Liberals and Eugenics

In the chapter of my book dealing with eugenics, I write:

When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on “conservative” tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it’s because they’re really conservatives!

Not surprisingly, my book did little to eradicate the habit. Consider this often-interesting piece on Paul Popenoe in the latest New Yorker. The author, Jill Lepore, writes (emphasis mine):

It has become a commonplace, on the right, to label eugenics “progressive” (in order, presumably, to make the word “progressive” as ugly a smear as “liberal”). Eugenics dates to the Progressive Era, when it was faddish. Early on, and particularly before the First World War, it was embraced by reformers on the left, from Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, but the movement that lasted was, at heart, profoundly conservative, atavism disguised as reform. After a while, but nowhere near soon enough, the disguise got pretty flimsy. In “The Eugenics Cult,” an essay that Clarence Darrow wrote in 1926, a year after defending Scopes, he judged that he would rather live in a nation of ill-matched misfits and half-wits than submit to the logic of a bunch of cocksure “uplifters.” “Amongst the schemes for remolding society,” Darrow wrote, “this is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race.”

Now, this is a really cleverly written passage. She makes it sound like conservatives are either idiots or liars for suggesting that eugenics was “progressive,” all the while conceding that eugenics was embraced by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. But that’s just because eugenics merely “dates back” to the Progressive Era and their attachment to it wasn’t serious. It was merely “faddish.”

She goes on to write in the next paragraph:

The week Holmes handed down his decision in Buck v. Bell, the Times reported that Harvard declined a sixty-thousand-dollar bequest to fund eugenics courses, refusing “to teach that the treatment of defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures was a sound doctrine.” Popenoe, undaunted, pressed on. In 1933, he wrote to Bell, asking for photographs of Carrie Buck and her mother and daughter for his archive. He told him, “A hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendants may well be proud.” Popenoe, in fact, had become something of a historian. Later that year, Grant published “The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America,” a “racial history” based on “scientific interpretation,” recommending “the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries,” to be followed by the deportation of illegal aliens. Popenoe had spent four years conducting the research for Grant’s book; he had also compiled the bibliography. Unlike “The Passing of the Great Race,” Grant’s American pseudohistory met with a furious reception. Ruth Benedict said that the only difference between it and Nazi racial theory was that “in Germany they say Aryan in place of Nordic.” Franz Boas attacked Grant in The New Republic; Melville Herskovits did so in The Nation. The Anti-Defamation League said that “The Conquest of a Continent” was “even more destructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

See? Good liberals never embraced this “profoundly conservative, atavism disguised as reform.” Of course, there’s no evidence provided that any conservatives supported eugenics. Merely that these name-check liberal institutions and individuals at some point criticized eugenics.

But this is all, at minimum, misleading. The Nation was then still more of a classically liberal publication. Clarence Darrow, a complicated fellow (who was a rabid jingoist during World War I, and a devastating critic of the New Deal) wrote his anti-eugenics piece for HL Mencken’s American Mercury, hardly a journal that spoke authoritatively for elite progressive opinion unlike, say, The New Republic which, contrary to Lepore’s insinuation, was hardly opposed to eugenics in the 1920s. Sure, by the mid-1930s, they had moved away from it. But that was after Herbert Croly, the founder of the magazine, died. Croly was a believer. For instance, he wrote an unsigned editorial in 1916 which tried to make peace between the eliminationists and sterilizers on the one hand and the uplift-the-downtrodden eugenists on the other. The common ground, TNR argued, was to be found in socialism:

We may suggest that a socialized policy of population cannot be built upon a laissez faire economic policy. So long as the state neglects its good blood, it will let its bad blood alone. There is no certain way of distinguishing between defectiveness in the strain and defectiveness produced by malnutrition, neglected lesions originally curable, or overwork in childhood. When the state assumes the duty of giving a fair opportunity for development to every child, it will find unanimous support for a policy of extinction of stocks incapable of profiting from their privileges.

The  simple truth is that the “cocksure uplifters” Darrow was talking about were all, to a man and a woman, Progressives. Remember, the Progressives hated “social Darwinism,” which was a policy of laissez faire. The uplifters were members of the Addams camp.

Meanwhile, Lepore mentions that the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in the Buck v. Bell case, led by liberal hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a passionate eugenicist who considered “building a race” to be at the core of reform. Did Holmes and his fellow justices, including Louis Brandeis, sign on to the cause out of “faddishness”? What about the fact that the lone dissenter was Pierce Butler, a conservative Catholic Democrat appointed by a Republican (whose appointment was opposed by The Nation, The New Republic, and the KKK)?

Look, eugenics was a very complicated phenomenon. But it does not clarify the topic to insist that, contrary to mountains of evidence and common sense, that all of the progressives who subscribed to it were just wearing a conservative mask.

Image by A.M. Kuchling.