Eugenic influences on American economic reform during the Progressive era

I’m reading a paper due to be presented in a seminar tomorrow, bearing this title. The author is Tim Leonard, of Princeton University. Etiquette forbids, of course, more than cursory quotation of this paper, but this sort of thing is clearly his bag. In fact I believe that what I have is a companion (or follow-on) piece to this paper, in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

I treat you (from the latest publication):

… 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 grounds that the labor force should be rid of unfit workers, whom they labeled “parasites,” “the unemployable,” “low-wage races” and the “industrial residuum.” Removing the unfit, went the argument, would uplift superior, deserving workers.

He has also taught me a thing or two about the likes of John Gibson (besides, obviously, that they’re racist twats):

It was a scholarly fashion, circa 1890, to declare the U.S. frontier “closed” and to sound a Malthusian alarm about excess American population growth. But the professional economists who wrote on immigration increasingly emphasized not
the quantity of immigrants, but their quality. “If we could leave out of account the question of race and eugenics,” Irving Fisher (1921, pp. 226 –227) said in his presidential address to the Eugenics Research Association, “I should, as an econo-
mist, be inclined to the view that unrestricted immigration . . . is economically advantageous to the country as a whole . . . .” But, cautioned Fisher, “the core of the problem of immigration is . . . one of race and eugenics,” the problem of the
Anglo-Saxon racial stock being overwhelmed by racially inferior “defectives, delinquents and dependents.”

Fear and dislike of immigrants certainly were not new in the Progressive Era. But leading professional economists were among the first to provide scientific respectability for immigration restriction on racial grounds. They justified race-based immigration restriction as a remedy for “race suicide,” a Progressive Era term for the process by which racially superior stock (“natives”) is outbred by a more prolific, but racially inferior stock (immigrants). The term “race suicide” is often attributed to Edward A. Ross (1901a, p. 88), who believed that “the higher race quietly and unmurmuringly eliminates itself rather than endure individually the bitter competition it has failed to ward off by collective action.” Ross was no outlier. He was a founding member of the American Economic Association, a pioneering sociologist and a leading public intellectual who boasted that his books sold in the hundreds of thousands.

Ross’s coinage gained enough currency to be used by Theodore Roosevelt (1907, p. 550), who called race suicide the “greatest problem of civilization,” and regularly returned to the theme of “the elimination instead of the survival of the fittest.” In that same year, more than 40 years after the American Civil War, Ross (1907, p. 715) wrote: “The theory that races are virtually equal in capacity leads to such monumental follies as lining the valleys of the South with the bones of half a million picked whites in order to improve the conditions of four million unpicked blacks.”

What a wonderful concept – something that I can clearly see having as much currency as ever, even while the ordinary Malthusianism of population control has just wandered off to the Sierra Club types.

The seminar ought to be very enjoyable. I’m a big fan of picking through the effects of standard Graham Greene characters (the harm one can do with good intentions always impresses me). Grab some of his papers that are available and read them over your breakfast, or lunch, or whatever. Beats talking about baseball, or football, or whatever elses masquerades as a sport, ’round here.