The following is a brief history of eugenics in the United States. Personally, I find eugenics to be distasteful, disturbing, and a bunch of pseudo-science nonsense. This post is not meant to be anti-American in any way but a look into a darker period in the history of the United States.
The Declaration of Independence states, "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." Despite this noble language, there have been instances in the history of the United States where these words were not applied in practice. One dark period in United States history, however, has not been talked about much. Few people know of this dark blemish in American history, mainly because of its association with Nazi Germany. This topic is the eugenics movement that consumed the United States from the late 1890's to the end of World War II. Even after World War II, the taint of eugenics-like programs still exists today.
Eugenics found its modern roots in England, with the general ideas sketched out by Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Sir Charles Darwin. Basically, he stated that intellectual, moral, and character traits were hereditary and that through a process of selective breeding, these traits could be passed on to offspring. Society was weakening the gene pool by allowing marriages between "good" people and "inferior" people.
Regretfully, this pseudo-science crossed the Atlantic Ocean and spread to the United States. During the 1880's, Alexander Graham Bell studied the deaf population of Martha's Vineyard and concluded that the deaf should not be allowed to marry. In the late 1890's, states enacted laws prohibiting the "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin wrote the "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law" in 1922, advocating mandatory sterilization for those who were "socially inadequate." These included epileptics, alcoholics, criminals, blind, deaf, and others. Nazi Germany adopted Laughlin's views and wrote the Law for the Protection of Hereditary Health: Breeding the "Aryan Race," enacted in 1933. This law stated the following:
Article I. (1.) Anyone who suffers from an inheritable disease may be surgically sterilized if, in the judgment of medical science, it could be expected that his descendants will suffer from serious inherited mental or physical defects.
The United States, thankfully, did not reach the levels that Nazi Germany reached, but the results were ghastly. The Germans forcefully sterilized hundreds of thousands, killed millions of innocent people, and performed horrible experiments on live humans. In the United States, the state of California for example, sterilized 6,200 people classified as "feeble-minded." Yet, the language used by two well known people living at the time sound so eerily similar that one might believe that they were the same person.
Hitler writes the following in Mein Kampf:
"Those who are physically and mentally unhealthy and unfit must not perpetuate their sufferings in the bodies of their children....[I]t is a crime and a disgrace to make this affliction the worse by passing it on to innocent creatures out of a merely egoistic yearning."
Compare that statement with this written by United States Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendall Holmes, Jr. in his majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200, 207 (1927):
"We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind..."
According to Westlaw, it has been negatively criticized, but it has not been overturned. It's a highly questionable, although a legitimate ruling by the United States Supreme Court. As a historical sidenote, one justice did dissent to this decision, but he did not write one.
One can easily say that these examples are mere aberrations. Given the historical context, one can easily explain these as a sign of the time that these people were living in. Yes, this may be so, but it does not excuse a Supreme Court justice who is interpreting the law to write such a repulsive decision. One might say that people now are enlightened in the United States and such viewpoints are an aberration today. This assumption, sadly, is not so. Such a viewpoint exists, but couched in more palatable terms.
Take for instance, the Pioneer Fund. Founded in 1937 by a group of men including Harry Hamilton Laughlin, their Charter of Incorporation amended in 1985 states their purpose is for "human race betterment." Some of the research they funded came up with the following results. Children from professional backgrounds did better in their future life than those from a working class background. In South Africa, children of African descent did worse on standardized tests, but made significant improvements when taught in a certain manner. To explain these differences, the Pioneer Fund uses the "Out of Africa" Hypothesis that states that those living near the Equator did not need to specialize much to survive, whereas those living farther away from the Equator specialized by adapting to the changing seasons. Hence those living farther north, i.e. North America and Europe, had better brains and talent. Very enlightened views.
William Shockley, one of the founders of the modern transistor that made the computer revolution possible, was an avid believer of eugenics. He wrote a series of editorial letters to the Palo Alto newspapers claiming that the human race was going downhill because of bad breeding. Mr. Shockley came up with a solution to this problem. He suggested paying money to those with low-intelligence if they volunteered to be sterilized--$1,000 for every IQ point below 100. Of course, since these people were supposedly stupid, the money would be kept in a trust. To make it profitable for others, people who convinced those with low IQs to get sterilized would get a monetary reward. He continued to have these views until he died.
Take for instance Ethnic America written by Thomas Sowell. This book was highly touted by readers on Amazon. This book was considered a "must read" by several well-respected magazines and newspapers. Supposedly, it was a hard look into ethnicity and culture in the United States. This might be so, but some of what he writes is disturbing. This excerpt came from page 213:
"The internal distribution of children among blacks has made the upward movement of the race as a whole more difficult. The general tendency of poor people to have more children than middle-class people has been accentuated among American Negroes. Better educated and higher income blacks have even fewer children than their white counterparts, while low-income blacks have even more children than equally low income whites. Much of the struggle that has brought some blacks up from poverty has had to be repeated in successive generations because successful blacks did not have enough children to reproduce themselves."
Based upon this paragraph, one could make the conclusion that African-Americans would move up on the socioeconomic scale and be much better as a whole if the better-educated and higher income African Americans had more children. This conclusion, of course, is absurd. There are other factors that would help all people do better later in life and selective breeding is not one of them.
To quote Vincent Freeman, played by Ethan Hawke, in Gattaca, "There’s no gene for fate." Let’s just hope nobody takes eugenics seriously in the future.
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