Chapter 11: The Professor Goes to Washington

The chapter describes how Fabian socialists advanced their influence by redefining economics and related fields as “science.” Sydney Webb succeeds in having economics formally declared a science by the University of London. Beatrice Webb records approvingly that this involved divorcing economics from metaphysics and admits the decision was achieved by packing the commission.

Once economics and other social inquiries were labeled “social sciences,” professors could present ideological conclusions as objective research. Fabian writers argue this allowed political intent to be concealed behind academic authority.

The chapter traces the spread of Fabian ideas through British and American universities, extension programs, and summer schools. In the United States, professors studied socialism quietly to avoid professional consequences. Academic networks form around figures such as Richard T. Ely, Albert Shaw, and Woodrow Wilson.

Woodrow Wilson appears first as a professor influenced by these circles and later as president who accepted socialist-minded advisers. Under his administration, federal labor agencies were consolidated, culminating in the creation of the Department of Labor. These agencies generated statistics later used to support reform and regulation.

The chapter highlights legal innovation through the Brandeis Brief, which relied heavily on sociological data rather than traditional legal reasoning. This approach later became standard.

Major Fabian objectives realized during this period include the federal income tax, legalized through the Sixteenth Amendment during World War I. The chapter closes by describing how academics, journalists, and advisers shaped domestic and foreign policy during the Wilson years, embedding Fabian gradualism within American government.

Chapter 12: The Perfect Friendship

The chapter portrays Edward M. House as Woodrow Wilson’s most influential adviser: an outwardly quiet political operator who engineered Wilson’s 1912 nomination and sought a “fail-proof” president able to advance a radical program quietly, without public alarm. House is described as believing the U.S. Constitution was “outmoded” and should be rewritten gradually.

House’s program is presented through his anonymous novel Philip Drew, Administrator (1912), which the chapter treats as a blueprint: a military figure seizes power and rules by executive decree, reshaping administration, revising the judiciary, reforming labor/capital law, creating a graduated income tax, banking reform (later linked to the Federal Reserve), corporate taxation, old-age pensions, labor insurance, compulsory arbitration, labor representation on corporate boards, and an international League of Nations.

It describes House’s New York apartment as a political nerve center with direct lines to the White House and departments, and places British intelligence chief Sir William Wiseman in close proximity. A highlighted wartime episode: Trotsky is detained in Canada in 1917; Wilson/House request his release; he is allowed onward—paired with Lenin’s sealed-train passage—followed by Bolshevik takeover and Russia leaving the war.

The chapter then traces linked “peace” and opinion networks: Hull House activism, British Fabian-connected visitors, and the role of The New Republic (including Walter Lippmann and contributors like Harold Laski). It describes the secret planning group “The Inquiry,” organized via House and academics, producing memoranda behind Wilson’s Fourteen Points, and claims the program closely matches Britain’s Fabian-authored Labour’s War Aims (Sydney Webb central).

Finally, it recounts the Wilson–House break at Paris and ends with House convening a 1919 dinner that leads to founding the Royal Institute of International Affairs in Britain and, in the U.S., the Council on Foreign Relations.