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parliament of fools
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frostokovich's blog there's a discussion going on about eugenics in the US during the first half of the 20th century: http://frostokovich.livejournal.com/14884.html. I thought it might be helpful to post here the relevant few pages on the subject from my recently published book Corrupted Science.
Eugenics
Although often perceived to be a pseudoscience or even perhaps scientifically oriented, eugenics was and is not so much either of these as a belief system. The idea that the species can be improved either through the prevention of "undesirables" breeding (negative eugenics) or the encouragement of breeding between "ideal" partners (positive eugenics) dates back long before any ideas of evolution came onto the scene – Plato (427–347BC) mentioned notions along these lines – but really came to prominence after the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species in 1859. A prime early advocate was a cousin of Darwin's, Francis Galton (1822–1911), who also coined the term "eugenics". His statistical researches into human heredity convinced him that intelligence and other qualities – such as courage and honour – were inherited characteristics, and this encouraged him to become a proselytizer on behalf of "racial improvement" through both positive and negative selection. Galton's ideal of the human species was the Anglo-Saxon model; on the European continent, like-minded thinkers opted for the Nordics, supposed descendants of the once-great Aryan race such theorists near-worshipped.
In the US, the idea of eugenics fell on fertile soil. People of every nationality, creed and colour were arriving in the country, while the end of the Civil War caused a further mixing of populations as the poor from the South sought a living in the North; in places the melting-pot effect was successful, but often, as in so many instances where communities feel vulnerable, people sought scapegoats whom they could blame and, best of all, regard as inferior human beings. Racism was rampant in a complex of forms, as was religious discrimination, and eugenics, with its "scientific" veneer, was perfectly tailored to be a socially acceptable way of expressing these hatreds. In particular, since the eugenicists believed Blacks were a separate and inferior strain of humanity with a distinct evolutionary history, obviously miscegenation was to be discouraged as deleterious to the White lineage. (Strangely, no one seemed to wonder why all the best and most intelligent dogs seem to be mongrels.) The ideal scapegoat group was relatively powerless in society, so the immigrant Irish Catholics were a good choice; in turn, the Irish blamed and hated the Blacks, the single easily identifiable group in society who had even less power than the Irish; and so on.
The most prominent eugenicist in the US was the lawyer and Aryan aficionado Madison Grant (1865–1937), author of the books The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and The Conquest of a Continent (1933), among others. A marked success of Grant and his cronies was the passage by the Federal Government of the Johnson/Reed Act of 1924 (not repealed until 1952) that selectively restricted immigration, with people of "undesirable" stock being discriminated against. As well as the restriction of immigration, Grant advocated racial segregation (primarily as a way of avoiding miscegenation) and the sterilization of members of "inferior" races as well as "feeble-minded" Whites. In 1907 Indiana passed a state sterilization law, and 31 other state legislatures followed suit over the next two decades. The definition of "undesirable" could be very broad indeed: under the 1913 Iowa state law, "criminals, rapists, idiots, feeble-minded, imbeciles, lunatics, drunkards, drug fiends, epileptics, syphilitics, moral and sexual perverts, and diseased and degenerate persons" were all eligible for enforced sterilization. Even so, few of the states in fact carried out many sterilizations, since the popular mood was not wholly in favour and since there were questions as to whether the operation constituted "cruel and unusual punishment".
In 1927, however, the Buck vs. Bell case came before the Supreme Court. The teenage mother Carrie Buck – deemed feeble-minded solely because she had conceived out of wedlock – had been placed in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded, and the State of Virginia was determined to sterilize both her and her child on the grounds they were a drain on the state economy and their offspring would be a further drain. In the ensuing court case, the state enlisted the "scientific" support of the Eugenics Record Office, a laboratory founded in order to research ways of "improving" the US population by Grant ally Charles Davenport (1866–1944), author of such books as Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), and funded by the Carnegie Institution. The ERO's testimony was weighty enough that the case reached the Supreme Court – where, shamefully, it was found in favour of the State of Virginia. The degree to which the judges bought into the eugenicists' pseudoscience can be assessed by the majority statement of Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841–1935), son of the great essayist:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. 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.
The judgement was the green light for enforced sterilizations, which during the 1930s averaged 2200 per year in the US; by 1945 over 45,000 people had been compulsorily sterilized, of whom about half were inmates of state mental institutions. Almost half of all these operations were carried out by the State of California. The consequences of the Supreme Court decision were not just national, however, but – and tragically so – international. Over the next few years, sterilization laws were passed in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland.
And then there was Germany. There was a strong US connection to the ghastly happenings there, too – a connection that US historians not unnaturally tend to gloss over. In Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) promoted eugenics-based sterilization heavily, and in that same year the US Rockefeller Foundation gave $2.5 million to the Munich Psychiatric Institute as well as further money to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics, all in order to promote eugenics-oriented research. On Hitler's accession to power in 1933, one of the first acts his government passed was a sterilization law; the onus was placed upon physicians to report to a Hereditary Health Court any time they came across someone who was "deficient". The German law was to a large extent based on the existing law in California. In the following year, the American Public Health Association publicly praised the German law as a prime example of good science-based health policy that would benefit society, while the New England Journal of Medicine and even the New York Times – a strong supporter of the US sterilization laws – were effusive in their approval. By 1940, nearly 400,000 Germans had been sterilized according to the country's law. Rather than being horrified, US eugenicists were concerned their nation was lagging behind Germany's sterling example, and urged greater efforts to catch up.
Although Germany from about 1940 onward took the notion of simply murdering the insane and other "defectives" to an unenvisaged extreme, once again the idea was a product of the eugenics fanatics in the US, in particular Madison Grant's 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race, of which Hitler was a great fan. Grant's position was that, if killing the unfit was the only way to stop them breeding, then it was preferable to allowing them to stay alive. Grant was far from alone in this view – and far from the most extreme. Alexis Carrel (1873–1944), winner of the 1912 Nobel Physiology or Medicine Prize and employed by the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, wrote in Man the Unknown (1935):
Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and insane in a more economical manner?
His answer was that they should be "humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases". That was advice the Nazis took to heart; between 1940 and 1941, when Hitler discovered a new, antisemitic use for his chambers, the Nazis slaughtered some 70,000 of the mentally ill, mainly in Poland, and mainly for the sake of saving money.
After the end of WWII, when the full horrific scale of the atrocities at the German death camps became known to the US public, the ideas of the eugenicists, including enforced sterilization – which at times had enjoyed a 66% approval rating among that same public – took an abrupt nosedive, and fortunately they have remained in a fringe position ever since.
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One of the studies that helped fuel the eugenics movement in the US was the book The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (1877) by Richard L. Dugdale. Dugdale was a volunteer inspector for the New York Prison Association, and in 1874, while visiting the prison of Ulster County, in New York State's Hudson Valley, he noticed that no fewer than six of the prisoners there were blood relatives. Intrigued, he probed further, and discovered that, of 29 male blood relatives, 15 had been convicted of crimes – an extremely high rate for any extended family (well, outside the Mafia). He then traced the family concerned, the Jukeses, back as far as he could in the Hudson Valley, identifying 709 Jukeses under a diversity of surnames, and finally reaching an ancestor called Max, who was born sometime around 1720–40. The branch of the family that had caused all the trouble had begun with a daughter-in-law of Max's, a woman Dugdale called "Margaret, Mother of Criminals". (All the names he used, including "Jukes", were pseudonyms.) Tracing her descendants, he was able to show the family displayed an extraordinarily high incidence of criminality, mental defect and the like, and calculated the financial burden they'd placed on society as an astonishing $1.3 million (equivalent to about $21 million today). He speculated as to whether this catalogue of miscreancy and misfortune was due to heredity – "bad blood" – or environment, coming to no firm conclusion but tending to believe the responsibility was, as it were, the inheritance of a bad environment by each generation from the one preceding it: in other words, the Jukes kids always had a lousy upbringing.
The burgeoning eugenics movement ignored Dugdale's tentative conclusions about environmental influences and declared the Jukeses' failings to be exclusively hereditary, seizing on the Jukes family as an example of the kind of people who might justifiably be weeded out of society to society's benefit, either by sterilization or by euthanasia. In 1911 Dugdale's original notes were discovered and sent to the Eugenics Record Office. A researcher called Arthur H. Estabrook (1885–1973) was given the job of updating the study. Over the next few years Estabrook claimed to have tracked down a further 2111 Jukeses; there were 1258 alive at the time of his researches, and many of them were – horror of horrors – reproducing to produce yet more Jukeses, at vast potential cost to the taxpayer. In his book The Jukes in 1915 (1915) Estabrook estimated this further cost at over $2 million (over $35 million in today's terms). Estabrook's researches did show, however, that the Jukeses were becoming less problematic – a point the Eugenics Record Office, in its official pronouncement, blithely ignored. At the 1921 Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in New York at the American Museum of Natural History, a full display was devoted to the Jukeses as prime targets for eugenic removal. Right up until the general demise of the US eugenics movement at the end of WWII, the Jukeses were made an example of the kind of problem "sensible" eugenics could cure.
In 2001, however, a poorhouse graveyard was unearthed in Ulster County, and some of the graves there were discovered to be of members of the Jukes clan. Further, some of Estabrook's papers became available to researchers, including his charts of the pseudonyms he and Dugdale had used for the various individuals in the extended family. It emerged that, while indeed there had been plenty of bad hats in the lineage, there had also been some pillars of society, a fact neither Dugdale nor Estabrook had thought worth noting. Further, it appeared the real problem besetting the Jukeses was in most instances just straightforward poverty, which had the effect not only of, in the usual way, enticing or forcing some family members into criminality but also of making others vulnerable as scapegoats. The eugenicists' idea that the family suffered an inheritable biological flaw was simply untenable, as one might gather from the title of a recent book on the subject, The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea (2001) by Elof Axel Carlson. This hasn't, of course, stopped some modern-day self-appointed moral arbiters pointing to the family depicted in Dugdale's and Estabrook's studies as a classic example of the way in which "immorality" can be inherited. It would appear the Jukeses' role as scapegoats is not over yet.
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The Age of Madness
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Re: The Age of Madness
Re: The Age of Madness
I do have to give him credit though, for including in that book "The Machine in Ward Eleven," by Charles Willeford.
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It's scary enough treating livestock like livestock! The thing that's depressing about the eugenics fans and all their ilk is that these large-scale experiments of theirs, performed as they are with insufficient evidence to support any hypothesis -- let alone a particular hypothesis -- are always carried out on other people.
If these guys ever had the courage of their own convictions ("I've fathered a deficient child, therefore I'm off to get castrated in case I father another", or whatever), one might respect them a bit more. As it is, they're just vindictive little scum, really.