Wesley Clair Mitchell on Eugenics: A Note

The ‘‘progressive movement’’ swept the United States from roughly the first half of the 1890s through the early 1920s, generating a broad popular consensus on the role of government as the primary agent of social change. To that end, an entire generation of young crusaders in public service – inspired by their academic counterparts – seized and wielded sweeping new powers and enacted a stream of new legislation, including minimum wage and maximum hours laws, antitrust statutes, restrictions on the sale and consumption of alcohol, appropriations for hundreds of miles of roads and highways, assistance to new immigrants and the poor, women’s suffrage and electoral reform, among many other things.