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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 October 2021
Richard T. Ely was one of the most important architects of the administrative welfare state in the United States. His astonishingly influential career was the product of a fundamental re-thinking of the origin and nature of the state. Repudiating the social compact theory of the American founding in favor of a self-consciously “new,” “German,” and frankly “social” conception of the state ordered toward the realization of a collective vision of human perfection, Ely conceived the task of social reform as extending social control over the hereditary and environmental determinants of human character. In the early 1930s, Ely’s vision of social reform would inspire some of his boldest students, especially M. L. Wilson, to formulate a sweeping vision of social planning that would not only inform his little known and rather coyly named Division of Subsistence Homesteads, but also his efforts at the National Resources Board (NRB)—the nation’s first ever agency for comprehensive national planning.
Politics Department, University of Dallas, [email protected].
1 As quoted in Rowley, William D., M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1970), 138 Google Scholar.
2 See, e.g., John Allen Gable, The Bull Moose Years: Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive Party (Port Washington, NY: National University Publications, 1978), 5; Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 8-9; Robert Harrison, Congress, Progressive Reform and the New American State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 4–7; Daniel Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 3, gets closer to the truth. Rodgers recognizes the importance of the Progressive economists’ exposure, as graduate students, to the German Historical School of economics, though he vacillates over the extent to which it influenced them—Did it merely “unsettle” their inherited convictions about laissez-faire or provide them with new theoretical conceptions and practical models to imitate? But, because Rodgers identifies the “laissez-faire” that the economists attacked merely with “a wide-ranging suspicion of the clumsiness of state action, a subtle denaturalization of economic actors other than the private self, and an intellectual reconstitution of the jostling, cry-filled, early-modern marketplace from an arena of suspicion to an arena of self-equilibrating moral freedom”—with, in effect, a justification for limited interference in the market—he not only fails to understand the depth of the reformers critique of the United States, but also just how ambitious was the peculiar kind of “socialism” they promoted in its stead.
3 Richard T. Ely, Property and Contract in their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth, Vol. I (Dallas, TX: Kennikat Publishing Co., 1971[1914]), 249; see also Ely, Introduction to Political Economy (New York: Chautauqua Press, 1889), 87–88.
4 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 136.
5 Rowley, ibid., quoting Wilson’s colleague, H. R. Tolley, 32.
6 Ely, Richard T., Ground Under Our Feet (New York: The MacMillan Co., 1938), 41–44 Google Scholar.
7 See, for example, Ely, Property and Contract in their Relations to the Distribution of Wealth, Vol. I, xii–xiii.
8 The Verein’s founders are frequently cited as an important precursor to National Socialism in Germany. See, e.g., Franz Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism, 1933–1944 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1942), 104–105: “The influence of the so-called state or Katheder socialists upon the ultimate development of National Socialist racism seems far more important. The writings of Friedrich List and Adolph Wagner clearly show the factors that contributed to the triumph of racial ideas. These men were attempting to counteract socialist theories of class struggle by repudiating liberal thought and by setting up a state capitalist scheme that would ‘incorporate’ the working classes and imbue the whole people with the spirit of their racial superiority.”
9 Richard T. Ely, French and German Socialism (New York: Harper and Bros., 1883), 235–44. See also William Harbutt Dawson, Bismarck and State Socialism: An Exposition of the Social and Economic Legislation of Germany Since 1870 (London: Swan Sonnenschein and Co., 1891), chap. 1; Frederic C. Howe, Socialized Germany: (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915), 82–83; Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 91.
10 As quoted in Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 102. In 1885, as Ely, Ground, 121, describes it, “Adams, Clark, Patten, James, Seligman, and I, fresh from our studies in Germany, were regarded as a group of young rebels. We young men were deeply conscious of the fact that we were human beings as well as economists and that we were engaged in the task of furthering a science which is first and foremost a science of human relationships. We felt the urgent necessity for uniting into a solid group in an effort to break the ‘crust’ which had formed over economics. To accomplish this we founded the American Economic Association.”
11 Richard T. Ely, “The American Economic Association. 1885–1909,” American Economic Association Quarterly 11, no. 1 (1910): 49.
12 Ely, Ground, 179–81.
13 Richard T. Ely quoting his own letter to Albert Shaw, another former student, of January 25, 1892. Ground, 180–81.
14 M. L. Wilson, as quoted in Jess Gilbert and Ellen Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy: The Legacy of Progressive Professors,” Wisconsin Magazine of History (1997): 305.
15 Ely, Ground, 190; John R. Commons, Myself: The Autobiography of John R. Commons (Madison: The University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1963), 95.
16 On Commons’ (and Ely’s) prominent influence over Governor Robert M. LaFollette’s reforms in Wisconsin, see Robert M. LaFollette, Robert M. LaFollette’s Autobiography: A Personal Narrative of Political Experiences (Madison, WI: The Robert M. LaFollette Co., 1913), 30–31; Commons, Myself, chap. 5. The AALL was the American affiliate of the International Association for Labor Legislation (IALL), which was founded in 1900. The call to organize a German affiliate of the IALL was signed by the three economists who organized the “socialism of the chair” in Germany—i.e., Gustav Schmoller, Adolf Wagner, and Lujo Brentano. See Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 236. John B. Andrews, the man who would become the executive secretary of the AALL in 1909 (a position he would retain until his death in 1943), also completed his Ph.D. in economics under Commons’ and Ely’s direction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1909. David A. Moss, Socializing Security: Progressive-Era Economists and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 5.
17 After Andrews’ appointment, the AALL moved its headquarters from Madison to New York, and began expressly advocating the adoption of labor legislation, shifting its emphasis from reducing industrial accidents to social insurance. The AALL, Moss notes, “began campaigning for workers’ compensation laws in 1909, and they launched the American movement for unemployment and health insurance several years later” (Socializing Security, 6).
18 On Commons’ profound influence over the development of social insurance in Wisconsin as well as on the federal level, see Gilbert and Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” 281, n. 2. Both Arthur J. Altmeyer—“the Man FDR called ‘Mr. Social Security’”—and Edwin F. Witte—who is frequently referred to as “the Father of Social Security”—earned a Ph.D. under Commons’ direction at the University of Wisconsin. Witte, as Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 440–42, notes, was not only a “Commons’ protégé brought from the Wisconsin Industrial Commission,” but he was also a member of the Economics faculty at the University of Wisconsin. Witte hired one of his own young students, Wilbur J. Cohen, to assist in him in the development of what became the Social Security Act of 1935. Cohen would subsequently become known as “the Man Who Built Medicare.” Cohen credits Commons as the man “who guided and directed Witte into his life’s work.” See Cohen, “Edwin E. Witte (1887–1960): Father of Social Security,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review 14 (1960), available through the Online History of the Social Security Administration: www.ssa.gov/history/cohenwitte.html.
19 Gilbert and Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” 305.
20 Ely, Ground, 95.
21 Ely, An Introduction to Political Economy, 119.
22 Ely, Richard T., Social Aspects of Christianity and Other Essays (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1889), 128–29Google Scholar. My emphasis.
23 Ely, Social Aspects of Christianity, 124.
24 Ely, Ground, 23, 250.
25 Ely, “Heredity and Circumstances,” The Outlook (September 16, 1893): 506.
26 Ely, Social Aspects of Christianity, 128–29.
27 See, e.g. Ely, Property and Contract, Vol. I, p. 107; see also Vol. I, p. 249.
28 Ely, Social Aspects of Christianity, 129.
29 Ely, Introduction to Political Economy, 92.
30 Ibid., 89.
31 Ely, Socialism: An Examination of its Nature, Its Strength and its Weakness, with Suggestions for Social Reform (New York: Thomas Y. Croswell, 1894), 261.
32 Ibid., 3–5.
33 Richard T. Ely, The Social Law of Service (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1896), 232.
34 Ely, Property and Contract, Vol. I, p. 340.
35 My emphasis. Albion Small, “Some Contributions to the History of Sociology: Section XV. The Restoration of Ethics in Economic Theory. The Professorial Socialists. The Verein für Socialpolitik,” American Journal of Sociology 29 (1924): 718. As Axel Schafer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920, 50, notes: “Albion Small exemplified the combination of ethical reasoning, tempered moral relativism, and corporatist longing of German-inspired progressive thought.” After graduating from Colby College in 1879, Small spent a year at the University of Berlin, where he studied with Adolph Wagner and Gustav Schmoller. As his biographer George Christakes observes, Small “was drawn to and largely converted to … an ethical view of social science with its promise of scientific social reform,” that would serve as “the cornerstone of [his] view of social science for the rest of his life.” Small did not complete his Ph.D. before leaving Germany. In 1888–89, he enrolled at Johns Hopkins University to complete his doctorate. There he studied history with Herbert Baxter Adams, one of the most prominent German-trained historians, but his interest was “particularly stimulated” by Richard T. Ely. George Christakes, Albion W. Small (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall and Co., 1978), 17–19.
36 Albion Small, “The Present Outlook of Social Science,” The American Journal of Sociology 18, no. 4 (1913): 445.
37 Ely, Socialism, 193, note 1. Ely’s conception of the state departs from Aristotle’s polis in various ways, including that Ely shows no concern that constant change in the law could actually undermine its moral authority over its members. See Aristotle, The Politics, trans. Carnes Lord (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 1269a19–27.
38 John R. Commons, Social Reform and the Church (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell and Co., 1894), 73–74. Ely wrote the introduction to Commons’ book.
39 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 3.
40 Taylor, Henry C., A Farm Economist in Washington 1919–1925 (Madison: University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1992), 14–19 Google Scholar.
41 Gilbert and Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” 106; M. L. Wilson, “The Fairway Farms Project,” The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 2, no. 2 (1926): 156–71.
42 Conkin, Paul K., Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976), 77 Google Scholar.
43 On the “Ware cell,” see Evans, M. Stanton and Romerstein, Herbert, Stalin’s Secret Agents: The Subversion of Roosevelt’s Government (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2012), 78–80 Google Scholar.
44 Wessel, Thomas R., “Wheat for the Soviet Masses: M. L. Wilson and the Montana Connection,” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 31 (1981): 40, 53 Google Scholar; see also Gilbert, Jess, Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
45 Hamilton, David E., From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928–1933 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 21 Google Scholar, 171; Gilbert and Baker, “Wisconsin Economists and New Deal Agricultural Policy,” 301–302.
46 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 4.
47 Lord, Russell, Men of Earth (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1931), 286–89Google Scholar.
48 Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 180. On Ezekiel and his connection to the BAE, as well as his involvement in Wilson’s campaign, see ibid., 186–87.
49 Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 81; Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 188–92.
50 Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 192.
51 Leonard Salter, A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967), 8–9, traces the first policy steps toward a genuine national land policy in America to “the Conservation Era, 1891–1921,” when the United States began to create “forest reserves.” Salter, 5–8, also gives Ely and other “insurgent” (progressive) economists who studied with leading members of the German historical school of economics considerable credit in helping to bring about this change: “It is of signal importance to stress the fact of this German background, for it made possible the development of an interest in land economics and affected the approach which land economists took in their work.”
52 Ely had proposed public purchase or even “the compulsory exchange” of lands unfit, in one way or another, for agricultural production. See Ely, assisted by Mary L. Shine and George S. Wehrwein, Outlines of Land Economics, Vol. III: Land Policies (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Bros. Publishers, 1922), 13:
Is not the public interest in consolidating land ownership—so that the settlement may be with us also closer settlement—sufficiently great to warrant the state in doing whatever may be practicable to bring about closer settlement, even if this involves public purchase and sale of land or possibly in some cases the compulsory exchange of lands? This may not be constitutional at the present time, but constitutional changes are possible and desirable where there is a great public interest at stake.
See also Carl C. Taylor, Bushrod W. Allin, and O. E. Baker, “Public Purposes in Soil Use,” Soils and Men: Yearbook of Agriculture (United States Department of Agriculture, 1938), 54:
A policy for rural-slum clearance is one for promoting proper use of soils in problem areas, and this is necessarily a long-time policy … . A definite public program to clear out the surplus population of the problem areas requires no decision now as to how many should be resettled by the Government. It requires only continuous and persistent efforts to retire permanently from agricultural use, by public purchase or other appropriate means, submarginal lands operated by people who are both willing and able to move to areas or occupations that provide better opportunities.
53 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 57–58; Hamilton, 181–87. On Black’s connection to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, see Willard W. Cochrane, “Remembering John D. Black,” Choices (1989): 31.
54 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 133–34.
55 Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 6, 94.
56 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 98.
57 J. D. Black, J. S. Davies, and H. R. Tolley, “Report on Economic Planning for Agriculture,” 3. Available at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=coo.31924013761915&view=1up&seq=7 The report begins by extensively quoting the work of a recently concluded conference—the Social Science Conference of the Pacific Coast—held in San Francisco, CA, from June 15–17, 1932.
58 Black, Davis, and Tolley, “Report on Economic Planning for Agriculture,” 4.
59 On Ezekiel’s close collaboration with Wilson, see Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, chaps. 7–9. According to Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 187, sometime during 1931–1932 Ezekiel spent a year abroad on a Guggenheim Fellowship studying how European governments intervened in their economies. Ezekiel, “European Competition in Agricultural Production, with Special Reference to Russia,” Journal of Farm Economics 14 (1932): 277, also mentions his visit to the Soviet Union during this time.
60 Black, Davis, and Tolley, “Report on Economic Planning for Agriculture,” 9–10. The form industrial and agricultural planning did take in the New Deal would ultimately more closely emulate Mussolini’s corporatism, though in milder form.
61 On Tugwell’s trip, see Soviet Russia in the Second Decade: A Joint Survey by the Technical Staff of the First American Trade Union Delegation, Stuart Chase, Robert Dunn, and Rexford Guy Tugwell, eds. (New York: The John Day Company, 1928), xi. Tugwell’s contribution to this volume was entitled “Russian Agriculture.” In it, he writes:
Not only in this matter is [the Russian peasant] the object of governmental solicitude. There is a far-reaching movement afoot for land reorganization, for the provision of cheap capital equipment, for expert advice in production and for a lifting of cultural levels. These have none of them gone far as yet; but it must be remembered that these policies have but just been concretely formulated; there has not yet been time for their results to be registered. For a nation which is only now emerging from the years of war, revolution, and civil war, the record must be said to be astonishingly good. (101)
62 Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings, 85, notes, it was the young Patten who helped redirect young Ely, who had come to Germany to study philosophy, to economics.
63 Ibid., 97.
64 Ibid., 101.
65 Steven A. Sass, The Pragmatic Imagination: A History of the Wharton School, 1881–1981, 93–94.
66 Hans-Joerg Tiede and Michael Berube, University Reform: The Founding of the American Association of University Professors (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 105. Patten was forced to retire in 1917. See ibid., 108.
67 Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), 29: “Leo Tolstoy, Simon Patten, my grandfather and my mother were my earliest and most influential teachers. These four entered my life at critical periods and played crucial roles in determining my thoughts and actions.” Tugwell wrote a good deal about Patten’s influence on him. See, for example, Rexford G. Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights of Morningside (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 42–47.
68 Nearing, Making of a Radical, 52.
69 Saltmarsh, Scott Nearing: An Intellectual Biography (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 2; Sass, The Pragmatic Imagination, 121.
70 Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 27–28 n. 30.
71 My emphasis.
72 Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 27–28 n. 30. On Nearing’s likening the aim of breeding a super race to what Greece and Rome sought to do, see Nearing, The Super Race: An American Problem (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1912), 19.
73 Black, Davis, and Tolley, “Report on Economic Planning for Agriculture,” 8–9.
74 Ibid. Under the National Industrial Act, industrial councils were established throughout industry. Something more limited but longer lasting was likewise done in agriculture under the auspices of the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933. Many commentators have downplayed the idea that these planning initiatives were at all inspired by or even resembled Mussolini’s corporatism. But progressive economist John R. Commons, Institutional Economics, Volume II (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961 [1934]), 900, also noted the resemblance: “But American legislatures and Congress are learning to relieve themselves of the details of administration required by the modern complexity of conflicting interests … [by creating administrative commissions]. These commissions are semi-legislative bodies, and where they are most effective it is being found that they set up representation of the conflicting economic interests as advisory committees, curiously analogous to Mussolini’s Fascist Corporations but with the difference that the interests are voluntary, electing their own representatives, while his are compulsory and the representatives are selected by himself.”
See also, Otis L. Graham, Jr.’s “Afterword,” in Tugwell, To the Lesser Heights, 255, in which he suggests that the New Deal realized Tugwell’s industrial planning proposal more fully, for a time, than one might think:
Roosevelt borrowed from Tugwell’s planning ideas, and the New Deal to some extent reflected them in strategy and structure. In agriculture they led to better results than in industry, where NRA-style ‘planning’ was an economic mess and a political disaster. The central planning institution that Tugwell urged upon the president was never allowed to emerge, despite some stubborn presidential support for a small coordinating institution that went by several names and was eventually remembered as the National Resources Planning Board. Congress was not ready for such an institution in the constellation of governmental units, and, of course, the idea of planning had a very weak hold upon the American mind.
75 Tugwell, “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire,” American Economic Review 22 (1932): 89–90. Tugwell reiterates this point in The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933), epigraph, 228–29.
76 Tugwell, “The Principle of Planning and the Institution of Laissez Faire,” 92. My emphasis.
77 See also, Tugwell, , “The Place of Government in a National Land Program,” Journal of Farm Economics 16 (1934): 55 CrossRefGoogle Scholar:
The federal government will, I believe, perform two functions with respect to our land in the future. It will directly hold and administer, as public forests, parks, game preserves, grazing ranges, recreation centers and the like, all areas which cannot at the time be effectively operated under private ownership. And, it will control the private use of the areas held by individuals to whatever extent is found necessary for maintaining continuous productivity. It is only by conceiving the government in this double active and supervisory role that we can expect to attain a permanent system of agriculture.
78 Tugwell, Rexford G., The Diary of Rexford G. Tugwell: The New Deal, 1932–1935 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), 42–44 Google Scholar.
79 Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 211.
80 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 150–65.
81 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 185–97; George N. Peek, Why Quit Our Own: Offering an American Program for Farm and Factory (New York: D. Van Nostrand Co. Inc., 1936), 70–71, 75; Van L. Perkins, Crisis in Agriculture: The Agricultural Adjustment Administration and the New Deal, 1933 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 39–40.
82 Perkins, Crisis in Agriculture, 3–4.
83 Rowley, M. L. Wilson and the Campaign for the Domestic Allotment, 195.
84 In late 1935, the DSH and other smaller initiatives would be reorganized into the Resettlement Administration (RA), which Tugwell would lead. See Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 7, and chap. 7.
85 Ibid., 88–89.
86 Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 102; 191–96; M. L. Wilson, “Decentralization of Industry in the New Deal,” Social Forces (1935), 597–8.
87 Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, quoting Dr. William E. Zeuch, 203. Zeuch completed a Ph.D. under John R. Commons’ direction at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1922. Available at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89080045016&view=1up&seq=5
88 Conkin, Tomorrow a New World, 190, 213.
89 Ibid., 186.
90 Ely, Ground, 192; Gilbert, Planning Democracy, 47.
91 Ely had long given some small attention to conservation. See, e.g. Introduction to Political Economy, 90–92. His more thematic work on conservation begins in the teens. See Ely, “Conservation and Economic Theory,” in Ely, Ralph H. Hess, Charles K. Leith, and Thomas Nixon Carver, The Foundations of National Prosperity: Studies in the Conservation of Permanent National Resources (New York: MacMillan Company, 1917).
92 Gilbert, Planning Democracy, 50; Salter, A Critical Review of Research in Land Economics, 16–17.
93 Salter, ibid., 17. On Ely’s proposed “National Policy for Land Utilization,” see Ely, Outlines of Land Economics, Vol. III (“Land Problems”) (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1922), 139–65.
94 Hamilton, From New Day to New Deal, 171–76.
95 Ely, “Adjusting the Tax Burden to the Tax-paying Ability of the Tax Bearer,” Proceedings of the National Conference on Land Utilization (Washington, DC: United States Government Printing Office, 1932), 126. Available at: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=umn.31951000786544i;view=1up;seq=4
96 The Conference issued eighteen recommendations including: 1) that the land resources of the United States be inventoried and its soils classified; 2) that lands classified as submarginal should be removed from agricultural production; 3) that privately owned land development enterprises should be licensed and regulated; 4) that various kinds of lands should be removed from private ownership and control; 5) that a program for soil conservation should be initiated; 6) that the possibility of a decentralization of industry and population should be studied.
97 National Resources Board, “A Report on National Planning and Public Works in Relation to Natural Resources and Including Land Use and Water Resources with Findings and Recommendations,” December 1, 1934; Marion Clawson, New Deal Planning: the NRPB (Baltimore, MD: Resources for the Future, Inc., 1981), 108.
98 National Resources Board, “A Report on National Planning,” 8.
99 Ibid., My emphasis.
100 Ibid., 15.
101 Ibid.; see also 17–19.
102 Ibid., 15.
103 Ibid., 16–17.
104 Clawson, New Deal Planning, 111.
105 Ely, Foundations of National Prosperity, 47–53.
106 National Resources Board,“A Report on National Planning,” v.
107 Ibid., v, 20.
108 Ibid., v. Compare Ely, Foundations of National Prosperity, 47–53. In “Conservation and Economic Theory,” chapter 2, Ely reiterates just how important the “German idea of the state” was to the development of conservation.
109 Howe, Socialized Germany, 7, 82–83. Howe enrolled in Johns Hopkins University in 1889, where he became a student of Ely, and some of Ely’s oldest students. See Kenneth E. Miller, From Progressive to New Dealer: Frederic C. Howe and American Liberalism (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010), chaps. 1–2.