Category Archives: Eugenics

In August 1912, Harvard president emeritus Charles William Eliot addressed the Harvard Club of San Francisco on a subject close to his heart: racial purity. It was being threatened, he declared, by immigration. Eliot was not opposed to admitting new Americans, but he saw the mixture of racial groups it could bring about as a grave danger. Each nation should keep its stock pure, Eliot told his San Francisco audience. There should be no blending of races.

Eliots warning against mixing raceswhich for him included Irish Catholics marrying white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, Jews marrying Gentiles, and blacks marrying whiteswas a central tenet of eugenics. The eugenics movement, which had begun in England and was rapidly spreading in the United States, insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children.

The former Harvard president was an outspoken supporter of another major eugenic cause of his time: forced sterilization of people declared to be feebleminded, physically disabled, criminalistic, or otherwise flawed. In 1907, Indiana had enacted the nations first eugenic sterilization law. Four years later, in a paper on The Suppression of Moral Defectives, Eliot declared that Indianas law blazed the trail which all free states must follow, if they would protect themselves from moral degeneracy.

He also lent his considerable prestige to the campaign to build a global eugenics movement. He was a vice president of the First International Eugenics Congress, which met in London in 1912 to hear papers on racial suicide among Northern Europeans and similar topics. Two years later, Eliot helped organize the First National Conference on Race Betterment in Battle Creek, Michigan.

None of these actions created problems for Eliot at Harvard, for a simple reason: they were well within the intellectual mainstream at the University. Harvard administrators, faculty members, and alumni were at the forefront of American eugenicsfounding eugenics organizations, writing academic and popular eugenics articles, and lobbying government to enact eugenics laws. And for many years, scarcely any significant Harvard voices, if any at all, were raised against it.

Harvards role in the movement was in many ways not surprising. Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world. Harvard was hardly the only university that was home to prominent eugenicists. Stanfords first president, David Starr Jordan, and Yales most acclaimed economist, Irving Fisher, were leaders in the movement. The University of Virginia was a center of scientific racism, with professors like Robert Bennett Bean, author of such works of pseudo-science as the 1906 American Journal of Anatomy article, Some Racial Peculiarities of the Negro Brain.

But in part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university. Harvard has, with some justification, been called the brain trust of twentieth-century eugenics, but the role it played is little remembered or remarked upon today.It is understandable that the University is not eager to recall its part in that tragically misguided intellectual movementbut it is a chapter too important to be forgotten.In part because of its overall prominence and influence on society, and in part because of its sheer enthusiasm, Harvard was more central to American eugenics than any other university.

Eugenics emerged in England in the late 1800s, when Francis Galton, a half cousin of Charles Darwin, began studying the families of some of historys greatest thinkers and concluded that genius was hereditary. Galton invented a new wordcombining the Greek for good and genesand launched a movement calling for society to take affirmative steps to promote the more suitable races or strains of blood. Echoing his famous half cousins work on evolution, Galton declared that what Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.

Eugenics soon made its way across the Atlantic, reinforced by the discoveries of Gregor Mendel and the new science of genetics. In the United States, it found some of its earliest support among the same group that Harvard had: the wealthy old families of Boston. The Boston Brahmins were strong believers in the power of their own bloodlines, and it was an easy leap for many of them to believe that society should work to make the nations gene pool as exalted as their own.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.A.B. 1829, M.D. 36, LL.D. 80, dean of Harvard Medical School, acclaimed writer, and father of the future Supreme Court justicewas one of the first American intellectuals to espouse eugenics. Holmes, whose ancestors had been at Harvard since John Oliver entered with the class of 1680, had been writing about human breeding even before Galton. He had coined the phrase Boston Brahmin in an 1861 book in which he described his social class as a physical and mental elite, identifiable by its noble physiognomy and aptitude for learning, which he insisted were congenital and hereditary.

Holmes believed eugenic principles could be used to address the nations social problems. In an 1875 article in The Atlantic Monthly, he gave Galton an early embrace, and argued that his ideas could help to explain the roots of criminal behavior. If genius and talent are inherited, as Mr. Galton has so conclusively shown, Holmes wrote, why should not deep-rooted moral defectsshow themselvesin the descendants of moral monsters?

As eugenics grew in popularity, it took hold at the highest levels of Harvard. A. Lawrence Lowell, who served as president from 1909 to 1933, was an active supporter. Lowell, who worked to impose a quota on Jewish students and to keep black students from living in the Yard, was particularly concerned about immigrationand he joined the eugenicists in calling for sharp limits. The need for homogeneity in a democracy, he insisted, justified laws resisting the influx of great numbers of a greatly different race.

Lowell also supported eugenics research. When the Eugenics Record Office, the nations leading eugenics research and propaganda organization, asked for access to Harvard records to study the physical and intellectual attributes of alumni fathers and sons, he readily agreed. Lowell had a strong personal interest in eugenics research, his secretary noted in response to the request.

The Harvard faculty contained some of nations most influential eugenics thinkers, in an array of academic disciplines. Frank W. Taussig, whose 1911 Principles of Economics was one of the most widely adopted economics textbooks of its time, called for sterilizing unworthy individuals, with a particular focus on the lower classes. The human race could be immensely improved in quality, and its capacity for happy living immensely increased, if those of poor physical and mental endowment were prevented from multiplying, he wrote. Certain types of criminals and paupers breed only their kind, and society has a right and a duty to protect its members from the repeated burden of maintaining and guarding such parasites.

Harvards geneticists gave important support to Galtons fledgling would-be science. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvards Bussey Institution, propounded a particularly racial version of eugenics. In his 1919 book Inbreeding and Outbreeding: Their Genetic and Sociologi
cal Significance, East warned that race mixing would diminish the white race, writing: Races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits. The simple fact, he said, was that the negro is inferior to the white.

East also sounded a biological alarm about the Jews, Italians, Asians, and other foreigners who were arriving in large numbers. The early settlers came from stock which had made notable contributions to civilization, he asserted, whereas the new immigrants were coming in increasing numbers from peoples who have impressed modern civilization but lightly. There was a distinct possibility, he warned, that a considerable part of these people are genetically undesirable.

In his 1923 book, Mankind at the Crossroads, Easts pleas became more emphatic. The nation, he said, was being overrun by the feebleminded, who were reproducing more rapidly than the general population. And we expect to restore the balance by expecting the latter to compete with them in the size of their families? East wrote. No! Eugenics is sorely needed; social progress without it is unthinkable.

Easts Bussey Institution colleague William Ernest Castle taught a course on Genetics and Eugenics, one of a number of eugenics courses across the University. He also published a leading textbook by the same name that shaped the views of a generation of students nationwide. Genetics and Eugenics not only identified its author as Professor of Zoology in Harvard University, but was published by Harvard University Press and bore the Veritas seal on its title page, lending the appearance of an imprimatur to his strongly stated views.

In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that racial crossing benefited neither. From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race, he wrote. From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.

Castle also propounded the eugenicists argument that crime, prostitution, and pauperism were largely due to feeblemindedness, which he said was inherited. He urged that the unfortunate individuals so afflicted be sterilized or, in the case of women, segregated in institutions during their reproductive years to prevent them from having children.

Like his colleague East, Castle was deeply concerned about the biological impact of immigration. In some parts of the country, he said, the good human stock was dying outand being replaced by a European peasant population. Would this new population be a fit substitute for the old Anglo-Saxon stock? Castles answer: Time alone will tell.

One of Harvards most prominent psychology professors was a eugenicist who pioneered the use of questionable intelligence testing. Robert M. Yerkes, A.B. 1898, Ph.D. 02, published an introductory psychology textbook in 1911 that included a chapter on Eugenics and Mental Life. In it, he explained that the cure for race deterioration is the selection of the fit as parents.

Yerkes, who taught courses with such titles as Educational Psychology, Heredity, and Eugenics and Mental Development in the Race, developed a now-infamous intelligence test that was administered to 1.75 million U.S. Army enlistees in 1917. The test purported to find that more than 47 percent of the white test-takers, and even more of the black ones, were feebleminded. Some of Yerkess questions were straightforward language and math problems, but others were more like tests of familiarity with the dominant culture: one asked, Christy Mathewson is famous as a: writer, artist, baseball player, comedian. The journalist Walter Lippmann, A.B. 1910, Litt.D. 44, said the results were not merely inaccurate, but nonsense, with no more scientific foundation than a hundred other fads, vitamins, or correspondence courses in will power. The 47 percent feebleminded claim was an absurd result unless, as Harvards late professor of geology Stephen Jay Gould put it, the United States was a nation of morons. But the Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize unfit Americans and keep out unworthy immigrants.The Yerkes findings were widely accepted and helped fuel the drives to sterilize unfit Americans and keep out unworthy immigrants.

Another eugenicist in a key position was William McDougall, who held the psychology professorship William James had formerly held. His 1920 book The Group Mind explained that the negro race had never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments and was apparently incapable of doing so. His next book, Is America Safe for Democracy (1921), argued that civilizations declined because of the inadequacy of the qualities of the people who are the bearers of itand advocated eugenic sterilization.

Harvards embrace of eugenics extended to the athletic department. Dudley Allen Sargent, who arrived in 1879 to direct Hemenway Gymnasium, infused physical education at the College with eugenic principles, including his conviction that certain kinds of exercise were particularly important for female students because they built strong pelvic muscleswhich over time could advantage the gene pool. In giving birth to a childno amount of mental and moral education will ever take the place of a large well-developed pelvis with plenty of muscular and organic power behind it, Sargent stated. The presence of large female pelvises, he insisted, would determine whether large brainy children shall be born at all.

Sargent, who presided over Hemenway for 40 years, used his position as a bully pulpit. In 1914, he addressed the nations largest eugenic gathering, the Race Betterment Conference, in Michigan, at which one of the main speakers called for eugenic sterilization of the worthless one tenth of the nation. Sargent told the conference that, based on his long experience and careful observation of Harvard and Radcliffe students, physical educationis one of the most important factors in the betterment of the race.

If Harvards embrace of eugenics had somehow remained within University confinesas merely an intellectual school of thoughtthe impact might have been contained. But members of the community took their ideas about genetic superiority and biological engineering to Congress, to the courts, and to the public at largewith considerable effect.

In 1894, a group of alumni met in Boston to found an organization that took a eugenic approach to what they considered the greatest threat to the nation: immigration. Prescott Farnsworth Hall, Charles Warren, and Robert DeCourcy Ward were young scions of old New England families, all from the class of 1889. They called their organization the Immigration Restriction League, but genetic thinking was so central to their mission that Hall proposed calling it the Eugenic Immigration League. Joseph Lee, A.B. 1883, A.M.-J.D. 87, LL.D. 26, scion of a wealthy Boston banking family and twice elected a Harvard Overseer, was a major funder, and William DeWitt Hyde A. B. 1879, S.T.D. 86, another future Overseer and the president of Bowdoin College, served as a vice president. The membership rolls quickly filled with hundreds of people united in xenophobia, many of them Boston Brahmins and Harvard graduates.

Their goal was to keep out groups they regarded as biologically undesirable. Immigration was a race question, pure and simple, Ward said. It is fundamenta
lly a question as towhat races shall dominate in the country. League members made no secret of whom they meant: Jews, Italians, Asians, and anyone else who did not share their northern European lineage.

Drawing on Harvard influence to pursue its goalsrecruiting alumni to establish branches in other parts of the country and boasting President Lowell himself as its vice presidentthe Immigration Restriction League was remarkably effective in its work. Its first major proposal was a literacy test, not only to reduce the total number of immigrants but also to lower the percentage from southern and eastern Europe, where literacy rates were lower. In 1896the league persuaded Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, A.B. 1871, LL.B. 74, Ph.D. 76, LL.D. 04, to introduce a literacy bill. Getting it passed and signed into law took time, but beginning in 1917, immigrants were legally required to prove their literacy to be admitted to the country.

The league scored a far bigger victory with the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. After hearing extensive expert testimony about the biological threat posed by immigrants, Congress imposed harsh national quotas designed to keep Jews, Italians, and Asians out. As the percentage of immigrants from northern Europe increased significantly, Jewish immigration fell from 190,000 in 1920 to 7,000 in 1926; Italian immigration fell nearly as sharply; and immigration from Asia was almost completely cut off until 1952.

While one group of alumni focused on inserting eugenics into immigration, another prominent alumnus was taking the lead of the broader movement. Charles Benedict Davenport, A.B. 1889, Ph.D. 92, taught zoology at Harvard before founding the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910. Funded in large part by Mrs. E.H. Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate, the E.R.O. became a powerful force in promoting eugenics. It was the main gathering place for academics studying eugenics, and the driving force in promoting eugenic sterilization laws nationwide.Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined.

Davenport wrote prolifically. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911,quickly became the standard text for the eugenics courses cropping up at colleges and universities nationwide, and was cited by more than one-third of high-school biology textbooks of the era. Davenport explained that qualities like criminality and laziness were genetically determined. When both parents are shiftless in some degree, he wrote, only about 15 percent of their children would be industrious.

But perhaps no Harvard eugenicist had more impact on the public consciousness than Lothrop Stoddard, A.B. 1905, Ph.D. 14. His bluntly titled 1920 bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, had 14 printings in its first three years, drew lavish praise from President Warren G. Harding, and made a mildly disguised appearance in The Great Gatsby, when Daisy Buchanans husband, Tom, exclaimed that civilizations going to piecessomething hed learned by reading The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard.

When eugenics reached a high-water mark in 1927, a pillar of the Harvard community once again played a critical role. In that year, the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, a constitutional challenge to Virginias eugenic sterilization law. The case was brought on behalf of Carrie Buck, a young woman who had been designated feebleminded by the state and selected for eugenic sterilization. Buck was, in fact, not feebleminded at all. Growing up in poverty in Charlottesville, she had been taken in by a foster family and then raped by one of its relatives. She was declared feebleminded because she was pregnant out of wedlock, and she was chosen for sterilization because she was deemed to be feebleminded.

By an 8-1 vote, the justices upheld the Virginia law and Bucks sterilizationand cleared the way for sterilizations to continue in about half the country, where there were similar laws. The majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., A.B. 1861, LL.B. 66, LL.D. 95, a former Harvard Law School professor and Overseer. Holmes, who shared his fathers deep faith in bloodlines, did not merely give Virginia a green light: he urged the nation to get serious about eugenics and prevent large numbers of unfit Americans from reproducing. It was necessary to sterilize people who sap the strength of the State, Holmes insisted, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. His opinion included one of the most brutal aphorisms in American law, saying of Buck, her mother, and her perfectly normal infant daughter: Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

In the same week the Supreme Court decided Buck v. Bell, Harvard made eugenics news of its own. It turned down a $60,000 bequest from Dr. J. Ewing Mears, a Philadelphia surgeon, to fund instruction in eugenics in all its branches, notably that branch relating to the treatment of the defective and criminal classes by surgical procedures.

Harvards decision, reported on the front page of The New York Times, appeared to be a counterweight to the Supreme Courts ruling. But the Universitys decision had been motivated more by reluctance to be coerced into a particular position on sterilization than by any institutional opposition to eugenicswhich it continued to embrace.

Eugenics followed much the same arc at Harvard as it did in the nation at large. Interest began to wane in the 1930s, as the field became more closely associated with the Nazi government that had taken power in Germany. By the end of the decade, Davenport had retired and the E.R.O. had shut down; the Carnegie Institution, of which it was part, no longer wanted to support eugenics research and advocacy. As the nation went to war against a regime that embraced racism, eugenics increasingly came to be regarded as un-American.

It did not, however, entirely fade awayat the University, or nationally. Earnest Hooton, chairman of the anthropology department, was particularly outspoken in support of what he called a biological purge. In 1936, while the first German concentration camps were opening, he made a major plea for eugenic sterilizationthough he emphasized that it should not target any race or religion.

Hooton believed it was imperative for society to remove its worthless people. Our real purpose, he declared in a speech that was quoted in The New York Times, should be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority, and the special and diversified gifts of its superior members.Our real purposeshould be to segregate and to eliminate the unfit, worthless, degenerate and anti-social portion of each racial and ethnic strain in our population, so that we may utilize the substantial merits of its sound majority.

None of the news out of Germany after the war made Hooton abandon his views. There can be little doubt of the increase during the past fifty years of mental defectives, psychopaths, criminals, economic incompetents and the chronically diseased, he wrote in Redbook magazine in 1950. We owe this to the intervention of charity, welfare and medical science, and to the reckless breeding of the unfit.

The United States also held onto eugenics, if not as enthusiastically as it once did. In 1942, with the war against the Nazis raging, the Supreme Court had a chance to overturn Buck v. Bell and hold eugenic sterilization unconstitutional, but it d
id not. The court struck down an Oklahoma sterilization law, but on extremely narrow groundsleaving the rest of the nations eugenic sterilization laws intact. Only after the civil-rights revolution of the 1960s, and changes in popular views toward marginalized groups, did eugenic sterilization begin to decline more rapidly. But states continued to sterilize the unfit until 1981.

Today, the American eugenics movement is often thought of as an episode of national follylike 1920s dance marathons or Prohibitionwith little harm done. In fact, the harm it caused was enormous.

As many as 70,000 Americans were forcibly sterilized for eugenic reasons, while important members of the Harvard community cheered andas with Eliot, Lowell, and Holmescalled for more. Many of those 70,000 were simply poor, or had done something that a judge or social worker didnt like, oras in Carrie Bucks casehad terrible luck. Their lives were changed foreverBuck lost her daughter to illness and died childless in 1983, not understanding until her final years what the state had done to her, or why she had been unable to have more children.

Also affected were the many people kept out of the country by the eugenically inspired immigration laws of the 1920s. Among them were a large number of European Jews who desperately sought to escape the impending Holocaust. A few years ago, correspondence was discovered from 1941 in which Otto Frank pleaded with the U.S. State Department for visas for himself, his wife, and his daughters Margot and Anne. It is understood today that Anne Frank died because the Nazis considered her a member of an inferior race, but few appreciate that her death was also due, in part, to the fact that many in the U.S. Congress felt the same way.

There are important reasons for remembering, and further exploring, Harvards role in eugenics. Colleges and universities today are increasingly interrogating their paststhinking about what it means to have a Yale residential college named after John C. Calhoun, a Princeton school named after Woodrow Wilson, or slaveholder Isaac Royalls coat of arms on the Harvard Law School shield and his name on a professorship endowed by his will.

Eugenics is a part of Harvards history. It is unlikely that Eliot House or Lowell House will be renamed, but there might be a way for the University community to spare a thought for Carrie Buck and others who paid a high price for the harmful ideas that Harvard affiliates played a major role in propounding.

There are also forward-looking reasons to revisit this dark moment in the Universitys past. Biotechnical science has advanced to the brink of a new era of genetic possibilities. In the next few years, the headlines will be full of stories about gene-editing technology, genetic solutions for a variety of human afflictions and frailties, and even designer babies. Given that Harvard affiliates, again, will play a large role in all of these, it is important to contemplate how wrong so many people tied to the University got it the first timeand to think hard about how, this time, to get it right.

Read more here:
Harvard's eugenics era | Harvard Magazine

It is commonly believed that the Scopes trial was about the propriety of banning the teaching of evolution pushed by ignorant persons for religious reasons. In fact, not just human evolution but racism were the major concerns. This fact is well documented, and a review of the books used to teach evolution in the public schools at the time shows that they were blatantly racist. This fact is critical in understanding the concerns of those supporting the Butler act law, which was the focus of the trial.

Almost 90 years ago the trial of the century, the now-infamous Scopes evolution trial, occurred in Dayton, Tennessee (Lienesch 2007). The textbook involved, titled A Civic Biology (1914), was mandated by the state of Tennessee and many other states. For nearly a decade Hunters book was the most widely used high school science textbook in the nation. It was endorsed by many distinguished professors, including those at both Brown and Columbia Universities (Larson 1997). In 1919 the Tennessee Textbook Commission selected the Hunter book as the biology text for use in every one of its public schools.

The state of Tennessee did not have any issues with the bulk of the text, most of which covered basic information about earths plants and animals. Then, in March of 1925, the Tennessee Legislature passed the following law:

The statute was aimed at teaching the evolutionary origins of human beings (the Divine Creation of man), not the origin of the rest of life or even the origin of life. The law was intended to allow parents the right to instruct their children in matters of the origin of humans, human nature, and the destiny of humans. Because the law did not openly conflict with any section in A Civic Biology, which did not openly teach human evolution, the text remained in use throughout the state. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz correctly noted that those actively advocating evolution in 1925 included racists, militarists, and nationalists, who used evolution to push some pretty horrible programs, including forced sterilization (1990, p. 2). Those who wanted to prevent the immigration into America of persons judged by eugenists then as unfit and inferior, or of inferior racial stock, worked to pass the so-called Jim Crow laws. They rationalized their agenda on the grounds that blacks, Jews and others were racially inferior and would interbreed with the superior races, causing deterioration of the superior white race (Dershowitz 1990, p. 2). Dershowitz added that the eugenics movement took its impetus from Darwins theory of natural selection, explaining that German militarism

Darwin explained in detail the process of how selection functioned and the importance of death and war in advancing evolution. He stressed how all-important, in the never-ceasing wars of savages, fidelity and courage were to evolution, adding that a nation with superior qualities, those selected by natural selection, would have an evolutionary advantage that would enable them to destroy the weaker races (Darwin 1871, p. 162). This process of conflict was critical for evolution, and when natural selection that resulted from conflictsuch as from warceases, evolution also ceases. Hitler and other dictators repeatedly stressed this pointHitler in his bible Mein Kampf, and Marx, Engles, Lennin, Mao, and Stalin in their voluminous writings (Bergman 2012).

The law was supported by the famous Christian attorney, William J. Bryan, and opposed by the well-known agnostic attorney, University of Michigan trained Clarence Darrow. At issue in the 1925 trial were certain chapters on evolution and eugenics in a biology text by George W. Hunter. A major concern of attorney William J. Bryan was the degradation of humans by evolution and the influence of evolution on war and national conflicts. He wrote that the Darwinian theory teaches mankind reached his present perfection by the operation of the law of hatethe merciless law by which the strong crowd out and kill off the weak (quoted in Larson 2003, p. 252).

One book that influenced Bryan to draw this conclusion about the doctrine of evolution was written by American biologist Vernon Kellogg, who documented the importance of Darwinism in causing War World I (Kellogg 1917). The Hunter text perfectly illustrated Bryans concern because it was laced with the racism of the day (Larson 1997, p. 23). Its discussion of eugenics included such scarlet passages as the following openly racist claim:

Hunter also wrote that, if we can improve domesticated animals by breeding then future generations of men and women on the earth can also be improved by applying to them the laws of selection taught by Darwin. Hunter stressed that this is no small concern because nothing less than the improvement of the future race is at stake (1914, p. 261). Hunter then, under the subheading Eugenics, which made it clear what type of improvement programs he was referring to, applied the animal breeding research to humans:

When defending his eugenics program, Hunter incorrectly concluded that Tuberculosis (TB) is a genetic diseaseTB is actually caused by bacteria pathogens. Furthermore, the main causes of both epilepsy and feeble-mindedness are pathogens, trauma, and genetic damage occurring in the womb due to such conditions as genetic non-disjunction, not heredity as Hunter claimed. Hunter then wrote that research had been completed on many different families in America,

One now infamous case that Hunter cited was the Kallikak family that

Both of the Jukes and Kallikak family studies have now been thoroughly debunked by a reevaluation of the data and cases used to support the studies original conclusions (Smith 1985). The study is fatally flawed because it implied that the source of both the so-called bad as well as the good genes was from the female: the man bore all good progeny from the Quaker girl, and all bad progeny from the putative feeble-minded girl.

These irresponsible studies were the product of a powerful ideaDarwinismand they created a social myth that Hunter did much to spread throughout the Western world (Smith 1985, p. 193). The Kallikak family study was even translated into German in 1914, and the full text appeared in the German academic journal Friedrich Manns Pedagogishes Magazin. As a result, the Kallikak study also had a significant impact on Nazi Germanys racist policies that ended in the Holocaust.

One example was the infamous July 14 1933, sterilization law that began the murder of millions of inferior persons (Smith 1985, pp. 161162). Hitler used the same reasoning that Hunter used to justify his eugenic programs. For example, under the subheading Parasitism and its Cost to Society Hunter wrote that hundreds of families, such as the Kallikak family,

Hunter then quotes the now-notorious American eugenicist Charles Davenport (using the expression that Hitler later made famous: blood tells), writing eugenics has documented the belief that families which produce brilliant men and women did so because they received good genes from their ancestors. The text then used an example lifted from Davenports Heredity in Relation to Eugenics to illustrate the claim that greatness is due largely to genes (1914, p. 263). The story is about Elizabeth Tuttle, a women of strong will, and of extreme intellectual vigor who married Richard Edwards, a man of high repute and great erudition. This union produced Jonathan Edwards

No mention was made of the critical factor that social influence and privilege had in the success of this family. Genetics was the only factor given (Smith 1985). Olasky and Perry wrote that Hunters view of e
ugenics, widely accepted early in the twentieth century, was a common deduction drawn from and associated with Darwinian theory (2005, p. 70). They added that Hunter explained Darwinian evolution in only five pages, then moved on to the meat of the book, namely the section on

Hunter openly advocated the infamous solution, negative genetics, to what he saw as the mental illness and crime problem, genetically inferior persons. The reasoning was if these

Many Tennessee taxpayers, especially those of African American background, objected to the implications of the whole evolution doctrine that were made explicit in the very science text required by their state. Even prior to the 1925 Tennessee law, so great was the outcry against these passages in many other states that the publisher, American Book Company, had them rewritten (Tennessee used the original 1914 edition until 1926). Even the title of the book, Civic Biology, implied eugenics because the text taught that it is our civic duty to apply eugenics to achieve racial improvement.

Soon after the Tennessee anti-evolution law was passed, the American Civil Liberties Union began advertising for volunteers to challenge the law in court. The city of Dayton saw this as an opportunity to attract both attention and tourism. The local politicians then urged a new young football coach and math teacher, John Scopes, who once substituted for a biology teacher for a few days, to claim that he had violated the law during his short substitute teaching stint.

Prominent scientists from major universities soon flocked to Dayton to challenge the right of the state to regulate the teaching of human evolution and eugenics in public schools. A critical point is that these expert witnesses never once distanced themselves from the many inflammatory racist passages in A Civic Biology. Some of them were active supporters of the eugenics movement, as was Hunters text. Even after the abuses of Darwinian eugenics by the Nazis in the 1930s became common knowledge, some academics still approved the eugenic passages in this once-required public high school biology textbook.

Among the first persons to awaken to the racism lurking quite undisguised in these passages had been the left-leaning Democratic presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Mr. Bryan stood at the forefront of the most progressive victories in his time: Womens suffrage, the direct election of senators, the graduated income tax, among others (Gould 1991, p. 417). His nickname since his first presidential candidacy (1896) was The Great Commoner, and Bryan believed his battle against evolution was an extension of both his populist support and his life work (Gould 1991, p. 419).

Historian Michael Kazin expatiates on Bryans attachments both to Thomas Jefferson and to the type of rural yeomen on whom Jefferson had pinned his moral hopes for the American Republic (2006). Although Bryan harbored doubts on the subject of evolution, his objections to teaching human evolution went far beyond his concerns about a scientific theory (Gilbert 1997 p. 25). A major concern of Bryan was that Darwinism had been used to justify the German war machine and that the survival-of-the-fittest philosophy had been translated into the might-makes-right ethos that had engulfed Germany and threatened to spread to other countries (Gilbert 1997 p. 31).

Bryan, a life-long opponent of solving national problems by war, was fearful that other nations would soon emulate Germany by using the martial view of Darwinism [that] had been invoked by most German intellectuals and military leaders as a justification for war and future domination (Gould 1991, pp. 421422). Bryan even resigned as Secretary of State in President Wilsons cabinet in protest of Americas entry into World War I.

Bryan pointed out several implications that many professors of his day were drawing from Darwins theory, included not only eugenics, but also the nihilistic morals of Nietzsche as elucidated in Darrows brief about the University of Chicago in the Leopold-Loeb murder case, and the moral obligation of superior races, such as the Germans in World War I, to overpower the weak races (e.g., the Belgians) for the advantage of the superior races future welfare. Bryan had been awakened to this last concern by reading a book by the well-known Stanford University biologist Vernon L. Kellogg (1917) that related his conversations with the German General Staff in Belgium in 1914.

African Americans were especially active in opposing evolution because Darwinism was a major force that supported racism against Negroes. The African American responses to Darwinism

Professor Moran added that African Americans living in both the Southern and Northern states openly expressed

Furthermore,

He added that

Using Darwinism to defend the coercive eugenics that was then being taught in American schools from Hunters bookand promoted by academiais now seen as repulsive by both most scholars and most Americans. Bryan turned out to be right on this point, while the promoters of eugenics as a corollary of human evolution were embarrassingly wrong. Bryan was right to object to Hunters text because its interpretation of science was wrong, and evolutionists were wrong to coercively impose their Darwinian eugenics philosophy and racism on public school students. The fact is, Bryan had identified something deeply troubling in the Scopes caseand that the fault does lie partly with scientists and their acolytes (Gould 1991, p. 423).

Bryan was also very concerned about the effects of Darwins racism teachings, such as the following passage from The Descent of Man: With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated (Darwin 1871, p. 168). Bryan made his concerns about the dignity of humankind very clear in the presentation that he gave to the court at the Scopes trial:

Bryan also noted that Darwins hostility to the use of vaccinations existed

Bryan then quoted Wiggam, a best-selling author in 1925, who wrote that

In his defense of accused murderers Loeb and Leopold, Darrow acknowledged the influence of Darwin on his clients. In his appeal to the court, Darrow wrote that Loeb became enamored of the philosophy of Nietzsche, a writer

In a chapter titled Monkeys and Mothers, Moran discusses gender and the anti-evolution impulse, concluding that, during the debate over the Butler anti-evolution act, the Tennessee State Senate Speaker

In addition, letters to

Moran concluded that the

One reason postulated by Moran for the opposition to Darwinism by women was because American women

Another reason he gave for womens support of anti-evolution was they were already secure

This concern of women was also over the harm that they felt Darwinism caused to their family.

Darrow added that one book Nietzsche wrote, titled Beyond Good and Evil, contained a criticism of all moral codes, and actually argued that the

These were exactly Bryans concerns as he documented in his booklet titled the Last Message (1975). Bryan was very concerned about the fact that an increasing number of students were attending high school and, Bryan believed, that Darwinism made man too much the product of essentially a material Godless process that invited his degradation through eugenics, too much a competitor in a struggle for survival that justified rapacious business relations and war between nations (Kevles 2007, p. x).

Bryans objections to evolution were openly related to Darwins writings about eugenics and i
ts implications for human rights, human dignity, and humanity as a whole. In short, he focused public attention on the social implications of Darwinism (Larson 2003, p. 250). Bryan was especially concerned about defending the weak against the assaults of the strong and powerful, a fact that resulted in his being labeled The Great Commoner. Bryan, as a political progressive, was very concerned about the

As a result, due to his progressive political instinct of seeking legislative solutions to social problems, Bryan campaigned for restrictions against teaching the Darwinian theory of human evolution in public schools (Larson 2007, p. 68). These many well-documented facts of history are often forgotten or ignored when Bryans role in the Scopes trial is reviewed (Gould 1981, p. 1987).

The most common claim is Darrow scored a triumph for academic freedom after John Scopes was accused of violating a Tennessee law that prohibited the teaching of evolution (Farrell 2011, p. 111). This background is imperative to understand why the trial occurred and the implications of evolution both then and today. Last, this review shows how totally erroneous the common claims are about the Scopes Trial, such as those presented in the film Inherit the Wind.

I wish to thank John UpChurch, Jody Allen, RN, Clifford Lillo, M.S., and Mary-Ann Stewart, M.S., for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.

Bergman, Jerry. 2012. Hitler and the Nazis Darwinian Worldview: How the Nazis Eugenic Crusade for a Superior Race Caused the Greatest Holocaust in World History. Kitchener, Ontario, Canada: Joshua Press.

Bryan, William Jennings. 1975. The Last Message of William Jennings Bryan. (A Reprint Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Scopes Evolution Trial, July 1021, 1925). Dayton, Tennessee: Bryan College.

Comfort, Nathaniel, ed. 2007. The Pandas Black Box: The Intelligent Design Controversy. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Darwin, Charles. 1871. Descent of Man. London: John Murray.

Dershowitz, Alan (introduction). 1990. The Scopes Trial. Birmingham, Alabama: The Gryphon Press, Notable Trials Library Series.

Farrell, John. 2011. Darrow in the Dock. Smithsonian 42, no. 8: 98111.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1981. A Visit to Dayton: The Site Remains a Pleasant Sleepy Town, but to the Bestial Cause of the Scopes Trial Stirs Again. Natural History 90, no. 10: 818.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1991. Bully for Brontosaurus: Reflections in Natural History. New York: W.W. Norton and Company. Chapter 28: William Jennings Bryans Last Campaign, pp. 416431, and Chapter 29: An Essay on a Pig Roast, pp. 432447.

Gould, Stephen Jay. 1987. William Jennings Bryans Last Campaign: Scientists and Their Acolytes are Partly to Blame for the Lengthy and Bitter Struggle Against Creationism. Natural History 96, no. 11:1626.

Gilbert, James. 1997. Redeeming Culture: American Religion in an Age of Science. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Ginger, Ray. 1974. Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hunter, George. 1914. A Civic Biology. New York: American Book Company.

Kazin, Michael. 2006. A Godly Hero: The Life of William Jennings Bryan. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Kellogg, Vernon. 1917. Headquarters Nights: A Record of Conversations and Experiences at the Headquarters of the German Army in France and Belgium. Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press.

Kevles, Daniel. 2007. Foreword in The Panda's Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy. Nathaniel Comfort, Ed., Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Larson, Edward John. 1997. Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and Americas Continuing Debate over Science and Religion. New York: Basic Books.

Larson, Edward John. 2003. The Scopes Trial in History and Legend in When Science & Christianity Meet. Lindberg and Numbers, Ed., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Larson, Edward John. 2007. The Classroom Controversy: A History Over Teaching Evolution in The Pandas Black Box: Opening up the Intelligent Design Controversy. Nathaniel Comfort, Ed., Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Lienesch, Michael. 2007. In the Beginning: Fundamentalism, the Scopes Trial, and the Making of the Antievolution Movement. Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press.

McKernan, Maureen. 1924. The Amazing Crime and Trial of Leopold and Loeb. Chicago: The Plymouth Court Press.

Moran, Jeffrey P. 2012. American Genesis: The Evolution Controversies from Scopes to Creation Science. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Olasky, Marvin and John Perry. 2005. Monkey Business: The True Story of the Scopes Trial. Nashville, Tennessee: Broadman and Holman Publishing Group.

Smith, J. David. 1985. Minds Made Feeble: Myth and Legacy of the Kallikaks. Rockville, Maryland: Aspen.

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William J. Bryans Fight against Eugenics and Racism ...

Eugenics and Other Evils is the title of a 1922 book written by author and social critic, G. K. Chesterton. His pessimistic outlook on eugenics flew in the face of the near universal view that humans finally had the tools and the know-how to re-shape civilizationand humanity itself. Just a few years earlier, on the other side of the pond, a book was published by a certain Margaret Sanger containing those optimistic themes, and urging readers to courageously accept the facts. The only thing that stood in the way of Progress was societys squeamishness. The book was The Pivot of Civilization, released in 1918.

Not more than twenty years after this, Chesterton proved right, and Sanger was left scrambling to try to find a way to keep her eugenic goals respectable. The first thing she did, in 1942, was change the name of her organization, the American Birth Control League, to Planned Parenthood.

But ironically, no one remembers Sangers sympathies to the Nazis goals and methods. Indeed, Planned Parenthood continues to this day to give a Margaret Sanger award every year! To put a finer point on it, today, the word eugenics is nearly the worst label you can put on something (the worst, of course, being Nazi), while eugenics ideas and philosophies persist.

In fact, the reader of this introduction is probably a eugenicist, at least to some degree, without even knowing it.

And that is because few know or understand what really drove the eugenics movement when it was popular and socially accepted. Because of this, not many understand that eugenics is alive and well in America and in the world, just not by that name.

Chesterton was right in linking Other Evils to Eugenics. Eugenics is, historically speaking, a whole package of interrelated ideasthings that might never cross your mind as eugenics. Nonetheless, his warnings were spot on at the time. The danger is obvious: perhaps the warnings still apply.

This website is dedicated to presenting a broader picture of eugenics, highlighting some of the lesser known components of the eugenics mindset. They may be lesser known, but they were deemed vital and central by the eugenicists themselves. We forget them at our peril.

While pop culture is totally out of touch with the true picture of eugenics (and Nazism, for that matter), contemporary scholars have been making good strides towards setting the record straight. You are encouraged to pick up some of the books on the resource page. Any one of them will prove fertile territory for further research on the real history, past and present, of eugenics.

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Home | Eugenics and Other Evils

Lynchburg is an independent city in the Commonwealth of Virginia. As of the 2010 census, the population was 75,568. The 2014 census estimates an increase to 79,047.[2] Located in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains along the banks of the James River, Lynchburg is known as the "City of Seven Hills" or the "Hill City".[3] Lynchburg was the only major city in Virginia that was not captured by the Union before the end of the American Civil War.[4]

Lynchburg is the principal city of the Metropolitan Statistical Area of Lynchburg, near the geographic center of Virginia. It is the fifth largest MSA in Virginia with a population of 254,171[5] and hosts several institutions of higher education. Other nearby cities include Roanoke, Charlottesville, and Danville. Lynchburg's sister cities are Rueil-Malmaison, France and Glauchau, Germany.

A part of Monacan country upon the arrival of English settlers in Virginia, the region had traditionally been occupied by them and other Siouan Tutelo-speaking tribes since ca. 1270, driving Virginia Algonquians eastward. Explorer John Lederer visited one of the Siouan villages (Saponi) in 1670, on the Staunton River at Otter Creek, southwest of the present-day city, as did Batts and Fallam in 1671. The Siouans occupied the area until c. 1702, when it was taken in conquest by the Seneca Iroquois. The Iroquois ceded control to the Colony of Virginia beginning in 1718, and formally at the Treaty of Albany in 1721.

First settled in 1757, Lynchburg was named for its founder, John Lynch, who at the age of 17 started a ferry service at a ford across the James River to carry traffic to and from New London. He was also responsible for Lynchburg's first bridge across the river, which replaced the ferry in 1812. He and his mother are buried in the graveyard at the South River Friends Meetinghouse. The "City of Seven Hills" quickly developed along the hills surrounding Lynch's Ferry. Thomas Jefferson maintained a home near Lynchburg, called Poplar Forest. Jefferson frequented Lynchburg and remarked "Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to be useful to the town of Lynchburg. I consider it as the most interesting spot in the state."

Lynchburg was established by charter in 1786 at the site of Lynch's Ferry on the James River. These new easy means of transportation routed traffic through Lynchburg, and allowed it to become the new center of commerce for tobacco trading. In 1810, Jefferson wrote, "Lynchburg is perhaps the most rising place in the U.S.... It ranks now next to Richmond in importance..." Lynchburg became a center of commerce and manufacture in the 19th century, and by the 1850s, Lynchburg (along with New Bedford, Mass.) was one of the richest towns per capita in the U.S.[6] Chief industries were tobacco, iron and steel. Transportation facilities included the James River Bateau on the James River, and later, the James River and Kanawha Canal and, still later, four railroads, including the Virginia and Tennessee Railroad and the Norfolk and Petersburg Railroad.

Early on, Lynchburg was not known for its religiosity. In 1804, evangelist Lorenzo Dow wrote of Lynchburg "... where I spoke in the open air in what I conceived to be the seat of Satan's Kingdom. Lynchburg was a deadly place for the worship of God." This was in reference to the lack of churches in Lynchburg. As the wealth of Lynchburg grew, prostitution and other "rowdy" activities became quite common and, in many cases, ignored, if not accepted, by the "powers that be" of the time. Much of this activity took place in an area of downtown referred to as the "Buzzard's Roost[citation needed]."

During the American Civil War, Lynchburg, which served as a Confederate supply base, was approached within 1-mile (1.6km) by the Union forces of General David Hunter as he drove south from the Shenandoah Valley. Under the false impression that the Confederate forces stationed in Lynchburg were much larger than anticipated, Hunter was repelled by the forces of Confederate General Jubal Early on June 18, 1864, in the Battle of Lynchburg. To create the false impression, a train was continuously run up and down the tracks while the citizens of Lynchburg cheered as if reinforcements were unloading. Local prostitutes took part in the deception, misinforming their Union clients of the large number of Confederate reinforcements.

From April 610, 1865, Lynchburg served as the Capital of Virginia. Under Governor William Smith, the executive and legislative branches of the commonwealth escaped to Lynchburg with the fall of Richmond. Then Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse, roughly 20 miles east of Lynchburg, ending the Civil War.

In the latter 19th century, Lynchburg's economy evolved into manufacturing (sometimes referred to as the "Pittsburgh of the South") and, per capita, made the city one of the wealthiest in the United States. In 1880, Lynchburg resident James Albert Bonsack invented the first cigarette rolling machine. Shortly thereafter Dr. Charles Browne Fleet, a physician and pharmacological tinkerer, introduced the first mass marketed over-the-counter enema. About this time, Lynchburg was also the preferred site for the Norfolk & Western junction with the Shenandoah Valley Railroad. However, the citizens of Lynchburg did not want the junction due to the noise and pollution it would create. Therefore, it was located in what would become the City of Roanoke.

In the late 1950s, a number of interested citizens, including Virginia Senator Mosby G. Perrow, Jr., requested the federal government to change its long-planned route for the interstate highway now known as I-64 between Clifton Forge and Richmond.[7] Since the 1940s, maps of the federal interstate highway system depicted that highway taking a northern route, with no interstate highway running through Lynchburg, but the federal government assured Virginia that the highway's route would be decided by the state.[8] A proposed southern route called for the Interstate to follow from Richmond via US-360 and US-460, via Lynchburg to Roanoke and US-220 from Roanoke to Clifton Forge, then west following US-60 into West Virginia. Although the State Highway Commission's minutes reflected its initial approval of the northern route, the issue remained in play,[9] proponents of the southern route ultimately succeeded in persuading a majority of Virginia Highway Commissioners to support the change after a study championed by Perrow demonstrated that it would serve a greater percentage of the state's manufacturing and textile centers. But in July 1961 Governor Lindsay Almond and U.S. Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges announced that the route would not be changed.[10] This left Lynchburg as the only city with a population in excess of 50,000 (at the time) not served by an interstate.[11]

For several decades throughout the mid-20th century, the state of Virginia authorized compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded for the purpose of eugenics. The operations were carried out at the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, now known as the Central Virginia Training School, located just outside Lynchburg in Madison Heights. An estimated 8,300 Virginians were sterilized and relocated to Lynchburg, known as a "dumping groun
d" of sorts for the feeble-minded, poor, blind, epileptic, and those otherwise seen as genetically "unfit".[12]

Sterilizations were carried out for 35 years until 1972, when operations were finally halted. Later in the late 1970s, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a class-action lawsuit against the state of Virginia on behalf of the sterilization victims. As a result of this suit, the victims received formal apologies and counseling if they chose. Requests to grant the victims reverse sterilization operations were denied.

Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, was sterilized after being classified as "feeble-minded", as part of the state's eugenics program while she was a patient at the Lynchburg Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded.

The story of Carrie Buck's sterilization and the court case was made into a television drama in 1994, Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story.

"Virginia State Epileptic Colony," a song by the Manic Street Preachers on their 2009 album 'Journal For Plague Lovers,' addresses the state's program of eugenics.

Downtown Lynchburg has seen a significant amount of revitalization since 2002 with hundreds of new loft apartments created through adaptive reuse of historic warehouses and mills. Since 2000, there has been more than $110 million in private investment in downtown and business activity increased by 205% from 2004 - 2014.[13] In 2014, 75 new apartments were added to downtown with 155 further units under construction increasing the number of housing units downtown by 48% from 2010 - 2014.[14] In 2015, the $5.8 million Lower Bluffwalk pedestrian street zone opened to the public in downtown which has seen a significant amount of residential and commercial development around the zone in recent years.[15] Notable projects underway in downtown by the end of 2015 include the $25 million Hilton Curio branded Virginian Hotel restoration project, $16.6 million restoration of the Academy Center of the Arts, and $4.6 million expansion of Amazement Square Children's Museum. [16][17][18][19]

Over 40 sites in Lynchburg are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.[20]

Lynchburg is located at 372413N 791012W / 37.40361N 79.17000W / 37.40361; -79.17000 (37.403672, 79.170205).

According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of 49.6 square miles (128.5km2), of which 49.2 square miles (127.4km2) is land and 0.5 square miles (1.3km2) (1.0%) is water.[21]

Lynchburg has a four-season humid subtropical climate (Kppen Cfa), with cool winters and hot, humid summers. The monthly daily average temperature ranges from 35.1F (1.7C) in January to 75.3F (24.1C) in July. Nights tend to be significantly cooler than days throughout much of the year due in part to the moderate elevation. In a typical year, there are 26 days with a high temperature 90F (32C) or above, and 7.5 days with a high of 32F (0C) or below.[22] Snowfall averages 12.9 inches (33cm) per season but this amount varies highly with each winter; the snowiest winter is 199596 with 56.8in (144cm) of snow, but the following winter recorded only trace amounts, the least on record.[23]

Temperature extremes range from 106F (41C), recorded on July 10, 1936, down to 11F (24C), recorded on February 20, 2015.[22] However, several decades may pass between 100F (38C) and 0F (18C) readings, with the last such occurrences being July 8, 2012 and February 20, 2015, respectively.[22]

As of the 2010 census,[31] there were 75,568 people, 25,477 households, and 31,992 families residing in the city. The population density was 1,321.5 people per square mile (510.2/km). There were 27,640 housing units at an average density of 559.6 per square mile (216.1/km). The racial makeup of the city was 63.0% White, 29.3% African American, 0.2% Native American, 2.5% Asian, 0.04% Pacific Islander, 0.63% from other races, and 1.7% from two or more races. Hispanic or Latino of any race were 3.0% of the population.

There were 25,477 households out of which 27.8% had children under the age of 18 living with them, 41.6% were married couples living together, 16.0% had a female householder with no husband present, and 38.8% were non-families. 32.7% of all households were made up of individuals and 12.9% had someone living alone who was 65 years of age or older. The average household size was 2.30 and the average family size was 2.92.

The age distribution of the city had: 22.1% under the age of 18, 15.5% from 18 to 24, 25.3% from 25 to 44, 20.8% from 45 to 64, and 16.3% who were 65 years of age or older. The median age was 35 years. For every 100 females there were 84.2 males. For every 100 females age 18 and over, there were 79.1 males.

The median income for a household in the city was $32,234, and the median income for a family was $40,844. Males had a median income of $31,390 versus $22,431 for females. The per capita income for the city was $18,263. About 12.3% of families and 15.9% of the population were below the poverty line, including 22.4% of those under age 18 and 10.7% of those age 65 or over.

Lynchburg ranks below the 2006 median annual household income for the U.S. as a whole, which was $48,200, according to the US Census Bureau.[32]

The city's population was stable for 25+ years: in 2006, it was 67,720; in 2000, it was 65,269; in 1990, it was 66,049; in 1980, it was 66,743.[33]

In 2009 almost 27% of Lynchburg children lived in poverty. The state average that year was 14 percent.[34]

Lynchburg features a skilled labor force, low unemployment rate,[35] and below average cost of living. Of Virginia's larger metro areas, Forbes Magazine ranked Lynchburg the 5th best place in Virginia for business in 2006, with Virginia being the best state in the country for business.[36] Only 6 places in Virginia were surveyed and most of Virginia's cities were grouped together by Forbes as "Northern Virginia". Lynchburg achieved the rank 109 in the whole nation in the same survey.

Industries within the Lynchburg MSA include nuclear technology, pharmaceuticals and material handling. A diversity of small businesses with the region has helped maintain a stable economy and minimized the downturns of the national economy.[37][38] Reaching as high as 1st place (tied) in 2007, Lynchburg has been within the Top 10 Digital Cities survey for its population since the survey's inception in 2004.

The Lynchburg News & Advance reports that while more people are working than ever in greater Lynchburg, wages since 1990 have not kept up with inflation. Central Virginia Labor Council President Walter Fore believes this is due to lack of white-collar jobs. According to the Census Bureau, adjusted for inflation, 1990 median household income was about $39,000 compared to 2009 median household income of $42,740. As of 2009 Forbes has named Lynchburg as the 70th best metro area for business and careers, ahead of Chicago and behind Baton Rouge. The reason for the decent ranking was due to the low cost of living and low wages in Lynchburg. In other areas, the region didn't come in as strong. It ranked at 189 for cultural and leisure and at 164 for educational attainment.[39]

Virginia Busin
ess Magazine reports that Young Professionals in Lynchburg recently conducted a study that clearly showed how much of its young workforce has been lost.[40]

According to Lynchburg's 2012 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report,[41] the top private employers in the city are:

The city is served by the Lynchburg City Public Schools. The school board is appointed by the Lynchburg City Council.

The city is also home to a number of mostly religious private schools, including Holy Cross Regional Catholic School, James River Day School, Liberty Christian Academy, New Covenant Classical Christian School, Appomattox Christian Academy, Temple Christian School, and Virginia Episcopal School.

Lynchburg is also home to the Central Virginia Governor's School for Science and Technology located in Heritage High School. This magnet school consists of juniors and seniors selected from each of the Lynchburg area high schools. As one of eighteen Governor's Schools in Virginia, the Central Virginia Governor's School focuses on infusing technology into both the math and science curriculum.

Further education options include a number of surrounding county public school systems.

Colleges and universities in Lynchburg include Central Virginia Community College, Liberty University, Lynchburg College, Randolph College, Sweet Briar College, and Virginia University of Lynchburg.

The Greater Lynchburg Transit Company (GLTC) operates the local public transport bus service within the city. The GLTC additionally provides the shuttle bus service on the Liberty University campus.

The GLTC has selected a property directly across from Lynchburg-Kemper Street Station as its top choice of sites upon which to build the new transfer center for their network of public buses. They are interested in facilitating intermodal connections between GLTC buses and the intercity bus and rail services which operate from that location. The project is awaiting final government approval and funding, and is expected to be completed around 2013.[42]

Intercity passenger rail and bus services are based out of Kemper Street Station, a historic, three-story train station recently restored and converted by the city of Lynchburg to serve as an intermodal hub for the community. The station is located at 825 Kemper Street.[43]

Greyhound Lines located their bus terminal in the main floor of Kemper Street Station following its 2002 restoration.[43] Greyhound offers transport to other cities throughout Virginia, the US, Canada, and Mexico.

Amtrak's long distance Crescent and a Northeast Regional connect Lynchburg with Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Charlotte, Atlanta, Birmingham, New Orleans and intermediate points.

In October 2009, Lynchburg became the southern terminus for a Northeast Regional that previously had overnighted in Washington. The forecast ridership was 51,000 for the 180-mile extension's first year, but the actual count was triple that estimate, and the train paid for itself without any subsidy.[44] By FY 2015, the Regional had 190,000 riders. The Lynchburg station alone served a total of 85,000 riders in 2015. It is located in the track level ground floor of Kemper Street Station.[45]

Lynchburg has two major freight railroads. It is the crossroads of two Norfolk Southern lines. One is the former mainline of the Southern Railway, upon which Kemper Street Station is situated. NS has a classification yard located next to the shopping mall. Various yard jobs can be seen. Railfans who wish to visit the NS Lynchburg yard are advised to inquire with an NS official. CSX Transportation also has a line through the city and a small yard.

Lynchburg Regional Airport is solely served by American Eagle to Charlotte. American Eagle, a subsidiary of American Airlines, is the only current scheduled airline service provider, with seven daily arrivals and departures. In recent years air travel has increased with 157,517 passengers flying in and out of the airport in 2012, representing 78% of the total aircraft load factor for that time period.

Primary roadways include U.S. Route 29, U.S. Route 501, U.S. Route 221, running north-south, and U.S. Highway 460, running east-west. While not served by an interstate, much of Route 29 has been upgraded to interstate standards and significant improvements have been made to Highway 460.

In a Forbes magazine survey, Lynchburg ranked 189 for cultural and leisure out of 200 cities surveyed.[39]

The following attractions are located within the Lynchburg MSA:

Lynchburg is home to sporting events and organizations including:

The first neighborhoods of Lynchburg developed upon seven hills adjacent to the original ferry landing. These neighborhoods include:

Other major neighborhoods include Boonsboro, Rivermont, Fairview Heights, Fort Hill, Forest Hill (Old Forest Rd. Area), Timberlake, Windsor Hills, Sandusky, Linkhorne, and Wyndhurst.

Notable residents of Lynchburg include:

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Lynchburg, Virginia - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A free event open to the public, Eugenics in California: a Legacy of thePast?, will take place at the Berkeley Law School on the UC Berkeleycampus (105 Boalt Hall) on Tuesday, August 28, 2012 from 12:30 to 2 pm.

For much of the 20th century, California was at the forefront of eugenicideology and practices in the United States, and holds the dubiousdistinction of being the state with the highest number of eugenicsterilizations performed under the authority of law some 20,000procedures between 1909 and the mid-1950s. Coerced sterilizationscontinued in public hospitals into the 1970s, and it has recently come tolight that in very recent years, women prisoners in California have beensterilized without their consent or knowledge. Today, California is aleader in research and services related to human genomics and assistedreproductive technologies. Speakers at this public event will consider thelong history of eugenics in California and explore continuities anddiscontinuities in the uses and misuses of genetic ideas and practices.

Dean Christopher Edley, Berkeley School of Law, will give opening remarksto welcome attendees.

SPEAKERS:

"Eugenic Sterilization in California: Stories and Statistics" Miroslava Chvez-Garca, University of California at Davis, and AlexandraMinna Stern, University of Michigan

We provide an overview of the patterns of the 20,000 eugenic sterilizationsperformed in California state institutions from 1909 to 1979, with closeattention to race, gender, class, and diagnosis. We will also highlightstories of sterilization victims and the ways in which they attempted tochallenge the state's authority to control and contain their reproductiverights. As we will demonstrate, the process had a devastating impact onthe victims.

Ms Bebs? (documentary film) Renee Tajima-Pea, University of California at Santa Cruz; Virginia Espino,University of California at Santa Cruz, and Kate Trumbull, documentaryfilmmaker

The feature-length documentary Ms Bebs? (working title) investigatesthe history of Mexican American women who allege they were coercivelysterilized at Los Angeles County-USC Medical Center during the 1960s and70s. Many spoke no English, and testified that they were prodded intotubal ligations during active labor. The sterilizations triggered the1978 class action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, and a protest campaignthat galvanized the Chicana feminist movement.

Eugenics in California Womens Prisons Today Kimberly Jeffrey and Courtney Hooks, Justice Now

Since 2003, Justice Now has been working collaboratively with people inCalifornias womens prisons to document how prisons violate theinternational right to family and function as a tool of reproductiveoppression. Presenters will place a spotlight on personal experience withas well as the systemic pattern of destruction of reproductive capacity ofwomen of color and gender variant people in California womens prisonsthrough several state-sanctioned policies, including forced and coercedsterilizations (e.g. the illegal and routine sterilization of hundreds ofpeople in prison during labor and delivery), and other violations of safemotherhood and reproductive justice.

Should We Worry About a New Eugenics? Marcy Darnovsky, Center for Genetics and Society

Today's fast-developing genetic and reproductive technologies offersignificant benefits, but can also be misused in ways that exacerbateexisting inequalities and create entirely new forms of injustice. California, a hotbed of eugenic advocacy in the last century, is today acenter of biotechnology research and commercial development and theassisted reproduction sector, as well as home to some troublingtechno-enthusiastic ideologies. Our efforts to confront California'seugenic history can help prevent these dynamics from veering toward a neweugenics.

CONTACTS: Susan Schweik, UC Berkeley, sschweik@berkeley.edu, MarcyDarnovsky, Center for Genetics and Society,darnovsky@geneticsandsociety.org

Co-sponsored by the Center for Genetics and Society and U.C. BerkeleysHaas Diversity Research Center, School of Law, Institute for the Study ofSocietal Issues, American Cultures Center, Disability Studies program,Center on Reproductive Rights and Justice, and Center for Race and Gender.

This event is wheelchair accessible. Captioning will be provided. Torequest an accommodation, please email disability@berkeley.edu.

Continued here:
Eugenics in California: A Legacy of the Past? | Center for ...

(This article first appeared in the January 20, 1992 edition of Citizen magazine)

How Planned Parenthood Duped America At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the "black" and "yellow" peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger's American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.

Sanger's other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as "scientific" and "humanitarian." And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America's human "breeding stock" and purging America's "bad strains." These "strains" included the "shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South."

Not to be outdone by her followers, Margaret Sanger spoke of sterilizing those she designated as "unfit," a plan she said would be the "salvation of American civilization.: And she also spike of those who were "irresponsible and reckless," among whom she included those " whose religious scruples prevent their exercising control over their numbers." She further contended that "there is no doubt in the minds of all thinking people that the procreation of this group should be stopped." That many Americans of African origin constituted a segment of Sanger considered "unfit" cannot be easily refuted.

While Planned Parenthood's current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as "Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics" (June 1920), "The Eugenic Conscience" (February 1921), "The purpose of Eugenics" (December 1924), "Birth Control and Positive Eugenics" (July 1925), "Birth Control: The True Eugenics" (August 1928), and many others.

These eugenic and racial origins are hardly what most people associate with the modern Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which gave its Margaret Sanger award to the late Dr. Martin Luther King in 1966, and whose current president, Faye Wattleton, is black, a former nurse, and attractive.

Though once a social pariah group, routinely castigated by religious and government leaders, the PPFA is now an established, high-profile, well-funded organization with ample organizational and ideological support in high places of American society and government. Its statistics are accepted by major media and public health officials as "gospel"; its full-page ads appear in major newspapers; its spokespeople are called upon to give authoritative analyses of what America's family policies should be and to prescribe official answers that congressmen, state legislator and Supreme Court justiices all accept as "social orthodoxy."

Blaming Families Sanger's obsession with eugenics can be traced back to her own family. One of 11 children, she wrote in the autobiographical book, My Fight for Birth Control, that "I associated poverty, toil, unemployment, drunkenness, cruelty, quarreling, fighting, debts, jails with large families." Just as important was the impression in her childhood of an inferior family status, exacerbated by the iconoclastic, "free-thinking" views of her father, whose "anti-Catholic attitudes did not make for his popularity" in a predominantly Irish community.

The fact that the wealthy families in her hometown of Corning, N.Y., had relatively few children, Sanger took as prima facie evidence of the impoverishing effect of larger families. The personal impact of this belief was heightened 1899, at the age of 48. Sanger was convinced that the "ordeals of motherhood" had caused the death of her mother. The lingering consumption (tuberculosis) that took her mother's life visited Sanger at the birth of her own first child on Nov. 18, 1905. The diagnosis forced her to seek refuge in the Adirondacks to strengthen her for the impending birth. Despite the precautions, the birth of baby Grant was "agonizing," the mere memory of which Sanger described as "mental torture" more than 25 years later. She once described the experience as a factor "to be reckoned with" in her zealous campaign for birth control.

From the beginning, Sanger advocacy of sex education reflected her interest in population control and birth prevention among the "unfit." Her first handbook, published for adolescents in 1915 and entitled, What Every Boy and Girl Should Know, featured a jarring afterword:

It is a vicious cycle; ignorance breeds poverty and poverty breeds ignorance. There is only one cure for both, and that is to stoop breeding these things. Stop bringing to birth children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. To Sanger, the ebbing away of moral and religious codes over sexual conduct was a natural consequence of the worthlessness of such codes in the individual's search for self-fulfillment. "Instead of laying down hard and fast rules of sexual conduct," Sanger wrote in her 1922 book Pivot of Civilization, "sex can be rendered effective and valuable only as it meets and satisfies the interests and demands of the pupil himself." Her attitude is appropriately described as libertinism, but sex knowledge was not the same as individual liberty, as her writings on procreation emphasized.

The second edition of Sanger's life story, An Autobiography, appeared in 1938. There Sanger described her first cross-country lecture tour in 1916. Her standard speech asserted seven conditions of life that "mandated" the use of birth control: the third was "when parents, though normal, had subnormal children"; the fourth, "when husband and wife were adolescent"; the fifth, "when the earning capacity of the father was inadequate." No right existed to exercise sex knowledge to advance procreation. Sanger described the fact that "anyone, no matter how ignorant, how diseased mentally or physically, how lacking in all knowledge of children, seemed to consider he or she had the right to become a parent."

Religious Bigotry In the 1910's and 1920's, the entire social orderreligion, law, politics, medicine, and the mediawas arrayed against the idea and practice of birth control. This opposition began in 1873 when an overwhelmingly Protestant Congress passed, and a Protestant president signed into law, a bill that becam
e known as the Comstock Law, named after its main proponent, Anthony Comstock. The U.S. Congress classified obscene writing, along with drugs, and devices and articles that prevented conception or caused abortion, under the same net of criminality and forbade their importation or mailing.

Sanger set out to have such legislation abolished or amended. Her initial efforts were directed at the Congress with the opening of a Washington, D.C., office of her American Birth Control League in 1926. Sanger wanted to amend section 211 of the U.S. criminal code to allow the interstate shipment and mailing of contraceptives among physicians, druggists and drug manufacturers.

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Historical Examples

eugenics is based to a very large extent upon the principles underlying sex hygiene.

I try so hard not to be afraid of men, for I know they are necessary to eugenics.

eugenics is the science of reproducing better humans by applying the established laws of genetics or heredity.

It is a sin of our race that the eugenics Office should have bred out--but they have failed.

eugenics deals with the even more vital subject of improving the inherent type and capacities of the individuals of the future.

It has been said that eugenics is futile because it cannot define its end.

British Dictionary definitions for eugenics Expand

(functioning as sing) the study of methods of improving the quality of the human race, esp by selective breeding

Derived Forms

eugenic, adjectiveeugenically, adverbeugenicist, nouneugenist (judnst) noun, adjective

Word Origin

C19: from Greek eugens well-born, from eu- + -gens born; see -gen

Word Origin and History for eugenics Expand

1883, coined (along with adjective eugenic) by English scientist Francis Galton (1822-1911) on analogy of ethics, physics, etc. from Greek eugenes "well-born, of good stock, of noble race," from eu- "good" (see eu-) + genos "birth" (see genus).

eugenics in Medicine Expand

eugenics eugenics (y-jn'ks) n. The study of hereditary improvement of the human race by controlled selective breeding.

eugenics in Culture Expand

The idea that one can improve the human race by careful selection of those who mate and produce offspring.

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Eugenics | Define Eugenics at Dictionary.com

The legacy of Darwins cousin Galton

By Russell Grigg

Few ideas have done more harm to the human race in the last 120 years than those of Sir Francis Galton. He founded the evolutionary pseudo-science of eugenics. Today, ethnic cleansing, the use of abortion to eliminate defective unborn babies, infanticide, euthanasia, and the harvesting of unborn babies for research purposes all have a common foundation in the survival-of-the-fittest theory of eugenics. So who was Galton, what is eugenics, and how has it harmed humanity?

Photos Darwin by TFE Graphics, Hitler and Galton by Wikipedia.org

Francis Galton (featured on right in photo montage, right) was born into a Quaker family in Birmingham, England, in 1822. A grandson of Erasmus Darwin on his mothers side and so a cousin of Charles Darwin (pictured above left), he shared the Darwinian agnosticism and antagonism to Christianity for most of his adult life.

As a child, he had learned the alphabet by 18 months, was reading by age 2, memorizing poetry by five, and discussing the Iliad at six.1 In 1840, he began studies at Cambridge University in medicine and then in mathematics, but, due to a nervous breakdown, succeeded in gaining only a modest B.A. degree, in January 1844.2 When his father died that same year, he inherited such a fortune that he never again needed to work for a living.

This gave the wealthy young Galton free time not only for amusement, but also to dabble in a number of fields, including exploration of large areas of South West Africa, his reports of which gained him membership of the Royal Geographic Society in 1853, and three years later of the Royal Society. In that year, Galton married Louisa Butler, whose father had been Headmaster at Harrow School.

As an amateur scientist of boundless curiosity and energy, he went on to write some 14 books and over 200 papers.3 His inventions included the silent dog whistle, a teletype printer; and various instruments and techniques for measuring human intelligence and body parts; and he invented the weather map and discovered the existence of anticyclones.

The publication of Darwins Origin of Species in 1859 was undoubtedly a turning point in Galtons life. In 1869 he wrote to Darwin, [T]he appearance of your Origin of Species formed a real crisis in my life; your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition [i.e. religious arguments based on design] as if it had been a nightmare and was the first to give me freedom of thought.4

From Nott, J.C. and Gliddon, G.R., Indigenous Races of the Earth, J.B. Libbincott, Philadelphia, USA, 1868.

An allegedly scientific illustration from 1868 showing that blacks were less evolved than whites by suggesting similarities with a chimpanzee.

Even the famous evolutionist Stephen Jay Gould commented that the chimpanzee skull is falsely enlarged and the negro jaw falsely extended to suggest that negros rank even lower than apes. This demonstration was not from racist or fringe literature but from one of the leading scientific textbooks of its time. Todays militant evolutionists like to conveniently evade the social implications of their ideas, but history demonstrates otherwise.

Galton was among the first to recognize the implications for mankind of Darwins theory of evolution.5 He believed that talent, character, intellect, etc. were all inherited from ones ancestors, as was also any lack of these qualities. Thus the poor were not hapless victims of their circumstances, but were paupers because they were biologically inferior. This was contrary to the prevailing scientific view that all such qualities were due to environment, i.e. how and where a person was brought up.6 Galton believed that humans, like animals, could and should be selectively bred. In 1883, he coined the term eugenics [Greek: (eu) meaning well and (genos) meaning kind or offspring] for the study of ways of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race.

Galtons views left no room for the existence of a human soul, the grace of God in the human heart, human freedom to choose to be different, or even for the dignity of the individual. In his first published article on this subject, in 1865,7 He denied that mans rational faculties are a gift to him from God; he denied that mankind has been cursed with sinfulness since the day of Adam and Eve; and he viewed religious sentiments as nothing more than evolutionary devices to insure the survival of the human species.8

Concerning the sense of original sin, he wrote that [this] would show, according to my theory, not that man was fallen from a high estate, but that he was rapidly rising from a low one and that after myriads of years of barbarism, our race has but very recently grown to be civilized and religious.9

In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton enlarged on all these ideas and proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. When Charles Darwin read this book, he wrote to Galton, You have made a convert of an opponent in one sense for I have always maintained that, excepting fools, men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work .5 Galtons ideas undoubtedly helped him extend his evolution theory to man. Darwin did not mention Galton in his Origin, but referred to him no less than 11 times in his Descent of Man (1871).

Three International Eugenics Congresses were held in 1912, 1921 and 1932, with eugenics activists attending from Britain, the USA, Germany, France, Australia, Canada, India, Japan, Mauritius, Kenya and South Africa. Notables who supported the ideas preWorld War II included Winston Churchill, economist John Maynard Keynes, science fiction writer H.G. Wells10 and US Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge. Galton received the Huxley Medal from the Anthropological Institute in 1901, the Darwin Medal from the Royal Society in 1902, the DarwinWallace Medal from the Linnean Society in 1908, and honorary degrees from Cambridge and Oxford Universities; he was knighted in 1909. Despite these honours, in life Galton was not his own best advocate for his theories. He had many long-lasting bouts of illness, and notwithstanding his and his wifes good intellectual pedigrees, they produced no children of their own to carry on his name and heritage. After his death in 1911, his will provided for the funding of a Chair of Eugenics and the Galton Eugenics Laboratory at the University of London.

The concept of improving the physical and mental characteristics of the human race may seem admirable at first glance. However, historically the method of achieving it has involved not just increasing the birthrate of the fit by selected parenthood (positive eugenics), but also reducing the birthrate of those people thought to impair such improvement, the unfit (negative eugenics).11

For example, by 1913, one-third (and from the 1920s on, more than half)12 of the US States had laws allowing for the compulsory sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to be unfit. This resulted in the forced sterilization of some 70,000 victims, including criminals, the mentally retarded, drug addicts, paupers, the blind, the deaf, and people with epilepsy, TB or syphilis. Over 8,000 procedures were done at the one city of Lynchburg, Virginia,13 and isolated instances continued into the 1970s.14,15

About 60,000 Swedish citizen
s were similarly treated between 1935 and 1976, and there were similar practices in Norway and Canada.16

In Germany in 1933, Hitlers government ordered the compulsory sterilization of all German citizens with undesirable handicaps, not just those held in custody or in institutions. This was to prevent contamination of Hitlers superior German race through intermarriage.

Image Wikipedia.org

Eugenics congress logo. Click here for larger view

Then from 1938 to 1945, this surgical treatment of such useless eaters was superseded by a more comprehensive solutionthe eager genocide, by Hitlers Nazis, of over 11 million people considered to be subhuman or unworthy of life, as is authenticated and documented by the Nuremberg Trials records. Those killed included Jews, evangelical Christians,17 blacks, gypsies, communists, homosexuals, amputees and mental patients.

This was nothing other than rampant Darwinismthe elimination of millions of human beings branded unfit/inferior by, and for the benefit of, those who regarded themselves as being fit/superior.

The core idea of Darwinism is selection.18 The Nazis believed that they must direct the process of selection to advance the German race.19 Galtons nave vision of a eugenics utopia had mutated into the Nazi nightmare of murderous ethnic cleansing.

Sadly, ideas of racial superiority and eugenics did not die with Hitlers regime. David Duke, Americas infamous anti-black and anti-Jew racist, developed his views from reading the eugenicist writings of Galton, H.G. Wells, Sir Arthur Keith and others, as well as the early writings of modern sociobiologists such as Harvards E.O. Wilson.20

Following World War II, eugenics became a dirty word. Eugenicists now called themselves population scientists, human geneticists, family politicians, etc. Journals were renamed. Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics, and Eugenics Quarterly became the Journal of Social Biology.21 However today, some 60 years after the Holocaust, the murderous concept that Galtons eugenics spawned is once again alive and flourishing, and wearing a lab-coat of medical respectability.

Doctors now routinely destroy humans, who were created in Gods image (Genesis 1:26), by abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, as well as in fetal/embryonic stem-cell research.

According to the UKs Daily Mail, women are increasingly eliminating their unborn children because of non life-threatening deformities such as deformed feet or cleft lips and palates, and more Downs Syndrome babies are now killed than are allowed to be born.22 Dr Jacqueline Laing of Londons Metropolitan University commented, These figures are symptomatic of a eugenic trend of the consumerist society hell-bent on obliterating deformity. This is straightforward eugenics, said UKs Life Trustee, Nuala Scarisbrick. The message is being sent out to disabled people that they should not have been born. It is appalling and abhorrent.22

Globally, there are an estimated 50 million abortions each year. Thats one abortion for every three live births, so any child in the womb, on average, worldwide, has a one in four chance of being deliberately killed.23

China is famous for its coercive one-child-per-family policy. In practice, most families want a boy, so if a girl is born, she can be at risk. Sometimes the same grisly principle is followed, but before birth. In India, its common to find out the sex of the baby, and a vast majority of abortions are of girl babies. It makes the feminist support of abortion distressingly ironic.

And disabled babies are at risk as well. Ethicist Peter Singer has advocated legalization of infanticide to a certain age. He writes: [K]illing a disabled infant is not morally equivalent to killing a person. Very often it is not wrong at all.24

In May 2001, Holland became the first country to legalize euthanasia, with the law coming into effect from January 2002. Euthanasia was tolerated in Belgium until May 2002, when it was legalized. It is tolerated in Switzerland, Norway and Columbia.23

Photo Bryan College

Clarence Darrow (left) and William Jennings Bryan

The textbook from which Scopes taught evolution, A Civic Biology by George Hunter,2 and its companion lab book3 were blatantly eugenic and offensively racist. Hunter divided humanity into five races and ranked them according to how high each had reached on the evolutionary scale, from the Ethiopian or negro type to the highest type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.4A Civic Biology asserted that crime and immorality are inherited and run in families, and said that these families have become parasitic on society. If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race.4

This is the book that Darwinists of the day insisted that Scopes had a right to teach!

All this is documented by Dr David Menton in the DVD Inherently Wind: a Hollywood History of the Scopes Trial (right).

Perhaps the most frequently asked question concerning the eugenics-inspired genocide of the Holocaust is: How could it have happened? In the 1961 MGM film Judgment at Nuremberg, about the trial of four Nazi war criminals, judges who had enforced Nazi decrees,1 one of the defendants (Judge Ernst Janning, played by Burt Lancaster) cries out to Chief Judge Dan Haywood (played by Spencer Tracy): Those peoplethose millions of peopleI never knew it would come to that. You must believe it! Haywoods response was eloquent: It came to that the first time you sentenced a man to death you knew to be innocent.

Likewise today, eugenic killing of innocent preborn babies because they are thought to be less than perfect began the first time a doctor consented to kill a handicapped child in the womb. The rest is history.

The photograph (above right) comes from the first Nuremberg Trial (19456), the most famous and significant of them because it tried the main German leaders. Front row (left-to-right): Hermann Gring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel; Back row: Karl Dnitz, Erich Raeder, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Not all evolutionists are murderers, of course, and Francis Galton may never have conceived that his theories would lead to the killing of so many millions of people, let alone the onslaught on defenceless unborn babies. However, such action is totally consistent with evolutionary teaching, namely the survival of the fittest by the elimination of the weakest. Deeds are the outcome of beliefs. As Jesus said: A bad tree bears bad fruit; it cannot bear good fruit (Matthew 7:1718).

Contrary to the deadly philosophy of eugenics, every human person has eternal value in Gods sight and has been created in the image of God (Genesis 1:2627). God also explicitly forbade murder (Exodus 20:13), or intentional killing of innocent humans. Indeed, God so loved humanity that He sent His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, to die on the Cross to save us from sin (John 3:1617)
, and to transform us into the image of His Son when we believe on Him (Romans 8:29; 2 Corinthians 3:18). In Jesus, the Second Person of the Trinity took on human nature (Hebrews 2:14), becoming the Last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45), thus becoming the (kinsman-) Redeemer (Isaiah 59:20) of the race of the first man, Adam.

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+In Regards To Noncoding DNA+ My opponent states that noncoding DNA has the functions of "1. Regulation of gene expression during development 2. Enhancers for transcription of proximal genes 3. Silencers for suppression of transcription of proximal genes 4. Regulate translation of proteins" Would these also not be simplified? These introns have the "function" of marking DNA, but with an extremely bulky price. Markers for DNA could be extremely more simple just by taking out the large, unused middle section of these DNA strains. With this loss, cell division would be exponentially faster (because DNA replication uses a large portion of that time) and would allow for less errors to occur in transcoding (which could stem the cause of diseases, mental and physical).

+In Regards To Human Vices+ I guess this is also a debatable topic, but I would say that vices come from faulty mental processes, correct? These mental processes are controlled by the brain and the nerves that process information. I would say that faulty mental processes would stem from a bad interpretation of the result of the actions of the individual or from a cloudy interpretation of the facts in which the body is given a faulty signal. Addictions could become regulated as understanding of the genetic implications in the nervous system becomes evident. Since addictions are a result of dependence on that substance or the substantial release of dopamine in an action. You could effect the reasons the body produces dopamine and instead make such vices extremely unpleasant for the individual in question. (I understand that this is a bit far into the field of theoretics like a lot of my claims)

+In Regards To Social and Pragmatic Concerns+ In concern of genetic liability, I agree with my opponent. If the geneticists ruin a child's life, then I believe that that geneticist is liable. However, I have two points. One is that you assuming that the mistake would be permanent. It is a known fact that viruses can be used in genetic engineering, as they essentially carry and inject DNA into all of the cells in the body. With a bit of research (and a lot less than would be required to make eugenics a reality), we could manipulate the DNA the virus injects and the cells it targets. With differentiation, the cells that would harm the child would usually (except in case of severe genetic butchering) be in a specific targeted area. The fixing of the mistakes would be simple. Also, I am saying that by the time any human trials would be performed, the genetic manipulation process would be perfected to an intense degree (as perfection would be needed to dare risk the life of a human for enhancing purposes). In concern of discrimination, I believe my opponent misinterpreted what I said. I was saying that the extent of discrimination wouldn't be increased, and would probably decrease. As with ignorance, comes discrimination (possibly another debatable topic). Eugenetically-induced humans would be far from ignorant as their brain capacity would be increased and knowledge could probably even be implanted. In regards to the disruption of natural selection, Eugenetics would just speed up the evolutionary process. Think for a second about what sets humans apart. I would say it is self-evolution. We have the unique ability to use tools to our desires and ends. Eugenics would just be an extension of this gift to an even greater degree. And, you must consider that other species are adapting too. Soon, we will be superseded by another species, if we don't learn how to directly evolve ourselves and keep ahead of any evolutionary flow.

+In Regards to Population Growth+ In concern of overcrowding Earth, I must point towards the space program. By the time we have advanced science to the point of eugenics becoming a reality, do you not think we will have advanced to the point of terraforming Mars (which I must say is already an endeavor which we started planning). There is lots of space in the galaxy that is sustainable for human growth. Already sciences have pinpointed lots of exoplanets that have a possibility of sustaining life.

+In Regards to Interfering with Nature+ I have two points to make. The first is that survival of the fittest (nature's law) states, simply that the best survive. So, Eugenics would be the purest form of this law. We would literally be making ourselves the best that could ever possibly live, which is what human nature dictates us to try to do. The second is that the reason we take a backseat to nature is because we don't understand it very deeply. We don't understand most of the systems that occur in nature so we simply say "Don't mess with Nature." But once you realize and understand nature to a far degree, you can tame Nature. In the time Eugenics could be possible, it is also the time that ecology would be a very complete science and provide a deep understanding into Nature and our irrational fear of it.

+In Regards to Monetary Concern+ On the topic of monetary concern, I will simply allude to a television or a computer. When they first came out, they were inefficient and extremely pricey. As time went on (and not much time), more and more people got them in their homes. Now, if you ask a group of kids who have a tv or computer in their house, a lot more than a few will raise their hands. My opponent made a fantastic point about the taxing of eugenics as a public good, and I completely agree with him. However, if it became a consumer item, it would spread and become cheaper in order to increase the clientele, until the process is entirely common.

+In Regards to an Allusion to Crude, Immoral Eugenics+ The eugenics my opponent talks about that occured in Japan, Germany, and in the Buck v. Bell trial are extremely crude, deformed forms of what I am referring to. So much, in fact, that I believe that the process should take a different term. The crude eugenics he refers were the butchering and erasing of people with physical or mental hindrances or, more commonly, because of their race. My plan would kill no one, and holds infinite promise.

+In Conclusion+ In conclusion, I would like to state that this process holds so many promises. So many problems would be solved that the ones described here almost seem trivial. However, they are important problems. I believe Con is clouded in his views. he is scared of change and what it brings with it, but I say that not only is change healthy, but it is essential to life as we know it. This is not an atrocity. Eugenics would be perfected in the laboratory over many years. Animal trials will be done and human tissues will be tested. This process is not gruesome and shouldn't be thought of that way. Eugenics is the next step in the evolutionary chain. The question is, are you going to be part of the next generation of humans or are you going to become extinct?

In Round 2, PRO postulates that "DNA could be extremely more simple just by taking out the large, unused middle section of these DNA strains. With this loss, cell division would be exponentially faster (because DNA replication uses a large portion of that time) and would allow for less errors to occur in transcoding." Of course, that is all theoretical, just as it was theoretical that junk DNA was junk.

The science is in, and within the so-called junk DNA, transposons arrange and influence thousand of strands of DNA, as a kind of cut and paste function that NATURALLY occurs, and it's importance is immeasurable. I find PRO's theories on removing non-coding DNA dangerous, as he lacks both the credentials and the wherewithal to be making assertions like this. "Junk DNA" is not junk, and removing large segments of
DNA would obviously have deleterious effects. [1][2][3]

PRO proceeds to graciously answer my request for how he proposes to rid the world of human vice. Again, however, PRO does not offer anything beyond his own theoretical musings, with zero scientific justification to back them up, as he oversimplifies human vice and overstates the role of genes. What we refer to as "vice," and how it all happens, is a complex ballet between nature and nurture in tandem with one another.

Some of the most compelling studies to conclude that nurture is as important as nature comes from separated hereditary twin research. Twin studies have been made to determine whether hereditary is the leading factor, or if it's the environment. The results have shown that it's basically an even amount of influence on a person. Separated twins often share common interests in food, struggle or succeed in math, have natural athleticism, and have similarities in temperament, tempo, and ways of doing things. The effects of nurture, however, show their working habits, and thoughts; whereas one twin might be liberal, the other conservative. How they view and respond to the world, however, reflects more upon how they were raised. Consequently, this is what affects serial killers and other crimes of ill-repute more than nature. They had similarities due to heredity, but they often have marked differences because they grew up in two very different environments.

Life isn't as simple as DNA, lest humans are merely a sum of their parts. I doubt very seriously that if we were to take one of PRO's perfect humans who have allegedly been genetically rid of vice, and tortured them for the first 10 years of their life, that they would be well adjusted human beings. They'd be homicidal like anyone else. Our external experiences are equally as important as our genetic makeup. [4]

The next portion of the debate focuses on liability of researchers who genetically alter a zygote. I had previously asked if they would be held accountable for any mistakes made when, say, they attempted to make one of PRO's superhuman with deformities. PRO thinks that, however, we can simply go back and make changes like we're changing oil or changing out a tire. That is science fiction. You can't just sit somebody down in a chair and change their DNA, that would be absurd. The whole eugenic process must occur on the zygote level, that is, an inseminated ovum is extracted from a mother's womb and researchers study the genome and tweak it, a priori, not posteriori. Of course, even that is a gross oversimplification of the process, but PRO's insinuation that we can correct problems later is based on pure fantasy.

At most we can do is something known as "gene therapy," which on a very limited basis, inserts healthy genes in to diseased ones. Gene therapy has not yet been approved because it is in the clinical stages.

PRO further postulates, in regards to my point of rampant population growth, that In concern of overcrowding Earth, I must point towards the space program." And so we see PRO using another science fiction to cover the other. There are no definitive plans for humans to move to the moon, Mars, or anywhere else in the solar system. Just because NASA entertains the theoretical possibility does not mean that one can rely on that as an answer to a troubling concern. As far as I'm concerned, that's a non-answer to my legitimate question. I trust the reader will render the same judgment.

In regards to nature, he made the following comment: "But once you realize and understand nature to a far degree, you can tame Nature" PRO seems to think that humans can and should control nature, simply because humans are intelligent. Everything on planet earth seems to be at his disposal for manipulation. What about nature is there to "tame" anyhow? There is no right or wrong with nature, it just is. Humans, continually altering nature, are constantly endagnering the very nature we need to survive and share a symbiotic relationship with. Global warming and nuclear holcausts are just two examples of how anthropogenic efforts intended to help us, end up hurting ourselves and nature.

PRO then assures me that his version of eugenics is nothing like what occurred in Germany, Japan, or in America with Buck v. Bell. He states that those people were viewed as hindrances, which is why they wanted to eradicate them. But is this not what PRO wants too? Does he not desire a race of people without weakness? His first post in Round 1 makes it clear that he does in fact want a world free from the ills of society. Sure, PRO may not desire to kill the sick and the lame, but the slippery slope of eugenics is that it's thus far been the reality. He may not want that, but who's to say that his protege won't? Or the government?

We must remember that all of the atrocities I pointed were foisted on us under the pretense of benefiting society. At what cost? Genocide? Discrimination? The fact that the only recorded cases of eugenic programs focused on these makes it more than relevant to question the future of it. I don't think that is being overly-paranoid.

=== FINAL CONCLUSION ===

To be fair, I do understand the world that PRO wants. I certainly do not believe that he has any malicious intent, and as I stated earlier, I appreciate his enthusiasm and interest in science. His candor on the matter is much appreciated as well. Be that as it may, what troubles me is the lack of substance put forth to some of my legitimate concerns. I do not feel that PRO properly addressed my fiscal concerns, the bio-ethical concern, the over-population concern, the penchant to manipulate nature, or any other argument I set forth. PRO claims that I am scared of change, but this is simply not true.

All scientific efforts are in the interest of improvement, which I do not have a problem with, provided it is carefully dissected and we do not run in to it headlong with reckless abandonment. PRO simply wants humans to take the reigns as nature itself, making a grandiose claim that eugenics is the next evolutionary step. Evolution, in case any forgot, is an unguided process. The very act of manipulating nature to achieve selfish ends is the non-epitome of evolution. If that's not playing God, then I don't what is. To be so arrogant to think that one can usurp nature is playing the fool. It is a dangerous prospect that has already proved its self-destruction.

In closing, I want to again thank my opponent for such an interesting and provocative debate. I think he has a bright future at DDO, but nonetheless I think I have created a strong case of reasonable doubt. I trust the voter will see how I refuted his points.

For this reason, sensible voters votes CON! Resolution negated.

=== SOURCES ===

1. http://www.sciencedaily.com... 2. http://www.sciencedaily.com... 3. http://www.sciencedaily.com... 4. http://wilderdom.com...

See the original post here:
Debate Topic: Eugenics | Debate.org

THE BEST BOOK ON EUGENICS. Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most vulnerable citizens.

Wesley Smith National Review

Gregory Mott Washington Post Book World

Gregg Sapp Library Journal

Daniel Kevles New York Times Book Review

Adrienne Miller Esquire Magazine

Starred Review Publishers Weekly

Ray Olson Booklist

Tony Platt Los Angeles Times Book Review

David Plotz Mother Jones Magazine

Paul Ranier Der Spiegel

Nancy Schapiro St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Carl Zimmer Discovery

Cynthia Dettelbach Cleveland Jewish News

Steve Courtney Hartford Courant

Mark Lewis Tampa Tribune

Jack Fischel The Forward

Amy DeBaets Ethics and Medicine

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