Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering
According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the vicissitudes of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. The Progressives had faith that experts would rise above self-interest and implement wise plans to create a great society. The resulting state-level workplace safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and minimum wages restored dignity and safety to the trod-upon and exploited workers.
Despite the widespread acceptance of this narrative, there are many reasons to question whether it accurately portrays the motivations and hopes of some Progressive-Era reformers. In a 2005 article in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, “Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era,” the economist Thomas C. Leonard offered a completely new historical account of the sources of Progressive-Era labor legislation and the intentions of its supporters. Leonard’s work, including an important 2009 article coauthored with legal scholar David E. Bernstein for Law and Contemporary Problems, “Excluding Unfit Workers: Social Control Versus Social Justice in the Age of Economic Reform,” indicates that lurking behind what many people see as humanitarian reforms was something much uglier.
Leonard and Bernstein argue that some of the most prominent of the Progressive reformers were “partisans of human inequality.” They supported interventions as ways to forward their eugenic goal of a purer (that is, whiter) human race by eliminating the opportunities for the “unfit” to get meaningful work. The “unfit” here included not just nonwhites (especially African-Americans) but also the “insane,” immigrants (especially from central and eastern Europe), and in a somewhat different way, women.
In other words, what we today think of as the unintended consequences of laws supported by today’s well-meaning but economically uninformed Progressives were actually the intended goals of some of their intellectual ancestors a century ago. Early Progressive economists understood the effects of these interventions, but they thought those effects were desirable.
The Progressive economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw social science not merely as a means of inquiry and understanding but as a guide to social management and control. The advent and broad acceptance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, combined with a more general belief in the power of science and scientific management to solve social problems, led to a fascination with eugenics and the possibility of using public policy to ensure the “survival of the fittest” and the purity and strength of the human race. In the hands of many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinian theory became a rationale for using the power of government to weed out the “undesirable” and “unfit” in much the way that the new understanding of evolution was changing agriculture and animal husbandry. Eugenics clubs and societies grew rapidly and many of the leading intellectuals of the early twentieth century, including a number of well-known economists (such as John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher, perhaps the most famous American economist of the time), were active in these groups and saw their work through the lens of eugenics.
Eugenics and Intended Consequences
We look back on the eugenics movement with proper horror. Yet the same ideas that led to forced sterilization also led to restrictions in the workplace, because labor markets were one place where eugenics-oriented economists could combine their two interests. They recognized early on that legislation which excluded the “unfit” from labor markets would advance their eugenic goals. Most of these laws were enacted at the state level during this period, but the New Deal era saw many of the same arguments applied at the national level.
Consider minimum wage laws, for example. Today we tend to think people support them because they believe a minimum wage is a free lunch that will help the poor. Classical-liberal economists have long criticized such regulations, arguing they are a perfect example of the law of unintended consequences and of the disconnect between intentions and outcomes. In a competitive labor market any worker who can produce value is hirable at some wage up to that value. Even workers with limited skills are employable. What the minimum wage and other mandated benefit laws do is create a minimum productivity criterion for hiring, closing off the labor market to workers whose productivity is too low to justify that cost.
Leonard’s work shows that some advocates of the minimum wage, including many giants of the early days of the economics profession, such as John R. Commons and Richard T. Ely, understood exactly what minimum wage laws would do and liked it. In addition, various Progressives and socialists who were not economists, such as Eugene Debs and Beatrice and Sidney Webb, also supported minimum wage laws and other interventions into the labor market precisely because they would weed out those who were deemed too stupid or lazy to compete in a market economy—in particular, women, immigrants, and blacks.
Leonard writes, “the progressive economists . . . 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.’” He quotes the Webbs’ statement that “this unemployment is not a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” Further, he quotes Henry Rogers Seager of Columbia University, who suggested that minimum wages were necessary to protect workers from the “wearing competition of the casual worker and the drifter.”
A. B. Wolfe, who would one day be a president of the American Economic Association, wrote in the American Economic Review in 1917 (quoted in part by Leonard and Bernstein): “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by minimum wages,] so would the ineffective workers. I am not disposed to waste much sympathy upon either class. The elimination of the inefficient is in line with our traditional emphasis on free competition, and also with the spirit and trend of modern social economics. There is no panacea that can ‘save’ the incompetents except at the expense of the normal people. They are a burden on society and on the producers wherever they are.”
In the context of the early twentieth century this group largely included nonwhites, immigrants, and women, as well as white males with physical or mental disabilities—the very same groups the Progressive eugenicists thought were diluting the quality of the human gene pool. Unlike their modern successors, these supporters of minimum wage laws were under no illusion about the effects of their proposed policies; they understood and intended the negative consequences that economists now go to great lengths to argue will be the outcomes of the policies favored by contemporary Progressives. A great irony of the Progressive movement for a minimum wage is that while it aimed at eliminating the “unemployable,” it in fact created a group of “unemployables.”
Leonard’s research shows that even professional economists, including some for whom distinguished prizes and lectures are named today, engaged in a manner of thinking about issues like minimum wages that was profoundly—even obscenely, given their explicitly racist goals—anti-economic. According to some Progressives, wages were determined not by marginal productivity but by the living standards to which a particular worker was accustomed. Competition from women, children, and members of “low-wage races” threatened the dignity of white male heads of households, the robustness of the white genetic stock, and ultimately the social fabric. Leonard and Bernstein quote sociologist Edward A. Ross, who wrote that “the coolie, though he cannot outdo the American, can underlive him.” If society was to endure, white male breadwinners needed protection from outside competition.
Economists today sometimes argue that subsidies or expansion of negative income tax programs like the earned income tax credit are far more efficient ways to help the poor than policies like minimum wages. Leonard and Bernstein point out that according to Progressive economist Royal Meeker, wage subsidies were undesirable precisely because they would create more employment, particularly among “unfortunates.” The virtue of the minimum wage was that it increased the supposed dignity of white labor while separating “unfortunates” and “defectives” from jobs they would have otherwise had. Minimum wages were supported by explicit racists seeking explicitly racist ends.
Fast-forward a few decades and the results are still the same even if the intentions are more noble. In a recent paper, “Unequal Harm: Racial Disparities in the Employment Consequences of Minimum Wage Increases,” William Even and David Macpherson argued that in states fully exposed to the most recent minimum wage increases, the law cost young African Americans more jobs than the recession has. We should judge policies by results, not intentions. As the economist Thomas Sowell might say, whether a policy is deemed “compassionate” or not should depend on its effects rather than the stated goals of its advocates.
Other Labor Market Interventions
Eugenics provided an allegedly scientific pretext for protectionist legislation—specifically, restrictions on immigration. The eugenicists supported immigration restrictions because they believed that members of “low-wage races” would compromise not only whites’ living standards but also whites’ genetic stock through miscegenation. According to them, immigrants and other outsiders (read: African-Americans) would degrade the labor force and debauch the species. The Progressives proceeded on a model of society in which a (white male) breadwinner earned a “family wage” sufficient to support a (white) wife and (white) children. Women were to fulfill their roles as “mothers of the race,” and children were to be trained to do the same in the following generation.
In his 2005 article Leonard pointed out that restrictions on child labor were enacted specifically to prevent the lower classes from putting their children to work. Presumably this would then cause them to think twice about procreating as well as limit their incomes.
The Progressives used the same techniques to reduce the labor market opportunities of women. Women were seen both as fragile—in need of protection from the rigors of the workplace—and as having a special role in bearing children and managing the household as “mothers of the race.” This was in contrast to the perceived “overbreeding” of nonwhites and immigrants from places like eastern and southern Europe. Progressive reformers tried to keep women out of the labor force by enacting a variety of “protective” legislation at the state level, including maximum hours and minimum wage laws for women, both of which were set differently from those for men. Such laws made women less desirable and more expensive employees, which limited their labor force participation—precisely the goal of the reformers.
The perils of the 1930s provided an opening for additional burdens on the labor market designed to exclude “unfit” workers. Leonard and Bernstein report that the Davis-Bacon Act, for example, was “passed with the intent of preventing itinerant African American workers and others from competing with white labor unionists for jobs on federal construction projects.” The amplification of interest-group politics was evident in the relatively transparent attempts by New Deal Progressives to protect special interests from low-wage competition from the South—from African-Americans and other “low-wage races.”
In the 1930s U.S. Rep. John Cochran (D-Mo.) said he had “received numerous complaints in recent months about southern contractors employing low-paid colored mechanics getting work and bringing the employees from the South.” Rep. Clayton Allgood (D-Al.) joined in: “Reference has been made to a contractor from Alabama who went to New York with bootleg labor. This is a fact. That contractor has cheap colored labor that he transports, and he puts them in cabins, and it is labor of that sort that is in competition with white labor throughout the country.”
The disemployment effects, for example, of the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) were stark. Leonard and Bernstein cite one estimate that the NIRA’s “wage provisions directly or indirectly led to the dismissal of 500,000 African American workers.” They also write that “the American Federation of Labor took credit for the failure of the FLSA [Fair Labor Standards Act] to provide for a lower minimum wage in the South,” preventing southward capital flows.
The Progressives, the Modern Left, and the Dismal Science
This history can be read as the American version of what happened earlier in England. David Levy has shown that economics became known as the “dismal science” because classical-liberal economists (such as J. S. Mill) favored racial equality in a free labor market. Reactionary, elitist British Romantics such as Thomas Carlyle and John Ruskin argued that the free market, with its underlying assumption of equality, would eliminate racial hierarchies and bring a “dismal” future of racial mixing. It was the classical-liberal economists who were providing the intellectual support for that future.
The moral of the story is that, despite the modern left’s continued claim that the pro-market philosophy is racist, sexist, and xenophobic, history demonstrates that classical liberals/libertarians were proponents of equality and opponents of racism, and that those who viewed the races as unequal were likely to seek backing from the State, particularly in labor markets. The historical record of the left on these counts is much more mixed than it is willing to acknowledge.
Despite their odious views on race and the use of the State to enforce their eugenically informed vision of the future, Progressive-Era reformers were ahead of their modern liberal counterparts in one important way. They understood that free markets, especially free labor markets, are the enemy of racism.
Comment by Dan Griffing on 21 September 2011:
Another aspect of the Progressive view is that everyone should be given a decent living regardless of whether they work. But to run a robust economy there are some undesireable and potentially dangerous jobs that need doing, like mining, excavation and heavy labor. Why should anyone want to work at these if they don’t have to? Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “The Gulag Archipelago” clearly documents how the Soviet Union, from 1917 through the 60′s engaged in eugenics, AND solved the “problem” of how to get undesirable jobs filled with their extermination labor camps. Solzhenitsyn estimates that the U.S.S.R. murdered nearly 70 million of their own citizens with their experiment in Progressivism.
Comment by Redmond on 21 September 2011:
Tommy Douglas, the beloved founder of government monopoly healthcare in Canada, wrote his master thesis on Eugenics and the need for sterilization.
The eugenic laws on the books in Alberta and BC weren’t repealed until the 1970′s
Progressivism in action.
Comment by David Brewitz on 21 September 2011:
This is truly a great piece on the dark side of the progressive era from the point of view of the progressive and Fabian socialist economists and intellectuals of that time. There is so much that has been and currently is taught in schools, media, etc., that this was a period of benevolence on the side of experts and politicians in restraining the ‘problems’ of laissez-faire capitalism. These ‘experts’ would indeed attempt to guide and control society for what they thought is the greatest good, selflessly of course. This has been a popular narrative but it is long overdue to have a more objective look. Many times, from my own personal studies on this topic, the reality is quite the contrary. I see it as largely a reactionary movement against the classical liberal philosophy of the day. The State, with the help of experts, would have ultimate social and economic control of society with the use of policies that had (and have) some very dark underlying intentions. Progressives were and still are in large part hostile to individualism.
Markets, of course, work to eliminate irrational barriers and promote an equality for people in pursuing enterprise and free labor. Those who do hold some irrational and/or racist prejudice against another will ultimately have to pay for their prejudice in a free market. That is why they believe it is better to use the state apparatus to accomplish the same task. This is what the progressives did in policies of creating a segregated group of “unemployables.” The market would have punished that behavior had there been no policies like that, as you have covered. This is especially remarkable to me because while the progressive and Fabian thinkers in the progressive era had acknowledged the higher unemployment (“social benefit”) that would result from their MW policies, modern progressives often flat out deny it. I don’t know if it is intellectual dishonesty or what. I also find it odd that they so often claim moral superiority for supporting these policies when, if they look back, they would not be holding the high ground from today’s perspective. Regardless of their intention then and now, the outcome is the same.
I do greatly appreciate this piece Mr. Horwitz and Mr. Carden and hope light continues to be shed on this topic. I have read all of Mr. Leonard’s published works on this subject and heard he is going to have a book out sometime in the future. I look forward to getting my hands on it. This is a very neglected part of history that needs more attention so that people today can get a more balanced view. It’s not hard to see the kind of extremes atrocities that grew out of the ideas of the progressive movement. It may have been tamed down and since relabeled in various ways from that very dark time but it certainly has not disappeared. Knowing this history helps to provide a better understanding and context for people today. It’s important to help people recognize and think twice before clamoring for a certain policy. The MW law shows just how different intentions can be, yet outcomes the same.
Comment by Jon von Briesen on 21 September 2011:
Re: Comment by Redmond
Thanks for that comforting observation. Ouch.
“The eugenic laws on the books in Alberta and BC weren’t repealed until the 1970′s”
about the same time the US Govt. ended the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments.
Comment by Larry Motuz on 22 September 2011:
The fact of the matter is that it was never only so-called progressives that were ‘for’ eugenics. It was the biomythology of an era…and its strands were found as eagerly put forward by so-called non-progressives also known as conservatives.
This does not detract from the realities that underlie regulations re hours of work, pay, vacations &c. as anyone familiar with labor/worker history knows intimately. The bloodshed by laborers in garnering these protections was not shed in the name of any eugenic aims, but to salvage and regain their dignity and abilities to thrive as human beings.
Comment by Chris on 22 September 2011:
I have a facebook group about Tommy Douglas and his eugenicist past.
https://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=324407517876
This is a history the NDP wants swept under the rug. Tommy was actually voted “Greatest Canadian of All Time”, if you can believe that.
Comment by Matthew Diehl on 26 September 2011:
To enslave a people you need to blame someone else for the misery you control them with. Just keep repeating the same lie. We know it works. Why bite the hand that you see feeding you, may it be only crumbs, than to take a chance and break free to compete. You are told they will not let you compete. This keeps their attentive blame outside the cage instead of upon the cage keeper.
Everyone needs to obtain a copy of MAAFA 21 Black Genocide in the 21st Century America. By Life Dynamics Inc. (940) 380-8800 MAAFA21.com
Comment by Bob Bergin on 27 September 2011:
Modern progressives are in denial about much of this because they simply don’t understand the history of the Fabian Socialists. I have sat down with a few of them on occasion, and pointed out the agenda, the notable members,- John Maynard Keynes, George Bernard Shaw, etc., and needless to say they were dumbfounded and speechless, and then comes the denial and intellectual dishonesty as stated above.
Comment by Alex on 28 September 2011:
This article is yet another example of throwing the baby with the bath water. Forced eugenics is of course wrong. Forced anything is wrong. But the basic idea of eugenics (that some people should not have children) is sound – scientifically, morally, and economically. Eugenic policies should be encouraged and pursued on a consensual basis, free of coercion and government intervention. It makes no sense to close our eyes to to social and economic realities.
Comment by Ned Netterville on 28 September 2011:
Eugenics is like climate science: both are outside the ambit and capacity of government. Government can’t even balance its own checkbook. That the clowns in congress whould even comment let alone legislate on the climate or genetics is ludicrous and rather horrifying. There is nothing more judicious than throwing the baby out with the bath water when the baby is the spawn of legislation.
Comment by Michael Price on 1 October 2011:
Larry Motuz, the fact of the matter is that all the examples I’ve seen are “progressives” not conservatives advancing eugenics. If you have counterexamples provide them. The bloodshed by laborers in garnering these protections from competition was for exactly the eugenicists aims. White workers wanted to limit black competition, eugenicists wanted the same thing. The “dignity” they wanted to preserve was the ability to get stuff by having people threaten the competition. So it was much like the “honour” of the mafia.
Comment by Darth Maul on 1 October 2011:
Interesting article.
Please remember that when we let the people “do what they want”, the oppression of people has been awful as well. Paying 50 cents an hour enslaves the person to the factory and with little money to fight for their rights, those mules have to watch as inequalities grow and their environment becomes degraded and destroyed.
I would like to point out this philosophy of “social engineering” is still at play today in our school systems. Their is absolutely zero competition in public schools now. They are all winners and everything is fine. Most minorities come to school with no nurturing from the home and the school teaches them they are great no matter what. These kids can be absolutely awful at sports and never practice, but are convinced they will be a pro athlete some day. They have no idea what competition means and how to improve at the sport. Most of them don’t even want to listen to a coach because they are already “awesome”. They are passed on with hardly any academic skills, care a less they are below proficient on standardized tests, and even laugh and have conversation when they fail tests or don’t do homework. Meanwhile “white” kids and the small population of minority kids that do come from a nurturing family are taught how to compete. They are all equal until of course they reach adulthood. Then it does become competitive and of course those so called winners don’t know how to win. How many minorities are locked up in jail?
If you can’t compete in a private school, they boot you out. Not in a public school. They tell you that you are a winner. It has been going on so long that the parents of the middle school age today were the beginning generation when this philosophy began. These ‘winner” parents can’t even internalize their children’s academic data and parent them. Below proficient means nothing. They argue with teachers about grades at the end of the nine weeks and look at assignments that show their child exhibits no critical thinking skills, let alone complete sentences, and then ask why did my child get a “make believe C They completed it. Even punctuation will be missing. They even argue with coaches about “why isn’t my kid playing?” Students are in complete control because they know they will get passed on and do the bare minimum. In the end the nurtured kids will still know how to compete.
I had a 4th grade science teacher, that when you turned in an assignment and it had misspelled words he would throw it away and say do it again and do it right. It was embarrassing and you didn’t want the other students thinking you were dumb so you did it right the next time. Little things like that taught me to compete and improve myself. Nowadays that teacher would be burned at the stake by the parents. The kids would make up lies about the teacher and that teacher would have to defend themselves to the administration. Good teachers get out of the business.
Social engineering wins. Private school families win. Nurtured public school kids still compete, learn and do things on their own and have a chance. Great teachers leave the profession. Mules are created.
I typed this fast and had no time to review so sorry about the all over the place thoughts.
I love this website
Comment by Jim Rose on 4 October 2011:
The racism of the Left is often forgotten.
The australian labor party supported a white australia policy until 1966.
Pingback by Leftism: Same As It Ever Was « The Camp Of The Saints on 5 October 2011:
[...] at The Freeman, Art Carden and Steven Horwitz have published a very important piece that reminds us of the horrible ideas that fueled the Progressive Movement in the first half of the [...]
Comment by Bryan Dodson on 10 October 2011:
I find it odd, if not suspicious, that the single individual left off of this list is the man who termed the phrase, “Social Darwinism”. The reason I find it suspicious is because that man is the “libertarian” “thinker”, Herbert Spencer.
While he did advocate for free markets, as they would let the cream rise to the top in a competition of the fittest, it ought to be pointed out that few groups/movements (at least from this time period) are absent these idiotic ideas. Any thoughts?
Pingback by DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Eugenics: Progressivism’s Ultimate Social Engineering on 11 October 2011:
[...] Read it. The Progressive economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw social science not merely as a means of inquiry and understanding but as a guide to social management and control. The advent and broad acceptance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, combined with a more general belief in the power of science and scientific management to solve social problems, led to a fascination with eugenics and the possibility of using public policy to ensure the “survival of the fittest” and the purity and strength of the human race. In the hands of many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinian theory became a rationale for using the power of government to weed out the “undesirable” and “unfit” in much the way that the new understanding of evolution was changing agriculture and animal husbandry. Eugenics clubs and societies grew rapidly and many of the leading intellectuals of the early twentieth century, including a number of well-known economists (such as John Maynard Keynes and Irving Fisher, perhaps the most famous American economist of the time), were active in these groups and saw their work through the lens of eugenics. [...]
Comment by Alex on 13 October 2011:
Bryan Dobson,
“I find it odd, if not suspicious, that the single individual left off of this list is the man who termed the phrase, ‘Social Darwinism’. The reason I find it suspicious is because that man is the ‘libertarian’ ‘thinker’, Herbert Spencer.”
Spencer coined the phrase, he didn’t advocate it. Would you accuse the man who coined the term “genocide” of supporting genocide? Have you read any of Spencer’s works?
“While he did advocate for free markets, as they would let the cream rise to the top in a competition of the fittest, it ought to be pointed out that few groups/movements (at least from this time period) are absent these idiotic ideas.”
That’s not even a coherent sentence. What are you trying to say? Proofread before you ask us for thoughts.
Comment by Alex on 13 October 2011:
Correction – I wasn’t reading carefully.
Spencer didn’t even coin that term. He coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. Do some reading before you mouth off, Dobson.
Comment by David Brewitz on 17 October 2011:
Bryan Dobson,
I suggest you look more into “social Darwinism” as this phrase has held ambiguous meanings and was not coined by Herbert Spencer, as others have pointed out. Richard Hofstadter had been the one to popularize and write about it, though very little in one area (the reflection of his own, the progressive side). There are essentially two different types of “social Darwinism”: Individualist Darwinism which was considered laissez-faire, and Collectivist Darwinism (also known as reform Darwinism), which was the “underside of progressive reform: racism, eugenics and imperialism” (Leonard, 2009).
Leonard,Thomas C. (2009) “Origins of the Myth of Social Darwinism: The Ambiguous Legacy of Richard Hofstadter’s Social Darwinism in American Thought.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization 71: 37–51. http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/myth.pdf
Additional Reading:
“Mistaking Eugenics for Social Darwinism: Why Eugenics is Missing from the History of American Economics. http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/mistaking.pdf
American Economic Reform in the Progressive Era: Its Foundational Beliefs and Their Relation to Eugenics
http://www.princeton.edu/~tleonard/papers/otherbel.pdf
Social Darwinist Collectivism
http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/histn/histn006.pdf
Comment by Mike on 19 November 2011:
Alex, as far as I’m concerned, as a disabled person, your “sound eugenics” is just an attempt to justify your bigotry against the disabled.
Comment by Vince on 28 November 2011:
Eugenics is alive and well. It’s just gone underground…