In a recent article, I agreed with Justice Clarence Thomas that progressivism did (and still does) much damage to our body politic and our society. Obviously, the so-called intelligentsia in academe, politics, and the media didn’t agree.
What really set off the critics, however, was Thomas’s claim that progressivism had helped pave the way for Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. Hitler, of course, is universally hated while both Stalin and Mao—despite their mass murdering—were roundly praised by the western intellectuals and journalists. Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law, simply denied that these men were “progressives” in any sense of the word, although he failed to note that Hitler, Stalin, and Mao all had followings from among western progressives.
Chemerinsky then attempts to whitewash what was key to progressive thinking in the first half of the 20th century: eugenics:
Certainly, the history of progressivism is not spotless. Some progressives did champion eugenics, which led to horrific consequences. But one need not defend everything progressives have advocated to see the flaws in Justice Thomas’ unequivocal and emphatic condemnation of everything progressive.
No, eugenics was not a minor point of progressive thinking and held only by a small minority at that. Instead, eugenics as promoted by American progressives was an important part of their entire belief system, which held to the supremacy of “science,” as opposed to governance by mere passions.
Few people today defend eugenics as did the American intelligentsia a century ago, but even now the remains still are with us, and especially with those ensconced in the “commanding heights” of politics, education, and science. Not long ago, we noted the passing of Paul Ehrlich—whose population theories still are honored today even though they were proven to be demonstrably false. Planned Parenthood—founded by eugenicist Margaret Sanger—has become a powerful political force in urban America and is an icon of the Democratic Party.
The spirit of eugenics also lives on in the assisted suicide programs around the world, and especially in Canada and the Netherlands, where medical professionals heavily promote an early death as an alternative to everything from having to suffer through terminal illnesses or even depression. And while they don’t refer to abortions, birth control, and assisted suicide as forms of eugenics, nonetheless, they are promoted very much in the spirit of the 20th century eugenicists.
Eugenics and the Immigrants
Because of the heavy influx of immigrants to the US, progressives took note as to the countries of origin. Murray Rothbard wrote:
To the founder of the American eugenics movement, the distinguished biologist Charles Benedict Davenport, a New Yorker of eminent New England background, the rising feminist movement was beneficent provided that the number of biologically superior persons was sustained and the number of the unfit diminished. The biologist Harry H. Laughlin, aide to Davenport, associate editor of the Eugenical News, and highly influential in the immigration restriction policy of the 1920s as eugenics expert for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, stressed the great importance of cutting the immigration of the biologically “inferior” southern Europeans. For in that way, the biological superiority of Anglo-Saxon women would be protected.
Added Rothbard:
Harry Laughlin’s report to the House Committee, printed in 1923, helped formulate the 1924 immigration law, which, in addition to drastically limiting total immigration to the United States, imposed national origin quotas based on the 1910 census, so as to weight the sources of immigration as much as possible in favor of northern Europeans. Laughlin later emphasized that American women must keep the nation’s blood pure by not marrying what he called the “colored races,” in which he included southern Europeans as well as blacks: for if “men with a small fraction of colored blood could readily find mates among the white women, the gates would be thrown open to a final radical race mixture of the whole population.”
Thomas Leonard noted that many of the prominent economists of that era also were true believers in eugenics:
In the United States especially, Progressive Era eugenics tended to be racist. But “race” had connotations in the Progressive Era different than those of today, and eugenicists of that time were both imprecise and inconsistent in their use of the term. Sometimes the term refers to all of humankind—the human race. Sometimes “race” was used in something like its modern sense. But more commonly, the Progressive Era usage of “race” meant ethnicity or nationality, especially when distinguishing among Europeans, so that the English, or those of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, were presumed to be a race distinct from, say, the Irish race or the Italian race. The most influential racial taxonomy of the day, The Races of Europe, was written by William Z. Ripley (1899), an economist trained at MIT and Columbia, who spent a long career at Harvard studying railroad economics and served, in 1933, as president of the American Economic Association (AEA).
Given that academic and social elites had fully bought into eugenics, it should not be a surprise that the US government restricted immigration with The Immigration Act of 1924, which restricted entry into the US according to one’s nation of origin. These restrictions would remain in place for 41 years until Congress passed The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that abolished country of origin restrictions and emphasized family unity and worker skills.
Not surprisingly, progressives tried to apply eugenics theories to the workplace and came up with the minimum wage as a means to exclude “undesirable” workers. Leonard writes:
In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation, the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms, notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.”
Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson, 1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.
It is impossible to escape the fact that the minimum wage in this country had racist beginnings. Today, unfortunately, the minimum wage is touted as a savior for minority groups and anyone who opposes it can only do so through racist motivation.
The German Connection
Modern progressives simply refuse to believe that the ideology from the progressive movement of a century ago had anything to do with Hitler and his own eugenics crusades. Declares the leftist publication Salon:
During a recent speech, Thomas criticized early 20th-century progressivism — including ideas associated with President Woodrow Wilson — arguing that such movements contributed to conditions that enabled authoritarian regimes in Europe. The comments, which circulated widely online, drew sharp responses from historians and legal scholars who rejected the comparison as inaccurate and misleading.
Experts note that the rise of Nazi Germany is broadly understood to have stemmed from a complex set of factors, including economic collapse, political instability and the aftermath of World War I, not American progressive reforms. Critics argue that invoking Hitler in modern ideological debates risks distorting that history while inflaming political divisions.
Yet, given the open hostility American progressives showed toward non-white and southern and eastern European groups, not to mention Jews, certainly would have emboldened Aryan supremacy advocates in Europe. Although modern US progressives try to whitewash the “scientific” racism and support for eugenics by their intellectual forebears like Margaret Sanger, the record is there for people to see, even if they wish to ignore it.
Edwin Black writes that the progressive foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Foundation, and the Harriman Foundation provided money and “respectability” for the pseudo-scientific studies aimed at promoting eugenics:
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics’ racist aims.
Unfortunately, these foundations promoting eugenics did not limit their influence to the US, as they also were influential in Germany:
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California’s quasi-autonomous eugenic societies, such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These organizations–which functioned as part of a closely-knit network–published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
Black continues:
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side. While Hitler’s race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the ’20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep personal and professional relationships with Germany’s fascist eugenicists. In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. “There is today one state,” wrote Hitler, “in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress of the American eugenics movement. “I have studied with great interest,” he told a fellow Nazi, “the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.”
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his “bible.”
Conclusion
American progressives continue to deny the horrific legacy of progressivism. Application of its economic theories gave us the Great Depression, and the attempts to apply its pseudo-science into racial and social affairs created the monsters of Jim Crow and mass sterilization of “unfit” women, with the social harm from these legacies continuing to ravage American society today.
But this poisonous ideology was not contained in the American shores, and we don’t have to be reminded of what it did overseas. Despite Chemerinsky’s claim that progressives promoted the ideals of the Declaration of Independence and racial harmony, in truth, he had it wrong. Progressives sowed the wind and ever since, the world has reaped the whirlwind.
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