The so-called “Progressive Era” of the last century — a time of virtually unlimited governmental intervention in the private lives of America’s citizens conducted by legions of do-gooders imbued with only the best of intentions — has never really gone away, sad to say:

According to the received account of the Progressive Era, an enlightened government swept in and regulated markets for goods, labor, and capital, thereby protecting the hapless masses from the vicissitudes of unrestrained laissez-faire capitalism. The Progressives had faith that experts would rise above self-interest and implement wise plans to create a great society. The resulting state-level workplace safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and minimum wages restored dignity and safety to the trod-upon and exploited workers.

Despite the widespread acceptance of this narrative, there are many reasons to question whether it accurately portrays the motivations and hopes of some Progressive-Era reformers. — Art Carden and Steven Horwitz

Regardless of all the high-flown rhetoric of the time, furthermore, “lurking behind what many people see as humanitarian reforms was something much uglier” — an intentional war on the “undesirable” and the “unfit.”

The implications of Darwinian thinking were enthusiastically implemented in eugenics programs, most of them officially sanctioned by scientific, cultural, political, and economic establishmentarians:

The Progressive economists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw social science not merely as a means of inquiry and understanding but as a guide to social management and control. The advent and broad acceptance of Darwinism in the late nineteenth century, combined with a more general belief in the power of science and scientific management to solve social problems, led to a fascination with eugenics and the possibility of using public policy to ensure the “survival of the fittest” and the purity and strength of the human race. In the hands of many thinkers at the turn of the twentieth century, Darwinian theory became a rationale for using the power of government to weed out the “undesirable” and “unfit” in much the way that the new understanding of evolution was changing agriculture and animal husbandry.

One problem with Progressivist thought is how protean it is, insinuating itself into nearly all aspects of life:

We look back on the eugenics movement with proper horror. Yet the same ideas that led to forced sterilization also led to restrictions in the workplace, because labor markets were one place where eugenics-oriented economists could combine their two interests. They recognized early on that legislation which excluded the “unfit” from labor markets would advance their eugenic goals. Most of these laws were enacted at the state level during this period, but the New Deal era saw many of the same arguments applied at the national level [to the institution of minimum wage laws, for instance].

You can read Carden and Horwitz’s Freeman Online article here.