Rikurzhen
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- Jul 24, 2014
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Look here:
And yet the Progressives themselves repeatedly denied that this was the case. As Theodore Roosevelt acknowledged in a private letter near the end of his life:These debates are still playing out today. Progressives see no limit to the expansion of government. Progressives favor unmooring the Constitution from what the Founding Fathers intended. Conservatives are in favor of Originalist readings of the Constitution. Eugenics was to the Progressives of the era as Climate Change is to the Progressives of this era - it was "sciency" and they lapped it up.
I do not for one moment believe that the Americanism of today should be a mere submission to the American ideals of the period of the Declaration of Independence. . . . Such action would be not only to stand still, but to go back. American democracy, of course, must mean an opportunity for everyone to contribute his own ideas to the working out of the future. But I will go further than you have done. I have actively fought in favor of grafting on our social life, no less than our industrial life, many of the German ideals.[10]The Progressives, at least, understood that their approach to reform was animated by a new conception of government or, more precisely, “the State.” Importantly, this idea, the “German idea of the State,” departs from the American Founders’ understanding of government in a couple of key respects, both of which help explain the Progressives’ enthusiasm for eugenics.[11]
For the Progressives, to begin, the power of government is NOT limited in principle to securing the natural or “inalienable” rights of man, as the Declaration of Independence has it. “It is not admitted that there are no limits to the action of the state,” as the German-trained progressive political scientist and future New Dealer Charles Merriam concludes in a 1903 survey of progressive thinking,
“in general,” as the German-trained progressive economist Richard T. Ely likewise affirms, “there is no limit to the right of the State, the sovereign power, save its ability to do good.”[12] The first step toward bold, experimental reform was to untie the hands of government.
but on the other hand it is fully conceded that there are no ‘natural rights’ which bar the way. The question is now one of expediency rather than of principle . . . each specific question must be decided on its own merits, and each action of the state justified, if at all, by the relative advantages of the proposed line of conduct.
For the Progressives, the government’s obligation in this regard was perfectly compatible with treating different races (whom they believed were at varying stages of development), differently in law and policy.[13] It also trumped not only the ability of individuals to exercise their now “so-called innate or ‘natural rights'” –e.g. the right to live, enjoy one’s physical liberty, acquire and use property, marry, speak, worship God according to the dictates of one’s conscience, etc.–but also an individual’s fundamental right to attain his own highest development where the prospect for development was believed to be relatively small, or his restraint was believed to be advantageous to the development of a greater number.[14]
Perhaps nowhere is the Progressives’ willingness to run roughshod over individual liberty, for the sake of improving America generally, as stark as in their support for eugenics.
This was an expansion of government power which was alien to conservatives.
The man who I quoted in the OP and later in the thread, wrote "Eugenics and Other Evils" in 1922. A Christian-based opposition to what Progressives were undertaking. Here is the full-text of that work.
The Mainline denominations which have disproportionately provided the footsoldiers of modern-day Liberalism. It's not a surprise that in an era in which everyone belonged to some Christian church that there was variation seen on the metric of how closely a group subscribed to Scripture. Then when religiosity declined the members of these Churches abandoned their Christianity and migrated over to their new religion, Liberalism. The present-day remnants of these Churches are the ones who have Gay Bishops and such.
From the book "The Encyclopedia of Religion in American Politics:
The people who fought against eugenics in the past are drawn from the same set as the people who fight against abortion today, for eugenics and abortion are thematically linked.
Eugenics in the early 20th century was closely intertwined with the anti-immigration movement.
Yes, it was.
