APPLIED DARWINISM:

The words "progress" and "progressive" evoke images of enlightened reformers selflessly promoting justice and overcoming ignorance and bigotry. I guarantee, however, that anyone who reads Thomas C. Leonard's new book, Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, & American Economics in the Progressive Era, will be troubled--and, in many cases, shocked--by some of the motivations of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century progressives who sought to dismantle the American experiment in ordered liberty and replace it with the administrative state. [...]

This mixture of utopianism, faith in the state, and sheer confidence in their own righteousness was one aspect of the progressives' mindset. Another influence, Leonard illustrates, stemmed from particular ideas flowing from or associated with Darwinism.

To be sure, Leonard points out, people from across the political spectrum found something in Darwin's thinking to support their positions. Some economic conservatives, most notably Herbert Spencer, appealed to survival of the fittest (though his own evolutionary views predated Darwin's, as Leonard points out). Yet this principle also inspired economic progressives such as the English mathematician Karl Pearson (a father of modern statistical theory but also a eugenicist), who, as Leonard observes, "found a case for socialism in Darwin."

These ideas made their way into economic progressives' arguments for systematic state intervention. Many economic progressives held, Leonard demonstrates, that "regulation was the most efficient route to better hereditary." Science, they believed, had opened the way to identify the fittest. It followed, so the progressives believed, that "state experts would select the fittest by regulating immigration, labor, marriage, and reproduction."

The broader effect was to advance the "scientific" case for dispensing with the divided government bequeathed by America's founders. Economic progressives regarded such arrangements as obstructing the development of a centralized government capable of ensuring that society remained a "healthy organism." The use of such language was partly about grounding the progressives' agenda in the authority conferred by the new science of biology. It also reflected, however, the progressives' lack of interest in and hostility toward individual liberty.

The proliferation of such concepts made it easier for two other elements to acquire traction among economic progressives. The first was eugenics, in the sense of replacing random natural selection with purposeful social selection. The second was "race science." Grounded on the then-widespread conviction that different races were inherently dissimilar in abilities and habits, race science drew heavily on "polygenism": the now-generally rejected theory that humans evolved from several independent pairs of ancestors.

Today we associate eugenics and race science with the policies of regimes such as National Socialist Germany. These included the 1935 Nuremburg race laws, the regime's efforts to sterilize (beginning in 1934) and euthanize (beginning in 1939) the mentally and physically impaired, and its frenzied and yet systematically planned attempt to wipe the Jews off the face of the earth during World War II.

For a long time, however, eugenics and race science enjoyed great respectability. For at least three decades, Leonard notes, "eugenic ideas were politically influential, culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream." They flourished, he adds, in "nearly all non-Catholic Western countries." In 1911, for example, the Governor of New Jersey, Woodrow Wilson, signed forcible sterilization legislation that targeted what eugenicists regarded as "the hopelessly defective and criminal classes." Likewise, the claims of race science were widely accepted by progressives. In his History of the American People (1902), for instance, Wilson asserted that southern and eastern Europeans had "neither skill nor energy nor any initiative of quick intelligence."

So how did such ideas shape the economic progressives' policy prescriptions? Economic progressives, Leonard shows, didn't hesitate to invoke eugenics' emphasis on planned selection as part of their proofs for economic planning's superiority over free markets: "Just as the plant or animal breeder outdid nature, the analogy went, so too did the intelligent administrator of the economy outdo the economy left alone."

In some cases, the influence of eugenics and race science combined to produce very specific policy advocacy by progressives. Many, for instance, tried to ensure that the health care provided to black Americans was "accompanied by eugenic measures designed to reduce the quantity and improve the quality of black births."

Economic progressives also concluded that the "unemployable" (such as the mentally and physically disabled) or those who threatened to drag down the wages of inherently more productive Anglo-Saxons (such as Eastern European Jews or migrants from Asia and Southern Europe) had to be squeezed out of labor markets in the name of greater economic productivity. 

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