Progressivism, Race, and the Training Wheels of Freedom

Professor Tiffany Jones Miller reports on the racism of the progressives:

The progressives’ treatment of blacks domestically mirrors their treatment of the Filipinos. On the one hand, the progressives widely regarded the 15th Amendment — which barred the federal and state governments from denying the right to vote on account of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude” — as an egregious error. Progressive economist John R. Commons, Ely’s student and colleague who personally trained many leading New Deal figures, complained that, following the Civil War, the “Negro” race, “after many thousand years of savagery and two centuries of slavery, was suddenly let loose into the liberty of citizenship and the electoral suffrage. The world never before had seen such a triumph of dogmatism and partisanship. It was dogmatism, because a theory of abstract equality and inalienable rights of man took the place of education and the slow evolution of moral character.” It is foolish, Commons insists, to confer rights upon men as men: “The suffrage must be earned, not merely conferred.” In his view the legal right to vote should not be extended to blacks until they acquired sufficient “intelligence, self-control, and capacity for cooperation,” which fitness could best be determined by “an honest educational test” — that is, a literacy test.

John R. Commons and the ideas behind the welfare state.