1. Eugenics

Category Archives: Eugenics

1916 Eugenics Masturbation Sex Prostitution Nazi Hitler …

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Nature's Secret's Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of The Laws of Sex Life and Heredity or Eugenics.

Shannon, TW. Truitt, WJ. Fallows, Bishop Samuel. Marietta, Ohio: S. A. Mullikin Company/ Leslie Judge Co., NY: 1916.

Elaborately embossed black boards with "Eugenics" on the front, "The Science of Human Life" on the spine crown; gilt slightly faded with minimal wear to edges/ extremities. Numerous b&w illustrations/ photos as well as some color plates throughout. Black faux leatherette shows little to no wear to exterior; only minor shelfwear, fading to the gilt and light rounding. Marbled page edges. Hinges intact, unmarked with all pages bound. Heavily tooled with texture and embossed design. 584 pp. Good luck!

About EUGENICS and its ties to Nazis (wiki):

Eugenics is the "applied science or the biosocial movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population," usually referring to human populations.[2] Eugenics was widely popular in the early decades of the 20th century, but has fallen into disfavor after having become associated with Nazi Germany and with the discovery of molecular evolution. Since the postwar period, both the public and the scientific communities have associated eugenics with Nazi abuses, such as enforced racial hygiene, human experimentation, and the extermination of "undesired" population groups. However, developments in genetic, genomic, and reproductive technologies at the end of the 20th century have raised many new questions and concerns about the meaning of eugenics and its ethical and moral status in the modern era.

As a social movement, eugenics reached its height of popularity in the early decades of the 20th century. By the end of World War II eugenics had been largely abandoned.[3] Although current trends in genetics have raised questions amongst critical academics concerning parallels between pre-war attitudes about eugenics and current "utilitarian" and social theories allegedly related to Darwinism,[4] they are, in fact, only superficially related and somewhat contradictory to one another.[5] At its pre-war height, the movement often pursued pseudoscientific notions of racial supremacy and purity.[6]

Eugenics was practiced around the world and was promoted by governments, and influential individuals and institutions. Its advocates regarded it as a social philosophy for the improvement of human hereditary traits through the promotion of higher reproduction of certain people and traits, and the reduction of reproduction of other people and traits.[7]

Today it is widely regarded as a brutal movement which inflicted massive human rights violations on millions of people.[8] The "interventions" advocated and practiced by eugenicists involved prominently the identification and classification of individuals and their families, including the poor, mentally ill, blind, promiscuous women, homosexuals and entire racial groups -- such as the Roma and Jews -- as "degenerate" or "unfit"; the segregation or institutionalisation of such individuals and groups, their sterilization, euthanasia, and in the extreme case of Nazi Germany, their mass extermination.[9]

The practices engaged in by eugenicists involving violations of privacy, attacks on reputation, violations of the right to life, to found a family, to freedom from discrimination are all today classified as violations of human rights. The practice of negative racial aspects of eugenics, after World War II, fell within the definition of the new international crime of genocide, set out in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide.[10]

The modern field and term were first formulated by Sir Francis Galton in 1883,[11] drawing on the recent work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.[12][13] At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by prominent people, including Margaret Sanger,[14][15]Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Emile Zola, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling[16] and Sidney Webb.[17][18][19] Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.[20]

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1916 Eugenics Masturbation Sex Prostitution Nazi Hitler ...

Challenging the Immigrant

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The Ellis Island intelligence tests, 1915

An officer of the U.S. Public Health Service administers an intelligence test.

Immigrants coming to the New World from Europe had to run a gauntlet of tests at Ellis Island, the main federal immigration station in the U.S. from 1892 to 1954. In charge of the tests were the officers and men of the U.S. Public Health Service.

If incoming ships showed no sign of endemic disease, they were allowed to land. Medical tests for individuals began as soon as they hefted their luggage up the stairs to the registry room: those who arrived huffing and puffing were pulled aside for further health checks. Diseases such as trachoma (an eye disease that is now rare) or other ailments considered back then to be serious and incurable would be sent back to their port of origin right away; those who were ill might have to wait until they were healthy to be admitted to the country.

The immigrants were interviewed to weed out political and social undesirables: communists, anarchists, bigamists and those who seemed too poor to support themselves (a larger problem for women and children) were turned away.

Our article from January 9, 1915, highlights a third hurdle for the immigrants, tests for cognitive ability: The purpose of our mental measuring scale at Ellis Island is the sorting out of those immigrants who may, because of their mental make-up, become a burden to the State or who may produce offspring that will require care in prisons, asylums, or other institutions. Anyone who had a suspected mental defect or who showed definite signs of mental disease were given these tests that we can readily recognize as intelligence tests. Federal law in 1915 required that anyone who failed the tests be turned away.

>> View a slideshow of photos of the Ellis Island tests

Our article was authored by Dr. Howard A. Knox of the U.S. Public Health Service. He is widely credited with being a pioneer in developing intelligence tests. He also had some connections with eugenics, now considered to be a wholly unsavory branch of scientific research.

The process sounds frighteningand many people were indeed scaredand perhaps 20 percent of immigrants were detained for testing or while recuperating from illness. In the end, though, only about 2 percent of those people coming to seek a new life were eventually turned away for any of the above reasons.

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Challenging the Immigrant

Our Gift To You: 'Not To Be Missed' Stories | WUNC

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It's impossible to listen to the radio every minute 24 hours a day. Even the biggest WUNC fan is bound to miss something. So here, in no particular order, are some of our favorite stories from 2014 that you might have missed.

Closer to Freedom (December 8, 2014)

Joseph Sledge, 68, has been in prison for half of his life for the 1976 Bladen County murders of a mother and daughter. News & Observer Investigative Reporter Mandy Locke has followed the story closely. She tells Frank Stasio about the work of the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission to bring Sledge's case to a three judge panel for possible exoneration.

Frank Stasio talks with News & Observer Investigative Reporter Mandy Locke about Joseph Sledges case.

The Year of the Teacher (August 7, 2014)

High-school graduation rates are at an all-time high in North Carolina, and National Association of Educational Progress (NAEP)scores are higher than the national average. Why then, do teachers feel under attack?

Coal Ash Coverage

A broken storm pipe caused 33,000 tons of coal ash to spill into the Dan River in February. Immediately, reporter Jeff Tiberii began filing regular reports on the issue. His reporting, augmented by stories from Jorge Valencia and Dave DeWitt, made national environmental, economic and political news.

Why Some NC Sterilization Victims Won't Get Share Of $10 Million Fund (October 6, 2014)

In 2013, North Carolina lawmakers set up a $10 million compensation fund for victims of state-sponsored eugenics. More than 780 people applied, claiming they had been forcibly or coercively sterilized by the state. After an initial review, the state decided only about 200 of those claims are valid, while more than 500 have come up short. This is the story of one victim, Debra Blackmon.

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Our Gift To You: 'Not To Be Missed' Stories | WUNC

The Sentinel published 'Wealth is not a sign of intelligence'

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PHILIP Sandland (Sentinel Letters, December 9) believes that wealth is a sign of intelligence and that Karl Marx claimed everyone is equal.

Wealth is just as likely to accompany a dim, egocentric, ruthless and exploitative personality. I do not know of many millionaire Nobel Prize winners but there are numerous sons of Third World politicians and military dictators, with dubiously sourced wealth, who have studied at an English public school.

For example, a disproportionate number of ex-public schoolboys occupy the best-paid jobs in the City and judiciary.

This is unlikely to be because they are especially bright but because their parents were rich and able to afford the intense tuition and social contacts that are not available to their poorer contemporaries.

In turn their children will benefit from having wealthy parents and the wealth gap, that the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has recently reported to have hampered the growth of the UK economy, is perpetuated.

The grammar school system, which Mr Sandland advocates, is only a little better.

It benefits the children of middle-class parents who are able to provide books and the encouragement that the poorer parents of equally talented children who have to work all the hours God sends to survive cannot provide.

The children of poorer parents are definitely disadvantaged. I do not know the answer to this but I am sure Mr Sandland is wrong to blame their unintelligent parents. Human eugenics was discredited many years ago.

ALEX SHAW

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The Sentinel published 'Wealth is not a sign of intelligence'

Homegrown cartoonist Kate Beaton gets around

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A Nova Scotia-born cartoonists work swept across the country Thursday when it popped up as the daily Google Doodle.

Its totally cool. Its something everyone sees, artist Kate Beaton said in a telephone interview Thursday evening.

The worlds most popular search engine contacted her earlier this fall about doing a drawing for their daily doodle for Canada, Beaton said.

The nicest thing is that Im the one they thought of.

She describes her work as a mixed bag featuring history jokes, literary jokes and pop culture.

Google had wanted to do something to celebrate a woman in Canadian history.

Initially, they thought of using the image of suffragette Nellie McClung, but she was eventually ruled out because of her controversial support of eugenics.

Its important to take the bad with the good when you are celebrating people, Beaton said.

However, they settled on well-known female rights advocate Henrietta Edwards.

In Beatons drawing, Edwards is dressed in period clothing leading a group of marching women and carrying a banner that proclaims womens rights as townspeople look on in surprise and consternation.

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Homegrown cartoonist Kate Beaton gets around

Homegrown cartoonist gets around

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A Nova Scotia-born cartoonists work swept across the country Thursday when it popped up as the daily Google Doodle.

Its totally cool. Its something everyone sees, artist Kate Beaton said in a telephone interview Thursday evening.

The worlds most popular search engine contacted her earlier this fall about doing a drawing for their daily doodle for Canada, Beaton said.

The nicest thing is that Im the one they thought of.

She describes her work as a mixed bag featuring history jokes, literary jokes and pop culture.

Google had wanted to do something to celebrate a woman in Canadian history.

Initially, they thought of using the image of suffragette Nellie McClung, but she was eventually ruled out because of her controversial support of eugenics.

Its important to take the bad with the good when you are celebrating people, Beaton said.

However, they settled on well-known female rights advocate Henrietta Edwards.

In Beatons drawing, Edwards is dressed in period clothing leading a group of marching women and carrying a banner that proclaims womens rights as townspeople look on in surprise and consternation.

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Homegrown cartoonist gets around

The War on Drugs Was Born 100 Years Ago

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When I went to the Oxford Union debates this past summer I was told by a veteran of the debates that I must have a joke in order to win over the audience. My attempt to win over the British audience was a success, but unfortunately my opening remarks are too close to the truth and in retrospect, are really not that funny:

Mr. Chairman, I want to thank you for the opportunity to debate the War on Drugs in this forum. Mr. Chairman, as you probably know, the War on Drugs was not a response to calls from experts, it was not in response to recommendations from the medical community, or even the law enforcement community. Mr. Chairman, the War on Drugs was started by the agitation of racists, bigots, religious fanatics, believers in eugenics, extremist politicians, and power hungry diplomats. In other words, Mr. Chairman, the average ordinary American.

The War on Drugs was initiated by legislation that was passed not to help drug addicts and protect the innocent, but rather was designed to control and marginalize minority groups and to push the United States into a leadership role in world diplomatic affairs.

The War on Drugs is 100 years old today. It kills thousands of people, destroys untold number of lives, and wastes hundreds of billions of dollars every year. Plus it prevents us from using three of the most miraculous plants on the planet, even for their legitimate uses.

As written, the Harrison Narcotics Act of 1914 was legislation that established a tax and registration requirement on narcotics and cocaine. Politicians and journalists openly targeted Chinese immigrants, Southern blacks, and Mexicans with outrageous propaganda. The real priority of the legislation, however, was to comply with the first international drug control treaty, the International Opium Convention of 1912.

As implemented, the legislation quickly evolved into an outright prohibition. Enforcement bureaucrats argued that doctors prescribing narcotics for drug addiction was an illegitimate medical practice. The courts ruled in their favor and addict-maintenance medical practices and addiction clinics were forced to close.

Marijuana prohibition went national with the passage of the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. It too quickly changed from a measure to tax and regulate into an outright prohibition. Even hemp, the non-intoxicating form of cannabis was banned! When propaganda claiming that marijuana was deadly and caused insanity, violence, and criminal behavior was debunked (aka Reefer Madness), the gateway theory was born to fill the void. The gateway theory posits that while marijuana might not be addictive or dangerous, it would lead the user to try the hard drugs, such as heroin. This theory became the prevailing view in the second half of the twentieth century.

In my dissertation, I showed that the gateway theory did not explain the movement toward harder drugs. This research was subsequently published in The Economics of Prohibition. I showed that it was actually prohibition enforcement itself that created incentives for suppliers to make drugs more potent e.g., more potent marijuana, and to switch to more potent drug types e.g., smuggling cocaine instead of marijuana.

It was the case that the markets for narcotics, cocaine, and marijuana had problems and concerns, but as Mises Institute Summer Fellow Audrey Redford has shown, it was also the case that these markets were already impacted by numerous state and local regulations and prohibitions, by heavy tariffs, the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, and by a host of state and local alcohol prohibitions and restrictions.

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The War on Drugs Was Born 100 Years Ago

Using GMO Food to Reduce World’s Population by 90% by David Schnittger – Video

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Using GMO Food to Reduce World #39;s Population by 90% by David Schnittger
Hawaiians Win Community GMO Victory Over Monsanto http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/05/hawaiians-win-community-gmo-victory-over-monsanto However, eugenics as a modern ...

By: Dave Flang

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Using GMO Food to Reduce World's Population by 90% by David Schnittger - Video

Thomas Massie: Jonathan Gruber’s "Eugenics" Economics of Abortion – Video

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Thomas Massie: Jonathan Gruber #39;s "Eugenics" Economics of Abortion
Air Date: December 5th, 2014 This video may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes only. This constitutes a #39;fair use #39; of any such copyrighted...

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Thomas Massie: Jonathan Gruber's "Eugenics" Economics of Abortion - Video

Devangshu Datta: The 'colour' of intelligence

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James Watson recently created a stir by auctioning off his Nobel medal. The 86-year-old co-discoverer of the molecular structure of deoxyribonucleic acid or DNA received the Nobel for Physiology in 1962, along with Maurice Wilkins and Francis Crick. Tragically, Rosalind Franklin, who also made a major contribution, died in 1958.

Watson's achievements are gigantic. He has held positions at Harvard, at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and headed the Human Genome Project. His personal account, The Double Helix, remains a best-seller, and so do his textbooks on molecular biology.

But his career has also been tainted by recurrent accusations of racism and sexism. He has a talent, if it may be so described, for making quotable statements on charged subjects. For example, he once said a pregnant woman should "hypothetically" have the right to abort if tests showed the foetus "may have a tendency to become homosexual".

He has also famously speculated on links between libido and skin colour: "That's why you have Latin lovers. You've never heard of an English lover. Only an English Patient." He has argued in favour of eugenics and genetic screening to "cure stupidity".

In 2007, Watson was on tour promoting his book, Avoid Boring People: Lessons from a Life in Science (an extremely readable and irreverent tome), when he spoke to Sunday Times. He said "I am inherently gloomy about Africa. All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really". He continued that "people who have to deal with black employees find this (equal intelligence) is not true". Those remarks (which he subsequently withdrew) led to the cancellation of the tour and enforced retirement from Cold Harbor.

Although not in financial need, Watson felt ostracised by the scientific community and decided to auction his medal. Alisher Usmanov, billionaire co-owner of Arsenal FC, bought the medal for $4.8 million and promptly returned it. Watson is said to have donated a large part of the money to Cold Harbor, the University of Chicago, Indiana University and Cambridge.

Watson's racism, and his advocacy of eugenics reflect attitudes that were mainstream when he was a young man. Given the colonial history of the 19th and 20th centuries, the racism may have been historically inevitable.

Francis Galton (1822-1911), who was Charles Darwin's cousin and a pioneering statistician, coined "eugenics". Galton did studies on the inheritable nature of intelligence and the environmental effect on it. He advocated giving intelligent people incentives to marry each other and thus, produce bright progeny.

The darker side is forbidding marriage and procreation rights to "unsuitable" people with lower intelligence, criminal tendencies and so on. Nazism indulged in the extermination of "undesirables". Apartheid in South Africa and Segregation in southern American states created highly discriminatory environments and punished "miscegenation". India's sterilisation programmes during the Emergency also disproportionately targeted specific socio-economic classes.

Among other Nobel Prize winners, Winston Churchill (unsurprisingly) and William Shockley were pro-eugenicists. Shockley was a co-developer of the transistor and one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley. He was an abrasive, paranoid man who alienated subordinates and eventually, his children. Shockley believed that the "less intelligent" should be prevented from having children in order to prevent the spreading of bad genes.

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Devangshu Datta: The 'colour' of intelligence

Book Review: The Shelf

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Author Phyllis Rose Writes About Adventures in ExtremeReading

The subtitle of Phyllis Roses new book, Adventures in Extreme Reading, sounds like the opposite of extreme sports, and Rose admits that while she imagined her adventure to be similar to crossing Antarctica, reduced to eating the sled dogs, leading my men through the frozen wastes, in reality, she prefers to sleep under a quilt with my head on a goose downpillow.

That sense of gentle, tongue-in-cheek irony permeates The Shelf, as well it should since Roses expedition is simply reading all the books on a single shelf in the New York Society Library: LEQ to LES. While this shelf is chosen largely at random, Rose picks it in part because it contains a mix of older and contemporary works and none are by an author she knows personally. She is curious about the largely forgotten writers whose works fill most of the space in any library: Who reads their work now? Are we missingout?

In general, her answer is that, yes, we are missing out, as she comes to appreciate not only moth-eaten classics like Alain-Ren Le Sages Gil Blas but also books by contemporaries such as Rhoda Lerman and Lisa Lerner, whom she meets and becomes friends with during the course of writing The Shelf. While Rose emphatically trusts her own judgment, she is also intrigued by the comments of the online community: I discovered the fun of participating in a virtual conversation about literature at any moment of the day ornight.

Rose is naturally sympathetic to the efforts of other writers, even if their work doesnt particularly move her. In fact, she is at her funniest when she dislikes the material she has forced herself to read. She describes two of the heroes in detective novels by John Lescroart this way: Rather than old friends whom I looked forward to seeing again, they were the couple who were always inviting us over for dinner and I finally had to accept, knowing we were in for a lacklusterevening.

Not surprisingly, reading so many books that have largely disappeared from public view leads Rose to the world of deaccessioning or weeding. Librarians use the acronym MUSTIE to decide if a book must go. Is it Misleading, Ugly, Superseded by a new or better edition, Trivial, Irrelevant to the needs of the community it serves, and can it be found Elsewhere? As Rose suggests, just about any book could be accused of at least one of these sins, and weeding turns out to be a hot topic in library circles, with most librarians sadly conceding its necessity, while an outspoken few champion the idea that deaccessioning books is akin to eugenics andmurder.

Ultimately, the pleasure of The Shelf is Roses writing, which is thoughtful, droll, and occasionally indignant. The book itself is a success. In contrast, Roses efforts to promote the books she encounters in LEQ to LES are less effective. This is due in part to her honesty in reporting on the books style and contents; they rarely sound scintillating. By the end of a chapter, she may have convinced herself that she has uncovered a hidden treasure, but the average reader cannot be blamed for remaining content to allow these neglected volumes to remain on theirshelf.

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Book Review: The Shelf


  1. Eugenics