The Relics of Intervention; C. Carson

THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: Clarence B. Carson 2. Progressivism SOME of the major relics of govern ment intervention are still with us today as a result of the Progressive movement of the early twentieth century. The Progressives promoted and brought about intervention in three distinct ways. (1) They made the fateful link between the idea of progress and positive government action. (2) They adapted socialistic reform to the A·merican framework as gradual and mounting govern ment intervention. (3) They suc ceeded in getting some of their re forms enacted into law either as particular programs or constitu tional amendments. The Progressive movement began to make its political impact in the first years of the twentieth century and had largely spent itself by 1920. Some would date the beginning of that impact from 1901, when TheoDr. Carson has written and taught extensively, spe cializing in American intellectual history. He is the author of several books and a frequent contributor to The Freeman and other scholarly journals.

dore Roosevelt became President af ter the assassiqation of McKinley.1 The end of its thrust as a national movement can! be dated from two events which occurred in 1920: the election of WarIjen Harding as Pres ident vowing to bversee a "Return to Normalcy," and the adoption of the 19th Amendmeqt, which was the last ofthe Progresshte amendments to the Constitution. The peak of ;the movement was reached in 1912 when Woodrow Wilson, an avo~ed progressive, was elected Presid~nt as a Democrat, when Theodore Roosevelt came in second to him as the nominee of the Progressive Patty, and when Wil liam Howard T~ft, whom Roosevelt had chosen to succeed him in 1908 because of his iprogressive tenden cies, came in t~ird as the Republi can candidate. Most of the legisla tive triumphs which can be attributed to the Progressive move ment came during the years 1913 1916. 305 306 THE FREEMAN May Neither the public in general nor very many intellectuals in particu lar associated the idea of progress with government intervention in the economy before the twentieth cen tury. On the contrary, the prevail ing ideas in the nineteenth century opposed government intervention as retrogressive and reactionary. Polit ical and economic progress were to be attained by restraining govern ment and freeing the energies of peoples. The Progressives, then, ef fected a major change in thought by giving currency to the notion that progress could be made by forceful government action.

The Idea of Progress How important this change was for the thrust of intervention becomes clear only when we recall the lode stone-like attractiveness of the idea of progress over the past several centuries. Since the seventeenth century, European thinkers had be come increasingly enamored of the idea. Indeed, the belief that progress was .taking place goes back further than that. Men of the Renaissance believed that they were progressing far beyond their Medieval forebears. But their progress they attributed mainly to the recovery of the learn ing of the Ancients. Seventeenth-century scientific discoveries, however, began to point in a different direction. Thinkers were. now discovering laws and relationships not only unknown to thinkers of ancient Greece and Rome but also some of which ran counter to their assumptions, such as that the sun moves around the earth and that freely falling bodies accelerate at a uniform rate regardless of weight. However much their think ing might be buttressed by the ear lier work of Greek and Roman thinkers, the Moderns were now going well beyond them. They were making progress. (That there were still champions of ancient learning as .late as the eighteenth century to contend with the proponents of mod ern progress is at least suggested by Jonathan Swift's satire, The Battle of the Books, published in 1710.) The idea of progress gained in creasing sway in the course of the eighteenth century, especially among intellectuals. The idea of an orderly universe which was greatly bol stered by the findings of Kepler, Galileo, and Newton,among others, was now being extended into the so cial, political, and economic realms.

Everywhere men studied they found signs of underlying laws, laws sub sisting, as they said, in the nature of things. The belief took hold that by gaining knowledge of this natu ral order great progress could be made by men by bringing their be havior into conformity with it. There were many indications, too, that something like this was actually taking place.

1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 307 In the nineteenth century, belief in the idea of progress was well on its way to becoming an article of faith. Cities began holding great fairs and expositions at which displays of the latest marvelous achievements from around the world could be made. Even so, a major change was occur ring in the ideological underpin nings of the idea of progress. EvolutionaryTheoriesGain in Social Impact Evolutionary theories, particu larly the biological theories of Dar win, were being substituted for or being used to support older ideas of progress. Herbert Spencer made the social interpretation of evolution that had the greatest immediate impact. But progress, on this view, was the result of the working out of natural laws for the development of society. Governments could not intervene so as to alter the course of develop ment. As William Graham Sumner, Spencer's American disciple, de scribed the situation, the Western world had moved into an industrial stage. It was a stage which, he be lieved, was bringing great progress.

The notion of intervening in it so as to change its course was absurd. "We have to make up our minds to it," he said, "adjust ourselves to it, and sit down and live withit."2 My main point, however, is that by the early twentieth century Americans generally had come to believe in progress. It had become, or was becoming, a word to conjure with and was re~dy to join that other word, "freedom:," which all politi cians who would succeed must avow as the aim of their programs. It was especially important for those who would use the power of government to $ake social improve ments to identifY their programs with progress. After ~ll, the only feasible justification for' making their inno vations was th3it they would lead to improvement or progress. Yet their path was doubly blocked in the late nineteenth centmry. In the first place, the case against intervention had been made by the Spencerians, who had made the i earliest and most plausible application of the Darwin ian theories. In the second place, much of socialist thought, which was the main sourc~ both of the critique of contemporary society and of the vision of a bett~r one, was equally set against goyernment interven tion. Karl Marx, for example, was so convinced of th~ futility of amelio rative measures achieved by gov ernment intervention that he be lieved socialism ¢ould only be reached by violent revolution.

The work of overriding these the oretical obstacl¢s to reform by way of government i:rp.terventionhad been largely accompl~shed before the Pro gressive movernent was well under way. It almost certainly had to be. While a goodly. number of thinkers 308 THE FREEMAN May contributed to the undertaking, Les ter Frank Ward, an obscure sociolo gist, made one of the most direct as saults on the Spencerian position. (American thinkers could, and did, usually ignore the Marxian argu ment against ameliorative reform.) Ward granted that in times past social change as well as biological changes had taken place without being consciously directed. But, he proclaimed, a new stage in evolution had now been reached as a result of thousands of years of movement in its direction. The new stage was the "advent with man of the thinking, knowing, foreseeing, calculating, designing, inventing and construct ing faculty, which is wanting in lower creatures .... " This development re pealed "the law of nature and en acted in its stead the psychologic law, or law ofmind."3 By the Mind of Man The vision that Ward held forth was one in which man could use the creative powers of his mind to take over the direction of social develop ment. By so doing, he could bring nature and natural law to heel, or, as Ward put it: ... When nature comes to be regarded as passive and man as active ... , when human action is recognised as the most important of all forms of action, and when the power of the human intellect over vi tal, psychic and social phenomena is practically conceded, then, and then only, can man justly claim to have risen out of the animal and fully to have entered the human stage of development. 4 In short, the path to progress now lay through man's taking over and directing the course of social devel opment.

It should be pointed out, however, that neither Lester Frank Ward nor anyone else has proved that govern ment intervention in general can produce progress, nor even that par ticular interventions will necessar ily do so. Indeed, the intellectuals Ward, Richard Ely, E. A. Ross, John Dewey, Walter Rauschenbusch, Thorstein Veblen, Herbert Croly, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, and others-were gener ally strong on assertion and weak on proof. By and large, they were en thusiasts, caught up in the vision of making all things new, eager to in novate, aware, perhaps, that most men do not so much require proof as vigor in assertion, and bent toward joining their word visions of the fu ture to political power. In any case, they prepared the way for linking the idea of progress to government intervention, not because they had proved the connection by evidence and reason, but by laying their claim on the basis of assertions about what could be accomplished. The politi cians did the rest.

Even though the linkage was made by little more than intellectual sleight of hand and political bom1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 309 bast, it was nonetheless a political master stroke. Long after the Pro gressive movement had been rele gated to the pages of history reform ers continued to give impetus to their measures by claiming they were progressive and by denouncing those who opposed them as reactionaries desirous of returning to the unsa. vory past. Today, the linkage is a relic, a relic of intervention. Actually, the linking of the idea of progress to government interven tion was one of the ways that social istic reform was adapted to the American framework. It was, how ever, such an important element of that effort, and so distinctive, that it has been accorded separate discus sion. What needs discussing about the adaptation is how the Progres sives smoothed the way and pre pared Americans for the reforms and interventions.

AmericanizedReform Most of the basic reform ideas were promulgated by the Populists in the 1890s. However, they advanced them as immediate demands and made it appear that if they were adopted a virtual revolution would be accom plished. Their arguments were cast in class language; their denuncia tions of wealth, banking, and gold were clearly demagogic; their pro posals were rough hewn and heavy handed. Their monetary panaceas were at considerable remove from programs the generality of Ameri cans were likely to find acceptable. By contrast, j Progressivism was much more attuned to the American political motif. iDemagoguery there might be, but it:was toned down to a level that made it little different from the approach of !mostpoliticians. The class struggle w~s muted; wealth and property were riot attacked directly; the utopianism of populism was kept out of sight, and reform and gradual change were t~e only tickets pre sented.

However m~ch Populist ideas might be drawn from intellectuals, they had about them the aura of Kansas farms a:p.dChicago factories. Progressivism, ion the other hand, brought to th~ fore the reformer dressed in his! Sunday best, so to speak, ready to!take up his place in the American !mainstream. While Richard Hofstadter held that Popu lism merged into Progressivism in the early twentieth century, he de scribed the differences between them this way: "Populism had been over whelmingly run~.l and provincial. The ferment of the Progressive era was urban, middle"'1class, and nation wide. Above al~, Progressivism dif fered from Pop~lism in the fact that the middle classes of the cities not only joined the trend toward protest but took over ita leadership."5 Both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilsqn, the most promi nent political leaders of a progres310 THE FREEMAN May sive bent, illustrate the point well.

They were of older American stock, respectable, and had their political careers in the established political parties. Roosevelt was a Republican, until his temporary break in 191Q, and Wilson was a Democrat throughout, as befitted a man who was born in Virginia and who grew up in the South. They were both col lege men, trained at old prestigious universities, Roosevelt at Harvard and Wilson at Princeton. Both, too, went to law school, Roosevelt at Co lumbia and Wilson at the Univer sity of Virginia, though neither was attracted to the practice of law. They were both historians, of sorts, though Roosevelt had no extensive formal training in the discipline in contrast with Wilson, who obtained a Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins. In short, they were nurtured in the most prominent of American institutions and were suc cessful members of the prevailing American society. To put it another way, they were ideally suited by background and training to help make reform re spectable in America, and they did.

Both were attracted to reform ini tially in opposition to what they took to be the corruption of American ideals and political principles. Roosevel t had been only a few weeks in his first political position as a member of the New York legis lature when he moved to have a well known judge impeached. The judge had made favorable rulings for some financiers and, although the im peachment move failed, Roosevelt did manage to make known his be lief that the legislature was being corrupted by what he called the "wealthy criminal class." One of the first acts Wilson man aged to get through the New Jersey legislature after he was elected gov ernor in 1910 was a Corrupt Prac tices Act. He also managed to get direct primaries instituted, a mea sure touted as "returning the gov ernment to the poeple." Such reform did have the appearance, at least, of being an effort to restore American ideals rather than to make radical changes.

"National Need" Comes First But both Roosevelt and Wilson, and Progressives in general, were something much more than simply reformers bent on rooting out cor ruption. They had hold of the vision of using the power of government to change the direction of the develop ment of America. What Roosevelt sought, according to Richard Hof stadter, was "A strong centralized State, extended government inter ference in economic life, freedom of politics from concern for special in terests .... "6 As Roosevelt himself stated it in his call for aNew Nationalism: "The American people are right in de manding that New Nationalism, 1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 311 without which we cannot hope to deal with new problems. The New Na tionalism puts the national need be fore sectional or personal advan tage .... This New Nationalism regards the executive power as the steward of the public welfare. It de mands of the judiciary that it shall be interested primarily in human welfare rather than in property, just as it demands that the representa tive body shall represent all the peo ple rather than anyone class or sec tion of the people."7 Wilson said, "I believe that the time has come when the govern ment of this country, both state and national, have to set the stage ...

for the doing of justice to men in ev ery relationship of life.... Without the watchful interference, the reso lute interference, of the govern ment, there can be no fair play be tween individuals and such powerful institutions as the trusts. Freedom to-day is something more than being let alone. The program of a govern-" ment of freedom must in these days be positive, not negative merely."8 Since both men wanted to use government for large and extensive purposes the attack on corruption had for its specific purpose the building of public confidence in gov ernment. Only if the public had con fidenee in the uprightness of govern ment in general would it be likely to support such a great increase in re liance upon it. Moving Gradually Progressivesiwere reformers, me liorists- "impr~vers"-not revolu tionaries. They proposed to work within the existing framework, even to change the fIiamework, and some times posed as iconservatives, seek ing· to preserve i the inherited order by making changes. If they be con sidered as socia.ists, and a case could be made for it,' they were gradual ists, moving gr~dually toward a dis tant goal of socialism. The extent to which particular Progressives had such a distant gpal in view is largely undetermined. \The evidence exists mostly in bits!and pieces. For ex ample, Wilson was reported to have made these remarks to a confidant, while ruminati~g about the changes that would occur after World War I: The world is going to change radically, and I am satisfiedi that governments will have to do many things which are now left to individuals! and corporations. I am satisfied for inst~nce that the govern ment will have toltake over all the great natural resources l ••all the water power, all the coal mine$, all the oil fields, etc.

They will have to be government owned.9 He went on to peny that he was a socialist, but qis words speak for themselves. Be that as i~ may, the Progres sives served the function of accli mating Americans to socialism by the gradual proce~s. Moreover, the gradual method bad already been set forth when Wilson and Roosevelt 312 THE FREEMAN May were advancing their programs. The English Fabians had described how it was to be done at great length in the 1890s. Some American intellec tuals were not slow, either, to ex plain how it could be done within the American framework. Perhaps, the most thorough effort along these lines was made by Her bert Croly in The Promise of Amer ican Life, a book published in 1909. Croly's work is important in this context, too, for Roosevelt read and was influenced by it. lO The book is largely a reprise of American his tory written to show that certain seeds of a promise had been here in the beginning in the ideas of J effer son and Hamilton, but they had never been brought to fruition be cause Jefferson had been individu alistic and Hamilton had focused on the development of business. Croly's program has been summarized by one historian this way: It would es tablish "a tremendously powerful national state that would regulate corporations, unions, small busi nesses' and agriculture in the 'na tional interest.' "11 Croly admitted that in very im portant respects his programs might well be characterized as socialistic. 12 Most important, however, was his consistent gradualism. This is well illustrated by his description of how government might gradually get control of the railroads. He ex plained it this way: In the existing condition of economic development and of public opinion, the man who believes in the ultimate neces sity of government ownership of railroad and road-beds and terminals must be content to wait and to watch. The most that he can do for the present is to use any opening which the course of railroad development affords,.for the assertion of his ideas; and if he is right, he will grad ually be able to work out, in relation to the economic situation of the railroads, some practical method of realizing the ultimate purpose. 13 This gradualist approach has been taken by reformist politicians not only for regulation of the railroads but also for just about everything else. It is a premier relic of interv en tion from the Progressives.

Trustsand Monopolies The bete noire of the Progressives was what they most often called "the trusts," but which they also de scribed as "monopolies." By so doing, they promoted a confusion as to the meaning of these words which be came a part of the American lexicon. The businesses they castigated as "trusts" were not in fact trusts. The trust device had been employed at one time by Standard Oil to control companies not owned. However, the Sherman AntiTrust Act of 1890 prohibited the business use of the device, and it was abandoned. True, the holding company was eventu ally developed to perform a similar function, but whatever else might be 1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 313 said about it, it was not a "trust." As to "monopoly," the word had been used in the past most com monly to refer to a legally estab lished exclusive right of sale of some good or service. The new use, which somewhat antedated the Progres sives, conveyed some such notion as a company becoming the "only" or "major" seller of some good or ser vice. In fact, the word lost all preci sion, and its vagueness down to this day has served mainly to make all enforcement of antitrust legislation arbitrary and punitive.

What the Progressives apparently meant, so far as they meant any thing specific, when they castigated "trusts" and "monopolies," were large nationwide businesses and espe cially those that had resulted from combinations of these. At any rate, everywhere they looked they saw ei ther potential or actual "trusts" and "monopolies." If there was not al ready a "trust" under every bed there soon would be, to hear them tell it. There was an "oil trust," a "sugar trust," a "steel trust," a "tobacco trust," probably a "telephone and telegraph trust," and so on. Above all, by 1913 there was something on the order of a "money trust," according to the Pujo Com mittee report. Two great confedera tions of Wall Street financial orga nizations' those of J. P. Morgan and of Rockefeller, occupied a dominant posi tion in finance, so this report concluded. By in~erlocking director ates they contr:olled huge banks, major insurance companies, large railroads and other industries, and investment firms. Prior to 1907, the houses of Morgan and Rockefeller had competed with one another, but after the panic: of that year they worked with one!another .14 Talk of a money monopoly was already ram pant before the ¢ommittee made its report.

DifferentDirecti<>nsof Reform Progressives 'were agreed that business combinations, concentra tions of wealth, iand Eastern finan cial institutions posed a serious and mounting threat to Americans and that the Federal igovernment should do something abbut it, but they dif fered on importapt points as to what should be done. Roosevelt and Wil son divided sharply in the campaign of 1912, and the!different directions they set forth have remained in the reform impulse ever since and often resulted in inconsistent lines of po litical action. Roosevelt had gained fame during his presidency as a "trustbuster." By 1910, or earlier, 1he had changed di rections in his thinking about this. He had concluded that combination and growth in b~siness was a natu ral development> that it was often the most efficien~ way to produce and distribute goods, ~nd that it was both futile and harmful to set out to break 314 THE FREEMAN May them up. Instead, he favored vigor ous government regulation of busi ness, in effect, government control of it. He favored government em powerment of labor unions and their regulation as well. Generally, Roo sevelt favored the establishment of commissions, such as the Interstate Commerce Commission, to accom plish the regulation. 15 By contrast, Woodrow Wilson was much more intent upon breaking what he conceived to be the power of the "trusts." His analysis convinced him that the "trusts" were not a nat ural growth so much as a product of government nurture. The tradi tional arguments of Democrats against the protective tariffs' could be rung in to support this view. He pointed out, too, that the corpora tion derives its powers "wholly ...

from legislation."16 He proposed to remove government supports, where appropriate, the use of government power to break them up, in many instances, and to prevent by law the development of industrial giants. The legislation of the Progressive years bore earmarks of both these strains of thought. Before discussing that, however, it may be well to em phasize that both Roosevelt and Wilson believed in a strong and in novative presidency. In his earliest studies, Wilson had described the potentialities of presidential power, and Roosevelt demonstrated how it could become actuality by hisenergetic involvement in all sorts of things. They initiated and devel oped the idea of presidential candi dates developing fullfledged pro grams, giving them a name, and campaigning on the basis of them what I have elsewhere character ized as "Four-Year Plans."17 Roose velt weighed in with the first pro gram under the rubric of a Square Deal. For the campaign in 1912 he came up with the New Nationalism.

Wilson followed suit by dubbing his program the New Freedom. Since that time, such program names have been devices used mostly by Demo crats. Regulatory Measures In the main, the reform legisla tion· of the Roosevelt-Taft years (1901-1913) falls into the regula tory pattern. Much of it had to do with increasing the power and sway of the Interstate Commerce Com mission. (The Commission was es tablished in the 1880s, but it was granted little power, and the courts tended -to restrain it even further.) In 1903, the Elkins Act provided statutory penalties for railroad offi cials who gave rebates and defined and prohibited discrimination be tween railroads. The Hepburn Act of 1906 empowered the ICC to set maximum rail rates 'and prescribe uniform. accounting procedures.- It expanded the jurisdiction of the ICC and gave to its decisions binding au1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 315 thority subject to court review. The Mann-Elkins Act of 1910 extended the authority of the ICC to tele phone and telegraph facilities and further expanded its powers. The whole scheme of railroad regulation was finally rounded out by the Transportation Act of 1920, which gave the ICC the most comprehen sive control over the railroads that had ever been devised for privately owned companies.

Progressive legislation moved into other areas during these years, too. In 1903, a Department of Commerce and Labor was established. It had within it a Bureau of Corporations which was empowered to investi gate corporate behavior, a first step toward control. An Expedition Act was passed in the same year, giving the Attorney General authority to place antitrust suits at the head of court dockets. A Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in 1906 which put the Federal government in the busi ness of regulating these. On the same day, a Meat Inspection Act was passed. The Aldrich-Vreeland Act of 1908 turned out to be a forerunner of the Federal Reserve, since it au thorized the issuance of currency on the basis of commercial paper and government bonds. The act also es tablished a National Monetary Commission, whose eventual report pointed hesitantly toward the set ting up of a central banking system.

In the same year, a National Conservation Commission was estab lished for the purpose of cataloging the natural resources within the United States. The Mann Act of 1910 put the Federal government into the business of regulating morals by prohibiting the transportation of fe males across state lines for immoral purposes. And, a Postal Savings bank was established i in the same year, bringing into being a system sought by the Populists nrst in 1892. ConstitutionalAmendment Four amendments to the Consti tution can be attributed to the Pro gressive impulse. Two were passed by Congress anq sent to the states for consideration during Taft's pres idency. The 16th,Amendment, whose ratification was completed in 1913, made taxes on incomes legal and has been used as the! basis for the grad uated income tax on individuals and corporations, thopgh there is no spe cific grant of power to do so con tained in it, or ellj;ewhere in the Con stitution. At any!rate, the stage was now set for a dinect assault by gov ernment upon the accumulation of wealth.

The 17th Amendment was a more indirect slap at wealth. It provided for the direct election of Senators. The charge had been repeatedly made that the Senate was a rich man's club, and! claims were made that since Senat~rs were elected by state legislatures wealth could eas316 THE FREEMAN May ily be used to influence elections. The much more important impact of the amendment, however, was to reduce the extent to which Senators repre sented states. The 18th and 19th Amendments were passed and ratified during Wil son's administration. The 18th-the Prohibition Amendment-was in several respects more revealing ofthe heart of the Progressive impulse than any other. It was an attempt to use the power of government to alter human behavior, perhaps, even hu man nature. Drinking had long been reckoned a major evil among re formers. Most Populists had loathed alcohol with as much fervor as the gold standard. The amendment, too, was an attack on business and trade, since the manufacture and sale of alcohol is a business. The Volstead Act, passed to enforce prohibition in 1920, looked more like the New Tyr anny than the New Freedom, but it was Wilsonian in spirit nonetheless.

It was an attempt to stop the liquor traffic, once and for all, root and branch. The Roosevelt approach won out in the end. Prohibition failed; the amendment was repealed; but the industry remains heavily regulated and highly taxed. That would have been Roosevelt's way. The 19th Amendment simply extended the franchise to women. Wilson moved quickly, with the help of a compliant Congress, to en act major parts of his New Freedom program. Probably, the single most important act was the one setting up the Federal Reserve system. It was passed in December, 1913. Although the act was supposed to break up the alleged money monopoly and decen tralize monetary sources, it actually set up a central banking system un der the auspices of the government. While state chartered banks did not have to become a part of the system, most eventually did, and national banks had to become members. Its establishment turned out to have been a gradualist move to give the national government full control of the money supply.

Curbing "Unfair" Trade Two acts passed in 1914 appear to have been more along the Roosevel tian lines of regulating business than the course Wilson claimed to be set on. The Federal Trade Commission was established to prevent what were called "unfair trade practices." It had similar investigative powers to those given to the Bureau of Corporations, which was now eliminated, and it was authorized to issue cease and desist orders. "Among the practices which the commission subsequently singled out were trade boycotts, mislabeling and adulteration of commodities, combinations for maintaining resale prices, and false claims to patents."18 The Clayton AntiTrust Act singled out and pro hibited a number of practices, such 1982 THE RELICS OF INTERVENTION: PROGRESSIVISM 317 as interlocking directorates, which were supposed to lead to monopoly. Ostensibly, it exempted from its provisions worker organizations. The tendency of this act was to discour age business cooperation and to en courage the organization of labor. It was certainly class legislation.

These acts, and supportive ones not discussed, demonstrate the deter mination of the Progressives to es tablish government control over the economy. There is a widespread misconception that intervention on any scale got underway with the New Deal. That is by no means the case. Progressives had not only worked out the intellectual justification and set forth the methods but also made headway in altering the Constitu tion and passing legislation. Most of this was done, too, without even the excuse of any emergency, economic or otherwise. The United States generally enjoyed unparalleled prosperi ty from the beginning of the century to World War I. The relics of intervention are from further back than is commonly supposed. Even so, the New Deal did make a more con certed effort toward a government managed economy than the Pro gressives ever managed (except, possibly, during World War I), and it is appropriate now to turn to that story. , Next: The New Deal Bent to Infla tion.

-F001NOTESlSee, for example, Daniel Aaron, Men ofGood Hope (New York: OxfoIil University Press, 1951), p.245. 2William G. Sumner, "The Absurd Effort to Make the World Over," in American Thought: Civil War to World Wa~ I, Perry Miller, ed. (New York: Rinehart, 1954)~ p. 81. 3Quoted in Henry S; Commager, The Ameri can Mind (New Have*: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 206. 4Lester E Ward, "Mind as a Social Factor," in .American Ideas, Ger~ld N. Grob and Robert Beck, eds. (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1963),129. 5Richard Hofstadter'i The Age of Reform (New York: Alfred A. Knopfj1955), p. 131. 6Richard Hofstadter, The American Tradi tion (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), p. 232. 7Theodore Roosevelt, The New Nationalism, William E. LeuchtenblJrg, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), p. 36. 8Woodrow Wilson, the New Freedom, Wil liam E. Leuchtenburg, ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N. J.: Prentice-Hall, 1~61), pp. 130, 164.

9Quoted in Hofstad~er, The American Politi cal Tradition, p. 278. 10See Charles Forcey, The Crossroads ofLib eralism (New York: Qxford University Press, 1961), p. 5. llEric F. Goldman, Q,endezvous with Destiny (New York: Vintage ~ooks, 1956, rev. ed.), p. 156. 12See Herbert Croly; The Promise of Ameri can Life (New York: C.pricorn Books, 1964), p. 209. I3Ibid.,p. 203. 14See Arthur S. Link, American Epoch (New York: Alfred A. Knopf~ 1955), pp. 51-52. 15See Roosevelt, op. ¢it., pp. 86-96. 16Wilson, op. cit., p. $5. I7See The Flight from Reality (Irvington, N. Y.: The Foundation !for Economic Education, 1969), ch. 22. 18Richard B. Mordls, ed., Encyclopedia of American History (New York: Harper & Bros., 1953), p. 275.