Freedom, History, and Race in Progressive Thought

Summary

Introduction

Commentators discussing America's turn of the twentieth century enthusiasm for eugenics—an umbrella term encompassing various policies discriminating against races believed to be inferior, as well as individuals of all races deemed to be “degenerate” —typically emphasize that support for such policies spanned the ideological spectrum. “For most white Americans,” as James B. McKee observes, “both common sense and scientific evidence seemed so obvious that one had to accept the prevailing racial theories whether one's political leanings were conservative or liberal.” America's experiment in eugenics, it would thus seem, was as much characteristic of the political views of the Left as of the Right—of the principles of late-nineteenth-century Progressivism (or any other incipient form of socialism) as those inherited from the American Founding. While this characterization is perhaps understandable in view of the conflicting definitions given to the political labels of the day, it is nonetheless odd, as the eugenists generally, and the Progressives specifically, repeatedly advocate such policies as correctives for the principles inherited from the American Founding.

The purpose of this essay, accordingly, is to explain why the eugenics agenda is so natural an outgrowth of Progressivism. Part of the reason for this, as Thomas C. Leonard well suggests, stems from the Progressives' rejection of “the individualism of (classical) liberalism” —of, that is, the fundamental principles of the Founders' theory of government. The cornerstone of the Founders' social compact theory is the idea of natural human equality, the idea that all men at all times in all places are “created equal.”