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Funding the Eugenics Movement
Last Updated: 05/27/2009
Eugenics Watch

When Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin) coined the word eugenics (means “well-born” and set out to promote the idea, he launched a movement based on an ideology. Different people at different times have been attracted by different aspects of eugenics — and have often rejected some pieces. There is no neat package, no central headquarters, no guiding Fuhrer. Rather, eugenics is a collection of ideas and projects about improving the human race by social control of human reproduction.

The eugenics movement has spread around the world, and into all facets of social life. No one in the United States (or anywhere in the developed world) today needs to look far to find eugenics: if you have trouble finding it in the mirror, you might look in your high school textbooks, and even in papers that you wrote yourself. It is in our newspapers (and all media), in the fiction we enjoy (and in much nonfiction), in government, at the mall, in your best friend’s head. It is a way of thinking about life that some very smart people have been pushing for a century, with little or no resistance in the last 50 years.

To ask, then, about the funding for the movement is to pose a huge and tangled question. Nonetheless, we will wade into the thicket, not planning to get a complete answer, but expecting to get some idea of the size of the eugenics movement, some sense of the magnitude of the challenge we face.

The Robber Barons

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, the United States changed dramatically, from a society based on agriculture to a society based on industry. The population did not shift from the farms to the cities right away, but the money and power shifted. Men no longer made huge fortunes based on tobacco or cotton plantations; instead, men made huge fortunes from steel, oil, railroads and banking. In 1934, Matthew Josephson stuck a label on the small handful of very aggressive and successful businessmen who amassed huge fortunes in that period, and the label stuck — the “robber barons.” The eugenics movement was funded substantially by them (and other multimillionaires).

Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919) made his fortune in railroads and then steel. In 1889, he wrote an essay about the life of a rich man, explaining his view that the successful should spend part of life acquiring wealth and then part of life distributing it wisely. And he tried to follow his own advice. Unfortunately, some of his money went to the eugenics movement.

The Carnegie Institution of Washington funded the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, beginning in 1904. This beautiful little outpost of biological research and study hosted the Eugenics Record Office (funded with Harriman money), beginning in 1910. C. B. Davenport was the director of the Cold Spring Harbor lab, and also the director of the Eugenics Record Office. Throughout the century, a number of universities and think-tanks have welcomed and groomed eugenics theorists and leaders. Individuals moved among these institutions as if there were revolving doors between them. The Carnegie Institution of Washington was among these eugenics think-tanks. For example, Robert S. Woodward was president of the Institution from 1904 to 1920, and helped to plan the Second International Congress of Eugenics. Other eugenics activists who went through the Carnegie revolving door included Ellsworth Huntington, Michael Teitelbaum and Howard Newcombe.

In 1952, when the eugenics movement was reorganizing, the Carnegie Institution of Washington helped out. George W. Corner, representing the Carnegie Institution, argued that there was “a great and emergent need for which special weapons are required.” The Institute helped to fund research on these “special weapons” — new birth control methods.

Edward Henry Harriman (1848-1909) made his fortune speculating on the stock market. In 1897, he took over the bankrupt Union Pacific Railroad, and then went on to build a railroad empire in the West. When he died, his wife inherited his money. The following year, she provided $500,000 to found the Eugenics Record Office. The Eugenics Record Office was involved in the forced sterilization campaigns and the anti-immigration laws.

In 1932, the Third International Eugenics Congress was held in New York, at the Museum of Natural History. (The First International Eugenics Congress had been in 1912 in London (see post #48 or maybe it’s #46), and the Second was in New York.) Mrs. E. H. Harriman was among the sponsors, along with Mrs. H. B. DuPont and Dr. J. Harvey Kellogg, among others.

John Davison Rockefeller (1839-1937) made his fortune in the oil industry. He founded Standard Oil, which at one time controlled 95 percent of the oil refining business in the country. He and his descendants gave away hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Rockefellers funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany, when eugenicists were preparing the way ideologically for what eventually became the world’s most infamous slaughter, the Nazi holocaust. The Rockefeller Institute supported Alexis Carrel, who advocated the use of gas to get rid of the unwanted. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council. Rockefeller money made Alfred Kinsey’s sex research possible. (Rockefeller also funded Margaret Sanger’s first Family Planning Clinic in Brooklyn).

In the fall of 1993, the Rockefeller Archive Center Newsletter published “The Rockefeller Foundation, the Population Council and the Groundwork for New Population Policies” by John B. Sharpless of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Sharpless had been studying the files of the Rockefeller Foundation (RF), the records of the Population Council, and the personal papers of John D. Rockefeller III. He concluded that “Foundations and individual philanthropists are important in understanding the impressively quick and nearly unanimous change in attitudes and ideas about population that occurred during the 1960s.” Such foundations funded the development of contraceptives, but also built the international network of experts who shaped the public debate, who shared “a core body of knowledge and a common mode of discourse” as well as a “shared set of assumptions about how population dynamics worked.”

Sharpless wrote, “The power to accomplish this task was based on their relationship with the philanthropic community. In addition to the Rockefeller Foundation and the Population Council, other Foundations active in this area included the Ford Foundation, the Milbank Memorial Fund and, to a lesser extent, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Conservation Foundation.”

Henry Ford (1863-1947) was a pioneer in the use of assembly lines, and mass-produced the first inexpensive automobile, the Model T. He and his son Edsel (1893-1943) established the Ford Foundation in 1936. For many years, this was the largest foundation in the world, giving away billions of dollars.

For many years, the Ford Foundation supported population control. In the 1970s, Michael Teitelbaum worked quietly on Capitol Hill to shape American population policy (WITHOUT ANY PUBLIC DEBATE OR SCRUTINY); he was supported for part of his career by the Ford Foundation. The foundation’s impact on population policy is described at length in John Caldwell’s 1986 book, Limiting Population Growth and the Ford Foundation.

John Harvey Kellogg, M.D. (1852-1945) figured out new ways to get Americans to eat the abundant grain of the Midwest. His best known product was corn flakes, a staple on American breakfast tables for generations.

Kellogg was on the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society from the early days. HE FOUNDED THE RACE BETTERMENT FOUNDATION, AND WAS A SPONSOR OF THREE EUGENICS CONFERENCES.

Clarence J. Gamble used part of the fortune made by Procter & Gamble products (including soap) to finance birth control projects for the poor in many parts of the world. He helped to push through legislation in 1937 legalizing birth control in Puerto Rico; the law specified that birth control material WAS TO BE DISTRIBUTED BY TRAINED EUGENICISTS. He supported birth control distribution in Appalachia and in rural Japan. A leader in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Federation, he suggested that they set up a “NEGRO PROJECT,” using black clergy and physicians to promote birth control. He founded the Pathfinder Fund, to promote population control around the world.

In 1930 in New York, many of the wealthiest people in the world were members of the American Eugenics Society. They did not all provide funds for major eugenics initiatives, but their support certainly opened doors. It does not hurt an organization financially if its membership includes:

J. P. Morgan, Jr., chairman, U. S. Steel, who handled British contracts in the United States for food and munitions during World War I;

Mrs. Mary Duke Biddle, tobacco fortune heiress;
Cleveland H. and Cleveland E. Dodge and their wives, who used some of the huge fortune that Phelps Dodge & Company made on copper mines and other metals to support eugenics;

Robert Garrett, whose family had amassed a fortune through banking in Maryland and the B&O railroad, who helped finance two international eugenics congresses;

Miss E. B. Scripps, whose wealth came from United Press (later UPI);

Dorothy H. Brush, Planned Parenthood activist, whose wealth came from Charles Francis Brush (1849-1929), who invented the arc lamp for street lights and founded the Brush Electric Company;

Margaret Sanger, who used the wealth of one of one of her husbands, Noah Slee, to promote her work. Slee made his fortune from the familiar household product, 3-in-One Oil.
http://www.watchmanbiblestudy.com/Articles/FundingEugenics.htm

Hi Gene, Alice Bailey left money toward her many dark causes of which this was one, many of the English elitists also left their money toward this same pro-death cause...funding doesn’t seem to be a problem as those who are pro-death are usually the rich. It’s difficult to fathom how they rationalize and justify their conscience but when money is the idol, one wants to keep it and what better way than to eliminate the competition. Then there’s the people like Alice Bailey who have other reasons...

Eugenic Sterilization Laws

Paul Lombardo, University of Virginia

While some eugenicists privately supported practices such as euthanasia or even genocide, legally-mandated sterilization was the most radical policy supported by the American eugenics movement. A number of American physicians performed sterilizations even before the surgery was legally approved, though no reliable accounting of the practice exists prior to passage of sterilization laws.

Indiana enacted the first law allowing sterilization on eugenic grounds in 1907, with Connecticut following soon after. Despite these early statutes, sterilization did not gain widespread popular approval until the late 1920s.

Advocacy in favor of sterilization was one of Harry Laughlin’s first major projects at the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914, he published a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that proposed to authorize sterilization of the “socially inadequate” – people supported in institutions or “maintained wholly or in part by public expense. The law encompassed the “feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf; deformed; and dependent” – including “orphans, ne’er-do-wells, tramps, the homeless and paupers.”

By the time the Model Law was published in 1914, twelve states had enacted sterilization laws.

By 1924, approximately 3,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in America; the vast majority (2,500) in California. That year Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin’s Model Law. IT WAS ADOPTED AS PART OF A COST-SAVING STRATEGY TO RELIEVE THE TAX BURDEN in a state where public facilities for the “insane” and “feebleminded” had experienced rapid growth.

The law was also written to protect physicians who performed sterilizing operations from malpractice lawsuits. Virginia’s law asserted that “heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, idiocy, imbecility, epilepsy and crime…”

It focused on “defective persons” whose reproduction represented “a menace to society.”

Carrie Buck, a seventeen-year-old girl from Charlottesville, Virginia, was picked as the first person to be sterilized. Carrie had a child, but was not married. Her mother Emma was already a resident at an asylum, the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and the Feebleminded. Officials at the Virginia Colony said that Carrie and her mother shared the hereditary traits of “feeblemindedness” and sexually promiscuity. To those who believed that such traits were genetically transmitted, Carrie fit the law’s description as a “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring.” A legal challenge was arranged on Carrie’s behalf to test the constitutional validity of the law.

At her trial, several witnesses offered evidence of Carrie’s inherited “defects” and those of her mother Emma. Colony Superintendent Dr. Albert Priddy testified that Emma Buck had “a record of immorality, prostitution, untruthfulness and syphilis.” His opinion of the Buck family more generally was: “These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” Although Harry Laughlin never met Carrie, he sent a written deposition echoing Priddy’s conclusions about Carrie’s “feeblemind-edness” and “moral delinquency.”

SOCIOLOGIST Arthur Estabrook, OF THE EUGENICS RECORD OFFICE, TRAVELLED TO VIRGINIA TO TESTIFY AGAINST Carrie. HE AND A RED CROSS NURSE examined Carrie’s baby Vivian and concluded that she was “below average” and “not quite normal.” RELYING ON THESE COMMENTS, the judge concluded that Carrie should be sterilized to prevent the birth of other “defective” children.

The decision was appealed to United States Supreme Court. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., himself a student of eugenics, wrote the formal opinion for the Court in the case of Buck v. Bell (1927). His opinion repeated the “facts” in Carrie’s case, concluding that a “deficient” mother, daughter, and granddaughter justified the need for sterilization. The decision includes the now infamous words: It 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…

Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Recent scholarship has shown that Carrie Buck’s sterilization was based on a false “diagnosis” and her defense lawyer conspired with the lawyer for the Virginia Colony to guarantee that the sterilization law would be upheld in court. Carrie’s illegitimate child was not the result of promiscuity; she had been raped by a relative of her foster parents. School records also prove that Vivian was not “feebleminded.” Her 1st grade report card showed that Vivian was a solid “B” student, received an “A” in deportment, and had been on the honor roll.

Nevertheless, Buck v. Bell SUPPLIED A PRECEDENT (which was why the Eugenics sociologist travelled to testify against her) for the eventual sterilization of approximately 8,300 Virginians.

Borrowing from Laughlin’s Model Law, the German Nazi government adopted a law in 1933 that provided the legal basis for sterilizing more than 350,000 people. LAUGHLIN PROUDLY PUBLISHED A TRANSLATION OF THE GERMAN LAW for the Prevention of Defective Progeny in The Eugenical News.

In 1936, Laughlin was awarded an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg as a tribute for his work in “the science of racial cleansing.”

The second Supreme Court case generated by the eugenics movement tested a 1935 Oklahoma law that prescribed involuntary sexual sterilization for repeat criminals. Jack Skinner was chosen to test the law’s constitutionality. He was a three-time felon, guilty of stealing chickens at age nineteen, and convicted twice in later years for armed robbery. By the time his case was struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court, in 1942 some 13 states had laws specifically permitting sterilization of criminals.

The opinion striking down the sterilization law in the case of Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942) was written by Justice William O. Douglas. He highlighted the inequity of Oklahoma’s law by noting that a three-time chicken thief could be sterilized while a three-time embezzler could not. Said Douglas: “We have not the slightest basis for inferring that … the inheritability of criminal traits follows the neat legal distinctions which the law has marked between those two offenses.”

Despite the Skinner case, sterilization of people in institutions for the mentally ill and mentally retarded CONTINUED THROUGH THE MID-1970’s. At one time or another, 33 states had statutes under which more than 60,000 Americans endured involuntary sterilization.

THE BUCK v. BELL PRECEDENT ALLOWING STERILIZATION OF THE SO-CALLED “FEEBLEMINDED” HAS NEVER BEEN OVERRULED!!! (my emphasis)
http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay8text.html

This horrendous practice was signed into law and performed on our brethren. If they did it once they can do it again. This evil must be confronted and Buck v. Bell overruled, as a public lesson at least, and a warning for the future. Death Panels are not an impossibility...HHS has the money and they also have the power as programs they lay-out need not pass congress - it’s in the bill. And we still have the czars, professors and banksters in the wings chomping, chomping... This time they’re calling it over-population - don’t they love to change the name.