In August of 1912, while addressing the Convention of the National Progressive Party in Chicago, Theodore Roosevelt described Wisconsin as “a laboratory for wise social experiment in the betterment of conditions.”

That same year, Roosevelt wrote the introduction to The Wisconsin Idea, a kind of handbook for Progressives penned by reformer and visionary librarian Charles McCarthy, a pioneer in the science of public policy and administration.

McCarthy, the son of Irish immigrants who mortgaged their home to assist striking workers, led a remarkably varied, if foreshortened, life. Among other things, he was an All-American football player at Brown, where he was initially denied admission but secured enrollment by way of a direct appeal to the school’s president. On the field, the 128-pound McCarthy demonstrated “unbounded determination, great power of endurance and pluck,” according to The Philadelphia Record, a daily published from 1877 until 1947. McCarthy never managed to meet Brown’s mathematics requirement. In the end, the faculty waived it and he was awarded a degree in philosophy.

After Brown, McCarthy found his way to The University of Georgia, where he coached the football team in 1897. The following year, he tried to fight in the Spanish-American war but that didn’t pan out. He got malaria and was never allowed to formally enlist. He coached a few more games for Georgia before heading to the University of Wisconsin, where he made his name.

McCarthy chose Wisconsin for the university’s Progressive politics. He was particularly taken with American Economic Association founder Richard T. Ely, who served as head of the university’s economics department from 1892 until 1925. Ely, the “father of institutional economics,” was a towering figure and in some respects, still is. A prodigious writer whose students included Woodrow Wilson, Ely was among the most prominent figures of the Progressive revolution in America. He was also an avowed racist who argued (quite vociferously) for eugenics. In that he was hardly alone, particularly among Progressives of the day.

A mainstay of liberal discourse in America is the notion that Wisconsin (and specifically the “Wisconsin Idea” McCarthy shaped, promulgated and proselytized alongside “Fighting” Bob La Follette and former University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise) was “lost” some years ago to an overtly racist, radically anti-democratic conspiracy hatched by state Republicans. That narrative isn’t inaccurate. Democrats generally date the tragedy to 2011, when Republican lawmakers, working behind closed doors with a team of lawyers convened specifically for the purpose, drew up a malicious redistricting scheme aimed at disenfranchising minority voters or, if that’s too strong, ensuring Republican command over state politics irrespective of the majority will.

The redistricting effort followed mass protests in Madison, where Progressives, furious with then governor Scott Walker for a brazen crackdown on collective bargaining, tried to block access to the state assembly chamber, among other acts of civil disobedience. Act 10, as Walker’s legislation was known, would live in infamy. Richard Trumka, the late AFL-CIO boss, dubbed it a “corruption of democracy.” Phil Neuenfeldt, then president of the Wisconsin state AFL-CIO, said Walker and Republicans were engaged in an open “ideological war on the middle class and working families.” (Neuenfeldt died in 2018, Trumka in 2021.)

In his new volume Minority Rule, Mother Jones’ national voting rights correspondent Ari Berman uses the 2011 Wisconsin redistricting as a jumping off point for a sweeping critique of what he (aptly) describes as an “effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power.” The state, he laments, was transformed from the Progressive Era democracy laboratory into a “laboratory for oligarchy.”

“Entrenching GOP dominance by manipulating core democratic institutions represented a huge shift not just in Wisconsin’s politics, but in its culture as well,” Berman notes, echoing a familiar refrain among concerned Democrats. He quotes La Follette — the “most celebrated figure in Wisconsin history,” as one historian described the former governor, US senator and 1924 presidential candidate — as well as Roosevelt.

La Follette insisted on the primacy of the people’s will in good, legitimate government. Writing in 1912 for McCarthy’s good government instruction manual (which in places reads like a quasi-manifesto), Roosevelt praised La Follette while holding up Wisconsin as a proof of concept. “Thanks to the movement for genuinely democratic popular government which senator La Follette led to overwhelming victory in Wisconsin, that state has become literally a laboratory for wise experimental legislation aiming to secure the social and political betterment of the people as a whole,” Roosevelt declared, juxtaposing the state’s tangible legislative results with the “cheap clap-trap” observed in other states’ high-minded, but ultimately vacuous, pretensions to reform.

McCarthy was instrumental in fusing academics with lawmaking. In 1901, he founded the Legislative Reference Library as a resource for legislators seeking to improve outcomes through academic rigor. McCarthy’s library, which leveraged the University of Wisconsin’s know-how, was the forerunner of today’s Wisconsin Legislative Reference Bureau, which drafts all bills, resolutions and amendments for introduction in the state legislature. It was also a model for the Congressional Research Service.

Today, the university describes the “Wisconsin Idea” as one of the school’s “longest and deepest traditions” which “signifies [the] general principle that education should influence people’s lives beyond the boundaries of the classroom.” In 2015, Walker tried to remove the doctrine from the school’s mission statement before ultimately claiming the stunt, which morphed into a PR debacle, was a misunderstanding.

In his book, Berman charges Walker and 2010 Wisconsin Republicans with orchestrating a coup against the state’s century-old commitment to good government. The GOP “launched a counterrevoltuion against… the ‘Wisconsin Idea,'” he writes. “Rather than government working for the many, Walker wanted to concentrate power in the hands of an elite and wealthy conservative white minority.” A far cry, it would seem, from the vision of University of Wisconsin president Van Hise, who in 1905 proclaimed, “I shall never be content until the beneficent influence of the university reaches every family of the state.”

When I set out to pen this monthly, I had something pretty specific (and very straightforward) in mind. Berman’s Minority Rule complements Tyranny Of The Minority, the latest from Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, whose 2018 work How Democracies Die proved terrifyingly prescient on January 6, 2021. The plan (my plan) was to paint a familiar picture of a fractious and, more importantly, fracturing, American democracy increasingly beholden to the will and whim of a would-be autocrat who, through showmanship and textbook demagoguery, did what his nativist Republican predecessors couldn’t: Conquer and subsume the GOP establishment in the course of subjugating the party to its far-right fringe.

I may yet write that monthly on a second a try. But in the course of trying to write it the first time, I found myself struggling quite directly and in my view inescapably, with the discomfiting similarity between the xenophobic, exclusionary agenda of Tea Party-era Republicanism (which presaged MAGA Republicanism) and the views harbored by many (albeit not all) Progressive Era reformers, including prominent “Wisconsin Idea” progenitors.

To be absolutely clear, the ostensible parallel between the overt, cartoonish racism espoused by early-20th century Progressives and the comparatively understated, strategic ethnonationalism employed by today’s Republicans is an absurd example of “Whataboutism” that seeks to exonerate the insidious agenda of men who, by virtue of being born a century or more later, “should know better,” by reference to wholly anachronistic quotes from men whose abhorrent views on race and gender were more a reflection of “the times” than of any incurable moral shortcomings. Relatedly, it’s not obvious how eugenics tracts penned by early American Progressives are relevant for today’s political debate. So, this is probably more non sequitur than parallel.

Why bother then? That was the question posed to me by an attorney friend who’s made a successful side career of penning pointed editorials around the Trump legal circus. If the ideological parallel between yesteryear’s Progressives and today’s Republicans is no parallel at all, then contemporary accounts of the GOP’s efforts to leverage systematic disenfranchisement in the service of preserving what’s left of white privilege before demographic realities relegate the idea of a stratified, Christian Anglo-Saxon caste system to the dustbin of history, don’t need an asterisk.

That might be true in peacetime. But this isn’t peacetime. We’re living through the most intense information battle since the Cold War. And the battleground’s right here at home. All’s fair. Weaponized “Whataboutism” is a mainstay of modern, right-wing information combat in America and the GOP has attained something akin to Soviet-level mastery of that dark art. In these circumstances, it can be politically ruinous to make unqualified declarative statements about the virtuous character of a given cause and the people associated with it, contemporary or historical. No cause is entirely pure and everyone’s a hypocrite in one way or another. To pretend otherwise is to invite exploitation of those impurities and hypocrisies.

In January of 2016, four months before Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, Princeton lecturer and economic historian Thomas Leonard published Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, which, in Leonard’s words, “tells the story of the Progressive scholars and activists who enlisted in the Progressive Era crusade to dismantle laissez-faire and remake American economic life through the agency of the administrative state.”

Ostensibly, Leonard’s Illiberal Reformers is a dispassionate, historical account, but it reads early and often like a critique. He frames (not incorrectly) the Progressive project as a hubristic, interventionist endeavor to right the multiplying wrongs of industrial capitalism by replacing the exalted free hand with an enlightened bureaucracy. “Nothing,” Leonard writes, “was more integral to Progressivism than its extravagant faith” in administrative government, the “visible hand” of which, “guided by disinterested experts who were university trained and credentialed, would diagnose, treat and cure” the myriad and proliferating socioeconomic injustices of the Gilded Age and, more germane, the Second Industrial Revolution.

If Leonard’s argument is that the overbearing, visible hand of administrative bureaucracy, no matter how adept and well-trained, will everywhere, always and invariably lead to suboptimal outcomes compared to the light-touch, invisible hand of the free market, he’d be in plenteous company. But you don’t need to vilify (fairly or not) Progressive Era intellectuals to sing the praises of laissez-faire. True, laissez-faire has produced some highly undesirable socioeconomic outcomes, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that free-market capitalism, imperfect and inhumane though it can be, is the best secular religion humans have come up with so far. You could fairly say that’s a low bar, but it is what it is. Even the best of sundry other “-isms” are at a hopeless disadvantage due to capitalism’s claim on having done more than any other secular religion to facilitate humanity’s “great leap forward” (if you’ll pardon the bad “-ism” joke) over the “long 20th century,” as J. Bradford DeLong describes the period from 1870 to 2010 in his celebrated 2022 tome Slouching Towards Utopia.

Similarly, if Leonard means to suggest it’s a bad idea to subjugate individual liberty to the good of the polity as defined by a quasi-monastic guild of academics entrusted to exercise disinterested, benign paternalism in the service of informing legislation that views individual rights as acceptable collateral damage in pursuit of utilitarian societal outcomes, it’s not an especially difficult argument to make. Particularly if the monks happen to be xenophobes and misogynists.

The point: Leonard’s meticulous cataloguing of Progressive Era intellectuals’ moral shortcomings — and specifically their penchant for “traffic[king] in reprehensible ideas,” as he aptly puts it — is a worthwhile endeavor in many respects, but I’m not sure it’s an especially efficient (let alone effective) way to go about critiquing the American administrative state.

Writing in 2017 for the Journal of Economic Literature, a publication of Ely’s AEA, a discernibly indignant Marshall Steinbaum and Bernard Weisberger suggested Leonard’s “real target” in Illiberal Reformers is the policy legacy of Progressivism — interventionist social reforms aimed at bettering workers’ lot, for example — not the xenophobic ideas harbored by Progressive academics of the day. That’s the way to book reads to me.

But that assessment, accurate or not, doesn’t answer the questions posed by Leonard prior to the publication of Illiberal Reformers. “If eugenic thought influenced reform economics and legislation of the Progressive Era, why has that influence gone largely unremarked?” he wondered, in a 2009 paper. And, more poignantly: “Why is eugenics more or less missing from the history of American economics?”

The short answer, I think, is that it’s embarrassing. Chapter 7 of Illiberal Reformers is a veritable highlight (or, more aptly, lowlight) reel of repugnant quotes from prominent Progressive Era academics, intellectuals and economists, Ely foremost among them. Below, I’ve provided links to the actual source texts for anyone inclined to research the “context.”

In an 1898 editorial entitled “Fraternalism vs. Paternalism in Government,” Ely wrote that, “There are classes in every modern community composed of those who are virtually children, and who require paternal and fostering care, the aim of which should be the highest development of which they are capable.” On the off chance it wasn’t clear what he was driving at, Ely elaborated. “We may instance the negroes, who are for the most part grown-up children and should be treated as such,” he remarked, as though the matter was settled fact.

John R. Commons, the celebrated “spiritual father of social security” who taught labor economics at the University of Wisconsin on an invite from Ely, once mused, “In the entire circuit of the globe those races which have developed under a tropical sun are found to be indolent and fickle.” Two sentences later, Commons wrote that, “[I]f the negro [is] to adopt that industrious life which is second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion.”

Sociologist Edward A. Ross, another student of Ely’s, supported Wisconsin’s first sterilization law (passed in 1913) explaining that, “Sterilization is not nearly so terrible as hanging a man.” Ross, in what today reads like dark satire, went on to say that “sterilization should at first be applied only to extreme cases [but] as the public becomes accustomed to it, and it is seen to be salutary and humane, it will be possible gradually to extend its scope until it fills its legitimate sphere of application.” That “legitimate sphere of application” entailed utilizing compulsory sterilization to save future generations the trouble of dealing with “an increasing volume of defectives,” as a Wisconsin legislative committee put it at the time.

University of Wisconsin President Van Hise, in what the Wisconsin Magazine of History described as “an influential series of lectures,” declared that “defectives should be precluded from continuing the race by some proper method.” That method, he emphasized, should be “thoroughgoing.”

It’s important to understand that these aren’t isolated quotes. And these aren’t tangential figures. Racism, xenophobia, nativism and generalized notions of ethno-superiority were an integral part of the early Progressive program which was profoundly exclusionary and in many cases obsessively fascinated with applied eugenics. And some of Wisconsin’s superstar Progressives were race science’s foremost proponents.

Some reviews of Leonard’s work suggest he gives short shrift to the pervasiveness of such views in the late-19th and early-20th century outside of Progressive circles. The above-mentioned Steinbaum and Weisberger, for example, write that “retrograde views… were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the Progressives’ staunchest opponents inside and outside academia.”

Whatever you want to say about the book, Leonard isn’t derelict in communicating the extent to which “retrograde” views were commonplace. That, in my view, isn’t a valid criticism of the work and even if it was, it’s a bit circular: The book’s about early Progressives. It’s their story. Who else would it focus on? It’s certainly not how they’d tell their story, and it’s not how some other historians would tell it either, but that’s a separate issue.

Invalid though it may be, that line of critique does raise an important question: Why? Why, other than that Leonard’s written copiously on the subject over the years, do Progressive academics and economists get singled out? I find Leonard’s answer to that question unsatisfying.

Just a few pages in, he writes that “the Progressives command the historian’s attention because they prevailed.” In the same passage, Leonard appears to claim, implicitly, that “the Progressive vision of how to govern scientifically” is so inextricably bound up with early Progressives’ abhorrent views on race science, that the very idea of an administrative, interventionist state is guilty by association. “Expertise in the service of an administrative state… has survived the discredited notions once used to uphold it,” he writes. “Indeed it has thrived.”

I agree wholeheartedly with the notion that a person (or a group of people) can irretrievably ruin a legacy defined by splendid accomplishments with but a single heinous word or wicked deed. And you could fill a book with Progressive Era economists’ heinous words. Leonard did just that. I’m also open to the notion that the blast radius (if you will) from heinous words and wicked deeds extends well beyond the person (or group of people) who uttered or committed them.

But there’s a point beyond which guilty by association claims become far-fetched or even farcical. Economics itself was in many respects born during the Progressive Era, and as Leonard was keen to point out, it likely wouldn’t have emerged and flourished as a discipline in that way that it did were it not for some of the characters mentioned above. If the administrative state’s guilty by association, isn’t economics likewise condemned?

Beyond that, I’m not sure the Progressives did in fact “prevail.” You could argue, quite persuasively, that in the end it was individual liberty, laissez-faire and unfettered capitalism that won the day in America. Putting aside the extreme views espoused by “Don’t tread on me,” bumper sticker libertarian types for whom any government is too much government and any intrusion is an intolerable affront, American government isn’t uniquely meddlesome. Indeed, recent American history is replete with examples of laissez-faire run totally amok. In 2008, the combination of maniacal financial innovation enabled by unfettered capitalism and deregulation, nearly dead-ended in the complete collapse of the global economy, to name just one example.

In addition, it’s fair to suggest that between Belle Époque-style inequality, the rise of the centibillionaire class, the omnipresence of tech monopolies and the near extinction of organized labor as an economic actor with clout (prior to a nascent, post-pandemic union revival), Progressive Era economists, were they alive today, probably wouldn’t see victory in America’s socioeconomic conditions.

In the end, it’s not entirely clear what Leonard’s goal is in Illiberal Reformers, and it’s even less clear how, or even if, the book fits into modern political discourse. I’m hardly alone in coming away stumped in that regard. As The New Republic (which Leonard mentions as an early opponent of individual liberties) put it in a review published shortly after the book’s release, “Leonard’s personal politics are hard to read [and] it’s difficult to suss out exactly what the lessons of Illiberal Reformers are for our present moment.”

There may not be any. “Lessons” from the book “for our present moment,” I mean. But if the tale of GOP efforts to subvert American democracy runs through Wisconsin, and if that chapter of liberals’ narrative entails painting state Republicans’ machinations as antithetical to the “Wisconsin Idea,” the story risks being labeled a revisionist history. In an era where non sequiturs and logical fallacies regularly pass for valid criticism in right-wing echo chambers, revisionist history is a dangerous road to stumble down for liberals trying to win the information wars.

I’m not, of course, the first person to warn on this risk as it relates to Wisconsin. “The unraveling of the ‘Wisconsin Idea ‘ — due to voter disaffection, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and the influx of huge sums of money from national conservative special interests — certainly is part of the story of the rise of Walker and the demise of Wisconsin liberalism such as it had been [b]ut the nostalgic longing for a lost liberal past is based on a blinkered vision that ignores Wisconsin’s long history of systemic racism and inequity,” S. Ani Mukherji, a Cornell B.A., Berkeley M.A. and Brown Ph.D. who teaches American Studies at Hobart and William Smith, wrote, for The Boston Review in 2018. “Any politics of restoration that fails to understand the rise of the right as an extension of the past, rather than its inversion, is both deeply flawed and incredibly dangerous,” he went on.

In the article, Ani Mukherji quotes a community organizer who, during a 2015 Black Lives Matter event at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, indelicately suggested Wisconsinites “be up-front when we’re talking about what [the] ‘Wisconsin Idea’ is.” “The Wisconsin I’ve always known is racist,” she said. That remark, Ani Mukherji noted, caused some discomfort in the crowd, as it “discredited a beloved idealized image of the state as exceptionally Progressive.”

When we grapple with the legacy of historical figures, we tend to contextualize otherwise unpardonable personal shortcomings by reference to the customs, conventions and social mores which prevailed “at the time.” Almost as a matter of course, we employ that logic to grant reprieves for contemptible character flaws, many of which would be utterly disqualifying in modernity.

In America, the most obvious example of such context-based grants of blanket immunity is the amnesty afforded the authors and signatories of the country’s founding documents, many of whom declared all men equal and possessed of inalienable, God-given rights, while holding other men in bondage, as property. That seems a greater affront to individual liberty — and a cognitive dissonance of immeasurably greater proportions — than anything Ely and his Progressive disciples might’ve said or exhibited.

In February of 2020, the AEA, led by Janet Yellen, convened an ad hoc committee to consider removing Richard T. Ely’s name from a prominent annual lecture series. The committee, which included now-Fed governor Lisa Cook, noted in its findings that “although Ely made positive contributions to economic thought, he also wrote approvingly of slavery and eugenics, inveighed against immigrants, and favored segregation.”

Ely, Cook and her colleagues went on to chide, harbored views that are “inconsistent with the code of professional conduct” adopted by the organization he founded nearly 135 years previous.

In October of 2020, following a summer of nationwide street protests against racial inequality in America, the “Ely Lecture” was rebranded the “AEA Distinguished Lecture Series.”

---