World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals

Murray N. Rothbard’s historical essay, first published in 1989 and republished in 2017, interprets American participation in World War I as the fulfillment of progressive ambitions for social control. The supplied version includes an appendix on the National Research Council, first published in 2017. Against accounts of war as a defeat for progressivism, Rothbard presents mobilization as an opportunity for reformers, intellectuals, and corporate interests to acquire administrative authority. His central question is how emergency powers converted moral aspirations and professional expertise into institutions directing economic and cultural life.

The argument begins with the religious genealogy of reform. Rothbard connects progressive activism to postmillennial Protestantism, whose adherents sought to prepare the world for salvation through organized human action. In his interpretation, secularization could remove theological commitments while retaining the ambition to remake society. Prohibition, women’s mobilization, and military vice control thus emerge as related projects of moral regulation. A prohibitionist appeal joins moral condemnation to wartime economy:

Aside from the long list of awful tragedies following in the wake of the liquor traffic, the economic waste is too great to be tolerated at this time.

Food conservation and hostility toward Germany strengthened the campaign against alcohol. Suffrage organizations combined political advancement with registration campaigns, patriotic instruction, and the Americanization of immigrants. Raymond Fosdick’s Commission on Training Camp Activities extended regulation to prostitution and soldiers’ recreation. These examples establish a recurring mechanism: war supplied both a justification for intervention and institutional opportunities for reform professionals. For Rothbard, benevolent purposes did not diminish coercive effects.

The discussion of The New Republic shifts from organized reform to intellectual advocacy. Herbert Croly, Walter Lippmann, and John Dewey regarded mobilization as an opening for collective economic direction. Rothbard emphasizes their hope that wartime coordination would become a model for peacetime government. His treatment of Lippmann’s pursuit of draft exemption highlights what he regards as an asymmetry between intellectual authority and personal sacrifice. Dewey’s instrumental understanding of force becomes a broader target: judging coercion by its promised benefits, Rothbard argues, helped reconcile reform with militarism.

Richard T. Ely connects this outlook to the professionalization of economics. Rothbard contrasts deductive economic reasoning, which he regards as a barrier to intervention, with the German Historical School’s empirical orientation and admiration for state administration. Ely’s organizational work and influence on Wisconsin reform provide the background to his wartime attacks on dissent. His campaign against Robert La Follette and willingness to restrict academic freedom exemplify the contention that professional authority could enforce political conformity rather than protect independent criticism.

The treatment of statistics examines intervention’s informational infrastructure. Through Edwin Gay, Wesley Clair Mitchell, Irving Fisher, and their networks, Rothbard traces a movement from wartime data gathering toward permanent research organizations and government-business cooperation. He identifies an aspiration to insulate expertise from political conflict:

The conclusion being drawn by these people by 1915 was that fact-finding and policymaking had to be isolated from class struggle and freed from political pressure groups.

For Rothbard, this separation was itself political: scientific neutrality could legitimize transferring authority to experts whose judgments appeared as technical necessities. Although emergency agencies often disappeared, their personnel, methods, and ambitions persisted through the National Bureau of Economic Research, Brookings, and Herbert Hoover’s Commerce Department. Fisher’s optimism and the failure of the 1929 Recent Economic Changes study to anticipate depression undercut claims to expert foresight.

The appendix extends this institutional history to scientific organization. George Ellery Hale, Robert Millikan, Michael Pupin, industrial leaders, and philanthropic foundations helped establish and sustain the National Research Council. Disputes concerned the form and extent of coordination; fellowships offered a comparatively decentralized means of organizing research.

The essay’s distinctive contribution is its account of wartime power as an alliance of moral purpose, corporate interest, and professional ambition. Its openly libertarian interpretation connects reform convictions with opportunities for institutional authority. Mobilization’s enduring legacy, on this reading, lay not only in surviving organizations but in the expectation that organized expertise should direct social life.