Racial and ethnic issues have often produced vehement assertions in various times and places around the world. These assertions have ranged from the genetic determinism of early twentieth-century America— which proclaimed that “race is everything”1 as an explanation of group differences in economic and social outcomes— to the opposite view at the end of that century that racism was the primary explanation of such group differences.
That different people have different beliefs is hardly unusual in the history of human beings. What is unusual— and dangerous— is (1) the extent to which such beliefs prevail without being subjected to tests of either facts or logic, and (2) the extent to which people who present empirical evidence counter to prevailing beliefs are met with ad hominem denunciations and with efforts to suppress their evidence, by means ranging from censorship to violence, especially on academic campuses.
These are not simply dangers to particular individuals or particular viewpoints. These are dangers to the basic functioning of a free society of fallible human beings, whose differing beliefs must be put to some test. Otherwise, a free society can either destroy freedom or destroy itself in internal conflict. Both have happened all too often, in all too many places, over the centuries.
ASSERTIONS VERSUS EVIDENCE
The fundamental issue is not whether employer discrimination— or societal discrimination in general— can be a cause of different economic and social outcomes among racial or ethnic groups. It can be, it has been, and there is no reason whatever to preclude it from the possibilities in our own times. But there is also no reason to preclude any of the many other factors that have also produced outcome disparities among all sorts of groups, around the world and throughout recorded history.
Since the most often discussed disparities in the United States have been disparities between black and white Americans, this is as good a place to begin as any. The question is whether differences between black and white Americans are unusual, or are of an unusually larger magnitude than differences among other groups in the United States or elsewhere. The question is also whether there are any other discernible reasons for those differences besides race— that is, genetics— or racism.
Median black American family income has been lower than median white American family income for generations. As regards the magnitude of the difference, official government data going back as far as 1947 show that the disparity has not been as large as 2:1 in any of those years.2 How does that particular disparity compare to disparities among other groups in the United States, or among groups in other countries?
Within the United States, the median per capita income of such Asian ethnic groups as those of Chinese, Japanese, Indian and Korean ancestry is more than twice as high as the median per capita income of Mexican Americans.3 These Asian groups also have higher median per capita incomes than the median per capita income of white Americans.4 Asian Indians have nearly three times the median per capita incomes of Mexican Americans, and a median per capita income more than $15,000 a year higher than the median per capita income of white Americans.5 Among full-time, year-round male workers, Asian Indian males earned over $39,000 a year more than white male full-time, year-round workers.6
Is this the “white supremacy” we are so often warned about in some quarters? Even among low-income, non-white groups, there is considerable overlap with the incomes of white Americans. For example, 2020 census data show more than 9 million black Americans with higher incomes than the median incomes of white Americans.7 There are also thousands of black millionaire families,8 and even several black billionaires, including Tiger Woods and Oprah Winfrey.9
However much this situation differs from the image of blacks in political rhetoric, and in much of the media and academia— an image that often seems more like what existed a century ago— the current situation is no reason for complacency. On the contrary, it is a reason for a younger generation of blacks to educate themselves for opportunities that are clearly available, and to advance themselves even more than previous generations of black people have.
Nevertheless, economic differences between different groups are a special concern when discussing different rates of poverty. For example, the poverty rate among black American families as a whole has long been higher than the poverty rate among white American families as a whole.10 But, over a span of more than a quarter of a century since 1994, in no year has the annual poverty rate of black married-couple families been as high as 10 percent. And in no year in more than half a century since 1959 has the national poverty rate of Americans as a whole been as low as 10 percent.11
If black family poverty is caused by “systemic racism,” do racists make an exception for blacks who are married? Do racists either know or care whether blacks are married?
By contrast, single-parent families have much higher poverty rates than married-couple families— whether they are black or white. White, female-headed, single-parent families have had a poverty rate more than double the poverty rate of black married-couple families in every year from 1994 to 2020, the latest year for which data are currently available.12 If “white supremacists” were so powerful, how could this happen?
Male-headed, single-parent families are rarer than female-headed, single-parent families, among both blacks and whites. White, male-headed, single-parent families have had a lower rate of poverty than white, female-headed, single-parent families. Nevertheless, white, male-headed, single-parent families have also had a higher poverty rate than black married-couple families, in every year from 2003 to 2020.13
Statistical differences between races are not automatically due to race— either in the sense of being caused by genetics or being a result of racial discrimination. Differences in the proportion of single-parent families among various racial groups are other differences that affect differences in income. So are differences in median age, and in education— among other factors.
Just as income disparities are by no means unique among American racial or ethnic groups, neither are disparities within such groups necessarily any less than disparities between these groups.
In New York City, for example, in school year 2017–2018 there were dozens of places in low-income minority neighborhoods where public charter schools and traditional public schools, serving the same local community, were housed in the same buildings. When black and Hispanic students in both kinds of schools took the same statewide test in mathematics, the charter school students achieved the official “proficient” level in mathematics more than 6 times as often as children of the same ethnicities in traditional public schools housed in the very same buildings.14 These are huge disparities within the same groups, so that neither race nor racism can account for these huge differences.15 Nor can culturally biased tests.
Similarly, a 1930s study of the black community in Chicago found that the delinquency rate within that community ranged from more than 40 percent in some black neighborhoods to less than 2 percent in some other black neighborhoods.16 Again, these were disparities within the same racial group in the same city at the same time.
Within the white population as well, there have long been internal disparities as great as the disparities between blacks and whites. In 1851, for example, when the white population of the South was about half as large as the white population in other regions, only 8 percent of the patents issued in the United States went to residents of the Southern states.17 Southern whites also long lagged behind other whites in various work skills. For example, although the South in 1860 had 40 percent of the nation’s dairy cows, they produced just 20 percent of the nation’s butter and only 1 percent of the nation’s cheese.18 Southerners’ lags in the dairy industry continued on into the twentieth century.19
In addition to such quantifiable differences as a higher rate of illiteracy among Southern whites in the antebellum South than among their Northern white contemporaries,20 many observers commented on a visibly lower work effort among Southern whites. These observers included Alexis de Tocqueville, in his classic Democracy in America21 and Frederick Law Olmsted in his widely read account of his travels in the antebellum South, The Cotton Kingdom.22 Among white Southerners themselves, similar observations were made by General Robert E. Lee,23 antebellum Southern writer Hinton Helper24 and twentieth-century Southern historians U.B. Phillips25 and Rupert B. Vance.26
Even today, in the twenty-first century, there are counties in the Appalachian regions of Kentucky— Clay County and Owsley County— that are more than 90 percent white, where the median household income is not only less than half the median household income of white Americans in the country as a whole, but also thousands of dollars less than the median household income of black Americans in the country as a whole.27 A Census Bureau study found Owsley County to be the lowest-income county in any American state in 2014, and its population was 99 percent white.28
These were not just isolated flukes in a particular year. These very same counties had the very same income pattern in five different surveys, made over more than half a century, during the years from 1969 to 2020.29
In 2014, an article in the New York Times Magazine rated American counties in economic terms— and six of the bottom ten counties were in eastern Kentucky.30 Although that article did not mention the race of the people in those counties, Census data show that each of these six counties had populations that were more than 90 percent white.31
Here too, this was not just a fluke in a particular year. Data for these same six counties, surveyed over the same years from 1969 to 2020, show a very similar pattern of median household incomes consistently far below the median household income of whites nationwide, as well as median household incomes consistently below the median household incomes of blacks nationwide.32
In a sense, such patterns go back even further. More than a hundred years ago, a scholarly treatise on geography pointed out how people of the same race, living in different geographic settings, can have radically different economic and social outcomes— using Kentucky communities among the examples. This treatise referred to the “hill country of the Cumberland Plateau,” with its “one-room cabins” and “a backward population sprung from the same pure English stock as the Bluegrass people.”33 Nor was this pattern peculiar to the United States.
According to the author, distinguished geographer Ellen Churchill Semple, such “influences of environment” appear “in every part of the world, in every race and every age.”34 Her own voluminous research, and that of other scholars since then, show that people living in mountains and foothills— “hillbillies” in American terminology— have usually lagged both economically and in terms of social development.35 High levels of high-school dropouts and low levels of college graduates among American hillbillies are obvious examples of neglected social development.
What we learn from persistent and severe poverty in hillbilly communities can be helpful in sorting out factors involved in the poverty and lagging progress of other peoples, including racial minorities. If, by some miracle, we could get to zero racism, it is by no means certain how much effect that would have. People in low-income American hillbilly counties already face zero racism, because these people are virtually all white. Yet they have lower incomes than blacks.
Conversely, in a world where nobody believes that all racism has been eliminated, black married couples have consistently had a lower poverty rate than the national average, and less than half the poverty rate among white, female-headed, single-parent families. In other words, some behavior patterns seem to pay off, more so than an absence of racism.
Some emphasis on racism can even be counterproductive. President Barack Obama related an experience he had when talking with a black young man who wanted to become a pilot. This young man at first thought of joining the U.S. Air Force, in order to get trained to be a pilot. But then he said he realized that the Air Force “would never let a black man fly a plane.”36 This was said decades after there was a whole squadron of black American fighter pilots during World War II— and, in later years, two black pilots went on to become generals in the U.S. Air Force.37 Whoever indoctrinated this young man did him more harm than a racist could have, by keeping him from even trying to become a pilot.
There are many reasons why different people are in poverty, and these reasons are not limited to just the ones that happen to be currently in vogue, such as discrimination by race or sex. None of this automatically tells us how much effect discrimination, or any other factor, has on a given group’s economic or other advancement, which can vary at different times or under different conditions. But the facts of history can at least save us from jumping to automatic conclusions, on the basis of rhetoric and repetition of such catchwords as “legacy of slavery,” “white supremacy,” and “blaming the victim.”
Alexis de Tocqueville set an unfortunate precedent, in the early nineteenth century, when he attributed differences between Southern whites and Northern whites to the existence of slavery in the South38— a view echoed by both Frederick Law Olmsted39 and Hinton Helper.40 In reality, however, the very same range of differences existed between the ancestors of white Southerners and the ancestors of white Northerners when they lived in different parts of Britain, before either of them had ever seen a slave.41 The very same unsubstantiated assumption would be used again in the twentieth century, and on into our own times, to try to explain behavioral differences between blacks and whites by “a legacy of slavery.”
The higher incidence of children being born to unmarried women among black Americans is among many other things attributed to a “legacy of slavery.” But, for more than a hundred years after the end of slavery, most black children were born to women who were married, and the children were raised in two-parent homes. Daniel Patrick Moynihan became alarmed, back in the 1960s, because 23.6 percent of black children were born to single mothers in 1963— and that was up from 16.8 percent in 1940.42
Although these rates for black Americans were much higher than for white Americans, the rate of births to unmarried women among whites also rose suddenly and sharply in the 1960s, after having been— for decades— only a small fraction of what it became after 1960.43 For neither blacks nor whites does this pattern suggest a “legacy of slavery,” when this upturn in births to unmarried women began for both races with the huge expansion of the welfare state in the 1960s. This new pattern has now persisted for more than half a century. In 2008, births to unmarried women among white Americans reached almost 30 percent.44 This exceeded the 1963 levels among black Americans that had alarmed Daniel Patrick Moynihan.45
The proportion of births to unmarried black mothers at the end of the twentieth century (68.7 percent)46 still greatly exceeded the proportion among unmarried white mothers as a whole. But, among white mothers with less than 12 years of education, the rate of non-marital births in the early years of the twenty-first century was not far behind at just over 60 percent.47
As with other disparities, differences between races are not necessarily racial differences, either in the sense of being caused by genes or being caused by racial discrimination. Some behavioral patterns produce similar outcomes in groups that differ by race, so that these disparities in outcomes can reflect disparities in behavior— for whatever reasons— without implying either genetic determinism or societal discrimination. Internationally, in the twenty-first century, there are a number of European nations where at least 40 percent of the births are to unmarried women48— and these nations have no “legacy of slavery.” But they have expanded welfare states.
Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, more than a century ago, that catchwords can “delay further analysis for fifty years.”49 Too many catchwords have already delayed analysis longer than that— and are still doing so.
GENETIC DETERMINISM
In the early decades of the twentieth century, when Progressivism was a major new force among American intellectuals and in politics, one of Progressivism’s central tenets was genetic determinism— the belief that less successful races were genetically inferior.
Later, in the closing decades of the twentieth century, Progressives with similar views on such other issues as the role of government, environmental protection and legal philosophy, now took an opposite view on racial issues. Less successful races were now seen as being automatically victims of racism, as they had once been considered automatically inferior. The conclusions were different, but the way evidence was used and the way contrary views and contrary evidence were disregarded, was very similar.
Both sets of Progressives expressed utter certainty in their conclusions— on this and other subjects— and dismissed critics as uninformed at best, and confused or dishonest at worst.50
While Progressivism was an American movement, similar views and attitudes existed under other names on the other side of the Atlantic. There too, the prevailing views on race were opposite at the beginning of the twentieth century from what they became at the end of that century, and on into our own times.
Early Progressivism
Genetic determinism did not begin with the Progressives. In earlier times, many people considered themselves born inherently superior to other people, without requiring either the reality or the pretense of scientific evidence.
Some considered themselves superior as a class or a race, or because of royal blood, or whatever. In Britain, Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911) wrote a book titled Hereditary Genius, based on the fact that many outstanding achievements were concentrated in particular families. This conclusion might have had more weight as evidence if other families had comparable opportunities, but such a requirement could hardly have been met then, and it is not certain how often it can be met now.
A major piece of empirical evidence became available when soldiers in the U.S. Army were given mental tests during the First World War. Mental test scores from a sample of more than 100,000 of these tests showed that black soldiers as a whole scored lower than white soldiers as a whole on those tests. That was treated as irrefutable evidence that genetic determinism was a proven fact.51 But an internal breakdown of the mental test score data showed that black soldiers from Ohio, Illinois, New York and Pennsylvania scored higher on the Army mental tests than white soldiers from Georgia, Arkansas, Kentucky and Mississippi.52
If the reason for the over-all test score differences between the races were genetic, people’s genes do not change when they cross a state line. But some states do have better schools than others.
Even a moderately well-informed person in that era could hardly avoid knowing that other things were not equal between the races in the South, as Southern politicians of that era loudly proclaimed their determination to keep things unequal. This went beyond an unwillingness to spend equally on black and white schools. As far back as the end of the Civil War, when thousands of white volunteers from the North went into the South to teach the children of newly freed slaves, these teachers— mostly young women— were not only ostracized by Southern whites, but were even harassed and threatened.53
This was an era when many Southern whites did not want blacks to be educated, and the education policies of Southern state governments reflected that.54 When wealthy white philanthropists such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Julius Rosenwald sent money to help create schools for black children in the South,55 the state of Georgia passed a law, taxing donations to schools by people of a different race from the race of the students in those schools.56
The most fundamental problem with the conclusions reached by the genetic determinists of that era— and the opposite conclusions reached by Progressives of a later era— was in the way they used empirical evidence. Progressives in each era began with a preconception, and ended their examination of evidence when they found data which seemed to fit their preconception. Such a procedure may be enough to supply talking points. But, if the goal is to find the truth, the search must continue, in order to see if there are other data that conflict with the initial belief.
People with opposing views are often eager to supply opposing evidence, so the difficulty is not in finding such evidence. The difficulty is in whether such evidence will be examined. For example, were there other groups of whites— besides soldiers from certain states during the First World War— who scored as low on mental tests as blacks, or lower than blacks, in the twentieth century? It turns out that there were. These would include whites living in some American mountain and foothill communities.57
There have also been white people living in the Hebrides islands off Scotland,58 and white people living in canal boat communities in Britain, with IQ test scores similar to those of black Americans.59 What these particular whites have all had in common was isolation, whether geographic isolation or social isolation. Such social isolation from the larger society has also long been common among black Americans.
Although blacks in the U.S. Army during the First World War scored marginally lower than various members of recently-arrived European immigrant groups, other blacks— living in Northern communities— often scored either equally or marginally higher on mental tests than these same immigrant groups. These immigrants included Italian American children in a 1923 survey of IQs.60 Similar results were found in a 1926 survey of IQ results for Slovaks, Greeks, Spaniards and Portuguese in the United States.61 During this era, most European immigrants settled outside the South, and blacks outside the South had higher average IQs than blacks living in the South.62
Whites living in isolated mountain and foothill communities are an especially striking group, as regards poverty and isolation from both the outside world and from similar communities in the same mountains and foothills. We have seen how strikingly lower the incomes of such people have been in Appalachian counties in the twenty-first century.63 Back in 1929, the IQs of children in Blue Ridge Mountain areas were studied, and can be compared to the IQs of blacks, which averaged 85 nationally. The average IQs of these white children in Blue Ridge Mountain communities ranged from a high of 83.9 to a low of 61.2, varying with which particular IQ test was used.64
White children in East Tennessee mountain schools in 1930 had an average IQ of 82.4. As with black children with similar IQs, these white mountain children had higher IQs when young— 94.68 at age six, declining to 73.50 at age sixteen.65 A decade later, in 1940, after many improvements in both the local environment and in the schools, children in the same communities— and apparently from many of the same families66— had an average IQ of 92.22. Now their average IQ at age six was 102.56, and this declined to 80.00 at age sixteen.67
Clearly, these lower than average IQs were not due to race, but— before 1940— they were at least as far below the national average IQ of 100 as were the IQs of black children. These results seem consistent with what geographer Ellen Churchill Semple said, back in 1911, that human advancement “slackens its pace” in the foothills and “comes to a halt” in the mountains.68 Other studies of life in isolated mountain and foothill communities around the world show similar patterns of both poverty and lagging human development.69
Later years would bring additional evidence incompatible with genetic determinism. A 1976 study showed that black orphans raised by white families had significantly higher average IQs than other black children, and IQs slightly above the national average.70 It so happens that one of the first notable black scientists— George Washington Carver, in the early twentieth century— was an orphan raised by a white family.71
Genetic determinism in the early twentieth century was by no means simply an issue about black and white Americans. The belief that blacks were genetically inferior was already so widely accepted that most of the genetic determinism literature of that era focused on arguing that people from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe were genetically inferior to people from Western Europe and Northern Europe. This was a major issue in that era, because large-scale emigration from Europe had changed in its origins from predominantly Western Europe and Northern Europe in earlier times to predominantly Eastern Europe and Southern Europe, beginning in the last two decades of the nineteenth century.
Among the massive new wave of immigrants were Eastern European Jews. A leading mental test authority in that era, Carl Brigham— creator of the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT)— said that the Army mental test results tended to “disprove the popular belief that the Jew is highly intelligent.”72 Another mental test authority, H.H. Goddard, who tested children of these Eastern European and Southern European immigrants at the Ellis Island immigrant receiving facility, declared that “These people cannot deal with abstractions.”73
Prominent economist of that era Francis A. Walker described immigrants from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe as “beaten men from beaten races”74— a “foul and stagnant pool of population in Europe,” originating in places where “no breath of intellectual life has stirred for ages.”75
Professor Edward A. Ross, an official of the American Economic Association and President of the American Sociological Association, coined the term “race suicide” to describe the prospect of a demographic replacement over time of the Western Europeans and Northern Europeans as the majority of the American population by Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans, because both these latter groups had a higher birthrate.76 He called these new immigrants “oxlike men,” and descendants of backward peoples, whose very physical appearance “proclaims inferiority of type.”77
Professor Ross lamented an “unanticipated result” of widespread access to medical advances— namely, “the brightening of the survival prospect of the ignorant, the stupid, the careless and the very poor.”78
Ross was the author of more than two dozen books, with large sales.79 The introduction to one of his books included a letter of fulsome praise from Theodore Roosevelt.80 Among Professor Ross’ academic colleagues was Roscoe Pound, who later became dean of the Harvard law school. Professor Pound credited Professor Ross with setting him “in the path the world is moving in.”81 This sense of mission, and a history-is-on-our-side assumption, marked Roscoe Pound’s influential writings over a long career, as he promoted judicial activism to free government from Constitutional restrictions, leaving judges with a more expansive role to play in promoting Progressive social policies.82
The people who led the crusade for genetic determinism in the early twentieth century were not ill-educated, lower-class people. They included some of the most intellectually prominent people of that era, on both sides of the Atlantic.
These included the founders of such scholarly organizations as the American Economic Association83 and the American Sociological Association,84 a president of Stanford University and a president of MIT,85 as well as renowned professors at leading universities across the United States.86 In England, John Maynard Keynes was one of the founders of the eugenics society at Cambridge University.87 Most of these intellectuals were on the political left in both countries.88 But there were also some conservatives, including Winston Churchill and Neville Chamberlain.89
There were hundreds of courses on eugenics in colleges and universities across the United States,90 just as there are similarly ideological courses on college and university campuses across the country today, promoting very different ideologies as regards race, but with a very similar sense of mission, and a very similar intolerance toward those who do not share their ideology or their mission.
“Eugenics” was a term coined by Sir Francis Galton, to describe an agenda to reduce or prevent the survival of people considered genetically inferior. He said, “there exists a sentiment, for the most part quite unreasonable, against the gradual extinction of an inferior race.”91 Professor Richard T. Ely, one of the founders of the American Economic Association, said of the people he considered genetically inferior: “We must give to the most hopeless classes left behind in our social progress custodial care with the highest possible development and with segregation of sexes and confinement to prevent reproduction.”92
Other contemporary academics of great distinction expressed very similar views. Professor Irving Fisher of Yale, the leading American monetary economist of his day, advocated the prevention of the “breeding of the worst” by “isolation in public institutions and in some cases by surgical operation.”93 Professor Henry Rogers Seager, of Columbia University, likewise said that “we must courageously cut off lines of heredity that have been proved to be undesirable,” even if that requires “isolation or sterilization.”94
Prominent Harvard professor of economics Frank Taussig said of a variety of people he considered inferior, that if it were not feasible to “chloroform them once and for all,” then “at least they can be segregated, shut up in refuges and asylums, and prevented from propagating their kind.”95
The casual ease with which leading scholars of their time could advocate imprisoning people for life, who had committed no crime, and depriving them of a normal life, is a painfully sobering reminder of what can happen when an idea or a vision becomes a heady dogma that overwhelms all other considerations. A widely read book of that era, The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, declared that “race lies at the base of all the manifestation of modern society”96 and deplored “a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life,” when that is used “to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community.”97
This book was translated into other languages, including German, and Hitler called it his “Bible.”98
The early twentieth-century Progressives were by no means Nazis. They took pride in advocating a wide range of policies for social betterment, very similar to the kinds of policies that would be advocated by other Progressives in the later years of the twentieth century, and on into our own times.
Prominent economist Richard T. Ely, for example, rejected free-market economics because he saw government power as something to be applied “to the amelioration of the conditions under which people live or work.” Far from seeing government power as a threat to freedom, he said, “regulation by the power of the state of these industrial and other social relations existing among men is a condition of freedom.”99 He favored “public ownership” of municipal utilities, highways and railroads— and declared that “labor unions should be legally encouraged in their efforts for shorter hours and higher wages” and that “inheritance and income taxes should be generally extended.”100 Eugenics was to him just another social benefit he wanted provided by government.
Professor Ely was clearly a man of the left, and has been called “the father of institutional economics”101— a branch of economics long noted for its opposition to free-market economics. One of Ely’s students— John R. Commons— became a leading institutional economist at the University of Wisconsin. Professor Commons rejected free-market competition because “competition has no respect for the superior races,” so that “the race with lowest necessities displaces others.”102
Among Ely’s other students was the iconic Progressive President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson.103 President Wilson too saw some races as inferior. He approved of the annexation of Puerto Rico by President William McKinley before him, saying of those annexed, “they are children and we are men in these deep matters of government and justice.”104 Wilson’s own administration segregated black employees of federal agencies in Washington,105 and he showed the movie, “Birth of A Nation”— glorifying the Ku Klux Klan— in the White House to invited guests.106
Like other Progressives of his time and later times, Woodrow Wilson saw no dangers to freedom in an expansion of government power— whether through the creation of new federal agencies like the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve System during his own administration,107 or through the appointment of federal judges who would “interpret” the Constitution so as to loosen what President Wilson regarded as excessive restriction on the powers of government.108
In his book The New Freedom, Woodrow Wilson arbitrarily defined government benefits as a new form of freedom,109 thereby verbally finessing aside concerns about expanding powers of government being a threat to people’s freedom. This redefinition of freedom has persisted among various later advocates of expanding welfare state powers, on into the twenty-first century.110
Among other prominent scholars of the early Progressive era who were clearly on the political left, along with advocating eugenics, was the already mentioned Professor Edward A. Ross, who was regarded as one of the founders of the profession of sociology in the United States. Professor Ross referred to “us liberals” as people who speak up “for public interests against powerful selfish private interests,” and denounced those who disagreed with his views as unworthy “kept” spokesmen for special interests, a “mercenary corps” as contrasted with “us champions of the social welfare.”111
In their own minds, at least, these early twentieth-century Progressives were advocating social justice— and Roscoe Pound used that specific phrase.112 There is no need to question Ross’ sincerity, as he questioned others’ sincerity. People can be very sincere when presupposing their own superiority.
Madison Grant, whose book Hitler called his “Bible,” was likewise a staunch Progressive of the early twentieth century. While not an academic scholar, neither was he an ignorant redneck. He was from a wealthy family in New York, and he was educated at Yale and the Columbia University law school. He was an activist in Progressive causes, such as conservation, preserving endangered species, municipal reform and the creation of national parks.113 He was welcomed into an exclusive social club established by Theodore Roosevelt,114 and during the 1920s he exchanged friendly letters with Franklin D. Roosevelt, addressing him in these letters as “My dear Frank,” while FDR reciprocated by addressing him as “My dear Madison.”115
In short, the Progressives of the early twentieth century shared more than a name with Progressives of a later era, extending on into our own times. While these different generations of Progressives reached opposite conclusions on the reasons for racial differences in economic and social outcomes, they shared very similar views on the role of government in general and judges in particular. They also had similar practices in dealing with empirical evidence. Both remained largely impervious to evidence or conclusions contrary to their own beliefs.
In addressing one of the central issues in early twentieth-century America— the massive increase in immigration from Eastern Europe and Southern Europe that began in the 1880s— the Progressives went beyond claiming that the current generation of immigrants was less productive or less advanced than the previous generations from Western Europe and Northern Europe. The Progressives’ claim was that Eastern Europeans and Southern Europeans were inherently, genetically— and therefore permanently— inferior, whether in the past or the future.
Ironically, the Western civilization that all these Europeans shared originated, thousands of years earlier, in Southern Europe— specifically in ancient Greece, located in the eastern Mediterranean. The very words that genetic determinists wrote were written in letters created in Southern Europe by the Romans. In those ancient times, it was the Southern Europeans who were more advanced. In the ancient days of the Roman Empire, Cicero warned his fellow Romans not to buy British slaves, because they were so hard to teach.116 It is difficult to see how it could have been otherwise, when someone from an illiterate tribal people in ancient Britain was brought in bondage to a highly complex and sophisticated civilization like that in ancient Rome.
As for the claim that Southern European and Eastern European immigrant children tested at Ellis Island “cannot deal with abstractions,”117 that can hardly be taken as proof of a genetic inability of people from these regions to deal with abstractions. The ancient Greeks did not simply learn mathematics. They were among the creators of mathematics— Euclid in geometry and Pythagoras in trigonometry.
Nor need we believe that there was some biological superiority of the ancient Greeks in southeastern Europe. A series of geographic treatises on the history of Europe’s socioeconomic development by Professor N.J.G. Pounds offered a very different explanation of why the earliest developments of Western civilization began where they did:
Most of the significant advances in man’s material culture, like agriculture and the smelting of metals, had been made in the Middle East and had entered Europe through the Balkan peninsula. From here they had been diffused northwestward to central Europe and then to western.118
World leadership in various fundamental advances of human beings has changed hands repeatedly over the thousands of years of recorded history. That Western Europe and Northern Europe were more advanced in some respects than Eastern Europe and Southern Europe in the early twentieth century was no mandate for genetic determinists to eternalize that relationship to the past and the future.
Among peoples of various races, in countries around the world, those groups that score low on mental tests typically score lowest on abstract questions.119 This hardly seems surprising, since abstractions do not play major roles in all people’s lives— especially not among low-income, working-class people, who predominated among the immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe, who were tested at Ellis Island.
The story was very different among the ancient Greek elites, whose achievements included not only mathematics but also philosophy, literature and architecture. The ancient Greeks created magnificent buildings in the Acropolis that have served as models for iconic buildings in many other countries, thousands of years later. The Capitol building in the United States, and the Supreme Court building across the street from the Capitol, are examples. Anyone who has seen both the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and the Parthenon built in ancient Athens can hardly fail to notice the resemblance. The ancient Greeks also created exquisite statues and busts of human beings that people still marvel at and admire in museums in various countries today.
By contrast, the primitive structures and crude attempts at representing human likenesses, by those ancient Britons who were contemporaries of the ancient Greeks, inspire no such admiration or imitation. Names of ancient Greek thinkers like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Euclid and Pythagoras still resonate today. But there is not a single Briton from those same ancient times whose name can be found in the pages of history.120
Nevertheless, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries A.D., Britons led the world into the industrial revolution. Moreover, the scientific breakthroughs of Britons in the centuries preceding the industrial revolution— including the scientific achievements of Sir Isaac Newton, who was also one of the creators of calculus— dwarf anything produced among Britain’s nineteenth-century Greek contemporaries. The British Empire of the nineteenth century included one-fourth of the land area of the Earth and one-fourth of all the human beings on the planet. A twentieth-century Italian author raised the question: “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?”121
These undisputed facts of history argue against genetic determinism, when peoples in different parts of Europe were clearly more advanced in different centuries. Such radical changes over millennia suggest reciprocal inequalities on a grand scale, from very different historical epochs.
Some people with a non-judgmental philosophy today might refuse to say that the capabilities of either Greeks or Britons were superior. But that is just a verbal evasion of the plain reality that each had superior capabilities to the other in different epochs. What such reversals of relative capabilities from one epoch to another calls into question is whether these different capabilities were genetic.
To honestly admit the reality of vast differences in specific capabilities of different peoples, at different times and in different places, is no capitulation to genetic determinism. Nor are comparisons between different groups of Europeans the only evidence against a genetic explanation. A thousand years ago, the Chinese were more advanced than Europeans in many endeavors.122 But, several centuries later, their positions were reversed— and there is no evidence that the genetic makeup of either the Chinese or the Europeans had changed.
Moreover, there have been similarly large disparities within different segments of the same race. In 1994, for example, the millions of overseas Chinese produced as much wealth as the billion people in China.123 Here the race was the same, but the production of wealth per capita was radically different. A similar pattern can also be found in the United States today, when several of the very poorest counties in the country have overwhelmingly white populations, with median household incomes lower than the median household incomes of black Americans.124 No one has gone into those counties and exploited those people. They have simply not produced as much.
The genetic determinists of the early Progressive era took a remarkably narrow sample of the evidence available to them. The history of ancient Greece and Rome was already well-known as the origins of Western civilization, and places far in advance of the rest of Europe in ancient times. Whatever the relative positions of different regions of Europe during the Progressive era, to see their positions at that time as genetically determined implied that these positions were permanent, for both the future and the past. But readily available evidence about the past said otherwise.
Even the purely contemporary evidence used during the early Progressive era was by no means unambiguous. Answering questions in one section of the Army mental tests required knowing such information as the color of sapphires, the location of Cornell University, the profession of Alfred Noyes and the city in which the Pierce Arrow automobile was manufactured.125 Why black Americans, or recent immigrants to the United States, would be expected to have such information is a puzzle. Why such information would be considered a measure of anyone’s innate intelligence is a bigger puzzle.
Not all the questions on the Army mental tests were as dubious as these. But, for someone who was not quite up to par in answering more valid questions, to have his imprisonment or his freedom depend on whether he had such miscellaneous information seems grotesque.
Mental test pioneer Carl Brigham asserted in 1923 that the Army mental tests provided an “inventory” of “mental capacity” with “a scientific basis.”126 This was neither the first nor the last time when the word “scientific” was invoked, without either the procedures or the precision of science. Brigham was, however, one of the few who later recanted. Writing in 1930, he belatedly pointed out that many of the immigrant men tested by the Army were raised in homes where the language spoken was not English. He candidly declared that his previous conclusions were— in his own words— “without foundation.”127
How many of today’s totally convinced people, with opposite convictions, will be able to later follow in Carl Brigham’s footsteps, only the future can tell.
With the passing years, more and more evidence accumulated that undermined the conclusions of Progressive-era genetic determinists. For example, Jews who had scored low on the 1917 Army mental tests began to score above the national average on various IQ tests and college admissions tests,128 as they became a more English-speaking group. This and other evidence, such as the IQs of black orphans raised by white families,129 undermined the central premise of genetic determinism— its rationale for urging drastic steps to prevent some races from reproducing, on the assumption that such races’ higher birthrates would lead to a decline in the nation’s IQ over time.
A decisive blow was dealt to that argument by the later research of Professor James R. Flynn, an American expatriate in New Zealand. His research showed that, in more than a dozen countries around the world, the average performance on IQ tests rose substantially— by a standard deviation or more— in a generation or two.130
This trend had been going on for years, before Professor Flynn’s research brought it to light. The reason it was not obvious to others before him was that IQ test results were repeatedly renormed, in order to maintain the average number of questions answered correctly at its definitional level of 100.131 As more people answered more IQ test questions correctly over the years, an IQ of 100 now represented correctly answering more questions than before. Because Professor Flynn went back to the original raw scores on IQ test questions answered correctly, these rising performances on IQ tests were brought to light.132
Although the black IQ average, for example, remained more or less constant at about 85 for years, this constancy concealed the fact that blacks, like others, were answering more IQ test questions correctly than in the past. The number of questions that blacks answered correctly on IQ tests in 2002 would have given them an average IQ of 104 by the norms used in 1947–1948. This was slightly higher than the average performance of Americans in general during the earlier period.133
In short, the performances of blacks on IQ tests had risen significantly over time, just as the performances of other people in the United States and in other countries had risen, even though the renorming of IQ tests concealed these changes. Later data published by Charles Murray in 2021 showed that the mean black IQ was now 91,134 up from the usual 85 in earlier times. This meant that black improvement on IQ tests had not simply kept pace with other people’s improvement but had improved somewhat more.
The devastating effect of Professor Flynn’s research was that it destroyed the central rationale for the conclusions of early twentieth-century, Progressive-era genetic determinists, who had proclaimed an urgent necessity to prevent people with lower IQs from reproducing, on the assumption that such people were genetically incapable of reaching the same average intellectual level that was then current. Therefore, on that assumption, the intelligence of the nation as a whole would decline over time. But, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that IQ test results are a perfect measure of intelligence, the factual evidence is that people in multiple countries were correctly answering more IQ test questions in later years, not fewer.
Something else was implicit in the genetic determinism of early twentieth-century Progressivism— namely, that there was a genetically determined ceiling on the intelligence of some groups, making it imperative that they be prevented from reproducing. As late as 1944, Gunnar Myrdal reported, in his path-breaking book An American Dilemma, that belief in a low ceiling on black intelligence was common among white Americans at that time.135
Nevertheless, just one generation later, even the leading academic scholar researching the effect of genes on IQ— Professor Arthur R. Jensen, of the University of California at Berkeley— repudiated the IQ ceiling conclusion, and asked “why should anyone be surprised to find that there are Negro children having IQs of 115 or higher, or that they should be concentrated in the affluent integrated neighborhood in Los Angeles?”136
With the implicit assumption of a low IQ ceiling by the early Progressive-era genetic determinists now gone, and the falling IQ test performances expected now contradicted by widespread rises in performances on IQ tests in later generations, as discovered by Professor Flynn’s research,137 that era is a chapter in human history now mercifully closed— though not before it provided a rationale for genocide. Its enduring significance for our era is as a painfully urgent warning against intolerant ideological stampedes, even when these stampedes are led by leading scholars and intellectuals, and spread by a wide range of institutions.
Later Progressivism
In the later decades of the twentieth century, and on into the twenty-first century, latter-day Progressives substituted racial discrimination for genes as the automatic explanation of group differences in economic and social outcomes. Mental tests— once exalted as an embodiment of “science,” supposedly proving genetic determinism— were now automatically dismissed as biased, when SAT and ACT college admissions tests produced results that conflicted with the new social justice agenda of imposed demographic representation of various social groups in various institutions and endeavors.
In this new Progressive era, statistical disparities between blacks and whites, in any endeavor, have usually been sufficient to produce a conclusion that racial discrimination was the reason. Often there are also statistical data on Asian Americans in these same endeavors. But these Asian American data are almost invariably omitted, not only by the media, but even by academic scholars in elite universities. Such data would often present a serious challenge to the conclusions reached by latter-day Progressives.
In the job market, for example, it has often been said that blacks are “the last hired and the first fired,” when there are downturns in the economy. Black employees may in fact be terminated during an economic downturn, sooner or to a greater extent than white employees. But data also show that white employees are often let go before Asian American employees.138 Can this be attributed to racial discrimination against whites, by employers who were usually white themselves? Are we to accept statistical data as evidence when these data fit existing preconceptions, but not accept such data when they go counter to those same preconceptions?
Or are we to be spared such problems by those who simply omit facts that go against their vision or agenda?
One of the major factors in the housing boom and bust, which produced an economic crisis in the United States, early in the twenty-first century, was a widespread belief that there was rampant racial discrimination by banks and other lending institutions against blacks applying for mortgage loans. Various statistics from a number of sources showed that, although most black and white applicants for conventional mortgage loans were approved, black applicants were turned down at a higher rate than white applicants for the same loans. What was almost universally omitted were statistical data showing that whites were turned down for those same loans more often than Asian Americans.139
Nor was there any great mystery as to why this was so. The average credit rating of whites was higher than the average credit rating of blacks— and the average credit rating of Asian Americans was higher than the average credit rating of whites.140 Nor was this the only economically relevant difference.141
Nevertheless, there were outraged demands in the media, in academia and in politics that the government should “do something” about racial discrimination by banks and other mortgage lenders. The government responded by doing many things. The net result was that it forced mortgage lenders to lower their lending standards.142 This made mortgage loans so risky that many people, including the author of this book, warned that the housing market could “collapse like a house of cards.”143 When it did, the whole economy collapsed.144 Low-income blacks were among those who suffered.
The same question can be raised about mortgage approval patterns as the question about hiring and firing in the job market. Were predominantly white mortgage lenders discriminating against white applicants? If that seems highly unlikely, it is also unlikely that black-owned banks were discriminating against black mortgage loan applicants. Yet black applicants for mortgage loans were turned down at an even higher rate by a black-owned bank.145
It has been much the same story with student discipline in the public schools. Statistics show that black males have been disciplined for misbehavior more often than white males. Because of the prevailing preconception that the behavior of different groups themselves cannot be different, this automatically became another example of racial discrimination— and literally a federal issue. A joint declaration from the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Justice warned public school officials that they wanted what they characterized as a racially discriminatory pattern ended.146
Statistical data from a landmark study of American education— No Excuses: Closing the Racial Gap in Learning by Abigail Thernstrom and Stephan Thernstrom— showed that black students were disciplined two-and-a-half times as often as white students, who were disciplined twice as often as Asian students.147 Were the predominantly white teachers biased against white students? Nor was the disciplining of black students correlated with whether the teachers involved were black or white.148
Although we may analyze all these statistics by race, that does not necessarily mean that the employers, lenders or teachers made their decisions on the basis of race. If black, white and Asian employees had different distributions of jobs, or were distributed differently at different levels in the same occupations, then decisions as to which kinds of jobs— or job performances— were expendable during an economic downturn could result in the racial disparities seen.
Banking officials who decided whose mortgage applications to accept or reject are unlikely to have actually seen the applicants themselves. These applicants would more likely be interviewed by lower-level bank employees. These employees would then pass the income and other data— including individual credit ratings— on to higher officials, who would then either approve or disapprove the applications. In the public schools, teachers would obviously see the students whose misbehavior they reported, but the fact that black and white teachers made similar reports, suggests that race was not likely to be the key factor in this case either.
Perhaps the point in American history when there was the widest consensus on racial issues, across racial lines, was the occasion of the historic speech by Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial in 1963. That was when he said that his dream was of a world where people “will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”149 His message was equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race. But that agenda, and the wide consensus it had, began eroding in the years that followed. The goal changed from equal opportunity for individuals, regardless of race, to equal outcomes for groups, whether these groups were defined by race, sex or otherwise.
What now rose to dominance was the social justice agenda, which included equalized outcomes in the present and reparations for the past. This new agenda drew on history, or on myths presented as history, as well as assertions presented as facts— the latter in a spirit reminiscent of the certitude and heedlessness of evidence in the genetic determinism era.