During the second half of the Progressive Era, beginning roughly in 1908,
progressive economists and their reform allies achieved many statutory victories,
including state laws that regulated working conditions, banned child labor, instituted
“mothers’ pensions,” capped working hours and, the sine qua non, fixed
minimum wages. In using eugenics to justify exclusionary immigration legislation,
the race-suicide theorists offered a model to economists advocating labor reforms,
notably those affiliated with the American Association for Labor Legislation, the
organization of academic economists that Orloff and Skocpol (1984, p. 726) call
the “leading association of U.S. social reform advocates in the Progressive Era.”
Progressive economists, like their neoclassical critics, believed that binding
minimum wages would cause job losses. However, the progressive economists also
believed that the job loss induced by minimum wages was a social benefit, as it
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performed the eugenic service ridding the labor force of the “unemployable.”
Sidney and Beatrice Webb (1897 [1920], p. 785) put it plainly: “With regard to
certain sections of the population [the “unemployable”], this unemployment is not
a mark of social disease, but actually of social health.” “[O]f all ways of dealing with
these unfortunate parasites,” Sidney Webb (1912, p. 992) opined in the Journal of
Political Economy, “the most ruinous to the community is to allow them to unrestrainedly
compete as wage earners.” A minimum wage was seen to operate eugenically
through two channels: by deterring prospective immigrants (Henderson,
1900) and also by removing from employment the “unemployable,” who, thus
identified, could be, for example, segregated in rural communities or sterilized.
