Eugenics: the “well-born” science Joanne Woiak, jwoiak@uw.edu

1. Eugenics: the “well-born” scienceJoanne Woiak, jwoiak@uw.edu • Scientific knowledge: genetic determinism • Concern about which heritable traits are spreading thru the human population. • Cause of social ills is bad heredity. • “Eugenics” coined in 1883 by Francis Galton. • “I object to pretensions of natural equality.” • Social policies: “rationally” improve biological quality by controlling reproduction • Fewer offspring from “unfit” people; more from the “fit.” • What kinds of people do we want in the world? • Who is an asset; who is a burden?

2. Eugenics movement • 1900-1940s. • 30+ countries had their own versions. • Considered progressive: • “Improvement” of health & fitness of population. • Government intervention for the public good. • Led by middle-class professionals, esp. in science and medicine. • Valid science of human heredity at the time.

3. Policies for improving the “race” • Positive eugenics • Encourage or educate “fitter” people to have more offspring. (“voluntary” measures) • Negative eugenics • Persuade, pressure, or compel “unfit” people to have no offspring, so they can’t pass on their “defective” genes. E.g. compulsory segregation & sterilization.

4. Negative eugenics: 30 states had forced sterilization laws by 1930s

5. Washington enacted sterilization laws in 1909 and 1921

6. WA Sterilization victims • Total 685: based on data gathered from superintendents by the CA-based Human Betterment Foundation, 1942 • 184 Male • 501 Female • 403 “Insane” (M 147, F 256) • 276 “Feebleminded” (M 33, F 243) • 6 “Others” (M 4, F 2)

7. Negative eugenics: 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, led by WA Congressman Albert Johnson, with expert testimony by eugenicists Albert Johnson: “The US is undertaking to regulate and control the great problem of the commingling of races. Our hope is in a homogeneous nation. At one time we welcomed all and all helped to build the nation. But now asylum ends. This nation must be as completely unified as any nation in Europe or Asia. Self-preservation demands it.” Carl Brigham, A Study of American Intelligence (1923)

8. 1913 Ellis Island mental testing Eugenicists as “moron detectors” 80% immigrants scored feebleminded

9. Sources: Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement http://eugenicsarchive.org • Hosted by the Human Genome Project’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. • Which was originally the Eugenics Record Office, the center of human genetics research and advocacy for eugenics policy, 1910-1939.

10. Eugenics and Disability 1. Medical model 2. Economic rationale 3. Public good

11. Authority of science and medicine: medical model of disability “With savages, the weak in body & mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick…. Thus the weak members of societies propagate their kind…. “No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how want of care leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.”

12. Charles Darwin, Descent of Man (1871) • The human species evolved by natural selection. • Cruel, rigorous weeding out of the “inferior” individuals and races. • “Degeneration” of the species occurs when the “unfit” are permitted to survive and reproduce.

13. Evolutionary theory: race and disability intersect • Enlightenment equal rights of “man” countered with scientific evidence of racial hierarchies. • 1854 Types of Mankind • Observations of an Ethnic Classification of Idiocy (1866 J. Langdon Down) • “Mongolism” • Equivalent to people of non-white races. • Evolutionary “throwbacks” to a “lower” stage. • “What Is It?” • Performer at the “freaks” museum 1860 • Evolutionary “missing link.”

14. Pedigrees: scientific evidence that “defects” are transmitted by genes. Gathered by the Eugenics Record Office, 1910-1939.

15. Explanation of the symbols used on pedigree charts created by field workers. • 1911 Eugenics Record Office pamphlet, The Study of Human Heredity

17. Inherited and congenital defects: “results of conception when the father was intoxicated.”

18. Who were considered the innately weak & unfit, and blamed for society’s problems? • Poor people (“socially inadequate”) • On welfare, in prison, alcoholics, prostitutes… • Disabled people • Institutions for people with mental disabilities. • Investigators claimed these groups had excessively large families. • Degenerate family pedigrees • The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877) • The Kallikaks (1912)

20. History of institutions • Civil commitment laws • 19th century goal of treatment of “lunatics” and training of “idiots” gave way by 1900 to emphasis on confinement and care. • Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children: “brutes in the human shape, but without the light of human reason.” • Washington “custodial school for feebleminded and defective children.”

21. ERO flash cards to identify genetic “defects,” 1922

22. Deaf eugenics: Alexander Graham Bell • 1872 founds deaf school in Boston. • Invents devices to aid hearing. • Studies heredity in deaf families. • 1883: “avoid creating a deaf-mute variety of the human race” by intermarriages. • Becomes leader of eugenics movement.

23. IQ testing: who is “feebleminded”? • 1905 IQ invented by Alfred Binet. • “abnormal” children can be educated. • 1910s US psychologists corrupt this goal. • Intelligence is hereditary, unchangeable. • Measure & label & institutionalize. • “Menace” to society. • Moron – imbecile – idiot. • By 1900, 328 institutions, with 200,000 people labeled mentally ill or mentally deficient.

24. 1918 IQ tests • US Army • For recruits who were non-English speaking or illiterate. • Complete the picture. • 40% found to be FM.

25. Actual Test Questions, Army Alpha SAMPLE People hear with their eyes\ears\nose\mouth 1. Pinochle is played with rackets\cards\pins\dice 2. Habeus corpus is a term used in medicine\law\pedagogy 3. Bud Fisher is a famous actor\author\athlete\comic 4. Velvet Joe appears in ads for tooth powder\soap\dry goods\tobacco 5. The number of a Kaffir’s legs is . . . 2\4\6\8

27. Economic values: disability as a burden on society “It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded, epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year.” • Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record Office

28. COSTS of hospitals, asylums, prisons, feebleminded colonies, poverty, unproductive citizens (State fair exhibits to promote eugenics awareness)

29. Disability as dependency • 1882 federal Immigration Act • Denied entry to “convicts, lunatics, idiots, and people likely to become public charges.” • 1881-1918 “Ugly Laws” • "It is prohibited for any person, who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or deformed in any way, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, to expose himself to public view."

31. “The brighter class of the feebleminded, with their weak will-power and deficient judgment, are easily influenced for evil, and are prone to become vagrants, drunkards, and thieves…. It is better and cheaper for the community to assume the permanent care of this class before they have carried out a long career of expensive crime.”

32. continued • Immorality worst in the feebleminded woman: “She has not sense enough to protect herself from the perils to which women are subjected. Often bright and attractive, if at large they either marry and bring forth in geometrical ratio a new generation of defectives and dependants, or become irresponsible sources of corruption and debauchery in the communities where they live.”

33. Most extreme: eugenics in Nazi Germany, 1933-45 • Forced sterilization law for “hereditary defectives.” (400,000+ people) • Murder (“euthanasia”) • “Lives not worth living” • Economic logic: “useless eaters” • 200,000+ adults and children with disabilities. • Final Solution killed 6 million Jewish people and others: gas chambers from the T-4 program.

34. What “public good”? • Financial burden on taxpayers • Public health • Tainted whiteness • Morality • Suffering • Who was targeted? • Class, race, gender, disability

35. Who is “fit”? Positive eugenics: Fitter Families contests and the Cross of Honor of the German Mother

36. Measuring up to eugenic ideals • Health • IQ • Education, occupation • Special talents, tastes • Church, politics • Clubs, activities

37. Better Babies at the Puyallup Fair, 1910s

38. Popularizing hereditarian science: for the sake of “health”

39. Hereditary defective groups invading the body politic • “Infectious germs”: symbols for Jews, communists, gays. • “With his poison, the Jew destroys the sluggish blood of weaker peoples; so that a diagnosis arises, of swift degeneration. With us, however, the case is different: The blood is pure; we are healthy!”

40. Links between German and American eugenics movements • Nazi regime seeking “racial purity” (1933) borrowed the idea of forced sterilization law from the American eugenicists and used Laughlin’s model (1922). • Hitler: “I have studied with great interest the laws of several Am. states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock…. The possibility of excess and error is no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.”

41. July 14, 1933 “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring” • Doctors required to register births • Cases go to Genetic Health Court • “Hitlerschnitt” for hereditary FM, mental illness, epilepsy, alcoholism, blind, deaf (1%). • Laughlin awarded an honorary degree by the Nazis. • Widespread positive coverage of Nazi program in US media, focusing on elimination of disability (not on racism & Jewish population). • American eugenicists visited & were jealous that “the Germans are beating us at our own game,” by sterilizing on a larger scale.

42. Mass murder (“euthanasia”) of Germans with disabilities • August 1939: 5000 disabled children under age 3 killed in secret operation, by gassing, injection, starvation. Form letter to parents about death. • Oct 1939: T-4 program begins for systematic mass murder of adults in institutions (200,000), seen as “unproductive.” By order of Hitler (not by law), decisions made by doctors. • 1941: order to kill Jews in German hospitals, all concentration camp inmates who were unable to work and Jews. Moved the gassing apparatus and medical personnel from the hospitals for the disabled to the camps. Jan 1942: “final solution”

43. US Eugenic “Euthanasia” and Disability

44. 1917 eugenic film The Black Stork (retitled Are You Fit to Marry?) Physician Harry Haiselden: • “There are times when saving a life is a greater crime than taking one.” • “We have been invaded. Our streets are infested with an Army of the Unfit—a dangerous, vicious army of death and dread.... Horrid semi-humans drag themselves along our streets.... What are you doing to do about it?”

45. 1927 Buck v. Bell, US Supreme Court • Upheld the Virginia statue for forced sterilization. • “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” • “For the protection and health of the state.” • “The principal that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

46. Oliver Wendell Holmes decision 1927 “There can be no doubt that so far as procedure is concerned the rights of the patient are most carefully considered. We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better 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.”

47. The real story of “three generations of imbeciles” Carrie Buck and her mother

48. Gender bias? 2/3 of sterilization victims were women

50. 1909 WA criminal statute: the second forced sterilization law in the nation • Whenever any person shall be adjudged guilty of carnal abuse of a female person under the age of ten years, or of rape, or shall be adjudged to be an habitual criminal, the court may, in addition to such other punishment or confinement as may be imposed, direct an operation to be performed upon such person, for the prevention of procreation. • Still on the books: RCW 9.92.100