When I was an instructor on government to today’s high school youth, I was always on the lookout for insightful explorations of this important topic. It was to my delight that I came upon the thoughts of a learned professor of jurisprudence and politics of Princeton University in his treatise, The State:  Elements of Historical and Practical Politics. In this densely packed 656 page analysis he begins by noting:

For purposes of widest comparison in tracing the development of government it would of course be desirable to include in a study of early society not only those Aryan and Semitic races which have played the chief parts in the history of the European world, but also every primitive tribe, whether Hottentot or Iroquois, Finn or Turk, of whose institutions and development we know anything at all.  Such a world-wide survey would be necessary to any induction which should claim to trace government in all its forms to a common archetype.  But, practically, no such sweeping together of incongruous savage usage and tradition is needed to construct a safe text from which to study the governments that have grown and come to full flower in the political world to which we belong .  .  . The main stocks of modern European forms of government are Aryan.  The institutional history of Semitic or Turanian peoples is hardly part of the history of European governments:  it is only analogous to it in many of the earlier stages of development.

Ah ha!  So there is the essential key to unlocking the essence and nature of government — the fundamental positive contributions of the Aryan race to European civilization, in contract to the marginalized or spurious Semitic notions. And who is the distinguished author of this decorous academic study — Woodrow Wilson —  the same Woodrow Wilson who later as president, presided over the exhibition to his cabinet and their families of the notorious pro-Ku Klux Klan film, The Birth of a Nation, in the White House.

Based on the novel, The Clansman, by his Johns Hopkins classmate Thomas Dixon, the movie included a slide quoting Wilson’s History of the American People in defense of the Klan, and another citing how “The former enemies of North and South are united again in common defense of their Aryan birthright.” It leads one to ponder the impact Woodrow Wilson’s scholastic works had on Adolf Hitler in the drafting of his own Mein Kampf.

However in a lockstep motion in totalitarian cancel culture, Princeton University has finally decided to remove the Archangel Woodrow from its public policy school and one of its colleges, Wilson College. Princeton’s president, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said in a statement Saturday that the school’s board of trustees found that President Wilson’s “racist thinking and policies make him an inappropriate namesake for a school or college whose scholars, students, and alumni must stand firmly against racism in all its forms.”

Previous to the nationwide ongoing hysterical destruction of American history sweeping the continent, one would never hear any of the inconvenient history related below by today’s “progressives” or their mirror images, the neocons, who dominate the American elite political landscape, court intellectual academia, and the mainstream news media. Thomas C. Leonard of Princeton University, author of the magnificent book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, has compiled a terrific power point presentation on the Progressive Era. The presentation is very comprehensive, yet explains in very easy to understand terms why understanding this crucial period is important. This is definitely NOT Glenn Beck at his blackboard superficial stuff. This is the real deal. Many of Leonard’s explorations and insights are very compatible with the synthesis of analysis developed by economist/historian Murray N. Rothbard in his magisterial book, The Progressive Era:

“The Progressive Era and the Family“: The Progressive Era was the incubation period of the welfare-warfare state – and of all the malevolence that follows. “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals“: The Great War was not the end of Progressive “reform” but its fulfillment. “Origins of the Welfare State in America“: Here Rothbard provides the Rosetta Stone to understanding the origins of the welfare state in America: the role of post-millennial Protestant pietistic intellectuals and evangelical activists born in the crucial decade surrounding the events of the Civil War who, because of the seductive influence of the evolutionary naturalism of Darwinism, came of age increasingly secularized, but who did not forsake their faith in statism and elitist social control.

Until the 1890s, American history was essentially presented as the development of the Eastern seaboard states, seen as an extension overseas of English history or an episode in European overseas expansion. The origins of American ethnopolitical culture were Teutonic (or Germanic) in nature. This type of analysis focused upon the thirteen colonies of the United States, and explained the evolution of America westward through the development of these political communities. This racist Teutonic Germ Theory of History was dominant among the academic and governing elites at the close of the Nineteenth Century in the United States and Great Britain. Senator Albert J. Beveridge spoke for this generation when he stated in support of an American Empire:

Mr. President, this question is deeper than any question of party politics; deeper than any question of the isolated policy of our country even; deeper even than any question of constitutional power. It is elemental. It is racial. God has not been preparing the English-speaking and Teutonic peoples for a thousand years for nothing but vain and idle self-contemplation and self-admiration. No! He has made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adepts in government that we may administer government among savage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of all our race He has marked the American people as His chosen nation to finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mission of America, and it holds for us all the profit, all the glory, all the happiness possible to man. We are trustees of the world’s progress, guardians of its righteous peace. The judgment of the Master is upon us: “Ye have been faithful over a few things; I will make you ruler over many things.”

This was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism,”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenics and the idea of “race suicide.” Ideas truly have consequences.

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