AMERICAN EUGENICS

I believe it is important to understand that the following is just background information on a topic that is very disturbing and, while many may think it is a thing of the past, it is a latent ongoing worldwide movement.  You can discover much on your own by simply using Google to explore or use your local library. Sharon

Published on Tuesday, February 15, 2000 in the Chicago Tribune

Yale Study:
U.S. Eugenics Paralleled Nazi Germany
by David Morgan

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - U.S. doctors who once believed that sterilization could help rid society of mental illness and crime launched a 20th century eugenics movement that in some ways paralleled the policies of Nazi Germany, researchers said on Monday.

A Yale study tracing a once-popular movement aimed at improving society through selective breeding, indicates that state-authorized sterilizations were carried out longer and on a larger scale in the United States than previously believed, beginning with the first state eugenics law in Indiana in 1907.

Despite modern assumptions that American interest in eugenics waned during the 1920s, researchers said sterilization laws had authorized the neutering of more than 40,000 people classed as insane or ``feebleminded'' in 30 states by 1944.

Another 22,000 underwent sterilization from the mid-1940s to 1963, despite weakening public support and revelations of Nazi atrocities, according to the study, funded by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Merck Co. Foundation.
Forced sterilization was legal in 18 U.S. states, and most states with eugenics laws allowed people to be sterilized without their consent by leaving the decision to a third party.

``The comparative histories of the eugenical sterilization campaigns in the United States and Nazi Germany reveal important similarities of motivation, intent and strategy,'' the study's authors wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a journal published by the American College of Physicians-American Society of Internal Medicine.
Eugenics sprang from the philosophy of social Darwinism, which envisioned human society in terms of natural selection and suggested that science could engineer progress by attacking supposedly hereditary problems including moral decadence, crime, venereal disease, tuberculosis and alcoholism.

``The eugenics laws in the United States were virulent, just as they were in Sweden, France and Australia,'' said Art Caplan, head of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Bioethics.

The U.S. practice ended in the 1960s after being overwhelmed by court challenges and the civil rights movement.
German and American eugenics advocates both believed science could solve social problems, tended to measure the worth of the individual in economic terms and felt mental illness a threat to society grave enough to warrant compulsive sterilization.
And while Nazi claims of Aryan superiority are well known, researchers said U.S. advocates of sterilization worried that the survival of old-stock America was being threatened by the influx of ``lower races'' from southern and eastern Europe.
There was also mutual admiration, with early U.S. policies drawing glowing reviews from authorities in pre-Nazi Germany.

``Germany is perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit,'' editors of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote in 1934, a year after Hitler became chancellor.

U.S. Eugenics Movement Waned
But the study, based partly on old editorials from the New England journal and the Journal of the American Medical Association, also demonstrated how the U.S. eugenics movement gradually waned while its Nazi counterpart carried out 360,000 to 375,000 sterilizations during the 1930s and grew to encompass so-called ``mercy'' killings.

``In the United States, a combination of public unease, Roman Catholic opposition, federal democracy, judicial review and critical scrutiny by the medical profession reversed the momentum,'' the article said.

The U.S. practice of neutering ``mentally defective'' individuals was backed by most leading geneticists and often justified on grounds that it would relieve the public of the cost of caring for future generations of the mentally ill.
Sterilizations also took place mainly in public mental institutions, where the poor and ethnic or racial minorities were housed in disproportionately high numbers.

``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,'' Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in the majority opinion of a landmark eugenics case in 1926.

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Prominent Founders of The American Eugenics Society

American Eugenics Society : Leon Whitney was the executive secretary
The prominent list of original founders of sponsors of The American Eugenics Society each had some direct relationship with either Wickliffe Draper of The Pioneer Fund or Andrew Preston founder of The Boston Fruit Company, later United Fruit in New Orleans, LA:

In 1930 many of the wealthiest people in the world were members of the American Eugenics Society.
It earliest members and sponsors included:

J. P. Morgan, Jr., chairman, U. S. Steel, who handled British contracts in the United States for food and munitions during World War I. Wickliffe Draper used his J. P. Morgan Trust Account to fund The Mississippi Sovereignty Commission and its activities.

Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle, tobacco fortune heiress whose family founded Duke University.

Cleveland H. and Cleveland E. Dodge and their wives, who used some of the huge fortune that Phelps Dodge & Company made on copper mines and other metals to support eugenics.

Robert Garrett, whose family had amassed a fortune through banking in Maryland and the B&O railroad, who helped finance two international eugenics congresses attended by Harry Laughlin and Wickliffe Draper.

Miss E. B. Scripps, whose wealth came the Scrips-Howard newspaper chain and from United Press (later UPI).

Dorothy H. Brush, Planned Parenthood activist, whose wealth came from Charles Francis Brush (1849-1929), who invented the arc lamp for street lights and founded the Brush Electric Company. Draper's version of Planned Parenthood was to pass the Involuntary Sterilization laws in 15 different U.S. States.

Margaret Sanger, also from Planned Parenthood, who used the wealth of one of one of her husbands, Noah Slee, to promote her work. Slee made his fortune from the familiar household product, 3-in-One Oil.

The other Finance Committee members included:
Leon F. Whitney the son of Eli Whitney inventor of the Cotton Gin who was the Chairman. The Draper Looms in Hopedale, MA were used to spin the raw cotton harvested by the Eli Whitney cotton gins into fabrics, cloth and yarn.

Frank L. Babbott the well-known philanthropist and educator.

Madison Grant later of The Pioneer Fund, founded by Wickliffe Draper following the 1936 Olympics when his namesake, Foy Draper, was edged out for Olympic glory by Jesse Owens and Ralph Metcalf.

Mrs. Helen Hartley Jenkins and John H. Kellogg who started the Kellogg's Cereal Company.

John Kellogg and The Race Betterment Foundation
Kellogg was outspoken on his beliefs on race and segregation, in spite of the fact that he himself adopted a number of black children. In 1906, together with Irving Fisher and Charles Davenport, Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation, which became a major center of the new eugenics movement in America. Kellogg was in favor of racial segregation and believed that immigrants and non-whites would damage the gene pool. He acted as a sort of mentor and advisor to Wickliffe Draper through his publications. Draper adopted Kellogg's recommendations and beliefs on subjects like racial segregation, anti-miscegnation laws, staunch anti-immigration attitudes and also the lifestyle choice of total sexual abstinence as a lifelong habit. Draper later died from prostate cancer. It is not known whether or not Draper was converted by Kellogg into one of the favorite Kellogg routines of taking regular yogurt enemas.

Robert Garrett was one of the primary financial sponsors of the American Eugenics Society the personal project of Wickliffe P. Draper who sponsored most of the research behind "The Bell Curve" published in 1994. Garrett also served on the Finance Committee of the International Congress of The American Eugenics Society along with Madison Grant author of "The Passing of the Great Race."

[edit] List of presidents
•Irving Fisher 1922-26 (Political Economy, Yale University)
•Roswell H. Johnson 1926-27 (Cold Spring Harbor, Univ. of Pittsburgh)
•Harry H. Laughlin 1927-29 (Eugenics Record Office)
•C. C. Little 1929 (Pres., Michigan University)
•Henry Pratt Fairchild 1929-31 (Sociology, New York University)
•Henry Perkins 1931-34 (Zoology, University of Vermont)
•Ellsworth Huntington 1934-38 (Geography, Yale University)
•Samuel Jackson Holmes 1938-40 (Zoology, University of California)
•Maurice Bigelow 1940-45 (sex education, Columbia University)
•Frederick Osborn 1946-52 (Osborn-Dodge-Harriman RR connection)
•Harry L. Shapiro 1956-63 (American Museum of Natural History)
•Clyde V. Kiser 1964-68 (differential fertility, Milbank Memorial Fund)
•Dudley Kirk 1969-72 (Demographer, Stanford University)
•Bruce K. Eckland 1972-75 (Sociology, University of North Carolina)
•L. Erlenmeyer-Kimling 1976-78 (Genetic Psychiatry)
•Lindzey Gardner 1979-81 (Center for Advanced Study, Behavioral Sciences)
•John L. Fuller 1982-83 (Behavioral genetics)
•Michael Teitelbaum 1985-1990 (US Congress staff; US population policy)
•Robert Retherford 1991-1994 (East-West Institute, Hawaii; funded by AID)
•Joseph Lee Rodgers 1994, 1995 (family influences)
•Current: S. Jay Olshansky

[edit] See also
•British Eugenics Society
•Human Betterment Foundation