 Hi, Professor Joel Friedman, Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts at Amherst again. And we're here today to talk about another approach to the age of reform, the more cynical corporate liberalism approach. Now, the first thing to note about the age of reform from this perspective, which sees it all as the most extreme version is just a giant con perpetrated on the American people. First thing is to note the chronology here. The age of reform arose after 1900. Now, if you look at maps of American elections, you see a signal change in the American voting patterns after 1894. It starts in the election of 1892. Through the 1880s, elections are almost ditto marks. They're almost all the same. The North votes Republican, the South votes Democratic. Now, there are parts of the country where that continues down into the 1960s and 70s with the same pattern. There are counties that there's the state of Vermont, which never voted Democratic for president until 1964. Never. And Mississippi, which never voted Republican until 1964. I told you, the 60s things change. But what's striking is starting in 1896, elections really change. There's a little bit in 1892, a little bit in 1894, but it's 1896 is a big change. All of a sudden, the West switches. The West, the Mountain West, votes Democratic for the first time. And parts of the North that had had some Democratic support move solidly into the Republican camp. Elections stopped being only about the Civil War. For 20 years, elections were only about the Civil War, only about race, because the Republicans, even after the end of Reconstruction, were still sort of pushing to protect the rights of the freemen. Under Teddy Roosevelt, they gave that up completely. Teddy Roosevelt, yeah, he had Booker T. Washington for dinner. But he also countenanced the establishment of segregationist Republican parties in the South. And when he formed the Progressive Party in 1912, it was Lily White. The Republicans, after 1900, basically gave up on civil rights. That allowed the reorganization of American politics on economic grounds, to some extent. I mean, race and the Civil War still remain powerful issues, as I said. Vermont, Mississippi, et cetera. But one part of the Progressive Era was a reconciliation of the northern and southern elites. AF, it was a post-civil rights reconciliation. This is what we talked about with Ulrich B. Phillips. He was the ideologue of this Progressive Era reconciliation. A group of historians in the 1950s and 60s took this idea further. And it goes back to one of the greatest historians of America's 20th century, Richard Hofstadter. When I was in college, I would hang out in the library, the Hofstadter Library. He was a professor at Columbia. He died just a few years before I started college. He donated his books. They became the core of this library, which was the nicest place to study. And I just felt good hanging around Richard Hofstadter's books. In 1955, he wrote a book, The Age of Reform, which argues that it wasn't about reform. And the Progressive Era was not about helping workers. On the contrary, it was all about reasserting the status of the old, Yankee, Brahmin, Harvard-educated elite, who were losing social status to the emerging capitalist class. It was all about reasserting the status of the Cabot Lodges against the William Randolph-Hurse, finding a place in government for these old, Harvard-educated, Yale-educated elites, giving them authority and status, even while their economic position was deteriorating relative to these upstart nouveau riche capitalists. After Hofstadter, we had two major people, Gabriel Coco, who ended up in Toronto, and James Weinstein, who ended up publishing a socialist weekly in these times out of Chicago. They articulated the idea of a corporate liberalism. The Age of Reform was not about reform. It was about using the state to prop up the position of the emerging corporate giants. So a symbiotic relationship formed, Coco and Weinstein argued, between large corporations and the state. Antitrust activity wasn't about breaking up the large corporations, all of whom survived Teddy Roosevelt's antitrust moves. But keeping upstarts out. So using the state to maintain prices on the one hand, to stabilize capitalism so that corporations, giant corporations, could maintain a steady stream of profits. The Federal Reserve system was used to prop up capitalism. And using reform language to pacify labor without actually giving anything. Now, there's a lot that's been written about this from this approach. And it unites the far left and the far right, which is kind of interesting. Murray Rothbard and others on the libertarian right, some tea party people go along with the far left. It's all corporate liberalism. It's all the state propping up giant corporations. Some truth to it. But there's also a lot that's not true. And when you get into the details, as Elizabeth Sanders did in her book on reform, Roots of Reform, when you get into the details, it's like if the large corporations favored this, favored these measures, then how can they oppose them at the time? The Federal Reserve system, which Weinstein and Coco and Rothbard and others would hold up as the prime example of establishing a giant state bureaucracy to prop up capitalism, the bank has fought it tooth and nail. It was supported and pushed through by Southern and Western Democrats and progressive Republicans from the West and with the support of members of Congress associated with the labor movement. The same for the whole range of labor legislation and reform legislation, the FTC, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act, all these things were opposed by the corporations. It may be that since then they've been used to some extent to prop up capitalism. But the corporate liberals certainly, if there's a grain of truth in what they say, there's a bolder or more of non-truth. So we'll pick up and talk about the Great Depression next time. Thank you and have a good day. Bye-bye.