I. Introduction
In contrast to older
historians who regarded World War I as the destruction of progressive reform, I
am convinced that the war came to the United States as the “fulfillment,” the
culmination, the veritable apotheosis of progressivism in American life.[1] I regard progressivism as basically a
movement on behalf of Big Government in all walks of the economy and society,
in a fusion or coalition between various groups of big businessmen, led by the
House of Morgan, and rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals.
In this fusion, the values and interests of both groups would be pursued
through government.
Big
business would be able to use the government to cartelize the economy, restrict
competition, and regulate production and prices, and also to be able to wield a
militaristic and imperialist foreign policy to force open markets abroad and
apply the sword of the State to protect foreign investments. Intellectuals
would be able to use the government to restrict entry into their professions
and to assume jobs in Big Government to apologize for, and to help plan and
staff, government operations. Both groups also believed that, in this fusion,
the Big State could be used to harmonize and interpret the “national interest”
and thereby provide a “middle way” between the extremes of “dog-eat-dog”
laissez faire and the bitter conflicts of proletarian Marxism.
Also animating both groups of
progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism that had conquered
“Yankee” areas of northern Protestantism by the 1830s and had impelled the
pietists to use local, state, and finally federal governments to stamp out
“sin,” to make America and eventually the world holy, and thereby to bring
about the Kingdom of God on earth. The victory of the Bryanite forces at the Democratic
national convention of 1896 destroyed the Democratic Party as the vehicle of
“liturgical” Roman Catholics and German Lutherans devoted to personal liberty
and laissez faire and created the roughly homogenized and relatively
non-ideological party system we have today. After the turn of the century, this
development created an ideological and power vacuum for the expanding number of
progressive technocrats and administrators to fill. In that way, the locus of
government shifted from the legislature, at least partially subject to
democratic check, to the oligarchic and technocratic executive branch.
World War I brought the
fulfillment of all these progressive trends. Militarism, conscription, massive
intervention at home and abroad, a collectivized war economy, all came about
during the war and created a mighty cartelized system that most of its leaders
spent the rest of their lives trying to recreate, in peace as well as war. In
the World War I chapter of his outstanding work, Crisis and Leviathan, Professor Robert Higgs concentrates
on the war economy and illuminates the interconnections with conscription.
In this paper, I would like
to concentrate on an area that Professor Higgs relatively neglects: the coming
to power during the war of the various groups of progressive intellectuals.[2] I use the term “intellectual” in the
broad sense penetratingly described by F.A. Hayek: that is, not merely
theorists and academicians, but also all manner of opinion-molders in society —
writers, journalists, preachers, scientists, activists of all sort — what Hayek
calls “secondhand dealers in ideas.”[3] Most of these intellectuals, of
whatever strand or occupation, were either dedicated, messianic postmillennial
pietists or else former pietists, born in a deeply pietist home, who, though
now secularized, still possessed an intense messianic belief in national and
world salvation through Big Government. But, in addition, oddly but
characteristically, most combined in their thought and agitation messianic
moral or religious fervor with an empirical, allegedly “value-free,” and strictly
“scientific” devotion to social science. Whether it be the medical profession’s
combined scientific and moralistic devotion to stamping out sin or a similar
position among economists or philosophers, this blend is typical of progressive
intellectuals.
In this paper, I will be
dealing with various examples of individual or groups of progressive
intellectuals, exulting in the triumph of their creed and their own place in
it, as a result of America’s entry into World War I. Unfortunately, limitations
of space and time preclude dealing with all facets of the wartime activity of
progressive intellectuals; in particular, I regret having to omit treatment of
the conscription movement, a fascinating example of the creed of the “therapy”
of “discipline” led by upper-class intellectuals and businessmen in the J.P.
Morgan ambit.[4] I shall also have to omit both the
highly significant trooping to the war colors of the nation’s preachers, and
the wartime impetus toward the permanent centralization of scientific research.[5]
There is no better epigraph
for the remainder of this paper than a congratulatory note sent to President
Wilson after the delivery of his war message on April 2, 1917. The note was
sent by Wilson’s son-in-law and fellow Southern pietist and progressive,
Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, a man who had spent his entire
life as an industrialist in New York City, solidly in the J.P. Morgan ambit.
McAdoo wrote to Wilson: “You have done a great thing nobly! I firmly believe
that it is God’s will that America should do this transcendent service for
humanity throughout the world and that you are His chosen instrument.”[6] It was not a sentiment with which the
president could disagree.
II. Pietism and Prohibition
One
of the few important omissions in Professor Higgs’s book is the crucial role of
postmillennial pietist Protestantism in the drive toward statism in the United
States. Dominant in the “Yankee” areas of the North from the 1830s on, the
aggressive “evangelical” form of pietism conquered Southern Protestantism by
the 1890s and played a crucial role in progressivism after the turn of the
century and through World War I. Evangelical pietism held that requisite to any
man’s salvation is that he do his best to see to it that everyone else is
saved, and doing one’s best inevitably meant that the State must become a
crucial instrument in maximizing people’s chances for salvation. In particular,
the State plays a pivotal role in stamping out sin, and in “making America
holy.”
To the pietists, sin was very
broadly defined as any force that might cloud men’s minds so that they could
not exercise their theological free will to achieve salvation. Of particular
importance were slavery (until the Civil War), Demon Rum, and the Roman
Catholic Church, headed by the Antichrist in Rome. For decades after the Civil
War, “rebellion” took the place of slavery in the pietist charges against their
great political enemy, the Democratic party.[7] Then in 1896, with the evangelical
conversion of Southern Protestantism and the admission to the Union of the
sparsely populated and pietist Mountain states, William Jennings Bryan was able
to put together a coalition that transformed the Democrats into a pietist party
and ended forever that party’s once proud role as the champion of “liturgical”
(Catholic and High German Lutheran) Christianity and of personal liberty and
laissez faire.[8][9]
The pietists of the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries were all postmillennialist: They believed that
the Second Advent of Christ will occur only after the millennium — a thousand
years of the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth — has been brought
about by human effort. Postmillennialists have therefore tended to be statists,
with the State becoming an important instrument of stamping out sin and
Christianizing the social order so as to speed Jesus’ return.[10]
Professor
Timberlake neatly sums up this politico-religious conflict:
Unlike
those extremist and apocalyptic sects that rejected and withdrew from the world
as hopelessly corrupt, and unlike the more conservative churches, such as the
Roman Catholic, Protestant Episcopal, and Lutheran, that tended to assume a
more relaxed attitude toward the influence of religion in culture, evangelical
Protestantism sought to overcome the corruption of the world in a dynamic manner,
not only by converting men to belief in Christ but also by Christianizing the
social order through the power and force of law. According to this view, the
Christian’s duty was to use the secular power of the state to transform culture
so that the community of the faithful might be kept pure and the work of saving
the unregenerate might be made easier. Thus the function of law was not simply
to restrain evil but to educate and uplift.[11]
Both prohibition and
progressive reform were pietistic, and as both movements expanded after 1900
they became increasingly intertwined. The Prohibition Party, once confined — at
least in its platform — to a single issue, became increasingly and frankly
progressive after 1904. The Anti-Saloon League, the major vehicle for
prohibitionist agitation after 1900, was also markedly devoted to progressive
reform. Thus at the League’s annual convention in 1905, Rev. Howard H. Russell
rejoiced in the growing movement for progressive reform and particularly hailed
Theodore Roosevelt, as that “leader of heroic mould, of absolute honesty of
character and purity of life, that foremost man of this world….”[12] At the Anti-Saloon League’s
convention of 1909, Rev. Purley A. Baker lauded the labor union movement as a
holy crusade for justice and a square deal. The League’s 1915 convention, which
attracted 10,000 people, was noted for the same blend of statism, social
service, and combative Christianity that had marked the national convention of
the Progressive Party in 1912.[13] And at the League’s June 1916
convention, Bishop Luther B. Wilson stated, without contradiction, that
everyone present would undoubtedly hail the progressive reforms then being
proposed.
During the Progressive years,
the Social Gospel became part of the mainstream of pietist Protestantism. Most
of the evangelical churches created commissions on social service to promulgate
the Social Gospel, and virtually all of the denominations adopted the Social
Creed drawn up in 1912 by the Commission of the Church and Social Service of
the Federal Council of Churches. The creed called for the abolition of child
labor, the regulation of female labor, the right of labor to organize (i.e.,
compulsory collective bargaining), the elimination of poverty, and an
“equitable” division of the national product. And right up there as a matter of
social concern was the liquor problem. The creed maintained that liquor was a
grave hindrance toward the establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth, and it
advocated the “protection of the individual and society from the social,
economic, and moral waste of the liquor traffic.[14]
The Social Gospel leaders
were fervent advocates of statism and of prohibition. These included Rev.
Walter Rauschenbusch and Rev. Charles Stelzle, whose tract Why Prohibition! (1918) was distributed, after the
United States’ entry into World War I, by the Commission on Temperance of the
Federal Council of Churches to labor leaders, members of Congress, and
important government officials. A particularly important Social Gospel leader
was Rev. Josiah Strong, whose monthly journal, The
Gospel of the Kingdom, was published by Strong’s American Institute
of Social Service. In an article supporting prohibition in the July 1914 issue,
The Gospel of the Kingdom hailed the progressive spirit that was at last
putting an end to “personal liberty”:
“Personal
Liberty” is at last an uncrowned, dethroned king, with no one to do him
reverence. The social consciousness is so far developed. and is becoming so
autocratic, that institutions and governments must give heed to its mandate and
share their life accordingly. We are no longer frightened by that ancient bogy
— “paternalism in government.” We affirm boldly, it is the business of
government to be just that — Paternal. Nothing human can be foreign to
a true government.[15]
As true crusaders, the
pietists were not content to stop with the stamping out of sin in the United
States alone. If American pietism was convinced that Americans were God’s
chosen people, destined to establish a Kingdom of God within the United States,
surely the pietists’ religious and moral duty could not stop there. In a sense,
the world was America’s oyster. As Professor Timberlake put it, once the
Kingdom of God was in the course of being established in the United States, “it
was therefore America’s mission to spread these ideals and institutions abroad
so that the Kingdom could be established throughout the world. American
Protestants were accordingly not content merely to work for the kingdom of God
in America, but felt compelled to assist in the reformation of the rest of the
world also.”[16]
American entry into World War
I provided the fulfillment of prohibitionist dreams. In the first place, all
food production was placed under the control of Herbert Hoover, Food
Administration czar. But if the US government was to control and allocate food
resources, shall it permit the precious scarce supply of grain to be siphoned
off into the “waste,” if not the sin, of the manufacture of liquor? Even though
less than two percent of American cereal production went into the manufacture
of alcohol, think of the starving children of the world who might otherwise be
fed. As the progressive weekly The Independent demagogically
phrased it. “Shall the many have food, or the few have drink?” For the
ostensible purpose of “conserving” grain, Congress wrote an amendment into the
Lever Food and Fuel Control Act of August 10, 1917, that absolutely prohibited
the use of foodstuffs, hence grain, in the production of alcohol. Congress
would have added a prohibition on the manufacture of wine or beer, but
President Wilson persuaded the Anti-Saloon League that he could accomplish the
same goal more slowly and thereby avoid a delaying filibuster by the wets in
Congress. However, Herbert Hoover, a progressive and a prohibitionist,
persuaded Wilson to issue an order, on December 8, both greatly reducing the
alcoholic content of beer and limiting the amount of foodstuffs that could be
used in its manufacture.[17]
The
prohibitionists were able to use the Lever Act and war patriotism to good
effect. Thus, Mrs. W. E. Lindsey, wife of the governor of New Mexico, delivered
a speech in November 1917 that noted the Lever Act, and declared:
Aside
from the long list of awful tragedies following in the wake of the liquor
traffic, the economic waste is too great to be tolerated at this time. With so
many people of the allied nations near to the door of starvation, it would be
criminal ingratitude for us to continue the manufacture of whiskey.[18]
Another
rationale for prohibition during the war was the alleged necessity to protect
American soldiers from the dangers of alcohol to their health, their morals,
and their immortal souls. As a result, in the Selective Service Act of May 18,
1917, Congress provided that dry zones must be established around every army
base, and it was made illegal to sell or even to give liquor to any member of
the military establishment within those zones, even in one’s private home. Any
inebriated servicemen were subject to courts-martial.
But
the most severe thrust toward national prohibition was the Anti-Saloon League’s
proposed eighteenth constitutional amendment, outlawing the manufacture, sale,
transportation, import or export of all intoxicating liquors. It was passed by
Congress and submitted to the states at the end of December 1917. Wet arguments
that prohibition would prove unenforceable were met with the usual dry appeal
to high principle: Should laws against murder and robbery he repealed simply
because they cannot be completely enforced? And arguments that private property
would be unjustly confiscated were also brushed aside with the contention that
property injurious to the health, morals, and safety of the people had always
been subject to confiscation without compensation.
When the Lever Act made a
distinction between hard liquor (forbidden) and beer and wine (limited), the
brewing industry tried to save their skins by cutting themselves loose from the
taint of distilled spirits. “The true relationship with beer,” insisted the
United States Brewers Association, “is with light wines and soft drinks-not
with hard liquors.” The brewers affirmed their desire to “sever, once for all,
the shackles that bound our wholesome productions to ardent spirits.” But this
craven attitude would do the brewers no good. After all, one of the major
objectives of the drys was to smash the brewers, once and for all, they whose
product was the very embodiment of the drinking habits of the hated
German-American masses, both Catholic and Lutheran, liturgicals and beer
drinkers all. German-Americans were now fair game. Were they not all agents of
the satanic Kaiser, bent on conquering the world? Were they not conscious
agents of the dreaded Hun Kultur, out to
destroy American civilization? And were not most brewers German?
And so the Anti-Saloon League
thundered that “German brewers in this country have rendered thousands of men
inefficient and are thus crippling the Republic in its war on Prussian militarism.”
Apparently, the Anti-Saloon League took no heed of the work of German brewers
in Germany, who were presumably performing the estimable service of rendering
“Prussian militarism” helpless. The brewers were accused of being pro-German,
and of subsidizing the press (apparently it was all right to be pro-English or
to subsidize the press if one were not a brewer). The acme of the accusations
came from one prohibitionist: “We have German enemies,” he warned, “in this
country too. And the worst of all our German enemies, the most treacherous, the
most menacing are Pabst, Schlitz, Blatz, and Miller.”[19]
In
this sort of atmosphere, the brewers didn’t have a chance, and the Eighteenth
Amendment went to the states, outlawing all forms of liquor. Since twenty-seven
states had already outlawed liquor, this meant that only nine more were needed
to ratify this remarkable amendment, which directly involved the federal
constitution in what had always been, at most, a matter of police power of the
states. The thirty-sixth state ratified the Eighteenth Amendment on January 16,
1919, and by the end of February all but three states (New Jersey, Rhode
Island, and Connecticut) had made liquor unconstitutional as well as illegal.
Technically, the amendment went into force the following January, but Congress
speeded matters up by passing the War Prohibition Act of November 11, 1918,
which banned the manufacture of beer and wine after the following May and
outlawed the sale of all intoxicating beverages after June 30, 1919, a ban to
continue in effect until the end of demobilization. Thus total national
prohibition really began on July 1, 1919, with the Eighteenth Amendment taking
over six months later. The constitutional amendment needed a congressional
enforcing act, which Congress supplied with the Volstead (or National
Prohibition) Act, passed over Wilson’s veto at the end of October 1919.
With
the battle against Demon Rum won at home, the restless advocates of pietist
prohibitionism looked for new lands to conquer. Today America, tomorrow the
world. In June 1919 the triumphant Anti-Saloon League called an international
prohibition conference in Washington and created a World League Against
Alcoholism. World prohibition, after all, was needed to finish the job of
making the world safe for democracy. The prohibitionists’ goals were fervently
expressed by Rev. A.C. Bane at the Anti-Saloon League’s 1917 convention, when
victory in America was already in sight. To a wildly cheering throng, Bane
thundered:
America
will “go over the top” in humanity’s greatest battle [against liquor] and plant
the victorious white standard of Prohibition upon the nation’s loftiest
eminence. Then catching sight of the beckoning hand of our sister nations
across the sea, struggling with the same age-long foe, we will go forth with
the spirit of the missionary and the crusader to help drive the demon of drink
from all civilization. With America leading the way, with faith in Omnipotent
God, and bearing with patriotic hands our stainless flag, the emblem of civic
purity, we will soon bestow upon mankind the priceless gift of World
Prohibition.[20]
Fortunately,
the prohibitionists found the reluctant world a tougher nut to crack.
III. Women at War and at the
Polls
Another direct outgrowth of
World War I, coming in tandem with prohibition but lasting more permanently,
was the Nineteenth Amendment, submitted by Congress in 1919 and ratified by the
following year, which allowed women to vote. Women’s suffrage had long been a
movement directly allied with prohibition. Desperate to combat a demographic
trend that seemed to be going against them, the evangelical pietists called for
women’s suffrage (and enacted it in many Western states). They did so because
they knew that while pietist women were socially and politically active, ethnic
or liturgical women tended to be culturally bound to hearth and home and
therefore far less likely to vote.
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Hence,
women’s suffrage would greatly increase pietist voting power. In 1869 the
Prohibitionist Party became the first party to endorse women’s suffrage, which
it continued to do. The Progressive Party was equally enthusiastic about female
suffrage; it was the first major national party to permit women delegates at
its conventions. A leading women’s suffrage organization was the Women’s
Christian Temperance Union, which reached an enormous membership of 300,000 by
1900. And three successive presidents of the major women’s suffrage group, the
National American Woman Suffrage Association — Susan B. Anthony, Mrs. Carrie
Chapman Catt, and Dr. Anna Howard Shaw — all began their activist careers as
prohibitionists. Susan B. Anthony put the issue clearly:
There
is an enemy of the homes of this nation and that enemy is drunkenness. Everyone
connected with the gambling house, the brothel and the saloon works and votes
solidly against the enfranchisement of women, and, I say, if you believe in
chastity, if you believe in honesty and integrity, then take the necessary
steps to put the ballot in the hands of women.[21]
For its part, the
German-American Alliance of Nebraska sent out an appeal during the unsuccessful
referendum in November 1914 on women suffrage. Written in German, the appeal
declared, “Our German women do not want the right to vote, and since our opponents
desire the right of suffrage mainly for the purpose of saddling the yoke of
prohibition on our necks, we should oppose it with all our might….”[22]
America’s
entry into World War I provided the impetus for overcoming the substantial
opposition to woman suffrage, as a corollary to the success of prohibition and
as a reward for the vigorous activity by organized women in behalf of the war
effort. To close the loop, much of that activity consisted in stamping out vice
and alcohol as well as instilling “patriotic” education into the minds of often
suspect immigrant groups.
Shortly after the US
declaration of war, the Council of National Defense created an Advisory
Committee on Women’s Defense Work, known as the Woman’s Committee. The purpose
of the committee, writes a celebratory contemporary account, was “to coordinate
the activities and the resources of the organized and unorganized women of the
country, that their power may be immediately utilized in time of need, and to
supply a new and direct channel of cooperation between women and governmental
department.”[23]Chairman of the Woman’s Committee, working
energetically and full time, was the former president of the National American
Woman Suffrage Association, Dr. Anna Howard Shaw, and another leading member
was the suffrage group’s current chairman and an equally prominent suffragette,
Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt.
The Woman’s Committee
promptly set up organizations in cities and states across the country, and on
June 19, 1917 convened a conference of over fifty national women’s
organizations to coordinate their efforts. It was at this conference that “the
first definite task was imposed upon American women” by the indefatigable Food
Czar, Herbert Hoover.[24] Hoover enlisted the cooperation of
the nation’s women in his ambitious campaign for controlling, restricting, and
cartelizing the food industry in the name of “conservation” and elimination of
“waste.” Celebrating this coming together of women was one of the Woman’s
Committee members, the Progressive writer and muckraker Mrs. Ida M. Tarbell.
Mrs. Tarbell lauded the “growing consciousness everywhere that this great
enterprise for democracy which we are launching [the US entry into the war] is
a national affair, and if an individual or a society is going to do its bit it
must act with and under the government at Washington.” “Nothing else,” Mrs.
Tarbell gushed, “can explain the action of the women of the country in coming
together as they are doing today under one centralized direction.”[25]
Mrs.
Tarbell’s enthusiasm might have been heightened by the fact that she was one of
the directing rather than the directed. Herbert Hoover came to the women’s
conference with the proposal that each of the women sign and distribute a “food
pledge card” on behalf of food conservation. While support for the food pledge
among the public was narrower than anticipated, educational efforts to promote
the pledge became the basis of the remainder of the women’s conservation
campaign. The Woman’s Committee appointed Mrs. Tarbell as chairman of its
committee on Food Administration, and she not only tirelessly organized the
campaign but also wrote many letters and newspaper and magazine articles on its
behalf.
In
addition to food control, another important and immediate function of the
Woman’s Committee was to attempt to register every woman in the country for
possible volunteer or paid work in support of the war effort. Every woman aged
sixteen or over was asked to sign and submit a registration card with all
pertinent information, including training, experience, and the sort of work
desired. In that way the government would know the whereabouts and training of
every woman, and government and women could then serve each other best. In many
states, especially Ohio and Illinois, state governments set up schools to train
the registrars. And even though the Woman’s Committee kept insisting that the
registration was completely voluntary, the state of Louisiana, as Ida Clarke
puts it, developed a “novel and clever” idea to facilitate the program: women’s
registration was made compulsory.
Louisiana’s Governor Ruftin
G. Pleasant decreed October 17, 1917 compulsory registration day, and a host of
state officials collaborated in its operation. The State Food Commission made
sure that food pledges were also signed by all, and the State School Board
granted a holiday on October 17 so that teachers could assist in the compulsory
registration, especially in the rural districts. Six thousand women were
officially commissioned by the state of Louisiana to conduct the registration,
and they worked in tandem with state Food Conservation officials and parish
Demonstration Agents. In the French areas of the state, the Catholic priests
rendered valuable aid in personally appealing to all their female parishioners
to perform their registration duties. Handbills were circulated in French,
house-to-house canvasses were made, and speeches urging registration were made
by women activists in movie theaters, schools, churches, and courthouses. We
are informed that all responses were eager and cordial; there is no mention of
any resistance. We are also advised that “even the negroes were quite alive to
the situation, meeting sometimes with the white people and sometimes at the
call of their own pastors.”[26]
Also helping out in women’s
registration and food control was another, smaller, but slightly more sinister
women’s organization that had been launched by Congress as a sort of prewar
wartime group at a large Congress for Constructive Patriotism, held in
Washington, D.C. in late January 1917. This was the National League for Woman’s
Service (NLWS), which established a nationwide organization later overshadowed
and overlapped by the larger Woman’s Committee. The difference was that the
NLWS was set up on quite frankly military lines. Each local working unit was
called a “detachment” under a “detachment commander,” district-wide and
state-wide detachments met in annual “encampments,” and every woman member was
to wear a uniform with an organization badge and insignia. In particular, “the
basis of training for all detachments is standardized, physical drill.”[27]
A vital part of the Woman’s
Committee work was engaging in “patriotic education.” The government and the
Woman’s Committee recognized that immigrant ethnic women were most in need of
such vital instruction, and so it set up a committee on education, headed by
the energetic Mrs. Carrie Chapman Catt. Mrs. Catt stated the problem well to
the Woman’s Committee: Millions of people in the United States were unclear on
why we were at war, and why, as Ida Clarke paraphrases Mrs. Can, there is “the
imperative necessity of winning the war if future generations were to be
protected from the menace of an unscrupulous militarism.”[28] Presumably US militarism, being
“scrupulous,” posed no problem.
Apathy and ignorance
abounded, Mrs. Catt went on, and she proposed to mobilize twenty million
American women, the “greatest sentiment makers of any community,” to begin a
“vast educational movement” to get the women “fervently enlisted to push the
war to victory as rapidly as possible.” As Mrs. Catt continued, however, the
clarity of war aims she called for really amounted to pointing out that we were
in the war “whether the nation likes it or does not like it,” and that
therefore the “sacrifices” needed to win the war “willingly or unwillingly must
be made.” These statements are reminiscent of arguments supporting recent
military actions by Ronald Reagan (“He had to do what he had to do”). In the
end, Mrs. Catt could come up with only one reasoned argument for the war, apart
from this alleged necessity, that it must be won to make it “the war to end
war.”[29]
The
“patriotic education” campaign of the organized women was largely to
“Americanize” immigrant women by energetically persuading them (a) to become
naturalized American citizens and (b) to learn “Mother English.” In the
campaign, dubbed “America First,” national unity was promoted through getting
immigrants to learn English and trying to get female immigrants into afternoon
or evening English classes. The organized patriot women were also worried about
preserving the family structure of the immigrants. If the children learn
English and their parents remain ignorant, children will scorn their elders,
“parental discipline and control are dissipated, and the whole family fabric
becomes weakened. Thus one of the great conservative forces in the community
becomes inoperative.” To preserve “maternal control of the young,” then,
“Americanization of the foreign women through language becomes imperative.” In
Erie, Pennsylvania, women’s clubs appointed “Block Matrons,” whose job it was
to get to know the foreign families of the neighborhood and to back up school
authorities in urging the immigrants to learn English, and who, in the rather
naive words of Ida Clarke, “become neighbors, friends, and veritable mother
confessors to the foreign women of the block.” One would like to have heard
some comments from recipients of the attentions of the Block Matrons.
All in all, as a result of
the Americanization campaign, Ida Clarke concludes, “the organized women of
this country can play an important part in making ours a country with a common
language, a common purpose, a common set of ideals — a unified America.”[30]
Neither
did the government and its organized women neglect progressive economic
reforms. At the organizing June 1917 conference of the Woman’s Committee, Mrs.
Carrie Catt emphasized that the greatest problem of the war was to assure that
women receive “equal pay for equal work.” The conference suggested that
vigilance committees be established to guard against the violation of “ethical
laws” governing labor and also that all laws restricting (“protecting”) the
labor of women and children be rigorously enforced. Apparently, there were some
values to which maximizing production for the war effort had to take second
place.
Mrs. Margaret Dreier Robins,
president of the National Women’s Trade Union’s League, hailed the fact that
the Woman’s Committee was organizing committees in every state to protect
minimum standards for women and children’s labor in industry and demanded
minimum wages and shorter hours for women. Mrs. Robins particularly warned that
“not only are unorganized women workers in vast numbers used as underbidders in
the labor market for lowering industrial standards, but they are related to
those groups in industrial centers of our country that are least Americanized
and most alien to our institutions and ideals.” And so “Americanization” and
cartelization of female labor went hand in hand.[31][32]
IV. Saving Our Boys from
Alcohol and Vice
One of organized womanhood’s
major contributions to the war effort was to collaborate in an attempt to save
American soldiers from vice and Demon Rum. In addition to establishing rigorous
dry zones around every military camp in the United States, the Selective
Service Act of May 1917 also outlawed prostitution in wide zones around the
military camps. To enforce these provisions, the War Department had ready at
hand a Commission on Training Camp Activities, an agency soon imitated by the
Department of the Navy. Both commissions were headed by a man tailor-made for
the job, the progressive New York settlement-house worker, municipal political
reformer, and former student and disciple of Woodrow Wilson, Raymond Blaine
Fosdick.
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Fosdick’s
background, life, and career were paradigmatic for progressive intellectuals
and activists of that era. Fosdick’s ancestors were Yankees from Massachusetts
and Connecticut, and his great-grandfather pioneered westward in a covered
wagon to become a frontier farmer in the heart of the Burned-Over District of
transplanted Yankees, Buffalo, New York. Fosdick’s grandfather, a pietist lay
preacher born again in a Baptist revival, was a prohibitionist who married a
preacher’s daughter and became a lifelong public school teacher in Buffalo.
Grandfather Fosdick rose to become Superintendent of Education in Buffalo and a
battler for an expanded and strengthened public school system. Fosdick’s
immediate ancestry continued in the same vein. His father was a public school
teacher in Buffalo who rose to become principal of a high school. His mother
was deeply pietist and a staunch advocate of prohibition and women’s suffrage.
Fosdick’s father was a devout pietist Protestant and a “fanatical” Republican
who gave his son Raymond the middle name of his hero, the veteran Maine
Republican James G. Blaine. The three Fosdick children, elder brother Harry
Emerson, Raymond, and Raymond’s twin sister, Edith, on emerging from this
atmosphere, all forged lifetime careers of pietism and social service.
While
active in New York reform administration, Fosdick made a fateful friendship. In
1910, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., like his father a pietist Baptist, was chairman
of a special grand jury to investigate and to try to stamp out prostitution in
New York City. For Rockefeller, the elimination of prostitution was to become
an ardent and lifelong crusade. He believed that sin, such as prostitution,
must be criminated, quarantined, and driven underground through rigorous
suppression.
In 1911, Rockefeller began
his crusade by setting up the Bureau of Social Hygiene, into which he poured $5
million in the next quarter century. Two years later he enlisted Fosdick,
already a speaker at the annual dinner of Rockefeller’s Baptist Bible class, to
study police systems in Europe in conjunction with activities to end the great
“social vice.” Surveying American police after his stint in Europe at
Rockefeller’s behest, Fosdick was appalled that police work in the United
States was not considered a “science” and that it was subject to “sordid”
political influences.[33]
At
that point, the new Secretary of War, the progressive former mayor of Cleveland
Newton D. Baker, became disturbed at reports that areas near the army camps in
Texas on the Mexican border, where troops were mobilized to combat the Mexican
revolutionary Pancho Villa, were honeycombed with saloons and prostitution.
Sent by Baker on a fact-finding tour in the summer of 1916, scoffed at by tough
army officers as the “Reverend,” Fosdick was horrified to find saloons and
brothels seemingly everywhere in the vicinity of the military camps. He
reported his consternation to Baker, and, at Fosdick’s suggestion, Baker
cracked down on the army commanders and their lax attitude toward alcohol and
vice. But Fosdick was beginning to get the glimmer of another idea. Couldn’t
the suppression of the bad be accompanied by a positive encouragement of the good,
of wholesome recreational alternatives to sin and liquor that our boys could
enjoy? When war was declared, Baker quickly appointed Fosdick to be chairman of
the Commission on Training Camp Activities.
Armed with the coercive
resources of the federal government and rapidly building his bureaucratic
empire from merely one secretary to a staff of thousands, Raymond Fosdick set
out with determination on his twofold task: stamping out alcohol and sin in and
around every military camp, and filling the void for American soldiers and
sailors by providing them with wholesome recreation. As head of the Law
Enforcement Division of the Training Camp Commission, Fosdick selected Bascom
Johnson, attorney for the American Social Hygiene Association.[34] Johnson was commissioned a major,
and his staff of forty aggressive attorneys became second lieutenants.
Employing the argument of
health and military necessity, Fosdick set up a Social Hygiene Division of his
commission, which promulgated the slogan “Fit to Fight.” Using a mixture of
force and threats to remove federal troops from the bases if recalcitrant
cities did not comply, Fosdick managed to bludgeon his way into suppressing, if
not prostitution in general, then at least every major red light district in
the country. In doing so, Fosdick and Baker, employing local police and the
federal Military Police, far exceeded their legal authority. The law authorized
the president to shut down every red light district in a five-mile zone around
each military camp or base. Of the 110 red light districts shut down by
military force, however, only 35 were included in the prohibited zone.
Suppression of the other 75 was an illegal extension of the law. Nevertheless,
Fosdick was triumphant: “Through the efforts of this Commission [on Training
Camp Activities] the red light district has practically ceased to be a feature
of American city life.”[35] The result of this permanent
destruction of the red light district, of course, was to drive prostitution
onto the streets, where consumers would be deprived of the protection of either
an open market or of regulation.
In some cases, the federal
anti-vice crusade met considerable resistance. Secretary of Navy Josephus
Daniels, a progressive from North Carolina, had to call out the marines to
patrol the streets of resistant Philadelphia, and naval troops, over the
strenuous objections of the mayor, were used to crush the fabled red light
district of Storyville, in New Orleans, in November 1917.[36]
In its hubris, the US Army
decided to extend its anti-vice crusade to foreign shores. General John J.
Pershing issued an official bulletin to members of the American Expeditionary
Force in France urging that “sexual continence is the plain duty of members of
the A.E.F., both for the vigorous conduct of the war, and for the clean health
of the American people after the war.” Pershing and the American military tried
to close all the French brothels in areas where American troops were located,
but the move was unsuccessful because the French objected bitterly. Premier
Georges Clemenceau pointed out that the result of the “total prohibition of
regulated prostitution in the vicinity of American troops” was only to increase
“venereal diseases among the civilian population of the neighborhood.” Finally,
the United States had to rest content with declaring French civilian areas off
limits to the troops.[37]
The more positive part of
Raymond Fosdick’s task during the war was supplying the soldiers and sailors
with a constructive substitute for sin and alcohol, “healthful amusements and
wholesome company.” As might be expected, the Woman’s Committee and organized
womanhood collaborated enthusiastically. They followed the injunction of
Secretary of War Baker that the government “cannot allow these young men to be
surrounded by a vicious and demoralizing environment, nor can we leave anything
undone which will protect them from unhealthy influences and crude forms of
temptation.” The Woman’s Committee found, however, that in the great
undertaking of safeguarding the health and morals of our boys, their most
challenging problem proved to be guarding the morals of their mobilized young
girls. For unfortunately, “where soldiers are stationed the problem of
preventing girls from being misled by the glamour and romance of war and
beguiling uniforms looms large.” Fortunately, perhaps, the Maryland Committee
proposed the establishment of a “Patriotic League of Honor which will inspire
girls to adopt the highest standards of womanliness and loyalty to their
country.”[38]
No group was more delighted
with the achievements of Fosdick and his Military Training Camp Commission than
the burgeoning profession of social work. Surrounded by handpicked aides from
the Playground and Recreation Association and the Russell Sage Foundation, Fosdick
and the others “in effect tried to create a massive settlement house around
each camp. No army had ever seen anything like it before, but it was an
outgrowth of the recreation and community organization movement, and a victory
for those who had been arguing for the creative use of leisure time.”[39] The social work profession
pronounced the program an enormous success. The influential Survey magazine summed up the result as “the most
stupendous piece of social work in modern times.”[40]
Social workers were also
exultant about prohibition. In 1917, the National Conference of Charities and
Corrections (which changed its name around the same time to the National
Conference of Social Work) was emboldened to drop whatever value-free pose it
might have had and come out squarely for prohibition. On returning from Russia
in 1917, Edward T. Devine of the Charity Organization Society of New York
exclaimed that “the social revolution which followed the prohibition of vodka
was more profoundly important than the political revolution which abolished
autocracy.” And Robert A. Woods of Boston, the Grand Old Man of the settlement
house movement and a veteran advocate of prohibition, predicted in 1919 that
the Eighteenth Amendment, “one of the greatest and best events in history,”
would reduce poverty, wipe out prostitution and crime, and liberate “vast
suppressed human potentialities.”[41]
Woods,
president of the National Conference of Social Work during 1917–18, had long
denounced alcohol as “an abominable evil.” A postmillennial pietist, he
believed in “Christian statesmanship” that would, in a “propaganda of the
deed,” Christianize the social order in a corporate, communal route to the
glorification of God. Like many pietists, Woods cared not for creeds or dogmas
but only for advancing Christianity in a communal way; though an active
Episcopalian, his “parish” was the community at large. In his settlement work,
Woods had long favored the isolation or segregation of the “unfit,” in
particular “the tramp, the drunkard, the pauper, the imbecile,” with the
settlement house as the nucleus of this reform. Woods was particularly eager to
isolate and punish the drunkard and the tramp. “Inveterate drunkards” were to
receive increasing levels of “punishment,” with ever-lengthier jail terms. The
“tramp evil” was to be gotten rid of by rounding up and jailing vagrants, who
would be placed in tramp workhouses and put to forced labor.
For Woods the world war was a
momentous event. It had advanced the process of “Americanization,” a “great
humanizing process through which all loyalties, all beliefs must be wrought
together in a better order.”[42] The war had wonderfully released the
energies of the American people. Now, however, it was important to carry the
wartime momentum into the postwar world. Lauding the war collectivist society
during the spring of 1918, Robert Woods asked the crucial question, “Why should
it not always be so? Why not continue in the years of peace this close, vast,
wholesome organism of service, of fellowship, of constructive creative power?”[43]
V. The New Republic Collectivists
The New Republic magazine, founded in 1914 as the
leading intellectual organ of progressivism, was a living embodiment of the
burgeoning alliance between big-business interests, in particular the House of
Morgan, and the growing legion of collectivist intellectuals. Founder and
publisher of the New Republic was Willard W.
Straight, partner of J.P. Morgan & Co., and its financier was Straight’s
wife, the heiress Dorothy Whitney. Major editor of the influential new weekly
was the veteran collectivist and theoretician of Teddy Roosevelt’s New
Nationalism, Herbert David Croly. Croly’s two coeditors were Walter Edward
Weyl, another theoretician of the New Nationalism, and the young, ambitious
former official of the Intercollegiate Socialist Society, the future pundit
Walter Lippmann. As Woodrow Wilson began to take America into World War I,
the New Republic, though originally Rooseveltian, became an
enthusiastic supporter of the war, and a virtual spokesman for the Wilson war
effort, the wartime collectivist economy, and the new society molded by the
war.
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On the higher levels of
ratiocination, unquestionably the leading progressive intellectual, before,
during, and after World War I, was the champion of pragmatism, Professor John
Dewey of Columbia University. Dewey wrote frequently for the New Republic in this period and was clearly its
leading theoretician. A Yankee born in 1859, Dewey was, as Mencken put it, “of
indestructible Vermont stock and a man of the highest bearable sobriety.” John
Dewey was the son of a small town Vermont grocer.[44] Although he was a pragmatist and a
secular humanist most of his life, it is not as well known that Dewey, in the
years before 1900, was a postmillennial pietist, seeking the gradual
development of a Christianized social order and Kingdom of God on earth via the
expansion of science, community, and the State. During the 1890s, Dewey, as
professor of philosophy at the University of Michigan, expounded his vision of
postmillennial pietism in a series of lectures before the Students’ Christian
Association. Dewey argued that the growth of modem science now makes it
possible for man to establish the biblical idea of the Kingdom of God on earth.
Once humans had broken free of the restraints of orthodox Christianity, a truly
religious Kingdom of God could be realized in “the common incarnate Life, the
purpose animating all men and binding them together into one harmonious whole
of sympathy.”[45]
Religion would thus work in
tandem with science and democracy, all of which would break down the barriers
between men and establish the Kingdom. After 1900 it was easy for John Dewey,
along with most other postmillennial intellectuals of the period, to shift
gradually but decisively from postmillennial progressive Christian statism to
progressive secular statism. The path, the expansion of statism and “social
control” and planning, remained the same. And even though the Christian creed
dropped out of the picture, the intellectuals and activists continued to
possess the same evangelical zeal for the salvation of the world that their
parents and they themselves had once possessed. The world would and must still
be saved through progress and statism.[46]
A
pacifist while in the midst of peace, John Dewey prepared himself to lead the
parade for war as America drew nearer to armed intervention in the European
struggle. First, in January 1916 in the New Republic, Dewey attacked the
“professional pacifist’s” outright condemnation of war as a “sentimental
phantasy,” a confusion of means and ends. Force, he declared, was simply “a
means of getting results,” and therefore would neither be lauded or condemned
per se. Next, in April Dewey signed a pro-Allied manifesto, not only cheering
for an Allied victory but also proclaiming that the Allies were “struggling to
preserve the liberties of the world and the highest ideals of civilization.”
And though Dewey supported US entry into the war so that Germany could be
defeated, “a hard job, but one which had to be done,” he was far more
interested in the wonderful changes that the war would surely bring about in
the domestic American polity. In particular, war offered a golden opportunity
to bring about collectivist social control in the interest of social justice.
As one historian put it,
because
war demanded paramount commitment to the national interest and necessitated an
unprecedented degree of government planning and economic regulation in that
interest, Dewey saw the prospect of permanent socialization, permanent
replacement of private and possessive interest by public and social interest,
both within and among nations.[47]
In an interview with
the New York World a few months after US entry into
the war, Dewey exulted that “this war may easily be the beginning of the end of
business.” For out of the needs of the war, “we are beginning to produce for
use, not for sale, and the capitalist is not a capitalist [in the face of] the
war.” Capitalist conditions of production and sale are now under government
control, and “there is no reason to believe that the old principle will ever be
resumed…. Private property had already lost its sanctity …industrial democracy
is on the way.”[48]
In short, intelligence is at
last being used to tackle social problems, and this practice is destroying the
old order and creating a new social order of “democratic integrated control.”
Labor is acquiring more power, science is at last being socially mobilized, and
massive government controls are socializing industry. These developments, Dewey
proclaimed, were precisely what we are fighting for.[49]
Furthermore, John Dewey saw
great possibilities opened by the war for the advent of worldwide collectivism.
To Dewey, America’s entrance into the war created a “plastic juncture” in the
world, a world marked by a “world organization and the beginnings of a public
control which crosses nationalistic boundaries and interests,” and which would
also “outlaw war.”[50]
The editors of the New Republic took a position similar to Dewey’s,
except that they arrived at it even earlier. In his editorial in the magazine’s
first issue in November 1914, Herbert Croly cheerily prophesied that the war
would stimulate America’s spirit of nationalism and therefore bring it closer
to democracy. At first hesitant about the collectivist war economies in Europe,
the New Republic soon began to cheer and urged the
United States to follow the lead of the warring European nations and socialize
its economy and expand the powers of the State.
As America prepared to enter
the war, the New Republic, examining war
collectivism in Europe, rejoiced that “on its administrative side socialism
[had] won a victory that [was] superb and compelling.” True, European war
collectivism was a bit grim and autocratic, but never fear, America could use
the selfsame means for “democratic” goals.
The New Republic intellectuals also delighted in the
“war spirit” in America, for that spirit meant “the substitution of national
and social and organic forces for the more or less mechanical private forces
operative in peace.” The purposes of war and social reform might be a bit
different, but, after all, “they are both purposes, and luckily for mankind a
social organization which is efficient is as useful for the one as for the
other.”[51]Lucky indeed.
As America prepared to enter
the war, the New Republic eagerly looked
forward to imminent collectivization, sure that it would bring “immense gains
in national efficiency and happiness.” After war was declared, the magazine
urged that the war be used as “an aggressive tool of democracy.”
“Why
should not the war serve,” the magazine asked, “as a pretext to be used to
foist innovations upon the country?” In that way, progressive intellectuals
could lead the way in abolishing “the typical evils of the sprawling
half-educated competitive capitalism.”
Convinced
that the United States would attain socialism through war, Walter Lippmann, in
a public address shortly after American entry, trumpeted his apocalyptic vision
of the future:
We
who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an
aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy.
We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies — to our Colorado
mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is
loose in America. Our own reactionaries will not assuage it. We shall know how
to deal with them.[52]
Walter Lippmann, indeed, had
been the foremost hawk among the New Republic intellectuals.
He had pushed Croly into backing Wilson and into supporting intervention, and
then had collaborated with Colonel House in pushing Wilson into entering the
war. Soon Lippmann, an enthusiast for conscription, had to confront the fact
that he himself, only twenty-seven years old and in fine health, was eminently
eligible for the draft. Somehow, however, Lippmann failed to unite theory and
praxis.
Young Felix Frankfurter,
progressive Harvard Law Professor and a close associate of the New Republic editorial staff, had just been
selected as a special assistant to Secretary of War Baker. Lippmann somehow
felt that his own inestimable services could be better used planning the
postwar world than battling in the trenches. And so he wrote to Frankfurter
asking for a job in Baker’s office. “What I want to do,” he pleaded, “is to
devote all my time to studying and speculating on the approaches to peace and
the reaction from the peace. Do you think you can get me an exemption on such
highfalutin grounds?” He then rushed to reassure Frankfurter that there was
nothing “personal” in this request. After all, he explained, “the things that
need to be thought out, are so big that there must be no personal element mixed
up with this.” Frankfurter having paved the way, Lippmann wrote to Secretary
Baker. He assured Baker that he was only applying for a job and draft exemption
on the pleading of others and in stern submission to the national interest. As
Lippmann put it in a remarkable demonstration of cant:
I
have consulted all the people whose advice I value and they urge me to apply
for exemption. You can well understand that this is not a pleasant thing to do,
and yet, after searching my soul as candidly as I know how, I am convinced that
I can serve my bit much more effectively than as a private in the new armies.
No
doubt.
As
icing on the cake, Lippmann added an important bit of “disinformation.” For, he
piteously wrote to Baker, the fact is “that my father is dying and my mother is
absolutely alone in the world. She does not know what his condition is, and I
cannot tell anyone for fear it would become known.”
Apparently, no one else
“knew” his father’s condition either, including his father and the medical
profession, for the elder Lippmann managed to peg along successfully for the
next ten years.[53]
Secure in his draft
exemption, Walter Lippmann hied off in high excitement to Washington, there to
help run the war and, a few months later, to help direct Colonel House’s secret
conclave of historians and social scientists setting out to plan the shape of
the future peace treaty and the postwar world. Let others fight and die in the
trenches; Walter Lippmann had the satisfaction of knowing that his talents, at
least, would be put to their best use by the newly emerging collectivist State.
As the war went on, Croly and
the other editors, having lost Lippmann to the great world beyond, cheered
every new development of the massively controlled war economy. The
nationalization of railroads and shipping, the priorities and allocation
system, the total domination of all parts of the food industry achieved by
Herbert Hoover and the Food Administration, the pro-union policy, the high
taxes, and the draft were all hailed by the New Republic as
an expansion of democracy’s power to plan for the general good. As the
Armistice ushered in the postwar world, the New Republic looked
back on the handiwork of the war and found it good: “We revolutionized our
society.” All that remained was to organize a new constitutional convention to
complete the job of reconstructing America.[54]
But the revolution had not
been fully completed. Despite the objections of Bernard Baruch and other
wartime planners, the government decided not to make most of the war
collectivist machinery permanent. From then on, the fondest ambition of Baruch
and the others was to make the World War I system a permanent institution of
American life. The most trenchant epitaph on the World War I polity was
delivered by Rexford Guy Tugwell, the most frankly collectivist of the Brain
Trusters of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Looking back on “America’s wartime
socialism” in 1927, Tugwell lamented that if only the war had lasted longer,
that great “experiment” could have been completed: “We were on the verge of
having an international industrial machine when peace broke,” Tugwell mourned.
“Only the Armistice prevented a great experiment in control of production, control
of prices, and control of consumption.”[55] Tugwell need not have been troubled;
there would soon be other emergencies, other wars.
At the end of the war,
Lippmann was to go on to become America’s foremost journalistic pundit. Croly,
having broken with the Wilson Administration on the harshness of the Versailles
Treaty, was bereft to find the New Republic no
longer the spokesman for some great political leader. During the late 1920s he
was to discover an exemplary national collectivist leader abroad — in Benito
Mussolini.[56] That Croly ended his years as an
admirer of Mussolini comes as no surprise when we realize that from early
childhood he had been steeped by a doting father in the authoritarian socialist
doctrines of Auguste Comte’s Positivism. These views were to mark Croly
throughout his life. Thus, Herbert’s father, David, the founder of Positivism
in the United States, advocated the establishment of vast powers of government
over everyone’s life. David Croly favored the growth of trusts and monopolies
as a means both to that end and also to eliminate the evils of individual
competition and “selfishness.” Like his son, David Croly railed at the
Jeffersonian “fear of government” in America, and looked to Hamilton as an
example to counter that trend.[57]
And
what of Professor Dewey, the doyen of the pacifist intellectuals — turned
drumbeaters for war? In a little known period of his life, John Dewey spent the
immediate postwar years, 1919–21, teaching at Peking University and traveling
in the Far East. China was then in a period of turmoil over the clauses of the
Versailles Treaty that transferred the rights of dominance in Shantung from
Germany to Japan. Japan had been promised this reward by the British and French
in secret treaties in return for entering the war against Germany.
The
Wilson Administration was torn between the two camps. On the one hand were
those who wished to stand by the Allies’ decision and who envisioned using
Japan as a club against Bolshevik Russia in Asia. On the other were those who
had already begun to sound the alarm about a Japanese menace and who were
committed to China, often because of connections with the American Protestant
missionaries who wished to defend and expand their extraterritorial powers of
governance in China. The Wilson Administration, which had originally taken a
pro-Chinese stand, reversed itself in the spring of 1919 and endorsed the
Versailles provisions.
Into this complex situation
John Dewey plunged, seeing no complexity and of course considering it
unthinkable for either him or the United States to stay out of the entire fray.
Dewey leaped into total support of the Chinese nationalist position, hailing
the aggressive Young China movement and even endorsing the pro-missionary YMCA
in China as “social workers.” Dewey thundered that while “I didn’t expect to be
a jingo,” that Japan must be called to account and that Japan is the great
menace in Asia. Thus, scarcely had Dewey ceased being a champion of one terrible
world war than he began to pave the way for an even greater one.[58]
VI. Economics in Service of the
State: The Empiricism of Richard T. Ely
World War I was the
apotheosis of the growing notion of intellectuals as servants of the State and
junior partners in State rule. In the new fusion of intellectuals and State,
each was of powerful aid to the other. Intellectuals could serve the State by apologizing
for and supplying rationales for its deeds. Intellectuals were also needed to
staff important positions as planners and controllers of the society and
economy. The State could also serve intellectuals by restricting entry into,
and thereby raising the income and the prestige of, the various occupations and
professions. During World War I, historians were of particular importance in
supplying the government with war propaganda, convincing the public of the
unique evil of Germans throughout history and of the satanic designs of the
Kaiser. Economists, particularly empirical economists and statisticians, were
of great importance in the planning and control of the nation’s wartime
economy. Historians playing preeminent roles in the war propaganda machine have
been studied fairly extensively; economists and statisticians, playing a less
blatant and allegedly “value-free” role, have received far less attention.[59]
Although
it is an outworn generalization to say that nineteenth century economists were
stalwart champions of laissez faire, it is still true that deductive economic
theory proved to be a mighty bulwark against government intervention. For, basically,
economic theory showed the harmony and order inherent in the free market, as
well as the counterproductive distortions and economic shackles imposed by
state intervention. In order for statism to dominate the economics profession,
then, it was important to discredit deductive theory. One of the most important
ways of doing so was to advance the notion that, to be “genuinely scientific,”
economics had to eschew generalization and deductive laws and simply engage in
empirical inquiry into the facts of history and historical institutions, hoping
that somehow laws would eventually arise from these detailed investigations.
Thus
the German Historical School, which managed to seize control of the economics
discipline in Germany, fiercely proclaimed not only its devotion to statism and
government control, but also its opposition to the “abstract” deductive laws of
political economy. This was the first major group within the economics
profession to champion what Ludwig von Mises was later to call “anti-economics.”
Gustav Schmoller, the leader of the Historical School, proudly declared that
his and his colleagues’ major task at the University of Berlin was to form “the
intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern.”
During
the 1880s and 1890s bright young graduate students in history and the social
sciences went to Germany, the home of the PhD degree, to obtain their
doctorates. Almost to a man, they returned to the United States to teach in
colleges and in the newly created graduate schools, imbued with the excitement
of the “new” economics and political science. It was a “new” social science
that lauded the German and Bismarckian development of a powerful
welfare-warfare State, a State seemingly above all social classes, that fused
the nation into an integrated and allegedly harmonious whole. The new society
and polity was to be run by a powerful central government, cartelizing,
dictating, arbitrating, and controlling, thereby eliminating competitive
laissez-faire capitalism on the one hand and the threat of proletarian
socialism on the other. And at or near the head of the new dispensation was to
be the new breed of intellectuals, technocrats, and planners, directing,
staffing, propagandizing, and “selflessly” promoting the common good while
ruling and lording over the rest of society. In short, doing well by doing
good. To the new breed of progressive and statist intellectuals in America,
this was a heady vision indeed.
Richard T. Ely, virtually the
founder of this new breed, was the leading progressive economist and also the
teacher of most of the others. As an ardent postmillennialist pietist, Ely was
convinced that he was serving God and Christ as well. Like so many pietists,
Ely was born (in 1854) of solid Yankee and old Puritan stock, again in the
midst of the fanatical Burned-Over District of western New York. Ely’s father,
Ezra, was an extreme Sabbatarian, preventing his family from playing games or
reading books on Sunday, and so ardent a prohibitionist that, even though an
impoverished, marginal farmer, he refused to grow barley, a crop uniquely
suitable to his soil, because it would have been used to make that monstrously
sinful product, beer.[60] Having been graduated from Columbia
College in 1876, Ely went to Germany and received his PhD from Heidelberg in
1879. In several decades of teaching at Johns Hopkins and then at Wisconsin,
the energetic and empire-building Ely became enormously influential in American
thought and politics. At Johns Hopkins he turned out a gallery of influential
students and statist disciples in all fields of the social sciences as well as
economics. These disciples were headed by the pro-union institutionalist
economist John R. Commons, and included the social-control sociologists Edward
Alsworth Ross and Albion W. Small; John H. Finlay, President of City College of
New York; Dr. Albert Shaw, editor of the Review of Reviews and influential
adviser and theoretician to Theodore Roosevelt; the municipal reformer
Frederick C. Howe; and the historians Frederick Jackson Turner and J. Franklin
Jameson. Newton D. Baker was trained by Ely at Hopkins, and Woodrow Wilson was
also his student there, although there is no direct evidence of intellectual
influence.
In
the mid-1880s Richard Ely founded the American Economic Association in a
conscious attempt to commit the economics profession to statism as against the
older laissez-faire economists grouped in the Political Economy Club. Ely
continued as secretary-treasurer of the AEA for seven years, until his reformer
allies decided to weaken the association’s commitment to statism in order to
induce the laissez-faire economists to join the organization. At that point,
Ely, in high dudgeon, left the AEA.
At Wisconsin in 1892, Ely
formed a new School of Economics, Political Science, and History, surrounded
himself with former students, and gave birth to the Wisconsin Idea which, with
the help of John Commons, succeeded in passing a host of progressive measures
for government regulation in Wisconsin. Ely and the others formed an unofficial
but powerful brain trust for the progressive regime of Wisconsin Governor
Robert M. La Follette, who got his start in Wisconsin politics as an advocate
of prohibition. Though never a classroom student of Ely’s, La Follette always
referred to Ely as his teacher and as the molder of the Wisconsin Idea. And
Theodore Roosevelt once declared that Ely “first introduced me to radicalism in
economics and then made me sane in my radicalism.”[61]
Ely was also one of the most
prominent postmillennialist intellectuals of the era. He fervently believed
that the State is God’s chosen instrument for reforming and Christianizing the
social order so that eventually Jesus would arrive and put an end to history.
The State, declared Ely, “is religious in its essence,” and, furthermore, “God
works through the State in carrying out His purposes more universally than
through any other institution.” The task of the church is to guide the State
and utilize it in these needed reforms.[62]
An inveterate activist and
organizer, Ely was prominent in the evangelical Chautauqua movement, and he
founded there the “Christian Sociology” summer school, which infused the
influential Chautauqua operation with the concepts and the personnel of the
Social Gospel movement. Ely was a friend and close associate of Social Gospel
leaders Revs. Washington Gladden, Walter Rauschenbusch, and Josiah Strong. With
Strong and Commons, Ely organized the Institute of Christian Sociology.[63] Ely also founded and became the
secretary of the Christian Social Union of the Episcopal Church, along with
Christian Socialist W.D.P. Bliss. All of these activities were infused with
postmillennial statism. Thus, the Institute of Christian Sociology was pledged
to present God’s “kingdom as the complete ideal of human society to be realized
on earth.” Moreover,
Ely
viewed the state as the greatest redemptive force in society. In Ely’s eyes,
government was the God-given instrument through which we had to work. Its
preeminence as a divine instrument was based on the post-Reformation abolition
of the division between the sacred and the secular and on the State’s power to
implement ethical solutions to public problems. The same identification of
sacred and secular which took place among liberal clergy enabled Ely to both
divinize the state and socialize Christianity: he thought of government as
God’s main instrument of redemption….[64]
When war came, Richard Ely
was for some reason (perhaps because he was in his sixties) left out of the
excitement of war work and economic planning in Washington. He bitterly
regretted that “I have not had a more active part then I have had in this
greatest war in the world’s history.”[65] But Ely made up for his lack as best
he could; virtually from the start of the European war, he whooped it up for
militarism, war, the “discipline” of conscription, and the suppression of dissent
and “disloyalty” at home. A lifelong militarist, Ely had tried to volunteer for
war service in the Spanish-American War, had called for the suppression of the
Philippine insurrection, and was particularly eager for conscription and for
forced labor for “loafers” during World War I. By 1915 Ely was agitating for
immediate compulsory military service, and the following year he joined the
ardently pro-war and heavily big business–influenced National Security League,
where he called for the liberation of the German people from “autocracy.”[66
In advocating conscription,
Ely was neatly able to combine moral, economic, and prohibitionist arguments
for the draft: “The moral effect of taking boys off street corners and out of
saloons and drilling them is excellent, and the economic effects are likewise
beneficial.”[67] Indeed, conscription for Ely served
almost as a panacea for all ills. So enthusiastic was he about the World War I
experience that Ely again prescribed his favorite cure-all to alleviate the
1929 depression. He proposed a permanent peacetime “industrial army” engaged in
public works and manned by conscripting youth for strenuous physical labor.
This conscription would instill into America’s youth the essential “military
ideals of hardihood and discipline,” a discipline once provided by life on the
farm but unavailable to the bulk of the populace now growing up in the effete
cities. This small, standing conscript army could then speedily absorb the
unemployed during depressions. Under the command of “an economic general
staff,” the industrial army would “go to work to relieve distress with all the
vigor and resources of brain and brawn that we employed in the World War.”[68]
Deprived of a position in
Washington, Ely made the stamping out of “disloyalty” at home his major
contribution to the war effort. He called for the total suspension of academic
freedom for the duration. Any professor, he declared, who stated “opinions which
hinder us in this awful struggle” should be “fired” if not indeed “shot.” The
particular focus of Ely’s formidable energy was a zealous campaign to try to
get his old ally in Wisconsin politics, Robert M. La Follette, expelled from
the US Senate for continuing to oppose America’s participation in the war. Ely
declared that his “blood boils” at La Follette’s “treason” and attacks on war
profiteering. Throwing himself into the battle, Ely founded and became
president of the Madison chapter of the Wisconsin Loyalty Legion and mounted a
campaign to expel La Follette.[69] The campaign was meant to mobilize
the Wisconsin faculty and to support the ultrapatriotic and ultrahawkish
activities of Theodore Roosevelt. Ely wrote to TR that “we must crush La
Follettism.” In his unremitting campaign against the Wisconsin Senator, Ely
thundered that La Follette “has been of more help to the Kaiser than a quarter
of a million troops.”[70] “Empiricism” rampant.
The faculty of the University
of Wisconsin was stung by charges throughout the state and the country that its
failure to denounce La Follette was proof that the university — long affiliated
with La Follette in state politics — supported his disloyal antiwar policies.
Prodded by Ely, Commons, and others, the university’s War Committee drew up and
circulated a petition, signed by the university president, all the deans, and
over 90 percent of the faculty, that provided one of the more striking examples
in United States history of academic truckling to the State apparatus. None too
subtly using the constitutional verbiage for treason, the petition protested
“against those utterances and actions of Senator La Follette which have given
aid and comfort to Germany and her allies in the present war; we deplore his
failure loyally to support the government in the prosecution of the war.”[70]
Behind the scenes, Ely tried
his best to mobilize America’s historians against La Follette, to demonstrate
that he had given aid and comfort to the enemy. Ely was able to enlist the
services of the National Board of Historical Service, the propaganda agency
established by professional historians for the duration of the war, and of the
government’s own propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information. Warning
that the effort must remain secret, Ely mobilized historians under the aegis of
these organizations to research German and Austrian newspapers and journals to
try to build a record of La Follette’s alleged influence, “indicating the
encouragement he has given Germany.” The historian E. Merton Coulter revealed
the objective spirit animating these researches: “I understand it is to be an
unbiased and candid account of the Senator’s [La Follette’s] course and its
effect — but we all know it can lead but to one conclusion — something little
short of treason.”[71]
Professor
Gruber well notes that this campaign to get La Follette was “a remarkable
example of the uses of scholarship for espionage. It was a far cry from the
disinterested search for truth for a group of professors to mobilize a secret
research campaign to find ammunition to destroy the political career of a
United States senator who did not share their view of the war.”[72] In any event, no evidence was turned
up, the movement failed, and the Wisconsin professoriat began to move away in
distrust from the Loyalty Legion.[73]
After
the menace of the Kaiser had been extirpated, the Armistice found Professor
Ely, along with his compatriots in the National Security League, ready to segue
into the next round of patriotic repression. During Ely’s anti–La Follette
research campaign he had urged investigation of “the kind of influence which he
[La Follette] has exerted against our country in Russia.” Ely pointed out that
modem “democracy” requires a “high degree of conformity” and that therefore the
“most serious menace” of Bolshevism, which Ely depicted as “social disease
germs,” must be fought “with repressive measures.”
By
1924, however, Richard T. Ely’s career of repression was over, and what is
more, in a rare instance of the workings of poetic justice, he was hoisted with
his own petard. In 1922 the much-traduced Robert La Follette was reelected to
the Senate and also swept the Progressives back into power in the state of
Wisconsin. By 1924 the Progressives had gained control of the Board of Regents,
and they moved to cut off the water of their former academic ally and
empire-builder. Ely then felt it prudent to move out of Wisconsin together with
his Institute, and while he lingered for some years at Northwestern, the heyday
of Ely’s fame and fortune was over.
VII. Economics in Service of
the State: Government and Statistics
Statistics
is a vital, though much underplayed, requisite of modern government. Government
could not even presume to control, regulate, or plan any portion of the economy
without the service of its statistical bureaus and agencies. Deprive government
of its statistics and it would be a blind and helpless giant, with no idea
whatever of what to do or where to do it.
It might be replied that
business firms, too, need statistics in order to function. But business needs
for statistics are far less in quantity and also different in quality. Business
may need statistics in its own micro area of the economy, but only on its
prices and costs; it has little need for broad collections of data or for
sweeping, holistic aggregates. Business could perhaps rely on its own privately
collected and unshared data. Furthermore, much entrepreneurial knowledge is
qualitative, not enshrined in quantitative data, and of a particular time,
area, and location. But government bureaucracy could do nothing if forced to be
confined to qualitative data. Deprived of profit and loss tests for efficiency,
or of the need to serve consumers efficiently, conscripting both capital and
operating costs from taxpayers, and forced to abide by fixed, bureaucratic
rules, modern government shorn of masses of statistics could do virtually
nothing.[74]
Hence
the enormous importance of World War I, not only in providing the power and the
precedent for a collectivized economy, but also in greatly accelerating the
advent of statisticians and statistical agencies of government, many of which
(and who) remained in government, ready for the next leap forward of power.
Richard T. Ely, of course,
championed the new empirical “look and see” approach, with the aim of
fact-gathering to “mold the forces at work in society and to improve existing
conditions.”[75] More importantly, one of the leading
authorities on the growth of government expenditure has linked it with
statistics and empirical data: “Advance in economic science and statistics
strengthened belief in the possibilities of dealing with social problems by collective
action. It made for increase in the statistical and other fact-finding
activities of government.”[76] As early as 1863, Samuel B. Ruggles,
American delegate to the International Statistical Congress in Berlin,
proclaimed that “statistics are the very eyes of the statesman, enabling him to
survey and scan with clear and comprehensive vision the whole structure and
economy of the body politic.”[77]
Conversely,
this means that stripped of these means of vision, the statesman would no
longer be able to meddle, control and plan.
Moreover, government statistics
are clearly needed for specific types of intervention. Government could not
intervene to alleviate unemployment unless statistics of unemployment were
collected — and so the impetus for such collection. Carroll D. Wright, one of
the first Commissioners of Labor in the United States, was greatly influenced
by the famous statistician and German Historical School member, Ernst Engel,
head of the Royal Statistical Bureau of Prussia. Wright sought the collection
of unemployment statistics for that reason, and in general, for “the
amelioration of unfortunate industrial and social relations.” Henry Carter
Adams, a former student of Engel’s, and, like Ely, a statist and progressive
“new economist,” established the Statistical Bureau of the Interstate Commerce
Commission, believing that “ever increasing statistical activity by the
government was essential — for the sake of controlling naturally monopolistic
industries.” And Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, eager for government to
stabilize the price level, conceded that he wrote The Making of Index Numbers to solve the problem
of the unreliability of index numbers. “Until this difficulty could be met,
stabilization could scarcely be expected to become a reality.”
Carroll Wright was a
Bostonian and a progressive reformer. Henry Carter Adams, the son of a New
England pietist Congregationalist preacher on missionary duty in Iowa, studied
for the ministry at his father’s alma mater, Andover Theological Seminary, but
soon abandoned this path. Adams devised the accounting system of the
Statistical Bureau of the ICC. This system “served as a model for the
regulation of public utilities here and throughout the world.”[78]
Irving Fisher was the son of
a Rhode Island Congregationalist pietist preacher, and his parents were both of
old Yankee stock, his mother a strict Sabbatarian. As befitted what his son and
biographer called his “crusading spirit,” Fisher was an inveterate reformer,
urging the imposition of numerous progressive measures including Esperanto,
simplified spelling, and calendar reform. He was particularly enthusiastic
about purging the world of “such iniquities of civilization as alcohol, tea,
coffee, tobacco, refined sugar, and bleached white flour.”[79]
During the 1920s Fisher was
the leading prophet of that so-called New Era in economics and in society. He
wrote three books during the 1920s praising the noble experiment of
prohibition, and he lauded Governor Benjamin Strong and the Federal Reserve
System for following his advice and expanding money and credit so as to keep
the wholesale price level virtually constant. Because of the Fed’s success in
imposing Fisherine price stabilization, Fisher was so sure that there could be
no depression that as late as 1930 he wrote a book claiming that there was and
could be no stock crash and that stock prices would quickly rebound. Throughout
the 1920s Fisher insisted that since wholesale prices remained constant, there
was nothing amiss about the wild boom in stocks. Meanwhile he put his theories
into practice by heavily investing his heiress wife’s considerable fortune in
the stock market. After the crash he frittered away his sister-in-law’s money
when his wife’s fortune was depleted, at the same time calling frantically on
the federal government to inflate money and credit and to re-inflate stock
prices to their 1929 levels. Despite his dissipation of two family fortunes,
Fisher managed to blame almost everyone except himself for the debacle.[80]
As we shall see, in view of
the importance of Wesley Clair Mitchell in the burgeoning of government
statistics in World War I, Mitchell’s view on statistics are of particular
importance.[81] Mitchell, an institutionalist and
student of Thorstein Veblen, was one of the prime founders of modern
statistical inquiry in economics and clearly aspired to lay the basis for
“scientific” government planning. As Professor Dorfman, friend and student of
Mitchell’s, put it:
“clearly
the type of social invention most needed today is one that offers definite
techniques through which the social system can be controlled and operated to
the optimum advantage of its members.” (Quote from Mitchell.) To this end he
constantly sought to extend, improve and refine the gathering and compilation
of data…. Mitchell believed that business-cycle analysis …might indicate the
means to the achievement of orderly social control of business activity.[82]
Or,
as Mitchell’s wife and collaborator stated in her memoirs:
he
[Mitchell] envisioned the great contribution that government could make to the
understanding of economic and social problems if the statistical data gathered
independently by various Federal agencies were systematized and planned so that
the interrelationships among them could be studied. The idea of developing
social statistics, not merely as a record but as a basis for
planning, emerged early in his own work.[83]
Particularly
important in the expansion of statistics in World War I was the growing
insistence, by progressive intellectuals and corporate liberal businessmen
alike, that democratic decision-making must be increasingly replaced by the
administrative and technocratic. Democratic or legislative decisions were
messy, “inefficient,” and might lead to a significant curbing of statism, as
had happened in the heyday of the Democratic party during the nineteenth
century. But if decisions were largely administrative and technocratic, the
burgeoning of state power could continue unchecked. The collapse of the
laissez-faire creed of the Democrats in 1896 left a power vacuum in government
that administrative and corporatist types were eager to fill.
Increasingly, then, such
powerful corporatist big business groups as the National Civic Federation
disseminated the idea that governmental decisions should be in the hands of the
efficient technician, the allegedly value-free expert. In short, government, in
virtually all of its aspects, should be “taken out of politics.” And
statistical research with its aura of empiricism, quantitative precision, and
nonpolitical value-freedom, was in the forefront of such emphasis. In the
municipalities, an increasingly powerful progressive reform movement shifted
decisions from elections in neighborhood wards to citywide professional
managers and school superintendents. As a corollary, political power was
increasingly shifted from working class and ethnic German Lutheran and Catholic
wards to upper-class pietist business groups.[84]
By
the time World War I arrived in Europe, a coalition of progressive
intellectuals and corporatist businessmen was ready to go national in
sponsoring allegedly objective statistical research institutes and think tanks.
Their views have been aptly summed up by David Eakins:
The
conclusion being drawn by these people by 1915 was that fact-finding and policymaking
had to be isolated from class struggle and freed from political pressure
groups. The reforms that would lead to industrial peace and social order, these
experts were coming to believe, could only be derived from data determined by
objective fact-finders (such as themselves) and under the auspices of sober and
respectable organizations (such as only they could construct). The capitalist
system could be improved only by a single-minded reliance upon experts detached
from the hurly-burly of democratic policy-making. The emphasis was upon
efficiency — and democratic policymaking was inefficient. An approach to the
making of national economic and social policy outside traditional democratic
political processes was thus emerging before the United States formally entered
World War I.[85]
Several corporatist
businessmen and intellectuals moved at about the same time toward founding such
statistical research institutes. In 1906–07, Jerome D. Greene, secretary of the
Harvard University Corporation, helped found an elite Tuesday Evening Club at
Harvard to explore important issues in economics and the social sciences. In
1910 Greene rose to an even more powerful post as general manager of the new
Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, and three years later Greene became
secretary and CEO of the powerful philanthropic organization, the Rockefeller
Foundation. Greene immediately began to move toward establishing a
Rockefeller-funded institute for economic research, and in March 1914 he called
an exploratory group together in New York, chaired by his friend and mentor in
economics, the first Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Business, Edwin F.
Gay. The developing idea was that Gay would become head of a new, “scientific”
and “impartial” organization, The Institute of Economic Research, which would
gather statistical facts, and that Wesley Mitchell would be its director.[86]
Opposing advisers to John D.
Rockefeller, Jr., won out over Greene, however, and the institute plan was
scuttled.[87] Mitchell and Gay pressed on, with
the lead now taken by Mitchell’s longtime friend, chief statistician and vice
president of AT&T, Malcolm C. Rorty. Rorty lined up support for the idea
from a number of progressive statisticians and businessmen, including Chicago
publisher of business books and magazines, Arch W. Shaw; E.H. Goodwin of the US
Chamber of Commerce; Magnus Alexander, statistician and assistant to the
president of General Electric, like AT&T, a Morgan-oriented concern; John
R. Commons, economist and aide-de-camp to Richard T. Ely at Wisconsin; and
Nahum I. Stone, statistician, former Marxist, a leader in the “scientific
management” movement, and labor manager for the Hickey Freeman clothing
company. This group was in the process of forming a “Committee on National
Income” when the United States entered the war, and they were forced to shelve
their plans temporarily.[88] After the war, however, the group
set up the National Bureau of Economic Research, in 1920.[89]
While the National Bureau was
not to take final shape until after the war, another organization, created on
similar lines, successfully won Greene’s and Rockefeller’s support. In 1916
they were persuaded by Raymond B. Fosdick to found the Institute for Government
Research (IGR).[90] The IGR was slightly different in
focus from the National Bureau group, as it grew directly out of municipal
progressive reform and the political science profession. One of the important
devices used by the municipal reformers was the private bureau of municipal
research, which tried to seize decision-making from allegedly “corrupt”
democratic bodies on behalf of efficient, nonpartisan organizations headed by
progressive technocrats and social scientists.
In 1910 President William
Howard Taft, intrigued with the potential for centralizing power in a chief
executive inherent in the idea of the executive budget, appointed the “father
of the budget idea,” the political scientist Frederick D. Cleveland, as head of
a Commission on Economy and Efficiency. Cleveland was the director of the New
York Bureau of Municipal Research. The Cleveland Commission also included
political scientist and municipal reformer Frank Goodnow, professor of public
law at Columbia University, first president of the American Political Science
Association and president of Johns Hopkins; and William Franklin Willoughby,
former student of Ely, Assistant Director of the Bureau of Census, and later
President of the American Association for Labor Legislation.[91] The Cleveland Commission was
delighted to tell President Taft precisely what he wanted to hear. The
Commission recommended sweeping administrative changes that would provide a
Bureau of Central Administrative Control to form a “consolidated information
and statistical arm of the entire national government.” And at the heart of the
new Bureau would be the Budget Division, which was to develop, at the behest of
the president, and then present “an annual program of business for the Federal
Government to be financed by Congress.”[92]
When Congress balked at the
Cleveland Commission’s recommendations, the disgruntled technocrats decided to
establish an Institute for Government Research in Washington to battle for
these and similar reforms. With funding secured from the Rockefeller
Foundation, the IGR was chaired by Goodnow, with Willoughby as its director.[93] Scan Robert S. Brookings assumed
responsibility for the financing.
When
America entered the war, present and future NBER and IGR leaders were all over
Washington, key figures and statisticians in the collectivized war economy.
By far the most powerful of
the growing number of economists and statisticians involved in World War I was
Edwin F. Gay. Arch W. Shaw, an enthusiast for rigid wartime planning of
economic resources, was made head of the new Commercial Economy Board by the
Council for National Defense as soon as America entered the war.[94] Shaw, who had taught at and served
on the administrative board of Harvard Business School, staffed the board with
Harvard Business people; the secretary was Harvard economist Melvin T.
Copeland, and other members included Dean Gay.
The
board, which later became the powerful Conservation Division of the War
Industries Board, focused on restricting competition in industry by eliminating
the number and variety of products and by imposing compulsory uniformity, all
in the name of “conservation” of resources to aid the war effort. For example,
garment firms had complained loudly of severe competition because of the number
and variety of styles, and so Gay urged the garment firms to form a trade
association to work with the government in curbing the surfeit of competition.
Gay also tried to organize the bakers so that they would not follow the usual
custom of taking back stale and unsold bread from retail outlets. By the end of
1917, Gay was tired of using voluntary persuasion and was urging the government
to use compulsory measures.
Gay’s
major power came in early 1918 when the Shipping Board, which had officially
nationalized all ocean shipping, determined to restrict drastically the use of
ships for civilian trade and to use the bulk of shipping for transport of
American troops to France. Appointed in early January 1918 as merely a “special
expert” by the Shipping Board, Gay in a brief time became the key figure in
redirecting shipping from civilian to military use. Soon Edwin Gay had become a
member of the War Trade Board and head of its statistical department, which
issued restrictive licenses for permitted imports; head of the statistical
department of the Shipping Board; representative of the Shipping Board on the
War Trade Board; head of the statistical committee of the Department of Labor;
head of the Division of Planning and Statistics of the War Industries Board
(WIB); and, above all, head of the new Central Bureau of Planning and
Statistics. The Central Bureau was organized in the fall of 1918, when President
Wilson asked WIB chairman Bernard Baruch to produce a monthly survey of all the
government’s war activities. This “conspectus” evolved into the Central Bureau,
responsible directly to the president. The importance of the bureau is noted by
a recent historian:
The
new Bureau represented the “peak” statistical division of the mobilization,
becoming its “seer and prophet” for the duration, coordinating over a thousand
employees engaged in research and, as the agency responsible for giving the
president a concise picture of the entire economy, becoming the closest
approximation to a “central statistical commission.” During the latter stages
of the war it set up a clearinghouse of statistical work, organized liaisons
with the statistical staff of all the war boards, and centralized the data
production process for the entire war bureaucracy. By the war’s end, Wesley
Mitchell recalled, “we were in a fair way to develop for the first time a
systematic organization of federal statistics.”[95]
Within a year, Edwin Gay had
risen from a special expert to the unquestioned czar of a giant network of
federal statistical agencies, with over a thousand researchers and statisticians
working under his direct control. It is no wonder then that Gay, instead of
being enthusiastic about the American victory he had worked so hard to secure,
saw the Armistice as “almost a personal blow” that plunged him “into the slough
of despond.” All of his empire of statistics and control had just been coming
together and developing into a mighty machine when suddenly “came that wretched
Armistice.”[96] Truly a tragedy of peace.
Gay tried valiantly to keep
the war machinery going, continually complaining because many of his aides were
leaving and bitterly denouncing the “hungry pack” who, for some odd reason,
were clamoring for an immediate end to all wartime controls, including those
closest to his heart, foreign trade and shipping. But one by one, despite the
best efforts of Baruch and many of the wartime planners, the WIB and other war
agencies disappeared.[97] For a while, Gay pinned his hopes on
his Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics (CBPS), which, in a fierce bout
of bureaucratic infighting, he attempted to make the key economic and statistical
group advising the American negotiators at the Versailles peace conference,
thereby displacing the team of historians and social scientists assembled by
Colonel House in the Inquiry. Despite an official victory, and an eight volume
report of the CBPS delivered to Versailles by the head of CBPS European team,
John Foster Dulles of the War Trade Board, the bureau had little influence over
the final treaty.[98]
Peace having finally and
irrevocably arrived, Edwin Gay, backed by Mitchell, tried his best to have the
CBPS kept as a permanent, peacetime organization. Gay argued that the agency,
with himself of course remaining as its head, could provide continuing data to
the League of Nations, and above all could serve as the president’s own eyes
and ears and mold the sort of executive budget envisioned by the old Taft
Commission. CBPS staff member and Harvard economist Edmund E. Day contributed a
memorandum outlining specific tasks for the bureau to aid in demobilization and
reconstruction, as well as rationale for the bureau becoming a permanent part
of government. One thing it could do was to make a “continuing canvass” of
business conditions in the United States. As Gay put it to President Wilson,
using a favorite organicist analogy, a permanent board would serve “as a
nervous system to the vast and complex organization of the government,
furnishing to the controlling brain [the president] the information necessary
for directing the efficient operation of the various members.”[99] Although the President was “very
cordial” to Gay’s plan, Congress refused to agree, and on June 30, 1919 the
Central Bureau of Planning and Statistics was finally terminated, along with
the War Trade Board. Edwin Gay would now have to seek employment in, if not the
private, at least the quasi-independent, sector.
But Gay and Mitchell were not
to be denied. Nor would the Brookings-Willoughby group. Their objective would
be met more gradually and by slightly different means. Gay became editor of
the New York Evening Post under the aegis of its new
owner and Gay’s friend, J.P. Morgan partner Thomas W. Lamont. Gay also helped
to form and become first president of the National Bureau of Economic Research
in 1920, with Wesley C. Mitchell as research director. The Institute for
Government Research achieved its major objective, establishing a Budget Bureau
in the Treasury Department in 1921, with the director of the IGR, William F.
Willoughby, helping to draft the bill that established the bureau.[100] The IGR people soon expanded their
role to include economics, establishing an Institute of Economics headed by
Robert Brookings and Arthur T. Hadley of Yale, with economist Harold G. Moulton
as director.[101] The institute, funded by the
Carnegie Corporation, would be later merged, along with the IGR, into the
Brookings Institution. Edwin Gay also moved into the foreign policy field by
becoming secretary-treasurer and head of the Research Committee of the new and
extremely influential organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).[102]
And
finally, in the field of government statistics, Gay and Mitchell found a more
gradual but longer-range route to power via collaboration with Herbert Hoover,
soon to be Secretary of Commerce. No sooner had Hoover assumed the post in
early 1921 when he expanded the Advisory Committee on the Census to include
Gay, Mitchell, and other economists and then launched the monthly Survey of
Current Business. The Survey was designed to supplement the informational
activities of cooperating trade associations and, by supplying business
information, aid these associations in Hoover’s aim of cartelizing their
respective industries.
Secrecy in business
operations is a crucial weapon of competition, and conversely, publicity and
sharing of information is an important tool of cartels in policing their
members. The Survey of Current Business made available the current production,
sales, and inventory data supplied by cooperating industries and technical
journals. Hoover also hoped that by building on these services, eventually “the
statistical program could provide the knowledge and foresight necessary to
combat panic or speculative conditions, prevent the development of diseased
industries, and guide decision-making so as to iron out rather than accentuate
the business cycle.”[l03]
In promoting his
cartelization doctrine, Hoover met resistance both from some businessmen who
resisted prying questionnaires and sharing competitive secrets and from the
Justice Department. But, a formidable empire-builder, Herbert Hoover managed to
grab statistical services from the Treasury Department and to establish a
“waste elimination division” to organize businesses and trade associations to
continue and expand the wartime “conservation” program of compulsory uniformity
and restriction of the number and variety of competitive products. As assistant
secretary to head up this program, Hoover secured engineer and publicist
Frederick Feiker, an associate of Arch Shaw’s business publication empire.
Hoover also found a top assistant and lifelong disciple in Brigadier General
Julius Klein, a protégé of Edwin Gay’s, who had headed the Latin American
division of the Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce. As the new head of the
bureau, Klein organized seventeen new export commodity divisions — reminiscent
of commodity sections during wartime collectivism — each with “experts” drawn
from the respective industries and each organizing regular cooperation with
parallel industrial advisory committees. And through it all Herbert Hoover made
a series of well-publicized speeches during 1921, spelling out how a
well-designed government trade program, as well as a program in the domestic
economy, could act both as a stimulant to recovery and as a permanent
“stabilizer,” while avoiding such unfortunate measures as abolishing tariffs or
cutting wage rates. The best weapon, both in foreign and domestic trade, was to
“eliminate waste” by a “cooperative mobilization” of government and industry.[104]
A month after the Armistice,
the American Economic Association and the American Statistical Association met
jointly in Richmond, Virginia. The presidential addresses were delivered by men
in the forefront of the exciting new world of government planning, aided by
social science, that seemed to loom ahead. In his address to the American
Statistical Association, Wesley Clair Mitchell proclaimed that the war had “led
to the use of statistics, not only as a record of what had happened, but also
as a vital factor in planning what should be done.” As he had said in his final
lecture in Columbia University the previous spring, the war had shown that when
the community desires to attain a great goal “then within a short period
far-reaching social changes can be achieved.”
“The
peace will bring new problems, he opined, but “it seems impossible” that the
various countries will “attempt to solve them without utilizing the same sort
of centralized directing now employed to kill their enemies abroad for the new
purpose of reconstructing their own life at home.”
But
the careful empiricist and statistician also provided a caveat. Broad social
planning requires “a precise comprehension of social processes” and that can be
provided only by the patient research of social science. As he had written to
his wife eight years earlier, Mitchell stressed that what is needed for
government intervention and planning is the application of the methods of
physical science and industry, particularly precise quantitative research and
measurement. In contrast to the quantitative physical sciences, Mitchell told
the assembled statisticians, the social sciences are “immature, speculative,
filled with controversy” and class struggle. But quantitative knowledge could
replace such struggle and conflict by commonly accepted precise knowledge,
“objective” knowledge “amenable to mathematical formulation” and “capable of
forecasting group phenomena.” A statistician, Mitchell opined, is “either right
or wrong,” and it is easy to demonstrate which. As a result of precise
knowledge of facts, Mitchell envisioned, we can achieve “intelligent
experimenting and detailed planning rather than agitation and class struggle.”
To achieve these vital goals
none other than economists and statisticians would provide the crucial element,
for we would have to be “relying more and more on trained people to plan
changes for us, to follow them up, to suggest alterations.”[105]
In a
similar vein, the assembled economists in 1918 were regaled with the visionary
presidential address of Yale economist Irving Fisher. Fisher looked forward to
an economic “world reconstruction” that would provide glorious opportunities
for economists to satisfy their constructive impulses. A class struggle, Fisher
noted, would surely be continuing over distribution of the nation’s wealth. But
by devising a mechanism of “readjustment,” the nation’s economists could occupy
an enviable role as the independent and impartial arbiters of the class
struggle, these disinterested social scientists making the crucial decisions
for the public good.
In
short, both Mitchell and Fisher were, subtly and perhaps half-consciously,
advancing the case for a postwar world in which their own allegedly impartial
and scientific professions could levitate above the narrow struggles of classes
for the social product, and thus emerge as a commonly accepted, “objective” new
ruling class, a twentieth-century version of the philosopher-kings.
It might not be amiss to see
how these social scientists, prominent in their own fields and spokesmen in
different ways for the New Era of the 1920s, fared in their disquisitions and
guidance for the society and the economy. Irving Fisher, as we have seen, wrote
several works celebrating the alleged success of prohibition, and insisted even
after 1929, that since the price level had been kept stable, there could be no
depression or stock market crash. For his part, Mitchell culminated a decade of
snug alliance with Herbert Hoover by directing, along with Gay and the National
Bureau, a massive and hastily written work on the American economy. Published
in 1929 on the accession of Hoover to the presidency, with all the resources of
scientific and quantitative economics and statistics brought to bear, there is
not so much as a hint in Recent Economic Changes in the
United States that there might be a crash and depression in the
offing.
The Recent Economic Changes study was originated and
organized by Herbert Hoover, and it was Hoover who secured the financing from
the Carnegie Corporation. The object was to celebrate the years of prosperity
presumably produced by Secretary of Commerce Hoover’s corporatist planning and
to find out how the possibly future President Hoover could maintain that
prosperity by absorbing its lessons and making them a permanent part of the
American political structure. The volume duly declared that to maintain the
current prosperity, economists, statisticians, engineers, and enlightened
managers would have to work out “a technique of balance” to be installed in the
economy.
Recent Economic Changes,
that monument to “scientific” and political folly, went through three quick
printings and was widely publicized and warmly received on all sides.[106] Edward Eyre Hunt, Hoover’s
long-time aide in organizing his planning activities, was so enthusiastic that
he continued celebrating the book and its paean to American prosperity
throughout 1929 and 1930.[107]
It is
appropriate to end our section on government and statistics by noting an
unsophisticated yet perceptive cry from the heart. In 1945 the Bureau of Labor
Statistics approached Congress for yet another in a long line of increases in
appropriations for government statistics. In the process of questioning Dr. A.
Ford Hinrichs, head of the BLS, Representative Frank B. Keefe, a conservative
Republican Congressman from Oshkosh, Wisconsin, put an eternal question that
has not yet been fully and satisfactorily answered:
There is no doubt but what it
would be nice to have a whole lot of statistics. I am just wondering whether we
are not embarking on a program that is dangerous when we keep adding and adding
and adding to this thing.
We
have been planning and getting statistics ever since 1932 to try to meet a
situation that was domestic in character, but were never able to even meet that
question. Now we are involved in an international question. It looks to me as
though we spend a tremendous amount of time with graphs and charts and
statistics and planning. What my people are interested in is what is it all
about? Where are we going, and where are you going?[108]
Notes
[1] The
title of this paper is borrowed from the pioneering last chapter of James
Weinstein’s excellent work, The Corporate Ideal in the
Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). The last
chapter is entitled, “War as Fulfillment.”
[2] Robert
Higgs, Crisis And Leviathan (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1987), pp. 123–158. For my own account of the collectivized war economy
of World War I, see Murray N. Rothbard, “War Collectivism in World War I,” in
R. Radosh and M. Rothbard. eds., A New History of Leviathan:
Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State (New York:
Dutton. 1972), pp. 66–110.
[3] F.A.
Hayek, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” in Studies in Philosophy, Politics
and Economics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp.
178ff.
[4] On
the conscription movement, see in particular Michael Pearlman, To Make Democracy Safe for America: Patricians and Preparedness in
the Progressive Era (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1984). See also John W. Chambers II, “Conscripting for Colossus: The Adoption
of the Draft in the United States in World War I,” PhD diss., Columbia
University. 1973; John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of a
Dragon: the Campaign for American Military Preparedness, 1914–1917
(Westport, Conn. Greenwood Press, 1974); and John Gany Clifford, The Citizen Soldiers: The Plattsburg Training Camp Movement (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1972).
[5] On
ministers and the war, see Ray H. Abrams, Preachers Present Arms (New
York: Round Table Press, 1933). On the mobilization of science, see David F.
Noble, America By Design: Science, Technology and the Rise of Corporate
Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), and
Ronald C. Tobey, The American Ideology of National Science,
1919–1930 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1971).
[6] Cited
in Gerald Edward Markowitz, “Progressive Imperialism: Consensus and Conflict in
the Progressive Movement on Foreign Policy, 1898–1917.” PhD diss., University
of Wisconsin, 1971, p. 375, an unfortunately neglected work on a highly
important topic.
[7] Hence
the famous imprecation hurled at the end of the 1884 campaign that brought the
Democrats into the presidency for the first time since the Civil War, that the
Democratic Party was the party of “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.” In that one
phrase, the New York Protestant minister was able to sum up the political
concerns of the pietist movement.
[8] For
an introduction to the growing literature of “ethnoreligious” political history
in the United States, see Paul Kleppner, The Cross of Culture (New
York: the Free Press, 1970); and idem, The Third Electoral System, 1853–1892 (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North
Carolina Press, 1979). For the latest research on the formation of the
Republican Party as a pietist party, reflecting the interconnected triad of
pietist concerns — antislavery, prohibition, and anti-Catholicism — see William
E. Gienapp, “Nativism and the Creation of a Republican Majority in the North
before the Civil War,” Journal of American History 72
(December 1985): 529–559.
[9] German
Lutherans were largely “high” or liturgical and confessional Lutherans who placed
emphasis on the Church and its creed or sacraments rather than on a pietist,
“born-again” emotional conversion experience. Scandinavian-Americans, on the
other hand, were mainly pietist Lutherans.
[10] Orthodox
Augustinian Christianity, as followed by the liturgicals, is “a-millennialist,”
i.e., it believes that the “millennium” is simply a metaphor for the emergence
of the Christian Church and that Jesus will return without human aid and at his
own unspecified time. Modern “fundamentalists,” as they have been called since
the early years of the twentieth century, are “premillennialists,” i.e., they believe
that Jesus will return to usher in a thousand years of the Kingdom of God on
Earth, a time marked by various “tribulations” and by Armageddon, until history
is finally ended. Premillennialists, or “millennarians,” do not have the
statist drive of the postmillennialists; instead, they tend to focus on
predictions and signs of Armageddon and of Jesus’ advent.
[11] James
H. Timberlake, Prohibition and the Progressive Movement,
1900–1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1970), pp. 7–8.
[13] The
Progressive Party convention was a mighty fusion of all the major trends in the
progressive movement: statist economists, technocrats, social engineers, social
workers, professional pietists, and partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. Social
Gospel leaders Lyman Abbon, the Rev. R. Heber Newton and the Rev. Washington
Gladden, were leading Progressive Party delegates. The Progressive Party
proclaimed itself as the “recrudescence of the religious spirit in American
political life.” Theodore Roosevelt’s acceptance speech was significantly
entitled “A Confession of Faith,” and his words were punctuated by “amens” and
by a continual singing of pietist Christian hymns by the assembled delegates.
They sang “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and
especially the revivalist hymn, “Follow, Follow, We Will Follow Jesus,” with
the word “Roosevelt” replacing “Jesus” at every turn. The horrified New York Times summed up the unusual experience by
calling the Progressive grouping “a convention of fanatics.” And it added, “It
was not a convention at all. It was an assemblage of religious enthusiasts. It
was such a convention as Peter the Hermit held. It was a Methodist camp
following done over into political terms.” Cited in John Allen Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port
Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1978), p. 75.
[15] Quoted
in Timberlake, Prohibition, p. 27. Italics in the
article. Or, as the Rev. Stelzle put it, in Why Prohibition!,
“There is no such thing as an absolute individual right to do any particular
thing, or to eat or drink any particular thing, or to enjoy the association of
one’s own family, or even to live, if that thing is in conflict with the law of
public necessity.” Quoted in David E. Kyvig, Repealing National Prohibition (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1979), p. 9.
[18] James
A. Burran, “Prohibition in New Mexico, 1917.” New Mexico Historical Quarterly 48
(April 1973): 140–141. Mrs. Lindsey of course showed no concern whatever for
the German, allied, and neutral countries of Europe being subjected to
starvation by the British naval blockade. The only areas of New Mexico that
resisted the prohibition crusade in the referendum in the November 1917
elections were the heavily Hispanic-Catholic districts.
[21] Quoted
in Alan P. Grimes, The Puritan Ethic and Woman
Suffrage (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 78.
[23] Ida
Clyde Clarke, American Women and the World War (New
York: D. Appleton and Co., 1918), p. 19.
[25] Ibid.,
p. 31. Actually Mrs. Tarbell’s muckraking activities were pretty much confined
to Rockefeller and Standard Oil. She was highly favorable to business leaders
in the Morgan ambit, as witness her laudatory biographies of Judge Elbert H.
Gary, of US Steel (1925) and Owen D. Young of General Electric (1932).
[31] Ibid.,
p. 129. Margaret Dreier Robins and her husband Raymond were virtually a
paradigmatic progressive couple. Raymond was a Florida-born wanderer and
successful gold prospector who underwent a mystical conversion experience in
the Alaska wilds and became a pietist preacher. He moved to Chicago, where he
became a leader in Chicago settlement house work and municipal reform. Margaret
Dreier and her sister Mary were daughters of a wealthy and socially prominent
New York family who worked for and financed the emergent National Women’s Trade
Union League. Margaret married Raymond Robins in 1905 and moved to Chicago,
soon becoming longtime president of the league. In Chicago, the Robinses led
and organized progressive political causes for over two decades, becoming top
leaders of the Progressive Party from 1912 to 1916. During the war, Raymond
Robins engaged in considerable diplomatic activity as head of a Red Cross
mission to Russia. On the Robinses, see Allen F. Davis, Spearhead for Reform: the Social Settlements and the Progressive
Movement, 1890–1914 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
[32] For
more on women’s war work and woman suffrage, see the standard history of the
suffrage movement, Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The
Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York:
Atheneum, 1968), pp. 288–289. Interestingly, The National War Labor Board
(NWLB) frankly adopted the concept of “equal pay for equal work in order to
limit the employment of women workers by imposing higher costs on the employer.
The “only check,” affirmed the NWLB, on excessive employment of women “is to
make it no more profitable to employ women than men.” Quoted in Valerie I.
Conner, “‘The Mothers of the Race’ in World War I: The National War Labor Board
and Women in Industry,” Labor History 21
(Winter 1979–80): 34.
[33] See
Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An
Autobiography (New York: Harper & Bros., 1958), p. 133.
Also see Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Rockefellers: An American
Dynasty (New York: New American Library, 1976), pp. 103–105.
Fosdick was particularly appalled that American patrolmen on street duty
actually smoked cigars! Fosdick, Chronicle, p. 135.
[34] The
American Social Hygiene Association, with its influential journal Social Hygiene, was the major organization in what was
known as the “purity crusade.” The association was launched when the New York
physician Dr. Prince A. Marrow, inspired by the agitation against venereal
disease and in favor of the continence urged by the French syphilographer,
Jean-Alfred Fournier, formed in 1905 the American Society for Sanitary and
Moral Prophylaxis (ASSMP). Soon, the terms proposed by the Chicago branch of
ASSMP, “social hygiene” and “sex hygiene,” became widely used for their medical
and scientific patina, and in 1910 ASSMP changed its name to the American
Federation for Sex Hygiene (AFSH). Finally, in late 1913, AFSH, an organization
of physicians, combined with the National Vigilance Association (formerly the
American Purity Alliance), a group of clergymen and social workers, to form the
all-embracing American Social Hygiene Association (ASHA).
In
this social hygiene movement, the moral and medical went hand in hand. Thus Dr.
Morrow welcomed the new knowledge about venereal disease because it
demonstrated that “punishment for sexual sin” no longer had to be “reserved for
the hereafter.”
The
first president of ASHA was the president of Harvard University, Charles W.
Eliot. In his address to the first meeting, Eliot made clear that total
abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, and even spices was part and parcel of the
anti-prostitution and purity crusade.
On physicians, the purity
crusade, and the formation of ASHA, see Ronald Hamowy, “Medicine and the
Crimination of Sin: ‘Self-Abuse’ in 19th Century America,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies I (Summer 1972):
247–259; James Wunsch, “Prostitution and Public Policy: From Regulation to
Suppression, 1858–1920,” PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1976; and Roland R.
Wagner, “Virtue Against Vice: A Study of Moral Reformers and Prostitution in
the Progressive Era,” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin, 1971. On Morrow, also
see John C. Burnham. “The Progressive Era Revolution in American Attitudes
Toward Sex,” Journal of American History 59
(March 1973) 899, and Paul Boyer, Urban Masses and Moral Order in
America, 1820–1920 (Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1978),
p 201. Also see Burnham, “Medical Specialists and Movements Toward Social
Control in the Progressive Era: Three Examples,” in J. Israel, ed., Building the Organizational Society: Essays in Associational
Activities in Modem America (New York: Free Press, 1972), pp.
24–26.
[35] In
Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort
1917–1919 (Lincoln, Nebr.: University of Nebraska Press, 1966),
p. 222. Also see ibid., pp. 221–224; and C.H. Cramer, Newton D. Baker: A Biography(Cleveland: World
Publishing Co., l96l), pp. 99–102.
[36] Fosdick, Chronicle, pp. 145–147. While prostitution was indeed
banned in Storyville after 1917, Storyville, contrary to legend, never “closed”
— the saloons and dance halls remained open, and contrary to orthodox accounts,
jazz was never really shut down in Storyville or New Orleans, and it was
therefore never forced up river. For a revisionist view of the impact of the
closure of Storyville on the history of jazz, see Tom Bethell, George Lewis: A Jazzman from New Orleans (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1977), pp. 6–7; and Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans (Montgomery, Ala.:
University of Alabama Press, 1974). Also, on later Storyville, see Boyer, Urban Masses, p. 218.
[37] See
Hamowy, “Crimination of Sin,” p. 226 n. The quote from
Clemenceau is in Fosdick, Chronicle, p. 171.
Newton Baker’s loyal biographer declared that Clemenceau, in this response,
showed “his animal proclivities as the ‘Tiger of France.'” Cramer, Newton Baker, p. 101.
[38] Clarke, American Women, pp. 90, 87, 93. In some cases,
organized women took the offensive to help stamp out vice and liquor in their
community. Thus in Texas in 1917 the Texas Women’s Anti-Vice Committee led in
the creation of a “White Zone” around all the military bases. By autumn the
Committee expanded into the Texas Social Hygiene Association to coordinate the
work of eradicating prostitution and saloons. San Antonio proved to be its
biggest problem. Lewis L. Gould, Progressives and
Prohibitionists: Texas Democrats in the Wilson Era(Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1973), p. 227.
[40] Fosdick, Chronicle, p. 144. After the war, Raymond Fosdick went
on to fame and fortune, first as Under Secretary General of the League of
Nations, and then for the rest of his life as a member of the small inner
circle close to John D. Rockefeller, Jr. In that capacity, Fosdick rose to
become head of the Rockefeller Foundation and Rockefeller’s official
biographer. Meanwhile, Fosdick’s brother, Rev. Harry Emerson, became
Rockefeller’s hand-picked parish minister, first at Park Avenue Presbyterian
Church and then at the new interdenominational Riverside Church, built with
Rockefeller funds. Harry Emerson Fosdick was Rockefeller’s principal aide in
battling, within the Protestant Church, in favor of postmillennial, statist,
“liberal” Protestantism and against the rising tide of premillennial
Christianity, known as “fundamentalist” since the years before World War I. See
Collier and Horowitz, The Rockefellers,
pp. 140–142, 151–153.
[41] Davis, Spearheads for Reform, p. 226; Timberlake, Prohibition, p. 66; Boyer, Urban Masses, p. 156.
[42] Eleanor
H. Woods, Robert A. Woods; Champion of Democracy (Boston:
Houghton Mifflin, 1929), p. 316. Also see ibid., pp. 201–202, 250ff., 268ff.
[44] H.L.
Mencken, “Professor Veblen,” in A Mencken Chrestomathy (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1949), p. 267.
[45] Quoted
in the important article by Jean B. Quandt, “Religion and Social Thought: The
Secularization of Postmillennialism,” American Quarterly 25
(October 1973): 404. Also see John Blewett, S.J., “Democracy as Religion: Unity
in Human Relations,” in Blewett, ed., John Dewey: His Thought and
Influence (New York: Fordham University Press, 1960), pp.
33–58; and John Dewey: The Early Works, 1882–1989,
eds., J. Boydstan et al., (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1969–71), vols. 2 and 3.
[46] On
the general secularization of postmillennial pietism after 1900, see Quandt,
“Religion and Social Thought,” pp. 390–409; and James H. Moorhead, “The Erosion
of Postmillennialism in American Religious Thought, 1865–1925,” Church History 53 (March 1984): 61–77.
[47] Carol
S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of
the Higher Learning in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1975), p. 92.
[48] Quoted
in Gruber, Mars and Minerva, pp. 92–93. Also
see William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in J.
Braeman, R. Bremner, and E. Walters, eds., Change and Continuity in
Twentieth-Century America (New York: Harper & Row, l966),
p. 89. For similar reasons, Thorstein Veblen, prophet of the alleged dichotomy
of production for profit vs. production for use, championed the war and began
to come out openly for socialism in an article in the New Republic in 1918, later reprinted in his The Vested Interests and the State of the Industrial Arts (1919).
See Charles Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism and World War I,” Mid-America 45 (July 1963), p. 150. Also see David
Riesman, Thorstein Veblen: A Critical Interpretation (New
York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1960), pp. 30–31.
[51] Hirschfeld,
“Nationalist Progressivism,” p. 142. It is intriguing that for the New Republic intellectuals, actually existent
private individuals are dismissed as “mechanical,” whereas nonexistent entities
such as “national and social” forces are hailed as being “organic.”
[52] Quoted
in Hirschfeld, “Nationalist Progressivism,” p. 147. A minority of pro-war
Socialists broke off from the antiwar Socialist Party to form the Social
Democratic League, and to join a pro-war front organized and financed by the
Wilson administration, the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy. The
pro-war socialists welcomed the war as providing “startling progress in
collectivism,” and opined that after the war, the existent state socialism
would be advanced toward “democratic collectivism.” The pro-war socialists
included John Spargo, Algie Simons, W.J. Ghent, Robert R. LaMonte, Charles
Edward Russell, J.G. Phelps Stokes, Upton Sinclair, and William English
Walling. Walling so succumbed to war fever that he denounced the Socialist
Party as a conscious tool of the Kaiser and advocated the suppression of
freedom of speech for pacifists and for antiwar socialists. See Hirschfeld,
“Nationalist Progressivism,” p. 143. On Walling, see James Gilbert, Designing the Industrial State: The Intellectual Pursuit of
Collectivism in America, 1880–1940 (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1972), pp. 232–233. On the American Alliance for Labor and Democracy and its
role in the war effort, see Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United
States Foreign Policy (New York: Random House, l969), pp.
58–71.
[53] In
fact, Jacob Lippmann was to contract cancer in 1925 and die two years later.
Moreover, Lippmann, before and after Jacob’s death, was supremely indifferent
to his father. Ronald Steel, Walter Lippman and the American
Century (New York: Random House, l981), p. 5, pp. 116–117. On
Walter Lippmann’s enthusiasm for conscription, at least for others, see
Beaver, Newton Baker, pp. 26–27.
[54] Hirschfeld,
“Nationalist Progressivism,” pp. 148–150. On the New Republic and the war, and particularly on John
Dewey, also see Christopher Lasch, The New Radicalism in America,
1889–1963: The Intellectual as a Social Type (New York: Vintage
Books, 1965), pp. 181–224, especially pp. 202–204. On the three New Republic editors, see Charles Forcey, The Crossroads of Liberalism: Croly, Weyl, Lippmann and the
Progressive Era, 1900–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1961). Also see David W. Noble, “The New Republic and
the Idea of Progress, 1914–1920,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review, 38 (December 1951): 387–402. In a book titled The End of the War(1918), New Republic editor Walter Weyl assured his
readers that “the new economic solidarity once gained, can never again be
surrendered.” Cited in Leuchtenburg. “New Deal,” p. 90.
[55] Rexford
Guy Tugwell, “America’s War-Time Socialism” The Nation (1927),
pp. 364–365. Quoted in Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal,” pp. 90–91.
[56] In
January 1927, Croly wrote a New Republic editorial,
“An Apology for Fascism,” endorsing an accompanying article, “Fascism for the
Italians,” written by the distinguished philosopher Horace M. Kallen, a
disciple of John Dewey and an exponent of progressive pragmatism. Kallen
praised Mussolini for his pragmatic approach, and in particular for the élan vital that Mussolini had infused into Italian
life. True, Professor Kallen conceded, fascism is coercive, but surely this is
only a temporary expedient. Noting fascism’s excellent achievement in
economics, education, and administrative reform, Kallen added that “in this
respect the Fascist revolution is not unlike the Communist revolution. Each is
the application by force …of an ideology to a condition. Each should have the
freest opportunity once it has made a start….” The accompanying New Republic editorial endorsed Kallen’s thesis
and added that “alien critics should beware of outlawing a political experiment
which aroused in a whole nation an increased moral energy and dignified its
activities by subordinating them to a deeply felt common purpose.” New Republic 49 (January 12, 1927), pp. 207–213.
Cited in John Patrick Diggins, “Mussolini’s Italy: The View from America,” PhD
diss., University of Southern California, 1964, pp. 214–217.
[57] Born
in Ireland, David Croly became a distinguished journalist in New York City and
rose to the editorship of the New York World.
Croly organized the first Positivist Circle in the United States and financed
an American speaking tour for the Comtian Henry Edgar. The Positivist Circle
met at Croly’s home, and in 1871 David Croly published A Positivist Primer. When Herbert was born in 1869, he
was consecrated by his father to the Goddess Humanity, the symbol of Comte’s
Religion of Humanity. See the illuminating recent biography of Herbert by David
W. Levy, Herbert Croly of the New Republic (Princeton:
Princeton University Press; 1985).
[58] See
Jerry Israel, Progressivism and the Open Door: America and
China, 1905–1921 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
1971).
[59] For
a refreshingly acidulous portrayal of the actions of the historians in World
War I, see C. Hartley Grattan, “The Historians Cut Loose,” American Mercury, August 1927, reprinted in Haw Elmer
Barnes, In Quest of Truth and Justice, 2nd ed. (Colorado
Springs: Ralph Myles Publisher, 1972), pp. 142–164. A more extended account is
George T. Blakey, Historians on the Homefront: American
Propagandists for the Great War (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 1970). Gruber, Mars and Minerva,
deals with academia and social scientism, but concentrates an historians. James
R. Mock and Cedric Larson, Words that Won the War (Princeton
University Press, 1939), presents the story of the “Creel Committee,” the
Committee on Public Information, the official propaganda ministry during the
war.
[60] See
the useful biography of Ely, Benjamin G. Rader, The
Academic Mind and Reform: The Influence of Richard T. Ely in American Life (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1966).
[61] Sidney
Fine, Laissez Faire and the General-Welfare State: A Study of Conflict
in American Thought 1865–1901(Ann Arbor: Univenity of Michigan
Press, 1956), pp.239–240.
[63] John
Rogers Commons was of old Yankee stock, descendant of John Rogers, Puritan
martyr in England, and born in the Yankee area of the Western Reserve in Ohio
and reared in Indiana. His Vermont mother was a graduate of the hotbed of
pietism, Oberlin College, and she sent John to Oberlin in the hopes that he
would become a minister. While in college, Commons and his mother launched a
prohibitionist publication at the request of the Anti-Saloon League. After
graduation, Commons went to Johns Hopkins to study under Ely, but flunked out
of graduate school. See John R. Commons, Myself (Madison,
Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964). Also see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New
York: Viking, 1949), vol. 3. 276–277; Mary O. Furner, Advocacy and Objectivity: A Crisis in the Professionalization of
American Social Science, 1865–1905 (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1975), pp. 198–204.
[64] Quandt,
“Religion and Social Thought,” pp. 402–403. Ely did not expect the millennial
Kingdom to be far off. He believed that it was the task of the universities and
of the social sciences “to teach the complexities of the Christian duty of
brotherhood in order to arrive at the New Jerusalem “which we are all eagerly
awaiting.” The church’s mission was to attack every evil institution, “until
the earth becomes a new earth, and all its cities, cities of God.”
[66] See
Rader, Academic Mind, pp. 181–191. On top big business
affiliations of National Security League leaders, especially J.P. Morgan and
others in the Morgan ambit, see C. Hartley Grattan, Why We Fought (New York Vanguard Press, 1929) pp.
117–118, and Robert D. Ward, “The Origin and Activities of the National
Security League, 1914–1919,” Mississippi Valley Historical
Review, 47 (June 1960): 51–65.
[67] The
Chamber of Commerce of the United States spelled out the long-run economic
benefit of conscription, that for America’s youth it would “substitute a period
of helpful discipline for a period of demoralizing freedom from restraint.”
John Patrick Finnegan, Against the Specter of Dragon: The Campaign for American
Military Preparedness, 1914–1917 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974), p.
110. On the broad and enthusiastic support given to the draft by the Chamber of
Commerce, see Chase C. Mooney and Martha E. Layman, “Some Phases of the
Compulsory Military Training Movement, 1914–1920,” Mississippi Historical Review 38 (March 1952):
640.
[68] Richard
T. Ely, Hard Times: The Way in and the Way Out (1931),
cited in Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American
Civilization (New Yark: Viking, 1949). vol. 5, p. 671; and in
Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal,” p. 94.
[69] Ely
drew up a super-patriotic pledge for the Madison chapter of the Loyalty Legion,
pledging its members to “stamp out disloyalty.” The pledge also expressed
unqualified support for the Espionage Act and vowed to “work against La
Follettism in all its anti-war forms.” Rader, Academic Mind, pp.
183ff.
[72] Ibid.,
pp. 209–210. In his autobiography, written in 1938, Richard Ely rewrote history
to cover up his ignominious role in the get–La Follette campaign. He
acknowledged signing the faculty petition, but then had the temerity to claim
that he “was not one of the ring-leaders, as La Follette thought, in
circulating this petition….” There is no mention of his secret research
campaign against La Follette.
[73] For
more an the anti-La Follette campaign, see H.C. Peterson and Gilbert C.
Fite, Opponents of War: 1917–1918 (Madison: University
of Wisconsin Press, 1957), pp. 68–72; Paul L. Murphy, World War I and the
Origin of Civil Liberties in the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 1979),
p. 120; and Belle Case La Follette and Fola La Follette, Robert M. LaFollette (New York: Macmillan, 1953),
volume 2.
[74] Thus,
T.W. Hutchison, from a very different perspective, notes the contrast between
Carl Menger’s stress on the beneficent, unplanned phenomena of society, such as
the free market, and the growth of “social self-consciousness” and government
planning. Hutchison recognizes that a crucial component of that social
self-consciousness is government statistics. T.W. Hutchison, A Review of Economic Doctrines, 1870–1929 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1953), pp. 150–151, 427.
[76] Solomon
Fabricant, The Trend of Government Activity in the United
States since 1900 (New York: National Bureau of Economic
Research, 1952), p. 143. Similarly, an authoritative work on the growth of
government in England puts it this way: “The accumulation of factual
information about social conditions and the development of economics and the
social sciences increased the pressure for government intervention…. As
statistics improved and students of social conditions multiplied, the continued
existence of such conditions was kept before the public. Increasing knowledge
of them aroused influential circles and furnished working class movements with
factual weapons.” Moses Abramovitz and Vera F. Eliasberg, The Growth of Public Employment in Great Britain (Princeton:
National Bureau of Economic Research, 1957), pp. 22–23, 30. Also see M.I.
Cullen, The Statistical Movement in Early Victorian Britain: The
Foundations of Empirical Social Research (New York: Barnes
& Noble, 1975).
[77] See
Joseph Dorfman, “The Role of the German Historical School in American Economic
Thought.” American Economic Review, Papers and
Proceedings 45 (May 1955), p. 18. George Hildebrand remarked on
the inductive emphasis of the German Historical School that “perhaps there is,
then, some connection between this kind of teaching and the popularity of crude
ideas of physical planning in more recent times.” George H. Hildebrand,
“International Flow of Economic Ideas-Discussion,” ibid., p. 37.
[78] Dorfman,
“Role,” p. 23. On Wright and Adams, see Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization (New
York: Viking Press, 1949), vol. 3, 164–174, 123; and Boyer, Urban Masses, p. 163. Furthermore, the first professor
of statistics in the United States, Roland P. Falkner, was a devoted student of
Engel’s and a translator of the works of Engel’s assistant, August Meitzen.
[79] Irving
Norton Fisher, My Father Irving Fisher (New
York: Comet Press, 1956), pp. 146–147. Also for Fisher, see Irving Fisher, Stabilised Money (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1935), p. 383.
[80] Fisher, My Father, pp. 264–267. On Fisher’s role and influence
during this period, see Murray N. Rothbard, America’s Great Depression,
4th ed. (New York: Richardson & Snyder, 1983). Also see Joseph S.
Davis, The World Between the Wars, 1919–39, An Economist’s View (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), p. 194; and Melchior Palyi, The Twilight of Gold, 1914–1936: Myth and Realities (Chicago:
Henry Regnery, 1972), pp. 240, 249.
[81] Wesley
C. Mitchell was of old Yankee pietist stock. His grandparents were farmers in
Maine and then in Western New York. His father followed the path of many
Yankees in migrating to a farm in northern Illinois. Mitchell attended the
University of Chicago, where he was strongly influenced by Veblen and John
Dewey. Dorfman, Economic Mind, vol. 3, 456.
[83] Emphasis
added. Lucy Sprague Mitchell, Two Lives (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1953), p. 363. For more on this entire topic, see
Murray N. Rothbard, “The Politics of Political Economists: Comment,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 74 (November 1960):
659–665.
[84] See
in particular James Weinstein, The Corporate Ideal in the
Liberal State, 1900–1918 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968); and
Samuel P. Hays, “The Politics of Reform in Municipal Government in the
Progressive Era,” Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59
(October 1961), pp. 157–169.
[85] David
Eakins, “The Origins of Corporate Liberal Policy Research, 1916–1922: The
Political-Economic Expert and the Decline of Public Debate,” in Israel,
ed., Building the Organizational Society, p. 161.
[86] Herbert
Heaton, Edwin F. Gay, A Scholar in Action (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1952). Edwin Gay was born in Detroit of old New
England stock. His father had been born in Boston and went into his
father-in-law’s lumber business in Michigan. Gay’s mother was the daughter of a
wealthy preacher and lumberman. Gay entered the University of Michigan, was
heavily influenced by the teaching of John Dewey, and then stayed in graduate
school in Germany for over a dozen years, finally obtaining his PhD in economic
history at the University of Berlin. The major German influences on Gay were
Gustav Schmoller, head of the Historical School, who emphasized that economics
must be an “inductive science,” and Adolf Wagner, also at the University of
Berlin, who favored large-scale government intervention in the economy in
behalf of Christian ethics. Back at Harvard, Gay was the major single force, in
collaboration with the Boston Chamber of Commerce, in pushing through a factory
inspection act in Massachusetts, and in early 1911 Gay became president of the
Massachusetts branch of the American Association for Labor Legislation, an
organization founded by Richard T. Ely and dedicated to agitating for
government intervention in the area of labor unions, minimum wage rates,
unemployment, public works, and welfare.
[87] On
the pulling and hauling among Rockefeller advisers on The Institute of Economic
Research, see David M. Grossman, “American Foundations and the Support of
Economic Research, 1913–29,” Minerva 22
(Spring–Summer 1982): 62–72.
[88] See
Eakins, “Origins,” pp. 166–167; Grossman, “American Foundations,” pp. 76–78;
Heaton, Edwin F. Gay. On Stone, see Dorfman, Economic Mind, vol.
4, 42, 60–61; and Samuel Haber, Efficiency and Uplift:
Scientific Management in the Progressive Era 1890–1920 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1964), pp. 152, 165. During his Marxist period,
Stone had translated Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy.
[89] See
Guy Alchon, The Invisible Hand of Planning: Capitalism,
Social Science, and the State in the 1920’s(Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985), pp. 54ff.
[92] Stephen
Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion
of the National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 187–188.
[93] Vice-chairman
of the IGR was retired St. Louis merchant and lumberman and former president of
Washington University of St. Louis, Robert S. Brookings. Secretary of the IGR
was James F. Curtis, formerly Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Taft
and now secretary and deputy governor of the New York Federal Reserve Bank.
Others on the board of the IGR were ex-President Taft; railroad executive
Frederick A. Delano, uncle of Franklin D. Roosevelt and member of the Federal
Reserve Board; Arthur T. Hadley, economist and president of Yale; Charles C.
Van Hise, progressive president of the University of Wisconsin, and ally of
Ely; reformer and influential young Harvard Law professor, Felix Frankfurter;
Theodore N. Vail, chairman of AT&T; progressive engineer and businessman,
Herbert C. Hoover; and financier R. Fulton Cutting, an officer of the New York
Bureau of Municipal Research. Eakins, “Origins,” pp. 168–169.
[94] On
the Commercial Economy Board, see Grosvenor B. Clarkson, Industrial America in the World War: The Strategy Behind the Line,
1917–1918 (Boston: Houghton Mifilin, 1923), pp. 211ff.
[95] Alchon, Invisible Hand, p. 29. Mitchell headed the price
statistics section of the Price-Fixing Committee of the War Industries Board.
[98] See
Heaton, Edwin Gay, pp. 129ff; and the excellent book on the
Inquiry, Lawrence E. Gelfand, The Inquiry: American
Preparations for Peace, 1917–1919 (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1963), pp. 166–168, 177–178.
[100] In
1939 the Bureau of the Budget would be transferred to the Executive Office,
thus completing the IGR objective.
[101] Moulton
was a professor of economics at the University of Chicago, and vice-president
of the Chicago Association of Commerce. See Eakins, “Origins,” pp. 172–177;
Dorfman, Economic Mind, vol. 4, 11, 195–197.
[102] Gay
had been recommended to the group by one of its founders, Thomas W. Lamont. It
was Gay’s suggestion that the CFR begin its major project by establishing an
“authoritative” journal, Foreign Affairs. And
it was Gay who selected his Harvard historian colleague Archibald Cary Coolidge
as the first editor and the New York Post reporter
Hamilton Fish Armstrong as assistant editor and executive director of the CFR.
See Lawrence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust: The
Council on Foreign Relations and United States Foreign Policy (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 1977), pp. 16–19, 105, 110.
[103] Ellis
W. Hawley, “Herbert Hoover and Economic Stabilization, 1921–22,” in E. Hawley,
ed., Herbert Hoover as Secretary of Commerce: Studies in New Era
Thought and Practice (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press,
1981), p. 52.
[104] Hawley,
“Herbert Hoover,” p. 53. Also see ibid., pp. 42–54. On the continuing
collaboration between Hoover, Gay, and Mitchell throughout the 1920s see
Alchon, Invisible Hand.
[106] One
exception was the critical review in the Commercial and Financial
Chronicle (May 18, 1929), which derided the impression given
the reader that the capacity of the United States “for continued prosperity is
well-nigh unlimited.” Quoted in Davis, World Between the Wars,
p. 144. Also on Recent Economic Changes and
economists’ opinions at the time, see ibid., pp. 136–151, 400–417; David W. Eakins,
“The Development of Corporate Liberal Policy Research in the United States,
1885–1965,” PhD diss., doctoral dissertation University of Wisconsin, 1966, pp.
166–169, 205; and Edward Angly, comp., Oh Yeah? (New
York: Viking Press, 1931).
[107] In
1930, Hunt published a book-length, popularizing summary, An Audit of America. On Recent
Economic Changes, also see Alchon, Invisible Hand, pp.
129–133, 135–142, 145–151, 213.
[108] Department of Labor — FSA Appropriation Bill for 1945.
Hearings Before the Subcommittee on Appropriations. 78th Congress, 2nd Session,
Part I (Washington, 1945), pp. 258f., 276f. Quoted in Rothbard, “Politics of
Political Economists,” p. 665. On the growth of economists and statisticians in
government, especially during wartime, see also Herbert Stein, “The Washington
Economics Industry,” American Economic Association
Papers and Proceedings 76 (May 1986), pp. 2–3.
Murray N. Rothbard (1926–1995) was dean
of the Austrian School, founder of modern libertarianism, and academic vice
president of the Mises
Institute. He was also editor – with Lew Rockwell – of The Rothbard-Rockwell Report, and appointed
Lew as his literary executor. See his books.