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

By Thomas C. Leonard

Before I get into the substance of this book, I have to preface this post by saying how absolutely frustrating it was to be disrupted in my reading by the many typos I encountered. Not one, not even three. Honestly, there were too many to even keep count. Princeton Press, seriously? Did you not have the budget for a competent copy editor? I know copy editing can be a droning task, but countless other people do it, so there really is no excuse.

With that out of the way, let’s get into the contents of this book.

I honestly did not know too much about the Progressive Era. I misjudged the book by its subtitle. And while I was initially dismayed that not enough modern-day connections were made, I found the epilogue to be highly relevant. I’m not going to quote it in full, but it’s worth reading. I see a number of parallels with today’s elites and their absolute trust, nay, fealty to technocrats, and that too all in the name of Science they take as and on faith.

If you don’t walk away from history thinking about the present, I would argue you are missing something important. History is fascinating, yes, but it should also serve as a lesson.

I read pretty much each page thinking, “OMG! This is horrible.” I knew that Woodrow Wilson was a racist (not something I learned from school, by the way), and I had also learned from other books I read that Teddy Roosevelt was a racist, though I didn’t know how much of a proponent of eugenics he was, i.e. respectable white women should not work because they needed to perpetuate the Anglo-Saxon race. Additionally, I did not know that other proponents included such celebrated figures as Hull House founder Jane Addams, Social Gospeler Walter Rauschenbusch, and most saddening to my heart, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis.

The Progressives surely fought for things like minimum wage and workday limits that people today regard as good things, but did you know that they advocated for these measures as a way of keeping the deplorables out of the work force?

Oh yeah.

There’s some really juicy and riveting stuff in here. And for that alone, I recommend folks read this book (if you can ignore all the typos; I don’t believe there is a second edition).

But I want to bring my (your?) attention to something that seems to be also relevant today: what do we “do” with figures of our history who did some good things, while also holding some really abhorrent beliefs and views?

What makes this question particularly complex is that the eugenicists in the late 19th and early 20th century were not “fringe” scientists; they were highly respected ones and everyone who supported this movement believed the science on eugenics was settled. We now know it was not.

I think any serious student of history would say this is a recurring question they and, by extension, we must contend with.

While I am no relativist in the general or philosophical sense — I do believe there is such a thing as Absolute Truth — when looking at history, we need to understand that that worldview in which the people of the time were operating in was in many cases different from our own.

Does that mean that we are all the same in a moral sense? Not necessarily; in many cases, no. But we need to have the humility to acknowledge that those who come after us may judge us in the way we judge those we came before us.

We just need more humility in general, in what we know and how we know it.

And also, don’t let the credentialed class fool you into believing what you know to be true is false (and vice versa) just because they said so. Because they may very well be wrong.