3. Adolph Reed Jr., "Intellectual Brownshirts," Progressive, Dec. 1994.
4. Sherwin B. Nuland, "The Death of Hippocrates," New Republic, Sept. 13, 2004, p. 31.
5. Alan Wolfe, "Hidden Injuries," New Republic, July 7, 1997.
6. A former adviser to Teddy Roosevelt, and an extremist even by the standards of many eugenicists, Grant wrote, "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race." Quoted in Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 10. See also Robert Jay Lifton, The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York: Basic Books, 2000), p. 24; Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), p. 291.
7. Black, War Against the Weak, p. xviii.
8. Charles Murray, "Deeper into the Brain," National Review, Jan. 24, 2000, p. 49; Thomas C. Leonard, "'More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," History of Political Economy 35, no. 4 (Winter 2003), p. 707.
9. Diane Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," Journal of the History of Ideas 45, no. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1984), p. 586 n. 56, citing H. G. Wells, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), p. 60; William J. Hyde, "The Socialism of H. G. Wells in the Early Twentieth Century," Journal of the History of Ideas 17, no. 2 (April 1956), p. 220; H. G. Wells, The New Machiavelli (New York: Duffield, 1910), p. 379. In A Modern Utopia (1905), Wells wrote:
The State is justified in saying, before you may add children to the community for the community to educate and in part to support, you must be above a certain minimum of personal efficiency...and a certain minimum of physical development, and free of any transmissible disease...Failing these simple qualifications, if you and some person conspire [note the use of the criminal "conspire"] and add to the population of the State, we will, for the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim of your passions, but we shall insist that you are under a debt to the State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use restraint to get the payment out of you. (H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia [London, 1905], pp. 183-84, quoted in Michael Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought: A Study in Ideological Affinity," Historical Journal 22, no. 3 [Sept. 1979], p. 656)
10. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman: A Comedy and a Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: University Press, 1903), p. 43; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 568, citing George Bernard Shaw, Sociological Papers (London, 1905), pp. 74-75; Shaw, Man and Superman, pp. 45, 43; George Bernard Shaw, preface to Major Barbara (New York: Penguin, 1917), p. 47.
11. Freeden, "Eugenics and Progressive Thought," p. 671; Chris Nottingham, The Pursuit of Serenity: Havelock Ellis and the New Politics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), pp. 185, 213; Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," p. 567, citing J. B. S. Haldane, "Darwin on Slavery," Daily Worker (London), Nov. 14, 1949.
12. Paul, "Eugenics and the Left," pp. 568, 573.
13. In its first year of publication, a full quarter of the magazine's contributions came from the British Isles. Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), p. 276.
14. For more of such encomiums, see Yosal Rogat, "Mr. Justice Holmes: A Dissenting Opinion," Stanford Law Review 15, no. 1 (Dec. 1962), pp. 3-44.
15. William E. Leuchtenburg, The Supreme Court Reborn: The Constitutional Revolution in the Age of Roosevelt (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 19. Emphasis mine.
16. Robert J. Cynkar, "Buck v. Belclass="underline" 'Felt Necessities' v. Fundamental Values?" Columbia Law Review 81, no. 7 (Nov. 1981), p. 1451.
17. In 1911 Wilson asked Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen, the state's leading eugenicist and an expert on epilepsy, to draft the law. A Polish Catholic of Jewish extraction and American citizenship, Katzen-Ellenbogen has a story too lengthy to recount here. But it is worth noting that this profoundly evil man later found himself a doctor to the SS in France and ultimately a "prisoner" who ended up working with the butchers of Buchenwald. He personally murdered thousands — often in the name of eugenic theories he developed in American psychiatric hospitals — and tortured countless more. The "science" he learned in America was quite warmly received by the SS. In a grotesque miscarriage of justice, he escaped execution at Nuremberg. See Edwin Black, "Buchenwald's American-Trained 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.