Category Archives: Eugenics

In August 1964, the North Carolina Eugenics Board met to decide if a 20-year-old Black woman should be sterilized. Because her name was redacted from the records, we call her Bertha.

She was a single mother with one child who lived at the segregated O'Berry Center for African American adults with intellectual disabilities in Goldsboro. According to the North Carolina Eugenics Board, Bertha had an IQ of 62 and exhibited aggressive behavior and sexual promiscuity. She had been orphaned as a child and had a limited education. Likely because of her low IQ score, the board determined she was not capable of rehabilitation.

Instead the board recommended the protection of sterilization for Bertha, because she was feebleminded and deemed unable to assume responsibility for herself or her child. Without her input, Berthas guardian signed the sterilization form.

Berthas story is one of the 35,000 sterilization stories we are reconstructing at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab. Our interdisciplinary team explores the history of eugenics and sterilization in the U.S. using data and stories. So far, we have captured historical records from North Carolina, California, Iowa and Michigan.

More than 60,000 people were sterilized in 32 states during the 20th century based on the bogus science of eugenics, a term coined by Francis Galton in 1883.

Eugenicists applied emerging theories of biology and genetics to human breeding. White elites with strong biases about who was fit and unfit embraced eugenics, believing American society would be improved by increased breeding of Anglo Saxons and Nordics, whom they assumed had high IQs. Anyone who did not fit this mold of racial perfection, which included most immigrants, Blacks, Indigenous people, poor whites and people with disabilities, became targets of eugenics programs.

Indiana passed the worlds first sterilization law in 1907. Thirty-one states followed suit. State-sanctioned sterilizations reached their peak in the 1930s and 1940s but continued and, in some states, rose during the 1950s and 1960s.

The United States was an international leader in eugenics. Its sterilization laws actually informed Nazi Germany. The Third Reichs 1933 Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases was modeled on laws in Indiana and California. Under this law, the Nazis sterilized approximately 400,000 children and adults, mostly Jews and other undesirables, labeled defective.

The team at the Sterilization and Social Justice Lab has uncovered some remarkable trends in eugenic sterilization. At first, sterilization programs targeted white men, expanding by the 1920s to affect the same number of women as men. The laws used broad and ever-changing disability labels like feeblemindedness and mental defective. Over time, though, women and people of color increasingly became the target, as eugenics amplified sexism and racism.

It is no coincidence that sterilization rates for Black women rose as desegregation got underway. Until the 1950s, schools and hospitals in the U.S. were segregated by race, but integration threatened to break down Jim Crow apartheid. The backlash involved the reassertion of white supremacist control and racial hierarchies specifically through the control of Black reproduction and future Black lives by sterilization.

In North Carolina, which sterilized the third highest number of people in the United States 7,600 people from 1929 to 1973 women vastly outnumbered men and Black women were disproportionately sterilized. Preliminary analysis shows that from 1950 to 1966, Black women were sterilized at more than three times the rate of white women and more than 12 times the rate of white men. This pattern reflected the ideas that Black women were not capable of being good parents and poverty should be managed with reproductive constraint.

Berthas sterilization was ordered by a state eugenics board, but in the 1960s and 1970s, new federal programs like Medicaid also started funding nonconsensual sterilizations. More than 100,000 Black, Latino and Indigenous women were affected.

Many felt shame and shrouded these experiences in secrecy, not even telling their closest relatives and friends. Others took to the streets and filed law suits to protest forced sterilization. The powerful documentary No Ms Bebs tells the story of hundreds of Mexican American women coerced into tubal ligations at a county hospital in Los Angeles in the 1970s. One of them, who became a plaintiff in a case against the hospital, reflecting back decades later said her experience makes me want to cry.

In the years between 1997 and 2010, unwanted sterilizations were performed on approximately 1,400 women in California prisons. These operations were based on the same rationale of bad parenting and undesirable genes evident in North Carolina in 1964. The doctor performing the sterilizations told a reporter the operations were cost-saving measures.

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Unfortunately, forced sterilization continues on. Romani women have been sterilized unwillingly in the Czech Republic as recently as 2007. In northern China, Uighurs, a religious and racial minority group, have been subjected to mass sterilization and other measures of extreme population control.

All forced sterilization campaigns, regardless of their time or place, have one thing in common. They involve dehumanizing a particular subset of the population deemed less worthy of reproduction and family formation. They merge perceptions of disability with racism, xenophobia and sexism resulting in the disproportionate sterilization of minority groups.

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Forced sterilization policies in the US targeted minorities and those with disabilities and lasted into the 21st century - The Conversation US

As harrowing as the current pandemic is, humankind has to consider that more and worse of these may lie ahead. Wildlife displacement and other ecological footprints of our species are wreaking such global warming as makes plausible storylines resembling the most fanciful fiction, like long-dormant viruses that killed Neanderthals, mammoths and woolly rhinos returning to life. The global disruption caused by Covid has only served a small sample of what climate change will do to us all unless we do something to restrain it.

Perhaps nothing less than a new age of enlightenment can rise to this challenge. In its last incarnation the great thinkers of the age were deeply engaged with the scientific questions of their time Locke, Rousseau, Adam Smith etc.Gradually of course this trend gave way to disciplinary narrowness as science became more technical and specialised, and technocracies took the driving seat in many societies. But the perils of this kind of decision making are all around us today. Science needs a renewal of vows with values and a higher purpose.

Whether it is broader climate change or its immediate manifestations like the pandemic or the California wildfires or the Amphan super cyclonic storm which caused extensive damage in Bengal in May, several roots of the environmental crisis lie in a technocratic attitude towards nature, science and progress. Our humanist self needs to take back control instead. Its a question of survival of our species. Of course its science which will give us the vaccine and other solutions as well. But from Nazi eugenics to unchecked emissions to Chinas surveillance engine, its clear that without ethical guidance science can stumble badly. Today such big picture guidance needs to unite rationality with a collective humanity and even spirituality. At stake is pulling the planet back from a heated catastrophe.

This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.

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New age of reason: Technocracies have botched the human-nature nexus. We need science with ethics today - The Times of India Blog

Image: Screen shot from That Hideous Strength: C.S. Lewis's Prophetic Warning against the Abuse of Science.

Editors note: Published on August 16, 1945,C. S. LewissThat Hideous Strengthis a dystopian novel that eerily reflects the realities of 2020, putting into a memorable fictional form ideas expressed in Lewiss non-fiction work, The Abolition of Man. To mark the former books three-quarter century anniversary,Evolution Newspresents a series of essays, reflections, and videos about its themes and legacy.

James A. Herrick is the Guy Vander Jagt Professor of Communication at Hope College in Holland, MI. His books include The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition.

This post is adapted from Chapter 10 ofThe Magicians Twin: C. S. Lewis on Science, Scientism, and Society, edited by John G. West. See also:

Profound concerns about the direction of Western education and science prompted C. S. Lewis to pen the three lectures that were first published as The Abolition of Man in 1944. In the third talk Lewis argued famously that the power to affect the entire subsequent history of the human race will be determined by a few technologists and bureaucratic planners who alter foundational components in human biology.

The three brief chapters making up The Abolition of Man Men without Chests, The Way, and The Abolition of Man were originally presented as the Riddell Memorial Lectures at the University of Newcastle in February of 1943. In the most discussed lecture and the one from which the book takes its title, Lewis warns that if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. Far from being freer and better humans, these new creatures will be weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preordained how they are to use them.1 As a result of sophisticated biotechnology, Mans conquest of Nature, if the dreams of some scientific planners are realized, means the rule of a few hundreds of men over billions upon billions of men. Lewis concludes: The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will have been won.2

Lewiss deep suspicion of modernist educational projects, subjectivism about morality, and progressive scientific planning animates these lectures. He was particularly concerned about biotechnological experimentation with humanity as its patient, a possibility he also explored in That Hideous Strength. In both works Lewis casts a dark vision of the human race redesigned by scientific programmers who have stepped outside the Tao.3 Should such a project succeed, every individual human being eventually would reflect in her or his very cells a new nature crafted by technologists. The new human nature would mirror a moral vision founded on popular but largely unexamined mythologies such as progress and evolution, narratives shaping even scientific planning. Lewis wrote famously, For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases will be the power of some men to make other men what they please.4 These man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irrepressible scientific technique: we shall get a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in any shape they please.5

For the Conditioners Lewiss label for the scientists and bureaucrats at work on the new humanity values and emotions are mere physical phenomena to be produced or repressed in students through education informed by advanced psychology. Breaking with past traditions, values become an educational outcome to be propagated rather than a deeply rooted moral awareness to be refined, the product, not the motive, of education. The Conditioners will acquire the capacity to produce conscience and decide what kind of conscience they will produce.6

Future academic and governmental elites will define good and then set about producing this invented good in humankind by a combination of educational technique and biotechnology. According to Lewis, they know quite well how to produce a dozen different conceptions of good in us, though guided by no external, objective standard of good themselves. Ignoring the timeless Tao, the Conditioners become the arbiters of good and bad.7 But, for Lewis, to step outside the Tao is to sever ones moral connection with all previous human experience, in essence, to cease to be human. To propagate this moral rupture by technological means is to create, not an improved human race, but a race that is no longer human; this is the abolition of man.

Tomorrow, C. S. Lewis, Science, and Science Fiction.

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Why CS Lewis Wrote The Abolition of Man - Discovery Institute

When Ruth Morris was a teenager, her family was given a choice their daughter could either be sterilized by the state or stay in an institution. Her father signed a paper allowing the surgery, and forever taking away her ability to have achild.

I had to do it. They told me after it was done. I was unhappy but I couldnt do anything about it, Ruthsaid.

At the time, Ruth lived at Fairview Training Center, Oregons primary state-run institution for those with intellectual and developmental disabilities (I/DD). For decades, just about anyone leaving the institution faced compulsory sterilization before returning to the community. It was a policy known aseugenics.

In the early twentieth century, more than 30 states passed eugenicslaws.

Simply put, eugenics policy advocated improving the human race through selective reproduction. People considered ideal citizens were encouraged to have children together, while those deemed unfit weresterilization.

In Oregon, Bethenia Owens-Adair, one of the regions earliest female physicians, helped write and promote state-mandated sterilization legislation. A supporter of womans suffrage, and prohibition, Owens-Adair advocated that eugenics would improvesociety.

We can and must protect our nation from insanity, epilepsy, and the varied train of abnormalities that follow in their wake.Dr. Bethenia Adair Owens said in1915.

Oregons 1923 law targeting people deemed feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, habitual criminals, moral degenerates, and sexualperverts.

The state set up a Board of Eugenics that had the final decision over who would be sterilized. The board ordered its last forced sterilization in 1981. In 1983, Oregons eugenics law was repealed. By that time, over 2,600 Oregonians had undergone compulsory sterilization by thestate.

In 2002, then-Governor John Kitzhaber officially apologized for the policy of forced sterilization. Ruth, and others who had also been forcibly sterilized, attended the event at the state capitol. Ruth says she was happy to take part in the ceremony, I felt good that heapologized.

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Eugenics In The Shadow Of Fairview . News - OPB News

But the new eugenics also presents dissimilarities with the old one, which are not due only to an improvement of techniques, but which reflect the difference between a non-Christian society, and an apostate society. Apostasy descends more abjectly than paganism, because the negation of Christian values leads to the negation of natural values accessible to reason, which the ancient world had more or less discovered. Take away the supernatural, it will not even remain natural.

The first traces of a new eugenics can be found during the Renaissance with authors such as the skeptic Montaigne (1533-1592), the humanist Rabelais (1494-1553) or even the Dominican Campanella (1568-1639) - who passed a good part of his life in the prisons of the Holy Office. All three show a concern for the selection of the best. Fr. Franois-Joseph Thonnard wrote that the humanists of this period were indeed captivated by the assimilation of the past in the order of beauty more than truth, and also a return to nature exalted by pagan Hellenism Just as artists renewed ancient forms, philosophers revived most of the ancient systems.

As for Francis Bacon (1561-1626), one of the thinkers who opened the modern period, in his book New Atlantis, he depicts a society organized according to a policy guided by science and reason, where the constitution of couples must be a State affair aimed at the procreation of a strong and intelligent race. For this philosopher, it is no longer on God that moral life must be regulated, but on social and human utility. The goal of a moral life is therefore the good of humanity: is good, that which is useful to humanity. This morality therefore inevitably tends toward utilitarianism. This formula, repeated, amplified, and distorted, will have many consequences a few centuries later.

What comes into being is a positive eugenics attached to the idea of human quality.

The first legislative intervention took place in Sweden, a Protestant country which prohibited the marriage of epileptics in 1757. And it was in Germany, where Protestantism was also widespread, that Dr. Johann Peter Frank in 1779 published his Complete System of Medical Policy in which he states: I firmly believe that there is no more powerful means to stimulate the vigor and the health of the human species, than a severe selection among those who, nowadays, spread exclusively the bad seed on the field of collective life, and to make it impossible for all the degenerates and the miserable to continue to sacrifice half of humanity, according to their unreasonable impulses (G. Banu).

For Protestantism, material prosperity is a mark of divine blessing; the Protestant therefore naturally goes towards the things of the earth and cares about it almost exclusively. And since his morality is constantly evolving, he is not repelled by these new ideas.

The concern for positive eugenics underpins the work of the revolutionary Condorcet (1743-1794): Can we have any other goal than to multiply well-formed beings, capable of being useful to others and making their own happiness? Influenced by Lamarck (1744-1829), he believed in the inheritance of acquired personality and turned towards social action. He was among the first to apply statistical methods to the study of social phenomena and populations, founding what he called social mathematics.

And so the quantitative notion appeared for the first time, oriented however towards the measure of quality. This work will be continued by Adolphe Qutelet (1796-1872), the founder of biometrics, which he called social physics. But he too is more interested in environment.

It was in 1798 that the Protestant cleric Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834) published his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population. This book marks the true birth of modern concerns about population regulation. Beginning at that point there will exist a current called Malthusianism and then Neo-Malthusianism, which seeks above all to decrease or stabilize populations, and which can be called quantitative eugenics. For Malthus, it is in the nature of things that the rich cannot help the poor indefinitely; that they have no right to be maintained at the expense of society.

This is the refusal to accept the word of Our Lord: For the poor you have always with you (Jn. 12:8). Selfishness, the fruit of materialism, is the origin. It takes on the appearance of a false goodness: helping the poor to become less poor by limiting their offspring. This current, distinct from qualitative eugenics, comes from the same background. They will eventually meet.

In 1803, in France, Robert le Jeune published his Megalanthropogenesis which describes the practice of marrying eminent men to distinguished women in order to give birth to intelligent children. It is the return of an old Greek idea: While nothing is spared in Europe to enhance the beauty of horses, improve the beasts of wool, and perpetuate the race of good bloodhounds, is it not a shame that man is abandoned by man? In other words, the progress of qualitative eugenics.

Quantitative eugenics also continued to grow. As early as 1821, John Stuart Mill (1806-1873), the utilitarian philosopher, adhering to the theses of Malthus, wrote in the Encyclopedia Britannica: The great problem of the hour is to find the means of limiting the number of births. In 1848, he specified that one can hardly hope that morality will make progress, as long as one does not consider large families with the same contempt as intoxication or any other bodily excess. If he himself does not propose immoral means, he leaves the door open for them. As early as 1822, the Englishman Francis Place launched neo-Malthusianism by publishing his Illustrations and Proofs of the Principles of Population which marks the beginning of birth-control (BC). He anonymously distributed his Diabolicals handbills where he recommended the use of all the contraceptive methods known at the time.

The development of Malthusian theses continued in the Anglo-Saxon countries, because the Latin countries, which remained Catholic, strongly opposed these methods. The United States saw the publication in 1833 of Dr. Charles Knowltons book, The Fruits of Philosophy: or The Private Companion of Young Married People, which likewise describes all contraceptive methods in the wake of Francis Place. In 1854 in England, Dr. Charles V. Drysdale published his Elements of social science, a treatise on contraception considered from the economic, philosophical and medical point of view. He saw in the institution of indissoluble marriage a degradation of women, and he added that poverty is a sexual question and not a question of politics and charity.

A degree is crossed when feminism joins the eugenic struggle. In 1877, the English Malthusian League was founded by Charles Bradlaugh and Annie Besant: neo-Malthusianism entered social life. The following year the worlds first birth control clinic opened in Amsterdam, Holland, a Protestant country, at the same time as a Malthusian league started up there. In 1896, Paul Robin founded the League for Human Regeneration in Paris, which in 1900 organized the first International Neo-Malthusian Conference in which the union of the two currents took shape.

Certain currents follow the logic of the same starting principles. In 1851 Gobineau (1816-1882) published his Essay on the Inequality of Human Races which founded racist theory. This would be received with enthusiasm in Germany, in particular by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), for whom all the rules of aesthetics, morals, and politics can be summed up in one: Preserve and promote the purity of Aryan blood.

These theories are contained in potential in eugenics. An improvement implies a standard, which necessarily establishes a position in relation to itself. From there to contempt for those who are below this standard, is only one step which soon leads to elimination. The standard itself can be variable depending on the criteria set by the selector. So the racist element fits into any eugenics.

The work of Charles Darwin (1809-1882) marks a turning point in qualitative eugenics, because it offers, in his book On the Origin of Species, published in 1860, the first scientific support. Darwin sees in inheritance and in the struggle for life the means for the fittest to perpetuate themselves at the expense of the unfit. This conception bears the seeds on the one hand for the extension of positive eugenics to the whole of society, selection being a factor of evolution, and on the other hand for the elimination of the unfit. It was during the same time period time that Gregor Mendel published his Essay on Plant Hybrids (1865) which laid the foundations for genetics, a science which experienced rapid development from the start of the 20th century, and which provided the means long awaited by eugenics.

It is to the Englishman Francis Galton (1822-1991), cousin of Charles Darwin, that we owe the creation of the term Eugenics or the well-born. As early as 1869 he published Hereditary Genius, whose title shows that he intended to bring eugenics to the field of heredity, in order to improve human intelligence which would follow its laws. Here is what he said in his memoirs: When I understood that the inheritance of mental qualities, on which I had done my research, was real, and that heredity was a means of developing human qualities much more powerful than the environment, I wanted to explore the scale of qualities in different directions, in order to establish to what extent childbirth, at least theoretically, could modify the human race. A new race could be created, possessing on average a degree of quality equal to that encountered so far only in exceptional cases.

And he adds: Far be it from me to say anything that could underestimate the value of the environment in itself, since it includes, for example, all kinds of health improvements. I wish to proclaim that all these improvements are powerful auxiliaries of my cause; nevertheless I consider the Race as more important than the Medium. Race has a double effect: it creates smarter and better individuals.

Here we find a new fundamental error which will have repercussions indefinitely in the eugenic system in all its forms: the confusion between science and morals. Eugenics imagine that morality automatically follows intelligence, but that conflates two areas, which, if they have close and necessary interdependencies, are none the less different. The more intelligent an evil being, the more harm he can do. This vice is ineradicable, because the eugenicist thinks of improving man by actions which make abstractions of good and evil, and which only targets measurable qualities, even if it is a question of intelligence.

Galton offers two definitions of Eugenics. The first, in 1883, in his Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development: Science of the improvement of the race, which is not limited to questions of judicious unions, but which, particularly in the case of man, occupies all the influences likely to give the best endowed races a greater number of chances to prevail over the less good races. This definition integrates the medium and the inheritance, because Galton realized the insufficiency of the criteria treating positive eugenicsgenetics is barely justified. The second, in 1904, erases the racist aspect: Study of the socially controllable factors which can raise or lower the racial qualities of future generations, both physically and mentally.

His action is then recognized. Foundations were multiplying: National Chair of Eugenics, Office of Eugenic Registration, Society of Eugenic Education (1908), Eugenics Review (1909), etc. His ideas spread everywhere, which Galton wanted. He wanted to make it a branch of academic studies; thus, to introduce it into the national consciousness like a religion. He even speaks of a holy war!

From that point eugenics was launched. It even obtained the much desired political consecration. However, Dr. Jean Sutter, one of the founders of the National Institute of Demographic Studies, drew up this assessment in 1950: Genetics could not find its own technique and, so to speak, its scientific personality, so much so that at present it seems to disappear as a science to make way for eugenics, which is only a state of mind; it is to be expected that it will meet, more and more, within the various disciplines used by all of the sciences.

This judicious reflection sounds like a true prophecy.

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Eugenics Yesterday and Today (6): The Origins of Modern Eugenics - FSSPX.News

Last month, USC President Carol Folt announced that the school would remove former university President Rufus von KleinSmids name from a campus building, citing his leadership role in the racist eugenics movement and his refusal to admit Japanese American students to the university after World War II. In explaining the decision, Folt cited Von KleinSmids actions as being at direct odds with USCs multicultural community and our mission of diversity and inclusion. What Folt did not mention was Von KleinSmids ties to Nazism and anti-Semites.

Von KleinSmid led the university from 1921 until 1947, but it was during the 1930s and early 1940s that his tolerance of anti-Semitism was most evident. We know this in part through reports sent to Leon Lewis between 1933 and 1941 from a network of spies he recruited. Beginning in August 1933, Lewis, founding executive secretary of the Anti-Defamation League, coordinated a group of men and women who went undercover and joined every Nazi and fascist group in Los Angeles. Often rising to positions of leadership, they detailed the activities of local Nazis and their supporters, including faculty and students at USC.

According to their reports, Von KleinSmid tolerated and supported pro-Nazi faculty such as Erwin Mohme, the chairman of USCs German department. Mohme, was a frequent speaker at Nazi rallies in Hindenburg Park in La Crescenta, north of Los Angeles, according to Lewis spies. He worked closely with the Friends of New Germany (predecessor of the German American Bund) and was awarded the Order of the Eagle from Los Angeles German Consul Georg Gyssling in 1938, the only Southern Californian to receive such an honor. Yet Von KleinSmid kept him in his position as head of a department.

In the summer of 1933, Von KleinSmid was part of a delegation of American university presidents who visited Germany. According to documents I obtained from Germany while researching my book Hitler in Los Angeles, the German Foreign Office was ordered to extend a warm welcome to USCs head, who had requested a personal meeting with Joseph Goebbels. The Germans believed Von KleinSmid was sympathetic to their cause even if he could not say so in public. Upon his return to the U.S. in September 1933, Von KleinSmid denounced German anti-Semitism; but he took no steps to stamp it out at USC.

The USC president also appeared on podiums with his fellow eugenics enthusiast Baron Ernst Ulrich von Buelow, who was, as I documented in my book, head of Nazi spy operations in Southern California. Von KleinSmid also, according to Lewis spies, lent a hand to Von Buelows protege, Kurt Bernhard, Prince Zur Lippe, a German undergraduate who enrolled at USC in 1933 claiming he wanted to learn more about the United States. In fact, Bernhard was a secret German agent who recruited Nazi supporters at USC. According to Lewis spies, Bernhard bragged about his good relationship with Von KleinSmid, and while on campus founded a Nazi-sympathizing fraternity and wrote for an anti-Semitic student newspaper, the Owl. He also boasted of his ability to pass out Nazi propaganda with no blowback from university administrators. In 1938, Bernhard was finally forced to register with the U.S. government as a German foreign agent.

USCs Nomenclature Task Force is currently looking at Cromwell Field, which bears the name of former USC coach and assistant Olympic track coach Dean Cromwell. During the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Cromwell prevented two Jewish runners, Marty Glickman and Sam Stoller, from competing, something Glickman and many others believed was done in order not to embarrass Hitler by having Jews on the winners podium. After the Olympics, Cromwell spoke at a Nazi-organized German Day celebration at La Crescentas Hindenburg Park, which was filled with swastika flags and storm troopers, according to a report in the American Jewish World. Anti-Nazi groups were outraged by his speech, in which he talked about how few U.S.-born people lived in New York and quipped, Oh boy, if I could only be that handsome boy Adolf [Hitler] in New York for an hour.

Cromwell also marveled that while in Berlin he did not see a single colored man, woman or children. They have all chosen to leave for some reason or other, and I for one certainly dont object to that. Following the speech, the audience gave three shouted Heil Hitlers, the Nazi salute, and a singing of the Horst Wessel song.

When newspaper reporters queried Von KleinSmid about the incident, noting how much it had disturbed the citys Jewish community, USCs leader dismissed reports of Cromwells anti-Semitism and racism as a tempest in a teapot. Cromwells remarks, he insisted, were only facetious. An unrepentant Cromwell responded that the criticism comes from a group of people [New York Jews] that raised a big slush fund to keep our team out of the Olympics.

The USC faculty were silent, but not the Los Angeles community. On September 15, 1936, 1,500 people met at the Knickerbocker Hotel to demand that USC fire Cromwell for his anti-Semitic and anti-Negro remarks. More than 100 telegrams were sent to Von KleinSmid. No action was taken.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Von KleinSmid strongly supported the American war effort to defeat Germany. He built barracks for U.S. troops on campus, and in his 1942 commencement address he asked students to dedicate themselves toward all that we are and must be after victory to the end that righteousness may again reign in the world. But it was too little and too late to undo the anti-Semitic damage he had allowed to happen at USC.

I first began hearing about Von KleinSmid when I left New York to take a job at USC in January 1979. I was told by older Angelenos that Jews didnt go to USC, they went to UCLA. I asked why, and was told about the legacy of Von KleinSmid and a belief that USC was not friendly to Jews. Things have changed dramatically since then, and now President Folt has taken steps to renounce the mistakes of the past. This moment is our Call to Action, Folt wrote, a call to confront anti-Blackness and systemic racism, and unite as a diverse, equal, and inclusive university. You have asked for actions, not rhetoric, and actions, now.

A name change is a step in the right direction, but what happens after those names are changed? What happens to that ugly history? This is a rare moment of reckoning at USC and across the nation to fully air all kinds of past prejudice, including anti-Semitism, and to excise the demons of our collective past. As we have learned from history, silence is never the answer.

Steven J. Ross is a professor of history at USC and author of Hitler in Los Angeles: How Jews Foiled Nazi Plots Against Hollywood and America.

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Op-Ed: USC's reckoning with its past needs to include how anti-Semitism was allowed to flourish there - Los Angeles Times

Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler coined several now-common psychological terms such as schizophrenia, autism and ambivalence. He also believed mental and physical cripples should be sterilised in order to preserve racial purity. At a time when controversial historical figures are increasingly under the microscope, how should we judge scientists like Bleuler?

Born in London, Thomas was a journalist at The Independent before moving to Bern in 2005. He speaks all three official Swiss languages and enjoys travelling the country and practising them, above all in pubs, restaurants and gelaterias.

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Swiss individuals and institutions helped produce the toxic waste of scientific racism and played a leading role in international eugenics, says Pascal Germann, an expert on the history of eugenics and racism at the University of Berns Institute for the History of Medicine.

In other words, they didnt merely follow the zeitgeist but actively shaped these ideologies and practices of exclusion. This should be a topic in schools and universities.

Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) was born and died in Zollikon, near Zurich.

His sister, Pauline, five years his elder, had a psychiatric disorder.

His wife, Hedwig Bleuler-Waser, was one of the first women to receive her doctorate from theUniversity of Zurich. She founded the Swiss Association of Abstinent Women.

Bleuler was an early proponent of the theories ofSigmund Freud.

In 2000, the asteroid (11582) Bleuler was named after him.

Bleuler, director of the Burghlzli psychiatric hospital in Zurich from 1898 to 1927, was a reformer. He took his psychotic patients seriously, focused on personal treatment and pushed for improvements in conditions. He championed a community environment for patients rather than institutionalisation, and he avoided the use of straitjackets where possible.

However, his theory, and that of other psychiatrists, that undesirable behaviour was genetically transmitted was used to justify forced sterilisation and castration.

Writing in his seminal study of 1911, Dementia Praecox, or the Group of Schizophrenias, Bleuler noted that castration, of course, is of no benefit to the patients themselves. However, it is to be hoped that sterilisation will soon be employed on a larger scale for eugenic reasons.

In the same article he claimed that most of our worst restraining measures would be unnecessary if we were not duty bound to preserve the patients lives which, for them as well as for others, are only of negative value.

In 1924 Bleuler wrote in the Textbook of Psychiatry: The more severely burdened should not propagate themselves If we do nothing but make mental and physical cripples capable of propagating themselves, and the healthy stocks have to limit the number of their children because so much has to be done for the maintenance of others, if natural selection is generally suppressed, then unless we will get new measures our race must rapidly deteriorate.

This appeal for new measures was soon answered in Europe and the United States by various laws permitting compulsory sterilisation or worse, although murder was spun as euthanasia or mercy killing.

Eugen Bleuler was an exponent of the eugenics movement, a scientific and political movement aimed at improving the genetic make-up of populations. To this end, it called for interventions in human reproduction and sexuality. People who were considered genetically unhealthy and inferior were to be excluded from reproduction, while the reproduction of healthy and valuable parts of the population was to be encouraged, Germann says.

Although eugenics was accompanied by a rhetoric of exclusion and hardness, it gained its persuasive power through a positive message: disease and suffering were to be prevented, health was to be promoted. In this respect, eugenics can be placed in the context of modern health efforts which aimed to improve life.

Germann points out that eugenics was also a modern movement because it was strongly based on the latest scientific findings and technology. These ambivalences must be stressed in order to understand why eugenics had such a strong appeal to so many eminent scientists and physicians, he says.

In Switzerland forced sterilisations took place throughout the 20th century. According to a 1991 study by the Swiss Nursing School in Zurich, 24 mentally disabled women aged 17-25 were sterilised between 1980 and 1987. In addition, the story of the Swiss gypsy people, known as the Jenisch, exposed a calculated policy of Nazi-style eugenics carried out behind closed doors well into the 1970s.

Eugenics was an international movement that was capable of connecting to a wide variety of political ideologies and had very different manifestations: there was not only fascist and nationalist eugenics, but also liberal, socialist and Catholic eugenics, Germann says.

Eugenic thinking was widespread in the early 20th century, especially among physicians and psychiatrists, but also among many natural and social scientists. Eugenics was also supported by leading geneticists, for example. However, it would be wrong to assume that eugenics simply reflected the spirit of the age. There was vehement criticism of eugenics early on, for example from Catholic circles, but also from scientists and physicians who rejected eugenic demands on scientific and/or moral grounds.

Bleuler certainly wasnt the only scientist at the time to have views that are now considered unacceptable. The explicit racism of Swiss biologist and geologist Louis Agassiz, for example, continues to generate controversy.

So how, as Switzerland debates its past and controversial monuments, should we weigh up the legacy of problematic scientists from more than a century ago?

Is it possible to say that Bleuler was basically a good man with good intentions he did after all seem to genuinely care about his patients? Can one separate the good Bleuler from the bad Bleuler?

No, that doesnt seem to make sense to me. Its more plausible that figures like Bleuler were influenced by the ambivalences of modernity. The science-based health efforts of modernity produced great achievements, but they often also led and eugenics is just one particularly drastic example here to exclusion and marginalisation. Or in the worst case were associated with a racism that regarded entire sections of the population as unhealthy, inferior and unworthy of life, Germann says.

The fact that some eugenicists were good scientists does not mean that their research was morally acceptable or politically harmless. You cant separate the one from the other.

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Reviewing the legacy of racist scientists - SWI swissinfo.ch - swissinfo.ch

A reader familiar with New York-based Irish American writer Peter Quinns work can be forgiven for identifying the novelist with Fintan Dunne, the central character in three of his four period-piece novels.

A cynical, world-weary, and unmistakably Catholic detective in three novels, Dunne in many ways comes across as an alter ego for Quinn and his coming of age in pre-Vatican II New York.

A younger Dunne first appears in The Hour of the Cat, whose plot involves investigation of a Nazi-inspired eugenics campaign in New York City in the years just prior to the U.S. entry into World War II.

An older, more wizened Dunne shows up again in Dry Bones, a post-World War II story of espionage and U.S. government involvement with ex-Nazi operatives, and a mature Dunne exits the narrative stage in The Man Who Never Returned, an engaging fictional retelling 25 years after the fact of the disappearance of New York Supreme Court Judge Joseph Force Crater in 1930.

Incidents of Dunnes Catholic upbringing and his doubt-filled practice of the faith as a private investigator color much of the narrative in the three novels. For example, Quinn presents a reflective Dunne in churches, such as this moment in Dry Bones: Dunne silently repeated the Suscipiat, one of the prayers from the Mass hed mentioned as an altar boy at the Catholic Protectory, a single, tongue-twisting Latin sentence (Suscipiat Dominus sacrificium de manibus tuis ). Dunne went to Mass occasionally, to confession when he felt the need, ditto for praying. Hail Marys and Our Fathers mostly. Prayers he didnt remember learning, with words he didnt think about, just repeated. The one prayer that he carefully articulated, that made him feel as though he was actually praying, was the one whose words he didnt understand: Suscipiat.'

Fintan Dunne is a composite of people I grew up with in the Bronx, Quinn told Catholic News Service. Hes got a hard shell but, inside, theres a core of decency and humanity. Hes suspicious of the powerful and wealthy and cant be intimidated. Hes a Catholic whos casual in his practice; while not always on the straight and narrow, he has an acute sense of right and wrong.

Quinn is also author of Banished Children of Eve, an epic-length novel detailing Irish immigrant struggles in the days leading up to the advent of the U.S. Civil War. The story, which won the 1995 American Book Award, is an intriguing history lesson on the construction of New Yorks St. Patricks Cathedral and of the struggles of New Yorks first archbishop, Dagger John Hughes who, Quinn believes, made the New York Irish into a political as well as religious constituency.

This work, which Quinn says helped him to reconsider his attitude toward the Catholic faith in general, reads like a history of the emergence of the Catholic Church in America as a result of the massive immigration of famine Irish in the mid-19th century.

I lifted the title of Banished Children of Eve from the Salve Regina, a favorite prayer that Ive said since I was a child, Quinn said. For me, it expresses the human feeling of exile (mourning and weeping in this vale of tears) as well as the hunger for return (turn again thine eyes of mercy toward us). The characters from the book are Anglo American, African American and Irish. Theyve all been expelled from one garden or another and seek to find a place where they feel they belong.

Quinn, however, believes The Man Who Never Returned is probably his most Catholic in terms of its allusions to striving, suffering and redemption in a fallen world.

Each chapter features a quote from The Divine Comedy, a book Ive gone back to many times since I first read it in college, Quinn explained. The story opens with Fintan Dunne, the protagonist of all three mysteries, finding himself in the middle of lifes journey, I woke to find myself lost in a dark wood away from the straight path.'

In Dunnes case, the dark wood is a New York department store, where he finds himself feeling outdated and past his prime. As he becomes involved in tackling a baffling, unsolved case, he passes through his own version of hell, purgatory and paradise. His journey is the real story, not that of the vanished jurist, a case Quinn deliberately leaves unsolved.

Prior to becoming a full-time fiction writer in 2008, Quinn worked at as a speechwriter and corporate editorial director for Time Warner. He earned a bachelors degree from Manhattan College in 1969 and a masters in history from Fordham University in 1974.

Quinns response to the essential question in this writer series a Catholic writer or a writer who happens to be Catholic? is both unique and revealing.

I dont happen to be Catholic. I choose to be. And I dont happen to be a novelist. I choose to be. Both come with their tribulations and triumphs, and at times, theres the temptation to walk away. But I stay because, at the deepest level, these identities define my sense of self. That said, I dont consciously write, defend or advance church precepts or presumptions. Im a novelist, not a philosopher. I write about people who are confused and compromised in all sorts of ways.

By way of elaboration, Quinn offers the metaphor of God the creator as the primordial writer. He brings these characters (us) into life and endows them (us) with free will, Quinn said. At times, I want to warn my characters away from certain choices and decisions, but I cant force them to do what they dont want to do. Doesnt God face the same dilemma? If I try to make a character do something not true to who he/she is, the writing becomes forced and false. I believe in original sin and grace and redemption. I dont ask my character to embody my beliefs. I ask them to be believable and real.

Quinns home parish growing up was St. Raymonds in the Bronx, where he was influenced by a young curate, Father John Flynn. Quinn cites the influence of Flynn as a key not only to his writing, but also to his maintaining any contact with the Catholic Church.

The example and memory of Father Flynn are one of the reasons Im still a Catholic, Quinn said. His heroic service to the marginalized is a reminder of what it means to live out the essential message of the Gospel.

He has also attended at Sacred Heart Parish in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and St. Joseph of the Holy Family in Harlem.

Quinn continues to pursue Catholic writing projects, both as a journalist and as a writer of fiction.

Ive been working on a new book for six years, give or take a year or so, he told CNS in November. The title is Eat the Moon, from Yeats poem Brown Penny. Its a race to see which will be finished first me or the novel.

Mastromatteo is a Toronto-based writer and editor.

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Novelist cites Bronx priests influence on his writing, Catholic faith - Crux: Covering all things Catholic

The names of scientists whose discredited racial theories continue to pervade U.S. society still adorn prestigious college buildings and are attached to awards and prizes, while their statues stand on campuses and their portraits hang in university museums.

To take just one example, the University of Pennsylvanias Institute for Environmental Studies is housed in Hayden Hall, named after Ferdinand Hayden, a geologist famous for his explorations of Yellowstone but who described Native Americans as savages and Wyoming as infested with hostile Indians. He advocated for U.S. expansionism to include the whole of North and Central America from the Arctic Circle to the Isthmus of Darien and promoted and helped enable White settlement of the West. His 1871 US Geological Survey of Wyoming stated that unless Indians are localized and made to enter upon agricultural pursuits they must ultimately be exterminated. More than 40 topographic features are named after Hayden, and efforts are underway by Indigenous activists to rename the Hayden Valley in Yellowstone National Park as Buffalo Nations Valley.

The history of science is shot through with racism. Ethnology, anthropology, paleontology, archaeology and zoology have all served to support racist theories, doctrines and policies, as have chemistry, medicine, genetics, mathematics and economics. Many scientists who made pioneering advances or whose achievements underpin scientific progress and thinking today held and actively promoted racist views. In their time they were celebrated and honored as important or even great scientists but today it is important that we address their roles in building and perpetuating racist stereotypes, structures and institutions.

University leaders who have been slow to respond to and act upon the legacy of slavery and slave-holding in their histories have been even slower to address the history of racism in science. It was not until 2018 for example, that the University of Pittsburgh stripped Thomas Parrans name from its Graduate School of Public Health. As US Surgeon General from 1938 to 1946, Parran oversaw the infamous Tuskegee biomedical experiment in which treatment for syphilis was withheld from hundreds of Black share-croppers in Alabama who were tricked into participating in the study. He also approved unethical experiments in Guatemala, where female sex workers, prison inmates, mental patients and soldiers were unknowingly infected with syphilis or gonorrhea.

In recent months, as the brutal police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Rayshard Brooks and others sparked unprecedented nationwide protests and support for the Black Lives Matter movement, calls for action to address racist memorialization on campuses haveincreased. In June, after resisting years of pressure, the University of Southern California finally took the name of Rufus von KleinSmida eugenicist who supported forced sterilizationoff the Center for International and Public Affairs building, which had been named for the former university president. At the University of Maine, however, Little Hall still remains named after former university president and eugenicist Clarence Cook Little who supported laws to limit immigration based on race and to prevent mixed-race marriages.

Eugenics is a major thread weaving through scientific racism. Alexander Graham Bell, H.G. Wells and Marie Stopes were all supporters. Francis Galton, the polymath English scientist & statistician coined the term, meaning well-bred,in 1883. Galton advocated the selective breeding of humans to produce a superior race. Eugenics built on Mendelian studies of heredity and Darwinian notions of fitness and extended the principles of plant and animal breeding to humans, with its proponents seeing it as a way to weed out a broad range of undesirable traits including mental and physical disabilities and racial inferiority.

Photo of Sir Francis Galton taken at Alphonse Bertillons Criminal Identification Laboratory in Paris in 1893.

The roots of some statistical techniques lie in the efforts of Galton and other eugenicists to help prove their racial gene theories. Eminent statistician Sir Ronald Aylmer Fisher was the founder of the Cambridge University Eugenics Society. Rothamstead Research, the UK agricultural science laboratory where he worked for many years has recently renamed its accommodation block, Fisher Court to AnoVa Court, and the Committee of Presidents of Statistical Societies retired the R. A. Fisher Award and Lectureship in June 2020 after 56 years. Freshman statistics students at University College of London (UCL) always had their lectures in the Galton Theatre until it was finally stripped of the name in June 2020. However, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge has yet to remove a stained glass window that honors him and has recently been a target of anti-racist activists.

Eugenics was widely embraced in the U.S. scientific and political establishments, and the dean of Harvard Medical school, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. was an early promoter of it. Holmes believed Boston Brahminsthe White elite of Bostonto have hereditary and superior bloodlines.

Harvard students, faculty and alumni are now calling for the renaming of the Holmes Society of the universitys medical and dental schools. In 1927, Holmes son, the former Harvard law professor and Supreme Court Justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the courts opinion in Buck v Bell which, with the infamous words, three generations of imbeciles is enough upheld the right of the Commonwealth of Virginia to sterilize a woman regarded as feeble-minded (she wasnt) and opening the floodgates to state laws allowing sterilization.

Charles Davenport created the member-based Eugenics Records Office at Cold Spring Harbor in 1910 and Stanfords David Starr Jordan was the groups first chair. It received funding and institutional support from philanthropist Mrs. E. H. Harrington, John Harvey Kellogg, the Carnegie Institution and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Davenport provided expert testimony for The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 which used eugenic arguments to restrict immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe. By 1931, 28 US states had sterilization laws and by 1936 at least 60,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor Black people. The Carnegie Institution eventually concluded that there was no scientific merit in eugenics and withdrew funding in 1939.

The U.S. eugenics movement helped to provide the intellectual underpinning for Nazi racial theories and sterilization policies. In Germany, Nazis lauded the success of Californias sterilization laws and used them as a model for their own legislation in 1933. Even after the full horror of the Nazi sterilization programs and extermination camps was uncovered, eugenic ideas maintained a grip in the mainstream scientific community. For example Nobel Prize winning geneticists Francis Crick and James Watson both believed that Black people are genetically inferior, and Crick was an advocate of sterilization.

Decades before eugenics took hold in the U.S., scientific racism had already been firmly established and many of its founders are still memorialized on campuses today.

Louis Agassiz, founder of Harvard Universitys Museum of Comparative Zoology (CMZ) and one the first celebrity scientists was a leading polygenist, believing that several human races were createdseparately according to their climate and geography and that the White European race was superior to all others. Agassiz was inspired by the anthropologist Samuel George Morton who used craniologythe measurement of brain capacity in the skullto try to demonstrate that Caucasians were racially superior.

A statue of Louis Agassiz (left) who believed Black people were an inferior race stands above the entrance to a Stanford University hall named after the eugenicist David Starr Jordan. Scientist and abolitionist Alexander von Humboldt (right) argued that there were no biological different races. Photo: Creative Commons/Dicklyon.

Morton collected and measured hundreds of skulls and proposed that there were five biologically distinct races to which he assigned immutable character traits that he derived from, among other things, reading travel literature. Despite being shot through with biases and distortions and lacking any shred of scientific merit, Mortons work was nevertheless widely accepted in the scientific community. It provided credibility for arguments in defense of slavery, segregation, and the dispossession and killing of Native Americans.

A statue of Agassiz has stood for more than 100 years over the entrance to Stanford University Psychology Departments Jordan Hall. The hall itself is named after David Starr Jordan, Stanfords founding president, an ichthyologist and prominent eugenicist. Stanford is currently reviewing a request from faculty and students to remove the statue and change the name of the hall.

In another egregious example of campus memorialization, the honors college building of the University of Alabama is named in honor of one of the most influential scientific racists of the 19th century. Josiah C. Nott was a surgeon, anthropologist, founder of the University of Alabama School of Medicine and a slaveholder.

He was a polygenist, who believed that if Black and White races mixed, it would lead to extinction through degeneration, and thought Black people to be the lowest point in the scale of human beings. In 1854, with the British Egyptologist George Gliddon he published the book Types of Mankind.

It sold three and a half thousand copies in the first four months and ran to ten printings over 17 years. Scientific proof of the inferiority of Black people was just what the slaveholders of the South were looking for. Frederick Douglass in his commencement address at Western Reserve College in 1854 said that of all the efforts to disprove the unity of the human family, and to brand the Negro with natural inferiority, the most compendious and barefaced is the book, entitled Types of Mankind.

Robert A. Smith of Pittsburg State University argues that Types of Mankind fixed the issue of race in the minds of everyday Americans. The concept of race had been isolated, identified, and finally popularized. The mere fact that we consider race to be an issue at all in the twenty-first century is due in no small measure to Nott and Gliddons efforts in the nineteenth. And yet still Notts name remains attached to a building at the University of Alabama (UA).

Nott Hall at the University of Alabama, named to honor Josiah Nott in 1922. Photo: courtesy of Hilary Green.

In her ongoing Hallowed Grounds Project, Dr. Hilary N. Green, a UA historian, highlights a vilely racist and incandescently angry 17-page letter from Nott the greatest living anthropologist of America to O. O. Howard, head of the post-war Freedmans Bureau, that was published in the July 1866 issue of thePopular Magazine of Anthropology. In it, Nott claimed that History proves indisputably, that a superior and inferior race cannot live together practically on any other terms than that of master and slave, and that the inferior race, like the Indians, must be expelled or exterminated. In every climate where the White man can live and prosper, he drives all others before him.

Nott soon joined the ranks of what historian Daniel Sutherland has termed the Confederate Carpetbaggers, who moved to the Northern states seeking to regain their wealth and status. In New York he became president of the New York Obstetrical Society and a close friend of J. Marion Sims, sometimes referred to as the father of gynecology. Sims is known for his experiments on enslaved women without the use of anesthesia. After years of protests, his statue was eventually removed from New Yorks Central Park in 2018. But monuments to Sims still stand on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse and the Alabama state capitol.

History is an ongoing effort to understand the past, and heritage is the range of cultures, traditions, buildings, monuments and objects we inherit and pass on to future generations. Both are dynamic and constantly undergoing interpretation, with heritage demanding choices about what is important, to whom and why. Removing or re-contextualizing a monument, changing the name of a building, or taking a portrait off a wall does not erase history as some have argued, but it can reflect a better understanding of past events and motivations, new societal norms, or the values of local or affected communities. Some say that re-naming structures only facilitates forgetting about the past and that what is needed is an explanatory plaque instead, but why should a BIPOC student be forced to be reminded of Louis Agassiz or John Notts abhorrent views whenever they walk by or enter a particular campus building?

There are many ways to unwrap, interpret, teach and remember the complex histories of science and race in universities without maintaining honors and monuments that were bestowed or created many decades ago, not infrequently to uphold and celebrate a racist worldview or create an implicitly White space on campus. In some cases there may be an opportunity to leave a monument or an artwork and create a powerful new one beside it to catalyze reflection and discussion. Such an approach was tried in 2018 at the University of Kentucky, where Black artist Karyn Olivier was asked to create an artwork in dialogue with a controversial 1934 New Deal era mural in its Memorial Hall. In June, however, the university announced that it will remove the original mural, despite the fact that doing so removes the context for Oliviers responsive work and willsilence a contemporary Black voice.

An anti-racist reassessment of whose stories get told and how, is urgently needed on U.S. campuses. Scientists whose views promoted and legitimized genocide, slavery, segregation, forced sterilization, race-based immigration restrictions and structural inequality should no longer be memorialized.

There are many ways that the scientific community must reckon with the harm it has caused through its history and present complicity in racist actions. Removing names from buildings or busts from hallways wont bring an end to systemic and institutional racism in universities, but it is an essential part of the process. And it cannot wait.

N.B. An excellent reading list of decolonizing science resources has been prepared by Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein. Kit Mead has a goodeugenics reading list.

USGS/William Henry Jackson

Posted in: Science and Democracy, Uncategorized Tags: Alabama, Black history, Black lives matter, craniology, decolonisation, eugenics, genocide, Harvard, Louis Agassiz, Manifest Destiny, racism, scientific racism, segregation, slavery

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U.S. Universities Must Stop Honoring Racist Scientists of the Past - Union of Concerned Scientists

Four skiers going downhill on Mount Washburns northern slopes in Yellowstone National Park: this image was the first to depict skiing on the cover of a national American magazine. The illustration ran on an 1877 issue of Harpers Weekly and reflected the excitement around the new national parksand the potential for skiing that lay within.

The governments earliest involvement with skiing in the West dates back to Yellowstone, the nations first national park. Beginning in 1886, the U.S. Army occupied this land and managed Yellowstones development as a park. In winter, cavalry soldiers patrolled on skis to protect the park from poachers and vandals.

Thirty years later, the National Park Service took over the parks management. Inheriting the militarys use of skis, the NPS promoted and subsidized winter use of the parks. Lift-served skiing promoted national parks as recreational winter destinations, but this rubbed up against the mandate of wilderness preservation and ecological management.

So, controversy ensued. Throughout the 20th century, skiings role in the parks was contested. At present, the U.S. Forest Service is the primary agency associated with skiing in the West, and lift-served skiing in national parks is uncommon. Still, many skiers utilize these parks as access points to premiere backcountry skiingand most of these skiers are White.

An NPS diversity report in 2003 found that people of colorand especially Black peoplevisited national parks less frequently than White people. Black people were more than three times as likely as White people to believe that park employees provided poor visitor service and that parks were uncomfortable places for people like them. People of color were also more likely than White people to believe that overall costs, lack of information about parks, and travel distance were significant barriers to visitation.

Five years later, the 2008-2009 NPS Survey acknowledged that the lands set aside as units of the National Park System do not have the same meaning for everyone. So in 2013, the NPS created the Office of Relevancy, Diversity, and Inclusion in an effort to address race-based disparities at the parks. BIPOC activists have also addressed the national parks diversity problem, by creating outdoor groups of color and subsidizing transport and gear.

But what appears as a present-day diversity problem actually stretches back to the 19th century, to the original idea for federally-protected parks. For the NPS centennial, POWDER produced Monumental, a hardbound book, magazine feature, and a film on skiing our national parks. As the introduction notes: It is very possible that had it not been for a handful of visionary conservationists in the early 20th century, the natural heritage of the United States would have been, if not erased, compromised forever.

Maybe thats truebut also true is the fact that the conservationists who architected the national parks idea (and the parks themselves) are inextricable from ideologies of White supremacy, the exclusion of BIPOC, and especially the displacement of Indigenous peoples.

Lets look at Yosemite. In July 1864, Abraham Lincoln signed into law the California-based protection of Yosemite Valley. Many advocates for the protection imagined the park as exemplifying American republicanism; the parks were to be accessible to everyone, regardless of class status.

However, its clear now that everyone was a contingent category. In Dispossessing the Wilderness: Indian Removal and the Making of the National Park, Mark Spence traces how Native Americans were displaced from land thats now called Yosemite and also from land that became our other national parks. Park advocates wanted to protect the uninhabited wilderness. So they also advocated for the forced removal of Native Americans, in order to construct an uninhabited wilderness that did not previously exist.

Thus began a public lands movement heavily rooted in racism and dispossession. Land for parks was obtained using policies like the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the idea of the parks took off. Yosemite made way for a parks bill. On March 1, 1872, the Yellowstone region was set aside as a public park or pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, creating the first national park and eventually forcing many Indigenous nations off the land.

All the while, park lobbyists espoused ideals of an egalitarian republicanism: Yellowstone was to be a public park. For the people. Legislation, photographs, and newspaper articles constructed Yellowstone as a national glory.

That glory, however, was exclusive. Compounding the forced dispossession linked to the parks creation was the explicit racism of conservationists. An oft-cited example is Madison Grant, who was a eugenicist and a major activist for parks like Yellowstone. He lobbied in Washington D.C. for Yellowstones protections from what would have been a railroad project. To Grant, these natural spaces were symbolic of Americas exceptionalism, and he lobbied often to protect them.

Rooted in Grants natural history writing was a real concern for conservation. Still, early shadows of prejudice were at the root of his methods. For example, he grew angry with Italian immigrants hunting local songbirds and squirrels for food, and he tried introducing a bill in the state legislature to ban non-U.S. citizens from owning or carrying guns.

These propositions can only be understood in the context of citizenships moral weight and the historical context of exclusion. The Naturalization Act of 1790 had functioned for about a century then, limiting naturalization to free White persons and excluding Native Americans, indentured servants, enslaved people, free Black people, and Asian people. In this context, Grants bill operated under the assumption that non-White persons threatened the environment.

Furthermore, Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916, which became a seminal text on eugenics and decades later became one of Adolf Hitlers great influences. Grant argued that the survival of societies, like the survival of ecosystems, was contingent upon preserving the best of its germ plasm.

The germ plasm was to be communally owned: the peoples park, in the environmental context. For human populations, race was the primary determining factor, and Grant saw race as biological and unchangeable. The superior Nordic races needed to be conserved, just as the bison needed to be protected.

In this way, the parks movement and the eugenics movement were literally ideologically linked, they were about preserving the best of nature or human populations. Fears of the environmental degradation that might occur from a profit-motive were paralleled by fears of the moral degeneration that might come from unfit populations.

Certainly, this past isnt acknowledged today in the public narrative around our national parks and especially not by the NPS. Thats a problem, especially since none of this is a revelation (here and especially here). But while acknowledgments of this disturbing history are necessary, they also feel like a kind of trick. The parks problem is also the disturbing racist history itself.

To quote Dina Gilio-Whitaker: The lingering result of the Yellowstone story is that coded within the language of preservation, wilderness landscapesalways already in need of protectionare, or should be, free from human presence. But this logic completely evades the fact of ancient Indigenous habitation and cultural use of such places.

When White American conservationists advocated for protected public lands, what did they envision? When the military patrolled Yellowstone on skis, what were they protecting? For whom? And from whom?

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The National Parks Are Inviting to Skiers, Less So to BIPOC - Powder Magazine