Hidden History: When Progressives Were More Conservative than Liberals

A Skeptics View of American History

Episode 14: Early Progressives Were Not Liberals

Mark Stoler Phd

Film Review

In this presentation, Stoler tries to clarify the historical distinction between progressivism and liberalism, as well as explaining the difference between US and European conservatism. Unfortunately he omits mentioning Henry George, the most famous progressive of the 19th century and mistakenly attributes the “invisible hand” concept to Scottish natural philosopher Adam Smith.

Stoler stresses that progressivism never represented a unified movement in the US, as both Republican president Teddy Roosevelt and Democratic president Woodrow Wilson considered themselves progressive.

According to Stoler, reforms associated with the progressive movement included

• the progressive income tax
• regulation of the railroads
• antitrust legislation
• the Pure Food and Drug Act
• the Federal Reserve
• major attacks on civil liberties during World War I
• limitations on immigration
• enforced professional standards for doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc
• the birth of social work as a profession, along with settlement houses to help immigrants and the poor
• the national birth control movement
• worsening of living and job conditions for African Americans
• social gospel movements in US churches promoting progressive reform
• a racist eugenics movement that promoted forced sterilization.

Although Stoler lists a number of prominent individuals* linked with the progressive movement, for some reason he leaves out the most famous progressive of all of the late 19th century. During the 1890s, social reformer Henry George (who published Progress and Poverty) in 1879, was the third most famous American (after Mark Twin and Thomas Edison).** Progress and Poverty sold millions of copies worldwide (more than any prior American book). A printer turned journalist, George also ran for mayor of New York City (twice). Following his death during the second campaign, his ideas on economic reform were carried forward by many organizations in the US and throughout the English-speaking world.

Unlike other progressives, Henry George opposed a progressive income tax. He believed government at all levels should be funded by a land value tax.

According to Stoler, progressives differed from traditional liberals (like Thomas Jefferson) who feared excessive government power. Progressives, discouraged by the soul-destroying poverty and inequality created by rapid industrialization believed a strong central government was necessary to break up monopolies and regulate industries that were brutally exploiting workers.

Here, once again, Stoler mistakenly attributes the concept a self-regulating market (via the “invisible hand” of competing self-interests) to Adam Smith. The concept of the invisible hand didn’t originate with Smith but with one of his contemporaries. In fact, he makes no mention of it in Wealth of Nations. In Volumes 4 and 5, he calls for government intervention in a number of instances.

In the US, people who opposed any government intervention (as 18th and 19th century liberals did) came to be known as conservatives, whereas European conservatives historically favored absolute government power (ie monarchy).

Both US conservatives and liberals tended to base their political views on John Locke’s notions of the social contract formed between rulers and their subjects.** In contrast, European conservatives tended to base their views on Thomas Hobbes’s views of a natural order (ie human nature) that causes life to be nasty, brutish and short, with the only solution being obedience to a monarch with absolute power.

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*Philosopher William James, educational reformer Charles Dewey, social reformer and peace activist Jame Addams, General Leonard Wood, Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendall Holmes and Louis Brandeis (who ran the international Zionist movement from his Supreme Court chambers – see https://ifamericansknew.org/us_ints/history.html), investigative journalists Lincoln Steffens and Ida Tarbell, political authors Jack London, Steven Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, politicians Franklin D Roosevelt (an imperialist globalist) and Robert La Follette (an anti-imperialist isolationist).

**See https://stuartbramhall.wordpress.com/2013/12/24/progress-and-poverty-a-suppressed-economics-classic/

*** By definition a social contract is an actual or hypothetical agreement between a community and its ruler that defines and limits the rights and duties of each

The film can be viewed free on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/video/early-progressives-were-not-liberals

Hidden History: The Swiss Eugenics Laws

Au Nom de de l’Ordre Morale (In the Name of Morale Order)

Directed by Bruno Joucea and Romain Russo (2015)

French with English subtitles

Film Review

This is a French documentary about the post-World War II Swiss eugenics program. Switzerland was forced to end the program in 1981, after signing the European Convention on Human Rights. Under the program, tens of thousands of victims were imprisoned, lost custody of their children, or underwent forced sterilization for “immoral” behavior inconsistent with Swiss national values.

Those imprisoned (many teenagers who became pregnant out of wedlock) were classified as “administrative prisoners.” Imprisoned alongside convicted criminals, by 1967 they made up half the prison population. Unlike their fellow inmates, they had no set release date.

Children removed from their families were institutionalized in 40 Catholic orphanages, where they were half starved and physically tortured by nuns and sexually abused by priests.

Between 15,000 and 20,000 were still alive when this film was released in 2015. In 2014, they successfully organized a national referendum calling for an official investigation and the right to access their personal records.

The documentary features the heart breaking stories of two women imprisoned for teen pregnancies during the 1960s and two men and one woman removed from their biological parents.

The last forced sterilization occurred in 1977.

Class Society and Inequality: Debunking the Myth

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

By Nancy Isenberg

Viking (2016)

Book Review

White Trash is a meticulously documented investigation of the historical roots of class inequality in the US. Despite the warm and fuzzy founding myths all American children are taught in school, the foundation for class inequality was laid during the early colonization of North America. The wealthy English elite who financed the colonies viewed the New World as a giant workhouse for England’s surplus poor (following the Enclosure Acts that drove them off the commons). British vagrants, vagabonds and convicts were both voluntarily and involuntarily transported to North America as apprentices, indentured servants and impressed^* seaman. A surprising number of indentured servants, particularly in New England, were teenagers.

Most indentured servants (who functioned as virtual slaves) were promised land on completing their term of servitude. However nearly all went on to lose their land to property speculators and rigged taxation schemes, becoming squatters on the outskirts of established settlements. Comprising at least half of the population of most colonies, they were used by colonial elites as a wedge to encroach on Native American lands – only to be driven off their farms once the land was cleared and planted.

The lifestyle enjoyed by these squatters and their descendants was one of entrenched poverty and malnutrition, as well as hookworm, pellagra and other chronic illnesses associated with malnutrition. The disparaging attitude of wealthy elites and the emerging middle class towards this population clearly debunks ubiquitous corporate media claims about the “classless” nature of US society. Labels applied to them have changed over time, but the most prevalent have included “white trash,” “rednecks,” “mudsills,” and “mudeaters” (mud eating is a common symptom of hookworm). During her recent election campaign, Hillary Clinton referred to them as “deplorables.”

Isenberg reveals that post-World War II industrialization would lead many of these families migrate to northern cities, where they became “trailer trash.”

The wealthy elites have alternated between blaming white trash squatters and their descendants for their miserable circumstances and attributing their problems to genetic aberrations. The latter would lead to the eugenics movement and forced sterilization in the 20th century.

For me the most interesting parts of the book concerned the election of Andrew Jackson, the first “white trash” president, and the effects of slavery and the plantation system in creating a permanent “squatter class.” During his term as President, Jackson was repeatedly mocked by the elite-owned press for his lack of refinement – in much the same way as President-elect Donald Trump.

Isenberg assets that the creation of massive plantations maintained by slave labor created a permanent “squatter class” by driving an unprecedented number of poor white settlers off their land. She also maintains that the secession of seven states (which led to the Civil War) was more about preserving racial and class hierarchies than about preserving states rights. An astonishing number of poor southern whites either fought for the Union side, deserted or participated in food riots to protest shortages stemming from the exclusive dedication of prime agricultural land to cotton (rather than food).

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*Impressment refers to the involuntary kidnapping of men, during the 18th and 19th century, into a military or naval force.

Originally published in Dissident Voice

The Wall Street Elites Who Financed Hitler

Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States – Prequel B

Directed by Oliver Stone

Film Review

Prequel B starts with the period of social repression that followed the return of GIs from World War I. US leaders were extremely concerned they would spread the oral sex techniques they had learned from French women. Alcohol prohibition, a crackdown on prostitution, rampant antisemitism (even Harvard restricted Jewish admissions) and anti-immigrant sentiment, and the eugenics movement (accompanied by forced sterilization of convicts, the “feeble minded” and promiscuous women) were all typical of this intense repression.

During the same period, Wall Street banks greatly reduced their investment in agriculture and manufacture, preferring the easier profits to be had from cheap credit and speculation. In 1929, a disastrous decision by central banks to increase interest rates triggered a deadly global depression, setting the stage for the rise of fascism in Europe.

Back in the US, Generals MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton charged 40,000 World War I veterans and their families with infantry and tanks and burned their tents. The latter, calling themselves the Bonus Army, were demanding immediate payment of the bonus they had been promised for serving in World War I.

Stone describes the 1930s as a radical period of social experimentation, in part due to Roosevelt’s sweeping New Deal social reforms (including Social Security, unemployment insurance, agricultural subsidies, aid to dependent children and Federal paid work schemes), and in part due to aggressive industrial unionization and intense interest on the part of American intellectuals in Russia’s experiment with communism. Hundreds of thousands of Americans would join the Communist Party, while numerous prominent writers (including Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Sinclair Lewis, Richard Wright, Clifford Odets, and Sherwood Anderson) were communist sympathizers.

During the same period, the America’s wealthy elites were more inclined to support Hitler. Key individuals who helped finance the Third Reich include Henry Ford, Prescott Bush, William Randolph Hearst, the Morgan brothers, Allen Dulles (first CIA director) and John Foster Dulles (Secretary of State under Eisenhower). The key US banks involved were Bank of International Settlements, Chase Manhattan, JP Morgan and United Banking Corporation (Brown Brothers Harriman). Specific US companies that provided Hitler with armaments, military vehicles, aircraft, oil and other material support include Kodak, ITT, Dupont, Westinghouse, Standard Oil, Singer, GE, Pratt and Whitney, United Fruit, Singer, Douglas Aircraft and International Harvester.

In 1933, some of these same industrialists would also try to instigate a coup – foiled by General Smedley Butler – to remove Roosevelt from office.

 

A 241 Year Fairy Tale About American Democracy

 

War is a Lie

By David Swanson

Just World Books (2016)

Book Review

In War is a Lie, author David Swanson presents extensive historical evidence that the US has never been a democratic republic – that this is a carefully crafted fairy tale the ruling elite has been telling us since the late 18th century. He also demolishes the myth that warfare is deeply ingrained in human nature. Ninety-eight percent of people are deeply opposed to killing and warfare and require extensive brainwashing to commit to either. Although the species homo sapiens is 60,000 – 1000,000 years old, they have only engaged in war for the last 10,000 years. Many human civilizations (including the people of the Arctic, Northeast Mexico, Australia and Nevada’s Great Basin) had no experience of war prior to contact with Europeans. Among the more astonishing facts Swanson reveals is that 80% of the US troops drafted into World War II declined to kill enemy troops.

Starting with the Revolutionary War, War is a Lie is full of delightful little factoids that are omitted from high school and college US history courses.

Among the high points:

Revolutionary War

The two real goals of the US War of Independence were to 1) remove the King’s representatives from positions of power in North America and replace them with colonial merchants and bankers and 2) to overturn the British ban on western expansion (via the slaughter of indigenous tribes). The Continental Army consisted mainly of poor farmers who were forcibly conscripted, brutally mistreated and rarely paid (even though General Washington was the richest man in the colonies. During and after the war, numerous “democratic reforms” were enacted to motivate these the “recruits, with all being promptly nullified.

War of 1812

Contrary to what we’re taught in school, the US started the War of 1812, with the intention of invading and occupying Canada. They lost this war.

Mexican-American War (1846-48)

Another war about western expansion that resulted in the US annexation of Texas, California, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and parts of Colorado and Oregon. Many Irish and other European immigrants fought for Mexico.

Civil War

Swanson maintains the Civil War was also about western expansion and whether the North or South would control the new western territories. Swanson stresses that Lincoln could have easily freed the slaves without launching a war (other countries did so). The Emancipation Proclamation was issued well after the war started, as public sentiment turned against the war due to high casualties. Swanson reminds us that the Proclamation only applied to states that had seceded – slavery remained legal in Union states.

World War II

Swanson details the deliberate Wall Street strategy of arming Hitler to neutralize the Soviets, highlighting orders US pilots received not to bomb German munitions factories owned by Americans. He also writes at length about the Nazi eugenics experiments that originating in the US under the guidance of Rockefeller, Carnegie and Harrison. I was intrigued to learne the Rockefeller Foundation funded Josef Mengele’s experiments on Jewish prisoners. Swanson attributes Roosevelt’s eagerness to enter World War II to increasing working class militancy in the US (which the compulsory draft ended) and fears of full blown insurrection. He also discusses numerous efforts Hitler made (as late as 1940) to negotiate a peace settlement with the allies – which they rebuffed.