Sanger’s like-minded associates, Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, also maintained good personal ties with the Nazis. Grant received letters of praise from the German chancellor, and his book The Passing of the Great Race was personally inscribed by Hitler as “my bible” on the subject of eugenics. Stoddard met with Hitler and praised him in 1940 for “weeding out the worst strains in the Germanic stock,” adding that the Jew problem in Germany is “settled in principle and soon to be settled in fact by the physical elimination of the Jews themselves.”
Progressives like Sanger weren’t just concerned with limiting the births of nonwhite people; they were also concerned with limiting their immigration to the United States. What these people feared was the browning of America. They fought it on two fronts. First they tried to construct a legal blockade to keep the brown people out, and if they got through the blockade, to restrict their breeding. The two methods worked together, in a kind of scissors motion, toward the same racially restrictive end.
Progressives like Edward A. Ross, Lothrop Stoddard, and Madison Grant—all associates of Sanger—were leading champions of laws restricting immigration. Ross was an academic advisor to Sanger. Employing with full gusto the social Darwinist rhetoric of early twentieth century progressivism, Ross described immigrants from central and southern Europe as “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality. Clearly 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.”10
Stoddard, who served on the board of Sanger’s Birth Control League—the forerunner to Planned Parenthood—was the author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. He was, during the 1920s, the most famous racist writer in the United States. The Ku Klux Klan regularly cited his work and so did the Nazis. Stoddard wrote that immigrants were a kind of virus and “just as we isolate the bacterial invasion, and starve out the bacteria, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”11
Madison Grant was president of the New York Zoological Society and one of Sanger’s heroes; she listed his book The Passing of the Great Race as required reading on the eugenics list of her Birth Control Review. Grant warned that what he called Nordic civilization was being swamped and vitiated by inferior Alpine and Mediterranean strains from central and southern Europe. These darker Europeans were really “Western extensions of Asiatic species,” Grant insisted, while Nordics were Aryans, “the white man par excellence.”12
KEEPING OUT THE “UNFIT”
Although we hear many progressive laments today about how Republicans are against immigrants—an allegation supported by nothing more than opposition to illegal immigration—in reality no one has attacked immigrants with the venom of progressives. In fact, the progressive assault on immigrants in the 1920s was unprecedented and had far-reaching consequences.
America had long been considered a magnet for immigrants. Hundreds of thousands of Irish, Italians, and Jews came to America in the nineteenth century, and these groups helped build America. Immigration levels were just as high in the early twentieth century. More than four hundred thousand immigrants came to America each year from 1900 to 1920.
But progressives hated immigration largely because they hated the types of immigrants whom they saw entering the country. Sanger’s main cause was birth control, but she too eagerly backed immigration curbs for “unfit” populations. Sanger argued that America should “keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as the feebleminded, idiots, morons, the insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others.”13
Progressive influence was instrumental in the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. From the outset Sanger supported the law, but her public endorsement of restrictive immigration came later, in a speech in 1932 titled “My Way to Peace.” Nevertheless, for the first time in American history, laws were passed that systematically barred people from entry and established quotas based on race and national origin. White immigrants were preferred over immigrants of color, and northern Europeans were preferred over southern Europeans.
Of course there were laws that restricted Chinese immigration in the nineteenth century. These were anomalous, however, and there were no laws that curtailed immigration from Europe. The 1924 law put even most Europeans on the unwanted list. The effect was immediate. In the period from 1925–1939, immigration levels dropped to around twenty-five thousand a year, an astonishing 95 percent decline from earlier levels. Progressive “reform” had won the day.
This “reform,” however, had dangerous consequences. During the 1930s there were last-ditch efforts to waive some of the restrictions of the 1924 Immigration Act in order to grant asylum to Jews whose lives were in mortal danger from the Nazis. These were not Jewish applications that came through the mail from Germany. The issue was far more pressing. Almost a thousand German Jews waited desperately in a ship off the coast of Florida, seeking a life-saving approval of their immigration papers.
Progressives like Harry Laughlin—a director of the Birth Control League and close ally of Sanger—resolutely opposed entry to the U.S. by these Jews. In his report, Immigration and Conquest, Laughlin sought to prove that Jews were hard to assimilate and that they would cause a “breakdown in the race purity of the superior stocks.”14 In a sense, American progressives like Laughlin were tacitly collaborating with the Nazis who obviously did not want the Jews to escape to the United States. As a consequence of progressive resistance, the Nazis got their wish and the ship was sent back to Germany.
Progressive support for eugenics and hostility to immigration were both rooted in social Darwinism, with its accompanying idea of higher and lower races. The social Darwinists developed a social program that they said was modeled on Darwin’s concept of natural selection: “survival of the fittest.” Basically they sought to plan and design society so that “fit” groups could prosper and “unfit” groups could be exterminated. (Recall Sanger’s reference to the “extermination” of the Negro population.)
This extermination rhetoric would prove immensely appealing to the fascist movement emerging in Germany. As historian Richard Weikart shows in two important books, From Darwin to Hitler and Hitler’s Ethic, Hitler himself was a social Darwinist. Hitler’s speeches and writings are suffused with social Darwinist rhetoric. He used that rhetoric to justify his racialist and eugenic policies.
Case in point: Hitler promoted and subsidized childbirth for what he considered “fit” Nordic and Aryan types. At the same time, he supported abortion and sterilization for Jews, gypsies, and other “unfit” groups. Hitler was, then, anti-abortion for the “Master Race” and proabortion for everyone else. Hitler’s discrimination between Aryans and non-Aryans is very much along Sanger’s racial lines. For Hitler, as for Margaret Sanger, birth control meant “more children from the fit, fewer from the unfit.”
COVERING THEIR TRACKS
Thanks to its association with Hitler, social Darwinism became taboo. At this point, progressives moved quickly to camouflage their association with it. Historian Richard Hofstadter in his 1944 book Social Darwinism in America spearheaded the academic cover-up. The progressive claque hailed Hofstadter’s book as a masterpiece because it blamed social Darwinism on the free market. Later scholars have largely discredited Hofstadter’s thesis, but even so that thesis remains the basis for the conventional wisdom about social Darwinism.15
In Hofstadter’s analysis, social Darwinism in America was a movement to promote capitalist and laissez-faire ideals. Hofstadter could only find two individuals who represented his thesis, and one of them was an Englishman, Herbert Spencer. Spencer could only in an antiquated sense be termed a Darwinian, since he preceded Darwin. He did, however, coin the term “survival of the fittest” which was later adopted by Darwin. The only American free market advocate who spoke in Darwinian terms was sociologist
William Graham Sumner.
What about the economists and actual businessmen—did their support for free market values arise out of a commitment to social Darwinism? In general, no. Many American economists supported laissez-faire but they defended their principles by appealing to Adam Smith, not Darwin. Most American businessmen simply accepted free markets as what commerce was all about. Darwin and Darwinism had nothing to do with it.
It was leftists, progressives, and Marxists who frequently invoked Darwin, and they did so to justify higher taxes, government regulation, and socialism. Marx, for example, wrote in 1861 that Darwin’s work “is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.”16 Marx liked Darwin because he saw Darwin as overthrowing the idea of a natural order in society.
Other socialist and leftist intellectuals—Thorstein Veblen, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw—also employed Darwin’s ideas to support their own statist economic and social theories. Hofstadter knew all this—he quoted the line from Marx that I have given above—but he downplayed it. He also downplayed the role of social Darwinism in advancing progressive causes like eugenics and racially based immigration controls.
Hofstadter’s goal was to use the cudgel of social Darwinism to attack the free market. (Hofstadter was a progressive who understood the importance of covering up the tracks of the progressive movement. He was also a member of the American Communist Party for a brief period in 1938.) Thus Hofstadter twisted social Darwinism to make it into something it wasn’t, and he submerged the actual themes of social Darwinism, giving them only a passing mention. In this way Hofstadter successfully dissociated American progressivism from its eugenic and racist association with fascism and Nazism.
As the enormity of Hitler’s crimes became apparent, progressives were forced to abandon Nazi-sounding eugenic schemes and racially based immigration policies. On immigration, progressives adopted essentially the same solution that they had earlier discovered for blacks. They went from being opponents of legal immigration to becoming champions of illegal immigration. By offering the newcomers free stuff, progressives hope to convert these populations they formerly considered undesirable and unfit into highly-desired and fit Democratic voters.
While progressives jettisoned old-style eugenics, they didn’t altogether stop caring about the subject. They continued to champion birth control, but now as a means of personal choice and population reduction. In other words, the explicit eugenic racial element was removed. No more talk about more children from the fit, fewer from the unfit. No more references to wiping out the black population!
Nevertheless, it cannot escape notice that progressive groups like Planned Parenthood even today concentrate their propaganda in the inner cities. They champion birth control as just another free “entitlement,” like free education and free health care. Today 40 percent of the women having abortions are black and, in places like New York City, abortions outnumber births in the black community. How proud Margaret Sanger would be if she had been around to see it.
So what happened to Planned Parenthood’s Negro project? It still exists! Today it is simply called . . . Planned Parenthood. The group’s propaganda efforts are now concentrated in black and minority communities, and largely invisible everywhere else.
A MUTUAL ADMIRATION SOCIETY
While progressives were forced to modify their fascist social policies, they never gave up on fascist economic policy. The progressive fascination with fascist economics goes back to the early 1930s, when FDR came to office with virtually no plan to deal with the Great Depression. Ambitious, confused, and a little desperate, FDR looked abroad.
There he saw what the new governments were doing in Europe. He was impressed. Yes, what caught FDR’s eye was fascism. Both in Italy and Germany, FDR witnessed charismatic strongmen who harnessed the fear caused by the global depression. They directed that fear against the business class and the entrepreneurs who were previously the most powerful people in society. They drew on that fear to increase the power of the state to control industry and control people. FDR’s reaction was: Hey, if this is fascism, what’s not to like?
Today, of course, the idea of a revered figure like FDR admiring fascist leaders like Mussolini seems far-fetched bordering on absurd. What could FDR have seen in that cartoon dictator? But as historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch points out, the image of Mussolini as a cartoon dictator is a post–World War II creation. After the war, progressives remade Mussolini into that figure. Viewed retrospectively, Mussolini’s fascism—what he termed the Corporate State—became a bad joke.
Before the war, however, these same progressives viewed Mussolini quite differently. As Schivelbusch points out, before World War II progressives emphasized not the differences between FDR’s New Deal and Mussolini’s Corporate State but the similarities. These similarities were evident not only in America but in Europe as well. As we will see, FDR and Mussolini recognized them themselves.
In 1932, the progressive writer H. G. Wells gave a telling speech at Oxford University. The speech was titled, “Liberal Fascism.” Wells argued that liberals in the West were mostly trying to copy Soviet-style socialism but actually the fullest, finest form of socialism was fascism. Basically, according to Wells, progressives needed to overcome their inhibitions and move in the fascist direction. Wells ended his speech with a resounding call “for a Liberal Fascisti, for enlightened Nazis.”17 This is not a speech you are likely to find today in a progressive reader.
While Wells puts fascism out in front, he seems to recognize that FDR’s welfare-state liberalism and Soviet Communism were movements running in the same direction. Schivelbusch remarks that the similarities between these movements were widely noticed on both sides of the Atlantic prior to World War II. His book comparing them is called Three New Deals. All of them centralized power; all put a new class of planners in charge of the productive wealth of the society, restricting the operations of the free market; and all used modern propaganda techniques to rally the masses in the name of collective solidarity.18
These are movements that drew upon each other, and learned from each other. FDR assembled a “brain trust” of intellectuals and media figures around him, just as Mussolini and Hitler did. The Italian and German fascists used academia and the media as allies in establishing their domination over the business class, and FDR followed suit. In fact, he began the practice of progressive presidents calling on these “brain trusts.” JFK subsequently had a brain trust, as did Lyndon Johnson. Obama seems to prefer czars, his tastes apparently favoring Russian autocracy over the Germanic type.
In the grim aftermath of World War II and the Stalinist purges, the term “totalitarianism” has become a bad word. But for progressives before the war, Jonah Goldberg points out, it was a good word. “Totalitarianism” was a term used by Mussolini in a positive, descriptive sense. It meant giving total allegiance to the state; it meant a state that took care of people’s physical, emotional, and aspirational needs. Totalitarianism implied an exhilarating unity of thought and action. 19
Totalitarianism, in this sense, was the shared aspiration of fascists, Nazis, and progressives. Schivelbusch writes, “The New Deal Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany all profited from the illusion of the nation as an egalitarian community whose members looked out for one another’s welfare under the watchful eyes of a strong leader.”20 Progressives across Europe and America in the 1930s relished the idea of the totalitarian society in which they could impose this unity, in other words, to supervise and control people’s lives.
Does totalitarianism in this sense seem unfamiliar? It shouldn’t be. Recall President Obama’s propagandistic “Julia” videos. Essentially the Obama administration promised this hypothetical young woman cradle-to-grave protection. Absurdly, the package of benefits offered by the government under Obama would be worth more than the wages of a typical forty-hour work week.
“Under President Obama” Julia would get education subs
idies, minimum wage, food stamps, and free health care. “Under President Obama” Julia even decides to bear a child. To me, it’s a bit unnerving. But this is progressive utopia: citizens are all brought into complete subordination and submission to an all-powerful state.
HILLARY’S FASCIST STREAK
We find the same totalitarian overtones in Hillary Clinton’s statist vision for children represented in her book It Takes a Village. Let’s see how. Her book is based on the African proverb, “It take a village to raise a child.” As the Africans mean it, raising children is not merely a job for parents; the whole culture of the village must be supportive. In this sense, I agree: my own childhood on the outskirts of Mumbai was enriched by extended family, a wide circle of friends, the subcultures of church and school, sporting and civic associations, a whole ecosystem of support.
This, however, is not what Hillary means by the title of her book. What she means is “It takes a central government.” In Hillary’s view all associations from the family to the church to the civic group are ultimately submissive to the state. Children, ultimately, are wards of the state. They may be under the provisional care of parents, but parents are answerable to the state, which has the right to step in at any time and take over if it chooses.
If this seems like an extreme view, the extremism is not in my analysis but in Hillary’s own views. In 1973, Hillary published an article titled “Children Under the Law” in the Harvard Educational Review. In that article, she advocated liberating “child citizens” from their parents and especially from what she termed the “empire of the father.”
Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party Page 18