Search

Thomas Leonard's 2016 book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era argues that exclusionary views on eugenics, race, immigration, and gender taint the intellectual legacy of progressive economics and economists. This review essay reconsiders that legacy and places it in the context within which it developed. While the early generations of scholars who founded the economics profession in the United States and trained in its departments did indeed hold and express retrograde views on those subjects, those views were common to a broad swath of the intellectual elite of that era, including the progressives' staunchest opponents inside and outside academia. Moreover, Leonard anachronistically intermingles a contemporary critique of early-twentieth-century progressive economics and the progressive movement writ large, serving to decontextualize those disputes—a flaw that is amplified by the book's unsystematic approach to reconstructing the views and writing it attacks. Notwithstanding the history Leonard presents, economists working now nonetheless owe their progressive forebears for contributions that have become newly relevant: the “credibility revolution,” the influence of economic research on policy and program design, the prestige of economists working in and providing advice to government agencies and policy makers, and the academic freedom economists enjoy in modern research-oriented universities are all a part of that legacy. (JEL A11, B15, D82, J15, N31, N32)

For once, the usual back-of-the-jacket encomium for a book does not lie. Lawrence M. Friedman describes Crossing Over the Line as "fresh, lucid, at times witty, at times intense and passionate," and "tremendously fun to read." Despite a personal dislike of the word "fun" used as an adjective, I dissent in no way from that verdict. However, on another purely mechanical matter, I think the august University of Chicago Press needs to check the credentials of anyone who accepted a sentence beginning: "The appellate court noted with rye [sic] amusement" (p. 218). The omission of a bibliography that prevents a quick overview of the sources is also surprising in a work issued by a scholarly press. Setting that aside, Crossing Over the Line is admirable on many counts. Most of the story unfolds in the courts where the Mann Act-prohibiting the interstate transportation of women for an "immoral purpose"-was enforced, and Langum is very good at explaining prosecutorial and judicial strategies without lapsing into legalese or losing sight of the piquant details of cases. He generally keeps to a firm timeline and drives his tale with the energy and focus of an author who wants to convince. Langum does not confuse objectivity with neutrality. He dislikes the Mann Act. It is to him "a splendid example of the failure of American democracy... so far as the politicalization of morality is concerned; like other laws of its kind it allows 'the exercise of a tyranny of the majority"' (pp. 258-59). Although many of the thousands of people convicted under the act were no angels, it was a badly drafted law. Enacted to deal with a real but overhyped public evil--coerced prostitutionit quickly underwent a moralistic interpretation that ignored the realities of human sexual behavior and became a tool of aggressive prosecutors and even blackmailers. Eventually outmoded by changing popular attitudes, it remained unamended largely through political inertia and cowardice. The facts are hardly disputable. In the early years of the twentieth century, prostitution was an established feature of big-city life and a subject of intense

the dry bones began to stir in that notable valley of historical skeletons, the Reconstruction period. In February 1939, the Journal of Southern History carried an article by Francis B. Simkins describing a number of "New Viewpoints of Southern Reconstruction."' Frankly facing the fact that "the main issue of the Reconstruction period, the great American race question," like Banquo's ghost, would not down, Simkins asked for a fairer analysis of Reconstruction's achievements and failures and an end to the notion that encouraging the Negro in voting and officeholding was somehow a crime of crimes. By adopting a more "critical, creative and tolerant attitude," he said, historians of the South could better discharge their "great civic obligation."