One of Murray Rothbard’s greatest contributions to American history was his analysis of the Progressives, and in this week’s column I’m going to discuss two key themes from that analysis, themes that are very relevant to us today. To be clear, we are talking about the period from approximately the mid-1890s to the mid-1920s. The two themes are, first, that the government welcomed war as a means by which it could take over the American economy and subvert our liberties, and second, that the state used kept “intellectuals” to whip up support for its nefarious schemes.
Murray summarizes his view of the connection between war and the government in this way:
“More than any other single period, World War I was the critical watershed for the American business system. It was a ‘war collectivism,’ a totally planned economy run largely by big-business interests through the instrumentality of the central government.”
The war showed, Murray says, that “the economy could be cartelized under the aegis of government, with prices raised and production fixed and restricted, in the classic pattern of monopoly.”
During World War I, the War Industries Board, headed by the warmongering Bernard Baruch, took virtually total control of the American economy:
“Administrative problems beset the WIB, however, and a satisfactory ‘autocrat’ was sought to rule the entire economy as chairman of the new organization. The willing autocrat was finally discovered in the person of Bernard Baruch in early March 1918. With the selection of Baruch, urged strongly on President Wilson by Secretary McAdoo, war collectivism had achieved its final form. . .. The WIB developed a vast apparatus that connected to the specific industries through commodity divisions largely staffed by the industries themselves. The historian of the WIB, himself one of its leaders, exulted, ‘Never was there such an approach to omniscience in the business affairs of a continent.’”
Murray had a very low opinion of Herbert Hoover. Far from being the reactionary advocate of laissez-faire capitalism depicted in Marxist propaganda, Hoover was a Progressive who controlled U.S. agriculture during the war:
“The most thoroughgoing system of price controls during the war was enforced not by the WIB but by the separate Food Administration, over which Herbert Clark Hoover presided as ‘Food Czar.’ The official historian of wartime price control justly wrote that the food control program ‘was the most important measure for controlling prices which the United States … had ever taken.’”
Murray makes clear that Hoover’s control over food was total:
“Herbert Hoover accepted his post shortly after American entry into the war, but only on the condition that he alone have full authority over food, unhampered by boards or commissions. The Food Administration was established without legal authorization, and then a bill backed by Hoover was put through Congress to give the system the full force of law. Hoover was also given the power to requisition ‘necessaries,’ to seize plants for government operation, and to regulate or prohibit exchanges.”
One aspect of Hoover’s operation ties in very well with our second theme. Hoover engaged in propaganda to gain public support:
“A notable feature introduced by Hoover in his reign as Food Czar was the mobilization of a vast network of citizen volunteers as a mass of eager participants in enforcing his decrees. Thus, Herbert Hoover was perhaps the first American politician to realize the potential — in gaining mass acceptance and in enforcing government decrees — in the mobilizing of masses through a torrent of propaganda to serve as volunteer aides to the government bureaucracy. Mobilization proceeded to the point of inducing the public to brand as a virtual moral leper anyone dissenting from Mr. Hoover’s edicts.”
“Collectivist intellectuals” saw the war as a way they could advance the cause of socialism I’m going to concentrate on two writers for the New Republic whom Murray loathed: John Dewey and Walter Lippmann. “As Woodrow Wilson began to take America into World War I, the New Republic became an enthusiastic supporter of the war, and a virtual spokesman for the Wilson war effort, the wartime collectivist economy, and the new society molded by the war.”
Murray saw Dewey as the main intellectual supporting war: “On the higher levels of ratiocination, unquestionably the leading progressive intellectual, before, during, and after World War I, was the champion of pragmatism, Professor John Dewey of Columbia University. Dewey wrote frequently for the New Republic in this period and was clearly its leading theoretician. . .In an interview with the New York World a few months after U.S. entry into the war, Dewey exulted that ‘this war may easily be the beginning of the end of business.’ For out of the needs of the war, ‘we are beginning to produce for use, not for sale, and the capitalist is not a capitalist … [in the face of] the war.’ Capitalist conditions of production and sale are now under government control, and ‘there is no reason to believe that the old principle will ever be resumed. … Private property had already lost its sanctity … industrial democracy is on the way.’”
Dewey did his best to blacklist the work of his former protégé Randolph Bourne, who refused to join the warmongers. Bourne argued that “war is the health of the state,” exactly the reason Dewey supported the war.
Murray’s other target was the young journalist Walter Lippmann who “had been the foremost hawk among the New Republic intellectuals.” Like Dewey, Lippmann saw the war as a way to promote socialism:
“Convinced that the United States would attain socialism through war, Walter Lippmann, in a public address shortly after American entry, trumpeted his apocalyptic vision of the future: ‘We who have gone to war to insure democracy in the world will have raised an aspiration here that will not end with the overthrow of the Prussian autocracy. We shall turn with fresh interests to our own tyrannies — to our Colorado mines, our autocratic steel industries, sweatshops, and our slums. A force is loose in America. … Our own reactionaries will not assuage it. … We shall know how to deal with them.’”
Lippmann not only advocated war: he also took an active role in trying to direct it and to plan the post-war peace. He was the main writer of Woodrow Wilson’s notorious Fourteen Points, which needlessly prolonged the war. Murray mordantly mocked Lippmann, who had secured a draft exemption by lying about his father’s medical condition:
“Secure in his draft exemption, Walter Lippmann hied off in high excitement to Washington, there to help run the war and, a few months later, to help direct Colonel House’s secret conclave of historians and social scientists setting out to plan the shape of the future peace treaty and the postwar world. Let others fight and die in the trenches; Walter Lippmann had the satisfaction of knowing that his talents, at least, would be put to their best use by the newly emerging collectivist State. At the end of the war, Lippmann was to go on to become America’s foremost journalistic pundit.”
Let’s do everything we can to avoid war, which results in state control of the economy, and to promote genuine intellectuals like Murray Rothbard who want peace.
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