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

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Leonard, Thomas C., author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Eugenics--United States--History.

Eugenics.

Progressivism (United States politics)--History.

Progressivism (United States politics).

Economics--United States--History.

Economics.

United States--Social conditions--1865-1918.

United States.

United States--Economic policy--To 1933.

United States--Economic conditions--1865-1918.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (265 p.)

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2016]

Language Note:

English

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 maximum-hours laws, workmen's compensation, 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. 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.

Contents:

Prologue

The Progressive Ascendancy. Redeeming American Economic Life ; Turning Illiberal ; Becoming Experts ; Efficiency in Business and Public Administration

The Progressive Paradox. Valuing Labor: What Should Labor Get? ; Darwinism in Economic Reform ; Eugenics and Race in Economic Reform ; Excluding the Unemployable ; Excluding Immigrants and the Unproductive ; Excluding Women

Epilogue.

Notes:

Includes index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Jul 2019)

ISBN:

9781400874071

1400874076

OCLC:

1132672135