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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,
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