Chris
07-17-2013, 11:38 AM
You won't hear this in Progressive's public education.
The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics (http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html)
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
Progressive genocide (http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/)
Among the many concerns that captivated the American educated class early in the last century, few were thought to be as urgent as the threat posed to the nation by sexually insatiable female morons. This may sound silly; today, our fear of morons is rather abstract, and on a national scale confined mostly to whomever is the current resident of the White House. But a hundred years ago, morons were public enemy No. 1, seen as a drain on the nation’s resources and a grave danger to its stability. The situation was most keenly appreciated by progressives — scientists, businessmen, feminists and liberal politicians — who, as even the best of us sometimes do, feared that within a short time, the nation would be overrun by simpletons.
...As the journalist Harry Bruinius explains in “Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” his comprehensive new history of the American eugenics movement, the problem wasn’t just that morons were given to crime and poverty; because feeblemindedness was a genetic condition passed on from one generation to the next, their children, and their children’s children, and on and on, were similarly suspect as well. Of particular concern were the afflicted women, in whom scientists had found the symptoms of feeblemindedness more pronounced. Female morons gave in to their sexual urges more quickly than feebleminded men, and they sometimes deceived normal men into consorting with them; in addition, they were “hyper-fecund,” as doctors termed their apparent tendency to become pregnant easily. Put this all together, as many smart Americans did, and you had a big problem on your hands: an extremely fertile, extremely needy, apparently permanent underclass.
...Progressives saw sterilization as having natural advantages over traditional methods of helping the poor, such as charity. Sterilization was “scientific” — its rationale could be found in the writings of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who mused that superior people, like superior crops and farm animals, were the product of good breeding. The term “gene” had not yet been coined — among the surprises in Bruinius’ book is that the science and the word “genetics” were born of the pseudoscience eugenics, and not vice versa — but any well-read person could understand that if you wanted to rid the world of inferior people, you ought to stop them from passing on their characteristics to future generations. Whereas charity only prolonged and deepened the problem of poverty by allowing the “unfit” among us to survive and procreate, sterilization presented what you might call a permanent, final solution. Give a man a fish and he eats for one day; cut his mother’s fallopian tubes and you can be pretty certain not to need any fish, or fishing lessons, in the first place.
...And yet in Bruinius’ telling American eugenicists don’t look nearly so inconsequential. Importantly, Bruinius points out, we were the first to pick up the eugenics bug. Galton, a Brit, provided the intellectual basis for eugenics, but Americans, who fancied themselves a chosen people and whose blood has always run hot on matters of utopia, actually implemented the plans. In 1907, Indiana passed “the first sterilization law in human history,” Bruinius writes, and “in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the ‘unfit.’” At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.
It’s not exactly clear what Roosevelt meant by “citizens of the wrong type,” but it should be noted that as eugenics thinking matured, many supporters began to see the delineations between people of the right and wrong type as extending beyond just mental categories. Leading eugenicists argued that science proved that non-whites were genetically inferior to whites, that certain kinds of Europeans were better than other kinds, and that you should never trust a Jew. The eugenicists’ claims were touted by opportunistic politicians, who used the scientific findings to pass restrictive immigration laws in the U.S.
The American enthusiasm for purifying the populace did not go unnoticed beyond our borders. After the Supreme Court approved the process, “the American technique of social engineering became the model for laws in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, and Sweden,” Bruinius writes. And one more: Hitler’s Germany, where the sterilization laws were consciously modeled on and supported by the American efforts.
...
The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics (http://hnn.us/articles/1796.html)
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race."
But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power. California eugenicists played an important, although little known, role in the American eugenics movement's campaign for ethnic cleansing.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions, enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third of all such surgeries.
Progressive genocide (http://www.salon.com/2006/03/04/bruinius/)
Among the many concerns that captivated the American educated class early in the last century, few were thought to be as urgent as the threat posed to the nation by sexually insatiable female morons. This may sound silly; today, our fear of morons is rather abstract, and on a national scale confined mostly to whomever is the current resident of the White House. But a hundred years ago, morons were public enemy No. 1, seen as a drain on the nation’s resources and a grave danger to its stability. The situation was most keenly appreciated by progressives — scientists, businessmen, feminists and liberal politicians — who, as even the best of us sometimes do, feared that within a short time, the nation would be overrun by simpletons.
...As the journalist Harry Bruinius explains in “Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity,” his comprehensive new history of the American eugenics movement, the problem wasn’t just that morons were given to crime and poverty; because feeblemindedness was a genetic condition passed on from one generation to the next, their children, and their children’s children, and on and on, were similarly suspect as well. Of particular concern were the afflicted women, in whom scientists had found the symptoms of feeblemindedness more pronounced. Female morons gave in to their sexual urges more quickly than feebleminded men, and they sometimes deceived normal men into consorting with them; in addition, they were “hyper-fecund,” as doctors termed their apparent tendency to become pregnant easily. Put this all together, as many smart Americans did, and you had a big problem on your hands: an extremely fertile, extremely needy, apparently permanent underclass.
...Progressives saw sterilization as having natural advantages over traditional methods of helping the poor, such as charity. Sterilization was “scientific” — its rationale could be found in the writings of Charles Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who mused that superior people, like superior crops and farm animals, were the product of good breeding. The term “gene” had not yet been coined — among the surprises in Bruinius’ book is that the science and the word “genetics” were born of the pseudoscience eugenics, and not vice versa — but any well-read person could understand that if you wanted to rid the world of inferior people, you ought to stop them from passing on their characteristics to future generations. Whereas charity only prolonged and deepened the problem of poverty by allowing the “unfit” among us to survive and procreate, sterilization presented what you might call a permanent, final solution. Give a man a fish and he eats for one day; cut his mother’s fallopian tubes and you can be pretty certain not to need any fish, or fishing lessons, in the first place.
...And yet in Bruinius’ telling American eugenicists don’t look nearly so inconsequential. Importantly, Bruinius points out, we were the first to pick up the eugenics bug. Galton, a Brit, provided the intellectual basis for eugenics, but Americans, who fancied themselves a chosen people and whose blood has always run hot on matters of utopia, actually implemented the plans. In 1907, Indiana passed “the first sterilization law in human history,” Bruinius writes, and “in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the ‘unfit.’” At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.
It’s not exactly clear what Roosevelt meant by “citizens of the wrong type,” but it should be noted that as eugenics thinking matured, many supporters began to see the delineations between people of the right and wrong type as extending beyond just mental categories. Leading eugenicists argued that science proved that non-whites were genetically inferior to whites, that certain kinds of Europeans were better than other kinds, and that you should never trust a Jew. The eugenicists’ claims were touted by opportunistic politicians, who used the scientific findings to pass restrictive immigration laws in the U.S.
The American enthusiasm for purifying the populace did not go unnoticed beyond our borders. After the Supreme Court approved the process, “the American technique of social engineering became the model for laws in Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, and Sweden,” Bruinius writes. And one more: Hitler’s Germany, where the sterilization laws were consciously modeled on and supported by the American efforts.
...