 Trevor Burrus. I'm Aaron Powell. Trevor Burrus. Welcome to Free Thoughts from Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. I'm Trevor Burrus. I'm Aaron Powell. Joining us today is Thomas C. Leonard, a research scholar at the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University and lecturer at Princeton University's Department of Economics. He is the author of the new book, Illiberal Performers, Race Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Welcome to Free Thoughts. Thanks. Nice to be with you. With the title, which says a lot by itself, why Illiberal Reformers? Thomas C. Leonard Well, everyone knows that the scholars and activists who dismantled laissez-faire and built the welfare state were reformers. They don't call it the Progressive Era for nothing. But it's my claim that a central feature of that reform, a central feature of erecting the regulatory state, a new kind of state, was the producing of liberties in the name of various conceptions of the greater good. Not just economic liberties, property rights, contract and so forth. That's sort of a well-known part of the transition from 19th century liberalism to 20th century liberalism. But also I maintain civil and personal liberties as well. Thomas C. Leonard And what time period? So we're talking about just after the turn of the 20th century or going back further than that? Thomas C. Leonard Well, the ideas, the architecture, if you will, the blueprints were drawn up sort of in the last decade and a half of the 19th century. And they gradually made their way into actual sort of legislation and institutions, government institutions in the first two decades of the 20th century, sort of to use the usual scholarly terms kind of late gilded age and then the Progressive Era. Thomas C. Leonard So who are these people, these reformers? Are they politicians mostly or are they in some other walk of life? Thomas C. Leonard Eventually they're politicians, but the politicians have to be convinced first. So the convincers in the beginning are a group of intellectuals or if you like scholars. They are economists, sociologists, population scientists, social workers. Thomas C. Leonard So are those like population scientists? Are those basically Malthusians or? Thomas C. Leonard No, today we'd call them demographers. Thomas C. Leonard We don't use that term anymore. We call them what today? Thomas C. Leonard No. No. Today we would call them demographers. Thomas C. Leonard Oh, okay. Thomas C. Leonard Yeah. It's not quite, doesn't have to sound that sinister. One of the interesting things, Trevor, about social science in this kind of, in its very beginnings in the late 19th century is it's only beginning to become an academic discipline which is part of the book's story. And a lot of social science, kind of social investigations, fact-finding, research reports, a lot of that's being done outside the academy in the immigrant settlement houses to a lesser extent in government administrative agencies, in investigations funded by the brand new foundations, and eventually in this brand new invention called the think tank. Trevor Burrus Was this increasing influence by, these people are ultimately working as largely academics. Was this new for academics? Were academics this influential before this? Thomas C. Leonard No. It is new. It's a revolution in academia. If we could transport ourselves backwards in time to Princeton say in 1880, we wouldn't recognize the place. Even colleges in the immediate just after the Civil War were tiny institutions. They weren't particularly scholarly. They were denominational. They were led by ministers. In Princeton's case they would have been finishing Southern gentlemen and you wouldn't recognize it at all. If however we could transport ourselves back to say 1920, just at the end of the progressive era, you would recognize everything about the place. The social sciences have been invented and installed. There's the beginning of the physical sciences in academia and it's no longer just the classics, theology, and a little bit of philosophy and mathematics. Part of the story of the rise of reform is the story of this revolution in American higher ed which takes place between 1880 and 1900. Trevor Burrus In the book you discuss how Germany figures into this to some degree, which I thought was kind of interesting because Germany also figured into reforming our public education below higher ed, but the Germany status in the intellectual world was very influential on Americans in particular. Aaron Ross Yeah, that's quite right. The German connection is crucial for understanding the first generation of economists and other reformers in the 1870s and into the 1880s. If you wanted to study cutting-edge political economy, Germany was where you went. All of the founders of American economics and indeed most of the other sort of newly hatching social sciences did their graduate work in Bismarck in Germany. It's only sort of beginning in the 1890s that American higher ed catches up, but boy does it catch up quickly. That's why we use the term revolution. By the turn of the century, the number of graduate students in the United States getting PhDs is in the thousands, sort of after the Civil War or even as late as 1880, it would have just been a handful. Trevor Burrus So what did these people start thinking about? I mean these illiberal reformers, what did they get in their head partially from Germany, partially from other sources, which we can talk about later, but in the sort of general overview, when they looked at society, what did they sort of, maybe not suddenly, but at that moment, what did they decide they wanted to do with it? Aaron Ross Well, another thing to understand is that most of them, in addition to sort of having this German model of how an economy works and also a German model of how an economy should be regulated, they were also evangelical Protestants. Most of them grew up in evangelical homes. Most of them were sons and daughters of ministers or missionaries, and they had this, you know, this extraordinary zeal, this desire to set the world to rights. And they looked around them during the industrial revolution, and they saw what really was extraordinary, unprecedented economic and social change, which we kind of gather under the banner of the industrial, or at least the American industrial revolution. And when they looked around them, they saw injustice, they saw low wages. There was a newly visible class of the poor in the cities. They saw inefficiency. They saw labor conflict. They saw uneducated men getting rich. And this upending of the old social order, in their view, was not only inefficient. It was also un-Christian and immoral, and it needed to be reformed. And they were sort of, it's important to say, unabashed about using evangelical terminology. They referred to, this is the first generation of progressives, they referred to their project as bringing a kingdom of heaven to earth. So they've got this project, they've identified these issues that they want to change. How did they go about turning that concern and the expertise that they thought they had into control of the reins of power or influence within government? Great question. It wasn't easy. They understood that they had a tall task in front of them. They had to persuade those in power that reform was needed and reform was justified. And it helped that two of their students, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, went onto famous as politicians, and so did other progressives at lower levels too. The idea of academic economics in this sort of beginning stage was that you didn't just spend time in the library or do blackboard exercises. Your job was to go out and make the world a better place. So I think the best way to think about it was they, along with many other reformers, wrote for the newspapers, went on the lecture circuits, bent the ear of politicians, first at the state level and then later at the federal level, and said it's a new economic world. The old economic ideas, laissez-faire, as they called it, are not only is it immoral, it's economically obsolete. And we need to build a new relationship, not unlike the model that Germany provided between the state and economic life. And very gradually it happened. And we're talking about also the emergence of the administrative state comes into this too because then they can take over posts in government that are not necessarily elected where their expertise is supposed to be utilized. That's exactly right. The crucial point is that we think about the progressive era as a huge expansion in the size and scope of government, and indeed it is that. But the progressives didn't just want bigger government. They also wanted a new kind of government, which they saw as a better form, as a superior form of government. Famously, the progressives weren't just unhappy with economic life, which was one thing. They were also unhappy with American political life and with American government, which they saw, and rightly so, as corrupt and inefficient and not doing what it should be doing to improve society and economy. So they wanted to not only to expand state power, but also to relocate it, to move government authority away from the courts, which traditionally had held quite a bit of regulatory power, and away from legislatures and into what they sometimes called a new fourth branch of government, the administrative state. You write in your book, which I think this is a very succinct way of putting it, progressivism was first and foremost an attitude about the proper relationship of science and its bearer, the scientific expert, to the state and of the state to the economy and polity. These experts, I also want to think we should make clear, this was not a fringe group of intellectuals and academic professors. Would you say it was the mainstream or at least a kind of who's who of American intellectuals and all the great Ivy League institutions? Absolutely. It's the best and brightest, if I can use an anachronistic phrase. Now, we have to be a little careful with Ivy League because the centers of academic reform are at places like Wisconsin and to some extent at Columbia and at Johns Hopkins and to some extent at Penn. But the old colonial colleges like Harvard and Yale were a little late to catch up. It took them a while to catch on to this new German model of graduate seminars and professors as experts and not merely instructors. So how did they conceptualize the average worker that needed their help? You have this great line in your book, which I think says something about modern politics, too. Progressives did not work in factories. They inspected them. Progressives did not drink in saloons. They tried to shudder them. The bold women who chose to live among the immigrant poor and city slums called themselves settlers, not neighbors. Even when progressives idealized workers, they tended to patronize them, romanticizing a brotherhood that they would never consider joining. Yeah, I think it's fair to say, and it's not exactly a revelation that the the progressives were not working class. But neither were they, you know, part of the gentry class. They were middle class and and from middle class backgrounds, as I say, sons and daughters of ministers and missionaries. So they were unhappy when they looked upward at the new plutocrats who were uneducated and in their view un-Christian and potentially corrupting of the Republic. And but they also didn't like what they saw when they looked downward at ordinary people, particularly at immigrants. And if you don't mind, I just I feel like I should circle back to this fourth state, this fourth branch idea as a conception of the administrative state, I didn't finish my thought very well. I think that the way that the progressives thought about the fourth branch is is very important because the administrative state, as as everyone knows, has done nothing but grow since it's blueprinting in and it's sort of the first construction in Woodrow Wilson's first term. I think the key thing is sort of there's two key key components that make this a new kind of government in the progressive mind. The first is that the independent agencies like the Federal Reserve and the Federal Trade Commission and the Permanent Tariff Commission were designed to be independent of Congress and the president. That was by design. They were supposed to be in in some sense above politics. They had they served for seven years. They had overlapping terms. Often often times they would be balanced politically. And the president could not remove one of these commissioners except for cause and neither could Congress impeach them. So they they they occupied a kind of a unique place in a new place, did these bureaucrats. The second thing that matters, I think, for understanding the administrative state is is that administrative regulations have the full force of federal law, right? Regulations are laws no different than, you know, Congress had passed one. Moreover, the fourth branch of the administrative administrators are also responsible for executing regulations. And third, of course, they're responsible for adjudicating regulatory disputes. So there's this combination of statutory and adjudicatory and executive power all rolled up into one, which is why I think the progressives called it the fourth branch. And the growth of administrative government, I think, is a is is a much is a much better metric for thinking about the success, if you will, or the durability of the progressive vision than simply looking at something like government spending as a share of GDP. Can we decouple, at least for purposes of critique the ideology, the progressives from the methods, because obviously they they ended up once they had the power, ended up doing a lot of really lamentable or awful things with it. But the basic idea of having experts in charge of things, I mean, you can see a certain appeal to that, especially as, you know, science advances, technology advances, we our body of knowledge grows, we understand more about the economy and more about how societies function, like just like you would want, you know, experts in the medical sciences overseeing your health as opposed to just laymen. Is there anything just inherently wrong or dangerous about the idea of turning over more of government to experts distinct from just the particular ideas of this set of experts? I don't think so. I think the question is more a practical one of what we think experts should do, whether they're working in government or in the private sector. And the progressives had what you might call a heroic conception of expertise. They they believed that they not only could the experts serve the public good, but they could also identify the public good. And that's what I mean by a heroic conception and say, not only do we know how to get to a particular outcome, we know also what those outcomes should be. Now, there's nothing about expertise per se that requires that heroic vision, which in retrospect, looks both arrogant and naive. It makes good sense for the state to call upon expertise where expertise can be helpful. So I don't think it's an indictment of the very idea of using science for the purposes of state. It's more about what sort of authority and we want experts to have. And going as we sort of move into the New Deal era, which is another great growth spurt in the size of the state, we get a slightly less heroic vision of what experts do. So there's well, after World War One, the that that sort of naive heroic view of expertise is simply outmoded. So they they definitely they're pretty arrogant, as you mentioned. They have so I'm going to ask you a sort of a few things about about the way that they're looking at society and what they think that they can do with it and and what they are allowed to do with it. So how do they view individual rights in this? And as a corollary, I guess, what are they? How do they think of society as opposed to the individual in terms of the sort of methodology of their of their science or statecraft or whatever you want to have everybody describe it? That's a great question. I I think one of the most dramatic changes that we see in sort of American liberal thinking in this transition from 19th century small government liberalism to 20th century liberalism of a more activist expert guided state is a reconception of the what Dan Rogers calls the the moral whole, the idea of a nation or a state or a social organism as an entity that is something greater than the individual people that make it up. And I think this this fundamental change is is one of the sort of key elements in in this progressive inflection point in American history. Up until that point, if you're willing to call an era a point, forgive me, up until that moment, I think that's what we should we should say that's right. Yes. Yeah, right. We would have said the United States are. And after the progressive reconceptualization, it's the United States is instead of a collection of states of Federation. Now the idea is that there's a nation with a Wilson's famous phrase at least famous in these precincts was Princeton in the nation service. And this this desire to identify a kind of moral whole, a nation, a state or a social organism, they gave it different names, I think gave great impetus to the idea that it was it was okay to trespass on individual liberties, as long as it promoted the interests of the nation, or the state or the people or society or the social organism. So how does in this another big factor because it's kind of interesting. Yeah, we have a cobble. We talk about them as evangelicals and the progressives, which a lot of people might be surprised given the people who call themselves progressives now. But we also have them as evangelical, but they're with Darwin and evolution having a huge influence on their thinking. And which also seems to not go with the way we align these things today. How did Darwin and evolution come into their thinking? And what did it make them start to conclude? Right. Well, remember the the quote you you had before about progressivism as being essentially a concept that refers to the relationship of science to government and of government to the economy. The science of the day or at least the science that most influenced the economic reformers was was Darwinism. And there's just no understanding progressive era reform without understanding the influence of Darwinism. It was in the progressive view what made these brand new social sciences just barely established scientific. That's one of the reasons we do history. Economics today doesn't have make much doesn't have a whole lot to do with evolution or with Darwinism and has a lot to do with mathematics and statistical approaches. But at the turn of the century and until the end of the First World War, evolutionary thinking was was at the heart of the science that underwrote economics and the other and and the other new social sciences which were at least in the progressive view to guide the administrative state in its relationship to economy and polity. What is Darwinian thinking look like in practice for the the policy preferences of the progressives? I mean, I said we're not just talking about we need to breed out undesirable traits or something of that sort. So, how does it how does the specifics of Darwin apply to their broader agenda? Well, Darwin does many things for the progressives. Darwin by himself is is is sort of a figure that they admire sort of he's he's he's a disinterested man of science concerned only with the truth and uninterested in profit like say a greedy capitalist, uninterested in power, like say a greedy politician. I mean, Darwin is kind of a a synecdoche if you like for the progressive conception of what a scientific expert does. More than that, I think that they you know the progressives and and by the way many other intellectuals to socialists and conservatives alike were able to find whatever they needed in Darwin. Darwin was so influential in the Gilded Age and in the progressive era that everybody found something useful for their political and intellectual purposes during the Gilded Age and the progressive era. Take competition, for example, if you are a so-called social Darwinist, you could say that competition was survival of the fittest. Herbert Spencer's phrase that Darwin eventually borrowed himself and that therefore that those who succeeded in economic life were in some sense fitter. The progressives could use other evolutionary thinkers and say, wait a second, not so fitter doesn't necessarily mean better, fitter just means better adapted to a particular environment. So that's competition would be an example of Darwinian thinking that was influential in the way that progressives thought about the way an economy works. But they were particularly, I mean they weren't laissez-faire and I know at one point you mentioned that the, I think you said that it was either the the American Economic Association or maybe sociology was started partially against William Graham Sumner, was it was it sociology? William Graham Sumner was very influential on creating counter movements to him and he is sort of a proto-libertarian or libertarian figure who was laissez-faire but they were absolutely not. Yeah, that's quite right. Sumner is the bent noir of the economic reformers. He was of a slightly earlier generation, the generation of 1840 and he was the the the avatar as you say of free markets and of small government and Sumner was the man Ely, Richard T. Ely sort of the standard bearer of progressive economics said that he organized the American Economic Association to oppose. Yeah, Sumner was in the end the only economist who was not asked to join the American Economic Association. So much was he sort of personally associated with laissez-faire. Now of course they were accused and this is an important historical point because you mentioned the social Darwinism and I think I can almost hear your scare quotes through the line because that that idea of Sumner and Herbert Spencer being Darwinists of a of a sort that sort of wanted to let people die is a little bit overextended. Spencer definitely had some evolutionary ideas about society but the social Darwinism doesn't really come in until the 50s if I understand correctly. Social Darwinism is really an anachronism applied to the progressive era. I think we can safely ascribe the influence of that term to Richard Hofstadter who coined it in his his dissertation which was published in during the Second World War. It is true of course that you could find apologists for laissez-faire you could find people who said that economic success was not a matter of luck or a fraud or of coercion but was deserved was justified. There were lots of defenders of laissez-faire on various grounds and Spencer and Sumner it's fine they fit that description but neither of them were particularly Darwinian. Spencer was a rival of Darwin's. He thought his theory was well it was prior. He thought it was better and he coined the term evolution and Sumner really wasn't much of a Darwinist at all. If you look through his work it's only dotted with a few Darwinian references. I think what what Hofstadter did and he was such a graceful writer is he coined a new term that sounded kind of unpleasant and if you if you look through the entire literature which I've done you will be hard-pressed to find a single person who identifies him or herself as a social Darwinist. You won't find a journal of social Darwinism. You won't find laboratories of social Darwinism. You won't find international societies for the promotion of social Darwinism. But ironically Eugenics you will find all of those things. You will find all of those things. Actually can you explain what Eugenics is before we jump into the the the truly distasteful part of this episode. Well Eugenics is just in the progressive era what it meant the period of my book is the social control of human heredity. It's the idea that human heredity just like anything else guided by good science and overseen by socially minded experts can improve human heredity just like it can improve government. It can make government good. It can make the economy more efficient and more just and so too can we do the same for human heredity. And Eugenics was I mean I think big is even an understatement of at least the first two decades of the 20th century and into the third and fourth decade but especially the first two decades. Yeah there was an extraordinary intellectual vogue for Eugenics all over the world not just in in the United States. Eugenics it's very difficult viewed in retrospect that is viewed through the sort of crimes that were committed by Nazi Germany in the middle of the 20th century it's very difficult to see how what is a term that is a dirty word could actually be regarded as sort of the height of high-mindedness and social concern but it was in fact at the time. And all across American society Eugenics was popular. It was popular among the new experimental biologists who we now call geneticists. It was certainly popular among the new social scientists the economists and others who were staffing the the bureaus at the administrative state and sitting in chairs in the university and it was popular among politicians too. It was there were many journals of of Eugenics there were many Eugenics societies they had international and national conferences. Hundreds probably thousands of scholars were happy to call themselves Eugenicists and to advocate for eugenic policies of various kinds. There's a there's a book published in I think around 1924 by Sam Holmes who's a Berkeley zoologist and it has there's like six or seven thousand titles on Eugenics in in the bibliography. How did the Eugenicists of the time think about what they were doing or think about the people that they were doing it too? Well first of all that's what they were doing we haven't ever actually got to that. But I mean in jet like the attitude towards the very notion of this because we can even setting aside the the horrors of what Nazi Germany did from our modern perspective looking back at this with the the debates that we have and the struggle we have to allow people to say define the family the way that they choose and just that that the overwhelming significance in you know the scope of one's life and the way one lives in in that decision to have children and become a parent and Eugenics no matter I mean matter the details of it is ultimately taking that choice away from someone or making that choice for them and it seems just profoundly dehumanizing and did they consciously or unconsciously was there a dehumanizing element to it? Did they think of the people that they were going to practice this on as somehow less and so therefore deserving of less autonomy or was there a distancing from that element of it? Well it's important to remember the answer to the question is yes the professionals if you will in the Eugenics movement the sort of the professionals and the propagandists certainly saw immigrants from southern and eastern Europe immigrants from Asia African Americans the mentally and physically disabled as inferiors as as as unfit there's just no question about it but what we need what one important caution here again is that there were very few people at the time proposing anything like hurting inferiors into death chambers Eugenic policies were were were much less extreme so when we encounter it in the context of of say economic reform it comes up in immigration for example if you regard immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and from Asia as as unfit as threats to American racial integrity or as economic threats to American working man's wages that's a eugenic argument you're saying that when you argue that they will sort of reduce American hereditary vigor that's a eugenic argument it doesn't have to involve something as ugly as say coercive sterilization or worse there's many ways of which I think are are you know strange to us in retrospect of thinking about the law be it immigration reform or minimum wages or maximum hours as a device for or keeping the inferior out of the labor force or or or out of the country altogether yeah let's go yeah the last third of your book kind of goes through these we we have a chapter called excluding the unemployable so can you talk a little about what about what that entailed sure the the unemployable is is a is a kind of buzz phrase that I think was probably coined by Sydney and Beatrice Webb who are Fabian socialists founders of the London School of Economics and whose work was was widely read by American progressives yeah and with whom American progressives had a very kind of fruitful transatlantic interaction with the idea it's it's it's a misnomer of course because the unemployable refers to people who many of whom were actually employed and and the idea here is is that a certain category of worker is is willing to work for wages below what progressives regarded as as a living wage or a fair wage and that these sorts of people who were often called feeble minded when they were mentally disabled or defectives when they were physically disabled were we're doing this sort of transgressing in multiple ways the first thing was by accepting lower wages they were undermining the deserving American working man where American really means Anglo-Saxon the second thing is because they were willing to accept low wages the American worker was unwilling to do so to accept these low wages and so instead opted to have smaller families that argument went by the name of race suicide so the undercutting inferior worker because he was racially predisposed to accept or innately predisposed to accept lower wages meant that the Anglo-Saxon native if you will scare quotes around native had fewer children and as a result the inferior strains were out breeding the superior strains and the result was what Edward A. Ross called race suicide now that sounds like the movie idiocracy if you've ever seen this movie I'm not familiar with it so but I wanted to clarify something that that might shock our listeners that and you mentioned this briefly a bit like it for the economists for members of the American economics association at the time some of them thought of the minimum wage as valuable precisely because it unemployed these people so whereas now we're actually having this fight about whether or not the minimum wage unemployes anyone it seems like there was a few doubts that it did unemployed people and the people that unemployed were the with the unproductive are the the unemployable unproductive workers who shouldn't be employed in the first place that's right there's there's a very long list of people who at one time or another just almost comically if it weren't sad a long list of of groups that were vilified as as being inferior as I say physically disabled mentally disabled coming from Asia or southern Europe or eastern Europe African-American although the progressives weren't terribly worried about the African-Americans at least outside the south until they started the great migration and became economic competitors in the factories as well so this very long list of inferiors creates a kind of regulatory problem which is how are we going to identify them and so you can if you think for example that a Jew from Russia or an Italian from the Mezzajorno is inferior how are you going to know that they're Jewish or that they're from southern Italy their passport doesn't specify necessarily so one way of course is is is to take out your handbook the dictionary of the races of America or another more clever way ultimately is to simply set a minimum wage so high that all unskilled labor will be unable to legally come to America because they'll be priced out and that was also true of because a little bit past your book but the the migration of African-Americans north had some influence on the federal minimum wage of the due deal if I remember yes it did and also the also Mexican immigrants as well the the idea of inferior's threatening quote unquote Americans or native Americans quote unquote is is a trope that recurs again and again and again not just in the progressive era but also in the new deal and it is I suppose shocking and bizarre to see the minimum wage as hailed for its eugenic virtues but one very convenient way of of solving this problem of how do we identify the inferiors is to simply assume that they're low skilled and therefore unproductive and a binding minimum wage will ensure that the unproductive are are kept out or if they're already in the labor force they'll be idle and the deserving that is to say the productive workers who were always assumed of course to be Anglo-Saxon will keep their jobs and get a raise it's a very appealing notion and you're quite right that today you know most of the debate or a good part of the minimum wage debate concerns the question of how much unemployment you get for a given increase in the minimum but there's no question that any disemployment from a higher minimum is is is a social cost that's undesirable and the progressive era was not seen as a social cost it was not seen as a bug it was seen as a desirable feature and this is why progressivism is made a virtue of it precisely because it did exclude so many so many folks who were regarded as deficient deficient in their heredity deficient in their politics deficient in and many other ways as well what struck me when you were running through the the policies that they wanted the so the minimum wage in order to exclude these people or the concerns about immigration right is how many of them maybe i mean not in not in the motives behind them necessarily not in the stated motives but in the the specifics of the policies and some of the concerns look very much like what you hear today you know they they seem to be conventional wisdom about the need to keep out unskilled immigrants you hear stuff about their you know that there's there's too many of them in the population and that that will ultimately cause problems if they tip over into a majority or the or the existing minimum wage but they don't seem they don't have the what we think of as terrifically ugly motives behind them and so is there like that that historic change because it seems odd that if if the motives and and the the desires and the attitudes have shifted we would have seen the the resulting policies shift so how did that how did we get that transition from you know keeping the a desire for the policies the progressive era but shifting our attitudes our sense of virtue to something that would see these the motives behind the policy the progressive era as so repugnant well i think that you know we teach freshmen in economics to make this fairly bright distinction between the so-called positive and the normative right so the positive question is what are the effects of the minimum wage on employment and what are the effects of the minimum wage on output prices and what are the effects of the minimum wage on the income distribution and you can sort of think about those questions without sort of tipping over onto the normative side which is is is it a good thing or a bad thing that a particular class of worker namely the the very unskilled are likely to to be harmed at all so it's you can i think in a way it's it's partly a parable about the you know the capacity of sorting so-called scientific claims from from so-called normative or ethical matters you know my own view is it's one can be a supporter of the minimum wage of course without you know having repugnant views about the folks who are going to lose their job if we raise the minimum wage uh too high yeah of course that goes with i think that goes without saying well that's an interesting question about what are the lessons yeah from this but i wanted i wanted to ask you about one more thing before we kind of get to that question which about because there's another one which we didn't touch on which might surprise people which is excluding women there's a so we got we went through there was some sterilization which we talked about a much much but you mentioned excluding unemployable we had about immigration and now we also have excluding women and people might be surprised to hear that progressives were actually interested in doing this yeah this is uh this is a well all of these accounts are complex the story of women's labor legislation is probably the most complex of all and and that's partly because in the in the progressive era most labor legislation was directed at women and at women only not all but sort of the the pillars of of the welfare state which is to say minimum wages maximum hours mother's pensions which eventually evolved into um afdc and welfare um those pillars were uh for the those those pillars that's that legislation was women and women only now there are different ways of thinking about it i think that the thing to remember um is that a lot of this legislation to to to set a wage floor to set a maximum number of hours to give women payments women with dependent children payments at home were enacted not so much to protect women from employment the hazards of employment but rather to protect employment from women and when you look at the discourse um you do find a kind of protective paternalistic line where for example the the famous brandyce brief which was used in so many court supreme court cases in defensive labor legislation it's just sort of baldly asserts that women are the weaker sex and that's why women as women need to be protected from the hazards of of market work um they didn't worry so much about the hazards of domestic work and brandyce was a champion of i mean he's considered a champion of progressive era but he did write this unbelievably sexist brief in moeller versus origan indeed he did and uh he collaborated with his sister-in-law josephine goldmark and it's regarded as sort of uh not only the case but the brief itself is regarded as sort of a landmark in in in uh in legal circles uh so they that there's also a second class of argument uh which is still lives on today i might add which is called the family wage and this is the idea uh that there's a kind of natural family structure wherein the father is a breadwinner and the mother stays at home and tends to hearth and raises the kids and that male workers are entitled to a wage sufficient to support a wife and and and other dependents and that when women work for wages they wrongly usurp the wages that rightly belong to the breadwinner that's another argument for regulating women's employment that's not really protecting women that's protecting men of course um and there there were a whole host of arguments another argument was worried about women's sexual virtue that if women accepted you know low wages at the factory they'll be tempted into prostitution uh the euphemism of the day was the social vice um and uh john big clark pointed out that um if if five dollars a week tempts a factory girl into vice then zero dollars a week zero dollars a week will do so more surely it's really hard to to decide when you're going through all this stuff and you include immigration and all these these issues whether or not these people are we're talking about progressives so that that's the name we all call them now but if we were to use modern term are they liberals are they conservative i mean the if the immigration thing looks conservative now and and the protecting women's virtue and and supporting the family looks conservative and the racism you know but the minimum wage want that one and that it's just it's there seem to be a hodgepodge of something that that doesn't really map to anything now yeah i think that's right i think it's a mistake i mean one of the problems uh that we face um looking backwards from today is that progressivism today a progressive today is someone on the left someone on the left wing of the democratic party say and that's not what progressive meant um in the progressive era there certainly were plenty of folks uh on the left who were progressives but uh there were also right progressives too men like Theodore Roosevelt um would would be a canonical sort of right progressive um Roosevelt ran as as you know as to on the progressive ticket in 1912 handing the White House to Woodrow Wilson in so doing um yeah i think uh you know one of the you know the historiographic lessons of the book is uh be careful projecting contemporary categories backwards in time um you know the original progressives um they defended human hierarchy they were Darwinists um they either ignored or justified Jim Crow they were moralists um they were evangelicals they they promoted the claims of of the nation over individuals um and they had this of course heroic conception of their own roles as experts um that's very different from from what 21st century uh progressives are about the 21st century progressives uh couldn't be more different in some respects they're not evangelicals they're very secular they emphasize racial equality and minority rights they're nervous about nationalism but they don't they're not imperialists like the progressives were they're they're unhappy with too much Darwinism in their social science so so in these respects contemporary progressives are are very different um from um their namesakes on the other hand though having said that and that's a very important point just because they share a name doesn't mean they share everything is there are some things about the progressives that I think still carry over to today um and one is this sort of this combination of uh statism and and expertise the idea that our politics should be scientific not political if you will and that um economic life uh is best governed by the visible hand of an administrative state that investigates and regulates and supervises um the economy and that maybe that's the the lesson for for what we can take from this because that can run amuck under certain circumstances yes it can I mean it one of the lessons I think I learned in in writing this book is uh and it was I have to say it was a hard one lesson um is that um that the history of bad ideas like uh a coercive eugenics is just as interesting and as important as the history of good ideas and that's because um bad ideas that were historically important like like eugenics were thought almost by definition or were thought by many people to be a good idea at the time so we need we need to be uh we need to be wary of of of scientism maybe that's the right word particularly in the social sciences like economics I mean it really hard as it is to understand viewed from today eugenics was seen as the best science of the day it was something a high-minded person had to get behind and indeed nearly everybody did so I think that that is another lesson for today is particularly in economics and particularly if you're an advocate of of an extensive expert um state involvement in the economy is you really better be sure your science is good and I can guarantee you that a hundred years hence uh you know when uh there's a podcast looking back at us um there there will be some ideas that we think of as not only scientific um but profoundly important that they will think of as uh reprehensible thank you for listening free thoughts is produced by evan banks and mark mcdaniel to learn more find us on the web at www.libertarianism.org