Nonetheless, progressives did come up with a term for conservative opponents of eugenics. They called them social Darwinists. Progressives invented the term "social Darwinism" to describe anyone who opposed Sidney Webb's notion that the state must aggressively "interfere" in the reproductive order of society. In the hothouse logic of the left, those who opposed forced sterilization of the "unfit" and the poor were the villains for letting a "state of nature" rule among the lower classes.
Herbert Spencer, the supposed founder of social Darwinism, was singled out as the poster boy for all that was wrong in classical liberalism. Spencer was indeed a Darwinist — he coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" — but his interpretation of evolutionary theory reinforced his view that people should be left alone. In almost every sense, Spencer was a good — albeit classical — liberaclass="underline" he championed charity, women's suffrage, and civil liberties. But he was the incarnation of all that was backward, reactionary, and wrong according to the progressive worldview, not because he supported Hitlerian schemes of forced race hygiene but because he adamantly opposed them. To this day it is de rigueur among liberal intellectuals and historians to take potshots at Spencer as the philosophical wellspring of racism, right-wing "greed," and even the Holocaust.22
Thanks to some deeply flawed scholarship by the liberal historian Richard Hofstadter, nearly all of the so-called robber barons of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were dubbed social Darwinists, too, even though subsequent historians have demonstrated that Gilded Age industrialists were barely influenced by Darwinism, if at all. Darwinism was a fixation of intellectuals and academics. The so-called robber barons generally lacked formal education. To the extent they grounded their worldview in anything, it was in Christian ethics and the writings of Adam Smith. Moreover, they believed that capitalism was good for the poor. Yet selective quotations and sweeping generalizations — usually infused with Marxist cliches — rendered the robber barons ersatz fascists.23
A few historians have dealt with these conundrums by labeling the progressives "reform Darwinists." Reform Darwinists were the only real Darwinians as we understand the term today. Almost all the leading progressive intellectuals interpreted Darwinian theory as a writ to "interfere" with human natural selection. Even progressives with no ostensible ties to eugenics worked closely with champions of the cause. There was simply no significant stigma against racist eugenics in progressive circles.24
Before we continue, it is important to dispel a misperception that may be building in some readers' minds. While progressive eugenicists were often repugnantly racist, eugenics as a field was not necessarily so. Obviously, intermarriage with blacks would be greeted with horror by people already terrified by "Aryans" marrying Slavs or Italians. But W. E. B. DuBois shared many of the eugenic views held by white progressives. His "Talented Tenth" was itself a eugenically weighted term. He defined members of the Talented Tenth as "exceptional men" and the "best of the race." He complained that "the negro has not been breeding for an object" and that he must begin to "train and breed for brains, for efficiency, for beauty." Over his long career he time and again returned to his concern that the worst blacks were overbreeding while the best were underbreeding. Indeed, he supported Margaret Sanger's "Negro Project," which sought to sharply curtail reproduction among "inferior" stocks of the black population.25
Perhaps an even better indication of how little modern popular conceptions jibe with the historical reality during this period is the Ku Klux Klan. For decades the Klan has stood as the most obvious candidate for an American brand of fascism. That makes quite a bit of sense. The right-wing label, on the other hand, isn't nearly as clean a fit. The Klan of the Progressive Era was not the same Klan that arose after the Civil War. Rather, it was a collection of loosely independent organizations spread across the United States. What united them, besides their name and absurd getups, was that they were all inspired by the film The Birth of a Nation. They were, in fact, a "creepy fan subculture" of the film. Founded the week of the film's release in 1915, the second Klan was certainly racist, but not much more than the society in general. Of course, this is less a defense of the Klan than an indictment of the society that produced it.
For years the conventional view among scholars and laymen alike was that the Klan was rural and fundamentalist. The truth is it was often quite cosmopolitan and modern, thriving in cities like New York and Chicago. In many communities the Klan focused on the reform of local government and on maintaining social values. It was often the principal extralegal enforcer of Prohibition, the consummate progressive "reform." "These Klansmen," writes Jesse Walker in an illuminating survey of the latest scholarship, "were more likely to flog you for bootlegging or breaking your marriage vows than for being black or Jewish."26
When modern liberals try to explain away the Klan membership of prominent Democrats — most frequently West Virginia senator Robert Byrd — they cough up a few cliches about how good liberals "evolved" from their southern racial "conservatism." But the Klan of the 1920s was often seen as reformist and modern, and it had a close relationship with some progressive elements in the Democratic Party. The young Harry Truman as well as the future Supreme Court justice Hugo Black were members. In 1924, at the famous "Klanbake" Democratic convention, the KKK rallied around the future senator William McAdoo, Woodrow Wilson's secretary of the treasury (and son-in-law), a key architect of Wilson's war socialism, and a staunch Prohibitionist.
Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we've been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. Indeed, the modern institution of academic tenure was largely carved out by progressive academia's solidarity with E. A. Ross, the author of the "race suicide" thesis.27 Simultaneously one of America's leading sociologists, economists, and "raceologists," Ross was the quintessential reform Darwinist. He first became attracted to Progressivism when he saw that one of his conservative professors was horrified by Henry George's Progress and Poverty — a tract that inspired American progressives, British socialists, and German national socialists. Ross studied in Germany and then returned to the United States, where he finished his studies among the Germanophiles of Johns Hopkins and under the tutelage of Woodrow Wilson and Richard Ely.
A great bear of a man, Ross was an omnipresent public intellectual, writing for all the right magazines and giving lectures at all the right schools. He served as a tutor on immigration issues to Teddy Roosevelt, who was kind enough to write the introduction to Ross's Sin and Society. He shared with Ely, Wilson, and others a conviction that social progress had to take into account the innate differences between the races. Ross also shared Wilson's view, expressed in The State, that various races were at different stages of evolution. Africans and South Americans were still close to savages. Other races — mostly Asians — might be more "advanced" but had slid into evolutionary degeneration. Ross believed that America faced similar degeneration through immigration, intermarriage, and the refusal of the state to impose sweeping eugenic reforms. In 1914 he wrote: "Observe immigrants not as they come travel-wan up the gangplank, nor as they issue toil-begrimed from pit's mouth or mill-gate, but in their gatherings, washed, combed, and in their Sunday best...[They] are hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality...[C]learly they belong in skins, in wattled huts at the close of the Great Ice Age. These ox-like men are descendants of those who always stayed behind."28