Posted on 11/27/2004, 11:39:14 AM by Lindykim
War Against the Weak Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race By Edwin Black Review by Johannes L. Jacobse
In War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Edwin Black exhaustively chronicles the rise of the American eugenics movement. Eugenics ("good birth" in Greek) is considered crackpot science today, but at one time it captured the hearts and minds of America's leading thinkers, including social scientists, educators, judges, philanthropists, and clergy.
America in the late 1800s and early 1900s was particularly susceptible to eugenic ideology, writes Black. The divisions between people were marked not by economic class but by race, which compelled social analysts to think in group terms. Crime and poverty were considered ethnic - and in some cases generational - phenomena, rather than individual incidents. The resistance to quick assimilation demonstrated by the eighteen million immigrants between 1890 and 1920 threatened social cohesion. Regional trends like the absorption of Mexicans after the Mexican-American war, the mass influx of Chinese laborers, and the numbers of emancipated slaves affirmed the fear that America was tearing itself apart.
The father of the modern eugenics movement, England's Francis J. Galton, gave the pseudo-science its first taste of scientific credibility. Intoxicated by the ideas of Charles Darwin, the rediscovered genetic theories of Gregor Mendel, and the secularized philosophy of Herbert Spencer, Galton concluded that assembling data about social heredity could predict which families and ethnic groups would produce socially desirable offspring.
Eugenics never found widespread acceptance in England, but in America it was a different story. The American movement found a leader in Charles Davenport, a biologist with a flair for organization, fundraising, and promotion. Drawing upon Galton's work and funded by the Carnegie Foundation, Davenport opened the Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1904. Davenport wasted no time. In short order, a battalion of social workers fanned into the countryside to chart the characteristics of people they considered undesirable (blacks, poor, infirm, criminals, alcoholics, etc.). Thousands of people were forcibly sterilized (6,000 between 1907 and 1927; 36,000 by 1940). Children were taken from their families. Criminals were castrated.
Some states passed legislation supporting sterilization, and the nation soon found itself considering a federal policy of forced sterilization. The eugenics movement found its poster child in Carrie Buck, the daughter of a prostitute. After giving birth to an illegitimate child, Carrie was forcibly institutionalized and declared "feebleminded by the laws of heredity."
Oliver Wendell Holmes was the chief jurist hearing the case. Carrie lost 8-1. Writing for the majority, Holmes arrogantly declared: We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if we could not call upon those who sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices… compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… three generations of imbeciles is enough.
It was music to the eugenicists' ears. Common people were more clear-headed. The arbitrary decisions about what constituted social desirability struck many Americans not only as capricious but as evil. The movement was resisted, critiqued, and mocked at every turn, and justifiably so. It was challenged in the courts and editorial pages. Support for it finally began to wane.
In Germany, the opposite happened. The American ideas were enthusiastically embraced by German thinkers, resulting in the murder of 250,000 disabled Germans between 1935 and 1945 alone. Black believes that the inspiration for Hitler's Final Solution drew more from the ideas of American eugenicists than from Hitler's nationalism. Here the real evil that eugenic ideas could unleash was revealed to anyone willing to look.
However War Against the Weak displays one glaring inconsistency. Early on Black praises Planned Parenthood, but Planned Parenthood preserves the eugenic ideal more visibly than any other American organization today. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood and the patron saint of the contemporary abortion movement, was an ardent and unrepentant eugenicist. Black roundly criticizes her, but why he finds it necessary to throw this bone to Planned Parenthood is unclear. Black concludes his impressive work with an ominous warning:
After Hitler eugenics did not disappear. It renamed itself. What has thrived loudly for decades quietly took postwar refuge under the labels human genetics and genetic counseling.
Genetic data banks, designer babies, and plans for massive social engineering projects are run by a new league of eugenicists that threaten the weak on a scale about which early eugenicists could only dream. Only one precept can prevent a slide into this dark age of war against the weak, cautions Black: "Nothing should be done to exclude, infringe, repress, or harm a person because of his genetic makeup." A simpler commandment will do: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Johannes L. Jacobse is a Greek Orthodox priest and edits the website www.orthodoxytoday.org. Further Information: Official website for "War Against the Weak"
A form of eugenics is being practiced now. Pro abortion liberals have a plummeting birth rate. Good reason to get the whole abortion issue out of politics for good.
There is nothing wrong with "eugenics" as long as participation is voluntary. And to equate "genetic counseling" with something bad is ridiculous.
It's really sneaky, we get a few people from everywhere together and mix them all up. ^^
IOW, he's blaming Hitler on the US.
Barf. :\
Margaret Sanger, the originator of the abortion movement, was a racist and eugenics advocate. She wanted to eliminate poverty by eliminating the poor.
The federal government is prohibited from funding abortion, as it is not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. That doesn't seem to stop our politicians from violating it in a wholesale manner on a whole variety of issues.
On the other hand, having liberals off themselves may be worth our tax money.
Ping
The infamous Nuremburg Statutes were modeled on Virginia's eugenics code. Just as the 1968 ban on specified weaponry was almost a literal translation of a Nazi law. Influence runs both ways.
From the Planned Parenthood Mission Statement:
---International Family Planning
Planned Parenthood Federation of America affirms the fundamental right of each individual to manage his/her fertility free from coercion. It is Planned Parenthood's policy:
to support international programs which are designed to increase access to safe and effective means of voluntary fertility regulation;
to advocate and assist in the expansion of voluntary family planning services throughout the world;
to encourage public and governmental attitudes and policies favorable to the continuation and expansion of United States support for international voluntary family planning programs;
to provide leadership in encouraging other countries to address population issues and to develop their own effective voluntary family planning programs;
to assist community groups, agencies, and institutions in developing countries to undertake innovative, effective, and self-supporting voluntary family planning programs.---
Also from their Mission Statement:
---Population
It is the policy of Planned Parenthood Federation of America to advance understanding of the interrelationship between population growth and the quality of human life.
Voluntary family planning programs and sound population policies contribute to the process of socioeconomic development and to family health, particularly in countries where rapid population growth hinders development efforts. Therefore, the Federation is committed to providing education in the communities it serves to enable people to understand the scope of world population growth and its impact on the economic, political, social, and physical environment we all must share.
[Adopted 1984]---
Most of the population conrtol and family planning efforts are being conducted in "developing countries", i.e. populations of color. Is this so different from some of the "outreach" programs advocated by Margaret Sanger and other Eugenics proponents of the Early 20th century?
"Nothing should be done to exclude, infringe, repress, or harm a person because of his genetic makeup."
Sounds like a whole new field for Affirmative Action.
Actually, if we were only a LITTLE BIT selective, by any set of objective measures, about immigration, we would do far better than any eugenics program.
Immigration of PhDs from Russia and Asia is good. Immigration of criminals from Mexico is bad. Even the cost of an airplane ticket is selcetive enough to raise the quality of immigrants.
I am in favour of voluntary eugenics -- I can't imagine why the self-righteous would insist on the duty of people they do not know, to bear Tay-Sachs babies and watch them die, or to perpetuate Huntingtons Chorea or other well known genetic weaknesses in families that choose to end the problem with their own generation. I do not see any problem in encouraging people to have fewer children if they can't support the ones they already have. The law in Georgia that prevented girls from getting more welfare when they had more babies cut the out of wedlock birth rate 40% in the first year of implementation.
We do not insist that the Volkswagen Corporation be dismantled and people forbidden from driving their cars because Hitler had the idea first. And I have never understood the difference between binding burdens on other people and forbidding them from enjoying their pleasures because you in your high mightiness know better than they do how to run their lives.
So??? As long as initial participation in and choice of final result is voluntary, who cares??
But what if it no longer became voluntary? What if insurance companies insisted on genetic counseling prior to covering a pregnancy or a child? Genetically "faulty" children would be excluded from coverage.
As long as it's not mandated by law, it's voluntary. In the case of the hypothetical insurance company--there are sure to be OTHER insurance companies that will offer coverage, although perhaps at higher rates.
As for this story I believe I smell ozone in the air.
Here kitty,kitty,kitty,kitty.....................
The key word is voluntary. Too often, it isn't.
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