Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era

Illiberal Reformers examines how the intellectual champions of the regulatory welfare state proposed using it not to help those they portrayed as inferiors — immigrants, African Americans, women, and “mental defectives,” whom they vilified as low-wage threats to the American workingman — but to exclude them.Thomas C. Leonard is a research scholar in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton and a lecturer in the Department of Economics.