WASHINGTON

The progressive mob that disrupted Charles Murray’s appearance last week at Middlebury College was protesting a 1994 book read by few if any of the protesters. Some denounced “eugenics,” thereby demonstrating an interesting ignorance: Eugenics — controlled breeding to improve the heritable traits of human beings — was a progressive cause.

In “The Bell Curve,” Murray, a social scientist at the American Enterprise Institute, and his co-author, Harvard psychologist Richard J. Herrnstein, found worrisome evidence that American society was becoming “cognitively stratified,” with an increasingly affluent cognitive elite and “a deteriorating quality of life for people at the bottom end of the cognitive ability distribution.” The authors were “resolutely agnostic” concerning the roles of genes and the social environment. They said that even if there developed unequivocal evidence that genetics are “part of the story,” there would be “no reason to treat individuals differently” or to permit government regulation of procreation.

Middlebury’s mob was probably also ignorant of this: Between 1875 and 1925, eugenics advocates were disproportionately progressives because eugenics coincided with progressivism’s premises and agenda, which rejected the Founders’ natural rights doctrine and conception of freedom. Progressives said freedom is not the natural capacity of individuals whose rights pre-exist government. Rather, freedom is something achieved, at different rates and to different degrees, by different races.

Progressivism’s concept of freedom dictated rethinking the purpose and scope of government. Princeton University scholar Thomas C. Leonard, in his 2016 book “Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era,” says progressives believed scientific experts should determine the “human hierarchy” and appropriate social policies, including eugenics.

Economist Richard T. Ely, a founder of the American Economic Association whose students at Johns Hopkins included Woodrow Wilson, said progress depended on recognizing “that there are certain human beings who are absolutely unfit, and who should be prevented from a continuation of their kind.” The mentally and physically disabled were deemed “defectives.”

In 1911, then-Gov. Wilson signed New Jersey’s forcible sterilization law, which applied to “the hopelessly defective and criminal classes.” In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia’s law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes saying that in affirming the law requiring the sterilization of “imbeciles” he was “getting near to the first principle of real reform.”

Progressives derided the Founders as unscientific for deriving natural rights from what progressives considered the fiction of a fixed human nature. But they asserted that races had fixed and different natures calling for different social policies. Progressives resolved this contradiction when, like most Americans, they eschewed racialism — the belief in distinct races with fixed traits and capacities. Middlebury’s turbulent progressives should read Leonard’s book. After they have read Murray’s.

George F. Will is a columnist for Newsweek and The Washington Post.

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