 I left a few loose ends dangling, to say the least, at the end of the last lecture. And I'd like to. Yes, exactly. Even more than that, actually. Someone reminded me that I did not, as promised, explain the origin of the term local foco. It's one of those things that I promised to do, and they just forgot about. So for those of you who are interested in such things, the term local foco was actually the name of a match company, of a newly invented friction match. And the local focos met in New York in a gas lit meeting hall, and when the political democratic bosses of New York wanted to stop their meeting, they turned out all the gas in the meeting hall to shut down the lights. And rather than leave, the local focos lit up their local foco matches to light up the hall. And after that, they were known as local focos because of the use of the matches. A little bit of historical trivia in case your friends ever ask you. I think I probably left a very distorted view, at least of my opinion of the Civil War and the issues involved, in view of what I said at the end of the last session. So I would like to try to clear a little bit of that up. When I indicated, for example, that you could, in a sense, pick between the North and the South from a libertarian point of view and not find much difference between them in regard to who was right and who was wrong. That's certainly in regard to some of the political leaders on both sides. But certainly in regard to the fact that the North was clearly the aggressor in the war, my sympathies would clearly lie with the South. You have to remember that many people in the South, in fact, the majority were not slave owners. And their motives for joining the Southern cause were indeed diverse. Many of them simply fought because they felt they were being invaded and had to fight in self-defense. There are a number of issues involved in the war, very profound moral issues. And I think it's important that libertarians address those kinds of issues because they're relevant to today as well. There's a few things I'd like to point out regarding the impact of the Civil War on the burgeoning libertarian movement of the time. In a word, the Civil War destroyed what libertarian movement there was in America at the time. Like most wars, it destroys any serious movements for freedoms because nationalism becomes intense, the demand for cultural and ideological uniformity becomes intense, and dissidents are simply not tolerated. And we find, indeed, that those anti-war activists who before the war were clamoring for peace often sell out when war actually comes to pass. And I'm sorry to say that some of my particular heroes in the abolitionist movement such as William Lloyd Garrison, although a pronounced pacifist, actually supported the northern side during the war. Now this is particularly ironic in view of the fact that Garrison and his allies, previous to the war, had not only defended the right of secession, but it actually advocated that the north secede from the south. But when the south seceded from the north, Garrison and many of his allies and cohorts sold out, in effect, intellectually, and supported the northern cause because of the connection with the slavery issue. Garrison was not so naive as to believe that Lincoln's motive in entering into the war was to free the slaves, but he hoped the political necessity would eventually force Lincoln to free the slaves, as indeed it did. The abolitionists early in the war argued with Lincoln that if he would free the slaves, it would help the war cause because the Southerners were short of manpower as it was. And they believed that the only thing that was keeping the slaves on the plantations was the belief that would they return to the north, they wouldn't necessarily be free. So it was argued that should the word travel down to the southern slaves that they were now emancipated, they would rise up against their southern slave masters and cause intense internal difficulties for the south, which would then have to deal not only with the north, but also with an internal revolt among the slaves themselves. That was the military thinking. One of Lincoln's motives in issuing the Emancipation Proclamation was to destroy any possibility that England would enter in the war on the side of the south, because there was a good deal of sympathy for the south in England, partly owing to the financial or the economic connection because Manchester and northern England was a great consumer of southern cotton. And so there was a lot of sympathy in England for the southern cause because England at that time was very much pro-free trade and the south on the whole was very pro-free trade. And the British tended to look at the civil war or the war between the states, as the Southerners like to call it, as a economic war, not as a war over slavery, but as a war fought over economic issues like the tariff. And there's a good deal to be said for that, by the way. Now, once the war began and once the, I should point out also that the south did not secede in one block. After the election of Lincoln, which was seen as the ascension of a sectional candidate to the presidency, you have the deep south, such as South Carolina, seceding. It wasn't until after Fort Sumter, however, that many of the other states, such as Virginia, seceded. There were two different groups of succession, and that's important to keep in mind. The motives for states like Virginia was not so much a slavery issue, as it was the fact that they felt that the north had aggressed upon the south. So the Fort Sumter issue became a very important issue. And there's a whole body of historical revisionism on the issue of whether Lincoln kind of trumped up the Fort Sumter incident in order to provoke a war, or whether it was something he wished to avoid. I tend to think that there's a considerable body of evidence suggesting that Lincoln and his cabinet more or less expected a war to come, not that they necessarily wanted it. But in the south, there were also these fire reader types who also more or less expected a war to come. And when you think about that, it's hard to imagine why would these people really want a war? Why would they encourage a war? Well, typically, people who think in those terms believe that they are far superior militarily, and that they will immediately crush the opponent. It's inconceivable that anyone in the north or the south could have imagined how long the war would have been dragged out, and how costly it would have been in terms of human lives and property loss. Now, you have to remember that on the announced principle of the denial of the right of succession, the Civil War took some 600,000 American lives. I mean, this was the costliest, the most bloody war in American history in terms of the numbers of Americans killed. And what was it fought for? What was the motive in fighting such a war? Well, if you listen to the northern proponents of the war, particularly Lincoln and his cabinet, it was fought to prove that the Union could not, in fact, be dissolved, that the Union was perpetual. And for that particular issue, over half a million Americans died. Now, the effect of the war was extremely important, as indeed all wars are. The Civil War was the first heavily industrialized war. Technology had changed dramatically since the War of 1812, or even since the Mexican War fought under the Polk administration. And the reason the casualties were so high in the Civil War had much to do with the changed technology and the inability of military strategists to plan strategy based on the new technology. Now, again, this is a rather complex subject. I will simply try to summarize what some of the latest historians have speculated on this matter. One of the puzzling things about the Civil War, and you may have seen this in some movies, if you watch movies of that sort, one of the most puzzling aspects is the immense number of casualties. You have these fortified lines, and you'd have these hundreds or thousands of men rushing the line, and they would just get mowed down. Well, why did these military commanders keep leading their men into open combat like this, just rushing these entrenched opponents? Well, part of the reason is that that was the way of fighting the war, for example, during the Mexican War. And many of these officers, such as Grant, for example, learned their military skills during the Mexican War, say, under Zachary Taylor. Also, there was a lot of influence of the Napoleonic style of warfare, the idea of quickly rushing the opponent's stronghold and overpowering them. But what had happened since the Napoleonic Wars, and even since the Mexican War, was a change in technology. Rifles were now widely used, and not just musket loading rifles, but breech loading rifles. So not just rifles you had to load from the muzzle, but rather ones you could load in a bullet. So you have the evolution of technology. This meant a much more rapidly firing precision rifle that was accurate at a very long range, a couple hundred yards, say, even longer. And this meant that prior to the old days when they used muskets, say, where your troops could come within, say, a hundred yards of the enemy, do a rush and get only fired upon, say, once before they reached the enemy lines, now this meant that the enemy had time to reload three, four times before you had a chance to get to them. The defensive forces could reload many more times. It also forced the artillery further back, so the artillery wasn't as effective. So what this meant was you had the same idea that you have to rush the stronghold of the defensive forces, but there was a much more firepower on the side of the defense now. So rather than simply getting one shot off, they could get many more times that. That meant that the casualties of the advancing forces were far greater. And for some reason, whether it was pigheadedness or just an unwillingness to adapt, the military tacticians during the Civil War didn't really adjust to this very well. They did try to step up the pace of attack. There was a certain rate at which you attacked, and they tried to step that up to make it faster. But nevertheless, these feudal charges continued virtually all throughout the war, costing many, many, many lives. What happened in the Civil War is that the advantage fell to the side of the defensive. And there were no longer the decisive offensive victories that one finds, for example, during the Napoleonic Wars. That sort of warfare had become outmoded. And you find much more of this trench warfare that later becomes exemplified in World War I, where you're fighting and you're fighting and you can lose thousands of men just literally to gain a few yards. There's a preview of that occurring in the Civil War. And that accounts for the enormously high casualties, and we see that extending all the way into the first World War. Now, with the secession of the Democrats, the Southern Democrats, of course, the Northern Republicans just had a field day in Congress. And here, all of the old nationalistic Hamiltonian ideas of the Republicans come to the front. When they had control of the Congress, the Republicans pushed through a number of legislative measures, a high tariff called the Moral Tariff, land grants to colleges, a Pacific Railroad Act, providing land grants to railroads, the National Banking Act. The list of legislation that goes on during the Civil War Congresses run by Republicans reads like a who's who of Hamiltonian programs, in effect, in a new guise. So this points out what the Republicans really wanted economically. They wanted very high protectionism. And I should point out, when we talk about high protectionism under Republican administrations, we're talking about very, very high tariffs. Moving ahead in time up until, say, to 1897 under the Republican administration of McKinley, there was a tariff past then that was 57%. These are extremely high tariffs. They're extremely onerous tariffs for the protection of American industry. And that's what the Republicans were primarily interested in, to protecting American industry or certain types of American industry from foreign competition. Now, the other comment and the final comment I want to make about the war and regarding the type of warfare that was fought is that it marks, at least in American history, a clear end to the idea of civilized warfare, the kind of civilized warfare that we talked about in the previous lecture that reigned in the 18th century. Now, I didn't want to idealize the 18th century concept of civilized warfare. An ideal is one thing, practice is another. But the Civil War marks the end of the ideal. Nobody really seriously took it as a principle anymore. This is clearly exemplified in the march of General Sherman through Georgia and then up through South Carolina and North Carolina. This is Sherman's famous march, which certainly justifies the naming of a tank after him. Sherman was an interesting character. He claimed to detest war. He claimed that he wanted to end war as quickly as possible, but he also claimed that when you fight a war, you fight it all out. And Sherman was quite perceptive in identifying the Southern Rebel cause as what he called a, quote, people's war, close quote. He pointed out that the Southern armies had immense popular support among the common folk of the South, and that they derived much of their tactical and logistical support from the farmers and the people who just lived in the South. And that, therefore, any successful invasion of the South would have to deal not only with the Confederate armies, it would have to deal also with the civilian population, in other words, the source of supply for those armies. Therefore, the strategic thinking of a Sherman was basically to devastate the countryside as he moved his huge army through Georgia and then up through South Carolina. This was the famous Sherman's march, which is still remembered by Southerners today for good reason. The Sherman's army literally cut a swath miles wide devastating everything in sight through the South. They killed cattle, livestock, anything they couldn't carry with them. They burned all houses, barns, everything. Complete devastation, utter devastation. On the theory, again, that you have to destroy the rebels' base of supply, the foundation by which they managed to support themselves. One of the most brutal and total war ideas ever to emerge in American warfare. So here you have a complete reversal of the previous idea of civilized warfare. Now it's no longer just armed combatants. Everyone is fair game. Civilians, even animals, livestock, crops, all can be destroyed in the name of winning a war. This is the kind of warfare that becomes particularly prevalent, of course, in World War I and in World War II, where you have so-called strategic bombing of civilian population centers to, quote, demoralize the enemy. Veal wrote a very important book for everyone to read called Advanced to Barbarism. And this is precisely the thesis that Veal defends in this book that the 20th century, beginning with the Civil War, really, but the 20th century in general represents a, quote, advanced to barbarism. That is, it is a regression back to a very barbaric style of warfare, as opposed to the 18th century concept of civilized warfare. Now, except for the immense devastation overlooking now the immense financial and material and human losses caused by the Civil War, what else can we say about some of the effects of the Civil War? What can we say about the effects, let us say, intellectually? Because I am concerned here a good deal with intellectual history. Well, the Civil War had a good deal of intellectual impact and for good reason. The Southerners, when they argued the right of secession, obviously relied very heavily on a contract or social contract theory of government. That is, they argued that the Constitution itself was a contract or a compact between sovereign states and that therefore, one of those states, if the terms of the contract were violated, which they believed it had been, could secede, could leave or terminate the contract. In other words, the traditional American political theory, social contract theory, had very ominous implications regarding the right of secession. It lended itself very well to arguments for secession. This became very evident to northern political theorists who quickly switched from a social contract theory much more to an organic theory of the state. Now, this is a rather complex intellectual change, but one can observe it even in single individuals who, before the war, adopted a social contract approach and after the war, adopted much more of an organic or organismic approach to the state. To give you just one example, Professor of Political Science, Columbia University, Francis Lieber, who is a German immigrant and wrote a number of books on political theory in the 19th century, very widely read. Lieber's early works are quite libertarian in some respects. He talks about the state being a result of a social contract. It's in that locking tradition. His later works after the war deal much more in terms of the state as being a social organism, that it's not the result of a contract and therefore cannot be broken. Rather, everyone is part of a giant social organism. And you could no more take part of that organism away than you could cut off the hand of a person or cut off the head of a person. You see what I'm getting at here? The metaphor of the state or society as a giant organism of some kind is much more conducive to the sort of political philosophy that the Northerners were arguing for, that you could not dissolve the union. So the Northerners political philosophers tended to go away from that idea of a social contract based on equal consenting parties. A number of historians have pointed this out. Now, another effect of the war closely related to this is an intense nationalism, extremely intense nationalism. This comes out in the literature of the time, the songs, popular culture, the battle hymn of the republic, for example. This intense nationalism continues for a very long period of time. It's again an example of what I referred to earlier as the militarization of culture, which typically accompanies major wars. You find it in World War I, World War II. If you want an interesting exercise in militarization of culture, spend a day at the library glancing through Time magazine, Newsweek magazine, for the World War II period. And look at the ads. Look at the ads for Dixie cups. Look at the ads for Shell Oil and the gasman at Shell Oil. They're all relating to the war effort. You've got a guy holding a Dixie cup and saying, a soldier holding a Dixie cup. When I drink from this Dixie cup, I think of all you folks back home who are also drinking from Dixie cups. Everything is related to the war effort. And this is what I mean by the militarization of culture. And very much this sort of thing happened during the Civil War. Now specifically, let me give you an example, and I'm going to use this example throughout the rest of this talk. It's kind of a touchstone. It's also an area that I'm very familiar with having done research on a book on education and the history of state education. I've been working on this now for several years. I'm going to use the institution of state education as an example of how these issues were approached in the context of the political conflicts of the time. Now, it's after the war in America, after the Civil War, that we see an intense drive. There had been public schools before, of course. But we really see an increased effort to increase state schooling in America. Specifically, we see a much more increased effort to pass compulsory attendance laws at government schools. There had been a few compulsory attendance laws before this. Massachusetts passed one in 1852. But virtually all the compulsory attendance statutes were enacted after the Civil War, a decade or so after the Civil War. And this is clearly related to the intense nationalism that's arising. Let me give you one example out of many possible such examples. This was actually took place during the war itself. There was a character named John Sweatt, who was a SWETT, who was an extremely important educator in California. He was a third state superintendent of schools in California. He was a San Francisco superintendent of schools. He was probably the most important educator in 19th century California. And when Sweatt was running for superintendent of public instruction in 62, his major plank was that he was, quote, a union man. He said that he was a union man in every fiber of his body. And he promised to make California, quote, union to the backbone. He went on to argue that the common schools, and the word common schools here means the same as we would mean by state schools or public schools. He argued that the common schools are, quote, the great nurseries of patriotism. Continuing the, quote, cast your eye over the map of our country today and show me a section of states from which men shed their blood most freely in battle for the defense of their union. And I will show you that such states have also expended the most money for public schools. Close, quote. The crowning achievement in Sweatt's words of the common schools, quote, is that they have educated an army of half a million of men who have volunteered to sustain the national flag with the bayonet. He went on to say, in this great national crisis, let us consecrate ourselves anew to our work in educating the boys and girls that shall preserve this government from future disunion and secession. Close, quote. Now, there are many such quotes that I could give like this. This was a very, very common method of argument around the time of the Civil War. And in fact, this intense nationalism is current throughout all of the arguments for state schooling in America. And I want to do a brief digression here for a moment because I want to develop this idea of nationalism. The nationalism was prevalent before the Civil War. It just reaches its climax during the Civil War period. And the nationalism comes out very clearly, even in early advocates of state schooling. And I'm going to give you a few brief quotations just to illustrate what I mean. The first comes from a very important revolutionary writer, Benjamin Rush, who is also a very important physician and psychiatrist, is referred to as the father of American psychiatry. Thomas Zaz has a few unkind words to say about Rush. In 1786, Rush, who was one of the early strong advocates for American state schooling, argued, quote, let our pupil be taught that he does not belong to himself, but that he has public property. Let him be taught to love his family, but let him be taught at the same time that he must forsake and even forget them when the welfare of his country requires it. He must be taught to amass wealth, but it must be only to increase his power of contributing to the wants and demands of the state. He must be taught that his life is not his own when the safety of his country requires it, close quote. Now this idea of the use of institutions, particularly state schooling, to prop up the state, to preserve the power of the state, was in fact the major argument used by 19th century advocates of state schooling. Let me give you just a few brief examples. Now these are going into the post-Civil War period now. William T. Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, believed that the individual, quote, owes all that is distinctively human to the state, close quote. Not surprisingly, state education was viewed by Harris as, quote, a mere war measure as a means of preservation of the state, close quote. William T. Harris was one of the most important educators on the national scene in America in the 19th century. Another example, James W. Patterson, New Hampshire State Superintendent of Public Instruction, addressed the National Education Association in 1881 when he argued that it is proper for the state to provide education, quote, when the instinct of self-preservation shall demand it. It is solely as an act of self-defense, Patterson noted, that the government comes to the rescue of the schools. During this age of burgeoning American nationalism and militarism, Patterson believed it is essential that the schools impart knowledge, quote, of the genius and heroism of military arms, close quote. Now, again, I want to bore you with a lot of similar passages like this. They abound all throughout the literature of the time. You will note what you don't find in this literature. You don't find arguments about educating the poor kids. This is a 20th century creation. This had nothing to do with the justifications for state schooling and other kinds of institutions. There were purely political motives, and the people of this time were at least honest enough to admit what they were about. The sort of argument you hear today about externalities and public goods and educating poor kids is more or less an after-the-fact rationalization of such institutions. Jumping ahead a bit, I want to carry this into the progressive era because I want to be dealing with the intellectual movements that lead up to the progressive era. This, again, illustrating the role that state education is to play, this ideology, the use of the state to instill state values in children becomes especially prominent during the progressive era. And I'm going to take two very prominent, I mean, very important, these are not small fries, these are very important sociologists during the progressive era. The first was Charles Cooley, C-O-O-L-E-Y, who was a very influential sociologist and a champion of what we now call the liberal corporate state or whatever term you wish to use. And Cooley was astonishingly clear on the implications of state schooling for social policy. Here's how Cooley put it, quote, since the school environment is comparatively easy to control, here is the place to create an ideal formative group or system of groups which shall envelop the individual and mold his growth. A model society by assimilation to which he may become fit to leaven the rest of his life. Here, if anywhere, we can ensure his learning, loyalty, discipline, service, personal address, and democratic cooperation. This is long before George Orwell wrote, you understand. I have an even worse one for you, and I'll be quoting from this character a little bit more later. This is from another sociologist who was greatly admired by what you would guess, Theodore Roosevelt. This is one of Theodore Roosevelt's favorites. And here's how this sociologist, Edward Ross, put it, regarding the function of state schooling in this future progressivist society, quote, to collect little plastic lumps of human dough from the private households and shape them on the social kneading board, exhibits a faith in the power of suggestion which few people ever attained to. And so what happens, he concludes, that the role of the schoolmaster is just beginning, close quote. Rather chilling way of putting it, to say the least. Now, again dealing for a moment with the issue of schooling, there were other things going on, both pre- and post-civil war that I want to touch on because they're extremely important to understand the cultural conflicts that were going on during this whole period. Remember earlier I talked about this ethno-cultural school of interpretation. That becomes extremely important in understanding the reaction to the heavy immigration that was taking place throughout the 19th century. What you have basically in the 1830s and 1840s is a very heavy, very profound Irish Catholic immigration. The 1840s was the period of the great Irish potato famine. People were dying by the thousands in Ireland and they were coming over by whatever means they could to the United States. Now this meant, especially in towns like Boston and New York, a massive influx of aliens who were Catholic and who were Irish. It's hard to say which offended these Protestant scientists more. It's not a coincidence that the major push for state schooling developed in the same time and in states like Massachusetts that were experiencing the greatest influx of these immigrants. Horace Mann, who is called the father of the common school system in America, viewed with great reverence by educators today, was in fact a Massachusetts legislator, a Whig. Remember I talked about the Whig culture embodying this pietism. He was an early advocate of compulsory temperance reform. He wanted to outlaw liquor. Although a Unitarian and very theologically liberal, he was even in favor of Sabotarian laws because he thought they served a certain social function even though he didn't grant they served any particular political function. He believed basically that if you had a system of common schools, you would basically have a secular millennium that common schools would usher in a utopia. If you think I'm kidding about this, let me give you a quote from Mann on this. And this is again a very common sort of phraseology that was used by these pietistic Whigs in particular. The common school, Mann declared, quoting, is the greatest discovery ever made by man. We repeat it, the common school is the greatest discovery ever made by man. He went on to prophesy that the common schools would usher in a secular millennium, quote, nine tenths of the crimes in the penal code would become obsolete. The long catalog of human ills would be abridged. Men would walk more safely by day. Every pillow would be more inviolable by night. Property, life, and character held by a stronger tenure, all rational hopes respecting the future brightened, close quote. Well, this is the prophecy that was given by people who claimed that just if we had state schools, that's what would happen. Crime would virtually disappear. Everyone would be safe in the streets. And of course, we all know that's what we have today. If you believe in Popperian falsification of a theory, well, we have here a good example of how you can falsify a theory with empirical evidence. That was commonly argued that the only way to get rid of the crime is to have a lot of state schooling. Now, the most crime sometimes occurs in the state schools. The thing I want to point out is that among the more straightforward proponents of state schooling, and again, this will all tie into the evolution of the progressive era, because this is all really cut from a whole cloth. This opposition to the Catholic Irish who were immigrating was very pronounced and very explicit. The Democrats tended to mobilize the Catholic immigrants into a very powerful political machine in places like New York. The Whigs and later the Republicans, for the most part, detested the Catholics and the Irish immigrants. Later, the German immigrants came in after 48, and you have a whole series of immigrations later from the Slavic countries in the later 19th century. And generally, these immigrant groups were seen as the primary target of public schools. The phrase that was used is that we must Americanize the immigrants. The other phrase that was used is that we must Christianize the Catholics. And again, they were quite clear. As Murray Rothbard once put it, this was the age before the invention of public relations. And therefore, these people are quite blunt. I mean, here you have at least kind of Randian villains. I mean, they're very clear about what their principles are. They're principle villains. And you can get a real hold on them, as opposed to modern bureaucrats. And you don't know what they stand for. If they stand for anything, you can't get a real clear statement of principles. But these people are extremely blunt. Let me give you an example referring specifically to the problem of educating Irish Catholics. This is from the Massachusetts teacher, a prominent Massachusetts journal written around 1850. And here's what this journal says in regard to the problem of educating Irish Catholics. Quote, with the old, not much can be done. But with their children, the great remedy, note the wording, is education. The rising generation must be taught as our children are taught. We say must be, italicized, because in many cases this can only be accomplished by coercion. You see, there's no beating around the bush here, very straightforward. In too many instances, the parents are unfit, now I'm talking about Catholic parents, of course, only. In too many instances, the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. If left to their direction, the young will be brought up in idle, disillute, vagrant habits, which will make them worse members of society than their parents are. Instead of filling our public schools, they will find their way into our prisons, houses of correction, and almshouses. Nothing can operate effectually here, but stringent legislation, thoroughly carried out by an efficient police, this is the school, as you understand it, an efficient police, the children, and again, note the wording, must be gathered up and forced into school. And those who resist or impede this plan, whether parents or priests with priests italicized, must be held accountable and punished, close quote. You come to say QED, I mean, there's just not a lot you can add to that. So as bad as it is, at least it's straightforward. You know exactly where this writer stands. There's no second guessing. So this is the sort of thing one finds around this period of time which becomes more pronounced with the Civil War. And I'm going to return to the subject of education again as kind of a test case when I deal more with the Progressive Era, because it becomes an extremely important issue anyway, and it's a good way to gauge what's going on in any particular period of time. For now, I want you to go into a somewhat different subject, and then we'll turn back around to this. I'm going to skip the period of reconstruction just because it's very complicated, and I just simply cannot cover it here. Reconstruction, the idea behind reconstruction, it was kind of the pet theory of the radical Republicans in the Congress to punish the Southerners adequately for their treason. There was the question of what to do with the freed slaves, of course. And this was a very tricky social question. Some of the radical Republicans had at least the germ of good ideas as to how to deal with the freed slaves. Lysander Spooner, interestingly, Lysander Spooner was good on the Civil War. He opposed the war. In fact, although he was an ardent anti-slavery person, he nevertheless thought the South had a right to secede. And this is, in fact, the argument you find in that no treason series, of which three parts were published, no treason in the Constitution of no authority. That was the reason he published that essay, was to ultimately defend the right of the South to secede, even though he detested the system of slavery. The idea that Spooner had as to how to deal with the freedman problem was that the slaves were, in effect, the true homesteaders of the plantation land on which they had worked, and therefore should have property rights in that plantation property over a sensible owner of the property. That if you had been forced on that property for 10 years to work on it, then you should own some of it. That should be the way to give a certain landed property to the slaves. Now, that would have been very difficult to implement politically. The problem with some of the radical Republicans, who in some respects were not bad on some issues, was that some of them wanted to confiscate not just the land of slave owners, they wanted to confiscate the land of virtually every Southerner who fought on the side of the South. In other words, they did not distinguish between Southerners who had fought to defend slavery versus those Southerners who owned no slaves at all. So this issue gets very murky during this period. You have this vicious period of military rule in the South where there's an attempt to impose a virtual military dictatorship on the South by the North. That eventually breaks down, of course, then you see the resurgence of Southern nationalism, if you wish to call it that, a certain vengeful streak coming out in organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, and a lot of racial hatred coming out of that. So it becomes an awful mess. The effects of the Civil War are, in a sense, still with us today. This is the period at which the Democratic Party, which had been devastated, of course, during the Civil War because of secession, the Democratic Party experiences a revival. They don't really win the presidency for a while, but they start gaining seats in the house and the Senate. They start winning state races. And they become a political force virtually equal again to that of the Republicans. And you have a period from around 1871 until almost 1900, and that's 1898 when they made the big mistake of having William Jennings Bryan run as a Democratic candidate. You have a period, a very, very close, tight competition between the Democrats and the Republicans. Very close, very hotly contested races. You had the famous Hayes-Tilden election, where the Democratic candidate, Samuel Tilden, gets the majority of popular votes, but owing to some nice rigging that was done in three Southern states, Hayes gets the election in the Electoral College. Some very back-stabbing politicking going on during this whole period. The thing I want to point out is this period is important for a number of reasons. Now, when you measure the growth of government, you can do it a number of different ways. You can look at the laws on the books. You can look at what the laws say. But putting laws on the books is one thing. Enforcing them is another. One way to look at the growth of government is to look at the administrative capacity of a government. That is how many people does it really employ, how many people does it have at its disposal to enforce its will. Now, one thing you'll note about the period, let us say, between 1871 and 1901, is the dramatic rise in the number of civil servants or the civilian payroll, that is a non-military payroll, in the federal government. In 1871, you have 53,000 civilian employees of the federal government. In 1901, some 30 years later, you have 256,000, a dramatic post-war increase in the growth of the federal government. To give you another example, in 1871, federal expenditures were approximately $292 million. In just 20 years, not 1901, but 1891, we had our first billion-dollar congress. So federal expenditures during this period were increasing at a breakneck speed. It was a period of intense growth of government. It's a mistake just to look at the progressive era at an arbitrary date and say, well, beginning in 1900, we had this takeoff of government. The government was growing increasingly during all of this period. It was a buildup, and it started to snowball more and more. Well, what were some of the reasons for this rapid buildup? Well, some historians will attribute it to the crisis created by industrialism in America. I'm sure you've all heard this, the massive immigrant populations to the cities, which cause severe social planning problems. Frankly, whenever I hear an historian attribute some governmental growth to the response to industrialism, I just kind of a haze comes over my eyes, because I don't know what that means. I hear historians attributing almost everything to responses to industrialism, as if there's no other alternative. You have industrialism, you have to have a big government, as if that's self-evident. So I hope you don't get fooled by that. If you read any of this literature, you'll find books with the titles of the response to industrialism. Well, clearly it was a response to industrialism, but it was a response given a certain ideology, a certain way of looking at things. And what we have during this period, as I indicated earlier, is a noted ideological shift. That is, the intellectuals during this period are thinking in far different terms than they did before the Civil War. That explains it as much as anything does. In other words, what were the policy makers thinking? Who was influencing them during this period of time? Well, let's take a brief look at that. And we'll spend a lot of time on this, but we can get some idea. The 1870s and 1880s become very important for a number of reasons. Intellectually, many American academics were traveling to Germany to take their PhDs in German universities. And at that time in German universities, the predominant influence by far was Hegel, the German philosopher. Now, I don't know how many of you are familiar with Hegel's political philosophy, but to put it simply, in Hegel's political philosophy one finds an extreme glorification of the state, extreme glorification of the state. And one finds a very clear, organic theory of the state that in the state one finds the culmination of everything society should stand for. And a number of important intellectuals, like James you've probably never heard before, John Burgess, Richard E. Lee, Albie and W. Small, the sociologist, a number of intellectuals like this came back from Germany with their German PhDs in hand, having thoroughly imbibed the ideas of Hegelianism. And these individuals start talking about the need for a very strong, centralized, unified government. It's also at this period of time that one finds the movement for professionalization in various disciplines. One finds the organization of professional organizations like the AMA, various bar associations, American Association for the Advancement of Science. The list goes on and on of various professional organizations that were formed during this period of time. The school teachers organize, and behind a lot of this professionalization is the idea that experts should be planning what is going on in this increasingly chaotic society. This was the idea that there are the best and the brightest. There are the social experts who should plan rationally rather than simply letting things happen just on their own without some sort of direction and planning. This comes out very clearly even in the statements of some of these professional organizations. Consider the American Economic Association, which was formed in 1885. In the Statement of Principle, we find the following very clearly non-value-free statement regarding the aims of the American Economic Association. And I quote, we regard the state as an agency whose positive assistance is one of the indispensable conditions of human progress. Close quote. Well, as I said, so much for value-free economics. Richard Eli, in 1898, he was one of these people who fell under the influence of Hegelianism, said, quote, the state and the state alone stands for us all. Close quote. A very influential writer. Again, this sort of thinking, this sort of terminology becomes increasingly common. To give you another example, one very influential sociologist of this period, Lester F. Ward, who rivaled Herbert Spencer for his influence in sociology, and an important work called dynamic sociology, said in no uncertain terms that a new age had dawned in America. Ward said, quote, the individual has reigned long enough. The day has come for society to take its affairs into its own hands and shape its own destiny. Close quote. You also have these characters like Charles Cooley and Edward Ross, whom I quoted earlier on the issue of education. And let me go back for a moment to the issue of education and quote you, Ward, once again. Because you see, this is a very good example of what I mean by the professionalization, the idea that experts should rule. Experts know what is best. Here's what Ward said very explicitly about one of the reasons for state education. And now, listen to this in the context that I've just been telling you about the need for experts. Quote, the secret of the superiority of state over private education lies in the fact that in the former, the teacher is responsible solely to society. As in private, so also in public education, the calling of the teacher is a profession. And his personal success must depend upon his success in accomplishing the result which his employers desire accomplished. But the result desired by the state is a wholly different one from that desired by parents, guardians, and pupils. Of the latter, the teacher is happily independent. Close quote. In other words, the big argument that Ward used for state education is that it insulated the educational bureaucracy from what he called the desires of parents. And this was the idea behind a professional bureaucracy in America. You needed an entrenched class of professionals of experts who were in a sense immune to the whims and caprices of parents and consumers and that sort of thing. You needed experts in there to guide us in the right directions. Now this is really much of the thinking behind the whole civil service reform movement that really takes off in the 1870s and 1880s, again during the same period. Now I don't wish to imply that all the individuals involved in this movement were Hegelians or were rabid status. In fact, I'm sorry to say that some of the individuals involved in the movement for civil service reform were in fact, some of them at least, were in fact in the tradition of classical liberalism. And their interest in civil service reform was to retrench political expenditures and to make government more efficient and therefore less costly. You'll find some of the reformers from the Civil War period after the war is over going into civil service reform. Well, why was civil service reform such an issue among these people? Well, because after the war it became very clear that whether you were a Democrat or a Republican had nothing to do with how much corruption you would engage in. Under the Grand Administration, which of course is a Republican administration, there was the infamous credit mobiliar scandal where many congressmen got rich off the railroad scam. There was also the whiskey conspiracy or the whiskey ring scandal where people were getting paid off by the whiskey distillers in terms of taxes. There was the famous, around the 1870s, there's a famous Tammany Hall scandal with boss Tweed, who was the Democratic boss of New York. In short, it was clear that politics was a great feeding ground for people who wanted to get rich. This was no secret. This was called patronage, by the way. Like the Tammany Hall thing. Now, patronage was actually defended by the Democrats as a kind of a break on government. Andrew Jackson, despite the fact that John Quincy Adams called him that ignorant barbarian, actually had some intelligent things to say about patronage. Patronage was where when you came into office as president, you fired all the other administration's employees in the post office in customs houses, and you put all your own political people in that helped you in the campaign. Incidentally, this is the reason that things like the post office were so important to make state functions. How do you find arguments today for the post office? Something to do with economic problems or private mail delivery? That has nothing to do with why the state wanted the post office. It was the standard patronage position. You could assign jobs to thousands of people if you control the post office. It was a way of rewarding your political supporters. And this is why governments like to hang on to these sorts of jobs. They're very important as a means of gaining political power. So what happened for many years until civil service reform is basically you would come into office, you would fire as many of the old guys as you could from the previous administration, and you would reward your own supporters with these plum jobs. Now this was called patronage, or if you were against it or if you were kicked out, it was called corruption. So you can take your pick. But so problematic did this become, say with the Tweed Ring in New York. I mean, you've got Tweed, for example, commissioning a building, and the plaster makes $3 million, right? I mean, the patronage did get a little extreme in some cases, and you came to the attention, it even bothered some of the Democrats. So you have, among some of the liberals as well, a concern for taking corruption out of government. And the idea was that there was a certain arm of government, the administrative arm, which should be free of politics altogether. In other words, there was no reason in the minds of these people that you couldn't make the administrative branch of government totally free of politics. So you'll have a professional, highly trained, expert, professional bureaucracy which will occupy these civil service jobs and which will bring us all in a state of utopia in an unspecified number of years. Well, this sort of movement, if you combine the liberal reformers, I think when I say liberal reformers, I'm thinking of individuals like E. L. Godkin, who founded the nation. He was kind of in the classical liberal tradition, not totally so. Even someone like William Graham Sumner was pushing some of the civil service reform stuff. Well, these people wanted a professional bureaucracy, and that's what they got eventually. And that's what we still have. I'm not saying that everyone did it for perverse reasons. I think some of these people were well-intentioned, but it's a good example of unintended consequences in the political sphere. I heard Milton Friedman not too long ago comment that compared with the problems of dealing with the professional and trench bureaucracy today, he would rather go back to the old spoiled system, as it was called, the patronage system. Because the problems then were far less serious. And despite the good intentions of some of these reformers to economize and take corruption out of politics, they really accelerated the growth of a professional bureaucracy and therefore accelerated the growth of an entrenched, established elite within government, the professional bureaucracy. And I'd say that we're living with that today. This begins to take off in the 1880s with the Pendleton Act. There's a number of civil service reform acts, but because of the intense political competition that takes place for a period of years, it doesn't really get off the ground in a real serious way until the progressive era comes, particularly with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt and then beyond that, although much of it was taking place. You have around the progressive era a long period of Republican dominance in terms of the presidency. There wasn't as much political competition going on at the time. Now let's move up more directly to the progressive era now. And I've tried to lay some of the groundwork for it here. So you see that several things are happening here. At one time, we have a number of different intellectual trends coming together at this time. And we have emerging in the progressive era. By the way, the dates in the progressive era, these are arbitrary historical classifications. But if you were to pick dates, say 1900 to 1914 or whatever, they're pretty much arbitrary. And in a way, these sorts of classifications are misleading, because nothing particularly important happened at 1900, especially. Again, it's somewhat arbitrary. But we have around this period of time a new class of intellectuals arising from the backgrounds I've discussed before. We have a particularly important event in 1901, and that's McKinley's assassinated. And that means a person that was regarded as idiotic, even by his Republican supporters, Teddy Roosevelt, comes into power, much to the chagrin of the Republican power people who would kind of put him there to get him out of the way out of New York. They figured they'd stick him in the innocuous vice presidency, he can't do any harm. And so he ends up, poor McKinley gets it, and here Teddy ends up being the president. So nobody particularly liked Roosevelt, I don't think. But he was a very important figure, both ideologically in terms of the actual actions he took. He managed to do a lot of harm even before he got in office. He kicked around New York for quite a while, and went on these raids in New York in the Lower East Side trying to enforce the blue laws. He seemed to get a particular pleasure out of that. I think Ralph will be going into his role in the Spanish American War when he was assistant secretary of the Navy, almost single-handedly ordering Dewey to capture the Philippines. He was a real militarist type. We're dealing here with the post-Spanish American war period, and we're dealing with the highlight of American imperialism. You have all the worst elements in a Teddy Roosevelt, believe me. Let me give you some examples of the way Roosevelt thought. I'm not going to go into a whole thing about his presidency and so forth. I don't really see the point here. But let me deal a little bit with his mindset. He had a very simple way of dealing with mobs. He recommended, quote, taking 10 or a dozen of their leaders out, standing them against the wall and shooting them dead, close quote. For anarchists and socialist agitators, he recommended, quote, the most wholesome desire to do them harm. These are the people he wanted to shoot. Now, he was very concerned, again quoting from Roosevelt himself, that he was convinced that national greatness rested on, quote, the power to attain a high degree of social efficiency. And by that, in his own words, he meant love of order and, quote, the capacity to subordinate the interests of the individual to the interests of the community, close quote. He was explicitly an admirer of Alexander Hamilton and the Hamiltonian system. And indeed, what he tried to implement, his vision of the corporate, the liberal corporate state, was very much a modernized version of the Hamiltonian scheme. He despised the Jeffersonian tradition and Jefferson himself. He regarded Jefferson as weak and ineffectual. And he said regarding laissez faire, he said that Americans had to, quote, abandon definitely the laissez faire theory of political economy and fearlessly champion a system of increased government control, close quote. Well, this sort of thing goes all throughout the works of Roosevelt. I won't bore you with any more. But to give you a little bit broader sense of other intellectual things that were going on, let's go back to a few other people that I mentioned earlier. One of these, in fact, I think I may just not deal with anyone other than this. One of these was going back, I'm going back to Edward Ross. Now, remember, I mentioned Edward Ross as a prominent American sociologist at the Progressive Era who was greatly admired by Teddy Roosevelt. And I read that little quote about little plastic lumps of human dough, remember? Well, Ross had a lot of other things to say. Now, in reading this, I'm almost reluctant to read it because it's an extremely offensive passage. But I read it to communicate to you how extremely offensive a lot of these progressive thinkers were. Many of them were overt racists, anti-Semites. Many of them were championing things not only like compulsory prohibition, but even wanted compulsory sterilization laws. I'm not saying all of them did, but a good number of them did, and a good number of respectable ones did. There are many, many aspects of the Progressive Era and its way of thinking that even historians today tend to flinch at when they investigate it, and they don't like to overplay it. Because for so many years, the Progressive Era and Progressive Thinkers were seen as somehow great humanitarian liberal in the modern sense reformers, battling big business. And that's simply, to say the least, an extremely distorted view of what was going on. Let me give you an example. And again, we're not dealing with a small fry. I wouldn't bother quoting this unless it were by a prominent sociologist like Ross. This was an article he published around the turn of the century in a prominent magazine called The Century Magazine. This was meant for popular consumption, but it was done under the rubric of social science. If you're one of those people who believe that governments are far-seeing, and in fact, we do need experts like social scientists to tell us the truth about things who, because they are scientific, know what's really going on, listen to what this respected social scientist has to say about the race problem in America at this time. Ross assessed the various immigrant stocks that he observed coming into America. According to Ross, quote, the blood now being injected into the veins of our people is sub-common. He went on to say, it is reasonable to expect an early falling off in the frequency of good looks in the American people. It is unthinkable that so many persons with crooked faces, coarse mouths, bad noses, heavy jaws, and low foreheads can mingle their heredity without making personal beauty yet more rare among us than it actually is. So much ugliness is at last bound to work to the surface, close quote. Now, you don't know quite what to make of some of Ross's comments. On the one hand, they're almost funny sometimes, but they're so extremely racist they're also repulsive. For example, the Irish, according to Ross, remember this is a social scientist speaking, are not only good after dinner speakers, but they, quote, give us good salesmen and successful traveling men, close quote. Unfortunately, however, they are often afflicted with, quote, slackness, unthrift, and irresponsibility. Germans, although strong, are, quote, too stocky for grace, and their slow reflexes make them poor competitors in sports. Scandinavians, we had something to say about everyone, Scandinavians are deficient in what he called visual imagination. While Italians have, quote, a propensity for personal violence, it is generally agreed, he notes, that the southern Italians lie more easily than northern Europeans, great liars. The Sicilian, in particular, quote, with those darting eyes and hands, will stab his best friend in a sudden quarrel over a game of cards. Those playing bridge with Ralph, I want to. He thinks I don't see him out there. Now, Slavs, what about Slavs? Yes, Slavs are notorious wife beaters. The most numerous group among the Slavs, the Poles are, quote, uncleanly, intemperant, quarrelsome, ignorant, priest-ridden, and hard on women and children. They congregate together in an attempt to preserve, quote, a rancid bit of the old world, close quote. This gets worse. He goes on to say, I don't know if he had his empirical evidence here, or he had it in some scholarly journal, but when a few Poles have come into a neighborhood, the other farmers become restless, sell out, and move away. Soon a parish is organized, church and parish school arise, the public school decays, and Slavdom has a new outpost, close quote. And of course, the usual anti-Semitism doesn't escape his eye either. Jews, he said, avoid hard muscular labor and prefer, instead, to supervise, speculate, and finance, quote, none can beat the Hebrew at a bargain for through all the intricacies of commerce he can send his prophet, close quote. Eastern European Jews tend to pursue Gentile women. They have a bad reputation for lying and, quote, the insurance companies scan a Jewish fire risk more closely than any other, close quote. Well, if you're doing a parody of a racist propaganda, this is something you expect from one of these strange looking right-wing papers that you occasionally get in the mail if you're on a tax resistance movement mailing list. But anyway, this is, again, one of the better sociologists of the period, and again, one of his big fans was Roosevelt. Well, actually, this is not unusual. I wish I had some of the really great passages. You read all these people, and they're very arrogant about the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to conquer the world and to bring the benefits of humanity. Henry Cabot Lodge, one of these imperialist types, defending imperialism coined the phrase, hands across the sea. This is when they were grabbing the Philippines and Guam and Hawaiian and so forth. And one sage critic pointed out that the true expression should be, hands across the sea and into someone else's pocket. That was really what was going on here. Now, the other great philosopher and probably known to you all during this period that I want to spend a few minutes with is John Dewey. Because if any philosopher, social thinker, exemplifies the progressive era, it has to be John Dewey. Now, John Dewey far outlived his usefulness. I mean, he really, he kept spewing this type of propaganda long before anyone continued to believe it, I think. He outlived his time. But he certainly was one of the early proponents of an explicitly progressivist sort of ideology. Now, what do I mean by progressivist ideology? Well, I mentioned some of the components before. The Hegelianism and the role of the state. But there's another element here. A lot of these progressivist thinkers were influenced by Darwinian evolutionism. But it wasn't the Herbert Spencer theory of evolution where you let things go their own course and develop spontaneously. It was the idea that while we're intelligent human beings and we can speed along the progress of the human race through intelligent planning. Now, Dewey had a very strong vision of the role of the state in social planning. And unlike a lot of these other thinkers, he defended it philosophically. And that's why I want to spend just a couple of minutes with Dewey, so you get a flavor of how the most prominent philosopher of the progressive era saw the role of the state in social planning. Dewey defended what he called socialization, a term still used by sociologists and educators, by the way. And he thought that the primary role of the state school, the public school, was to socialize children. Well, what did he mean by socialization? Well, to understand this, you have to understand that Dewey heralded the transition from what he called the old individualism to the new individualism. He said, we may say that the United States has steadily moved from an earlier pioneer individualism to a condition of dominant corporateness. This new social corporateness, as he called it, requires that we replace the old rugged individualism for a new individualism that stresses the unity of the individual with society. The old individualism, Dewey said, is characterized by ideas of pecuniary profit. And this is, quote, the chief obstacle to the creation of a type of individual whose pattern of thought and desire is enduringly marked by consensus with others, close quote. Again, very Orwellian type of terminology. The goal here is consensus with others. And how is the new individualism to supplant the old, quote, only through the controlled use of all the resources of the science and technology that we have mastered the physical forces of nature, close quote. In other words, here you have a coming together of the social engineering idea combined with the rise in technology that with all this new technology, surely we can engineer society. Surely we can plan society. Dewey's model of society, in short, was a corporate society planned by social experts, employing the scientific method. It is therefore no surprise that Dewey admired the Soviet school system, as did many progressives later on. Although he expressed dissatisfaction with aspects of the, quote, professed philosophy which animates Bolshevik Russia, he was nonetheless, quote, sure that the future historian of our times will admire those who had the imagination first to see that the resources of technology might be directed by organized planning to serve chosen ends, close quote. And we all know how much the Soviet school system is admired. Indeed, quote, the Russian educational situation is enough to convert one to the idea that only in a society based upon the cooperative principle can the ideals of educational reformers be adequately carried into operation, close quote. Now, Dewey's fascination with essentially administered corporate order is further illustrated by his remark, amazingly, that, quote, war, meaning World War I, has revealed the possibilities of intelligent administration, close quote, because it was in World War I that social engineering came to the fore in the form of war planning. And this is a very dominant theme in some of the progressivists. They didn't profess to like war, although Roosevelt seemed to like it for its own sake. But many of them came from more of a pacifist tradition. Yet they couldn't help but notice that during wartime, the kind of society they thought should prevail came to be. It was during wartime you had central planning. You had efficient use of resources for a common national goal. And so people like Dewey looked at World War I and they said, well, gee, we don't like this sort of war, but if we could just have the same thing without the war, you see. And this is where William James, another progressivist thinker, his famous phrase comes, the moral equivalent of war. That is what we need in the progressivist philosophy, is not war, we need the moral equivalent of war. We need a war on poverty. We need a war on ignorance. We need some type of domestic war whereby we can stamp out individual goals and subordinate all individuals into a collective drive for a common goal. So that's what was meant by the moral substitute for war. The progressivist ideal of the sort of planning that takes place in war except without the actual physical war itself. Now in the minutes remaining, I want to discuss a bit the role of big business and its relationship to the rise of the progressivist philosophy and specifically to the rise of government intervention in the economy. Now fortunately Roy Childs has done a very excellent job in an article he did some years ago called Big Business in the Rise of American Statism, which was distributed to you in your reading list. And that is such a good summary of the thesis that I don't particularly feel a need to go into great detail here when you can simply read it there. But I would like to summarize for you the essentials of that way of looking at the progressive era. Not dealing so much now with the ideas but dealing with the role of businessmen, particularly large business people, large businessmen, in the rise of the corporate state, that is the close alliance between business and the state. Now if you understand the philosophy, the ideology that was prevailing at this time, I think you can understand the social conditions, the intellectual conditions that made this sort of merger between government on the one hand and business on the other possible. The thing to realize here is that when you enter the late 19th century and you have these various large corporations and the movements to mergers, the trusts and so forth, the pooling that was done earlier on, the large corporation, the large trusts, were not criticized by the progressive thinkers really. They were in fact admired for their social efficiency. In fact, the trust was taken by many people, by many progressive thinkers, as a model of social organization. They firmly believed that society itself, government in particular, could be set up along the lines of a trust. Now they obviously believed there should be some restrictions on what these trusts could do. But it would be a mistake to think that the progressive thinkers were anti-trust as a model. They weren't. In fact, they admired the model. And this is a lot of the thinking that went into this corporate ideology that you can model society. If these trusts run things so efficiently, then surely we can model all of society along similar lines. Now, an interesting question here is, to what extent does ideology filter down into the business community? And to what extent does the general ideology in society influence the thinking of businessmen? Are businessmen motivated by broader ideological concerns? Are they motivated primarily by short-term pecuniary concerns? Well, that's not an easy question to answer. But regardless of which answer we give, it's clear, and this is clear from Roy's article, which summarizes primarily the work of Gabriel Coco in two books, Railroads and Regulations and The Triumph of Conservatism, Coco argues very convincingly there are a number of points that are very important for libertarians to understand. Because they're contrary to common, popular historical judgment on this matter. Well, first of all, let me paint you the traditional picture of this period, which I'm sure you've all heard. The traditional picture is that around the 1870s, 1880s, you have a lot of these large corporations, these trusts, these mergers, and so forth, coming into existence, Standard Oil, and so forth. And that these trusts were large, they were ruthless, they were out competing their competitors, they were driving out smaller businesses, and therefore to preserve competition, government had to step in with various forms of regulation and preserve the marketplace, they had to protect the consumer from these rapacious trusts. Now you've all heard that, I assume, that that version of American history. What Coco shows, convincingly I think, is that precisely the opposite was true. That despite the fact that these mergers were taking place, or perhaps because of the fact these were taking place, competition was actually increasing. That as these mergers continued, they became increasingly inefficient, small competitors would come in, and that many of their profits were dropping, particularly around the turn of the century, as you get into 1901, 1902. There were some very serious drops in profit. In effect, Coco argues that if you look across all the attempts to form these mergers and trusts, whether it's the iron and the steel industry, the auto industry, the railroad industry, the meatpacking industry, he goes through a variety of industries. One will find clearly that these mergers almost universally failed to accomplish their stated objectives. Price fixing did not work, because they're always the possible. How do you fix prices? How do you fix prices higher on the market than they would be ordinarily? You can only do it by cutting back production. So you have to have agreements to curtail production. That's very difficult to do in a complex network of industrial firms. Cheating is relatively easy. There's always a temptation for one firm to cheat. You can get around things by providing rebates, and there's various other ways of getting around agreements, cartel agreements. And this is, in fact, what happened. The marketplace kept these cartels from being very effective. Let me read to you a very nice passage where Koko summarizes this point. And again, his book, for those who have read it, as you know, is just studded with details on this. Koko says the following. He says, despite the large number of mergers and the growth of the absolute size of many corporations, the dominant tendency in the American economy at the beginning of this century was toward growing competition. Competition was unacceptable to many key business and financial interests, and the merger movement was to a large extent a reflection of voluntary, unsuccessful business efforts to bring irresistible competitive trends under control. As new competitors sprang up and as economic power was diffused throughout an expanding nation, it became apparent to many important businessmen that the only national government could rationalize, that is stabilize, the economy. All those specific conditions varied from industry to industry, internal problems that could be solved only by political means were the common denominator in those industries whose leaders advocated greater federal regulation. Ironically, contrary to the consensus of historians, Koko concludes, it was not the existence of monopoly that caused the federal government to intervene in the economy, but the lack of it, close quote. To summarize Koko's thesis, he argues in his works that big business played an extremely important role in bringing about increased government intervention in the economy, and they did so primarily to accomplish what they could not accomplish by voluntary means through mergers and trust. That is to stabilize prices to keep them higher than the market would keep them, to restrict entry into the market, to various regulatory agencies. And in fact, this is becoming, I think, more and more accepted by historians. The old progressivist view is dying out, and the Koko view is becoming, I think, more prevalent now. So it's particularly important for those, I think, who say have only read, and I don't mean this in a condescending way, but this is fairly new to you, and you've read, say, Ein Rant's Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal. Well, as I recall, there's a chapter in there called Something Like Big Business, America's Persecuted Minority. Now, I think Rant has a certain point to make, but I think you should investigate, if you're interested in this, the role that these big businesses, the so-called persecuted minorities, have played in fostering government intervention for their own benefit. And I think as libertarians, it's very important that we are always clear on the distinction between businesses which thrive on competition, survive in the marketplace, through competition, versus those businesses which, in the Hamiltonian fashion, work hand in glove with government, and therefore survive at the expense of other competitors and the expense of taxpayers. Now, to pull all of this together, I would like to go back to one of the original things I said at the beginning of the first lecture, and that is the quote I gave from John Adams regarding the role of ideas in the American Revolution. You recall that Adams said that the real American Revolution was a revolution in ideas which occurred between 1760 and 1775 before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. Well, we've seen over this rather rapid survey of American history, we've gone from good to very bad. We've started out with radical Whig ideology, ideas of individual rights, free market, spontaneous order, and we've ended up with this corporate liberalism, this corporate progressivism which stresses a subordination of the individual to the collective, the role of the state in intervening in the economy. We have glorification of war. We have racism. In other words, we have, to put it mildly, a distinct decline in ideological purity. We have, from a libertarian point of view, an absolute disaster ideologically. And the thing that I want to stress is that I think the American Revolutionaries were essentially correct. I think the place to begin a revolution at least is with ideas. Even regarding military force, ideas are extremely important because if you change a man's ideas, you change the direction in which he points his gun. For those of you who believe that economic interests prevail, that we cannot fight the economic interests that some business people have in government, again I would remind you that economic interests are not primary. Economic interests are interpreted in terms of one's ideas. You can have two people in identical economic circumstances facing identical conditions, and yet they might act in totally different ways, each thinking that they're acting in their economic self-interest simply because both have different views of economics. In other words, they have different ideas. So I think, no matter how you put it, we have to approach, and the thing we can learn from history, is that we have to approach social and political change first at the intellectual level. And it's by changing the opinions of all strata of society, from politicians, to housewives, to businessmen, that everyone's long range interest lies in a free market. And then in fact, that is the justice system. I think that's what we can learn from this sort of history, that we can once again implement the kind of ideological revolution over the next 15 or 20 years that John Adams talked about. Thank you. Thank you. Do you want to take a minute for questions? I mean, I'll see. When did we start? We've got 15 minutes, I guess, don't we? OK, good. Yes? What is the information for? Yes, the people who put up the grant for that have been asking the same question for a number of years. I haven't been able to give them a good answer yet, so I don't know if I can give you one. I hope after the summer is over, it's going to take another month or two to get the final draft done. After that, we don't know how long it will take to get it published. It could be a year or more. It'll be a good book, though, when it finally does get done. Yes? Have you had an opinion from a contemporary libertarian view about the violence used by the early colonialists pulling down the handle of the taxpayer? Would you personally view that as ethically wrong? No, I don't think it was ethically wrong. I think in the context they were working in, I think it was ethically proper. It was a form of escalated violence, but I think that can serve a role, and I think it did there very clearly. Scott, it seems to me it was a trend towards extreme collectivism, a particular event that, in this period of time that you talked about, you feel that there was a reversal of this trend back towards individual rights. Is there a particular event or a core decision that stands out to be a reversal? During the period I discussed? Well, yes, there are a couple. There's an ebb and flow, particularly in the early period. The Jeffersonian victory is clearly a turn in the right direction. The Jacksonian victory is a turn in the right direction after the presidency of John Quincy Adams. There are a few isolated cases like that, but the general trend after the Civil War in particular becomes dominantly statist and dominantly collectivist in his thinking. So after that period, I don't see any particular bright spots. I mean, you've got a Grover Cleveland being elected, who was a Democrat, fairly free trade in a lot of respects, but I don't think that alters the general historical trend that was going on during that period. Yes? After the Democratic Party sort of became reconstituted after the Civil War, did they then return to the pre-Civil War, Jeffersonian ideas, and mention that if they did, at what point did they start becoming turning into the opposite? Well, you have to look, I suppose, at each, I haven't really gone through each platform for each election. The Democratic Party stayed pretty good up until the 1896 election, which was when they nominated William Jennings Bryan, which was an absolute disaster because he was bad on money, he was bad on everything. He was a pietist. They really abandoned, he was essentially from a populist background, and the Democratic Party tried to go populist with Bryan, and it was another disaster for them. Up until that time, if you had to choose between the party, certainly the Democratic Party was the more laissez-faire party. But again, you have variations. One thing you have to remember, and I perhaps should have mentioned this during the lecture, just because someone opposes controls at the federal level doesn't mean that they're against state intervention. And some of these Democratic types, the state's right types, sound great on federal intervention, but you find them back home pushing for their own particular forms of state intervention, that is their own state. So I don't wish to make these people to be purer than they are, but it varies. You find a wide, it's hard to, this puzzles me, when I read someone and I ask myself, why are the Democratic parties opposed to the Republican Party, sometimes it's very difficult to reach a clear answer. You've got some Republicans that were very good from time to time on hard money issues in free trade. So it's by no means a unanimous thing, but on the whole, the Democrats did embody the more laissez-faire tradition. There's no question about that. Yes? I see, remember that the part of the standard trial trust was actually improving the efficiency of the production of gasoline. What would the government gain, was it maybe a popular measure to try to attack that organization? I'm not familiar enough with that case to know the specifics of it. I may be Roy or someone, do you want to tackle that or Ralph? What does the government gain by attacking the standard trial trust? Yeah, I would refrain from commenting on that until I look into them closer. I know that some of the theories have to do with the Rockefeller-Morgan fights that were going on, but I haven't personally verified that myself, so I hesitate to offer those kinds of theories without looking into them closer. Yes? I think probably what might be a partial answer to that is that most of the antitrust work has not been because people are too low in prices and they're charging too high prices because they're charging too low prices. And that goes for the initial one on the bread for companies, and to figure out a way to manufacture bread much more profitably, to currently use the persecuting companies by the end. Any place where we've had tremendous technological advances and during the call, it's in computer thoughts, it's certainly not for any justified reasons. Yes? I have a question on your opinion of James D'Orby Hill, because I've heard conflicting reports. In one sense, he's, they juxtapose him to the big four, as the guy who never took an ounce of government subsidy, but in Colco's book, Raros Regulation, I seem to get a different picture. Yeah, again, I haven't done specific research on Hill, but you are right. The kind of picture you get, for example, in the capitalist and the unknown ideal book, Hill, I think, has mentioned as an example of a good entrepreneur, and yet Colco does point out that he was involved in all kinds of government. Roy, do you want to say something about that? Yes, Randy Hill's been mostly his so-called refusal to accept federal aid, but the fact is he wasn't offered any of the great aid of the state level, and also where he made a pile of money with James K. Hill and built the railroad for the Tsar in Siberia. Yes. Do you have any comment on the impact of Margaret Mead, and on the progressive racist ideas in the late 1800s? I don't know really about Margaret Mead's influence. Does anyone want to comment on that? There's maybe people here far more qualified than I am. I don't know too much about Margaret Mead, but I do know there's a science called Eugenics that was very popular and dealt with that racial stereotypes based on certain facial characteristics and things, and there are a lot of Eugenics laws passed to sterilize the mental room where they retarded things like this. Now do you have information on that? I know a little bit, but I thought maybe you would tie that if you knew more, you would be able to tie it. What's the connection? I'm curious. Do you have some of her writings? A lot of her writings, and she had it under the guise of maybe birth control, but in reality her real serious writings, she wanted mandatory birth control for minorities, and her basic goal was actually was the elimination of all minorities. I mean it wasn't put like that until you really got right down to it, but in research it's... Well, she was racist, let's put it that way. We seem to have conflicting views here. Yes. Well, again, you have decisions in the early... One thing I didn't talk about, one thing the Federalist did going back to the Federalist period, the Federalist ascendancy, the stronghold of Federalist power was in the Supreme Court and in the judiciary system generally. Before John Adams, I think it was literally the night before his term was over as President, he signed this Midnight's Appointments Bill where he put a lot of Federalist into newly created judgeships. And that had an immense influence because when the Jeffersonians got in power they tried to remove some of them, but they had a very difficult time doing so. Chief Justice John Marshall, who was the first Supreme Court, who was the Supreme Court Chief Justice during a very long period of time, and handed down a lot of very important decisions like Marbury versus Madison, which established the Doctrine of Judicial Review. These, Marshall in particular, was very important in implementing and installing certain Federalist ideas of the role of Supreme Court. You see the Jeffersonian idea of the Supreme Court was that the Supreme Court shouldn't really have the power of judicial review. The Supreme Court should not have the power to nullify what the legislature has done. And Madison instituted this policy of judicial review and there was immense bitter feelings between Marshall and the Jeffersonians. Now after Marshall you have Roger Tawny coming in under Jackson. Now Tawny is the one who, he's best known for the Dred Scott decision, but Tawny in some ways wasn't bad on some issues. He wasn't good on some either, but you have more of a Jacksonian view with Tawny of the sanctity of private property than certainly you do with Marshall. And Tawny reigned for a long time up into close to the Civil War. In fact, he reigned into the Civil Wars as Chief Justice of Supreme Court. In fact, he was the one that, that sitting on the Supreme Court condemned some of Lincoln's actions such as the suspension of habeas corpus. He was just ignored, but he was good on some civil rights issues. Unfortunately Tawny is a good example being a southern judge of the problem of equating slavery with the defense of private property. Because if you accept that you can have property in slaves and it follows in a sense that the Dred Scott decision was a correct decision and that you shouldn't become free just by going into another state. You should be able to bring your property back with you. So Tawny is pretty good. During the period from then to you've got Samuel Chase later on, you've got a string and there it starts to vary. You have certain Chief Justices. I'm not real familiar with the actions of some of them, but they pass relatively good decisions, but as you get towards the later of the 19th century, from a libertarian point of view, they get progressively worse. So you get a lot more scope given the intervention to correct, you know, for so-called consumer welfare and such. Let me see. Someone else? Let me get this fellow first. Yes. You placed blood emphasis on just the constitution, but you didn't talk at length about the articles of confederation. You learned in my status to education that they were terrible. Can you comment on them from a libertarian point of view? Well, I referred to the Jensen books because I think the arguments are there. It's a fairly complex issue. What were the objections that were confederation? Well, one of the major objections was they didn't give taxing power to the central government. Well, I suppose, you know, obviously that depends on your view of weakness. There were other problems associated with the articles. One of them was the so-called problems of internal terrorists between the states. You needed a national government which would eliminate all internal terrorists between states. And there were other issues like this raise, the problem of raising an army, a national army and this sort of thing. Could the articles really do that? Now, the issue really is one of whether these were serious objections and whether they were seriously believed by people or whether it was more in the nature of propaganda. I think some people probably really believed them. I'm not sure that all did. And like I said, the anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry addressed these objections. He specifically addressed the question of whether the articles were weak. And he said that basically there had been a chaotic period after the war because of inflation and the depression after the war, but that was caused by the war and not by the articles. And that period had more or less worked its way out and they were in a period of recovery and things were getting better. And in other words, the things that were blamed on the articles were in fact, according to Henry, the results of a war, a protracted war. The other thing that I might mention is not quite connected but close. There's another big factor in pushing for the Constitution was Shay's rebellion in Western Massachusetts and uprising against farmers against taxes. And Shay's rebellion, if you look through the various debates in the state legislatures on the Constitution, Shay's rebellion comes up over and over again as a justification for the Constitution because it was felt that there would be these outbreaks of rebellion and you needed a strong central government to deal with these potential outbreaks. That was another argument against the Articles Confederation. They did not provide an efficient military to suppress these periodic outbreaks. And the interesting thing about Jefferson, he was in France at the time. He thought that the panic over Shay's rebellion was greatly over-exaggerated and that's where Jefferson's famous passage comes from that you may be familiar with that every government should have these rebellions from time to time. I don't remember how the exact passage goes but he talks about the tree of liberty being nourished in the blood of revolution or something like that. That's in reference to Shay's rebellion. So I do recommend the Jensen volumes. I've just given you a few of the issues. I'll take one last there and back. How do you account for historical explanations of times or against the whole seeming Congress of facts with the evidence such as the explanation of the progressive era prior to the Pope's revisions? What causes his story to be destroyed? That's a good question. That's a good question. I suppose you could give a charitable and uncharitable answer to that. My answer would probably be uncharitable. I believe that historians for the most part push their own brand of ideology and I think that's true of libertarian historians as well. That doesn't mean that all what I'm saying is I don't think history is value free. That doesn't mean that we can't distinguish between good and bad history. But it means all history exists within an interpretive framework including value judgments. In fact, going back to Roy's article on big business and the rise of American statism, those who have read that know there's a very excellent theoretical discussion of the role of history as an intellectual discipline and that is discussed there. I believe in some cases that some of these historians have more or less deliberately closed their eyes or overlooked some of the more unsavory aspects of the progressive era. It's possible they didn't have access to the sorts of facts that Coco came up with and that could be just new information forthcoming. But it's hard to believe that the early historians of the progressive era could have missed this sort of racism and talk about eugenics and so forth that is rampant throughout this literature. And moreover this rampant statism is bad sounding to us but obviously many of the historians liked it. Many of the historians looked at this philosophy, this rising status philosophy as a progressive forward looking philosophy. To them the idea of social engineering was a great idea, therefore the progenitors of this idea were heroes in their way of thinking. And one still finds admirers of Theodore Roosevelt. I mean this is hard to believe but there are people today who think Theodore Roosevelt was one of our great presidents. And that's a pretty sorry state. Thank you very much.