The 'Progressive' Legacy
by Thomas Sowell
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by Thomas Sowell: Getting
Nowhere, Very Fast
Although Barack
Obama is the first black President of the United States, he is by
no means unique, except for his complexion. He follows in the footsteps
of other presidents with a similar vision, the vision at the heart
of the Progressive movement that flourished a hundred years ago.
Many of the
trends, problems and disasters of our time are a legacy of that
era. We can only imagine how many future generations will be paying
the price – and not just in money – for the bright ideas and clever
rhetoric of our current administration.
The two giants
of the Progressive era – Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson –
clashed a century ago, in the three-way election of 1912. With the
Republican vote split between William Howard Taft and Theodore Roosevelt's
newly created Progressive Party, Woodrow Wilson was elected president,
so that the Democrats' version of Progressivism became dominant
for eight years.
What Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had in common, and what attracts some
of today's Republicans and Democrats, respectively, who claim to
be following in their footsteps, was a vision of an expanded role
of the federal government in the economy and a reduced role for
the Constitution of the United States.
Like other
Progressives, Theodore Roosevelt was a critic and foe of big business.
In this he was not inhibited by any knowledge of economics, and
his own business ventures lost money.
Rhetoric was
TR's strong suit. He denounced "the mighty industrial overlords"
and "the tyranny of mere wealth."
Just what specifically
this "tyranny" consisted of was not spelled out. This was indeed
an era of the rise of businesses to unprecedented size in industry
after industry – and of prices falling rapidly, as a result of economies
of scale that cut production costs and allowed larger profits to
be made from lower prices that attracted more customers.
It was easy
to stir up hysteria over a rapidly changing economic landscape and
the rise of new businessmen like John D. Rockefeller to wealth and
prominence. They were called "robber barons," but those who put
this label on them failed to specify just who they robbed.
Like other
Progressives, TR wanted an income tax to siphon off some of the
earnings of the rich. Since the Constitution of the United States
forbad such a tax, to the Progressives that simply meant that the
Constitution should be changed.
After the
16th Amendment was passed, a very low income-tax rate was levied,
as an entering wedge for rates that rapidly escalated up to 73 percent
on the highest incomes during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
One of the
criticisms of the Constitution by the Progressives, and one still
heard today, is that the Constitution is so hard to amend that judges
have to loosen its restrictions on the power of the federal government
by judicial reinterpretations. Judicial activism is one of the enduring
legacies of the Progressive era.
In reality,
the Constitution was amended four times in eight years during the
Progressive era. But facts carried no more weight with crusading
Progressives then than they do today.
Theodore Roosevelt
interpreted the Constitution to mean that the President of the United
States could exercise any powers not explicitly forbidden to him.
This stood the 10th Amendment on its head, for that Amendment explicitly
gave the federal government only the powers specifically spelled
out, and reserved all other powers to the states or to the people.
Woodrow Wilson
attacked the Constitution in his writings as an academic before
he became president. Once in power, his administration so restricted
freedom of speech that this led to landmark Supreme Court decisions
restoring that fundamental right.
Whatever the
vision or rhetoric of the Progressive era, its practice was a never-ending
expansion of the arbitrary powers of the federal government. The
problems they created so discredited Progressives that they started
calling themselves "liberals" – and after they discredited themselves
again, they went back to calling themselves "Progressives," now
that people no longer remembered how Progressives had discredited
themselves before.
Barack Obama's
rhetoric of "change" is in fact a restoration of discredited ideas
that originated a hundred years ago.
"Often wrong
but never in doubt" is a phrase that summarizes much of what was
done by Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, the two
giants of the Progressive era, a century ago.
Their legacy
is very much alive today, both in their mindset – including government
picking winners and losers in the economy and interventionism in
foreign countries – as well as specific institutions created during
the Progressive era, such as the income tax and the Federal Reserve
System.
Like so many
Progressives today, Theodore Roosevelt felt no need to study economics
before intervening in the economy. He said of "economic issues"
that "I am not deeply interested in them, my problems are moral
problems." For example, he found it "unfair" that railroads charged
different rates to different shippers, reaching the moral conclusion
that these rates were discriminatory and should be forbidden "in
every shape and form."
It never seemed
to occur to TR that there could be valid economic reasons for the
railroads to charge the Standard Oil Company lower rates for shipping
their oil. At a time when others shipped their oil in barrels, Standard
Oil shipped theirs in tank cars – which required a lot less work
by the railroads than loading and unloading the same amount of oil
in barrels.
Theodore Roosevelt
was also morally offended by the fact that Standard Oil created
"enormous fortunes" for its owners "at the expense of business rivals."
How a business can offer consumers lower prices without taking customers
away from businesses that charge higher prices is a mystery still
unsolved to the present day, when the very same arguments are used
against Wal-Mart.
The same preoccupation
with being "fair" to high-cost producers who were losing customers
to low-cost producers has turned anti-trust law on its head, for
generations after the Progressive era. Although anti-trust laws
and policies have been rationalized as ways of keeping monopolies
from raising prices to consumers, the actual thrust of anti-trust
activity has more often been against businesses that charged lower
prices than their competitors.
Theodore Roosevelt's
anti-trust attacks on low-price businesses in his time were echoed
in later "fair trade" laws, and in attacks against "unfair" competition
by the Federal Trade Commission, another agency spawned in the Progressive
era.
Woodrow Wilson's
Progressivism was very much in the same mindset. Government intervention
in the economy was justified on grounds that "society is the senior
partner in all business."
The rhetorical
transformation of government into "society" is a verbal sleight-of-hand
trick that endures to this day. So is the notion that money earned
in the form of profits requires politicians' benediction to be legitimate,
while money earned under other names apparently does not.
Thus Woodrow
Wilson declared: "If private profits are to be legitimized, private
fortunes made honorable, these great forces which play upon the
modern field must, both individually and collectively, be accommodated
to a common purpose."
And just who
will decide what this common purpose is and how it is to be achieved?
"Politics," according to Wilson, "has to deal with and harmonize"
these various forces.
In other words,
the government – politicians, bureaucrats and judges – are to intervene,
second-guess and pick winners and losers, in a complex economic
process of which they are often uninformed, if not misinformed,
and a process in which they pay no price for being wrong, regardless
of how high a price will be paid by the economy.
If this headstrong,
busybody approach seems familiar because it is similar to what is
happening today, that is because it is based on fundamentally the
same vision, the same presumptions of superior wisdom, and the same
kind of lofty rhetoric we hear today about "fairness." Wilson even
used the phrase "social justice."
Woodrow Wilson
also won a Nobel Prize for peace, like the current president – and
it was just as undeserved. Wilson's "war to end wars" in fact set
the stage for an even bigger, bloodier and more devastating Second
World War.
But, then as
now, those with noble-sounding rhetoric are seldom judged by what
consequences actually follow.
The same presumptions
of superior wisdom and virtue behind the interventionism of Progressive
Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson in the domestic
economy also led them to be interventionists in other countries.
Theodore Roosevelt
was so determined that the United States should intervene against
Spain's suppression of an uprising in Cuba that he quit his post
as Assistant Secretary of the Navy to organize his own private military
force – called "Rough Riders" – to fight in what became the Spanish-American
war.
The spark that
set off this war was an explosion that destroyed an American battleship
anchored in Havana harbor. There was no proof that Spain had anything
to do with it, and a study decades later suggested that the explosion
originated inside the ship itself.
But Roosevelt
and others were hot for intervention before the explosion, which
simply gave them the excuse they needed to go to war against Spain,
seizing Puerto Rico and the Philippines.
Although it
was a Republican administration that did this, Democrat Woodrow
Wilson justified it. Progressive principles of imposing superior
wisdom and virtue on others were invoked.
Wilson saw
the indigenous peoples brought under American control as beneficiaries
of progress. He said, "they are children and we are men in these
deep matters of government and justice."
If that sounds
racist, it is perfectly consistent with President Wilson's policies
at home. The Wilson administration introduced racial segregation
in Washington government agencies where it did not exist when Wilson
took office.
Woodrow Wilson
also invited various dignitaries to the White House to watch a showing
of the film The
Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan – and
which Wilson praised.
All of this
was consistent with the Progressive era in general, when supposedly
"scientific" theories of racial superiority and inferiority were
at their zenith. Theodore Roosevelt was the exception, rather than
the rule, among Progressives when he did not agree with these theories.
Consistent
with President Wilson's belief in racial superiority as a basis
for intervening in other countries, he launched military interventions
in various Latin American countries, before his intervention in
the First World War.
Woodrow Wilson
was also a precursor of later Progressives in assuming that the
overthrow of an autocratic and despotic government means an advance
toward democracy. In 1917, President Wilson spoke of "heartening
things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia."
What was "heartening"
to Wilson was the overthrow of the czars. What it led to in fact
was the rise of a totalitarian tyranny that killed more political
prisoners in a year than the czars had killed in more than 90 years.
Although Wilson
proclaimed that the First World War was being fought because "The
world must be made safe for democracy," in reality the overthrow
of autocratic rule in Germany and Italy also led to totalitarian
regimes that were far worse. Those today who assume that the overthrow
of authoritarian governments in Egypt and Libya is a movement toward
democracy are following in Wilson's footsteps.
The
ultimate hubris of Woodrow Wilson was in promoting the carving up
of whole empires after the First World War, in the name of "the
self-determination of peoples." But, in reality, it was not the
peoples who did the carving but Wilson, French Premier Georges Clemenceau
and British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Walter Lippmann saw
what a reckless undertaking this was. He said, "We are feeding on
maps, talking of populations as if they were abstract lumps." He
was struck by the ignorance of those who were reshaping whole nations
and the lives of millions of people.
He said of
this nation-building effort: "When you consider what a mystery the
East Side of New York is to the West Side, the business of arranging
the world to the satisfaction of the people in it may be seen in
something like its true proportions."
But Progressives,
especially intellectuals, are the least likely to suspect that they
are in fact ignorant of the things they are intervening in, whether
back in the Progressive era or today.
February
16, 2012
Thomas
Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford
University. His Web site is www.tsowell.com.
To find out more about Thomas Sowell and read features by other
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