Transcript Excluding - Princeton University

EXCLUDING INFERIOR WORKERS:
EUGENIC INFLUENCES ON ECONOMIC
REFORM IN THE PROGRESSIVE ERA
TIM LEONARD
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0. The progressive economists
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During the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, professional social science, the American
research university, and the American welfare state all grew up together, of common
origins.
All three institutions were founded or influenced by a pioneering band of progressive
American economists, who made the case that administrative government should
intervene broadly in voluntary commercial relationships.
But progressive economic reform, influential as it proved to be, was not that
progressive.
The men and women who made American economics into an academic, policy
discipline, and who built the foundations of the American welfare state, were also
partisans of human inequality, heirs to the American tradition of race thinking, and
their justification for economic reform was deeply informed by evolutionary science,
especially by the Progressive Era vogue for eugenics, the social control of human
heredity.
The conflict between progressivisms' contradictory goals – social uplift and social
control – shaped the economic reform so characteristic of the Progressive Era.
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The central debates – working poverty, immigration and the relation of women to market work – remain vital and
contentious today.
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I. Setting the Stage: Industrial Revolution
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The United States became a modern, urban, industrial and multicultural world
power between 1890 and 1920.
INDUSTRIALIZATION: Following the Civil War, the United States industrialized on a
revolutionary scale
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NATIONALIZATION
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railroad and telegraph networks both measured and fostered the new national scope of American
markets.
From “island communities” to mass society
URBANIZATION: The transformation from an agricultural to an industrial economy
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“the most profound and rapid alteration in the material conditions of life that human society has
ever experienced” (Haskell 1977: 1).
1870-1913: Real GDP (1990$): 98 B to 517 B;
Farm to factory; explosive growth in American cities.
About half the work force in agriculture in 1880; about one-quarter in 1920
IMMIGRATION
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By 1910, twenty-two percent of the U.S. labor force was foreign-born, and fully one-third of the
population was foreign-born or had at least one foreign-born parent.
60 percent of Chicagoans in 1889 were foreign-born.
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I. Setting the Stage: Industrial Revolution (2)
• Unionization: Coincident with industrialization,
nationalization, urbanization, and immigration were the
rise of labor unions: 1880-1886: 50,000 to 1,000,000.
• The 1890s consolidation of industry into pools and trusts –
oil, railroads, steel, tobacco
• The concentration of labor and capital intensified recurrent
and sometimes violent labor conflict, for which names like
Haymarket, Homestead, and Pullman still serve as
synecdoches
• Business cycle volatility: Prolonged economic depression in
1890s – unemployment exceeds 18%.
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I. Setting the Stage: Industrial Revolution (3)
• Those who lived through the time recognized its revolutionary aspects.
• E.R.A. Seligman’s 1902 Presidential address to the American Economic
Association, “Economics and Social Progress,” said that
industrialization promised an almost “limitless increase in production,”
enough that “the history of the world in the future would be so
different from the past.”
• Simon Patten, a leading progressive economist at Pennsylvania’s
Wharton School, saw in industrialization the rise of a new age of
material abundance, so unprecedented as to form “a new basis for
civilization,” and to make earlier forms of political economy, with their
emphasis on scarcity and Malthusian inevitability, obsolete.
• “One can hardly believe,” John Dewey marveled in 1899, “there has
been a revolution in all history so rapid, so extensive, so complete”.
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II. The Progressive Response: The Age of Reform
• An unprecedented outpouring of reform projects, private and
public, undertaken in response to industrialization’s
transformative changes in American economic, social, and
political life.
• Progressive Era reform reached into nearly all aspects of
American life.
• Familiar causes: anti-saloon leaguers, women suffragists,
muckraking journalists, social Gospelers, birth controllers,
trust busters, social surveyors, charity reformers, settlement
house workers, peace activists, city beautifiers, factory
inspectors, social purifiers, child-welfare advocates, and
conservationists.
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II. The Progressive Response: The Age of Reform (2)
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The diversity and sheer scope of American reform meant that progressive
organizations and constituencies would frequently find their respective reform
goals incompatible.
– W.E.B. Du Bois and Woodrow Wilson, for example, were both progressives,
but held entirely opposed views of the proper role of whites and blacks in
American life.
– Progressive economist Richard T. Ely beat the drums for American entry into
the First World War, while his former Wisconsin progressive ally, Robert
LaFollette, opposed it.
– Theodore Roosevelt, exemplary progressive, preferred to regulate the trusts,
while Louis Brandeis, “the people’s lawyer,” wanted to break them up.
– Social scientists John R. Commons and Edward A. Ross preached against the
evils of drink, while John Dewey thought that reformers had more important
things to worry about than “booze.”
The result was a pattern of conflict and cooperation that led to shifting political
alliances, and to a reputation for fractiousness. “The friends of progress,”
Benjamin P. DeWitt lamented as early as 1915, “are frequently the enemies of
each other.”
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II. The Progressive Response: The Age of Reform (3)
• The heterogeneity of historical interpretation has led some
historians to despair of identifying a coherent set of ideas
that can be gathered under the rubric of “progressivism”
(Filene 1970).
• But Progressive-Era historiography, for all the diversity it
unavoidably (and rightly) reflects, does evince important
narrative and intellectual commonalities, no more so than
with respect to economic reform.
– Economic reform, perhaps more than any other major tributary
of American progressivism, unified progressives.
– And though, like progressivism more generally, economic
reform cannot be reduced to a single creed, it is possible to
recover a real intellectual coherence in the foundational ideas of
the Progressive Era economists, and their fellow progressives.
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III. Who were the progressive economists?
• The first generation of American economic progressives was born largely
between the mid-1850s and 1870.
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Nearly all came from New England families of Puritan background. Their
families typically were Republican and Unionist.
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Unlike the Generation of 1840, men such as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Lester
Frank Ward, and William Graham Sumner, the progressives were too young to
have served in the Civil War.
– They grew up revering the martyred president, Abraham Lincoln
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The cadre of reform economists that founded the American Economic
Association in 1885 was a youthful one.
– RICHARD T. ELY (b. 1854), the prime mover behind the Association’s founding, was
thirty-one years old at the time. WOODROW WILSON (b. 1856) was twenty-eight,
EDWARD W. BEMIS (b. 1860) was twenty-five, and EDWIN R.A. SELIGMAN (b. 1861)
was twenty-four. Among the senior charter members, such as Henry Carter
Adams (b. 1851) and Simon Patten (b. 1852), John Bates Clark (b. 1847) was, at
thirty-eight, the grand old man. The elder statesman selected for the first AEA
presidency, Francis Amasa Walker (b. 1840), was then forty-five.
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American Economic Association (1885) Founders
Richard T. Ely
(1854-1943)
Frank Fetter, J.B. Clark
(1847-1938)
Francis Amasa Walker
(1840-1897)
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American Economic Association (1885) Founders
John R. Commons
(1862-1945)
Henry Carter Adams
(1851-1921)
T. Woodrow Wilson
(1856-1924)
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American Economic Association (1885) Founders
Simon N. Patten
(1852-1922)
E.R.A. Seligman
(1861-1939)
Edmund J. James
(1855-1925)
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III. Who were the progressive economists?(2)
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A key formative experience of the AEA’s core group – graduate education in
Germany.
– Bismarkian Germany gave the young Americans exposure to the ideas of the
German Historical School, with its positive view of state economic
intervention, and its hostility to the idea of natural economic laws, what it
disparaged as “English” economics.
Their German university professors, men like Adolph Wagner, Johannes Conrad
and Gustav Schmoller were, moreover, accorded respect and authority and they
were consulted on important matters of national economic policy.
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The example of their German professors permitted the young American graduate students to
imagine careers as yet non-existent in the United States – academic advocates with expert influence
upon economic policy.
The young American economists’ experience in Germany gave shape and
direction, however, to a reform impulse already strong in them.
– The progressive economists’ desire to set the world to rights was powered by
a quintessentially American phenomenon, an evangelical Protestant reform
movement known as social Christianity, or the social Gospel.
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III. Who were the progressive economists?(3)
• The Social Gospel describes a late 19th-century and early 20thcentury form of evangelical Protestantism that sought
progressive economic and social improvement via a religiously
motivated and scientifically informed project of social
redemption.
• The Social Gospel was erected upon a version of Protestant postmillennialism, the Christian doctrine that prophesizes that a
Kingdom of God – reigning for one thousand years of peace and
love – would be realized on Earth by the good works of Christian
men and women.
• The post-millennial substitution of the spirit of Christ for Christ
himself as the agency of redemption helped make the Social
Gospel especially congruent with the more rationalistic aspects
of Progressive reform.
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III. Who were the progressive economists?(4)
• 23 Protestant clergymen among the 55 charter AEA members who
signed on in Saratoga in 1885
– Thirteen of them prominent leaders of the Social Gospel movement, among
them Washington Gladden, Lyman Abbott, R. Heber Newton and Newman
Smyth.
– Ely retailed the AEA economists as belonging to the “Christian School
of Political Economy.”
• Most of the association’s leading co-founders – Henry Carter
Adams, Edward Bemis, John Bates Clark, Edmund J. James, Simon
Patten – were, like Ely, not just economic reformers, but also Social
Gospelers.
– who “valued moral conscience in social and political as well as
personal life,” and who “demanded of themselves and their
countrymen moral purity and social renewal” (D. Ross).
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IV. The progressive doctrine: Social control
• The progressive economists belonged to a broad group of
American intellectuals and activists who promoted the idea
of using a powerful, centralized state, led by a vanguard of
expert social scientists, to reform markets and society in
the name of advancing a social welfarist vision of the
nation’s good.
– Early on: “Christian Commonwealth”
• Their ends were plural, but the progressives were broadly
agreed on the best means to those ends – social control, or,
reform through “organization, the application of scientific
expertise, and the value of efficiency and rationality.”
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IV. The progressive doctrine: Social control (2)
• The reform economists, like most progressives, placed a special
faith in administrative government as the ideal organizational
vehicle for economic reform.
• “Social control” captures the extraordinary progressive faith in the
power of scientifically trained experts to beneficially direct the
course of human events, that is, to produce progress.
• The key assumption behind social control was that private and
social interests were fundamentally at odds, so that when private
behavior was excessive or destructive or deviant, it had to be
controlled by society or government.
– E.A. Ross Social Control: Survey of the Foundations of Order, first
published in 1901, was in print until 1932.
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IV. The progressive doctrine: Social control (3)
• The late 19th-century progressive embrace of social-control doctrine
thus represented a decisive intellectual break with classically liberal
thought, in two ways.
• (1) Most fundamentally, it reconceived how economic and social
progress was obtained.
– No longer was progress seen as a gradual, evolutionary process arising
naturally as the byproduct of voluntary exchange.
– Instead, reformers argued, progress would need to be planned and
continuously directed – the new guarantor of economic progress
would be the visible hand of expert-guided government.
• (2) American progressives were profoundly, almost naively,
optimistic about the efficacy of reform, and the scope for its
application: reform could improve education, medicine, family life,
government, the economy, even humanity itself – everything, as
Jane Addams said, was amenable to improvement.
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IV. The progressive doctrine: Social control (4)
• The classically liberal idea that economic progress could be
obtained as the natural byproduct of voluntary exchange, was
dismissed by economic reformers as so much laissez-faire
dogma.
• Free market economics: a quaint doctrine perhaps suitable for
Adam Smith’s day, but made obsolete by the new era of
American industrial capitalism, which featured not only new
organizational forms – trusts, natural monopolies and mass
labor unions – but a rapidly increasing economic and social
interdependence wrought by the furious pace of growthinduced specialization
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IV. The progressive doctrine: Social control (5)
• How much government should interfere, and in what fashion, were
questions that gave rise to vigorous debate.
• But nearly all progressives ultimately accepted the two-fold justification
for greater social control of the economy.
• First, American economic life in the Gilded Age, most saliently in the form
of labor conflict, (1) created social disorder, (2) operated with enormous
waste, and (3) distributed its fruits unfairly and unequally.
• Second, given the unprecedented complexity and volatility of economic
life driven by industrial capitalism, markets, to the extent they ever could,
could no longer self-regulate.
• Thus, the only way to remedy the disorder, inefficiency and unfairness of
American economic life was by greater social control: government must
interfere more, government must interfere guided or directed by
economic experts, and government must interfere, first and foremost, in
labor relations.
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IV. Intellectual foundations of social control
1)
the progressives believed in a powerful, national state, conceiving of administrative
government as the best means for promoting the social good and rejecting the
individualism of (classical) liberalism;
2)
the progressives venerated social efficiency almost to the point of identifying progress
with greater efficiency;
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cult of efficiency (measurement and statistics); Social Survey
3)
the progressives believed in the epistemic and moral authority of science
 biology could explain and control human inheritance
 economics could explain and control the root causes of economic ills;
4)
the progressives believed that intellectuals should guide social and economic
progress,
• a faith the disinterestedness and incorruptibility of scientific experts
• a faith that expertise could not only serve the social good, but also identify it;
5)
While anti-monopoly, pro-Big Business (consistent with their faith in planning,
organization and command), at least Big Business properly managed
• the progressives believed that industrial consolidation was inevitable, and (mostly)
desirable,
• Fred Winslow Taylor and scientific management
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IV. Intellectual foundations of social control (2)
• Economic progressivism was not some inevitable
democratic (or populist) upwelling of the people versus
the moneyed and powerful interests (D. Kennedy)
• It was the purposeful and successful effort of ambitious
middle class professionals and scientific experts to
bring system and rationality to a society suffering from
the evils (even if democratic evils) of disorder,
inefficiency and injustice (ibid).
• The progressives didn’t deliver govt. to Labor, but
neither did they deliver it to Capital. They delivered
govt. to themselves. (D. Ross)
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IV. Social Control in practice: Bringing in the state
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By the outbreak of the first World War in 1914, the U.S. government had
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created the Federal Reserve Banking system,
amended the Constitution to institute a graduated personal income tax,
established the Federal Trade Commission,
applied anti-trust laws to industrial combinations,
exempted (with the Clayton Act) labor unions from anti-trust prosecution,
restricted immigration,
regulated food and drug safety,
conserved federal lands,
established a Children’s Bureau,
supervised railroad rates, and outlawed railroad price discrimination.
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During the First World War, the War Industries Board introduced Americans to business
planning methods applied by the government to entire economy
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it coordinated most government purchasing, determined the allocation of resources,
established priorities in output, restricted the alcohol trade, and fixed prices on commodities
in over 60 industries, not all of them military-related (Fogel 2000).
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The War also enabled a permanent increase in federal income taxes and their progressivity
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Federal government expenditures, under $1 billion before the war, jumped to $12.7 billion in 1918.
In 1920, federal spending fell, but remained six times its pre-war level.
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IV. Social Control in practice: Bringing in the state (2)
• State governments, where the labor reform impulse was
stronger still
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regulated working conditions
inspected factories
banned child labor
compelled education for children
mandated workmen’s compensation
instituted “mothers’ pensions” (payments to single mothers with
dependent children)
capped working hours
set minimum wages
taxed inheritances
adopted antitrust statutes before the federal government
and banned corporate donations to political campaigns.
• Local governments municipalized streetcar companies and gas
and water utilities.
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V. Eugenics in the Progressive Era
• A new name for an old idea.
• A movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human
breeding, premised on the assumption that differences in human
intelligence, character and temperament are largely due to differences in
heredity (Paul, 2001).
– negative eugenics: check the birthrate of the “unfit”
– positive eugenics: promote the birthrate of the “fit”
• The important human traits are heritable, and improvable for social ends.
• Francis Galton (Victorian and half-cousin to Darwin): eugenics is the social
program that aims “to replace natural selection by other processes that
are more merciful and not less effective.”
• Galton (1869) Hereditary Genius; (1883) Inquiries into Human Faculty and
its Development;
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V. Eugenics in the Progressive Era (2)
• Eugenics is related to racial science
• Progressive Era usage of “race” often meant ethnicity or nationality
– e.g., the Anglo-Saxon race, the Irish race, the Italian race, the Hebrew race
• Racial science begins with the view that human racial differences are real,
significant, scientifically measurable, and heritable.
– Scientific racism is racial science premised on racial hierarchy—the idea that different
races can be ranked by innate fitness
• The most influential racial taxonomy of the day, The Races of Europe, was
written by William Z. Ripley (1899), an economist, AEA president
– Measured heads (cephalic index), physiognomy, hair color,
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Wm. Z. Ripley: Races of Europe (1899)
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Wm. Z. Ripley: Races of Europe (1899)
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Wm. Z. Ripley: Races of Europe (1899)
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V. Popularity of eugenics
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Dirty-word problem
In 1933, Paul Popenoe boasted that eugenic sterilization laws obtained in jurisdictions
comprising 150 million people (Kevles, 1995, p. 115).
Eugenic ideas were influential in nearly all non-Catholic western countries and in many
others besides.
– Canada (McLaren, 1990), France (Schneider, 1990), Japan (Suzuki, 1975), Russia (Adams,
1990), Scandinavian countries (Broberg and Roll-Hansen, 1996), Romania (Bucur, 2002),
Latin America (Stepan, 1991) and China (Dikotter, 1992)
American eugenic science, before the 1930s, was, especially among elites, popular and
respectable, signaled high-mindedness, and possessed real scientific authority.
It was also supported by leading figures in the newly emerging science of genetics; defections
begin only in the late 1920s
– Thomas Hunt Morgan (Nobel in Medicine 1933); Raymond Pearl
In 1928, 376 US college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics
Searchlights on Health, the Science of Eugenics, sold one million copies in the first two years
of its publication
The American Eugenics Society, co-founded by Irving Fisher to educate Americans on the
virtues of eugenics, set up instructional pavilions and staged “fitter family” competitions at
state agricultural fairs.
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V. Popularity of eugenics (2)
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Scopes “Monkey” Trial: Hunter's Civic Biology (1914), pp. 261-265.
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“Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those
described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all
parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as
certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these
families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by
corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and
cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse
and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return.
They are true parasites.
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The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill
them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we
do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in
various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating
such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried
successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this
country.”
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V. Eugenics and Darwinism
• Eugenics, social selection of the fittest, was clearly connected to the theory
of evolution by natural selection.
– Darwin, after all, began the Origin of Species explaining natural
selection by analogy to artificial selection: nature selects, Darwin
suggested, as does a breeder of dogs or pigeons.
• But eugenics also departed from Darwinism in several ways important for
progressivism.
– Eugenics was premised on the idea that evolution by natural selection
was too wasteful, too gradual, and too indifferent to progress.
– Human direction of evolution would (1) reduce waste, (2) improve
heredity at a faster rate, and (3) ensure that evolutionary change was
not left to blind chance, but was made progressive.
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V. Eugenics and Darwinism (2)
• Who shall select the fittest: nature, women or experts?
– There was little disagreement between conservatives and progressives on the value of
selection, and its importance for the biological fitness of the human species.
• The disagreement concerned how, and to what extent, humankind had a
role in superintending its own evolution.
– Some proponents of laissez-faire argued that the best way to improve
the race was by Spencerian bootstrapping, competition would induce
individuals to purposefully improve their minds and bodies.
– Wallace, and proto-feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman, argued that
best mechanism would be female selection. Improve the economic
status of women, and they will choose fitter husbands.
– The mainline eugenicists, for their part, wanted government experts to
select the fittest.
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VI. The Unfit As “Unemployable”
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The unemployable were those workers who, owing to putative hereditary debility, earned
less than what American reformers called a “living wage.”
– Reformers understood the difference between actual wages and living wages as
entailing a shortfall that must be met by charity, by the state, or by other members of
the worker’s household. By this logic, reformers called firms that paid workers less than
living wages “parasites,” an epithet also attached to workers who received such wages.
Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, to pick an influential example, classified as
unemployable
– children, the aged, and the child-bearing women[,] . . . the sick and the crippled, the
idiots and lunatics, the epileptic, the blind and the deaf and dumb, the criminals and the
incorrigibly idle, and all who are actually “morally deficient” . . . and [those] incapable of
steady or continuous application, or who are so deficient in strength, speed, or skill that
they are incapable . . . of producing their maintenance at any occupation whatsoever.
Progressive Era reform economists argued that a worker’s standard of living, not his
productivity, determined market wages.
Making wages a function of living standards opened the door to the eugenic claim that
immigrant groups were hereditarily predisposed to low standards of living.
Economist-turned-sociologist Edward A. Ross, for example, argued that “the coolie, though
he cannot outdo the American, can underlive him.” “Native” workers were more productive,
claimed Ross, but because Chinese immigrants were racially disposed to work for lower
wages, they displaced the “native” workers, the Anglo-Saxon race disposed to “American”
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wages.
VI. The Unfit As “Unemployable”(2)
• In Races and Immigrants, John R. Commons argued that “[t]he Jewish
sweatshop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race.”
•
For Commons, when inferior races were allowed to work, their economic
competition not only lowered wages, it also biologically selected for the
unfit races.
– “[C]ompetition has no respect for superior races,” said Commons; “[t]he race
with lowest necessities displaces others.”
• Because race, not productivity, determined living standards, Commons
could populate his low-wage-races category with the industrious and lazy
alike. African Americans, he said, were “indolent and fickle,” which
explained why slavery was defensible, even necessary: “The negro could
not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a
free man . . . . [I]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is
second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some
form of compulsion.”
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VI. The Unfit As “Unemployable”(3)
• Few groups escaped the reformers’ low-wage-race indictment.
Labor leader Eugene Debs said in 1891 of Italian immigrant workers,
“‘The Dago . . . lives far more like a savage or a wild be[a]st than the
Chinese’ and therefore can ‘underbid the American workingman.’”
•
Wharton School reformer Scott Nearing volunteered that if “[a]n
employer has a Scotchman working for him at $3 a day [and] [a]n
equally efficient Lithuanian offers to do the same work for $2 . . .
the work is given to the lowest bidder.”
• Paul Kellogg, editor of The Survey, one of the most influential
organs of progressive ideas, defended legislation “to exclude
[Angelo] Lucca and [Alexis] Spivak and other ‘greeners’ from our
congregate industries, which beckon to them now.”
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VI. The Unfit As “Unemployable”(4)
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The low-wage races threatened American wages and employment, and their
putatively greater fertility also threatened the health and viability of the AngloSaxon race.
The latter claim was known as “race suicide,” a Progressive Era catchphrase for the
idea that persons of inferior stock outbreed their biological betters. Races
compete, argued race-suicide theorists, and racial competition is subject to a kind
of Gresham’s law.
“Race suicide” was coined by Edward A. Ross, who bemoaned that “[t]he higher
race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually
the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action.”
Ross’s theory was that the “native” Anglo-Saxon stock was biologically well
adapted to rural, traditional life but less well suited to the new urban, industrial
milieu of capitalism. Thus could the inferior immigrant races, “beaten members of
beaten breeds,” outbreed the superior Anglo-Saxon race. New immigrant stock,
while racially inferior, was, said Ross, better adapted to the conditions of industrial
capitalism.
President Theodore Roosevelt called race suicide the “greatest problem of
civilization.”
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VI. The Unfit As “Unemployable”(5)
• Confronted with this two-fold threat, the task for
reformers was to devise scientific methods for
identifying low-wage races and other inferior groups
(for example, the “feeble-minded”)—such as cranial
measurements, literacy tests, and intelligence tests—
and to promote laws that would exclude inferiors
from work and isolate them for eugenic treatment.
• Two historically important vehicles for exclusion: (1)
race-based immigration barriers and (2) statutory
minimum wages.
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VII. Immigration and “Race Suicide”
• The Emergency Quota Act of 1921 ended the era of open immigration to
the United States. Already stalled by World War I, the immigration of the
eastern and southern European peoples, which had averaged 730,000 per
year in the decade before World War I, plummeted to a scant 20,000
persons per year following the eugenics-inspired Immigration Act of 1924,
which also barred immigration from Japan.
• The American Economic Association (AEA), founded in 1885, almost
immediately began offering annual prizes for the best essay on the evils of
unrestricted immigration.
– In 1887, progressive economist Edward W. Bemis devised the idea of
using a literacy test to exclude putatively unfit immigrants, particularly
those from southern and eastern Europe.
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VII. Immigration and “Race Suicide” (2)
•
Leading economist Irving Fisher said, “If we could leave out of account the question of race
and eugenics, I should, as an economist, be inclined to the view that unrestricted
immigration . . . is economically advantageous to a country as a whole . . . .” But, cautioned
Fisher, “[t]he core of the problem of immigration is . . . one of race and eugenics”: the
problem of the Anglo-Saxon racial stock being overwhelmed by racially inferior “defectives,
delinquents and dependents.”
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“[Mine] is not an argument against immigration,” demurred University of Chicago sociologist
Charles Henderson, “but only against the immigration of persons who can never be induced
to demand a civilized scale of life.” Remove the unfit, said Henderson, and “the real workers
will more easily rise in earning power.”
•
Wharton School reformer Simon Patten argued that social progress is “a higher law than
equality” and proposed the “eradication of the vicious and inefficient.”
Henry Farnam, cofounder of the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL) and later
AEA president, thought the growth of the unfit classes rendered “more and more imperative
the solution of that exceedingly difficult problem which Mr. Arnold White calls ‘the
sterilization of the unfit.’”
Ross, well known for his militancy against immigration, once suggested that “should the
wors[e] come to the worst, it would be better for us if we were to turn our guns upon every
40
vessel bringing [Asiatics] to our shores rather than to permit them to land.”
•
•
VII. Immigration and “Race Suicide” (3)
•
Francis Amasa Walker, president of MIT and of the AEA and director of the U.S.
Census of 1870 and of 1880, offered an especially influential theory of race
suicide.
•
Walker argued that immigration itself checked the natural fertility of the native
population, so that inferior foreign-born stock effectively displaced superior native
stock: “[T]he native element failed to maintain its previous rate of increase
because the foreigners came in such swarms.” The American shrank from industrial
competition with the low-wage races, Walker argued: “He was unwilling himself to
engage in the lowest kind of day-labor with these new elements of the population;
he was even more unwilling to bring sons and daughters into the world to enter
into that competition.”
•
Walker characterized the low-wage races, “peasants” from “southern Italy,
Hungary, Austria, and Russia,” as “beaten men from beaten races; representing the
worst failures in the struggle for existence.” Without immigration restriction,
Walker warned, “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, [in] which
no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages . . . [will] be decanted upon our
shores.”
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VII. Immigration and “Race Suicide” (4)
• Race-suicide theories were popular abroad as well, differing principally in
their conception of which inferior races constituted the eugenic threat. In
England, for example, Sidney Webb devised a novel term, “adverse
selection,” to describe what he saw as English race suicide:
– Twenty-five percent of our parents, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps warning
us, is producing 50 percent of the next generation. This can hardly result in
anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country
gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.
• Eugenic views of inferior groups were commonplace in the Progressive Era
textbooks of leading economists.
• In his Elementary Principles, Irving Fisher declared that “if the vitality or
vital capital is impaired by a breeding of the worst and a cessation of the
breeding of the best, no greater calamity could be imagined.”
• Fortunately, said Fisher, eugenics offered a means, “by isolation in public
institutions and in some cases by surgical operation,” to prevent the
calamity of “inheritable taint.”
.
42
VII. Immigration and “Race Suicide” (5)
• Similarly, Princeton economist Frank Fetter lamented, “Democracy and
opportunity are increasing the mediocre and reducing the excellent strains
of stock . . . . Progress is threatened unless social institutions can be so
adjusted as to reverse this process of multiplying the poorest, and of
extinguishing the most capable families.”
– Eugenic policies would introduce “an element of rational direction into the
process of perpetuating the race.”
• In his Principles of Economics, Harvard’s Frank Taussig asked, rhetorically,
“how . . . deal with the unemployable?”
• Taussig identified two classes of unemployable workers, distinguishing the
aged, infirm, and disabled from the “feeble minded[,] . . . those saturated
by alcohol or tainted with hereditary disease . . . [and] the irretrievable
criminals and tramps.” The latter class, Taussig proposed, “should simply
be stamped out.” “We have not reached the stage,” Taussig allowed,
“where we can proceed to chloroform them once [and] for all; but at least
they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented
from propagating their kind.”
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VIII. The Eugenic Benefits of Minimum-Wage Laws
• Minimum-wage legislation, passed by several states beginning with
Massachusetts in 1912, was the sine qua non of progressive labor reform,
and progressive economists championed minimum wages.
• But eugenically minded progressives advocated minimum wages precisely
because binding minimums would cause job losses.
• They argued that minimum-wage-induced job loss was a social benefit
because it performed the eugenic service of ridding the labor force of the
“unemployable.”
• Sidney and Beatrice Webb, as ever, put it plainly: “With regard to certain
sections of the population [the unemployable], this unemployment is not
a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of
dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb opined, “the most
ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as
wage earners . . . .”
44
VIII. The Eugenic Benefits of Minimum-Wage Laws (2)
•
•
•
Henry Rogers Seager leading progressive economist, argued that deserving
workers needed protection from the “wearing competition of the casual worker
and the drifter” and from the other “defectives” who drag down the wages of
more deserving workers.
Seager made clear what should happen to those who, even after remedial training,
could not earn the legal minimum: “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made
of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must
courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by
isolation or sterilization . . . .”
A.B. Wolfe, an American progressive economist and future AEA president, also
argued for the eugenic virtues of removing from employment those who are “a
burden on society.” “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by
minimum wages,] so would the ineffective workers,” said Wolfe. “I am not
disposed to waste much sympathy upon either class. The elimination of the
inefficient is in line with our traditional emphasis on free competition, and also
with the spirit and trend of modern social economics.”
45
VIII. The Eugenic Benefits of Minimum-Wage Laws (3)
• For economic progressives, a minimum wage, which is a wage floor, had
the useful property of segregating the unfit, who would lose their jobs,
from the deserving workers, who would not.
• Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s
Commissioner of Labor, opposed subsidies of poor workers’ wages
because wage subsidies increase employment. “It is much better to enact
a minimum-wage law, even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,”
argued Meeker.
• Labor Commissioner Meeker argued, “Better that the state should support
the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than
subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth after
their kind.”
• As with immigration restriction, the minimum-wage barrier was seen to
meet the two-fold threat of inferior workers: it protected deserving
workers’ wages by reducing the competition of inferior groups, and it
identified (by disemploying) inferior groups, enabling eugenic treatment.
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VIII. The Eugenic Benefits of Minimum-Wage Laws (4)
• The Webbs: a minimum would mark “out [weaklings and
degenerates] . . . so that they could be isolated and properly treated.”
• Sidney Ball, another Fabian, likewise promoted minimum wages for
enabling “a process of conscious social selection by which the industrial
residuum is naturally sifted and made manageable for some kind of
restorative, disciplinary, or, it may be, surgical treatment.”
• Felix Frankfurter, then the AALL’s legal counsel, found that the culling
effects of minimum-wage laws helped buttress his legal defense of
minimum wages. Instancing the police-power virtues of minimum wages
for identifying (by disemployment) the class of the unemployable,
Frankfurter argued that “[t]he state . . . may use means, like the present
statute, of sorting the normal self-supporting workers from the
unemployables and then deal with the latter appropriately as a special
class . . . .”
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IX. Women Workers as Unemployable
• Florence Kelley, perhaps the most influential U.S. labor reformer of
the period, endorsed the Victoria, Australia, minimum-wage law as
“redeeming the sweated trades.” It did so by preventing the
“unbridled competition” of the unemployable, the “women,
children, and Chinese [who] were reducing all the employees to
starvation.”
• Kelley’s exclusion of Chinese and women workers from the category
of “employee,” and her grouping of these workers with children,
characteristically treats women and Chinese as both victims and
threats. Her conflation depicts women and Chinese as children,
thus in need of paternalistic protection, but also as competitive
threats to the deserving, white male workers, thus in need of social
control.
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IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (2)
• Their current reputation for feminism notwithstanding, the original
progressives were in fact deeply ambivalent about women’s
participation in the labor force—and sometimes hostile to it.
• The reform case against women’s market work, couched as it often
was in the language of protection, was subtler than the eugenic
hysteria directed at immigrants and mental and moral defectives.
•
Nonetheless, as with other groups they deemed unemployable,
leading progressives portrayed women’s labor-force participation as
socially and economically destructive— (1) a threat to the wages of
deserving workers (white male heads of household), (2) a threat to
the sanctity of the home, and (3) a threat to the eugenic health of
the race
49
IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (3)
• The tension between the progressives’ impulse to protect women and
their impulse to control women manifested itself in the sometimes
contradictory arguments for regulating women’s market work.
• Some progressives argued that women, too, deserved living wages. But
even this more-egalitarian framing was often “maternalist”; that is, it
conceived of women as mothers and guardians of the home first.
• So, when progressives calculated living wages, they assumed that male
workers deserved a wage sufficient to support several dependents—the
so-called “family wage.”
• Women, however, deserved only enough to support a single woman living
alone, presumably until marriage could end the misfortune of market
employment. “So long as men cannot be mothers,” Florence Kelley wrote
in defense of female difference and female deference, “the cry Equality,
Equality, where Nature has created Inequality is as stupid and as deadly as
the cry Peace, Peace where there is no Peace.”
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IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (4)
• Moreover, even when progressives spoke of “equal pay for
equal work,” they often were not referring to comparable
worth.
• In the Progressive Era, “equal pay for equal work” also
referred to the reform idea that motherhood—which was
seen to require removal from the labor force—should be
recognized as socially vital work and should be compensated
by the state.
• Paying women to stay home to bear and raise children was a
popular progressive idea in the United States and abroad.
Indeed, from 1911 to 1919, all but nine states passed
“mothers’ pensions” laws.
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IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (5)
• Other arguments for regulating women’s work reflected the
tension between the goals of protecting women and
controlling women.
• One strand of paternalism argued that women, as the
biologically weaker sex, needed, like children, protection
from the hazards of market work (if not from the hazards of
domestic labor), usually in the form of hours restrictions.
• Reformers also argued that minimum wages could serve a
paternalistic (and moralistic) function by protecting wageearning women (if not women working in the home) from
the temptation of prostitution. Better-paid factory girls
were less likely to succumb, a key selling point for
promoters of social purity.
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IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (6)
• It is a peculiar sort of protection for women that proposes to
protect men and to protect the Anglo-Saxon race from the laborforce participation of women.
• Indeed, the “family wage” and “mothers of the race” reasoning
argued not for women’s rights but for women’s obligations, not for
women’s welfare but for the welfare of men and the race.
– Nonetheless, the “family wage” argument was pervasive among
reformers: “Almost all [progressive] welfare activists, male and female,
endorsed the family-wage principle . . . .”
• The “family wage” and “mothers of the race” rationales for womenonly labor legislation essentially abandoned protection of women in
favor of social control of women. The family-wage argument
portrayed wage-earning women as usurpers of jobs that rightfully
belonged to male heads of household. Returning women to the
home would also ensure that women properly carried out their
eugenic duties as “mothers of the race.”
53
IX. Women Workers as Unemployable (7)
• The arguments for women-only labor legislation were
heterogeneous—variously paternalistic, moralistic, maternalistic,
and eugenicist.
• They were, moreover, sometimes internally inconsistent, reflecting
the tension between the two progressive desiderata, to protect
women and to control women.
• But, however different or inconsistent, all these arguments for
regulating women’s work were premised upon the idea that women
workers should be legally inferior to men, owing to their biological
weakness or to their “natural” obligations to husband, family, and
race.
• And, most importantly, all these arguments for regulating women’s
work had the intended effect of discouraging women’s labor-force
participation
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X. Conclusion: social uplift vs. social control
• Thus did progressives advocate for labor, even as they depicted many
groups of poor workers as threats – the cause rather than the
consequence of low wages.
• Thus did progressives advocate for women’s rights, even as they also
promoted a maternalist vision of economic and family life that would
remove women from the labor force, the better to meet women’s
obligations to be “mothers of the race,” and to defer to the “family wage”.
• Thus did progressives advocate for peace, even as they founded their
opposition to war on its putatively dysgenic effects, and championed
making the world safe for democracy.
• Thus did progressives argue for more democracy (via secret ballot,
referendum, direct election), even as they proposed to limit democratic
control over the technocratic agencies they devised and staffed.
• Thus did progressives seek to countervail corporate power, even as they
admired the scientifically managed corporation, regarding its planning,
organization and efficiency as an exemplar for the reform of government.
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X. Conclusion: social uplift vs. social control (2)
•
•
•
The protean aspect of American reform derives from a longstanding tension between two
opposed and rival conceptions of American nationhood. Is the United States constituted
solely by its founding principles, or is it, rather, an organic entity (as economist Henry C.
Adams once put it), constituted by a people or a race connected by evolutionary
consanguinity?
Gary Gerstle (1994) calls these opposed and rival conceptions of the American nation, civic
nationalism and racial nationalism, respectively. Civic nationalism is inclusive. It requires only
that citizens join an implicit social compact and it implies that democracy can be made
universal. Racial nationalism, in contrast, is exclusive. It requires that citizens be of good
heredity, on grounds that only the right stock is capable of meeting the special demands of
American political and economic life, and it implies that democracy can and must be limited.
The conflict between progressivisms’ contradictory goals – social uplift and social control –
shaped the economic reform so characteristic of the Progressive Era. Directly and indirectly,
progressives appealed to both the civic and racial conceptions of the American nation.
Progressive advocacy of social uplift was inclusive, in the tradition of civic nationalism – it
embraced Americans on the margins of economic and political life. Progressive advocacy of
social control, in the tradition of racial nationalism, was exclusive – it restrained Americans on
the margins of economic and political life.
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