Eugenics was all the rage in America in the early twentieth century, as suggested by the names of influential organizations: the American Breeders Association, the Eugenics Record Office, and the National Conference on Race Betterment. Yes, these were real organizations.
Intellectually, eugenics was fueled by social Darwinism. Darwin’s doctrine of evolution was described by the sociologist Herbert Spencer as “survival of the fittest.” This is where Sanger got the term, and it became a mantra of a newly emerging progressivism.
For Darwin, survival of the fittest was a description of the natural order—of the way things are. But eugenicists interpreted the term to reflect their aspiration for the social order, for the way things ought to be. They demanded that society be designed so that the “fittest” reproduce and multiply, and the less fit disappear from the face of the earth.
UNDER THE KNIFE
Progressivism is closely associated with eugenics and social Darwinism. This is not to say that all of progressivism can be reduced to these two things. In its origins progressivism was a broad movement that even included some Republicans. Teddy Roosevelt, for example, was a Republican who once ran for president under the banner of the progressive (Bull Moose) party.
But Republican progressives generally focused on reforming government, dismantling political machines like New York’s Tammany Hall. They also sought, like TR, to break up what we might now call crony capitalism, the collusion of large corporations with the government. TR sometimes used a racially tinged Darwinian vocabulary, but he was too much of an enthusiast for large families to support any kind of eugenics. As we saw in the last chapter, he befriended Booker T. Washington in a manner that once again confirms Republicans—not Democrats—as the party of a color-blind society.
Even though a progressive himself, TR railed against the kind of progressivism that Woodrow Wilson represented, and it is this kind of progressivism that became the dominant force in the Democratic Party. This is what we mean by progressivism today, and this is the progressivism that became closely intertwined with racism. For these progressives, eugenics and social Darwinism became the vehicle for moving society onward and upward.
The eugenicists and social Darwinists had a vision for society that was rich, educated, and white. Yet they feared that, without their intervention, the poor would outbreed the rich, and society would become increasingly poor, uneducated, and dark-skinned. Progress, in this context, had a specific meaning. It meant reducing the number of poor, uneducated, dark-skinned people.
Many progressives supported forced sterilization. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to adopt a sterilization law. By 1915, a dozen states had passed similar measures to sterilize women dubbed “unfit” or “retarded.” These statutes resulted in tens of thousands of American women being forcibly sterilized. Decades later, some of these laws remained on the books. The eugenic legacy of progressivism is hardly a phenomenon of the distant past.
In an infamous 1927 case, the Supreme Court ordered the sterilization of a young woman named Carrie Buck. Buck was white, but the State of Virginia classified her as “retarded” and ordered her forcibly sterilized. A group of progressive experts, without having met Buck, found her “shiftless, ignorant and worthless.” Buck had given birth to an illegitimate child, and this seemed to be the main basis for the assessment. Later, however, Buck would show she wasn’t retarded; she went on to live a normal life, demonstrating adequate intellectual and social capacity.
The Supreme Court, however, upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, sealing Buck’s fate. Writing for the majority, progressive Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes justified his decision in progressive social Darwinist terms. “It is better for all the world, 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.” Echoing Sanger, Holmes crisply commented, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough!”11
It may seem from the case of Carrie Buck that progressive sterilization schemes weren’t necessarily racist because Buck, after all, was white. But in reality progressive sterilization was aimed at minorities. So how did Carrie Buck qualify? Because she was a white person that progressives somehow managed to lump together with non-whites.
This seems bizarre today, but as progressives of the time saw it, even white people from certain parts of Europe didn’t count as white. Olive-colored southern Europeans, for instance, failed to make the grade. Carrie Buck, white as they come, was demoted from whiteness because she was regarded by progressives as feeble and degenerate just like blacks and other minorities.
We can see from this that progressivism thoroughly incorporated racism, expanding its reach from blacks to other minorities—not only brown people but also white people who were not perceived as “acting white.” No wonder that the Democratic Party, racist to its core, admired and effortlessly adopted this new way of thinking.
There was no dramatic “switch” from racism to progressivism. Rather, Democrats adopted progressivism as an innovation and continuation of their racist philosophy. Progressivism in a way enlarged racism by extending it beyond blacks to include Mexicans, Asians, and even southern and eastern Europeans. In progressivism, the Democrats saw an opportunity to extend their empire of subjugation to cover a bigger range of people.
Progressivism had something else going for it, as far as Democrats were concerned. Progressives distrusted the free institutions of society to bring about the results they sought. From the beginning, they proposed centralized planning as the mechanism for moving society forward. For the job of planners, the progressives proposed . . . well, themselves! They considered themselves eminently qualified to run things.
This top-down approach also appealed to the leadership of the Democratic Party. The Democrats, remember, relied on the federal government to protect slavery by returning runaway slaves. In the South they institutionalized state-sponsored segregation. In other words, Democrats had a history of imposing government supervision of people’s lives.
Now here was progressivism proposing a new system of regimented government control. Once again, this appealed to Democrats because, as they had seen in the past, governments operate through coercion rather than consent. From the Democrats’ point of view, what better way was there to control people and exploit them? The Democrats took a hard look at progressivism, and what they saw, they liked.
WOODROW WILSON’S PROGRESSIVE BIGOTRY
At first, the Democrats saw no cause to abandon southern segregation for northern progressivism. Rather, they simply held on to the one while embracing the other. These two forms of bigotry came together in the person of Democratic president Woodrow Wilson. “During the Wilson years,” historian Ira Katznelson writes, “the composite of racism and progressive liberalism came to dominate the Democratic Party.”12
Earlier we saw how Wilson promoted segregation and the Ku Klux Klan. This might suggest Wilson was the prototypical racist southern Democrat. Wilson, however, was a man of the South who had gone north to become the president of Princeton University and also governor of New Jersey. There Wilson was exposed to northern progressive ideas. He became a zealous convert to social Darwinism.
Wilson now spoke in terms of a natural hierarchy in which black and brown people were simply less evolved than whites. The case of Orientals—the yellow people—was complicated: Wilson considered them an advanced race, but for reasons unexplained this group had “degenerated,” basically lowering them into the black and brown category.
In order to reduce the numbers of these groups, Wilson championed the same type of eugenic birth control policies that Sanger advocated. As New Jersey governor, Wilson signed legislation that formed a Board of Examiners of the Feebleminded, Epileptics and Other Defectives. The law enabled the state to regulate procreation for women with a criminal record, women living in poorhouses, and women broadly classified as “feebleminded” or “defective.”
Wilson’s progressivism can be seen in the way he championed centralized power in Washington, D.C., and repudiated the South’s traditional political doctrine of states rights. As president, Wilson openly advocated that America’s founding principles be replaced by centralized planning. Wilson recognized that the Founders had created a federal system that divided power between the national government and the states. But this formula, Wilson insisted, was out of date. “We are not bound,” Wilson said, “to adhere to the doctrines held by the signers of the Declaration of Independence.”13
This is a remarkable statement; no previous American president spoke like that. Previous presidents might quarrel over the meaning of the founding, but none before Wilson scornfully dismissed the founding. Wilson denounced the Founders in the name of progressive centralization of power. For Wilson, centralized planning and power were the way of the future; they represented progress. Those who espoused such ideas he cherished as fellow progressives; those who opposed them he considered regressive.
FDR’S RACIST BARGAIN
While Wilson balanced racism and progressivism, maintaining a kind of equilibrium between the two, Franklin Roosevelt tilted the scales decisively in favor of progressivism. Even so, FDR didn’t replace racism with progressivism; rather, he maintained his governing coalition through a bargain with racism that lasted throughout his three-term presidency.
The facts are laid out in historian Ira Katznelson’s book Fear Itself. Katznelson writes that Roosevelt’s New Deal relied on “an intimate partnership with those in the South who preached white supremacy.” Racist Democrats, Katznelson says, “acted not on the fringes but as an indispensable part of the governing political party.” Roosevelt’s progressivism relied for its success on a pact with bigotry. Without racism, in other words, there would never have been a New Deal.
Following his election in 1932, FDR sought to create a Democratic majority in American politics. To do so, he needed the support of the “solid South,” which is to say the Democratic South. FDR pitched his progressive platform to the southern Democrats, and they immediately saw how nicely progressivism dovetailed with their existing racist schemes. The southern Democrats recognized that they too could use entitlements for some to extract money from the general population, and also that this process gave government something important to do, thus consolidating its power over the productive sector.
But the southern Democrats had no intention of giving up their existing racist racket. They wanted progressivism, but they wanted it in addition to racism, not as a substitute for it. So the southern Democrats told FDR they would come on board under two conditions. First, FDR must make no effort to overturn segregation or lynching. Indeed, FDR must oppose desegregation measures and block the anti-lynching schemes of blacks and Republicans. Moreover, FDR must not hold it against Democrats if they belonged to white supremacist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.
FDR agreed to this first condition and upheld his end of the bargain. At the White House, he continued Wilson’s policy of segregation among the household staff. He banned black reporters from White House press conferences. Throughout his presidency, he continued Wilson’s segregation of the armed forces.
When Republicans during World War II called for integrated fighting units, FDR said that to change the existing structure of segregation would “produce situations destructive to morale.” Working with his Democratic majority in Congress, FDR ensured that anti-lynching bills were defeated; he even pressured northern Democrats to table or oppose such measures.
As Katznelson points out, some of Roosevelt’s closest allies in the Senate were notorious racists like Hugo Black of Alabama; Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi; James Byrnes of South Carolina; and Claude Pepper of Florida. All were progressives on economic issues, and staunch backers of Roosevelt’s New Deal policies. Pepper was so left-wing on issues other than race that his nickname was “Red” Pepper. Still, these were the Democrats who filibustered anti-lynching legislation. Roosevelt made sure that their filibusters were successful and that such bills never became law.
In 1934 a black man accused of rape and murder was caught by a posse and murdered in front of a crowd of four thousand people, including women and children. The victim was castrated and burned, and his body hung from a tree. Outraged at this expression of mob justice, Republicans once again tried to push an anti-lynching measure through Congress. Roosevelt remained silent on the issue, one of his spokesmen saying that the president believed that lynching was undesirable but it remained a matter for the states to decide for themselves.
The southern Democrats launched a procedural adjournment move to kill the anti-lynching bill. This maneuver could have been defeated had northern Democrats allied with Republicans. They did not. “What is striking about this,” Katznelson writes, “is not the overwhelming support of southern Democrats or the comparable degree of opposition by Republicans. It is, rather, the critical support for adjournment provided by non-southern Democrats, almost half of whom voted to support the South’s procedural move.”14
Among the racist southern Democrats who were FDR’s allies, Bilbo was probably the most notorious. FDR backed Bilbo’s selection as chairman of the Senate Committee on the District of Columbia, effectively making him mayor of the city. Listen to how this man talked. “You know folks, I run Washington. I’m Mayor there. Some niggers came to see me one time to try to get the right to vote there. Their leader was a smart nigger. Of course he was half white. I told him that the nigger would never vote in Washington. Hell, if we give ’em the right to vote up there, half the niggers in the South will move into Washington and we’ll have a black government.”15
SOME OF HIS BEST FRIENDS ARE KLANSMEN
FDR appointed two members of his racist cabal, James Byrnes and Hugo Black, to the Supreme Court. What made Black’s appointment controversial was that he was a former Ku Klux Klan member. His law partner Crampton Harris, Cyclops of the Birmingham Klan, had introduced Black to the Klan. Black became an active member, marching in parades and addressing Klan rallies throughout Alabama.
Black was also known as a Klan lawyer, both representing Klansmen and making effective appeals to Klan-dominated juries. In court cases, Black specialized in appeals to racial prejudice, asking questions in court like, “Was he standing at the door where this nigger woman came in?” When Black ran successfully for the Senate, his campaign manager was James Esdale, Grand Dragon of the Alabama Klan.
Republicans protested Black’s nomination. Echoing Bill Clinton’s justification for Robert Byrd, Black protested that he simply joined the Klan in order to advance his career. “The Klan,” he said “was in effect the underground Democratic Party in Alabama.”16 Here Black was telling the truth, and what a telling truth it is!
One might expect northern Democrats to be outraged at this candid confession of Black’s participation in the Klan for self-advancement. This, however, was not the case. Democrats across the country backed Black’s nomination. One of them, Senator William King of Utah, said he saw no reason why membership in the KKK should disqualify someone for elevation to the Supreme Court.
FDR did not directly address the issue, but the president’s private feelings were later revealed by Black himself in a 1968 memo. “President Roosevelt told me there was no reason for my worrying about having been a member of the Ku Klux Klan. He said that some of his best friends and supporters were strong members of that organization. He never in any way, by word or attitude, indicated any doubt about my having been in the Klan nor did he indicate any criticism of me for having been a member of that organization.”17
The southern Democrats had a second demand for FDR. They demanded that a disproportionate share of New Deal programs be steered toward the South and that blacks, who mainly worked as domestic servants and farm laborers, be excluded from those programs. No “New Deal” for the blacks!
Again, FDR agreed. As Katznelson describes, he wrote his New Deal legislation in such a way that the South recei
ved a large fraction of the goodies. A telling example was the TVA Act, which involved the construction of huge power and navigation dams on the Tennessee River. The program benefited Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Virginia. An elated Mississippi Democrat, John Rankin, boasted that TVA would produce “power that will exceed the amount of physical strength of all the slaves freed by the Civil War.”18
Keeping up his end of the bargain, FDR also ensured that the two main occupations involving blacks, namely domestic and farm labor, were excluded from federal benefits. This is a fact that progressive historiography usually omits, because of its devastating significance. Most blacks were excluded from New Deal programs! The grim consequence of FDR’s diabolical pact with the racists was that millions of blacks were ineligible to receive Social Security, unemployment, and a host of other benefits that were being offered to workers in every other type of industry.
One might think that blacks, seeing all this, would indignantly repudiate FDR and his progressive pact with bigotry. But during the 1930s blacks were desperate. The Depression hit blacks harder than anyone else. So the black leadership decided that the crumbs being offered by the progressive Democrats were at least more than they were getting before.
New Deal programs like the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) and the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) were segregated and offered the best jobs to whites. Even so, blacks saw they at least offered employment to tens of thousands of blacks. The administration denied FHA loans to blacks seeking to move into white neighborhoods, but they did assist blacks in buying homes in black areas. Other federal projects backed by the Works Project Administration (WPA) also alleviated black unemployment.
Recognizing that FDR was steering benefits their way, blacks during the New Deal era moved steadily toward the Democratic Party, in a sense selling their votes for a mess of pottage. By 1936, 75 percent of blacks became Democrats. This trend has only continued since then, so that today around 90 percent of blacks vote Democratic and only 10 percent vote Republican. From 1865 to 1936, the trend was exactly the reverse: approximately 90 percent of blacks voted Republican and only 10 percent voted Democratic.
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Page 15