“The
Progressive Era” is a doorstopper volume containing writings by Murray Rothbard
on this particular period in American history (which to Rothbard also included
the New Deal). Some of the material has been published previously in various
libertarian journals. Other pieces were intended as chapters of a new work, a
work Rothbard never finished. “The Progressive Era” was published posthumously
in 2017 by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. I readily admit that Rothbard´s
extreme brand of libertarianism doesn´t appeal to me. It also strikes me as
contradictory. Rothbard supports open borders and identifies heavily with the Catholic
and German Lutheran communities who supported the old style Democratic Party,
but these people were hardly “libertarian”. One sure wonders what Rothbard said
about the more recent mass immigration of Hispanics and Muslims to the United
States? Especially since he supports alien voting rights… Many of Rothbard´s
positions would make more sense if he had been a conservative communitarian,
but even then, it´s difficult to see how a nation with 100+ such communities
could possible survive in the long run, especially if it has a very weak central
power. I sometimes get the impression that there isn´t *anything* (except
government intervention and lesbianism) Rothbard isn´t willing to defend, from
slumlords and child labor to misleading labeling and Tammany Hall politics. That´s
“laissez faire” for you, right there.
[A RELIGIOUS CONFLICT?]
That
being said, “The Progressive Era” does contain interesting takes on a number of
topics. Rothbard believes that the conflict between the
Federalist-Whig-Republican tradition of cartelized Big Business or Big
Government meddling into the life of the ordinary citizen, on the one hand, and
the Jeffersonian-Jacksonian-Bourbon Democratic tradition of “individual liberty”
and laissez faire economics, on the other, is at bottom a *religious* conflict.
What Rothbard calls Pietists or sometimes “Pietistic Liberal Protestants”
(PLPs) were pitted against Liturgicals (or rather Liturgicals and something we
could call Creedals).
The Pietists supported the Republicans and their moral
crusades to remake all of society by stamping out sin, both individual vices
such as drinking alcohol and political sins such as slavery. This moralistic
holier-than-thou busy-body attitude rather seamlessly morphed into
authoritarian social engineering of a liberal or socialistic slant. Both were
based on the idea that the government has the duty to stamp out sin and
injustice. Hence progressivism is really a secularized “left” version of
Pietistic postmillennial Protestantism. Even feminism is part of this context,
since it began as a “Christian” crusade against the saloon, the traditional
gathering-place of patriarchal men. The typical Yankees of New England, who
began as authoritarian Puritans, were Pietistic under Rothbard´s definition. So
were many Scandinavian Lutherans. By contrast, the German Lutherans and most
Catholics were Liturgicals, wanted to keep the government out of their
communities, and believed that salvation was a private (or perhaps
communitarian) matter solely mediated through their respective Churches, not
through government institutions. Traditional creedal Calvinists had a similar
attitude as the Liturgicals.
Rothbard believes that a detailed analysis of 19th
century election results showed that the Republican-Democratic split usually followed
the Pietist-Liturgical divide. In the same city, two equally poor working class
districts could vote for two different candidates depending on religious
attitude. Democrats did better (or even better) among hard line German
Lutherans (yes, that would be the notorious Missouri Synod) than among German
Lutherans who were more soft line, and so on.
The fall of the old style
Democrats came in 1896, when the Democrats had been taken over by the agrarian populists
around William Jennings Bryan, who spouted a Pietistic program and hence
attracted droves of such activists and voters to the Democratic banner, scaring
away all Liturgicals except the Irish, who preferred to stay in the Democratic
camp due to their control of a number of city-wide political machines.
Meanwhile, the Republicans under William McKinley moved to the center, thereby
attracting the declutched Liturgicals and winning the election. Unfortunately
for any believer in laissez faire, neither party promoted it from then on, the new
style Democrats continuing with their Pietistic campaigns under the
ever-defeated perennial presidential candidate Bryan, while the “centrist”
Republicans turned out to be hard boiled centralizers, cartelizers,
imperialists and – surprise – authoritarian social engineers, and hence pretty “Pietistic”
themselves, especially under one Teddy Roosevelt. They probably didn´t really believe
in the gold standard, either…
[THE LESBIANS DID IT!]
When
Rothbard is at his most frivolous, he essentially claims that the American
welfare state (please, *what* welfare state?) was the work of “lesbians”, that
is feminist activists who apparently had this particular sexual orientation to
a very large degree. Eleanor Roosevelt is one of the few exceptions – she is
rather “our first bisexual First Lady”. OK, Murray, whatever you say. After a
cold shower or two, the author does say some interesting things about the
women´s movement, too, although they will probably rub the (post)modern
feminists the wrong way! The early feminist movement had strong nativist and
classist traits, attacking mass immigration (since the immigrant males were
often more patriarchal than the Anglo men – sounds familiar?) and the
foreign-born working class. The feminists, who were “upper class” according to
the author, resented being treated as second class citizens, while immigrant males
were automatically given the right to vote. It´s interesting to note that the
votes of immigrant males often defeated proposals to extend the franchise to
women when put to a referendum, thereby proving a thing or two, but nothing
(post)modern feminists want to hear, of course.
As already noted, the attacks
of the Women Christian Temperance Union on saloons (sometimes literal attacks)
weren´t simply fanaticized responses to the sin of drinking improperly labeled
whiskey. The saloon was the all-male social hub of many immigrant communities,
and the saloon-owner was often also a Democratic Party ward-heeler, making
saloons politically important, too. It was in the saloon that the Democrats
convinced or cajoled the local males into voting Democrat. When the Pietistic
moral crusaders (who Rothbard see as proto-feminists) attacked the saloons
and/or demanded state legislation against the selling of alcohol, they were
striking a blow against the political power of patriarchal structures in the
immigrant (often Catholic) districts. Of course, they were also promoting the
Republicans over the Democrats…
Rothbard
believes that female suffrage was a sheer political maneuver from certain
interested parties, rather than a genuine concession to struggling oppressed
women. This is most obvious in Utah, one of the first US territories to allow
women the right to vote. Here, the reason was to bolster the domination of the
Mormon-exclusive People´s Party (hardly a lesbian matriarchy) at a time when
non-Mormon migrants settled in the territory in increasing numbers. In Wyoming,
where many of the old settlers were Yankees, female suffrage was introduced to
ensure old settler control of the legislature as against more transient new
settlers. In both Utah and Wyoming, the new settlers had often left their
families back East, or didn´t have any, and these all-male constituencies could
therefore be defeated at the polls by enlarged male-and-female old settler
constituencies. Rothbard believes that a similar scheme was underway all over
the United States. If women were given the right to vote, the Pietistic
candidates would gain most female votes, since Catholic women usually didn´t
vote at all.
[THEODORE ROOSEVELT: THE FIRST PROGRESSIVE]
Another
topic dealt with extensively in “The Progressive Era” is the politics of our
favorite US president, Theodore Roosevelt, magnanimously dubbed “the first
progressive” by Rothbard. Less magnanimously and more maliciously, Mr R implies
that McKinley was assassinated on TR´s orders! To Rothbard, Theodore
Roosevelt´s progressive regulations were really a form of forced cartelization
of the US industry. This explains the otherwise curious fact that the largest capitalists
actually *supported* the administration. Federal regulations made life harder
for smaller and medium-sized firms, and also for dangerous innovators, while
the large businesses would remain unscathed – since they could afford the regulations,
while smaller businesses could not. Thus, federal regulation is a way for
monopolistic capitalist businesses to do away with pesky competition and cartelize
their respective industries. And not just businesses – the banking interests
were busy working backstage to create a central bank dominated by them,
something they didn´t succeed in doing until the Democratic administration of
Woodrow Wilson (who was just as “progressive” as Teddy Roosevelt).
Even TR´s
much celebrated conservation measures were really undertaken on behalf of Big
Business, or so Rothbard believes. By setting aside huge amounts of unused land
as a federal reserve, the price of all other land (now a scarce resource) sharply
rose, which of course benefited its owners (wealthy Republican donors?). Conservation
also benefitted the railway interests, since land around the railways was
exempted from government confiscation. This forced settlers to buy land for
their farms from the railroad companies (which of course hiked the prices). Rothbard
doesn´t give much for the trust-busting activities of the TR and Taft
administrations. With a few exceptions, he believes that the trust-busting
followed a pattern. Theodore Roosevelt was closely allied with the Morgan
banking interest, while William Howard Taft was more lined up with the
Rockefellers (so was FDR later). The trust-busting usually hit the capitalist
group which *didn´t* support the sitting president…
In a
concluding chapter, Rothbard sharply attacks Herbert Hoover, who in his opinion
was a super-regulator rather than a proponent of laissez faire. To the author,
Hoover´s policies were actually quite similar to those of both Wilson and
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The difference – which proved crucial in the end –
was that Hoover couldn´t accept wholesale federal coercion of the business community.
Instead of such “fascism”, Hoover believed that all regulatory measures must at
bottom be voluntary. FDR believed otherwise and the rest, as they say, is
history.
[WHAT WAS THE PROGRESSIVE ERA?]
So what
was the Progressive Era? I suppose it was a nativist-imperialist form of neo-mercantilism
inspired by Pietistic Postmillenial Protestantism and German
Kathedersozialismus incorporating authoritarian social engineering and collaboration
between Big Business and Even Bigger Government. While dominated by an alliance
of bankers, industrialists and “progressive” Anglo politicians, it attracted middle
class intellectuals who saw it as a third way between “anarchic” and “wasteful”
free market capitalism and revolutionary socialism. And while Roth mentions it
only in passing, one of the system´s functions was to appease and control an
increasingly restive working class by co-opting Big Labor.
In other
words, the Progressive Era was simply the modern phase of capitalism, in which
laissez faire and a weak government is replaced by large scale production and a
strong national administration, while the establishment decides to give the
native workers a slice of the pie to avoid too much class conflict. Behold,
really existing Social Democracy!
Wtf, I
love the Progressive Era now.
