Adoption History: Eugenics – University of Oregon

Worries about the bad blood of children available for adoption were a prominent feature of the adoption landscape during the first four decades of the twentieth century. They help to explain why most child welfare professionals favored family preservation over adoption. At the time, a vigorous eugenics movement sought to control the reproduction of genetically inferior people through sterilization (called negative eugenics) and encourage the reproduction of genetically superior people (called positive eugenics). The movement drew support from Americans of all political persuasions. Henry Chapin, a famous pediatrician whose wife, Alice, founded one of the first specialized adoption agencies, claimed that the divergent fertility rates of rich and poor were fueling the demand for adoptable babies because citizens with better genetic endowment were more likely to suffer from infertility. For Chapin, eugenic factors always mattered in adoption. Not babies merely, but better babies, are wanted.

Fears about childrens quality or stock were shared by ordinary people as well as professionals and policy-makers. In 1928, one couple wrote to the U.S. Childrens Bureau, We are very anxious to adopt a baby but would like to get one that we know about its parentage. Are there any homes or orphanages where a person can find out whether there is insanity, fits, or other hereditary diseases in its ancestors? We would like to have one from Christian parentage. In addition to religious preferences, specifications for gender, racial, ethnic, and national qualities in children illustrated popular ideas about heredity. Physical health, mental health, criminality, educability, sexual morality, intelligence, and temperament were all associated with blood.

Before 1940, eugenic concerns were expressed frequently and bluntly. Henry Herbert Goddard, a national authority on feeble-minded children, insisted that compassion for needy children was shortsighted because adoption was a crime against those yet unborn. The eugenic threat adoption posed, according to Goddard, was directly tied to illegitimacy. Unmarried mothers were likely to be feeble-minded themselves and have feeble-minded children whose adoptions would contaminate the gene pool by reproducing future generations of defectives. Goddard advocated segregating these children and adults in benevolent institutions, where their dangerous sexuality could be contained.

Even professionals who believed in making adoption work believed that it was a social crime to place inferior children with parents who expectedand deservednormal children. Agencies sometimes required parents to return children if and when abnormal characteristics appeared and laws, such as the Minnesota Adoption Law of 1917, treated feeble-mindedness as cause for annulment. Medical writers in the popular press warned parents to be careful whom you adopt. Adopters faced frightening risks because children unlucky enough to need new parents were also unlucky enough to be genetic lemons.

Tragic stories of unregulated adoptions which ignored or overlooked the hard facts of bad heredity were publicized by reformers determined to institute minimum standards and protect couples from their own foolish desires to adopt newborns and infants. Professionals used mental tests and other assessment techniques to reveal hard-to-detect problems. Elaborate genealogies, extending well beyond parents to grandparents and other natal relatives, were considered evidence of thoroughness in child placement. Case records showed that many social workers expected anti-social behavior of all kinds to be passed intergenerationally from birth parents to children. Nature-nurture studies often reflected eugenic convictions about the heritability of intelligence and tried to establish scientifically the maximum tolerable gap between hereditary background and adoptive home.

Many people believe that eugenics disappeared in America after the specter of Nazism made eugenics synonymous with racism and genocide. While public discussion of taint and degeneration certainly decreased after World War II, blood and biology remained central themes in adoption history. Anxieties about miscegenation in transracial adoptions and international adoptions, as well as strenuous efforts to make racial predictions and offer genetic counseling in cases of mixed-race infants illustrate that eugenics did not disappear so much as change into a less aggressive, more polite form.

Continued here:

Adoption History: Eugenics - University of Oregon

Eugenics news, articles and information: – NaturalNews.com

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Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics

The American Historical Review

Description: The American Historical Review (AHR) is the official publication of the American Historical Association (AHA). The AHA was founded in 1884 and chartered by Congress in 1889 to serve the interests of the entire discipline of history. Aligning with the AHAs mission, the AHR has been the journal of record for the historical profession in the United States since 1895the only journal that brings together scholarship from every major field of historical study. The AHR is unparalleled in its efforts to choose articles that are new in content and interpretation and that make a contribution to historical knowledge. The journal also publishes approximately one thousand book reviews per year, surveying and reporting the most important contemporary historical scholarship in the discipline.

Coverage: 1895-2009 (Vol. 1, No. 1 - Vol. 114, No. 5)

The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal. Moving walls are generally represented in years. In rare instances, a publisher has elected to have a "zero" moving wall, so their current issues are available in JSTOR shortly after publication. Note: In calculating the moving wall, the current year is not counted. For example, if the current year is 2008 and a journal has a 5 year moving wall, articles from the year 2002 are available.

ISSN: 00028762

EISSN: 19375239

Subjects: History, American Studies, History, Area Studies

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Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics

Eugenics and pandemics | AGAINST THE GLOBALIST POPULATION …

I have been working on my submission to the state prosecutor here in Larisa for the past few days. And driving my Greek translator crazy by my frequent changes. But the effort is paying off, I think. The key evidencethat Greeces Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Billionaire George Soros both have direct knowledge of my blog, and evencopy from my blog (spelling mistakes and all!), now appears in aclearer order and is laid out in a better visual way. Its the best I can do, anyway,given my lack of skills with the Paint programme. What do you think?

TSIPRAS SOROS EVID

The evidence that Tsipras and Soros read my blog and copy from my blog reinforces the notion that they believemy blogis credible, factual and accurate. By extension, it is reasonable to say they believe my accusations against them are credible, factual and accurate. And that they believeothers also findthese credible. At any rate, with such illustrious readers as Soros and Tsipras, I can no longer be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist.

As for the progress of my case, the police in Ajia questioned two key witnesses at the beginning of November. The file is now back in Larisa. Due to the Christmas breakI will not be able to view it until the New Year, indeed from 10th January onwards. Painful experience in Austria has taught me this is the stage where key evidence disappears from the file or the file disappears altogether. This time, I am going to watch overthe filelike a hawk. Its time for somejustice!

It seems, the state prosecutor should take about amonth to determine whether the case goes to trial. If, given the overwhelming evidence of a crime, he or she does not decide to let it go to trial, I will take legal action because it will be a clear case of corruption.

The whole process may, however,be delayed if Tsipras calls yet another election in the New Year as he and banksters like Soros bring Greece evercloser to total financial and social collapse. After all, strong evidence thatTsipras is one of my readers implicates him directlyin the attempt to silence me in April 2015, and gives him a motive to suppress the case by various means.

Anyway, this is the latest, and hopefully, the final draft of my submission on the involvement of Tsipras and Soros. Information concerning individuals who have been stalked and harassed by Theodekti Vallianatou is omitted for the sake of privacy. It is staggering that the Bishop of Volos and Archbishop of Athens have held their protective hand over Theodekti Vallianatou. But then again, the Archbishop of Athens has had numerous meeting with Tsipras and seems to have good relations with him. Tsiprasabandoned plans for more church taxes.

Most of the rest of the information in this reportis already in the public domain.

SUMMARY

You dont write on your blog what everyone else does. Ive called the police. They are coming to confine you.

These were the words of Theodekti Vallianatou after I escaped from an attempt to lock me in an office. It happened just as I was about to leave a monastery in Anatoli, Greece, in April 2015. I thought my end had come.

Meanwhile, new facts in my case, which emerged in September and in October, establish that both Greeces Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras and Billionaire George Soros have direct and personal knowledge of my blog, birdflu666. That underlines that even if I do not write what anyone else does as Theodekti Vallianatou, my blog is, nevertheless, factual, accurate and credible. Powerful people like Soros and Tsipras do not waste time on reading the blogs of minor conspiracy theorists.

In this report, I will demonstrate Soros and Tsipras had

* knowledge of my blog as proved (Section A.I ) by the reproduction by Alexis Tsipras in his Greek language tweets of a rare spelling mistake I make in my blog post reporting on Tsipras meeting with Austrian Chancellor Werner Fay(n)mann and as proved (Section A.II) by a linguistic analysis of a text written by George Soros.

* a motive for silencing me for disclosing information about their wrongful activities in relation to finance, epidemics and vaccines which pose a significant danger to the public health (Section B).

Proof that Soros and Tsipras not only read my blog, but copy my blog, even a spelling mistake, underlines that they consider the information on my blog to be credible. By extension, they also consider my accusations against them both as credible. Threatened by the exposure of their wrongdoing on my blog, I allege they looked for ways to silence me.

* a means to do it in the form of networks in Greece, which could improperly influence Theodekti Vallianatou, particularly her brother Grigories Vallianatos, by offering financial or other benefits (Section C).

Vallianatos is a graduate of the London School of Economics as is George Soros and Soros close associate former Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou. Vallianatos is also a long timer former advisor of Papandreou.

* an opportunity in the form of the isolated location of the monastery under the control of Theodekti Vallianatou, the sister of Grigoris Valliantos, as the Abbess of St John the Forerunner monastery, Anatoli, in Greece (Section D).

Ordering native English speaker and Oxford graduate Theoktisti to leave the office (Theoktisti would have testified that my blog met the criteria of investigative journalism), Theodekti tried to use a special law that allows a person to be forcibly confined for one month on the basis of the testimony of only two people. Her plan was to lock me into the office and have me escorted by police and pyschiatric nurses straight from there to a waiting ambulance. I would have been taken to a pyschiatric unit within a collapsing country, whose medical institutions are rife with corruption, an easy picking for any international medical mafia flush with cash to offer bribes, kickbacks and other inducements to staff entrusted with treatign me.

Only after one month of forced medication does Greek law requires that the victim is presented to a judge to assess their state. My lawyer is of the view I would never have come out alive. Indeed, it is likely that forced medication would have made me so incoherent that any judge would have ordered me to continued to be detained. Even if I had been discharged, something which likely would have happened only after forced medication, I would have been left on the streets of Greece with no money, no ID, no phone and no language. Either way my fate would have been sealed.

Theodekti Vallianatou could reasonably have expected that her actions would have set in motion a chain of events that would have resulted in my death. That is why her actions can be called a murder attempt. Her use of physical violence as she attempted to lock me into her office and on other occasions that day and the next underlines the malevolence of her motivation.

I was a victim of the trend of using pyschiatry to silence whistleblowers. Four tax inspectors in Hessen, Germany, have been awarded compensation after they were classified as paranoid and suspended from their jobs and an investigation into a CDU party donation scandal.

http://www.welt.de/debatte/kolumnen/deutsch-sued-west/article149957266/Hessen-schickt-seine-Steuerfahnder-zum-Psychiater.html

A government official who warned about the deficiences in the G36 gun had to take legal action to avoid being sent to a pyschiatrist and declared mad by his employer, the German army.

http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article141784634/Bundeswehr-soll-Waffenexperten-drangsaliert-haben.html

And in April, 2015, just as the snow was beginning to thaw on top of the mountain where the monastery, it was my turn. Yet again.

I was an investigative journalist performing a public watchdog function and about to disappear under the pretext of being mentally ill. There would have been no immediate dead body to have to explain away. Yes, there is even a possibility that the readers of this blog would not have noticed I was no longer writing it. My blog has been hacked before. It could have been continued by an unseen hand, albeit without the punch or even coherence of my usual posts to discredit me in a new, more subtle way. That is a possibility.

You dont speak Greek. No one will believe you. Everyone will believe me. The sisters will say whatever I want them to, Theodekti had said, confident that her plan would work.

Your blog posts show you are mentally ill, she continued, mocking me.

Fast forward eight months later and I can present two new separate pieces of evidence proving that both Tsipras and Soros read my blog. These separate proofs emerged within ten days of each other, implying that Tsipras and Soros have a close working relationship when it comes to me.

According to the Wirtschafts Woche, Soros sponsored Alexis Tsipras as early as 2012. I have reported on the links between Soros and Tsipras on my blog as early as January and February 2015.I have accused Tsipras of being a puppet of the banks injuring the Greek people.

The new proof that both Tsipras and Soros have knowledge of my blog also corroborates claims I made in my police report in July that they were the ones who had the motive, networks and opportunity to silence me. I allege, it makes them, in fact, the prime suspects as the ultimate orchestrators in a premedidated, carefully planned attempt to murder me in April, 2015 by Theodekti Vallianatou.

I allege Soros and Tsipras are at the top of the chain of command and Theodekti Vallianatou at the bottom. The brother of Theodekti, Grigoris Vallianatos is a journalist, and a mayoral candidate for Athens, Grigoris Vallianatos is interested in obtaining high political office and is dependent on donations.

http://www.taz.de/!5048278/

In addition, Grigories Vallianatos, Soros and Papandreou as well as Maurice Saatchi are all graduates of the London School of Economics, creating a particularly close network.

On my blog, I have presented evidence that Soros is at the centre of a shadowy network of Billionaires with mulitple links to key scientists and organizations and media at the centre of the engineered Ebola outbreak. The Billionaires call themselves the Good Club and met in New York in 2009. They discussed ways of curbing overpopulation according to the Sunday Times, including infectious diseases.

Bill Gates and David Rockefeller are other members. I note that David Rockefeller has close links to David Petraeus, the head of KKR, a company which benefits from the policies of Tsipras. A sub company of KKR is Singular Logic, which is in control of every aspect of Greeces elections, and apparently with independent few controls.

Presenting their activities as philanthropy, my blog has presented evidence that they were, in fact, violating laws, funding shady scientists and a complex network of media, NGOs and organizations hiding vital information from the publc. Indeed, their enterprise are dangerous to the public and their success depends entirely on their ability to keep their activities out of the public eye.

As a journalist and a blogger, who had credibility because of my accurate reporting of the swine flu scandal of 2009, I allege I represented an obstacle to their plans for mass epidemic vaccination campaigns with risky vaccines.

I have also explained how the creation of money in the hands of private banks and the resultant interest is crushing countries like Greece. As a science journalist who has some knowledge of economics (my father had a doctorate in economics) I was able to connect the global plans for mass vaccination with the financial crisis. Martial law to control a financial collapse due to debt can be declared under the pretext of having to stop an epidemic.

Knowing the legal avenue of defamation was closed to them because my reports were factual, I allege they chose an illegal avenue.

Threatened by my exposure of their wrong doing on a truly vast scale, I suggest they have considering ways and means to silence me for a long while.

I allege that their desire to silence me took on a new urgency after an Open Letter I wrote to the Chair of the health committee of the UK Parliament in February 2015 warning about Lord Maurice Saatchis Medical Innovation Bill seemed to produce a result. I also called for an investigation into the activities of Soros and Bill Gates in relation to the Ebola epidemic.

At the end of my Open Letter in February, I wrote that I lived in fear of my life because of my investigative journalism activities, which exposed the crimes of a powerful elite. Within two months carefully premeditated attempt was to deprive me of my civil liberties without due process and silence me was made.

The evidence I present in this report suggests a plausible chain of events is that Lord Maurice Saatchi contacted fellow LSE graduate George Soros about my role in blocking his legislation. Soros, in turn contacted his friend in Greece, Papandreou, also an LSE graduate. Papandreou, in turn, contacted his friend and long time advisor Grigoris Vallianatos, also an LSE graduate. He rang Theodekti Vallianatou in the monastery, and told her to come to Athens immediately to flesh out the details of a plan they already had to remove me.

At ay rate, the fact is Theodekti Vallianatou made what she called a spontaneous visit to Athens immediately Lord Saatchis Medical Innovation Bill was unexpectedly blocked by the Liberal Democrats in February. There she stayed for six weeks giving her plenty of time to plan my removal in secrecy together with her brother, a lawyer. Although she is an Abbess and although Easter is a special time, and although the second in command, Theoktisti was away much of the time giving a pre scheduled talk in the USA, Theodekti did not return to the monastery until just before Easter Sunday. Shortly afterwards, Theodekti seized her first and also, as she thought, her last opportunity. She put into effect a coldly, premeditated plan to deprive me of my civil liberties without due process and silence me.

She was thwarted when the local police realized the law was being abused and refused to come, something Theodekti Vallianatou had not reckoned with.

Since then, Theodekti Vallianatou has made every effort to cover up her crime. She actively seeks out information about where I am in Larissa and seizes opportunities to harrass, intimidate and threaten people around me. I note that the Bishop of Volos has held his protective hand over her and empowered her to engage in stalking and harassment against me and another person in Germany involved in a civil defamation case with Theodekti.

A. I) PROOF OF KNOWLEDGE OF MY BLOG ALEXIS TSIPRAS

i. Evidence

Documents

1) A screenshot of tweet by Alexis Tsipras with the incorrect spelling Faynmann from October 6th 2015.

2) A screenshot of tweet Alexis Tsipras sent with the correct spelling of Faymann on 9th February 2015.

3) A screenshot of Google search page of the date of my report with the incorrect spelling Faynmann from 9th February 2015.

4) A screenshot of my report on the meeting between Tsipras and Faymann in Vienna on 9th February, 2015.

5) A screenshot of my cartoon on the meeting between Tsipras and Faymann in Lesbos in October 2015.

6) A screenshot of Google search page of Werner Faynmann showing only 620 results for the incorrect spelling Faynmann in in an English and or German language language Google.

7) A screenshot of Google search page of Werner Faymann showing 482,000 results for the correct spelling Faymann in an English and or German language Google.

8) A screenshot of Greek language Google search page of Werner Faynmann showing 11,800 results for the incorrect spelling Faynmann in Greek letters.

9) A screenshot of Greek language Google search page of Werner Faymann showing 89,000 results for the correct spelling Faymann in Greek letters.

10) A screenshot of Alexis Tsipras Greek language twitter account.

11) A screenshot of the Google search date of publication 10th February 2015 of my report on the funding of Tsipras by Soros.

12) A screenshot of the beginning of my report on the funding of Tsipras by Soros.

13) A screenshot of my report on the choice of the bank Lazard by Tsipras and of the Google search date of publication 29th January 2015.

14) A screenshot of the beginning of above report.

15) A report on the links between Tsipras, Yannis Vaourfakis and Soros I published on 30th January 2015.

ii. Discussion

The proof that Alexis Tsipras has knowledge of my blog comes in the form of tweets that Tsipras sent on 6th October, 2015, reproducing in the Greek language exactly the same spelling mistake of the surname of Austrian Chancellor Werner Faymann that I also made on my blog posts in the English language reporting on 9th February 2015 on their meeting in Vienna. [1]

Tsipras writes Faynmann in Greek letters. That is, he adds an extra n in Greek language tweets he sent during his visit with Faymann to the island of Lesbos. [1]

In a cartoon, I drew attention to the meeting between Tsipras and Faymann on Lesbos. The cartoon illustrates Tsipras and Faymann discussing an orchestrated cholera or Ebola outbreak in Greece. [5]

The Tsipras character jokes that any such plans will be published all over my blog, and notes that even Soros reads it as a textual analysis in the next part of the report will demonstrate.

Tsipras started to add the extra n in his tweets in Greek after his personal meeting with Faymann in Vienna on 9th February 2015.

http://diepresse.com/home/politik/aussenpolitik/4658551/Tsipras-bei-Faymann_Konnte-einen-neuen-Freund-gewinnen

In his first tweet in the Greek language on arriving in Vienna, and apparently before his personal meeting of Faymann, Tsipras spelled Faymanns name correctly, that is, he did not add an n in his tweet. [2]

The fact that Tsipras spelled Faymann in Greek letters correctly in his first tweet raises the question of how he came to introduce a spelling mistake and exactly the same one I make.

S

ince Tsipras first spelled Faymann correctly, it means that any Google searches he may have made would have used the correct spelling Faymann in Roman or Greek letters. Where exactly did Tsipras get the idea that the correct spelling was, in fact, Faynmann? I believe the most plausible explanation is that Tsipras read my post about the meeting between him and Faymann in February, saw my incorrect spelling in Roman letters and reproduced it exactly using Greek letters.

I misspelled Faymann by adding an extra n, in my report about the meeting between Tsipras and Faymann in Vienna on 9th February, 2015. [3] [4]

http://diepresse.com/home/politik/aussenpolitik/4658551/Tsipras-bei-Faymann_Konnte-einen-neuen-Freund-gewinnen

I corrected the spelling mistake on my blog. For the purposes of this case I put back the original spelling mistake, which can also be seen on the Google search page showing the date of my report.

My misspelling is very rate. There are only 620 cases of Faymann mispelled as Faynmann on non Greek language Google search engines as of 15th December 2015. [6]

This compares to 482,000 correct spellings of Faymann. [7]

In Greek letters, the incorrect spelling Faynmann appears in 11, 800 Google searches. [8]

Werner Faymann is spelled correctly in 89,000 Google searches in Greek letters. [9]

Tsipras has 325 000 followers on Twitter as of today, about two months after his visit to Lesbos. [10]

The most likely explanation for the unusually large number of cases of the misspelling of Faynmann in the Greek speaking world is, therefore, that Greek speakers reproduced Tsipras spelling mistake after reading it on his twitter account.

Searching in the Greek language Google with Werner Faynmann in quotation marks in Roman letters produces results similar to 620 in the German and English language. But a search in Greek language Google with Werner Faynmann without quotation marks and in Roman letters produced about 480,000 results. It is not clear why so many cases of Faynmann appear in the Greek language Google when there are so few cases in the non Greek language Google. It is not clear what factor has skewered the result. However, the fact is established tha Tsipras spelled Faymann correctly in his first ever tweet in February 2015 in Greek letters. It can, therefore, be ruled out that he picked up the spelling by doing a Google search with Faynmann in Roman letters.

The date when Tsipras picked up the spelling mistake establishes the basis for believing that Tsipras may have became familiar with my blog in February 2015 through Faymann, althougth it is also possible he became familiar with it through George Soros himself given the evidence that Soros reads my blog.

More plausible I believe, is that Tsipras read my blog post on his meeting between him and Faymann on 9th February 2015, saw my wrong spelling of Faynmann and reproduced it. The date of the first correct spelling forms the basis of believing that Faymann himself showed Tsipras my blog. In the light of subsequent events, I believe Faymann suggested to Tsipras the need to remove me as well as the use of the method.

I note the same method as Theodekti Vallianatou used was used by Austrian government officials, including Professor Lukas Kenner, a member of the government bioethics committee. Kenner twice twice attempted to deprive me of my civil liberty without due process when I was performing a public watchdog function on the internet as a journalist. He offered inducements to a pyschiatrist Dr Verena Strausz to confine me illegally. She twice refused, recognizing it was illegal.

I reported alleged links between Tsipras and Soros in my blog posts on 29th January 2014. [11]

I argued that Tsipras and Yannis Varoufakis were working for the banks and were injuring the interests of the Greek people. I said they performed a function of a puppet or controlled opposition in my blog posts in January and February 2015. [12] [13] [14] [15]

According to the Wirtschafts Woche, Soros sponsored Alexis Tsipras as early as 2012.

http://www.wiwo.de/politik/europa/portraet-rettungsplaene-fuer-den-euro/7751122-4.html

With respect to these searches, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Google uses server location as one of the factors determining the location and targeting of the site. Google also uses Page Rank algorithms to rank sites based on each sites so called truth factor score. After I published evidence on my blog that Tsipras reads my blog, the search results I obtained for Werner Faynmann were significantly different depending on whether I used a wifi connection in a familiar location (hacked?) or an Wifi connection in an unfamiliar one. Using familiar and possibly hacked wifi connections, the results for the wrong spelling Faynmann were suddenly much higher at about 1,700 compared to 620 in may be be a bid to skew the evidence by filtering results.

A. II) PROOF OF KNOWLEDGE OF MY BLOG GEORGE SOROS

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Eugenics and pandemics | AGAINST THE GLOBALIST POPULATION ...

Introduction. -The dogma of human equality is no part of …

Journal of the History of Ideas

Description: Since its inception in 1940, the Journal of the History of Ideas (JHI) has served as a medium for the publication of research in intellectual history that is of common interest to scholars and students in a wide range of fields. It is committed to encouraging diversity in regional coverage, chronological range, and methodological approaches. JHI defines intellectual history expansively and ecumenically, including the histories of philosophy, of literature and the arts, of the natural and social sciences, of religion, and of political thought. It also encourages scholarship at the intersections of cultural and intellectual history -- for example, the history of the book and of visual culture.

Coverage: 1940-2011 (Vol. 1, No. 1 - Vol. 72, No. 4)

The "moving wall" represents the time period between the last issue available in JSTOR and the most recently published issue of a journal. Moving walls are generally represented in years. In rare instances, a publisher has elected to have a "zero" moving wall, so their current issues are available in JSTOR shortly after publication. Note: In calculating the moving wall, the current year is not counted. For example, if the current year is 2008 and a journal has a 5 year moving wall, articles from the year 2002 are available.

ISSN: 00225037

EISSN: 10863222

Subjects: History, History

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Introduction. -The dogma of human equality is no part of ...

Eugenics in North Carolina – North Carolina Digital History

The logo from the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 1921, depicts eugenics as a tree whose roots are various fields of medicine and science. Eugenics, it proclaims, is the self direction of human evolution. About the illustration

The North Carolina General Assembly of 1929 authorized the governing body or executive head of any penal or charitable public institution to order the sterilization of any patient or inmate when such an operation was deemed to be in the best interest of an individual or for the public good. Additionally, the county boards of commissioners were authorized to order sterilization at public expense of any mentally defective or feeble-minded resident upon receiving a petition from the individuals next of kin or legal guardian.

Each order for sterilization was required to be reviewed and approved by the commissioner of the Board of Charities and Public Welfare, the secretary of the State Board of Health, and the chief medical officers of any two state institutions for the feeble-minded or insane. A medical and family history of the patient or inmate was attached to the order to provide information and guidance for the reviewers.

In 1933 the General Assembly created the Eugenics Board of North Carolina to review all cases involving the sterilization of mentally diseased, feeble-minded, or epileptic patients, inmates, or non-institutionalized individuals. The five members of the board included the commissioner of the Board of Charities and Public Welfare, the secretary of the State Board of Health, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane (appointed by the other board members), the chief medical officer of the State Hospital at Raleigh, and the attorney general.

In hearings that involved patients or inmates in a public institution, the executive head of that institution (or his representative) acted as prosecutor in presenting the case to the board. Hearings that concerned non-institutionalized individuals were prosecuted by the county superintendent of welfare or another authorized county official. Along with the petition for a hearing, the prosecutor provided a medical history signed by a physician who was familiar with the case and a social history addressing whether the person was likely to produce offspring.

A copy of the petition was sent to the individual and his or her next of kin or guardian. When the inmate, patient, or other individual could not defend himself or herself at the hearing, the next of kin, guardian, or county solicitor represented the individual and defended that persons rights and interests. The county superior court could appoint a guardian if necessary. Individuals could also be represented by legal counsel during the hearing.

Factors to be considered by the board included whether the operation seemed to be in the best interest of the individuals mental, moral, or physical health; whether it would be for the public good; and whether it was likely that the individual might produce children with serious mental or physical problems. Orders for sterilization had to be signed by at least three members of the board and returned to the prosecutor. Mentally competent individuals, at their own expense, could select their own physician for consultation or for an operation. A decision by the board could be appealed by the individual or in his or her behalf to the county superior court and further appealed to the states supreme court. A successful appeal precluded any further petition for the sterilization for one year unless specifically requested by the individual, or by his or her guardian or next of kin.

In 1937 the General Assembly authorized any state hospital, at the discretion of the superintendent, to provide temporary admission for any feeble-minded, epileptic, or mentally diseased person for whom the Eugenics Board had authorized sterilization. The regular or consulting staff of the hospital could then perform the operation. These hospitals were authorized to charge the appropriate state institution or county for the operation and expenses.

Under the Executive Organization Act of 1971, the Eugenics Board of North Carolina was transferred to the newly created Department of Human Resources (DHR). Although the board retained its statutory powers and actions regarding sterilization proceedings, the boards managerial and executive authority was vested in the secretary of the DHR, a cabinet-level officer appointed by the governor.

Under the Executive Organization Act of 1973, the Eugenics Board became the Eugenics Commission. The following five members of the commission were to be appointed by the governor: the director of the Division of Social and Rehabilitative Services of the DHR, the director of Health Services, the chief medical officer of a state institution for the feeble-minded or insane, the chief medical officer of the DHR in the area of mental health services, and the attorney general.

In 1974 the General Assembly transferred to the judicial system the responsibility for any sterilization proceedings against persons suffering from mental illness or mental retardation. In 1977 the General Assembly formally abolished the Eugenics Commission.

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Eugenics in North Carolina - North Carolina Digital History

Eugenics – Rotten.com

rotten > Library > Medicine > Eugenics Eugenics means selective breeding -- not in the sense that you are individually selective regarding persons with whom you breed, but rather that someone else is pulling the strings in order to get a specific result. Eugenics techniques are used all over the world, every day, for all manner of God's creatures, but if you try using them on humans, people get very upset.

The theory behind eugenics is simple: When good people bone good people, good babies with good genes result. The trouble comes when trying to apply eugenics in an organized way to society, with the biggest problem being that someone has to decide who the "good people" are. Anyone who concludes that he or she is qualified to make this determination is generally the last person in the world who should have such power.

Early human civilizations had no special qualms about killing children who were sick or deformed, although they were not likely thinking about the genetic repercussions of doing so. The concept of selective breeding to enhance certain traits reaches back to prehistoric times, about 10,000 years ago, at least as far as animals are concerned. "Eugenics" is the word for a social mandate to impose selective breeding on a human population for the presumed good of all mankind, with the operative word being "presumed."

The idea appears to have first been extended to humans by Plato, of all people, who recommended in his Republic that the ruling class should be carefully maintained by a secret program of selective breeding in which seemingly random orgies would be staged in order to breed desirable qualities. Strangely, this program tends to be left out of high school history books.

The actual word "eugenics" was invented by Francis Galton, a British scientist who was distantly related to Charles Darwin. In addition to studying the weather and analyzing fingerprints, Galton was deeply interested in how intelligence and talent passed from generation to generation. He invented the word "eugenics" to describe how he believed his insights should be employed -- a social program designed to engineer racial superiority through coerced optimized breeding.

Galton believed people should be bred for success just like cattle. That is not a rhetorical flourish -- Galton literally argued that people should be bred in the same manner as cattle, racehorses and dogs.

Darwin himself did not endorse his cousin's views, although he conceded that there was a certain logic in the view that natural selection was no longer working to improve the human species:

Although some of Galton's observations on social mating and inheritance were scientifically inspired, the overall thrust of his musings on genetics tended toward an aggressive defense of colonial-style racism, with much discussion of Britons -- and especially upper-crust British nobility -- as the master race, best suited to govern the "lower races," especially people of (any) color. (The fallacy of this view is painfully obvious.)

Building on Galton's ideas, a small group of intellectuals seized on the idea of eugenics and began working to promote the idea to governments and other cultural institutions. They succeeded in winning support from such luminaries as a young Winston Churchill who served as vice president of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, and the Catholic Church. The esteemed elders of the Church had no beef with using eugenics to stamp out "undesirable" traits and prevent race-mixing, although they did object to the use of contraception. The 1914 edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia explained their position:

In the wake of World War II and the Holocaust, Western civilization conveniently edited the history books to obscure the fact that the eugenics movement had been quite popular all around the world. Although the modern mind would love to lump the responsibility for the horrors of eugenics onto the Third Reich, the movement originally garnered substantial momentum in the United States in the early 20th century.

America had already had its fair share of racial troubles, from the genocide of the continent's original inhabitants to longstanding laws against interracial marriage to the "single drop" rule. A number of factors fed racial discontent in the U.S. as the 20th century began -- the emancipation of blacks, a flood of immigration, the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan and an economic depression.

The American eugenics movement took on steam with the discovery of genetic coding and the rise of such revolutionary figures as Margaret Sanger, a nurse who has been lionized by history and the abortion rights movement as an early advocate of contraception education.

Sanger was a screaming racist and a founding member of the Eugenics Society of America. Among other things, she advocated the sterilization of the mentally and physically disabled and endorsed the use of birth control to suppress what she saw as the tendency of the lower classes and "inferior races" to breed like rabbits. Later, she apparently reformed her views (although a substantial amount of controversy endures on this topic).

Sanger was hardly alone in her views. During the first 40 years of the 20th century, Americans embarked on a eugenics program that was in many ways as ambitious in scope as any of Adolf Hitler's wet dream. In 1921, then-vice president and future president Calvin Coolidge wrote an anti-immigration rant for Good Housekeeping Magazine in which he bemoaned the mix of good Nordic (i.e., white) stock with "inferior" races:

Later, as president, Coolidge signed the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 -- which targeted dirty Italians and those dirty, dirty Jews -- declaring that "America must remain American!" The law clamped lid on the good old "melting pot", but then that was mostly a myth to begin with.

Other prominent American supporters of eugenics included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, biologist Charles Davenport, steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh and coprologist Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. Several U.S. states instituted a variety of eugenics-inspired laws -- including bans on mixed-race marriage and the first laws in history to compel the sterilization of the "unfit" or disabled.

Many of these laws remained on the books for decades. Virginia's forced sterilization law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in an opinion written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., now remembered by history as one of the greatest legal minds of the 20th century. Holmes not only upheld the compulsory sterilization law; he complained that it was not broad enough.

But, it is said, however it might be if this reasoning were applied generally, it fails when it is confined to the small number who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside.

At least 60,000 people were involuntarily sterilized for the greater good of eugenics in the United States, and that number is almost certainly a whitewash of a substantially more depressing reality. The figure also fails to include the effects of a wide array of secretive medical experiments conducted under the auspices of the U.S. government, such as feeding radioactive mush to the mentally disabled.

The man perhaps most responsible for the success and influence of the American eugenics movement was also unintentionally responsible for its eventual fall from grace. Oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller financed hundreds of thousands of dollars of research through his "philanthropic" foundations, and the inflation-adjusted equivalent of millions of dollars given directly to Germany's budding Nazi pursuit of a master race, including funds that indirectly helped underwrite the playscape of Josef Mengele.

Although America had incubated the eugenics movement, Germany mechanized it to levels of efficiency never seen before (and hopefully never to be seen again). The Germans decided that their nation had to restore its pure blonde, blue-eyed Aryan heritage by purging foreign bloodlines, particularly Jews.

Putting aside the ensuing carnage for the moment, this concept is hilariously, ludicrously wrong. The mythopoetic blue-eyed ideal human race that dominated the Nazi imagination was itself a bastardization of the genuine Aryan stock, brought about by race-mixing. The original Aryans were Semites from Iran, more closely related to Jews than to Scandanavians.

After absorbing the rhetoric of American eugenicists and the money of American "philanthropists," the Germans began an institutionalized eugenics program after Hitler took power in 1933. Initially, the program was directly based on U.S. eugenics laws. First, they mandated sterilization for anyone with an inherited condition such as congenital blindness or deafness, most forms of mental illness and alcoholism. This program prompted the New England Medical Journal to gush: "Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit."

American eugenicists were proud of inspiring Germany's program, while American government officials eyed Hitler's progress with envy. Many wrote that Germany's efforts would be the seed of a worldwide movement and looked forward to the day when America's leaders would follow the Nazi example.

Although the earlier efforts had largely concerned themselves with overt "unfitness", the subtext of Jewish inferiority and other racial hate had continued to play out at every level of German society. It didn't take long for this aspect of the Nazi agenda became clearer.

In 1935, the Nazis passed a law requiring couples to receive "racial hygiene" counseling before marriage, including answering questions about whether they had any Jewish blood. The government cranked out propaganda films intended to discourage race mixing. Jews and Gypsies were the biggest targets, and blacks, Slavs and gays were all designated "unfit" by the Reich.

As we all know (well, most of us), the Germans quickly determined that sterilization was a slow process, and that genocide went much faster. Although the Holocaust was arguably carried out in the name of eugenics, the scope of what happened next far exceeded anything Galton probably envisioned and is best discussed elsewhere. By the end of World War II, suffice it to say, the excesses of the Nazi regime had crushed most of the momentum that the eugenicists had built during the preceding 40 years.

Amazingly, the world's shock and horror at the depravities of the Nazi extermination machine failed to completely derail the eugenics movement. It lingered through the late 1960s and even into the '70s, but in a much quieter mode. By the early 1980s, forced sterilizations and anti-miscegenation laws had become a thing of the past.

In part, the disenchantment with eugenics came about due to the fatal flaw with the concept, that of the self-appointed arbiter of what is a desirable trait and what is not. As civil rights and racial equality rose in prominence, the eugenicists began to slink off into the woodwork.

The word is still bandied about, often by religious conservatives who believe that abortion rights and family planning programs are camouflaged eugenics programs. However, nearly everyone advancing this argument is anti-abortion first, and anti-eugenics second.

As genetic science became more sophisticated in the 1990s, some scientists also began to tiptoe around the notion of controlled breeding again, although no one is suggesting such a plan be imposed by the government any more. Instead, researchers cautiously note that certain conditions -- such as Autism and specifically Asperger's Syndrome -- are extremely heritable among certain types of parents, with the gentle hint that maybe engineers shouldn't marry other engineers. (The fact that Asperger's may be part of a forward step in human evolution is quietly underplayed in such discussions.)

Fortunately, perhaps, there is little foreseeable use for the concept of controlled breeding, sterilization of "undesirables" and anti-miscegenation laws. The idea of manipulating the human animal through selective breeding is obsolete.

Future zealots who wish to "improve" the human race according to their own master plan will use the tools of genetic engineering to accomplish their goals. Why mess around with people's sex lives when you can just inject them with an RNA retrovirus and magically remove all the undesirable qualities from their DNA? No muss, no fuss, no Nuremberg Tribunal!

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Eugenics - Rotten.com

Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy

In 1907, a new law passed by the state legislature and signed by the Governor of Indiana provided for the involuntary sterilization of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists." Although it was eventually found to be unconstitutional, this law is widely regarded as the first eugenics sterilization legislation passed in the world. In 1927, a revised law was implemented and before it was repealed in 1974, over 2,300 of the States most vulnerable citizens were involuntarily sterilized. In addition, Indiana established a state-funded Committee on Mental Defectives that carried out eugenic family studies in over twenty counties and was home to an active "better babies" movement that encouraged scientific motherhood and infant hygiene as routes to human improvement.

News Release

American Medical Association News Article

The centenary of the 1907 legislation provides a unique opportunity to evaluate the far-reaching significance of this event by exploring the largely untold history of eugenics in Indiana, and the relevance of this history to contemporary issues in human genomics, public health genetics, and reproductive health in other parts of the country. An expert project team has been assembled of historians, bioethicists, lawyers, and art/design faculty to undertake a series of scholarly and public projects to mark the 100th anniversary of the Indiana eugenics legislation. These included:

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Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy

Alabama Eugenics

Alabama

Number of victims

There were 224 people who were sterilized, of whom approximately 58% were male. All of the sterilized were deemed mentally deficient. In terms of the total number of people sterilized, Alabama ranks 27th in the United States. Of the 32 states that had sterilization laws, Alabama is the state with the 5th lowest number of sterilizations.

Period during which sterilizations occurred

The period was 1919 to 1935 (Paul p. 246)

Temporal pattern of sterilizations and rate of sterilization

After the passage of the sterilization law in 1919, the number of sterilization appears to have been low. Gosney/Popenoe (p. 194; see data sources) report no sterilizations yet at the end of 1927, but the number for the end of 1929 was 44. After that year, the number of sterilizations increased. The last sterilizations occurred in June 1935 (Paul, p. 246). Between 1930 and 1935, the annual number of sterilization was about 30. The rate of sterilization per 100,000 residents per year was about 1.

Passage of law(s)

According to Edward Larson, Alabama began its long flirtation with eugenicsbefore any other state in the Deep South (Larson, p. 50). At the 1901 meeting of the Medical Association of the State of Alabama (MASA), Dr. William Glassell Sommerville, Trustee of the Alabama Insane Hospitals, declared it a proven fact that the moral disposition for good and evil, including criminal tendenciesare transmitted fromone generation to anotherand is as firmly believed by all scientific men as the fact that parents transmit physical qualities to their children (Dorr, Defective or Disabled?,pp. 383-4). At that same meeting, John E. Purdon stated that it was a proven fact that criminality, insanity, epilepsy, and other alleged manifestations of degraded nerve tissue were hereditary (Larson, 50). He emphasized that [i]t is essentially a state function to retrain the pro-creative powers of the unfit (Larson and Nelson, p. 407). He suggested that the use of sterilization would benefit the race by saying, [e]masculation is the simplest and most perfect plan that can be adapted to secure the perfection of the race (Larson, p. 50). Finally, Purdon explained his belief that the goodness, the greatness, and the happiness of all upon the earth, will be immeasurably advanced, in one or two generations, by the proposed methods (Larson and Nelson, p. 407), and, based on his belief thatweakness begets weaknessfeared that humanitarianism would assist the imperfect individual to escape the consequences of his physical and moral malformation (Dorr, "Honing Heredity," p. 29).

Over the next decade, MASA was encouraged by many authorities such as physicians and Birminghams medical society to draft a bill to legalize the sterilization of the unfit. In 1911 at the annual MASA meeting, Walter H. Bell of Birmingham declared that any person who would produce children with an inherited tendency to crime, insanity, feeblemindedness, idiocy, or imbecility should be sterilized (Larson, p. 51). He believed that sterilization was an easy, safe and practical method of prevention with no restrictions or punishment attached (Larson and Nelson, p.410).

The MASA, however, continued to delay taking action until 1914 when it created a committee of physicians who would research needful data in regard to defective children, with a purpose to urge upon the state legislature the proper provision for the care of such defectives (Larson, , p. 60). During the 1915 MASA meeting, C.M. Rudolph suggested the formation of a home for mentally ill children. He stressed the importance of segregating the unfit youth because he believed it shrewd to [s]egregate the defectives of one generation to prevent the multiplication of their kind in the next (Larson, p. 60). In this same meeting it was decided that an Alabama Society for Mental Hygiene (ASMH) would be formed and led by William Partlow as a liaison with the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (NCMH) and to survey Alabamas defectives (Larson, p. 60). That year, MASA collectively agreed to support eugenic sterilization (Dorr, Defective or Disabled?, pp. 386-87).

In 1919, the MASA and the ASMH reached their goal. In the next regular session of the State legislator, a bill was passed to create the Alabama Home (Larson and Nelson, p. 413). Buried within the law was a clause granting permission to the superintendent of the Home for the Feeble-Minded in Tuscaloosa, to sterilize its patients. This was the first law passed in Alabama that supported sterilizations (Paul p. 239).

In 1934, Partlow wanted permission to sterilize all discharged patients from the Home (a procedure he was already practicing as superintendent) (Dorr, "Eugenics in Alabama"). Partlow proposed a bill that gave the superintendent of any state hospital for the insane complete power to sterilize any or all patients upon their release. The bill also proposed the creation of a board with three doctors who would have the right to sterilize a larger group of people. Finally, the anticipated bill granted permission for county public health committees to sterilize anyone in a state or local custodial institution (Larson and Nelson, p. 418). Although Partlows bill was passed in both the House and the Senate, the bill was vetoed by Alabamas Governor, Bill Graves after consulting with the Alabama Supreme Court on the bills constitutionality (Larson and Nelson, p. 422). In 1935 the Alabama State Supreme Court viewed the bill and deemed it unconstitutional because it violated the Due Process Clauses of the state and federal constitutionsa sterilization victim would not have the right to appeal to a court against his or her sterilization (Larson and Nelson, p. 422). A second version of the bill was drafted and, similarly, passed in both houses but was vetoed by the Governor (Larson and Nelson, pp. 422-23). Soon after this second veto, Partlow discontinued the practice of sterilization (Larson and Nelson, p. 424).

Partlowsbill, however, was unsuccessfully reintroduced in 1939 and again in 1943. In 1945, legislation was created that asked for the right to sterilize every inmate or person eligible for entrance in the states insane asylums. This bill was passed by the senate but was rejected by the house (Larson and Nelson, p. 426).

Groups identified in the law

In the 1919 law, William Partlow included in his draft the permission for the superintendent of the Home for the Feeble-Minded to sterilize any inmate (Larson, p. 84). Inmates were any person confined in a poor house, jail, an orphanage, or a boarding school in the State (Larson, pp. 48-49). In the 1935 bill, it was proposed that any sexual pervert, Sadist, homosexualist, Masochist, Sodomist, or any other grave form of sexual perversion, or any prisoner who has twice been convicted of rape or imprisoned three times for any offense be sterilized. It was also suggested granting permission to county public health committees to sterilize anyone in a state or local custodial institution (Larson and Nelson, p. 418).An expansion of the law, proposed by Alabama State Health Officer Dr. James Norment Baker, called for the sterilization of anyone committed to state homes for the insane and feebleminded, reformatories, industrial schools, or training schools, , as well as any sexual pervert, Sadist, homosexual, Masochist, Sodomist (Dorr, "Protection," p. 173) as well as anyone convicted of rape twice. The bill was considered unconstitutional and vetoed by Governor Bill Graves.

Process of the law

In the 1919 law, the superintendent of the Alabama Home for the Feeble-Minded was given the authority to sterilize any inmate (Larson, pp. 48-49). This law held only one limitation on sterilization in the Alabama Home. The superintendent of the Alabama Insane Hospitals had to agree upon the sterilization of the inmates from the Alabama Home for the Feeble-Minded (Larson, pp. 105-06). This absence of safeguards for inmates in the law made it possible for William Partlow to sterilize every inmate of the Home. This law was drafted by Partlow and was the only sterilization law passed in Alabama. Although this law passed, Partlow continued to try to strengthen the power to sterilize in Alabama through other bills. All of his attempts, however, failed.

Precipitating factors and processes

The entire Southern region in general was more hesitant to adopt eugenic ideals for many reasons. One of the most important Southern values was its traditional emphasis on family and parental rights, which eugenics challenged (Larson, p. 8). The Southern sense of family also encouraged relatives to take responsibility for individuals who might otherwise be subject to eugenic remedies in state institutions (Larson, p. 9). Most immigrants in the South came from the British Isles, the same area most Southerners originated from. Subsequently, a community existed in the South including many immigrants, unlike the North and West where Americans focused their eugenic ideas on ethnically diverse immigrants (Larson, p. 9). The strength of Southern religion also played a role in the overall rejection of eugenics in Alabama. Religion lent itself to conceptions of congregations as extended families and many people in the South accordingly apposed segregating the unfit (Larson, pp. 13-14). In comparison with the rest of the United States, Progressivism in the South was relatively weak due to the comparatively small size of its typical carriers, secular groups, urban professional middle classes, and the more educated (Larson, p. 17). Moreover, the Deep South was lagging other regions in biological research programs, as well as scientists and education, which shifted the advocacy of eugenics to state mental health officials and local physicians (Larson, pp. 40-44). The MASA and leaders such as William Partlow were extremely important to the eugenics movement in Alabama. Without the organizations and leaders that were produced from the MASA, Alabama may have never started eugenic practices.

Overall, Alabama was not in favor of sterilization, which is reflected in the comparatively low number of sterilization victims. In general, the people of Alabama were more in favor of segregation of the unfit than sterilization (Larson, pp. 60-63). However, inadequate funding of such facilities for segregating the feeble-minded as well as over-crowding seems to have facilitated a push toward sterilization (Larson, pp. 90-91). Even though mental health surveys placed Alabamas feeble-minded population at more than 7,000 persons, the new facility could accommodate only 160 residents, and was filled within two months of it opening (Larson, p. 90).

Groups targeted and victimized

Among those targeted were males, including some of the delinquent boys who[m] we fear might escape (Larson, p. 106),the poor, mental deficien[ts] and the feebleminded (Larson, p. 151). People who could be committed to the state mental health hospital included people in prison, a poor house, and orphanage, or a state boarding school (Larson, pp. 48-49).

While Alabama never established a facility for feebleminded blacks (see Dorr, Defective or Disabled?,p. 387), Gregory Dorr has argued that the absence of such a facilty should not lead observers to conclude that eugenics in Alabama lackedracist elements, for the limitation ofeugenicsto the sterilization of whites (in contrast to Virginia) reflected the belief that the "betterment" of theblack "race" could not be achieved by such measures. In fact, by the timethe wall of segregation had started to come to down in the 1970s and no longer assured second-class citizenship of Blacks, African Americans had become the targets of extra-institutional and extra-legal sterilizations, reflective of a more general southern racist view that it was necessary"to further protect the white race itself from black folks" (Dorr, "Defective or Disabled?," p. 383; see also Dorr, Segregation's Science).

The Relf case

The cause of forced sterilization in Alabama was not helped by the Relf case. By 1973, the focus had moved away from sterilization of the mentally deficient and those imprisoned, to the use of sterilization as birth control. The Relf family was on welfare, and living in a public housing project in Montgomery, Alabama. Two Relf sisters, Minnie Lee, age 14, and Mary Alice, age 12, had been receiving shot of Depo-Provera as a form of long term birth control (Rossoff, p. 6). When the use of the drug was no longer allowed, the mother was mislead into signing a consent form allowing the sterilization of her daughters. Mrs. Relf was unable to read or write, so she signed the form with an X, without any physicians explaining the conditions to her (Roberts, p. 93, Carpia, p.78, Caron, p. 211, Southern Poverty Law Center). She thought she was signing a form consenting to additional shots, when she was actually consenting to sterilizations (Tessler, p. 58). A third daughter, Katie Relf, also received the birth control shots, but refused to open the door to her room when the official came to get the three girls to be sterilized. Because she was 17, she could not be sterilized without her own consent. (Larson and Nelson, p. 440) Later, when Mrs. Relf realized that her daughters had been sterilized, she sued the surgeons and other associated groups for $1,000,000 (Rosoff, p. 6). As a result, a moratorium was placed on federally funded, coerced sterilizations until a decision was reached by the Department of Justice.

Other restrictions placed on those identified in the law or with disabilities in general

In 1919, Alabama passed legislation that made it the first state in the Deep South that made it illegal for people with venereal diseases to marry (Larson, p. 88).

Feeder institutions and institutions where sterilizations were performed

(Photo origin: http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/apps/pbcsi.dll/bilde?Site=TL&Date=20110305&Category=NEWS&ArtNo=110309845&Ref=AR&MaxW=600&border=0)

The Alabama Home for the Feeble-Minded opened in Tuscaloosa, Alabama in 1919 as a result of the law in favor of a home for the feeble-minded.Two months after the Alabama Home for the Feeble-Minded opening, the institution was completely full of people from poor houses, jails, orphanages, and boarding schools (Larson, pp. 48-49, 90). In 1927, this school was renamed the Partlo State School for Mental Deficients (Larson, p. 106). The school is now known as the Partlow State School and Hospital. Its closure has been announced in 2011 ("W.D. Partlow Developmental Center to close").

Opposition

Although the original bill went largely unnoticed by the population (Paul, pp. 239-40), the movement did meet considerable opposition in Alabama. Chief among these objectors were the Catholics, who were entirely against eugenics and any form of birth control in general. Alabama Catholicswrote legislators and spoke out at public hearings in response to their bishops plea to use every means at our disposal to help defeat this bill (Larson, p. 151). Protestants were similarly concerned. A Baptist claimed that he found in the Bible all the warrant he required to vote against the bill (Larson and Nelson, p. 420). Trade unions were also against expanding the sterilization law. As one laborer anxiously said, theres nothing in the bill to prevent a labor man from being railroaded into an institution where he could be sterilized on suspicion of insanity or feeble-mindedness (Larson, p. 141). Similarly, Alabamas Governor, Bill Graves was extremely important to the opposition of eugenics because of his decision to veto the 1935 bill and its revision. He claimed [t]he hoped for good results are not sure enough or great enough to compensate for the hazard to personal rights that would be involved in the execution of the provisions of the Bill (Larson and Nelson, p. 422).

Overall, however, the population in Alabama was perhaps not as supportive of eugenic sterilization laws as in other American states.

Bibliography

Carpia, Myla F. Thyrza. 1995. "Lost Generations: The Involuntary Sterilization of American Indian Women." Master's Thesis, Department of American Indian Studies, Arizona State University.

Dorr, Gregory M. 2006. Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, 4: 359-92.

-------. 2008. Segregation's Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Dorr, Gregory M. 2011. "Protection or Control: Women's Health, Sterilization Abuse, and Relf v. Weinberger." Pp. 161-90 in A Century of Eugenics in America, edited by Paul Lombardo. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Larson, Edward. 1995. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Larson, Edward J., and Leonard J. Nelson.1992. Involuntary Sexual Sterilization of Incompetents in Alabama: Past, Present, and Future. Alabama Law Review 43: 399-444. Noll, Steven. 1995. Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

-------.2005. The Public Face of Southern Institutions for the Feeble-Minded. The Public Historian 27, 2: 25-42. Paul, Julius. 1965. 'Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough': State Eugenic Sterilization Laws in American Thought and Practice. Washington, D.C.: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

Relf Original Complaint. Available at <http://www.splcenter.org/sites/default/files/Relf_Original_Complaint.pdf>

Roberts, Dorothy E. 1997. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon Books.

Rosoff, Jeannie I. 1973. The Montgomery Case. The Hastings Center Report 3, 4:6.

Southern Poverty Law Center. Relf v. Weinberger. Available at <http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/case-docket/relf-v-weinberger>

Tarwater, James S. 1964. The Alabama State Hospitals and the Partlow State School and Hospitals. New York: Newcomer Society in North America.

Tessler, Suzanne. 1976. Compulsory Sterilization Practices. Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 1, 2: 52-66.

"W.D. Partlow Developmental Center to close." Tuscaloosa News 4 March 2001. Available at <http://www.tuscaloosanews.com/article/20110305/NEWS/110309845>

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Alabama Eugenics

Eugenics in the United States – Wikipedia, the free …

Early proponents

The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton, which originated in the 1880s. Galton studied the upper classes of Britain, and arrived at the conclusion that their social positions were due to a superior genetic makeup.[8] Early proponents of eugenics believed that, through selective breeding, the human species should direct its own evolution. They tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples; supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws; and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and "immoral".[9] Eugenics was also supported by African Americans intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Thomas Wyatt Turner, and many academics at Tuskegee University, Howard University, and Hampton University; however they believed the best blacks were as good as the best whites and "The Talented Tenth" of all races should mix.[10] W. E. B. Du Bois believed "only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race's heritage of moral iniquity."[10][11]

The American eugenics movement received extensive funding from various corporate foundations including the Carnegie Institution, Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune.[6] In 1906 J.H. Kellogg provided funding to help found the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan.[8] The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was founded in Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1911 by the renowned biologist Charles B. Davenport, using money from both the Harriman railroad fortune and the Carnegie Institution. As late as the 1920s, the ERO was one of the leading organizations in the American eugenics movement.[8][12] In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard, Harry H. Laughlin, and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the "unfit". Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.[13] The Eugenics Record Office later became the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.

Eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community.[6] By 1928 there were 376 separate university courses in some of the United States' leading schools, enrolling more than 20,000 students, which included eugenics in the curriculum.[14] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[15]

By 1910, there was a large and dynamic network of scientists, reformers and professionals engaged in national eugenics projects and actively promoting eugenic legislation. The American Breeder's Association was the first eugenic body in the U.S., established in 1906 under the direction of biologist Charles B. 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." Membership included Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford president David Starr Jordan and Luther Burbank.[16][17] The American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality was one of the first organizations to begin investigating infant mortality rates in terms of eugenics.[18] They promoted government intervention in attempts to promote the health of future citizens.[19][verification needed]

Several feminist reformers advocated an agenda of eugenic legal reform. The National Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters were among the variety of state and local feminist organization that at some point lobbied for eugenic reforms.[20]

One of the most prominent feminists to champion the eugenic agenda was Margaret Sanger, the leader of the American birth control movement. Margaret Sanger saw birth control as a means to prevent unwanted children from being born into a disadvantaged life, and incorporated the language of eugenics to advance the movement.[21][22] Sanger also sought to discourage the reproduction of persons who, it was believed, would pass on mental disease or serious physical defect. She advocated sterilization in cases where the subject was unable to use birth control.[21] Unlike other eugenicists, she rejected euthanasia.[23] For Sanger, it was individual women and not the state who should determine whether or not to have a child.[24][25]

In the Deep South, women's associations played an important role in rallying support for eugenic legal reform. Eugenicists recognized the political and social influence of southern clubwomen in their communities, and used them to help implement eugenics across the region.[26] Between 1915 and 1920, federated women's clubs in every state of the Deep South had a critical role in establishing public eugenic institutions that were segregated by sex.[27] For example, the Legislative Committee of the Florida State Federation of Women's Clubs successfully lobbied to institute a eugenic institution for the mentally retarded that was segregated by sex.[28] Their aim was to separate mentally retarded men and women to prevent them from breeding more "feebleminded" individuals.

Public acceptance in the U.S. was the reason eugenic legislation was passed. Almost 19 million people attended the PanamaPacific International Exposition in San Francisco, open for 10 months from February 20 to December 4, 1915.[29][30][31] The PPIE was a fair devoted to extolling the virtues of a rapidly progressing nation, featuring new developments in science, agriculture, manufacturing and technology. A subject that received a large amount of time and space was that of the developments concerning health and disease, particularly the areas of tropical medicine and race betterment (tropical medicine being the combined study of bacteriology, parasitology and entomology while racial betterment being the promotion of eugenic studies). Having these areas so closely intertwined, it seemed that they were both categorized in the main theme of the fair, the advancement of civilization. Thus in the public eye, the seemingly contradictory[clarification needed] areas of study were both represented under progressive banners of improvement and were made to seem like plausible courses of action to better American society.[32][verification needed]

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded"[33] from marrying.[citation needed]

The first state to introduce a compulsory sterilization bill was Michigan, in 1897 but the proposed law failed to garner enough votes by legislators to be adopted. Eight years later Pennsylvania's state legislators passed a sterilization bill that was vetoed by the governor. Indiana became the first state to enact sterilization legislation in 1907,[34] followed closely by Washington and California in 1909. Sterilization rates across the country were relatively low (California being the sole exception) until the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell which legitimized the forced sterilization of patients at a Virginia home for the mentally retarded. The number of sterilizations performed per year increased until another Supreme Court case, Skinner v. Oklahoma, 1942, complicated the legal situation by ruling against sterilization of criminals if the equal protection clause of the constitution was violated. That is, if sterilization was to be performed, then it could not exempt white-collar criminals.[35] The state of California was at the vanguard of the American eugenics movement, performing about 20,000 sterilizations or one third of the 60,000 nationwide from 1909 up until the 1960s.[36]

While California had the highest number of sterilizations, North Carolina's eugenics program which operated from 1933 to 1977, was the most aggressive of the 32 states that had eugenics programs.[37] An IQ of 70 or lower meant sterilization was appropriate in North Carolina.[38] The North Carolina Eugenics Board almost always approved proposals brought before them by local welfare boards.[38] Of all states, only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization.[37] "Here, at last, was a method of preventing unwanted pregnancies by an acceptable, practical, and inexpensive method," wrote Wallace Kuralt in the March 1967 journal of the N.C. Board of Public Welfare. "The poor readily adopted the new techniques for birth control."[38]

The Immigration Restriction League was the first American entity associated officially with eugenics. Founded in 1894 by three recent Harvard University graduates, the League sought to bar what it considered inferior races from entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American racial stock (upper class Northerners of Anglo-Saxon heritage). They felt that social and sexual involvement with these less-evolved and less-civilized races would pose a biological threat to the American population. The League lobbied for a literacy test for immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among "inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897, 1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included: A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University.[39]

The League allied themselves with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further its goals and in 1909 established a Committee on Eugenics chaired by David Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, Vernon Kellogg, Luther Burbank, William Ernest Castle, Adolf Meyer, H. J. Webber and Friedrich Woods. The ABA's immigration legislation committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F. Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the Immigration Restriction League. They also founded the Eugenics Record Office, which was headed by Harry H. Laughlin.[40] In their mission statement, they wrote:

Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so it may also annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm. Here is where appropriate legislation will aid in eugenics and creating a healthier, saner society in the future."[40]

Money from the Harriman railroad fortune was also given to local charities, in order to find immigrants from specific ethnic groups and deport, confine, or forcibly sterilize them.[6]

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.[41][verification needed] The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the "Nordic race" (a form of white supremacy), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race-mixing.[42] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.[43]

Stephen Jay Gould asserted that restrictions on immigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Influential eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin (who was appointed as an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920) presented arguments they would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted.[44][45] It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country.[42][46]

Both class and race factored into eugenic definitions of "fit" and "unfit." By using intelligence testing, American eugenicists asserted that social mobility was indicative of one's genetic fitness.[47] This reaffirmed the existing class and racial hierarchies and explained why the upper-to-middle class was predominately white. Middle-to-upper class status was a marker of "superior strains."[28] In contrast, eugenicists believed poverty to be a characteristic of genetic inferiority, which meant that that those deemed "unfit" were predominately of the lower classes.[28]

Because class status designated some more fit than others, eugenicists treated upper and lower class women differently. Positive eugenicists, who promoted procreation among the fittest in society, encouraged middle class women to bear more children. Between 1900 and 1960, Eugenicists appealed to middle class white women to become more "family minded," and to help better the race.[48] To this end, eugenicists often denied middle and upper class women sterilization and birth control.[49]

Since poverty was associated with prostitution and "mental idiocy," women of the lower classes were the first to be deemed "unfit" and "promiscuous."[28] These women, who were predominately immigrants or women of color[citation needed], were discouraged from bearing children, and were encouraged to use birth control.

In 1907, Indiana passed the first eugenics-based compulsory sterilization law in the world. Thirty U.S. states would soon follow their lead.[50][51] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[52] the U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, upheld the constitutionality of the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924, allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[53]

Some states sterilized "imbeciles" for much of the 20th century. Although compulsory sterilization is now considered an abuse of human rights, Buck v. Bell was never overturned, and Virginia did not repeal its sterilization law until 1974.[54] The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[55] Beginning around 1930, there was a steady increase in the percentage of women sterilized, and in a few states only young women were sterilized. From 1930 to the 1960s, sterilizations were performed on many more institutionalized women than men.[28] By 1961, 61 percent of the 62,162 total eugenic sterilizations in the United States were performed on women.[28] A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane.[56][57]

Men and women were compulsorily sterilized for different reasons. Men were sterilized to treat their aggression and to eliminate their criminal behavior, while women were sterilized to control the results of their sexuality.[28] Since women bore children, eugenicists held women more accountable than men for the reproduction of the less "desirable" members of society.[28] Eugenicists therefore predominately targeted women in their efforts to regulate the birth rate, to "protect" white racial health, and weed out the "defectives" of society.[28]

A 1937 Fortune magazine poll found that 2/3 of respondents supported eugenic sterilization of "mental defectives", 63% supported sterilization of criminals, and only 15% opposed both.[58]

In the 1970s, several activists and women's rights groups discovered several physicians to be performing coerced sterilizations of specific ethnic groups of society. All were abuses of poor, nonwhite, or mentally retarded women, while no abuses against white or middle-class women were recorded.[59] Although the sterilizations were not explicitly motivated by eugenics, the sterilizations were similar to the eugenics movement[according to whom?] because they were done without the patients' consent.

For example, in 1972, United States Senate committee testimony brought to light that at least 2,000 involuntary sterilizations had been performed on poor black women without their consent or knowledge. An investigation revealed that the surgeries were all performed in the South, and were all performed on black welfare mothers with multiple children. Testimony revealed that many of these women were threatened with an end to their welfare benefits until they consented to sterilization.[60] These surgeries were instances of sterilization abuse, a term applied to any sterilization performed without the consent or knowledge of the recipient, or in which the recipient is pressured into accepting the surgery. Because the funds used to carry out the surgeries came from the U.S. Office of Economic Opportunity, the sterilization abuse raised older suspicions, especially amongst the black community, that "federal programs were underwriting eugenicists who wanted to impose their views about population quality on minorities and poor women."[28]

Native American women were also victims of sterilization abuse up into the 1970s.[61] The organization WARN (Women of All Red Nations) publicized that Native American women were threatened that, if they had more children, they would be denied welfare benefits. The Indian Health Service also repeatedly refused to deliver Native American babies until their mothers, in labor, consented to sterilization. Many Native American women unknowingly gave consent, since directions were not given in their native language. According to the General Accounting Office, an estimate of 3,406 Indian women were sterilized.[61] The General Accounting Office stated that the Indian Health Service had not followed the necessary regulations, and that the "informed consent forms did not adhere to the standards set by the United States Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW)."[62]

One of the methods that was commonly suggested to get rid of "inferior" populations was euthanasia. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report mentioned euthanasia as one of its recommended "solutions" to the problem of cleansing society of unfit genetic attributes. The most commonly suggested method was to set up local gas chambers. However, many in the eugenics movement did not believe that Americans were ready to implement a large-scale euthanasia program, so many doctors had to find clever ways of subtly implementing eugenic euthanasia in various medical institutions. For example, a mental institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk infected with tuberculosis (reasoning that genetically fit individuals would be resistant), resulting in 30-40% annual death rates. Other doctors practiced euthanasia through various forms of lethal neglect.[63]

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. The Euthanasia Society of America was founded in 1938.[64]

Overall, however, euthanasia was marginalized in the U.S., motivating people to turn to forced segregation and sterilization programs as a means for keeping the "unfit" from reproducing.[65]

Mary deGormo, a former classroom teacher was the first person to combine ideas about health and intelligence standards with competitions at state fairs, in the form of "better baby" contests. She developed the first such contest, the "Scientific Baby Contest" for the Louisiana State Fair in Shreveport, in 1908. She saw these contests as a contribution to the "social efficiency" movement, which was advocating for the standardization of all aspects of American life as a means of increasing efficiency.[18] deGarmo was assisted by the pediatrician Dr. Jacob Bodenheimer, who helped her develop grading sheets for contestants, which combined physical measurements with standardized measurements of intelligence.[66] Scoring was based on a deduction system, in that every child started at 1000 points and then was docked points for having measurements that were below a designated average. The child with the most points (and the least defections) was ideal.[67][verification needed]

The topic of standardization through scientific judgment was a topic that was very serious in the eyes of the scientific community, but has often been downplayed as just a popular fad or trend. Nevertheless, a lot of time, effort, and money were put into these contests and their scientific backing, which would influence cultural ideas as well as local and state government practices.[68][verification needed]

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People promoted eugenics by hosting "Better Baby" contests and the proceeds would go to its anti-lynching campaign.[10]

First appearing in 1920 at the Kansas Free Fair, Fitter Family competitions, continued all the way until WWII. Mary T. Watts and Florence Brown Sherbon, both initiators of the Better Baby Contests in Iowa, took the idea of positive eugenics for babies and combined it with a determinist concept of biology to come up with fitter family competitions.[69]

There were several different categories that families were judged in: Size of the family, overall attractiveness, and health of the family, all of which helped to determine the likelihood of having healthy children. These competitions were simply a continuation of the Better Baby contests that promoted certain physical and mental qualities.[70] At the time, it was believed that certain behavioral qualities were inherited from your parents. This led to the addition of several judging categories including: generosity, self-sacrificing, and quality of familial bonds. Additionally, there were negative features that were judged: selfishness, jealousy, suspiciousness, high temperedness, and cruelty. Feeblemindedness, alcoholism, and paralysis were few among other traits that were included as physical traits to be judged when looking at family lineage.[29]

Doctors and specialists from the community would offer their time to judge these competitions, which were originally sponsored by the Red Cross.[29] The winners of these competitions were given a Bronze Medal as well as champion cups called "Capper Medals." The cups were named after then Governor and Senator, Arthur Capper and he would present them to "Grade A individuals".[71]

The perks of entering into the contests were that the competitions provided a way for families to get a free health check up by a doctor as well as some of the pride and prestige that came from winning the competitions.[29]

By 1925 the Eugenics Records Office was distributing standardized forms for judging eugenically fit families, which were used in contests in several U.S. states.[72]

After the eugenics movement was well established in the United States, it spread to Germany. California eugenicists began producing literature promoting eugenics and sterilization and sending it overseas to German scientists and medical professionals.[65] By 1933, California had subjected more people to forceful sterilization than all other U.S. states combined. The forced sterilization program engineered by the Nazis was partly inspired by California's.[7]

The Rockefeller Foundation helped develop and fund various German eugenics programs,[73] including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.[6][74]

Upon returning from Germany in 1934, where more than 5,000 people per month were being forcibly sterilized, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe bragged to a colleague:

"You will be interested to know that 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. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people."[75]

Eugenics researcher Harry H. Laughlin often bragged that his Model Eugenic Sterilization laws had been implemented in the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws.[76] In 1936, Laughlin was invited to an award ceremony at Heidelberg University in Germany (scheduled on the anniversary of Hitler's 1934 purge of Jews from the Heidelberg faculty), to receive an honorary doctorate for his work on the "science of racial cleansing". Due to financial limitations, Laughlin was unable to attend the ceremony and had to pick it up from the Rockefeller Institute. Afterwards, he proudly shared the award with his colleagues, remarking that he felt that it symbolized the "common understanding of German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics."[77]

After 1945, however, historians began to attempt to portray the US eugenics movement as distinct and distant from Nazi eugenics.[78]Jon Entine wrote that eugenics simply means "good genes" and using it as synonym for genocide is an "all-too-common distortion of the social history of genetics policy in the United States." According to Entine, eugenics developed out of the Progressive Era and not "Hitler's twisted Final Solution."[79]

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Population | Define Population at Dictionary.com

Contemporary Examples

Dual-eligibles are the sickest, poorest, and most vulnerable segment of the Medicare population.

The Monitor in November reported that more than 10 percent of the population uses Facebook in 51 countries.

But for half the populationAfghanistan's womenthat's a truth with modifications.

Should I have married someone Jewish, if only to keep our population up?

Oklahoma Total background checks: 344,781 population: 3,791,508 Background checks per 100,000 residents: 9,094 9.

Historical Examples

Some reports give the nominal Christian population as high as 80,000.

What, then, must be the population of the British empire if the increase in one city was at that rate?

He expressed his preference for parliamentary reform, based on population.

As our population has expanded, the Union has been cemented and strengthened.

It is not so in fact, but in Russia it is believed to be so by all classes of the population.

British Dictionary definitions for population Expand

(sometimes functioning as pl) all the persons inhabiting a country, city, or other specified place

the number of such inhabitants

(sometimes functioning as pl) all the people of a particular race or class in a specific area: the Chinese population of San Francisco

the act or process of providing a place with inhabitants; colonization

(ecology) a group of individuals of the same species inhabiting a given area

(astronomy) either of two main groups of stars classified according to age and location. Population I consists of younger metal-rich hot white stars, many occurring in galactic clusters and forming the arms of spiral galaxies. Stars of population II are older, the brightest being red giants, and are found in the centre of spiral and elliptical galaxies in globular clusters

(statistics) Also called universe. the entire finite or infinite aggregate of individuals or items from which samples are drawn

Word Origin and History for population Expand

1610s, from Late Latin populationem (nominative populatio) "a people; a multitude," as if from Latin populus "a people" (see people (n.)). Population explosion is first attested 1953.

population in Medicine Expand

population population (pp'y-l'shn) n.

The total number of people inhabiting a specific area.

The set of individuals, items, or data from which a statistical sample is taken.

All the organisms that constitute a specific group or occur in a specified habitat.

population in Science Expand

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Population | Define Population at Dictionary.com

Eugenics – Conservapedia

Eugenics was a movement which tried to eliminate "dangerous human pests" and "the rising tide of imbeciles" through what has been euphemistically called "selective breeding". What this meant, in actual practice, was forced sterilization of American immigrants and minorities (particularly in California).[1]

The theory of evolution suggests that humans are merely evolving animals. The claimed biological struggle for survival that brought humans here is continuing. Man's long-term survival is, according to evolution, a biological survival of the fittest. Evolution theory teaches that there must be a biological struggle for survival among various human races and groups.

Charles Darwin declared in The Descent of Man:[2]

Darwin was not the first to claim racial superiority. But he was the first to teach that some races of man "will almost certainly exterminate, and replace" other races of man. His followers developed a new intellectual field called "eugenics" for this mythical biological struggle.

In fact, the term "eugenics" was coined by Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton.[3]

Defenders of Darwin, and Darwinism, often try to argue that Darwin, and Darwinism, have no logical connection to eugenics at all. However, in a 1914 speech, Charles Darwin's son, Francis Darwin, wrote: "In the first edition of The Descent of Man, 1874, [my father] distinctly gives his adherence to the eugenic idea by his assertion that many might by selection do something for the moral and physical qualities of the race."[4] He based his ideas on his cousin's work.

Francis Darwin's clear statement that his father endorsed Galton's conception of eugenics is important, because many people try to distance Darwin from the taint of eugenics by pointing out that Darwin himself never advocated for it by name. But Galton coined the word after Darwin's death, so naturally he wouldn't have used the word 'eugenics.' Darwin's son can be expected to have understood his father's theory well enough to know whether or not his father's book, "The Descent of Man", 'gave adherence to the eugenic idea.'

The word "eugenics" is based on Greek roots meaning "well born." The Merriam-Webster dictionary provides 1883 as the date of origin for the term. Later, Darwin's son, Leonard, served as the president of the First Congress of Eugenics in 1912 in London.

The encyclopedia describes eugenics as now being "in disrepute,"[5] although Professor Peter Singer of Princeton University has sought to remove the stigma from it. Evolutionist and atheist Richard Dawkins has stated in one letter his wish that it no longer be banned from polite discussion.[6]

The Spartans in ancient Greece practiced a primitive form of eugenics, wherein babies which were judged to be too "weak" or "sickly" would be left to die.

In the early 1900s, many influential officials advocated Darwinism and eugenics. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes became a strong proponent. So did many others in prominent government and academic positions. Members of the British Eugenics Society, including the International Planned Parenthood Federation, are listed.[7]

Between 1907 and 1937, 32 American states passed eugenics laws requiring sterilization of citizens deemed to be misfits, such as the mentally infirm. Oliver Wendell Holmes and all but one conservative Democratic Justice upheld such laws in a Supreme Court decision that included Holmes' offensive statement that "three generations of imbeciles are enough." Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927).[8] In fact, the third generation "imbecile" was very bright, but was declared by a eugenics "expert" as "supposed to be a mental defective," apparently without an examination.

Eugenics was taught as part of the evolution curriculum of many science classes in America in the early 1900s. For example, it was featured in the textbook used in the famous Scopes trial in 1925.

"By 1928, the American Genetics Association boasted that there were 376 college courses devoted exclusively to eugenics. High-school biology textbooks followed suit by the mid-1930s, with most containing material favorable to the idea of eugenical control of reproduction. It would thus have been difficult to be an even moderately educated reader in the 1920s or 1930s and not have known, at least in general terms, about the claims of eugenics."[9]

Important remnants of the evolution-eugenics approach exist today, in part because many of Justice Holmes' opinions are still controlling law. The very first quote in the infamous Roe v. Wade abortion decision is an unprincipled statement of Justice Holmes in a 1905 opinion. Indeed, Holmes once wrote favorably in a letter to a future Supreme Court Justice about "restricting propagation by the undesirables and putting to death infants that didn't pass the examination.[10]

Existing laws requiring students to receive controversial vaccines are based on a eugenics-era decision granting the State the power to forcibly vaccinate residents. [11] That decision, in fact, was the cited precedent for Justice Holmes' offensive "imbeciles" holding quoted above.

For the same reason that evolution teaching led to eugenics, evolution teaching today encourages acceptance of abortion and euthanasia. Under evolution theory, after all, we are merely animals fighting for biological survival.

German Darwinist Ernst Haeckel promoted evolution by drawing fraudulent pictures of humans embryos, to pretend that their developmental stages imitate an historical evolution of humans from other species.[12]

In 1904, Haeckel reiterated the view of Darwin quoted above: "These lower races are psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes or dogs) than to civilized Europeans; we must, therefore, assign a totally different value to their lives." [13]

It wasn't long before intellectuals viewed war as an essential evolutionary process. Vom Heutigen Kriege, a popular book by Geberal Bernhardi, "expounded the thesis that war was a biological necessity and a convenient means of ridding the world of the unfit. These views were not confined to a lunatic fringe, but won wide acceptance especially among journalists, academics and politicians."[14] In America, Justice Holmes similarly wrote that "I always say that society is founded on the death of men - if you don't kill the weakest one way you kill them another."[15]

World War I entailed a brutality unknown in the history of mankind. Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the liberal New Republic magazine, observed that "prior to the Scopes trial [in 1925, William Jennings] Bryan had been on a revival tour of Germany and had been horrified by the signs of incipient Nazism. Before this point, Bryan had been a moderate in the evolution debate; for instance, he had lobbied the Florida legislature not to ban the teaching of Darwin, only to specify that evolution must be taught as a theory rather than a fact. But after hearing the National Socialists talk about the elimination of genetic inferiority, [historian Gary] Wills wrote, Bryan came to feel that evolutionary ideas had become dangerous; he began both to oppose and to lampoon them."

The march of evolution/eugenics continued unabated in Germany. By the 1920s, German textbooks were teaching evolution concepts of heredity and racial hygiene. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics was founded in 1927.

In 1933, Germany passed the Law for the Protection of Heredity Health. Next was the Nazi sterilization law entitled "Eugenics in the service of public welfare." It required compulsory sterilization for the prevention of progeny with hereditary defects in cases including congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis and hereditary epilepsy.

The German schools indoctrinated their students. In 1935, a German high-school math textbook included the following problem:[9] " how much does it cost the state if:

One German student was Josef Mengele, who studied anthropology and paleontology and received his Ph.D. for his thesis entitled "Racial Morphological Research on the Lower Jaw Section of Four Racial Groups." In 1937, Mengele was recommended for and received a position as a research assistant with the Third Reich Institute for Hereditary, Biology and Racial Purity at the University of Frankfort. He became the "Angel of Death" for directing the operation of gas chambers of the Holocaust and for conducting horrific medical experiments on inmates in pursuit of eugenics.

The liberal American Medical Society provided this summary:[16]

Many genocides have been commited in the name of Eugenics, most notably the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was a strong believer in eugenics and evolution and believed that Jewish people were closest to apes, followed by Africans, Asians, non-Aryan Europeans, and finally Aryans, who he believed were most evolved.

Pat Milmoe McCarrick and Mary Carrington Coutts, reference librarians for the National Reference Center for Bioethics Literature at Georgetown University, were more succinct: "The Nazi racial hygiene program began with involuntary sterilizations and ended with genocide." [17]

From The Nazi Connection[18]:

In The Nazi Connection, Stefan Kuhl uncovers the ties between the American eugenics movement and the Nazi program of racial hygiene, showing that many American scientists actively supported Hitler's policies. After introducing us to the recently resurgent problem of scientific racism, Kuhl carefully recounts the history of the eugenics movement, both in the United States and internationally, demonstrating how widely the idea of sterilization as a genetic control had become accepted by the early twentieth century. From the first, the American eugenicists led the way with radical ideas. Their influence led to sterilization laws in dozens of stateslaws which were studied, and praised, by the German racial hygienists. With the rise of Hitler, the Germans enacted compulsory sterilization laws partly based on the U.S. experience, and American eugenists took pride in their influence on Nazi policies. Kuhl recreates astonishing scenes of American eugenicists travelling to Germany to study the new laws, publishing scholarly articles lionizing the Nazi eugenics program, and proudly comparing personal notes from Hitler thanking them for their books. Even after the outbreak of war, he writes, the American eugenicists frowned upon Hitler's totalitarian government, but not his sterilization laws. So deep was the failure to recognize the connection between eugenics and Hitler's genocidal policies, that a prominent liberal Jewish eugenicist who had been forced to flee Germany found it fit to grumble that the Nazis "took over our entire plan of eugenic measures."

By 1945, when the murderous nature of the Nazi government was made perfectly clear, the American eugenicists sought to downplay the close connections between themselves and the German program. Some of them, in fact, had sought to distance themselves from Hitler even before the war. But Stefan Kuhl's deeply documented book provides a devastating indictment of the influenceand aidprovided by American scientists for the most comprehensive attempt to enforce racial purity in world history.

Some argue that parents who abort infants with genetic mutation or other disabilities are practicing a form of eugenics.[19] Some doctors and scientists have defended this practice and named it "liberal eugenics" in order to differentiate it from traditional forms of eugenics such as Nazi eugenics.[20] Eugenicists in the United States and elsewhere have been known to employ or advocate abortion as a method of eugenics.

In the 2006 satirical comedy Idiocracy, the entire movie is premised on the idea that the out-breeding of the stupid over the intelligent will lead to a uniformly stupid world run by advertisers, marketers, and anti-intellectualism.

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Eugenics - Conservapedia

EugenicsArchive.Org: Image Archive on American Eugenics Movement

he philosopher George Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." This adage is appropriate to our current rush into the "gene age," which has striking parallels to the eugenics movement of the early decades of the 20th century. Eugenics was, quite literally, an effort to breed better human beings by encouraging the reproduction of people with "good" genes and discouraging those with "bad" genes. Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and to sterilize people considered "genetically unfit." Elements of the American eugenics movement were models for the Nazis, whose radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust.

We now invite you to experience the unfiltered story of American eugenics primarily through materials from the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, which was the center of American eugenics research from 1910-1940. In the Archive you will see numerous reports, articles, charts, and pedigrees that were considered scientific "facts" in their day. It is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected political and social prejudices, rather than scientific facts.

You may find some of the language and images in this Archive offensive. Even supposedly "scientific" terms used by eugenicists were often pervaded with prejudice against racial, ethnic, and disabled groups. Some terms have no scientific meaning today. For example, "feeblemindedness" was used as a catch-all for a number of real and supposed mental disabilities, and was a common "diagnosis" used to make members of ethnic and racial minority groups appear inferior. However, we have made no attempt to censor this documentary record to do so would distort the past and diminish the significance of the lessons to be learned from this material.

During a two-year review process, involving a 14-member Advisory Panel, this site has developed an editorial policy to protect personal privacy and confidentiality. For this reason, names and places have been deleted from pedigrees, medical documents, and personal photographs.

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EugenicsArchive.Org: Image Archive on American Eugenics Movement

Origins of Eugenics: From Sir Francis Galton to Virginias …

Sir Francis Galton. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society. [2.1]

ENLARGE [2.2] Faces and Races, illustration from a eugenical text, Racial History of Mankind. Courtesy of Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

[2.3] Harry H. Laughlin and Charles Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office. Courtesy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Archives.

Sir Francis Galton first coined the term eugenics in 1883. Put simply, eugenics means well-born. Initially Galton focused on positive eugenics, encouraging healthy, capable people of above-average intelligence to bear more children, with the idea of building an improved human race. Some followers of Galton combined his emphasis on ancestral traits with Gregor Mendels research on patterns of inheritance, in an attempt to explain the generational transmission of genetic traits in human beings.

Negative eugenics, as developed in the United States and Germany, played on fears of race degeneration. At a time when the working-class poor were reproducing at a greater rate than successful middle- and upper-class members of society, these ideas garnered considerable interest. One of the most famous proponents in the United States was President Theodore Roosevelt, who warned that the failure of couples of Anglo-Saxon heritage to produce large families would lead to race suicide.

The center of the eugenics movement in the United States was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Biologist Charles Davenport established the ERO, and was joined in his work by Director Harry H. Laughlin. Both men were members of the American Breeders Association. Their view of eugenics, as applied to human populations, drew from the agricultural model of breeding the strongest and most capable members of a species while making certain that the weakest members do not reproduce.

Eugenicists attempted to demonstrate the power of heredity by constructing pedigree charts of defective families. These charts were used to scientifically quantify the assertion that human frailties such as profligacy and indolence were genetic components that could be passed from one generation to the next. Two studies were published that charted the propensity towards criminality, disease, and immoral behavior of the extended families of the Jukes and the Kallikaks. Eugenicists pointed to these texts to demonstrate that feeblemindedness was an inherited attribute and to reveal how the care of such degenerates represented an enormous cost to society.

The ERO promoted eugenics research by compiling records or pedigrees of thousands of families. Charles Davenport created The Family History Book, which assisted field workers as they interviewed families and assembled pedigrees specifying inheritable family attributes which might range from allergies to civic leadership. Even a propensity for carpentry or dress-making was considered a genetically inherited trait. Davenport and Laughlin also issued another manual titled How to Make a Eugenical Family Study to instruct field workers in the creation of pedigree charts of study subjects from poor, rural areas or from institutionalized settings. Field workers used symbols to depict defective conditions such as epilepsy and sexual immorality.

The American Eugenics Society presented eugenics exhibits at state fairs throughout the country, and provided information encouraging high-grade people to reproduce at a greater rate for the benefit of society. The Society even sponsored Fitter Family contests.

ENLARGE [2.4] Kallikak family of New Jersey Normal and Degenerate Lines (enlarge to view additional eugenical pedigree charts). Courtesy of Paul Lombardo.

ENLARGE [2.5] Eugenics Display. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

[2.6] Winners of Fittest Family Contest. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

[2.7] Harry H. Laughlin photograph. Courtesy of American Philosophical Society.

ENLARGE [2.8] Comparative Intelligence Chart. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society.

ENLARGE [2.9] Virginias Racial Integrity Act of 1924 (enlarge to view additional Virginia legislative acts). Courtesy of Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University.

In 1914, Harry H. Laughlin attended the first Race Betterment Conference, sponsored by J. H. Kellogg. The same year, in his Model Sterilization Law, Laughlin declared that the socially inadequate of society should be sterilized. This Model Law was accompanied by pedigree charts, which were used to demonstrate the hereditary nature of traits such as alcoholism, illegitimacy, and feeblemindedness. Laughlin asserted that passage of these undesirable traits to future generations would be eradicated if the unfortunate people who possessed them could be prevented from reproducing. In 1922 Laughlins Model Law was included in the book Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. This book compiled legal materials and statistics regarding sterilization, and was a valuable reference for sterilization activists in states throughout the country.

Proponents of eugenics worked tirelessly to assert the legitimacy of this new discipline. For Americans who feared the potential degradation of their race and culture, eugenics offered a convenient and scientifically plausible response to those fears. Sterilization of the unfit seemed a cost-effective means of strengthening and improving American society.

By 1924 Laughlins influence extended in several directions. He testified before Congress in support of the Immigration Restriction Act to limit immigration from eastern and southern Europe. Laughlin influenced passage of this law by presenting skewed data to support his assertion that the percentage of these immigrant populations in prisons and mental institutions was far greater than their percentage in the general population would warrant.

Laughlin also provided guidance in support of Virginias Racial Integrity Act, which made it illegal for whites in Virginia to marry outside their race. The act narrowly defined who could claim to be a member of the white race stating that the term white person shall apply only to such person as has no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian. Virginia lawmakers were careful to leave an escape clause for colleagues who claimed descent from Pocahontasthose with 1/16 or less of the blood of the American Indian would also count as white.

The language of Laughlins Model Sterilization Act was used in Virginias Eugenical Sterilization Act to legalize compulsory sterilizations in the state. This legislation to rid Virginia of defective persons was drafted by Aubrey E. Strode, a former member of the Virginia General Assembly, at the request of longtime associate, Albert Priddy, who directed the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia.

2004 Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

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Origins of Eugenics: From Sir Francis Galton to Virginias ...

Virginia Eugenics – University of Vermont

Number of victims

In total, 7325 individuals were sterilized in Virginia under its sterilization law. Of those sterilized about half were deemed mentally ill and the other half deemed mentally deficient. Approximately 62% of total individuals sterilized were female. Some estimate the total number of sterilizations as high as 8,300 individuals (Dorr 2006, p. 382).

Period during which sterilization occurred

Sterilization in Virginia occurred under state law between 1924 and 1979. It thus appeared to have continued such sterilizations longer than any other state (Landman 1932, pp. 83-4; Largent 2008, p. 80). There are known instances of eugenic sterilization before 1924 (Dorr 2008, p. 116).

Temporal pattern of sterilization and rate of sterilization

Although Virginia formally adopted a sterilization law in 1924, sterilization was not practiced widely until after the United State Supreme Court ruling against Carrie Buck in 1927. This ruling set a precedent on the legality of sterilization not only in Virginia but also throughout the nation. During the 1930s, immediately after this Supreme Court ruling, sterilization in Virginia occurred at its highest rate with approximately 13 sterilizations per 100,000 state residents. A 1938 report stated that 632 of the first 1,000 patients sterilized had been paroled, and that 812 of the same group were from impoverished families (Trent 1994, 217). After the 1930s prior to, during, and following WWII sterilization initially decreased and thereafter maintained a fairly constant rate. After this, sterilization rates dropped dramatically until the practice faded out and then was subsequently forced out of practice with the repeal of the 1924 act in 1974 and the additional removal of all mention of eugenic sterilization to prevent hereditary forms of mental illness that are recurrent from being passed on from Virginia code in 1979 (Dorr 2008, p. 221, Lombardo 2008b, p. 250). Compulsory sterilizations for non-eugenic purposes continue today, but under very strict regulations. A compulsory sterilization patient must be unable to give informed consent, in need of contraception, unable to use any other form of contraception, and permanently unable to raise a child (Lombardo 2008b, p. 267).

Passage of law(s)

On March 20, 1924, Virginia SB 281, the Eugenical Sterilization Act, was signed into law (Landman 1932, pp. 83-4).

Groups identified in the law

Under the Eugenical Sterilization Act, individuals confined to state institutions afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy could be sterilized (Landman 1932, p. 84).

Process of the law

In order for a sterilization to take place under the 1924 Eugenical Sterilization Act the superintendent of a colony or hospital had to present the case for each individual to be sterilized in the form of a petition to a special board of directors at said institution. A copy of this petition was also required to be presented to the patient and the legal guardian of the patient. Thirty days after the board deemed an individual fit for sterilization, the sterilization was permitted to occur. Appeals were heard but rarely considered. No individual involved in this process could be held civilly or criminally liable. Additionally, nothing in the Eugenical Sterilization Act could prevent a legally licensed doctor from partaking in a medical procedure that could incidentally involve the nullification or destruction of reproductive functions (SB 281, Virginia Sterilization Act; (Landman 1932, p. 84).

Precipitating factors and processesThe white, Virginia elite of the time was immersed in the idea of perpetuating and protecting the purity of the American race (i.e., Anglo-Saxon Whites). This socioeconomic elite group wanted to maintain their traditional Southern identity while also embracing modern progressive ideology. The eugenic movement offered an avenue to pursue both of these notions simultaneously. Through the embrace of eugenics as a progressive science and ideology, Virginians were able to modernize their identity while maintaining the purity of their state through the coerced sterilization of minorities and undesirable whites alike (Dorr 2000, p. 262). Often, mongrels and worthless whites were collected in mountain sweeps. This involved a sheriff of a nearby town driving into mountain villages and forcibly removing individuals and taking them to institutions where they would only be released upon submission to sterilization (Black 2003, pp. 3-8). More often than not these individuals were unaware of the consequences of the procedures that they underwent.

On March 20, 1924 (the same day as the passage of SB 281, the Eugenical Sterilization Act) Virginia signed into law SB 219, the Racial Integrity Act. Under this piece of legislation it became unlawful for any white person in [Virginia] to marry any [person] save a white person (SB 219, Racial Integrity Act). The Racial Integrity Act garnered lots of public attention, allowing the Sterilization Law (written by Carrie Bucks defense lawyer) to pass without much public notice (Lombardo 2008b, p. 100).

The Virginia sterilization law was paramount to the perceived legality of sterilization throughout the country. With the Carrie Buck Supreme Court case of 1927, the American eugenics movement gained the legitimacy necessary to avoid adversity in various courts (Paul 1965, p. 497). This ruling precipitated high rates of sterilization in Virginia and throughout the rest of the United States. This sterilization pattern continued throughout the first half of the twentieth century until rates began to decline in the mid-1950s (Paul, p. 504). In both 1956 and 1962, bills were proposed that allowed for compulsory sterilization of women with multiple illegitimate children. Both bills failed (Lombardo 2008b, p. 242-243). Furthermore, with the issue of Recommendation 6 of the Commission to Study Problems Relating to Children Born Out of Wedlock in 1959, compulsory sterilization was seriously questioned for the first time since its legalization (Paul 1965, pp. 504-6). Even in the presence of such concern, the 1961 report of the Virginia Advisory Legislative Council recommended no change to the sterilization statute because there had been no substantial complaint (Dorr 2008, p. 213). At this time every other state in the Nation, with the exception of North Carolina, had found reason to stop or slow sterilization (Paul 1965, pp. 506-9). Virginia enacted additional voluntary sterilization legislation in 1962 (Windle 1965, p. 307), which allowed women to volunteer to be sterilized as a birth control measure (Lombardo 2008b, p. 243). In order to qualify for voluntary sterilization, women needed to be married and to have obtained spousal consent. Virginias current law, enacted in the early 1980s, only allows for those with a need for contraception, who have no other options in obtaining it, to be sterilized. Patients can be sterilized involuntarily, but the process one must go through before gaining permission to involuntarily sterilize a patient is very protective (Lombardo 2008b, p. 267).

Groups targeted and victimized

After Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, racist eugenics became more prominent. The 1954 Supreme Court case brought a resurgence of racist eugenics called Massive Resistance to prevent desegregation (Dorr 2008, p. 196).

Racist eugenics once again came into discussion with the 1962 and 1964 proposed laws for punitive sterilization of welfare mothers with illegitimate children. There was some fear that African, Far eastern, Indian, and African American populations were expanding far more rapidly than others, and these proposed laws were in part to target such communities (Dorr 2008, p. 196, 211). Even with the voluntary sterilization law, there was some concern that a woman might consent to being sterilized if strongly advised by a physician to do so. This trust in physicians could have given them the power to influence women to undergo sterilization for ultimately eugenic purposes (Dorr 2008, p. 214).

Other restrictions placed on those identified in the law

On March 20, 1924 (the same day as the passage of SB 281, the Eugenical Sterilization Act) Virginia signed into law SB 219, the Racial Integrity Act. Under this piece of legislation to became unlawful for any white person in [Virginia] to marry any [person] save a white person (SB 219, Racial Integrity Act).

(Photo origin: University of Virginia Health Systems' Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, available athttp://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/eugenics/3-buckvbell.cfm)

After the 1924 act was passed, Priddy was a key proponent in the sterilization of a Virginia Colony patient, Carrie Buck, in order to test the strength of sterilization legislation and set a precedent of its legality. (The court case Buck v. Bell was originally Buck v. Priddy, however; Albert Priddy died before the case went into the appeals process and the Virginia Colonys new Superintendent Dr. J.H. Bell replaced Priddy in the case during appeals.) Priddys power and eugenic ideology was a key factor in the success of eugenics throughout Virginia (Claude Moore Health Sciences Library). While there were many major other proponents of eugenics and sterilization in Virginia, it is important to note the influence of Walter Plecker, the University of Virginia, and of the journal Virginia Medical Monthly. Walter Plecker, in his role as State Registrar at the Bureau of Vital Statistics, intended to maintain the purity of the states white race by classifying all residents in the state of Virginia by their race to prevent any intermarriage through the threat of prosecution of those who dissented (Black 2003, pp. 165-70). It was under the great influence of Plecker and his racist rhetoric that the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 became law (Lombardo 1996, p. 9).

Additionally, the University of Virginia acted as a highly respected educational institution that pushed the thought and science of eugenics through research and education. In the words of Dr. H.E. Jordan, Dean of the Department of Medicine at the University of Virginia, eugenics will work the greatest social revolution the world has yet known [for] it aims at the production and the exclusive prevelancy of the highest type of physical, intellectual and moral man within the limits of human protoplasm (Claude Moore Health Sciences Library).Having asimilar influence, the Virginia Medical Monthly published medical reports from superintendents of various Virginia institutions as a method to increase the loathing toward those deemed feeble-minded while also spreading eugenics theory and practice. These proponents continued to condemn the unfit to sterilization and with their continual insistence of the necessity of sterilization, public support grew (Noll 1995, p. 61).

Feeder institutions and institutions where sterilizations were performed

(Photo origin: University of Virginia Health Systems' Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, available athttp://www.hsl.virginia.edu/historical/eugenics/3-buckvbell.cfm)

In Virginia, state hospitals and institutions were used both to institutionalize and to sterilize patients. Most infamous throughout Virginia is the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia, which started as a place to house epileptics, who had previously been put into prisons with criminals (Lombardo 2008b, p. 13). Pictured above is the Hasley Jennings building at the Virginia Colony where many individuals, including Carrie Buck, were sterilized (Claude Moore Health Sciences Library). Its name has been changed to Central Virginia Training Center (CVTC; Noll 2005, p. 29).

While Steven Noll noted in a 2005 article that the CVTC does not address its role in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case (p. 39), it does so now withremarkable candor about its past on its website under "History" (http://www.cvtc.dmhmrsas.virginia.gov/feedback.htm). Its cemetery is open to the public; however,archival material is not maintained in a manner that permits public viewing (Noll 2005, p. 37).

(Photo origin: http://www.wsh.dmhmrsas.virginia.gov/images/photoofoldsite.jpg)

Patients were also sterilized the Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia under the supervision of Joseph S. DeJarnette. The hospital opened in 1825 as the Western Lunatic Asylum, but its name was changed in 1894 to the Western State Hospital. Western State was the second largest sterilization institution, after Lynchburg (Brocato 2008, p. 113). There is no mention of sterilization on any official webpages, but the Western State Hospital still functions as a psychiatric hospital.

(Photo origin: http://www.gotghost.net/images/P3010134.JPG)

With less frequency, sterilization occurred at Virginias Central State Mental Hospital in Petersburg, which stopped treating intellectual disability patients in 1971, but continues as a rehabilitation facility under the name Central State Hospital.

(Photo origin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_State_Hospital)

Sterilizations also took place at Eastern State Hospital in Williamsburg, which is still functioning and claims to be America's first psychiatric hospital, and at Southwestern State Hospital in Marion as well (Black 2003, p. 4). Now a museum, the original hospital built in 1773 has been rebuilt on excavated foundations.

Southwestern State Hospital, originally called Southwestern Lunatic Asylum, is now called Southwestern Virginia Mental Health Institute. These institutions make no reference to their history in sterilization.

Commemoration

In 2002, a marker was erected to commemorate those sterilized under the Virginia sterilization law. The marker was erected by the Virginia Department of Historic Resources. The marker number is Q-28. It reads: In 1924, Virginia, like a majority of states then, enacted eugenic sterilization laws. Virginias law allowed state institutions to operate on individuals to prevent the conception of what were believed to be genetically inferior children. Charlottesville native Carrie Buck (19061983), involuntarily committed to a state facility near Lynchburg, was chosen as the first person to be sterilized under the new law. The U.S. Supreme Court, in Buck v. Bell, on 2 May 1927, affirmed the Virginia law. After Buck more than 8,000 other Virginians were sterilized before the most relevant parts of the Act were repealed in 1974. Later evidence eventually showed that Buck and many others had no hereditary defects. She is buried south of here (Lombardo 2008a).

Thelocation of the marker is 382.202N, 7829.303W. It is located in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Preston Avenue (U.S. 250) 0.2 miles south of Grady Avenue (U.S. 250), on the left when traveling north. The approx. address is 800 Preston Avenue, Charlottesville, Virginia.

Opposition

Opposition outside of the Catholic Church appears to have been minimal throughout Virginia. While Catholics opposed sterilization in any form because such mutilation is in direct violation of Natural Law, it seems that the strong Protestant, white supremacist ideology present throughout much of the South allowed for eugenic sterilizations to go nearly unquestioned (Windle 1965, p. 308). Very little information pertaining to the opposition to sterilization is available prior to Charles Windles case study on the passage of sterilization legislation in Virginia during the 1962 legislative session. During this session, a bill requiring the compulsory sterilization of women with more than one illegitimate child who is also receiving welfare benefits died in committee debate (Windle 1965, pp. 306-7). While the compulsory sterilization proposal failed, a voluntary sterilization bill during the same session passed by a large margin (Windle 1965, p. 307). It is important to note that this legislation was considered nearly forty years after sterilization was first legalized in Virginia and public opinion allowed for compulsory sterilization in 1924. Additionally, at the time these bills were considered, sterilization legislation was still on the books in Virginia. Even the Buck v. Bell case had little to do with any opposition to sterilization. Rather, this case was a ploy by eugenicists to set a nationwide standard of sterilization legality by taking appeals to the United States Supreme Court (Claude Moore Health Sciences Library).Moreover, Virginia is a traditionally agrarian state and sterilization legislation (when considered in 1962) was widely supported by individuals concerned with race relations and welfare in poorer, nonurban areas with high proportions of nonwhites and of agricultural and manufacturing employment (Windle 1965, p. 314). The number of sterilizations that continued to occur into the 1970s is a testament to the stronghold of eugenic ideology throughout the state.

Bibliography:

Brocato, Amanda D. 2008. The Campaign for Eugenics in Virginia: The Influence of Dr. J.S. DeJarnette. Augusta Historical Bulletin. pp 105-117. Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia Health System. "Eugenics: Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Virginia, Eugenics, and Buck v. Bell." Available at . Dorr, Gregory M. 2006. Defective or Disabled?: Race, Medicine, and Eugenics in Progressive Era Virginia and Alabama. Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 5, 4: 359-92. Dorr, Gregory Michael. 2000. "Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivery Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915-1953." Journal of Southern History 66, 2: 257-96.

Dorr, Gregory Michael. 2008. Segregations Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Rev Ed: Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press. Landman, J. H. 1932. Human Sterilization: The History of the Sexual Sterilization Movement. New York: MacMillan. Largent, Mark A. 2008. Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilizatioin in the United States. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lombardo, Paul. "Eugenic Sterilization Laws." Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. Available at . Lombardo, Paul A. 2008a. The Historical Marker Database: Buck v. Bell. Available at Lombardo, Paul A. 2003. "Facing Carrie Buck." Hastings Center Report 33, 2: 14-17. Lombardo, Paul A. 1996. "Medicine, Eugenics, and the Supreme Court: >From Coercive Sterilization to Reproductive Freedom." Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy 13, 1: 1-25.

Lombardo, Paul A. 2008b. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Rev. Ed. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.

Noll, Steven. 2005. The Public Face of Southern Institutions for the Feeble-Minded. The Public Historian 27, 2: 25-42.

Noll, Steven. 1995. Feeble-Minded in Our Midst: Institutions for the Mentally Retarded in the South, 1900-1940. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Paul, Julius. 1965. Three Generations of Imbeciles Are Enough: State Eugenic Sterilization Laws in American Thought and Practice. Unpublished manuscript. Washington, D.C.: Walter Reed Army Institute of Research.

Trent, James W. Jr. 1994. Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in the United States. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Windle, Charles. 1965. "Factors in the Passage of Sterilization Legislation: The Case of Virginia." The Public Opinion Quarterly 29, 2: 306-14.

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Racial Integrity Act of 1924 – Wikipedia, the free …

On March 20, 1924 the Virginia General Assembly passed two laws that had arisen out of contemporary concerns about eugenics and race: SB 219, titled "The Racial Integrity Act[1]" and SB 281, "An ACT to provide for the sexual sterilization of inmates of State institutions in certain cases", henceforth referred to as "The Sterilization Act". The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 was one of a series of laws designed to prevent inter racial relationships.

The Racial Integrity Act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the "one-drop rule", defining as "colored" persons with any African or Native American ancestry. It also expanded the scope of Virginia's ban on interracial marriage (anti-miscegenation law) by criminalizing all marriages between white persons and non-white persons. In 1967 the law was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.

The Sterilization Act provided for compulsory sterilization of persons deemed to be "feebleminded," including the "insane, idiotic, imbecile, or epileptic."[2]

These two laws were Virginia's implementation of Harry Laughlin's "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law",[3] published two years earlier in 1922. The Sterilization Act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the case Buck v. Bell 274 U.S. 200 (1927). This had appealed the order for compulsory sterilization of Carrie Buck, who was an inmate in the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, and her daughter and mother.

Together these laws implemented the practice of "scientific eugenics" in Virginia.

In the 1920s, Virginia's registrar of statistics, Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, was allied with the newly founded Anglo-Saxon Club of America in persuading the Virginia General Assembly to pass the Racial Integrity Law of 1924.[4] The club was founded in Virginia by John Powell of Richmond in the fall of 1922; within a year the club for white males had more than 400 members and 31 posts in the state.[5]

In 1923, the Anglo-Saxon Club founded two posts in Charlottesville, one for the town and one for students at the University of Virginia. It sought (and was successful in gaining) passage of legislation to classify all persons as belonging either to the "white" or "Negro" races. A major goal was to end "amalgamation" by racial intermarriage. Members claimed also to support Anglo-Saxon ideas of fair play. Later that fall, a state convention of club members was to be held in Richmond.[6]

The Virginia assembly's 21st-century explanation for the laws summarizes their development:

The now-discredited pseudo-science of eugenics was based on theories first propounded in England by Francis Galton, the cousin and disciple of famed biologist Charles Darwin. The goal of the "science" of eugenics was to improve the human race by eliminating what the movement's supporters considered hereditary disorders or flaws through selective breeding and social engineering. The eugenics movement proved popular in the United States, with Indiana enacting the nation's first eugenics-based sterilization law in 1907.[7]

In the following five decades, other states followed Indiana's example by implementing the eugenic laws. Wisconsin was the first State to enact legislation that required the medical certification of persons who applied for marriage licenses. The law that was enacted in 1913 generated attempts at similar legislation in other states.

The Racial Integrity Act cited "scientific" eugenics arguments for prohibiting marriage between whites and non-whites. However, anti-miscegenation laws, banning interracial marriage between whites and non-whites, had existed long before the emergence of eugenics. First enacted during the Colonial era when slavery had become essentially a racial caste, such laws were in effect in Virginia and in much of the United States until the 1960s.

The first law banning all marriage between whites and blacks was enacted in the colony of Virginia in 1691. This example was followed by Maryland (in 1692) and several of the other Thirteen Colonies. By 1913, 30 out of the then 48 states (including all Southern states) enforced such laws.

During the early 20th century, Harry H. Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, became concerned that states were not enforcing their eugenics laws. In 1922, he published his book, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, which included a "MODEL EUGENICAL STERILIZATION LAW" in Chapter XV.[8]

By 1924, 15 states had enacted similar legislation; however, unlike Virginia, many or most or all of those states failed to rigidly enforce their laws requiring specific qualities in all persons seeking to marry. Forced sterilization, however, was much more common. By 1956, twenty-four states had laws providing for involuntary sterilization on their books. These states collectively reported having forcibly sterilized 59,000 people over the preceding 50 years.[9]

Virginia implemented Laughlin's "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law" with little modification two years after it was published. New York eugenicist Madison Grant worked to ensure his model of the "one-drop rule" was implemented by the Virginia registrar of statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker, who developed the racial criteria behind the act.[10]

The Racial Integrity Act was subject to the "Pocahontas exception"since many influential "First Families of Virginia" (FFV) claimed descent from Pocahontas, a daughter of the Powhatan, the legislature declared that a person could be considered white even if he or she had as much as one-sixteenth Native American ancestry.[11] By comparison, during the 19th century, the legislature had defined that a person with one-eighth or less African ancestry could be considered white. During the years when slavery was in effect, white citizens of Virginia were less concerned with non-European ancestry than people had become by the early 20th century, more than 50 years after emancipation.

Dr. Plecker, a leading eugenicist physician who was the registrar of vital statistics from 1912 to 1946, lobbied for years to get the eugenics laws passed in Virginia. Once these laws were passed, Dr. Plecker was in the position to enforce them.

Gov. E. Lee Trinkle, a year after signing the act, asked Plecker to ease up on the Indians and not embarrass them any more than possible.

Plecker responded, I am unable to see how it is working any injustice upon them or humiliation for our office to take a firm stand against their intermarriage with white people, or to the preliminary steps of recognition as Indians with permission to attend white schools and to ride in white coaches.[12]

Unsatisfied with the "Pocahontas Exception", eugenicists introduced an amendment to narrow loopholes to the Racial Integrity Act. This was considered by the Virginia General Assembly in February 1926 but it failed to pass.[13] If adopted, the amendment would have reclassified thousands of "white" people as "colored" by more strictly implementing the "one-drop rule" of ancestry as applied to American Indian ancestry.[14]

The combined effect of these two laws adversely affected the continuity of Virginia's American Indian tribes. The Racial Integrity Act called for only two racial categories to be recorded on birth certificates, rather than the traditional six: "white" and "colored" (which now included Indian and all discernible mixed race persons.)[15] The effects were quickly seen. In 1930, the US Census for Virginia recorded 779 Indians; by 1940, that number had been reduced to 198. In effect, Indians were being erased as a group from official records.[4]

In addition, as Plecker admitted, he enforced the Racial Integrity Act extending far beyond his jurisdiction in the segregated society.[16] For instance, he pressured school superintendents to exclude mixed-race (then called mulatto) children from white schools. Plecker ordered the exhumation of dead people of "questionable ancestry" from white cemeteries to be reinterred elsewhere.[15]

As registrar, Plecker directed the reclassification of nearly all Virginia Indians as colored on their birth and marriage certificates, because he was convinced that most Indians had African heritage and were trying to "pass" as Indian to evade segregation. Consequently, two or three generations of Virginia Indians had their ethnic identity altered on these public documents. Fiske reported that Plecker's tampering with the vital records of the Virginia Indian tribes made it impossible for descendants of six of the eight tribes recognized by the state to gain federal recognition, because they could no longer prove their American Indian ancestry by documented historical continuity.[16]

Historians have not estimated the impact of the miscegenation laws. There are records, however, of the number of people who were involuntarily sterilized during the years these two laws were in effect. Of the involuntary sterilizations reported in the United States prior to 1957, Virginia was second, having sterilized a total of 6,683 persons. Many more women than men were sterilized: 4,043 to 2,640. Of those, 2,095 women were sterilized under the category of "Mentally Ill"; and 1,875 under the category "Mentally Deficient." The remainder were for "Other" reasons. (California was first, having sterilized 19,985 people without their consent.) Other states reported involuntary sterilizations of similar numbers of people as Virginia.[17]

The intention to control or reduce ethnic minorities, especially "Negroes," can be seen in writings by some leaders in the eugenics movement:

In an 1893 "open letter" published in the Virginia Medical Monthly, Hunter Holmes McGuire, a Richmond physician and president of the American Medical Association, asked for "some scientific explanation of the sexual perversion in the Negro of the present day." McGuire's correspondent, Chicago physician G. Frank Lydston, replied that African-American men raped white women because of "[h]ereditary influences descending from the uncivilized ancestors of our Negroes." Lydston suggested as a solution to perform surgical castration, which "prevents the criminal from perpetuating his kind."[18]

In 1935, a decade after the passage of Virginia's eugenics laws, Plecker wrote to Walter Gross, director of Nazi Germanys Bureau of Human Betterment and Eugenics. Plecker described Virginia's racial purity laws and requested to be put on Gross' mailing list. Plecker commented upon the Third Reich's sterilization of 600 children in the Rhineland (the so-called Rhineland Bastards, who were born of German women by black French Colonial fathers): "I hope this work is complete and not one has been missed. I sometimes regret that we have not the authority to put some measures in practice in Virginia."[19]

Despite lacking the statutory authority to sterilize black, mulatto and American Indian children simply because they were "colored", a small number of Virginia eugenicists in key positions found other ways to achieve that goal. The Sterilization Act gave State institutions, including hospitals, psychiatric institutions and prisons, the statutory authority to sterilize persons deemed to be "feebleminded" a highly subjective criterion.

Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, director of the Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, was a leading advocate of eugenics. DeJarnette was unsatisfied with the pace of America's eugenics sterilization programs. In 1938 he wrote:

"Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while the United States with approximately twice the population has only sterilized about 27,869 in the past 20 years. ... The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the U.S. should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the maximum... The Germans are beating us at our own game."[20]

By "12 million defectives", DeJarnette was almost certainly referring to ethnic minorities[citation needed], as there have never been 12 million mental patients in the United States.

According to historian Gregory M. Dorr, the University of Virginia School of Medicine (UVA) became "an epicenter of eugenical thought" that was "closely linked with the national movement." One of UVA's leading eugenicists, Harvey Ernest Jordan, Ph.D. was promoted to dean of medicine in 1939 and served until 1949. [21] He was in a position to shape the opinion and practice of Virginia physicians for several decades. This excerpt from a 1934 UVA student paper indicates one student's thoughts: "In Germany, Hitler has decreed that about 400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great step in eliminating the racial deficients."[22]

The racial effects of the program in Virginia can be seen by the disproportionately high number of black and American Indian women who were given forced sterilizations after coming to a hospital for other reasons, such as childbirth. Doctors sometimes sterilized the women without their knowledge or consent in the course of other surgery.[23]

In the early twentieth century minorities in everyday southern society feared to voice their opinions due to severe oppression. Magazines such as the Richmond Planet marked the beginning for minorities to have a voice and have their voice heard all over the community. The Richmond Planet blindly made a difference in society by openly expressing the opinions of minorities in society[citation needed]. After the passing of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924 the Richmond Planet published the article Race Amalgamation Bill Being Passed in Va. Legislature. Much Discussion Here on race Integrity and Mongrelization Bill Would Prohibit Marriage of Whites and Non-whites Skull of Bones Discusses race question..[24] The journalist opened the article with Racial Integrity Act and gave a brief synopsis of the act. Then followed statements from the creators of the Racial Integrity Act John Powell and Earnest S. Cox. Mr. Powell believed that racial integrity act was needed as maintenance of the integrity of the white race to preserve its superior blood and Cox believed in what he called the great man concept which means that if the races were to intersect that it would lower the rate of great white men in the world. Surprisingly enough the minorities agreed with racial integrity act the author states:

"The sane and educated Negro does not want social equality They do not want intermarriage or social mingling any more than does the average American white man wants it. They have race pride as well as we. They want racial purity as much as we want it. There are both sides to the question and to form an unbiased opinion either way requires a thorough study of the matter on both sides."

Racial minorities were not the only people affected by these laws. About 4,000 poor white Virginians were involuntarily sterilized by government order. When Laughlin testified before the Virginia assembly in support of the Sterilization Act in 1924, he argued that the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South," created social problems for "normal" people. He said, "The multiplication of these 'defective delinquents' could only be controlled by restricting their procreation."[25]Carrie Buck was the most widely known white victim of Virginia's eugenics laws. She was born in Charlottesville to Emma Buck. After her birth, Carrie was placed with foster parents, John and Alice Dobbs. She attended public school until the sixth grade. After that, she continued to live with the Dobbses, and did domestic work in the home.

Carrie became pregnant when she was 17, as a result of being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. To hide the act, on January 23, 1924, Carries foster parents committed the girl to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded on the grounds of feeblemindedness, incorrigible behavior and promiscuity. They did not tell the court the true cause of her pregnancy. On March 28, 1924, Buck gave birth to a daughter, whom she named Vivian. Since Carrie had been declared mentally incompetent to raise her child, her former foster parents adopted the baby.

On September 10, 1924, Dr. Albert Sidney Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded and a eugenecist, filed a petition with his board of directors to sterilize Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old patient. He claimed she had a mental age of 9. Priddy said that Buck represented a genetic threat to society. While the litigation was making its way through the court system, Priddy died and his successor, Dr. James Hendren Bell, came on the case. When the directors issued an order for the sterilization of Buck, her guardian appealed the case to the Circuit Court of Amherst County. It sustained the decision of the board. The case then moved to the Supreme Court of Appeals of Virginia, where it was upheld. It was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, which upheld the order.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote the ruling. He argued the interest of the states in a "pure" gene pool outweighed the interest of individuals in bodily integrity:

"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 principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes."

Holmes concluded his argument with the phrase: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Carrie Buck was paroled from the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded shortly after she was sterilized. Under the same statute, her mother and three-year-old daughter were also sterilized without their consent. In 1932, her daughter Vivian Buck died of "enteric colitis."

When hospitalized for appendicitis, Doris Buck, Carrie's younger sister, was sterilized without her knowledge or consent. Never told that the operation had been performed, Doris Buck married and with her husband tried to have children. It was not until 1980 that she was told the reason for her inability to get pregnant.[citation needed]

Carrie Buck went on to marry William Eagle. They were married for 25 years until his death. Scholars and reporters who visited Buck in the aftermath of the Supreme Court case reported that she appeared to be a woman of normal intelligence.

The effect of the Supreme Court's ruling in Buck v. Bell was to legitimize eugenic sterilization laws in the United States. While many states already had sterilization laws on their books, most except for California had used them erratically and infrequently. After Buck v. Bell, dozens of states added new sterilization statutes, or updated their laws. They passed statutes that more closely followed the Virginia statute upheld by the Court.

In 1967 the US Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that the portion of the Racial Integrity Act that criminalized marriages between "whites" and "nonwhites" was found to be contrary to the guarantees of equal protection of citizens under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. In 1975, Virginia's Assembly repealed the remainder of the Racial Integrity Act. In 1979, it repealed its state Sterilization Act. In 2001, the legislature overwhelmingly passed a bill (HJ607ER[26]) to express the assembly's profound regret for its role in the eugenics movement. On May 2, 2002, Governor Mark R. Warner issued a statement also expressing "profound regret for the commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement," specifically naming Virginia's 1924 compulsory sterilization legislation. [27]

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Planned Parenthood, Fetal Body Parts, and Eugenics …

Todays medical innovation amid moral ambiguity echoes that of a century ago.

There is a haunting familiarity to the arguments defending Planned Parenthoods sale of body parts from aborted babies for medical research: an echo of another era of medical innovation amid moral ambiguity. Then, as now, the response of cultural leaders especially religious leaders is a story about the corruption, and potential renewal, of Western civilization.

Today were told there is no other way to achieve the research results we desire, because fetal tissue is a uniquely rich source of stem cells, which provide invaluable clues to human development. Second, were led to believe that research on aborted babies will heal diseases, eradicate physical defects, and greatly enhance the human condition. And finally, were warned that prohibiting medical experimentation of this kind would mean subordinating science to religion.

Well, now. It ought to give us pause that each of these claims was enlisted a century ago when it was believed that the tools of evolutionary science could be applied to improve the human species. What Nature does blindly, slowly, ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly, English anthropologist Francis Galton told a learned society in London in 1909. As it lies within his power, so it becomes his duty to work in that direction.

What duty did Galton have in mind? It was the obligation to improve the human gene pool through the scientific methods of selective breeding and sterilization. Galton coined the term eugenics good birth to promote his social vision. What began as a fringe, pseudo-scientific exercise became, in barely a generation, mainstream thinking among scientific and academic elites. It must be introduced into the national conscience, Galton said, like a new religion.

And so it was. Beginning in 1912, a series of international conferences were held in London and New York, creating a global venue for a burgeoning class of eugenicists and their supporters. No longer on the margins of respectability, they were affiliated with institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia; they became leaders in Americas premier scientific organizations.

RELATED: What Ben Carson Knows About Planned Parenthood

Religious authorities, especially those in the liberal wing of the Christian church, did not want to be seen as the enemies of science. As Christine Rosen explains in her insightful book Preaching Eugenics, many ministers became zealous evangelists for the new gospel of genetic engineering. Prompted by the American Eugenics Society, hundreds of American clergymen participated in a national eugenics sermon contest. The Reverend Kenneth Arthur declared in his winning entry: If we take seriously the Christian purpose of realizing on earth the ideal divine society, we shall welcome every help which science affords.

Poverty, crime, family disintegration there were indeed reasons to worry about the quality of the genetic stock of Western societies, thanks to the social breakdown instigated by the Industrial Revolution. Add to this the psychological trauma of the First World War. The supposedly Christian nations of Europe among the most advanced in human history had nearly destroyed one another in a global suicide pact. In the postwar years, books with titles like The Twilight of the White Races (1926) and Sterilization of the Unfit (1929) typified the mood.

RELATED:The Planned Parenthood Videos Expose Our Countrys Silent Pact with the Abortion Industry

Meanwhile, many Americans watched with deep anxiety as millions of undesirable immigrants from southern Europe (including my Italian grandparents) washed across Americas shores in the aftermath of the Great War. Eugenics advocates got the attention of Congress in 1920, when the House held hearings on the Biological Aspects of Immigration. The testimony of eugenicist Harry Laughlin included these chilling lines: Our failure to sort immigrants on the basis of natural worth is a very serious national menace. By setting up a eugenical standard for admission demanding a high natural excellence of all immigrants...we can enhance and improve the national stamina and ability of future Americans.

Establishing and enforcing a genetic threshold for immigrants proved implausible. So how to best identify and isolate the biological defectives among them? Marriage laws were considered ineffective; immigration restrictions couldnt stop defective people who were already here from procreating.

Thus the United States with its passion for technological and scientific advances earned the noxious distinction of becoming the first nation in the West to legalize compulsory sterilization. Beginning with Indiana in 1907, many states passed sterilization laws to prevent procreation of confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a political progressive and eugenics advocate, authored the 1927 Court decision upholding Virginias sterilization laws: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Not everyone succumbed to the siren song of human perfectionism. For conservative and orthodox Christians, the eugenics movement represented a frontal assault on the Bibles teaching about human nature: a reduction of the individual to mere biology.

Two of the 20th centurys greatest Christian authors, C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, used their literary imagination to launch a counterattack. Both men began their academic careers at Oxford in the 1920s, when the eugenics movement was in full swing. They came to share a deep distrust of scientific progress the kind of progress that threatened to degrade or enslave human beings.

In their epic works of heroic fiction, Lewis and Tolkien depict their characters as physical and spiritual beings, responsible for their eternal souls even as they are constrained by their earthly nature. The worlds of Narnia and Middle-earth are also filled with non-human races elves, dwarves, hobbits, centaurs, etc. who nonetheless share this human attribute. The point must not be missed: No creature no matter how small or apparently insignificant deserves to be treated as a means to an end. Like no other authors of their postwar generation, Lewis and Tolkien insisted on the unique moral status of the human person.

RELATED: Cecil and Cecile: Humanness, but Not for the Human

At its heart, Tolkiens War of the Ring is a struggle to preserve the essential freedom and humanity of the inhabitants of Middle-earth. Thus, in The Lord of the Rings, we glimpse the frightful prospect of genetic engineering the creation of robotic orcs in an effort to extend the dictatorship of Mordor throughout the world. In Lewiss Perelandra, the second novel in his Space Trilogy, we meet Professor Weston, a physicist and devotee of emergent evolution, a quasi-scientific process by which the human species thrusts its way upward and ever upward toward physical and mental perfection. Man in himself is nothing, Weston explains. The forward movement of Life the growing spirituality is everything. Weston becomes an essentially satanic figure.

But, some will ask, isnt conservative Christianity an enemy of scientific progress if it seems to challenge the authority of the Bible? Isnt the debate over fetal tissue really just another conflict between reason and revelation?

It is true that Christian fundamentalists have sometimes discredited themselves in their approach to scientific controversies. But we shouldnt blame the traditional teachings of the Bible for bad behavior. Its worth remembering that the Bible thumpers at the Scopes Monkey Trial were also some of the most vigorous opponents of human eugenics; they were dead right about the morally debased agenda of the eugenicists. As Rosen points out, it was progressive Christianity that portrayed the eugenics movement as a mandate from heaven. The evidence yields a clear pattern about who elected to support eugenic-style reforms and who did not, she writes. Religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets.

The eugenics agenda eventually fell out of favor: The conscience of the West was quickened by the sight of the ovens at Auschwitz, the ultimate manifestation of the logic of eugenics. Yet the scientific community, with its rising cultural authority, had helped to persuade a generation of an urgent biological necessity. Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, was among the ranks of the true believers. Speaking at Vassar College in 1926, Sanger warned of a social crisis an increasing race of morons unless sterilization policies were widely implemented.

In that worldview, there are few restraints on what science can do must do in order to improve mankinds physical well-being. This is what C. S. Lewis meant when he warned of the abolition of man the negation of human dignity in the name of progress, or compassion, or humanity, or science itself. Lewis lived long enough to witness firsthand the dreadful progeny of this idea: For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

The passage of time, it seems, has only strengthened this power and the fearsome temptation to use it.

Joseph Loconte is an associate professor of history at the Kings College in New York City and the author of A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 19141918.

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Planned Parenthood, Fetal Body Parts, and Eugenics ...

Frank Salter – Eugenics, Ready or Not – Hour 1 – YouTube

Frank Salter is an Australian academic and researcher at the former Max Planck Institute for Behavioral Physiology. He is a political ethologist, studying political phenomena using the methods and theories of behavioral biology in addition to conventional methods. Franks recent essay, Eugenics, Ready or Not is the platform for our conversation, which begins with clarification of the definition and background of eugenics, along with its links to genetics and the rapidly advancing field of reproductive technology. Frank details some points in history that have given eugenics a bad name, underscoring instances where the state has stepped in and taken authority over individual sovereignty, an action he declares is extremely dangerous. We discuss where eugenics gets mixed up in the utopian dreams of the left, with social engineering schemes based largely on the denial of science and technology. Frank gives examples of positive, negative and coercive eugenics, and we look at the conditions that have created a consumer-driven eugenics industry via the expanding utilization of in vitro fertilization (IVF). In the members segment, Frank explains where the field of eugenics is receiving major influence from the cultural left, and we look at the myriad of moral, ethical and societal dilemmas that have sprung up because of the classic utopian socialist ideology that is being thrust forth into civilization by the social sciences and university system. He points to the war against Western society that is being waged through strong anti-white arguments involving the notion of breeding out ethnocentrism and the desire for self-preservation. We talk about the effects of the skewed drive for diversity across European and American lands, and we consider how the corroding weight of mass immigration could be clearing the way for a renewed interest in maintaining traditional rights. Frank highlights issues in the study of genetics involving gene editing that are posing dangerous implications for pushing biology out of the social sciences and humanities. To wrap things up, we size up the mad upsurge of asylum seekers looking to settle in the west along with the decline in native European populations and what this means for our genetic continuity.

Authors website: http://socialtechnologies.com.au/

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Suffer The Little Children, Pennhurst State Home: Eugenics …

Suffer The Little Children: A Peek into the History of Eugenics and Child Abuse by the State - Pennsylvania Pennhurst. (Full Documentary) The ground-breaking 1968 NBC10 Expose on Pennhurst State School by Bill Baldini. Haunting Similarities to current horrors of CPS Shelters + Group Homes (abuse, money benefits contractors, children worse off). Once called the shame of the nation, Pennhurst was the epicenter of a civil and human rights movement that changed the way the world saw people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. The atrocities of neglect at Pennhurst resulted in Supreme Court litigation that sounded the death knell for institutionalization worldwide. Pennhurst was the battleground in a monumental struggle to secure basic human rights for the last group of Americans to attain privileges assumed to be the natural freedoms of all persons. Pennhurst's historic and beautiful campus is, like Valley Forge and Independence Mall to the east, hallowed ground in the struggle for dignity and self-determination, a western anchor to a freedom corridor, that, though stretching but a few miles, reaches all the way around the world. Pennhurst Memorial and Preservation Alliance seeks to ensure that those achievements won at Pennhurst are neither lost nor forgotten. http://www.preservepennhurst.com/defa...

PA & EUGENICS - In 1913, the legislature appointed a Commission for the Care of the Feeble-Minded which stated that the disabled were unfit for citizenship and posed a menace to the peace, and thus recommended a program of custodial care. The Commission desired to prevent the intermixing of the genes of those imprisoned w the general population. In the Biennial Report to the Legislature submitted by the Board of Trustees, Pennhurst's Chief Physician quoted Henry H. Goddard, a leading eugenicist:- "Every feeble-minded person is a potential criminal. The general public, although more convinced today than ever before that it is a good thing to segregate the idiot or the distinct imbecile, they have not as yet been convinced as to the proper treatment of the defective delinquent, which is the brighter and more dangerous individual."

More on Eugenics in Pennsylvania - -- In 1857 the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision while it held session at Bedford Springs in Bedford, Pennsylvania. Dred Scott and his family walked into the Supreme Court as free people and walked out as slaves. Transferring authority from the parent to the state produced profound subservience and slavery into the entire culture. Millions of American families are now experiencing the very same fate as the Dred Scott family, as "family courts" and bureaucratic slave-makers are committing the very same atrocities in eugenics "kangaroo courts." http://bedfordsprings.blogspot.com/ -- Eugenics in America, Began in Bedford, Pennsylvania and Continues to Destroy through CPS Fraud, Abuse, False Accusations. http://robertscourt.blogspot.com/2009...

--- Cases --- PENNHURST STATE SCHOOL V. HALDERMAN, 465 U. S. 89 (1984). The Court of Appeals affirmed, holding that the MH/MR Act required the State to adopt the "least restrictive environment" approach for the care of the mentally retarded, and rejecting petitioners' argument that the Eleventh Amendment barred a federal court from considering this pendent state law claim. The court reasoned that, since that Amendment did not bar a federal court from granting prospective injunctive relief against state officials on the basis of federal claims, citing Ex parte Young, 209 U. S. 123, the same result obtained with respect to a pendent state law claim. HELD: Eleventh Amendment prohibited the District Court from ordering state officials to conform their conduct to state law. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-124. (a) The principle of sovereign immunity is a constitutional limitation on the federal judicial power established in Art. III of the Constitution. The Eleventh Amendment bars a suit against state officials when the State is the real, substantial party in interest, regardless of whether the suit seeks damages or injunctive relief. The Court in Ex parte Young, supra, recognized an important exception to this general rule: a suit challenging the federal constitutionality of a state official's action is not one against the State. Pp. 465 U. S. 97-103. http://supreme.justia.com/us/465/89/

EX PARTE YOUNG, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), Whether a state statute is unconstitutional because the penalties for its violation are so enormous that persons affected thereby are prevented from resorting to the courts for the purpose of determining the validity of the statute, and are thereby denied the equal protection of the law, and their property rendered liable to be taken without due process of law, is a Federal question and gives the Circuit Court jurisdiction. http://supreme.justia.com/us/209/123/...

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Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, In Her Own …

On blacks, immigrants and indigents: "...human weeds,' 'reckless breeders,' 'spawning... human beings who never should have been born." Margaret Sanger, Pivot of Civilization, referring to immigrants and poor people

On sterilization & racial purification: Sanger believed that, for the purpose of racial "purification," couples should be rewarded who chose sterilization. Birth Control in America, The Career of Margaret Sanger, by David Kennedy, p. 117, quoting a 1923 Sanger speech.

On the right of married couples to bear children: Couples should be required to submit applications to have a child, she wrote in her "Plan for Peace." Birth Control Review, April 1932

On the purpose of birth control: The purpose in promoting birth control was "to create a race of thoroughbreds," she wrote in the Birth Control Review, Nov. 1921 (p. 2)

On the rights of the handicapped and mentally ill, and racial minorities: "More children from the fit, less from the unfit -- that is the chief aim of birth control." Birth Control Review, May 1919, p. 12

On religious convictions regarding sex outside of marriage: "This book aims to answer the needs expressed in thousands on thousands of letters to me in the solution of marriage problems... Knowledge of sex truths frankly and plainly presented cannot possibly injure healthy, normal, young minds. Concealment, suppression, futile attempts to veil the unveilable - these work injury, as they seldom succeed and only render those who indulge in them ridiculous. For myself, I have full confidence in the cleanliness, the open-mindedness, the promise of the younger generation." Margaret Sanger, Happiness in Marriage (Bretano's, New York, 1927)

On the extermination of blacks: "We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population," she said, "if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members." Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America, by Linda Gordon

On respecting the rights of the mentally ill: In her "Plan for Peace," Sanger outlined her strategy for eradication of those she deemed "feebleminded." Among the steps included in her evil scheme were immigration restrictions; compulsory sterilization; segregation to a lifetime of farm work; etc. Birth Control Review, April 1932, p. 107

On adultery: A woman's physical satisfaction was more important than any marriage vow, Sanger believed. Birth Control in America, p. 11

On marital sex: "The marriage bed is the most degenerating influence in the social order," Sanger said. (p. 23) [Quite the opposite of God's view on the matter: "Marriage is honorable in all, and the bed undefiled; but whoremongers and adulterers God will judge." (Hebrews 13:4)

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Margaret Sanger, Founder of Planned Parenthood, In Her Own ...