Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

Abstract

As a Wake Forest University undergraduate, I had several classes with Thomas F. Gossett, whose 1963 book, Race: The History of an Idea in America, first brought the connection between race and eugenics to my attention and to the attention of many others. Since Gossett's work appeared, the literature on the topic has burgeoned. Like Gossett, Thomas C. Leonard is interested in the history of ideas that shape meaning and policy, and like Gossett, Leonard draws on the writings of Progressive Era reformers. For Gossett, race, after 1865, became an idea shaped both by a southern aristocracy ready to reassert its prewar authority and by northern reformers and industrial conservatives prepared to adjust the nation to dramatic economic and social changes. Gossett was certainly appreciative of the effects of social Darwinism and the eugenics movement on the shaping of American post–Civil War views of race. For Leonard, a group of progressive economists, who, amid late nineteenth-century disciplinary and professional formation, were just as likely to think of themselves as sociologists and social workers, were led by German ideas that privileged state authority over individual liberty. Like early nineteenth-century German romanticism that challenged the claims of the French and Scottish Enlightenments, these later German “illiberal” ideas led American social scientists to merge social Darwinism with state intervention. In doing so, Progressive Era reformers shaped American social policies in ways that reinforced the subordination of groups of vulnerable people: immigrants, disabled people, ordinary wage laborers, racial minorities, and women.

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