Progressives! WOW!

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

United States

In the USA, eugenic supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, pre-1960's Democratic Party, the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association and the National Research Council. Research was funded by distinguished philanthropies and carried out at prestigious universities.[citation needed] It was taught in college and high school classrooms. Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood of America to urge the legalization of contraception for the lower classes. In its time eugenics was touted by some as scientific and progressive, the natural application of knowledge about breeding to the arena of human life. Before the realization of death camps in World War II, the idea that eugenics would lead to genocide was not taken seriously by the average American.

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.[55] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[56] 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.[57]

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.[58]

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.[59] 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.[60]

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. All in all, 60,000 Americans were sterilized.[61]

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.)[62] Though their methodology and research methods are now understood as highly flawed, at the time this was seen as legitimate scientific research.[63] 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.[64]

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.[65] 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.[61] American eugenicists inspired and supported Hitler's racial purification laws, and failed to understand the connection between those policies and the eventual genocide of the Holocaust.[66]

A pedigree chart from The Kallikak Family meant to show how one illicit tryst could lead to an entire generation of imbeciles.The idea of "genius" and "talent" is also considered by William Graham Sumner, a founder of the American Sociological Society (now called the American Sociological Association). He maintained that if the government did not meddle with the social policy of laissez-faire, a class of genius would rise to the top of the system of social stratification, followed by a class of talent. Most of the rest of society would fit into the class of mediocrity. Those who were considered to be defective (mentally retarded, handicapped, etc.) had a negative effect on social progress by draining off necessary resources. They should be left on their own to sink or swim. But those in the class of delinquent (criminals, deviants, etc.) should be eliminated from society ("Folkways", 1907).

However, methods of eugenics were applied to reformulate more restrictive definitions of white racial purity in existing state laws banning interracial marriage: the so-called anti-miscegenation laws. The most famous example of the influence of eugenics and its emphasis on strict racial segregation on such "anti-miscegenation" legislation was Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924. The U.S. Supreme Court overturned this law in 1967 in Loving v. Virginia, and declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional.

With the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, eugenicists for the first time played an important role in the Congressional debate as expert advisers on the threat of "inferior stock" from eastern and southern Europe.[67] This reduced the number of immigrants from abroad to 15 percent from previous years, to control the number of "unfit"[citation needed] individuals entering the country. While eugenicists did support the act, the most important backers were union leaders like Samuel Gompers[68]. The new act, inspired by the eugenic belief in the racial superiority of "old stock" white Americans as members of the "Nordic race" (a form of white supremacy), strengthened the position of existing laws prohibiting race- mixing.[69] Eugenic considerations also lay behind the adoption of incest laws in much of the U.S. and were used to justify many anti-miscegenation laws.[70]

Anthropometry demonstrated in an exhibit from a 1921 eugenics conference.Stephen Jay Gould asserted that restrictions on immigration passed in the United States during the 1920s (and overhauled in 1965 with the Immigration and Nationality Act) were motivated by the goals of eugenics. During the early 20th century, the United States and Canada began to receive far higher numbers of Southern and Eastern European immigrants. Influential eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin (who was appointed as an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920) presented arguments they would pollute the national gene pool if their numbers went unrestricted.[citation needed] It has been argued that this stirred both Canada and the United States into passing laws creating a hierarchy of nationalities, rating them from the most desirable Anglo-Saxon and Nordic peoples to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, who were almost completely banned from entering the country.[71] However, several people, in particular Franz Samelson, Mark Snyderman and Richard Herrnstein, have argued, based on their examination of the records of the congressional debates over immigration policy, Congress gave virtually no consideration to these factors. According to these authors, the restrictions were motivated primarily by a desire to maintain the country's cultural integrity against a heavy influx of foreigners.[72]

Oregon repealed its forced sterilization law in 1983, with the last known forced sterilization having been done in 1978 [10].

The Negro Project conspiracy theory is an alleged eugenics program. The project, according to proponents of the theory, was originated by Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and supposedly aims to reduce or eliminate the black population through use of abortion.[73]

[Ggreen 12]

Get over it.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

[Niels Bohr 72]

I'd support the law of marriage where it prevents a imbecile, feeble-minded high school dropouts invdividual from marrying and having sex.

Edited April 29, 2009 by Niels Bohr

[Nagishkaw 510]

Lets ask Arlen Specter his opinion.

[Ban Hammer 14,569]

Lets ask Arlen Specter his opinion.

he was around then, wasn't he?

[almaty 19]

nah, that was storm thurmond

[Bobby+Umit 161]

I'd support the law of marriage where it prevents a imbecile, feeble-minded high school dropouts invdividual from marrying and having sex.

I agree, or people who can't use spell check!

(j/k)

[almaty 19]

that be me

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

And I gave my opinion.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

And I gave my opinion.

I gotta give you some credit for knowing what went on. Alot of ppl here only have the ability to refer from their own history and dont care to look back further.

[spookyturtle 9,466]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

And I gave my opinion.

I gotta give you some credit for knowing what went on. Alot of ppl here only have the ability to refer from their own history and dont care to look back further.

I'm sure coming from you that means a lot to him.

[Trumplestiltskin 5,791]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

And I gave my opinion.

I gotta give you some credit for knowing what went on. Alot of ppl here only have the ability to refer from their own history and dont care to look back further.

I'm not sure how relevant it is to draw connections between a modern politician and the policies that their party supported back in the 30s, policies that are not part of the contemporary mainstream for either party.

[Pinocchio Liberal 268]

I can't see any modern politician (and few people generally) supporting Eugenics.

Just cuz "YOU" cant see it! doesnt make it so. I was trying to provoke some thought! So many ppl dont have a clue what went on back in the day.

And I gave my opinion.

I gotta give you some credit for knowing what went on. Alot of ppl here only have the ability to refer from their own history and dont care to look back further.

I'm not sure how relevant it is to draw connections between a modern politician and the policies that their party supported back in the 30s, policies that are not part of the contemporary mainstream for either party.

** the mainstream! If your familiar with what Im talkin about, you understand what I mean.