The Eugenics Movement
Galton was born in 1822. His parents were people of means, and so he was enabled to receive a very liberal education and to devote his life to scientific research. As early as 1865 Galton began his work of measuring the human faculties and of tracing similarities and differences in definite families through several generations.
Eugenics before the end of the Second World War was seen in a different light. In the 1920s almost all intellectuals, both conservative and liberal, applauded the eugenics movement. It was seen by those on the Left as progressive, with science having an opportunity to direct human evolution in a progressive direction — healthier children, more talented and intelligent children, and longer life expectancies — among those advocating positive eugenics such as H.J.Muller and Julian Huxley. It was inferred that by mating eminent people with eminent people, one can produce eminent people.
The science was divided into positive eugenics and negative. The one encourages parenthood of the fit or worthy, whilst the other discourages parenthood of the unfit or unworthy. Thus eugenics concerns itself largely with selection in marriage and with the exercise of the marital function. Negative eugenics also seeks to eradicate the racial defects of alcohol, venereal disease, lead poisoning, feeblemindedness, and consumption.
The eugenics movement hoped that education would be the major path to the success of the eugenics movement. They believed that just as humans learned to separate sexual activity from procreation by adopting, voluntarily, family planning, so too would they learn to separate the genetic heritage of the child from the process of procreation, using the sperm (or eggs) of those superior to themselves. This seemed no more unlikely than the adoption of Sanger's birth control movement, which rapidly spread across the United States and the rest of the World in a single generation.
In 1902, Charles B. Davenport, then a Professor of Zoology at the University of Chicago, approached the Carnegie Institution with a request for $45,000 to create a “Biological Experiment Station for the study of evolution” on the Cold Spring Harbor Campus. His aim would be the “analytic and experimental study of the causes of specific differentiation—of race change.”
Eugenics was seen as a necessary culling of “the unfit” by those who favored negative eugenics such as Davenport and Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor's Eugenics Record Office. The endorsements came from American presidents (Coolidge, Harding, and Hoover) as well as noted journalists, college presidents, industrial leaders, and even social workers such as Margaret Sanger.
It is also difficult to realize that before 1945 it was widely believed that the state was more important than the individual and that states had the right to institutionalize their failed citizens, sending them to asylums upon being declared insane, placing them in prisons upon conviction, putting them in poor houses when they were destitute, and deporting them if they were immigrants who were deemed troublemakers.
In the United States, all of these practices were common in the 1880s to 1920s. The courts upheld the right of the state to vaccinate its citizens and the right of the state to sterilize its “unfit” people. Even eugenists like Dr. Saleeby and Dr. Havelock Ellis disapproved of compulsory surgery.
In the words of James Bryce [The American Commonwealth: Vol. 4, 1895]: "But for one difficulty the South might well be thought to be the most promising part of the Union, that part whose advance is likely to be swiftest, and whose prosperity will not be least secure. This difficulty, however, is a serious one. It lies in the presence of seven million negroes."
According to the law of Alabama one was a person of color who has had any Negro blood in his ancestry in five generations. In Virginia a person of color was one who has one-sixteenth or more Negro blood. In Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Missouri and South Carolina a person of color was one who has as much as one-eighth Negro blood. In Michigan, Nebraska, and Oregon one was not legally a person of color who had less than one-fourth Negro blood. In Arkansas, persons of color include all who had a visible and distinct admixture of African blood.
Miscegenation was the amalgamation, or mixing of racial stocks. This may take place in wedlock or out. By the early 1920s twenty-nine States had laws which made intermarriage between the races illegal.
The general rule with reference to intermarriages between races was thus: If the applicant for a marriage license had even only one great-grand parent who was a full-blooded Negro he may not receive a license; but if that great-grandparent were a mulatto and in all later generations mating took place (illegally, of course) with a white person, then the person in question is legally white and may marry a white person. Otherwise stated, the descendant of a Negro to the third generation inclusive, though one ancestor in each generation were pure white, is excluded; or persons having one-eighth or more of Negro blood are excluded from marrying a white person.
Davenport, Director of the Eugenics Record Office of Cold Springs Harbor, Long Island, which was established for the purpose “of accumulating and studying records of physical and mental characteristics of human families to the end that the people may be better advised as to fit and unfit marriages,” made a study of the effects of miscegenation and also of the State laws relating thereto.
Davenport concluded with the statement that “the skin-color is not of itself a matter of social moment — it should not be at any rate.” In regard to present legislation he said: “The reasonable conclusion, then, would seem to be this: in legislating, forget skin-color and concentrate attention upon matters of real importance to organized society. Prevent those without sex control or educability or resistance to serious disease from reproducing their kind. This may be done by segregation during the reproductive period, or even as a last resort, by sterilization. Encourage, on the other hand, such marriages as will produce effective offspring. "The problem of the socially fit must be treated not as one of color, but as a problem of the spread of feeblemindedness and physical weakness in organized society. From this point of view the social problem in the South is the same as that in the North, only it is larger, in that it involves a larger proportion of the whole population. However, if the demand for cheap labor in the North shall long continue to lure the weaklings of Europe to our Northern cities, the North will soon have on its hands as large a problem as the South has now — a problem which in its turn arose from the demand for cheap labor.
"Both sections alike must not be content merely to bow their heads before the oncoming storm, but must take positive measures to increase the density of socially desirable traits in the next generation by education, segregation, and sterilization; and by keeping out immigrants who belong to defective strains.”
In answer to the question “What legislation concerning miscegenation would square with biological knowledge?” Davenport made the following suggestion: “No person having one-half part or more Negro blood shall be permitted to take a white person as spouse. Any person having less than one-eighth part of the Negro blood, shall not be given a license to marry a white person without a certificate from the States Eugenics Board."
Davenport wrote in 1911 that " two very light "colored" parents will have (probably) only light children, some of whom "pass for whites" away from home. So far as skin color goes they are as truly white as their greatgrandparent and it is quite conceivable that they might have mental and moral qualities as good and typically Caucasian as he had. Just as perfect white skin color can be extracted from the hybrid, so may other Caucasian physical and mental qualities be extracted and a typical Caucasian arise out of the mixture."
Davenport's friend Madison Grant was a wealthy New York lawyer, Yale graduate (1887), and an ardent amateur naturalist. He introduced the eugenic ideals to mass audience in his best-selling The Passing of the Great Race (1916). "A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit -- in other words social failures -- would allow solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."
One of Hilter's first acts after gaining control of the German government was the passage of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring (Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses) in July 1933. The Nazis, when proposing their own sterilization program, specifically noted the “success of sterilization laws in California” documented most notably by the American eugenicist P.B. Popenoe. The Nazi program ultimately resulted in the sterilization of 360,000–375,000 persons. The intellectual linkage between the United States and Nazi eugenic programs is further illustrated by Davenport's presence on the editorial boards of two influential German racial hygiene journals, Zeitschrift für Rassenkunde und ihrer Nachbargebiete and the Zeitschrift für menschliche Vererbungs- und Konstitutionslehre.
Racial Categories in the U.S. Census had evolved from those of 1800: White, Other except Indians not taxed, slaves (3/5th person), to those of 1890: Chinese, Japanese, Indian, White, Black, Mulatto [1/2 black], Quadroon [1/4 black], Octoroon [1/8 black]. Nuremberg Laws, the centerpiece anti-Jewish legislation of the Nazi regime, were crafted in an atmosphere of considerable attention to the precedents American race laws had to offer.
The Nuremberg Laws were anti-Jewish statutes enacted by Germany on September 15, 1935, marking a major step in clarifying racial policy and removing Jewish influences from Aryan society. Full Jews had three to four Jewish grandparents. Half-Jews had two Jewish grandparents, and quarter-Jews had one Jewish grandparent. When a Mischling belonged to the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew, the Nazis counted him as a full Jew. Jews could only marry Jews or half-Jews, and half-Jews could only marry Jews or other half-Jews. Quarter-Jews could only marry Aryans.
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