“More Merciful and Not Less Effective”: Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era

“Survival Value and a Robust, Practical, Joyless Individualism”: Thomas Nixon Carver, Social Justice, and Eugenics

“…In a series of contributions, Thomas C. Leonard (2003Leonard ( , 2005aLeonard ( , 2005bLeonard ( , 2009) has offered a fresh opportunity to reexamine the actual motivations behind much of the Progressive-era reform impetus. Leonard's work indicates and documents the decisive role played by eugenic considerations in the arguments made for such labor policies as minimum wages and restrictions on immigration.…”

Origins of the myth of social Darwinism: The ambiguous legacy of Richard Hofstadter's Social Darwinism in American Thought

“….. We are closing this century with as definite a bias in favor of biologic reasoning and analogy as the last century closed with a similar bias in favor the method of reasoning used in physics and astronomy" (1894, p. 68). Moreover, a Who's Who of Progressive Era political economy appealed to eugenics (planned social control of human heredity) to justify the economic reform legislation so characteristic of the time (Leonard, 2003).…”

Retrospectives: Eugenics and Economics in the Progressive Era

“…Less well known is that a crude eugenic sorting of groups into deserving and undeserving classes crucially informed the labor and immigration reform that is the hallmark of the Progressive Era (Leonard, 2003). Reform-minded economists of the Progressive Era defended exclusionary labor and immigration legislation on Ross's (1901b) theory was that the "native" Anglo-Saxon stock was biologically well-adapted to rural, traditional life, but less well-suited to the new urban milieu of industrial capitalism.…”