Previously
by Charles A. Burris: War
Crimes, the Holocaust, and Today’s National Security State
You will never
hear any of the inconvenient history related below by today’s “progressives”
or their mirror images, the neocons, who dominate the American elite
political landscape, court intellectual academia, and the mainstream
news media.
Thomas C. Leonard
of Princeton University has compiled a
terrific power point presentation on the Progressive Era. The
presentation is very comprehensive, yet explains in very easy to
understand terms why understanding this crucial period is important.
This is definitely NOT Glenn Beck at his blackboard superficial
stuff. This is the real deal.
Many of Leonard’s
explorations and insights are very compatible with the synthesis
of analysis developed by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard:
“The
Progressive Era and the Family“: The Progressive Era was the
incubation period of the welfare-warfare state — and of all the
malevolence that follows.“World
War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals“: The Great
War was not the end of Progressive “reform” but its fulfillment.“Origins
of the Welfare State in America“: Here Rothbard provides the
Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare state
in America: the role of post-millennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals
and evangelical activists born in the crucial decade surrounding
the events of the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence
of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly
secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and
elitist social control.
Until the 1890s,
American history was essentially presented as the development of
the Eastern seaboard states, seen as an extension overseas of English
history or an episode in European overseas expansion. The origins
of American ethnopolitical culture were Teutonic (or Germanic) in
nature. This type of analysis focused upon the thirteen colonies
of the United States, and explained the evolution of America westward
through the development of these political communities. This racist
Teutonic Germ Theory of History was dominant among the academic
and governing elites at the close of the Nineteenth Century in the
United States and Great Britain.
Senator
Albert J. Beveridge spoke for this generation when he stated
in support of an American Empire:
Mr. President,
this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper
than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper
even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental.
It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and
Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle
self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master
organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns.
He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of
reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government
that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples.
Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into
barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American
people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration
of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds
for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible
to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its
righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye
have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over
many things.”
This was a
crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent
as
Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the
impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard
T. Ely, Herbert
Baxter Adams, and John
W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during
this period, dominated by the
rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home
imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore
Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson transformed into hard
reality.
This worship
of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the
influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism,”social
imperialism,” Fabian
socialism imported from Great Britain, the
increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism,
all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged
as progressivism
— complete with its elite notions of centralized
political/economic planning, aggressive
nationalism, eugenics
and the idea of “race
suicide.”
Ideas
truly have consequences.
June
26, 2013
Charles
A. Burris [send him mail]
teaches history in the Murray N. Rothbard Room at Memorial High
School in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Copyright
© 2013 Charles A. Burris
This article originally appeared on: Lew Rockwell