Republican Social Policy in 1936

In April 1936, the RNC recruited an economic brain trust, on the Roosevelt model, that consisted, appropriately, of several of the most distinguished conservative – which is to say, rigorously classical – scholars of the day. There is a story, possibly improved in the telling, of one of them, Thomas Nixon Carver of Harvard. Unaware that on his appointment his words would, somewhat exceptionally, be noticed, he spoke publicly of the desirability of sterilizing all paupers in the United States so that they could not breed and perpetuate their kind. A pauper he defined as anyone earning less than $1800 a year, a category that then embraced around half of all the families in the country.

The Republican brain trust was quietly, but firmly, set aside.

JK Galbraith, ECONOMICS IN PERSPECTIVE, p. 196.