The label “progressivism” has had multiple meanings over the course of American political history. During the Progressive Era, it is important to realize that the phrase was not attached to a particular political ideology or set of policy commitments. Rather, “progressivism” referred to a specific set of philosophical and governing principles about the role the state should play in modern society. Progressives adopted such diverse ideological perspectives that in 1912 the three major presidential candidates, all from different parties, identified as Progressives.
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Progressives of varying party allegiances shared a few basic precepts. They critiqued the constitution, its emphasis on individual rights, and the role of parties, corruption, and bossism in American politics. They favored a state that was administered by experts and professionals, advised by knowledge-based communities, and anchored governance in science. Discourses of determinism, heredity, and eugenics flourished in this setting.401
Three ideational and ideological features of Progressive political thought created a fertile ideological terrain for these developments. First, Progressives believed that the modern state should be guided by science rather than politics. It was thought that disinterested, nonpartisan, objective experts would run the state more efficiently than politically motivated individuals selected by party bosses. Despite their diverse factions, Progressives relied on expertise by drawing from a historically specific set of scientific and intellectual discourses that shaped the politics of the early twentieth century.402
Central to this discursive universe were the sciences of heredity, including Darwinism, scientific racism, and eugenics. These frameworks presented social, moral, and economic failure as outcomes of biological inferiority among society’s weakest and most defective. But it was the eugenics movement that pushed the conclusions of race
401 Stephen Skowronek and Stephen Engel, “The Progressives’ Century,” in The Progressives’
Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State, ed. Stephen Skowronek, Stephen Engel, and Bruce Ackerman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 1–15; Nicole Mellow, “The Democratic Fit: Party Reform and the Eugenics Tool,” in The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 197–218.
402 Daniel Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism,” Reviews in American History 10, no. 4 (December
1982): 113–32; Rogers Smith, “The Progressive Seedbed: Claims of American Political Community in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries,” in The Progressives’ Century: Political Reform, Constitutional Government, and the Modern American State, ed. Stephen Skowronek, Stephen Engel, and Bruce Ackerman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 264–90; Skowronek and Engel, “The Progressives’ Century.”
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science and evolutionary theory to new extremes. Whereas bio-determinist logic during the Gilded Age rationalized a “survival of the fittest” approach to economics and social policy, eugenics called for a greater expansion of state power. Eugenicists believed it was the state’s duty to identify and sort out the unfit as part of an effort to regulate breeding and promote racial progress. This replaced the “natural selection” logic of Gilded Age politics with a project of artificial selection led by expert administrators who proactively identified the unfit to prevent them from propagating.
This allowed Progressives of varying ideologies to defend invasive and repressive legal regimes. Jim Crow laws, restrictive immigration statutes, compulsory sterilizations, and repressive policies for the poor, women, and “unfit” became essential to the state’s program of improving the nation’s racial stock. Progressives consequently defended social uplift for some members of society and repression for others because they relied on discourses that lent scientific credence to established hierarchies of race, class, and gender, believing that eugenics would enable the state to improve the polity by uplifting the worthy and repressing the unworthy.403 So despite similarities with Gilded Age
political thought, the eugenics movement changed the state’s relationship to the citizen by promoting new interventions to monitor social behavior.
The Progressives’ embrace of eugenics is related to a second theme of the era’s politics—an emphasis on the primacy of the collective over the individual. As Daniel Rodgers has argued, Progressives embraced the “rhetoric of the moral whole” while
403 Leonard, Illiberal Reformers; McGerr, A Fierce Discontent; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic
Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015); Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness.
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rejecting the individualist ethos of American political culture.404 Progressives articulated
anthropomorphic depictions of American society as a living organism that needed to be cared for.405 But to protect society as social organism required exclusionary politics;
undesirable groups were viewed as uninvited parasites and social diseases that threatened collective national health and survival. This drove the move from natural selection to state-administered artificial selection; instead of allowing nature to run its course through minimal intervention into economic and social policy, restrictive immigration regimes and invasive eugenic policies were means of protecting the social organism of the polity from invasive and parasitic undesirables.406
The Progressives’ embrace of eugenics was premised on exterminating, or at least controlling, the unfit to improve the social body. This required the “fittest” to be determined prior to the selection process. As a result, eugenicists constructed elaborate taxonomic hierarchies of naturally occurring human types to guide the state’s selection of the fit and unfit. By asserting the primacy of the collective over the individual, Progressives ironically justified great social control over the individual in the name of collective health. Their articulation of social unity thus relied on a mix of eugenics and race science to justify exclusionary politics and state expansion in service of a greater good. Worked into these taxonomic structures were constructs of criminality.
This emphasis on science and expertise during the Progressive Era was not simply nominal. A third important current of progressive politics was that scientific experts
404 Rodgers, “In Search of Progressivism.”
405 Skowronek and Engel, “The Progressives’ Century.”
406 McGerr, A Fierce Discontent; Cowie, The Great Exception; Rafter, Creating Born Criminals;
Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race
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believed it was their duty to be public figures. Men like Charles Henderson, Frederick Winslow Taylor, and Richard Ely threw themselves into academia and public policy debates. They worked with professional organizations, held federal appointments, worked on state policy boards, and were active members of prominent academic associations. Progressives believed that experts should not only identify the public good and instruct the public as to what it was—they should help the state pursue it through public service. This ensured that eugenics and race science travelled from intellectual circles into policy ones.407
It was in this political milieu that state-sponsored eugenic selection came to be the state’s logic of social control. According to Progressives, it was the state’s duty to identify and target biologically inclined criminals, among other defectives, for segregation out of the population. This is not to say there was no contestation over understandings of criminality in the Progressive Era. Lombrosian theory still persisted alongside psychological and eugenic theories. Cultural theorists and critical race scholars attacked notions of natural criminality, and their work forged new directions for sociological and criminological research. But hereditarian theory and eugenics were among the most widely accepted strands of expertise among Progressives studying race, economics, sociology, and crime. These discourses fueled repressive crime policy in ways that promoted a state-sponsored program of class control.