The Training Wheels of Freedom

I read an extremely illuminating article in the National Review (November 14, 2011, pg. 37) on the development of segregation. It’s entitled Progressivism, Race and the Training Wheels of Freedom, by Tiffany Jones Miller, associate professor of politics at the University of Dallas. Though it would seem that segregationist policies would develop almost immediately after the collapse of reconstruction in the 1870’s, the strongest laws weren’t passed till the 1890’s, why; because the same philosophical divisions on the concept of liberty roil our politics to this day.

If we follow the path of natural rights it will lead straight from the ideals of the Founders and Fredrick Douglass that men are born free and the only way they can exercise this freedom is by exercising it, anything else is slavery. Therefore education, the ability to choose one’s labor, the gaining of property and the vote were the marks of a free man. As Douglas said:

“'Preparing' them to better handle freedom would practically enslave the Negro,     and make the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 a mockery and a delusion. What is Freedom? It is the right to choose one’s own employment. Certainly it means that, if it means anything; and when any one undertakes to decide for a man when he shall work, where he shall work, at what he shall work, and for what he shall work, he or they practically reduce him to slavery." 

Yet this “preparation” was the program of the southern Progressive reformer, not only for the Negro but for all other members of all the lowly classes; degenerates, the feeble-minded, epileptics and unemployables.

However, if anyone had experience in not choosing his work it would be a freedman.

Professor Miller finds in the work of C. Van Woodward, the dean of Southern History, this observation, “In the South, the typical Progressive reformer rode to power on a disenfranchising or white-supremacy movement.” Also in the work of Axel Schafer she finds “the high tide of progressive reform coincided with the darkest moments of segregation, discrimination and racial violence.” As professor Miller puts it:

“And they did so not in spite of the principles animating their economic reforms, but precisely because of them. The progressive’s support for disenfranchisement and segregation, in other words, was but one practical expression of their philosophically inspired drive to revolutionize the moral basis of American government---to redefine the very meaning of human freedom and the rights to which individuals are, as a consequence, entitled.”

To these modern progressives, trained in Hegelian methods in German Universities, the highest level of the human ideal was one of service. This “ethical ideal” redefined the concept of liberty from a set of negative rights, or what the state could not do to you, to a set of positive rights, or what the state owes you, and, of course, what you owe the state.

One of the most important of these thinkers was Robert Ely, America’s first great economist. In any study of turn of the century Progressivism Ely’s name looms large, and his view that the highest form of state power was in its ability to guide the citizen in his life’s choices. Ely preached a politics of the heart, an early version of “The Politics of Meaning”. As he said, “There is no limit to the right of the State, save its ability to do good.”  For all Progressives this meant paternalism in the citizen’s relation to the state, to the southern progressive this paternalism extended to segregation in education, public accommodation, and all other aspects of public life (Plessey v. Ferguson). This also extended the imposition of tests and taxes for voting registration. For an example of the effect of these new laws, the level of registered black voters in Louisiana went from 130,334 in 1896 to 1,342 in 1904. The central idea being that if the Negro could advance under the benevolent watch of the State till he had demonstrated a level of competence to hold the full spectrum of rights, his “training wheels” would be taken off, then and only then would he be truly free.

The strongest statements in this vein are those of Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the American Journal of Sociology where she calls for those below a certain “grade of citizenship, unable to be decent, self-supporting and progressive, shall be taken hold of by the State” to be, shall we say, “Reeducated”?

But who will keep custody of the custodians?

The article touches on colonial policy in the Philippines, Immigration reform, and other areas where the Progressives sought to bring moral reform, but always returns to the basic problem, the Progressive's denial of the existence of Natural Rights held by all men from birth. As the Declaration of Independence says:

 We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…

Without this rock we swim in a sea of smiling sharks.

For an example of the thinking in the present day we have Senator Obama in 2001.

I hope you’ll visit your local Library’s periodical room for the full article. Also the following article by Jay Nordlinger on another historian of the South, Gene Genovese is excellent.

JimG33