Progressives, it seems, have always been obsessed with racial biological collectivism. Whether it was Progressives in the early 20th Century during the so-called Progressive Era (1900-1920) and their mania for eugenics, scientific racism, and race suicide; or today’s Progressives, equally obsessed with identity politics; race, class, gender and queer studies; and intersectionality.

The Progressive Era was a crucial time in American intellectual history. Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard T. Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during this period, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, ”social imperialism,” Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, all provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as progressivism – complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, eugenics and the idea of “race suicide. It is a seminal focus of their skewed, maniacal totalitarian world view. Progressives have always insisted upon rule by an elitist professional class of credentialed experts removed from the populist majority of everyday Americans, who they regarded as “deplorables,” “white trash,” or “the unwashed masses.”

Here are some intellectual resources which tell the nefarious backstory:

The Eugenics Crusade

Tomorrow’s Children – Eugenics in America

Eugenics in High School History: Failure to Confront the Past  by Thomas F. Cargill

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black

The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, by Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine  

Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, by Charles Benedict Davenport

The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant

The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, by Lothrop. Stoddard

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, by Nancy Isenberg

Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard

Liberal Fascism: the Secret History of the American left, from Mussolini to the politics of change, by Jonah Goldberg

For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene, by Stefan Kühl

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, by Stefan Kühl

Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, by James Q. Whitman

The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, by Dinesh D’Souza

Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor

Hitler is Winning: How Hitler’s Plan For A Master Race Was Created By The West And Is Being Implemented Today, by Jerry Leonard

The Best of Charles Burris