[Marxism] The American Eugenics Movement

["Hunter Gray" <hunterbadbear@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Note by Hunter Bear:

This "eugenics" stuff is pure, rank poison.  I collected examples of this at
Seattle for my hate literature
collection in the fall of '67.  Some of it was very cunningly written to
give the superficial appearance of "scientific respectability."  The
behavioristic sociologist, Lundberg [based primarily at University of
Washington], was into this at one time.  Although "eugenics" has lost
considerable ground in the past few decades, it can still very disturbingly
burst forth openly -- and certainly has its sub rosa roles, e.g., stifling
immigration and alien rights in the US.  H

      Ill Bred: The American Eugenics Movement
      by Baruch Kimmerling
      www.dissidentvoice.org
      July 27, 2004

In the wake of my review of Samuel P. Huntington's book Who Are We? The
Challenges to America's National Identity ("The Crumbling of Apple Pie,"
Dissident Voice, June 29), several American friends and colleagues, who read
it on the Haaretz English Web site, wrote to me to say that there was an
important and chilling aspect of American heritage -- and a dismal chapter
in United States history -- that I had left out. From then on, I spent days
and nights doing some not very light reading, feeling it was my duty to sum
up a selection of books and articles on this topic for the benefit of
readers.

      It turns out that many themes and arguments raised in Huntington's
book under the guise of socio-cultural theory, including his phobia about
"an influx of Latin American immigrants," were put forward by the American
Eugenics Society in the period between the two world wars. The founder of
eugenics was the British anthropologist Francis Galton, who preached against
interracial marriage (miscegenation) back in 1883, as a means of improving
the human race. The American society, however, based itself mainly on the
genetic discoveries of Gregor Mendel, who developed mathematical formulas
for selective breeding. This society regarded itself as a pioneer in a field
of science that would benefit all of humanity, as well as the bearer of a
mission and a message that extended beyond the Nordic-American race.

      The eugenics movement (derived from the Greek words for "good" and
"generation") was not a marginal phenomenon. In the U.S., and to a lesser
degree in Britain, eugenics was embraced as a "science" and an ideology.
Some of America's leading lights - among them presidents, Supreme Court
judges, millionaires, Protestant clergymen and eminent scientists -
supported the movement or became active members in it. America was perceived
as a "Nordic" race that should not be mixed with inferior blood.

      The movement was not just in favor of barring the immigration of
inferior races such as Blacks, Latinos, Asians and East Europeans. It
roundly supported "improving racial stock" by sterilizing people who were
"not useful" to society. Some leaders of the movement even advocated
physically eliminating the defectives, "putting them to sleep" as an act of
mercy and compassion. On the list were the mentally disabled, people with
birth defects or genetic diseases, the physically handicapped, criminals,
alcoholics, epileptics, prostitutes, homosexuals or just plain
"degenerates." The idea extended to prohibiting these people from marrying,
banning interracial unions, and forcing unfit couples who had not undergone
sterilization to have abortions. Between the two world wars, some 60,000
persons were forced to undergo sterilization, most of them poor women or
native Americans. At the same time, nationwide contests were held for "the
fittest couples" (Nordic, of course) and the most fertile men and women.

      Local societies for racial betterment began to appear in the early
20th century, merging in 1923 into a national association that was also a
powerful political lobby. Respected research institutes and universities
allocated huge budgets for eugenics research. There is no question that the
masses of immigrants seeking refuge in the U.S. in those years, especially
from Eastern Europe, were perceived as a major threat by both the elite and
by the working classes, afraid for their jobs. This acted as a further boost
for the movement, and especially its efforts to curb immigration.

      Nordic ties

      This very visible movement, whose members included the owners of some
of America's leading newspapers, achieved its immediate political objective.
In 1924, after a panel of "experts" appeared before the Congress and the
House of Representatives, an immigration law was passed that limited the
number of newcomers to 165,000 a year and imposed strict quotas on
immigration from various regions in keeping with a scale of presumed blood
ties with the Nordic race. "America must remain American," declared U.S.
president Calvin Coolidge as he affixed his signature to the new law. The
laws of biology prove that Nordic stock declines when it mixes with other
races, he said. Thus a quota of 86 percent was established for immigrants
from northern and western Europe, as opposed to 9 percent from Eastern
Europe. Actually, these quotas remained in force until 1988.

      During this period, 30 American states adopted sterilization laws. The
first was Indiana, which opted for vasectomies, "so that degenerate genetic
traits would not be passed down to the next generation." There were, of
course, geneticists, scientists and intellectuals who denounced this
American infatuation with eugenics. In fact, the sociopolitical conclusions
from the new genetic discoveries should be the very opposite, they said,
since crossbreeding helps to reduce hereditary diseases and deformities. But
they were not politically organized and their voice remained a cry in the
wilderness. And what could they do when the flagship publication, The
Journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, was almost a mouthpiece
for the eugenics movement?

      The Catholic Church was also opposed, but its political clout was very
limited. On top of that, the eugenics movement was really the sum and
substance of American Darwinist Protestantism. Toward the end of World War
II, as the horrors of Nazi racism emerged, the eugenics movement faded into
oblivion, although some states continued to perform involuntary
sterilization until the 1970s, and the immigration laws and quotas changed
very little.

      The movement itself disappeared, but eugenics in scientific and
pseudo-scientific garb still cropped up on occasion, arousing controversy.
In 1956, William Shockley received the Nobel Prize for Physics for his
invention of the transistor - that little chip, without which all of the
modern telecommunications and computer technology we couldn't live without
today would not exist. But the eminent Stanford University professor won
world acclaim less for his brilliant invention than for his social
philosophy.

      Taking advantage of his scientific acclaim, he argued that America's
social welfare policy was lowering the quality of the human race because
people on welfare had a lower IQ, and government support of the feebleminded
worked to the detriment of natural selection and survival of the fittest.
Moreover, because contributions to humanity rely on a tiny handful of people
at the top of the famous Bell Curve, Shockley proposed setting up a sperm
bank for Nobel Prize winners. The sperm would be used to impregnate
middle-class (i.e., predominantly white), physically perfect women with IQ
scores in the top 2 percentile, in order to increase the number of geniuses
contributing to the advancement of the human race. He also proposed the
establishment of a federal bureaucratic mechanism to run the project.

      In 1979, a millionaire from northern California, Robert K. Graham,
announced that in view of the inaction of the government, he would open his
own sperm bank for Nobel Prize winners. Later, it turned out that very few
of the prize laureates met the criteria for donating sperm because they were
too old. This was also true for Shockley, who was among the only ones to
publicly announce his willingness to be a donor. So Graham's team settled
for young, brilliant promising scientists, even if they hadn't won a Nobel
yet. He invited eligible women and couples to volunteer for his genetic
engineering project, and many candidates were tested for their suitability
for vitro fertilization (mainly in cases where the husband was sterile). By
the time the sperm bank closed in 1999, 200 babies had been born utilizing
the collected sperm, most of them in the U.S. No survey of findings were
ever published on the superior intelligence of these children, and the
anonymity of the couples and their offspring remained a closely guarded
secret.

      Self-fulfilling prophecy

      In 1978, Arthur Jensen published an article in the prestigious Harvard
Educational Review summing up all the research done until then on IQ
testing. Blacks, he wrote, scored at least 10-15 points lower than the
general population, and this differential was due to genetic make-up. The
question was whether it really was genes or an array of social factors.
Until today, these findings are pulled out in the debate over affirmative
action for Afro-Americans (if the phenomenon is indeed a product of
socioeconomic hardship), or referral to scholastic and occupational tracks
that are less intellectually demanding. Actually, this was a political issue
because declaring the gap environmental (the nature vs. nurture argument)
meant that massive resources would have to be channeled into education,
housing and welfare in order to correct the problem, in addition to a policy
of affirmative action.

      Another series of studies and analyses showed that IQ tests, which
supposedly predict scholastic success and the ability to carry out tasks
requiring intellectual skill, are culture-bound. Hence if Blacks composed
the questions, it stands to reason that whites would not do as well. Another
interesting study showed that when groups of girls were given an exam in
math and told in advance that it would test gender differences in
mathematical ability, they scored lower than the boys. But when they were
not told the purpose of the exam, there were no differences between girls
and boys. In other words, fear of failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

      Also fascinating from a sociological perspective is the fact that a
study of intelligence as a predictor of social class, published in 1994 by
two acclaimed psychologists, Herrnstein and Murray (also from Harvard
University), made the New York Times best-seller list. Intelligence is
inherited, Herrnstein and Murray write, but Blacks and Latinos are less
intelligent than whites, both for genetic reasons and due to poor parental
investment. On the other hand, Asians are more intelligent than average
whites. Within the racial groups themselves, cognitive skills are graded:
Jobless whites have a lower IQ than employed whites. Unemployment is thus
the fault of the unemployed and their genes - not the system. White women
with a low IQ are less likely to marry, so they have illegitimate children.
In the end, the authors reach the inevitable conclusion that immigration
decreases the cognitive-intellectual ability of the American people. Hence
their recommendation to limit the reproductive capacity of those with low
intelligence.

      As Charles Lane writes in his review in The New York Review of Books
("The Tainted Source of the Bell Curve"), most of Herrnstein and Murray's
source material comes from The Mankind Quarterly -- a periodical published
by the Pioneer Fund. This fund, established in 1937 by Wycliffe Draper, a
millionaire and gung-ho supporter of Nazi Germany, financed eugenic
research, advocated the expulsion of Blacks from the U.S., and provided
stipends to researchers and scientists, including Jensen, who toed its line.

      Hitler's praise

      In his book Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler heaps praise on the American
eugenics movement and the American people for knowing how to protect itself
racially, confessing that he learned a lot from them. Recently unearthed in
archives in the U.S. and Germany is an enthusiastic correspondence between
Hitler and the American Eugenics Society. In some of the letters, Hitler
singles out "The Passing of the Great Race" by the well-known eugenicist
Madison Grant, for special praise. He calls it "his bible." German doctors
were sent on study fellowships to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the
movement's documentation and research center, which received funding from
the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institute in Washington. Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory recently published Elof Axel Carlson's book to
dissociate itself once and for all from its murky past.

      Maybe Hitler didn't need the "information" he received from the U.S.
to develop his master race theory - or maybe he did - but there is no doubt
he derived great encouragement from the very existence of such a movement
and its political achievements. We will never know how things might have
turned out if the American Eugenics Society had not come into being and
enjoyed such success.

      Nevertheless, this is an opportunity to look from a slightly different
angle at the murder of 6 million Jews, as well as a very large number of
gypsies, homosexuals, mental patients, disabled persons and communists (the
"morally unfit"), in Nazi death camps. In a sense, there were two nuclei of
responsibility for the Holocaust. Not only did the rise of eugenics in the
U.S. lead the country to close its doors to immigration, with the main
victims of this policy being the Jews of Eastern Europe, who were in the
midst of moving en masse to the "goldene medina," but the movement served as
a guide and a source of inspiration for the Nazis. Of course, the chief
culprit was still Nazi Germany. But think of what might have happened if
most of the Jews in Eastern Europe had managed to resettle in North America
in 1924-1938. For good or for bad, the Zionists might never have established
the State of Israel. Maybe New York would have become a Jewish state.

      It is hard for me to accuse Huntington of racism. For me, he is the
cultured and courteous scholar, very warm and open (particularly after the
third whiskey), with whom I had some fascinating discussions at the
mahogany-paneled faculty club at Harvard University. But there is no
question that deep inside, he carries that small but important facet of
American heritage that is described here.

      Book Sources:

      War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a
Master Race by Edwin Black, (Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 179 pages, $27

      American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy and the Science of Nationalism
by Nancy Ordover, (Minnesota University Press, 2003), 297 pages, $28.95

      The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National
Socialism by Stefan Khul, (Oxford University Press, 2002), 192 pages, $17.95

      Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically
Organized State, edited by G.K. Chesterton and Michael W. Perry, (Inkling
Books, 2000), 179 pages, $14.95

      The Unfit: A History of a Bad Idea by Elof Axel Carlson, (Cold Spring
Harbor, Laboratory Press, 2001), 451 pages, $25

      The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in America by Richard
J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray (Free Press, 1994), 912 pages, $16

      Baruch Kimmerling is a professor of sociology at the Hebrew University
of Jerusalem. Among his recent books are Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War
Against the Palestinians (Verso, 2003), Immigrants, Settlers and Natives
(Alma and Am Oved, Hebrew, 2003), and  The Palestinian People (Harvard
University Press, 2003) with Joel S. Migdal.


      Other Articles by Baruch Kimmerling



      * The Crumbling of Apple Pie
      * Sacred Rage: Exploring the Motivations Behind Terrorism
      * From Barak to the Road Map

      * Why is the United States Scaring Me?

      * The Politicide of Palestinian People

      * The Battle over Jenin as an Inter-ethnic War

      * My Holiday, Their Tragedy


      HOME



HUNTER GRAY  [HUNTER BEAR]   Micmac /St. Francis Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk
www.hunterbear.org
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´
and Ohkwari'

In our Gray Hole, the ghosts often dance in the junipers and sage, on the
game trails, in the tributary canyons with the thick red maples, and on the
high windy ridges -- and they dance from within the very essence of our own
inner being. They do this especially when the bright night moon shines down
on the clean white snow that covers the valley and its surroundings.  Then
it is as bright as day -- but in an always soft and mysterious and
remembering way. [Hunter Bear]













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