Day: March 8, 2019

by Bradley Thomas   Progressive ideology focuses on the “common good” while devaluing individual rights. This mindset, however, has disturbing consequences: when you elevate the “common good” over the rights of individuals, individuals become expendable. Such a mindset can lead to some disturbing practices. Eugenics and the Progressive Era Indeed, American progressives in the Progressive Era had quite an affinity for eugenics as a means to improve the stock of society by “scientific” means of control. Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard documents this in his 2016 book Illiberal Reformers; Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era. The Progressive Era in America is typically recognized as the three to four decades after 1890. Eugenics is commonly referred to as a movement to “improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding.” During the Progressive Era, Leonard notes, it was quite fashionable in scholarly circles to openly discuss eugenics. “In 1928, 376 college courses were dedicated to the subject of eugenics,” he wrote. During that time, popular economist Irving Fisher co-founded the American Eugenics Society, which was accompanied by the American Race Betterment Society established in 1906 and the American Breeders Magazine that began publication in 1910. “Hundreds,…