Nazi,' Jerusalem Report, Sept. 22, 2003.
18. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), pp. 345, 191.
19. Charles Richard Van Hise, The Conservation of Natural Resources in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1910), p. 378.
20. Scott Gordon, The History and Philosophy of Social Science (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 521; Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 68.
21. Justice Butler did not offer a written opinion, but there are two (compatible) possible explanations for his dissent. One, Butler was a social Darwinist in the sense that he didn't believe the state should 'interfere, interfere, interfere!' as Sidney Webb had put it. Two, he was the Court's only Catholic at the time, and the Church was resolute in its teachings against anything that smacked of eugenics.
22. Edward Pearce, writing in the British Guardian, calls Spencer 'a downright evil man...whose passion for eugenics and elimination made him the daydreamer of things to come.' Edward Pearce, 'Nietzsche Is Radically Unsound,' Guardian, July 8, 1992, p. 20. Edwin Black, author of War Against the Weak, claims that eugenics was born of Spencer's ideas and that Spencer 'completely denounced charity' in Social Statics. Black clearly has not read the book; neither of these things is true. See Roderick T. Long, 'Herbert Spencer: The Defamation Continues,' Aug. 28, 2003, www.lewrockwell.com/orig3/long3.html (accessed March 13, 2007).
23. Part of the problem is that Hofstadter simply got much of the history wrong (a point even the left-wing historian Eric Foner is forced to concede in his introduction to the 1992 edition of Social Darwinism in American Thought). Fifteen years after the publication of Hofstadter's book, Irvin Wyllie of the University of Wisconsin demonstrated that almost none of the Gilded Age industrialists expressed themselves in Darwinian terms or took much notice of the Darwin fad among the intellectual classes. Even the phrase 'social Darwinism' was almost unknown during the so-called age of the robber barons. In one egregious example, Hofstadter erroneously attributed a statement about the 'survival of the fittest' to John D. Rockefeller. Rather, it was Rockefeller's college-educated son, John D. Rockefeller Jr., who offered the throwaway line in 1902 in an address at Brown University. Irvin G. Wyllie, 'Social Darwinism and the Businessman,' Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Oct. 15, 1959, p. 632, citing Raymond B. Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), pp. 130-31.
24. The progressive Jane Addams worked closely with the Chicago judge Harry Olson, the founder of the American Eugenics Society and onetime president of the Eugenics Research Association. As a pioneer of juvenile courts in America, Olson was dedicated to weeding out 'the cheaper races.' He advocated sterilization when necessary, but his preferred remedy was to set up a psychiatric gulag where the unfit could live out their lives segregated from the better human stocks. In 1916 the New Republic demonstrated the spirit of compromise among progressives in an editorial (almost surely written by Croly):
Laissez-faire as a policy of population leads straight to perdition ...Imbecility breeds imbecility as certainly as white hens breed white chickens; and under laissez-faire imbecility is given full chance to breed, and does so in fact at a rate far superior to that of able stocks... 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...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. (New Republic, March 18, 1916; emphasis mine)
Translation: Cast the social safety net as far and as wide as possible, and all good progressives will agree that whoever's left out of the net will be a candidate for 'extinction.'
25. Daylanne English, 'W. E. B. DuBois's Family Crisis,' American Literature 72, no. 2 (June 2000), pp. 297, 293; Charles Valenza, 'Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?' Family Planning Perspectives 17, no. 1 (Jan.-Feb. 1985), pp. 44-46.
26. Jesse Walker, 'Hooded Progressivism,' Reason, Dec. 2, 2005.
27. Rexford Tugwell, FDR's Brain Truster, claims, to the contrary, that it was his mentor Simon Patten who deserves the honor of coining the phrase. Leonard, ''More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'' pp. 693-94, 696 n. 13.
28. David M. Kennedy, 'Can We Still Afford to Be a Nation of Immigrants?' Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1996, pp. 52-68.
29. Edward Alsworth Ross, Social Control: A Survey of the Foundations of Order (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 418.
30. Sidney Webb, 'The Economic Theory of a Legal Minimum Wage,' Journal of Political Economy 20, no. 10 (Dec. 1912), p. 992, quoted in Leonard, ''More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'' p. 703.
31. Edward Alsworth Ross, Seventy Years of It (New York: Appleton-Century, 1936), p. 70, quoted in Leonard, ''More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'' p. 699; Royal Meeker, 'Review of Cours d'economie politique,' Political Science Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1910), p. 544, quoted in Leonard, ''More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'' p. 703.
32. Commons is rightly a member of the 'Labor Hall of Fame.' For a glowing summary of his accomplishments, see Jack Barbash, 'John R. Commons: Pioneer of Labor Economics,' Monthly Labor Review 112, no. 5 (May 1989), pp. 44-49, available at
www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/1989/05/art4full.pdf (accessed March 16, 2007). The historian Joseph Dorfman writes, 'More than any other economist [Commons] was responsible for the conversion into public policy of reform proposals designed to alleviate defects in the industrial system.' Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in America, 1918-1933 (New York: Viking, 1959), vols. 4-5, p. 377, quoted in Barbash, 'John R. Commons,' p. 44.
A onetime president of the American Economic Association, Commons complained in his influential Races and Immigrants in America that 'competition has no respect for superior races,' which was why 'the race with lowest necessities displaces others.' Hence, 'the Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race.' John R. Commons, Races and Immigrants in America (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 151, 148.
33. 'The negro could not possibly have found a place in American industry had he come as a free man...[I]f such races are to adopt that industrious life which is a second nature to races of the temperate zones, it is only through some form of compulsion.' Leonard, ''More Merciful and Not Less Effective,'' p. 701.
34. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 47. The Swedes — long the model of humane Third Way economics — had passed eugenics laws around the same time as the Nazis. Even more disturbing, the Swedes continued the practice well into the mid-1970s. Over sixty thousand Swedes were forcibly sterilized. Or, to be more fair, some were given the option of being locked up until their child-bearing years were over instead of going under the knife. Among those who received 'treatment' were children of racially mixed parents, Swedes with 'gypsy features,' unwed mothers with 'too many' children, habitual criminals, and even a boy deemed 'sexually precocious.' The Danes passed similar eugenics laws in 1929, even before the Nazis. They sterilized eleven thousand and kept their laws on the books until the late 1960s. In Finland eleven thousand people were sterilized, and four thousand involuntary abortions were performed between 1945 and 1970. Similar revelations came from Norway, France, Belgium, and other quarters of enlightened Europe. A year earlier, Alberta, Canada, went through a similar controversy when it was revealed that nearly three thousand people were sterilized for all the usual reasons. Some were told they were being admitted for appendectomies and left the hospital barren. Adrian Wooldridge, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Sept. 15, 1997.
35. Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann, The Racial State: Germany, 1933- 1945 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 34, 35.
36. As Michael Burleigh and Wolfgang Wippermann note, after 1935 Nazi 'social policy was indivisible from
