For those who wonder about extreme rightwing racism and their view that Arabs need to be killed and why they blindly support shrub with his proto-theologic references to war on terror.
(also for those with some time to read several pages)
Most Americans have little understanding or an incorrect understanding of the eugenics movement. Indeed its association with the Nazis and the Holocaust has distorted the true nature of the movement as surviving groups sought to distance themselves from a movement associated with the Nazis. Almost all Americans incorrectly assume that the movement died beside the Third Reich. Such an assumption is not only wrong ,but also dangerous, as the eugenics movement is still alive and well today.
One of the first benefactors of eugenics in the United States was the Carnegie Institute. Following an infusion of bonds and other assets totaling $14 million from the founder in 1901, the Institute was rechartered by a special act of congress in 1904. Under the charter, the institute was established to be one of the premier scientific organizations of the world. Twenty-four eminent individuals from science, government and finance were selected as trustees including Elihu Root, Cleveland Dodge, and John Billings. John Merriam was appointed president of the institute. The institute soon added a new science to their principal areas of investigations, negative eugenics.
Charles Davenport would soon emerge as the driving force behind the American eugenics movement. Davenport was a sad character with a Harvard degree in zoology. He came from a long line of Congregational ministers. His father was a real estate man and had founded two churches and was a deacon in one and an elder in the other.
Davenport approached the Carnegie Institute in 1902 to fund a study of evolution at the biological experiment station at Cold Spring Harbor where he worked. In 1903, Davenport approached the American Breeders Association (ABA), a group created by the Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experimental Stations. He was elected to the five-person permanent oversight committee. Davenport was also successive in pushing the ABA into adopting the views of negative eugenics. In 1904, the Carnegie Institute formally inaugurated the evolution center at Cold Spring Harbor with Davenport as director.
Davenport’s work impressed the wealthy elite of New England and soon attracted more funding from the Carnegie Institute and additional funding from Mary Harriman, the widowed heir to the railroad fortune of E.H. Harriman. Others that jumped aboard the movement included Henry Ford, John Kellogg, Clarence Gamble, J.P. Morgan, and E.B Scripps.
Davenport soon enlisted the help of Harry Laughlin, a schoolteacher from Missouri. Laughlin, like Davenport was a minister’s son. Davenport structured the Eugenics Records Office to further enable Laughlin’s career. Laughlin was soon at work at the eugenic records office at Cold Spring Harbor. He first set about to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, which he estimated to be about ten percent of the population. He toured Sing Sing and obtained the records of the inmates to prove for all times criminal behavior was hereditary. After obtaining the records from Sing Sing, Loughlin proceeded to tour New York’s State Asylum to obtain the records of those committed. He also toured the Connecticut school for the feeble minded for the records of their charges. Laughlin then set about training field workers to generate additional eugenics records. Besides targeting criminals and the feeble-minded, Laughlin targeted epileptics as well.
In early May 1911, the ABA created a special committee to study the best practical means of cutting off the defective germ-plasma of the American population. The stage was now set for removing the undesirables. Laughlin was appointed secretary of the committee. The advisory panel included Dr. Alexis Carrel of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, the chief of the Bureau of Statistics, O. P. Austin, and immigration expert Robert DeCouncy Ward among other prominent advisors.
In mid July 1911, the special committee met in Manhattan and systematically plotted a campaign to purge the blood of American people of the deteriorating influence of these undesirable anti-social classes. Ten classes of the socially unfit were identified. The classes were as follows in the rank given by the committee: feeble minded, pauper, alcoholics, criminals including petty criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, those predisposed to certain diseases, the deformed, and finally the blind and deaf. Not only did the ABA target the individuals afflicted, but also targeted their extended families as well. The group agreed that sterilization of the extended families was desirable.
The eugenic committee had endorsed a very ambitious plan. The plan prioritized the sterilization of those receiving custodial care, including those in poor houses, insane asylums, prisons, and any others under state care. This group contained approximately one million people. The plan called for the further sterilization of borderline cases of some seven million people deemed by the ABA to be totally unfit to become useful parents or citizens. The estimated eleven million people targeted for the first wave was more than ten percent of the population. After the first wave was completed, the plan called for the sterilization of the extended families of those deemed unfit.
Moreover, the committee sought to bypass the court system in ordering the sterilization. They attempted to define the sterilization as a police function. In their view, once a eugenic board had ordered the sterilization of an individual, the police would simply enforce the decision. Additionally, Laughlin and his committee suggested polygamy and systematic mating to increase the bloodline of the desirables and draconian laws preventing births from any deemed unfit. They called for restrictive marriage laws, forced segregation of undesirables, and compulsory birth control. Nor did they confine their views to just the United States; they envisioned a global movement.
It was only a short step from theory to implementing the plan. The sterilization of undesirables first occurred outside the law and paralleled the development of eugenics. The first cases of sterilization occurred in Kansas, where F. Hoyt Pitcher surgically asexualized fifty-eight children confined in the Kansas Home for the Feebleminded during the 1890s. Kansas’s citizens denounced the doctor, and he was reluctantly removed by the board of trustees. The board staunchly defended Pitcher and defended his work. The doctor did not face any charges.
About the same time, Dr. Harry Clay Sharp was castrating inmates at the Indiana Reformatory to cure convicts of masturbation. Again, the procedure was conducted outside of the law. In 1899 Sharp read an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). The article, written by Dr Albert Ochsner advocated the sterilization of all convicts with vasectomies. After reading the article, Sharp performed the procedure on scores of inmates without anesthetics.93
By 1906, Sharp claimed to have performed 206 vasectomies, even though the procedure was still not legal. While Sharp was very influential in the passage of Indiana’s sterilization law, he was by no means alone. Reverend Oscar McCulloch, the pastor of the Indianapolis’s Plymouth Congregational Church, was a leading reformer and advocate of public charity while harboring a deep hate for the poor. Indiana law specified a compulsory servitude for its paupers. They could be farmed out to the highest bidder. MuCulloch performed his own genealogical survey of Indiana’s wandering tribe of paupers called the Tribe of Ishmael. MuCulloch’s survey of the Tribe of Ishmael quickly became a centerpiece of eugenics studies. MuCulloch preached to his congregation that the paupers were parasites and preordained to be nothing more.
The reader maybe wondering about a connection between religion and eugenics as three of the most influential people in the early development of eugenics came from deep religious backgrounds: Laughlin, Davenport, and MuCulloch. While there were a large number of evangelical ministers that served as officers in the eugenic movement, and more were members, the connection seems more informal than formal and dependent solely upon the individual minister involved. At the same time, few ministers spoke out against eugenics and those that did so waited until the 1930s, after eugenics had been discredited and associated with the Nazis. The connection between eugenics, the Klan, and religion is an area open to further research.
David Jordan, president of the University of Indiana, lectured his students that paupers were indeed parasites. In 1902, in his book Blood of a Nation he first proposed the concept of blood as the immutable basis for race. Jordan left Indiana to accept a position as the first president of Stanford University.94
In addition to Jordan and MuCulloch, Indiana’s State Board of Health was headed by Dr. J. N. Hurty, a staunch believer in eugenics. Hurty would later rise to become head of the American Public Health Association. In 1907, at the repeated urging of Sharp and Hurty, Indiana became the first state to pass eugenic laws calling for the sterilization of undesirables. Indiana, however, was not the first state to have had eugenic sterilization laws introduced in the legislator. Sterilization laws were first introduced in the Michigan legislator in 1905, and again in Pennsylvania in 1906. Both measures failed, however, the Indiana law was modeled on the Pennsylvania bill. The bill passed the Indiana House by a margin of 59 to 22 and the Senate by 28 to 16 votes. The vote was proceeded by little debate in both chambers.
In 1909, Oregon’s Governor George Chamberlain vetoed a sterilization bill noting that’s it didn’t require enough safeguards. Moreover, eugenic sterilization laws failed in several other states in 1909, including another attempt in Michigan and a first attempt in Wisconsin. However, sterilization laws did pass in three states in1909. Washington State passed a bill mandating sterilization of habitual criminals and rapists. Connecticut passed a law allowing the medical staff to examine patients of two asylums for the feebleminded and their family trees to determine if the patients should be sterilized. California enacted a bill that allowed castration or sterilization of convicts and residents of the state home for the feebleminded.
In the next two years, additional states passed eugenic sterilization laws. Iowa passed perhaps the most inclusive law, allowing the sterilization of criminals, idiots, feebleminded, imbeciles, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, and moral or sexual perverts. Nevada, New Jersey and New York were among the states to pass sterilization laws.
Nonetheless, the American Breeders Association and the Eugenic Record office remained frustrated with the progress of eliminating undesirables from the gene pool. Although several states now had laws allowing for forced sterilization, few people were ever sterilized. Only in California, where more than two hundred were sterilized, had the law been applied to more than a couple individuals. Moreover, public sentiment for the enforcement of the sterilization laws was lacking across the nation.
Following the death of Galton in 1911, the First Eugenic Conference was organized to be held in London. Winston Churchill was scheduled to introduce the king at the conference and was reportedly concerned about the rising number of people judged to be mental defects. The organizers wanted the Secretary of State, P.C. Knox to send an official delegation. However, the state department could not comply because the conference was a non-governmental meeting. However, Knox did send official invitations to prominent American leaders on official letterhead. Knox, who had been a former lawyer for Carnegie Steel, effectively used the state department as the eugenics post office. American racial theories dominated the conference held at the University of London.
The next big stride forward for the American eugenic movement came with the US entry into WWI. Officials struggled with the task of classifying the three million draftees. Robert Yerkes, president of the American Psychological Association, gathered other eugenic activists around him and pleaded for intelligence testing of the new draftees. They developed two tests for the army, the beta test for those that could read and write English, and a pictorial alpha test for those that could not read. The questions centered largely on pop culture. Hence, urbanites could pass the exam easily, while draftees coming from rural population, and isolated from theaters and large cities with the newest consumer items, failed the test miserably. Even the questions in the pictorial tests were drawn from the latest pop culture. In the pictorial test, the subject was to draw in what was missing. One such question featured a picture of a bowling lane and the subject was expected to pencil in the missing bowling ball. America was still largely rural with many areas almost isolated as the only means of transportation at the time depended upon the railroads and horses. With such questions, one can easily see why a large number of rural recruits failed the exam. Predictably, the results were dismal: 47 percent of all whites failed and 89 percent of all Blacks failed. However, Yerkes claimed that feeblemindedness was the lowest in the following Anglo groups: 0.1 percent in the Dutch, 0.2 percent in Germans and less than 0.05 percent in Swedes.95
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