PROGRESSIVES AND EUGENICS: THE CASE OF JUSTICE BRANDEIS. “While the progressives did introduce a number of helpful, legitimate reforms, they also threw their weight behind some of the most destructive government policies of the era, from race-based restrictions on immigration (justified in the name of protecting U.S. workers from degrading competition) to the South’s racist Jim Crow regime (justified on the grounds that state officials should have broad leeway to control economic affairs),” Damon Root writes at Reason. “Perhaps the most glaring example of this phenomenon is eugenics, a notorious branch of pseudo-science that was championed by most leading progressive politicians and activists and ultimately given the stamp of legal approval by progressive judicial hero Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.”