Dreams from his eugenicists.(The Week)

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LAST year, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman started a big debate by waxing righteous about the Republican party's allegedly racist past. He charged that Ronald Reagan's 1980 campaign was born in racism and that the Gipper's admirers have been tainted ever since as a result. The lynchpin of his argument: Shortly after he was nominated at the GOP convention, Reagan gave a 15-minute speech at the Neshoba County Fair near Philadelphia, Miss. (It was in Philadelphia that, 16 years earlier, three civil-rights activists had been murdered by segregationist thugs.)

The speech was almost entirely about economics--Jimmy Carter's failed policies and the like--and was delivered in Reagan's typically jovial style. Somewhere along the way he also said that he favored states' rights--something he'd said many times before, and would say many times after. But, as you may know, "states' rights" is an abracadabra phrase. It magically reveals that the speaker wants to make black folk drink from separate water fountains.

I bring this up because, on the night Barack Obama won the "Chesapeake primary," he held a victory rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, at which he declared: "And where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the progressive movement was born?"

Now some readers may be aware that I recently wrote a book arguing that American progressives shared emotional, philosophical, and political affinities with European fascists. But put that aside. Let us instead ask: What did the progressives at the University of Wisconsin believe in?

The president of the university during its heyday as the laboratory of progressivism was Charles Van Hise. A devoted eugenicist, he explained that "he ...