TURN OF THE CENTURY PROGRESSIVES: Polluting the American Gene Pool.

The turn of the century progressives were technocrats who liberal reformer, Thomas Leonard, observes “agreed that expert public administrators do not merely serve the common good, they also identify the common good.” Schools of public administration, including the one that since 1948 has borne Woodrow Wilson’s name, still enshrine that conviction.

Leonard also brings to light an embarrassing truth: In the early 20th century, the progressive definition of the common good was thoroughly infused with scientific racism. Harvard economist William Z. Ripley, for example, was a recognized expert on both railroad regulation and the classification of European races by coloring, stature and "cephalic index," or head shape. At the University of Wisconsin, the red-hot center of progressive thought, leading social scientists turned out economic-reform proposals along with works parsing the racial characteristics -- and supposed natural inferiority -- of blacks, Chinese, and non-Teutonic European immigrants.

In following the irrefutable science of that era day, it was concluded, with the precision of geometric logic, that the American gene pool was being polluted by people from the Mediterranean region. The polluters included those whose ancestries gave us the “cradle of civilization” and  the Golden Age of Greece.  Dominant in that mix of Leonard’s gene polluters were the Italians who nourished and passed on to us all that we now enjoy as western civilization and the Renaissance.  The people whose ancestors discovered, explored, and named  this great country by being the first to sail across the great ocean in search of a way to circumvent the dominance of the Muslim world over Europe were proven, by the science of that day, to be polluting the gene pool of the settlers whose pedigree stems from the barbaric horde that produce the dark ages from which we emerged via the Italian led Renaissance.