Eugenics and Its Aftermath | Linda Stryker

Eugenics and Its Aftermath

Linda Stryker

I. Introduction

The term “Eugenics” was coined by the English genius Francis Galton (1822-1911), a half-cousin of Darwin, in 1883. The word means “well-born” or “good genes”. But the ideas behind eugenics were known for many centuries before Galton. Animal domestication and husbandry began around 13,000 BCE with the inclusion of the dog into society. Then, soon, selective breeding Francis Galton of dogs, pigs, cattle, sheep, and goats for desired traits began. Around 400 BCE, Plato suggested that this sort of breeding be applied to humans. He believed that human reproduction should be monitored and controlled by the state. However, he did acknowledge that “gold soul” persons could still produce “bronze soul” children.

With animals, this type of breeding seems justified. We do it today. Good traits include hardiness, prolificness, mothering abilities, fast growth rates, low feed consumption per unit of growth, better body proportions, higher yields, better fiber qualities and other characteristics. Undesirable traits such as having health defects, low production, and aggressiveness are selected against.

Selective breeding has been responsible for large increases in productivity. For example, in only thirty years, the typical eight-week-old broiler chicken became almost five times heavier. The average milk yield of a dairy cow nearly doubled.

Because of such “success” with animals, stereotypical thinking grew. The belief was that if you reinforce the “good genes,” you can improve humans, and hence, the human race. The idea that “prominent men have prominent sons” took hold. The intent was to populate the Earth with more people of the higher socioeconomic and biological kind––and less, or none, of everyone else. At best, the ideas were utopian, that is: improve lives, help eradicate disease and disability, foster productivity, all of which would lead to a happier, healthier future for everyone.

Sounds great. But let’s examine where these ideas lead.

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II. American eugenics (early 1900s onward)

Early in the 20th century, eugenics and its ideas became American national policy. There were laws enacted, both nationally and in states, that forced sterilization; there arose laws concerning segregation and exclusions, marriage restrictions against racial mixing, secret experimentation, and certain laws concerning women. Eugenicists noted that poor, uneducated people, and minorities produced more offspring than did the wealthy and/or highly educated Europeans and Americans. This led to a Problem, as they calculated that Society would go downhill within 400 years.

During the Progressive Era (late 19th and early 20th century), eugenics was considered a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population. Now, it is generally associated with racism and white supremacy, rather than being based on scientific genetics.

American eugenicists tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon peoples, and they supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the “feebleminded” (catchword of the day), the “immoral” and the “inferior”, which included the insane, criminals, epileptics, alcoholics, blind people, deaf people, deformed people, and indigent people.

Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community. By 1928, there were 376 separate university courses in eugenics in many leading schools.

Laws supporting eugenics were enacted in 27 states, including Arizona. In

Handmade Eugenics poster

Handmade Eugenics poster 1928, the Human Betterment Foundation was formed “to foster and aid constructive and educational forces for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship”. Among its roles were to systemize and distribute legal information about compulsory sterilization.

In the U.S., about 62,000 people were coercively sterilized between the 1920s to 1970s, hundreds were barred from marriage, many people were segregated into “colonies” and “ghettoes,” and there were numerous perse-

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Stryker | Commentary and Analysis cutions, which included beatings, lynchings, and murders. We see echoes of this today. California boasted 80% of the national sterilizations leading up to WWII, with 20,000 forced sterilizations. Arizona had 30.

In the 1910s and 1920s, about 75,000 immigrants poured into the U.S. each month. Mexicans, Indians (native American), Asians (Chinese), Blacks, Jews, eastern/southern Europeans were deemed undesirable and unfit, so that, by the mid-1920s, restrictions were placed on the numbers being allowed to enter. Also, to “save money” on welfare, rejected from entering were the feebleminded, infirm, old, and poor.

Laws concerning women were established, with or without their consent: if on welfare, limit the number of children; if on drugs, sterilize them; if on probation, force contraception; if mentally feeble, force sterilization.

II-A. The Case of Carrie Buck

Although on record as being an average student, Carrie Buck (1906–1983) was taken out of school to help with housework when she was put in the foster home of the Dobbs family. She was raped at age 17 and became pregnant. The Dobbs committed her to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, for reasons of imbecility, incorrigibility, promiscuity, that they claimed. This was all sham! The Dobbs’ nephew was the rapist; so, they adopted the baby, Vivian. Vivian had As, Bs, and Cs, and even made honor roll, far from imbecility. Unfortunately, she died at age eight.

Carrie was ordered to be sterilized for her purported feeble-mindedness.

Poster c. 1926.

The surgery took place under the authority of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, as part of Virginia’s eugenics program.

Racial Integrity Act of 1924.

Even the U.S. Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its infamous 1927 decision regarding Carrie Buck, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, “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.”

But, there wasn’t any actual evidence! There was only biased word-ofmouth testimony by eugenicists who were seeking the backing of the Supreme Court. It was a major victory for them. The decision, based on manufactured evidence, opened the floodgates for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as subhuman. States began enacting similar laws, and the number of sterilizations rose to more than 12,000 by 1947. At the Nuremberg trials, for their defense, Nazis quoted Holmes’ statement. To make sure the family didn’t reproduce, Carrie Buck’s sister was also sterilized when she was hospital-

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis ized for appendicitis. She was never told about the sterilization. In later years, she married and she and her husband attempted to raise a family. She did not discover the reason for their failure until 1980.

Newspapermen and those researchers who visited Carrie over the years stated clearly that Carrie Buck was a woman of normal intelligence. II–B. Leading proponents of eugenics

Francis Galton was knighted in 1909. His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social-scientific attempt to study genius and greatness. He founded the science of measuring mental faculties (psychometrics), also differential psychology and studied personality. He even developed a way to classify fingerprints.

Galton wrote about many of his observations and conclusions about eugenics in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development (1883) He pointed out the tendencies of late marriages of eminent people, and the low numbers of children, all of which he termed “dysgenic”. He proposed that ‘marks for family merit’ should be instituted, and early marriages between high-ranking families should be encouraged by financial reward. The Eugenics Review, the journal of the Eugenics Education Society, began in 1909, with Galton as Honorary President.

Charles Davenport (1866–1944), a renown American biologist, had met with Galton in 1904 in London, and brought back Galton’s ideas to the U.S. Also in 1904, Davenport became director of Cold Spring Harbor Lab-

Carrie and her mother, Emma Buck, 1924

oratory, where he founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO, 1910-1939), funded by billionaires Mary Averell Harriman and Andrew Carnegie. Davenport began investigations into aspects of inheritances of personality and mental traits. Over the years he published hundreds of papers and several books on the genetics of alcoholism, pellagra (actually, a vitamin deficiency), criminality, feeblemindedness, seafaring-ness, bad temper, intelligence, manic depression, and the biological effects of mixing races. He also co-founded the Charles Davenport. Race Betterment Foundation (1906).

The American Breeder’s Association (ABA) was the first eugenics body in the U.S., also established in 1906 by Davenport. The ABA was formed specifically to “investigate and report on heredity in the human race and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”

Davenport’s 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was used as a college textbook for many years. The year after it was published, Davenport was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Davenport’s work did cause a lot of controversy. Although his writings were about eugenics, his findings were basic and simplistic and did not incorporate findings from the science of genetics. This bolstered the racial and class prejudices already present in society.

The First International Eugenics Congress took place in London in 1912. Winston Churchill was there. Davenport attended. The Second Congress (New York, 1921) and the Third Congress (New York, 1932) continued with their bold eugenical suggestions of sterilization and “eliminating the unfit”. The ABA exhibited their findings on hereditary defects.

In the 1920s, the ERO collected a huge amount of data on family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport and others (all well respected at the time) began to influence finding various solutions to the problem of the “unfit.” Davenport favored sterilizing and the restriction of immigration; others favored segregation; another favored all of these and even suggested extermination.

A eugenics poster of 1926 advocated the removal of genetic “defectives” such as the insane, the feebleminded, and criminals, and supported the selective breeding of “high-grade” individuals. Contests were held to find “fitter families” and to hold them up for society to emulate. Prizes included loans,

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Stryker | Commentary and Analysis tax breaks, and childcare. To those considered a drain on society, “prizes” were quarantine, sterilization, and euthanasia.

Admirers and Promotors of Eugenics

David Starr Jordan Founding president of Stanford; Chair of American Eugenics Commission; Vice President of American Society for Social Hygiene; Vice President of Eugenics Education Society of London

John H. Kellogg (Corn Flakes); Race Betterment Foundation and Exhibit at Pan Pacific Exposition (San Francisco, 1915)

Lewis Terman

Developed IQ test; Human Betterment Foundation

Robert Millikan Nobel in Physics; Human Betterment Foundation; Professor at Cal Tech

U. S. Webb

California Attorney General for 37 years; promoted forced sterilizations

Rufus von KleinSmid President UA, USC; co-founder of Human Betterment Foundation

Teddy Roosevelt

Julian Huxley

George Bernard Shaw

Alexander Graham Bell

Luther Burbank

Madison Grant (1865–1937) wrote one of the most notorious works of “scientific” racism, The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and he was prominent in drafting strong restrictions on immigration and worked on anti-miscegenation laws.

Grant’s work was noticed and embraced by people in the National Socialist (Nazi) movement in Germany and his book was the first non-German book reprinted by the Nazis when they took power. This book was lauded by Adolf Hitler, who in the early 1930s wrote a ’fan letter’ to Grant in which he called

the book “his Bible.” At the Nuremberg Trials, Grant’s book was introduced as evidence by the defense team of Karl Brandt, Hitler’s personal physician and head of the Nazi euthanasia program, in order to justify the population policies of the Third Reich, and to indicate that they were not unique to Nazi Germany and not so different from similar policies in America.

T. H. Morgan (1866-1945) studied fruit flies. Awarded the Nobel Prize in 1933, he recognized that inheritance and genetics were complex, and were not the simple idea of A’s genes + B’s genes = C’s genes that eugenicists were pushing. He quit his membership in the ERO and left the eugenicists.

Financial support came from the Carnegie Institution; the Rockefeller Foundation; John Kellogg; and Mary Averell Harriman, daughter of the railroad magnate E.H. Harriman (and sister of Averell Harriman, Governor of New York). Supporting Universities included Stanford, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and many others.

Writers of novels in the 1880s – 1940s began to include dystopic visions of degeneration and how these led to the end of culture and the world as we knew it.

II–C. Lending “scientific” weight to American societal prejudices

How to “scientifically” determine that a person was feebleminded? give an exam during a time when the person is distracted by pain; ask questions that few normal people could answer; obtain a mark for their lack of success on the exam; rate the person as feebleminded if the score was lower than an established cutoff.

Sixty-one percent of sterilizations were performed on women. North Carolina was the most aggressive state (between 1933-1977). Their laws stated that if the person’s I.Q. was below 70, then sterilization was justified. Men were sterilized to treat aggression and to eliminate criminal behavior, while women were sterilized to control “the results of their sexuality”. Since women bore children, eugenicists held women more accountable for the reproduction of the less “desirable” members of society. Eugenicists therefore predominantly targeted women in their efforts to regulate the birth rate, to “protect” white racial health, and to weed out “defectives” of society. As mentioned above, about 62,000 sterilizations were carried out in the U.S.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 cut entry of immigrants by 80% to 97%, so that work toward an American, white/Nordic, “super-race” could begin. Its Mission Statement read: “Society must protect itself; … Here is where appropriate legislation will aid in eugenics and creating a healthier, saner society in the future”.

Canada and the U.S. passed laws to create a rating of nationalities from

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis the “most desirable Anglo-Saxon/Nordic peoples, down to Chinese and Japanese immigrants,” who were almost completely barred from entering the country. Also virtually stopped was the influx of Italians, Greeks, Eastern European Jews, Poles, Slavs, and Russians. All this “to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity.”

Bans on immigration were actually based on racist fear and hatred disguised as being of benefit to our national society and to build a “healthier” nation. Harriman money was also directed to local charities, to find and target specific immigrants to deport, confine, or forcibly sterilize them. II–D. Human experimentation in the United States

A 1911 Carnegie Institute report explored eighteen methods for removing defective genetic attributes. Method number eight was euthanasia. Some other methods included: exposing people to chemical and biological weapons (including infecting people with deadly or at least, highly debilitating, diseases), human radiation experiments, injection of people with toxic and radioactive chemicals––like KX-338 testing of soldiers with mustard gas and agent orange––surgical experiments, interrogation and torture experiments, tests involving mind-altering substances, and a wide variety of others. Many of these tests were performed on children, the sick, and mentally disabled individuals, often under the guise of “medical treatment.” In many of the studies, a large portion of the subjects were poor, racial minorities, or prisoners, for example, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study 1932-1972, when 600 poor sharecroppers were lied to about their “health care” and not given treatment, even though the antibiotic penicillin became available in 1944. It wasn’t until 1972 that laws were changed to protect study participants.

As another example, a mental institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed incoming patients milk infected with tuberculosis, after reasoning that genetically healthy individuals would be resistant. This resulted in 30–40% annual death rates, compared with their usual number. Elsewhere, doctors practiced euthanasia through various forms of lethal neglect. In the 1930s, there was a wave of portrayals of eugenic “mercy killings” in American film, newspapers, and magazines. In 1931, the Illinois Homeopathic Medicine Association began lobbying for the right to euthanize “imbeciles” and other defectives. In 1938, the Euthanasia Society of America was founded. Originally formed to alleviate the suffering of dying patients, many members saw the Society as being a eugenics issue. (In England in 1936, King George V was euthanized by his doctor to avert his suffering from heart/lung failures; this was kept secret for 50 years.) In Germany, euthanasia took on a much ghastlier definition, as we shall see.

III. Outcomes / Germany

In 1920s-1930s, Hitler had read papers and books by American eugenicists. He wrote to Madison Grant and others that he planned to base Germany’s purification plan on what he had read. More than just providing a roadmap, America actually funded Germany’s eugenics institutions.

By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000––about $4 million in today’s money–– to hundreds of German researchers. In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 (about 2 million) toward creation of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading German psychiatrists was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and eventually an architect of Hitler’s systematic medical cruelties. The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs and institutes, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.

Also within the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute’s complex of eugenics institutions was the Institute for Brain Research. Rockefeller’s grant of $317,000 (about 3 million) allowed the institute to take center stage in Germany’s race biology research. The institute received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation over the next several years. Leading the institute was Rüdin, who instituted murderous experimentation and research to be conducted on Jews, Gypsies, homosexual people, disabled people, the aged, poor, and infirm.

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, after learning that more than 5,000 people each month were being forcibly sterilized, one California eugenics leader bragged to a colleague (probably Laughlin): “your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program.”

American eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin (superintendent of the ERO) often boasted that his Model Eugenical Sterilization Law (1922) had been implemented in Hitler’s 1935 racist Nuremberg Laws on hygiene. Between 35,000 and 80,000 sterilizations took place during the first year in Germany, leading to a total around 400,000.

When American newspapers began reporting on the massive abuses in Germany, American eugenics was exposed for its poor science and now began to be linked with Nazism, such that previously abundant funding was now drying up and federal and state laws began to change.

Laughlin was highly rewarded and received honorary degrees from Hitler’s Germany. After Hitler’s rise to power, Laughlin maintained connections with various Nazi institutions and publications, both before and during World War II. He held editorial positions at two influential German journals, founded in 1935, and in 1939 he wrote a contribution to the Festschrift for Otto Reche,

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Stryker | Commentary and Analysis who was prominent in removing those populations considered “inferior” in eastern Germany. Laughlin’s biographer wrote: he was “among the most racist and anti-Semitic of early twentieth-century eugenicists.”

III–A. Nazi Eugenics

Those who were labelled under the term “unworthy of life” (Lebensunwertes Leben) included prisoners, “degenerates”, dissident people with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities (including people who were feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, who had cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, or were deaf and/or blind), homosexual, the insane, the weak, and the idle, for removal from the gene pool.

Of the steps Nazis took to carry out the principle of “life unworthy of life,” coercive sterilization was the first step, following America’s example. Following that, they first euthanized impaired/deformed children in hospitals and then impaired adults, found mostly in mental institutions and centers, where carbon monoxide gas was readily available. This killing project soon included impaired inmates in concentration camps and, finally, to the wholesale mass killings in extermination camps.

The Holocaust of Occupied Poland.

The Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring was enacted in 1933. This law was meant to ensure a pure Aryan race by sterilizing or eu-

thanizing people who were categorized as being “genetically defective”. This law legalized the involuntary sterilization of people with “hereditary” diseases: weak-mindedness, schizophrenia, alcoholism, insanity, blindness, deafness, and/or physical deformity. Four hundred thousand people were sterilized against their will within the first four years, and more than 70,000 were killed under their a euthanasia program.

After the Nazis passed the antisemitic Nuremberg Laws, both marriage partners had to be tested for possible hereditary diseases. No marriages between Aryan Germans and non-Germans were permitted. Citizenship and all rights were taken from non-Germans––Jews, Romani, and Black people––all classified as “enemies of the race-based state”. Beginning in 1940, between 50,000 to 100,000 Germans were taken from old age homes, mental institutions and other facilities and systematically murdered. This genocide had its roots in the misguided, wrong beliefs in eugenics. Nazis justified their enormous human rights abuses by claiming there was little difference between the Nazi eugenics programs and those programs in the U.S.

All of this has been ignored by American generations who refused to link themselves to the horrendous Nazi criminal abuses and by succeeding generations that do not know the truth about what led up to and transpired during WWII. Very recently, names of prominent eugenicists including Millikan and von KleinSmid are being removed from campus buildings, because of their affiliation with the Human Betterment Foundation. Governors of five states, including California, have issued public apologies for sterilizations, unethical medical studies, and other abuses of the not-so-distant past.

IV. HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

In the later 20th century, human genetics has become a more enlightened endeavor. Scientists have further explored the human genetic code with the Human Genome Project. Now, any individual can be biologically identified and classified by traits and ancestries. Yet there are still some leading voices in the genetic world who call for a “cleansing of the unwanted”, and even for a master human species.

There are understandable fears about the more ordinary forms of abuse, for example, in whether to deny insurance coverage or work hires, based on genetic results. In 1996, the United States passed the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) which “protects people against the unauthorized and non-consensual release of individually identifiable health information to any entity not actively engaged in the provision of healthcare services to a patient”. This was the United States’ first genetic anti-discrimi-

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis

Stryker | Commentary and Analysis nation legislation and was passed unanimously by the Senate.

Now, in the age of a more detailed mapped genome, embryos can be tested for susceptibility to disease and genetic defects, as well as determining gender. Therefore, genetics is no longer just a discovery and regulation of a person’s genome but can discover and carry out changes to the genes of embryos.

Resources

Books: 1. Philippa Levine, Eugenics: A very short introduction 2. GK Chesterton, Eugenics and Other Evils 3. Adam Cohen, Im-be-ciles 4. Carl Zimmer, She has her Mother’s Laugh 5. Theodore M. Porter, Genetics in the Madhouse 6. NYT Opinion: Disability (13 Sept 2017) 7. Kenny Fries, “The Nazi’s First Victims were the Disabled”

Video: 8. PBS “The Eugenics Crusade: What’s Wrong with Perfect?”, American Experience

Internet: 9. https://www.sciencenews.org/article/study-human-heredity-got-itsstart-insane-asylums

There are no Libertarians in a hurricane.

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