The Contours Of American History by William Appleman Williams

Author:William Appleman Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Quadrangle Books
Published: 1961-06-07T16:00:00+00:00

Field's strategy was to define the market place as a national rather than a state problem and then insist that die due process clause of

the i4th amendment gave the Supreme Court the power and the duty to review all restrictions on private property. That meant that the market place of the system would remain one unit instead of becoming a wild and uneconomic conglomeration of many different (state) market places. It also meant that regulation would be milder because of the weaker position of the reformers in the Congress. His first victory came when the New York high court accepted his dissenting argument against Justice Waite in the Munn Case as its majority view. In a test (In re Jacobs, 1885) of the state's right to regulate the atrocious conditions of cigar manufacturing, New York judges explicitly raised the specter of a return to mercantilist doctrine on social property. Such ideas—"from those ages when governmental prefects supervised ... the rate of wages, the price of food, and a large range of other affairs"—were declared archaic. They disturbed the "normal adjustments" of the market place, and also violated the due process clause which protected "personal liberty and private property."

During the next two years, moreover, even Waite agreed that the "right of continuous transportation from one end of the country to the other is essential," and admitted that the corporation was entitled to "equal protection" as an individual under the due process clause. Field's triumph was announced by his ideological colleague, Justice Rufus W. Peckham, in 1889 with a direct reference to Waite's earlier citation of English mercantilist law: "no reason exists for ... [going] back to the seventeenth or eighteenth century ideas of paternal government." It was further consolidated in 1897, in the Allgeyer v. Louisiana case, when the court stressed the "right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties" and tied that principle to the "pursuit of happiness" clause in the Declaration of Independence.

Another brick in the ideological monument to laissez faire was made with straw from the natural sciences. Because it was a relatively obvious and easy comparison to make, the system was often explained and favorably presented as the human counterpart of the Darwinian mechanism of evolution in the world of nature. Competition produced the changes that were necessary for survival and desirable for progress. Most arguments of this kind were taken second-hand from the English adaptation provided by Herbert Spencer and showed little imagination or subtlety. But since it was often presented in an articulate and stylish form, this pseudo-theory

often gives the impression of having established something of a monopoly in the ideological market of the time.

While some entrepreneurs like Carnegie and a few railroad executives appear to have thought at the time about their operations within this framework, the Darwinist analogy was actually used by intellectuals, reformers, and some capitalists more in talking about the system either to explain their actions after the fact or to place invidious connotations of the jungle upon its protagonists.

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