Progressive's History

NOT JUST WOODROW WILSON: Pretty much everything Donald Trump says was said in more stately and respectable prose by early-20th-century academics. My latest Bloomberg View column draws on the forthcoming intellectual history Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era (plus a host of pre-1923 sources easily available through Google Books):

Early 20th-century progressives transformed American institutions, and the movement’s premises continue to inform thinking and policy across the political spectrum. “It was the progressives who fashioned the new sciences of society, founded the modern American university, invented the think tank, and created the American administrative state, institutions still defined by the progressive values that formed and instructed them,” writes Leonard, a research scholar at Princeton’s Council of the Humanities.
The progressives believed, first and foremost, in the importance of science and scientific experts in guiding the economy, government, and society. Against the selfishness, disorder, corruption, ignorance, conflict and wastefulness of free markets or mass democracy, they advanced the ideal of disinterested, public-spirited social control by well-educated elites. The progressives were technocrats who, Leonard observes, “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.
Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroad regulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and “cephalic index,” or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics — and supposed natural inferiority — of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants. (Present-day progressives somehow didn’t highlight this heritage when they were defending “the Wisconsin Idea” against the depredations of Republican Governor Scott Walker.)

The University of Wisconsin has a lot to be embarrassed about. At least The Donald doesn’t talk about “race suicide.” Read the rest of the column here.

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