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The General Context Faith in modernity drove the great engine of progress. In the words of Richard Ely, founder of the Department of Economics, Political Science, and the History of Science at the University of Wisconsin: “Keep off the track! The train of progress is coming!” The metaphor was most fitting. Railroads had been one of the components driving industrialization; for the generation growing up in the rural Midwest and South, railroads were emblematic of the passage from a society of isolated communities to a modern urban-industrial environment. As William Thomas, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Sociology, recalled, the distance that separated his hometown (“an isolated region of old Virginia twenty miles from the railroad, in a social environment reminiscent of the eighteenth century”) from the metropolitan life of the early twentieth century was comparable to the “three centuries” that the railroad crossed, going “from a rural environment to the twentieth-century city.”1 The abnormal growth of the great metropolises where millions of new immigrants settled was only one of the weighty problems engaging public debate. Other important subjects involved the relationship between corporate economic power and political power, the serious labor con- flicts that had broken out all over the country, women’s demand for full citizenship, the struggle of African Americans for equal rights, and the movement for Congress to adopt a law outlawing the monstrous practice of lynching that had spread across the South. Rather than the federal government, the individual states and municipalities had become laboratories for reforms at the turn of the century. At the University of Wisconsin Richard T. Ely established an important center for political research and experimentation in 1892. It attracted economists such as John R. Commons, sociologists such as Edward A. Ross, and historians like Frederick Jackson Turner. Together they constituted a unique group for working on common objectives, notwithstanding the diversity of their specific disciplines. CHAPTER 2 The Language of Race, the Crowd, and the Public in the Progressive Era language of race, crowd, and public 37 The influence of the German historical school in the fields of jurisprudence , economics, and social sciences allowed them to rise above their individual disciplines and combine the different juridical, economic, and social dimensions and their interactions in a single process understood in its complexity. Second, by distancing themselves from the rigidity of formal logic and by following a pragmatic orientation, they adopted an analytical method that focused on the data of experience in the formulation of research hypotheses.2 Empirical analyses of the variations and correlations of social phenomena had to be based on statistical surveys that were scientifically quantitative. Science, “the basic word that every school of thought claimed and worshipped ,” was not so much a matter of content as a matter of method.3 According to the historian Robert Wiebe, “science had become a procedure or an orientation rather than a body of results.” As such, faith in science was widespread in public discourse, especially in a cultural environment that held an intermediate position between highbrow culture and the growing mass culture seized on by the muckrakers.4 According to the progressive advocates of the new middle class, the criteria of rationality, efficiency, and bureaucracy, inspired by the idea of scientific management, should be extended to the whole society. “If science becomes the language of mature democracy, so too it transforms the structures of the State and the attitudes of those occupying it,” writes the political scientist Raymond Seidelman.5 Therefore, scientists represented the vanguard of rational politics.6 They were not limited to abstract theories and teaching in universities but often were quite active participants in public debate, through the press or the mushrooming public and private commissions. Walter Lippmann, who collaborated with Herbert Croly at the New Republic, caught this cultural climate in his book Drift and Mastery, in which he showed new possibilities opening up for his generation to control and guide social processes. Thus the expert came out of academia and entered fully into civic life: “It was no longer possible to dismiss ideas by calling them ‘academic,’ for no one any longer saw a clear boundary between the academy and society,” notes Richard Hofstadter. The newer type of university professor, according to one observer of the time, was an “expert who knows all about railroads and bridges and subways; about gas commissions and electrical supplies, about currency and banking; Philippine tariffs, Venezuelan boundary lines, the...

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