Eugenics: A Dark Page in America's History

by Madeleine Kando

I recently heard an announcement on public radio that the victims of forced sterilization in North Carolina were going to be compensated. That made me curious about the subject because I had not known that, until fairly recently, forced sterilization had taken place on a nation-wide scale in the Unite States. I assumed those were things that happened in other countries, like Nazi Germany.

Forced sterilization was part of a wider movement called ‘Eugenics’, a bio-social movement which advocated the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population. The word ‘Eugenics’ was coined by Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. He reasoned that, since many human societies seek to protect the underprivileged and weak, those societies are at odds with the natural selection responsible for extinction of the weakest. This movement, which started in England as a subject of scientific curiosity, soon found its way across the ocean, and became very popular in America in the early 20th century.

The proponents of Eugenics said that society should encourage the procreation of desirables, by getting rid of its undesirable elements, and forcibly (by sterilization) discourage them from procreating. But who were these 'undesirables?' The ones deemed unfit to reproduce were the mentally ill and the epileptics, teenage mothers and survivors of rape or incest. Some ‘undesirables’ only had committed the crime of having low IQs, and some were gay.

Over thirty states adopted compulsory sterilization laws, which led to more than 60,000 sterilizations of disabled individuals. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 1927 Buck v. Bell case that the state of Virginia could sterilize those it thought unfit. Eugenics was not a fringe movement. It was regarded as a respected, scientific approach to population control and a means to guarantee a superior ‘gene-pool’. It had the financial backing of people like Andrew Carnegie, Edward H. Harriman and John d. Rockefeller. (see: Funding the Eugenics Movement).

But the popularity of Eugenics and forced sterilization was not unique to America. Many Northern European countries believed that society could be improved based on the largely ‘junk science’ of eugenics. Norway, Denmark, Finland and Sweden had sterilization programs. Sweden sterilized more than 62,000 people between 1934 and 1976. That was 0.1% of the population! Nazi Germany perfected the art of ethnic cleansing and took first place by sterilizing hundreds of thousands of men and women between 1930 and 1940.

The U.S. Eugenics program in California, where more than 20,000 sterilizations were performed between 1909 and 1950, was taken as proof by Hitler that ethnic cleansing worked. In part, Eugenics became so popular because there was a huge influx of immigrants at the time. Twelve million immigrants arrived between 1890 and 1910, mostly from southern Europe, and eugenics was trying to preserve the white Anglo-Saxon dominant group in the American population.

One of the leaders of the Eugenics Movement was Paul Popenoe, an army venereal disease specialist. I downloaded his book ‘Eugenics Applied’ from Google and the foul smell that emanates from the pages makes me almost want to vomit. In the chapter on the ‘coercive and non-coercive methods’ of restricting procreation amongst the ‘feeble-minded', he writes:

‘The first method which presents itself is execution. Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated’ and: ‘It is possible to render either a man or woman sterile by a much less serious operation than castration, which is sterilization’.

Later on he discusses the problem of alcoholism: ‘The way to solve the liquor problem is not to eliminate drink, but to eliminate the drinker: to prevent the reproduction of the degenerate stocks and the tainted strains that contribute most of the chronic alcoholics.’

Many states have apologized for their mistakes. The ‘Indiana Eugenics: History and Legacy website is a good example of an intelligent response to the crimes committed by this movement, by educating the reader and the voter.

Eugenics was a monstrous idea. It was one of the darkest chapters in the history of the Western world and belongs to the same practices as medieval witch burning and Roman crucifixion. It seeks to apply the biological principles of Darwinism to Sociology and to Politics. It seeks to “weed out” groups perceived to be inferior. It is also highly racist. The problem with such theories is that they are based on a ‘Naturalistic fallacy’, which means that they are trying to derive an ‘ought’ statement from an ‘is’ statement. Darwin’s theory of the ‘survival of the fittest’ in nature is something that IS. Applying it to human society is an OUGHT. People ought not to be mentally ill, epileptic, alcoholic… but they are. Trying to eradicate imperfection by causing suffering will always backfire. leave comment here

** You can download the book via this link for free.