I didn't know some of this. But I am stalled in the middle of a book, Ebony
and Ivy, which describes the interelationship between slavery, racism, and
the development of American colleges and universities. So one can trace the
threads of racism way back in academia.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carl Jarvis
Sent: Thursday, March 17, 2016 3:10 PM
To: blind-democracy
Subject: [blind-democracy] will the real villan please stand up
Are drones today's eugenics?
Does it really matter the method, when the aim is to eliminate those we deem
to be less worthy. Here is an article by:
Edwin Black
Edwin Black is the author of "
IBM and the Holocaust"
and "
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master
Race,"
from which the following article is drawn.
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.
Eugenics was the racist pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human
beings deemed "unfit," preserving only those who conformed to a Nordic
stereotype.
Elements of the philosophy were enshrined as national policy by forced
sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions,
enacted in twenty-seven states. In 1909, California became the third state
to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics practitioners coercively sterilized
some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated
thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just
learning. Before World War II, nearly half of coercive sterilizations were
done in California, and even after the war, the state accounted for a third
of all such surgeries.
California was considered an epicenter of the American eugenics movement.
During the Twentieth Century's first decades, California's eugenicists
included potent but little known race scientists, such as Army venereal
disease specialist Dr. Paul Popenoe, citrus magnate and Polytechnic
benefactor Paul Gosney, Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, as well as
members of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections and the
University of California Board of Regents.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for
extensive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie
Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune.
They were all in league with some of America's most respected scientists
hailing from such prestigious universities as Stamford, Yale, Harvard, and
Princeton.
These academicians espoused race theory and race science, and then faked and
twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims.
Stanford president David Starr Jordan originated the notion of "race and
blood" in his 1902 racial epistle "Blood of a Nation," in which the
university scholar declared that human qualities and conditions such as
talent and poverty were passed through the blood.
In 1904, the Carnegie Institution established a laboratory complex at Cold
Spring Harbor on Long Island that stockpiled millions of index cards on
ordinary Americans, as researchers carefully plotted the removal of
families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics
advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's
social service agencies and associations.
The Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities, such as the New York
Bureau of Industries and Immigration, to seek out Jewish, Italian and other
immigrants in New York and other crowded cities and subject them to
deportation, trumped up confinement or forced sterilization.
The Rockefeller Foundation helped found the German eugenics program and even
funded the program that Josef Mengele worked in before he went to Auschwitz.
Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American
eugenics movement came from California's quasi-autonomous eugenic societies,
such as the Pasadena-based Human Betterment Foundation and the California
branch of the American Eugenics Society, which coordinated much of their
activity with the Eugenics Research Society in Long Island. These
organizations--which functioned as part of a closely-knit network--published
racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical
News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.
Eugenics was born as a scientific curiosity in the Victorian age. In 1863,
Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented
people only married other talented people, the result would be measurably
better offspring. At the turn of the last century, Galton's ideas were
imported into the United States just as Gregor Mendel's principles of
heredity were rediscovered. American eugenic advocates believed with
religious fervor that the same Mendelian concepts determining the color and
size of peas, corn and cattle also governed the social and intellectual
character of man.
In an America demographically reeling from immigration upheaval and torn by
post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early
twentieth century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused
their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a
better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist
ideology.
The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic
and biological kind--and less or none of everyone else.
The superior species the eugenics movement sought was populated not merely
by tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic
types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth.
In the process, the movement intended to subtract emancipated Negroes,
immigrant Asian laborers, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews,
dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified
outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.
How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them
to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines.
The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of
those deemed weak and inferior--the so-called "unfit." The eugenicists hoped
to neutralize the viability of 10 percent of the population at a sweep,
until none were left except themselves.
Eighteen solutions were explored in a Carnegie-supported 1911 "Preliminary
Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeder's
Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting
Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population." Point eight was
euthanasia.
The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in America was a "lethal
chamber" or public locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, Popenoe, the Army
venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used
textbook, Applied Eugenics, which argued, "From an historical point of view,
the first method which presents itself is execution
Its value in keeping up
the standard of the race should not be underestimated." Applied Eugenics
also devoted a chapter to "Lethal Selection," which operated "through the
destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment,
such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."
Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an
organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors
practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own.
One institution in Lincoln, Illinois fed its incoming patients milk from
tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune.
Thirty to forty percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors
practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at
mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.
Nonetheless, with eugenicide marginalized, the main solution for eugenicists
was the rapid expansion of forced segregation and sterilization, as well as
more marriage restrictions. California led the nation, performing nearly all
sterilization procedures with little or no due process. In its first
twenty-five years of eugenic legislation, California sterilized 9,782
individuals, mostly women. Many were classified as "bad girls," diagnosed as
"passionate," "oversexed"
or "sexually wayward." At Sonoma, some women were sterilized because of what
was deemed an abnormally large clitoris or labia.
In 1933 alone, at least 1,278 coercive sterilizations were performed, 700 of
which were on women. The state's two leading sterilization mills in 1933
were Sonoma State Home with 388 operations and Patton State Hospital with
363 operations. Other sterilization centers included Agnews, Mendocino,
Napa, Norwalk, Stockton and Pacific Colony state hospitals.
Even the United States Supreme Court endorsed aspects of eugenics. In its
infamous 1927 decision, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote,
"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." This decision opened the floodgates
for thousands to be coercively sterilized or otherwise persecuted as
subhuman. Years later, the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials quoted Holmes's
words in their own defense.
Only after eugenics became entrenched in the United States was the campaign
transplanted into Germany, in no small measure through the efforts of
California eugenicists, who published booklets idealizing sterilization and
circulated them to German officials and scientists.
Hitler studied American eugenics laws. He tried to legitimize his
anti-Semitism by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in the more palatable
pseudoscientific facade of eugenics. Hitler was able to recruit more
followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.
While Hitler's race hatred sprung from his own mind, the intellectual
outlines of the eugenics Hitler adopted in 1924 were made in America.
During the '20s, Carnegie Institution eugenic scientists cultivated deep
personal and professional relationships with Germany's fascist eugenicists.
In Mein Kampf, published in 1924, Hitler quoted American eugenic ideology
and openly displayed a thorough knowledge of American eugenics. "There is
today one state," wrote Hitler, "in which at least weak beginnings toward a
better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our
model German Republic, but the United States."
Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed the progress
of the American eugenics movement. "I have studied with great interest," he
told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning
prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all
probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."
Hitler even wrote a fan letter to American eugenic leader Madison Grant
calling his race-based eugenics book, The Passing of the Great Race his
"bible."
Hitler's struggle for a superior race would be a mad crusade for a Master
Race. Now, the American term "Nordic" was freely exchanged with "Germanic"
or "Aryan." Race science, racial purity and racial dominance became the
driving force behind Hitler's Nazism. Nazi eugenics would ultimately dictate
who would be persecuted in a Reich-dominated Europe, how people would live,
and how they would die. Nazi doctors would become the unseen generals in
Hitler's war against the Jews and other Europeans deemed inferior. Doctors
would create the science, devise the eugenic formulas, and even hand-select
the victims for sterilization, euthanasia and mass extermination.
During the Reich's early years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's
plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and
effort.
California eugenicists republished Nazi propaganda for American consumption.
They also arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits, such as an August 1934
display at the L.A. County Museum, for the annual meeting of the American
Public Health Association.
In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per
month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe upon returning from
Germany ebulliently bragged to a key colleague, "You will be interested to
know, that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of
the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making
program.
Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by
American thought.
I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you
for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great
government of 60 million people."
That same year, ten years after Virginia passed its sterilization act,
Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital,
observed in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, "The Germans are beating us at our
own game."
More than just providing the scientific roadmap, America funded Germany's
eugenic institutions. By 1926, Rockefeller had donated some $410,000 --
almost
$4 million in 21st-Century money -- to hundreds of German researchers.
In May 1926, Rockefeller awarded $250,000 to the German Psychiatric
Institute of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, later to become the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. Among the leading psychiatrists at the
German Psychiatric Institute was Ernst Rüdin, who became director and
eventually an architect of Hitler's systematic medical repression.
Another in the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute's eugenic complex of institutions
was the Institute for Brain Research. Since 1915, it had operated out of a
single room. Everything changed when Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A
grant of $317,000 allowed the Institute to construct a major building and
take center stage in German race biology. The Institute received additional
grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years.
Leading the Institute, once again, was Hitler's medical henchman Ernst
Rüdin. Rüdin's organization became a prime director and recipient of the
murderous experimentation and research conducted on Jews, Gypsies and
others.
Beginning in 1940, thousands of Germans taken from old age homes, mental
institutions and other custodial facilities were systematically gassed.
Between 50,000 and 100,000 were eventually killed.
Leon Whitney, executive secretary of the American Eugenics Society declared
of Nazism, "While we were pussy-footing around
the Germans were calling a
spade a spade."
A special recipient of Rockefeller funding was the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute
for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin. For decades,
American eugenicists had craved twins to advance their research into
heredity.
The Institute was now prepared to undertake such research on an
unprecedented level.
On May 13, 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York dispatched a
radiogram to its Paris office: JUNE MEETING EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE NINE
THOUSAND DOLLARS OVER THREE YEAR PERIOD TO KWG INSTITUTE ANTHROPOLOGY FOR
RESEARCH ON TWINS AND EFFECTS ON LATER GENERATIONS OF SUBSTANCES TOXIC FOR
GERM PLASM.
At the time of Rockefeller's endowment, Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a hero
in American eugenics circles, functioned as a head of the Institute for
Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Rockefeller funding of that
Institute continued both directly and through other research conduits during
Verschuer's early tenure. In 1935, Verschuer left the Institute to form a
rival eugenics facility in Frankfurt that was much heralded in the American
eugenic press. Research on twins in the Third Reich exploded, backed up by
government decrees.
Verschuer wrote in Der Erbarzt, a eugenic doctor's journal he edited, that
Germany's war would yield a "total solution to the Jewish problem."
Verschuer had a long-time assistant. His name was Josef Mengele. On May 30,
1943, Mengele arrived at Auschwitz. Verschuer notified the German Research
Society, "My assistant, Dr. Josef Mengele (M.D., Ph.D.) joined me in this
branch of research. He is presently employed as Hauptsturmführer [captain]
and camp physician in the Auschwitz concentration camp. Anthropological
testing of the most diverse racial groups in this concentration camp is
being carried out with permission of the SS Reichsführer [Himmler]."
Mengele began searching the boxcar arrivals for twins. When he found them,
he performed beastly experiments, scrupulously wrote up the reports and sent
the paperwork back to Verschuer's institute for evaluation. Often, cadavers,
eyes and other body parts were also dispatched to Berlin's eugenic
institutes.
Rockefeller executives never knew of Mengele. With few exceptions, the
foundation had ceased all eugenic studies in Nazi-occupied Europe before the
war erupted in 1939. But by that time the die had been cast. The talented
men Rockefeller and Carnegie financed, the institutions they helped found,
and the science it helped create took on a scientific momentum of their own.
After the war, eugenics was declared a crime against humanity--an act of
genocide. Germans were tried and they cited the California statutes in their
defense.
To no avail. They were found guilty.
However, Mengele's boss Verschuer escaped prosecution. Verschuer
re-established his connections with California eugenicists who had gone
underground and renamed their crusade "human genetics." Typical was an
exchange July 25, 1946 when Popenoe wrote Verschuer, "It was indeed a
pleasure to hear from you again. I have been very anxious about my
colleagues in Germany
. I suppose sterilization has been discontinued in
Germany?" Popenoe offered tidbits about various American eugenic luminaries
and then sent various eugenic publications. In a separate package, Popenoe
sent some cocoa, coffee and other goodies.
Verschuer wrote back, "Your very friendly letter of 7/25 gave me a great
deal of pleasure and you have my heartfelt thanks for it. The letter builds
another bridge between your and my scientific work; I hope that this bridge
will never again collapse but rather make possible valuable mutual
enrichment and stimulation."
Soon, Verschuer once again became a respected scientist in Germany and
around the world. In 1949, he became a corresponding member of the newly
formed American Society of Human Genetics, organized by American eugenicists
and geneticists.
In the fall of 1950, the University of Münster offered Verschuer a position
at its new Institute of Human Genetics, where he later became a dean. In the
early and mid-1950s, Verschuer became an honorary member of numerous
prestigious societies, including the Italian Society of Genetics, the
Anthropological Society of Vienna, and the Japanese Society for Human
Genetics.
Human genetics' genocidal roots in eugenics were ignored by a victorious
generation that refused to link itself to the crimes of Nazism and by
succeeding generations that never knew the truth of the years leading up to
war.
Now governors of five states, including California have issued public
apologies to their citizens, past and present, for sterilization and other
abuses spawned by the eugenics movement.
Human genetics became an enlightened endeavor in the late twentieth century.
Hard-working, devoted scientists finally cracked the human code through the
Human Genome Project. Now, every individual can be biologically identified
and classified by trait and ancestry. Yet even now, some leading voices in
the genetic world are calling for a cleansing of the unwanted among us, and
even a master human species.
There is understandable wariness about more ordinary forms of abuse, for
example, in denying insurance or employment based on genetic tests. On
October 14, America's first genetic anti-discrimination legislation passed
the Senate by unanimous vote. Yet because genetics research is global, no
single nation's law can stop the threats.
