Harold Laski, to some the most respected British political scientist of the twentieth century (he was Joseph Kennedy Jr.'s tutor and JFK's professor), echoed the panic over "race suicide" (an American term): "The different rates of fertility in the sound and pathological stocks point to a future swamping of the better by the worse." Indeed, eugenics was Laski's first great intellectual passion. His first published article, "The Scope of Eugenics," written while he was still a teenager, impressed Francis Galton, the founder of eugenics. At Oxford, Laski studied under the eugenicist Karl Pearson, who wrote, "Socialists have to inculcate that spirit which would give offenders against the State short shrift and the nearest lamp-post."12
Laski, of course, had an enormous impact on American liberalism. He was a regular contributor to the New Republic — which in its early years published scores of leading British intellectuals, including Wells.13 He also taught at Harvard and became friends with Felix Frankfurter, an adviser to FDR and, later, Supreme Court justice. Frankfurter introduced Laski to FDR, and he became one of Roosevelt's most ardent British supporters, despite his strong communist ties. More famously, he became one of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes's closest friends, despite an age difference of more than five decades. The two maintained a storied correspondence that lasted nearly twenty years.
EUGENICS, AMERICAN-STYLE
American progressives, who took their lead in many ways from their British cousins, shared a similar ardor for racial hygiene. Take Justice Holmes, the most admired jurist of the progressive period and one of the most revered liberal icons in American legal history. It seems that no praise of Holmes can go too far. Felix Frankfurter called him "truly the impersonal voice of the Constitution." "No Justice thought more deeply about the nature of a free society or was more zealous to safeguard its conditions by the most abundant regard for civil liberty than Mr. Justice Holmes." Another observer commented, "Like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he is the summit of hundreds of years of civilization, the inspiration of ages yet to come." Others have declared that "for the American lawyer he is the beau ideal, and the lawyer quotes his aphorisms as the literate layman quotes Hamlet."14
What explains Holmes's popularity with liberals? It's a complicated question. Holmes was hailed by many civil libertarians for his support of free speech during the war. Progressives loved him for holding that their nation-building social welfare programs were constitutional. "If my fellow citizens want to go to hell, I will help them. It's my job," Holmes famously declared. This has caused some conservatives to admire his "judicial restraint." But the truth is he practiced "restraint" mostly because he agreed with the direction the progressives were taking.
In 1927 Holmes wrote a letter to Harold Laski in which he proudly told his friend, "I...delivered an opinion upholding the constitutionality of a state law for sterilizing imbeciles the other day — and felt that I was getting near the first principle of real reform." He went on to tell Laski how amused he was when his colleagues took exception to his "rather brutal words...that made them mad."15
Holmes was referring to his decision in the notorious case of Buckv. Bell, in which progressive lawyers on both sides hoped to get the Supreme Court to write eugenics into the Constitution. Holmes was eager to oblige. The state of Virginia deemed a young woman, Carrie Buck, "unfit" to reproduce (though she was not, as it turned out, retarded, as the state had contended). She was consigned to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where she was cajoled into consenting to a salpingectomy, a form of tubal ligation. The case depended in part on a report by America's leading eugenicist, Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York — the RAND Corporation of eugenics research, funded by various leading progressive philanthropists. Without having ever met Buck, Laughlin credited the assessment of a nurse who observed of the Buck family, "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." Hence, Laughlin concluded that eugenic sterilization would be "a force for the mitigation of race degeneracy."
Writing for the majority, Holmes issued a terse opinion barely over a single page long. The decision now ranks as one of the most vilified and criticized examples of legal reasoning in American history. Yet of all his many opinions, it is perhaps the most revealing. Citing only one precedent, a Massachusetts law mandating vaccinations for public school children, Holmes wrote that "the principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes...It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind." He concluded by declaring, famously: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." As we will see, this reasoning endures in the often unspoken rationale for abortion.
The opinion tied together many of the major strains in progressive thought at the time. Holmes, a bloody-minded veteran of the Civil War, saw war as a source of moral values in a world without meaning. Given the sacrifice of so many noble characters on the battlefield, requiring degenerates like Carrie Buck to sacrifice their ability to breed — or even their lives — for the greater good seemed entirely reasonable and fair. By citing a public health measure as an adequate precedent, Holmes further underscored how the health of the organic body politic trumped individual liberty. Whether through the prism of mobilization or public health, the project was the same. As Holmes put it in a 1915 Illinois Law Review article, his "starting point for an ideal for the law" would be the "co-ordinated human effort...to build a race."16
Given such rhetoric, it is impossible not to see Progressivism as a fascistic endeavor — at least by the standards we use today.
There's a general consensus among liberal historians that Progressivism defies easy definition. Perhaps that's because to identify Progressivism properly would be too inconvenient to liberalism, for doing so would expose the eugenic project at its core. The most obvious reply — that progressives were merely representing the age they lived in — fails on several levels. For one thing, the progressive eugenicists had non-progressive, anti-eugenic adversaries — premature conservatives, radical libertarians, and orthodox Catholics — whom the progressives considered to be backward and reactionary. For another, arguing that progressives were a product of their time simply reinforces my larger argument: Progressivism was born of the fascist moment and has never faced up to its inheritance. Today's liberals have inherited progressive prejudice wholesale, believing that traditionalists and religious conservatives are dangerous threats to progress. But this assumption means that liberals are blind to fascistic threats from their own ranks.