America's Forgotten History, Part Four: Grotius Rises: America’s Forgotten History, #4

Other Books by the Author

America’s Forgotten History: Part I: Foundations

America’s Forgotten History: Part II: Rupture

America’s Forgotten History: Part III: A Progressive Empire

Dancing On the Edge of the Widening Gyre: A History of Our Times

Globocop: How America Sold Its Soul and Lost Its Way

Language and Globalization: The History of Us All

Language: A Window on the Mind

Preface

There are always numerous ways to look at the same events and the same history. Which of the ways you choose probably depends mostly on two things: what you have been shown and what you believe. No version of history produced by humans can escape that dependency. Of course, we should strive for objectivity and fairness. But, as humans, we simply cannot extricate ourselves cleanly from what we have learned from others and how we have molded our minds. We can push the boundaries of learning and belief, but we can’t escape them. In other words, all histories are ideological. That is both a curse and an advantage. It’s a curse because it limits our understanding. It’s an advantage because, without an ideological frame, we wouldn’t know which of the seeming infinity of events to designate as important enough for inclusion in our histories, nor would we be able to connect the events we designate into a meaningful pattern. Ideology, then, dims our awareness of other possibilities, but it also gives us the means to understand things. A non-ideological history, if it were even possible to write, would be nonsense. Almost as bad, it would be boring.

The ideological frame for this series is libertarian. Or, better yet, let's call it classical liberal. That’s an older ideology which might be considered a more open-minded, less confrontational, and, yes, squishier version of libertarianism. In any case, since twentieth century history has been dominated by non-libertarian, non-classical-liberal ideologies, this history will raise in importance events most modern histories have ignored, reduce in importance events they have focused on, and connect the events differently. Hopefully it will make sense; hopefully it won’t be boring.

As an example of how ideology will shape the story, consider first one of the most important developments of twentieth century American history: the growth of government from a tiny thing into a behemoth. This has been an astounding development, one which has had immense consequences for America and the world. And yet, in most modern histories, it is hardly considered a central issue. It exists, of course, but generally as background for the story. Or maybe we could say that the growth of mega government is the road that modern history travels on. In mainstream modern histories, the road is there and it’s essential, as all roads are, but it’s hardly worth looking at in detail. It is, after all, just a road, not the story itself. For a classical liberal history, though, the whys and hows of the growth of government are no longer a mere backdrop or context or road to a more important place; they are at the very core of the story. That alone will make this history rather different than most the reader is likely to encounter, and hopefully provide a perspective heretofore overlooked.

Grotius Rises is a rather obscure title, and needs a word of explanation.

The Political Enlightenment was an attempt to apply the principles of the Enlightenment in general to the problem of solving a horrific contradiction: followers of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, had made Europe, for the better part of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a vast field of flames, blood, famine, and death.

Though it took a while for the combatants to sort out which side they were on, ultimately the fighting was largely Protestant northerners against Catholic southerners with each decrying the other as the Antichrist. Though their justifications for the wars were religious, the reality looked for all the world like that ancient human bugaboo: ethnic-cultural conflict. To the extent that it was north against south, it was Germanic against Latinic. Though exceptions were rife, as they normally are, we can probably generalize and say that these were wars in which religious ideals gave voice and justification to ethnic passions. That would be cynical enough, but we can wax even more cynical and say it was kings and governments using religious ideals and ethnic passions for their own aggrandizement.

Okay, those wars may be too complicated for such easy generalizations but clearly the voiced justifications were often Christian. This was a complex of holy wars for God and his Son, the proponent of Peace on Earth. This contradiction of war for peace is the one which the political Enlightenment set out to solve; and one revived, in a much different way, by a major character in this volume, the one who proclaimed the Great War the war to end all wars.

The philosophers of the Enlightenment drew on both Christianity, where all are equal in the eyes of God, and Roman-Greco civilization, where the rule of law was inviolate (in principle), where People, not some warlord or hereditary class, were entitled to lead the government. Both the Judeo-Christian and Roman-Greco underpinnings, then, pointed towards the radical and almost unheard of idea that: Every Person Has Value. Enlightenment thinkers derived Natural Law from the two foundational threads, which led to the conclusion that all people, both the most powerful and most humble, had natural rights to life, liberty, and property that could not be legally violated by any person or state.

There was only one exception, a necessary one if the concept of rights was to mean anything. No one had the right to take the rights of another except in defense of one’s own rights. Self-defense, then, was generally the only acceptable form of violence. Formulating natural and inviolable rights for the individual addressed the problem of state violence against the individual, but not the problem of violence between states. In other words, formulating natural rights for the individual did not address the problem of war. The problem of war would require taking the concept of natural rights and self-defense to the level of the state. This would fall under the purview of the part of Enlightenment political philosophy called the Law of Nations (which has since been altered somewhat and renamed International Law).

The formulators of the Law of Nations applied the basic principles of Natural Law to the actions of the state. Just as no individual had the right to use violence except in self-defense, so no state had the right to violence, except in self-defense. Only wars of self-defense, then, were legitimate.

So far, so good. But what of the problem of states which do horrendous things to their own people? Shouldn’t another more enlightened state do something about that if it has the means? This was a major problem within the philosophy of the Law of Nations. It was most fully represented by Hugo Grotius on the one hand, and Emer de Vattel on the other.

Grotius said a state which has the power to end terrible things being done to its own people by another state, has the right to enter that state and end the terrible things. In other words, this was an exception to the idea that only a war of self-defense is justified.

Vattel replied that, no, even that exception cannot be allowed because, human nature being what it is, the exception will be used as a pretext to go to war for other reasons.

The war by America on Spain in 1898 was not one of Vattelian self-defense but, in terms of its justification, anyway, a Grotiusian crusade for the benefit of the oppressed people of Cuba. As Vattel predicted, though, crusades can be used as a pretext for other things. In this case, America acquired an empire. Over the next four decades, in concord with the rise of large, centralized government, Grotius, too, rose. American foreign policy wavered between its traditional Vattelian policy of self-defense and the new Grotiusian policy of crusading. Then, following the Second World War, Grotius captured the American psyche. The American military would no longer be a civilian militia-based army devoted to self-defense, but a permanent professional army devoted to both self-defense and policing the world.

A note to the reader. Chapter One might almost be considered not a short chapter but a long continuation of this preface. I think it is worthwhile as a summary of both what has come before in the previous three volumes and an explanation of why the dawn of the era of progressivism is so relevant to our current situation. But it is a non-chronological mix of normal history and a history of the philosophical underpinnings of normal history. If that seems a bit much, right off the bat, I would suggest starting with Chapter Two.

CHAPTER ONE

The New Age

History sometimes turns on tiny events tipping political or social dominoes which, once they begin falling, trace lines which move in directions and reach places no person can predict. True, the dominoes may have already been in place, but if the first had been tipped at a different time or spot, who knows how they might have fallen?

In 1754, in the dark, silent forests of Trans-Appalachian Virginia, a twenty-two year old colonial militia leader with eyes set on martial glory as an officer in the British Empire bumbled into a political trap set by a Seneca Half King named Tanaghrisson. The wily Half King and his handful of Iroquois tricked the neophyte Virginian into attacking a few French soldiers who were on a diplomatic mission intended to reduce tensions between the English and French. Tanaghrisson, though nominally allied with the Virginians, had objectives of his own. He needed a war between the English and the French to boost his own recently declining political prospects within the Iroquois Confederation. He judged – correctly – that a dishonorable and humiliating mini-massacre of the French soldiers by English colonials would serve that purpose.

This, fifteen minutes of bloodshed far from the trappings of civilization, tipped the first domino. Repercussions reverberated across the Appalachians, then the Atlantic, and beyond. Soon five continents would be in flames. The ensuing Seven Years War – the real first world war, of which the French and Indian War was the North American component – would redraw the map of the world. But the dominoes did not stop falling when the fighting stopped. The oppressive tax burden from that expensive war led to revolution in both England’s American colonies and in France. The two revolutions would change the course of history.

Thirty-four years after he tipped the first domino, the young Virginian who had been so adroitly manipulated by Tanaghrisson had become the first president of his new nation, a nation born in revolt against an empire and against the twin crony-capitalist pillars of that empire: the East India Company and the Bank of England. The United States would remain virulently anti-imperial (at least rhetorically), ambiguously anti-crony-capitalist, and steadfastly suspicious of standing armies, foreign warfare, and large governments, cognizant of the power of those institutions to deprive people of their inalienable rights. Don’t Tread On Me was aimed at foreign foes and oppressive domestic government alike.

The year 1898 found John Long comfortably ensconced as secretary of the navy. However, the good secretary was more interested in a reduced workload, three day weekends, and an upcoming leisurely retirement than he was in running the navy. He cautiously let departmental power devolve to the unpredictable assistant secretary, Theodore Roosevelt. After all, Roosevelt’s prodigious work ethic, unrelenting organizational skills, astounding energy, and expertise in naval affairs made him the natural head of the department, even if he had a disconcerting tendency to ignore chains of command and do things on his own. Then one day, the Assistant Secretary took advantage of one of Secretary Long’s lengthy weekends to surreptitiously commandeer, with Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge at his side, the little-used cubbyhole of the administration’s telegraph office so that they could illegally, and against the wishes of both Secretary Long and President McKinley, turn the upcoming war with Spain over Cuba into a war of imperial conquest in the Pacific.

Dominoes again. First there is a political appointee as a cabinet secretary looking only for the honors of office before a quiet retirement. And then there are two men with much grander objectives taking advantage of the secretary’s penchant to avoid untoward complications or excessive exertion at the end of his career. Thanks to those seemingly trivial circumstances, America emerged from a short war with Spain over Cuba with a Pacific empire. That empire would, among other things, involve America first in a war with independence-minded Filipinos, and then in regulating trade and conquest among European and Japanese empires in China. That led inexorably to a war with Japan four decades later, which then turned history in a different direction. Roosevelt emerged such a hero and formidable political foe from the Spanish-American War that none dared challenge his reconfiguration of America from one thing into something quite different.

The Rooseveltian reconfiguration did not end with empire. As a war hero, and with the momentum of unpredictable dominoes propelling him on, Roosevelt found himself unexpectedly possessed of the ultimate power, which meant he was in position to implement his progressive belief that big government working hand-in-hand with big industry could ameliorate the excesses of industry for the betterment of the nation.

Despite the admirable ideals, goals, and intentions of progressive ideology, the only possible manifestation of progressivism in the real world – then and now – is crony-capitalism. This is because progressivism is the enabler of government-business cooperation, cooperation which human nature guarantees will be corrupt. The new age then, would be the age of empire, progressivism, crony-capitalism, and corruption.

America had come full circle. It had once revolted against empire and crony-capitalism only to ultimately embrace both. If George Washington was the father of America’s first age, one that was laissez-faire for the most part, Theodore Roosevelt would be the father of its second, the progressive age, which saw progressivism take over both political parties and, indeed, the political system itself.

THE RISE OF THE PROGRESSIVE MOVEMENT

Though the prerequisite intellectual foundations for progressivism had developed over the last half of the nineteenth century, it was driven forward by economic and demographic dislocation among the masses. Idealists looked to the native born prerequisites to formulate solutions to the dislocations. But, if largely forgotten now, they also found a real world example of practical application of the ideas in the rising new country of Germany. Travel was easier and cheaper than ever before in history, so quite a few managed to make their way to the source and vanguard of the brave new way: the German university system.

German universities were widely recognized as the best in the world with their development of graduate schools, their emphasis on scientific understanding of the world, and their focus on scholarly research. Americans returned from their intellectual sojourn to join with the stay-at-home Germanophiles to proselytize the new religion of scientific reorganization of society. Science had now reached the level of sophistication, they proceeded to teach, that it could rationalize economic development through the agency of government planning so that a better life for all would no longer be held hostage to the caprices of the marketplace.

In this volume, we will look at the classical liberal counterargument to the ideology of a scientifically planned society, even if classical liberalism has been condemned to a century of ridicule and irrelevancy by the triumphal progressive onslaught. Perhaps the time is right. Classical liberalism is now making its way back into the mainstream as the threatening maelstrom wrought by progressivism’s unnatural philosophy of human nature and by its unsustainable economics threaten to sweep us into the widening gyre.

Economic and Demographic Dislocations

The creative destruction born of free markets had led to a massive contraction in the number of workers needed by the industry which employed the most workers in America: agriculture. It also destroyed the greater part of the second most important employer: cottage industries, whose craftsmen had once produced almost everything that wasn’t actually produced at home.

The creative part of creative destruction compensates lost jobs with new jobs. Potential farmers and craftsmen became instead factory workers, railway porters, petroleum engineers, accountants, and advertising executives. Unfortunately, though, most of the newly created jobs were of a type that fiercely independent Americans were not used to and did not really like. Where before Americans worked for themselves, economic revolutions now required that they work for someone else. Traditionally, you only did that in your youth while learning a trade. Unless you were permanently established at the bottom of the social scale, you certainly did not make a career of working for another. True Americans were not cut out to be servants kowtowing to a boss and ruled by a clock.

At the same time, waves of immigrants were washing up on both coasts of America. That was not new. What was new by the latter decades of the nineteenth century was the kind of immigrants. Before, they had been mostly people from the British Isles, with a fairly significant smattering of properly protestant and hard-working Lutherans and Huguenots from Germany and France. Among the earlier immigrants, Scots and Irish were less acceptable (except the hard-working Scottish Presbyterian/Calvinists) but bearable since they were out of sight and mind, having migrated to the economic and intellectual backwaters of Appalachia, the southern hill country, and, later, on to Texas. And then there were the forced immigrants, Africans, but they were safely consigned to plantation slavery before the Civil War, and largely limited by custom and law to southern agriculture and such after. As the century progressed, though, there was no hiding away the growing numbers of strange people coming from Eastern and Southern Europe to the east coast, and from China and, later, Japan to the west coast. Many of the new breed immigrants – Jews from Europe and all those from Asia – were not even Christian. And the Christians themselves were often Catholic or Orthodox, which was almost as bad. Worst of all, the new immigrants were willing to work long and hard for low wages.

Thanks, then, to economic and demographic dislocations, Americans first lost their occupations as independent farmers and craftsmen to the efficiency of larger systems. Then the wages and working conditions within the new economy were suppressed by dirty, immoral, noisy, either swarthy or slant-eyed, often drunk foreigners who might be criminally inclined and couldn’t even speak English.

We don’t remember these new wave immigrants in such stark and derogatory terms. In fact, many or most of us are their descendants. Rather, we remember how they brought beer and wine, bagels and tempura, music and dance, funny accents... and quaint customs.

Customs. Historian David Hackett Fischer has reminded us of the importance of customs and reminded us that they are not merely quaint but critical to success in life. Economist Thomas Sowell has retaught us what we once knew before egalitarian ideology made such studies not merely taboo but evil: culture, given certain geographic and political prerequisites, is the key to the rapidity and form of economic advancement of different groups. Or, to look at the flip side, it’s the key, as Sowell phrases it, to disparity of achievements between different groups.

Sowell has studied the achievements of groups not only in America but around the world, and discovered that customs exert an influence far beyond the gastronomic or quaint, and they exert that influence with remarkable uniformity no matter which part of the world the various groups might immigrate to. Groups which become economically successful are successful wherever they go and no matter how poor and despised they start out. First, second, and even third generation members of groups tend to follow remarkably similar culturally determined roads to success (or relative lack of success) no matter where they end up.

When nations receiving immigrants are relatively free, the immigrants can fertilize the new ground to produce a magnificent flowering, even when immigrations start out as invasive species. Again, not all groups flower at the same speed, in the same way, or to the same extent. Speed, way, and extent depend a little bit on how the immigrants are received, which is the primary modern explanation for disparity of achievements among groups. But only a little bit. Analysis of the real world experience of immigrants in numerous countries over the course of the last century and a half has shown us that success may also depend to some degree on whether immigrants come to a sink-or-swim situation, which incentivizes both success and usually the desire to assimilate. If, on the other hand, they choose a place where they are supported by a welfare system, the incentives to self-select before coming, or to work hard and assimilate after coming, are substantially decreased. But success depends mostly not on the attitudes of people already there, nor on the kind of welfare institutions in place, but on cultural attributes immigrants bring with them.

Fischer documents in Albion’s Seed the story told in Volume One of Forgotten History of how the first four migrations from Britain seeded America. We all know that Anglo-Americans went first to Virginia and Massachusetts, but histories before Fischer – or at least histories since egalitarianism conquered the intellectual agenda – rarely if ever feature the importance of who went to those places and why. Fischer’s exhaustive research shows us that Virginia and Massachusetts were each populated by a different kind of people. In fact, each of these separate breeds immigrated to America in order to escape the other.

When Puritans were in power in England, borderers and cavaliers (as Fischer labels them) escaped the Puritan oppression of their royalist areas to Virginia. When royalists (that is, cavaliers) were in power, Puritans escaped royalist oppression of the Puritan southeast of England to Massachusetts – with sometimes a stop of a few years in Holland in between.

The agricultural, hierarchical, live-and-let-live, laid-back, fun-loving, violence-prone, clock-ignoring, food-frying, horse-racing upper and lower classes of British Saxony established southern culture. They even brought their system of large estates worked by semi-serfs, and possibly brought a vague historical memory of the long gone days when those serfs were actual slaves. The mercantile, egalitarian, dogmatic, dour, education-loving, law-abiding, punctual, food-baking, ball-playing middle class of East Anglia brought their tremendous work ethic and irritating teachy-preachy sense of moral certainty to establish northern culture.

The two groups had fought each other in the terrible English Civil War of the 1640s, the horrific illustration of why they had to escape each other. Distance insured that they could live much as they liked in America for over two centuries before circumstances and cultural tensions forced on them a new civil war that ended much as the first, with the rich, mercantile, and well-organized Puritan war machine triumphing over martially spirited and endowed but less organized and financially strapped royalists and farmers.

Puritans and cavalier/borderers were the original and therefore most important Anglos, but hard on their heals came cultural allies to each side. English Quakers and German Pietists came to Pennsylvania; Scots-Irish, though disembarking in Philadelphia, where they were most definitely not welcome, followed the Great Wagon Road up the Shenandoah Valley into the vast interior.

Quakers and German Pietists were more open-minded and less warlike than Puritans but otherwise had much in common with them. Many were intellectual and egalitarian with a strong reformist streak, and most were devoted to God, education, and commerce.

The Scots-Irish had a fierce sense of independence and love of war that surpassed even that of the more hierarchical borderers, but (except the Presbyterian/Calvinists among them, who were actually quite Puritan in many of their attitudes and customs) shared with their southern predecessors a slight regard for education (among the lower class, anyway), money-based commerce, or working overly hard when there was fun, singing, and dancing to be had. For both cultural and historical reasons, these Scots-Irish also shared with cavalier-borderers a great sense of irritation at the self-righteous preaching emanating from the Yankee domains.

Anti-immigration sentiment in America always existed and even found brief political expression in the short-lived Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798. But land was plentiful and few immigrants were different enough to fuel significant enmity. That changed, though, when the Great Potato Famine sent many more of the lesser breed of Irish to America. Where some of the Scots-Irish had come from protestant Scotland and the protestant northern parts of Ireland, now it was real Irish. They were militantly Catholic, dirt poor, uncultured and sensual, reeking of attitude, prone to drink and violence, and often spoke no English. These Irish often stayed in the cities they landed in. No more farming after farming had failed them so tragically back home. Or if they did leave the city, it was only to work on the railroads or in the mines, not to farm. It was this group, in fact, which remained the most violent and criminal group in America until well into the twentieth century, just as Irish immigrants to England had been in the nineteenth. There was a reason for the Irish Need Not Apply signs.

For Americans, the city occupied a place in the national psyche as the creation of mammon, dens of dirt, filth, and sin, in contrast to God’s Own Creation, the pure and glorious wonders of the mountains and forests of this new continent. Even those wealthy Americans making a good life for themselves in the city would have country estates to escape to. It was no surprise to Americans, then, that the new Pope-serving, alcohol-guzzling, hot-tempered, often violent, sometimes criminal, illiterate dregs of a backward world would choose the city as their natural abode.

And speaking of Catholics, though Germany itself was largely protestant, the newer German immigrants were more often Catholics escaping a rise in anti-Catholic feeling. Though, as people, not nearly as bad as the Irish, they, too, loved the demon drink. Though hard-working and productive, they kept to themselves in their own enclaves and often sent their children to German language schools and read only German language newspapers. Many, in fact, had come not from Germany but Russia, where they had lived for generations not as Russians but as Germans. They seemed determined to live as Germans in America, too.

By the last few decades of the century, immigration patterns had shifted from Western and Northern Europe to Eastern and Southern Europe, bringing a relentless inflow of Jews, Slavs, Hungarians, Greeks, and Italians. All were despised to varying degrees, though that hardly affected employment opportunities. Employers were naturally moved more by profit than whatever personal prejudices they may have felt. Market incentives do that to you, which is why free markets invariably break down discrimination, and why preserving discrimination requires legal barriers on natural markets such as apartheid in South Africa or Jim Crow laws in America. Italians and Hungarians (and likely others, too) were subjected to mob violence and lynchings. But the worst vitriol, hatred, and simple disgust was visited upon Jews, especially those coming from Poland. Even the already well established, successful, and relatively respected German Jewish community of New York was ambivalent at best towards this dodgy breed of unwashed, aggressive, noisy, pushy, and odd-looking brethren.

Their well-bred contempt was not an unusual reaction to foreign hordes. When, in the mid to late nineteenth century, the British brought in Chinese peasantry as virtual slaves to work in their enclaves in Southeast Asia (with the terms of servitude thankfully limited by contract to seven or eight years), the small but well-established Chinese business community was aghast at the hardly human forms they saw slinking off the British ships, and thought it proper they be confined to the bottom of the social totem pole, lower, even, than the natives. Yet, the cultural attributes the Jews and Chinese brought with them insured that within a generation or two they would rise to great success – total economic dominance, actually, in the case of the new Chinese in Southeast Asia. Their reward for providing their new societies tremendous benefits was discriminatory customs and legislation and, in the case of the Southeast Asian Chinese, violence that far surpassed that inflicted on post-Civil War blacks in America.

Meanwhile, on the Pacific coast of the United States, freely immigrating Chinese were bringing an even more alien culture than that of the new breed crossing the Atlantic. Though the Chinese came first to mine gold, they were soon excluded from the gold fields by racist miners and anti-Chinese legislation. They turned to building the Transcontinental and then other railroads, and when that was done, they hired out as farm hands. In both occupations, they exhibited work habits that pleased bosses for the same reason they threatened white laborers: they would work long and hard for low wages. They introduced agricultural techniques unknown in America, took initiative on the job, and caused relatively little trouble. In fact, they were critical to the immense effort involved in draining the swamps, building the dikes, and producing the fruit and vegetables which turned California into an agricultural juggernaut.

However, throughout the world, economic contribution is often a political liability, and it was in America, too. The Chinese were rewarded with vicious levels of racism from white labor unions, political parties, politicians, newspapers, and mobs which sometimes devolved into anti-Chinese race riots and occasional lynchings. At various times and places, Chinese in America were legally excluded from entering certain professions, from buying land, from attending public schools, or from living outside their communities except as live-in maids. They were prohibited from voting, serving on juries, testifying in court against whites, or from marrying whites. They responded to obstacles to work by going into business for themselves. A quarter of the Chinese workers in the United States in 1900 ran laundries, while many of the rest ran other small businesses.

Arriving a few decades after the Chinese, Japanese were a variation on a theme, similar in appearance and with cultural similarities such as a willingness to work long and hard without too much complaint. Like the Chinese, they started out at the bottom and suffered from the same egregious racial discrimination and the same full range of legal restrictions. But, unlike the first wave of Chinese, which were mostly male spiced with female prostitutes, many Japanese men came from Hawaii (after it was incorporated into the U.S. and therefore not subject to subsequent immigrations restrictions) with wives, while others procured picture brides from Japan. At first, the men worked as field hands – where they, too, introduced new irrigation and farming techniques – or in fish processing plants, while their wives worked as maids. Together, husband and wife saved the capital from their meager earnings to buy land when it was allowed, or fishing boats, so they could strike out on their own, or they began marketing the produce they were so heavily involved in producing. Finally working themselves into stable situations by the 1930s, it was all taken away during the Second World War when they were sent off to internment camps.

The South is remembered for the legal segregation of its Jim Crow laws, but the rest of the nation had its own quasi legal version of the same: Sundown Towns. Towns from the Atlantic to the Pacific displayed signs prominently at the city limits which warned, depending on which group was common in their region, Niggers, Injuns, Jews, Japs, and Coolies (as both Chinese and Japanese were called), to be out of town by sundown, or else, though the wording tended to be more polite in the Northeast. Segregation enforced by this serious threat of violence was absolutely effective, a northern and western form of Jim Crow which has been ignored by self-serving northern historians until this century. (Self-serving is not meant as an insult, but rather as a simple descriptor explaining why this northern and western version of segregation has gone vastly underreported; a descriptor applicable to anyone infected with human nature, an infection which inevitably colors all versions of history, as it colors all human activities.)

And yet, despite all this, when the laws allowed it, the immigrants came, from both Europe and Asia. The world then was not the world we know now. Bad as it was for them in America, back home, where freedom did not reach the minimal levels that released productivity, it was worse. In America, so long as they worked hard and strove to assimilate, they would find success.

Assimilation and success would inevitably tear down racist barriers, both personal and institutional, much more effectively than any kind of proactive legislation such as affirmative action. Fifty years of torturously slow-working proactive political solutions in America, for example, have only fed growing resentment among underclasses as the promised benefits go unrealized, and have fed growing resentment among borderline groups who feel left out and even blocked from the advantages given to the underclasses.

We’re not talking just America. The ineffectiveness of proactive political solutions, as well as their tendency to feed resentment, seem to be universal phenomena. Thomas Sowell has studied the effects of affirmative action and proactive political legislation throughout the world. He finds it has been tried everywhere, in both advanced and non-advanced countries, almost always with severely limited success, and finds it usually feeds resentment, that most dangerous of human emotions, on both sides of the affirmative action divide. In fact, resentment often follows proactive political solutions into the political realm, a process Sowell calls the politicization of resentment.

Politics can certainly impede progress. But beyond removing legal impediments such as Jim Crow, evidence suggests politics can’t really promote progress. Assuming a modicum of political freedom, the road to group success is virtually always found through culture, not politics; through personal effort in the context of free markets, not political advocacy. Throughout the world, if the requisite cultural attributes are not natural to a group – which is normally the case – success is found through assimilation of certain cultural attributes from successful groups. Total assimilation is not necessary. In fact, that would be boring, and even counterproductive since it removes variation and possibilities from the society. But assimilation towards the three cultural factors that Sowell identifies as common to all successful groups is necessary. Members of successful groups work and study hard, acquire marketable skills, and save money. Always. Assimilation of the drive to pursue the three key factors, though, is inevitably slowed to a snail’s pace by proactive political solutions, by the ideology behind proactive political solutions, and by the resultant politicization of resentment.

The German Connection

If economic dislocations from mechanization and immigration led to resentment and a sense of unfairness among Americans at the end of the nineteenth century, feelings alone cannot sustain a movement. For staying power, you need convincing explanations and ideologies. Those are the realm of the intelligentsia, which is why the intelligentsia and their ideas play a major role in all volumes of this history.

In Dancing on the Edge of the Widening Gyre, we looked at how the American and French Revolutions ushered in the post-monarchical world. Though both revolutions were born, in a sense, from the same parents, and both accomplished the same earth-shattering goal of killing the king, the siblings set out from their common ground in different directions. The American Revolution pointed strongly towards Lockeian classical liberalism; that of the French Revolution towards Rousseauian egalitarianism. Calling the two paths American or French is a label of convenience that gives tribute to the respective revolutions. But the reality was more mixed. America also had a strong egalitarian tradition cultivated within Puritan culture; nineteenth century France also had a strong classical liberal tradition exemplified by the great Lafayette, Bastiat, Say, and others.

In A Progressive Empire (Volume Three of this series) we looked at the post-Civil War intellectual foundations of the progressive movement in America, sprung from the egalitarian Puritan milieu, home to a complex of ideas which would capture both politics and the intelligentsia in the twentieth century. Before delving in subsequent chapters of this volume into the details of the progressive triumph, let’s look at how that native American progressivism was strengthened by European progressivism; that is, how the French Revolution was imported into America through Germany.

The political Enlightenment reached its greatest heights in precisely those two places that would collapse into revolution in response to the tax burden resulting from the real first world war, the Seven Years War of 1756-63. Those two revolutions produced different versions of Enlightenment understanding, even if some call the French version the CounterEnlightenment. Whatever. To the Germans, whether it was English or French, it was all Enlightenment. And since the Enlightenment had inspired the extreme disorderliness of two revolutions and, even worse, the Reign of Terror in France and, worse still, the execution of the King and Queen of France, Germans were suspicious.

Napoleon, meanwhile, rose to fill the vacuum left after the French Revolution had exhausted itself, and took Enlightenment values with him on his military conquest of the continent. Conquest by a self-proclaimed Enlightenment liberator, leading a people who had executed their king and queen, did not sit well with Germans. There is no nation-state of Germany yet, but there is a German nation of mostly Pietist and agrarian duchies, dukedoms, and principalities populated by conservative, submissive, illiterate, and highly religious peasants who almost worshiped their God-appointed rulers. Neither the peasants nor their rulers were much impressed by the spirit of independence and individualism that seemed to characterize new wave Enlightenment thinking. The German intelligentsia, though cognizant of the English and French Enlightenments, veered away from Enlightenment veneration of individualism after Napoleon gave this new thinking a bad name. A more Germanic, Romanticist, properly religious, anti-Enlightenment collectivism was certainly more comfortable and attractive. With Immanuel Kant and his Critique of Pure Reason from 1781 providing a properly German groundwork, they embarked on developing, as it were, a collectivist Third Way.

Germanness, in other words, was felt by Germans to be best for Germans. Still, people can’t help looking up to prestige – sometimes openly, sometimes secretly, sometimes unconsciously – and France was the continental locus of intellectual prestige. German philosophers were probably relieved to find a CounterEnlightenment French philosopher whose work could infuse their own: Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On Rousseau, they proceeded to build a German answer to Enlightenment individualism; to build a collectivist and authoritarian ideology which was more amenable to their comfortable home-grown feudal-familial structure. (France, in fact, did the same. But Germany would be the way station through which Rousseauian thinking found its way to America.) Immanuel Kant and his disciples – including most importantly Johann Herder, Johann Fichte, and Georg Hegel, a group which philosopher Stephen Hicks and others label right collectivists, and Mises labels right Hegelians – forged the path opened by Kant.

Later, of course, Georg Hegel’s most prominent disciple, the left collectivist or left Hegelian or Young Hegelian Karl Marx would significantly tweak their Prusso-Rousseauian ideology, while resuscitating the science of the Enlightenment, now gasping for air in the sea of German Romanticism, with his Scientific Socialism. Unlike the conservative right wing Old Hegelians, left wing Young Hegelians, especially Marx, deduced that history had not, in fact, already ended but that there was still one final denouement waiting to express itself through the inevitable final violent collision of historical forces that really would bring history to its socialist conclusion.

Later still, descending the lines of the Germanic genealogy, came Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Like Hegel, and like their godfather Rousseau, Heidegger could simultaneously be called both a right and left collectivist. He provided the collectivist metaphysical and epistemological underpinning for both fascism and communism – the two extremes of Rousseauian collectivism, which stood in opposition to Lockeian British/American classical liberalism. To super simplify, it was Locke vs. Rousseau, with Rousseauian collectivism dividing into two streams, the Marx/Engels/Lenin stream of communism and later, in reaction, the Mussolini/Hitler stream of fascism. In other words, following the death of classical liberalism, done in by the cultural implosion resulting from the physical and psychological devastation inflicted by the Great War, Europe had two opposing modes for organizing the now ascendant collectivist ideology: the universalist/class-warfare ideology of the left and the nationalist/classes-united solidarity ideology of the right. Both sides were collectivist, but the left divided the collective of good guys from the collective of bad guys according to class; the right divided the collective of good guys from the collective of bad guys according to nationality at first and later also according to race. Right collectivism was destroyed, at least temporarily, by defeat in the Second World War, but Heidegger’s metaphysics and epistemology were mobilized in the following decades to resuscitate Marxist left collectivism from its disastrous economic and moral failures.

Marxists from the Frankfurt School of Germany, followed soon after by Marxists from the Postmodernist School of France (though some of the French philosophers would later drift from doctrinaire Marxism after rejecting Marxist/Historicist style metanarratives), brought their new kind of Heidegger-infused Marxism to American universities in the 1960s – a second wave of Germanic-French thought – where it flourished, growing to dominate the social sciences, law, and education. Within another generation, the products of the now neo-Marxist American university system would also capture the media, the arts, and mainstream intellectual thought in general. Academia, the media, the arts, and the intelligentsia probably veer naturally towards collectivist explanations at least in part because those fields attract idealists who want to make a difference.

Idealists are often instinctually attracted to collectivism since collectivism can appear more moral than individualism. But post-1960s and 70s, this natural proclivity which, when properly channeled, can be a good thing, had become dominant among the intelligentsia, dominance inevitably making it a bad thing. Dominance is bad 1) because it feeds overconfidence in its own rightness, 2) because it opens the door to reaction, in this case, the threatening rise of neo-right collectivism, and 3) because the current power of left collectivism and the growing reactionary power of right collectivism are both dire threats to the classical liberal American experiment.

Because of its importance to both the American intellectual milieu of the early twentieth century and its subsequent dominance of the intellectual milieu of the late twentieth and early twenty-first, let’s consider in more detail one particular part of this timeline. We’ll focus in on the German conduit through which Germanic-French thought first flowed into America over a century ago.

By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the Germanic nations were unified and successful, both militarily and economically, proving the worthiness of their collectivist-authoritarian Third Way. Their universities, generously funded by the government, had become the best in the world, beacons of light to those attracted to advanced thinking. In America, on the other hand, graduate programs outside of law or medicine were almost non-existent. Even professors generally had not gone to graduate school. Ambitious and intellectually inclined American college students took notice of the German system, and crossed the ocean by the thousands to obtain the German certification of academic and intellectual excellence, something called there a PhD, or Doctor of Philosophy. Why would they not? Study abroad would be exciting (Europe! Paid for by Dad and the German government!) and intellectually stimulating. It would also give them a leg up over stay-at-homes in their pursuit of an academic career.

German intellectuals and professors at the great German universities now receiving so many Americans had taken their avant-garde thinking beyond the mere ethical to the metaphysical by placing progressivist ideology at the crest of the great wave of historical inevitability. Historical inevitability, inherent to the German ideology of historicism, seemed to infuse all forms of the German Third Way including, most famously, the Scientific Socialism of Marx and Engels. If that was too radical, Chancellor Bismarck showed the world that the milder non-Marxist form of the German Way – social welfare and societal organization paid for and mediated by the state – could work. The young American progressives who flocked to Germany, just as they would flock to the new Soviet Union two decades later to observe first hand the triumphantly Marxist future, returned from both countries with a fire in their bellies lit by the vision of a new world where all people would be equal.

Those young Americans were already receptive to new wave European thinking thanks to a potent complex of mostly homegrown intellectual trends expressed through such movements as the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism, also by Social Darwinism, and by the related assumption that science and engineering were on the cusp of finding solutions to not only scientific and medical problems, but all the social problems of the world. However, just as the German Way needed the prestige of France to penetrate deeply into traditional structures of thought, progressivism in America needed the prestige of Germany. In his notes to Murray Rothbard’s The Progressive Era, Patrick Newman writes,

[T]he transformation of economists during this time from laissez-faire philosophers to activist government planners was heavily related to the fact that many Yankee post millennial pietist reformers went to Bismarck’s Germany to get their PhDs and became instilled with German socialism and centralization.

Progressives confirm Rothbard’s classical liberal take on the history of the era. Daniel Rogers, for example, in his monumental study Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics In a Progressive Age, discusses the importance of the German connection in ameliorating what he calls the destructive excesses of market capitalism. Though the Germany-to-America conduit flowed to its fullest around the turn of the century, the spigot was open, according to Rogers, for a full sixty years before it was turned off by history and forgotten by American historians who, for tactical reasons, preferred to no longer portray Germany in the vanguard of progressive thought after its recent descent into a fascist nightmare.

Stretching from the 1870s, when the first American students began to catch wind of the assault on laissez-faire in the late-nineteenth-century German universities, through the convulsions of the Second World War, that moment marks off a more distinctive phase in the American past than history writing has yet fully to grasp.

Professor Nancy Unger agrees. In a recently published progressive take on history which she edited, she tells us of the Euro-American cross-fertilization, the American substrate, and the educational migrations to Germany by young American intellectuals in the introduction to a collection of writings called A Companion to the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era.

Rather than hewing strictly to socialism or laissez-faire liberalism, scholars such as William James, John Dewey, Max Weber, and Richard T. Ely contributed to a progressive mindset that reshaped Euro-American society. ... Rodgers stressed the social Protestantism, or Social Gospel, of the North Atlantic region that fueled the settlement movement. Like Wiebe, he invoked socialism, but rather than starting with Edward Bellamy, he began with London’s Fabian Society, which inspired many American socialists. Transatlantic networks sustained a republic of letters that flowered in reform minded American magazines like McClure’s and The New Republic.

In one chapter, Rodgers showed how the many Americans who trekked to Germany to study in its famous universities in the 1870s to the 1890s brought back with them reform ideas from that newly unified nation. In Berlin and Heidelberg, Americans learned a new variety of economic thought that challenged laissez-faire, or what was then called on the continent English economics. Although similar critics railed against unrestrained capitalism in France and England ... Prussian scholars were more influential because of the legions of young Americans – virtually all of them Protestant men who would have ended up in the clergy in an earlier era – who studied in Germany before returning to work in government or teach in America’s budding university system. Important educational institutions like Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Finance and Economy were staffed by German-trained scholars such as Edmund J. James and Simon Patton. Such international antecedents were often unwelcome back on the other side of the pond, where they were seen as un-American. ... Over time, such international influences were forgotten via a type of conscious amnesia. For example, the influential University of Wisconsin economist Richard T. Ely responded to accusations of un-Americanism by making the disingenuous but useful claim that the new ideas were a pure, native product that had originated in the pure soil and air of America’s heartland.

The claim was useful in overcoming nativist sentiments, especially those that tended towards laissez-faire and liberty. But it was not altogether disingenuous since, as Professor Unger herself points out, and as we’ve outlined in some detail in Volume Three, the Social Gospel and Christian Socialism movements had sprung directly and almost exclusively from the Puritan milieu of New England and its cultural colonies such as upstate New York and Connecticut’s Western Reserve of northern Ohio. And she confirms Murray Rothbard’s contention that the leaders of those pivotal movements were, almost to a man, New England clergymen or their sons (and occasionally, I’ll add, daughters). Progressivism in America might be considered, then, another name for neo-Puritanism. Or maybe you could call it Puritanism minus God, or Puritanism minus the church, grown from the New England substrate but fertilized at the great universities in Heidelberg and Berlin.

As Professor Unger also points out, it wasn’t a one way road. In fact, some of what young American scholars brought back from Germany had earlier been taken from America to Europe; most particularly, the important but largely forgotten Efficiency Movement, which will be discussed very soon and then again in Chapter Three. The Efficiency Movement fit the German character like a hand in a glove, and the cachet of it being German (though it was originally American) increased its prestige among the elite once it was re-imported back into America.

Not to leave the impression that the sometimes mystical, sometimes anti-rational line of philosophers which traces through the fulcrum of Germany back to Plato and forward to Derrida and Foucault is all bad. Personally, I find compelling their Kant-derived idea that deeper reality is not really accessible to human perceptions and understanding, or if it is, that it is accessible only through a mystical, non-rational, transcendent experience. It’s not an idea new with Kant. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave is a powerful thought experiment illustrating the notion. And evidence for the impossibility of real knowing is found in the seemingly infinite worlds that humans see. Among the seven and a half billion people alive today, there are certainly about seven and a half billion versions of what the world is, each version slightly different than it was yesterday, and each destined to be slightly different tomorrow. Logically speaking, no more than one of those can be right, and it is not likely it is mine or yours no matter how ferocious our devotion to it. So I’m with the long line of mystical philosophers on the inaccessibility of reality to the rational mind, and I’m even with them on the idea that none of those billions of shifting versions of reality is even close to real reality, warped as our perceptions are by biological parameters, genetic proclivities, social training, and individual experience. Critical Theorists have proposed that ideology is a block to personal liberation. I’m with them there, too, even if I suspect that most Critical Theorists are themselves consumed by ideology.

So if I’m with them, what’s my problem?

My problem is this. They have been lulled into overconfidence by their own superior intelligence. They come to assume that their life experience of being smarter than everyone around them qualifies them to expand their philosophy to encompass the planning and organizing of economic and political systems. However, these systems, in their hands, seem to be uniformly collectivist and authoritarian, and require leaders to know a great deal, even though they claim knowledge is beyond anyone’s grasp; and these systems always end up intolerantly moralistic, even though they’ve taught us that morality is relative. They don’t worry about the contradictions. And, more important than the contradictions, why such uniformity? Why is it they all seem to take the exact same leap from We can’t actually know the world or deduce its values to Therefore socialism (or something like it) is right?

Plato had an excuse since there were no free market philosophies around to elucidate spontaneous order, nor did he have the overwhelming empirical evidence that free market systems work far better and far more ethically than authoritarian systems. But the thinkers who have established the mainstream ideology of the modern intelligentsia – Marcuse, Adorno, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Rorty (maternal grandson of Walter Rauschenbusch, a fascinating connection), and others clustered within the tightly interlinking schools of thought roughly identified as the Frankfurt School, Critical Theory, Deconstructionism, Poststructuralism, Social Constructionism, and Postmodernism – have no excuse. (For convenience, and because from a classical liberal perspective it’s accurate enough, we’ll mostly subsume all these schools of thought under small ‘p’ postmodernism.) Despite their Orwellian rhetorical cleverness in pinning oppression, exploitation, and authoritarianism primarily on free market capitalism, anyone with a modicum of common sense and a comprehensive knowledge of twentieth century history has to realize the opposite is true. If the youthful Marxism or leftism of the fathers of postmodernism hadn’t hardened into a default mental perspective before their life journey took them into a sort of postmodernist mysticism, they likely would have come to understand that the spontaneous order of classical liberalism is actually more compatible with their metaphysics and epistemology than any intentionally constructed system.

Classical liberalism is descriptive. It tells no one what to do (other than outlawing the use of explicit force). It aims to describe the workings of a bottom-up, evolutionary, and emergent system that organically orders itself when people are relatively free to associate with each other as they please. Any intentionally constructed system is prescriptive. It does tell people what to do. It prescribes a top-down, manmade system which, almost by definition, must be imposed by authoritarian means. Even without considering the overwhelming empirical evidence against the workability of the uniformly collectivist and authoritarian solutions prescribed by the postmodern intelligentsia, isn’t spontaneous order actually a better fit for their metaphysics and epistemology?

In any case, as philosopher Stephen Hicks and psychiatrist Jordan Peterson – an expert on authoritarian systems – point out, lockstep uniformity of belief among them in quite similar politico-economic systems is highly suspect when there is no obvious reason why their politics shouldn’t be all over the political landscape. Their odd uniformity of belief indicates their philosophy may only be a cover for what they are really interested in: a neo-Marxist collectivist and authoritarian politico-economic system.

Class oppression, the Marxist explanation for inequality, never really panned out since interclass mobility has proved extreme under capitalism, with upward mobility the norm. So they preserve the Marxist framework by inserting into it a new oppressor, the privileged side of various ethnic, gender, and identity binaries who are protected by the cultural hegemony of capitalism. However, the notion of privileged vs. oppressed binaries is likely to have a shorter history than class conflict as an explanation since every year new victims are stuffed into the fragile and already fracturing coalition of victimhood. Ironically, though, neo-Marxists might be moving in the right direction. Once intersectionality reaches its logical conclusion – where every single person is a uniquely intersectional victim – you’ll have arrived at individualism, the opposite of collectivism, and the foundation of the Enlightenment and classical liberalism. Hopefully, any discovery on their part of individualism will evolve into a mature and sympathetic individualism that is societally oriented rather than self-absorbed.

Neo-Marxist postmodernist philosophers might counter the charge that their uniformity is suspicious by explaining that uniformity does, in fact, make sense. It comes from their shared understanding of the personal alienation and crass consumerism released upon humanity by capitalism. The sources of personal alienation are hard to pin down, but these children of capitalistic luxury grew up with crass consumerism, knew it intimately, and have critiqued it accurately – which is a good thing. But the real world is a world of trade offs. Crass consumerism as a trade off for reducing the endemic, widespread, and often soul-crushing poverty which dominates the non-capitalist world hardly seems a bad deal, and hardly one that they lack sufficient intelligence or sympathy to recognize. In the end, the uniformity among the founding ideologues of postmodernism can really only be a consequence of shared ideological blinders, forged in the fires of their turbulent times and fastened permanently into place when young.

Let me not leave the impression, either, that free market capitalism is all good. No