Title Illiberal reformers : race, eugenics & American economics in the Progressive Era / Thomas C. Leonard

Published Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2016] ©2016

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Description 1 online resource (250 pages) Contents Acknowledgments -- Prologue -- Part I. The Progressive Ascendancy. 1. Redeeming American Economic Life -- 2. Turning Illiberal -- 3. Becoming Experts -- 4. Efficiency in Business and Public Administration -- Part II. The Progressive Paradox. 5. Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get? -- 6. Darwinism in Economic Reform -- 7. Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform -- 8. Excluding the Unemployable -- 9. Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive -- 10. Excluding Women -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Index Summary "In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard reexamines the economic progressives whose ideas and reform agenda underwrote the Progressive Era dismantling of laissez-faire and the creation of the regulatory welfare state, which, they believed, would humanize and rationalize industrial capitalism. But not for all. Academic social scientists such as Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, and Edward A. Ross, together with their reform allies in social work, charity, journalism, and law, played a pivotal role in establishing minimum-wage and maximumhours laws, workmen's compensation, progressive income taxes, antitrust regulation, and other hallmarks of the regulatory welfare state. But even as they offered uplift to some, economic progressives advocated exclusion for others, and did both in the name of progress. Leonard meticulously reconstructs the influence of Darwinism, racial science, and eugenics on scholars and activists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revealing a reform community deeply ambivalent about America's poor. Economic progressives championed labor legislation because it would lift up the deserving poor while excluding immigrants, African Americans, women, and 'mental defectives, ' whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman and to Anglo-Saxon race integrity. Economic progressives rejected property and contract rights as illegitimate barriers to needed reforms. But their disregard for civil liberties extended much further. Illiberal Reformers shows that the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as hereditary inferiors, but to exclude them"--Provided by publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index Notes English Print version record Subject Economics -- United States -- History Progressivism (United States politics) -- History Eugenics -- United States -- History BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Economics -- General. BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Reference. BUSINESS & ECONOMICS -- Economic History. Economic history Economic policy Economics Eugenics Progressivism (United States politics) Social conditions Sozialreform Wohlfahrtsstaat Wirtschaft Liberalismus Ausgrenzung Rassismus Sozialdarwinismus Eugenik SUBJECT United States -- Economic conditions -- 1865-1918. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140022 United States -- Economic policy -- To 1933. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140034 United States -- Social conditions -- 1865-1918. http://id.loc.gov/authorities/subjects/sh85140515 Subject United States USA Genre/Form History Form Electronic book ISBN 9781400874071 1400874076

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