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Illiberal Reformers:
Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era
Thomas C. Leonard
In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all.
Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximum-hours laws, workmen’s compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress.
Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America’s poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and "mental defectives," whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity.
Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them.
Thomas C. Leonard is research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University, where he is also lecturer in the Department of Economics.
"Mythologies that arise around individuals, groups, and ideas of the past tend to mask many warts. Thomas Leonard’s excellent book about American economics during the Progressive Era shows how progressives’ efforts to champion reform drew on a vision of scientific development that would institutionalize the eugenic creed and, in the process, do great violence to the liberal project that had been at the heart of the American system. Illiberal Reformers provides a powerful lesson in the tensions that surround ideals of social progress, scientific expertise, and the democratic system."--Steven G. Medema, University of Colorado, Denver
"Economists like to think of their ancestors as heroic seekers of truth, each generation, as Newton suggested, standing on the shoulders of the giants who came before. Thomas Leonard demonstrates clearly that the story of economics in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America was far more complex--and more interesting. He shows how the economists of that era combined their passion for social reform with religion, eugenics, and evolution theory in ways that seem incredible today. This book is an eye-opener."--Craufurd Goodwin, James B. Duke Professor of Economics Emeritus, Duke University
Acknowledgments vii
Prologue ix
Part I The Progressive Ascendancy
1 Redeeming American Economic Life 3
2 Turning Illiberal 17
3 Becoming Experts 27
4 Efficiency in Business and Public Administration 55
Part II The Progressive Paradox
5 Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get? 77
6 Darwinism in Economic Reform 89
7 Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform 109
8 Excluding the Unemployable 129
9 Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive 141
10 Excluding Women 169
Epilogue 187
Notes 193
Index 233
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