Which dismantles your attempts to e.g. associate
progressivism with eugenics. Eugenics was a fad.
Some progressives were susceptible. Some weren't.
(As with conservatives. E.g., Popenoe.)
Alan Isaac
One can't sensibly discuss this subject from a priori convictions like "eugenics was a fad". These are historical issues, and some historians on this list have had much to say. Bateman's glorious article on "Clearing the Ground" in the Morgan-Rutherford volume should be required reading here, as should Rutherford's new volume on Institutionalism, and Tim Leonard's articles. Progressivism was a evangelical Christian response in the second religious reawakening, attempting to construct the kingdom of God here and now. The perfection, thus perfectibility, of men and institutions was needed to remake society as the Kingdom of God, and eugenics was just as much a natural tool to perfect humankind as were the anti-trust laws for the "social control" of business. (Thus the US and UK versions of eugenics are not the same in the sense of having arisen from identical sources.) Am I the only American on this list whose high school hygiene text talked about, and had photos of, the Jukes and Kallikaks?
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E. Roy Weintraub
Professor of EconomicsFellow, Center for the History of Political Economy