In a recent speech at the University of Texas Law School, Justice Clarence Thomas attacked the political doctrines of progressivism, declaring this belief system not only to be “anti-American,” but also the source of political oppression both in the United States and Europe. Not surprisingly, his speech was not well-received among American progressives who insist that progressivism represented much-needed reforms in American society to curb the excesses of capitalism. Huffed Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law:
Thomas suggests that the country began to go wrong early in the 20th century with the presidency of Woodrow Wilson. It is true that Wilson considered himself a progressive. But, on race issues, he was among our least progressive presidents, barring Black individuals from the federal civil service.
And it was progressives, led by the NAACP and Thurgood Marshall, who successfully challenged the Jim Crow laws that imposed apartheid through much of the country and culminated in Brown v. Board of Education. It was also progressives who finally succeeded in Loving v. Virginia, written by Chief Justice Earl Warren, in declaring unconstitutional laws prohibiting interracial marriage. It was progressives who ultimately overcame strong and sustained conservative opposition to enact the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Clearly, Chemerinsky does not know his legal history very well, and he certainly is not familiar with the role that progressives played in establishing Jim Crow laws across the country. Historians like Vann Woodward and David Southern authoritatively pointed out where progressives from both the North and the South were responsible for pushing legal segregation, although both authors did support progressivism themselves, calling progressive racism a “blind spot.” David Kiriazis and I wrote in 2013:
Woodward (1974) writes that Progressives “capitulated” to Jim Crow, as though they did so reluctantly, and Southern (1968) argues that institutional racism was a “blind spot” of Progressives, but the record tells a different story. Progressives did not begrudgingly accept the tenets of Jim Crow but instead were in the vanguard of establishing the American apartheid system. John Dewey, John R. Commons, Herbert Croly, Lyman Abbott, Charles Francis Adams Jr., Hoke Smith, Thomas Nelson Page, James Boyle, John W. Burgess, Herbert Baxter Adams, and his idealistic student Woodrow Wilson represent the leaders not only of Progressive economic and social theories, but also of the racial purity and segregation viewpoints that became legal and social policy in the United States.
Despite the outpouring of invective against Thomas following that speech, he was on solid ground – and that includes his bringing Hitler, Stalin, and Mao into the mix, blaming progressivism for helping create the conditions that helped bring them to power. It is the modern progressive journalists and academics that are standing on historical quicksand.
Progressive Reforms Were Disastrous
It obviously is impossible to have a full discussion of the damage done by progressives in a brief article, but we can deal with some of the issues and show how the so-called progressive reforms actually led to a number of disastrous events of the first half of the 20th century that led to the Great Depression, and created the disastrous aftermath of World War I, all of which did help lead to Adolph Hitler’s regime and helped to empower the murderous Joseph Stalin.
In attacking Thomas, the leftist publication Salon declared:
During a recent speech, Thomas criticized early 20th-century progressivism — including ideas associated with President Woodrow Wilson — arguing that such movements contributed to conditions that enabled authoritarian regimes in Europe. The comments, which circulated widely online, drew sharp responses from historians and legal scholars who rejected the comparison as inaccurate and misleading.
Experts note that the rise of Nazi Germany is broadly understood to have stemmed from a complex set of factors, including economic collapse, political instability and the aftermath of World War I, not American progressive reforms. Critics argue that invoking Hitler in modern ideological debates risks distorting that history while inflaming political divisions.
The assumption is that these regimes naturally appeared in Germany and Russia with no influence from anyone in the U.S., but the story is more complicated with World War I being the catalyst along with the progressive capture of the U.S. Government in 1912 with the election of Woodrow Wilson and a progressive Congress led by Democrats.
While historians are now rediscovering the institutional racism that came with the Wilson presidency, there was much more than just Wilson bringing Jim Crow to the federal government. The new Democratic Party-dominated Congress would pass a series of laws that fundamentally changed American life, from the implementation of the federal income tax (16th Amendment), direct election of U.S. senators (17th Amendment), and the establishment of the Federal Reserve System, along with what David Southern wrote was a “a torrent of bills proposing discriminatory legislation against Negroes, more than any other Congress in American history.”
All of these progressive measures would create their own sets of disasters, but, as Murray Rothbard wrote, the final progressive triumph of that decade was the U.S. entry into World War I, which in 1917 had become a stalemate that surely would have led to a negotiated settlement. Instead, the infusion of the U.S. Armed Forces would result in Germany’s defeat, which created a huge political vacuum in Central Europe that ultimately led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazi Party.
Hitler didn’t come to power because Germany lost World War I, but the political and economic turmoil following the war weakened the German economy and its social fabric, and then came along the Great Depression, which had its roots in the progressive institutions in the U.S. Rothbard has detailed in his books The Progressive Era and America’s Great Depression how the Federal Reserve played a major role in destabilizing the U.S. economy during the 1920s, leading to the disastrous stock market crash of October 1929. Furthermore, the measures taken by President Herbert Hoover to counteract the post-crash economic downturn were progressive, not laissez-faire, contrary to what modern intellectuals and historians might claim. Wrote Rothbard:
The conventional wisdom, of historian and layman alike, pictures Herbert Hoover as the last stubborn guardian of laissez-faire in America. The laissez-faire economy, so this wisdom runs, produced the Great Depression in 1929, and Hoover’s traditional, do-nothing policies could not stem the tide. Hence, Hoover and his hidebound policies were swept away, and Franklin Roosevelt entered to bring to America a New Deal, a new progressive economy of state regulation and intervention fit for the modern age.
He added:
… this conventional historical view is pure mythology and that the facts are virtually the reverse: that Herbert Hoover, far from being an advocate of laissez-faire, was in every way the precursor of Roosevelt and the New Deal, that, in short, he was one of the major leaders of the 20th-century shift from relatively laissez faire capitalism to the modern corporate state. In the terminology of William A. Williams and the New Left, Hoover was a preeminent “corporate liberal.”
Indeed, as Rothbard pointed out, the combination of the actions of the progressive central bank and Hoover’s attempt to implement policies favored by progressives were the real cause of the U.S. economic collapse in the early 1930s. Far from easing the U.S. economy out of depression, the policies of both the Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations blocked economic recovery and left the economy in a morass. Unfortunately, the Great Depression was not contained within the borders of the U.S., and it spread to other countries, including Germany, and it was the depression, which hit Germany very hard, that tipped the political balance to Hitler and the Nazis.
Progressivism and Eugenics
Unfortunately, American progressives also promoted the false science of eugenics. Thomas C. Leonard wrote:
“Eugenics” is a dirty word in contemporary discourse, largely because of its association with the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. Even professional historians find it difficult to resist the temptation to read all pre-Nazi history of eugenics as a prelude to Nazi crimes. But Progressive Era eugenics was, in fact, the broadest of churches. It was mainstream; it was popular to the point of faddishness; it was supported by leading figures in the newly emerging science of genetics; it appealed to an extraordinary range of political ideologies, not just progressives; and it survived the Nazis.
He added:
In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics. A single text among many, Searchlights on Health, the Science of Eugenics, sold one million copies in the first two years of its publication. The American Eugenics Society, co-founded by Irving Fisher to educate Americans on the virtues of eugenics, set up instructional pavilions and staged “fitter family” competitions at state agricultural fairs.
Much of what made the Nazi regime truly repulsive was its aggressive imposition of eugenics, yet much of what the Hitler people imposed had its roots in American progressivism. Wrote Edwin Black:
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called “Master Race.”
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn’t originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement’s campaign for ethnic cleansing.
He added:
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Likewise, because progressives tended to look favorably upon Stalin and the U.S.S.R. during the 1930s and in World War II, progressivism gave legitimacy to one of the bloodiest regimes in history. American progressives did not create Hitler and Stalin, but they helped to create the ground that nurtured the political movements that brought and kept these men in power.
Conclusion
The racial history of American progressivism, complete with its emphasis upon empowering the state – and especially the executive branch – to impose “scientific” policies that promoted racism, ethnic inferiority, along with economic intervention, is well-embedded into the progressive era. That later progressives tried to undo the handiwork of their forebears does not erase the horrific damage done by this political and intellectual movement.
And progressivism still is with us. Modern progressives have morphed into Democratic Socialism and other authoritarian movements that seek greater power for the state and the expense of individuals. Clarence Thomas was right in calling out progressives, and it is unfortunate that his is a very lonely voice.
