The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics: The Master Race

[appalachiablue]

Last edited Tue Apr 20, 2021, 06:59 PM - Edit history (2)

- Nazi Dr. Josef Mengele, head of the eugenics program at Auschwitz concentration camp.
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'The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics,' by Edwin Black, History News Network, Alternet, Dec. 12, 2020. - Ed.

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 27 states.

In 1909, California became the 3rd 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. California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement. During the 20th Century's first decades, California's eugenicists included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the University of California Board of Regents.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims. Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as talent and poverty were passed through the blood. In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples.

From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization. The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz. Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies.. Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably better offspring.. Galton's ideas were imported into the U.S. just as Gregor Mendel's principles of heredity were rediscovered...

Read More, https://www.alternet.org/2020/12/josef-mengele/
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- New York's Nazi town, Yaphank, Long Island.

-> Book Review, 'War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race,' by Edwin Black. NIH, 2004.

Eugenics is too frequently overlooked in histories of both the United States and Europe, even though the story is a fascinating and important one. The field to date has remained largely the preserve of academic historians, despite obvious connections to contemporary debates around science and ethics. These were prime motivations for War Against the Weak, Edwin Black's timely look at American eugenics and its impact on Nazism.

.. Created in Britain in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton (Charles Darwin's cousin), eugenics became reality in the United States before the rise of Nazism. Spurious scientific and medical work by eugenicists led to the forced sterilisation of 60,000 Americans and the banning of ethnically mixed marriages in many states. A eugenically inspired immigration act in 1924 kept out millions of Slavs, Jews, and others, who were subsequently killed by Nazi Germany's eugenically inspired genocide.

Black properly shows that eugenics was about more than just ethnicity and disability by discussing class, intelligence, crime, poverty, sexuality, alcoholism, and prostitution. Eugenics was also fundamentally about saving taxpayer dollars...

Read More, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC341445/
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- Eugenics In The United States,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#:~:text=The%20American%20eugenics%20movement%20was,which%20originated%20in%20the%201880s.&text=In%20the%20US%2C%20eugenics%20was,of%20breeding%20for%20specific%20traits.

U.S. eugenicists tended to believe in the genetic superiority of Nordic, Germanic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, supported strict immigration and anti-miscegenation laws, and supported the forcible sterilization of the poor, disabled and "immoral."



- 'Fitter Families' Contest Winners Stand, Eugenics Fair, Topeka, Kansas.
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- Josef Mengele, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Mengele

- The Eugenics Crusade, PBS American Experience (2018).

[no_hypocrisy]

1. Watch American Experience (PBS) re Eugenics

The USSC condoned state-sponsored involuntary sterilization and the case (Buck v. Bell) has not been overturned.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/eugenics-crusade/

[appalachiablue]

2. A well done program, the trailer is added

above. The Carrie Buck case, what a tragedy.



- Carrie Buck (L)

- Carrie Elizabeth Buck (1906 – 1983) was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, after having been ordered to undergo compulsory sterilization for purportedly being "feeble-minded." The surgery, carried out while Buck was an inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, took place under the authority of the Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924, part of the Commonwealth of Virginia's eugenics program...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrie_Buck

[no_hypocrisy]

3. This case continues to horrify me. The "trial" took place about 3 miles from where I went to

college. (Nobody talked about it when I was there, although there were hushed whispers about the Lynchburg Training School.)

On my wall is a black-ink drawing of the Amherst Courthouse, where the "trial" took place, just to remind me why I became a lawyer.

[appalachiablue]

5. Every time it comes up I learn more

about this case, the horrors of this country and the Old Dominion. For shame, the Loving case too and more.

[keithbvadu2]

4. "Anglo-Saxon" - lately associated with Marjorie Taylor Green

[appalachiablue]

6. Yes indeed, the evil perpetuates

[Rhiannon12866]

7. Thanks for posting.

I remember we studied the history of Eugenics in an Anthropology course I took at my boarding school. We were asked to have a debate on it and I was dismayed to be assigned to the pro-Eugenics side. And we lost before we even said a thing since the smartest kid in the class - maybe the entire school - was a student from Ghana.

[appalachiablue]

8. Good for the Ghana student, what an interesting lesson

[Rustyeye77]

9. Wow

just wow

[Bucky]

10. Eugenics is an ugly side story of American Progressivism.

Lots of people in the Progressive movement in the late 19th C and early 20th, well intended social reformers, including Victoria Woodhull, John Harvey Kellogg, Andrew Carnegie, Nikola Tesla, W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas Wyatt Turner, and Alexander Graham Bell got caught up in the "scientific" approach to improving families. It wasn't even intrinsically racist (DuBois and Turner were founders of the NAACP). It was part of the same pro-scientific approach to public life that led to childhood vaccinations, standardized milk pasteurization, urban reform, the professionalization of social work (as in the Hull House movement), the ending of child labor, and mandatory schooling laws --- and of course early efforts at making birth control safe and effective was connected to it.

It was an intellectual cul de sac, of course, and was eventually rejected as outright racists and forced sterilization proponents joined up, and as scientific evidence showed eugenics, like phrenology, was a load of horseshit. But similar to the temperance movement, eugenics was a terrible idea coming from well intentioned people lacking a full grasp of what unintended nightmares they were teeing up.

History has got some complicated shit in it. That's why liberalism, being open-minded about even your pet theories, is so important to modern life.

[Bucky]

11. And don't forget one of DUers' favorite movies, Idiocracy, is entirely based on eugenics

I mean, it's all a joke of course, but the confusion and misunderstanding is pretty easy to understand

[appalachiablue]

12. Plenty of people were swept into this

horrid pseudoscience, thanks for the reminder. And in some quarters it's around in a another iteration sorry to say.