Jill Lepore: Glenn Beck, Eugenics, and History

[Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History at Harvard University where she is also chair of the History and Literature Program. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale in 1995.]

Glenn Beck likes to give history lessons. His desk is strewn with books. “Read history!” he’ll holler into the camera. He’s even got a blackboard and chalk.

I got to thinking about Beck while writing about Paul Popenoe and the rise of marriage therapy. As I explain in this week’s magazine (and on the New Yorker Out Loud podcast), Popenoe’s interest in saving marriages grew out of his commitment to the “science” of eugenics: before he opened his marriage clinic, he was a leader in the campaign to sterilize the “unfit.” Eugenics is one of Beck’s bugbears. He rants about it the way the great cranks of ages past ranted about fluoride, aliens, and C.I.A. mind control. In January, he said:

The reason I bring up Hitler a lot of the times is because many of the things that he did had their roots here in America. The biggest example: Eugenics, which led to the extermination camps, was actually a progressive idea…. You see, the progressives always thought they were superior and it was the stupid people that were slowing us down.

Progressives promoted eugenics. Nazis practiced eugenics. Democrats like progressives. Democrats are Nazis. Case closed!...

That intellectual genealogy is striking—but, for God’s sake, it doesn’t make opponents of same-sex marriage Nazis. If history worked the way Beck thinks it does, he would be on the wrong side of the fight against fascism, but there is no Hitler in the House of Love. There is only the agony of history: the vital, never-ending, and often terrible struggle between what we inherit and what we become.