The Horrifying American Roots of Nazi Eugenics

2003 San Francisco Chronicle article via History Network ^ | September 2003

[TigerClaws]

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.

- See more at: http://hnn.us/article/1796#sthash.2W5ntE2W.dpuf

[TexasGator]

“Not in its completeness. That is a misrepresentation.”

Sounds pretty complete to me ...

“If a lens has too short or too long a focus, it may be amended either by an alteration of curvature, or an alteration of density; if the curvature be irregular, and the rays do not converge to a point, then any increased regularity of curvature will be an improvement. So [also] the contraction of the iris and the muscular movements of the eye are neither of them essential to vision, but only improvements which might have been added and perfected at any stage of the construction of the instrument. Within the highest division of the animal kingdom, namely the Vertebrata [animals with backbones], we can start from an eye so simple, that it consists, as in the lancelet [small sea animals which evolutionists think resemble the earliest ancestors of fish], of a little sack of transparent skin, furnished with a nerve and lined with pigment, but destitute of any other apparatus. In fishes and reptiles ... the range of gradations of dioptric [optical] structures is very great ... In living bodies, variations will cause the slight modifications, generation will multiply them almost infinitely, and natural selection will pick out with unerring skill each improvement. Let this process go on for millions of years; and during each year on millions of individuals of many kinds; and may we not believe that a living optical instrument might thus be formed as superior to one of glass as the works of the Creator are to those of man?”

[mgist]

ooops, sorry

[heartwood]

I don’t know why eugenics must always be called a “pseudoscience” to demonstrate the virtuousness of the writer.

Eugenics might be immoral in practice; the criteria used to promote or discourage reproduction may be bad science or short-sighted, but eugenics is most certainly a science as any animal or plant breeder can tell you, or as most observers of human families can.

[Sherman Logan]

Actually, it’s “Descent of Man.”

Here’s, AFAIK, the offending passage.

“At some future point, not distant as measured by centuries, the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate and replace the savage races throughout the world. At the same time the anthropomorphous apes, as Professor Schaaffhausen has remarked, will no doubt be exterminated. The break will then be rendered wider, for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state, as we may hope, than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as at present between the negro or Australian and the gorilla.”

Given what Darwin had seen in his lifetime, his conclusion that more advanced peoples would exterminate less-advanced ones was entirely reasonable. I don’t see in the above any indication that Darwin approved, or that he though this extermination would be a good thing.

I am also unaware of any passage where DArwin “compares the human race to a barnyard where defective animals are destroyed for the good of “the race.”

Many of those who claimed to follow him did so, of course, but AFAIK this was something they extrapolated (not unreasonably, to be fair) from his work, not something he stated himself.

Given the obvious implications for racism of his works, and the tenor of the times, I think Darwin’s work is surprisingly non-racist. For instance, he proclaimed a single origin for all the human races, in contradiction to the widely held, at the time, notion that the superior races had a different ancestry.

[TexasGator]

"He saw things that he thought could be explained by a theory of evolution."

[TBP]

Two words: Margaret Sanger.

[TBP]

0bamacare is ultimately another version of progressive eugenics.

Precisely! And intentionally so.

[Rashputin]

Interesting stuff, especially since the USSC ruled in Buck vs. Bell that the State has the right to sterilize anyone they see fit to sterilize. There's not a lot of nuance in the ruling, either. If the law is passed in the usual and accepted manner it's the law and the State may proceed as they see fit to implement the law that defines who should be sterilized with or without the consent of the persons the State chooses to sterilize.

IOW, the USSC has ruled that the State has the authority to decide who may and who may not have children. The fact that no one has ever bothered to challenge Buck v Bell is an illustration of how little strategic thinking exists within the ranks of US Conservatives and Pro-Life activists. Of course, it's not like denying you the right to have children is going to take money out of your pocket so it's just not an issue I guess. I feel sure BarryCare will make it an issue at some point, though.

Reading through the legal issues at Nuremberg is one of the best places to see how and where such laws originated and were implemented.

[virgil]

Read Jonah Goldbergs’s book, Liberal Fascism

[Tax-chick]

they were randy as stoats and bred themselves out of existence.

That's nonsense. For a woman to have a baby as often as possible requires having sex about once every ten months, and that's if she doesn't breastfeed her babies. (They had free baby formula in the Neanderthal days, right?)

Once every ten months is "randy as stoats"?

[Tax-chick]

The fact that no one has ever bothered to challenge Buck v Bell ...

You can't challenge a Supreme Court ruling just by filing a form. You have to have an actual event of harm caused by enforcement of a law you say is unconstitutional. If any state were presently attempting to sterilize citizens against their will, then you'd have a cause of action to procede.

It's possible that a case of judge-ordered abortion on an underage or mentally incompetent woman could generate a challenge to this precedent, but it seems not to have happened.

[Tax-chick]

Proceed.

[Agamemnon]

It should be noted that “Races” in Darwin’s title referred to what we would today more commonly refer to as “subspecies” or “breeds.” It did not specifically refer to human races. The term is still used in that way in botany and perhaps in other branches of biology.

Could you please supply an example where the term "Races" is used this way in a scholarly article or presentation in the field of "botany and perhaps in other branches of biology"?

FReegards!

[Sherman Logan]

http://ceventura.ucanr.edu/Com_Ag/Subtropical/Avocado_Handbook/Horticulture/Botany_-_Horticultural_Races_/

[DFG]

Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, “for the protection and health of the state” did not violate the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. The decision was largely seen as an endorsement of negative eugenics—the attempt to improve the human race by eliminating “defectives” from the gene pool.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_v._Bell

[GJones2]

> "Could you [Sherman Logan] please supply an example where the term 'Races' is used this way in a scholarly article or presentation in the field of 'botany and perhaps in other branches of biology'?"<

Here are a couple of examples from 19th-century encyclopedias: "The other dogs are not pure races, but have proceeded from commixtures of those already described." [Encyclopaedia Perthensis; or, Universal dictionary of Knowledge, 1816]

"The relationship of extinct races of plants and animals is various." [The Penny Cyclopaedia of the Society for the Difussion of Useful Knowledge, 1838]

[GJones2]

Of course, the best way to see how Darwin uses the word 'races' is simply to search for it in context in the book itself [The Origin of Species]. Using my browser's Find function, I skimmed through the first twenty or so occurrences, and except for the very first one, which concerned human beings, all the others had to do with other species (both plants and animals).

[Rashputin]

I know but I also know there have been opportunities that were not taken advantage of because no one was thinking beyond their nose.

Several women in Oklahoma come to mind as well as the cases where there were damages paid for having sterilized people. Rather than pursuing damages and nothing more those cases could have very easily been framed in a way that argued against the State having the right to sterilize at all rather than arguing that it was done without consent.

Like I said, a lack of strategic thinking, at least when it comes to court cases, is typical of Conservatives in this country. I think too many people are afflicted with a case of, "been down so long it looks like up to me".