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Eugenics is the practice or advocacyof improving the human species by selectively mating people with specific desirable hereditary traits. It aims to reduce human suffering by breeding out disease, disabilities and so-called undesirable characteristics from the human population. Early supporters of eugenics believed people inherited mental illness, criminal tendencies and even poverty, and that these conditions could be bred out of the gene pool.

Historically, eugenics encouraged people of so-called healthy, superior stock to reproduce and discouraged reproduction of the mentally challenged or anyone who fell outside the social norm. Eugenics was popular in America during much of the first half of the twentieth century, yet it earned its negative association mainly from Adolf Hitlers obsessive attempts to create a superior Aryan race.

Modern eugenics, more often called human genetic engineering, has come a long wayscientifically and ethicallyand offers hope for treating many devastating genetic illnesses. Even so, it remains controversial.

Eugenics literally means good creation. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term eugenics didnt come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Platos best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbidden but not between brother and sister. While Platos ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

In the late 19th century, Galtonwhose cousin was Charles Darwinhoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were feeble-minded to marry. In 1903, the American Breeders Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a pedigree registry. The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The Eugenics Record Office also maintained there was clear evidence that supposed negative family traits were caused by bad genes, not racism, economics or the social views of the time.

Eugenics in America took a dark turn in the early 20th century, led by California. From 1909 to 1979, around 20,000 sterilizations occurred in California state mental institutions under the guise of protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness.

Many sterilizations were forced and performed on minorities. Thirty-three states would eventually allow involuntary sterilization in whomever lawmakers deemed unworthy to procreate.

In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of the handicapped does not violate the U.S. Constitution. In the words of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, three generations of imbeciles are enough. In 1942, the ruling was overturned, but not before thousands of people underwent the procedure.

In the 1930s, the governor of Puerto Rico, Menendez Ramos, implemented sterilization programs for Puerto Rican women. Ramos claimed the action was needed to battle rampant poverty and economic strife; however, it may have also been a way to prevent the so-called superior Aryan gene pool from becoming tainted with Latino blood.

According to a 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation, between 25 and 50 percent of Native Americans were sterilized between 1970 and 1976. Its thought some sterilizations happened without consent during other surgical procedures such as an appendectomy.

In some cases, health care for living children was denied unless their mothers agreed to sterilization.

As horrific as forced sterilization in America was, nothing compared to Adolf Hitlers eugenic experiments leading up to and during World War II. And Hitler didnt come up with the concept of a superior Aryan race all on his own. In fact, he referred to American eugenics in his 1934 book, Mein Kampf.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler declares non-Aryan races such as Jews and gypsies as inferior. He believed Germans should do everything possible, including genocide, to make sure their gene pool stayed pure. And in 1933, the Nazis created the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring which resulted in thousands of forced sterilizations.

By 1940, Hitlers master-race mania took a terrible turn as Germans with mental or physical disabilities were euthanized by gas or lethal injection. Even the blind and deaf werent safe, and hundreds of thousands of people were killed.

During World War II, concentration camp prisoners endured horrific medical tests under the guise of helping Hitler create the perfect race. Josef Mengele, an SS doctor at Auschwitz, oversaw many experiments on both adult and child twins.

He used chemical eyedrops to try and create blue eyes, injected prisoners with devastating diseases and performed surgery without anesthesia. Many of his patients died or suffered permanent disability, and his gruesome experiments earned him the nickname, Angel of Death.

In all, its estimated eleven million people died during the Holocaust, most of them because they didnt fit Hitlers definition of a superior race.

Thanks to the unspeakable atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis, eugenics lost momentum in after World War II, although forced sterilizations still happened. But as medical technology advanced, a new form of eugenics came on the scene.

Modern eugenics, better known as human genetic engineering, changes or removes genes to prevent disease, cure disease or improve your body in some significant way. The potential health benefits of human gene therapy are staggering since many devastating or life-threatening illnesses could be cured.

But modern genetic engineering also comes with a potential cost. As technology advances, people could routinely weed-out what they consider undesirable traits in their offspring. Genetic testing already allows parents to identify some diseases in their child in utero which may cause them to terminate the pregnancy.

This is controversial since what exactly constitutes negative traits is open to interpretation, and many people feel that all humans have the right to be born regardless of disease, or that the laws of nature shouldnt be tampered with.

Much of Americas historical eugenics efforts such as forced sterilizations have gone unpunished, although some states offered reparations to victims or their survivors. For the most part, though, its a largely unknown stain on Americas history. And no amount of money can ever repair the devastation of Hitlers eugenics programs.

As scientists embark on a new eugenics frontier, past failings can serve as a warning to approach modern genetic research with care and compassion.

American Breeders Association. University of Missouri.Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office. University of Missouri.Forced Sterilization of Native Americans: Late Twentieth Century Physician Cooperation with National Eugenic Policies. The Center for Bioethics & Human Dignity.Greek Theories on Eugenics. Journal of Medical Ethics.Josef Mengele. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Latina Women: Forced Sterilization. University of Michigan.Modern Eugenics: Building a Better Person? Helix.Nazi Medical Experiments. Holocaust Encyclopedia.Plato. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.Unwanted Sterilization and Eugenics Programs in the United States. PBS.

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Eugenics - HISTORY

Background

A significant number of Nazi persecutory policies stemmed from theories of racial hygiene, or eugenics. Such theories were prevalent among the international scientific community in the first decades of the twentieth century. The term eugenics (from the Greek for good birth or stock) was coined in 1883 by the English naturalist Francis Galton. Its German counterpart, racial hygiene, (Rassenhygiene) was first employed by German economist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. At the core of the movements belief system was the principle that human heredity was fixed and immutable.

For eugenicists, the social ills of modern society criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, and even povertystemmed from hereditary factors. Supporters of eugenic theory did not believe that these problems resulted from environmental factors, such as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late 19th century in Europe and the United States. Rather, they advanced the science of eugenics to address what they regarded as a decline in public health and morality.

Eugenicists had three primary objectives. First, they sought to discover hereditary traits that contributed to societal ills. They also aimed to develop biological solutions to these problems. Lastly, eugenicists sought to campaign for public health measures to combat them.

Eugenics found its most radical interpretation in Germany, but its influence was by no means limited to that nation alone. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenic societies sprang up throughout most of the industrialized world. In Western Europe and the United States, the movement was embraced in the 1910s and 1920s. Most supporters in those places endorsed the objectives of American advocate Charles Davenport. Davenport advocated for the development of eugenics as a science devoted to the improvement of the human race through better breeding. Its supporters lobbied for positive eugenic efforts. They advocated for public policies that aimed to maintain physically, racially, and hereditarily healthy individuals. For example, they sought to provide marital counseling, motherhood training, and social welfare to deserving families. In doing so, eugenics supporters hoped to encourage better families to reproduce.

Efforts to support the productive members of society brought negative measures. For instance, there were efforts to redirect economic resources from the less valuable in order to provide for the worthy. Eugenicists also targeted the mentally ill and cognitively impaired. Many members of the eugenics community in Germany and the United States promoted strategies to marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity. They promoted limiting their reproduction through voluntary or compulsory sterilization. Eugenicists argued that there was a direct link between diminished capacity and depravity, promiscuity, and criminality.

Members of the eugenic community in Germany and the US also viewed the racially inferior and poor as dangerous. Eugenicists maintained that such groups were tainted by deficiencies they inherited. They believed that these groups endangered the national community and financially burdened society.

More often than not eugenicists scientifically-drawn conclusions did little more than to incorporate popular prejudice. However, by employing research and theory to their efforts, eugenicists could assert their beliefs as scientific fact.

German eugenics pursued a separate and terrible course after 1933. Before 1914, the German racial hygiene movement did not differ greatly from its British and American counterparts. The German eugenics community became more radical shortly after the World War I. The war brought unprecedented carnage. In addition, Germany saw economic devastation in the years between World War I and World War II. These factors heightened the division between those considered hereditarily valuable and those considered unproductive. For instance, some believed that hereditarily valuable Germans had died on the battlefield, while the unproductive Germans institutionalized in prisons, hospitals, and welfare facilities remained behind. Such arguments resurfaced in the Weimar and early Nazi eras as a way to justify eugenic sterilization and a decrease in social services for the disabled and institutionalized.

By 1933, the theories of racial hygiene were embedded into the professional and public mindset. These theories influenced the thinking of Adolf Hitler and many of his followers. They embraced an ideology that blended racial antisemitism with eugenic theory. In doing so, the Hitler regime provided context and latitude for the implementation of eugenic measures in their most concrete and radical forms.

Racial hygiene shaped many of Nazi Germanys racial policies. Medical professionals implemented many of these policies and targeted individuals the Nazis defined as hereditarily ill: those with mental, physical, or social disabilities. Nazis claimed these individuals placed both a genetic and a financial burden upon society and the state.

Nazi authorities resolved to intervene in the reproductive capacities of persons classified as hereditarily ill. One of the first eugenic measures they initiated was the 1933 Law for the Prevention of Progeny [offspring] with Hereditary Diseases (Hereditary Health Law). The law mandated forcible sterilization for nine disabilities and disorders, including schizophrenia and hereditary feeblemindedness. As a result of the law, 400,000 Germans were ultimately sterilized in Nazi Germany. In addition, eugenic beliefs shaped Germanys 1935 Marital Hygiene Law. This law prohibited the marriage of persons with diseased, inferior, or dangerous genetic material to healthy German Aryans.

Eugenic theory provided the basis for the so-called euthanasia (T4) program. This clandestine program targeted disabled patients living in institutions throughout the German Reich for killing. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand patients, the overwhelming majority of them German Aryans, fell victim to this clandestine killing operation.

Author(s): United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

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Eugenics | The Holocaust Encyclopedia

Before the Second World War, eugenics or as the Oxford Dictionary puts it: the science of improving a population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics was surprisinglypopular with many people still very famous today. The belief of many luminaries of pre-war Britain and America was that the human race needed urgent protectionfrom degenerates, the unfit and the feebleminded. People including architects of Britains welfare state and writersfamous for their socialist and Fabian principleswere veryhappy promoting eugenicist idealseven while Hitler was, horrendously, putting many of these theories to the test with policies designed to biologically improve the Aryan Ubermenschen master race.

The Nazis targeted people identified as life unworthy of life (German: Lebensunwertes Leben), such as those with congenital cognitive and physical disabilities which included the feebleminded, epileptic, schizophrenic, manic-depressive, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, deaf, blind and the homosexual, and then tried to eliminate them from the chain of heredity.

The idea of Eugenics to produce better human beings has existed at least since Plato in ancient Greece. The term eugenics to describe the concept of improving the quality of the human race through selective breeding was originally developed by Francis Galton, the half-cousin of Charles Darwin. In 1883, a year after Darwins death he gave his discredited science a name: Eugenics.

Once most people could see where it ultimately led to the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration campseugenics went into steep decline after 1945. For most of these, often well-meaning, peopleanyadmiration with theories horribly close to nazism were conveniently forgotten.

Here is the Flashbak Top Ten list of famous eugenicists who perhaps should have known better:

Number One Marie Stopes the family-planning pioneer.

Marie Stopes

Marie Stopes, who died in 1958 at the age of 77 and founded Britains first birth control clinic in North London in 1921 and indeed was honoured with a postage stamp in 2008, was actually a hardcore eugenicist. She once wrote that hordes of defectives should be reduced in number so to be less of a burden on the fit. Stopes even went on to disinherit her son because he married a short-sighted woman therefore risking a less-than-perfect grandchild. In Birth Control News a magazine she set up in 1922 she described southern Italians as a low-grade race and once said of the French that they should eliminate the taint of their large numbers of perverted or homosexual people.

In a book called Radiant Motherhood Stopes went on to denounce any society that allows the diseased, the racially negligent, the thriftless, the careless, the feeble-minded, the very lowest and worst members of the community to produce innumerable tens of thousands of stunted, warped and inferior infants. In August 1939, less than one month before the start of WW2, Stopes sent Adolf Hitler a copy of her book of Songs for Young Lovers which included a letter: Dear Herr Hitler, love is the greatest thing in the world: So will you accept from me these [poems] that you may allow the young people of your nation to have them? The young must learn love from the particular till they are wise enough for the universal. I hope too that you yourself may find something to enjoy in the book.

Three years into the war Marie Stopes wrote a humorous poem that included the line: Catholics, Prussians, the Jews and the Russians, all are a curse, or something worse.

Number Two:H.G. Wells writer

H.G. Wells visiting the set of Things to Come in 1937.

Herbert GeorgeWells, best known as the author of The Time Machine, the Invisible Man, the Island of Doctor Moreau and the War of the Worlds books and films still well known today. He isfamous for his socialist and pacifist principles but perhaps less well known for his rather racist views and his enthusiastic support of Eugenics.

He once wrote: The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born.It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies. Also:The mating of two quite healthy persons may result in disease, he wrote. I am told it does so in the case of interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyka region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly, and rarely live.

I believe that if a canvass of the entire civilized world were put to the vote in this matter, the proposition that it is desirable that the better sort of people should intermarry and have plentiful children, and that the inferior sort of people should abstain from multiplication, would be carried by an overwhelming majority.

..the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable.

H.G. Wells, once ventedhis annoyanceand irritationdirectlyto the, in his opionion, the feckless working class: We cannot go on giving you health, freedom, enlargement, limitless wealth, if all our gifts to you are to be swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny, he complained, and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.

Number Three Helen Keller deafand blind author, activist and lecturer

In defense of eugenics, Helen Keller wrote Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of some use to itself and to the world.She also called for physicians juries for defective babies. who would then vote on which children would be kept alive and which would not It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature, Keller said, adding that allowing a defective child to die was simply a weeding of the human garden that shows a sincere love of true life.

Number Four George Bernard Shaw playwright and author

George Bernard Shaw in 1941.

George Bernard Shaw is undoubtedly oneof the most celebrated writers of the western world. The Irishman was co-founder of the London School of Economics and alsofamous for his ardent socialism and wrote many brochures and speeches for the Fabian society. Today, however, his views on selective breeding seem pretty close to the ones of Hitler and oftentalked of killing people in a lethal chamber:

The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?

In 1910George Bernard Shaws lecture to the Eugenics Education Societywas reported in the Daily Express: A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other peoples time to look after them.

In 1934, a year after the Nazis had grabbed power in Germany, Shaw wrote:The moment we face it frankly we are driven to the conclusion that the community has a right to put a price on the right to live in it If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?

Number Five Winston Churchill politician and wartime prime-minister

Winston Churchill 1941

The man who stood up to Adolf Hitler and who was once described by the historian A.J.P. Taylor as the saviour of our country was, ratherironically, extremely pro-eugenics.

In a memo to Asquith, theprime minister, in 1910, Winston Churchill warned,The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.

Number Six WilliamBeveridge Economist and social reformer

William Beveridge 1942.

William Beveridge, thearchitect of the post-1945 welfare state, was a hardline supporter of theeugenics movement and in 1909once saidthat:

Those men who through general defects are unable to fill such a whole place in industry are to be recognized as unemployable. They must become the acknowledged dependents of the State but with complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood.

Beveridge was a eugenicist supporter for much of his life and Dennis Sewell in the Spectator in 2009 wrote about William Beveridge over thirty years later in 1943:

On the evening that the House of Commons met to debate the Beveridge Report, Beveridge himself went off to address an audience of eugenicists at the Mansion House. He knew he was in for a rough ride. His scheme of family allowances had originally been devised within the Eugenics Society with a graduated rate, which paid out more to middle-class parents and very little to the poor. The whole point was to combat the eugenicists great bugbear the differential birth rate between the classes. However, the government that day had announced a uniform rate. Beveridge was sympathetic to the complaints of his audience and hinted that a multi-rate system might well be introduced at a later date.

Number Seven Theodore Roosevelt 26th president of the United States

Theodore Roosevelt in 1906.

In 1913 Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, wrote a letter to the leading eugenicist Charles B. Davenport:

The Outlook287 Fourth AvenueNew York Lawrence

January 3rd 1913.

My dear Mr. Davenport:

I am greatly interested in the two memoirs you have sent me. They are very instructive, and, from the standpoint of our country, very ominous. You say that these people are not themselves responsible, that it is society that is responsible. I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum. Yet we fail to understand that such conduct is rational compared to the conduct of a nation which permits unlimited breeding from the worst stocks, physically and morally, while it encourages or connives at the cold selfishness or the twisted sentimentality as a result of which the men and women ought to marry, and if married have large families, remain celebates or have no children or only one or two. Some day we will realize that the prime duty the inescapable duty of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. at all.

Faithfully yours,

(Signed, Theodore Roosevelt)

Number Eight Jacques Cousteau sub-mariner and explorer

Jacques Cousteau circa 1973

In 1991 Jacques Cousteau was interviewed by the UNESCO Courier and at one point said: Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer . . . . Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species. . . . In order to stabilize world population, we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but its just as bad not to say it.

Number Nine John Maynard Keynes Economist

John Maynard Keynes c.1938

The extremely influentialeconomist, civil servant, director of the Bank of England and a member of the Bloomsbury Group, John Maynard Keynes was a prominent supporter of Eugenicsand even servedas Director of the British Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944. The state, according to Keynes, would one day work out the optimum population level and once said:the time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members.In 1946, and not long before he died, Keyneswrote thateugenics is the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists. By then, he must have known exactly what Hitler had been up to in the preceding 15 years, but then he did write this:

[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs

It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.

NumberTen Bertrand Russell Philosopher

17th June 1957, British mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872 1970). (Photo by John Drysdale/Keystone/Getty Images)

Themathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russellonce put forward the ideathat the state should issue colour-coded procreation tickets to prevent the gene pool of the elite being diluted by inferior human beings. Those who decided to have children with holders of a different-coloured ticket would be punished with a heavy fine. In 1924 he wrote:

It must be admitted, however, that there are certain dangers. Before long the population may actually diminish. This is already happening in the most intelligent sections of the most intelligent nations; government opposition to birth-control propaganda gives a biological advantage to stupidity, since it is chiefly stupid people who governments succeed in keeping in ignorance. Before long, birth-control may become nearly universal among the white races; it will then not deteriorate their quality, but only diminish their numbers, at a time when uncivilized races are still prolific and are preserved from a high death-rate by white science.

This situation will lead to a tendency already shown by the French to employ more prolific races as mercenaries. Governments will oppose the teaching of birth-control among Africans, for fear of losing recruits. The result will be an immense numerical inferiority of the white races, leading probably to their extermination in a mutiny of mercenaries.

Bertrand Russell, ICARUS or the Future of Science (1924)

In extreme cases there can be little doubt of the superiority of one race to another[] It seems on the whole fair to regard Negroes as on the average inferior to white men, although for work in the tropics they are indispensable, so that their extermination (apart from the question of humanity) would be highly undesirable.

Bertrand Russell,Marriage and Morals, pg. 266 (1929)

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Top Ten Unlikely and Surprising Eugenicists - Flashbak