The Master Race: Racialist Legacies of Progressivism

0:00I'm looking at the progressive era and the whole racial atmosphere that they created. By the way, I have a co-author, David Kiriatsis, who's our department chair at Frostberg State. He's from Detroit, and as you can see, if you want to talk about affirmative action, you can see Detroit. And I think you will understand that things can get very, very interesting. A lot of historians have looked at the progressives. If you read the progressives, if you know the things that they said, you know that these guys were just out and out, hardcore racists. I mean, they said things, it was very polite to say things back then that you would lose your job for today, or worse, and how historians treated them. Historians have admitted these people are racist, but it was a blind spot, because after all, they were giving us great economic reforms.

0:57They were for the consumer, they were for the worker, they were for goodness and everything else. And so the racism that accompanied the progressive era and the whole progressive movement was seen as just kind of a blind spot, something that grew up as a natural extension from the post-Civil War South. All right. In other words, that you had these feelings already, and it just sort of like grew like a slow movement, and finally by the 1890s, it just got worse and worse, and in around 1900, late 1800s, 1900 around there, now we start going into what we call Jim Crow.

1:42Well, here's an interesting editorial that, and I don't have time, it was, the news and courier in 1898 argued against the passage of a law in South Carolina to segregate rail cars. And their reasoning was this, you know, if we could do this, yeah, why don't we just, hey, why don't we have Jim Crow Bibles? Yeah, that's it. And they start, why don't we have Jim Crow Waiting Rooms, and bathrooms, and Jim Crow Water Place, and they went on, it was a reducio ad absurdum argument, and at the end of the decade, you had all those things, including the Jim Crow Bibles to kiss, for witnesses testifying in court. As they said, we've got along fairly well for a third of a century, including a long period of construction, we'll probably get on as well hereafter.

2:34and certainly not so extreme a measure should not be adopted in force without added and urgent cause. And at the time, it wasn't seen as any kind of added or urgent cause. Now, here's an interesting thing. I found a quote, you know, that turned out that Nathan Bedford Forrest, who of course is always vilified as the apostle of the worst kind of racism because he was the original, or one of the original founders of the Ku Klux Klan in 1868. If you read that, and I don't feel like I need to read the whole thing and take up all this time, but nonetheless, that you can see from there, this is not exactly a speech that is there to incite racial hatreds. What is he saying?

3:19You know, that, you know, do whatever you want, vote, you know, we're having, you know, enfranchisement. He wasn't talking about not letting them vote. He says that, I came to meet you as friends and welcome you to the white people. I want you to come near to us. And we made different in color but not in sentiment, and on and on, and so, and when you are oppressed, I'll come to your relief. Now, again, this, if you read the usual stuff, of course, in the New York Times about Nathan Bedford Forrest, that never quite makes it. It doesn't fit the Times paradigm, and as you know, the New York Times will go to great lengths to push their own paradigm even if the facts don't jive.

4:10Alright, now, let's look at the progressives, okay, this is Irving Fisher, alright, one of the most important US economists, alright, and now he was talking about the immigration but then he goes on, you know, that the core of immigration is one of race and eugenics, the problem of the Anglo-Saxon racial stock being overwhelmed by racially inferior defectives, and Delinquents and Dependents, and on and on. In fact, a number of progressives were very much into eugenics, including Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. What she wanted to do was have birth control to, quote, eliminate the entire Negro race. And she said, we need to get the black pastors to help us do this. And I don't have her in Edward A. Ross, yet another one of the founders of the American Economics Association The theory that the races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lying in the valleys of the south with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the condition of four million unpicked blacks.

5:33Frank Fetter, yes. In fact, in the very book that Jeff had talked about yesterday, he also has that the benefits of social progress are being neutralized by race degeneration owing to the suspension of the selective process. In other words, we've got to have eugenics. All right, now why do I bring this in? Because these are prominent people. These are not rednecks. These are not, you know, good old boy with the University of Alabama cap on Let's look at perhaps the most glorified of all progressives, and that's President Woodrow Wilson.

6:23Woodrow Wilson not only hated the Constitution, but in fact, when he came into office, it was announced Negroes should be expected to be treated as a servile race and then they had it was Wilson that really, really brought Jim Crow to the federal government in a way that nobody else had done before. And furthermore, the Congress, the Congress from 1913 to 1915, the same Congress that gives us of course all of these other wonderful things including the Federal Reserve that from 1913 to 1915, that Congress put through more racially discriminatory laws than any other Congress in the history of this country.

7:09And you look at some of the things that were done, these folks, let me tell you that these guys probably would have made Bull Connor look like a liberal. And of course we know that during that time lynching, it's very interesting because lynching goes from sort of a way to deal with different people, in fact more whites than blacks were lynched in the South long after the Civil War, but then getting to the progressive era, it starts to change. Now, you've got, of course, the Jim Crow laws that these were taken from later, but you've got that from Durham, North Carolina, a bus station there, the drinking, well, the old drinking place, that would have been at the workplace, but you had all of the, you know, this was an apartheid system, alright?

8:14Now, the theme of my paper though is not simply about what these guys believe because we already know this. I mean, I'm not telling people things that they didn't know about already. The people understand this, but what I want to do and what we do in this paper is we take on this whole blind spot thing because what we say is that the progressives had method to their madness, to their blindness, whatever, that the progressives actually did this on purpose because this was part and parcel to their economic reforms. Keep in mind, when I say reforms, I use that word very, very lightly. Now, so do we laud the reforms but condemn the racism? Okay. Now, what we're doing is really coming up with an alternative Theory.

9:14What is it that's going on progressivism? We hear all sorts of praise. Those progressives, they gave us occupational licensing and credentialing. That was one of the things with the Rockefellers. They were great believers in credentialing. We have the rise of John Dewey. You have the rise of professional classes that you have to go to certain kinds of school to go there. We really start quote professionalizing things and also using the law as a means to select who is going to go into certain kinds of occupations. That was really not the case in the United States before the progressive era. So we're talking about individual workers, but we're also talking about the kinds of regulation we see from antitrust regulation and I think the economists in this room who The Interstate Commerce Act and the regulation of the railroads and later trucking and airlines and all these things that came out of progressivism, what were they doing, all right?

10:31To most of the intelligentsia, they were reforming. To an economist, they're creating economic rents. Let me go back. What they're doing is they're dividing, creating economic rents that are now being enforced, not by entrepreneurship in the market. In other words, that if somebody has a rent, and entrepreneurs can take advantage, they can see those rents, and they can, you can try to move into that area, but with progressivism, people had economic rents that were protected by the state, whether it's through licensing, through regulation, and the like, and so, and in fact, one of the things and the things that Roderick had made a point that I don't have this up here that we need to point out that also the businessmen of the progressive era, the Andrew Carnegie's and the Henry Clay Fricks and others, ended up buying into progressivism, alright, the great entrepreneurs ended up getting into this whole we're captains of industry and that there's some sort of special dispensation. And so, you know, the whole country gets taken over by this stuff, unfortunately.

11:57And so what happens is this, that political rents have to be distributed politically. You don't have economic competition for political rents. It doesn't work that way. The political classes never allow that. You have to go at it in a different way. And so what happens when you create these rents, what are you doing? You are shrinking the economy. You really are. There's no way that you can put these added burdens upon economic activity and have more economic activity. I mean, anybody who thinks that should embrace Obamacare. So what happens is that now that you're causing things to shrink, you now set up a system of competition.

12:46What do we mean? A system of competition with political rents where you have winners and you have losers. Who's going to be the winner? Who's going to be the loser? How do you do this? How do you do these things? Jim Crow laws not only kept blacks out of occupations, which it previously worked. Now what happened, look at the propaganda coming out there. Oh, well, they're feeble-minded. Well, you know, they weren't so feeble-minded when they were doing this work before. But also, look at what happened. You have widespread disenfranchisement, okay? Because what happens in these systems where you have political spoils. What you were talking about before, that what Stalin was doing was creating political spoils. You've got to have a mechanism for being able to distribute these. How do you do it? Well, with the blacks, the idea was this, get them out of the picture. Push them out of the way, make them do menial work.

13:43You'll love this. I can't remember if I have it up here if I do. Let me give you an Minimum wage. What were the progressives saying about the minimum wage? When told that it's going to knock some people out of the labor market, it's going to price people out of the market, they said, good! These are feeble-minded people, they really shouldn't be in the workplace anyway, they shouldn't be allowed to be around here, and so this is a really good thing. If we can just impose this minimum wage, we can This is an administrative view of an entire economy. It's the idea that we can have some sort of state control, divide everybody up into different groups and call it progress.

14:34And so, in my, you know, that we do conclude that these Jim Crow laws, these were not blind spots. What they were, were nothing more than cold-blooded attempts, basically, to make these economic reforms work. How do you make them work? Well, you shut people out, you make sure that people cannot participate in the workplace, and you give yourself some sort of grandiose rhetoric about the whole thing and you call it progressivism. Thank you.