By Garda Ghista
World Prout Assembly
October 2005

10/05 - "World Prout Assembly" - Eugenics, an offshoot of social Darwinism, is defined as "the study of methods of improving genetic qualities by selective breeding (especially as applied to human mating)." It is a social philosophy or science that advocates the breeding of higher, more perfect human specimens, specifically through birth control, pre-emptive abortions, compulsory sterilization, selective breeding and marriage restrictions, miscegenation, genetic engineering, immigration control, segregation, and finally extermination.

Eugenics was talked about as far back as Plato, who felt that human breeding should be government-controlled. According to him, the best men and the best women should marry each other, and vice versa. However, it was in the 19th century that Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term "eugenics" in the year 1881. The term is derived from the Greek word which translates to mean well-born or good in birth. He made detailed studies showing how intellectual, moral and personality traits ran in families, concluding that genius and talent, along with other traits such as morality were hereditary. In 1904 he clarified his definition of eugenics as "the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage." From this original definition evolved two definitions: positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics refers to the increased reproduction of people with higher, more advantageous hereditary traits. Negative eugenics refers to segregation, sterilization and genocide of people who have disadvantageous or lower hereditary traits.

As early as 1887 the superintendent of the Cincinnati Sanitarium published the first public document advocating sterilization of criminals. In those days, sterilization meant castration. It was only in 1899 that the procedure of vasectomy was developed and then used on criminals. The Indiana State Reformatory was the first institution in the US to perform sterilizations of criminals - that too, on young boys to stop them from masturbating. Indiana was also the first state to pass a sterilization law in 1897, which stated that "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists" could be forcibly sterilized against their will if so advised by a committee of experts. In 1895 Connecticut became the first state in the US to ban marriage between so-called defective persons. Thereafter 41 other states ratified similar legislation.

After these actions in the U.S., Scandinavian countries along with Denmark became the first European countries to pass similar sterilization laws. In the famous Buck v. Bell case of 1927, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that cutting the Fallopian tubes was a legitimate procedure to stop the birthing of defective or insane offspring.

American scientists were the first, in fact, to begin ranking human beings according to intelligence and culture, and to label particular types of human beings as inferior, based on their immorality, depravity, criminality, or simply their "otherness" - being different from the average, run-of-the-mill Joe Blow. By the early 1900s eugenicists succeeded in legalizing compulsory sterilization of people having one or more of the above characteristics. In addition, between 1898 and 1936, Philippine immigrants became part of the "yellow peril" hysteria and were excluded from entry into the United States, where eugenics ideas had already permeated American social policy.

At the third American Breeders' Association ABA meeting in 1906, delegates divided their research into three categories: (1) general subjects, (2) animal breeding, and (3) plant breeding. In addition, a category called Human Heredity, or Eugenics, was created, and was the genesis of the American eugenics movement. Biologist Charles Davenport quickly became the leader of this new field, and described eugenics as "the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding." He and his colleagues believed unequivocally that criminality was the result of bad genes, meaning poor heredity. Based on this premise, they advocated keeping a data bank of all immigrants, for example, to screen out and deny entry to those with notable defects such as imbecility, insanity, criminality, alcoholism and immorality. Davenport further advocated the practice of sterilization of defective and degenerate human beings, and compared the selective mating of human beings to be as important as horse breeding.

In 1914 Davenport spoke at the first National Conference on Race Betterment and told the delegates about "the importance of marrying, marrying well and having healthy, effective children" - the eugenics movement was in fact the beginning of the scientific legitimization of the racism that gave birth to white American supremacy.

Harvard professor Robert Ward advocated the importance of keeping certain foreigners out of the U.S. and hence promoted a literacy test for immigrants. A few years later, passing a literacy test became required for all immigrants. Another eugenicist, Madison Grant, wrote openly his harshly anti-Semitic views, and once again, after just a few years the problem of Jews was solved with new immigration restriction laws passed in the 1920s. These new laws were to spell disaster for thousands of European Jews in the 1930s who, sensing the mood of the German leadership, saw great danger and sought desperately to emigrate to the U.S. As Stephen Gould wrote, "ideas can be agents [of destruction] as sure as guns and bombs." Harry Laughlin was another prominent eugenicist who originally studied agriculture and chicken breeding and then moved on to studying "feeble-mindedness" and genetic traits of immigrants. He believed that European immigrants coming into the U.S. were biologically inferior. He also promoted compulsory sterilization.

By the second decade of the 20th century, the Eugenics Record Office was established and became the American center for eugenics research, particularly on "cacogenic" (bad-gened) families. Field workers began going out to investigate cacogenic families. Studies were published, which discussed the so-called degenerate paupers and hillbillies, "living in filthy shacks." Today we refer to these same people as the homeless, the impoverished, the economically oppressed sections of society. Nevertheless, in the early 1900s, these pseudo-scientists were completely convinced that all negative social traits in human beings were genetically determined, and hence they saw a crying need to simply delete the genetically defective people. Tragically, this mindset spread to many disciplines, such as psychology, criminal justice, sociology and social work. It further shaped legal policies with regard to crime control.

The field of eugenics in Germany came after the US. Rather, Germany followed eagerly in the footsteps of American scientists, and passed its first sterilization law in 1933, immediately after the Nazis came to power. It was then that the German scientists came into their own element in the promotion of eugenics legislation for the sake of "ennoblement of the race." Eugenics in Germany came to be called "race hygiene." In 1920 two prominent academics, Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, published Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, which translates to Authorization for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life. The paper advocated the "mercy killing" of all patients who were lebensunwert - "unworthy of life." (And who decided which life was unworthy?) For Binding and Hoche, it meant people who were feeble-minded, whose lives were without purpose, and who were a burden to their families and to the society. Binding and Hoche called these people "human ballast," "semi-humans," "defective humanity," "mentally dead," and "empty shells of human beings."

The Germans followed eagerly on the heels of American eugenicists by instituting their own laws, using such euphemistic terms such as Aufartung durch Ausnerzung (physical renewal through elimination) for the said purpose of genetically improving the racial stock of the German people through elimination of both so-called inferiors as well as racial aliens, or immigrants.

As Patterson points out, all these words quickly became the standard terminology of Nazi ideology. After World War I German scientists meticulously followed developments in American eugenics, including the entire legalization of what today can only be called extreme racism, sexism and ageism.

However, again these developments in Germany can be traced back to the activities of eugenicists in the United States. Laughlin's racist statements about non-Nordic races and the "pioneer families" of America led to the formation in 1936 of the Pioneer Fund, which was primarily funded by the textile millionaire Wickliffe Draper, who shared the deeply racist views of the eugenicists and who financially supported their research and publications for the remaining sixty years of his life. Taking eugenics one step further, he advocated throughout his life that black people in America must be repatriated to Africa.

When the Nazis gained power in the mid-thirties, already more than 20 institutes for racial hygiene existed in Germany. As Friedrich Zahn said, the goal of these institutes was to prevent inferior life and generic degeneration by carefully targeting those parts of the population that were undesirable. The first mission of the new Nazi regime was sterilization, as the first step towards racial cleansing. Thus by 1933 sterilization was conducted on all patients having mental and physical disorders who resided in state hospitals and nursing homes. The law included people affected by blindness, deafness, physical deformity, manic-depressive psychosis, epilepsy, schizophrenia and feeble-mindedness. By 1935, Dr. Gerhard Wagner was advocating that the sterilization law include Jews. However, this inclusion became unnecessary with the advent of the "final solution" to the Jewish problem. The government proceeded to set up health clinics all over Germany, with a staff that presided over and determined which patients would be sterilized. By this time, in 1933, the U.S. had already sterilized more than 15,000 citizens who resided either in prisons or in homes for the mentally ill. Hitler was a great supporter of eugenics, sterilization, and the breeding of a superior human race. The total number of Germans sterilized under the Nazi regime range from 300,000 to 400,000 - all in the name of Nordic supremacy. The U.S. had also passed immigration laws that banned immigrants from non-Nordic countries ? another law which greatly impressed their German counterparts. German scientists further admired American marriage and miscegenation laws.

In 1939 Germany's leading race journal, Archiv for Rassen - und Gesellschaftsbiologie, reported that the University of Missouri had refused to admit black students. A few months later the journal reported that the American Medical Association refused to give membership to black doctors. By this time, Jewish doctors in Germany were allowed to practice only on other Jews. A series of German films produced between 1935 and 1937 declared that Jews were particularly prone to mental retardation and to immorality.

The American psychiatrist, Foster Kennedy, was known for his open support of killing mentally retarded people. American anthropologist Lothrop Stoddard, in his popular book, The Rising Tide of Color Against White-World Supremacy, wrote that the progress of civilization was the result of "Nordic blood," which was "clean, virile, genius-bearing blood, streaming down the ages through the unerring action of heredity, which will multiply itself, solve our problems and sweep us on to higher and nobler destinies." Based on this premise, Stoddard warned the public about the less civilized people of eastern and southern Europe as well as Africans and Asians.

Dr. Carl Schneider, Dean of the Faculty of Medicine at University of Heidelberg, became scientific adviser to the euthanasia program, under which the German government murdered thousands of mentally and physically handicapped German citizens in gas chambers. At the same time, the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute was collecting huge amounts of data on the physical and psychological traits of Jews.

In 1939 Hitler gave the order that the mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed and physically defective and handicapped citizens, who were thus an embarrassment to the Aryan race, should be annihilated - slaughtered. However, he first declared war, because with focus on the war, this slaughter could take place almost unnoticed by the world. And so it did. Hitler put his personal physician, Karl Brandt, along with Philip Bouhler, in charge of what the Nuremberg trials would later describe as "the systematic and secret execution of the aged, insane, incurably ill, or deformed children and other persons by gas, lethal injections, and diverse other means in nursing homes, hospitals, and asylums." Children were the first to be slaughtered, either by starvation, lethal doses of the sedative luminal, sleeping pills, morphine or scopolamine. After the children, began the slaughter of handicapped adults. As the world looked away oblivious, the eugenics movement moved onwards - from sterilization to mass murder. The eugenicists found it a logical, rational step forward. Most of the people involved were medical doctors and university professors.

Many famous Americans supported eugenics, including John Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell, G. Stanley Hall, John H. Kellogg, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Margaret Sanger and Theodore Roosevelt. Every step that the Germans took was preceded by an action taken by the Americans. The Germans took the ideas of American scientists and carried them out, to the horror of the world. The moral difference between the two countries' eugenicists was negligible. The difference was in the numbers. In the United States, several thousand or scores of thousands of people in some way defective were sterilized. In Germany the numbers were higher. The Germans moved to euthanasia and then to genocide. But, the mentality of both groups of scientists in the United States and Germany was identical: an unshakable belief in the idea that white Caucasians of Nordic stock were superior to all other races, that pure Nordic stock should be increased and races of "other" stock should be decreased or annihilated. American scientists worked hand in hand with German scientists, loving their work and "egging" them on. They knew fully well what the Germans began to do to the so-called defective species of human beings.

American scientists were accessories to murder and to genocide. The root of the research in both countries was the mental malady called extreme racism. It was hate crimes on a scale hitherto not witnessed in human history. The publication of The Bell Curve in 1994 by Charles Murray only further entrenched and expanded the racist views of eugenicists. The book openly disparages the US government's attempts to provide social programs to the poor and downtrodden, claiming that such assistance to inferior people will lead to the demise of American civilization. After Katrina, Murray wrote an article in the Journal called "The Hallmark of the Underclass," wherein he declared that Katrina provided irrefutable evidence that "the underclass has been growing during all the years that people were ignoring it - [that the images from New Orleans] show us the face of the hard problem: those of the looters and thugs, and those of inert women dong nothing to help themselves or their children. They are the underclass." Murray portrays the Katrina victims as beyond redemption, beyond rehabilitation. According to him, they are an evolutionary dead-end, and hence not worthy of mercy.

While one can postulate, as Laughlin did, that eugenics is a "pure science" dedicated to discovering fundamental truths regarding race and family-stock improvement, one needs to ask the question: if a human being feels no hereditary moral or spiritual distinction between himself and other human beings, then why the need for this research? The bottom line is that eugenics is preoccupied with the scientific establishment of distinctions and differences between human races rather than their commonalities. It is true that biotechnological eugenics may lead to breakthroughs in human evolution. The only safe solution would be that this research be conducted by moralists under the open scrutiny of the public. Such scientists would imbibe that moral compunction to utilize all knowledge gained for the pursuit of the welfare of all human beings.

Notes

1. Merriam-Webster?s Medical Dictionary, 2002 Merriam-Webster, Inc.
2. Charles Patterson, "Improving the Herd: From Animal Breeding to Genocide," in Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals and the Holocaust, New York: Lantern Books, 2002, p. 81.
3. Barbara Cruz, "Eugenics Past and Present," Social Education; 9/1/2001.
4. http://www.mugu.com/galton/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scope-aims.htm
5. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, p. 87.
6. Barbara Cruz, "Eugenics Past and Present," Social Education; 9/1/2001.
7. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, p. 88.
8. James A. Tyner, "The Geopolitics of Eugenics and the Exclusion of Philippine Immigrants from the United States," The Geographical Review, 1/1/1999.
9. Ibid, p. 83.
10. Congressman Charles Rangel made a comment on C-Span in the last week of September, 2005, saying that George Bush has done one good thing - amidst all his numerous crimes. He has shattered forever the myth of white supremacy!
11. Charles Patterson, Eternal Treblinka, p. 85.
12. Paul Lombardo, "'The American Breed': Nazi eugenics and the origins of the Pioneer Fund," Albany Law Review; 3/22/2002.
13. Barbara Cruz, "Eugenics Past and Present," Social Education; 9/1/2001.
14. Charles Murray and Richard J. Herrnstein, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, New York: Free Press, 1994.
15. Bill Van Auken, "William Bennett's 'hypothetical' on racial genocide,"
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/oct2005/benn-o03.shtml.
16. Peter Augustine Lawler, "The Utopian eugenics of our time." Symposium. Perspectives on Political Science; 3/22/2003.