The Fascist Early Progressives

This post title may be a bit extreme, to call progressivism “fascist,” but not by much.

After all, Ludwig von Mises referred to fascism as “socialism of the German pattern” to distinguish it from the Russian version. Instead of expropriation of private property to achieve socialist states, Nazi Germany and Fascist Spain and Italy imposed extensive government regulations to control private life, both business and personal.

The Progressive Era in the United States, from about 1890 to 1930, established the same pattern, but it was based on the leaders’ learning of democratic socialism in Prussian universities.

The early progressives’ specific policies, as comprehensively documented in Thomas C. Leonard’s book Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, would not be considered politically correct today, but their fundamental principles of using think-tank-guided “experts” and government guns to achieve socialist goals have been internalized by modern liberals and conservatives alike, and vastly extended to control nearly all aspects of private life.

Most of the early progressives were reared in old New England families, which made them evangelical white Anglo-Saxon Protestant males, and their program was largely independent of political affiliation: it was strongly supported, for example, by both the Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson.

Here’s a first taste of the progressives’ thinking, as stated in a review of Leonard’s book: “In the early twentieth century, progressives displayed an open contempt for individual rights. In a 1915 unsigned editorial at this magazine [The New Republic], the editors ridiculed the Bill of Rights as a joke.”

The reviewer continues, “If Leonard didn’t have the quotes from prominent progressives to back up his claims, this would read like right-wing paranoia . . . .” And the quotes are numerous.

This book is an important corrective to the history profession’s biased glamorizing of early progressivism.

The liberal individualism of the Scottish Enlightenment was viewed by these early progressives as selfish and therefore un-Christian and immoral. Their evangelical focus shifted from saving souls to saving society, from the individual to the collective. The “public” or “common good” became the standard for policy.

Indeed, one of the motivations for founding the American Economic Association in 1885 was to counter and exclude the ideas of classical liberals Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner.* The promoters of progressivism were mostly economists and sociologists: Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, Edward A. Ross, and Irving Fisher, plus many more.

Elitism and social engineering, not democracy, were their motivating aspirations.

Their form of elitism sought to exclude certain groups, believed to be inferior, from participating in much of society. For example, they eagerly sought to preserve race purity and maintain a living wage for workers of northern European extraction.

Among the groups targeted for exclusion were African Americans, women, and immigrants—especially the Chinese and those from southern and eastern Europe, which especially meant Jews. The disabled, feeble minded, and insane were also inferiors who were excluded to asylums and special farms away from the cities; in some cases they were sterilized.

The former three groups (the early progressives were not Marxists and did not use the term “classes”) were less skilled than their white Anglo-Saxon Protestant male counterparts, so by their willingness to accept a lower wage, they threatened to reduce earnings of the “more deserving” male workers.

Minimum wage and immigration laws were the progressives’ solution.

Maintaining racial purity was more of a challenge, but the “state-of-the-art science” of eugenics came to the rescue. “Well-born” is the meaning of the term, coined by Darwin’s half-cousin, Francis Galton. The aim of eugenics was hereditary control of the race through compulsory sterilization and euthanasia.

Up to 60,000 sterilizations were performed in the United States, as late as 1972. Justification for the practice was given in a Supreme Court decision in 1927, authored by the progressive justices William Howard Taft, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. The legal argument said compulsory sterilization was no different from compulsory vaccination.

Cancelling compulsion in either case was not an option—to those who knew best.

American psychiatrists promoted and supported the Nazi sterilization program that ran from 1934-39. A few supported compulsory euthanasia. The euphemistically labeled “mercy killings” began in Nazi Germany in 1938—in gas chambers disguised as showers.

Eugenics is not much talked about today, or taught in the schools—for the obvious reason that modern progressives do not want to be associated with Nazi Germany. The eugenic connection to progressivism is also seldom mentioned or taught, but it fit the progressives’ program like a glove.

Fascist progressivism? Theodore Roosevelt saw race suicide as the greatest problem of civilization and, according to H. L. Mencken, whom Leonard quotes, “believed simply in government,” not democracy.

The “quality” of the vote, not quantity, was what counted for progressives. Wealth and literacy tests were recommended to determine who should be allowed. Voter turnout in national elections fell thirty percent between 1896 and 1924, even more in the Jim Crow South.

Woodrow Wilson praised those “sturdy stocks . . . [from] the North of Europe” and denigrated immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. He also derided inalienable rights as “nonsense.” The Wilson administration re-segregated the federal government.

Fascist progressivism? Much, much more can be found in Leonard’s book.


* “Social Darwinism,” Leonard points out in a journal article, was a less-than-accurate construct of Richard Hoftstadter in 1944. It then became a favorite pejorative of modern historians, used to disparage the Progressive Era’s capitalism and capitalism’s advocates. The phrase was hardly used during the period, least of all by Spencer or Sumner.

The Barbarity of Modern Psychiatry

It is no accident that Thomas Hobbes—the “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” guy—advocated dictatorship. He was a materialist, one who holds the philosophical notion that consciousness is an illusion, at best an effect or non-causal by-product of the brain. Materialism denies free will and therefore assumes that all of our behavior is determined either by internal bodily functions or by external environmental events. The mind plays no role in influencing behavior. To avoid living in a nasty, brutish, anarchical society, says Hobbes, we need a strong, controlling central government to tell us what to do.

Today, the field of psychiatry is dominated by the theory of materialism. As a result, most of its practitioners have no qualms about imprisoning people against their will, then equally forcibly giving them electro-convulsive shock treatments or neuroleptic (psychotropic) drugs or performing surgery on them. The coercion is considered good medical practice, made possible by the government-sanctioned licensing and patent monopolies, the government socialized and cartelized medical-insurance system, and the laws regulating state-run mental hospitals and wards. The effects of the treatments are not cures for so-called mental illness (“biochemical imbalances”). They amount to total control over unwanted behaviors and their ultimate consequences often are irreversible brain and body damage.

The story is exhaustively documented in Peter Breggin’s 1991 book Toxic Psychiatry.* The culprit is the “medical model” that says psychological problems such as anxiety, depression, and paranoia are physiologically based and must be treated medically, with electroshock, drugs, or surgery. Yes, psychosurgery of the Ken Kesey type is still practiced today in the twenty-first century. Courses on psychotherapy, Breggin points out, are no longer taught in most medical schools that train psychiatrists. The outrage of it all, he demonstrates, is that there is no scientifically valid evidence for the physiological cause of any of these problems.

In page after page, chapter after chapter, Breggin cites researchers, many of them psychiatrists, who acknowledge that no causal connection has been demonstrated between brain physiology and psychological problems. Quite the contrary, evidence of brain damage due to electroshock, drugs, and surgery is abundant. For example, tardive dyskinesia and brain shrinkage are two common effects of the typical “treatments.” The terms “chemical straitjacket” and “chemical lobotomy” are used to characterize the results of some drug use and the immediate, short-term effect of drugs (and shock and surgery) is described as “blunting the personality,” “flattened affect,” and “subdued behavior.” The patients, in other words, look and act drugged. (More here and here.)

The treatments are instruments of restraint, especially of the hyperactive type of behavior that may occur in prisons and mental wards . . . and in schools.

Yet, as William Glasser says, so-called schizophrenics are “just lonely people.” And, as Breggin concurs, the root of the problems most often is family abuse (verbal and physical) or neglect.** The solution is Carl Rogers’ “unconditional positive regard” and nurturing talk therapy. Safe houses run by uncredentialed amateurs, psychiatric survivors in some cases, produce far better results for schizophrenics than any of the shocks, drugs or surgeries of psychiatrists.

Why do establishment psychiatrists persist in using the medical model when the evidence against it continues to pile up? Materialism, of course, is no small theory that blinds them to the contents of consciousness and possible psychosocial causes of mental stress. As academic researchers, some do what other academics have been known to do when discovering embarrassing facts: they bury them in tiny footnotes (all found by Breggin) or relegate their confessions and cautions to post-research interviews (all again found by Breggin) long after the headlines of supposed drug success have played out in the press. And then there’s the blatant conflict of interest, acknowledged by too few psychiatrists, of the millions of pharmaceutical company dollars that are fed to the profession.

“Modern psychiatry,” as Breggin puts it, “is not about counseling and empowering people. It's about controlling and suppressing them.” Its history dates to the seventeenth century but its tactics too often over the years have been those of the Inquisition: subjugating “behaviours unacceptable or inconvenient to those in power” (Models of Madness, p. 14). Mental hospitals of the nineteenth century, and even of the twentieth, have been called snake pits; inmates then, and still today, were and are treated as objects, not people with problems to be resolved.

Consider the eugenics programs of the 1920s and ‘30s in both the United States and Nazi Germany. Both were promoted in the name of science by psychiatrists; hundreds of thousands of people were sterilized or killed during that time and the death houses of the Nazi psychiatrists became the models of concentration camp gas chambers (1, 2). (In the United States compulsory sterilizations continued well into the 1960s.) And let us not forget the political abuse of psychiatry in the Soviet Union, the incarceration of political dissenters. Abuse? Yes. Surprising? No, given the philosophical premise of materialism. (And China?)

Consider also the 1992 federal Violence Initiative of the National Institute of Mental Health. It proposed psychiatric interventions to identify and treat children allegedly biologically and genetically predisposed to violence. Presumably the targeted children would have been treated with drugs. Because there is no evidence whatsoever of a genetic connection to crime or violence and because most victims and perpetrators of violence in the United States today are African Americans, accusations of racism quickly quashed the plan (1, 2, 3, 4).

But again, this is what materialism can lead to. Total domination. Consciousness is irrelevant. Psychosocial causes of behavior are only an illusion.

Thomas Szasz likened the questionable science of modern psychiatry to alchemy and astrology. Perhaps it should be called totalitarian science.



* In the twenty-one years since the publication of Toxic Psychiatry, evidence against the shock-drug-cut approach to helping distressed people has only increased. See Breggin’s web site for detail.

** Glasser and Breggin, both psychiatrists who heroically stand up to the authoritarianism of the profession, are not the only practitioners who talk and work in this manner to help so-called schizophrenics. See, for example, the authors of Models of Madness. Chapter 5 explains why I keep saying “so-called” about schizophrenia; John Read argues that it is an invalid concept.