Re: ...eugenics laws in the US were primarily aimed at the retarded and the insane. If those cases of forced sterilization were examined, probably all of them were because they were retarded or insane. Now true, some of them would have been also a minority, but it is not like they were grabbed off the street because their skin was too dark.
Of course, and that's basically because eugenics laws passed in the US in the late 19th/early 20th century came ON TOP OF Jim Crow and its dozens of racist laws that prohibited miscegenation and socializing between whites and nonwhites. However, as Harry Bruinius chillingly explains in his book, Better for all the world, eugenics luminaries --Charles Davenport, Harry Laughlin, and co-- were bent on a step-by-step strategy. In their correspondence, some of them candidly lament the fact that US public opinion wasn't ready for more drastic measures like the elimination/euthanasia of America's inferior races.... So, they first targeted white morons or so-called feeble-minded people. But then, on their scale of feeble-mindedness, all nonwhite people (including Jews) ranked below the stupidest white! That's what Dr Yerkes found out when he carried out the first IQ test with the US Army in 1916(?). It's clear, therefore, that American eugenicists and racial hygienists were but the harbingers of an American genocide aimed at most nonwhite minorities. Jim Crow and forced sterilization were only the first steps.
Gus
bookbrowse.com
Excerpt:
How did the American scientists' work influence Nazi "racial hygiene" and genocide?
It would be a mistake to see a simple cause-and-effect nexus at work. Eugenics is, however, an Anglo-American idea, and the United States was indeed the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs of better breeding, which included forced sterilization, antimiscegenation, and immigration restriction. Germany had its own history of eugenic research, which dated back to the late 19th century, and many of its eugenic programs rose out of German research. But eugenics had been an international movement with international conferences and collaborations, and global research played the same kind of role it usually does in the scientific community, with innovations being picked up, imitated, and revised by scientists in different countries.
Having said this, in the early 20th century many American eugenicists had already suggested, however subtly, that euthanasia could be one "solution" for the problem of "mental defectives," while conceding that it was "probably" against current social mores. While a few thinkers did suggest euthanasia as a eugenic solution—and there was a significant castration movement in the late 19th century—few called for actually killing. Forced sterilization, too, was very controversial in the early decades after 1900, reaching a high point in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
When the Nazi regime instituted its comprehensive sterilization program in 1934, it hailed American research and legislation as the model. This was probably for propagandistic purposes as much as anything, since such a program is inherently controversial.
As the states adopted new eugenic laws, when and how did the federal government, including President Theodore Roosevelt, become involved?
The federal government was involved in the early period of the eugenics movement. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, William Hayes, appointed Davenport and other prominent scientists to a national "Heredity Commission," charging them to investigate America's genetic heritage. Its purpose, Hayes said, should be scientific research, but "with the idea of encouraging the increase of families of good blood, and of discouraging the vicious elements in the cross-bred American civilization." The Commission should also try to discover whether "a new species of human being may be consciously evolved," even amid the resistance of traditional culture and mores.
This commission helped organize eugenic research and bring together key scholars in the early 20th century, but no federal legislation rose out of it. The key federal legislation is arguably the 1924 Immigration Act, which severely curtailed the immigration of "non-Nordic" peoples, especially Jews. While not an explicitly eugenics act, the arguments in Congress centered around the idea of racial purity. And Calvin Coolidge, who signed the bill into law, had said, "America must be kept American. Biological laws show that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races." But in this pre-New Deal era, most eugenic legislation was passed on the state level. |
