Category Archives: Eugenics

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Eugenics is the practice or advocacyof improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by breeding out disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitlers obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race.

Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long wayscientifically and ethicallyand offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. Even so, it remains controversial.

Eugenics literally means good creation. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term eugenics didnt come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Platos best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbidden but not between brother and sister. While Platos ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

In the late 19th century, Galtonwhose cousin was Charles Darwinhoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were feeble-minded to marry. In 1903, the American Breeders Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a pedigree registry. The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities. Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, three generations of imbeciles are enough. In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not before thousands of people underwent the procedure.

In the 1930s, the governor of Puerto Rico, Menendez Ramos, implemented sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women. Ramos claimed the action was needed to battle rampant poverty and economic strife; however, it may have also been a way to prevent the so-called superior Aryan gene pool from becoming tainted with Latino blood.

According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. Its thought some sterilizations happened without consent during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization.

As horrific as forced sterilization in America was, nothing compared to Adolf Hitlers eugenic experiments leading up to and during World War II. And Hitler didnt come up with the concept of a superior Aryan race all on his own. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his 1934 book, Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares non-Aryan races such as Jews and gypsies as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations.

By 1940, Hitlers master-race mania took a terrible turn as Germans with mental or physical disabilities were euthanized by gas or lethal injection. Even the blind and deaf werent safe, and hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins.

He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his patients died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname, Angel of Death.

In all, its estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didnt fit Hitlers definition of a superior race.

Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene.

Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are staggering since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost. As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy.

This is controversial since what exactly constitutes negative traits is open to interpretation, and many people feel that all humans have the right to be born regardless of disease, or that the laws of nature shouldnt be tampered with.

Much of Americas historical eugenics efforts such as forced sterilizations have gone unpunished, although some states offered reparations to victims or their survivors. For the most part, though, its a largely unknown stain on Americas history. And no amount of money can ever repair the devastation of Hitlers eugenics programs.

As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

American Breeders Association. University of Missouri.Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office. University of Missouri.Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics.Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan.Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Helix.Nazi Medical Experiments. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.

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Eugenics - HISTORY

Background

A significant number of Nazi persecutory policies stemmed from theories of racial hygiene, or eugenics. Such theories were prevalent among the international scientific community in the first decades of the twentieth century. The term eugenics (from the Greek for good birth or stock) was coined in 1883 by the English naturalist Francis Galton. Its German counterpart, racial hygiene, (Rassenhygiene) was first employed by German economist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. At the core of the movements belief system was the principle that human heredity was fixed and immutable.

For eugenicists, the social ills of modern society criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, and even povertystemmed from hereditary factors. Supporters of eugenic theory did not believe that these problems resulted from environmental factors, such as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th century in Europe and the United States. Rather, they advanced the science of eugenics to address what they regarded as a decline in public health and morality.

Eugenicists had three primary objectives. First, they sought to discover hereditary traits that contributed to societal ills. They also aimed to develop biological solutions to these problems. Lastly, eugenicists sought to campaign for public health measures to combat them.

Eugenics found its most radical interpretation in Germany, but its influence was by no means limited to that nation alone. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenic societies sprang up throughout most of the industrialized world. In Western Europe and the United States, the movement was embraced in the 1910s and 1920s. Most supporters in those places endorsed the objectives of American advocate Charles Davenport. Davenport advocated for the development of eugenics as a science devoted to the improvement of the human race through better breeding. Its supporters lobbied for positive eugenic efforts. They advocated for public policies that aimed to maintain physically, racially, and hereditarily healthy individuals. For example, they sought to provide marital counseling, motherhood training, and social welfare to deserving families. In doing so, eugenics supporters hoped to encourage better families to reproduce.

Efforts to support the productive members of society brought negative measures. For instance, there were efforts to redirect economic resources from the less valuable in order to provide for the worthy. Eugenicists also targeted the mentally ill and cognitively impaired. Many members of the eugenics community in Germany and the United States promoted strategies to marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity. They promoted limiting their reproduction through voluntary or compulsory sterilization. Eugenicists argued that there was a direct link between diminished capacity and depravity, promiscuity, and criminality.

Members of the eugenic community in Germany and the US also viewed the racially inferior and poor as dangerous. Eugenicists maintained that such groups were tainted by deficiencies they inherited. They believed that these groups endangered the national community and financially burdened society.

More often than not eugenicists scientifically-drawn conclusions did little more than to incorporate popular prejudice. However, by employing research and theory to their efforts, eugenicists could assert their beliefs as scientific fact.

German eugenics pursued a separate and terrible course after 1933. Before 1914, the German racial hygiene movement did not differ greatly from its British and American counterparts. The German eugenics community became more radical shortly after the World War I. The war brought unprecedented carnage. In addition, Germany saw economic devastation in the years between World War I and World War II. These factors heightened the division between those considered hereditarily valuable and those considered unproductive. For instance, some believed that hereditarily valuable Germans had died on the battlefield, while the unproductive Germans institutionalized in prisons, hospitals, and welfare facilities remained behind. Such arguments resurfaced in the Weimar and early Nazi eras as a way to justify eugenic sterilization and a decrease in social services for the disabled and institutionalized.

By 1933, the theories of racial hygiene were embedded into the professional and public mindset. These theories influenced the thinking of Adolf Hitler and many of his followers. They embraced an ideology that blended racial antisemitism with eugenic theory. In doing so, the Hitler regime provided context and latitude for the implementation of eugenic measures in their most concrete and radical forms.

Racial hygiene shaped many of Nazi Germanys racial policies. Medical professionals implemented many of these policies and targeted individuals the Nazis defined as hereditarily ill: those with mental, physical, or social disabilities. Nazis claimed these individuals placed both a genetic and a financial burden upon society and the state.

Nazi authorities resolved to intervene in the reproductive capacities of persons classified as hereditarily ill. One of the first eugenic measures they initiated was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Progeny [offspring] with Hereditary Diseases (Hereditary Health Law). The law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders, including schizophrenia and hereditary feeblemindedness. As a result of the law, 400,000 Germans were ultimately sterilized in Nazi Germany. In addition, eugenic beliefs shaped Germanys 1935 Marital Hygiene Law. This law prohibited the marriage of persons with diseased, inferior, or dangerous genetic material to healthy German Aryans.

Eugenic theory provided the basis for the so-called euthanasia (T4) program. This clandestine program targeted disabled patients living in institutions throughout the German Reich for killing. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand patients, the overwhelming majority of them German Aryans, fell victim to this clandestine killing operation.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Eugenics | The Holocaust Encyclopedia

Before the Second World War, eugenics or as the Oxford Dictionary puts it: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics was surprisinglypopular with many people still very famous today. The belief of many luminaries of pre-war Britain and America was that the human race needed urgent protectionfrom degenerates, the unfit and the feebleminded. People including architects of Britains welfare state and writersfamous for their socialist and Fabian principleswere veryhappy promoting eugenicist idealseven while Hitler was, horrendously, putting many of these theories to the test with policies designed to biologically improve the Aryan Ubermenschen master race.

The Nazis targeted people identified as life unworthy of life (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), such as those with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities which included the feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, deaf, blind and the homosexual, and then tried to eliminate them from the chain of heredity.

The idea of Eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato in ancient Greece. The term eugenics to describe the concept of improving the quality of the human race through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. In 1883, a year after Darwins death he gave his discredited science a name: Eugenics.

Once most people could see where it ultimately led to the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration campseugenics went into steep decline after 1945. For most of these, often well-meaning, peopleanyadmiration with theories horribly close to nazism were conveniently forgotten.

Here is the Flashbak Top Ten list of famous eugenicists who perhaps should have known better:

Number One Marie Stopes the family-planning pioneer.

Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes, who died in 1958 at the age of 77 and founded Britains first birth control clinic in North London in 1921 and indeed was honoured with a postage stamp in 2008, was actually a hardcore eugenicist. She once wrote that hordes of defectives should be reduced in number so to be less of a burden on the fit. Stopes even went on to disinherit her son because he married a short-sighted woman therefore risking a less-than-perfect grandchild. In Birth Control News a magazine she set up in 1922 she described southern Italians as a low-grade race and once said of the French that they should eliminate the taint of their large numbers of perverted or homosexual people.

In a book called Radiant Motherhood Stopes went on to denounce any society that allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped and inferior infants. In August 1939, less than one month before the start of WW2, Stopes sent Adolf Hitler a copy of her book of Songs for Young Lovers which included a letter: Dear Herr Hitler, love is the greatest thing in the world: So will you accept from me these [poems] that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them? The young must learn love from the particular till they are wise enough for the universal. I hope too that you yourself may find something to enjoy in the book.

Three years into the war Marie Stopes wrote a humorous poem that included the line: Catholics, Prussians, the Jews and the Russians, all are a curse, or something worse.

Number Two:H.G. Wells writer

H.G. Wells visiting the set of Things to Come in 1937.

Herbert GeorgeWells, best known as the author of The Time Machine, the Invisible Man, the Island of Doctor Moreau and the War of the Worlds books and films still well known today. He isfamous for his socialist and pacifist principles but perhaps less well known for his rather racist views and his enthusiastic support of Eugenics.

He once wrote: The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born.It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies. Also:The mating of two quite healthy persons may result in disease, he wrote. I am told it does so in the case of interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyka region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly, and rarely live.

I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children, and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication, would be carried by an overwhelming majority.

..the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable.

H.G. Wells, once ventedhis annoyanceand irritationdirectlyto the, in his opionion, the feckless working class: We cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny, he complained, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.

Number Three Helen Keller deafand blind author, activist and lecturer

In defense of eugenics, Helen Keller wrote Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world.She also called for physicians juries for defective babies. who would then vote on which children would be kept alive and which would not It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature, Keller said, adding that allowing a defective child to die was simply a weeding of the human garden that shows a sincere love of true life.

Number Four George Bernard Shaw playwright and author

George Bernard Shaw in 1941.

George Bernard Shaw is undoubtedly oneof the most celebrated writers of the western world. The Irishman was co-founder of the London School of Economics and alsofamous for his ardent socialism and wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian society. Today, however, his views on selective breeding seem pretty close to the ones of Hitler and oftentalked of killing people in a lethal chamber:

The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?

In 1910George Bernard Shaws lecture to the Eugenics Education Societywas reported in the Daily Express: A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other peoples time to look after them.

In 1934, a year after the Nazis had grabbed power in Germany, Shaw wrote:The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?

Number Five Winston Churchill politician and wartime prime-minister

Winston Churchill 1941

The man who stood up to Adolf Hitler and who was once described by the historian A.J.P. Taylor as the saviour of our country was, ratherironically, extremely pro-eugenics.

In a memo to Asquith, theprime minister, in 1910, Winston Churchill warned,The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.

Number Six WilliamBeveridge Economist and social reformer

William Beveridge 1942.

William Beveridge, thearchitect of the post-1945 welfare state, was a hardline supporter of theeugenics movement and in 1909once saidthat:

Those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry are to be recognized as unemployable. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.

Beveridge was a eugenicist supporter for much of his life and Dennis Sewell in the Spectator in 2009 wrote about William Beveridge over thirty years later in 1943:

On the evening that the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report, Beveridge himself went off to address an audience of eugenicists at the Mansion House. He knew he was in for a rough ride. His scheme of family allowances had originally been devised within the Eugenics Society with a graduated rate, which paid out more to middle-class parents and very little to the poor. The whole point was to combat the eugenicists great bugbear the differential birth rate between the classes. However, the government that day had announced a uniform rate. Beveridge was sympathetic to the complaints of his audience and hinted that a multi-rate system might well be introduced at a later date.

Number Seven Theodore Roosevelt 26th president of the United States

Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

In 1913 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, wrote a letter to the leading eugenicist Charles B. Davenport:

The Outlook287 Fourth AvenueNew York Lawrence

January 3rd 1913.

My dear Mr. Davenport:

I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me. They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous. You say that these people are not themselves responsible, that it is society that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates or have no children or only one or two. Some day we will realize that the prime duty the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. at all.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed, Theodore Roosevelt)

Number Eight Jacques Cousteau sub-mariner and explorer

Jacques Cousteau circa 1973

In 1991 Jacques Cousteau was interviewed by the UNESCO Courier and at one point said: Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer . . . . Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species. . . . In order to stabilize world population, we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but its just as bad not to say it.

Number Nine John Maynard Keynes Economist

John Maynard Keynes c.1938

The extremely influentialeconomist, civil servant, director of the Bank of England and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, John Maynard Keynes was a prominent supporter of Eugenicsand even servedas Director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. The state, according to Keynes, would one day work out the optimum population level and once said:the time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.In 1946, and not long before he died, Keyneswrote thateugenics is the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists. By then, he must have known exactly what Hitler had been up to in the preceding 15 years, but then he did write this:

[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs

It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.

NumberTen Bertrand Russell Philosopher

17th June 1957, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 1970). (Photo by John Drysdale/Keystone/Getty Images)

Themathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russellonce put forward the ideathat the state should issue colour-coded procreation tickets to prevent the gene pool of the elite being diluted by inferior human beings. Those who decided to have children with holders of a different-coloured ticket would be punished with a heavy fine. In 1924 he wrote:

It must be admitted, however, that there are certain dangers. Before long the population may actually diminish. This is already happening in the most intelligent sections of the most intelligent nations; government opposition to birth-control propaganda gives a biological advantage to stupidity, since it is chiefly stupid people who governments succeed in keeping in ignorance. Before long, birth-control may become nearly universal among the white races; it will then not deteriorate their quality, but only diminish their numbers, at a time when uncivilized races are still prolific and are preserved from a high death-rate by white science.

This situation will lead to a tendency already shown by the French to employ more prolific races as mercenaries. Governments will oppose the teaching of birth-control among Africans, for fear of losing recruits. The result will be an immense numerical inferiority of the white races, leading probably to their extermination in a mutiny of mercenaries.

Bertrand Russell, ICARUS or the Future of Science (1924)

In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another[] It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable.

Bertrand Russell,Marriage and Morals, pg. 266 (1929)

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Top Ten Unlikely and Surprising Eugenicists - Flashbak

On Monday, Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest, a candidate for governor, told a group of black ministers that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger created the organization to destroy the entire black race. The Cumberland County GOP shared the video on its Facebook page.

Theres no doubt that, when Planned Parenthood was created, it was created to destroy the entire black race,he said. That was the purpose of Planned Parenthood. Thats just the truth. Thats not just some bloc on the side. That was the purpose when that organization was created.

Forest is alluding to Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthoods founder, whose involvement in the eugenics movement has long beena subject of controversy. NPR ran a fact check of a similar statement Ben Carson made in 2015and found that Sangers role in the eugenics movement isnt entirely clear. She went to eugenics conferences because they intersected with the birth-control movement, which she supported.

She might have done so because she needed eugenicists to get behind her for political reasons; indeed, Theodore Roosevelt and John Rockefeller were both known eugenicists. Or she might have done so because she believed that eugenics could improve humanity, as did many elites of her era. In the early 20th century, many scientists bought into the idea based on Darwinism andGregor Mendels study of dominant and recessive genes.

Lending credence to the latter theory, Sangerwrote that theconsequences of breeding from stock lacking human vitality always will give us social problems and perpetuate institutions of charity and crime.

But as much as this is a favorite line of the anti-abortion crowd,its quite a stretch to suggest that her interest in eugenics was tied to racism. After all, she worked closely with W.E.B DuBois to get contraception into black communities.

The Negro race has reached a place in its history when every possible effort should be made to have every Negro child count as a valuable contribution to the future of America,she wrote. Sanger also sought out black ministers to combat misinformation on contraception and family planning.

Forest says he brought up these statements in the spirit of Martin Luther King, who was awarded the Planned Parenthood Federation of America Margaret Sanger Award in 1966.

Coretta Scott King accepted the award on Kings behalfand read a speech written by the reverend. If family planning is sensible, it can facilitate or at least not be an obstacle to the solution of the many profound problems that plague [African Americans], King said.

In the same speech, King told ministers that race didnt exist: [God] created a genetic code within Adam and Eve that gave the possibility for all the colors that we have now within humanity. Thats what He created. (Science has since caught up to King: Race is a social construct.)

As Gerald Givens, president of the Raleigh-Apex NAACP, pointed out in an interview with WRAL, when it comes to speaking in the spirit of MLK, Dan Forest would be well served to keep his mouth shut: Im not sure why the lieutenant governor feels hes authorized to speak on behalf of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. or on what African American people see. His opposition to organizations like Planned Parenthood shows he has not learned much from Dr. King.

Forest, after all, is a vocal proponent of the voter ID law that a federal court ruled targeted African Americans with surgical precision. Hes also backed the General Assemblys repeated efforts at racial gerrymanderinganother way to minimize black voting power to enhance the GOPs control. And, in a June 2019 speech, Forest said that the U.S. has survived diversity and multiculturalism, rhetoric drawn straight from the white-nationalist tiki-torch brigade.

And since Forest brought up eugenics, we should probably mention that North Carolina actually had a eugenics program that forcibly sterilized thousands of poor black women until 1976. Several years ago, hundreds of women were likely denied compensation for their sterilization by the North Carolina Industrial Commission, whose members Governor Pat McCrory appointed, based on missing paperwork.

Forest was lieutenant governor at the time. Funny how we cant recall any major speeches on the subject.

In other news, today is the 47th anniversary of Roe v. Wade. Heres the link to donate to Planned Parenthood, in case you want to piss Dan Forest off.

Contact digital content manager Sara Pequeo at spequeno@indyweek.com.

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Dan Forest, an Idiot, Thinks Planned Parenthood Was Founded to Destroy Black People - INDY Week

CANADA

Through the first half of the 1900s, the eugenics movement had close ties to post-secondary institutions. For example, leaders at the University of Alberta also engaged in the eugenics movement and at the Alberta Eugenics Board. Two of the three founding colleges of the University of Guelph the Macdonald Institute and the Ontario Agricultural College officially taught eugenics between 1914 and 1948.

Once, eugenics spread the deeply damaging idea that it is possible, and even desirable, to improve the human race through selective breeding. It ultimately spawned policies aimed at eradicating those deemed unfit through institutional confinement, restrictive marriage, immigration laws and sterilisation. Eugenics was considered a science from the early 1900s until the 1930s, when its scientific reputation began to decline and shift.

Exhibiting eugenics

Canadian universities have restricted access to those archives that implicate their institutions in profiting from oppressive ideas and practices. Kathryn Harvey, the schools head archivist, made the University of Guelph archive available to us.

Using the archives, we developed a co-created, multimedia and multi-sensory exhibition at the Guelph Civic Museum called Into the Light: Eugenics and Education in Southern Ontario, which began in September 2019 and runs until March 2020. It is the first of its kind to bring to light the difficult history of Canadian university involvement in teaching eugenics.

Into the Light is co-created by Mona Stonefish (our project Elder), Peter Park, Dolleen Tisawiiashii Manning, Evadne Kelly, Seika Boye and Sky Stonefish, with key supports from Carla Rice (ReVision Centre), Dawn Owen (Guelph Civic Museum) and Sue Hutton (Respecting Rights, a project at ARCH Disability Law Centre). It brings together Indigenous and disabled people who carry personal histories of forced confinement and sterilisation.

The exhibition embraces disability and decolonising curatorial practices that disrupt and unsettle. By presenting artistic, sensory and material expressions of memory through different formats, it speaks the hard truths of colonialism as Ho-Chunk scholar Amy Lonetree writes. By showing more than 30 years of eugenics course documents (1914-48) from the Macdonald Institute and Ontario Agricultural College, it is thus a rare opportunity to consider how eugenics was taught and practised in Ontario.

Teaching eugenics

In Into the Light, the eugenics course documents are accompanied by multiple perspectives. Take, for example, one of the course slides, entitled Eugenical Classification of the Human Stock that was initially displayed at the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.

The slide includes a chart which shows the connection between eugenics and British colonialism. In it, Cecil Rhodes is classified as a superior person of genius. In 1921, Rhodes was celebrated for his forceful British colonial and white supremacist agenda. Today, Rhodes is recognised as an early architect of apartheid, a policy that involved the systematic dehumanisation of South Africas Black population from 1948 to 1994.

Also shown on the chart are the eugenic traits of those whom eugenicists deemed to be unfit, including people classified as feeble-minded, poor, criminal and epileptic. In the process of claiming the land and its peoples, Canadian colonial administrators, officers, physicians, educators and scientists framed First Peoples as impaired and mentally unfit in order to justify their actions.

As decolonising scholar Karen Stote writes in An Act of Genocide, this was a precursor to unethical sterilisation and forced institutionalisation.

Food was often used to perpetuate colonialism. In a section of the exhibit at the Guelph Civic Museum, there is a stack of potato sacks, created by the artists, which shows a stereotypical image of an Indian with Eugenics Brand written on the sacks. Bright light streams between the sacks.

The sacks reveal the forced domestic and agricultural labour imposed on those who were placed, sometimes violently, in Ontario residential institutions.

The sacks are accompanied by the smell of rotting potato to evoke the feeling of being denied comfort and nutrition.

The eugenics course suppressed independent thinking and experiential knowledges. But Into The Light centres once-marginalised survivor experiences and encourages viewers to think critically.

The effect of eugenics

The exhibition has had a jarring impact on university students, especially those in psychology, sociology, human development, political science and social work who are aiming for careers in the same professions that once supported eugenics.

One psychology graduate student, for example, spoke about how his relationship towards the University of Guelph transformed after visiting the exhibition. When he learned about the universitys role in teaching eugenics, his pride quickly turned to feelings of discomfort and disorientation. But he became open and eager to change when he realised that the university chose to expose and address its history instead of trying to cover it up.

For survivors and aggrieved groups, the display of archival documents has had an impact also. One survivor of the Mohawk Institute and the Training School for Girls said she felt relieved and validated after decades of being silenced, denied and disbelieved all of which compounded the crimes she experienced due to eugenics.

Dalhousie University and Ryerson University are two schools with close ties to 19th century figures who profited from oppression, enslavement and colonisation Lord Dalhousie and Egerton Ryerson, respectively.

Both schools are coming to terms with these histories. They are establishing scholarly panels and consultation processes with aggrieved groups, that can address colonial, racist and ableist attitudes, policies and practices.

University archivists, librarians, researchers and administrators across the country should work with communities to find meaningful ways of making their archives accessible to those targeted by destructive ideas and practices. Uncovering hidden stories of the past calls into question our ways of doing things in the present; for aggrieved and justice-seeking groups, an open past opens up more just possibilities for the future.

Evadne Kelly is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Guelph and Carla Rice is professor and Canada Research Chair at the University of Guelph, Canada. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

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Universities must share their oppressive pasts - University World News

The beginning of Spring 2020 with the inpour of new faces and those still round from home-cooked meals is a time for second chances and new opportunities. Or not.

Despite the state-wide drought, USC experienced a near constant rainfall of scandals last year. Although the University has survived into the next decade still smelling of rain and glowing with the rosy dew of optimism its not yet time to celebrate; not when there remains a building dedicated to a known eugenicist. Until President Carol Folt takes real action toward renaming the building, the situation will remain as is: USCs administration supports the segregationist sentiments propagated by Rufus von KleinSmid.

Rufus von KleinSmid served as the Universitys fifth president from 1921 to 1947, switching to the chancellor position for the last 17 years of his life. During that time, he oversaw the expansion of USCs academic system, integrating 16 schools and eight buildings and tripling the student population. In his spare time, von KleinSmid went on to co-found the Human Betterment Foundation a Pasadena-based organization promoting the possibilities of race betterment by eugenic sterilization.

Prior to his appointment to the USC presidency, von KleinSmid had already made his name known in the realm of eugenics, publishing and presenting a paper titled Eugenics and the State at the Cincinnati Academy of Medicine in 1913. Some noteworthy lines from that paper include, our defective classes breed like rabbits and the normal boy and girl have rights to grasp from youth the fullest measure of what youthful life can gain without the hindering presence of those who can never help.

At this point, multiple articles have been published exposing the former president for propagating oppression and outright torture for that is what involuntrary sterilization is: torture. We can therefore move past the stage of questioning whether von KleinSmid was racist. That is not up for debate. A debriefing of von KleinSmids history was included above for the sake of the reader. However, the events themselves are not the focus here, and its clear that the absurdity of it all has lost all shock value.

The About USC website offers a, should we say, sanitized version of history of the Universitys former president, excluding any mention of von KleinSmids fervent advocacy for racism and oppression. This is a sound choice for the sake of advertisement but not as good for the preservation of truth and institutional integrity. In this haze of ignorance, USC hopefuls are led around campus, encouraged to admire the VKC building and why would they not? Its a beautiful building. With the towering globe statue and the array of flags representing international students home countries, it doesnt look like its named after a depraved human being.

President Folt entered her position with promises of progressive action and a total facelift for USC. However, the procedure seems to have been botched. Perhaps the physician wasnt certified as advertised. There definitely werent any rave reviews from her previous employment.

As chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Folt delayed the removal of the Silent Sam Confederate statue until after the majority of it had been torn down by student protesters. Her indecision gained no favor from either side in the arguments over the statues place on campus. Instead, it only sped up the process of her resignation.

Coming to USC a few months later, Folt should have addressed VKCs name change right away. With the campus in turmoil over the admissions scandals, there was a clear opportunity to increase morale among the student population by tackling a very visible problem. Instead, the president launched the Values Poll, which was a nicely wrapped distraction from the problem at hand, diverting attention from the student demonstrations which interrupted her inauguration.

This is not a matter of what the students want; students have advocated for the buildings renaming for years. Former USG Senator Preston Fregia presented a formal proposal and formed a committee focused on USC nomenclature two years ago. Put plainly, it is the Universitys higher-ups who are the roadblock to the change of which USC is in dire need.

Simply put: USC is protecting a eugenicist over its students and it doesnt look like that will change.

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VKC is entering the new year with the same baggage - Daily Trojan Online

There are people who say it never happened. I visited the Houston Holocaust Museum last week and it boggles the mind how anyone could think that. There, as in many other similar museums, was a preponderance of proof otherwise.

The museum was very well done and informative albeit disturbing. How could such a thing happen? In the late 19th century, many scientists and intellectuals began to apply the Darwinian concepts of evolution to the problems of society. It was known as eugenics and racial scientism. In the aftermath of World War I, many were willing to believe in it. The Nazi ideas that promoted German racial superiority were a more radical expression of that.

I once visited Dachau, one of the concentration camps in Germany. There, on a gray day, I set foot where so many suffered and died. A restless wind was blowing and the tall trees along the perimeter swayed to its rhythm. Later, I learned that the inmates had planted those trees. It was as if their spirits were stirring among us. As I peered into one of the dorms, an old German man beside me said, I come here to remember that men are just animals. Perhaps he had been there. I was afraid to ask.

From 1933 to 1945, Nazi Germany carried out a campaign to cleanse Germany of those viewed as biological threats to the nations well being. Any movement such as this has to begin with a leader-Hitler-who could convince people that a person can be a criminal by their birth and must be destroyed. Since that person was deemed less than human, some had no problem in killing them. It was a way to justify the madness.

In 1941, Hitler implemented the final solution. Killing centers were built and millions were put to death in gas chambers loaded with Zyclon B. Exhibits in the museum showed photos of the gas chambers and piles of emaciated bodies. The walls held maps of the locations of where all the many concentration camps had been.

As disturbing as this was to see, there were also photos and information about all those who helped hide Jewish families or help them escape at the risk of death to themselves and their families. Although many were caught, tortured and then put to death, they saved thousands. That gave an element of hope to the exhibitions of death and despair.

I would like to think that I would have been brave enough to do that. But when faced with it, would I? That was bravery beyond measure. Many gave their lives to resist this insanity. They are the heroes-ordinary people who did extraordinary things.

After the museum, our group went to lunch at Cleburnes Cafeteria, an icon in Houston known for their humongous portions. As I looked at the piles of food from which to choose, my mind went back to thoughts of the millions of people who were starved to death during the Holocaust. I offered up a prayer of thankfulness for all that God has blessed us with here in this country.

We should never take that for granted and so be ever vigilant to the dangers of hatred, prejudice, and apathy to our fellow man.

A former longtime Baytown resident, Ginger Stripling now lives in Mont Belvieu. Contact her at viewpoints@baytownsun.com, Attention: Ginger Stripling.

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The dangers of hatred, prejudice | Opinion - The Baytown Sun

Josef Mengele was nowhere near the upper ranks of the Nazi hierarchy yet has endured as one of the regimes most infamous figures. Prominent in fiction as well as credulous nonfiction, he is recalled as Dr. Death, notorious as an SS physician at Auschwitz, where he conducted experiments on his captives.

In Mengele: Unmasking the Angel of Death (W.W. Norton), David G. Marwell sifts through the documentary evidence and assembles the fullest, most accurate picture yet. The author is a former director of New Yorks Museum of Jewish Heritage and worked in the 1980s with the U.S. Justice Department to track Mengeles whereabouts (and his possible ties to U.S. intelligence).

The facts are both more interesting and more sinister than the legend. To clear up one misconception, Marwell shows that Mengele was part of an Auschwitz team of SS physicians. They worked in shifts as the trains of victims arrived, separating those to be killed immediately from those allowed a short reprieve. Even the great Elie Wiesel mistakenly assumed that Mengele was the man who decided he would live. Every survivor claims it was Mengele, but most descriptions dont tally with his appearance. Mengele did participate in the culling that occurred at the railroad platform but was one of many officers so tasked.

As for the experiments, Mengele was less a mad scientist than a researcher in a field shut down by mainstream science following the Holocaust: eugenics. Germany was not alone in the projects to improve human stock by breeding the fit, sterilizing the unfit and other measures. The U.S. was one of the leading nations with eugenic research and laws until Hitler. After 1933, Germanys formidable medical establishment redirected its efforts toward racial hygiene. As Mengele completed medical school, he was taught that the individual was nothing more than a single cell of an entire people. Under the Third Reich, great institutions became engaged in mapping racial and ethnic boundaries by measuring skulls and bones and making careful notations on complexion, hair and eye color.

As Marwell puts it, Mengele pursued his science not as some renegade propelled solely by evil and bizarre impulses, but rather in a manner that his mentors and his peers could judge as meeting the highest standards.

Before being posted to Auschwitz, Mengele was no stranger to the peer-reviewed journals of academic science. Mengele and his colleagues were seeking the biochemical basis of race and trying to prove the heritability of intelligence, physical health and personality. In eugenics, nature trumps nurture. Mengeles preoccupation with studying twins at Auschwitz was not unique but part of a broader study of the laws of inheritance.

For Mengele, Auschwitz was a laboratory where the minimum legal constraints preserved in Nazi Germany (parental consent) were repealed. At the death camp, he could choose from thousands of unwilling subjects and organize control groups for experiments. In death, Mengele collected their organs and bones for further study, sending many carefully preserved specimens to institutes in Berlin.

Marwell helped verify Mengeles 1979 death by examining his exhumed bones. He ends the book on a hopeful note: advances in genetics dont support the idea that inheritance determines habits, personalities and intelligence. Genetically, we are more alike than unlike each other.

At least one of Mengeles associates worked with the man who identified Aspergers as a distinct disorder, although his insights went unappreciated for decades. In Aspergers Children (W.W. Norton), historian Edith Sheffer goes in search of Viennese psychiatrist Hans Asperger, finding that his ideas were linked to Nazi eugenic theories. Although he never joined the Nazi Party, Asperger collaborated closely with Nazi physicians who euthanized autistic and developmentally disabled children in the name of improving racial stock. Like many scientists across the world, Asperger believed in eugenics, but perhaps he was uncomfortable with the drastic steps undertaken by the Nazis? His identification of high functioning autistic children (with the idea that they had redeeming social value) saved at least some lives.

Aspergers Children is a sophisticated analysis of the many shades of gray that colored life under Nazism. The acclaimed 2018 book is out now in paperback.

David Luhrssen lectured at UWM and the MIAD. He is author of The Vietnam War on Film, Encyclopedia of Classic Rock, and Hammer of the Gods: Thule Society and the Birth of Nazism.

Jan. 23, 2020

1:51 p.m.

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Angels of Death, Angels of Mercy? - Shepherd Express

Margaret Sanger, the womens rights activist and founder ofPlanned Parenthoodthe largest abortion provider in Americais a hero to themodern Left. And little wonder, given her outsized role in the founding andpromotion of the modern abortion industry.

But what few people realize is that Planned Parenthood isactually more extreme than its founder, at least when it comes to abortion. Infact, Sanger, as remarkable as it seems, looks positively tame next to themodern agenda.

Which raises the question: why would Planned Parenthood, whichhas gone so far beyond Sanger in its promotion of abortion, eugenics, andpopulation control, still hold her up as a leader of the movement? Isnt she abit behind the times?

The movement can thank prominent Progressive leaders of thelast decade for raising Sangers profile. Shes featured prominently in liberalspeeches and interviews, like when Hillary Clinton told supporters in 2009 thatshe was in awe of her. In 2014, Barack Obama became the first sittingpresident to address the abortion groups national conference, praisingSangers legacy as its core principle [that] has guided everything all of youdo.

Interestingly, Planned Parenthood, whose highest award still bears Sangers name, has moved so far to the left that its hero probably couldnt even get a job selling T-shirts for the radical abortion giant today. If they were consistent, modern leftists wouldcall Sanger a white supremacist or an extremist for her views on immigration, raceand yes, abortion.

Take, for example, Sangers desire to see Americas borderssealed to all unfit immigrants to protect what she considered a fragile gene pool.That sounds a lot like the caricature of pro-Trump conservatives conjured up inleft-wing fantasies.

Then there was her notorious speech before a branch of theNew Jersey Ku Klux Klan, a well-documented event despite the content beingnearly forgotten. In that speech, Sanger warned that America must keep thedoors of Immigration closed to genetic undesirables.

Then theres Sangers opinion of non-whites, which, if utterednow, would (rightly) cause a conniption among Americans. She consideredAustralias Aborigines compulsiverapists and the lowest known species of the human family, just a stephigher than the chimpanzee in brain development. Because he has no greatbrain development, Sanger wrote, police authority alone prevents [Aborigines]from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.

But if Planned Parenthood was honest about its founder,Sangers most unforgivable sin would be her skepticism of abortion itself.

One of Sangers few criticisms of the Soviet Union when shevisited the communist state in 1934 was its outright insistence on encouragingabortion over contraception. Four hundred thousand abortions a year indicatewomen do not want to have so many children, a perplexed Sanger told a Sovietdoctor.

She thought that access to birth control was a human rightbutwas repulsed by abortion. In my opinion it is a cruel method of dealing withthe problem, Sanger wrote upon returning home, because abortion, no matterhow well done, is a terrific nervous strain and an exhausting physical hardship.

In fact, the founder of Planned Parenthood was deeplyconcerned about the tremendous number of abortions taking place in the SovietUnion, as historian Paul Kengor has documented.Legalization of abortion was one of the communist governments first acts followingthe 1917 Russian Revolutionnearly 60 years before Roe v. Wadeaccomplished the same thing in America. By1920, the Soviet Union was providing abortions free of charge to its citizens.

Sanger wrote that the number of abortions in Moscow was 100,000per year. By the 1970s, there were 78 millionabortions annually in the USSRa rate unmatched in human history, Kengorpoints out. Roe v. Wade only managed 1.5 million in 1973, the year the SupremeCourt legalized abortion.

By these metrics, Planned Parenthoods position on abortion in2020 is far closer to that of post-Revolutionary Soviet Union than their hero, MargaretSanger.

If Progressives held Sanger to their own standards, theydhave to denounce her antiquated viewsso why do they continue to applaud her?Because the Left believes that Sangers contributions to the pro-choicemovement outweigh her racist views. So Planned Parenthood sticks with itsdespicable founder, refusing to disavow her altogether, to its shame.

If leftists were honest, theyd renounce Margaret Sangerandthen reflect on what it means that theyve become even more radical than theeugenicist who started their anti-life movement.

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Margaret Sanger Is a Hero to the Left. Here's Her History of Ugly Views. - Daily Signal

By David Kamioner|January 23, 2020

In a relocation that is certain to win support with pro-lifers existing at the March for Life in DC on Friday, the Trump Department of Justice Wednesday revealed it was home siding with the state of Ohio concerning a questionable expense that does not allow physicians to carry out abortions exclusively on the basis of a prenatal medical diagnosis of Down syndrome.

A doctor executing the treatment on a youngster with the problem would certainly encounter a fourth-degree felony fee, loss of their clinical certificate, and also various other lawful problems. The legislation will certainly be brought prior to the sixth Court of Appeals for a choice.

The UNITED STATE Supreme Court has actually discovered that any type of legal action that substantially burdens a woman from ending a maternity via abortion is unconstitutional. The Trump DOJ says that absolutely nothing in Ohios [Down syndrome] legislation develops a significant barrier to females acquiring an abortion.

RELATED: Trump First President in History to Speak at March for Life

It is numbing that, after totalitarian experiments in eugenics (the expected procedure of enhancing races and also the types by careful reproduction and also birth), and also our very own harmful stroll down that course in the very early 20 th century, that there are those that would certainly promote eliminating coming babies on the basis of health and wellness supremacy.

Though unfortunately, there is priority.

The eugenics activity was when so significant in America that also a valued jurist such as Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes,Jr stated most viewpoint in the 1927 Buck v. Bell instance, the instance worried eugenics procedures in Virginia, that It would certainly be odd if it (Virginia) might not contact those that currently sap the stamina of the State for these minimal sacrifices, commonly not really felt to be such by those worried, to avoid our being overloaded with inexperience.

It is much better for all the globe, if rather than waiting to perform degenerate children for criminal offense, or to allow them deprive for their imbecility, culture can protect against those that are manifestly unsuited from proceeding their kind. Holmes ended, Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

RELATED: Pro-Life Advocates Arrested Outside Nancy Pelosis Office

Planned Parenthood creator Margaret Sanger, in addition to numerous various other popular people and also companies, additionally sustained eugenics.

After the cold-blooded concept luckily shed support in the United States it was utilized en masse by Nazi Germany to genocidal outcomes.

That is the heritage those that desire to terminate Down syndrome infants tackle as their very own.

However, the state of Ohio and also the Trump DOJ do not credit these savage concepts. We are a much better country since they do not.

This item initially showed up in Life Zette and also is made use of by consent.

Read a lot more at Life Zette: President Trump Wins His First Impeachment Trial Victory as Senate Votes 53 to 47Tim Tebow Officially Tied the Knot and also Their Wedding Photos Are StunningLiberals Shamelessly Boo President Trump and also Vice President Pence During Visit to MLK Memorial

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Down Syndrome Is No Justification for Abortion - The Union Journal