Romans and Barbarians in American History

The qualities of the Roman Empire fulfilled the expectations of the ancient western mindset. First of all, slavery was the basis for economic profit, and military expansion, imperialism, was the method by which economic growth was achieved. Roman society was based on hierarchy, with the elite senatorial class followed by the equestrian class, citizens, freemen and then slaves. Centralization was viewed as necessary because the economy depended on military conquest and exploitation. The Romans were catholic because their Empire encompassed multitudinous ethnic groups, nationalities and religions.

The qualities of the barbarians, the Franks, Picts, Jutes, Goths, Vandals, etc. was also warlike. However, they were tribally focused and more decentralized than the Romans. They did not choose decentralization over centralization for strategic or economic reasons. Rather, tribal or ethnic prejudice was at the root. When they occupied the various parts of the Empire they wanted to emulate the Romans and to enjoy the economic benefits of Romanism, but they were not interested in a catholic worldview. Charlemagne's conquest of Germany and Italy was in the name of Frankish or Carolingian power, not in the name of re-establishing a catholic empire.

Thus, there were two important effects of the barbarian conquest of western Europe. First, the Empire became decentralized. This led to 15 centuries of economic progress. Secondly, tribalism became instituted in European culture. The European ruling classes continued to see themselves as Frankish or Norman until the 19th century, when aristocratic tribalism was transformed into nationalism.

In American history the two impulses of Romanism and tribalism followed a similar pattern. The Romans were the Federalists, Whigs, Progressives and social democrats, who were anti-racist and less nationalistic than the decentralizers, at least until the twentieth century when the Progressives adopted some of the racism, nationalism and imperialism that was characteristic of the Democrats in the 19th century.

The decentralizers in American history were the Anti-Federalists and Democrats in the 19th century. The southern Democrats were most famously for states' rights. As well, Andrew Jackson was responsible for the Trail of Tears; hated Indians; and was a racist. In contrast, the abolitionists were Whigs. The racists in 19th century America were characteristically working class Democrats. For instance, the draft riots in New York City were an anti-African American protest by working class Democrats who lynched a number of African Americans, including a number of children.

However, like the Barbarians of Europe, the working class Democrats in America were responsible for innovation and economic growth. Their pattern was similar to the Barbarians. They favored decentralization, aggressive expansion (the Mexican American War and the Indian Wars were very much Jacksonian).

The Barbarians were the innovators. The Romans the advocates of scale economies. Both principles are useful, and there is always a danger that one will proceed too far. Flexibility in the creation and destruction of economic institutions is therefore important to re-balance excessive centralization or excessive competition.
But this is best accomplished through capitalist, private institutions that are flexible and can be allowed to go bankrupt. Government, the Romanizing power in America, refuses to terminate any of its programs. Therefore, America, once the product of Barbarian thinking, especially of Montesquieu, the Physiocrats and Adam Smith, has become increasingly elitist and Romanized as the New Deal Democrats have instituted Roman philosophies.

Decentralization as the Remedy for Majority Faction

In the Federalist Number 10 James Madison made his famous argument that the size of the United States would limit the extent to which a majority or large minority could impose its will on a smaller minority. His theory was put to the test in 1798 with the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts at the time of the presidency of John Adams.

The Federalists passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, according to Richard Hofstadter, under the assumption that criticism of the administration was criticism of the government and therefore traitorous. The Acts were passed during the XYZ affair, when French diplomats had attempted to extract payments from America and many Federalists thought that a war with France would be necessary. In contrast, the Democratic Republicans were very pro French because of the French Revolution. There had been a long standing debate between the Federalists, who were pro English, and Jefferson's Democratic Republicans, who were pro French. The Federalists hoped to wipe out the Jefferson faction by labeling them treasonous. The public was frenzied by the XYZ affair much as it was by 9/11 eight years ago. The Federalists argued that the Democratic Republicans were a faction and that their criticisms of federal policy was treasonous and against the public interest. In a sense, the Alien and Sedition Act has parallels to the Patriot Act.

The French recanted and a war was avoided, so the Alien and Sedition Acts did not work strategically as what Hofstadter calls the "High Federalists" had hoped. Richard Hofstadter writes (The Idea of a Party System, p. 106):

"Federalist leaders made no secret of their hope of destroying opposition. Hamilton predicted that many Republican leaders would be remembered by the people in the same odious light as the Tories. Robert Goodloe Harper of South Carolina, a leading advocate of the Sedition Act in the House, wanted to be sure that 'no traitors should be left in the country' to jeopardize its defense. He professed his desire to imitate the internal security policies that had been adopted in England, charged the opposition with being a conspiracy, a faction leagued with a foreign power...'

"The language of the Sedition Act was vague enough to make a man criminally liable for almost any criticism of the government or its leading officers or any effort to combine for such a purpose. It made it possible for the courts to punish opinion, arbitrarily defined as seditious or disloyal, even in the absence of any overt act...'By identifying their administration with the government and the government with the Constitution, the Federalists construed criticism of the administration as opposition to the government and an attempt to subvert the Constitution...

"...In all, at least seventeen verifiable indictments were brought in, fourteen under the Sedition Act and three under the common law. Started in the main in 1798 or 1799, most of the cases came to trial in the election year, 1800, when it was hoped to stifle campaign criticism."

The indictments included the major Democratic Republican newspapers in New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Richmond as well as four smaller papers.

"But the Sedition Act was not conceived in a spirit of realism and it was not efficacious. The opposition was no small or paltry minority. As measured by representation in Congress, it was already at least equal to the administration in numbers...More importantly perhaps even than this, the country was still thoroughly decentralized, politically and geographically. Government, at the ultimate test, rests on sufficient force, and it was force that would have to be called upon if resistance to the laws became overt. The Virginia and Kentucky resolutions threatened that resistance might indeed reach this point, and at a time when the federal army numbered only about 3,500 men stationed mainly at frontier garrisons as a precaution against Indians, Virginia alone could have easily mustered a militia of twice that number and was indeed planning a force of 5,000. Nothing short of a foreign war would have created the conditions essential to raising a democratic army large enough, as Hamilton put it in one of his brasher moments, to 'put Virginia to the test.'"

"And here the demand for an army ran up against two of the deepest American prejudices: the tight-fisted rural reaction to taxes, and the long-standing suspicion (fully shared at this point by President Adams) against a standing army..."

Presumably, Hofstadter was a loose-fisted urbanite. Note that Madison was right in this case, which under other circumstances could have meant an armed conflict between predominantly Republican states and the Federalist-dominated government. It was decentralized that preserved freedom.

Centralization Begets Disharmony

One of the themes that runs through the writings of most of the Founding Fathers is opposition to political party. The opposition is found not only among the Federalists, who were the majority, centralizing party of the 1790s, but also among the Democratic Republicans, who were the opposition party in the 1790s and became the one dominant party in the "era of good feelings" after 1800. Both Hamilton and Jefferson disliked parties. In the Federalist Madison argued that faction posed a threat to liberty. Part of the opposition to political parties was the interest in harmony. References to classical history, such as the overthrow of the Roman republic by the centralizing Julius Caesar, who established an empire in place of the Roman republic, and to Athens. As well, more recent sources such as Bolingbroke and Trenchard and Gordon's Cato's Letters, were influential. According to Richard Hofstadter in Idea of a Party System (University of California Press, 1972, p. 14) Trenchard and Gordon were quoted more frequently than Locke in the Founding Fathers' writings. As well, Hofstadter argues that Washington may have seen himself as a non-monarchical realization of Bolingbroke's "Patriot King". Bolingbroke was a Tory, not a Whig, yet the Founding Fathers valued his ideas. In America, the Federalists were the equivalent of the court or Tory Party and the Democratic Republicans of Jefferson were the equivalent of the country or Whigs. Note that in the Federalist 10 Madison attacks "faction", a term which in those days referred to parties, or a more intensive, self-interested form of party. It did not exactly mean special interest group as it might today, although the meaning was close.

In part to understand the context of Bolingbroke and anti-faction libertarians like Trenchard and Gordon it is necessary to refer to de Juvenal's 1945 On Power, about which I have just been blogging. Understanding of medieval history was not so strong in the 18th century. Although Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws was a path breaking source on the subject, the Founding Fathers, like most Europeans, had a better understanding of classical (Greek and Roman) history than of the Middle Ages. Europeans did not have a firm understanding of their more recent tribal history or of the relations among the three estates, clergy, nobility and commoners. The concept of the great chain of being that dominated medieval thought was still smoldering--witness the property requirements for voting that were adopted in America. Nevertheless, the historical context preceding the 15th century was not utmost in their minds. But that history, as de Juvenal points out, were critical to understanding the more recent past, especially the English Civil War, a major factor in the 18th century's dread of party and faction.

Prior to the Tudor Kings in, the 15th century and earlier, Europe was considerably more decentralized than it is now. The barons, dukes and lords who were tenants of the king, had considerable power. In many cases their ancestors had been soldiers and officers in the invading barbarian armies, and their inherited rule originated in conquest. Much of medieval history involved the kings' wresting of power from these local rulers. The decentralization was overlaid not only by the king, who frequently had very limited resources, but also by the Church. Thus, the king's power was considerably restricted not only by decentralization and the nobility, but also by the Church. Moreover, there were considerable customs inherited from the barbarian codes, Roman law, local custom and Church law that limited the kings' power. The Hapsburg's' Holy Roman Empire, for instance, was dotted with various local duchies and dukedoms that had widely varying rules for how kings might comport themselves. Although the Hapsburg's were the most powerful family in Europe, they had limited power in their various holdings. The fact that they held a multiplicity of titles is evidence of the various restrictions on their power.

Henry VII and Henry VIII took a variety of centralizing steps in England. Among the most important was that they abolished the affinities of the English nobility, that is, the nobility's armies with which they could threaten the king. As well, Henry VIII took control of church lands, abolished monasteries which were a source of independent local power and granted considerable power to court officials like Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas Moore. He brutally suppressed Protestants as well as taking control of the Church. The court officials like Wolsey and Moore, early versions of state bureaucrats, could give out offices and favors. This included employing commoners as court officials. De Jouvenal emphasizes that the European kings in general, not just Henry VIII, gained considerable power between the 12th and 17th centuries by playing the commoners against the nobility. This meant establishing bureaucracies that gave employment to commoners, who in turn fought the nobility for power. This was accelerated in England during Henry VIII's reign.

Attendant upon Henry VIII's centralization of power was the move from Catholicism to Protestantism. Henry VIII assumed the mantle of the Pope, accruing additional power to himself and removing the historical limits that the Church set on kingly power. However, not everyone agreed on religious questions, and there ensued more than a century of bitter violence, strife, warfare and murder concerning religion, culminating in the English Civil War of the 1640s.

Viewed in large perspective, Henry VIII's centralizing steps contributed to the way the religious disagreements were mishandled. The Founding Fathers recognized this in separating Church and state. However, the Constitution was in the centralizing tradition, uniting the 13 colonies under a federal government that had more power than it had under the Articles of Confederation. The fear of faction had the same source as the interest in separation of church and state, but the Founding Fathers took a somewhat more particularistic approach in that they allowed private decision making with respect to religion but not with respect to other issues that might create factions such as the establishment of a central bank and tariffs. How far should unification go? The history of centralization was largely the development of totalitarianism. The first modern mass murders occurred under Cromwell's treatment of the Old English Irish Catholics and in the following century 16,000 Frenchmen were killed in the French Revolution.

Centralization begets conflict because if the nation is to function in harmony there must be agreement, and by uniting disparate localities and cultures into a single nation the kings and then the centralizing republicans were bound to create disagreement.

To the extent that the central government aims to manage conflict, it has to take one of four conflict resolution steps:

-Ignore the conflict by downloading decision making to the or localities. This was the basic federalist approach, which permitted a new way to look at decentralization. The medieval approach was tenancy and feudalism overlaid on manorial farming and often serfdom. The American approach, which reflected a centralizing move from 13 more independent states under the Articles of Confederation to 13 states under a stronger federal government under the Constitution with a free citizenry with inalienable rights largely composed of freemen farmers
-Compromise. By compromise I mean split the difference. This was the approach taken with respect to slavery. Limits were put on the slave trade (abolished in 1808, I believe) and over time the spread of slavery through the various compromises you study in high school, the Missouri Compromise, etc.
-Forcing, i.e., warfare or the threat of warfare. This was the outcome of the failure of the compromises concerning slavery
-Collaboration, finding creative solutions to apparent disagreements.

The point is, to the extent that the centralizing theme of Federalism was to take hold, the amount of conflict was bound to increase, and conflict was bound to become more prevalent, subverting the aim of harmony. If disagreement was to be suppressed, as it was during the Civil War, then freedom (at least for the non-slaves) was to be restricted. Compromise also led to a restriction on freedom because compromise amounts to splitting the difference. Collaboration is always the best way to solve problems, but how could the nation have found a collaborative solution concerning slavery? One idea that has been suggested would have been for the North to buy out the slaves. The combined cost of the Civil War for both sides might have covered a large share of the cost of buying out the southern slave holders. As well, it would have probably limited the bitter racism and resentment against the freed slaves.

Thus, the reason the founding fathers feared factions was the English Civil War, which in turn was the product of several centuries of medieval centralizing by the English (and European) kings. The opponents of faction and party, such as Bolingbroke and Trenchard and Gordon, were reacting to the recent history of the English Civil War, which had been preceded by religious discord, which in turn was the product of the kings' eagerness to centralize power.

Contours of American History I

I'm almost done reading William Appleman Williams's 1961 Contours of American History. Williams is considered a New Left historian (how "new" he is I don't know, the book is 47 years old and he died in 1990). I disagree with his ideological orientation, especially his hatred of property rights and his intense dislike of the laissez- faire policies of the Jacksonian period through about 1900. For instance, he refers to the 19th century laissez-faire philosophy as "reactionary" even though he develops the argument that the mercantilist or corporatist philosophy that originated in feudal England is preferable. In other words, he calls a 100 years old philosophy reactionary, but he does not so call, and instead praises to the heavens, a 400 year old philosophy, not considering that it might be reactionary to re institute a 17th century mercantilist model in 1900. Moreover, he expressly notes that real wages and standards of living were going up in the late nineteenth century and that there was a large degree of innovation. Yet, he insists that laissez-faire was a failure because of business "depressions". This was the corporate argument made at the time by economists such as DA Wells, but Williams does not question it.

One question that I am left with is why the left has so obsessed on restoring mercantilism or even feudalism, and accuses anyone who disagrees with the anti-property and anti-individualist stance as "reactionary". This is an illogical, almost insane, position. First, emphasis on individualism and property rights led to innovation and increasing living standards. Second, it is reactionary to advocate an older philosophy, not a newer one, and mercantilism is older than laissez-faire. Third, Williams has no interest in applying his significant and imaginative intellect to attempting to ascertain why laissez-faire was attacked.

That said, this is one of the most brilliant books I have ever read. Williams said it all in this sense:

1. He outlined how elitist economic interests have advocated mercantilism from the pre-Revolutionary War period through the Federalist era and then renewed them in the Progressive and New Deal eras. He falls down in the Jacksonian period in that he ignores the mercantilist impulse in the Whig philsophies of Abraham Lincoln and the American System of Henry Clay.

2. His exegesis of the frontier hypothesis is wonderful. He points out that Americans traditionally saw expansion to the frontier as a source of economic bounty. This was the famous argument of Frederick Jackson Turner. Then, he pushes the argument further, and this is where I got really excited. He argues that the emphasis of late nineteenth century business executives on large scale industry and state support for large scale industry was a function of the expansionist argument. John R. Commons too argued that "expansion of markets" is crucial to explaining labor relations, but Williams puts the expansionist vision into brilliant historical context. Globalization (he does not use that term as he wrote in 1961) and the emphasis on large scale business is a function of the expansionist impulse, and he documents that well. Thus, Americans have been obsessed with creating big business because they believed that "expansion" creates wealth. The Japanese don't have quite the same obsessions.

3. He argues that the New Deal was the fulfillment of Progressivism. I find this much more believable than the claim that there was a gulf between Progressivism and the New Deal. This leads to the question: if Herbert Hoover was a Progressive, how did the New Deal differ from what Hoover proposed? The National Industrial Recovery Act was essentially the implementation of fascism in America, but the Supreme Court overturned it. Hoover still favored a degree of individualism and property rights, and Roosevelt went a bit further than Hoover wanted to in the social democratic direction. The outlines of most of what Roosevelt did were already discussed in the Progressive era. Roosevelt's most extreme syndicalism was overturned. Hoover did not support the NIRA, which didn't go into effect in any case.

4. Williams outlines the new order as syndicalist, and it is. Economic interests, namely labor and management, were reflected in the new feudal or corporatist order. I quote these two paragraphs

"It is of course essential to evaluate the combined significance of these decisions within the framework of the syndicalist approach that had been present in the Progressive Movement from the very beginning of the 20th century and which the New Deal consolidated...In that system, the citizen was almost wholly dependent upon the definition of public welfare that emerged inside the national government as a consensus among the leaders of the various functional-syndicalist elements of the political economy. The possibility that Hoover had projected in 1921-22 had emerged as reality: the United States was 'a syndicalist nation on a gigantic scale'.

"Yet the citizens' political activity was carried on within a framework that was organized on an entirely different basis: i.e., geographic boundaries which had only the most causal and accidental relationship to the syndicalist structure of the political economy. That discrepancy left the citizen without any effective, institutionalized leverage on the crucial and centralized decisions affecting every phase of his life."*

What Appleman has done is conjoin the special interest theory of regulation with the historical narrative. Syndicalism recreated the mercantilist system of the Federalist period and earlier (and a little later) but it also created a free-for-all whereby those with the best representation would be able to extract the most wealth from the political system. Mancur Olson did not write until a bit later. His point was that special interests gain economic rents through structural advantages.

Although Appleman spiritually supports mercantilism, he does so despite a factual base that points in the opposite direction. The mercantilist model is not appropriate to the modern world because it is not responsive; it does not respond to change; it leads to bureaucracy; and it is not democratic. Most of all, it leads to oppression of less represented groups by better represented groups.

*William Appleman William, The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1966, p. 448.

Daniel Walker Howe's Political Culture of the American Whigs

Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1979. 404 pages. Available from Amazon.com for $26.60. Available used and new from $14.00.

This is a fine book. Interesting, highly informative, fun to read. Howe's writing is lucid. Books like this inspire us to learn. Howe's insights about the American Whig Party, their ideas, religion and culture are wonderful, and he covers a lot of ground. He uses a biographical approach that covers a wide range of Whig Party politicians beginning with John Quincy Adams (who became a Whig after his presidency and during his post-presidency Congressional tenure) and ending with Abraham Lincoln, not only the best-remembered Whig but also the best-remembered 19th Century politician, except perhaps for Jefferson. Of course, the Whig Party expired in 1856 and Lincoln gained the presidency as the first Republican, but his allegiance to Henry Clay never diminished.

I read the book because I became curious about the continuity of American elitist and pro-Central Bank ideology between the 18th and twentieth centuries. This book makes clear that there are many linkages between the Whigs and the Progressives, hence the New Deal (which is my own conclusion, not Professor Howe's). Nancy Cohen makes clear the link between the Mugwumps and the Progressives, and in his concluding pages Howe mentions that the Whigs mildly reasserted themselves via the Liberal Republican Party in the 1872 election, which is often referred to as an early phase of the Mugwumps' activism. Although Howe characterizes the Whigs as the "country" party, it is clear that many former Federalists became Whigs in the 1830s. It also is clear that the economic elite was associated with the Whigs just as they had been with the Federalists, niceties about political ideology aside. Thus, there is a clear line from the Federalists to the Whigs, then to the Mugwumps and then to the Progressives. The speeches of Theodore Roosevelt, himself a one-time Mugwump, make clear the connection between his own ideas and those of Franklin Roosevelt's.

One of the nice things about this book is that Howe covers the religious and evangelical elements in the Whig philosophy along with the economic and political. It is fairly clear that the evangelical social concerns, linked of course to abolitionism, form the basis of today's social democrats' concerns. The evangelical religious impulse developed in several ways, one of which was through Social Gospel Christianity, through to Progressivism and then the social welfare elements of the New Deal. The emotional commitment of social democrats to their programs can be explained in this evolution of religious feeling that has been displaced into social democracy.

This book, written as a solid piece of history, does not suggest that there is a continuous party that has favored economic centralization from the Federalists to the New Deal Democrats. But it seems clear from the evidence. For most of its history, with the exception of the Mugwump period, the centralization party has favored a central bank, public works (which were characteristic of not only of Hamilton's Federalist program but also of Henry Clay's American system, of Theodore Roosevelt's ideas and of the New Deal) and business. The Whigs, the Mugwumps and the Progessives were ambivalent about big business, although their moral concerns seem to have been easily displaced. There is little doubt that the tariffs that the Whigs implemented were in large part responsible for big business in America. The Mugwumps, at least in some instances, were willing to repeal the tariffs but the Progressives amounted to a reassertion of more aggressive Whiggery than had existed since the end of the Civil War. In the Mugwump period the urban elite became hostile to corruption of some big business. In turn, the Progressives and New Dealers in increasing progression used anti-business rhetoric to cloak their centralist orientation. The centralizing party favored tariffs in the Hamiltonian and Clay periods, then divided over tariffs during the Mugwump period. The anti-tariff position won thereafter to the extent that reductions in tariffs did not hurt American business interests.

American history occurs in cycles, with each cycle involving various combinations and variations on the issues of economic centralization, central banking, protectionism, and support for industry. Progressivism aggressively asserted the centralizing position against the late nineteenth century elitists' deviant laissez-faire philosophy. I call it deviant because in all other periods other than the late nineteenth century American elites have opposed laissez-faire in favor of corporatist, centralizing mercantilism, Progressivism and finally so-called "liberalism". It is a tribute to the power of laissez-faire that a movement that was backed primarily by working-class and small farmer Jacksonians from say 1825to today really, and had the backing of economic elites only during the post-bellum period that ended in the late 1890s, continued to provoke so much distress from university-trained economic elites, business and banking interests, organized labor and other proponents of elitist centralization through to the present.

Like the Whigs, the Progressives were advocates of a return to the corporatist mercantilism of the 17th and 18th centuries represented by Anthony Ashley Cooper, the Earl of Shaftesbury in the 17th century and Sir James Steuart in his "Inquiry into the Principles of Political Oeconomy", published in 1767. As William Appleman Williams aptly points out in his classic Contours of American History :

"...it is possible to gain a vital insight into that contemporary liberalism which defends the right of private property and asserts the supremacy of individual liberty while at the same time advocating the general welfare. For although such liberals show superficial similarities to the mercantilists, they are considerably removed from that conservative tradition of the common good. Such liberals usually label Karl Marx a heretic and consider socialism a heresy, but the reverse is much closer to the truth. The liberal tradition stems from the triumph of laissez-faire individualism over corporate Christianity. Marx and other socialists reasserted the validity of the original idea in response to the liberal heresy. That is indeed one of the basic explanations of socialism's persistent relevance and appeal in the 20th century."*

Williams's point can be expanded a bit, because not only socialists but also Whigs and Progressives rejected the laissez-faire heresy.

As opposed to laissez-faire, the Whig Party (p. 16) "advanced a particular program of national development. The Whig economic platform called for purposeful intervention by the federal government in the form of tariffs to protect domestic industry, subsidies for internal improvements, and a national bank to regulate the currency and make tax revenues available for private investment...The Democrats inclined toward free trade and laissez-faire; when government action was required, they preferred to leave it to the states and local communities. The Whigs were more concerned with providing centralized direction to social policy...The most important single issue dividing the parties, and the source of the most acute disappointment to the Whigs after President Harrison had been succeeded by Tyler, concerned the banking systemm. Jackson's veto of the recharter of the Second Bank of the United States in 1832 became the point of departure for a generation of political partisanship". By 1860 Abraham Lincoln favored reinstitution of a central bank but was unable to effect it, and a central bank was not reinstituted until 1913, under Woodrow Wilson, who was the first of several Democratic Party Whigs.

Howe goes on to point out (p. 17):

"The banking-currency issue (that is, the right of banks to issue their own paper money) mattered at the state as well as the federal level. Many states redrafted their constitutions during the Jacksonian period and had to decide whether they would authorize state banking monopolies (usually mixed public-private corporations), specially chartered banks, free banking, or no banks of issue at all. As time went by, the parties tended to polarize with respect not only to rechartering a national bank but to the function of banking in general. The Democrats generally became more committed to hard money (specie or government-issued currency), while the Whigs became defenders of the credit system (in which banks were the issuers of currency)."

"When Democratic "Martin van Buren complained during the Panic of 1837 that people looked to the government for too much," (Whig) Henry Clay retorted that the people were "entitled to the protecting care of a paternal government." This is very much in the tradition of mercantilism.

But while on economic issues the Democrats were anti-inflation and pro-democracy, on the race issue the Democrats were pro-slavery and racism while the Whigs were less racist and more anti-slavery.

Howe argues that (p. 20):

"there is danger in calling the Whigs champions of the positive liberal state. It makes them sound too much like twentieth-century liberals. Actually, the differences between the Whigs and twentieth century liberals are more important than the similarities. Whig policies did not have the object of redistributing wealth or diminishing the influence of the privileged. Furthermore, the Whigs distrusted executives in both state and federal government (they had been traumatized by the conduct of Jackson), whereas twentieth century liberals have endorsed strong executives more often than not. For all their innovations in economic policy, the Whigs usually thought of themselves as conservatives, as custodians of an identifiable political and cultural heritage. Most deeply separating the Whigs from twentieth century liberals were their moral absolutism, their paternalism and their concern with imposing discipline...the Whigs proposed a society that would be economically diverse but culturally uniform; the Democrats preferred the economic uniformity of a society of small farmers and artisans but were more tolerant of cultural and moral diversity."

Taking the last point first, economic diversity is not an issue of importance today, but cultural uniformity is. Perhaps invisibly to Howe, twentieth century social democrats have aimed to foist a cultural uniformity on America. In the mid twentieth century they claimed that liberalism reflected the national consensus. By the 1980s they advocated political correctness. Political correctness is a moralistic impulse with Whiggish religious roots. Moreover, although the twentieth and 21st centuries have rejected the sexual morality and Aristotelian virtues characteristic of the Whigs and earlier, they have replaced these with a host of politically correct moralities with which they replace faith and tradition, to include animal rights, global warming and similar causes.

It fascinates me that Howe's argument begs the argument of Murray Rothbard, Ronald Radosh and Martin J. Sklar in New History of Leviathan that twentieth century liberalism did not aim to redistribute wealth but only used social democratic rhetoric to re enforce elitist goals. In terms of culture, there is no doubt that 20th and 21st century liberalism repudiates 19th century Whiggish elitism as well as 19th century Democratic Party racism in favor of a revised elitist philosophy based in part on similar impulses, such as claiming special status for the educated, especially the professions. Changing technology and extensions of knowledge created new economic interests in the late nineteenth century that changed the emphasis of the Whigs' descendants, the Mugwumps, into emphasizing the role of the professions, Whiggish forms of government intervention in support of the professions and rationalization of industry and government (which the Whigs would have supported). Naturally, economic conditions altered the form elitist centralization took just as religious and moral emphasis and alliances shifted.

But on the following page Howe puts the statist essence of the Whigs into focus (p. 21):

"Because of their commitment to 'improvement', Whigs were much more concerned than Democrats with providing conscious direction to the forces of change. For them, real progress was not likely to occur automatically; it required careful, purposeful planning...Whig morality was corporate as well as individual; the community, like its members, was expected to set an example of virtue and to enforce it when possible. A third recurring theme in Whig rhetoric was the organic unity of society...the Whigs were usually concerned with muting social conflict."

Seventy years later, when Frederick Winslow Taylor advocated a "mental revolution" between labor and management as part of his system of scientific management that aimied to rationalized industry, like a good Whig Progressive (and Herbert Croly specifically endorsed Taylorism) he was arguing for the organic unity of society.

The Whigs liked to draw an analogy between the human body and the political system (p. 29): "An essential feature of the analogy for the Whigs was the parallel between regulating the faculties within an individual and regulating the individuals within society. Faculty psychology tgaught an ideal of harmony within diversity...The model ruled out laissez-faire as a social philosophy, emphasizing instead the mutual responsibility of individuals and classes. The ideal society, like the ideal personality, improved its potential in many directions. Economic development promoted a healthy diversity, which 'furnishes employment for every variety of human faculty.' The conception implied an active, purposeful central government, administering the affairs of the nation according to its best judgment for the good of the whole and all parts of the whole."

This explains the difference between the Whigs and their later descendants, the Progressives and the New Dealers, as to the importance of the chief executive. By 1900 the federal government was becoming too complex to permit a legislature to make managerial decisions. Hence, advocates of centralization had to choose between no centralization and a strong legislature or centralization and and a strong executive. Obviously, centralization was more important to the centralizing party than was a weak executive. As a practical matter, centralization is impossible without a strong executive once government reaches a certain level of size and complexity. Since the Whig/Progressive/New Deal Party has been focused on expanding government to satisfy the economic interests of the professional and managerial classes, the issue of a powerful executive is a trivial one compared to the issue of increasing size and complexity of government. You can't have both.

Moreover, the Whigs anticipated today's liberal New Deal Democrats in their claim that the educated had the right to special privileges and that the educated ought to rule over the uneducated (p. 30):

"John Locke had written that people who lacked the opportunity to cultivate their higher faculties (such as women and the poor) could not become fully rational and therefore justly held subordinate positions within society...The American Whigs were less explicit than Locke, but they shared his general view that those who had not had the opportunity of education should defer to the leadership of those who had received it..."

Today, the claim of elite privilege by the educated has reached a fever pitch. I doubt that a single Congressman or member of the President's cabinet lacks a college degree. This is so even as the intellectual demands of a college education have dwindled to next to nothing and college graduates today know less than high school graduates of 100 years ago. Compare this with an observation by Herbert Hoover in 1922**:

"That our system has avoided the establishment and domination of class has a significant proof in the present administration in Washington. Of the twelve men comprising the President, Vice-President, and Cabinet, nine have earned their own way in life without economic inheritance, and eight of them started with manual labor."

Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party violated the "politics of deference" characteristic of early American society through extending the spoils system to all classes (p. 31). This tradition continued through Hoover's time, but the Progressives and their New Deal descendants put in place policies that were less democratic. This repositioning of elitism to focus on education rather than on the traditional land and wealth criteria occurred during and before the Mugwump period. The Mugwumps emphasized the rationalization of civil service, a concept which the Progressives developed into scientific management.

To support business, Whigs supported tariffs and the central bank (p. 32). These stands appealed to wealthy business interests but not to the poor. In order to appeal to the poor, the Whigs emphasized ethnic (specifically, WASP) identity politics, and moral issues that cut across social classes. Part of this involved the evangelical Second Great Awakening as well as appeals to basic morals (p.33):

"The Whig party's electoral campaigns formed part of a cultural struggle to impose on the United States the standards of morality we usually term Victorian. They were standards of self-control and restraint, which dovetailed well with the economic program of the party, for they emphasized thrift, sobriety and public responsibility...They looked upon the Democratic voters as undisciplined."

The Whigs extended this moralism to a belief in central planning and opposition to free markets (p. 34):

"Running through Whig political appeals was the concept of consciously arranged order. This was characteristic of their reliance on government planning rather than the invisible forces of the marketplace. It was characteristic of their reliance on government planning..."

The Whigs emphasized public education, in part through the activities of Horace Mann, a Whig (p. 36): "A believer in uniformity and conscious planning, Mann wanted more centralization in school systems. Democrats, resenting higher taxes and loss of control, frequently opposed Mann and other Whig educational reformers."

In contrast to Democrats, who aimed to end economic privilege through systemic reform such as the abolition of the central bank (p. 37):

"Whig reforms were frequently altruistic efforts to redeem others rather than examples of self-help. Whigs supported Dorothea Dix's campaign for federal aid to mental hospitals; Democrats opposed. Whig prison reformers sought to make prison a place of redemption as well as retribution...Democratic prision reformers, on the other hand, were usually concerned with economy, efficiency and deterrence."

The parallels to Progressivism and the New Deal seem clear.

The Jacksonian Democrats were the ones who oppressed the Indians. For instance the Cherokee case, where the rich lands of the Five Tribes in Georgia led to their expulsion via the famously tragic "trail of tears" was a partisan Democratic policy. "Chief Justice John Marshall delivered the judgment of the United States Supreme Court in Worcester et al. v. Georgia on March 3, 1832. He found Georgia's action unconstitutional: the state had no right to legislate for the Cherokee Nation...But Georgia defied the Court's decision...and went ahead with the expulsion of the Indians. Jackson made it clear that he would never enforce the Court's mandate, and loopholes in federal appellate procedure enabled him to avoid doing so. Meanwhile, he used the Army to facilitate the dispossession of the Indians, not to protect them." Chief Justice Marshall was, of course, a Whig.

In part because of their emphasis on moral development that coincided with their belief in economic development, Whigs emphasized history to a greater extent than Democrats (p. 72). Whigs believed that a generation could bind a later generation, lending acceptability to long term mortgages. Again, we seen a hint of future big government social democracy. For instance (p. 72) the Whig William Henry Seward recommended a series of internal improvements in New York.

Thomas J. DiLorenzo of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute quotes a Edgar Lee Masters's biography of Lincoln that states that the internal improvements of the Whigs involved a considerable degree of corruption:

"Henry Clay was their champion, and he represented 'that political system which doles favors to the strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises.' They advocated 'a people taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone.' The Whig party had 'no platform to announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.' These men 'adopted the tricks of the pickpocket who dresses himself like a farmer in order to move through a rural crowd unidentified while he gathers purses and watches.'...Lincoln in the 1830s succeeded in having the legislature allocate $12 million in an absurd make-work scheme to turn Illinois into one vast system of government-subsidized canals and railroad lines...The scheme was a colossal failure as virtually all of the money was stolen or squandered. Lincoln's law partner, William Herndon, called the scheme 'reckless and unwise' and a disaster that 'rolled up a debt so enormous' that it impeded Illinois' economic growth for many years. 'The internal improvement system, the adoption of which Lincoln had played such a prominent part, had collapsed,' Herndon wrote in his biography of Lincoln."

These points contradict some in Howe's book, but Howe does not address the issue of corruption in the actual implementation of the public works projects that Whigs like Lincoln did implement. It is not surprising that corruption was involved, nor is it surprising that ideologically the Whigs might not have addressed this issue despite or rather because of the moralism in their belief system. On the other hand, Howe's evidence does not support DiLorenzo's claim that the Whigs did not have a platform. On some issues, such as treatment of the Indians, Whig opposition to the Mexican War (which was a Jacksonian plicy) and abolition, there was considerably more overlap between the Whigs' position and the libertarian one that DiLorenzo advocates. Nor is it fair to dismiss the mercantilist view as one that intentionally encouraged corruption. The economic development of Britain between 1600 and 1840 was one of the dramatic feats of economic development in the history of the world, and it occurred under a primarily mercantilist ideology. It might have been better to have adopted the ideas of Murray Rothbard in 1600, but it also might have been better if jets and cellular phones had been available to Clay, Biddle and Lincoln.

Like Libertarians, Jacksonian Democrats feared the emergence of a plutocratic elite. However, the Whigs saw a threat "in the perversion of the political process by demagogoues taking advantage of the loss of an independent spirit among the people" (p. 76) and they saw Jackson himself as a demagogue. Like the Federalists, the Whigs emphasized not democracy but balance. In their view (p. 77) "the purpose of government is not to implement popular will but to balance and harmonize interests." Balanced government, of course, is the theme of the Federalist Papers. The Whigs emphasized the national origin of the Constitution. They did not believe that the Constitution originated with the states. The federal government is mixed, neither wholly federal nor wholly consolidated.

(p. 77) "The most salient characteristic of American Whig political thought was that it remained within the tradition of the "commonwealthmen," that remarkable group of English and Scottish writers...Two favorite writers in the tradition were James Harrington and Viscount Bolingbroke."

(p. 78) "That the Whigs who advocated industrialization and economic development should have identified with a political heritage called 'country' may seem at first anomalous. Actually, however, the word 'country' was understood more in opposition to 'court' than in opposition to 'city'. Within the English 'country party' not only landed gentlemen but also bourgeois Protestant Dissenters were prominent...As a group that included both townsmen and commercial farmers, and as inheritors of the religious tradition of English Dissent, the Whigs found the country-party tradition congenial."

p. 90 "Both Whigs and Democrats claimed to be heirs of the Republican Party of Jefferson though both in fact contained some some former Federalists. Ex-Federalists like Daniel Webster became willing to cite Jefferson as an opponent of executive power once they had become Whigs. The closest ideological predecessors of the Whigs seem to have been not the Federalists but the 'moderate' or 'nationalistic' wing of the Republicans. This group combined, as the Whigs did later, a country-party respect for consitutional balance, legal tradition and executive restraint with belief in federally sponsored economic development and government 'for' rather than 'by' the people. The archetypal representative of this brand of Republicanism, and the patron of Whiggery, was James Madison. It is well known (or it should be) that Jefferson disapproved of Jackson's candidacy in 1824; it is even more significant that Madison and Gallatin, who were still alive in 1832, when the issues of the Jacksonian era had been clearly drawn, supported Clay for president that year."

"The Whig defeat in 1844 entailed consequences of imponderable magnitude, leading as it did to war with Mexico and exacerbated sectional antagonism. War was traditionally an evil in country-party ideology, dreaded not only for its cost in blood and money but because it provided an occasion for executive aggrandizement. President Polk's devious and provocative conduct, both before and afterthe beginning of hostilities, provided plenty of confirmation for such fears" (p. 92)

Howe provides fascinating biographies of two Whig entrepreneurs: Nathan Appleton and Henry Carey. Appleton founded various textile mills, including most famously an early joint stock company called the Merrimack Manufacturing Company. Appleton named the company town "Lowell" after a deceased partner. The firm made early forays into human resource management on a dramatic scale:

"The company built homes for the households of its male supervisory employees and boardinghouses for its unamrried female operatives; it supplied the town with a school, a hospital and a library, whose resources made possible the magazine the employees put out, the famous Lowell Offering. It was by no means sufficient for the proprietors to provide what they thought were wholesome working and living conditions at Lowell. They desired to preserve the morals of the people there to be gathered. With this in mind, they built or subsidized eight churces, exercised strict supervision over the workers' private lives and founded a savings bank...Lowell Massachusetts represented social innovation as much as technological innovation. In its original conception, it was to be not only a company town but also an experimental utopia...Lowell illustrates the Whig desire to remake the world...most of the workers were isolated from their families and lived regimented lives of hard work, chastity and diligent uplift...the workers would be women...By hiring women the Merrimack Manufacutring Company could pay lower wages than British industry was paying men..."

(p. 104) "In reply to Democratic charges that corporations were conspiratorial and elitist, Whig defenders of corporations (mixed or private) insisted that they conferred great benefit on savers of modest means by allowing them to participate with the rich in the profits of incorporated business. This was why John Quincy Adams could speak of the 'truly republican institution of joint stock companies.'"

Appleton and his associates founded a private banking system based in Boston. As a result, New England was not dependent on the bank of the United States for a uniform circulating medium. "Member banks in many New England towns would desposit sufficient funds to guarantee their notes at the Suffolk Bank in Boston. In consideration for the use of their money, the Suffolk Bank would redeem the notes of the out-of-town banks at par instead of discounting them. Thus a uniform circulating medium and banking reserve requirements were maintained within the region..." (p. 106).

Henry Carey (p. 109) "identified himself with what might be called the commercial wing of Jeffersonian Republicanism, advocating internal improvements, a protective tariff, a national bank, and reconciliation with the Federalists--in short, the Madisonian Platform." Carey was a moral philosopher and economist (p. 111) "who believed America would be a better place to live if it could industrialize." He believed that "genuine full employment was both the means to economic progress and, for Carey, the end of economic progress. Carey was a feminist and argued that economic development held out considerable promise to women (p. 112). He believed in a mixed economy, capitalism combined with government intervention (remember, this was the 1830s--the idea that a mixed economy was "progressive" was a claim of the 1900's-1930s, 70-100 years after Carey). "Government policy should add...what is today called social overhead--a transportation network and an educational system. To keep the economy expanding, the burden of taxation should not be oppressive, but in the United States in Carey's time there was little danger of this. Carey laid the most stress on a plentiful money supply and a protective tariff to prevent this money from being drained off...Taken together, trhese policies would secure investment capital, increase productivity and raise wages..."

"Carey looked to technology to solve the differences between capital and labor" (P. 113). Carey's philosophy had Christian and moral overtones (p. 114). He believed in progress and opposed Malthus and the Manchester school. He advocated a culture of progress (by which he meant economic as opposed to political progress).

Whigs may have been the first advocates of suburbanization. "Whiggery was an outlook more appropriate to villagers or townsmen than to either frontiersmen or city dwellers....in many parts of the country where the Whig party was strongest it was asociated with a longing to recreate the early New England town settlement." (p. 116). Whig candidates generally outpolled Democrats in the cities (p. 117). "The Whig desire to preserve rural values within an urban context eventually led to important developments in urban park and cemetary landscape architecture, culminating after the Civil War in the genius of Frederick Law Olmstead". Olmstead was a Mugwump associate of EL Godkin.

Le Corbusier is generally recognized as the ideological forerunner of Robert Moses, but Moses seems to bear some things in common with the Whigs, specifically, the notion of the need to introduce country-like super-blocks would seem to echo Olmstead's concept of a park within a city (although when Olmstead designed Central Park it was on the northern end of the city). Moses would seem to have fulfilled the Whiggish tradition, both in terms of being a master public works builder and one who introduced urban America to the suburbs through highway building and superblocks.

Carey opposed trade, viewing it as parasitic and exploitative. He viewed the Irish potato famine as indicative of the problems that trade can cause (p. 118) "The same Carey who praised the small-to-medium-scale capitalism of the town deplored the large-scale capitalism of the metropolis. A trading economy corrupted its own society...Within cities a submerged 'proletariat' appeared...The trading classes lived by appropriation of wealth created by others." The Whig ideology had an anti-capitalist flavor at times, which parallels Progressivism seven decades later. Carey believed that the evils of trade could be overcome with a protective tariff. Protectionism led to "a diversified economy" which would "provide a healthy human environemnt for varied talents." A diversified economy secured people's independence against intimidation. (p. 122) "The great triumph of Carey's life came with the passage of the Morrill Tariff of 1862, commencing a century of American protectionism that would last until the Kennedy round of economic conferences. Yet instead of a decentralized 'middle zone' of opportunity and morality, economic consolidation and further urbanization characterized the high tariff era. The idea that protection was only a transitional phase for infant industries was ignored." This brings us back to the Rothbard/Radosh thesis. Were the Whigs merely fools to advocate tariffs to encourage "a diversified economy" instead of big business, or were they merely front men for big business interests?

Henry Clay

"Henry Clay believed in stability and order" (p. 123). (p. 139) "The Bank issue brought into sharp focus the conflict between the two views of the nation's destiny: Clay's vision of economic development planned centrally by a capitalist elite and the Democratic vision of a land of equal opportunity. Even after the Bank's charter finally expired in 1836, banking and currency remained the subject of bitterest partisan debate." (p. 146) "The conjunction of commerce with Christianity was typical of the Whig version of imperialism". Clay adopted the ideas of Henry Carey. He (p. 137) advocated revenue sharing or distribution of federal money to the states. His American System "was predicated on the basis of a harmony of interests" 9P. 138). The Whigs argued for class harmony and mutuality of interests.

Lyman Beecher

Lyman Beecher represented the evangelical dimension of the Whigs. "The tradition of Edwardsean eschatology had been transmitted to Beecher via Timothy Dwight, Edwards's grandson, who became president of Yale during Beecher's undergraduate years. The continuity of evangelical thought remained unbroken during the time of the Whig party; the providential interpretation of history that one finds in Edwards' accounts of the Reformation or the Glorious Revolution appears in the writings of Whigs as late as the 1840s...Like Edwards--and John Quincy Adams--Beecher believed in postmillennialism, the doctrine that the Second Coming will occur at the end of the thousand years of peace...The Second Coming was not far off...One last big effort would do it--or rather two: the establishment of foreign missions to complete the conversion of the world and the moral renovation of American society to give Christ a beachhead for His return." (p. 152)

p. 152-3: the one hopeful source that the Whigs had was postmillenial theology. Their other sources were the classical writers and some economists who were pessimistic. The secular authors the Whigs read "espoused a limited view of the possibilities for human achievement...The evangelical movement supplied Whiggery with a conception of progress that was the collective form of redemption: like the individual, society as a whole was capable of improvement through conscious effort. Nineteenth century evangelicism, even more than eighteenth century evangelicism, demanded the moral regeneration of society, not simply of the individuals within it. Again, there are hints of Progressivism.

p. 154 "When Lyman Beecher declared that 'the stated policy of heaven is to raise the world from its degraded condition' he had in mind not only its spiritual but also its intellectual and material condition..."

p. 156 "In his 'Lectures on Political Atheism'...Beecher begins by arguing that Christianity is the ally of social progress and liberty...Biblical Christianity, that is Protestantism, promotes schools, morality, economic enterprise and relative social equality..."

The Whigs' ideology was institutionalist and evolutionary, as was that of Progressives like John R. Commons and John Dewey. The Democrats saw institutions as threatening liberty. (p. 182) "Whigs, however felt that institutions provided the structures that made freedom meaningful. Institutions could evolve to cope with changing circumstances; they could serve as intermediaries for redemption, as the benevolent societies did. Whig institutionalism was by no means incompatible with antislavery...European conservatives in the nineteenth century sometimes found that progressive legislation suited their purposes, as Bismarck and Disraeli well illustrate. Lord John Russell put their policy nicely: 'There is nothing so conservative as progress.' This attitude--that a measure of progress is desirable to forestall more drastic upheavals--was certainly not unknown among the American Whigs...'True conservatism,' a party spokesman affirmed, operates not by indiscriminate resistance to change, but the intelligent and seasonable combination of Order and Improvement."

(p. 182) "The economic, social, cultural and moral proram of the Whigs can be characterized in a broad sense as that of a modernizing elite, a bourgeois elite that was open to the talents of an upwardly mobile Lincoln or Greeeley...the modernizing of social organization during this time was pioneered to a great extent by paternalists...(Jackson) and his Democratic Party were primarily defending a society of independent yeoman and artisans, who were threatened by the kind of modernization the Whigs envisaged...As exemplars of Whigs who were deliberate modernizers, Horace Greeley and William Henry Seward serve well."

I disagree with Howe there. Although the Whigs claimed to advocate modernization, the most important modernizing steps occurred outside of the "American System" of Clay and Lincoln. These included the inventions of the late nineteenth century which occurred despite government not because of it. Because historians tend to emphasize institutions, philosophers, ideologues and political structures they fail to see the spontaneous change that occurs because of the Jacksonian impulse. This institutionalist bias in history results in mistaken and destructive policy conclusions that are drawn from failure to grasp the role of markets. Getting back to Howe:

(p. 187) "Greeley favored workers' cooperatives, supported the ten-hour day, and joined the printers' union; yet anything that smacked of class conflict was abhorrent to him. He advocated collective bargaining but felt that it should lead to binding arbitration rather than strikes. Since capital and labor did not seem to Greeley to have opposing interests, arbitration commended itself to him as peaceful, rational and just.

"Social reform did not, for Greeley, necessarily mean opposition to the interests or wishes of capitalists. He supported limited liability and the Whig Bankruptcy Act of 1841, admired the Lowell textile mills, and endorsed industrialization in general...Greeley belonged to a generation that could think of business itself as a moral cause." (p. 188)

"It makes it easier to understand Greeley if we note his remarkable similarity to the 'progressives' of the early twentieth century. Like them, he wanted to rationalize the existing social order and make it more humane. Through the Tribune he advocated such protprogressive casues as a national presidential primary, an income tax, the abolition of capital punishment, and the direct election of United States Senators...Almost alone among American newspapers, the Tribune gave thorough coverage and serious attention to the women's rights movement...Like most Whigs, Greeley retained a strong sense of the moral qualities of rural and small town life, even while favoring industrialization" (p. 195).

William H. Seward was a Whig who supported subsidies to business. Like Warren G. Harding, who supported subsidies to the merchant marine 80 years later, "He endorsed subsidies for the Collins Steamship Company to help it compete against the British Cunard Line...Seward's interest in American commercial activity in the Pacific was not without prcedent among the Whigs. Daniel Webster, when he was secretary of state, extended the scope of the Monroe Doctrine to include the Hawaiian Islands.

The Whigs combined an interest in "improvements" with a fundamental conservatism, and they emphasized "protecting property, maintaining social order, and preserving a distinct cultural heritage." Whigs and pro-bank Democrats were called "conservatives" in the 1830s, a usage that does not seem altogether different from the way the term is used today. "As a party, the Whigs wanted conservatism and progress to blend their harmonious action" (p. 210). Daniel Webster, one of the best-remembered Whigs, "has aptly been called a broker-state politician who thought of government policy in terms of adjusting the claims of propertied interests to government favors...In his mind, social organization legitimated encouraging economic modernization through special favors to property."

Again it is a serious mistake to confuse policies that encourage modernization with modernization itself. The abolition of the central bank may have caused more modernsization than the conscious policies of the Whigs. Conscious policies may be destructive if our minds are not capable of grasping the complexities of market phenomena, a contribution of Friedrich A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises in the 1920s and 1930s.

Abraham Lincoln was especially attracted to internal improvements. "Of all items in the Whig program, internal improvements held the greatest appeal for the young Lincoln.He shared the typical Whig aspiration for humanity to triumph over its physical environment. His first political platform, announcing his unsuccessful candidacy for the legislature in 1832, stressed the need for internal improvements, adi to education, and easy credit in promoting the development of the West...Lincoln was also an orthodox Whig on the crucial tariff and banking issues...In the 1830s and 1840s Lincoln consistently defended both state and national banking. To him, the assault on the Bank of the United States was part of a general breakdown of respect for property and morality that was also manifesting itself in lynch law...Lincoln was still arguing for the constitutionality of a national bank as a congressman in 1848 and even raised the issue several times in his great debates with Douglas a decade later."

"Believing that only those who paid taxes should vote, he opposed universal manhood suffrage. In an aggressively male society, he advocated votes for women."

Quoted, p. 266, from Robert Kelley "Ideology and Political Culture from Jefferson to Nixon", American Historical Review, 82, June 1977, 545.

Lincoln was a big supporter of Henry Clay. When the Republicans replaced the Whigs, the new party system "revealed a recombination of the cultural elements that had made up the old one. Douglas Democrats had come to endorse economic development, while Republicans now endorsed the westward movement. On strictly economic issues, there was little difference between them save for the tariff." (p. 289)

Lincoln synthesized elements of Jacksonian political thought with Whiggery. "Lincoln took over what was best in Jacksonian Democracy, the commitment to the rights of the common man." Lincoln reasserted the importance of the Declaration of Independence and "the proposition that all men are created equal" became a positive goal for political action" (p. 291).



*William Appleman William, The Contours of American History. Chicago: Quadrangle Paperbacks, 1966, p. 38.

**Herbert Hoover, American Individualism. New York: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1922, p. 21.

The Republicans' Whiggish Error

In Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America* Hartz argues that all American ideology is ultimately liberal, to include the Progressives and the New Deal. Hartz's book was written right around the same time as William F. Buckley's God and Man at Yale. It would be interesting to hear how Hartz might have updated his argument in light of the predominance of European left wing and New Left ideology in today's universities. It is true that the elements of New Left ideology that seem to carry forward are in large part those that fit democratic liberalism, such as diversity. Nevertheless, it is also true that Americans have been increasingly indoctrinated in anti-liberal and anti-democratic rhetoric, such as support for ill-defined regulatory systems that benefit economic elites; emphasis on credentials developed by universities that economically support the same New Left ideologues; and a monetary system that is supportive of economic elites, to include the major universities, whose endowments have mushroomed under the Republicans, at the expense of the common working man, whose hourly wage has been decimated by the Keynesian economic policies that university professors have advocated since the 1930s.

Hartz's book is brilliant and perhaps it does not receive more attention is because of the increased emphasis on New Left solutions, and perhaps because he did not anticipate increased deference to elites by an American public that has been increasingly educated to do so. However, as a description of the main run of American history, to include the present, the book makes excellent points.

The history of the Whigs suggests why the Republican Party of the millennium has failed to capture the public's imagination. The Republicans cannot be an elitist party, that is, they cannot pander to the wealthy at the expense of the public. If they do the voters will, as they have, reject them. One of a number of turning points was Bill Frist's refusal to carry forward a law that would have limited federal support for states which permit private use eminent domain. Their failure do so in light of the case of New London v. Kelo captured the (in the early 19th century American sense) impulse of the Whigs.

In order to be successful, the Republicans must inspire the public with what Hartz calls the Alger myth. Americans are in large part desirous of economic opportunity. The Democrats have sacrificed the image of opportunity on the altar of special interest group politics and advocacy of wealth transfers to professional interest groups, real estate developers and Wall Street in the name of the poor. The Republicans cannot cloak the substance of their ideology in purely altruistic raiment because then America would have not two but one party, the Democratic. Nor can they, as they have done, adopt the 19th century Whiggish elitism that is contemptuous of the public. Rather, the Republicans must cloak their ideology in the raiment of economic opportunity. An ideology that capitalizes on such opportunity is believable only if it emphasizes and nurtures private property rights of individuals as against the state and special interests. As well, the Republicans must fathom the source of economic opportunity, which is free enterprise, without which entrepreneurs cannot execute new ideas.

Under George Bush and Bill Frist the Republican Party became a Whig Party, a party of economic elitism. The methodology it adopted was Federalist and Whiggish (in the nineteenth century American sense). It maintained and strengthened regulation; it supported central bank monetary expansion; and it sacrificed private property rights in the interest of frivolous, inept and too often corrupt big business, Wall Street and real estate schemes which have helped to bankrupt the nation.

Hamilton believed that there is a class of people, large commercial operators, who are best equipped to guide the economy. He was wrong. As all who have worked in the real world of industry know the best ideas come from the man or woman on the production line, not the executive. One example is that of Ray Kroc, the builder of McDonald's, who did not create most of the chief concepts that made McDonald's successful (with the exception of a strong emphasis on uniformity and quality of execution), from the concept of scientific management of fast food production to Ronald McDonald, to the firm's use of cash flows, to real estate investment in the stores, to the Big Mac to the Filet O Fish, almost all of McDonald's chief ideas came from franchisees or Kroc's employees.

If so, then why have the Republicans chosen to revert to the Hamiltonian fantasy of a big business elite that is able to guide the economy with freshly minted Federal Reserve counterfeit rather than the reality that the development of new ideas depends on entrepreneurs? The Kelo case brought the Republicans' Whiggish error home.

To quote Hartz (pp. 94-5):

"American Whiggery...could have transformed the very liability of the American liberal community into a tremendous asset. For if the American democrat was unconquerable, he was so only because he shared the liberal norm. And this meant two things: one, that he was not a real threat to Whiggery; and two, that Whiggery had much to offer him in the way of feeding his capitalist impulse. Thus what Whiggery should have done, instead of opposing the American democrat, was to ally itself with him...It should have made a big issue out of the unity of American life, the fact that all Americans were bitten with the capitalist ethos which it was trying to foster. It should, in other words, have developed some sort of theory of democratic capitalism which fit the Tocquevillian facts of American life.

"But this, as we know, is precisely what Whiggery failed to do until it saw the light in 1840, and indeed, in any large sense until the post-Civil War days of Horatio Alger and Andrew Carnegie. Over most of its early history, it pursued a thoroughly European policy, and instead of emphasizing what it had in common with the American democrat, it emphasized precisely what it did not have in common with him. Instead of wooing this giant, it chose, quite without any weapons, to fight him. This would be a high species of political heroism were it not associated with such massive empirical blindness. One can admire a man who will not truckle to the mob, even though the mob is sure to beat him, provided there is actually a mob in the first place. But in America there was no mob: the American democrat was as liberal as the Whigs who denounced him. Consequently the suicidal grandeur of Fisher Ames is tinged with a type of stupidity which makes admiration difficult. At best one can find in the Whigs a kind of quixotic pathos....They pursue the usual conservative strategies but are baffled and dumbfounded at every turn..."


*Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1955.

Conformity, Rigidity and Decline

Max von Weber developed the thesis that America's Protestant roots led to a focus on capitalism because several Protestant sects view success in the world as evidence of divine grace. Reinhard Bendix developed Weber's spirit of capitalism thesis further in his Work and Authority in Industry in which he saw a historical pattern in the American interpretation of divine election's being carried forward in an ideological justification of managerial power despite the nation's democratic value system. Managers and big businessmen are entitled to social approval and legitimacy because of an evolving ideological justification. Bendix argued that the religious justification became a moral one, then shifted into social Darwinism and a biological justification. The ideological justification of managerial power then focused on psychological variables such as positive thinking. Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management was but one additional step on the road of ideological justification of business power. Taylor's scientific management, which holds that an industrial engineer is necessary to design work and control workers in turn evolved into the human relations school which argued that managers could understand workers' emotions and so constitute an elite, continuing the religious interpretation of divine election as applicable to management.

However, as Bendix emphasizes in his comparative study, managerial authority is justified in alternative ways around the world. The existence of managerial power is in part the result of economic and business necessity, for business cannot be managed democratically. Organizations can be managed democratically if there is little need for coordination. As coordination needs incrase, the possibility of democratic governance diminishes. Thus, capitalism, which depends on free market coordination and so does not require direction is most consistent with democracy, while socialism, in which government officers must direct the economy as well as the civil and military state functions tht exist under capitalism, tends toward dictatorship and suppression of diversity. Universities require little coordination because the work of scholarship is individual or collaborative on a small-group basis, hence universities can be run relatively democratically, but collaboration and coordination on a large scale is required of large manufacturing firms, so they must be run on an authoritarian basis. Thus, one of the most important writers on the subject of unity of command was not an American Protestant but a French Catholic, Henri Fayol. Fayol, a mining executive, emphasized authority, discipline, unity of command and unity of direction in his book General and Industrial Management, published in 1917. But Fayol's principles of management focus on large-scale industrial enterprise, and so may be less important to small firms, firms where coordination is not necessary (such as in universities, think tanks, firms with heavy emphasis on individual salesmanship or consulting firms). Thus, as Thompson has pointed out, technology is likely to influence the method of control. Thompson argued that there are three basic kinds of technologies, pooled, sequential and reciprocal. In sequential technologies tasks are performed in a required order and planning is critical. An example would be an assembly line. In pooled task interdependence the workers work separately but are guided by a central office. Coordination demands are minimal. Examples would be many service industries, sales offices where the salesmen work separately and universities. In reciprocal interdependence work may be broken into units that must interact flexibly. Thompson argued that sequential processes require the most control and should be grouped by process. In contrast, work requiring pooled processes need to be coordinated at a high level and coordination may not be possible. Reciprocal technologies such as involving teamwork need to be coordinated at a low level. If there are multiple reciprocal technologies then complexity necessitates decentralization.

Thus, the nature of authority relations may be imbued with a religious sense but may also shift with changing technology. The demands of government and the economy may shift in response to changing technology. As innovation changes the pace and rate of interaction, the nature of authority relations, public intervention in the market place, political control and the flexibility of government agencies might need to change along with it. Regulatory systems that mandate standard practices may be inappropriate in an economy where the flexibility of pooled or small group reciprocal relations requires rapid change. Yet because of the religious quality of authority structures, political factions may insist on ritualized patterns that seem important to them.

Americans in part believe in a natural aristocracy, one that is created by markets. But the religious aspect of Americans' value system may permit the emphasis on markets to be replaced by tradition. Because a businessman was successful in the past, there is a tendency to believe that he is entitled to success in the present and future as well, even if his decisions fail to correspond to reality. Thus, public conformity tends to support regulatory and financial systems even when the technology to which they respond have changed, have moved from sequential to pooled and reciprocal. The United States is no longer a manufacturing country, but its financial and regulatory regimes assume the importance of large firms, rigid production requirements and the need for government-supplied financing.

In Louis Hartz's Liberal Tradition in America Hartz argues that because America lacks a feudal tradition, it has never been drawn to socialism. Rather, he argues that Progressivism and New Deal social democracy are variants of Lockian liberalism. American society was based on Locke and was free prior to the American revolution, so Americans did not overthrow a feudal past. Rather, the American revolution reinforced values that were already present (p. 10):

"Here is a Lockean doctrine which in the West as a whole is the symbol of rationalism, yet in America the devotion to it has been so irrational that it has not even been recognized for what it is: liberalism. There has never been a liberal movement or a real liberal party in America: we have only had the American Way of Life, a nationalist articulation of Locke which usually does not know that Locke himself is involved...Ironically, 'liberalism' is a stranger in the land of its greatest realization and fulfillment. But this is not all. Here is a doctrine which everywhere in the West has been a glorious symbol of individual liberty, yet in America its compulsive power has been so great that it has posed a threat to liberty itself. Actually, Locke has a hidden conformitarian germ to begin with, since natural law tells equal people equal things, but when this germ is fed by the explosive power of modern nationalism, it mushrooms into something pretty remarkable. One can reasonably wonder about the liberty one finds in Burke.

"I believe that this is the basic ethical problem of a liberal society: not the danger of the majority which has been its conscious fear, but the danger of unanimity, which has slumbered unconsciously behind it: the 'tyranny of opinion' that Tocqueville saw unfolding as even the pathetic social distinctions of the Federalist era collapsed before his eyes...The decisive domestic issue of our time may well be the counter resources a liberal society can muster against this deep and unwritten tyrannical compulsion it contains. Given the individualist nature of the Lockean doctrine, there is always a logical impulse within it to transcend the very conformitarian spirit it breeds in a Lockean society..."Amricanism" oddly disadvantages the Progressive despite the fact that he shares it to the full, there is a strategic impulse within him to transcend it...In some sense the tragedy of these movements has lain in the imperfect knowledge that they have had of the enemy they face, above all in their failure to see their own unwitting contribution to his strength."

American conformitarianism has accepted a regulatory reform and institution of elites that is impractical because technology and the pace of market change has rendered them obsolete. As Americans sense a deterioration, not only in the average hourly real wage but also in the volatility of the housing and stock markets, they sense that there is something amiss; that systems have not responded to their expectations. But the systems have become institutionalized to a degree that has never existed in America before. Previously, because Americans lived in a laissez faire world, only the courts, the local governments and a few federal systems such as the post office were institutionalized rigidly. Now, much of American life, not only in the public sector in areas like Social Security have become rigidly institutionalized and unable to change, but also in the private sector. Firms are no longer permitted to fail.

The Search for Order

Robert H. Wiebe. The Search for Order 1877-1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967. 333 pages. (Newer edition available from Amazon.com for $12.60, used from $3.00).

Perhaps the most scintillating paragraph in Robert Wiebe's Search for Order is on pages 279-80. Inadvertently, Wiebe suggests a rationale for Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal in the context of Democratic Party strategy circa 1920. Although Wilson won in 1916:

"Two developments nullified his advantage. Beneath a facade of victories, the organization of the Democratic party had improved only slightly during the previous decade. After capitalizing upon the Republican divisions around 1912, Democrats had been unable either to integrate their party or to secure its finances. Even the election of 1916 had depended upon transitory factors: an immediate return on New Freedom legislation, an impression of friendliness to progressive latecomers, and an image of peace. Without an enduring base such as Republicans enjoyed, the Democrats could hold their majority only by an uninterrupted flow of benefits distributed with the utmost skill. War disrupted the makeshift pattern of success, and a rapid deterioration followed. The loss of both houses of Congress in 1918 presaged an approaching disaster."

The institutionalization of redistribution of wealth via New Deal ideology beginning 12 years later, in 1932, led to a 50-60 year Democratic ascendancy that paralleled the Republican ascendancy from 1860-1932.

Robert H. Wiebe is a masterful historian who combines intellectual, political and business history in this wonderfully written book. This book serves as a good backdrop to Nancy Cohen's recent Reconstruction of American Liberalism 1864-1914 which I previously reviewed. While Cohen emphasizes the Mugwumps and academic antecedents to Progressivism, Wiebe emphasizes Populist and Social Gospel influences.

Progressivism was in large part, as Cohen argues, an assertion of professional interests in fields like law, medicine and academia. It is this thread of professional interest that links the Mugwumps, Progressives, New Deal Democrats and post-World War II liberals. As well, big business appealed to government to protect it from competitive forces in the late 19th century, and this state-government alliance can be traced through American statism's various transformations. This insight flatly contradicts the popular conception of the New Deal as antipathetic to the feelings of business executives. Indeed, Alfred Sloan and other leading executives of the 1930s fought aspects of the New Deal. However, this was necessary for Roosevelt to implement the radically pro-business inflationary program that he established in 1932 and that has in recent decades resulted in the flattening of real wages and inflation of asset values.

In his final chapter entitled "Doorway to the Twenties" Wiebe notes that following World War I:

"A bureaucratic orientation now defined a basic part of the nation's discourse. The values of continuity and regularity, functionality and rationality, administration and management set the form of problems and outlined their alternative solutions. A few recognized the fact and accepted it. 'There will be no withdrawal from these experiments' (Republican) Elihu Root announced in 1916, referring specifically to the regulatory commissions. 'We shall go on; we shall expand them, whether we approve theoretically or not; because such agencies furnish protection..."

Wiebe notes that the new bureaucracies were ineffective in fighting the 1918influenza epidemic (pp.296-8):

"Although medical science could not meet the emergency, millions of educated Americans dutifully awaited the doctor's word, donning the same masks and cleansing the same foods in a remarkable display of coordinated faith..."

In other words, while Progressivism failed to produce outcomes that worked in improving social welfare, it did succeed in establishing a high degree of social control and in subsidizing big business:

"In particular, national progressivism had been predicated upon the existence of the modern corporation and its myriad relationships with the rest of American society. Chronologically, psychologically, this network had come first."

And, of course, big business welcomed the governmental subsidies:

"Somewhat more slowly, private leaders had come to believe that they also could not function without the assistance of the government, increasingly the national government. Only the government could ensure the stability and continuity essential to their welfare. Its expert services, its legal authority and its scope had become indispensable components of any intelligent plan for order. And what they sought could no longer be accomplished by seizing and bribing. The nineteenth-century formula of direct control--taking an office for yourself or your agent, buying a favor or an official--now had very little relevance to the primary goals of society's most influential men, whether in business, agriculture, labor or the professions. They required long-range, predictable cooperation through administrative devices that would bend with a changing world. Nor were they thinking about a mere neutralization of the government, the automatic reaction many had given to the fist flurries of reform. They wanted a powerful government, but one whose authority stood at their disposal; a strong, responsive government through which they could manage their own affairs in their own way..."

(p. 298)"...Government bureaucrats looked to the private groups in their bailiwick as a natural constituency, men with whom they must develop good relations and from whom they expected regular support. These groups reciprocated, looking in turn to the bureaus for essential services and acting as their lobbies--just as long as the effective power of decision remained in private hands...In the twentieth (century), the national government parcelled an increasing amount of its power to private groups; and these then exercised it through the national government itself. Progressive legislation sketched the outlines for that new system."

This transformation was assisted by World War I.

Wiebe begins this masterful book with a discussion of the depression of the 1870s:

"...it was a strange depression. The longest in the nation's history, in human terms it proved one of the mildest. The same falling prices that deterred investors facilitated commerce..."

America in the 1870s was still largely rural. Island communities "moved by the rhythms of agriculture", and (p. 4) "If there was an American philosophy in the seventies it was a corrupted version of Scottish common-sense doctrines, taking as given every man's ability to know that God had ordained modesty in woman, rectitude in men, and thrift, sobriety and hard work in both...small-town America took its stand against 'the credit system, the fashion system,and every other system tending to prodigality and bankruptcy.." The railroads disrupted this agricultural, rural world by heightening expectations and increasing income inequality. The Granger laws, passed mainly in the Midwest, were an attempt to address resentment toward wealthy railroad owners by setting rates and regulating business conduct.

Railroads such as the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, the Great Northern, the Southern Pacific and Northern Pacific united the nation and created a unitary market but (p.12) "America in the late 19th century was a society without a core."

The expansion of markets was not matched by expansion of business expertise. In banking, for instance (p. 21):

"A few institutions in the major cities experienced a phenomenal growth during the eighties in part from the demand for commercial banking facilities...Yet the apparent leaders, like their industrial counterparts, presided over vast mechanisms that had developed beyond their control...With intuitive methods for gauging the business cycle and rule-of-thumb measures for evaluating credit risks, they relied on stabs of shrewdness, not long-range wisdom, in conducting their affairs. Bankers at all levels strained to comprehend an increasingly complex, impersonal operation."

The difficulties business had in competing led to (p. 23):

"The classic sequence from tooth-and-claw competition to gentlemen's agreements to pools to trusts to holding companies...new techniques for cooperation rather than supplanting the old joined them to form a more intricate mosaic of business practice...the more complex the consolidation, the greater the internal confusion it tended to bring."

Wiebe writes (p. 25) that finance became an important field around 1890 and that JP Morgan guided many other financiers through the late 19th century: "Led by JP Morgan, whose imaginative policies in railroad cooperation had already won him fame during the eighties, a handful of financiers, almost all of them private investment bankers, took charge of the new surplus....Morgan enjoyed such respect that a caravan of domestic followers gladly marched to his beat."

As well, "the continuous need for credit as a matter of course made industrial executives vulnerable to bankers' direction...companies were showing interest in the benefits of an enforced peace." Nevertheless, in the 1890s 40% of the American railroad mileage had gone into receivership (p. 26). The investment banking community took over the railroads, reorganized them, and appointed managers who looked to Wall Street "for strategic guidance".

The expansion of markets led, according to Wiebe, to the end of the "island community" (p. 44). The growth of big business and the apparent concentration of wealth led scholar Richard T. Ely and evangelical minister Josiah Strong to argue for a social role for religion. Henry Demarest Lloyd attacked Standard Oil and moved into more radical causes, calling himself "a socialist-anarchist-communist-individualist-collectivist-co-operative-aristocratic-democrat". Lloyd's rhetoric sounded suspiciously like Herbert Croly's, 20 years later (p. 64) : " The new religion--man the redeemer...this divinity of democracy--the creative will of the people which is to be substituted for the old God." And Henry George argued for a 'single tax'. There was a sense of crisis, that "great corporations were stifling opportunity". There was a strong desire for self determination and community autonomy. There were, asserts Wiebe, Christian capitalists as well as Christian socialists. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was a Utopian novel, set in the year 2000, when society would be rationally designed and peace and goodwill would reign. Investment banks were abolished in Bellamy's world, and everyone would retire in middle age. All industry was to be run by the state. Everyone lives in small communities held together by fraternal cooperation.

The rural feeling of the threat of big business coupled with the fear of immigration and labor violence and strikes led to populism and the Populist or People's Party (p. 84):

"All of the community movements assumed that a natural, local society required the destruction of unnatural, national powers. As the Populist platform suggested, government would again become a function of men's everyday lives only after a direct democracy had dissolved a distant, corrupt government; technology would serve the communities only after nationalization had removed an oligarchy of railroad, telegraph, and telephone companies; power would belong to the people only after a silver currency, a decentralized postal savings system and subtreasury notes had replaced Wall Street and the national banks.."

By the early 1890s the Populist Party had captured 15% of the popular vote. Its downfall was its support for Democratic Party candidate William Jennings Bryan in 1896. When his free silver candidacy lost, the Populist Party lost credibility. In 1896 the Republicans became the party of sound money, of gold, and the Democrats became the party of silver, of inflation. A few Democrats, among them Woodrow Wilson, broke off from the Democratic Party in 1896 and fielded their own Gold Democratic candidate. Corporate America felt threatened by Bryan (they did not conceive of the advantages inflation offered them until after Lord Keynes wrote in the 1930s).

Along with a number of other authors in this field, Wiebe points out that the late nineteenth century saw a "revolution in values" (chapter nine) in that the expansion of markets shifted Americans' perceptions of wealth. In the day of the "island economies" of small town America, the relationship between morals and economic was perceived to have been that godliness and ethics led to economic prosperity. But in the expanded marketplace of big business, the relationship between morality and economic activity seemed to have been severed (p. 133):

"Now a perverted world was enabling men to perpetrate monstrous hoaxes in the name of the old morality. It had been natural enough to account for business success and nature in terms of individual virtue and vice; it was quite another matter to permit the corporations ill gotten profits because the Supreme Court adjudged them 'persons' within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment...No just God had given Rockefeller his money, whatever the man said. Yet for those who had customarily thought of wealth as a token of grace, re-arguing the case brought only frustration...From the seventies through the First World War, the nature of social change dominated their inquiries...With few exceptions the individual, who absorbed earlier and later generations, received only perfunctory attention."

In the 1870s and 1880s, economists believed in the wages fund theory and many combined it with social Darwinism. Some advocates of social Darwinism, such as Andrew Carnegie, argued for philanthropy. Wiebe, a product of mid-twentieth century statism, is somewhat sarcastic and condescending about the ideas of Sumner and David A. Wells, which are more viable and elastic than those of Keynes.

One response, the Social Gospel of Reverend Washington Gladden in his book Applied Christianity, was to argue for a boycott of monopolies and for employers to love employees. Another response was utopianism. In Looking Backward Bellamy argued for "the principle of fraternal co-operation...the only true science of wealth production" and a "people's economy supervised by an immaterial government". As well, Henry Demarest Lloyd argued for "cooperation to replace competition, nationalization under under an invisible government, a classless society living by the Golden rule." As a practical matter, Bellamy stated that he favored the nationalization of industry.

The utopianism of Bellamy and Gladden led to a combination of philosophical idealism and biology. Franklin H. Giddings and Brand Whitlock used biological metaphors to describe society and cities. They emphasized progress in stages. In 1883 Lester F. Ward (p. 141) argued that society had evolved in four stages.The academic Richard T. Ely argued that society would evolve through seven stages "to reach its destiny in industrial integration, essentially a Christian cooperative commonwealth." Wiebe states that following Comte, the most popular number of stages was three.

In the end, argues Wiebe, a bureaucratic mentality prevailed. The bureaucratic approach emphasized "recognizable, everyday problems" (p. 147) and eliminated biological analogies, relying instead on mechanical metaphors. This approach emphasized "scientific method", relying on statistics and a belief that "society was a vast tissue of reciprocal activity" (p. 147). Rather than discuss human psychology and focused instead on behavior (p. 149):

"Now education implied the guidance of behavior in harmony with social processes."

According to Wiebe (p.149),

"the bureaucratic orientation did not reach its peak of success until the nineteen twenties...By degrees the philosophy of urban political reform had moved from simple moral principles guaranteed by the proper forms of government to complex procedural principles advanced by the proper administration of government...A similar transformation occurred in social work. The original settlement workers had entered the slums and served the poor as moral acts. Over time...they became immersed in the endless, interrelated problems of a whole city's life."

Wiebe adds Arthur Bentley's bureaucratic analysis of government, The Process of Government, Frederick W. Taylor's scientific management and John Dewey's combination of pragmatism with a bureaucratic "theory that made individuals the plastic stuff of society."

It is evident from Wiebe's description of Dewey that modern "liberalism" (more accurately termed social democracy) is a betrayal of Dewey's ideas, particularly of his pragmatism:

"Throughout his writings ran a limitless faith in the scientific method as the means for freeing people of all ages to learn through exploration and through social experience."

But Dewey's ideas, while elegant, failed to anticipate the dominant impulse of interest groups and their extraction of rents from the state. The idea that social democratic institutions have led to rationality is laughable. Yet, instead of remaining loyal to the pragmatic impulse of William James, which would require a reassessment of failed ideology, today's social democrats ("liberals" or "progressives") continue to chant a rote commitment to failed ideas.

There is certainly a link between the bureaucratic ideas of Taylor and the classical liberalism of William Graham Sumner (p. 156):

"In a certain sense, bureaucratic thought reverted to the visions of the original classical theory, substituting an internally derived dynamic--a social process-for the externally justified balance of a John Fiske or a William Graham Sumner. Both theories, at least, sought to create unity out of diversity...the acknowledgment of society's inevitable pluralism raised difficulties that would plague bureaucratic through for years to come."

Advocates of Progressivism (which is the early twentieth century manifestation of Wiebe's bureaucratic approach) such as Walter Lippmann and Walter Weyl saw consumerism as the ultimate outcome of the bureaucratic society (p. 158).

Progressivism led to a" a strikingly different conception of government" which involved the replacement of economic with political criteria (p. 160):

"Trained, professional servants would staff a government broadly and continuously involved in society's operations. In order to meet problems as they arose, these officials should hold multiple mandates, ones that perforce would blur the conventional distinctions among executive, legislature and judiciary. Above them stood the public men, a unique and indispensible leader. Although learned enough to comprehend the details of a modern, specialized government, he was much more than an expert among experts. His vision encompassed the entire nation...Corps of servants received his general directives and translated them into their particular areas ...As the nation's leader, the public man would be an educator-extraordinary...In time, after a 'long tutelage in public affairs', the electorate would come to participate directly in certain aspects of government through the initiative, referendum and recall...The theory was immediately and persistently attacked as undemocratic...In fact the theory was not as boldly authoritarian as it sometimes appeared...The latitude he enjoyed in administration existed only because no one could predict the course of a fluid society...the theory purported to describe government by science not by men...As all citizens became rational, they would naturally arrive at the same general answers. Experts, of course, would always know more in their particualar fields, and the public man would always see the whole more clearly; but national rationality would assure consensus on the big issues, the matters of principle."

Wiebe articuately describes the essence of Progressivism. In chapter 7, "Progressivism arrives", he describes the roots of Progressivism in estern urban centers and some midwestern and southern agrarian states. The Progressives believed that a "patchwork government could no longer manager the range of urban problems" (p. 167). Mainstream business interests supported Progressivism (p. 167) "well-to-do merchants, manufacturers and bankers who sought more dependable and rewarding relations with government were moving to the vanguard of urban reform." This was accomplished in establishing utility regulation (p. 168), the secret ballot, the shortened ballot, and increasing the number of appointed governmental posts and the introduction of government budgeting. Their establishment of settlement houses led to an interest in child labor laws. Wiebe emphasizes (p. 169) the Progressives' fixation on improvement of government administration. They envisioned flexible, authority staffed by qualified experts in areas like housing regulation, early childhood education, conservation and public health. The Progressives emphasized efficiency.
In attempting to implement their ideas they linked themselves to businessmen and political bosses (p. 174).

Wiebe makes an important point (p. 174):

"It was the expert who benefited most from the new framework of politics...The more complex the competition for power, the more organizational leaders relied on experts to decipher and to prescribe...Only the professional administrator, the doctor, the social worker, the achitect, the economist could show the way...professors like Frank Goodnow, Leo Rowe and Edmund James were telling the National Municipal League what urban reforms it really wanted"

At the same time, businessmen began to institute systematizedpolitical contributions and lobbying slightly before 1900 as a concomitant of Progressivism:

"The political implications of the desire for continuity turned big businessmen into political innovators, and campaigning was one of the first areas affected. Particularly after 1896, such magnates as John McCall of New York Life Insurance, Henry H. Rogers of Standard Oil and Edward Harriman began both to contribute kmore consistently and to grant funds for a party rather than a man."

The contradiction inherent in Progressive reform, namely, its claim to rationality while at the same time encouraging a larger scale, more rationalized corruption, were apparent from the beginning.

The Search for Order is a fine historical work and anyone who reads it will be richer.