Editor's Comment: This is a long, 45-page read, and I don't endorse everything in it, but I learned an awful lot of things in it about the war that I've never seen addressed elsewhere. MH
Originally Published: Journal of Libertarian Studies 9, No. 1 (1989)
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| Professor Rothbard |
Big business would be able to use the government to cartelize the economy, restrict competition, and regulate production and prices, and also to be able to wield a militaristic and imperialist foreign policy to force open markets abroad and apply the sword of the State to protect foreign investments. Intellectuals would be able to use the government to restrict entry into their professions and to assume jobs in Big Government to apologize for, and to help plan and staff, government operations. Both groups also believed that, in this fusion, the Big State could be used to harmonize and interpret the "national interest" and thereby provide a "middle way" between the extremes of "dog-eat-dog" laissez faire and the bitter conflicts of proletarian Marxism.
Also animating both groups of progressives was a post-millennia 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 ad 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 intellectual. 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."' Most of these intellectuals, of whatever strand or occupation, were either dedicated, messianic post-millennial 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 ad 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.
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| The Big Moment: Wilson Asks for War |
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." It was not a sentiment with which the president could disagree.
Download the full article (pdf) HERE
Another attempt to make sense of the chaotic U.S. political, economic, and social forces at work in the world, before, during, and after WW1, and attribute it to "progressivism in American life." While much of it may be true or at least partially true, the idea that there was some organized and centralized movement at work, smacks of conspiratorial thinking. And conspiratorial thinking, by its very nature, attempts to create a unified alternative to conventional thinking, an alternative which is often way out in the stars somewhere.
ReplyDeleteA little about Professor Rothbard:
ReplyDeleteMurray Newton Rothbard March 2, 1926 – January 7, 1995) was an American heterodox economist of the Austrian School, historian, and a political theorist whose writings and personal influence played a seminal role in the development of modern right-libertarianism. Rothbard was the founder and leading theoretician of anarcho-capitalism, a staunch advocate of historical revisionism and a central figure in the 20th-century American libertarian movement. He wrote over twenty books on political theory, revisionist history, economics and other subjects.