But there were at least two important differences between America and Prussia. First, America was a democratic republic with a firm constitution designed to protect minorities (albeit imperfectly) against the tyranny of the majority. Second. Germans already constituted a “racial nation.” American progressives were frustrated by the first point because they were envious of the second. The progressives believed that, in the words of Justice Holmes, the aim of law and social policy was to “build a race.” Our democracy, with its inconvenient checks and balances, including a diverse population, made such a project difficult. Nonetheless, progressive social policy—the granite foundation of today’s welfare state—was from the outset dedicated to solving this “problem.”
The American welfare state, in other words, was in important respects a eugenic racial project from the outset. The progressive authors of welfare state socialism were interested not in protecting the weak from the ravages of capitalism, as modern liberals would have it. but in weeding out the weak and unfit, and thereby preserving and strengthening the Anglo-Saxon character of the American racial community.
“Raceologists” like E. A. Ross dedicated their careers to this effort. At the macro level, Ross described the program as one of “social control.” This meant mining the society for its purest elements and forging those elements into a “Superior race.” For white Anglo Protestants, this would amount to a national “restoration” (the watchword of all fascist movements). For the rest, it meant pruning the American garden of racial “weeds.” “defective germ plasm,” and other euphemisms for non-Aryan strains. Education, in the broadest sense, required getting the entire society to see the wisdom in this policy. Perhaps in a perfect world, the state wouldn’t have to get involved: “The breeding function of the family would be better discharged if public opinion and religion conspired ... to crush the aspirations of woman for a life of her own.” But it was too late for such measures, so the state had to interfere,
Ross was a showman, but his ideas fit squarely within the world-view of progressive economics, on both sides of the Atlantic. Consider the debate over the minimum wage. The controversy centered on what to do about what Sidney Webb called the “unemployable class.” It was Webb’s belief, shared by many of the progressive economists affiliated with the American Economic Association, that establishing a minimum wage above the value of the unemployables’ worth would lock them out of the market, accelerating their elimination as a class. This is essentially the modern conservative argument against the minimum wage, and even today, when conservatives make it, they are accused of—you guessed it—social Darwinism. But for the progressives at the dawn of the fascist moment, this was an argument for it. “Of all ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites.” Webb observed, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners,”
Ross put it succinctly: “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.” Since the inferior races were content to live closer to a filthy state of nature than the Nordic man. the savages did not require a civilized wage. Hence if you raised minimum wages to a civilized level, employers wouldn’t hire such miscreants in preference to “fitter” specimens, making them less likely to reproduce and. if necessary, easier targets for forced sterilization. Royal Meeker, a Princeton economist and adviser to Woodrow Wilson, explained: “Better that the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift. enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.” Arguments like these turn modern liberal rationales for welfare state wage supports completely on their head.
Few better epitomized the international nature of this progressive-socialist-nationalist consensus than the University of Wisconsin economist John R. Commons. Describing himself as “a socialist, a single-taxer, a free-silverite, a greenbacker. a municipal-ownerist, a member of the Congressional Church.” Commons was a lion of the international labor movement and dubbed the “American Sidney Webb.” His seminar room contained a giant chart that tracked the global success of progressive economics. Commons believed that many poor whites could be saved by government intervention and that they should receive the bounty of a lavishly generous welfare state. But he conceded that, by his estimate, nearly 6 percent of the population was “defective” and 2 percent was irretrievably degenerate and in need of “segregation.” These estimates didn’t even include blacks and other “inferior” races, whom he considered irredeemable, save perhaps through intermarriage with Aryans. Black inferiority was the main reason this champion of the labor movement felt slavery was justified.
Commons and colleagues at Wisconsin laid the foundation for most of the labor reforms we have today, many of them wholly defensible and worthwhile. Others, such as the Davis-Bacon Act, reflect the racial animus of the progressives. The act was passed in 1931 in order to prevent poor black laborers from “taking” jobs from whites. Its authors were honest about it, and it was passed explicitly for that reason; the comparatively narrow issue of cheap black labor was set against the backdrop of the vestigial progressive effort to maintain white supremacy. By requiring that contractors on federal projects pay “prevailing wages” and use union labor, the act would lock black workers out of federal jobs projects. Today the Davis-Bacon Act is as sacred to many labor movement liberals as Roe v. Wade is to feminists. Indeed, as Mickey Kaus has observed, devotion to Davis-Bacon is more intense today than it was thirty years ago, when self-described neoliberals considered it a hallmark of outdated interest-group liberalism.
To be fair, not all progressives supported the welfare state on eugenic grounds. Some were deeply skeptical of the welfare state—but also on eugenic grounds. The Yale economist Henry Farnam co-founded with Commons the American Association for Labor Legislation, the landmark progressive organization whose work laid the foundation for most social insurance and labor laws today. They argued that public assistance was dysgenic—that is. it increased the ranks of the “unfit”—because it afforded the degenerate classes an opportunity to reproduce, whereas in a natural environment such rabble would die off. But Farnam, the protectionist economist Simon Patten, and others didn’t therefore oppose the welfare state on those grounds. That would he tantamount to social Darwinism! Rather, they argued that the unintended consequences of the welfare state required a draconian eugenics scheme to “weed out” the defective germ plasm bred by the state’s largesse. Why should Aryans be denied the benefits of state socialism when you could simply sweep up the unavoidable mess with a eugenic broom?
Perhaps the only unifying political view held by virtually all eugenicists was that capitalism was dysgenic. “Racial hygiene” was a subset of the larger “social question,” and the one thing everyone knew was that laissez-faire was not the answer to the social question.
Until the Nazis came along, Germany generally lagged behind the United States and much of Europe when it came to eugenics. When Indiana passed the first sterilization law in 1907—for “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists”—the West took notice. In the subsequent thirty years, twenty-nine other American states passed similar laws, as did Canada and most of Europe. Yes, the Germans admired America’s “fitter family” contests, in which good American Aryans were judged like prized cattle at county fairs, but some Scandinavian nations were years ahead of the Germans when it came to eugenic schemes, and many European countries—and Canadian provinces—remained committed to eugenics decades after the fall of the Third Reich.
Comparisons between the progressives’ efforts to “build a race” and the Nazis’ efforts to hone or redeem their already homogeneous racial nation can easily become overly invidious because the checks on such programs in America were so much stronger. Thanks to American exceptionalism, progressives were forced to tinker surgically with scalpels—a point they lamented often—while thanks to German exceptionalism, National Socialists had a free hand to use axes, sledgehammers, and bulldozers. In a s
ense, Germany had been waiting for eugenics to arrive in order to give a scientific rationale to the deep Romantic yearnings in its culture.
Nietzsche himself had pointed the way. In 1880 he wrote, “The tendency must be towards the rendering extinct of the wretched, the deformed, the degenerate.” Reproduction, Nietzsche argued, needed to be taken out of the hands of the masses so that “race as a whole [no longer] suffers.” “The extinction of many types of people is just as desirable as any form of reproduction.” Marriage itself, Nietzsche argued, must be more scrupulously regulated by the state. “Go through the towns and ask yourselves whether these people should reproduce! Let them go to their whores!”
It’s almost impossible to talk about the “influence” of eugenic thought on Nazi public policy, since the Nazis conceived of eugenics as the goal of all public policy. One of the last things Hitler ever committed to paper was his wish that Germany stay loyal to its race laws. Everything—marriage, medicine, employment, wages—was informed by notions of race hygiene and the eugenic economics pioneered by British and American socialists and progressives. As in America, marriage licenses were a vital tool for eugenic screening. Marriages viewed as “undesirable to the whole national community” were forbidden. Meanwhile, subsidies, travel allowances, bonuses, and the like were doled out to favored racial classes. Forced sterilizations became a standard tool of statecraft.
As we’ll see, the Nazis co-opted independent religious and other charities under the auspices of the state. During their rise to power they constructed an alternative charitable infrastructure, offering social services the state couldn’t provide. When the Nazis finally took over, they methodically replaced the traditional infrastructure of the state and churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity.
But the more relevant aspect of the Nazi welfare state was how it geared itself entirely toward building a racially defined national community. While it used the standard leftist rhetoric of guilt and obligation typically invoked to justify government aid for the needy and unfortunate, it excluded anyone who wasn’t a “national comrade.” This points to the unique evil of Nazism. Unlike Italian Fascism, which had less use for eugenics than America or Germany, Nazism was defined as racial socialism. Everything for the race, nothing for those outside it, was the central ethos of Nazism’s mission and appeal.
One last point about the interplay of eugenics and the welfare state. In both Germany and America, eugenics gained currency because of the larger faith in “public health.” World War I and the great influenza epidemic drafted the medical profession into the ranks of social planners as much as any other. For doctors promoted to the rank of physicians to the body politic, the Hippocratic oath lost influence. The American medical journal Military Surgeon stated matter-of-factly, “The consideration of human life often becomes quite secondary...The medical officer has become more absorbed in the general than the particular, and the life and limb of the individual, while of great importance, are secondary to measures pro bono publico [for the public good].”
The Germans called this sort of thinking “Gemehinutz, geht vor Eigennutz,” the common good supersedes the private good. And it was under this banner that Germany took the logic of public health to totalitarian extremes. Prohibition was the premier illustration of how closely American progressives linked moral and physical health, and many Nazis looked favorably upon the American effort. The appreciation was mutual. In 1933 the American Scientific Temperance Journal celebrated the election of Hitler, a famous teetotaler. And while the racist undercurrent to Prohibition was always there—alcohol fueled the licentiousness of the mongrel races—in Germany the concern was more that alcohol and the even more despised cigarette would lead to the degeneracy of Germany’s Aryan purity. Tobacco was credited with every’ evil imaginable, including fostering homosexuality.
The Nazis were particularly fixated on cancer—the Germans were the first to spot the link between smoking and the disease, and the word “cancer” soon became an omnipresent metaphor. Nazi leaders routinely called Jews “cancers” and “tumors” on German society. But this was a practice formed from a broader and deeper habit. On both sides of the Atlantic, it was commonplace to call “defectives” and other groups who took more than they gave “cancers on the body politic.” The American Eugenics Society was dubbed “The Society for the Control of Social Cancer.” In Germany, before the Jews were rounded up, hundreds of thousands of disabled, elderly, and mentally ill “pure” Germans were eliminated on the grounds that they were “useless bread gobblers” or “life unworthy of life” (lebensunwertes Leberi), a term that first appeared in Germany in 1920. The application of these techniques and ideas to the “Jewish problem” seemed like a rational continuation of eugenic theory in general.
But the Holocaust should not blind us to less significant but more directly relevant repercussions of Progressive Era ideas that have escaped the light of scrutiny. The architects of the New Deal, the Fair Deal, and the Great Society all inherited and built upon the progressive welfare state. And they did this in explicit terms, citing such prominent race builders as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as their inspirations. Obviously, the deliberate racist intent in many of these policies was not shared by subsequent generations of liberals. But that didn’t erase the racial content of the policies themselves. The Davis-Bacon Act still hurts low-wage blacks, for example. FDR’s labor and agricultural policies threw millions of blacks out of work and off their land. The great migration of African-Americans to northern cities was in no small part a result of the success of progressive policies. Black leaders didn’t call the National Recovery Administration, or NRA, the “Negro Run Around” for nothing.
In the previous chapter I noted that liberals cling to the myth of the New Deal out of religious devotion to the idea of the all-caring God-state. Something similar is at work in the liberal devotion to the Great Society. The rationales for the Great Society are almost always suffused with racial guilt and what could only be described as a religious faith in the state’s redemptive power. In his book White Guilt, Shelby Steele tells of an encounter with a self-described “architect” of the Great Society. “Damn it, we saved this country!” the man barked. “This country was about to blow up. There were riots everywhere. You can stand there now in hindsight and criticize, but we had to keep the country together, my friend.” Moreover, added the LBJer, you should have seen how grateful blacks were when these programs were rolled out.
Well, the first claim is a falsehood, and the second is damning. While the civil rights acts were obviously great successes, liberals hardly stopped at equality before the law. The Great Society’s racial meddling—often under various other guises—yielded one setback after another. Crime soared because of the Great Society and the attitudes of which it partook. In 1960 the total number of murders was lower than it had been in 1930, 1940, and 1950 despite a population explosion. In the decade after the Great Society, the murder rate effectively doubled. Black-on-black crime soared in particular. Riots exploded on LBJ’s watch, often with the subtle encouragement of Great Society liberals who rewarded such behavior. Out-of-wedlock births among blacks skyrocketed. Economically, as Thomas Sowell has cataloged, the biggest drop in black poverty took place during the two decades before the Great Society. In the 1970s, when the impact of Great Society programs was fully realized, the trend of black economic improvement stopped almost entirely.
One could go on like this for pages. But the facts are of secondary importance. Liberals have fallen in love with the idea behind the racial welfare state. They’ve absorbed the Marxist and fascist conception of “the system” as racist and corrupt and therefore in constant need of state intervention. In particular, as Steele notes, they’ve convinced themselves that support for such programs is proof of their own moral worth. Blacks were “grateful” to white liberals; therefore, white liberals aren’t racist. We return once again to the use of politics to demonize those who fall outside the consensus—that is, conservat
ives—and to anoint those within it. Whites who oppose the racial spoils system are racists. Blacks who oppose it are self-hating race traitors.
Usually white liberals will simply opt to support black liberals who make such charges, rather than make them themselves. But occasionally they will step up and do so. Maureen Dowd, for example, writes that it is “impossible not to be disgusted” with blacks such as Clarence Thomas. According to Dowd. the Supreme Court justice hates himself for “his own great historic ingratitude” to white liberals or has been “driven barking mad” by it. Take your pick. Steele summarizes the racism of this sort of thinking: “[W]e’ll throw you a bone like affirmative action if you’ll just let us reduce you to your race so we can take moral authority for ‘helping’ you. When they called you a nigger back in the days of segregation, at least they didn’t ask you to be grateful.”
ABORTION
Margaret Sanger, whose American Birth Control League became Planned Parenthood, was the founding mother of the birth control movement. She is today considered a liberal saint, a founder of modern feminism, and one of the leading lights of the progressive pantheon. Gloria Feldt of Planned Parenthood proclaims, “I stand by Margaret Sanger’s side,” leading “the organization that carries on Sanger’s legacy.” Planned Parenthood’s first black president. Faye Wattleton—Ms. magazine’s Woman of the Year in 19S9—said that she was “proud” to be “walking in the footsteps of Margaret Sanger.” Planned Parenthood gives out annual Maggie Awards to individuals and organizations who advance Sanger’s cause. Recipients are a Who’s Who of liberal icons, from the novelist John Irving to the producers of NBC’s West Wing. What Sanger’s liberal admirers are eager to downplay is that she was a thoroughgoing racist who subscribed completely to the views of E. A. Ross and other “raceologists.” Indeed, she made many of them seem tame.
LIBERAL FASCISM Page 33