Originally published in 1986 and republished in 2017, Murray N. Rothbard’s essay interprets progressive family policy through ethnoreligious conflict. Moving from Protestant revivalism and public schooling to women’s suffrage, eugenics, and the Progressive Party, it argues that centralized administration joined elite institutional interests to campaigns for moral and cultural uniformity. The family becomes a central site of conflict because public institutions could displace parental authority over children’s upbringing.
Furthermore, that political conflict, from the 1830s on, stemmed from a radical transformation that took place in American Protestantism as a result of the revival movement of the 1830s.
Drawing on the “new political history,” Rothbard distinguishes evangelical pietists from Catholics and high-church Lutherans, whom he calls “liturgicals.” The distinction concerns both salvation and the permissible reach of politics. Liturgical communities emphasized church institutions and sacraments; evangelical pietism made believers responsible for transforming the social environment in which others sought salvation. Rothbard presents this obligation as a foundation for coercive campaigns against alcohol, Sunday recreation, and Catholic influence.
In short, the evangelicals will have to take over the state and stamp out sin, so that Jesus can then return.
This formulation captures the essay’s polemical account of the passage from religious conviction to political compulsion. Reform becomes more than private persuasion: state power acquires a redemptive function. Rothbard consequently treats ethnoreligious allegiance as an explanation of political commitments that economic interest alone cannot adequately explain.
Very rapidly, the political parties reflected a virtually one-to-one correlation of this ethnoreligious division: the Whig, and later the Republican Party consisting chiefly of the pietists, and the Democratic Party encompassing almost all the liturgicals.
Public schooling is decisive in this interpretation because it can interrupt the intergenerational transmission of religious and cultural identities. Protestant Bible readings, prayers, anti-Catholic textbooks, and temperance instruction exemplify what Rothbard regards as deliberate homogenization. Catholic resistance challenged not merely particular classroom practices but the schools’ claimed moral mission. The underlying question was who should exercise authority over children.
San Francisco provides an institutional case study. Rothbard traces struggles between Yankee Protestant reformers and immigrant constituencies, culminating in the displacement of elected superintendent Alfred Roncovieri. Roncovieri defended basic instruction while assigning sexual and moral education to families and churches. Reformers favored appointed administrators, centralized control, and expanded educational responsibilities. Rothbard reads their language of efficiency as legitimating a transfer of power away from parents and immigrant voters. The narrow passage of Amendment 37 in 1920, supported by middle- and upper-class districts and resisted in working-class Irish and Italian precincts, supports his interpretation of administrative reform as class and religious domination.
The essay then examines women’s suffrage and reproductive politics against the demographic growth of Catholic communities. Rothbard argues that prohibition threatened the saloon-centered networks of urban Democratic politics, while suffrage could mobilize Protestant women for moral regulation. The Women’s Christian Temperance Union and suffragists’ prohibitionist commitments support his account of electoral reform as intertwined with social control.
He extends this interpretation to immigration restriction, eugenics, and birth control. His discussions of Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, and Margaret Sanger emphasize connections between reproductive reform, hereditary classification, and racial hierarchy. Scientific authority, in this reading, could perpetuate older efforts to preserve Protestant cultural power. The argument foregrounds exclusionary alliances and coercive purposes within movements also associated with emancipation and professional expertise.
The Progressive Party convention of 1912 brings these strands together. Businessmen, social workers, intellectuals, and religious leaders appear as participants in an alliance between technocratic planning and evangelical reform. Roosevelt’s religious rhetoric and the delegates’ hymns exemplify their investment in political regeneration. Rothbard complements revisionist accounts centered on business, government, and professional experts by explaining popular religious support for state expansion. His distinctive claim is that centralized social policy gained force where elite institutional ambitions converged with campaigns to regulate family life and constrain cultural difference.
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