The early progressives

I am reading a serious work of history on the early American progressive movement at present. Something that is abundantly clear is that the notion I've seen circulating recently on the Internet, that these progressives were not intimately tied to eugenics movement, is simply propaganda. Eugenics flowed naturally from and fit neatly into the rest of the progressives' views: Imperialism, racism, anti-individualism, and top-down planning by elite experts. These were truly creepy people, and they make it totally understandable why those who oppose them felt the need to forward a doctrine like methodological individualism when faced with opponents for whom the lives of millions of individuals meant nothing, so long as "society" advanced. (Oliver Wendell Holmes famously said that the only thing wrong with war was that it killed the wrong people.)

UPDATE: I have now attended the lecture that went with our reading, by Tim Leonard of Princeton, who has devoted ten years of work to studying the progressive movement of (roughly) 1880-1920. Leonard is not even anti-progressive (his presentation was called "Progressivism: The Light and Dark Sides"), and he has strongly reinforced the understanding I got from his paper. Some quotes -- I was jotting these down as he went, so I do not claim I have him word for word, but I have never distorted his meaning:

"It is hard to find a progressive who wasn't a scientific racists." (He listed John Dewey, Jane Addams, and Edwin Seligman as exceptional "egalitarian progressives.")

John R. Commons was quoted as claiming that allowing inferior races to work was selecting for the unfit.

Theodore Roosevelt claimed that "race suicide" (of white Anglo-Saxons) was the "greatest problem of civilization."

Henry Seager said that American workers needed protection from "defectives."

Woodrow Wilson signed a bill permitting coercive sterilization into law as governor of New Jersey.

The 1924 immigration reform was designed by progressives to keep out inferior races. ("Race" at the time would have been applied to what we call ethnic groups such as Slavs, Jews, and Italians.)

The conquest of the Phillipines was unproblematic because Filipinos were not capable of giving consent to being governed.

The progressives generally considered the Bill of Rights an archaic impediment to their plans.

Our British guest Malcolm Rutherford commented during the Q&A that British progressives were probably even more fascinated by eugenics than were their American counterparts. (By the way, Rutherford, another expert on the era, sat through Leonard's whole talk, and did not object to a single factual claim Leonard made.)

Part of my motive in writing this post is this one. Note well: when I first read Williams' post many months ago, my thought was, "Hmm, that's interesting: I've seen some of the claims Williams is disputing; I wonder who is right?" Not being an expert, I didn't take a side.

But having met two experts now, I am pretty damned sure Williams' is wrong on at least two of his claims: progressives certainly were, in general, racists, and, in general, technocratic scientific wonks. Other of his claims are clearly correct: For instance, the progressives obviously were not Marxists. Marxists are far better than these people! And they clearly were not anti-American: they were strongly nationalist.

One final query: What sort of juvenile idiot feels the need to answer charges that his intellectual movement is "lame," and does so by comparing lists of celebrities with other movements? (Ah, it is fun to let loose and write like Marx from time to time!)