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Largely forgotten today, Albert Galloway Keller was one of the foremost sociologists of his time. A brilliant scholar and a staunch disciple of William Graham Sumner, Keller spent his entire academic career at Yale, first as a student and then as professor of the Science of Society, the chair formerly held by his mentor. The main coordinates of Keller's sociology are to be found in his major work, Societal Evolution (1915), where he sought to apply Charles Darwin's mechanism of variation, selection, and transmission to Sumner's general scheme. Although Keller gave priority to social variables, his evolutionary sociology retained many elements of the typically Progressive Era preoccupations with heredity and the biological quality of individuals. The aim of this paper is to examine in some detail Keller's views on eugenics and related issues, and to assess whether and to what extent these biologically deterministic elements played a role in his Darwinian approach to institutional change.

Franklin H. Giddings can be considered one of the founding fathers of sociology in the United States. With many of his contemporaries, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus that recent literature has placed at the core of the Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. The aim of this article is to present a discussion of Giddings's views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion.

Like other Progressive Era reformers, Thomas Nixon Carver promoted a form of biology-infused social science that included both eugenics and a strong version of hereditarianism. Carver was also a charismatic teacher who trained several generations of economists and sociologists at Harvard. In this paper we will focus on the contribution of three of them: James A. Field, Norman E. Himes, and Carl S. Joslyn. These authors differ in terms of style, method, and emphasis—with Field and Himes more interested in population and birth control issues, and Joslyn in the dynamics of social stratification. As it will be shown below, however, all of them reveal an explicit commitment to hereditarianism and eugenics, which can be directly traced back to Carver's influence during their student days at Harvard.