versus Oregon.
Thomas Leonard: Indeed he did and he collaborated
with his sister-in-law, Josephine Goldmark,
and it’s regarded as sort of not only the
case but the brief itself is regarded as sort
of a landmark in legal circles.
So there’s also a second class of argument
which still lives on today, I might add, which
is called the family wage and this is the
idea that there’s a kind of natural family
structure wherein the father is the breadwinner
and the mother stays at home and tends the
hearth and raises the kids and that male workers
are entitled to a wage sufficient to support
a wife and other dependents, and that when
women work for wages, they wrongly usurp the
wages that rightly belong to the breadwinner.
That’s another argument for regulating women’s
employment.
That’s not really protecting women.
That’s protecting men, of course.
And there were a whole host of arguments.
Another argument was worried about women’s
sexual virtue that if women accepted, you
know, low wages at the factory, they’ll
be tempted into prostitution.
The euphemism of the day was the social vice
and John Bates Clark pointed out that if 5
dollars a week tempts a factory girl into
vice, then 0 dollars a week will do so more
surely.
Trevor Burrus: It’s really hard to decide
when you’re going through all this stuff
and you include immigration and all these
issues whether or not these people are—when
we’re talking about progressives, so that’s
the name we all call them now.
But if we’re going to use modern term, are
they liberals or are they conservative?
I mean if the immigration thing looks conservative
now and the protecting women’s virtue and
supporting the family looks conservative and
the racism, you know, but the minimum wage
wanting that.
So there seemed to be a hodgepodge of something
that doesn’t really map to anything now.
Thomas Leonard: Yeah, I think that’s right.
I think it’s a mistake.
I mean one of the problems that we face looking
backwards from today is that progressivism
today—a progressive today is someone on
the left, someone on the left wing of the
democratic party and that’s not what progressive
meant in the progressive era.
There certainly were plenty of folks on the
left who were progressives but they were also
right progressives too.
Men like Theodore Roosevelt would be a canonical
sort of right progressive.
Roosevelt ran as you know on that progressive
ticket in 1912 handing the White House to
Woodrow Wilson in so doing.
Yeah, I think—yeah, one of the, you know,
the historiographic lessons of the book is
be careful projecting contemporary categories
backwards in time.
You know, the original progressives, they
defended human hierarchy.
They were Darwinists.
They either ignored or justified Jim Crow.
They were moralists.
They were evangelicals.
They promoted the claims of the nation over
individuals and they had this, of course,
heroic conception of their own roles as experts.
That’s very different from what 21st century
progressives are about.
The 21st century progressives couldn’t be
more different in some respects.
They’re not evangelicals.
They’re very secular.
They emphasize racial equality and minority
rights.
They’re nervous about nationalism but they
don’t—they’re not imperialists like
the progressives were.
They’re unhappy with too much Darwinism
in their social science.
So, in these respects contemporary progressives
are very different from their namesakes.
On the other hand though, having said that
and that’s a very important point just because
they share a name doesn’t mean they share
everything.
There are some things about the progressives
that I think still carry over to today.
One is this sort of this combination of statism
and expertise.
The idea that our politics should be scientific,
not political if you will and that economic
life is best governed by the visible hand
of an administrative state that investigates
and regulates and supervises the economy.
Trevor Burrus: Maybe that’s the lesson we
can take from this because that can run amok
under certain circumstances.
Thomas Leonard: Yes, it can.
I mean one of the lessons I think I learned
in writing this book is—and I have to say
it was a hard one lesson is that the history
of bad ideas like coercive eugenics is just
as interesting and is important as a history
of good ideas and that’s because bad ideas
that were historically important like eugenics
were thought— almost by definition were
thought by many people to be a good idea at
the time.
So we need to be wary of scienitism, maybe
that’s the right word, particularly in the
social sciences like economics.
I mean it really is hard as it is to understand
viewed from today.
Eugenics was seen as the best science of the
day.
It was something a high-minded person had
to get behind, indeed nearly everybody did.
So I think that is another lesson for today
is particularly in economics and particularly
if you’re an advocate of an extensive expert
state involvement in the economy is you really
better be sure your science is good, and I
can guarantee you that 100 years hence, you
know, when there’s a podcast looking back
at us, there will be some ideas that we think
of as not only scientific but profoundly important
that they will think of as reprehensible.
Trevor Burrus: Thank you for listening.
Free Thoughts is produced by Evan Banks and
Mark McDaniel.
To learn more, find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org
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