Today I received from Amazon my eagerly awaited copy of Murray N. Rothbard’s posthumous volume The Progressive Era (edited by Patrick Newman). Upon reading the opening lines of the Forward by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, I was seized by an eerie sense of déjà vu, for the academic experience he describes almost paralleled exactly that of my own at that time:
When I was in my junior and senior years at Princeton studying history in the early 1970s, I became fascinated with the Progressive Era. It attracted me at a time when America rejected as profoundly as it did under Lincoln and the Radical Republicans and even under FDR, the libertarian first principles of the American Revolution.
To pursue this interest, I volunteered to take a course in the Graduate School, a procedure permitted for a few undergraduates at the time. The course was an advanced look at Progressive intellectual thought taught by Woodrow Wilson’s biographer and hagiographer, Professor Arthur S. Link. The readings were all pro-Progressive as were all the other students in the class. We studied Professor Link’s works and the claptrap by his colleague William E. Leuchtenberg.
In my search for a rational understanding of the Era — and for ammunition to use in the classroom where I was regularly beaten up — I asked Professor Link if any academic had made the argument effectively that the Progressives were power-hungry charlatans in the guise of noble businessmen, selfless politicians, and honest academics.
He told me of a young fellow named Rothbard, of whose work he had only heard, but had not read. This advice sent me to Man, Economy, and State, which I devoured; and my ideological odyssey was off to the races.
As I have detailed previously at LRC, I was a budding libertarian undergraduate college student at the University of Tulsa in the early 1970s. From my readings of the monthly newsletter, Books for Libertarians (later Libertarian Review) I learned from its editor Roy A. Childs, Jr. and other contributors, of the seminal place in modern American history of the Progressive Era.
Like Judge Napolitano, “I became fascinated with the Progressive Era.” I took two specialized history courses, The Progressive Era, and American Intellectual Thought, which both dealt extensively with this period. Both of my instructors were amiable yet very conventional court historians.
In his course on The Progressive Era, Dr. William Settle assigned six texts: George E. Mowry, The Era of Theodore Roosevelt and the Birth of Modern America 1900-12; Arthur S. Link, Woodrow Wilson and the Progressive Era; Otis L. Graham, Jr., The Great Campaigns: Reform and War in America/1900-1928; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s; William E. Leuchtenburg, The Perils of Prosperity 1914-32; and Albert U. Romasco, The Poverty of Abundance: Hoover, the Nation, the Depression. I informed Professor Settle that an economist/historian named Murray N. Rothbard had written a devastating comprehensive review of the Romasco book, “The Hoover Myth,” which totally invalidated its merit. Originally published in the New Left academic journal, Studies on the Left, Volume VI, No. 4, Summer 1966, it was republished in an anthology entitled For A New America: Essays in History and Politics from ‘Studies on the Left’ 1959-1967. I gave him a photocopy of the damning piece which he stated he later read.
Professor I. E. Cadenhead, instructor of the later course, was author of Theodore Roosevelt: The Paradox of Progressivism. Unsurprisingly this hagiography contains no mention of the pioneering research of intellectual revisionists such as Rothbard, Gabriel Kolko, or James Weinstein, challenging the dominant reigning interpretation of Progressivism. Besides his book, students were assigned three volumes in the Rand McNally Series on the History of American Thought and Culture: Paul E. Boiller, Jr., American Thought in Transition: The Impact of Evolutionary Naturalism, 1865-1900; David W. Noble, The Progressive Mind, 1890-1917; and Roderick Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought 1917-1930.
Throughout this period I bolstered my intellectual ammunition by reading the revisionist anti-textbook histories of this era, Ronald Radosh and Murray N Rothbard, A New History of Leviathan: Essays on the Rise of the American Corporate State; and Gabriel Kolko’s The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916.
Perhaps in a belated sense of justice, Professor Patrick Newman, editor of The Progressive Era, will be invited to deliver the University of Tulsa’s Settle/Cadenhead Memorial Lecture regarding how the path-breaking research of that exemplary scholar Murray N. Rothbard has shattered forever the court history consensus on that seminal period in American history.
6:25 pm on October 28, 2017
