The government and the Women's Committee recognised that immigrant, ethnic women were most in need of 'patriotic education.'
By Murray Rothbard
In contrast
to older historians who regarded World War I as the destruction
of progressive reform, I am convinced that the war came to the United
States as the "fulfillment," the culmination, the veritable apotheosis
of progressivism in American life.[1]
I regard progressivism as basically a movement on behalf of Big
Government in all walks of the economy and society, in a fusion
or coalition between various groups of big businessmen, led by the
House of Morgan, and rising groups of technocratic and statist intellectuals.
In this fusion, the values and interests of both groups would be
pursued through government.
Big business
would be able to use the government to cartelize the economy, restrict
competition, and regulate production and prices, and also be able
to wield a militaristic and imperialist foreign policy to force
open markets abroad and apply the sword of the State to protect
foreign investments. Intellectuals would be able to use the government
to restrict entry into their professions and to assume jobs in Big
Government to apologize for, and to help plan and staff, government
operations. Both groups also believed that, in this fusion, the
Big State could be used to harmonize and interpret the "national
interest" and thereby provide a "middle way" between the extremes
of "dog-eat-dog" laissez faire and the bitter conflicts of proletarian
Marxism.
Also animating
both groups of progressives was a postmillennial pietist Protestantism
that had conquered "Yankee" areas of northern Protestantism by the
1830s and had impelled the pietists to use local, state, and finally
federal governments to stamp out "sin," to make America and eventually
the world holy, and thereby to bring about the Kingdom of God on
earth. The victory of the Bryanite forces at the Democratic national
convention of 1896 destroyed the Democratic Party as the vehicle
of "liturgical" Roman Catholics and German Lutherans devoted to
personal liberty and laissez faire and created the roughly homogenized
and relatively non-ideological party system we have today. After
the turn of the century, this development created an ideological
and power vacuum for the expanding number of progressive technocrats
and administrators to fill. In that way, the locus of government
shifted from the legislature, at least partially subject to democratic
check, to the oligarchic and technocratic executive branch.
World War I
brought the fulfillment of all these progressive trends. Militarism,
conscription, massive intervention at home and abroad, a collectivized
war economy, all came about during the war and created a mighty
cartelized system that most of its leaders spent the rest of their
lives trying to recreate, in peace as well as war. In the World
War I chapter of his outstanding work, Crisis
and Leviathan, Professor Robert
Higgs concentrates on the war economy and illuminates the interconnections
with conscription.
In
this paper, I would like to concentrate on an area that Professor
Higgs relatively neglects: the coming to power during the war of
the various groups of progressive intellectuals.[2]
I use the term "intellectual" in the broad sense penetratingly described
by F.A. Hayek: that is, not merely theorists and academicians, but
also all manner of opinion-molders in society – writers, journalists,
preachers, scientists, activists of all sort – what Hayek calls
"secondhand dealers in ideas."[3]
Most of these intellectuals, of whatever strand or occupation, were
either dedicated, messianic postmillennial pietists or else former
pietists, born in a deeply pietist home, who, though now secularized,
still possessed an intense messianic belief in national and world
salvation through Big Government. But, in addition, oddly but characteristically,
most combined in their thought and agitation messianic moral or
religious fervor with an empirical, allegedly "value-free," and
strictly "scientific" devotion to social science. Whether it be
the medical profession's combined scientific and moralistic devotion
to stamping out sin or a similar position among economists or philosophers,
this blend is typical of progressive intellectuals.
In this paper,
I will be dealing with various examples of individual or groups
of progressive intellectuals, exulting in the triumph of their creed
and their own place in it, as a result of America's entry into World
War I. Unfortunately, limitations of space and time preclude dealing
with all facets of the wartime activity of progressive intellectuals;
in particular, I regret having to omit treatment of the conscription
movement, a fascinating example of the creed of the "therapy" of
"discipline" led by upper-class intellectuals and businessmen in
the J.P. Morgan ambit.[4] I shall
also have to omit both the highly significant trooping to the war
colors of the nation's preachers, and the wartime impetus toward
the permanent centralization of scientific research.[5]
There is no
better epigraph for the remainder of this paper than a congratulatory
note sent to President Wilson after the delivery of his war message
on April 2, 1917. The note was sent by Wilson's son-in-law and fellow
Southern pietist and progressive, Secretary of the Treasury William
Gibbs McAdoo, a man who had spent his entire life as an industrialist
in New York City, solidly in the J.P. Morgan ambit. McAdoo wrote
to Wilson: "You have done a great thing nobly! I firmly believe
that it is God's will that America should do this transcendent service
for humanity throughout the world and that you are His chosen instrument."[6]
It was not a sentiment with which the president could disagree.
World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals - II
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