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

a 'really regenerated state government' would take steps to prevent 'crime and insanity' by regulating who could marry and procreate. Such an empowered state, he wrote archly, 'might conceivably reach the conclusion that the enforced celibacy of hereditary criminals and incipient lunatics would make for individual and social improvement even more than would a maximum passenger fare on the railroads of two cents a mile.' The state, he insisted, must 'interfere on behalf of the really fittest.'¹⁸

Still, these thoughts qualified Croly as something of a 'dove' on the issue of eugenics. Charles Van Hise, Roosevelt's close adviser, was more emphatic. 'He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot,' explained Van Hise, a founder of the American conservation movement and president of the University of Wisconsin during its glory days as the premier training ground for American progressives.¹⁹ Van Hise summarized the American progressive attitude toward eugenics well when he explained: 'We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied; we know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infectious and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.'²⁰

The key divide among progressives was not between eugenicists and non-eugenicists or between racists and non-racists. It was between advocates of 'positive eugenics' and advocates of 'negative eugenics,' between those who called themselves humanists and those who subscribed to theories of race suicide, between environmentalists and genetic determinists. The positive eugenicists argued for merely encouraging, cajoling, and subsidizing the fit to breed more and the unfit to breed less. The negative eugenicists operated along a spectrum that went from forced sterilization to imprisonment (at least during the reproductive years). Environmentalists stressed that improving the material conditions of the degenerate classes would improve their plight (many progressives were really Lamarckians when it came to human evolution). Race suicide theorists believed that whole lines and classes of people were beyond salvation.

For a variety of reasons, those we would today call conservatives often opposed eugenic schemes. The lone dissenter in Buck v. Bell, for example, wasn't the liberal justice Louis Brandeis or Harlan Fiske Stone but the 'archconservative' Pierce Butler.²¹ The Catholic conservative G. K. Chesterton was subjected to relentless ridicule and scorn for his opposition to eugenics. In various writings, most notably Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society, Chesterton opposed what was held to be the sophisticated position by nearly all 'thinking people' in Britain and the United States. Indeed, the foremost institution combating eugenics around the world was the Catholic Church. It was the Catholic influence in Italy — along with the fact that Italians were a genetically polyglot bunch — that made Italian Fascism less obsessed with eugenics than either the American progressives or the Nazis (though Mussolini did believe that over time Fascist government would have a positive eugenic effect on the Italians).

Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term 'social Darwinism' to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively 'interfere' in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the 'unfit' and the poor were the villains for letting a 'state of nature' rule among the lower classes.

Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist — he coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest' — but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good — albeit classical — liberal: he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigueur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing 'greed,' and even the Holocaust.²²

Thanks to some deeply flawed scholarship by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, nearly all of the so- called robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed social Darwinists, too, even though subsequent historians have demonstrated that Gilded Age industrialists were barely influenced by Darwinism, if at all. Darwinism was a fixation of intellectuals and academics. The so-called robber barons generally lacked formal education. To the extent they grounded their worldview in anything, it was in Christian ethics and the writings of Adam Smith. Moreover, they believed that capitalism was good for the poor. Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations — usually infused with Marxist cliches — rendered the robber barons ersatz fascists.²³

A few historians have dealt with these conundrums by labeling the progressives 'reform Darwinists.' Reform Darwinists were the only real Darwinians as we understand the term today. Almost all the leading progressive intellectuals interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to 'interfere' with human natural selection. Even progressives with no ostensible ties to eugenics worked closely with champions of the cause. There was simply no significant stigma against racist eugenics in progressive circles.²⁴

Before we continue, it is important to dispel a misperception that may be building in some readers' minds. While progressive eugenicists were often repugnantly racist, eugenics as a field was not necessarily so. Obviously, intermarriage with blacks would be greeted with horror by people already terrified by 'Aryans' marrying Slavs or Italians. But W. E. B. DuBois shared many of the eugenic views held by white progressives. His 'Talented Tenth' was itself a eugenically weighted term. He defined members of the Talented Tenth as 'exceptional men' and the 'best of the race.' He complained that 'the negro has not been breeding for an object' and that he must begin to 'train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty.' Over his long career he time and again returned to his concern that the worst blacks were overbreeding while the best were underbreeding. Indeed, he supported Margaret Sanger's 'Negro Project,' which sought to sharply curtail reproduction among 'inferior' stocks of the black population.²⁵

Perhaps an even better indication of how little modern popular conceptions jibe with the historical reality during this period is the Ku Klux Klan. For decades the Klan has stood as the most obvious candidate for an American brand of fascism. That makes quite a bit of sense. The right-wing label, on the other hand, isn't nearly as clean a fit. The Klan of the Progressive Era was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War. Rather, it was a collection of loosely independent organizations spread across the United States. What united them, besides their name and absurd getups, was that they were all inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation. They were, in fact, a 'creepy fan subculture' of the film. Founded the week of the film's release in 1915, the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than the society in general. Of course, this is less a defense of the Klan than an indictment of the society that produced it.

For years the conventional view among scholars and laymen alike was that the Klan was rural and fundamentalist. The truth is it was often quite cosmopolitan and modern, thriving in cities like New York and Chicago. In many communities the Klan focused on the reform of local government and on maintaining social values. It was often the principal extralegal enforcer of Prohibition, the consummate progressive 'reform.' 'These Klansmen,' writes Jesse Walker in an illuminating survey of the latest scholarship, 'were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish.'²⁶

When modern liberals try to explain away the Klan membership of prominent Democrats — most frequently West Virginia senator Robert Byrd — they cough up a few cliches about how good liberals 'evolved' from their southern racial 'conservatism.' But the Klan of the 1920s was often seen as reformist and modern, and it had a close relationship with some progressive elements in the Democratic Party. The young Harry Truman as well as the future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black were members. In 1924, at the famous 'Klanbake' Democratic convention, the KKK rallied around the future senator William McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the treasury (and son-in- law), a key architect of Wilson's war socialism, and a staunch Prohibitionist.

Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we've been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. Indeed, the modern institution of academic tenure was largely carved out by progressive academia's solidarity with E. A. Ross, the author of the 'race suicide' thesis.²⁷ Simultaneously one of America's leading sociologists, economists, and 'raceologists,' Ross was the quintessential reform Darwinist. He first became attracted to Progressivism when he saw that one of his conservative professors was horrified by Henry George's Progress and Poverty — a tract that inspired American progressives, British socialists,