Catchy thread title isn't it? Did some of you think this was going to be some wacko racist post? Well guess again (at least as far as my words are concerned). I just thought I would discuss one of the seminal works of AC philosopher Murray Rothbard, hero to legions of AC posters in this forum. That work is
Origins of the Welfare State in America
The cliff notes of that essay:
* Yankee protestant pietism movement (the basis of nanny-statism) starts in the early 1800s with do-gooding social advocacy.
* Above movement is gradually (and "inexorably"!) secularized by rich and social activist women, including many who are Jews and lesbians.
* This movement then progresses to the New Deal with the help of "probably the first bisexual First Lady", Eleanor Roosevelt and various rich "patrician" financiers.
* So basically, the unholy conspiracy of Women, Yankees, Lesbians and Jews (or various combinations of same), after taking over a movement started by pietistic Protestants, and with the aid of rich financiers who hoped to gain the most at the pig trough of the welfare state, were the ones responsible for foisting that welfare state on us. Other theories for the formation of the welfare state are debunked at the beginning of the essay.
Also FWIW here are some word counts from the essay:
Yankee: 39
Lesbian, Lesbianism: 15
Jew, Jewess, Jewish: 11
Granted those are out of 16,000+ words, and that the words "Christian" and "Protestant" are used more, but I'll bet they exceed the count of those words in most other economic essays.
Also this essay begs the question of since the above is a picture of whom and what is wrong, the question is what is its antithesis that is right and good? Well obviously it can't be Yankee, which means something like ante-bellum Southern I guess. And it can't be Lesbian, which means straight. And it can't be Jewish, which means gentile, even if not necessarily relgious at all. And furthermore it can't be women in general, especially the pietistic "busybody" types scorned by Rothbard. So it would seem that a bunch of ante-bellum loving Southern, white, gentile and straight males are who would be the "right persons" to found AC-land.
Now for some quotes:
If it wasn't industrialism or mass movements of the working class that brought the welfare state to America, what was it? Where are we to look for the causal forces? In the first place, we must realize that the two most powerful motivations in human history have always been ideology (including religious doctrine), and economic interest, and that a joining of these two motivations can be downright irresistible. It was these two forces that joined powerfully together to bring about the welfare state.
As early as the Puritan days, the Yankees were eager to coerce themselves and their neighbors; the first American public schools were set up in New England to inculcate obedience and civic virtue in their charges.
Of all the Yankee activists in behalf of statist "reform," perhaps the most formidable force was the legion of Yankee women, in particular those of middle- or upper-class background, and especially spinsters whose busybody inclinations were not fettered by the responsibilities of home and hearth.
Jane Addams was able to use her upper-class connections to acquire fervent supporters, many of them women who became intimate and probably lesbian friends of Miss Addams.
One of Jane Addams's close colleagues, and probable lesbian lover, at Hull House was the tough, truculent Julia Clifford Lathrop (b. 1858), whose father, William, had migrated from upstate New York to Rockford in northern Illinois.
Mary Rozet Smith, indeed, was able to replace Ellen Starr in Jane Addams's lesbian affection. She did so in two ways: by being totally submissive and self-deprecating to the militant Miss Addams, and by supplying copious financial support to Hull House. Mary and Jane proclaimed themselves "married" to each other.
The two other founders of the College Settlements were Katharine Coman (b. 1857), and her long-time lesbian lover Katharine Lee Bates.
Florence Kelley differed from her colleagues on two counts: (1) she was the only one who was an outright Marxist, and (2) she was married and not a lesbian.
Inspired by this example, however, three Yankee lesbians followed by founding the College Settlement Association in 1887
If the female social reform activists were almost all Yankee, by the late 19th century, Jewish women were beginning to add their leaven to the lump.
While she was not a Yankee, Lillian Wald continued in the dominant tradition by being a lesbian, forming a long-term lesbian relationship with her associate Lavina Dock.
Rounding out the important contingent of socialist-activist Jews were the four Goldmark sisters, Helen, Pauline, Josephine, and Alice.
At the other end of the social and ethnic spectrum from the Wilmarth sisters was the short, fiery, aggressively single Polish-American Jewess, Rose Schneiderman.
Perhaps the leading force emerging from the women's statist, social-welfare movement was none other than Eleanor Roosevelt (b. 1884), perhaps our first bisexual First Lady. Eleanor fell under the influence of the passionately radical London prep school headmistress, Madame Marie Souvestre, who apparently set Eleanor on her lifelong course.
Granted that I cherrypicked those quotes. But in a footnote, Rothbard says:
Recent feminist historians have been happy to overcome the reluctance of older historians, and have proudly "outed" the lesbianism of Addams and many other spinster Yankee progressive activists of that epoch. Probably these feminists are right, and the pervasive lesbianism of the movement is crucial to a historical understanding of why this movement got under way. At the very least, they could not simply follow other women and make a career of marriage and homemaking.
I mean, so are we to understand, that the underlying reason that the welfare statism that the AC'ers hate so much was foisted on us here in the US, was because lesbians and/or Jewish women didn't want to conform to traditional/gender roles that the society of the time expected of them, leaving them the only alternative of channeling their non-sexual energies into engineering the welfare state along with rich financiers who hoped to benefit monetarily from same? That's the impression I was left with after reading that essay.