Part 1

Contexts of Transformation

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 Clearing the Ground: The Demise of the
Social Gospel Movement and the Rise of
Neoclassicism in American Economics
Bradley W. Bateman

How did the pluralism that characterized interwar American economics

disappear so quickly by the end of the Second World War? How did a
diverse and apparently yeasty mix of giants such as Richard T. Ely,
John R. Commons, and Wesley Clair Mitchell give way to the world of
Paul Samuelson, Robert Solow, and Kenneth Arrow? The usual sus-
pects in the story would be a closely connected triumvirate: mathe-
matics, formalism, and physics envy. These different dimensions of the
process, which we still observe to be transforming economics at the end
of the century, were already in force when Samuelson published The
Foundations of Economic Analysis in 1947.
No one knows this better than historians of economic thought. Indeed,
it is almost impossible to attend a gathering of North American histo-
rians of economic thought without getting the uncomfortable feeling
that many are there to grieve over the corpse. Many come to lament a
time when economics was different, when it was better, and when it had
not been perverted by formalism and higher mathematics. Many grieve
for John Maynard Keynes and Commons, for Friedrich Hayek and
Mitchell and Ludwig von Mises.
But despite our great fondness for these dead economists and their
work, we have not very often thought about the historical currents that
carried them away from the center of the profession. The most common
way we have studied the figures from the first half of the century is to
focus intensively on their theoretical work. To the extent that many his-

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 30 Bradley W. Bateman

torians of economic thought are motivated by a desire for a different

kind of economics and a different kind of economic theory, they have
treated the careful exegesis of the ideas of heterodox economics as a
means of preserving alternative ways of being an economist. This has
produced some excellent scholarship in the close reading of texts, but it
has largely kept our focus off the context in which those theories
thrived or disappeared.
Or has it? Consider the list of economists mentioned previously:
Keynes, Commons, Hayek, von Mises, and Mitchell. It is an interna-
tional list, and yet to a large extent all were swept off the stage at the
same time and by what looks like the same forces: consolidation of the
highly mathematized neoclassical economics that came to the fore after
the Second World War. In this sense, formalism and mathematization
were certainly part of the context for decline. Mathematized neoclas-
sical economics was the outcome despite different national contexts,
but what was the particular context in which the American transforma-
tion took place?

How Was America Different?

Although neoclassicism might have triumphed in any case, this triumph
was undoubtedly the result of many complex and contingent forces. In
order to get a fuller picture of the changing nature of American eco-
nomics in the interwar period, it is worth considering one of the major
forces that helped undergird the pluralism that characterized early-
twentieth-century economics and was itself swept off the historical
stage just as that pluralism was about to give way: the Social Gospel
movement. But for better or worse, this fact is not likely to elicit much
response from contemporary economists.1 Few people today even
know of the Social Gospel movement, and still fewer know of its com-
plex history. There is considerable irony in this fact, for the Social
Gospel was an integral part of the Protestant impulse that shaped the
nation and was one of two major forces within the Progressive move-
ment before 1920. Thus, unlike many historians of economic thought

1. Nelson’s (1993) essay in the volume celebrating the first hundred years of economics at
the University of Wisconsin is a nice example. Nelson is interested in the fact that Ely was a
Social Gospeler, but she does not quite know what to make of it. The exception that proves the
rule is Gonce’s (1996) excellent essay on Commons.

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 Clearing the Ground 31

who have been forced to uncover the tacit dimensions of earlier times
in order to make sense of past intellectual debates, we are dealing with
a significant well-developed and explicit dimension of public life. The
forces that swept the Social Gospel off the historical stage, however,
were themselves a part of the increasing secularization of American
life and of a significantly altered vision within the Protestant commu-
nity after the Second World War. Thus, from our perspective today, we
cannot easily see what was important then; what was obvious has
become nearly invisible.
But although we are dealing with an important and easily identifiable
part of American history, it was a complex phenomenon with its own
complicated trajectory.2 Thus, just as E. Roy Weintraub argues in this
volume that one must consider the changing nature of mathematics and
mathematical economics to fully understand the evolution of economics,
one must also consider the changing ground of American Protestantism
to fully understand the story of early-twentieth-century economics.
Because of its complicated trajectory, the Social Gospel has been
subject to changing interpretations over time. Recently Luker (1991)
has looked at the Reconstruction period and argued that the roots of the
movement are more obviously found early in the nineteenth century in
the Second Great Awakening than is sometimes understood and that it
was a much more regionally driven phenomenon than was allowed by
earlier church historians who wanted to see it as a movement centered
in New England and the East. Thus, for instance, one can focus on the
Social Gospelers who were concerned with race relations and find
explicit links with the abolitionist ferment that arose from the Second
Great Awakening. Looking at the later years of the movement, Gorrell
(1988) has found that in the first two decades of the twentieth century it
achieved a sudden and unexpected victory when the mainline Protes-
tant churches institutionalized its agenda in the Social Creed of the
Churches, a document focused on industrial relations that committed
the churches to an activist agenda.3
The changes and continuities in the life of the Social Gospel are both
important to our story not just because they are uniquely American but
also because they help explain the force and ambiguous legacy of the

2. Perhaps the best recent attempt at a historiography of the Social Gospel is Luker 1991,
1 – 6, 419 – 32. For more standard histories, see Ahlstrom 1975, May 1949, and Schlesinger
1932. Marty 1984 and 1986 provide a richer, more contemporary picture.
3. I make more of Gorrell’s (1988) argument later.

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 32 Bradley W. Bateman

idea in early-twentieth-century American economics.4 Likewise, study-

ing the movement’s vicissitudes should help us understand why there is
more to our story than just the rise of mathematics and formalism.

The Kingdom of God on This Earth

One easy way to see the changes and continuities in the movement is to
look at it in the mid-1890s. In retrospect, the Social Gospel movement
is often said to have run roughly from 1865 to 1920, but those who par-
ticipated in it did not even use that name regularly until the twentieth
century. In the mid-1890s the most prominent manifestation of what we
now call the Social Gospel movement was the Kingdom movement.5
The Kingdom movement is best known for its gyring prophet,
George D. Herron, but it owed its existence to the organizational genius
of George A. Gates and much of its national recognition and prestige to
Josiah Strong. Gates was the president of Iowa College and had mas-
terminded the purchase of the Northwestern Congregationalist and its
transformation into the movement’s national organ, The Kingdom,
which he edited.6 Strong was the early proponent of social Christian-
ity whose Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis
(1885) was the best-selling book in America in the fifty years after the
publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).7
The name of the Kingdom movement came from the one theme that
remained central to the Social Gospel message from Washington Glad-

4. The Social Gospel and Christian socialism also had important careers in England, but
they reached their prime earlier there. And the economists who defined late-nineteenth-
century British economics are distinguished from their American counterparts by having lost
their religious faith before becoming economists.
5. The best history of the Kingdom movement is Handy (1950).
6. Gates, who would later serve as president of both Pomona and Fisk Colleges, is poorly
served by historians. The best source is still Isabel Smith Gates’s 1915 biography.
7. See Marty 1984 for a nice history of Strong in the Social Gospel movement. After read-
ing an earlier draft of this essay, a non-American questioned the significance of comparing
Strong’s book to Stowe’s. This is a good question, although not one that would likely occur to
an American reader. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the nation’s greatest commercial publishing suc-
cess at midcentury and is often credited with inciting American Protestants (in the North)
against slavery. Stowe was the daughter of one of the most famous early-nineteenth-century
Protestant ministers and was married to a well-known minister. The success of Strong’s book
both indicates the magnitude of his influence and points to the fact that by the end of the cen-
tury the country’s fundamentally Protestant makeup was still strong enough to determine the
success of a best-selling book. Strong used his fame to revitalize the interdenominational
(Protestant) movement called the Evangelical Alliance.

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 Clearing the Ground 33

den in the 1880s to Walter Rauschenbusch in the first decades of the

twentieth century: the realization of the Kingdom of God on this earth.
The idea of the Kingdom of God had been central to American thought
since the arrival of the Puritans and Pilgrims in the seventeenth century,
but by the late nineteenth century it had gone through three distinct
phases. Initially, the idea had referred to the “sovereignty of God” over
the individual conscience and only indirectly to the church and polity
created by individuals who accepted God’s sovereignty in their lives.
During the Revivalist period of the First Great Awakening, the King-
dom was understood in an intensely internal sense and focused more
narrowly on the salvation of individual souls. In the Second Great
Awakening, early in the nineteenth century, the internal “reign of
Christ” was expanded through an argument about God’s love to include
social reforms such as temperance and abolition.
The movement of evangelical Christians toward social reform in the
antebellum period marked a clear turning point in American Christian-
ity, but the Social Gospel had still not been fully born. Its arrival would
require two related changes in American society.
The first great change was the transformation of America’s economy
after the Civil War. As the full effects of the industrial revolution hit
the nation — increased productivity, immigration, concentration of eco-
nomic power, labor unrest, and urban poverty — America’s traditional
self-image as a rural society of pious individuals quickly faded away. In
response to these economic changes came a second change: many the-
ologians began to argue that the Kingdom of God referred not only to
the need for the salvation of individual souls but also to the need to
build new and more just social institutions. These institutions would be
the basis for the new earthly Kingdom. Whereas their predecessors had
been premillennialists, believing that Christ’s thousand-year reign
would come at some unspecified time in the future, this new breed of
Christians looked at the human suffering around them and declared
that the millennium had already arrived. Thus, the new Christians were
called postmillennialists, and their task was to begin building the King-
dom then and there.8
Gates, Herron, and Strong were postmillennialist evangelical Chris-
tians who wanted to redeem the institutions of the new industrial

8. This account of the idea of the Kingdom of God in America draws heavily on Niebuhr’s
1937 classic.

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 34 Bradley W. Bateman

America. Fogel (1996) has referred to this movement as the Third

Great Awakening. One of the group’s many vehicles for evangelizing
the country was the American Institute of Christian Sociology, a sum-
mer program held at Iowa College. The institute operated as a Chau-
tauqua, with hundreds of academics and ministers traveling to Iowa to
hear Strong lecture and Herron prophesy.
Among the organizers of the institute with Gates, Herron, and
Strong was one of the two great Social Gospel leaders in the 1880s,
Richard T. Ely. Ely and Washington Gladden, a Congregational minis-
ter in Columbus, Ohio, were the most recognized names in the social
Christianity movement by 1890, although in the wake of the Haymar-
ket riots in 1886, there had been a lessening of fervor and Ely had been
investigated by the authorities at Johns Hopkins University because of
his alleged support for socialism. The Kingdom movement was attrac-
tive to Ely and to his former student John R. Commons, however,
exactly because of the explicit interest of Herron and Gates in continu-
ing to explore socialism as the earthly manifestation of God’s Kingdom.
The 1890s were a turbulent time in American society — labor strife
(1892 – 94), financial panic (1893), depression (1893 – 96), and drought
(1894) — and the “new” religion was still much on the minds of these
two evangelical economists. Although Ely had toned his message down
somewhat in the wake of Haymarket, he had not given up his dream.
And Commons, because he was younger and had not finished graduate
school, had not been forced to modify his views at all. Thus, Gates and
Ely’s good friend Jesse Macy, the professor of constitutional history at
Iowa College, had little difficulty drawing Ely and Commons into the
inner circle of the Kingdom movement.9
Herron’s increasingly radical message was too much for either of the
evangelical economists, however. Herron had risen to national promi-
nence in 1890 with a sermon titled “The Message of Jesus for Men of
Wealth” (in Herron 1894). The sermon is a postmillennialist message
that Herron delivered across the country with a premillennialist’s fer-
vor. He had mastered the techniques of his rivals, but instead of calling
individual sinners down to the “nervous bench,” Herron called down an

9. For more about Macy, see his autobiographical writings posthumously edited by Noyes
(1933). Commons and Macy shared common Quaker roots; both men’s families had migrated
from North Carolina to Indiana at the same time to get out of slave territory. Commons
(1894a, 1894b, 1894c, 1894d, 1895a, 1895b, 1896, 1898) best demonstrate the explicitly evan-
gelical nature of his early work.

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 Clearing the Ground 35

entire group: the owners of capital. And like Billy Sunday, his most
prominent premillennialist adversary, he then proceeded to lay out their
sins slowly and carefully before calling for their repentance and offer-
ing them salvation. In his sermon “The Christian Revival of the
Nation,” Herron (1895, 179) stated: “We have failed. We have betrayed
our trust, and forsaken our mission. God is disappointed in this nation.
We are a fallen nation, an apostate people.” After his arrival at Iowa
College in 1893, Herron moved beyond his simple biblical exhorta-
tions, however. On the one hand, he edged closer and closer to an out-
right call for socialist revolution, and on the other, he called for a redef-
inition of Christian sociology along nonempirical, purely evangelical
lines:
We are in the beginnings of a revolution that will strain all existing
religious and political institutions, and test the wisdom and heroism
of the earth’s bravest souls; a revolution that will regenerate society
with the judgments of infinite love. (“The Social Revolution,” in Her-
ron 1893, 14)
What I have here to say treats of work, wages, and wealth; of the
rights and duties of capital and labor. And I approach the social prob-
lem, not from the standpoint of the political economist, but of the
Christian apostle; Christ did not save the world by a scientific study
of the economic conditions of society. Nor shall I make use of statis-
tics, the value of which is largely fictitious; it is a fallacy that statis-
tics cannot lie.10 (11)
Any, or all, of this might have been too much for Ely. Other promi-
nent academics, such as Albion Small, warned him to dissociate him-
self from Herron and the American Institute of Christian Sociology
(Furner 1975, 151; Ross 1991, 126 – 27). And although Ely was almost
certainly comfortable with a call to reexamine the relationship between
capital and labor, he may not have been so keen on Herron’s increasing
use of the word “revolution.” Nor would he have been likely to feel com-
fortable with Herron’s preaching style. Ely had escaped his Methodist
background early on to find a home in the Episcopal Church, so Her-
ron’s revivalist intensity may have been unappealing. At any rate, Ely
moved away from the institute after 1894, first trying unsuccessfully to

10. The best statement of Herron’s (1894) version of Christian sociology is in his sermon
“The Scientific Ground of a Christian Sociology.”

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 36 Bradley W. Bateman

move the summer institute to New York in 1895 and then abandoning it
altogether.
Commons was put off by Herron almost immediately. Although
Commons was recruited by Ely to serve as the secretary for the insti-
tute, he heard Herron preach in Chicago in 1893 and was instantly wary
of his message. In fact, he claims in his autobiography that after hear-
ing Herron, he determined to change the focus of his research.
At Bloomington I made my first venture in activities outside the aca-
demic field. The American Institute of Christian Sociology was orga-
nized, in 1893, to support an American version of what had been
known in Europe as Christian Socialism. The aim was to present
Christ as the living Master and King and Christian law as the ulti-
mate rule for human society, to be realized on earth. I was made Sec-
retary of the Institute. An eminent minister of the Gospel was made
our lecturer. I became upset as to the meaning of Christian Socialism
and Christian Sociology. On one night of his series our lecturer iden-
tified Christianity with pure Anarchism; on the next night he identi-
fied it with Communism. He identified each with the love of God.
But I now became mystified on the meaning of Love itself. I could
not make out whether Christian Socialism meant Love of Man or
Love of Woman. On this issue our Institute of Christian Sociology
split and disappeared.
I became suspicious of Love as the basis of social reform. I visited
the Amana community of Christian Communists in Iowa. They dis-
tinguished rigidly between love of man and love of woman. I studied
Mazzini, the great Italian leader of Christian Socialism fifty years
before. He founded Christian Socialism on the Duties of Man,
including duties to wife and family. Eventually, after many years, in
working out my institutional economics, I made Duty and Debt,
instead of Liberty and Love, the foundations of institutional eco-
nomics. (Commons 1934, 51 – 52)11
In the summer of 1893, Commons did not attend the institute because
of family illness, and in 1894 he again failed to attend. But he was
happy to publish in The Kingdom, and he worked out some of his best
early ideas there between 1894 and 1898.
11. Commons’s recollection here is not completely accurate. The questions of “free-love”
and the sanctity of marriage did not become central to Herron’s career for another four to five
years. Commons is conflating several years of Herron’s life into one year.

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 Clearing the Ground 37

The combination of Herron’s ability to redefine the Kingdom of God

in the public mind as revolutionary socialism and the defeat of William
Jennings Bryan and the Populists in 1896 took a clear toll on both Ely
and Commons. Both moved toward the center in their public stances
and their professional work after they were forced in academic trials in
the 1890s to determine their fitness to teach.12 They continued to cham-
pion the rights of labor, and both stayed very much at the liberal end of
the economics profession, but the climate was changing and so were
they. They could remain “ethical economists”—the term Ely had coined
in the 1880s for his new socially concerned, activist vision of profes-
sional economists — but increasingly the focus of their work would
change.

An Unexpected Turn
The tone and feel of American economics in the next two decades
almost certainly could not have been predicted in 1900. The profession
was now the home of several prominent former advocates of Christian
socialism, all of whom had made their own compromises with their for-
mer position.
The most prominent, of course, was John Bates Clark. After leading
the call for Christian socialism in the 1870s and 1880s, Clark was now
the foremost marginalist in the American profession and the “scien-
tific defender” of American capitalism.13 Ely was the giant of ethical
economics, and his Outlines of Economics (1893) remained the best-
selling economics textbook in the country until the Second World
War.14 Commons came back from exile in the private sector and began
building his distinguished career as the founder of American labor eco-
nomics and the leader of institutional economics (Commons 1934).
The story, however, involves much more than just the ways each
man changed and adapted his message, although this point is important.
Although each of the three would go a different way in his professional

12. Ely’s trial at the University of Wisconsin took place in 1894. The trustees of Syracuse
University voted in March 1899 to discontinue Commons’s chair. For the best account of these
and other academic trials, see Furner 1975.
13. For quite different accounts of the trajectory of Clark’s career, see Everett 1946 and
Morgan 1994, on the one hand, and Henry 1995, on the other. The term “scientific defender,”
applied to Clark’s defense of capitalism, is Henry’s.
14. In its revised editions, Outlines of Economics sold 350,000 copies between the First
and Second World Wars. See Rader 1966, 160 – 61.

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 38 Bradley W. Bateman

work, together they demonstrate the tension that was central to the plu-
ralism that existed up to the Second World War. Clark, who moved
away from Christian socialism a decade before Ely and Commons, was
the leading American figure in both marginalist and theoretical eco-
nomics, but his work was nonetheless suffused with a strong moral tone
(Morgan 1994). Indeed, one might argue that the moral tone was even
more important after 1900, as Clark was finished by then with true
theoretical innovation. And as long as Ely’s textbook served as the
standard-bearer of the profession and as the first text of most students,
marginalism would stay in the protective wrapping of an ethical mes-
sage much less conservative than Clark’s. Ely’s text introduced the stu-
dent to marginalism but made it very clear that utility maximization
and profit maximization were not the only, or the most important,
behaviors of the people economists studied.15 Commons was actually
carrying out the hard work of building the historical, institutional eco-
nomics that Ely championed in his text. Even a prominent economist
with absolutely no background in the Social Gospel movement like
E. R. A. Seligman (1902, 1905) was engaged in working out the same
pattern of concerns and tensions that Clark, Commons, and Ely had
helped bring to the center of American economics (Ross 1991, 188–95).
The particular historical contingencies that had brought the evangel-
ical economists to the fore during the Gilded Age crisis had thus largely
defined the ways American economics was done after the turn of the
century. Marginalism and historical analysis were the two theoretical
poles in the American profession, each informed by a strong desire for
social amelioration. Thus, even as marginalism progressed, it was
never separated from provisos that allowed for the importance of larger
social concerns and for an explicit acceptance that not all behavior was
self-centered and maximizing. The Social Gospel message was com-
patible with several types of economic analysis, as long as the focus of
the analysis was clearly ethical in nature; both Clark’s concern with the
fairness of marginal productivity pricing and Commons’s analysis of
the nature and fairness of market transactions could fall within the
acceptable realm of the dominant Protestant sensibility. Thus, during
the first two decades of the twentieth century, the Social Gospel mes-

15. Although Ely was already the author of An Introduction to Political Economy (1889),
he wrote Outlines expressly for the purposes of making a more analytically rigorous textbook
and introducing marginal utility analysis, albeit wrapped in a tight ethical jacket.

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 Clearing the Ground 39

sage served the function of sanctioning plural approaches within the

economics profession. It defined a mood and temper among a large part
of the profession that were stronger than any one school of thought.
American society continued to change as it entered the new century,
and this change helped determine the acceptance of the newly evolved
American economics and the economists themselves. The most obvi-
ous change was the Progressive movement.16 In the first decade of the
century, much of the fear, dislocation, and desire of the Gilded Age was
channeled into a broad-based political movement. This movement had
many fronts and varied agendas, but it was exactly the environment in
which the reform message of people like Ely and Commons found
an interested audience. And Clark turned away from new theoretical
development to address broader questions of the legitimacy of labor
unions and world peace. Institutionalists and marginalists could coex-
ist, despite different methods, as long as the issue was reform rather
than revolution and as long as ethical concerns informed their work.
The Social Gospel had itself taken a significant turn in the first
decade of the century. By 1900 the movement had reached a terrible
nadir.17 Many church leaders had been suspicious of the movement in
the 1880s and early 1890s, but as the Kingdom movement had grown
and as Herron had become better known, they felt no compunction in
shunning it altogether. Then Herron scandalized the nation in 1901
when, after being forced to resign his chair of applied Christianity at
Iowa College the year before because of his mounting radicalism, he
divorced his wife and married Carrie Rand, the young daughter of the
philanthropist who had originally endowed his chair. He had also
become a major force in the new American Socialist Party, personally
helping unite the Morris Hillquit and Eugene Debs factions of Ameri-
can socialism. All of this was too much for the mainline Protestants to
whom the Social Gospel leaders had to make their appeals. Herron’s
politics made him an outcast in almost all Protestant circles, but his
divorce and remarriage made him a pariah. When he lost his ordination
in Iowa because of his divorce, it made headlines across the country

16. I am using “progressivism” as this movement’s name even though an older, rich sec-
ondary literature disputes whether “progressivism” or “reform” should be used to label the
political activity these terms describe. “Reform” was the more common term at the time,
although “progressivism” is the term most often used now.
17. The sense of the collapse of the movement at the end of the 1890s, including Herron’s
scandal, and its unexpected rebirth are captured nicely in Hopkins 1940.

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 40 Bradley W. Bateman

and undercut his effectiveness as a Socialist leader. Because his new

wife’s family had paid his ex-wife sixty thousand dollars as part of the
divorce settlement, the popular press termed his new relationship “the
buying and selling of wives.” Virtually every time his name appeared in
the press in regard to his Socialist activities, the “buying and selling”
comments were repeated. This ultimately led to Herron’s self-imposed
exile in Italy (Hillquit 1934, 62 – 64).
Herron’s fall from grace was hard on the Social Gospel movement,
but the conditions the movement addressed were not disappearing. In
fact, activists like Jacob Riis and the muckrakers were finally beginning
to make people aware of the abject poverty in America’s cities, and the
relevance of the Christian message to these conditions was obvious to
churchgoing Americans. New leaders began to rise. Walter Rauschen-
busch, the first great American theologian in a century, was becoming
better known after 1900. He later stated: “All whose recollection runs
back to 1900 will remember that as a time for lonesomeness. We were
few and we shouted in the wilderness” (Rauschenbusch 1912, 9). As
Gorrell (1988) has nicely argued, the defining moment of the move-
ment’s resurgence came in 1908 when the mainline churches finally
gave up their historical reticence and signed the Social Creed of the
Churches. The creed consisted of eleven principles that formed a man-
ifesto for action as well as a statement of faith:
• For equal rights and complete justice for all men in all stations of
life.
• For the principle of conciliation and arbitration in industrial dis-
sensions.
• For the protection of the worker from dangerous machinery, occu-
pational diseases, injuries and mortality.
• For the abolition of child labor.
• For such regulation of the conditions of labor for women as shall
safeguard the physical and moral health of the community.
• For the suppression of the “sweating system.”
• For the gradual and reasonable reduction of the hours of labor to
the lowest practical point, with work for all; and for that degree of
leisure for all which is the condition of the highest human life.
• For a release from employment one day in seven.
• For a living wage in every industry.
• For the highest wage that each industry can afford, and for the

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 Clearing the Ground 41

most equitable division of the products of industry that can ulti-

mately be devised.
• For the recognition of the Golden Rule and the mind of Christ as
the supreme law of society and the sure remedy for all social ills.
(Hopkins 1940, 291)
The Social Creed was formally accepted by virtually every mainline
Protestant denomination in America through the guise of the Federal
Council of Churches.18 By 1912, the creed was being introduced to men
around the country by the Men and Religion Forward movement,
which was at that time “the most comprehensive evangelical effort ever
undertaken in the United States” (Hopkins 1940, 296). Traveling teams
of experts made nine thousand addresses nationwide to more than 1.5
million people in one nine-month period.
In this new world, Ely and Commons were in their element. Ely was
widely acknowledged for his many reform efforts of the 1880s and
1890s and used his prestige to undertake two new efforts: the founding
of land economics and the writing of his most important institutionalist
text, Property and Contract in Their Relations to the Distribution of
Wealth (1914). Commons evolved in this period into a leading force not
only in labor economics but also in the design and implementation of
social insurance schemes. The public profiles of Ely and Commons were
no longer seen as threats to their academic credibility, and in this way the
last phase of the Social Gospel period may be seen as one of the forces
that contributed to the continued acceptance of diverse views within
the profession. It was not just that Commons and Ely had moved toward
the center; the Protestant population, coming from the other direction,
was now standing behind them in the center as well. And the conserva-
tive Clark was by this time being dragged to the center, for instance, in
his reexamination of unions and his acknowledgment of their value.
Not all American economists in 1920 would have happily identified
themselves with the whole range of Ely’s and Commons’s work, and
certainly not all American economists then were liberal Protestants, but
in the glow of the Social Gospel’s golden years, historical and institu-
tional approaches were accepted and respected. Simon Nelson Patten
and Arthur Hadley could fit comfortably in this world, as could follow-

18. The council amended the creed in 1912 to include the provisions demanding one day in
seven as a day of rest, acceptance of a “minimum living wage” in every industry, and an effort
to pay “maximum possible wages” in any case.

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 42 Bradley W. Bateman

ers of Henry George and anyone else with religious roots and a pro-
gressive agenda. Even old Social Gospelers like Clark were swept
along by this tide; in fact, Ely’s text made the presence of marginalism
perfectly welcome in the mainstream by qualifying and cosseting it in
the language of higher ethical aims.

Another Unexpected Turn

Someone reading about the Social Gospel movement for the first time
might well wonder why this movement, if it was so central to American
culture, is virtually unknown to us today. How did it disappear so com-
pletely from sight if it was such a large force in American culture?
One answer would be that its influence, if not its name, is familiar to
virtually all of us in the guise of Martin Luther King Jr.’s work in the
Civil Rights movement. King learned the theology of the Social Gospel
at Boston University. Personalism, one of the concepts that animated
the Social Gospel in both the late nineteenth and the early twentieth
centuries, was at the heart of the message King preached.
But although the message has been able to move America in the late
twentieth century, its name is still unknown because of its ironic and
tragic success in the second decade of the century. After the Social
Creed of the Churches, the movement became so much a part of main-
line churches and of the majority Protestant viewpoint that it was trans-
formed into a variant of its early ancestors in the seventeenth and eigh-
teenth centuries: it became a form of nationalist ideology in the hands
of those who still conceived of America as the special land prepared for
the Kingdom that was to follow the Protestant Reformation. Many
Protestant ministers with a minimal commitment to social reform hap-
pily embraced the return to a nationalist theology and made this nation-
alism the center of their Social Gospel message.
Woodrow Wilson was an active proponent of the Social Gospel, and
among his core constituencies in 1912 were reforming Protestants
(Marty 1984, 361 – 64). Unfortunately, when the country entered the
First World War, many of the nationalistic preachers used their pulpits
to promote the war and excoriate the Germans. Social Gospel giants
like Rauschenbusch and Edward O. Steiner were sickened by the war
(Marty 1984; Jordan 1983). But amid the anti-German war propaganda,
their voices were drowned out. In his somewhat biased but nonetheless
chilling account of this period, Abrams (1969) documents the awful

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 Clearing the Ground 43

truth of the nationalistic preachers’ conduct. A common refrain in ser-

mons in 1917 was, “If Christ were alive today, he’d put the bayonet all
the way in . . . and turn it” (Abrams 1969, 67 – 70).
Not surprisingly, in the shattered postwar world these ministers lost
their moral authority. No longer was the public interested in their
nationalistic idea of the Kingdom of God. The few true leaders who had
refused to allow themselves to be sucked into the war mentality were
shattered by the experience. Rauschenbusch died heartbroken in 1918
four months before the armistice. Steiner slowly overcame his bitter-
ness after the war, but in the new despairing, cynical mood of the Lost
Generation, he was increasingly seen as an outdated figure. Then, with
the Great Crash and the Great Depression, the country slid from reli-
gious indifference to a “religious depression” marked by large decreases
in church attendance, mission giving, and public discussion of explicitly
religious ideas (Handy 1960; Marty 1986, 227 – 36).19 The one giant of
American theology in the 1930s, Reinhold Niebuhr (1932), explicitly
refused to identify himself with the Social Gospel theology. He saw its
dream of a Kingdom on this earth as naive and ill conceived in the face
of the awesome reality of the First World War. Although he was a strong
advocate of organized labor and preached often about poverty, he iden-
tified himself as a neoconservative theologian because of his deep belief
in people’s fundamental sinfulness. This unblinking focus on the fallen
nature of humankind earned him the label of “realist.”

The Changing Climate of Creativity

Although it is not surprising that Protestant theologians became more
“realistic” at the same time that neoclassical economics was consoli-
dating around a new, sharper, and unfettered model of individual opti-
mization, it would undoubtedly be wrong to attribute any direct influ-
ence to Niebuhr or his followers. Theologians like Niebuhr saw the
same reality in human selfishness as the economists did, but these were
independent discoveries of old truths; the economists were no longer
taking their lead from theologians. After the First World War, the
ground on which American economics was being built had been cleared

19. In retrospect, it seems clear that the idea of a “religious depression” during the 1920s
and 1930s was largely descriptive of the mainline Protestant experience. Church history was,
even at midcentury, largely about the Protestant churches.

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 44 Bradley W. Bateman

of Protestant influence.20 The movement that had spurred the early

work of many great turn-of-the-century economists and had later
helped sustain some of the diversity in American economics was now
a spent force in the larger culture and in the discipline of economics.
But although there was no direct connection between Niebuhr’s the-
ology and the newly evolving neoclassicism of the interwar years, it is
not difficult to see their common relation to the period’s new intellec-
tual climate. Crunden (1982, ix) has described progressivism as a “cli-
mate of creativity” in which a generation of Americans attempted to
create a “spiritual reformation to fulfill God’s plan for democracy in the
New World.” Using this framework, Crunden connects the work of peo-
ple in many different fields: Jane Addams, the cofounder of Hull
House; Herron; John Dewey, the philosopher and educational reformer;
Ely; Commons; Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect; Charles Ives, the
composer; the muckrakers; Edgar Lee Masters, the poet; and Upton
Sinclair, the novelist. Indeed, it is easy to see the common links in these
individuals’ Protestant background, their concern for social redemp-
tion, and the central place of ethical behavior in their thinking. Like-
wise, it is easy to see the common focus on selfish behavior in Nie-
buhr’s work and in the newly evolving neoclassicism of an economist
like Frank Knight as a reflection of the “realism” that characterized the
“creative climate” of the interwar period. As Americans let go of the old
world of progressivism, with its sense of hope and its ethical earnest-
ness, they embraced the starker, more “realistic” vision of Ernest Hem-
ingway’s novels and Edward Hopper’s paintings.
Initially, however, the new intellectual climate did not give a clear
field to neoclassicism. Progressivism is typically described as having
had two branches: the Social Gospel movement, or Christian Progres-
sives, and the scientific Progressives such as Frederick W. Taylor, the
industrial efficiency expert, and Herbert Croly, the editor of the New
Republic. In the aftermath of the First World War, the scientific Pro-
gressives, who had come to prominence only after 1910, were much
less affected than the Christian Progressives.21 Efficiency became a

20. Another related current in American society at this time was the secularization of the
universities. This was a complex process in which trustees were often anxious to point to reli-
gious life on campus while, in fact, religious tests and affiliations were being formally elim-
inated. See Marsden 1994.
21. Both Thompson (1987) and Danbom (1987) discuss the impact of the First World War
on Christian Progressives and scientific Progressives.

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 Clearing the Ground 45

hallmark of the interwar era for political and cultural reasons. Although
Warren Harding had promised to return the country to “normalcy” in
the 1920 presidential race, by which he clearly meant that he would
move away from Wilson’s preachy moralizing, he was nonetheless
motivated to ameliorate friction between labor and capital. “Efficiency”
served his purpose perfectly because of its explicit promise to increase
both wages and profits through increased productivity and output. But
in addition to providing a rhetoric that was seen as more “realistic”
than Wilson’s old calls for a higher, more ethical public conduct, it also
helped assuage the unease and uncertainty spawned by the new culture
of mass production and consumerism. Between 1916 and 1920, the
number of registered automobiles jumped from one million to eight
million; between 1920 and 1929, it increased from eight million to
twenty-three million. In this new world of assembly-line production
and the changing nature of work, the idea of efficiency was not just
about making the old system more productive and fair but also about
making sure that the newly evolving system would work well and in
everyone’s favor.
In this new “realistic” world of efficiency and scientific management,
the institutionalists made a much bigger initial impact than the neo-
classicists. Drawing from Thorstein Veblen’s ideas about the impor-
tance of engineers to the new industrial system and Ely’s and Com-
mons’s legacy of collecting data to interpret the evolving nature of
economic activity, institutionalists set out after the First World War to
build a science of controlling the economy. Wesley Clair Mitchell is the
epitome of this movement in the history of American economic
thought. When he set up the National Bureau of Economic Research
(NBER) in 1920, he represented both the impulse toward a “scientific”
understanding of the economy and the institutionalists’ central place in
that enterprise. But, of course, he was not alone; John Maurice Clark,
Sumner Slichter, Walton Hamilton, and Rexford Tugwell were some of
the leading names in American economics in the 1920s, and each was an
institutionalist. The titles of their articles in the post–World War I period
reveal their interests: “An Example of Municipal Research,” “Overhead
Costs in Modern Industry,” “Economical Theory in an Era of Social
Readjustment,” “Industrial Morale,” “Economic and Social Aspects of
Increased Productivity,” “Lines of Action, Adaptation, and Control,”
“Law and Economics,” “The Institutional Approach to Economic The-
ory,” “The Economic Basis of Business Regulation,” “The Principle of

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 46 Bradley W. Bateman

Planning and the Institution of Laissez-Faire.” The places in which

these articles were published also indicate their prominence: the Amer-
ican Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the
Quarterly Journal of Economics. (See Roger E. Backhouse’s essay in
this volume for a study of how publishing in the top journals changed
in subsequent decades.)
The institutionalists’ efforts to examine, explain, and control indus-
trial activity were very much a part of the climate of creativity that
Márcia L. Balisciano describes in her essay on planning in this vol-
ume. Although the adherents of efficiency and planning were them-
selves often strikingly naive in their assumptions about the disinter-
estedness of engineers and the appeal of their ideas to laborers, they
had, in their own minds, replaced the moral earnestness of the Chris-
tian Progressives with a scientific program that was vital and widely
respected.

Then What Happened?

In the 1920s, it looked as though American economics would continue
to be plural. Institutionalism was clearly the dominant school of
thought, but its position was not monolithic. John Bates Clark’s mar-
ginalist legacy was still alive and beginning to flourish in the hands of
theorists like Jacob Viner and Frank Knight. Irving Fisher published
regularly on index numbers, the value of the dollar, and business
cycles. Allyn Young was a rising star. American economics was diverse
and looked as if it would stay that way. So what happened?
One thing that happened was the Great Depression, of course. The
depression might have been expected to positively affect the status of
the institutionalists most among all the schools then in existence. They
were, after all, the economists in 1929 most centrally involved in shap-
ing and controlling economic performance, and so their services would
have been most in demand. Laissez-faire was not a popular idea as the
1930s unfolded (see Anne Mayhew’s essay in this volume). The expec-
tation of their expertise may not have helped the institutionalists in
the long run, however, for ultimately they were unable to provide a set
of policy recommendations that were seen as successful against the
depression. Tugwell’s central place in the First New Deal and the spec-
tacular failure of his recovery plan, the National Industrial Recovery

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 Clearing the Ground 47

Act, between 1933 and 1935 must have taken some of the sheen off
institutionalism’s star.
More was involved, however, than just a run of bad luck. Already by
the beginning of the 1930s marginalists were busy attacking institu-
tionalism; the tolerance and pluralism of the first two decades of the
century were breaking down. Knight’s vicious attack on Slichter’s new
textbook in 1932 is emblematic of the changing environment. Knight’s
review ran over forty pages and elicited a long reply from Slichter
(1932b). Likewise, the attack on “Measurement without Theory” by
Tjalling Koopmans in 1947 was a new kind of direct confrontation in
which the older spirit of pluralism was eviscerated. Koopmans’s attack
was especially devastating because a large part of the vitality of insti-
tutionalism in the 1920s had depended on its self-concept as “scien-
tific.” Because institutionalists collected data and examined them to
establish tentative theories and hypotheses, they had seen themselves
as more scientific than marginalists, who depended on a priori assump-
tions about human behavior and insisted on focusing on equilibrium
outcomes. Koopmans’s attack, however, put the very definition of sci-
ence in dispute. If economic science could be redefined so that it
required strong a priori theoretical assumptions, the validity of the
entire enterprise set up by Mitchell at the NBER would be in question,
at least in the way he had envisioned it.
In addition to attacks from marginalists and statisticians, institution-
alism also faced a threat from the new Keynesian consensus that
formed at the end of the interwar period. Here the problem was not
unfriendly attack, however, but the attraction of Keynesianism to insti-
tutionalists, especially those in government.22 As Keynesianism sup-
planted the many other kinds of planning that had been available in the
late 1920s and early 1930s and became the dominant framework for
economic policy and for the amelioration of capitalist dysfunction,
older institutionalist research into industry structure and business
cycles fell out of fashion. For some institutionalists, the functional
forms and geometry of the Keynesian model must have seemed a wel-
come apparatus in the face of growing charges that institutionalists
were nontheoretical. But this was a chimera, of course, for the neo-

22. Collins (1990) discusses how the institutionalist Leon Keyserling established the
Council of Economic Advisers as a government stronghold for institutional economists who
had become Keynesians.

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 48 Bradley W. Bateman

classical synthesis of John Hicks, Roy Harrod, and Samuelson would

soon make Keynesian macroeconomics into a healthy branch of utility-
maximizing neoclassicism.23
So what happened after the 1920s is a complex story in which an
aggressive, self-confident group of neoclassical economists, through
luck and hard work, pushed their most vital competitor out of the
picture.

Cleared Ground
At this point, we are back to the triumvirate of mathematics, formal-
ism, and physics envy, the primary characteristics of the neoclassicism
that pushed institutionalism off the stage and came to dominate Amer-
ican economics. But the success of the particular brand of marginalist
analysis that triumphed in this story was not foreordained; it came
about through a series of sometimes unlikely twists and turns.
When John Bates Clark developed his marginalist ideas at the end of
the nineteenth century, his work was highly mathematical. But despite
his renown, his work did not become predominant. On the contrary, it
became one type of a larger American economics that focused on “eth-
ical” solutions to social problems. Ely’s and Commons’s work in a more
historical, less theoretical mode was equally valued as a part of this
“ethical economics.”
But after the First World War, the ground shifted. The old Protestant
influence of the Social Gospel was swept away after 1918, and a new
sensibility began to define American economics. Now, instead of an
ethical economics that sought to reform the nation, America had a sci-
entific economics that sought to make the nation more efficient and to
control its economy. At first this new environment continued to support
plural approaches to economics, but eventually pluralism gave way.
Whereas institutional economics seemed perfectly “scientific” in 1922,
by 1947, it was no longer unquestionably regarded as such.
Institutionalism had suffered other setbacks and unfortunate turns,
particularly its identification with the First New Deal and the rise of

23. The charge that institutionalists were nontheoretical or antitheoretical was false, of
course. It is more accurate to say that they were multitheoretical. Institutionalists openly
debated many theoretical points of view but could not agree on any one theory. Institution-
alists in the first half of the twentieth century certainly could not agree that simple utility and
profit maximization sufficiently defined economic theory.

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 Clearing the Ground 49

Keynesianism, but the usurpation of the label “scientific” by neoclas-

sicists was the worst upset. By supplanting a definition of science that
was akin to evolutionary biology (collect, examine, and then hypothe-
size) with a sense that more closely approximated physics (theorize,
then use data for confirmation), neoclassicists effectively pushed institu-
tionalism off the stage. In a world defined by “realism” and “science,” it
was impossible for a research program to thrive if it was not “scientific.”
There is, perhaps, some irony in this end, for although the Social
Gospel had undoubtedly helped sustain a more pluralistic American
economics, its demise is usually seen as the beginning of a more plu-
ralistic American society. The Protestantism that had served as a
national ideology for over two centuries had helped keep Catholics,
Jews, women, blacks, and Asians from effective political representa-
tion, but that would slowly begin to change after 1918 as modern inter-
est-group liberalism began to emerge.24 As that pluralism in the larger
society began to become a reality, the more modest pluralism of Amer-
ican economics began to disappear. After the demise of the Social
Gospel, neither American society nor American economics would ever
be the same.

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