Among his revelations: The minimum wage was created to destroy jobs; progressives (including the founders of this magazine [New Republic]) really did hate small businesses and they were all way too enthusiastic about Germany’s social structure. But Leonard’s personal politics are hard to read, and at the very least he’s invested in progressivism, writing that it’s “too important to be left to hagiography and obloquy.”
The illiberal reformers of Leonard’s title are the first generation of American economists, born between 1850 and 1870. Late nineteenth-century tycoons, their hearts full of social gospel and their pockets full of other people’s labor, founded colleges like Cornell, Stanford, Johns Hopkins, The University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt. These new schools weren’t bound to the classical curricula of their New England predecessors, and they prioritized practical research and creating experts. They promoted the study of “political economy” — “economics” by 1900 — and the discipline took academia by storm.
The first generation of American economists were not laissez-faire capitalists, as an observer might reasonably imagine based on the current state of the field. In fact, they were anything but. “As Christians they judged laissez faire to be morally unsound,” Leonard writes, “and as economists they declared it functionally obsolete.” The British (think Adam Smith) model was unsuited for the era of railroads, labor unions, and scientific management. They much preferred the German idea of society as a single organism. Granted the premise that individuals were shaped by the nation and not the other way around, progressive economists had to decide who would run the country. These people had to be unbiased, scientific, brilliant, and out for the public good. The progressive economists decided on themselves.
In the early twentieth century, progressives displayed an open contempt for individual rights. In a 1915 unsigned editorial at this magazine, the editors ridiculed the Bill of Rights as a joke. “They insist upon invoking abstract principles, instead of trying to determine for concrete cases whether social control should supersede individual initiative…how can we discuss that seriously?” The doctrine of natural rights will “prevent us from imposing a social ideal.” The progressives were able to unite idealism and pragmatism via science and the administrative state. What good was democracy if people voted against their collective interest? What expertise did the average American have in managing a state or a race? Black Americans in particular could not be trusted with the ballot. “The progressive goal was to improve the electorate,” Leonard writes, “not necessarily to expand it.” Jim Crow laws suppressed turnout in the South, but it fell in the North as well. New York state’s participation went from 88 percent in 1900 to 55 percent in 1920.
Hagiography and obloquy:
hagiography / noun
the writing of the lives of saints
obloquy / noun
strong public condemnation
Now me grab cookie!
Liberalism/progressive-ism has but one end goal — to suppress the natural rights of the individual and subsume them, the individual and the rights, into the collective Utopian society built by those who see themselves as superior even to the Utopia they seek to impose by force.