Thomas C. Leonard Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. xiv + 250 p. $35.00.

Abstract

The final three decades of the nineteenth century saw the rapid transformation of the United States from an agricultural to an increasingly urban society. Demand for labor in the country's large industrial cities was increasingly met by large-scale immigration from southeastern and eastern Europe between 1870 and the start of World War I. Industrialization, in turn, led to the rise of labor unions and widespread labor conflict. The social and political activism of the Progressive Era (roughly 1890–1920) was an attempt to “remake American economic life through the agency of an administrative state” (p. 10). In Illiberal Reformers, Thomas Leonard describes the intellectual underpinnings of Progressivism. He traces the development of economics as an academic discipline, in part from roots in German universities. He explores the relationship between leading Progressives and their views on race and makes a persuasive case for the link between the belief that the state should intervene to improve working and social conditions and the notions of race that were common at the time. This connection was found most clearly in the eugenics movement, which held that an individual's potential was determined by heredity and, for many eugenicists, by racial origin. His most compelling chapters (6 and 7) explore how eugenic and Darwinian ideas were appropriated by Progressive Era economists to defend favored policies and practices. Extreme wealth gaps were justified by the principle of survival of the fittest; social reform was justified by the belief that improving the environment would improve heredity. Darwinism and eugenics were thus so malleable that they could be used by any side in nearly any debate. Darwinism, Leonard writes, was “the master metaphor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American social thought, and it profoundly influenced economic reform” (p. 107). Immigration restriction, compulsory sterilization laws, and bans on interracial marriage all grew out of the eugenic movement's ideas and legislative successes in the early twentieth century. Leonard examines how debates over minimum wage laws and industrial conditions were also influenced by its tenets, often as a way for reformers to distinguish “worthy” workers from the “unemployable.” Eugenics thus became a key intellectual tool for Progressives in their arguments for the regulation of society to increase efficiency and a key criterion in determining which individuals were deserving of state assistance and which were not. Leonard argues that the tendency of Progressives to value efficiency and scientific expertise led them into their alliance with the eugenicists, who touted themselves as experts on human nature in the same way economists were experts in their field. The outcome, he writes, was a large-scale assault on personal and civil liberties on par with the destruction of economic liberties facilitated by “dismantling the free market of classical liberalism and erecting in its place the welfare state of modern liberalism” (p. 191). Illiberal Reformers offers little that is new on the history and legacy of eugenics. Its strength lies rather in demonstrating how eugenics and economics walked hand-in-hand during the Progressive Era. Leonard might have easily taken his narrative further into the twentieth century to examine the most extreme period of immigration restriction following World War I. He might also have said more about eugenic sterilization laws, which were first passed before the war and were often justified in economic terms. On balance, though, Leonard provides a valuable contribution to understanding the intellectual links that made the eugenics movement so politically influential in the late nineteenth century and beyond.