But I think it is inescapable that Woodrow Wilson put it into high gear. His personal diaries reveal that he believed that every age was defined by one single great thinker and that in his day that was Darwin. He saw progressivism through the lens of social Darwinism with the white race surviving as the fittest. At Princeton he became a big fan of the theory of eugenics as part of his world view. The progressive “liberalism” of his day, of which he was a major part, was infected with this thinking.