Gabriel Kolko - The Triumph of Conservatism: A Reinterpretation of American History, 1900-1916

Atheneum Books for Young Readers
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the authors imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1963 by The Free Press

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

THE FREE PRESS and colophon are trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

First Free Press Paperback Edition 1977

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 63-16588

ISBN 0-02-916650-0

eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-1872-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-0291-6650-5

To my parents

EVERY RESEARCHER owes debts to library workers and archivists that can only be acknowledged but never repaid. This book would be far poorer were it not for the splendid assistance given by the staff of the various sections of the National Archives, and especially the Business Economics Branch. I am also grateful for the cooperation given by the staffs of the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, the University of Virginia Library, the Columbia University Library, and the Williams College Library. The various Harvard University Libraries provided not only admirable working facilities but also a congenial climate and stimulating friends.

All references to Federal Trade Commission materials in the National Archives, or manuscripts in the F.T.C. Building, are based on the commissions kind permission to allow me to examine their hitherto closed records. Needless to say, neither the commission nor any other agency is in any way responsible for my use and interpretation of materials under their jurisdiction.

Readers will notice that I do not discuss railroads in my history. Such a consideration will be the topic of a more specialized volume, Railroads and Regulation, to be published in the near future. Suffice it to say, the history of railroads and government regulation in the period 1877-1916 reinforces the more general theme developed in this book.

GABRIEL KOLKO

THIS IS A BOOK that is motivated by a concern with the seemingly nonacademic question of what might have been. All men speculate or dream as they choose, but the value of the speculation depends on the questions asked and on the way they are answered. Speculation of the type prompting this volume has its value only if it leads to the reexamination of what happenedwhat really happenedin the past.

The political or economic history of a single nation, especially during a specific, critical period which has a determining influence on the decades that follow, should be examined with provocative questions in mind. And there is no more provocative question than: Could the American political experience in the twentieth century, and the nature of our economic institutions, have been radically different? Every society has its Pangloss who will reply in the negative. But to suggest that such a reply is mere apologetics would be a fruitless, inaccurate oversimplification. Predominantly, the great political and sociological theorists of this century have pessimistically described and predicted an inexorable trend toward centralization, conformity, bureaucracytoward a variety of totalitarianismand yet they have frequently been personally repelled by such a future.

Unless one believes in an invisible, transcendent destiny in American history, the study of men and institutions becomes the prerequisite for discovering how ones question should be answered. The nature of the questions in this study demands that history be more than a reinterpretation of what is already known, in large part because what is known is insufficient, but also because histories of America from the turn of the century onwards have all too frequently been obsessed by effects rather than causes. Theories and generalizations based on such an approach have ignored concrete actions and intentions, and for this reason the study of consequences and effects has also been deficient.

Assuming that the burden of proof is ultimately on the writer, I contend that the period from approximately 1900 until the United States intervention in the war, labeled the progressive era by virtually all historians, was really an era of conservatism. Moreover, the triumph of conservatism that I will describe in detail throughout this book was the result not of any impersonal, mechanistic necessity but of the conscious needs and decisions of specific men and institutions.

There were any number of options involving government and economics abstractly available to national political leaders during the period 1900-1916, and in virtually every case they chose those solutions to problems advocated by the representatives of concerned business and financial interests. Such proposals were usually motivated by the needs of the interested businesses, and political intervention into the economy was frequently merely a response to the demands of particular businessmen. In brief, conservative solutions to the emerging problems of an industrial society were almost uniformly applied. The result was a conservative triumph in the sense that there was an effort to preserve the basic social and economic relations essential to a capitalist society, an effort that was frequently consciously as well as functionally conservative.

I use the attempt to preserve existing power and social relationships as the criterion for conservatism because none other has any practical meaning. Only if we mechanistically assume that government intervention in the economy, and a departure from orthodox laissez faire, automatically benefits the general welfare can we say that government economic regulation by its very nature is also progressive in the common meaning of that term. Each measure must be investigated for its intentions and consequences in altering the existing power arrangements, a task historians have largely neglected.

I shall state my basic proposition as baldly as possible so that my essential theme can be kept in mind, and reservations and intricacies will be developed in the course of the book. For the sake of communication I will use the term progressive and progressivism, but not, as have most historians, in their commonsense meanings.

Progressivism was initially a movement for the political rationalization of business and industrial conditions, a movement that operated on the assumption that the general welfare of the community could be best served by satisfying the concrete needs of business. But the regulation itself was invariably controlled by leaders of the regulated industry, and directed toward ends they deemed acceptable or desirable. In part this came about because the regulatory movements were usually initiated by the dominant businesses to be regulated, but it also resulted from the nearly universal belief among political leaders in the basic justice of private property relations as they essentially existed, a belief that set the ultimate limits on the leaders possible actions.

It is business control over politics (and by business I mean the major economic interests) rather than political regulation of the economy that is the significant phenomenon of the Progressive Era. Such domination was direct and indirect, but significant only insofar as it provided means for achieving a greater endpolitical capitalism.