“We can intelligently mold and guide the evolution in which we take part,” progressive theologian Walter Rauschenbusch wrote.“God,” Johns Hopkins economic professor Richard Ely asserted, “works through the state.” Many American progressives embraced eugenics as a way of making society better by preventing those considered “unfit” and “defective” from being born.“We know enough about eugenics so that if that knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a decade,” University of Wisconsin president Charles Van Hise opined.In the United States, the “science” of eugenics became intertwined with disturbing ideas about race.Speaking to the 1923 Second International Congress of Eugenics, President Henry Osborn of New York’s American Museum of Natural History argued that scientists should: “ascertain through observation and experiment what each race is best fitted to accomplish… If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturist or a fine mechanic… The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its peoples.