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Anger, Irony, and the Formal Rationality of Professionalism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2010

Ajay K. Mehrotra
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Extract

One of the challenges in writing about the history of American law and political economy is determining the proper amount of historical context necessary to make sense of past institutional and organizational change. Where to begin and end a historical narrative and how much to include about the broader social, cultural, political, and economic conditions of a particular place and time are, of course, questions that accompany any attempt to reconstruct the past. How one addresses these issues invariably shapes the motives and intentions that can be ascribed to historical figures. In their eloquent and thoughtful comments, Christopher Capozzola and Michael Bernstein have urged me to think more carefully about these issues, about where my story begins and ends, about the broader social, political, and material circumstances that animated World War I state-building, and about the seemingly apolitical ideas and actions of the Treasury lawyers who are the center of “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys.”

Type
Forum: Response
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 28 , Issue 1 , February 2010 , pp. 241 - 248
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2010

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References

1. Christopher Capozzola, “Raising Revenue and Raising Hell,” (in this volume).

2. Michael Bernstein, “Tocqueville v. Weber” (in this volume, 237, 240).

3. Capozzola, Christopher, Uncle Sam Wants You: World War I and the Making of the Modern American Citizen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Capozzola, “Raising Revenue,” 227, 230, 231.

4. Scholars have generally referred to the quasi-voluntary compliance of tax payments mainly because of the coercive power of the state to enforce the collection of tax payments (Levi, Margaret, Of Rule and Revenue [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989]Google Scholar).

5. “An Urgent Duty And A Glorious Privilege,” The Literary Digest, January 12, 1918, 32; Roper, Daniel C., Fifty Years of Public Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1941), 180Google Scholar; Daniel Roper, “The War Revenue Act and the Taxpayer,” Dec. 13, 1917, 5, Box 27: “Addresses” in Daniel C. Roper Papers, Rare Book, Manuscript & Special Collections Library, Duke University, Durham, N.C. As part of its “Campaign for Education,” the Bureau of Internal Revenue mobilized a variety of private industries and voluntary associations including “speakers of the Four Minute Men organization,” who addressed “chambers of commerce, theaters, moving-picture houses,” and other public places (U.S. Treasury Department, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Fiscal Year 1918 [1919], 963–65Google Scholar).

6. Roper, Fifty Years, 176; U.S. Treasury Department, Annual Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the State of the Finances for the Fiscal Year 1918 (1919), 944–45Google Scholar.

7. Wilson, Woodrow, The State: Elements of Historical and Practical Politics (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1898), 572–73Google Scholar (quoted in Capozzola, “Raising Revenue”).

8. Leffingwell to Roper, Oct. 20, 1919, NARA Excess Profits Tax Folder. Likewise, Arthur Ballantine directed opponents of the excess-profits tax to focus their energies on repealing the levy through democratically elected lawmakers rather than through the courts. Ballantine, , “Some Constitutional Aspects of the Excess Profits Tax,” Yale Law Journal 29 (6) (1919): 625–42, 635, 642CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. Incidentally, congressional probes like the Nye Commission, and the Pecora Investigation that preceded it, also highlighted the alleged machinations of bankers and industrialists, and hence gave New Dealers ample, if exaggerated, justifications for bolstering the powers of the regulatory, administrative state. See, Leuchtenburg, William E., Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (1963), 59, 9Google Scholar; Mayhew, David R., Divided We Govern: Party Control, Lawmaking, and Investigations, 1946–2002 (2005), 156–57Google Scholar.

10. And it is one reason why “Lawyers, Guns, and Public Moneys” only claims that “the lawyers helped build the trust between citizens and government that was essential to the success of a liberal democracy engaged in global war” (emphasis added).

11. Arthur A. Ballantine, “War Policies in Taxation, Statement Before the War Policies Commission,” May 20, 1931, Record Group 56—General Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Treasury, Box 187, Folder “Tax—Excess Profits & War Profits, 1923–32” National Archives and Record Administration II, College Park, Md.

12. “Lawyer, Guns, and Public Moneys” includes only a brief glimpse at the comparative financing of World War I. But Christopher Capozzola's comment provides a useful brief bibliography of important sources. See, Capozzola, “Raising Hell,” 228n2.

13. Portions of this theme are explored in Ajay K. Mehrotra, “American Economic Development, Managerial Corporate Capitalism, and the Institutional Foundations of the Modern Income Tax,” Law & Contemporary Problems (forthcoming in 2010).

14. Brownlee, W. Elliot, “The Public Sector,” in The Cambridge Economic History of the United States, Volume III: The Twentieth Century, ed. Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1017Google Scholar.

15. Bernstein, Michael, A Perilous Progress: Economists and Public Purpose in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar, see, especially, chap. 1.

16. Elsewhere, I have examined how late nineteenth-century political economists interested in tax reform, and in furthering the “professionalism” of economics, belittled the “amateur” advocacy of more radical reformers and quashed a fledgling affinity between social gospel ministers and Henry George's single-tax (Mehrotra, Ajay K., “Envisioning the Modern American Fiscal State: Progressive-Era Economists and the Intellectual Foundations of the U.S. Income Tax,” UCLA Law Review 52 [August 2005]: 1793–1866Google Scholar; Mehrotra, “‘Render Unto Caesar …’ Religion/Ethics, Expertise, and the Historical Underpinnings of the Modern American Tax System,” Loyola University Chicago Law Review 40 [Winter 2009]: 321–67).

17. Weber, Max, “Bureaucracy,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. Gerth, H. H. and Mills, C. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 196–244Google Scholar; see also Brubaker, Rogers, The Limits of Rationality: An Essay on the Moral and Social Thought of Max Weber (1984), 35–43Google Scholar.

18. See, for example, Stanley, Robert, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Horwitz, Morton, The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 19–27Google Scholar.