Who Shall Select the Fittest?: Eugenics, Economics and the Origins of American Reform

Thomas (Tim) Leonard

Dept. of Economics Fisher Hall

Princeton University Princeton, NJ 08544

(609) 258-4036

tleonard@princeton.edu www.princeton.edu/~tleonard

For History of Political Economy Seminar, Duke University Dept. of Economics

February 25, 2005

1. Introduction American economics transformed itself in the Progressive Era, and, in so doing, permanently changed the relationship of the state to the economy. In the three to four decades after1890, American economics became an expert policy science. Academic economists traded upon the authority of their new professorial chairs, and played a leading role in bringing about a vastly more expansive state role in the American economy.1 So much is well known to historians of economics. Less well documented is the influence of eugenics upon the Progressive-Era economic thought that intellectually underwrote the transformation of the state’s relationship to the American economy. American economics, like the regulatory state it helped found, came of age at a time when eugenic approaches to social and economic reform were popular, respectable and widespread. Reform-minded economists defended exclusionary labor and immigration legislation on grounds that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers, whom they labeled “parasites,” “the unemployable,” “low-wage races,” and the “industrial residuum.” Removing the unfit, went the argument, would uplift superior, deserving workers. Economists and others influential in American reform depicted immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, Blacks, women, and those deemed defective in character or intellect as undeserving threats to the health and well being of deserving workers and of society more generally. Invidious distinction – the crude eugenic sorting of groups into deserving and undeserving classes – crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard 2003a). This essay documents the influence of eugenic ideas upon American economic reform, and (briefly) tries to illuminate something of its causes and consequences. 2. What is eugenics? “Eugenics” describes a movement to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding, based on the assumption that differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament are largely due to differences in heredity (Paul 2001). Francis Galton, statistical innovator and half-cousin of Charles Darwin, is regarded as the modern founder of eugenics.

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1 By the first World War, the U.S. government amended the Constitution to institute a personal income tax, created the Federal Reserve, applied anti-trust laws, restricted immigration, and began regulation of food and drug safety. State governments, where the reform impulse was stronger still, regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted “mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours, and set minimum wages.

Eugenics’ “first object,” said Galton, “is to check the birth rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being . . . the second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and the healthful rearing of children” (1908: 323). Eugenics is premised on a human hierarchy, and in the United States especially, Progressive-Era eugenics tended to be racist.2 But race did not exhaust the variants of human hierarchy embraced by American eugenicists, and one must be careful to understand that “race” had connotations in the Progressive Era somewhat different than those of today. The American eugenicists’s catalogue of unfit persons included far more than inferior races. Sex and class were also taken to signal fitness. Women and the “lower orders,” whatever their race, were commonly regarded as less fit. Eugenicists were also gravely concerned with those they regarded as deficient in character and intellect – for example, epileptics, the mentally ill and the “feeble-minded,” a term for the mentally retarded. Progressive-Era eugenicists were both imprecise and inconsistent when defining race. Sometimes the term refers to all of humankind – the human race – and sometimes “race” denotes something like its modern sense – a group roughly defined by skin color and geographic ancestral origin. More commonly, however, “race” meant ethnicity or nationality, especially when distinguishing among Europeans. Progressive-era usage routinely treats the English, or those of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity, as a race distinct from, say, the Irish race or Polish race.3 3. Immigration and “race suicide” It was a scholarly fashion, circa 1890, to declare the U.S. frontier “closed,” and to sound a Malthusian alarm about excess American population growth. But the professional economists who wrote on immigration increasingly emphasized not the quantity of immigrants, but their quality. Anti-immigration economists made plain their distinction between numbers and blood. “If we could leave out of account the question of race and eugenics,” Irving Fisher said in a Presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association, “I should, as an economist, be

2 Racism, however, is neither necessary nor sufficient for eugenics. The Swedish eugenicists of the mid-20th century, for example, disavowed racism, and early eugenic research in the United States, such as Richard Dugdale’s (1877) famous The Jukes, investigated Anglo-Saxon clans thought to have “degenerate” attributes, such as criminality, pauperism and alcoholism. Racism is also not sufficient for eugenics. Those with racist views can be and were skeptical of the idea that the social control of human breeding would be carried out by wise, humane governments.

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3 The most influential racial taxonomy of the day, The Races of Europe (1899) was written by William Z. Ripley, an economist trained at MIT and Columbia, who spent a long career at Harvard studying railroad economics, and later became AEA president.

inclined to the view that unrestricted immigration . . . is economically advantageous to the country as a whole . . . .” But, cautioned Fisher, “the core of the problem of immigration is . . . one of race and eugenics,” the problem of the Anglo-Saxon racial stock being overwhelmed by racially inferior “defectives, delinquents and dependents” (1921: 226-227). Fear and dislike of immigrants certainly were not new to the United States. But leading professional economists – among them Francis Amasa Walker, Frank Fetter and Edward A. Ross – were among the first to provide scientific respectability for immigration restriction on racial grounds.4 These economists justified race-based immigration restriction as a remedy for “race suicide,” a Progressive-Era term of art for the process by which racially superior stock (e.g., “natives”) is outbred by a more prolific, but racially inferior stock (e.g., immigrants). By 1912, Simon Patten, the reformist Wharton School economist, could say, “the cry of race suicide has replaced the old fear of overpopulation” (1912: 64).5 In explaining why those of inferior stock were more prolific, early Progressive-Era economists emphasized how economic life under industrial capitalism was increasingly dysgenic, that is, tended to select for the unfit. Simon Patten, for example, argued that “every improvement which simplifies or lessens manual labor increases the amount of the deficiencies which the laboring classes may possess without their being thereby overcome in the struggle for subsistence that the survival of the ignorant brings upon society” (in Ross 1991: 197). Patten emphasized not capitalism’s adverse effects upon to the poor but capitalism’s adverse effects upon selection of the fittest. What to do? Patten ultimately argued for the state taking over the task of selecting the

4 See also Richmond Mayo-Smith (1888a,b,c) and Edward W. Bemis (1888). Mayo-Smith, a Columbia economist who pioneered statistical approaches in the United States, said: “It is the right of the higher civilization to make the lower give way before it. It was this right that the nations of Europe felt was their justification in taking possession of this country . . . . The higher civilization has the moral right to triumph over the lower, for it is in this way that the world progresses” (1888c: 411).

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5 Patten’s influence in progressive circles derives from his role as a protectionist Wharton-School leader who viewed big business as an enemy of society, and, most especially, as an activist who argued that professional economists had an obligation to lead reform movements – to leave the library, write for the newspapers, “and get their inspiration from the struggle . . . which passing events reveal” (1909: 9). “To be scientific,” Patten said, “is to be popular” (ibid: 8). Students attracted to Philadelphia by Patten’s reform activism include many leading progressive voices, such as Scott Nearing, who later joined the Wharton faculty, and Edward Devine, a social-work professional.

fittest – eugenics. “Social progress is a higher law than equality,” Patten volunteered, “and a nation must choose it at any cost.” Since informal rules of conduct are insufficient, Patten argued, the only way to progress is the “eradication of the vicious and inefficient” (1899: 302-03). Henry Farnam, who co-founded the American Association for Labor Legislation (AALL), an influential reform organization led by academic economists, later serving as AEA president, emphasized ordinary reform as a cause of dysgenic selection: “[W]e are,” Farnam proposed , “by means of our very improvements, setting forces in operation which tend to multiply the unfit” (1888: 295). “Every effort . . . to remove what Malthus called the ‘positive checks’ to populations, without at the same time increasing the preventative checks, must result in an increase of the very classes which are least able to take care of themselves. . . .” The increase in the unfit, Farnam concluded, “render more and more imperative the solution of that exceedingly difficult problem which Mr. Arnold White calls ‘sterilization of the unfit’”(ibid). Frank Fetter (1899: 237), like Patten, a future president of the AEA, also worried that “the benefits of social progress are being neutralized by race degeneration,” owing to the “suspension” of the selective process.” Economist-turned-sociologist Edward A. Ross, a student of Richard T. Ely’s, referred to dysgenic social reform as “maleficent charity” (1903: 447). Patten, Farnam, Fetter and Ross saw higher living standards and ordinary reform as less a victory for social justice, than as an impediment to Darwinian weeding-out. Their response to what they regarded as the dysgenic effects of industrial capitalism was not to argue, as might a social Darwinist, against ordinary reform, but to advocate for eugenics, the substitution of state for natural selection of the fittest. Francis Amasa Walker offered a race-suicide account that proved especially influential in the immigration debate. Walker was a decorated Civil War hero, served as president of MIT, directed the US Census of 1870 and of 1880, served as the AEA’s first president, and was the most respected American economist at the beginning of the Progressive Era. Walker’s race-suicide theory argued that immigration itself checked the natural fertility of the native population, so that inferior foreign-born stock effectively displaced superior native stock.6 “The native element failed to maintain its previous rate of increase,” says Walker, “because the foreigners came in such swarms” (emphasis added, Walker 1899: 423). Walker proposed that native Americans would not compete with immigrants from the

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6 Walker uses “native” to refer to earlier European immigrants of Anglo-Saxon ethnicity.

“low-wage races.” “The American shrank from the industrial competition thrust upon him,” Walker argued. “He was unwilling himself to engage with the lowest kind of day labor with these new elements of the population; he was even more unwilling to brings sons and daughters into the world to enter that competition” (ibid, p. 424). Walker characterized the new elements of the population – “peasants” from “southern Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Russia” – as “beaten men from beaten races; representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence. Centuries are against them, as centuries were on the side of those who formerly came to us” (1896: 828). Walker predicted that, without racial immigration restriction, “every foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe, [in] which no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages . . . [will] be decanted upon our shores” (1899: 424). Like Patten, Farnam, Fetter, and Ross, Walker believed that poverty was often the product of bad heredity, and that, when this was true, the remedy lay in eugenic policies. “We must strain out of the blood of the race more of the taint inherited from a bad and vicious past,” Walker proposed, “before we can eliminate poverty, much more pauperism, from our social life. The scientific treatment which is applied to physical diseases must be extended to mental and moral disease, and a wholesome surgery and cautery must be enforced by the whole power of the state for the good of all” (1899: 469). Eugenics to one side, Walker’s race-suicide theory stood on a shaky inferential foundation. Waker noted that early 19th-century population forecasts for 1840 and 1850 assumed little immigration. Finding the forecasts quite accurate, but noting ex post the relatively large increase in immigration during the 1830-39 and 1840-49 decades, Walker concluded that the unanticipated immigration must have induced a native decline in birth rate, otherwise the forecasts, in assuming little immigration, would have underestimated the total population (1899: 422). Walker’s conjecture was not much of a demonstration. He failed to consider other possible explanations, for example, that native birthrates declined in response to increased urbanization, higher living standards, and later age of marriage. Economic historians have found that second-generation immigrants actually had lower fertility rates than did the Yankee descendants of earlier European immigrants, chiefly because of later age of marriage (King and Ruggles 1990). Race-suicide talk was, in any event, typically unburdened with empirical evidence, a point noted by Allyn A. Young (1905: 263). Thus could Walker’s scientific reputation, if not his

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science, carry the day. Anti-immigrant groups were pleased to appeal to Walker’s authority. Henry Pratt Fairchild, a Yale economist and author of The Melting Pot Mistake, said: “our immigrants are not additions to our total population, but supplanters of native children, to whom they deny the privilege of being born” (1911: 263). Prescott Hall, co-founder of the Immigration Restriction League, characterized Walker’s account thus: “the main point is that the native children are murdered by never being allowed to come into existence, as surely as if put to death in some older invasion of the Huns and Vandals” (1904: 182). Though professional economists were key innovators, race-suicide arguments were by no means confined to economics. Chicago sociologist Charles Henderson, who chaired the National Conference of Charities and Corrections – a title that, by itself, well captures the tension in the progressive view of economically marginal groups – also harkened to Walker’s account. “[Mine] is not an argument against immigration,” said Henderson, “but only against the immigration of persons who cannot be induced to demand a civilized scale of life” (1909: 232). And, claimed Henderson, when “[the unfit] are removed, the real workers will more easily rise in earning power” (1900: 253). Henderson offered banishment to rural labor colonies for the “feebleminded and degenerate” who “are not very numerous, and can all be easily segregated in self-supporting rural colonies” (1900: 253). But even segregation was not dire enough for the “obviously unfit,” who must, in the name of the greater good, be coercively sterilized. “It is clearly and distinctly the right of a commonwealth,” argued Henderson, “when called upon to support a large number of the obviously unfit, to deprive them of liberty and so prevent their propagation of defects and thus the perpetuation of their misery in their offspring. Therefore the policy of painless asexualization is offered . . . (1909: 228-29). Race-suicide theories were also not confined to the United States. They were popular abroad as well, even if different versions placed different races in the category of the unfit. In England, for example, Fabian socialist Sidney Webb devised a novel term, “adverse selection,” to describe what he saw as English race suicide. Echoing Karl Pearson, a founder of modern statistics and a leader of the eugenics movement, Webb asserted that:

Twenty-five percent of our parents, as Professor Karl Pearson keeps warning us, is producing 50 percent of the next generation. This can hardly result in anything but national deterioration; or, as an alternative, in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews (1907: 17).

The term “race suicide” is often attributed to Edward A. Ross, who believed that “the

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higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action” (1901a). Ross’s coinage gained enough currency to be used by a sitting President, Theodore Roosevelt, who called race suicide the “greatest problem of civilization,” and regularly returned to the theme of “the elimination instead of the survival of the fittest” (1907: 550). In that same year, more than forty years after the American Civil War, Ross wrote: “The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lining the valleys of the South with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the conditions of four million unpicked blacks” (1907: 715). During his stormy tenure at Stanford, Ross was well known for his stance against Chinese immigration. Speaking before a group of San Francisco labor leaders, newspaper accounts have Ross saying: “should the worst come to the worst, it would be better for us if we were to turn our guns upon every vessel bringing [“Asiatics”] to our shores rather than permit them to land” ( in Furner 1975: 236). Like the other race-suicide theorists, Ross emphasized what he saw as industrial capitalism’s effect upon racial fitness. Ross’s (1901b) theory was that the “native”Anglo-Saxon stock was biologically well adapted to rural, traditional life, but less well suited to the new urban, industrial milieu of capitalism. Thus could the inferior immigrant races, “Latins, Slavs, Asiatics, and Hebrews,” outbreed the superior Anglo-Saxon race. New immigrant stock, while racially inferior, was, for Ross, better adapted to the conditions of industrial capitalism. Ross was no outlier. He was a founding member of the AEA, a pioneering sociologist, and a leading public intellectual who boasted that his books sold in the hundreds of thousands. Of the several Gilded-Age academic freedom cases, Ross’s was the one that galvanized fellow academics. The AEA rallied to his side, which it had not done for other economists whose reformist politics made them unpopular with plutocratic university patrons. It is no small irony that Ross, who vigorously opposed freedom for the “unfit,” should today be so closely associated with the cause of academic freedom. The race-suicide proposition that persons of inferior stock outbreed their biological betters – that races compete and that racial competition is subject to a kind of Gresham’s law – turns Darwinism on its head, since Darwinism defines fitness as relative reproductive success.7

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7 “The fittest to survive in an unregulated economic competition of races is the one least advanced in culture, the one whose demands in respect to comforts and decencies are lowest, even the one, it sometimes seems, whose industrial productiveness is lowest,” wrote Henry Fairchild. “It is this fact which gives so dark an aspect to the industrial future of the United

Patten, Farnam, Ross, Fetter and Walker, like other eugenics proponents, were non-Darwinian in this respect. Indeed, their eugenic arguments were predicated on what Darwinism denies, what they called “survival of the unfit.” Darwinism calls fit those who have most successfully reproduced, an ex post judgment. Eugenics, on the other hand, regards fitness as a racial attribute, something judged ex ante. The social control of human breeding, after all, cannot select the fittest without a prior judgment as to which groups are fittest. The economists’ race-suicide argument made new and influential intellectual connections. Walker connected fertility to immigration, and immigration to the “labor problem.” The use of socioeconomic position and nationality as proxies for heritable fitness was vital in connecting all of these issues to the eugenics movement. Irving Fisher understood the political advantages of selling eugenics to those already predisposed to racial immigration restrictions. In a 1912 letter to Charles Davenport, Fisher wrote “Eugenics can never amount to anything practically until it has begun, as Galton wanted it, to be a popular movement with a certain amount of religious flavor in it, and as . . . there is already a sentiment in favor of restricting immigration . . . this is a golden opportunity to get people in general to talk eugenics” (in Haller 1984: 144). In the latter half of the Progressive Era, race-suicide and the eugenic solutions to it had enough currency to appear in the textbooks of leading economists. In his Elementary Principles, Irving Fisher declared that “if the vitality or vital capital is impaired by a breeding of the worst and a cessation of the breeding of the best, no greater calamity could be imagined.” Fortunately, said Fisher, eugenics offered a means, “by isolation in public institutions and in some cases by surgical operation,” to prevent the calamity of “inheritable taint” (1912: 746). “Democracy and opportunity” Princeton’s Frank Fetter lamented in Economic Principles, are “increasing the mediocre and reducing the excellent strains of stock . . . . Progress is threatened unless social institutions can be so adjusted as to reverse this process of multiplying the poorest, and of extinguishing the most capable families.” Eugenic policies would introduce, Fetter argued, “an element of rational direction into the process of perpetuating the race . . . ” (1918: 421-22). In making these connections, and in using eugenics to justify exclusionary laws, the race-suicide theorists offered a model to other reforming economists, notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the organization of academic economists that States under unregulated immigration” (1913: 343).

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Orloff and Skocpol (1984: 726) call the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.” 4. The eugenic effects of minimum wage laws Progressive ideas about labor reform become law during the second half of the Progressive-Era. In this interval progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories, promoting state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted “mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours, and, the sine qua non, fixed minimum wages. The leading proponents of legal minimum wages, certainly the economists among them, led or were affiliated with the AALL.8 More surprising than progressive support for legal minimum wages was the fact that progressive economists, like their neo-classical critics, believed that binding minimum wages would cause job losses. The progressive economists also believed that minimum-wage-induced job loss was a social benefit, as it performed the eugenic service of raising wages by ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.” Sidney and Beatrice Webb 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” (Webb and Webb 1920 [1897]: 785). “[O]f all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb opined in the JPE, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly compete as wage earners” (1912: 992). The progressive view that removing unfit workers from the labor force was socially beneficial distinguishes its proponents from today’s minimum-wage advocates, whose defense rests on a view that minimum wages do not disemploy workers. The notion that minimum-wage induced disemployment is a social benefit also distinguishes its progressive proponents from

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8 The AALL was founded in December 1905 at the Baltimore AEA meetings. Richard T. Ely was the AALL’s first president, and John R. Commons its second. Commons’s protégé, John B. Andrews, led the organization as executive secretary for many years. Irene Osgood (who became Irene Osgood Andrews), another Commons disciple, served as the AALL’s assistant secretary. Henry Rogers Seager served as its third and fifth president. Princeton’s William Willoughby was the fourth president, and Irving Fisher served as the sixth AALL president. The AALL masthead mapped the interlocking directorates of American progressivism: Jane Addams of Hull House, Charles Richmond Henderson, University of Chicago sociologist, and the head of Charities and Corrections, Paul Kellogg, editor of the Survey, an influential progressive organ, Louis Brandeis, AALL legal counsel until appointed to the Supreme Court by Woodrow Wilson, and Wilson himself, even after he became President of the United States.

their neoclassical critics, such as Alfred Marshall (1897), Philip Wicksteed (1913), A.C. Pigou (1913) and John Bates Clark (1913). These influential critics argued – consistent with the late-Classical view that preceded them, and the modern neo-classical view that succeeded them – that legally induced disemployment should be seen as a social cost of minimum wages, not as a putative social benefit (Leonard 2000). Columbia’s Henry Rogers Seager, future AEA president and a leading progressive economist, provides an example. Worthy wage earners, said Seager, need protection from the “wearing competition of the casual worker and the drifter” (1913a: 12), and from the other “unemployable” who unfairly drag down the wages of more deserving workers (1913b: 82-3). The minimum wage protects deserving workers from the competition of the unfit by making it illegal to work for less: “[t]he operation of the minimum wage requirement would merely extend the definition of defectives to embrace all individuals, who even after having received special training, remain incapable of adequate self-support” (1913a: 9). Seager made clear what should happen to those who, even after remedial training, could not earn the legal minimum. “If we are to maintain a race that is to be made of up of capable, efficient and independent individuals and family groups we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable by isolation or sterilization . . . ” (1913a: 10).9 At one time or another, progressives placed nearly all groups – male, Anglo-Saxon heads of household excepted – in the category of unemployable. Sidney and Beatrice Webb ([1897]1920: 785), to pick an influential example, classified as unemployable:

Children, the aged, and the child-bearing women . . . the sick and the crippled, the idiots and lunatics, the epileptic, the blind and the deaf and dumb, the criminals and the incorrigibly idle, and all those who are actually ‘morally deficient’. . . and [those] incapable of steady or continuous application, or who are so deficient in strength, speed or skill that they are incapable of producing their maintenance at any occupation whatsoever ([1897]1920: 785).

The unemployable were thus those workers who, generally owing to hereditary infirmity, earned less than some measure of an adequate standard of living, a standard the British called a “decent

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9 Some advocates of removing the unfit from employment proposed, at least for some groups, more humane policies, such public assistance and training. But most economists defending exclusionary legislation seem to have believed that some groups were so biologically disadvantaged, and thereby so socially dangerous, as to require more drastic measures, such as segregation and sterilization. John R. Commons estimated that “defectives” constituted fully 5.5 percent of the U.S. population in 1890, and that nearly two percent of the population was irredeemably defective (1897).

maintenance” and Americans referred to as a “living wage.” Reformers understood the difference between actual wages and living wages as entailing a consumption deficit – a shortfall that must be met by charity, by the state, or by other members of the worker’s household. Firms that paid workers less than the living wage they were entitled to were deemed parasitic, as were the workers who accepted such wages. For progressives, a legal minimum wage had the useful property of sorting the unfit, who would lose their jobs, from the deserving workers, who would not. Felix Frankfurter, then the AALL’s legal counsel, made a legal case for minimum wages on the police-power virtues of sorting: “the state . . . may use means, like the present statute, of sorting the normal self-supporting workers from the unemployables and then deal with the latter appropriately as a special class. . . .” (Powell 1917: 310). Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist who served as Woodrow Wilson’s U.S. Commissioner of Labor, opposed a proposal to subsidize the wages of poor workers for this reason. Meeker preferred a wage floor, because it would, unlike a wage subsidy, disemploy unfit workers, and thereby enable their culling from the work force. “It is much better to enact a minimum-wage law even if it deprives these unfortunates of work,” argued Meeker. “ Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind” (1910: 554). “[T]he adoption of a National Minimum [wage],” argued Sidney and Beatrice Webb, would work to “[mark] out [weaklings and degenerates] . . . so that they could be isolated and properly treated” ([1897] 1920: 787). Sidney Ball, an Oxford Fabian, agreed. Legal minima enabled “a process of conscious social selection by which the industrial residuum is naturally sifted and made manageable for some kind of restorative, disciplinary, or, it may be, surgical treatment . . . (1896: 295). “The Socialist policy,” Ball concluded, “so far from favoring the week, favors the strong . . . .” (ibid). A.B. Wolfe, an American progressive economist, and future AEA president, also argued for the eugenic virtues of removing from employment those who “are a burden on society.” “If the inefficient entrepreneurs would be eliminated [by minimum wages] so would the ineffective workers,” said Wolfe. “I am not disposed to waste much sympathy with 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. . .” (1917: 278). In his Principles of Economics, Harvard’s Frank Taussig asked, rhetorically, “how to deal

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with the unemployable?” Taussig identified two classes of unemployable worker, distinguishing the aged, infirm and disabled from the “feebleminded . . . those saturated with alcohol or tainted with hereditary disease . . . [and] the irretrievable criminals and tramps. . . .” The latter class, Taussig proposed, “should simply be stamped out.” “We have not reached the stage,” Taussig allowed, “where we can proceed to chloroform them once and for all; but all least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind” (1921: 332-33).10 Paul Kellogg, editor of The Survey, one of the most influential organs of progressive ideas, supported minimum-wage legislation on grounds it could enable a policy to deny new immigrants industrial employment. Kellogg proposed that those disemployed, marked as unfit, should be quarantined outside of urban, industrial areas. “[T]he intent and result of such legislation,” Kellogg made plain, was “to exclude [“Angelo”] Lucca and [“Alexis’] Spivak and other “greeners” from our congregate industries, which beckon to them now.” The deserving workers, “John Smith and Michael Murphy and Carl Sneider,” Kellogg imagined as the beneficiaries of excluding the unfit (1913: 75). 5. What made a worker unemployable? The progressive idea that the unemployable were those who could not earn a living wage was bound up with the progressive view of wage determination. Economists endorsed different wage theories in this era of eclectic political economy. The economists who pioneered the marginal productivity theory of factor pricing, such as John Bates Clark and Philip Wicksteed, argued in a recognizably neo-classical vein. Clark also believed that workers paid their marginal products got what they deserved, an ethical position for which he was widely criticized. Employers, Clark said plainly, owe workers their contribution to output, not “the radical policy of . . . a life of modest comfort” (1913: 293). But most American progressives belonged to an intellectual tradition that preferred to see wages determined by workers’ expenditures rather than by their productivity. The progressive view of wage determination, with its emphasis on consumption, drew upon the labor-union theory of the 1880s.11 Frank Foster of the American Federation of Labor, for example, argued

10 Historians ordinarily regard Taussig as right-of-center politically. But Taussig was very active in labor reform, serving on the AALL leadership. He also rejected the marginal productivity theory of factor pricing theory of John Bates Clark and the other neoclassical innovators.

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11 This paragraph is indebted to Lawrence Glickman (1997: 85-91).

that “it is not commonly the value of what is produced which chiefly determines the wage rate, but the nature and degree of the wants of the workers, as embodied in their customary mode of living” (Mussey 1927: 236). Likewise did the influential and pioneering labor reformer Carroll Wright, one of the first Americans to call for a legal minimum wage, assert that “[t]he labor question” is a matter of the “wants of the wage-laborer” (1882: 4-5). Progressives agreed that wages should be determined by consumption needs not by productivity, and that upon firms the cost of this entitlement should fall.12 But how should a living wage be determined? Did “a life of modest comfort” include, for example, piano lessons? More importantly, were workers with more dependents, and thus higher living expenses, thereby entitled to higher wages? The built-in indeterminacy of a living wage had important consequences for the progressive view of entitlement to work. Arguing that wages should be a matter of living standard opened the door, in this era of eugenics, to theories of wage determination that were grounded in biology, in particular the idea that “low-wage” races were biologically predisposed to low wages, or “under-living.”13 Edward A. Ross argued that “the Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him” (1936: 70). “Native” workers have higher productivity, claimed Ross, but because Chinese immigrants are racially disposed to work for lower wages, they displace the native workers. (Ross does not say why ostensibly more productive workers cannot command relatively higher wages). In his scabrous Races and Immigrants, John R. Commons volunteered that “the Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race” (1907: 148). Like Ross’s Coolie, Commons’s Jew is industrious but less productive than native workers. The tragedy Commons referred to is the process by which the Jewish predisposition to under-live led to destructive wage competition. Wage competition not only lowers wages, it also, for Commons, selects for the unfit races. “The competition has no respect for the superior races,” said Commons, “the race with lowest necessities displaces others” (1907: 151).

12 Wicksteed disagreed, arguing that “even if we collectively . . . declare that every man has a right to a decent maintenance . . . it is ourselves collectively against whom that right is to be asserted” (1913: 78).

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13 Progressives also argued that there was a “female” standard of living, something that was determined by women’s biological nature, or by their “natural” roles as mothers and helpmeets. See Leonard 2005.

Because race not productivity determined living standards, Commons could populate his low-wage-races category with the industrious and lazy alike. African Americans were, for Commons, “indolent and fickle,” which explained why, Commons argued, slavery was required: “The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man . . . [I]if such races are to adopt that industrious life which is second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion” (1907: 136).14 Labor leader Eugene Debs said of Italian immigrant workers: “The Dago . . . lives more like a savage or a wild beast than the Chinese,” and therefore can “underbid the American working man” (1891, cited in Glickman 1997: 89). Wharton School reformer Scott Nearing volunteered that if “an employer has a Scotchman working for him at $3 a day [and] an equally efficient Lithuanian offers to the same work for $2 . . . . the work is given to the low bidder” (1915: 22). When US labor reformers made investigations abroad, to study labor legislation in countries more precocious with respect to labor reform, they favorably commented on the eugenic efficacy of minimum wages in excluding from work the “low-wage races.” Harvard’s Arthur Holcombe, a member of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage Commission, referred approvingly to the Victoria, Australia’s minimum-wage law’s intent to “protect the white Australian’s standard of living from the invidious competition of the colored races, particularly of the Chinese” (1912: 21). Florence Kelley, perhaps the most influential U.S. labor reformer of the day, also endorsed the Australian minimum-wage law as “redeeming the sweated trades” by preventing the “unbridled competition” of the unemployable, the “women, children, and Chinese [who] were reducing all the employees to starvation . . . .” (1911: 304). For these progressives, race determined the standard of living, and the standard of living determined the wage, with adverse consequences for the superior, “high-wage races.” Thus were immigration restriction and labor legislation, especially minimum wages, justified for their eugenic effects. Invidious distinction, whether founded on the putatively greater fecundity of the unfit, or upon their putative greater predisposition to low wages, lay at the heart of the reforms we today see as the hallmark of the Progressive Era.

*****

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14 In Commons’s view, poor Appalachian whites, owing to their racial fitness as Anglo-Saxons, could be educated and thereby assimilated into American life. Poor blacks could not be so uplifted. Black inferiority, Commons believed, could be remedied only by interbreeding with superior races (1907: 213).

It is a Whiggish temptation to regard progressive thought of a century ago as akin to contemporary progressivism. Indeed, contemporary American liberals increasing adopt the term

“progressive” to describe their views. But their namesakes, the Progressive-Era progressives, viewed the poor and disenfranchised with great ambivalence. Many clearly believed that defective heredity offered a basis for sorting the worthy poor from the unworthy poor, and, that uplift of the worthy poor required eugenic control of the unworthy poor. Consider Popenoe and Johnson’s very successful Applied Eugenics (1918), published as part of the Social Science textbook series edited by Richard T. Ely. Paul Popenoe, a founder of American demography and an avid eugenicist, and his co-author argued for legislation that would abolish child labor, and provide education for all children. But these laws, though seemingly quite progressive, were designed to accomplish eugenic ends. Compulsory education and child labor bans, for Popenoe and Johnson, were desirable because they would raise the cost of children to the unfit poor. If the law banned child labor and compelled education, the unfit poor, unable to put their children to work, would have fewer children, a eugenic goal. The tip off comes when Popenoe and Johnson oppose free school lunches and textbooks for the poor. Because subsidies of books and lunches would lower the cost of child rearing, it would have the dysgenic effect of increasing children born to the unfit. Eugenically minded progressives often opposed subsidies for poor school children. Emily Greene Balch, Wellesley College economist, and future winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, also made a eugenic case against subsidies for poor school children. “If you simply want to have more people . . . depraved people quite as well as any other class . . . feeding school children [is] a good thing; but if you believe it is important . . . to have more of the right kind of people, then any measure of encouragement should be most carefully selective in character” (1907: 102) That progressives could oppose subsidies for poor school children reveals the extent to which eugenics informed American Progressive-Era reform, and its influence as means of sorting the worthy poor from the unworthy poor. 6. Eugenics, in the Progressive Era For many modern readers, the Progressive-Era relationship between American labor reform and the biology of human inheritance is doubly unexpected: first, that eugenics should have proved to be so popular and respectable, and second, that progressives should preponderate among economists attracted to eugenic explanations of economic problems. The influence of eugenics and its appeal to progressives surprise only because eugenics,

16

as a historical phenomenon, is still widely misunderstood. “Eugenics” remains a dirty word, because of its association with the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. Even professional historians find it difficult to resist the presentist temptation to read pre-Nazi history of eugenics as all a necessary preclude to Nazi crimes.15 Thus do many still regard Progressive-Era eugenics as an aberrant, pseudo-scientific, laissez-faire doctrine, a 20th-century version of Gilded-Age social Darwinism, that was wholly abandoned after the eugenic atrocities of German National Socialism. But Progressive-Era eugenics was, in fact, the broadest of churches. It was mainstream; it was popular to the point of faddishness; it was supported by leading figures in the newly emerging science of genetics; it appealed to an extraordinary range of political ideologies, not least to the progressives; it was, as state control of human breeding, a program that no proponent of laissez faire could consistently endorse, it opposed social Darwinism, and it survived the Nazis.16 In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics (Allen 1983: 116). A single text among many, Searchlights on Health, the Science of Eugenics sold one million copies in the first two years of its publication (Proctor 1991: 201, n. 28). The American Eugenics Society, co-founded by Irving Fisher to educate Americans on the virtues of eugenics, set up instructional pavilions and staged “fitter family” competitions at state agricultural fairs. Progressive-Era eugenic ideas were influential in nearly all non-Catholic western countries, and in many others besides. We today have scholarly treatments of eugenics movements in Canada, France, Japan, Russia, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Romania, China, Latin America, and elsewhere.17 In 1933, Paul Popenoe could boast that eugenic

15 Historian of eugenics Daniel Kevles describes his early work as “coming to terms with a dirty word” (cited in Adams 1990: 226). 16 Sweden, for example, greatly expanded its eugenic sterilizations during World War II. More than 60,000 Swedes, over 90 percent of them women, were sterilized from 1941 to1975 (Broberg and Tydén 1996: 109-10). The other Scandanavian countries also expanded eugenic sterilization programs after the second World War, as part of what historian Daniel Kevles (1999: 437) calls “the scientifically oriented planning of the new welfare state.” 17 On Canada, see McLaren 1990. On France see Schneider 1990. On Japan, see Suzuki 1975. On Russia see Adams 1990. On the Scandanavian countries, see Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996. On Romania, see Bucur 2002. On Latin American, see Stepan 1991. On China see Dikötter 1992.

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sterilization laws obtained in jurisdictions comprising one hundred and fifty million people (Kevles 1995: 115).18 Eugenics found advocates whose ideologies spanned the entire political spectrum, a measure of the pervasiveness and appeal of Progressive-Era eugenic thought. The eugenics movement attracted some reactionaries, such as Madison Grant, author The Passing of the Great Race, and key movement figures, such as Francis Galton, founder of modern eugenics, and Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory, can be described as social conservatives. But eugenics also won many advocates on the left, such as Birth Control advocates Margaret Sanger, who began intellectual life as a radical anarchist, and Marie Stopes, Fabian socialists such as Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw, to say nothing of the progressive economists and other reformers in the newly professionalizing sciences of society. Many biologists, including those pioneering the new field of genetics, were drawn to Progressive-Era eugenics. David Starr Jordan, for example, president of Stanford, was a tireless advocate of the eugenic idea that “the blood of nation determines its history,” as was Harvard Harvard geneticist and eugenicist E.M. East (Jordan 1902: 1). In fact, Paul and Spencer (1995: 302) report that, before the 1930s, Thomas Hunt Morgan was the only geneticist to publicly reject the eugenicist idea that socially undesirable traits were the product of bad heredity. Even when, in the 1930s and 1940s, genetics came to understand that eugenics’ single-gene-single-trait assumption was hopelessly oversimplified, leading geneticists, such as R.A. Fisher and Hermann Muller, remained attracted to eugenic ideas. Progressive-Era eugenic thought influenced intellectuals and others outside the movement proper.19 Virginia Woolf confided to her diary that “imbeciles” “should certainly be killed”. T.S. Eliot favorably reviewed eugenic articles from journals such as Eugenics Review. In 1908, D.H. Lawrence indulged in a eugenic extermination fantasy:

If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly, and then I’d go out in back streets and main streets and bring them all in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile at me (cited in Childs 2001:

18 Eugenic sentiments can even be found among scholars from traditionally black colleges. Miller (1917) worried about the lower fertility of the Howard University professoriate —“the higher element of the negro race”—when compared with the average African American.

18

19 I owe the following examples to Donald Childs’s (2001) fascinating volume, Modernism and Eugenics.

10). A Shaw character opined that “extermination must be put on a scientific basis if it is ever to be carried out humanely and apologetically as well as thoroughly” (From Shaw’s play “On the Rocks” (1933). Justices Louis Brandeis and William Howard Taft joined the infamous Buck v. Bell Supreme Court decision, where Oliver Wendell Holmes, a proponent of eugenics, opined that “The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” “Three generations of imbeciles,” they agreed, “is enough.”20 President Theodore Roosevelt, we have seen, called race suicide the “greatest problem of civilization” (1907: 550). President Calvin Coolidge, in the pages of Good Housekeeping, warned of the perils of race mixing, saying “ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law” (1921: 14). Coolidge said “America must remain American” when he signed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which imposed racial quotas, and which radically curtailed immigration from eastern and southern Europe. New scholarship in eugenics historiography has rediscovered Progressive-Era eugenics, especially the reform variant of eugenic thought, the one that saw eugenics as “a biologically based movement for social reform” (Schneider 1990: 4), “a branch of the drive for social perfection that many reformers of the day thought might be achieved through the deployment of science to good social ends” (Kevles 1998: 211). We now better understand how it is that economist James A. Field, writing a monograph-length survey of eugenics for the QJE, could believe that “eugenics is [one of the most] hopeful application[s] of science in social reform” (1911: 1-2).21 7. What drew the progressives to eugenics? Eugenic ideas, which date to Plato’s Republic at least, were not new in the Progressive Era, but they acquired new impetus with the Progressive-Era advent of a more expansive state relationship to American society. Galton first published on eugenics in the mid-1860s, but eugenics’ moment came only toward the end of Galton’s long life, when the new expansion of state power meant that it was now possible to have not only eugenic thought, but also eugenic

20Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 208 (1927) USSC.

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21 The crucial question, which biologists have mostly failed to comprehend, Field said, is “what eugenic policy promises the maximum increase of human welfare?” For “aid in answering that question,” Field maintained, “the economist is needed” (1911: 66-67).

practice. Eugenic legislation, says eugenics historian Diane Paul, had to “[await] the rise of the welfare state” (Paul 1995: 6). What drew progressives to eugenics was the same set of intellectual commitments that drew them to labor and other reform legislation. Paramount was the reform idea that laissez-faire was bankrupt. Many progressives believed that the state should take over from nature the project of selecting the fittest human beings. Sidney Webb said flatly, “no consistent eugenicist can be a ‘Laisser Faire’ individualist unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!”(Webb 1910 –11: 237). “[W]ith the twentieth century we have awakened to the fact, wrote eugenicist George Adami in Scientific Monthly, “that the principle of ‘laissez faire’ is as pernicious in the matter of marriage as it is in politics” (1921: 422). “Unless effective means are found to check the degeneration of the race, the noontide of humanity’s greatness is nigh, if not already passed,” Frank Fetter pronounced at the AEA meetings. “Our optimism must be based not upon laissez-faire,” said Fetter, “but upon vigorous application of science, humanity, and legislative art to the solution of the problem” (1907: 92-93). Progressive opposition to laissez faire was motivated by a set of deep intellectual commitments regarding the relationship between science, scientific expertise and right governance. The progressives were committed to:

(1) the explanatory power of scientific (especially statistical) social inquiry to get at the root causes of social and economic problems; (2) the legitimacy of social control, which derives from a organic conception of society as prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals; (3) the efficacy of social control via expert management of public administration, where (4) expertise is both sufficient and necessary for the task of wise public administration.

Progressives believed deeply in the power of social scientific inquiry, as means of discovering the root causes of economic problems, but also, in the case of eugenics, as a basis for organizing modern society. In the Progressive Era, especially in the United States, progressive economists and other reformers regarded science as a means for understanding social and economic problems, and also as a policy method – via scientific management of public administration – for setting the world to rights.22

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22 The reformers who founded the AEA and later the AALL were empirically minded, and a key selling point of the new reform economics they advocated was its methodological opposition to what they regarded as the excessively abstract, deductive approach of late classical political

By “scientific” the progressives meant, roughly, “statistical” in the sense of observation, measurement, tabulation, and, in time, some rudimentary kinds of inference. As with any system that assumes a human biological hierarchy, eugenics required measurement. A hierarchy presupposes that racial or other human types are distinguishable, and, if the hierarchy is to be stable, also generally requires a fixity of racial types across generations.23 It is no accident that so many notable eugenicists were drawn from statistics. Galton, Pearson, and Ronald A. Fisher were all founders of modern statistics, and were all, in addition, leading lights in the eugenics movement. Among economists, many proponents of eugenics were also statistically oriented. Francis Amasa Walker, Richmond Mayo-Smith, Irving Fisher, and Walter Wilcox, were all statisticians, by training and or by inclination. They regarded statistical measurement and inference as the method that put the “science” in social science. The first two of Pearson’s (1909) “bricks for the foundations of [eugenics]” were announced as follows: “[first] we depart from the old sociology, in that we desert verbal discussion for statistical facts, and [second] we apply new methods of statistics which form practically a new calculus” (1909: 19-20). Statistics were regarded by American progressives as the scientific foundation for their legislative reforms. Said reformer Lester Ward: “if laws of social events could be statistically formulated, they could be used for scientific lawmaking” (Ward 1915: 46). It is hard to overestimate the progressive methodological enthusiasm for counting and measuring. In his introduction to the Progressive social-policy manifesto, The Wisconsin Idea (1912), Theodore Roosevelt argued that “without means of attainment and measures of result an ideal becomes meaningless.” Social progress, Roosevelt argued, depended on measurement:

economy. See Barber 1987.

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23 The putative fixity of racial types, most commonly measured by the “cephalic index” – the ratio of skull length to width – was a key concern of eugenicists. Working for Cornell economist Jeremiah Jenks, who headed President Roosevelt’s 1907 U.S. Immigration Commission, the pioneering physical anthropologist Franz Boas took biometric measurements of thousands of European immigrants and their American-born and foreign-born children. Boas found the American-born children differed significantly from their immigrant parents and their foreign-born siblings in cephalic index and in other biometric measures, and that the measured differences between the immigrants and their foreign-born children were less than those between the immigrants and their American-born children. Boas concluded that there was no racial fixity but rather “a great plasticity of human type” and that the environmental advantages of the United States explained the greater change among American-born children of immigrants. (See Chase 1977).

“The real idealist is a pragmatist and an economist. He demands measurable results. . . . only in this way is social progress possible” (cited in Brown 1991: 139). Progressive enthusiasm for greater efficiency in education, in the military, in industry, in government and in human beings themselves, relied on counting and measuring. Joseph Mayer Rice’s 1913 bestseller, Scientific Management in Education, reported on the results of the new educational testing. The Progressive Era also marks the advent of measuring intelligence. Stanford psychologist Louis Terman’s 1916 manual for the Binet IQ test The Measurement of Intelligence was soon followed by Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (1920), written by Henry Herbert Goddard, superintendent of the Vineland (NJ) School for Feeble-Minded Boys. Psychologists of this era also measured physiological reaction times. Frederick Winslow Taylor published his Scientific Management in 1911. Physical anthropologists and biometricians gathered reams of anthropometric data, and the social workers at Hull House and elsewhere pioneered the use of social surveys, and of maps to visually display their quantitative information. For measurement on a broad scale, the state was indispensable. The rise of measurement – especially the measure of human bodies, character, and intelligence – was made possible by the state, which provided both funding and access to human subjects – WWI draftees, Ellis Island immigrants, school children, and the institutionalized. The progressives also believed strongly in the legitimacy of social control, a catch phrase of Progressive-Era reformers, as it was for their successors, the Institutionalists. “Social control” did not refer narrowly to state regulation of markets. Edward A. Ross, whose book (1901b) popularized the term, employed it in a broader, sociological sense, to describe the various ways in which society “can mold the individual to the necessity of the group,” which, in the context of his eugenics, meant a “program for survival” of the Anglo-Saxon race (in Furner 1975: 309). The legitimacy of social control meant, in practice, the legitimacy of state control.24 For progressives, the legitimacy of state control derived from their organic conception of the state as an entity prior to and greater than the sum of its constituent individuals. Lester Frank Ward devised the term “sociocracy” to describe the “scientific control of the social forces by the collective mind of society” (Fine 1956: 263). Progressives opposed the traditional liberal

24 Some utopian communities practiced eugenics as part of their philosophy of living. John Humphrey Noyes’s Oneida community is an interesting example of social control of human breeding, where social control is not equivalent to state control (See Karp 1982).

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emphasis on individual freedom, and the liberal view that the state’s legitimacy derives solely from the consent of its individual creators. Many eugenicists even saw state direction of human evolution as significant enough to serve a religious function. Galton wished to make a civic religion of eugenics, and called for a “‘Jehad’ or Holy War” upon “against customs and prejudices that impair the physical and moral qualities of our race” (1909: 33, 99).25 Irving Fisher imagined that eugenics would reunite science and religion. “We shall make of eugenics the biggest pillar of the church,” he proclaimed, “and eugenics will become embedded in the religion of the future. It shall happen hereafter that instead of conflicts between science and religion, these two great human interests will be marching together, hand in hand” (1913: 582-84). The progressives’s somewhat anti-democratic impulses also informed their view of how reform should be devised and implemented. They believed that academic experts were both sufficient and necessary for the task of wise public administration. Experts were sufficient, because they could and would suspend their own interests to circumvent (or better, transcend) the messy business of interest-group machine politics. As one widely read eugenics text put it: “government and social control are in the hands of expert politicians who have power, instead of expert technologists who have wisdom. There should be technologists in control of every field of human need and desire” (Albert Wiggam’s New Decalogue 1923 cited in Ludmerer 1972: 16-17). Experts were necessary for the task of wise public administration, because the modern conditions of industrial capitalism no longer permitted a quaint liberal individualism, but demanded wise government by expert elites. The idea was that the benignly-motivated experts should interpose themselves, in the name of the social good, to better represent the interests of the industrial poor, for whom reformers felt contempt as much as pity. Edward A. Ross described progressivism as “intelligent social engineering” (cited in McMahon 1999: 90). The case for technocratic governance was put bluntly by Irving Fisher (1907: 20), when he said: “The world consists of two classes —the educated and the ignorant — and it is essential for progress that the former should be allowed to dominate the latter. . . . once we admit that it is proper for

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25 When, in 1904, Galton wobbled out of retirement, happy at his belated fashionability, to address at LSE the newly founded British Sociological Society, his paper induced George Bernard Shaw to proclaim: “there is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations” (Galton 1904: 21).

the instructed classes to give tuition to the uninstructed, we begin to see an almost boundless vista for possible human betterment.” Put in historical context, the appeal of Progressive-Era eugenics to the progressive mind is clearer. Eugenics necessarily rejects individualism in favor of a collective – “the race” or the nation; eugenicists regarded unfettered industrial capitalism as dysgenic, both because improved well being thwarts natural Malthusian checks, and because capitalism promotes the inferior, low-wage races; eugenics boasted an air of scientific authority, especially with its emphasis on statistical measurement; and eugenics opposed laissez-faire values, by substituting an objective, expert determination of the social good for a subjective, individual determination of the social good. Thus, were eugenics and progressivism complementary rather than antagonistic trends in the United States during the Progressive Era.26 8. Conclusion Gunnar Myrdal wrote in The American Dilemma (1944), his influential study of race relations, “A handful of social and biological scientists over the last 50 years have gradually forced informed people to give up some of the more blatant of our biological errors. But there still must be other countless errors of the same sort that no living man can yet detect, because of the fog within which our type of Western culture envelops us” (in Gould 1981: 23). In The Mismeasure of Man, Steven Jay Gould invokes Myrdal’s passage as a commentary on the real difficulties that arise when trying to disentangle the effects of culture on science from the effects of science on culture. Gould was perhaps unaware that Myrdal knew whereof he spoke. Both Myrdal and his wife Alva were themselves eugenicists who promoted an expansion of Swedish coercive sterilization laws during World War II. More than 60,000 Swedes, over 90 percent of them women, were sterilized from 1941 to1975 (Broberg and Tydén 1996: 109-110). The Myrdals’ eugenics disavowed racism. They saw sterilization of the unfit, says Daniel Kevles, “as part of the scientifically oriented planning of the new welfare state” (1999). Said Alva Myrdal in 1941: “In our day of highly accelerated social reforms the need for sterilization on social grounds gains new momentum. . . . The fact that community aid is accompanied by increased fertility in some groups hereditarily defective or in other respects deficient and also the fact that infant mortality among the deficient is decreasing demands some corrective” (in Broberg and Tydén 1996: 105). Gunnar Myrdal’s meta-scientific insight was correct: scientists cannot step wholly

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26 This paragraph is indebted to Searle 1998: 25-26.

outside the culture in which they perform their scientific work. But Myrdal was unable or unwilling to apply this insight to his own scientific advocacy of eugenics. Instead, a rival and ultimately more powerful progressive idea carried the day; at the end of An American Dilemma, Myrdal writes: “We have today in social science a greater trust in the improvability of man and society than we have ever had since the Enlightenment” (1944: 1024).

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