At the turn of the 20th Century, rapid industrialization and urbanization led to a social upheaval,
defined by goals for a civilization free of violence, disease, and mental ailments.
However, the means by which this Utopian society would be attempted would include some of
the most profound ethical violations in the history of the United States.
The President was behind it, liberals were behind it, conservatives were behind it.
Even the Catholic Church at one point was behind it.
Intense growth of American industry, agricultural mechanization, and widespread immigration
led to the first major migration away from the farms and into the city which was now expanding
faster than adequate housing could be provided.
The solution to the modern problems of an industrialized society required increased
government involvement in the social sphere, a philosophy known as progressivism.
The construct of scientific management offered a methodical means of social engineering.
Geneticists of the age could prove, through the use of human pedigrees and their knowledge
of plant and animal genetics, that degeneracy was an inheritable trait.
It seemed only right that if a society free of all mental and physical ailments,
free of violence and crime, illiteracy and foolishness, it seemed only right to end the reproductive
capabilities of people expressing these traits.
Eugenics was the result of an America unwilling to make social changes, an upper class
fearful of its laboring counterparts.
Eugenics placed the blame of a social quandary on individual races and classes
and thus freed from culpability, the industrial, scientific, and political bearings of the time.
Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 1910.
Charles B. Davenport along with Harry H. Laughlin, both biologists and members of The
American Breeders Association, found the Eugenics Record Office, with financial help
from the Carnegie Institution.
The ERO would be the headquarters of eugenic research in the United States for
the next 34 years.
Using various research methods including human pedigrees, hereditary questionnaires,
interviewing groups of special interest such as circus performers, and collecting census data,
the ERO was able to justify the administration of eugenic laws nationwide
including immigration and marriage restrictions, race segregation, and forced sterilization
of criminals and other undesirables.
The ERO, however, was not only able to justify the eugenics atrocities, but integrated them
into popular culture to make eugenics and related terms, such as race hygiene, household words.
Popular literature published in the 20's, often donned eugenics in their subject matter
such as these manuals on raising a healthy family.
Clergymen preached of the necessity for good marriages.
Perhaps even more disturbing were the contests held at many state fairs, where awards
were given to the fittest family. Those with the purest pedigrees and undoubtedly the most
attractive phenotypes would receive awards such as this medal with an inscription reading,
'Yea, I have a goodly heritage.'
The eugenics movements spawned lots of people who were considered even in their own time,
out on the fringe. Who even endorsed such things as euthanasia, but that was not a mainline
part of the movement. It certainly became parts of the movement internationally,
but not so much here in America.
On March 9, 1907, the Indiana State Senate in a vote of 28 to 16, made history by being the first
jurisdiction in the world to force the sterilization of citizens it deemed unfit.
Unfit to exist, unfit to reproduce.
Connecticut was soon to follow.
By the time Laughlin of the ERO, had published his suggestion on how to implement legislation
for forced human sterilization, 12 states had already put into place sterilization laws of their own.
By 1924, 3000 socially inadequate people had been sterilized.
That same year based on Laughlin's model, Aubrey E. Strode, drafted Virginia's Eugenical
Sterilization Act in an attempt to rid the state of defective persons.
It passed in Virginia's General Assembly by a landslide.
Immediately, the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble-Minded, selected 17-year-old
Carrie Buck to be the first human sterilized under the act.
Carrie had a feeble-minded child, the result of a raping by one of her relatives, and was the
daughter of a feeble-minded mother, Emma, already a resident on the Virginia colony.
Carrie, purportedly carrying the genetic traits of feeble-mindedness and sexual promiscuity,
was a fine candidate as the law stated those to be sterilized must be probable potential
parents of socially inadequate offspring.
Carrie's feeble-mindedness was based on a mailed disposition by Laughlin who had never met Carrie
and her sexual promiscuity was based on the testimony of her school teacher,
that she sent flirtatious notes to school boys.
Carrie became the first person in Virginia to be sterilized under the new law
on October 19, 1927.
In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, official deliverer of the opinion of the United States
Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell, "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."
Vivian, Carrie's feeble-minded daughter, received B's on her first grade report card.
Buck v. Bell justified the sterilizations of over 8000 Virginians.
Over the history of the United States, 33 states have enacted statutes under which 60,000
Americans underwent compulsory sterilizations.
To this day, Buck v. Bell has never been overruled.
"Nazi Germany embraced the eugenics movement from the United States and just upped it in
its efficiency."
It should now be apparent that Germany's racial theories did not take place in a vacuum.
Nor can the fundamental philosophies and beliefs that would eventually lead to the atrocities
of the Nazi state be attributed solely to German authorities.
In fact, German scientists expressed a great affinity towards the US eugenic laws.
A young Adolph Hitler wrote positively of the US's immigration restrictions.
More specifically, how the law refuses immigration on principle by simply excluding certain races
from naturalization, in his book, "Mein Kampf".
Shortly prior to mobilizing the most comprehensive eugenics legislation in modern history,
Gerhard Wagner, head of the National Socialist Physician League, stated that America's
eugenic policies should be used as a model for Germany to follow.
Marie Kopp, of the American Committee on Maternal Health, proclaimed that the Nazi system
of seeking out those to be sterilized was administered in entire fairness and was
formulated after careful study of the California Experiment which had been responsible
for 2500 of the 3000 involuntary sterilizations in the US prior to 1924.
The ERO boasted on how the German statute on race hygiene read almost identical to
Laughlin's Model Sterilization Law.
Laughlin had such a significant impact on Nazi racial legislature that he was awarded an honorary
degree from the University of Heidelberg.
Laughlin thanked the university for reaffirming the common understanding of German and American
scientists of the nature of eugenics.
This common understanding would be translated into the law on preventing hereditarily ill progeny
which would be responsible for over 375,000 sterilizations in the Nazi state.
A number so impressive, one American eugenics advocate complained:
The sterilization program of the Nazi state modeled after Laughlin's Law and other
US eugenic theories, would be a gross prelude to the exterminations of the Holocaust.
But even before the gas chambers were open for the racist and anti-Semitic persecutions
we know all too well, they were opened in October 1939, for the systematic murder of the
mentally ill citizens of Germany.
Sadly, this practice was not faced with nearly as much stigmatism within the states
as euthanasia had long been discussed by American eugenicists as a solution for the feeble-minded.
"So, when people saw how eugenics can be easily be abused by the power of the state, they said
that's it, this is a monstrous idea that we should keep a distance from."
It is now the dawn of the 21st Century and advancements in technology and medicine
have excelled beyond even the most ambitious of projections.
Science that eugenicists of the 20th Century could only have dreamed of appear in our news
every single day.
"of stem cell research..."
"and picking the genes of our children..."
"Cloning of embryos for the destruction..."
"discovered stem cells in a new place..."
"if the embryo has a genetic disease..."
"genetic tests..."
Is it a danger? It's always a danger when there are technologies that can be used and abused.
And I think the history of the eugenics movement tells us when a technology actually exists,
people will try to use it - sometimes for reasons it was never intended to be used.
With the mapping of the human genome, prenatal testing, implantation genetic diagnosis,
therapeutic cloning, and stem cell therapy we find ourselves entering a promising world
of genetic medicine. It is with this great power, however, that comes the need for even
greater responsibility, sensitivity, and accountability.
Humanity truly does now possess a powerful tool for good. However, we must heed the warnings
founded by the coercive legislation and beliefs of the eugenics movement before we may venture into
the frontier of modern genetic medicine. Tragedy may very well give way to triumph but
how that will be recorded in the history books of tomorrow,
will be determined by our actions today.