The Corporation and the Twentieth Century

40. Ross summarized his argument from that lecture: “I tried to show that owing to its high Malthusian birth rate the Orient is the land of ‘cheap men,’ and that the coolie, though he cannot outdo the American, can under live him. I took the ground that the high standard of living that restrains multiplication in America will be imperiled if Orientals are allowed to pour into this country in great numbers before they have raised their standards of living and lowered their birth rate. . . . Should the worst come to the worst, it would be better for us to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing Japanese to our shores than permit them to land” (quoted in Eule [2015], from which this account is drawn). This language is actually mild compared to what Ross would later write (Leonard 2016, p. 148). With Jordan’s help, Ross landed on his feet at Nebraska and ultimately Wisconsin, and he became a major figure in American sociology. Jane Stanford died in 1905, almost certainly the victim of poisoning. Jordan carefully covered up the circum- stances of her death in order to safeguard the university’s endowment (White 2022).

Notes to Chapter 3 565

41. Although Ely diversified the committee in part as a sandbagging operation, it was none- theless true that all sides of the profession had an interest in academic freedom. Perry and other free traders were sometimes harassed by protectionist interests, and William Graham Sumner nearly lost his job at Yale early on for daring to teach Herbert Spencer. (He kept his job; but he didn’t assign Spencer.) In some Midwestern states, populist governments routinely fired econo- mists and administrators at state universities and installed people more sympathetic to popu- lism (Hofstadter and Metzger 1955, p. 424).

42. Coats (1988, p. 370); Hofstadter and Metzger (1955, pp. 442–43); Rader (1966, p. 171). One of the founders of the AAUP was the philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy, who had resigned from Stanford over the Ross firing.

43. Academic freedom was not, and is not, conceived of in terms of individual liberal free- doms. It is a professional privilege, a way of “ensuring that only specialists get to judge the work of other specialists” (Menand 2001, pp. 411–20).

44. Sklar (1992, pp. 172–73); Mills (1964, pp. 51–52).

45. Hofstadter (1955, p. 186). “They were working at a time of widespread prosperity, and their chief appeal was not to desperate social needs but to mass sentiments of responsibility, indignation, and guilt” (p. 196).

46. Feldstein (2006); Gentzkow, Glaeser, and Goldin (2004). 47. Ladd (2011, p. 41).

48. Ladd (2011, p. 6).

49. Mills (1964, p. 47).

50. “The Legal Realists were, in essence, the lawyer branch of institutionalism” (Hovenkamp 2015, p. 110). See also Williamson (1996).

51. Posner (1992, p. xxii). Holmesian legal realism influenced the post-1960s Law and Economics movement, of which Posner is a leading light. Like Holmes, Law and Economics understands descriptive legal studies in terms of predicting the behavior of litigants and judges. On the normative side, economic efficiency supplies the consequentialist criterion for legal decisions. Of course, whereas Holmes quipped that the law did not enact any particular economic theory, law-and-economics scholars think otherwise.

52. Menand (2001, pp. 65–66).

53. Menand (2001, p. 66).

54. Epstein (2007, pp. 99–102). Holmes did not in fact always side with speakers in free

speech cases, and—notably—in the superheated environment of World War I he upheld the conviction of socialist Eugene V. Debs to a ten-year stint in federal prison for having obliquely intimated that Americans might not want to enlist in an army that might someday be used against the Bolshevik revolutionaries. There were no universal rules in legal matters; “context” was all (Menand 2001, p. 424).

55. Bernstein (2004, 2011).

56. Epstein (2007, p. 48).

57. Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), at 75.

58. Epstein (2007, p. 105). This logic was not limited to the commercial arena. In other cases,

Holmes endorsed the use of the police power to force immigrant children to be educated in English and, famously, to sterilize a woman whom the State of Virginia considered mentally defective (Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 [1927]). “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” wrote Holmes, creating perhaps the most infamous meme in the history of eugenics.

566 Notes to Chapter 3

59. In fact, until the 1920s, the Court endorsed most police-power cases that came its way. One exception was a Louisville law mandating South-Africa-style housing segregation, which the court invalidated using the Lochner precedent. The Court did manifest a brief enthusiasm for Lochner in the 1920s under William Howard Taft, but many of the instances in which the precedent was used were actually civil-rights cases (Bernstein 2004, 2011).

60. Adelstein (2012, p. 11).

61. Roberts and Stephenson (1973).

62. Ely (1889, p. 240): “The socialists do not complain because productive property is too