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I’ve received a number of nice emails in response to my post yesterday and a couple worthwhile questions. First, there’s this:

Sharp piece in AEI, but apparently I may be a bit confused on one point. Clarence Darrow was a pointed critic of eugenics. Yet disgust with Social Darwinism, in part, caused many to side with the state against Scopes. I always thought, perhaps incorrectly, eugenics was simply Social Darwinism on speed, an extreme manifestation of the theory.

In the mind of Bryan and many others, Darwinism had been used to justify social inequities (granted, this was a perversion of the science but it had in fact happened). Any idea as to how the Progressives embraced eugenics so readily yet rejected Social Darwinism? This was one question that remained with me after I read your fantastic book last summer. The other had to do with syndicalism but I won’t bother you with that one.

Thanks and I realize you probably get too much email to respond.

And then there’s this:

Dear Jonah,

Your piece on eugenics at the Enterprise Blog was excellent and full of fascinating information. The only thing that leaves me puzzled is when you characterize Oliver Wendell Holmes as a “liberal hero”. Even though many of his judicial rulings were favored by liberals and progressives, I question whether any simple political label can accurately characterize Holmes, whose judicial and political philosophies were extremely complicated and idiosyncratic.

Personally, Holmes was not generally supportive of organized labor or other progressive causes, although he supported the right of elected legislatures to enact policy, progressive or otherwise, if they so chose. Mostly, Holmes supported legislatures’ right to make any laws they wanted unless those laws offended his sensibilities in some way (i.e., Abrams v. United States). My only point is that Holmes was too complex to be pigeonholed in a particular political category, especially contemporary political categories.

Thanks again for the informative article.

Let me try to answer both at once. Let’s start with Holmes. I agree entirely that his views were complex and glib categorization of his philosophy is hard (though there’s an embarrassing pile of fawning quotes from liberals about Holmes I can dig up if necessary. Felix Frankfurter dubbed Holmes “truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution,” which is nonsense on stilts). Holmes was a dark and nihilistic man, whose philosophical pragmatism led him into morally dubious waters (See my National Review colleague Ramesh Ponnuru’s review of a recent Holmes biography for a better sense of all that).

But while some of Holmes’s individual pronouncements and rulings can be scored on the right side of the ledger, he was—I would argue—a man who should ultimately be counted on the left. And by left I mean he was in league with the Progressivism of his age. He was a product of its intellectual currents and an advocate for many of Progressivism’s core ambitions. Most relevantly for this discussion, his deference to state legislators—so admired by conservatives—was usually (as in Lochner) deference to state power in general and Progressive social meddlers in particular. “If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It’s my job,” he famously said.

But he rarely, if ever, shared such sentiments in the name of holding back Progressive schemes. As H.L. Mencken put it, he was no “advocate of the rights of man,” but instead “an advocate of the rights of lawmakers.” While liberals today praise his “clear and present danger” test for free speech, Holmes intended it as a means to empower the state to lock a lot of people up.

As for eugenics, his passionate support for it was of a piece with his view of state power generally (or vice versa in some instances). As Sidney Webb once put it, “No consistent eugenicist can be a ‘Laisser Faire’ individualist,” he wrote, “unless he throws up the game in despair. He must interfere, interfere, interfere!”

In Holmes’s famous dissent in Lochner he rejected an implicit constitutional right to contract saying, “The Fourteenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Social Statics.”

Which brings us to the first emailer, who sees eugenics as “social Darwinism” on speed. I think this a very common way of thinking about social Darwinism and eugenics, and I think it is entirely wrong. The salient point about social Darwinism, as laid out by Herbert Spencer, its chief author and the man who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” is that it was an argument for radical libertarianism. Spencer was a passionate foe of statism. He was precisely the “‘Laisser Faire’ individualist” Webb had in mind. This is why it is so infuriating when liberal historians and intellectuals blame Spencer for eugenics, Hitler, etc. Spencer would have been horrified at all that. Why it should continually be news to some liberals is beyond me: but the Nazis were not laissez faire.

The missing piece of the puzzle is what the historian Eric Goldman and others have called “reform Darwinism.” This was the view that Darwinism legitimized state interference on eugenic grounds. Holmes’s expressed desire to use the law to “build a race” was quintessential reform Darwinism. Buck v. Bell was reform Darwinism. Holmes’s ridicule of Spencer in Lochner was perfectly consistent with Holmes’s statism and his reform Darwinism. The problem we have today is that any concept of reform Darwinism has dropped out of the discussion. All people remember is the term “social Darwinism,” which is supposed to describe both Hitlerism (hyper statist) and radical laissez faire (the opposite of hyper statism). Social Darwinism may be bad on any number of fronts (bad politics, bad science, bad philosophy, bad morals, etc.) but it isn’t statist.

In the chapter of my book dealing with eugenics, I write:

When reading the literature on the subjects of eugenics and race, one commonly finds academics blaming eugenics on “conservative” tendencies within the scientific, economic, or larger progressive communities. Why? Because according to liberals, racism is objectively conservative. Anti-Semitism is conservative. Hostility to the poor (that is, social Darwinism) is conservative. Therefore, whenever a liberal is racist or fond of eugenics, he is magically transformed into a conservative. In short, liberalism is never morally wrong, and so when liberals are morally flawed, it’s because they’re really conservatives!

Not surprisingly, my book did little to eradicate the habit. Consider this often-interesting piece on Paul Popenoe in the latest New Yorker. The author, Jill Lepore, writes (emphasis mine):

It has become a commonplace, on the right, to label eugenics “progressive” (in order, presumably, to make the word “progressive” as ugly a smear as “liberal”). Eugenics dates to the Progressive Era, when it was faddish. Early on, and particularly before the First World War, it was embraced by reformers on the left, from Jane Addams to Woodrow Wilson, but the movement that lasted was, at heart, profoundly conservative, atavism disguised as reform. After a while, but nowhere near soon enough, the disguise got pretty flimsy. In “The Eugenics Cult,” an essay that Clarence Darrow wrote in 1926, a year after defending Scopes, he judged that he would rather live in a nation of ill-matched misfits and half-wits than submit to the logic of a bunch of cocksure “uplifters.” “Amongst the schemes for remolding society,” Darrow wrote, “this is the most senseless and impudent that has ever been put forward by irresponsible fanatics to plague a long-suffering race.”

Now, this is a really cleverly written passage. She makes it sound like conservatives are either idiots or liars for suggesting that eugenics was “progressive,” all the while conceding that eugenics was embraced by the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Jane Addams. But that’s just because eugenics merely “dates back” to the Progressive Era and their attachment to it wasn’t serious. It was merely “faddish.”

She goes on to write in the next paragraph:

The week Holmes handed down his decision in Buck v. Bell, the Times reported that Harvard declined a sixty-thousand-dollar bequest to fund eugenics courses, refusing “to teach that the treatment of defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures was a sound doctrine.” Popenoe, undaunted, pressed on. In 1933, he wrote to Bell, asking for photographs of Carrie Buck and her mother and daughter for his archive. He told him, “A hundred years from now you will still have a place in this history of which your descendants may well be proud.” Popenoe, in fact, had become something of a historian. Later that year, Grant published “The Conquest of a Continent; or, The Expansion of Races in America,” a “racial history” based on “scientific interpretation,” recommending “the absolute suspension of all immigration from all countries,” to be followed by the deportation of illegal aliens. Popenoe had spent four years conducting the research for Grant’s book; he had also compiled the bibliography. Unlike “The Passing of the Great Race,” Grant’s American pseudohistory met with a furious reception. Ruth Benedict said that the only difference between it and Nazi racial theory was that “in Germany they say Aryan in place of Nordic.” Franz Boas attacked Grant in The New Republic; Melville Herskovits did so in The Nation. The Anti-Defamation League said that “The Conquest of a Continent” was “even more destructive than Hitler’s Mein Kampf.”

See? Good liberals never embraced this “profoundly conservative, atavism disguised as reform.” Of course, there’s no evidence provided that any conservatives supported eugenics. Merely that these name-check liberal institutions and individuals at some point criticized eugenics.

But this is all, at minimum, misleading. The Nation was then still more of a classically liberal publication. Clarence Darrow, a complicated fellow (who was a rabid jingoist during World War I, and a devastating critic of the New Deal) wrote his anti-eugenics piece for HL Mencken’s American Mercury, hardly a journal that spoke authoritatively for elite progressive opinion unlike, say, The New Republic which, contrary to Lepore’s insinuation, was hardly opposed to eugenics in the 1920s. Sure, by the mid-1930s, they had moved away from it. But that was after Herbert Croly, the founder of the magazine, died. Croly was a believer. For instance, he wrote an unsigned editorial in 1916 which tried to make peace between the eliminationists and sterilizers on the one hand and the uplift-the-downtrodden eugenists on the other. The common ground, TNR argued, was to be found in socialism:

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. There is no certain way of distinguishing between defectiveness in the strain and defectiveness produced by malnutrition, neglected lesions originally curable, or overwork in childhood. 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.

The  simple truth is that the “cocksure uplifters” Darrow was talking about were all, to a man and a woman, Progressives. Remember, the Progressives hated “social Darwinism,” which was a policy of laissez faire. The uplifters were members of the Addams camp.

Meanwhile, Lepore mentions that the Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in the Buck v. Bell case, led by liberal hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a passionate eugenicist who considered “building a race” to be at the core of reform. Did Holmes and his fellow justices, including Louis Brandeis, sign on to the cause out of “faddishness”? What about the fact that the lone dissenter was Pierce Butler, a conservative Catholic Democrat appointed by a Republican (whose appointment was opposed by The Nation, The New Republic, and the KKK)?

Look, eugenics was a very complicated phenomenon. But it does not clarify the topic to insist that, contrary to mountains of evidence and common sense, that all of the progressives who subscribed to it were just wearing a conservative mask.

Image by A.M. Kuchling.