“Three Generations of Imbeciles are Enough.”
But he’s wrong in saying we Americans have always condemned eugenics. That’s the problem. We haven’t.
I do not believe in whitewashing history–the history of Christianity or the history of the United States. And I do believe in making contemporary citizens and believers confront the bad decisions of the past.
The United States does not have a good history with eugenics –before the Second World War, and the revelations of the atrocities of Nazi Germany, it was attractive public policy.
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, in Buck v. Bell.
“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. [citations omitted]. Three generations of imbeciles are enough. “
Wow, Cathleen, that’s horrifying. Thank you for posting, and filling in the background.
In this particular instance, history may be speaking against liberal Christianity. That is the opinion of Amy Laura Hall, writing book reviews in The Christian Century, Nov. 2, 2004.
The best and the brightest of progressive Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century were zealous allies in the effort to encourage fitter families and to discourage the birth of those who would be a burden on the rest. Charitable Christian organizations, facing large numbers of poor, immigrant families and increasing crime rates in the nation’s cities, turned to the new science of heredity, to craft a more manageable, wholesome future.
…
WHY DID MAINLINE Protestants find this movement so compelling? A charitable interpretation is that they simply wanted to reduce human suffering. Perceiving a stark and growing contrast between respectable middle-class families and the “teeming broods” of new immigrants in the urban centers, progressive leaders turned to eugenic science to control what seemed the otherwise uncontrollable plight of the poor.
But another reading seems equally plausible–that many sought to shore up their status as part of the “responsible middle-class” by underscoring the discrepancy between their own “‘fit” families and those of the underclass. Whatever the motives, mainline Protestants lent their influence to an arsenal of coercion described in painstaking detail in Edwin Black’s War Against the Weak.
After he finished his controversial IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation (now the subject of international litigation), Black put his research team to work tracing the web of eugenics in the U.S. and abroad. War Against the Weak relates how many groups with prominent board members from the fields of religion, business and government pushed for state laws to sterilize both people on public assistance and those thought likely to breed children who would become wards of the state.
Their efforts were effective. North Carolina sterilized thousands of people before the program ended in 1974; historian Paul Lombardo estimates that Virginia sterilized at least 8,000. By 1940 more than 35,000 people from across the country had been sterilized or castrated, the majority in the preceding two decades. (Black’s first chapter features a brief but powerful interview with one Virginia victim.)
According to Black, two women played crucial roles in the “war against the weak.” The grand dame of eugenics was millionaire-widow Mrs. E. II. Harriman. Her aim was clear: to stem the tide of the “defective and delinquent classes.” Her motive was fairly transparent: to secure the superiority of wealth.
A different motive fueled the efforts of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood. She was drawn to eugenics through her nursing work in the slums of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, where “the oppressive reality of overpopulation and poverty cried out for relief.” She viewed the suffering of the urban poor in apocalyptic terms and vowed to usher in a different realm.
As Black relates, Sanger subsequently “embraced the Malthusian notion that a world running out of food supplies should halt charitable works and allow the weak to die off.” In her book Pivot of Civilization (1922), Sanger addresses “the cruelty of charity,” arguing against the “sinisterly fertile soil” that perpetuates “defectives, delinquents and dependents.” Charity “encourages the healthier and more normal sections of the world to shoulder the burden of unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity of others; which brings with it … a dead weight of human waste.”
Read the whole thing right here: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_22_121/ai_n6358841/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
Kathy beat me to it!
Of course, being familiar with the history of Planned Parenthood and the shape of progressivism in early 20th century helps – both movements clearly being implicated in eugenics rooted not only in a disdain for the handicapped but also racism and anti-immigrant sensibilities.
One of the books Hall is reviewing in the link Kathy gives is “Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement” – looks very interesting.
This probably goes without saying, but Christian Century is a left-leaning mainline Protestant magazine.
If history is speaking against liberal Christianity then it is also speaking against Catholicism and in particular a traditional Catholicism that you might seem to identify with, Kathy–the Catholicism of anti-Semitism, pogroms, the Crusades, the Inquisition, racism…This path leads to some ugly places, if you want to go there. All streams of Christianity have their dark byways, often the product of their particular mindsets, or mindsets of particular people of the time. I think they should seen as instructive, rather than means to denigrate other believers.
The fact that the original “progressives” believed in eugenics is why I’m continually baffled at how many liberals have taken to calling themselves “progressives” these days.
And because “conservatives” have been guilty of all manner of sins means that we should retire the label “conservative,” which I’d like to think has a noble history and future as well? C’mon…
PS: The story does not indicate much about this Lousiana legislator, except that he is a Republican. There are (or used to be) liberal Republicans, but does anyone have evidence that he is in fact a liberal Christian? I’d like to see that before making such an inflammatory linkage.
Eugenics in the United States (1890s–1978)
Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood of America) found it a useful tool to urge the legalization of contraception. In its time eugenics was seen by many as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the death camps of World War II, the idea that eugenics could lead to genocide was not taken seriously.
Eugenics was supported by Woodrow Wilson, and, in 1907, helped to make Indiana the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals.[33] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[34] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[35]
Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded” from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution. The Eugenics Record Office opened in 1910 while Davenport and Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[36]
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenics (before it was labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and, through noting that congenitally deaf parents were more likely to produce deaf children, tentatively suggested that couples where both were deaf should not marry, in his lecture Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race presented to the National Academy of Sciences on 13 November 1883.[37] However, it was his hobby of livestock breeding which led to his appointment to biologist David Starr Jordan’s Committee on Eugenics, under the auspices of the American Breeders Association. The committee unequivocally extended the principle to man.[38] Like many other early eugenicists, Bell proposed controlling immigration for the purpose of eugenics, and warned that boarding schools for the deaf could possibly be considered as breeding places of a deaf human race.[citation needed] During the 20th century, researchers became interested in the idea that mental illness could run in families and conducted a number of studies to document the heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof for its cause. State laws were written in the late 1800s and early 1900s to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally ill in order to prevent the “passing on” of mental illness to the next generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and were not abolished until the mid-20th century. By 1945 over 45,000 mentally ill individuals in the United States had been forcibly sterilized.[citation needed] All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.[39]
In years to come, the ERO collected a mass of family pedigrees and concluded that those who were unfit came from economically and socially poor backgrounds. Eugenicists such as Davenport, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard and the conservationist Madison Grant (all well respected in their time) began to lobby for various solutions to the problem of the “unfit”. (Davenport favored immigration restriction and sterilization as primary methods; Goddard favored segregation in his The Kallikak Family; Grant favored all of the above and more, even entertaining the idea of extermination.)[40] Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research.[41] It did, however, have scientific detractors (notably, Thomas Hunt Morgan, one of the few Mendelians to explicitly criticize eugenics), though most of these focused more on what they considered the crude methodology of eugenicists, and the characterization of almost every human characteristic as being hereditary, rather than the idea of eugenics itself.[42]
Some states sterilized “imbeciles” for much of the 20th century. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. The most significant era of eugenic sterilization was between 1907 and 1963, when over 64,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation in the United States.[43] A favorable report on the results of sterilization in California, the state with the most sterilizations by far, was published in book form by the biologist Paul Popenoe and was widely cited by the Nazi government as evidence that wide-reaching sterilization programs were feasible and humane. When Nazi administrators went on trial for war crimes in Nuremberg after World War II, they justified the mass sterilizations (over 450,000 in less than a decade) by citing the United States as their inspiration.[39]
There are some states that require a blood test prior to marriage.[80] While these tests are typically restricted to the detection of the sexually transmitted disease syphilis (which was the most common STD at the time these laws were enacted), some partners will voluntarily test for other diseases and genetic incompatibilities.
Harris polls in 1986 and 1992 recorded majority public support for limited forms of germ-line intervention, especially to prevent “children inheriting usually fatal genetic disease”.[81]
In 1971, lobbying by the US organization The International Association for Voluntary Sterilization (AVS), led politicians and officials at the Office for Equal Opportunity to pay for voluntary sterilization of low income Americans for birth-control purposes.[citation needed] AVS also focused on the International community, and its lobbying led to a US foreign policy and funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development to encourage Third World/Developing World countries to utilise abortion and sterilization in order to control their population growth.[citation needed] For further information see EngenderHealth
Slippery slope
A common criticism of eugenics is that it inevitably leads to measures that are unethical (Lynn 2001). A hypothetical scenario posits that if one racial minority group is on average less intelligent than the racial majority group, then it is more likely that the racial minority group will be submitted to a eugenics program rather than the least intelligent members of the whole population.
H. L. Kaye wrote of “the obvious truth that eugenics has been discredited by Hitler’s crimes,” (Kaye 1989). R. L. Hayman argued “the eugenics movement is an anachronism, its political implications exposed by the Holocaust,” (Hayman 1990).
Steven Pinker has stated that it is “a conventional wisdom among left-leaning academics that genes imply genocide.” He has responded to this “conventional wisdom” by comparing the history of Marxism, which had the opposite position on genes to that of Nazism:
But the 20th century suffered “two” ideologies that led to genocides. The other one, Marxism, had no use for race, didn’t believe in genes and denied that human nature was a meaningful concept. Clearly, it’s not an emphasis on genes or evolution that is dangerous. It’s the desire to remake humanity by coercive means (eugenics or social engineering) and the belief that humanity advances through a struggle in which superior groups (race or classes) triumph over inferior ones.[88]
Richard Lynn broadens his criticism of eugenics, by arguing that any social philosophy is capable of ethical misuse. Though Christian principles have aided in the abolition of slavery and the establishment of welfare programs, he notes that the Christian church has also burned many dissidents at the stake and allowed for the killing of large numbers of innocent people by Crusaders. Lynn argues the appropriate response is to condemn these killings, but believes Christianity does not “inevitably [lead] to the extermination of those who do not accept its doctrines,” (Lynn 2001).
You can also see the articles by Cardinal Gibbons and the Jesuit, Henry Woods, rebutting the liberal church approach to wedding licenses to insure purity.
And because “conservatives” have been guilty of all manner of sins means that we should retire the label “conservative,” which I’d like to think has a noble history and future as well? C’mon…
No, a better (albeit imperfect) analogy would be if “conservatives” suddenly started using the term “state’s rights” or even “confederates” to describe themselves. One’s reaction would be, “Why on earth are you reaching back into history to grab a racist term to apply to yourself?”
Stuart, when someone invokes those terms it is generally aimed at a invoking a specific agenda regarding segregation and slavery. Progressives today do not call themselves progressives because they want to resucitate racist and eugenicist policies. Your assertions are absurd. Not that it matters, but you have given no evidence that this Louisiana legislator is a “progressive” Christian.
Thanks to Bill DeHaas for the information. More light than heat.
Progressives today do not call themselves progressives because they want to resucitate racist and eugenicist policies.
Absolutely, I agree with that. Their choice of terms springs from sheer ignorance rather than from deliberate invocation of racism.
FYI, I never said that the Louisiana legislator was a “progressive Christian,” and I see no reason why I should try to come up with evidence as to that point, which I consider irrelevant.
I apologize for nagging, but — on behalf of writers, and in the interest of clarity — please be careful about citing sources. If you’re copying-and-pasting something here, be as clear as you can about who and what you’re quoting, and link to it if it’s online. In addition, please remember there’s a limit to how much it’s considered acceptable to copy-and-paste before we start running into fair-use and/or etiquette concerns — keep citations brief (250-300 words?) and link to the rest whenever possible.
Okay, back to the discussion!
Posted by David Gibson
on September 27th, 2008 at 10:44 am
“If history is speaking against liberal Christianity then it is also speaking against Catholicism and in particular a traditional Catholicism that you might seem to identify with, Kathy–the Catholicism of anti-Semitism, pogroms, the Crusades, the Inquisition, racism…This path leads to some ugly places, if you want to go there. All streams of Christianity have their dark byways, often the product of their particular mindsets, or mindsets of particular people of the time. I think they should seen as instructive, rather than means to denigrate other believers”.
I fail to catch the drift of this statement. Certainly all Catholics have been guilty of sins and crimes. Consider Margaret Sanger, It is part of our teaching – a strong and major part: a part that is much neglected in these days when one does not “like” discussing sin and Satan and hell. But it is not part of the teachings of the Church. Pope after pope has denounced anti-Judaism; pope after pope has denounced slavery; pope after pope has denounced racism. That some [indeed, many] Catholics, and indeed many bishops and priests, have practiced and defended these should be no surprise. Half the Catholic world was Arian in the time of Arius.
But they are not part of the teachings of the Church.
To the idiotic statement of the idiotic O.W.Holmes Jr., one can note that the only Catholic on the Supreme Court – Pierce Butler – was the only Justice who voted against the ruling. It later turned out that the object of the sterilization was not at all mentally incompetent, but had been the object of a rape and cover-up by her cousin, and her family.
It was sadly true that many prominent churchmen of other religious- particularly liberal Protestant groups – were all for “eugenics”. Consider the Anglican Dean Inge who was on the board of the U.S. “eugenics” group.
Another aspect of the proposal for sterilization:
“Hughes spoke out in response to a proposal by state Rep. John Labruzzo, a Republican from suburban Metairie, to combat poverty by offering poor women and men $1,000 to undergo reproductive sterilization and vasectomies. In addition, the lawmaker said he is considering whether to propose tax incentives for college-educated people to have more children”.
More college educated people? May the good Lord preserve us.
My point here wasn’t that Catholics or Protestants had engaged in this practice –but that Americans had. As Americans, we shouldn’t whitewash our past –or remain ignorant of it.
I have no issue with the teaching of evolution and accept its general premises as pretty much fact. Saying that, in the present context, it’s interesting to note that William Jennings Bryan was opposed to the teaching of evolution–in part at least–because of the way social Darwinism and eugenics were being taught in tandem with it. The book that John Scopes was teaching out of before the famous Monkey Trial linked evolutionary theory directly with the permissibility and desirability of eugenics to weed out the unfit. Simply a historical footnote that I find interesting, especially in light of Bryan’s usual reputation as nothing but a reactionary fundamentatlist demagogue (though those charges aren’t totally out of order either).
David,
I do not identify with pogroms, racism, or anti-semitism. If I didn’t believe in Jesus Christ I would definitely, joyfully be a Jew. I don’t identify with torture at all and I deplore the excesses of the Inquisition. I think we’ve all learned something about freedom and human dignity in the past few centuries–all to the good.
However, Catholicism/ Christendom is not the only religion/ culture capable of violence or excess. Traditional Catholicism–a multivocal term, btw–is not the only strand of Christianity guilty of oppressive, quixotic policies.
I think we ought to keep ourselves capable of sober judgment about particular cases.
I’ve come to think very differently (and I suppose more “Catholicly”) about abortion and eugenics as a result of this blog and its many sincere individuals.
So here’s a poser:
I have a friend who remains unmarried because she carries what she calls a “toxic genetic cocktail” (family history of bi-polar disorder, full-blown schizophrenia and alcoholism) that she doesn’t want to pass on. She is very supportive of her sister and brother and their kids–many of whom have inherited the aforementioned bundle of problems.
If someone turns down offers of marriage–offers she would otherwise have accepted with enthusiasm–because she’s afraid of her own gene pool (and rightly so; I’ve seen her family), where do they fall in such a discussion?
Is she a eugenics proponent?
If not, is her thinking “disordered” with the eugenic slant of our national attitudes?
Would suggest that you are mixing “eugenics” and the result of family genes. Eugenics, in my opinion, is a deliberate process of labelling and eliminating “deficient” groups – as I posted above, this approach is a slippery slope.
I feel sad for your friend but admire her own personal but obviously difficult choice. She is not taking life (eugenics) but hopefully and wisely opting for quality of life. There is always the old debate about preserving life vs. quality of life but in this specific example, I use the “double effect” proportional morality approach. Others may have a different rationale and opinion. Good question and story.
Jean,
I agree with Bill, you ask a difficult and very sad question.
My first instinct is to propose a distinction between her attitude and those of eugenics proponents on the basis of belonging. Your friend is saying something about her own contribution to the gene pool, not about others’. Also, she is controlling it herself in a way that is morally fine in itself, not-marrying; she is not sterilizing herself or anyone else.
I don’t know–these are initial thoughts.
Just to be clear, this isn’t part of some ongoing argument with a dear friend of more than 20 years’ standing; just trying to explore exactly what eugenics actually is.
Is it the systematic identification of and extermination/sterilization of “defective” individuals in utero or already born?
Or is it a larger philosophy that includes the notion that we have a moral duty, if not a legal obligation, to police ourselves in preventing the birth of “defective” individuals who would be a drain on society and a danger to themselves?
And if we buy into the notion that we have a duty to prevent the birth of “defective” individuals, are we pursuing an immoral line of thinking, even if we are not preventing those births by any immoral act, i.e., by avoiding marriage and procreation.
Isn’t intention often the crux of the biscuit when it comes to sin?
Someone on an earlier thread said, “Every child is a gift from God.” Clearly my friend doesn’t think any children of hers would be a gift from God, but burdens to themselves and society.
Just to be clear, this isn’t part of some ongoing argument with a dear friend of more than 20 years’ standing; just trying to explore exactly what eugenics actually is.
Is it the systematic identification of and extermination/sterilization of “defective” individuals in utero or already born?
Or is it a larger philosophy that includes the notion that we have a moral duty, if not a legal obligation, to police ourselves in preventing the birth of “defective” individuals who would be a drain on society and a danger to themselves?
And if we buy into the notion that we have a duty to prevent the birth of “defective” individuals, are we pursuing an immoral line of thinking, even if we are not preventing those births by any immoral act, i.e., by avoiding marriage and procreation.
Isn’t intention often the crux of the biscuit when it comes to sin?
Someone on an earlier thread said, “Every child is a gift from God.” Clearly my friend doesn’t think any children of hers would be a gift from God, but burdens to themselves and society.
Kathy wrote:
“I think we ought to keep ourselves capable of sober judgment about particular cases.”
Kathy, you might want to follow your own advice, and maybe try to practice even a small degree of the Christian charity you profess to espouse. You hurl accusations and then pretend that you have been accused of terrible things. You might want to sober up yourself and read what I wrote–which was a denunciation of the very judgments you make and the ones you do not want made against yourself.
Jean,
“Intention,” in Catholic ethical thought, is broader than mental intention. It includes the physicality of the act–what is done, physically, as well as what is desired.
David,
This is what I read: “a traditional Catholicism that you might seem to identify with, Kathy–the Catholicism of anti-Semitism, pogroms, the Crusades, the Inquisition, racism.”
I don’t think an if…then construction takes very much of the flame out of these remarks. But I can accept that you do, and I’ll take you out at your word that you meant ” a denunciation of the very judgments you make and the ones you do not want made against yourself.”
I sure wish you would phrase something like that more clearly next time.
I’m a little late to the conversation here, but I think it’s an important one. For those interested in the history of U.S. Catholic responses to the eugenics movement particularly surrounding the Buck v. Bell decision, you might want to read my article:
Sharon M. Leon,“’A Human Being, and Not a Mere Social Factor’: Catholic Strategies for Dealing with Sterilization Statutes in the 1920s,” Church History 73:2 (June 2004) 383-411.