The Progressive Era

Today I received from Amazon my eagerly awaited copy of Murray N. Rothbard's posthumous volume The Progressive Era (edited by Patrick Newman). Upon reading the opening lines of the Forward by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, I was seized by an eerie sense of déjà vu, for the academic experience he describes almost paralleled exactly that of my own at that time: "When I was in my junior and senior years at Princeton studying history in the early 1970s, I became fascinated with the Progressive Era. It attracted me at a time when America rejected as profoundly as it did under Lincoln and the Radical Republicans and even under FDR, the libertarian first principles of the American Revolution."To pursue this interest, I volunteered to take a course in the Graduate School, a procedure permitted for a few undergraduates at the time. The course was an advanced look at Progressive intellectual thought taught by Woodrow Wilson’s biographer and hagiographer, Professor Arthur S. Link. The readings were all pro-Progressive as were all the other students in the class. We studied Professor Link’s works and the claptrap by his colleague William E. Leuchtenberg."In my search for a rational understanding of the Era — and for ammunition to use in the classroom where I was regularly beaten up — I asked Professor Link if any academic had made the argument effectively that the Progressives were power-hungry charlatans in the guise of noble businessmen, selfless politicians, and honest academics."He told me of a young fellow named Rothbard, of whose work he had only heard, but had not read. This advice sent me to Man, Economy, and State, which I devoured; and my ideological odyssey was off to the races."As I have detailed previously at LewRockwell.com, I was a budding libertarian undergraduate college student at the University of Tulsa in the early 1970s. From my readings of the monthly newsletter, Books for Libertarians (later Libertarian Review) I learned from its editor Roy A. Childs, Jr. and other contributors, of the seminal place in modern American history of the Progressive Era.Like Judge Napolitano, "I became fascinated with the Progressive Era." I took two specialized history courses, The Progressive Era, and American Intellectual Thought, which both dealt extensively with this period. Both of my instructors were amiable yet very conventional court historians. In his course on The Progressive Era, Dr. William Settle assigned six texts: George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America 1900-12; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era; Otis L. Graham, Jr., The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America/1900-1928; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity 1914-32; and Albert U. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression.I informed Professor Settle that an economist/historian named Murray N. Rothbard had written a devastating comprehensive review of the Romasco book, "The Hoover Myth," which totally invalidated its merit. Originally published in the New Left academic journal, Studies on the Left, Volume VI, No. 4, Summer 1966, it was republished in an anthology entitled For A New America: Essays in History and Politics from 'Studies on the Left' 1959-1967. I gave him a photocopy of the damning piece which he stated he later read.Professor I. E. Cadenhead, instructor of the later course, was author of Theodore Roosevelt: The Paradox of Progressivism. Unsurprisingly this hagiography contains no mention of the pioneering research of intellectual revisionists such as Rothbard, Gabriel Kolko, or James Weinstein, challenging the dominant reigning interpretation of Progressivism. Besides his book, students were assigned three volumes in the Rand McNally Series on the History of American Thought and Culture: Paul E. Boiller, Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865-1900; David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917; and Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought 1917-1930.Throughout this period I bolstered my intellectual ammunition by reading the revisionist anti-textbook histories of this era, Ronald Radosh and Murray N Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State; and Gabriel Kolko's The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.Perhaps in the spirit of belated justice, Professor Patrick Newman, editor of The Progressive Era, will be invited to deliver the University of Tulsa’s Settle/Cadenhead Memorial Lecture regarding how the path-breaking research of that exemplary scholar Murray N. Rothbard has shattered forever the court history consensus on that seminal period in American history.

This is an excellent, well researched economic history of America during the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century. This book is loaded with information. The author's analysis is very different from what I had previously been taught. While always excellent in terms of content, it is, at times, a slow read. There is good reason for this.As I understand it, Murray Rothbard had assembled this prodigious body of information. He then died suddenly and unexpectedly. An editor, Patrick Newman, then put this product into a single comprehensible product for publication. I feel Mister Newman did a fine job under very difficult circumstances.With the above situation in mind, there are times that the book lacks an easy flow. At times the book reads like a college textbook and sometimes like a series of research papers. That is not a complaint. Just know what you are getting. Additionally, I found, without really trying, five different passages that are repeated, word for word, in different chapters. Again, I really don't mean that as a criticism. Under the circumstances, if I were editing this work, I might have felt the need to keep certain passages, in tact, as written for fear of altering Mister Rothbard's message. I truly feel Mister Newman did a fine, professional job with this.In summary, I am extremely glad to have had a chance to read this work. I learned a great deal and have rethought a lot about what I believed about this period. There were times I had to proceed very slowly and really concentrate. Speaking for myself, it was well worth the efffort. Thank You...

I'm 72. Been reading history for 60 years. Learned a few things here.. True, not a lot, but more than other books I've read recently

Rothbard wrote quite a few books in his life. This one he did not publish.There’s a reason for that: “The Progressive Era” is not really a book. Rather, it’s a series of articles he wrote that have been put together by editor Patrick Newman. The editor has gone about his business with passion, adding massive amounts of footnotes and an introduction that seeks to pull the book together. In this tome’s defense, moreover, there is a distinct chronological order to these articles, and they are bound together by prose that clearly comes from one man’s pen.Regardless, a miracle has not been pulled off here. By dint of being mere articles, the contents of the book often read like long lists of facts and names (and more names again, chiefly of J.P. Morgan bankers and associates) that one would only endure if one knew there’s only ten pages left, rather than hundreds. To make a long story short, I’m very proud of myself that I managed to finish this: it was very very dry and (precisely because it consists of independent articles) extremely repetitive. I could swear that whole pages around page 314 I’d read before in the book, but I could not find the courage to go back and see exactly where.On the flip side, even somebody like myself who resolutely does not share the ideology of the author will have to concede that this is an impressive catalog of undeniable historical facts, which may or may not add up to the narrative the author has in mind, but regardless present a side of history that has been neglected or forgotten by mainstream historians.So, for example, as a Krugman reader, I can remember his article entitled “fifty Herbert Hoovers,” which lamented the fact that in the 2008 crisis the states were not pulling their weight in stimulating the economy. A poor analogy, as it turns out! Rothbard makes a very convincing argument in the last chapter of this book that Hoover set in motion pretty much all of FDR’s New Deal and is only remembered in the wrong light because he did not push it as hard as his contemporaries might have wanted. Similarly, and with the benefit of having experienced the Greenspan put and the Bernanke QE, I was very happy to believe the argument made in the penultimate chapter of the book that the Fed has never changed its stripes and has, since its very inception, been an organization bent on promoting the interests of the financial sector. And now I’ve seen Tim Cook, who is losing the data wars to Google and Facebook, appeal for a national approach to data, I must say I totally sympathize with the author’s view that the ICC was not set up to regulate the railroads, but to protect them from competition amongst themselves.Additionally, it was very interesting (if on occasion mind-numbingly tedious, due to the county-by-county treatment) to follow the titanic Pietists vs. Liturgicals battle that characterized American post Civil War politics, how that was enmeshed with prohibition and how those two battles were entwined with the movement to give women the vote. Similarly, it was interesting to read that Teddy Roosevelt’s antitrust was mainly aimed at the trusts that opposed the biggest trust of all, that of J.P. Morgan. The conversion of the entire economy to a series of centralized cartels with guaranteed profits during WWI was fascinating to read as well and gave me flashbacks to my recent reading of Adam Tooze’s book about the Nazi war economy.On the other hand, I genuinely could not care less for the author’s fervor to discover and “expose” which historical figures were related to J.P. Morgan by blood or marriage, which suffragettes slept with each other and when or which industrialist funded what politician and why.Most importantly, the book is entitled “The Progressive Era” and the chapters that are actually dedicated to the Progressive Era itself I found to be the weakest. The author does lay out the motivations of the people who ushered in that era and makes strong arguments (sometimes even persuasive arguments) that these reforms were not enacted out of principle, but for petty, personal reasons, chiefly to do with protecting big business from nimbler small businesses.To which, of course, the correct answer is “so be it.” Especially to somebody who does not feel a need to explain why the world has become a worse place through banning child labor, establishing the FDA, giving women the vote and making education mandatory, to mention just a handful of that period’s remarkable achievements.