The Intellectual Legacy of Progressive Economics: a Review Essay of Thomas C

Journal of Economic Literature 2017, 55(3), 1064–1083 https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20171436

The Intellectual Legacy of Progressive Economics: A Review Essay of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers†

Marshall I. Steinbaum and Bernard A. Weisberger*

Thomas Leonard’s 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and economists. This review essay reconsiders that legacy and places it in the context within which it developed. While the early generations of scholars who founded the economics profession in the United States and trained in its departments did indeed hold and express retrograde views on those subjects, those views were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the progressives’ staunchest opponents inside and outside academia. Moreover, Leonard anachronistically intermingles a contemporary critique of early-twentieth-century progressive economics and the progressive movement writ large, serving to decontextualize those disputes—a flaw that is amplified by the book’s unsystematic approach to reconstructing the views and writing it attacks. Notwithstanding the history Leonard presents, economists working now nonetheless owe their progressive forebears for contributions that have become newly relevant: the “credibility revolution,” the influence of economic research on policy and program design, the prestige of economists working in and providing advice to government agencies and policy makers, and the academic freedom economists enjoy in modern research-oriented universities are all a part of that legacy. (JEL A11, B15, D82, J15, N31, N32)

1. Introduction Economics in the Progressive Era offers a revisionist history of the ideology and public homas C. Leonard’s book Illiberal advocacy of the pioneering economists who TReformers: Race, Eugenics, and Ameri can founded the American Economic Association in 1885 and, toting their scholarly wisdom, strode confidently onto the national stage to * Steinbaum: Roosevelt Institute. Weisberger: Evanston, IL. We thank Steven Durlauf, Walter Nugent, Mary Fur- spread the new gospel of the social sciences ner, Susan Carter, Richard Sutch, Jenny Bourne, Auroni during the following decades, right up to the Gupta, and Joshua Mound for their helpful comments and present. The relevance of the history Leonard references. † Go to https://doi.org/10.1257/jel.20171436 to visit the recounts is renewed in the contemporary article page and view author disclosure statement(s). intellectual climate for several reasons: the

1064 Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1065 high prestige of economics as a field when quotes and out-of-context examples, with- it comes to adjudicating contemporary aca- out much of a hearing for either their oppo- demic and policy debates; the return of the nents or for debate and disagreement among very same economic issues in the present themselves. The result is a powerful brief that once motivated that founding generation arguing that the intellectual movement of to put the new tools of their science to work that era has a decidedly problematic leg- in the public sphere; and controversies over acy on eugenics, racism, gender equality, whether the presumed nonjudgmental objec- immigration, and in countless other ways tivity of “genuine” science has had a negative that would give pause to anyone looking effect on the search for truth by excluding the to elevate their legacy. But all, or at least perspectives of the historically marginalized. much, of that history was known—revealed But the book’s revisionism goes too far, decades ago.1 Progressive-friendly historians well into the realm of anachronism. Leonard have known for a long time that almost all projects a contemporary ideological critique their heroes turned a blind eye toward the of progressive economics back onto the cir- racism that flourished in their own heyday. cumstances of its birth. Instead of present- For African Americans, that era was what ing the intellectual history as it happened, historian Rayford Logan (1954) called the Leonard conjures a legacy for progressive “nadir” of the post-emancipation years. The economics dating back to Plato and subse- era’s racial backsliding was, in part, the result quently to mercantilism, a set of positive and of less-than-honorable political dealings by normative beliefs about the economy that white progressives and populists that left were supposedly swept away by Adam Smith black Americans in the lurch. Between 1890 in inventing the modern field of economics and 1910, lynchings were at an all-time high, and propounded by classical and then neo- while disenfranchisement, peonage, and seg- classical economists since. In that schema, regation were increasingly enforced against a the progressives and the “institutionalist” powerless people both by law and terror. school they engendered within the econom- Historical writings on the Progressive ics profession appear as vestiges of a false movement have changed focus over the creed whose temporary influence between years. In the immediate aftermath of 1885 and the widespread revival of a neoclas- World War II, the sunshine period of sical framework for economics and policy in New Deal liberalism’s endorsement at the the second half of the twentieth century con- polls, books like Charles Madison’s Critics stituted an intellectual retrogression. And and Crusaders (1948) and Louis Filler’s the continued influence ofprogressive-era Crusaders for American Liberalism (1961) research questions and policy solutions, celebrated the heroic victories of the such as the minimum wage, appears as yet “crusaders”—whom the authors of that another flirtation with heresy, one that must history saw as their own intellectual be challenged by showing that its promoters forebears. But powerful revisionist works back then had dark and self-interested challenging the claims of objectivity in his- motives. Hence the necessity for the author’s tory as a social science have since shown intervention. that like-minded scholars and their prede- Motivated history is not good history. And cessors were reluctant to confront original the approach the book takes is particularly scholarship and critiques by the likes of unlikely to yield fruitful insight: sweeping statements about what “the progressives” believed, festooned with cherry-picked 1 For example, Furner (1975). 1066 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017)

W. E. B. DuBois in The Philadelphia Negro 2. The Intellectual and Political (1967 1899 ) and Black Reconstruction Background of Progressive Economics [ ] (1935). Those scholars labeled DuBois’s scholarship about the black community as Progressive economics grew out of a very inadmissible advocacy precisely because he particular moment in American history. On was black and therefore “biased.” And in the the one hand, the Union had won the Civil 1960s, a new generation of “New Left” histo- War largely on the ideology of “free labor”— rians cast further aspersions on the progres- that a man born to toil could, through hard sive legacy, on the grounds that they were work, skill, and thrift, rise to become a in effect in cahoots with the business estab- property owner and the employer of others. lishment to hold back the threat of socialist It was the threat slavery (particularly its west- revolution. ward expansion) posed to the continuation of Leonard goes further than any of these, that system by blocking out opportunity for arguing that problematic associations dis- whites, not abolitionism itself, that spurred credit the entirety of the legacy of progressiv- the Union to go to war to prevent its own ism and progressive economists, rendering dismemberment by secession. As the war all of their ideas suspect and all their scholar- went on and the Confederacy proved totally ship tainted by leftist-but-“illiberal” ideology. intransigent in the face of a moderate free- In that ambitious project, he fails. labor policy that left slavery in place where it This essay begins in section 2 by placing had long existed, the Union army operating the emergence of progressive economics in in the South came face to face with both the the proper context. Section 3 reconsiders horrors of slavery and the enthusiasm of the the theory of the labor market that Leonard enslaved population at the army’s arrival as ascribes to progressive economists—the agents of emancipation. Increasingly, black heart of his argument that their retrograde soldiers served in that army, and abolition- views taint their scholarship—and it con- ism and the inclusion of freed slaves in the trasts that false picture with what they community of free labor came to charac- actually espoused. Section 4 considers terize the war’s ideology in the North. The the role those economists played in pol- premise of Radical Reconstruction, starting icy making and in nascent government in 1866 and then extending into the Grant bureaucracies starting in the late nineteenth administration, was that the federal govern- century, a particular source of controversy ment had a duty to protect the free labor for Leonard. Section 5 then turns to the of former slaves from Southern attempts to views of economists outside the progressive yank it back in practice, even after slavery movement and others in the intellectual was legally abolished. elite, which read as similarly exclusionary to The free-labor coalition in the North a contemporary sensibility as those voiced fractured over the economic issues that by the progressives, albeit with a different increasingly dominated national politics, ideological flavor. That is in contrast with especially after the Panic of 1873 and the the generally enlightened picture Leonard long depression that ensued. An element of paints of those opponents. Section 6 then the Republican Party had already become asks what contemporary economists working disenchanted with the Grant administra- in academia and in economic policy-making tion’s slow pace of abandoning populist eco- agencies owe to the generation that founded nomic policies—namely the income tax and their profession in the United States. departure from the gold standard—adopted Section 7 concludes. during the crisis of the war. Those so-called Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1067

“Liberal Republicans” also resented the and moral edification, in the form of human empowerment of urban political machines uplift, and for the wealthy benefactors of the in many states and scandal-ridden patron- new foundations, they offered a way to gain age politics on the federal level—for which both prestige and societal relevance right they held Grant responsible. When the crisis off the bat. The American Social Science hit and unemployment spiked, the Liberal Association (ASSA), founded in 1865, aimed Republicans—led outside formal politics by to do just that. It incorporated researchers, E. L. Godkin, the influential editor of The journalists, and both political and bureau- Nation (then a classically liberal periodical)— cratic office-holders, with the aim of for- opposed any measure to relieve the suffering mulating what might now be termed “best of the unemployed. They argued that unem- practices” in a number of different depart- ployment benefits inculcated unwillingness ments: law and jurisprudence, finance, edu- to work and impaired the proper functioning cation, health, and “social economy.” The of the labor market. Liberal Republicans also ASSA adopted a disinterested, pragmatic, increasingly came to view the Reconstruction reformist point of view, until the political project as a failed effort to overturn the natu- and ideological questions roiling the country ral hierarchy of races, an effort that was only in the 1870s and 1880s made their presence serving to impede the economic recovery of felt inside the organization as economic dis- the South by unwise interference in its labor locations intensified. market. That was conveniently synchronous This introduction of the natural science with the political aims of the “Redeemer” of evolutionary biology into the nascent faction in Southern politics that sought to social sciences by the appearance of “social put an end to federal protection for former Darwinism” catalyzed ideological cleav- slaves. ages among these high-minded purveyors There was a concurrent evolution among of truth. Darwin’s theory of random vari- the nation’s intellectual elite: away from reli- ation and natural selection was meant to gion, abolitionism, and the leadership of the apply to the world of nature. No special clergy, and toward the new “social sciences,” moral purpose was involved in its opera- which in many cases took as their start- tion. But Herbert Spencer in Great Britain ing point the crisis of faith engendered by and William Graham Sumner, a professor the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the of sociology at Yale and a leading member Origin of Species. More generally, the wan- of the ASSA, furnished a teleological com- ing of traditional lines of authority through ponent—natural selection implied “survival urbanization and industrialization impover- of the fittest.” “Fittest” for what was not ished many who had social status as small always clear, but it appeared that the elite farmers and brought in whole new popula- of the 1880s—nationally, racially, and indi- tions of economic migrants from abroad. That vidually—deserved to be where they were crisis coincided with the institutionalization because in the competition to survive, nature of professional research, first in German uni- had endowed them with the sharpest teeth versities, then in England and the United and claws and cunning. States, as higher education once devoted to That was what allowed Sumner to say “com- educating the children of the elite as under- petition … is the law of nature … she grants graduates, primarily in a religious tradition, her rewards to the fittest … without regard moved instead to take on the societal pro- to other considerations of any kind.” If we duction of knowledge. The social sciences tried to amend it, he continued, the only way were well situated: they offered both truth would be to “take the rewards from those who 1068 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) have done better and give them to those who the power of mind to interfere with the have done worse. We shall favor the survival so-called laws of nature through social inno- of the unfittest and we shall accomplish this vation and material invention, humans could by destroying liberty.” There might possibly push ahead toward a plateau of existence be room for private charity, but help from the with a better life for all of society’s members. government was virtually criminal. There was The job of experts trained in social sciences, no defense for “legislation which forces one uncommitted to and unconstrained by politi- man to aid another.” “The man who has done cal affiliations orself-interest, was to find the nothing to raise himself above poverty” too effective and “correct” methods for giving readily found that “social doctors flock around progress a burst of acceleration. him bringing the capital which they have col- Leonard calls Ward “the intellectual lected from the (other class), and promising spearhead of the progressive assault on him the aid of the State to give him what the laissez-faire.” This description is correct other had to work for” (Sumner 1914, p. 25). in one respect: he definitely saw himself as As popularly understood, social taking part in, if not leading, a progressive Darwinism’s interpretation of evolution is counter-attack. “The commercial and finan- justly reproached for defending the harsh cial journals are filled with hostile flings at conditions imposed on the poor by inequal- ‘Government meddling’ and ‘bureaucracy’” ity and social domination, but it could cut in he wrote, and then listed an array of govern- two directions. A man less familiar to general ment actions by France, Germany, Britain, readers, Frank Lester Ward, took on the con- and the United States helpful to economic servative social Darwinists head to head in his growth. Dynamic Sociology announced that 1883 work, Dynamic Sociology. He declared “It is fashionable to declaim against the that when a “well clothed philosopher on a so-called ‘bureaucracy’ of modern times but bitter winter’s night sits in a warm room well this is only a part of the attempt of sagacious lighted for his purpose and writes on paper capitalists to manufacture public sentiment with pen and ink in the arbitrary characters to counteract the steady current of rational of a highly-developed language the statement conviction toward the conclusion that society that civilization is the result of natural laws must arouse to its own interests and take the and that man’s duty is to let nature alone . . . welfare of its members more directly into its [to] work out a higher civilization he simply own hands.” ignores every circumstance of his existence. . . Where Leonard’s characterization of Ward If men had acted upon his theory there goes wrong, however, is that he was not the would be no civilization and our philosopher “intellectual spearhead” of the progressive would have remained a troglodyte” (quoted assault on laissez-faire, or at least not the only in Commager 1967). one. In the 1880s, the ideological conflict But Ward, a polymath in such sciences as migrated from the organs of elite, though paleobotany, paleontology, and geology, and formally inexpert, opinion to the ivory tower, for many years a bureaucrat working for fed- a distinction that Leonard elides in his eral scientific agencies, was a believer in evo- sweeping characterization of progressive lution in his own way, a “reform Darwinist.” economics. And the academic success of the (Leonard prefers the awkward term “pro- interventionist, progressive counterattack, gressive social Darwinist.”) The difference insofar as it was successful, came through was that for Ward, man was not a mindless the deployment of the weapons of academic plant or animal, waiting for centuries to conflict: empirical evidence, the nascent con- reach a new stage of development. By using cept of peer review, the formal mechanisms Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1069 by which individuals are deemed experts or unable to find university employment. The excluded from expertise, and the formation result of that moderating tendency, in turn, of professional organizations. was the abdication of intellectual leadership The American Economic Association of the progressive movement, as it came to (AEA) was founded in 1885 with a platform be, to outside opinion leaders, including that explicitly rejected laissez-faire, by a journalists and politicians, with academics group of German-trained scholars, including on the sidelines offering expert advice. In Richard Ely, Edwin Seligman, and Henry return, they gained the employment pro- Carter Adams, all of whom attacked both the tections we have come to associate with aca- highly theoretical methodology and the for- demic freedom. That is the origin story of mal admonitions to nonintervention taken by the group of economists at whom Leonard’s the established expositors of political econ- book takes aim. omy and the orthodox elements of the ASSA. During the AEA’s first year of existence, the 3. The Theory and Empirics of the Labor Knights of Labor ballooned to 800,000 mem- Market bers. Then, in May of 1886, the Haymarket Riot unleashed one of the country’s periodic The linchpin of Leonard’s argument that Red Scares: the fear that radical immigrants the exclusionary, retrograde views espoused were poised to overthrow the status quo. by progressive economists discredit not only The labor movement of those years was their own scholarship, but also that of their not anticapitalist, and indeed the influence intellectual descendants, is the idea that of the free-labor tradition on the ideology of their theory of the labor market incorporated the Knights was evident: they claimed that those racist views into scholarly practice. It’s in order to attain the property ownership important to understand that background that had been the eventual reward to every for the book’s characterization of contempo- laborer before industrialization, in the new raneous disputes over how the labor market economy it was necessary for workers to works and what, if anything, could profitably organize to win it. But labor organizations be done to improve earnings and working were still seen as a threat, and in the after- conditions for the industrial and agricultural math of Haymarket, several of the AEA’s poor. Leonard’s aim isn’t a factual recon- leading members found themselves under struction of the debate, but rather, to use a assault by university administrators and caricature of it as a tentpole to get his more boards over the danger perceived in their ambitious argument off the ground. teaching and scholarship. At the same time, For example, Leonard characterizes the others of the younger generation, includ- progressive case for the minimum wage as ing Arthur Hadley and Frank Taussig, who follows: “A legal minimum wage, applied shared the same German training but not to immigrants and those already working in the anti-laissez-faire ideology, moved to join America, ensured that only the productive forces in a bid to elevate professionalism workers were employed. The economi- above ideological conflict. The result was a cally unproductive, those whose labor was narrowing of the range of opinion within the worth less than the legal minimum, would organization and the economics profession be denied entry, or, if already employed, generally: the old guard came to accept the would be idled. For economic reformers empirical critiques of the new generation, who regarded inferior workers as a threat, while the most radical members of that gen- the minimum wage provided an invaluable eration either moderated their views or were service” (Leonard, p. 140). Similarly, earlier 1070 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) in the book he characterizes the progressive scheme of social, political, and biological theory of the labor market as follows: “the hierarchy. The question of labor’s value has progressives ultimately turned the living been entangled with these hierarchies ever standard theory of wages into the theoretical since … The Greek model had extraordi- construct they called ‘race suicide’ ” (p. 86). nary staying power in Europe. Two thousand As we will see, these characterizations of the years later, an aristocracy still monopolized progressives’ theory of the labor market slot land ownership, ruled the polity and the them into an elaborate intellectual-historical economy, and claimed supernatural bases for construction—one almost entirely conjured its privilege … Social class remained identi- by Leonard. fied with productive function” (p. 80). Leonard is right to ascribe great impor- “Then everything changed,” Leonard tance to the issue of labor: contemporaries, writes. Namely, the French and American even those like Edwin Seligman who did revolutions overturned ancient political hier- not consider themselves specialists in labor archies, and Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations economics, also pointed to the “labor issue” (1950 [1776]) did away with the economic as the distinguishing feature of the debate theories underpinning them. Instead, “The between the “old” and “new” economics, at United States in 1790 was a rare thing: a lib- least in 1886—in the torrid aftermath of the eral Republic. Scarcity, the scourge of clas- Haymarket Riot. But Leonard’s characteriza- sical political economy, seemed absent; land tion of this war of ideas is even more sweep- and natural resources were hyperabundant” ing. He writes: (p. 82). Leonard’s highly schematic history is, As long as people have recorded their views on needless to say, not reflective of mainstream economic life, there have been two constants historical interpretation, which does not of political economy. The first constant has divide world history so neatly into pre- and been to distinguish two opposed methods of economic coordination: market exchange and post-redemptive phases, each with a cor- administrative command. The second con- responding, coherent ideology, political stant has been to scorn markets and to esteem history, and economic system. Neither the administration (p. 79). progressive economists themselves, nor their contemporaneous ideological oppo- Leonard traces the latter view back to Plato nents, nor any intellectual historian analyz- and Ancient Greek society: privileging poli- ing economic debates of the late nineteenth tics above economics, and yet depending on century has characterized their positions labor, trade, and finance for the prosperity in this way, because regardless of whether upon which their political power was built, Leonard’s interpretation of each piece of that Greeks developed the notion of a natural elaborate puzzle is correct, no one studying hierarchy that bound some people—outsid- the matter would draw a line between the ers, foreigners, slaves, and women—to the development of economic thought between necessary-but-subordinate role of laborers, ancient Greece and the period in question. traders, and money lenders. “The Greeks The reason Leonard draws this anachronistic relegated the dirtiest labor to slaves, who had link with ancient Greece is to put meat on no choice, indeed could have no choice, since the bones of his skeleton argument: that pro- nature fitted them for slavery” and “The polis gressive economists were wedded to a retro- depended on economic practices its culture grade hierarchical theory of the labor market disdained. Confronted with this intellec- that infects all of their analysis and all of their tual tension, the Greeks resolved it with a policy prescriptions. Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1071

Interestingly, however, aspects of Leonard’s himself never articulated the “safety valve” schematization are similar to the views theory in writing, even though posterity— expressed by the progressive economists including Leonard, apparently—has errone- who are otherwise the targets of his criticism. ously ascribed it to him. Turner did neglect For instance, he validates the idea that the the question of whether and how land on United States started as an egalitarian nation the frontier was allocated to newcomers and of smallholding property owners who were how secure their tenure was—and recent displaced by urbanization and industrializa- scholarship that could be characterized, at tion after the “market revolution” of the nine- a stretch, as partly resurrecting the frontier teenth century. He writes “The American thesis focuses on this question, in contrast frontier ‘closed’ in 1890, and with it the with other countries that had the equivalent traditional safety valve for urban unemploy- geography, but not the same distributive ment, westward migration to claim free land” mechanisms and legal security.2 (p. 29). This is a restatement of the “frontier In any case, while he appears to agree thesis” associated with Frederick Jackson with their historical interpretation, Leonard Turner, a historian who trained under Ely does not agree with the progressive econo- at Johns Hopkins and whose theories about mists in drawing the conclusion from the why social conflict arose in the Gilded Age frontier thesis that laissez-faire labor market were highly influential in driving progressive policies ought to be abandoned. His view is economists to make the argument that while rather that the closing of the frontier pre- laissez-faire orthodoxy may have been appro- sented an existential challenge to progres- priate to the agrarian, smallholding economy sive theories about how the labor market of the country’s first century—when, so the works and how it should work. According argument went, there was always the option to his presentation of what the progressives of going west to escape unemployment—the believed, what was true and worth preserv- problems of industrialized wage labor raised ing about the old free-labor argument was the need for an alternative model of the labor its automatic assumption that the “pru- market and alternative policies to regulate it. dent, penniless beginner,” to use Abraham The frontier thesis was influential, but as Lincoln’s phrase, would be a white, male, an actual interpretation of the function of “American” worker. The market revolution, the frontier in American economic or politi- on the other hand, made one giant competi- cal history, it has long been abandoned. The tive labor market where there had previously imaginary frontier line linking lightly pop- been entitlement by birth, subjecting those ulated areas was an artificial construct, and “Americans” to market forces they had here- agricultural settlement of the far West con- tofore avoided. Thus, according to Leonard, tinued right up to the eve of the First World what motivated the progressives to reform War and beyond. As cities developed, some the labor market was a desire to recreate workers may have looked for new opportu- the hierarchical condition that had existed nities, but the flow of migrants was always ex ante with a raft of exclusionary laws that positively, rather than negatively, selected bestowed a minimum wage, decent working and the “safety valve” is now recognized as conditions, and stable employment on that unsustainable mythology. Land was never in-group while foisting the dirty work—or as free as historical myth would have it, and no work at all—on immigrants, minorities, those who settled it tended to have the capital already in hand to get their concern off 2 This is what Garcia-Jimeno and Robinson (2009) call the ground. It should be noted that Turner the “conditional frontier thesis.” 1072 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) and women, in order to prevent them from its actual gradual disappearance) led those undercutting white men’s wages. (That this economists to embrace the view that those presentation of the changes wrought by the benefits could only be won through labor market revolution in the late nineteenth cen- organizing and state intervention in the tury—replacing an ancient hierarchy with labor market. In that interpretation oriented a free market—is at odds with Leonard’s toward bargaining power, the threat of strike presentation of the egalitarian free market breaking and labor outsourcing was acute, of smallholders established at the country’s and the exclusionary aspects of the pro- birth is never reconciled.) gressive economists’ scholarship and policy Leonard does not even attempt a factual program were motivated by their fear of a intellectual history of where progressive eco- resulting “race to the bottom” to overcome nomics came from, who its real ideological any gains labor might make. opponents were, and why its diverse adher- Their intellectual and ideological oppo- ents came to advocate for the labor reforms nents, on the other hand, saw labor com- that became core to the progressive cause. petition as not only the labor market’s Crucially, and contra Leonard, they did not “natural” state—their positive theory—but believe that labor “shouldn’t be in the mar- also considered that its highest state. We ket” or that “the worker’s claim was deter- have already related the social Darwinist the- mined by his political and social standing” ories attached to William Graham Sumner. (p. 86). Rather, their positive theory of the Sumner did not have a wide following among labor market was that workers were paid academic economists, and his closest imi- what they could get, and, to simplify enor- tator, Simon Newcomb, was not himself a mously, their normative theory was that trained economist, but rather an astronomer workers should get more.3 who published orthodox economics tracts Section 2 addresses the rise and fall of in the popular press. John Bates Clark, on the notion of free labor. The impetus for the other hand, was part of the circle that the progressive economists who favored founded the AEA, but his work increasingly labor-market reforms came from their con- ventured into theory and the influence of viction that those who relied on their labor the European neoclassical economists Léon to make their living were increasingly denied Walras, William Stanley Jevons, and, above access to the American dream (though it was all, Alfred Marshall. Clark was known, in not yet called that) of property ownership, his day, for a strongly neoclassical theory of upward social mobility, and economic the rental rate of capital, and for espousing security—prerequisites to live independently views to the effect that any intervention in of the whims of the boss or property owner. the labor market would thwart the “natural” The growing belief that wage labor was the adjustment of factor prices, which, if left permanent lot of the majority of the labor undisturbed, would eventually bring about force after the frontier had been “closed” the optimal allocation of national income (though not, we hasten to add, because of shares to capital and labor. Clark’s theory became, and remains, the clearest articulation of the neoclassical 3 In fact, this is precisely what Samuel Gompers, the founder and long-time head of the American Federation theory of the labor market and wage set- of Labor, articulated, as quoted by Leonard. While pro- ting in the American intellectual context. gressive economists remained nonpartisan with respect to Contemporary economists who accept this both formal politics and the internal politics of the labor movement, it would be fair to characterize their ideology theory do not, for the most part, take it as as aligned with that of the AFL. far as Clark did, verging on the normative Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1073 or moralistic, though factor shares that a member of the Boston Brahmin establish- are constant and optimal in the long run is ment. He was a General in the Civil War and implied by the macroeconomic concept of the Director of the United States Census the balanced growth path, given restrictions of 1870, in which position he railed against on population, technology, and taste param- the patronage that dominated the agency, eters. Contemporary economists also have impeding work that he saw as essential to a theory of human capital to further refine governing the industrializing postwar econ- their interpretation of the labor market and omy. Following his exasperated resignation, of wage setting, but it is, essentially, a com- he served as Commissioner of Indian Affairs plication of Clark, not a departure. during the violent years of the mid-1870s, Meanwhile, recent studies of wage set- returning to the Census after his proposed ting find a substantial and increasing role bill of reforms was passed through Congress for firm-specific bargaining that cannot be by Representative James Garfield shortly explained by worker-side characteristics, the before he was nominated for the presidency. traditional observable variables associated The 1880 Census Walker oversaw thereaf- with the human capital tradition, or with the ter was considered the most effective of the idea that a competitive labor market equil- nineteenth century—although, as will be dis- ibrates returns to worker-side characteris- cussed below, recent scholarship casts doubt tics across firms.4 In essence, contemporary on that reputation.5 debate about the determination of who gets Walker was a generation older than the what in the labor market sounds increasingly economists who took the lead in founding like the disputes that raged in the 1880s, and the AEA, though as America’s leading quan- that fact is not unrelated to the publication of titative social scientist of the day, he agreed Leonard’s book, which uses that resonance to lend his name to their endeavor. They all to tie what might be termed the resurgence shared the conviction that their newly won of progressive or institutionalist economics professional expertise ought to be brought back to its intellectual progenitors, and, in into the public sphere to exercise a ratio- turn, to their more disreputable views on nalizing, constructive influence—against race, intelligence, and population control. what they had all experienced as the tired But what also distinguishes both the con- doctrines of laissez-faire espoused in the temporary debate over how the labor market more intransigent confines of the ASSA. In works and its predecessor is the relevance of fact, it was that conviction that closed off new data and statistical techniques to cast the ideological disputes of the AEA’s early doubt on theoretical received wisdom. years, with the pull of rising professional credibility and public influence exerting a powerful moderating effect.6 The staunchest 4. The Beginnings of Economic Policy of the laissez-faire economists and members The first president of the American of the ASSA had themselves been pushed Economic Association was Francis Amasa into opposition to the postwar Grant admin- Walker, at the time serving as president of istration by their perception that political the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. patronage had disempowered the creden- The son of a well-known Harvard professor tialed elite, and the Liberal Republicans with of political economy, Walker was very much whom they affiliated migrated between the

4 See, for example, Card, Heining, and Kline (2013); 5 Carter and Sutch (1996). Card et al. (2016); and Song et al. (2016). 6 Weisberger and Steinbaum (2016), Furner (1975). 1074 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) major parties, depending on which appeared Gilded Age government agencies as a rhe- more committed to rooting out corruption torical weapon against the progressive econ- and handing power back to where it right- omists who advocated that they be reformed. fully belonged: themselves. The influence that progressive economists Following Walker’s lead, his younger col- (not to mention nonprogressive ones) had leagues similarly accepted positions either over policy is recast as an elitist bid to, first employed by newly formed federal, state, of all, stamp out individual rights, and sec- and local agencies or advising them from ond, to capture the public largesse to provide university positions. The most well-known a full employment program for economists. and well-regarded example of that was the “The fledgling economists, fingers in the so-called “Wisconsin Idea,” in which Ely and wind, cast their lot with the administrative his students John R. Commons and Edward state,” he writes (p. 27). And of the pro- A. Ross, once all three had gathered at the gressives’ aims to influence policy, Leonard University of Wisconsin, exercised a wide writes “The duties of administration would influence over state policy thanks in large regularly require overriding individuals’ part to the sympathetic ear of the state’s pro- rights in the name of economic common gressive governor, Robert La Follette. That good” (p. 22) and “They [progressive econo- gave rise to early experiments with state mists] always gave the moral whole primacy living- and minimum-wage policies, work- over the individuals it subsumed” (p. 24). place-safety regulation, and social insur- But the brain trust of the Wisconsin Idea ance, as well as rate regulation for railroads, did not seize the reins of power. La Follette telegraphs, telephones, water, and elec- offered the voters a program, they voted tricity. The goal was not to take over those to put it into effect, and the experts then utilities, but to make sure that their prices worked out the details which, in a modern were reasonable and not simply “what the economy, were complex. The people’s will traffic would bear.” Anathema as this might was not snatched away, but put into execu- be to laissez-faire proponents, the citizens tion by appointed experts under the final of Wisconsin liked it enough to reelect La authority of elected officials—exactly the Follette three times and then send him on way credentialed economists working now to the Senate for the rest of his life. In time, imagine their research gets operationalized La Follette argued, even investors in the in policy. That was why the state was some- regulated industries came to like it because times called a “laboratory for democracy.” fair regulation brought them higher returns, And the same group of scholars, along with since it was “scientific,” by which he meant progressive lawyers led by Louis Brandeis, less prone to the boom-and-bust cycle that founded the American Association of Labor traditionally afflicted natural monopolies Legislation to organize and advocate for with high fixed costs. these initiatives across states.7 The idea was In Leonard’s hands, all of this takes on a sinister air. For example, apparently in reference to Walker’s work reforming the 7 Leonard claims that AALL began life as part of the Census—again, rooting out the patronage AEA, but that is not quite correct. Ely certainly wanted the AEA to perform a similar function, at least during that had impaired its work—Leonard writes his stint as founding secretary from 1885 to 1892. But it “Walker already appreciated how economic was precisely the evolving identity of the AEA and similar expertise cashed out in political authority” professional associations against advocacy, even advocacy couched in social science, that led Ely and his colleagues to (p. 29), though elsewhere he uses the cor- look to the AALL, which was independent from its birth in ruption and graft that proverbially plagued 1905–06. See Gee (2012). Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1075 to test model legislation in friendly terri- protest if he published figures suggesting the tory and then use referendum campaigns problem was on the rise. to expand it to other states and, eventually, These actions (which go unmentioned enact it on the federal level. by Leonard) certainly do not redound to Ely and his coterie were definitely on the Walker’s credit in hindsight, but it’s import- left of the economics profession and in public ant to note that he appears to have been life, but the tendency to influence policy in a motivated not by an ideology he sought to technocratic direction was not by any means impose on the government, but rather by confined to them. Their intellectual rival, a moderating tendency to avoid inflaming Arthur Hadley, who eventually served as the public. Indeed, many of the progressive president of Yale, was also commissioner of economists offered their reformist schol- the Connecticut Bureau of Labor Statistics, arship and policy proposals in this spirit: to and such easy transitions and dual appoint- tame and moderate in a time of high political ments between universities and the grow- and ideological tension, and they quite con- ing bureaucracy were increasingly the norm sciously self-censored in order to do that. A as the expanding realm of economic policy letter dated May 1, 1886, the very day that sought expertise wherever it could be found. the strike leading to the Haymarket Riot Another conservative economist, Jeremiah was called, Arthur Hadley wrote a letter to Jenks, led the economic staff of the United Henry Carter Adams declining (initially) to States Industrial Commission, an inquiry join the AEA thanks to its ideological mission into the dual issues of monopolization and statement. Hadley wrote: labor unrest during the McKinley administration, which, characteristically of that era, The fact that the principles are true, only makes the danger of misinterpretation more espoused a hybrid policy platform of reject- serious. … My sympathies are in many respects ing outright breakup of trusts or public own- strongly with the movement. My inclinations ership of major industries, but collaborating would have led me to join it from the first. But in industrial policy with demonstrably con- I was afraid, and still am afraid, of getting into servative labor unions. a position which would do practical harm both to me and to others, where I should seem to It’s instructive to return to Francis Amasa be made an advocate of measures and maxims Walker’s actual record administering the which I cannot but regard as dangerous in the 1880 Census to gain insight into the real extreme.8 motivations of progressive economists when it came to influencing policy. Carter In other words, the truth of what might be a and Sutch (1996) show that Walker sys- controversial statement about the economy tematically and secretly excluded from the mattered less than its political implications. published tabulations of occupations many This concern really did color the progressive children, women, and elderly men who were economists’ scholarship, and if he stuck to nevertheless recorded as having an occupa- these grounds, Leonard would have a better tion by census enumerators. Those schol- case that their political motivations got the ars speculate that he feared the totals the better of them. enumerators had racked up for women and Instead, Illiberal Reformers is filled with older men would seem improbable or even selected quotations from “social control” scandalous to the general public. Child labor progressives expressing disdain for the was also a sensitive political issue at the time, and Carter and Sutch speculate that Walker might have been afraid of fueling public 8 Steinbaum and Weisberger (2016). 1076 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017)

intelligence of people on whose side they federal regulations on “free-market” princi- professed to be. But familiarity with the ples it read into the constitution.9 whole body of public writings and behav- Leonard’s view is informed by the so-called ior of the leaders in actual battle during “public choice” approach to economic schol- the early 1900s paints a different picture, arship, which reinterprets economic policies whatever opinions they may have enter- enacted through legislation and adminis- tained in later life when sadness and disillu- tration as attempts by contending interest sion set in. Ida Tarbell’s muckraking history groups to profit at the public’s expense and of the Standard Oil Company was a long, channel ostensibly reformist principles to attention-demanding book that ran serially their own ends. Successful though that view in McClure’s, a popular and inexpensive might be in interpreting individual instances magazine. So did Lincoln Steffens’s Shame of public policy for private benefit, enacted of the Cities, and similar exposures of cor- under the banner of reform, it doesn’t work ruption and injustice in other mass-audience as an overall interpretation of the progres- periodicals. Jane Addams’s story of her life at sive movement in politics and policy, as Hull House in the slums of Chicago showed Richard Yeselson shows in his intellectual nothing resembling contempt for the people history of “New Left” history and the career among whom she and her followers chose to of Gabriel Kolko, to whom we return in the live and work. Leonard sniffs at those “bold conclusion.10 women” for calling themselves “settlers, not Moreover, contrary to Leonard’s idea that neighbors,” a distinction entirely without a academics who were ideologically friendly to difference when it came to actual behavior. state action advocated for the establishment La Follette, campaigning for reform in rural of large agencies staffed by those very Wisconsin, would hold audiences of farm- same economists on careerist grounds, no ers spellbound for hours with the reading of full-employment program for economists public reports loaded with statistics to prove has ever been as successful as laissez-faire to them how they were being swindled by dogma. Again, it was precisely by retreating excessive railroad shipping charges—proof, from a broad-based challenge to the status if ever it was necessary, that expertise and quo that economics claimed the position of empirical analysis need not be at odds with authority it has enjoyed since—very much populist politics. including the abundant job opportunities More problematic than sweeping state- available to newly minted PhDs in all three ments that reinterpret expert influence over major career paths open to them: academia, economic policy as a plot to subsume the government, and the private sector. individual in service to the state, Leonard The point is that incentives for state action stretches the archival record to provide can operate in both directions, and frequently evidence in favor of his argument. He refers have done exactly that in the history of eco- to an editorial in the New Republic, one of nomics as a discipline. But notwithstanding the leading progressive organs of the era, as the actual dynamics of professionalization attacking the Bill of Rights, when in fact the within economics as an academic discipline, editorial is attacking the interpretation of Leonard writes “Laissez Faire was inimical Constitutional rights as protecting the “freedom” of individuals from state regulation of private contracts, the view the Supreme 9 See Rahman (2016) for a discussion of progressive views of the Constitution and of the New Republic in Court espoused during the so-called particular. “Lochner era,” when it struck down state and 10 Yeselson (2015). Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1077 to economic expertise,” an argument that conduct of economic policy. Indeed, immi- carries the useful implication that econo- grants were quite useful as cheap labor— mists’ advocacy for laissez-faire views is an particularly when workers of longer standing admission contrary to professional interest. managed to organize unions and achieve All of this just reiterates the special point of some measure of social power—and in view that Leonard brings to the history of that context, laissez-faire dogmatists were progressive economics—not intellectual his- happy to espouse the view that everyone was tory so much as motivated myth making. equally entitled to supply their labor. But immigrant populations became more problematic when they gained political power for 5. The Exclusionary Legacy of themselves. The laissez-faire faction found it Laissez-Faire easy to adhere to high principles of individ- The theme of Illiberal Reformers is that ual rights in some contexts, but not in others. progressive economists embraced reaction- Going beyond the labor market per se, ary ideas, which influenced their contribu- another strand of what might be called lais- tions to economics and to policy so thoroughly sez-faire identity-based exclusion concerned as to discredit them altogether. But those relief for the unemployed and other forms exclusionary views were not unique to the of policy-based redistribution for those not progressives in their day, and if they retain in work. Godkin, Newcomb, and Sumner any influence at all in the present intellectual excoriated the interference with competi- context, it is rather through the intellectual tion and natural selection. According to their descendants of the progressives’ opponents, own dysgenic (and scientifically illiterate) the expositors of laissez-faire, whatever their theory, any such “class legislation”—mean- rhetoric about individual liberty. ing redistribution of income—would even- We have already touched on the influ- tually breed constructive involvement in the ence of social Darwinism and noninterven- economy out of beneficiary populations, and tionist theories of the labor market on the so harm the larger economy by reducing the decision at the federal level to abandon supply of labor. Godkin mounted this exact Reconstruction, leaving the South’s black argument against Reconstruction, since population to be ruled by the Redeemers Redeemers argued that the evident reduc- and the Jim Crow system without the federal tion in labor supply by freed black workers intervention that was the Civil War’s greatest as compared with former slaves indicated a legacy for the freed slaves. The same group racial and hereditary disinclination to work in the political and intellectual elite had their that had to be surmounted by handing super- own reasons for seeking to exclude immi- visory power over labor supply back to local grants: they feared them as the detritus of elites. And similar ideas lent a convenient European labor deported to the colonies for backstory for conservatives’ own advocacy fear of their rabble-rousing powers at home. of mandatory sterilization of the “unfit” and They argued some should be deported forth- underemployed as a means of disciplining with for their radical views—or indeed, fol- labor. lowing Haymarket, executed—but a much A debate that took place at an AEA meeting larger fraction of the immigrant working in 1893 is instructive in this respect. Edward population was threatening simply because A. Ross (then the association’s secretary) and they exercised the right to vote. They thus a prominent conservative, Franklin Giddings replaced the rightful elite with urban polit- of Columbia, confronted the issue of agrar- ical machines and demanded a say over the ian populism. Against Ross’s sympathetic 1078 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) take, Giddings replied “Why, throughout the ideology today. In fact, labor-market dis- long years of his affliction, has [the farmer] crimination against historically marginalized always come off the worse in the contest? groups and resulting disparities in earnings, There must be something wrong in his own employment, and wealth, are perhaps their makeup…. If you want to reach the root greatest concern, whereas their opponents of the farmers’ difficulties, you will have to argue, like Giddings, that such discrimina- begin with the farmers’ minds.” The implication doesn’t exist and those disparities are tion that if group disparities persist for long caused by differences in underlying charac- enough, they must reflect innate group char- teristics, heritable or otherwise. That is why acteristics as opposed to exclusionary social, it matters that we get this intellectual history political, or economic structures, was com- right. mon among laissez-faire proponents of that time, and that assumption is arguably a per- 6. So What Do We Owe the Progressives? sistent intellectual legacy of an ideology that sees “the market” as inherently egalitarian. Why does it matter what the progressive For these reasons, Leonard is wrong to economists believed and whether their the- present the progressives as uniquely prone ories were or were not tainted by retrograde to exclusionary views. They certainly did and exclusionary views? Contemporary express their own exclusionary views, but economists have a great deal to thank them those views were motivated by seeking to for: nothing less than the origination, profes- increase the bargaining power of a narrowly sionalization, and high status and influence defined set of workers, eventually taking of their discipline in American policy and shape in the hands of Commons and Ross public life. Furthermore, the very critique as an elaborate racist typology legitimating they brought to orthodox economics as they exclusion from the labor market. For their found it shares much with the current state intellectual adversaries, on the other hand, of the field: scholars analyzed new sources the exclusion was motivated by their ideol- of data using methods that cast doubt on ogy: that extending full political and human the received wisdom of old models, which rights to “outsider” groups risked overturn- had themselves been accepted largely in the ing the social hierarchy and impairing the absence of evidence. proper functioning of the market, because The main idea in what became known members of those groups could not be as “institutionalist” economics was that the trusted to supply their own labor and thus truth of how the economy worked could required the supervision of employers to do only be discerned from close and particular- so—its own elaborate, racist typology. ized study. This was a reaction against what Progressives have enlarged the sphere they viewed as overly general and abstracted of those deemed worthy of advocacy—too theories, which either had little relation to slowly and with notable lacunae, to be sure, actual economic outcomes or, insofar as they as was the case with the exclusionary ele- did carry predictions about how the world ments of the New Deal and the premature works, were overly optimistic and proven abandonment and retrenchment from the wrong by the reality of the modern, industri- lofty goals of the civil rights movement. But alized economy. calls for excluding minorities and immigrants Publications by institutionalist scholars from the labor market and advocacy for invol- tend to be long, dry, and exhaustive, with untary restrictions on the birthrate are simply little in the way of what modern economists not to be found among critics of laissez-faire would recognize as either a clear statement of Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1079 theory or an empirical test of that theory. But review of estimates of the elasticity of taxable their approach nonetheless resonates with income to an income tax taken from various current trends in the field, with its emphasis quasi-experimental studies, with its recom- on narrowly defined claims backed up with mendation that statutory rates be adjusted evidence that is directly relevant to those accordingly and the tax base tightened to claims, and where the central issue hovering stymie observed tax avoidance behavior. over the work is its inferential value beyond That book would look very different than the very specific context being studied. Just Seligman’s: it would have many more estimat- as with economics now, the institutionalists ing equations, regression tables, and robust- implicitly retreated from an ambitious stance ness checks for the identifying assumptions about what economics as a field says, while at of the different underlying studies. In fact, it the same time embracing an expansive role would look like Emmanuel Saez, Joel Slemrod, for economists in academia and public life and Seth Giertz’s 2012 paper in this journal.11 as purveyors of advanced tools for analyzing But it would not be a very different book. A data and making nuanced policy recommen- similar comparison might be made between dations, or critiquing those of others. On the a 1920 book by John Andrews and John other hand, the distinguishing characteristic Commons, Principles of Labor Legislation, of neoclassical economics, both in the nine- and David Card and Alan Krueger’s Myth teenth century and today, is exactly that will- and Measurement, whose twentieth anniver- ingness to hold forth about what “economics sary edition now includes an introduction that says,” beyond the content of what it actually reads very similarly to Richard Ely’s 1884 arti- is that economics does or doesn’t say. cle “Past and Present of Political Economy.”12 Take a book like Edwin Seligman’s The The expertise in analyzing data and Income Tax, published in 1914, for example. providing policy advice across a range of It is an exhaustive account of the occasions applications, at the same time as the field on which an income tax, and its predeces- transcended overt ideological conflict, is sor, a class tax, had been enacted in many what made economics and economists indis- different countries and municipalities, what pensable to policy makers and the growing mechanisms had been used to collect it and apparatus of state policy. That tendency has on whom its incidence fell, in contrast with increased in leaps and bounds, if anything, what were then the more typical methods of accelerating recently, as compared with ear- federal public financing, tariffs, and excise lier periods, as the types of actors making taxes. The conclusion was that, far from being claims ostensibly driven by original data anal- an untested and radical idea, the income tax ysis have proliferated from academic depart- had been tried and had worked as intended ments and public agencies to interest groups and without harming other economic out- and the private sector. That expanded market comes. The publication of the book was for economic expertise has, in turn, fed back highly influential in swinging expert opin- to the academic departments that credential ion behind the Sixteenth Amendment, an economists, providing the demand necessary important element in its 1913 passage, and to expand graduate student enrollment and Seligman’s work had a wide influence in the employment opportunities that have bid spurring other countries to move to income up faculty salaries. taxes as a standard feature of national public financing, as well. 11 Saez, Slemrod, and Giertz (2012). If it were written today, a book like 12 Andrews and Commons (1920); Card and Krueger Seligman’s would essentially be a literature (2016); Ely (1884). 1080 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017)

There are other possible outcomes: eco- tion, declining to intervene in its “official” nomics could have gone the way of pure capacity in nearly every case in which aca- math or the social sciences that remained demic freedom was arguably threatened for more inward-looking. Part of the reason for ideological reasons. It was not until Ross the alternative approach economics took was summarily dismissed from Stanford may be due to the role that optimization University in 1900 that the AEA passed plays in economic theory, as it migrated a boycott measure in retaliation, and the from an assumption bounding the behav- university nearly did not survive the result- ior of economic agents within models to ing exodus of scholars. Ely, meanwhile, a larger, normative approach to evaluat- received the full-throated support of the ing real-world outcomes. That leap is not University of Wisconsin when he was chal- entirely due to the progressives, because lenged by a member of the state Board of they started from the second assumption Regents in 1894, and the endorsement of of pragmatism while, for the most part, academic freedom made by the investigat- bypassing the first about individual ratio- ing commission (though ghost-written by nality. But it was the progressives who first the university’s president) protected the made the case to economists that they ought university’s scholars and their contributions to have one foot in the public debate and to the Wisconsin Idea, endorsing them as convinced the public and their representa- the work of disinterested, outside experts tives that economists were worth listening operating in service to the state and thus to and could be trusted to have their inter- shielding them from political retaliation ests aligned. thereafter. Furthermore, that link has served econo- Economists ignore the valuable pro- mists not just by having our advice listened tections for academic freedom at their to (and remunerated), but also in having it peril, especially as the controversial issue protected. Henry Carter Adams, Richard of inequality returns to the fore in pub- Ely, Edward Ross, and John Commons lic debate, as it was in the Gilded Age. As were only some of the economists who Republicans and Populists vied for power in suffered professionally for expressing con- the contested politics of 1890s Kansas and troversial views in public. In Adams’s case, Nebraska, the entire economics faculties of the views in question were that American the state universities were forced to resign, industrialists were cynically exploiting their posts advocating for or against the gold xenophobia to defeat labor organizing, and standard seen as part of the spoils of winning the post-Haymarket crackdown on rad- statewide office. Preventing that was why ical immigrants was an unconstitutional provisions for tenure review by peers and infringement on their right to free speech shared governance were incorporated into and association. Adams’s hounding from institutional missions, accreditation docu- Cornell University is not an episode that ments, and, in some cases, in statute. That appears in Illiberal Reformers, since it threat to their institutional status may seem reflects advocacy on behalf of the individual remote from the experience of contempo- rights of outsiders that Leonard alleges pro- rary economists, but it could easily happen gressives did not engage in. again. The protections for economics won Part of the motivation for founding by Adams, Ely, Ross, and Commons remain the AEA was to offer some measure of extremely valuable, and potential threats to self-protection in solidarity. In the event, the them are not just a theoretical possibility but organization mostly did not serve that func- one to be vigilantly guarded against. Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1081

7. Conclusion in their turn, regulated and inspected factories; passed laws setting maximum hours “Everybody was doing it” is not an excuse of work and minimum wages, especially for for the endorsement of a sterilization policy women; mandated compulsory education that was not merely misguided, but cruel in for children; and “municipalized” streetcar its implementation and false in its rational- companies and gas and water utilities. izations, no matter how wide or narrow the The real target of Leonard’s book is this set of intellectual and societal peers who legacy, not the legacy of exclusion, eugenics, voiced support. But it must at least be said racism, and xenophobia. But contemporary that no eugenicist with any progressive links economists who research the effect of the realized that the notion of innate inferiority minimum wage do not remotely subscribe could open the door to the mass murder of to the same views as the progressive-era living populations. The concept of “prog- economists who pioneered its study. In fact, ress” itself, swelling from the eighteenth their key finding, a minimal disemployment through the early twentieth centuries, with effect, is at odds with Leonard’s character- its great, perhaps overwhelming, impact on ization of progressive motivations. Leonard all aspects of society in that era, denied that also devotes some attention to advocates such a radically evil act could be possible for women’s suffrage, who expressed many in an enlightened society. It took the Nazi of the same retrograde, exclusionary views, reign of darkness in a Germany that had often in harsher terms since many of them been among the world’s leaders in the arts did not share the economists’ motivation for and sciences to remind liberals and progres- social uplift. But, needless to say, that history sives, as Reinhold Niebuhr pointed out, that does not invalidate the argument for wom- Satan was still a very active presence among en’s suffrage, nor does the borderline-racist humankind. public record of some prominent abolition- Nonetheless, it is bad and tendentious ists discredit the movement to end slavery in history to use the involvement of some the United States, necessary though it is to progressives in eugenic advocacy as a club subject that record to disinterested historical with which to beat historians and econo- criticism. mists into denial of the positive and admi- In hunts for the soul of Progressivism rable achievements that they contributed with a capital “P,” so many different actors to the strengthening and improvement of with varying and sometimes even clashing American democracy. Leonard himself motives were unearthed that an article in lists a number of those achievements. They Reviews in American History in 1982 sug- include the progressive income tax, federal gested that it might be impossible to reach regulation of railroads, the breakup of gigan- a single defensible definition of what made tic trusts, the exemption of labor unions a progressive (Rodgers 1982). The standard from antitrust prosecution, the eight-hour view of the movement, in fact, was a repu- day for public works and railroad employ- diation of the heroic legend of authors like ees, mandated compensation for workers Filler and Madison. injured on the job, assurance of the purity Starting in the 1950s, a new wave of schol- and safety of food and drugs, and the pro- arly interpretations began to deconstruct that hibition of trade in goods made with child story. Works by Richard Hofstadter, Samuel labor plus, as he puts it, the federalization Hays, Robert Wiebe, and Gabriel Kolko of Western lands “in the name of conserva- argued that the progressives were old stock tion” (p. 44). State and local governments, Americans who, realizing that they were 1082 Journal of Economic Literature, Vol. LV (September 2017) becoming a shrinking proportion of the pop- Leonard’s book fits into the current sus- ulation, set about making sure that the “new” tained attack on progressivism and its immigrants of the post–Civil War boom were works that has moved the country steadily educated in the true American habits and rightward for some forty years. Leonard values of the sturdy pioneers. Some revision- affects to be even-handed and says in an epi- ists claimed that in fact the driving engine logue that “Progressivism is too important to of progressivism had really been the wish to be left to hagiography and obloquy” (p. 44). regulate and convert a wildly competitive and To his credit, he does not single out any con- socially restless nation into one less radical— temporary opponent for personal abuse. But that, in fact, the movement was a “triumph of all things considered in his mind, he finishes conservatism,” shutting off socialist and other with the statement that “It is well known”—a alternative systems to corporate capitalism. It vague and catch-all assertion at best—“that is only recently that the progressive hospitality modern liberalism permanently demoted to eugenics was added to this revisionist liter- economic liberties. Few twenty-first-century ature, as in the recent book by Adam Cohen, progressives think that minimum wages or Imbeciles (2016). It sets forth the sad story of maximum hours or occupational licensing how a young woman, Carrie Buck, deemed unjustly infringe upon a worker’s right to by “scientific” tests to be “feeble-minded,” freely contract on her [sic] behalf.” was sterilized under a Virginia law that Few indeed—and with good reason! And was upheld as constitutional by a Supreme after some 180 and more pages of such Court that included progressive icons Oliver charges leveled at progressivism then and Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, now, it is fair to say that, despite the author’s both of whom concurred with the decision. good intentions and thorough search for But it could be argued that perhaps a small what he wishes to find, if this book is not binding thread might be found, not in the obloquy, it is a superb imitation. determination of all the movement’s leading lights to build an ideal society, but on simple References outrage at the glaring flaws of the one they inhabited, the one created by concentrated Andrews, John B., and John R. Commons. 1920. Prin- ciples of Labor Legislation. New York: Harper and corporate power unhindered by the counter- Brothers. vailing power of state regulation and worker Byrd, Brandon. 2016. “The Black Intellectual Tradition organization. Americans think of themselves and the Myth of Objectivity.” http://www.aaihs.org/ the-black-intellectual-tradition-and-the-myth-of- as a moral people, and could any such people objectivity/. look at sweatshops, slums, children working Card, David, Ana Rute Cardoso, Jörg Heining, and Pat- in mines and glass factories, the brazen theft rick Kline. 2016. “Firms and Labor Market Inequal- ity: Evidence and Some Theory.” NBER Working of public lands, the deliberate thwarting Paper 22850. of competition, or the purchase of voters, Card, David, Jörg Heining, and Patrick Kline. 2013. judges, and lawmakers to gain profit-making “Workplace Heterogeneity and the Rise of West German Wage Inequality.” Quarterly Journal of Eco- advantages and not have the word “wrong” nomics 128 (3): 967–1015. written large on their minds? Or thinking Card, David, and Alan B. Krueger. 2016. Myth and that the nation would not be a better and Measurement: The New Economics of the Minimum Wage, Twentieth Anniversary Edition. Princeton and more democratic one in the absence of such Oxford: Princeton University Press. ugliness? That other kinds of ugliness were Carter, Susan B., and Richard Sutch. 1996. “Fixing the tolerated does not remove the benefits of Facts: Editing of the 1880 U.S. Census of Occupa- tions with Implications for Long-Term Labor-Force progressivism’s victories over the harshest Trends and the Sociology of Official Statistics.” types of inequality. Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Steinbaum and Weisberger: Review of Thomas C. Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers 1083

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