The American eugenics movement is just another one of the often glossed-over periods in American history. In the early 1900’s, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin lead this movement, founding the Eugenics Record Office in 1910. Eugenics was the idea of preserving desirable traits in a population stemming from the new ideas about evolution and heredity and breeding. The movement reached its height around the 1930’s with movies and books regarding the topic becoming popular. Although seemingly studied using scientific principles, it was less of a science and more of a social reaction to the huge wave of immigration happening in the United States during the late 19th century and early 20th century.
One article talked about the history of eugenics: how it started, how it rose in popularity, its use as justification for intelligence testing, and its later implications. The Binet test, one of the first intelligence tests, was first created as way to separate french school children who needed more help to understand course material and not as a way to categorize or rank people on a large scale. The Stanford Binet perversion used in the US took this test and did just that. The article stressed the intelligence test’s humble, good intentioned origins, but like heredity was then corrupted. I was shocked and even disgusted by some of the ideas and quotes from eugenicists. These ideas also seemed to permeate all levels of American culture. After a Supreme Court case in 1927 that upheld forced sterilization, a Chief Justice said“[i]t 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.” The article went on to discuss some of the more insidious effects of intelligence testing. Eugenics and the process of ranking individuals or classifying some as being unfit or unworthy helped support ideas like the holocaust. The extermination of one mentally and physically disabled infant soon led to the hunt for mentally retarded persons and eventually ethnic and religious minorities. The sterilization and separation of individuals in the US shocked me because I had never really heard about it before.
Eugenics became unpopular in the 1940’s and its ideas no longer accepted as its implications were put to practice by the Nazis. It is now closely associated with Nazism.
Corinne McCabe
This is really disturbing, I was not really aware that there was such large-scale eugenics that occurred in America. There has obviously been long and terrible history of segregation and assuring that there was no "race mixing" in the United States, interracial marriages being illegal even in the mid to late 1900s. I was unaware, however, that people had gone to such great lengths for the sake of eugenics in America.
ReplyDeleteEssentially eugenics is forced natural selection without having the strongest live. This idea is only good if it is used under temperament. For example, if we were to completely remove natural selection from the cycle of society, we would be left with nothing more than an infinite population growth of evolutionary defective humans (it sounds harsh but that is how we got Trump). However, if we are too harsh about how it is implemented then yes, that is how the Nazis became the Nazis.
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