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Title: 'More merciful and not less effective': Eugenics and American economics the progressive era
Citation Type: Journal Article
Publication Year: 2003
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Abstract: Oliver Wendell Holmes was made a Progressive lion upon his pithy dissent to the U.S. Supreme Courts landmark decision to overturn a New York statute restricting (male) bakers working hours. The 14thAmendment, said Holmes famously, does not enact the Social Statics of Mr. Herbert Spencer.1 Twenty-two years later, in another well-known case, Holmes wrote for the majority, which upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law proposing involuntary sterilization of persons believed to be mentally retardedthe feebleminded, in the jargon of the day. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes, Holmes wrote in Buck v. Bell (1927). Three generations of imbeciles, Holmes volunteered, is enough.How does an opponent of Spencerian Social Darwinism come to endorse coercive sterilization of the unfit? This essay argues that, as a matter of history, there is no contradiction in the views that underwrite the two opinions. It is not merely that both statutes proposed to subordinate individual rights to a putatively greater social good. Progressive thought, it turns out, did not have to travel far when it moved from labor statutes conceived as protecting society from Social Darwinism to eugenic legislation conceived as protecting society from persons deemed biologically unfit. The heart of the Progressive enterpriseto improve society by uplifting the industrial poorwas not the whole of the Progressive enterprise. In fact, in the Progressive Era especially, eugenic treatment of those deemed biologically inferior was promoted as ameans to the end of uplifting the industrial poor.
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Authors: Leonard, T.C.
Periodical (Full): History of Political Economy
Issue: 4
Volume: 35
Pages: 687-712
Data Collections: IPUMS USA
Topics: Other, Poverty and Welfare
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