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 Controclass="underline" 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 the 'selection' of 'alien' races and those of 'lesser racial value.'" Ibid., p. 48
37. John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 144.
38. Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 124.
39. Thomas Sowell, Civil Rights: Rhetoric or Reality? (New York: William Morrow, 1984), p. 84.
40. Maureen Dowd, "Could Thomas Be Right?" New York Times, June 25, 2003, p. A25; Steele, White Guilt, p. 174.
41. David Tell, "Planned Un-parenthood: Roe v. Wade at Thirty," Weekly Standard, Jan. 27, 2003, pp. 35-41; Gloria Feldt, Behind Every Choice Is a Story (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 2002), pp. xix, xvi; Faye Wattleton, "Humanist of the Year Acceptance Speech," Humanist, July-Aug. 1986.
42. Margaret Sanger: An Autobiography (New York: Norton, 1938), p. 70.
43. Daniel J. Kevles, "Sex Without Fear," New York Times, June 28, 1992.
44. Valenza, "Was Margaret Sanger a Racist?" p. 45, citing David M. Kennedy, Birth Control in America: The Career of Margaret Sanger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 115; H. G. Wells, introduction to The Pivot of Civilization, by Margaret Sanger (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003), p. 42.