For Part 1, go here .
Part 2: Eugenics and Anti-Catholic Sentiment
The other side of the Progressive movement was a secular philosophy anchored in the theories of Darwin and in an increased role of government. Social Darwinism had become a popular philosophy which eventually evolved into the eugenics movement. The premise of Social Darwinism was that the races developed and evolved apart from one another, and the relative civilization of each race determined how advanced they were. Therefore, certain races were more or less worthy of power. This, combined with a populist push to eradicate social ills (aided by the Social Gospel movement), led to a massive change in the role of government from dispassionate referee to guarantor of social justice. Many of the social programs instituted in the late 19th and early 20th centuries had aspects of Social Darwinism as the foundation.
Scientifically Inferior
Through the 1850s there was a mass migration of Germans, Irish, and other Europeans, specifically Catholic Europeans to the United States. Some of this was due to famine, but much was due to governmental upheaval. In the 1850s there was a number of outbreaks of violence against immigrant Catholics, specifically the Irish Catholics. The nativist tendency of the natural-born Americans was showing itself through resistance to the more assertive Catholic Church. As the Irish Catholics were forced to retreat into their own communities, they created systems of schools. These schools, which became parochial Catholic schools, raised even more suspicions from the native-born Americans regarding the infiltration of Catholicism into American society.
Many Americans, especially the Social Darwinists, despised the low-class Irish Catholics that immigrated to the United States during the Potato Famine and thereafter. Anti-immigrant sentiment was not new in the Progressive Era, but for the first time there was a science that supported the bias. Even more, there was something to be done about it. The Progressive movement had finally consolidated enough power in the national government that the Social Darwinists could implement policy, highlighted by the election of Teddy Roosevelt.
The Protestants were somewhat split on the science of eugenics versus the spirituality of the Social Gospel. On the one hand, racism against Catholics was stoked by the Social Darwinists. On the other hand, the Social Gospel preached a different message regarding the poor and the destitute in an attempt to purify and perfect America. As is the case in modern politics, the message became muddled and descended to the lowest common denominator: the dislike of immigrant Catholics. Economist Francis Walker bluntly summed up the moral and scientific fusion of the eugenics camp, “We must strain out of the blood of the race more of the taint inherited from a bad and vicious past before we can eliminate poverty, much more pauperism, from our social life. The scientific treatment which is applied to physical diseases must be extended to mental and moral disease, and a wholesome surgery and cautery must be enforced by the whole power of the state for the good of all.”
Dying Influence
Protestants were confronted with an emotionally charged problem. Everything had been fine up until the increased Catholic immigration of the 1850s, but there were fears of influence from Rome, and a general scientific consensus that the Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants were lesser races and were uncivilized. Stoking the flames of Catholic hatred was the First Vatican Council in 1869. The most well-known decision to come from Vatican I was the doctrine of papal infallibility. The Roman Catholic Church established that when the Pope was speaking ex cathedra, he was speaking in an inerrant manner. To a skeptical and hostile Protestant America, this looked exactly like what they feared. The Catholics were attempting to run the world from Rome.
To have a major player such as the Pope be declared infallible, especially in political and social pronouncements, makes clear why Protestants were uncomfortable with Catholics, especially since Protestants were losing their grip on the society. They were panicked by the thought of the Catholics having a growing political and social coalition that would ruin the previous homogeneity of thought and culture in the United States. In order to protect against this encroaching foreign power, Progressive Era Protestants focused their attention on the most malleable of the Catholics, their children.
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