I have a few brief preliminary things to note. The first is, it's difficult to follow Professor Livingston always, but I want to note to you that probably, I don't know what the timetable is exactly, but early next year, there's going to be appearing a special issue of the Journal of Libertarian Studies, which I'm honored to be serving.
The Confederacy Morally Available to Libertarians
Let's see, the second thing is I am sort of the mysterious phantom faculty member here
because for some reason I don't appear in the list of faculty at the end of the handout
that you got. I assure you I am a faculty member at this seminar. So I had a couple
people ask me, you know, are you going to give us your email address? Well, congratulations
everybody. Here it is. Okay. Woohoo. All right. If you should want to correspond with me,
Please don't correspond with me in the spirit of a crank who, if I haven't returned your email in three days, denounces me in a subsequent email.
You know, I do have work and family responsibilities in addition to your email, but I'll do the best I can to get right back to you.
Anyway, that's State University of New York.
Okay, and the third thing is our dean, Professor Reiko, just asked me, are you some kind of a nihilist when it comes to dress codes?
And in my own defense, I'm actually a rather smart dresser most of the time.
When I was here last month, those of you who were on the faculty of the Rothbard Graduate Seminar will remember that you were all wearing t-shirts and short-sleeved shirts and walking around with, you know, cut-offs on or something.
And I got the note from Pat Barnett saying that this was casual dress.
I'm not okay, I'll show up with my, I won't even bring a coat or a tie, and everybody's wearing a coat.
You just don't know. It's one of these black tie events.
Do I show up, and you show up in black tie, black tie optional, and you're the only one wearing black tie.
You never know what you're supposed to do. Anyway, the Progressive Era is what we're talking about.
And we talk about the Progressive Era, we're talking about basically the turn of the century,
obviously I mean 19th and 20th centuries, until about the end of World War I.
And this is the period in which we get many innovations that we've enjoyed over the years,
the Federal Reserve system, the income tax, it's just, you know, how could I even list them all?
You should all read Murray Rothbard's book, The Case Against the Fed.
I have a friend, one of my best friends, who works at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
And I've never really broached the issue with him.
But he came to, I had a bunch of friends stay over one night and he saw that book on my shelf and that got the picture through to him.
Basically what I'm saying to him is, you know, if I had my way, you know, you'd be selling pencils on the street, my friend.
But anyway, anyway, the progressive era, well, as Dr. Higgs noted in his opening talk,
this is obviously a period of accelerating statism in U.S. history and it's a period in which statism is given a kind of an ideological and philosophical veneer.
It isn't simply brute force. There's a rationale behind it. I'm not saying it's a good one, but it's there.
So in other words, the prejudice always is toward a state solution to whatever the problem is.
Likewise, there is a prejudice in favor of expert direction in society.
That so-called value-free technocratic experts ought to be entrusted with dealing with the various problems in society.
and the problems in society. So you see, therefore, during the progressive era, a lot of boards, a lot of, in the executive branch, to deal with various issues.
For instance, setting railroad rates, where we'll have an expert board decide what the railroad rates should be.
None of them have anything to do with railroads, but we'll have them set the rates, and I'm sure that will be really efficient.
Then there is a kind of a cult. There's a cult of efficiency. Everything needs to be efficient.
In a sense, this follows from everything else. The state, guided by experts, will give us efficient outcomes in various circumstances.
And we see that in a variety of areas in the progressive area, this emphasis on efficiency, not only in things like scientific management,
but also even there's a trend toward what's called scientific charity, whereby you might think, you know,
Scientific charity means we'll keep a little card on each family and say, well, you know, this one's kind of a louse or whatever, we are able to channel charity more effectively.
That's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. The Catholic Church and the St. Vincent de Paul Society kind of took some of that.
But I'm saying that it does reflect a spirit of efficiency in many areas of life.
and even, of course, in the way government works.
If the emphasis is on efficiency, well, then the U.S. Constitution isn't really your friend
because the U.S. Constitution throws up all kinds of roadblocks in your way, if you interpret
it in the traditional way. So you have to stop doing that. For instance, Theodore Roosevelt
is a good example. I'll be returning to him several times. I found, going through some
A letter in which he expressly says that insofar as the Senate becomes simply an obstructionist body,
and you can translate that as, as much as the Senate doesn't approve the things I want,
then power will pass into the hands of those willing to exercise it.
So in other words, efficiency is to be extended to government.
So if the Senate is not being efficient, if it isn't passing everything,
So I, being the executive, I can be more efficient. I'm just one guy. So let me do the governing.
So you see this cult of efficiency everywhere.
And finally, this really is the point that you can pinpoint as really the birth of the regulatory state,
with the regulatory agencies and a ceaseless stream of regulations.
I remember Professor Hoppe had written an article in the 90s, and I haven't updated it since then,
in which he was looking at the Federal Register, the Code of Federal Regulations,
and I remember it being something like, I forget how many hundreds of volumes it is,
but the index of it was almost 800 pages, just the index to all the regulations.
I think it took up something like 27 feet of shelf space, some bizarre thing.
So, you know, thank you very much, progressive era, for getting that particular ball rolling.
And I'm sure if even one of these regulations were removed, we'd probably all drop dead.
So thank goodness they're there.
Also connected to this emphasis on experts in science and efficiency, you can see in, for instance, trends in economic thought at that time.
And in a sense, this sort of precedes the progressive era.
But the beginnings of the American Economic Association, for instance, are very revealing.
and this is a point that you can see elaborated in the in the cost of war book
in Murray Rothbard's one of his chapters called world war one is fulfillment power
and the intellectuals which it was originally published in the journal of
libertarian studies an excellent excellent chapter that once you read it
the whole the whole atmosphere the whole milieu of the progressive era will be
infused into your brain it's extremely effective and extremely well done you
We should all have this book. It's absolutely indispensable.
Well, nevertheless, for instance, this, in 1884, when the AEA says this,
this very much sums up the spirit of the progressive era,
even though chronologically it somewhat precedes it.
We regard the state as an educational and ethical agency
whose positive aid is an indispensable condition of human progress.
Well, we recognize the necessity of individual initiative in industrial life.
How kind of them.
We hold that the doctrine of laissez-faire is unsafe in politics and unsound in morals,
and that it suggests an inadequate explanation of the relations between the state and the citizens.
Okay, well, that's that.
And as Rothbard points out, a lot of these folks who got the ball rolling here
saw that if they were going to be able to use economics in the service of the state,
have expert economists telling everybody how to organize things,
economics had to be emancipated from a tradition whereby economic truths were attained through deduction,
deduction from axioms and premises, very much like praxeology in Austrian economics,
because that always seemed to lead to free market conclusions. We have to chuck that.
Instead, we need to have a bunch of experts who go out and gather data
and then just sit there and look at the data and magically theories will come out of the data
or explanations will just pop up out of the data.
Well, you know, anyway, I don't know how you would evaluate that, but I'm not necessarily in favor of that.
But that indicates the spirit that animates this.
Likewise, another thing you see, you mentioned the progressive era, you think about things like muckrakers,
muckraking journalists who are writing articles about terrible conditions in the meatpacking plants and this sort of thing.
and that is a feature as well that we see but I you know I've some of these some
of these muckrakers don't really have in my view a whole lot of moral authority
like Lincoln Steffens he's going to lecture me on various problems in the
country here's the dolt who goes over into Soviet Russia after the Bolsheviks
have taken over and comes back with his most famous justly famous inane remark I
I have seen the future and it works.
You know, what kind of a complete idiot are you?
And I'm supposed to sit there and read your articles and say,
Oh my gosh, American society needs to be reformed.
Likewise, Ida Tarbell, who writes all about Standard Oil.
Well, she had a family member who was driven out of business by Rockefeller.
So, you know, no wonder she's a little bitter against Standard Oil.
You know, she may have an axe to grind in this case.
So, I don't know, in my opinion these people are basically reprehensible.
There was no social gospel movement in the Catholic Church at this time, nothing resembling
it whatsoever.
Yes, there was Rearim Navarro, but that's not at all the same thing.
The social gospel movement, as most of you know, is a movement within American Protestantism
that is guilty of certain innovations in Christian doctrine.
And that might not sound like such a sin to you, but innovation is not really the hallmark
or the cornerstone of Christian thought.
The idea is you're transmitting something that's old, and you're preserving something
There's nothing new about a theologian saying we ought to refer to the Bible in considering social problems.
There's nothing new about a theologian saying we ought to be generous toward those who are less fortunate.
What is new in the social gospel movement is theologians who are willing to remake Christian categories,
Christian ideas, Christian mysteries, to remake them, to reinterpret them and to give them a naturalistic meaning.
Salvation has to be carried out in a community context.
How can you really have salvation if housing is sort of dilapidated?
If you haven't figured out what the best railroad fare is yet, the railroad, you don't have
enough railroad regulation, how can we really say we've got salvation?
So salvation takes on this, and you begin to think that Christ died so that you could
get good railroad rates, you know, just absolute inane blasphemies like this that you see.
And by no means the worst of them is Walter Rauschenbusch, who has a number of books,
A theology for the social gospel, in which he argues that before all these dummies got
involved in Christianity, like St. Paul, and beyond that, we had a perfectly ethical religion.
It was dealing only with man's relationship to his fellow man.
That's what we need to get back to.
We don't need this dogmatic superstructure and things like sin and all these other...
Yeah, there's sin, but there's industrial sin, and judicial sin, and collective sin.
You know, anyway, but now obviously what's really notable about this, so obviously these
are people who go right along with the whole progressive program.
These are people who see in the state a kind of a divine institution that can get us out
of these messes that we're in, but what's especially notable, because I did my whole
dissertation on Catholics in the progressive era, is that the progressives are generally
is hostile toward traditional sort of dogmatic sectarian religion, Catholicism, some of the
reform churches that are still dogmatic, they teach Christian dogmas, the progressives are
generally hostile to them, the New Republic magazine is very hostile to Catholicism, sometimes
it's muted but it comes out, whereas on the other hand they have no problem with the social
gospel and they welcome them in because here's a completely non-threatening religion, doesn't
is a way of getting Christianity and using it as a tool to advance the program.
There are a million and one reasons, by the way, why they don't like dogmatic and sectarian religion,
but I have whole chapters on that, so we can talk about that later.
I want to just make a brief note up here of a couple of books that you might find useful.
These are books that all the faculty, they'll be yawning.
They all read these books a thousand times, but I assume most people don't sit around
I was thinking about the Progressive Era all the time, so there are a couple I would think of.
The first one isn't really on the Progressive Era per se, but I still want to mention it.
In fact, I know people can't really see the bottom of this board back there, so I'm going to use all the space I can get.
I was recommending this book to somebody the other day, and some of the time period that's covered in this book overlaps with the Progressive Era,
so I think it's legitimate to mention it now.
You know, it's sort of silly, but it's sort of good.
Let's see. Oh yeah, yeah. The Myth of the Robber Barons. It's got a good title, you know, because you're always being told,
oh my goodness, how could you believe what you believe? You know, if we didn't have the state look at all these terrible things that would happen,
we'd be getting cheap consumer goods. Yeah, what a disaster that would be. Okay, that's one thing.
This was published in the 90s, I think, by Young America's Foundation. It may still be in print. I think it is, but if you can check Amazon, it's good.
It's good, it destroys all the myths about this, and I mention this because it was during
the progressive era, particularly 1911, when Standard Oil had an antitrust suit, the suit
was brought in 1906, but didn't actually get resolved until 1911, and an American tobacco
company as well.
These are things that you'll see covered in here, and you'll get really what actually
happened.
And this is really almost kind of, I don't want to say out of date, but I think it still holds up.
It's everyone's favorite Marxist historian, sort of Marxist historian.
Gabriel Kolko, the triumph of conservatism, yes.
Now this doesn't mean conservatism in the sense that you're thinking.
It means conservatism in the sense of protecting established interests.
That's conservatism. And according to Kolko, all the reforms and regulations and all these maneuverings of the progressive era really were a sham, because all they did was, what you had at first was a highly competitive business environment.
And these regulations actually were an attempt by businessmen, who don't like, frankly, that competitive environment, to freeze the situation, to freeze their privileged position,
to use the mechanism of the state, to use regulation as a way of preserving their privileged position in the economy at that time.
Now, that's quite an interesting thesis, and I actually think this is a good book, actually.
The interesting thing is that Kalko is a complete leftist, and Professor Reiko was telling me the other night that, obviously, as you would imagine,
A lot of our type of people would also cite his book and say,
you see, this whole regulation business is a big scam.
It's just business taking advantage of people through regulation and hurting their competition that way and so on.
Well, Kolko got wind of this, that all libertarians were citing his work, you know, free market people.
And he actually said, look, stop citing me. I didn't write this for you people. Leave me alone.
Well, anyway, so this is something to look at.
Oh, and finally, just one more, one more, one more, and then we move on.
Institute, Antitrust and Monopoly, Anatomy of a Policy,
failure, so you know it's got to be a good book. It's not necessarily a book you'd read cover to cover, although maybe you would, but it's an excellent book for reference, because it's got all the really key cases, antitrust cases, mainly in the 20th century, and you see how flimsy they all are, and a lot of them are things that take place during these years.
Well, another issue I want to get to in the progressive era that isn't always mentioned
has to do with the growth of the presidency and the increase in the power of the presidency.
Now, there's a brand new volume out here on the presidency that the Institute has just published.
It's a huge book, and you really all should buy it, because I haven't had time to look at it yet,
but I was at the conference where the papers were given, and it's just excellent.
It just busts all these myths. It's wonderful. You're going to know more than 99% of the population just by reading it.
It's a real, real pleasure to own.
The chapter on Theodore Roosevelt, according to laissez-faire books, is a, quote, great chapter.
That was written by me, I guess, wasn't it?
I don't know if you had a chance to see the laissez-faire catalogue, but I thought I'd just bring you up to date on that.
Anyway, so I'm going to say a few things about Teddy Roosevelt.
During this period, you do see the presidency growing by leaps and bounds in its powers.
And I'm actually going to give empirical evidence for this.
But first, I have a little quotation from our friend Woodrow Wilson, who, you know,
president of Princeton University, getting elected president of the United States.
You know, need I say more? I'm at the end of discussion about Woodrow Wilson.
Well, he notes this. Of course, he's elected for our foreign guests. He's elected in 1912, serves two terms.
Woodrow Wilson, in his book, Constitutional Government in the United States, says this about the President.
Let him once win the admiration and confidence of the country, and no other single force can withstand him.
No combination of forces will easily overpower him.
If he rightly interpret the national thought and boldly insist upon it, he is irresistible.
And the country never feels the zest of action so much as when its president is of such insight and caliber.
The presidential office, Wilson said in another passage, is anything the president has the sagacity and force to make it.
Oh, unbelievable. He's a great president, Woodrow Wilson.
Theodore Roosevelt philosophy. Now, of course, T.R. precedes Wilson.
He's going to take over after he was vice president of McKinley. He was assassinated.
So he takes over in 1901 and then will serve an additional full term.
Now, there's plenty in my chapter on Roosevelt. There are plenty of stories about what a crazy not he is
Theodore Roosevelt's philosophy of the presidency stated briefly is that I, the President of the United States, have a special authority because I'm the only figure in the government
Everybody in the country votes for him.
Everybody in the country doesn't vote for the senators from Massachusetts,
just the Massachusetts people do.
But we all, theoretically, vote for a president.
So that gives the president a special authority.
He is the fountainhead, in a sense, of the people.
He is the summit of the people.
He is their representative, and he can therefore make a claim
that no other person in the government can make.
So he has this theory of the executive branch and of his power in particular.
Moreover he has the view, which is kind of an inverted view of the traditional view of
the Constitution, that the President can do anything that is not prohibited in the Constitution.
Well that's a little bit, gives a little latitude doesn't it?
They didn't really cover every conceivable issue that you could or could not do.
And he boasts of this, he boasts of the fact that he expanded the authority of the office,
he did things nobody else did or thought were constitutional, and he thought he was doing
the country a service in doing so, and he repeats this again and again.
And I think we can see, we can actually quantify this somewhat when we look at the issue of
Executive orders, presidential directives, when the president issues an order of his own accord, like when the pope issues a motu proprio.
I guess that's sort of an obscure reference. In other words, nothing that passes Congress is the president issuing something.
So, for instance, Andrew Johnson, after the war between the states, pardoning people who had taken part in the so-called rebellion, did that by executive order.
and that was a power that he legitimately held to issue pardons well this is going to become very
important with with Theodore Roosevelt it looks as though if you look back throughout history the
first what we would today refer to as executive orders were actually issued under George Washington
appropriately enough the first president incidentally before going on i would just note
that i think we all may remember the clinton aide who said some years ago he said speaking of
executive orders stroke of the pen law of the land kind of cool how could you
not want to punch that guy in the face you know I unbelievable unbelievable
well George that's right George Washington I think the first he called it
a proclamation but in our lingo we've called executive order in 1789 he asked
the outgoing confederation government to write him a report on the state of the
Country. Okay, that was an executive order, and nobody really thought that was an abuse of power.
And there are a few other things. By proclamation, he declared days of Thanksgiving. But the first
controversy involving executive orders seems to have taken place in 1793, when George Washington
did something that seems very straightforward and not especially controversial. And that is when he
He declared in 1793 the neutrality of the United States in the wars of the French Revolution.
Now obviously that is what most Americans believe, they wanted neutrality, but at that
time the President did not have the authority, strictly speaking, to declare neutrality.
So at the time, believe it or not, this was considered an abuse of Washington's power
to have simply of his own accord declared neutrality.
What wound up happening was, after the fact, Congress then later, in effect, ratified what
Washington had done.
And that's set right away.
President number one, a bad precedent is set, because it means the president could do some
crazy thing, and the Congress will get all upset about it, but basically they'll sign
off on it eventually.
I don't know if you want to be doing that.
Well you look down the history of presidential directives, executive orders, and what do
you see?
Well, let's say, okay, James Garfield didn't issue any.
Well, he wasn't really alive that long, but he didn't issue any.
Chester Arthur, I think, issued three of them.
And you keep going down, and you get to, and you keep looking at the list, zero, zero, four, zero.
You get to, and I think in his first term, Grover Cleveland, six.
In his second term, Grover Cleveland issued 71, and doubtless that had something to do with the labor unrest,
Theodore Roosevelt, 1006
That is quite a jump, and granted he served two terms, but really you could pretty much add up all the other ones in US history and give him a run for his money.
So that is an example of the way he thinks about the office of president.
Well, I have also a specific example that really stunned my class, and that is the Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine.
I'm sure a lot of you know what that is, but very quickly, the Monroe Doctrine, 1823, James Monroe, the President, essentially declares that it's the policy of the United States, you know, I'm not even paraphrasing, I'm butchering this so badly, but ultimately that we don't get involved in Europe's affairs and we expect Europe to return the favor in our hemisphere, in our backyard, for them, we expect them not to colonize in our backyard because that would be, we would consider
In 1904, the United States held in such contempt that no European power even bothered to respond for the Monroe Doctrine, but it was issued.
This is altogether too wishy-washy for Theodore Roosevelt.
His view, his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, is to say, suppose something is happening.
He makes this clear in 1904 and then he puts it into effect the following year.
Suppose you have a country that is deeply in debt to some European power and is unable
to repay and the European power is threatening to intervene to collect that just debt. Then
in order to prevent them from intervening, the U.S. should intervene first to prevent
them from intervening and that would be just our updated version of the Monroe Doctrine.
So we will intervene so they won't intervene and we will resolve the situation and make
to make sure that all just claims are satisfied.
So for instance, this was put into effect in the case of the Dominican Republic, 1905.
The Dominican Republic, again, they're in debt, and the United States,
Theodore Roosevelt's idea was that the United States would take over the customs houses in the Dominican Republic,
collect the money, and then dish out some of it for debt repayment and so on.
Well, when Roosevelt went through with this and established this agreement with the Dominican Republic, he did so, and he said, the agreement said, this agreement will take effect February 1st, 1905.
Well, the agreement was reached on January 21st, 1905. So, for the Senate to approve this, I mean, it is in effect a treaty.
Can you imagine, especially in these days, transportation is slow, everything is slow, the Senate approving this in 11 days with no...
He was obviously hoping to just bypass the Senate altogether. There's not enough time for them to consider this momentous decision.
He had hoped to just bypass them altogether. Well, at that time, the Senate actually cared about having a voice in anything,
and they protested vigorously and said, wait a minute, you don't have the authority to do this, what do you mean, some kind of madman?
I'm just going to bypass the Senate all together.
So finally, reluctantly, TR had to issue it to the Senate.
Okay, all right, why don't you look it over and, you know, let's get the ball rolling.
And the Senate, there was a special session, and they left without actually passing it one way or the other.
They didn't approve it. They didn't approve it.
So Roosevelt just enacted it anyway.
And he said, okay, well, it's not a treaty, really. It's an executive agreement.
So I don't really need your approval, as it turns out.
That's funny, I didn't think of that earlier, but after you didn't approve it, I suddenly found that it's an executive agreement.
Now this is just a... And you don't read about this either. I don't read that.
I'm always looking for a good American history textbook. Never find one. You don't see that. You don't see that.
We're supposed to be, you know, worshipping the guy and being thrilled about him, and I just... I won't do that.
Okay. Well, anyway, that's an example of Theodore Roosevelt and the presidency.
William Howard Taft, who was the president between TR and Woodrow Wilson, said,
this is very interesting, I didn't realize this until relatively recently, but he wrote a book in 1916,
Our Chief Magistrate and His Powers, and William Howard Taft in that book expressed alarm at this trend in the presidency,
that, you know, what force can stop him? You know, what's happening?
Well, you know, maybe before you brought all those antitrust suits, you might have asked yourself that, you big jerk.
But Taft wrote, you know, he was growing concern, and Taft is, you know, at least a thoughtful person.
I have to note, by the way, I can't resist in mentioning TR, since I've basically said everything I want to say about him before.
I have a couple of additional things that I didn't say about him in that chapter.
And this really, in a sense, also sums up the whole ethos of the progressive era.
Here's one historian's take on T.R.
He had only the greatest scorn for the kind of middle-class individualism and liberalism
that emphasized minding one's own business, both at home and abroad.
Following his death, T.R.'s death soon after the armistice of 1918, H.L. Mencken...
You don't want to get on the wrong side of H.L. Mencken's pen, my friends.
He wrote an autopsy of the late president, comparing him to Frederick the Great and the
Kaiser in his love of armies and battleships, to Nietzsche.
And he said this, all the fundamental objects of liberalism, of course in its classical
variety, free speech, unhampered enterprise, the least possible governmental interference,
were apparent to him.
In all his career, no one ever heard him make an argument for the rights of the citizen.
His eloquence was always expended in expounding the duties of the citizen.
Okay, well these are things that are certainly true about him.
Let me have a little drink here.
Okay, let's see, there are several other points I want to make and then I'll take any questions.
I think I'll write one more thing up here.
If you were to try to pin down the progressive movement, which you couldn't, but if you
wanted to get a good overview by somebody who was a member of the progressive movement and
who could be maybe a good example for you, it would be, well, if it were a magazine,
it would be The New Republic, which believe it or not was, it's hard to decide whether
it was better, was worse or better then than it is now, but The New Republic magazine,
You read article after article, it's cheering all these developments, cheering the increase
in power of the president.
I mean, I've read so many articles from old New Republics, not for fun, it was for research.
And one of the editors of the New Republic wrote the book on the progressive movement
that Theodore Roosevelt read and said, you know, this is it, this is my standard that
I'm going to, when he ran his third party campaign, in effect, this is more or less
my program.
Herbert Crowley wrote a book called The Promise of American Life.
Don't read it unless you're mature and settled enough to be able to grit your teeth through a real ordeal.
But at the same time it's a good primary source because it does sum up so much of the progressive program.
The first thing he does in this book is to attack laissez-faire theory.
This is morally reprehensible, and so is Jeffersonianism.
He absolutely loathes Jefferson.
Incidentally, so did Theodore Roosevelt loathed Jefferson.
Theodore Roosevelt loathed the Confederacy,
well, because it was not nationalist.
He wanted to break free from the nation.
He didn't think that a big country was its own justification,
so Roosevelt didn't like it.
Well, neither does Crowley.
He says that, really, Jeffersonianism is unrealistic.
with the small scale, with the individualism, the strict construction of the Constitution.
This is all really not reasonable.
And he compared Jefferson unfavorably to Hamilton.
He said Hamilton was much the finer man and much the sounder thinker and statesman.
Okay, well anyway, that's a point of view, I suppose.
According to Crowley, Jeffersonianism was inimical to a sound nationalism.
is necessary to the progressive reform movement in his view.
No reform can really be effective if it is not national in scope.
And there is beneath the surface of this whole movement
a profound distrust of and loathing for a federal system.
In fact, this is actually a book that I would recommend
on the progressive era, even though you look at the title
and you think, you know, I'd rather hang upside down by,
I don't know, my toenails are something to read this book, but it is not a bad book.
And it really brings out a lot of themes that hardly ever are brought out, except in my dissertation. Isn't that funny?
Okay. What a jerk I am. Okay, let's see.
This is a pretty good book. And it points out a million and one things.
It analyzes Crowley, it goes through all these things, and it makes note of and analyzes the progressive hostility toward dogmatic religion.
And it's very revealing, some of these arguments.
It examines the nationalism of the progressives, that they loathe the states, they loathe local government.
This is where we have corruption. Didn't you read The Muckrakers? It's all corruption.
Instead, on the national level, this is where you'll get your more efficient and less corrupt administration, presumably.
This is all brought out very well in this book, and I'm told that this gentleman is somewhat sympathetic to us.
Well, nevertheless, you go through Herbert Crowley, and he goes through American history, and he says,
look at Andrew Jackson. He thought that in order to be a Democrat, you had to be anti-national.
the National, you had to smash the bank of the United States, you had to destroy the great civil service system that we had being built up.
You know, what a big jerk, what an adult he was.
According to Crowley, really what we want to do is blend Jefferson and Hamilton.
And basically we take all the substance of Hamilton, we take a little, you know, we get a carrot, a little bit from Jefferson.
His idea was that he says, I favor democracy, but I don't favor the Jeffersonian brand where you've got all these little units.
Jefferson was positing a system in which power would be vested at the level of the
ward, which is really just be a part of a city, and this is how he imagined the country
looking.
No, no, no.
The kind of democracy that these people want is just one in which the national community
is taken into account.
That's what they want, and we give our allegiance to national elites.
And we remove our allegiance to local or other officials.
I remember I was at a conference some time ago of mostly leftists.
It was the E.F. Schumacher Society Decentralist Conference.
And I knew it was going to be bad when they opened a Decentralist Conference with a message
from Al Gore.
What does this guy know about Decentralism?
Anyway, so with, oh, this isn't going to be any good.
The one guy I liked at the whole conference was a Quaker, who was a traditional Quaker.
He wore the hat. He didn't own a telephone or a car. It broke my heart. I didn't want
to ask him, well, how'd you get here? He said, I didn't. But he published a good magazine,
and I liked him because he got up there and he said, you know, maybe I'm at the wrong
conference. But everybody keeps saying, in a decentralized conference, they're using
The American State will in effect be making itself responsible for a morally and socially
Desirable Distribution of Wealth. 1912, there's an election, a presidential election, and
you've got Taft running, the hapless Taft. You've got, not a thin man, Taft. You've got
Theodore Roosevelt running on a third party, and you've got Woodrow Wilson. So this is
This is an election to stay home for, and you've got Debs and the rest of them.
Well, anyway, in this election, if you actually look at it, you wonder what in the world separates these people.
You read historians, you read textbooks. Oh, it was a fiercely contested election.
Well, it's a battle of personalities, but what the heck is the difference, really, between
Theodore Roosevelt's new nationalism, which he models on Crowley, and Woodrow Wilson's new freedom?
What's the big, big, big difference? I mean, you can see tiny little things change in emphasis and whatever.
The New Republic basically supported TR, but then they rather came to like Woodrow Wilson.
He basically did what they wanted.
The key issue that you always see mentioned in the textbooks is, well, here's the difference.
It has to do with how did they want to deal with big business?
Well, TR had matured.
He used to be the trust buster and so on.
That's a little bit exaggerated, but he used to be interested in that.
And then he sort of matured and said, well, business combination per se isn't such a bad thing.
Perhaps it should be encouraged. It's a mark of civilization.
What we need to do simply is regulate businesses in the public interest.
Woodrow Wilson, on the other hand, you know, according to this,
favored, was favored breaking up large conglomerations, breaking them up,
using the antitrust legislation, breaking them up.
And that's it. That's the range of debate.
So nobody says, well, you know, if they're observing property laws,
why should we harass them at all? No one, basically.
You look in vain, try to find somebody who is officially arguing that.
So this is the great range of debate.
And as it turns out, most of the time when you read about the Progressive Era,
Woodrow Wilson is portrayed as the laissez-faire candidate.
Because, you see, what he's doing is he's restoring competition.
He's taking a big, big company, and if he splits it up,
then they can all compete against each other, and that's competition.
Now this is, I mean, these people, you know, historians understand nothing about economic,
These are the same historians who say that the Federal Reserve is a capitalist institution.
Where do you begin explaining these things?
There's nothing laissez-faire about Woodrow Wilson.
Anyway, one barely knows where to begin.
I would note in addition that you should, as I already recommended,
the chapter in The Costs of War about the Progressive Era that Murray Rothbard wrote.
Well, in particular, notice the title of his chapter when he says, World War I as fulfillment,
because it was sort of common for historians to say,
oh, you know, the progressive era was going gangbusters until World War I,
and then it was a disaster because they had to, it was like the Great Society in Vietnam,
you know, you can't do them both.
But in fact, as Rothbard correctly points out,
the progressive intellectuals with very few exceptions, like Jane Addams and a couple others,
They loved World War I, because now, since we supposedly need a command economy, well guess who's going to do the commanding?
All these intellectuals who have nothing else to do.
So now they get to be in charge of the state apparatus.
They get to put into effect all the status schemes they've been advocating.
A lot of these progressive intellectuals had studied in Germany.
That's where you could get a PhD.
They had absorbed a lot of statism from there, and they were anxious to carry this out.
And you can see the New Republic is practically gushing about the prospect and the possibilities of how we can produce not-for-profit anymore and we can produce for use and this and that.
And John Dewey is going on and on about how wonderful this is. So in fact, there is no incompatibility here.
They loved World War I. They loved coordinating the economy. And frankly, if you look at the Progressive Era, what they think they're doing is bringing order to chaos.
you've got a business community that's that's that's chaotic will bring order
to it and you've got also you've got a world that's chaotic well we the
enlightened intellectuals will bring order to it so there's there's a
similarity and a lot has been written about the fact that it's not a
coincidence that the progressives also happen to be imperialists it's the same
kind of nanny state intervention philosophy that that exists in both
The New York World newspaper, looking over what had happened during the first decade of the 20th century and into the second one, asked this question,
Question. Where will it all end? Despotism? Caesarism? Well, I think we have our answer.
Okay, I'm done. I'll take questions if you'd like to throw them at me because I didn't have that much time.
Thank you very much.