Wesley Clair Mitchell and the “Illiberal Reformers”: A Documentary Note

The aim of this note is to assess whether Wesley Clair Mitchell as a reformer ever expressed concern over the biological quality of individuals and whether he did somehow share the Progressive Era faith in eugenics as an instrument for improving American society’s health, welfare, and morals. Using both published and unpublished evidence, we argue that, as an institutionalist, Mitchell was free from the paternalistic and antidemocratic bent of the progressives described by Leonard and was ready to accept the new faith in the plasticity of human nature that sustained interwar reformism. At the same time, as someone who had been exposed to the Progressive Era cultural milieu, he could not completely divorce himself from the earlier decades preoccupations over the biological quality of individuals.