WEBVTT NOTE The Master Race: Racialist Legacies of Progressivism 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:09.000 I'm looking at the progressive era and the whole racial atmosphere that they created. 2 00:00:09.000 --> 00:00:14.000 By the way, I have a co-author, David Kiriatsis, who's our department chair at Frostberg State. 3 00:00:14.000 --> 00:00:19.000 He's from Detroit, and as you can see, if you want to talk about affirmative action, you can see Detroit. 4 00:00:19.000 --> 00:00:26.000 And I think you will understand that things can get very, very interesting. 5 00:00:26.000 --> 00:00:29.000 A lot of historians have looked at the progressives. 6 00:00:29.000 --> 00:00:34.800 If you read the progressives, if you know the things that they said, you know that these guys were just out and out, hardcore racists. 7 00:00:34.800 --> 00:00:44.800 I mean, they said things, it was very polite to say things back then that you would lose your job for today, or worse, and how historians treated them. 8 00:00:46.040 --> 00:00:57.840 Historians have admitted these people are racist, but it was a blind spot, because after all, they were giving us great economic reforms. 9 00:00:57.840 --> 00:01:03.840 They were for the consumer, they were for the worker, they were for goodness and everything else. 10 00:01:03.840 --> 00:01:10.840 And so the racism that accompanied the progressive era and the whole progressive movement 11 00:01:10.840 --> 00:01:22.840 was seen as just kind of a blind spot, something that grew up as a natural extension from the post-Civil War South. 12 00:01:22.840 --> 00:01:42.840 All right. In other words, that you had these feelings already, and it just sort of like grew like a slow movement, and finally by the 1890s, it just got worse and worse, and in around 1900, late 1800s, 1900 around there, now we start going into what we call Jim Crow. 13 00:01:42.840 --> 00:01:51.240 Well, here's an interesting editorial that, and I don't have time, it was, the news 14 00:01:51.240 --> 00:01:58.940 and courier in 1898 argued against the passage of a law in South Carolina to segregate rail 15 00:01:58.940 --> 00:02:04.160 cars. And their reasoning was this, you know, if we could do this, yeah, why don't we just, 16 00:02:04.160 --> 00:02:08.200 hey, why don't we have Jim Crow Bibles? Yeah, that's it. And they start, why don't we have 17 00:02:08.200 --> 00:02:27.200 Jim Crow Waiting Rooms, and bathrooms, and Jim Crow Water Place, and they went on, it was a reducio ad absurdum argument, and at the end of the decade, you had all those things, including the Jim Crow Bibles to kiss, for witnesses testifying in court. 18 00:02:27.200 --> 00:02:34.200 As they said, we've got along fairly well for a third of a century, including a long period of construction, we'll probably get on as well hereafter. 19 00:02:34.200 --> 00:02:40.200 and certainly not so extreme a measure should not be adopted in force without added and urgent cause. 20 00:02:40.200 --> 00:02:45.200 And at the time, it wasn't seen as any kind of added or urgent cause. 21 00:02:45.200 --> 00:02:52.200 Now, here's an interesting thing. I found a quote, you know, that turned out that Nathan Bedford Forrest, 22 00:02:52.200 --> 00:02:59.200 who of course is always vilified as the apostle of the worst kind of racism because he was the original, 23 00:02:59.200 --> 00:03:04.400 or one of the original founders of the Ku Klux Klan in 1868. 24 00:03:04.400 --> 00:03:08.560 If you read that, and I don't feel like I need to read the whole thing and take up all this time, 25 00:03:08.560 --> 00:03:18.400 but nonetheless, that you can see from there, this is not exactly a speech that is there to incite racial hatreds. 26 00:03:18.400 --> 00:03:19.400 What is he saying? 27 00:03:19.400 --> 00:03:28.760 You know, that, you know, do whatever you want, vote, you know, we're having, you know, 28 00:03:28.760 --> 00:03:37.480 enfranchisement. He wasn't talking about not letting them vote. He says that, I came to meet you as 29 00:03:37.480 --> 00:03:43.560 friends and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come near to us. And we made different 30 00:03:43.560 --> 00:03:50.480 in color but not in sentiment, and on and on, and so, and when you are oppressed, I'll 31 00:03:50.480 --> 00:03:51.480 come to your relief. 32 00:03:51.480 --> 00:03:58.520 Now, again, this, if you read the usual stuff, of course, in the New York Times about Nathan 33 00:03:58.520 --> 00:04:01.240 Bedford Forrest, that never quite makes it. 34 00:04:01.240 --> 00:04:05.640 It doesn't fit the Times paradigm, and as you know, the New York Times will go to great 35 00:04:05.640 --> 00:04:10.080 lengths to push their own paradigm even if the facts don't jive. 36 00:04:10.080 --> 00:04:16.160 Alright, now, let's look at the progressives, okay, this is Irving Fisher, alright, one 37 00:04:16.160 --> 00:04:27.800 of the most important US economists, alright, and now he was talking about the immigration 38 00:04:27.800 --> 00:04:32.840 but then he goes on, you know, that the core of immigration is one of race and eugenics, 39 00:04:32.840 --> 00:04:39.120 the problem of the Anglo-Saxon racial stock being overwhelmed by racially inferior defectives, 40 00:04:39.120 --> 00:04:46.000 and Delinquents and Dependents, and on and on. In fact, a number of progressives were 41 00:04:46.000 --> 00:04:52.580 very much into eugenics, including Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. What 42 00:04:52.580 --> 00:04:57.080 she wanted to do was have birth control to, quote, eliminate the entire Negro race. And 43 00:04:57.080 --> 00:05:04.080 she said, we need to get the black pastors to help us do this. And I don't have her in 44 00:05:04.080 --> 00:05:18.560 Edward A. Ross, yet another one of the founders of the American Economics Association 45 00:05:18.560 --> 00:05:22.640 The theory that the races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies 46 00:05:22.640 --> 00:05:26.440 as lying in the valleys of the south with the bones of half a million picked whites 47 00:05:26.440 --> 00:05:33.200 in order to improve the condition of four million unpicked blacks. 48 00:05:33.200 --> 00:05:41.080 Frank Fetter, yes. In fact, in the very book that Jeff had talked about yesterday, he also 49 00:05:41.080 --> 00:05:46.920 has that the benefits of social progress are being neutralized by race degeneration owing 50 00:05:46.920 --> 00:05:50.960 to the suspension of the selective process. In other words, we've got to have eugenics. 51 00:05:50.960 --> 00:05:57.080 All right, now why do I bring this in? Because these are prominent people. These are not 52 00:05:57.080 --> 00:06:01.920 rednecks. These are not, you know, good old boy with the University of Alabama cap on 53 00:06:01.920 --> 00:06:22.640 Let's look at perhaps the most glorified of all progressives, and that's President Woodrow 54 00:06:22.640 --> 00:06:23.640 Wilson. 55 00:06:23.640 --> 00:06:30.120 Woodrow Wilson not only hated the Constitution, but in fact, when he came into office, it 56 00:06:30.120 --> 00:06:34.440 was announced Negroes should be expected to be treated as a servile race and then they 57 00:06:34.440 --> 00:06:42.060 had it was Wilson that really, really brought Jim Crow to the federal government in a way 58 00:06:42.060 --> 00:06:45.040 that nobody else had done before. 59 00:06:45.040 --> 00:06:51.920 And furthermore, the Congress, the Congress from 1913 to 1915, the same Congress that 60 00:06:51.920 --> 00:06:56.200 gives us of course all of these other wonderful things including the Federal Reserve that 61 00:06:56.200 --> 00:07:09.200 from 1913 to 1915, that Congress put through more racially discriminatory laws than any other Congress in the history of this country. 62 00:07:09.200 --> 00:07:23.200 And you look at some of the things that were done, these folks, let me tell you that these guys probably would have made Bull Connor look like a liberal. 63 00:07:23.200 --> 00:07:46.200 And of course we know that during that time lynching, it's very interesting because lynching goes from sort of a way to deal with different people, in fact more whites than blacks were lynched in the South long after the Civil War, but then getting to the progressive era, it starts to change. 64 00:07:46.200 --> 00:08:14.200 Now, you've got, of course, the Jim Crow laws that these were taken from later, but you've got that from Durham, North Carolina, a bus station there, the drinking, well, the old drinking place, that would have been at the workplace, but you had all of the, you know, this was an apartheid system, alright? 65 00:08:14.200 --> 00:08:22.360 Now, the theme of my paper though is not simply about what these guys believe because we already 66 00:08:22.360 --> 00:08:23.360 know this. 67 00:08:23.360 --> 00:08:28.200 I mean, I'm not telling people things that they didn't know about already. 68 00:08:28.200 --> 00:08:34.920 The people understand this, but what I want to do and what we do in this paper is we take 69 00:08:34.920 --> 00:08:42.420 on this whole blind spot thing because what we say is that the progressives had method 70 00:08:42.420 --> 00:08:49.860 to their madness, to their blindness, whatever, that the progressives actually did this on 71 00:08:49.860 --> 00:08:57.100 purpose because this was part and parcel to their economic reforms. Keep in mind, when 72 00:08:57.100 --> 00:09:04.520 I say reforms, I use that word very, very lightly. Now, so do we laud the reforms but 73 00:09:04.520 --> 00:09:11.340 condemn the racism? Okay. Now, what we're doing is really coming up with an alternative 74 00:09:11.340 --> 00:09:14.240 Theory. 75 00:09:14.240 --> 00:09:17.260 What is it that's going on progressivism? 76 00:09:17.260 --> 00:09:18.760 We hear all sorts of praise. 77 00:09:18.760 --> 00:09:25.080 Those progressives, they gave us occupational licensing and credentialing. 78 00:09:25.080 --> 00:09:28.620 That was one of the things with the Rockefellers. 79 00:09:28.620 --> 00:09:31.000 They were great believers in credentialing. 80 00:09:31.000 --> 00:09:32.560 We have the rise of John Dewey. 81 00:09:32.560 --> 00:09:37.200 You have the rise of professional classes that you have to go to certain kinds of school 82 00:09:37.200 --> 00:09:39.300 to go there. 83 00:09:39.300 --> 00:09:49.480 We really start quote professionalizing things and also using the law as a means to select 84 00:09:49.480 --> 00:09:53.240 who is going to go into certain kinds of occupations. 85 00:09:53.240 --> 00:09:57.500 That was really not the case in the United States before the progressive era. 86 00:09:57.500 --> 00:10:02.020 So we're talking about individual workers, but we're also talking about the kinds of 87 00:10:02.020 --> 00:10:07.200 regulation we see from antitrust regulation and I think the economists in this room who 88 00:10:07.200 --> 00:10:31.200 The Interstate Commerce Act and the regulation of the railroads and later trucking and airlines and all these things that came out of progressivism, what were they doing, all right? 89 00:10:31.200 --> 00:10:38.200 To most of the intelligentsia, they were reforming. 90 00:10:38.200 --> 00:10:44.200 To an economist, they're creating economic rents. 91 00:10:44.200 --> 00:10:46.200 Let me go back. 92 00:10:46.200 --> 00:10:54.200 What they're doing is they're dividing, creating economic rents that are now being enforced, 93 00:10:54.200 --> 00:10:57.200 not by entrepreneurship in the market. 94 00:10:57.200 --> 00:11:27.200 In other words, that if somebody has a rent, and entrepreneurs can take advantage, they can see those rents, and they can, you can try to move into that area, but with progressivism, people had economic rents that were protected by the state, whether it's through licensing, through regulation, and the like, and so, and in fact, one of the things 95 00:11:27.200 --> 00:11:57.200 and the things that Roderick had made a point that I don't have this up here that we need to point out that also the businessmen of the progressive era, the Andrew Carnegie's and the Henry Clay Fricks and others, ended up buying into progressivism, alright, the great entrepreneurs ended up getting into this whole we're captains of industry and that there's some sort of special dispensation. And so, you know, the whole country gets taken over by this stuff, unfortunately. 96 00:11:57.200 --> 00:12:04.880 And so what happens is this, that political rents have to be distributed politically. 97 00:12:04.880 --> 00:12:07.840 You don't have economic competition for political rents. 98 00:12:07.840 --> 00:12:08.840 It doesn't work that way. 99 00:12:08.840 --> 00:12:11.320 The political classes never allow that. 100 00:12:11.320 --> 00:12:14.440 You have to go at it in a different way. 101 00:12:14.440 --> 00:12:19.460 And so what happens when you create these rents, what are you doing? 102 00:12:19.460 --> 00:12:23.280 You are shrinking the economy. 103 00:12:23.280 --> 00:12:24.280 You really are. 104 00:12:24.280 --> 00:12:29.640 There's no way that you can put these added burdens upon economic activity and have more 105 00:12:29.640 --> 00:12:30.880 economic activity. 106 00:12:30.880 --> 00:12:37.920 I mean, anybody who thinks that should embrace Obamacare. 107 00:12:37.920 --> 00:12:44.320 So what happens is that now that you're causing things to shrink, you now set up a system 108 00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:46.780 of competition. 109 00:12:46.780 --> 00:12:47.780 What do we mean? 110 00:12:47.780 --> 00:12:53.040 A system of competition with political rents where you have winners and you have losers. 111 00:12:53.040 --> 00:12:56.720 Who's going to be the winner? Who's going to be the loser? How do you do this? How do 112 00:12:56.720 --> 00:13:04.380 you do these things? Jim Crow laws not only kept blacks out of occupations, which it previously 113 00:13:04.380 --> 00:13:08.440 worked. Now what happened, look at the propaganda coming out there. Oh, well, they're feeble-minded. 114 00:13:08.440 --> 00:13:13.540 Well, you know, they weren't so feeble-minded when they were doing this work before. But 115 00:13:13.540 --> 00:13:20.540 also, look at what happened. You have widespread disenfranchisement, okay? Because what happens 116 00:13:20.540 --> 00:13:26.380 in these systems where you have political spoils. What you were talking about before, 117 00:13:26.380 --> 00:13:31.460 that what Stalin was doing was creating political spoils. You've got to have a mechanism for 118 00:13:31.460 --> 00:13:37.300 being able to distribute these. How do you do it? Well, with the blacks, the idea was 119 00:13:37.300 --> 00:13:43.700 this, get them out of the picture. Push them out of the way, make them do menial work. 120 00:13:43.700 --> 00:13:49.860 You'll love this. I can't remember if I have it up here if I do. Let me give you an 121 00:13:49.860 --> 00:14:19.860 Minimum wage. What were the progressives saying about the minimum wage? When told that it's going to knock some people out of the labor market, it's going to price people out of the market, they said, good! These are feeble-minded people, they really shouldn't be in the workplace anyway, they shouldn't be allowed to be around here, and so this is a really good thing. If we can just impose this minimum wage, we can 122 00:14:19.860 --> 00:14:34.860 This is an administrative view of an entire economy. It's the idea that we can have some sort of state control, divide everybody up into different groups and call it progress. 123 00:14:34.860 --> 00:14:47.360 And so, in my, you know, that we do conclude that these Jim Crow laws, these were not blind spots. 124 00:14:47.360 --> 00:14:56.060 What they were, were nothing more than cold-blooded attempts, basically, to make these economic reforms work. 125 00:14:56.060 --> 00:15:03.760 How do you make them work? Well, you shut people out, you make sure that people cannot participate in the workplace, 126 00:15:03.760 --> 00:15:08.680 and you give yourself some sort of grandiose rhetoric about the whole thing 127 00:15:08.680 --> 00:15:11.680 and you call it progressivism. Thank you.