Posted on 02/13/2009 5:37:23 AM PST by Ethan Clive Osgoode
Excerpts from: Eugenics, Good Health Publishing Co. Originally published in Good Health Magazine, 1913. [1]
Irving Fisher [2]
I have sometimes said that eugenics is hygiene raised to the highest power. It is a comparatively new movement, but one which is sweeping over the world with wonderful rapidity, and taking hold of the emotions of mankind in a way that no other movement has ever done, or has deserved to do.
The word was invented by Sir Francis Galton, of England, to express his ideal founding a world movement to improve the human race. It was, of course, a colossal ambition, and, at first almost everybody scoffed.
Nevertheless, I reassert that it is easily practical to alter and improve the human race and to do so in a very short time.
This is the new optimism of eugenics and it is based on solid evidence.
There are certain qualities which rank as defective. Feeble mindedness is a lack of a very important character. Suppose now that a normal or "strong minded" person, if we may use that term as distinct from feeble-minded, marries a feeble-minded person. Assuming that the "strong-minded" person is a "thoroughbred," all of the children will be apparently normal. None will be feeble-minded. "Strong-mindedness" is dominant over weak mindedness. Yet all these children that seem to be perfectly normal lack something in their bodies. This deficiency is simply covered up but can crop out in later generations. If two of these hybrids between the weak-minded and the strong-minded marry each other, one-quarter of the children will be feeble-minded, one-quarter thoroughbred strong-minded and the remaining half, though apparently strong-minded, will carry the taint in them just as their parents did. They are half-breeds. On the other hand, if two feeble-minded people marry, all of the children will be feeble-minded. Certainly we can and ought to forbid and prevent such marriages.
But feeble-mindedness is a recessive quality, so that if the feeble-minded marry only with normal individuals the feeble-mindedness does not blight the next generation, and if these apparently normal children of such marriages take pains to marry only really normal individuals, avoiding not only the feeble-minded but even those like themselves who have feeble-mindedness on one side of their family tree, there will be no feeble mindedness cropping out in future generations.
But when we propose to restrict marriages or mating of those unfit to marry, people are apt to say, "That is a dream. It can't be done." But it can be done and it has been done. Every one has heard of the cretins in Switzerland. They are a kind of idiot who are short in stature and afflicted in all cases with goitre in the neck. Of course, many people have goitre who are not cretins, but there is no cretin who has not goitre. These cretins are peculiarly a feeble-minded people. They are common still in many towns of Switzerland; they are loathsome objects, helpless as children, with silly smiles, unable to take care of themselves in even the simplest toilet ways, and have to be looked after like domestic animals, or even more closely. [3]
A gentleman very much interested in eugenics visited Aosta, in Italy, just outside of Switzerland once in 1900 and again in 1910. In 1900 he found many of these creatures among the beggars in the streets, in the asylum, in the home, in the orphan asylum -- everywhere he ran across these awful apologies for human beings. But in 1910 he found only one! What had happened? Simply that a few resolute intelligent reformers had changed the entire situation. An isolation institution, or rather two institutions, one for the men and the other for the women, were established. In these the best care of the inmates was taken as long as they lived, and they do not live long. But pains were taken to see that by no possibility could marriage or mating of those people take place. They forfeited any such rights in return for the care that they received from the State.
It seems, and it is, a colossal task to change average human nature one iota. Yet in the light of modern eugenics we could make a new human race in a hundred years if only people in positions of power and influence would wake up to the paramount importance of what eugenics means. And this could be done quietly and simply without violence to existing ideas of what is right and proper. It could be done by segregation of the sexes for defectives, feeble-minded, idiots, epileptics, insane, etc. By this kind of isolation, we can save the blood stream of our race from a tremendous amount of needless contamination. And it is being done. The growing tendency to put defectives in institutions, though originally with no such object, will have the effect of reducing the transmission of defects, especially when it is recognized that the sexes must be separated and that the inmates should be kept at the institution through the reproductive period of life.
Sterilization is also a means which may be advantageously applied in extreme cases. Sensible marriage laws if backed by an enlightened public opinion can add much. Every State should have a eugenics board authorized to pass on doubtful cases. But eugenic laws should be enacted only after approval by those who possess technical knowledge on this subject, such as Doctor Davenport [4]. Otherwise we are in danger of foolish, needless and even harmful legislation.
Few people have any idea, unless they have looked into the pedigrees of some of these people, what awful contamination can be saved the race by a wise application of eugenics. There is a family called "the Jukes," all descended from a thriftless fisherman, born in 1720. About twelve hundred of these descendants have been traced in 75 years. Of these, 310 were professional paupers who spent an aggregate of 2,300 years in poorhouses, 50 were prostitutes, 7 murderers, 60 habitual thieves and 130 common criminals. Dugdale, who compiled these facts, estimated that the "Juke" family cost the Government over $1,000 for each member of the family. Similarly the "Tribe of Ishmael," numbering 1,692 individuals in six generations, has produced 121 known prostitutes and has bred hundreds of petty thieves, vagrants and murderers. [5] Compare the descendants of that family with the descendants of Jonathan Edwards, who was born in the same period (1 703) and who has had about the same number of descendants (1,394 traced up to 1900). Out of those descendants, something like half have been public men or men of great distinction and good influence in the world; 295 were college graduates, about 100 were clergymen or missionaries, over 100 were lawyers, 80 held public office, 75 were officers in the army or navy, 60 were eminent writers, 30 were judges, 13 were college presidents. A similar example is afforded in the Darwin family, of which, by the way, Galton was a member. [6]
The subject of eugenics is intimately related to hygiene. Some people have thought that hygiene is opposed to eugenics, and in truth this may in many cases be true. Misapplied hygiene is likely to be injurious to the race. I was astonished at the ignorance of a university president with whom I conversed some years ago. He was very enthusiastic over hygiene and what it can do. He said, "I know of a girl who had many ailments and disabilities. She had a surgical operation to remedy one difficulty and special treatment to remedy others, so that finally she was so repaired and improved as to be made over into quite a respectable human being, and now she is married. Just think what a wonderful thing that is." Well the truth was such a result is greatly to be deplored. The hygiene was misapplied. This girl was really defective, and the pity of it is that her children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are likely to have a certain percentage of defects. The lives of the insane of this country have been prolonged about eight years by hygiene. To a certain extent this prolongation has done harm because the insane have been allowed to breed.
This leads me to say that eugenics is a wonderful touchstone. I believe eugenics will be in the future the essential foundation of ethics. Today, ethics is purely empirical. We teach at the mother's knee certain things to be right and certain things to be wrong, and they generally are right and wrong respectively. And yet we cannot explain why they are right and wrong. When the children ask us "Why?" we usually put them off by saving "Because it is right," or we put young men off by metaphysics and say, "Because of the categorical imperative," as Kant expressed it. But this does not satisfy, and the failure to satisfy is one reason for immorality in the world. There is not yet an accepted scientific foundation for right and wrong. I verily believe that eugenics is going to supply such a foundation. Some people say they don't think eugenics is right; they don't think it is right to talk about these things; they don't think that it is right to try to interfere with marriage. There are many things these people don't think is right because they have a false and conventional standard. But the time will come when, instead of asking whether eugenics is right or wrong according to some false conventional standard, we shall ask ourselves whether these conventional standards are right or wrong according to the standard of eugenics, the highest standard there is.
And so it will one day come about that we shall realize the dream of the founder of this science. Sir Francis Galton, and will link up eugenics with religion. A generation ago much was said of the conflict between science and religion; and it is a curious fact that at first religion frowned on new scientific discoveries. It frowned on the discovery of the rotundity of the earth, of the motion of the earth, of the geological periods of evolution according to Darwin, and of a great many other things. Some of the greatest saints in science, like Galileo and Bruno, were imprisoned and tortured because they would not prostitute their love of truth for the conventional religion of the day. Now I was fearful at first that we should have another unpleasant spectacle of a conflict between conventional religion and this new science of eugenics, and if you will watch the newspapers as I have been watching them during the last year, you will see occasional evidences of that today. One of the evidences of it came to me some years ago when David Starr Jordan, President of Leland Stanford University, and I both spoke before the New York Peace Society.
After we had finished our presentation of the subject a clergyman got up and said, "I disagree with the gentlemen who have spoken; men and women are not bred like sheep." This clergyman condemned at once the ideas we stood for because he had a narrow theological dogma that was impeding in his brain the reception of a new idea. But I am glad to note that such men are exceptional today. There is no conflict in evidence, except in very rare cases, between science and eugenics. On the contrary, for once in the history of the world, religion is accepting with open arms this eugenics as a new ally for morality.
Some people altogether miss the point of this religious sanction of eugenic marriages. It is not that it will prevent any persons from getting married who wish to outrage eugenic laws. They can easily find plenty of places where they can get married without medical certificates. But the fact that religion approves of eugenic marriages and disapproves of non-eugenic marriages will reform public opinion and ultimately make unsuitable marriages as incident as incest is today. This public opinion when it is full grown will not be simply a dull and lazy approval of eugenics, but a religious fervor. We shall make of eugenics the biggest pillar of the church, and eugenics will become embedded in the religion of the future. It shall happen hereafter that instead of conflicts between science and religion, these two great human interests will be marching together, hand in hand.
notes
| [1] | download the djvu. |
| [2] | Irving Fisher. Eugenic Record Office, board of scientific directors. Co-founder and president of the American Eugenics Society. President of the Eugenics Research Association. |
| [3] | Like the Jukes, this story is repeated ad nauseam in eugenic literature. |
| [4] | Charles Davenport. Director, Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution. Vice president of the Eugenics Society. Member of the American Eugenics Society. President of the 3rd International Eugenics Congress. President of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations. President of the Eugenics Research Association. Chairman of the Galton Society. |
| [5] |
These studies (Jukes, Kallikaks, etc.) were bogus. Dugdale worked for Davenport, and Davenport's science was bogus too (not to mention criminal.) Eventually the station was shut down. Paul Jalsevac, The Inherent Racism of Population Control (2004): Davenport drew many intellectuals to his cause with a simplistic version of Mendelian genetics despite his continual failure to find any substantial scientific evidence to support his claims. Davenport held that every human trait or characteristic was created by a specific gene for a specific unit of character... Good blood, therefore, contained the hereditary endowment for the positive qualities leading to success, intelligence, and physical health... On the other hand bad blood contained the unit characters for all physical, mental, and moral defects, including the despised unit character for pauperism... Davenport and his erstwhile colleague, psychologist Henry Goddard, author of The Kallikak family: A study in the heredity of feeble-mindedness, sent droves of field workers with little or no training on missions going from door to door asking for information on the residents’ family’s heritage. The vast collection of unconfirmed housewife tales and family lore which these field workers brought back was used by Davenport and Goddard as a body of evidence supporting their theory of bad blood. They used this ‘evidence’... to advocate active prevention of the procreation of genetically inferior... Their unscientific theory nevertheless drew many elite supporters because it provided even more ‘scientific’ evidence proving the inferiority of the lower classes. |
| [6] | Of course eugenic organizations enshrined the Darwin-Galton family as the model of eugenic excellence. |
History of Scientific Imposture ping.
Eugenics:
Primary goal of Margret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood,
Objective of banning DDT, because of its effectiveness in eliminating maleria in the 3rd world,
Goal of the WHO & International PP in recommending “low cost” anal sex as birth control in Africa, resulting in the AIDS epidemic there.
Fisher was also a well known economist, and a member of Yale’s “Skull & Bones.”
Where were you yesterday?
Out celebrating Darwin Day, of course.
Thanks for the ping!
INTREP
Of course! The eugenics proponents never see themselves as inferior stock in need of culling.
“Of course! The eugenics proponents never see themselves as inferior stock in need of culling.”Ever heard of Evolutionary biologist Dr Harry Laughlin?
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