SOURCE: "Strange 'Bell' Fellows," in Commonweal, Vol. CXXIII, No. 3, February 10, 1995, pp. 16-17.

[Fischel is an American educator. In the following essay, he faults The Bell Curve for its "poorly disguised political agenda" which fosters racism.]

Eugenics is as American as apple pie—well, stale apple pie. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was notoriously enamored of it. Even Norman Thomas, a putative champion of the common man, bemoaned the tendency of "those of a definitely inferior stock" to go on reproducing themselves. Now come the new kids on the genetic block, The Bell Curve authors Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein. Their explanations for the economic and social disparities in American society are hardly new. Thirty years ago Richard Hofstadter examined the long history of such schemes in his classic Social Darwinism in American Society [Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860–1915 (1944), revised as Social Darwinism in American Thought (1955)], exposing...