In a biting review of Olivier Zunz’s Philanthropy in America, Malcolm Harris sheds light on foundations that supported the early 20th century eugenics movement:
Eugenics wasn’t just another 20th century faddish pseudoscience, it was the central intellectual justification for a very American attempt to systematically eliminate entire “undesirable” races and classes of people. The reader wouldn’t know from Zunz’s description that the records in the Eugenics Records Office cataloged “inferior” Americans. It was ventures like this that led Adolf Hitler to write in Mein Kampf that “[t]here is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
The philanthropists’ aid to the formation of this “conception” was more than just inspirational; in addition to the Carnegie Institution’s support of the Davenport project, the Rockefeller family sent hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute where the Third Reich would recruit its top racial scientists. The Nazis frequently cited American eugenics laws, aspirationally, during their rise to power and defensively at Nuremberg. The ERO was shut down in 1939 when the Nazi connections became suddenly indefensible, but state eugenics laws lasted decades longer.
And eugenics were part of the progressive project. That's something today's liberals both know and remain embarrassed by.
The Dish 