Jimmy Douglass's View On Eugenics

The son of Scottish migrants to Manitoba in the early 1900’s, Tommy Douglas grew up with a strong Christian underpinning of the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ and the Christian ‘social gospel’ – a ‘belief that Christianity was above all a social religion, concerned as much with improving this world as with the life hereafter’. (Lovick and Marshall) These foundations initially led him to becoming a Baptist Minister in the small country town of Weyburn in Saskatchewan in 1930.
However not quite 26 years old, while at Weyburn and seeing the sick and the old suffer greatly under capitalism, particularly during the Great Depression, Douglas wanted to do more for them than he felt he could as a pastor. Motivated by the difficulties he saw, and consistent
As an ambassador to a World Youth Congress in 1936, Douglas wrote that ‘he experienced a ”frightful” epiphany after attending one of Adolf Hitler’s mass rallies’ (Bronca) – however many of these commentators often fail to note that while Douglas had theorised about but later rejected eugenics, other contemporary Canadian Premiers, and indeed 24 US States, had actually implemented eugenics programs and enacted forced sterilization laws. (McMartin) So it would seem appropriate to cut Douglas some slack in this.
Another criticism at the time of J. Edgar Hoover’s communist witch hunts in the USA in the late 1940’s to the mid 50’s, was that Douglas was anti-capitalist and a pro-communist. This was particularly so due to his ‘critique of capitalism (which) made him a target for the RCMP security service during the Cold War era of “Reds under the beds… The RCMP shadowed Douglas with Hoover-like zeal -- eavesdropping on private conversations, probing his links to the peace movement and analyzing his every remark’ and assembling a very thick dossier running into many hundreds of pages. (The Star Editorial; The Canadian
A classic Socialist wants ‘to abolish capitalism because they believe that it exploits the working class’ whereas ‘Progressives, on the other hand, believe that capitalism is the most expeditious way to grow the wealth of society under a regulated business environment.’ (Difference Between)
Misrepresenting his views was par for the course, as Babaluk notes ‘Tommy Douglas — who was at times labelled a “Red” and a “Communist” by his political opponents — (but) won the honour largely for his belief that every Canadian deserved the right to have quality health care, regardless of their economic or social situation… This conviction likely stemmed from his social gospel roots in Manitoba, and continued during his days as Premier of Saskatchewan and later as leader of the federal