Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

feared that modern technology had removed the natural constraints on population growth among the 'unfit,' raising the possibility that the 'higher elements' would be 'swamped' by the black and brown hordes below.

Not only was America no exception to this widespread panic among the intellectual and aristocratic classes; it often led the way. American progressives were obsessed with the 'racial health' of the nation, supposedly endangered by mounting waves of immigration as well as overpopulation by native-born Americans. Many of the outstanding progressive projects, from Prohibition to the birth control movement, were grounded in this quest to tame the demographic beast. Leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as an important, and often indispensable, tool in the quest for the holy grail of 'social control.'

Scholarly exchanges between eugenicists, 'raceologists,' race hygienists, and birth controllers in Germany and the United States were unremarkable and regular occurrences. Hitler 'studied' American eugenics while in prison, and sections of Mein Kampf certainly reflect that immersion. Indeed, some of his arguments seem to be lifted straight out of various progressive tracts on 'race suicide.' Hitler wrote to the president of the American Eugenics Society to ask for a copy of his Case for Sterilization — which called for the forcible sterilization of some ten million Americans — and later sent him another note thanking him for his work. Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race also made a huge impression on Hitler, who called the book his 'bible.' In 1934, when the National Socialist government had sterilized over fifty thousand 'unfit' Germans, a frustrated American eugenicist exclaimed, 'The Germans are beating us at our own game.'⁶

Of course American progressives are not culpable for the Holocaust. But it is a well-documented fact that eugenics lay at the heart of the progressive enterprise. The eugenic crusade, writes the historian Edwin Black, was 'created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.'⁷ German race science stood on American shoulders.

It would be nice to say that liberals' efforts to airbrush eugenics from their own history and fob it off on conservatives are unacceptable. But of course they have been accepted. Most intellectuals, never mind liberal journalists and commentators, don't know much about either conservatism or the history of eugenics, but they take it on faith that the two are deeply entwined. One can only hope that this wrong can be made right with a dose of the truth. A brief review of the progressive pantheon — the intellectual heroes of the left, then and now — reveals how deeply imbued the early socialists were with eugenic thinking.

Just as socialist economics was a specialization within the larger progressive avocation, eugenics was a closely related specialty. Eugenic arguments and economic arguments tracked each other, complemented each other, and, at times, melted into each other. Sidney Webb, the father of Fabian socialism and still among the most revered British intellectuals, laid it out fairly clearly. 'No consistent eugenicist,' he explained, 'can be a 'Laissez Faire' individualist [that is, a conservative] unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!' The fact that the 'wrong' people were outbreeding the 'right' ones would put Britain on the path of 'national deterioration' or, 'as an alternative,' result 'in this country gradually falling to the Irish and the Jews.'⁸

Indeed, British socialism, the intellectual lodestar of American Progressivism, was saturated with eugenics. The Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb, George Bernard Shaw, Harold Laski, and H. G. Wells were devoted to the cause. John Maynard Keynes, Karl Pearson, Havelock Ellis, Julian and Aldous Huxley, Eden Paul, and such progressive publications as the New Statesman (founded by Webb) and the Manchester Guardian were also supporters of eugenics to one extent or another.

As discussed earlier, Wells was probably the most influential literary figure among pre-World War II American progressives. Despite his calls for a new 'liberal fascism' and an 'enlightened Nazism,' Wells more than anyone else lent romance to the progressive vision of the future. He was also a keen eugenicist and particularly supportive of the extermination of unfit and darker races. He explained that if his 'New Republic' was to be achieved, 'swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people' would 'have to go.' 'It is in the sterilisation of failures,' he added, 'and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.' In The New Machiavelli, he asserts that eugenics must be the central tenet of any true and successful socialism: 'Every improvement is provisional except the improvement of the race.' While Wells could be squeamish about how far the state should go in translating this conclusion into policy, he remained a forceful advocate for the state to defend aggressively its interest in discouraging parasitic classes.⁹

George Bernard Shaw — no doubt because of his pacifist opposition to World War I — has acquired the reputation of an outspoken individualist and freethinker suspicious of state power and its abuses. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shaw was not only an ardent socialist but totally committed to eugenics as an integral part of the socialist project. 'The only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialization of the selective breeding of Man,' he declared. Shaw advocated the abolition of traditional marriage in favor of more eugenically acceptable polygamy under the auspices of a State Department of Evolution and a new 'eugenic religion.' He particularly lamented the chaotic nature of a laissez-faire approach to mate selection in which people 'select their wives and husbands less carefully than they select their cashiers and cooks.' Besides, he explained, a smart woman would be more content with a 10 percent share in a man of good genetic stock than a 100 percent share in a man of undesirable lineage. What was therefore required was a 'human stud farm' in order to 'eliminate the Yahoo whose vote will wreck the commonwealth.' According to Shaw, the state should be firm in its policy toward criminal and genetically undesirable elements. '[W]ith many apologies and expressions of sympathy, and some generosity in complying with their last wishes,' he wrote with ghoulish glee, we 'should place them in the lethal chamber and get rid of them.'¹⁰

Other liberal heroes shared Shaw's enthusiasm. John Maynard Keynes, the founding father of liberal economics, served on the British Eugenics Society's board of directors in 1945 — at a time when the popularity of eugenics was rapidly imploding thanks to the revelation of Nazi concentration camp experiments. Nonetheless, Keynes declared eugenics 'the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists.' Julian Huxley, the founder of the World Wildlife Fund, first director of UNESCO, and revered science popularizer, co-wrote The Science of Life with Wells and Wells's son. Huxley, too, was a sincere believer in eugenics. Havelock Ellis, the pioneering sex theorist and early architect of the birth control movement, spoke for many when he proposed a eugenic registry of all citizens, so as to provide 'a real guide as to those persons who are most fit, or most unfit to carry on the race.' Ellis did not oppose Nazi sterilization programs, believing that good science 'need not become mixed up in the Nordic and anti-Semitic aspects of Nazi aspiration.' J. B. S. Haldane, the British geneticist, wrote in the Daily Worker, 'The dogma of human equality is no part of Communism...the formula of Communism: 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,' would be nonsense, if abilities were equal.'¹¹

Harold Laski, to some the most respected British political scientist of the twentieth century (he was Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s tutor and JFK's professor), echoed the panic over 'race suicide' (an American term): 'The different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse.' Indeed, eugenics was Laski's first great intellectual passion. His first published article, 'The Scope of Eugenics,' written while he was still a teenager, impressed Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. At Oxford, Laski studied under the eugenicist Karl Pearson, who wrote, 'Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post.'¹²

Laski, of course, had an enormous impact on American liberalism. He was a regular contributor to the New Republic — which in its early years published scores of leading British intellectuals, including Wells.¹³ He also taught at Harvard and became friends with Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to FDR and, later, Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter introduced Laski to FDR, and he became one of Roosevelt's most ardent British supporters, despite his strong communist ties. More famously, he became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's closest friends, despite an age difference of more than five decades. The two maintained a storied correspondence that lasted nearly twenty years.

EUGENICS, AMERICAN-STYLE

American progressives, who took their lead in many ways from their British cousins, shared a similar ardor for racial hygiene. Take Justice Holmes, the most admired jurist of the progressive period and one of the most revered liberal icons in American legal history. It seems that no praise of Holmes can go too far. Felix Frankfurter called him