Eugenics: the “well-born” science

1. Eugenics: the “well-born” science • Science of eugenics: genetic determinism • Disabilities and “social ills” are inheritable traits. • Medical model (and moral). • Policies: “rationally” improve human biological quality by controlling who reproduces • Scientific knowledge applied to “better breeding.” • Fewer offspring from “unfit” people; more from “fit.” • What kinds of people do we want? Who should we prevent from being born?

2. Definitions • from Greek eugenes meaning wellborn; The eugenics movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to "improve" the human species and preserve racial "purity" through planned human breeding. Eugenicists supported anti-miscegenation laws and other, sometimes more extreme measures such as sterilization. • The practice of trying to influence human heredity by encouraging the transmission of 'desirable' characteristics and discouraging the transmission of 'undesirable' ones.

3. Eugenics movement, 1900-1945 • Word coined by Francis Galton 1860s. • 30+ countries had their own versions. • Organizations of social reformers, biologists, doctors, other professional experts. • Politically and scientifically “progressive.” • Apply the new science of human genetics to control/engineer population health & fitness. • Economic rationale: reduce the “burden” of welfare services, increase efficiency.

4. Sources: Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement http://eugenicsarchive.org • Hosted by the Human Genome Project’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. • Which was originally the Eugenics Record Office, the center of US human genetics research and advocacy for eugenics policy, 1910-1939.

5. How to improve the hereditary make-up of the “race”? • Positive eugenics • Encourage “fitter” people to have more kids who share their “good” genes. • Negative eugenics • Persuade, pressure, or compel “unfit” people not to pass on “defective” genes. • Permanent segregation. • Forced sterilization.

6. Eugenics in Nazi Germany • 1933 Forced sterilization law applied to 400,000 “hereditary defectives.” • 1939 Killing programs (“euthanasia”) against 200,000 institutionalized adults and children with disabilities. • Economic logic: “lives not worth living,” “useless eaters” • 1941 Gas chambers from that program moved to the concentration camps to murder 6 million Jewish people.

7. Negative eugenics in US: 30 states had sterilization laws by 1930s

8. 60,000 legally sterilized 1907-1970s

9. How much does “degeneracy” cost society? Who is “born to be a burden” as a criminal, feebleminded, etc? State fair exhibit promoting eugenics.

10. Eliminate all inherited and congenital disabilities, e.g. “results of conception when the father was intoxicated.”

11. Good heredity for the sake of “health”

12. Hereditary defective groups invading the body politic • “Infectious germs”: symbols for Jews, communists, gays. • “With his poison, the Jew destroys the sluggish blood of weaker peoples; so that a diagnosis arises, of swift degeneration. With us, however, the case is different: The blood is pure; we are healthy!”

13. Racist agenda & outcome of US eugenics: 1924 Immigration Act Eugenicists’ expert testimony on race & IQ. Law set quotas for Eastern and Southern European immigrants. Disability justified discriminatory policies since 1882, excluded undesirable “lunatics,” “idiots,” “likely to become a public charge.”

14. Congressman Albert Johnson, R-WA, 1924 speech “With this immigration act, the US is undertaking to regulate and control the great problem of the commingling of races. Our hope is in a homogeneous nation. At one time we welcomed all and all helped to build the nation. But now asylum ends. This nation must be as completely unified as any nation in Europe or Asia. Self-preservation demands it.”

15. 1913 Ellis Island mental testing • “moron detectors” • 80% immigrants scored feebleminded • Deportation rate increased

16. 1918 IQ tests US Army For recruits who were non-English speaking or illiterate. Complete the picture. 40% found to be FM.

17. Actual Test Questions, Army Alpha SAMPLE People hear with their eyes\ears\nose\mouth 1. Pinochle is played with rackets\cards\pins\dice 2. Habeus corpus is a term used in medicine\law\pedagogy 3. Bud Fisher is a famous actor\author\athlete\comic 4. Velvet Joe appears in ads for tooth powder\soap\dry goods\tobacco 5. The number of a Kaffir’s legs is . . . 2\4\6\8

18. WWI Army Mental Tests: Racial Rankings

19. Positive eugenics: Fitter Families contests and the Cross of Honor of the German Mother

20. US Eugenic “Euthanasia” and Disability

21. 1917 eugenic film The Black Stork: “There are times when saving a life is a greater crime than taking one.”

22. 1927 re-titled “Are You Fit to Marry?” • Haiselden’s autobio: “We have been invaded. Our streets are infested with an Army of the Unfit—a dangerous, vicious army of death and dread.... Horrid semi-humans drag themselves along our streets.... What are you doing to do about it?”

23. Negative eugenics • “Voluntary” measures • Eugenic education, propaganda aimed at general public, e.g. school textbooks, films, state fair exhibits. • Coercive policies • Permanent confinement in institutions. • Surgical sterilization, sometimes as condition for parole.

24. Who was targeted as “unfit”? Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office, the scientific branch of the US movement: “It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded, epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year.”

25. Alexander Graham Bell 1872 founds deaf school in Boston. Invents devices to aid hearing. Studies heredity in deaf families. 1883: “avoid creating a deaf-mute variety of the human race” by intermarriages. Becomes leader of eugenics movement.

26. Perkins School for the Blind: 1928 family pedigree and expenses

27. 1921 legislation inspired by hereditarian beliefs: prevent marriages of blind people.

28. Carrie Buck By 1924, approximately 3,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in America; the vast majority (2,500) in California. That year Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin’s Model Law. It was adopted as part of a cost-saving strategy to relieve the tax burden in a state where public facilities for the "insane" and "feebleminded" had experienced rapid growth. The law was also written to protect physicians who performed sterilizing operations from malpractice lawsuits. Virginia’s law asserted that "heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and crime…" It focused on "defective persons" whose reproduction represented "a menace to society."

29. Carrie Buck, a seventeen-year-old girl from Charlottesville, Virginia, was picked as the first person to be sterilized. Carrie had a child, but was not married. Her mother Emma was already a resident at an asylum, the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Feebleminded. Officials at the Virginia Colony said that Carrie and her mother shared the hereditary traits of "feeblemindedness" and sexually promiscuity. To those who believed that such traits were genetically transmitted, Carrie fit the law’s description as a "probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring." A legal challenge was arranged on Carrie’s behalf to test the constitutional validity of the law.

31. At her trial, several witnesses offered evidence of Carrie’s inherited "defects" and those of her mother Emma. Colony Superintendent Dr. Albert Priddy testified that Emma Buck had "a record of immorality, prostitution, untruthfulness and syphilis." His opinion of the Buck family more generally was: "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." Although Harry Laughlin never met Carrie, he sent a written deposition echoing Priddy’s conclusions about Carrie’s "feeblemind-edness" and "moral delinquency."

32. Sociologist Arthur Estabrook, of the Eugenics Record Office, traveled to Virginia to testify against Carrie. He and a Red Cross nurse examined Carrie’s baby Vivian and concluded that she was "below average" and "not quite normal." Relying on these comments, the judge concluded that Carrie should be sterilized to prevent the birth of other "defective" children.

33. Oliver Wendell Holmes “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in Buck v. Bell