An Exploration of Eugenics

by John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe

Contents

Acknowledgements and Dedication Introduction Chapter One: The Definition and the Pedigree of Eugenics Chapter Two: Francis Galton and the Eugenics Society Chapter Three: Eugenics Takes Shape in America Chapter Four: Slamming the Doors Shut Chapter Five: Sterilizing the Unfit Chapter Six: Eugenics Captures Feminism Chapter Seven: Laws Against Mixing Races Chapter Eight: The Scopes Trial Chapter Nine: World War II and the Nazi Holocaust Chapter 10: Eugenics after World War II Chapter 11: The Drive to Develop the Pill and the IUD Chapter 12: Funding the Eugenics Movement Chapter 13:The Abortion Debate Chapter 14: Social Biology Today - DNA and the Race Chapter 15: Population Control Today Chapter 16: "Modem Genetics Is Eugenics" Chapter 17: Bioethics, Shaping the Battle Field Chapter 18: What Do We See Today? Conclusion

Acknowledgements
I am at a loss about how to give proper credit to my sister, Katharine S. O'Keefe. It is an exaggeration to say that the sentence structure is mine, and the ideas are hers. But 95 percent of the original thought in this book is hers, not mine; it would be easier to footnote the new ideas that are mine than to note hers. I am indebted to the insights offered by the members of the Maryland Eugenics Seminar.

I am also indebted to many people who offered insights, criticism, support and encouragement as I wrote, including Katherine Adams, Jack Ames, William and Jane Applegate, Elsie Bergamini, Rachel Bohlin, Matthew Bowman and Will Goodman, Laura Carroll, James and Ann Creegan, Mary Daly, John DeLozier, Diane Duhig, Cathy Fagerstrom, Olga Fairfax, Thomas Furtado, Jeanne and David Gaetano, Nancy Gerdes, David and Nancy Graham, Don Greger, C. Lawrence Hamm, Lucy Hancock, Ph.D., Harry and Nancy Hand, Diane Hess, Doug and Kris Johncox, Connie Kneisly, Lianne Laurence, John Leonard, Barry and Diane Levy, John Marcus, Christopher and Patricia McKenna, Arthur McKnew, Rebecca Messall, Jane Meyerhofer, Nash and Catherine Monsour, Jack and Pat O'Brien, John and Martha O'Keefe, Cathy and Gerry Roth, Dian Schlosser, Charles Suraci, Mary Kay Truckenmiller, James Vittitow, Sherrie Wade, Joseph P. Wall, John Walton, Juli Loesch Wiley and John Wysong. I am especially grateful to Suzanne Abdalla for her research and suggestions, but also for her faith that the work would make a difference. My wife made heroic sacrifices cheerfully for months as I wrote.

Dedication
Finally, I am keenly aware that my friend James Miller worked his heart out on the issues addressed in this book. The book is dedicated, with respect and affection, to his memory.

Introduction
The principal manifestations of eugenics are racism and abortion. Eugenics is the driving force behind euthanasia, artificial or assisted insemination, environmental extremism, genetic engineering and coercive population policies. It shapes debate over welfare reform and health care reform. It is found in anthropology, sociology, psychology -- in all the social sciences. It is found in many works of modern literature, especially science fiction. Such a potent force deserves some study. Eugenics is a deadly serious effort to take charge of evolution and drive the human race forward into a new and improved world. The key idea is simple: We breed better roses, better tomatoes, better dogs, better horses. Why do we hesitate to breed better humans? Most people have never heard of eugenics. When you talk about it, most people think at first that you are mispronouncing "euthanasia." And then among that small handful of people who have heard of it, nearly all are confident that it is a thing of the past. The idea of breeding a better race bothers people in our time. But often, people are disturbed about human breeding because it sounds too much like something that Hitler did, not because they have any specific well-informed objections to it. In other words, when people hear about eugenics separate from the horrors of Nazism, it can sound good. In fact, there are a few scholars who know what it is, and know that it is part of today's world -- and consider it a good thing. They know about Hitler's eugenics, a serious effort

to achieve a master race by controlling birth, but they think that today's eugenics movement is different from the 1940s movement, and believe that this time eugenics is benign. This book will help you see what eugenics is, to see that it is widespread in our time, and to understand that it is grave assault on humanity. Once you understand what it is and how it works, you will find it in many places, and wonder why others don't see it also. After World War II, the eugenics movement had a public relations problem. Hitler was serious about building a master race, and anything that resembles his ideas too closely smells bad. So the leaders of the eugenics movement continued their work under other names, and tracing their work takes a little effort. Eugenics has a curiously effective disguise. The leaders of the post-war eugenics movement talked about "crypto-eugenics." That makes it easy to fall into the trap of thinking that the eugenics movement is some kind of conspiracy. This turns out to be one of the best defenses that the eugenics movement has. If a movement ever looked like a conspiracy, even briefly, then some potential critics will decide that it didn't exist, because conspiracies don't exist. Despite the secrets, eugenics is an ideology, a movement, not a conspiracy. You can find it in the morning paper. You can find it in many social programs. You can find it in the novels you read. You may be able to find it in your own family, and very likely in the mirror. Once you see how eugenics works, you will never let go of the knowledge. The plain fact in history is, there have been several different truly evil schemes that put the value of life on a sliding scale. One was racism: white people are better than yellow people, who are better than red or brown people, who are better than black people. At the beginning of the 21st century, it is easy for most people to reject any such scheme as evil. We can hope that as soon as people understand that the same kind of sliding scale can be built in other ways, they will be ready to resist those schemes also. Another sliding scale is based on IQ testing. The idea there is that people with a high intelligence level are better than normal people, who are better than "morons" with a lower IQ, who are better than "imbeciles" with a still lower IQ. Using this scale, eugenicists made a serious effort from the 1920s through 1960s to sterilize "imbeciles," to persuade "morons" to use birth control, to win the support and encouragement of normal people, and to increase the population of the above-average. Today, IQ tests are still used in schools everywhere, but they are not used to decide who should have children (at least not openly). Peter Singer, now a professor at Princeton, may bring back the old pattern, since he proposes infanticide for humans with a low IQ, and better protection for dolphins and apes with high IQs. There is another sliding scale, based on a twisted theory of evolution. The idea is that protozoa led to vegetables, vegetable life evolved into animal life, animals evolved until

there were mammals, mammals evolved until there were primates, primates evolved into savage humans, and some (not all) of the savages evolved into civilized humankind. The idea shows up in jokes ("How can you date that Neanderthal?"), but also in serious discrimination against aboriginal peoples. The sliding scale that kills people today is a developmental theory, similar to the evolutionary scheme. The idea is that sexual activity produces a clump of cells, the clump gives rise to a valuable embryo, which becomes a still more valuable fetus, which becomes a truly precious infant. Then the infant becomes a child, the child becomes an adult, and the adult declines into an old person, and the old person becomes a corpse. This idea -- of humanity accumulating over months until you get a real person -- almost died in the beginning of the 19th century, when scientists were able to see sperm and eggs under a microscope, able to observe fertilization, able to understand the explosive moment in which life begins. From the Greeks until the 19th century, philosophers and scientists had discussed the beginnings of life without any understanding of fertilization. For example, both Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas believed there was a sharp dividing line somewhere in the early days of life, separating something pre-human from a real though small human being. Before that point, what happened was interesting but did not involve the life of a new human being. They guessed that the critical event -- "ensoulment" -- took place during the first trimester of pregnancy. The microscope almost ended such speculation permanently, showing that the critical event is fertilization. Unfortunately, before the new science of embryology took hold in people's minds, Darwin's theories strengthened the old developmental theory. The explosive moments at the beginnings of life did not seize the imagination of the modern biologist. Darwin's theories encouraged biologists to cling to the ancient Greek picture, with stages of pre-human development over a period of time, with gradual changes leading slowly up to some point at which there was finally a real human being. Ideas like this allow biologists to ignore the moment of fertilization, and to apply a sliding scale of value to humans. As the field of biology laid the foundations for the 20th century, Darwin's theories triumphed over the microscope. As a result, the old idea survived, that size and weight and complexity and value and rights all accumulate gradually, that the beginning of physical life is different from the beginning of truly human life. Today, the theory of eugenics still plagues us -- evaluating human life on a sliding scale, and devaluing some lives. To defeat it, you must first understand it. John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe March 25, 2000

Chapter One:

The Definition and the Pedigree of Eugenics

Did you ever meet a little snob on a playground who thought he was better than everyone? Jack: Sometimes you sound like a snob. Do you think you are better than other people? Eugene: I don't think I'm better; I know I'm better. Jack: Oh? What makes you think that? Eugene: I'm smarter. Jack: That makes you better than other people? Are you also stronger, faster, wiser, more loving? Eugene: Look, you asked me a question, and I answered. I'm smarter. It's all objective and scientific; my IQ is higher than yours, a lot higher. That's just the way life works; I was born smarter than you. I'm better. Well, the little snob is back, all grown up. He still thinks he is better than you, and now he takes it all very seriously. His ideas are called eugenics. Eugenics is pretty simple, in some ways. Eugene, the snobby kid with the bow tie, really believes that a high IQ makes him a better human being. For him, what matters most about people is how smart they are, and he believes that:

intelligence is the key human quality intelligence is measurable intelligence is inherited the world would be a better place if more people were smart like Eugene

There is more to the theories of eugenics than Eugene's snobbery, but not much more. If you ever met Eugene or anyone like him, you already understand the dark heart of eugenics, the "ideology of arrogance." The opposite of eugenics: All men are created equal "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." On July 4, 1776, a document creating a new and independent nation was made public, signed by a group of courageous men who had been meeting to debate the future of a continent. The Declaration of Independence began with words that have stirred the hearts of Americans and many other people around the world for over two centuries. These words have great power, but what exactly do they mean? Are we equal? In what sense are we equal?

The American ideal is based on the idea that people are equal. Eugenics, by contrast, is based on the idea that people are not equal. To understand America, or to understand democracy, or indeed to understand the religious beliefs that people have held in this nation, we must develop a clear understanding of equality. In 1994, two scholars wrote about the idea of equality, offering two possible definitions. In The Bell Curve, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray made a distinction between equal opportunity and equal endowment. They argued that it is noble for a nation to make sure that every citizen has an equal opportunity to prosper. But they said it is obvious that people are not endowed equally. Some people are taller than others, some are stronger than others, some people are more intelligent than others. And these inequalities are at least partly because of genetic differences, not because of differences in the way children are raised. "We must learn to accept inequalities," wrote Herrnstein and Murray. In fact, they wrote, the framers of the Declaration of Independence would not have said that "all men are created equal" if they had understood genetics. Equality. The word has a nice sound, and a long history. But what does it mean? Different people use the word to mean different things: who is right? And does it make any difference what the word means? The American Revolution was fought over a declaration that "all men are created equal." The French Revolution started with ideas about "liberty, equality and fraternity." So the word matters, somehow. It is true that the framers of the Declaration of Independence did not understand modern genetics. But still, perhaps their idea of equality was based on something other than genetics. Perhaps they meant that we have equal dignity, because we are all children of one loving heavenly Father.

A New Generation of Americans When John F. Kennedy became President of the United States, he spoke about the meaning of "equality." He had fought in World War II, as a lieutenant in the Navy, and had been the skipper of a PT boat; he became President after Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in that war. So his election represented a shift in leadership from one generation to another. Kennedy referred to this change, saying that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans." But the "torch" in his speech was very specific: it was a belief in the fundamental basis of human equality. Here are his words: We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom -- symbolizing an end, as well as a beginning -- signifying renewal, as well as change. For I have sworn

before you and Almighty God the same solemn oath our forebears prescribed nearly a century and three quarters ago. The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary beliefs for which our forebears fought are still at issue around the globe -- the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God. We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans ... Human Dignity In American society today, many people work hard to avoid saying things about politics that seem to require a belief in God. So it is worthwhile trying to find a way to talk about equal dignity without referring to God. But the clearest expression of this equality, whether you accept the theology or just use the language as a metaphor, is the idea that we have equal dignity, because we are the children of one loving Father. This Father loves us equally, whether we are rich or poor, tall or short, quick or slow, smart or not so smart. In fact, if there are any hints of any inequality in the Father's love, it seems that the Father has a distinct preference for those children who are weak or vulnerable. The concept of "equal dignity" is not the same thing as equal endowment or equal opportunity. The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution guarantees "equal protection of the laws," a concept that stands between equal dignity and equal opportunity. Eugenics: a theory of inequality In the 19th century, a British thinker named Francis Galton laid the foundations for a theory of humanity that is based on inequality. The name of his theory is "eugenics." The word "eugenics" is based on two Greek words -- eu () which means good, and gen () which refers to birth or race. Other words which use the prefix eu- include: eulogy: good words, usually about a deceased person euphemism: good phrase, used to hide something ugly euphonic: sounding good euphoria: feeling great euthanasia: literally means good death, but the practice of mercy killing might be a quick road to Hell eutopia: literally means good place, but Thomas More played with the word, pointing out that is very close to utopia, which means no place It is interesting that many of the words using the prefix eu- are ironic, hinting at goodness but actually referring to serious problems.

The Greek root gen, referring to production or birth or race, also shows up in a variety of words, including: genes: the pieces of a DNA molecule that produce various traits in the next generation genetics: the study of genes genus: a class of things sharing common attributes generic: of the same kind or class general: originally meant of the same kind or class genius: a person who is born with great abilities gender: once referred to kind, sort, class; now refers to sex (i.e., male or female) genealogy: a systematic listing of ancestors and descendants generation: the offspring of the same parent or parents, one step in the descent of a family from an ancestor generous: once referred to someone from a noble family or high lineage, now refers to someone who gives freely genesis: beginning, origin Gentile: referring to nations other than Jews gentle: once referred to a person from a noble or highborn family; now refers to a person whose behavior is moderate and kind genitals: the organs of the body used for reproduction degenerate: n. a person whose behavior does not measure up to the family's expectations, or the family's previous reputation. v., to fall from one's ancestral quality congenital: having some specific characteristic that seems to be an innate part of your nature, e.g., congenital liar regeneration: regrowth of lost or destroyed parts or organs; or to spiritual conversion or "rebirth." Miscegenation refers to mixing races. In the 1920s, the eugenics movement pushed through anti-miscegenation laws, prohibiting intermarriage between blacks and whites. When you look at the history of the root word gen, and at the way it has developed over the last 25 centuries, it is striking that the references to birth have always been related to ideas about race. In eugenics, the focus shifts back and forth between tiny genes and the whole race. The alternative to eugenics is to focus more on the individual, and speak about the overwhelming dignity of the human individual (who has genes and belongs to the race). There is a word related to eugenics worth noting: dysgenic, referring to a bad birth or bad generation. The prefix dys- is the opposite of eu, meaning bad or unfortunate, but it is not used much except in a medical context (dyspnea, difficulty in breathing; dyslexia, difficulty in reading; muscular dystrophy, malnourished muscles). Eugenics is a noun that refers to (1) a pseudo-science about improving the human race, (2) a program of action to improve humanity, and (3) an ideology about improving the human race that functions like a religion. Eugenicist is a noun, referring to a person who believes in eugenics. Eugenic is an adjective used by eugenicists to refer to desirable traits, or to a likelihood

of producing "fit" children. Dysgenic is used only as an adjective, to refer to undesirable traits, or a likelihood of producing "unfit" children. The idea of eugenics became popular in the 19th century. An Englishman named Francis Galton coined the word and promoted the idea. He did not claim that the idea was his own; he said that he was building on the ideas of other people, especially Plato, Thomas Malthus -- and of course his cousin, the eminent naturalist, Charles Darwin. So what did they say? Plato's words about eugenics Plato was a Greek philosopher who lived from about 427 BC to about 347 BC. His thought had a tremendous impact on all of Western culture. One of his greatest works was the Republic, in which he explored the idea of justice, and how to develop a just society. He favored a system of aristocracy, or rule by the best people. Plato's discussion includes military matters, and he talked about a class of people who would be devoted to guarding the society, a kind of warrior class. Soldiers should be fierce when dealing with enemies, but should not be a threat to their own neighbors. Achieving and maintaining this balance is difficult, Plato felt, and so he discussed some ideas for breeding the kind of people he wanted. His ideas about breeding soldiers are shocking, and it is possible that Plato was making fun of someone else's ideas. But whether Plato took the ideas seriously or not, 19th century eugenicists were fascinated. Plato noted that dogs are frequently gentle to people they know, but fierce to strangers. Dog owners pay attention to their breeding, selecting only those considered to be the best. If the owner does not pay attention to breeding, the value of the dogs -- or birds, horses or other animals -- can deteriorate quickly. The question, then, is whether the techniques of animal breeding can be adapted to humans, to raise soldiers. Plato found human breeding plausible, if the rulers of the society were willing and able to be deceptive, manipulating people into accepting the rulers' plans. Breeding a soldier class requires that the rulers select the best of both sexes, and have them mate as much as possible, while discouraging mating among the inferior. Plato's scheme for a perfect society included not only barnyard methods of breeding humans and deception, but also promiscuity and abortion. Men and women considered too old to have healthy children could engage in sexual activity promiscuously, but any child they conceived accidentally was to be aborted. Not all Greeks favored abortion and infanticide. Hippocrates, the Greek physician who is called the "father of medicine," lived at about the same time as Plato. His greatest legacy is the charter of conduct he wrote for medical professionals, which was used for ages. It includes unequivocal opposition to euthanasia and abortion: "I will give no deadly drug to anyone, though it be asked of me, nor will I counsel such, and especially I will not aid a woman to procure abortion."

Population problems in Scripture In the Book of Exodus, we can see what happens when people no longer pay attention to individuals. The descendants of the Jewish patriarchs became numerous in Egypt. Then a new pharaoh came to power who was not mindful of what Joseph had done for his predecessors in years past. He saw the Jewish population as a threat. "Look!" he said. "The Israelite people are growing in numbers and in power, surpassing us! We should respond intelligently, and prevent their continuing growth." So he began to oppress them with forced labor. When that did not achieve his goals, he started a campaign of population control, ordering the Hebrew midwives to kill all the boys who were born. This grave evil began when the new Pharaoh no longer saw individuals like Joseph; instead, all he saw was a population of foreigners. In the Second Book of Samuel (chapter 24), there is another story about the evil of seeing people as numbers rather than as individuals. The chapter begins, "The Lord's anger against Israel flared again, and he incited David against the Israelites, prompting him to take a census of Israel and Judah." Joab argued with King David about it, but David persisted, and ordered a census. "Afterward, however, David regretted that he had carried out the census. He said to the Lord, 'What I have done was a serious evil; I have sinned.'" Then David was punished severely for carrying out a census. But the story does not explain what is wrong with a census. In fact, elsewhere in the Bible, there are careful tallies of the population. But it does seem plausible that the problem is straightforward: it is wrong to think of people as numbers, stripped of their individuality. In any case, carrying out a census is apparently a morally hazardous task; there is something about a census that can be seriously wrong. Thomas R. Malthus Thomas R. Malthus was an English clergyman and professor of history who lived from 1766 to 1834. He wrote an extremely provocative and influential book entitled An Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea in the book is about population and food supplies. He said that population, if allowed to grow without any interruption, can double every 25 years, while the food supply cannot increase that fast. If the population doubles each generation, then in two generations it will increase by a factor of four, and in three generations it will increase by a factor of eight, and in four generations by a factor of 16, etc. Unless this geometric progression is interrupted, the population would theoretically increase a thousandfold in ten generations, a millionfold in 20 generations, a billion-fold in 30 generations. Sooner or later, according to this bleak model, the population will outstrip the food supply, and there will be massive starvation. Malthus said that there are alternatives to starvation: war, disease and vice. Like all the clergy of his time -- indeed, like all Christian clergy until the 20th century -he considered artificial birth control to be a vice. However, people today who adopt his ideas, called neo-Malthusians, no longer oppose birth control. In fact, they promote it.

According to Malthus, the idea that population will inevitably outstrip the food supply does not undercut the idea of a loving God. However, Malthus argues, God's concern seems to be about the human race as a whole, not about the individual. Hunger andwant may be hard on the poor, but they lift humanity out of torpor, and drive people to develop their minds. Of course, starving people in order to produce a better race may seem cruel, and Malthus admits that it is "partial evil." But, he argues, "evil seems to be necessary to create exertion, and exertion seems evidently necessary to create mind." If hunger and pain are the tools that God uses to drive a lazy human race to develop mentally, as Malthus argues, then should people care for the poor? Malthus was not enthusiastic about caring for the poor. In his day, caring for the poor was generally among the responsibilities of a clergyman, but Malthus thought that charity just encouraged the poor to marry and create more poor children. Also, he said, giving food to "a part of the society that cannot in general be considered as the most valuable part" meant that there was less food available for the "more industrious and more worthy members."

Enrichment: arithmetic and geometric progression "Arithmetic progression" is a fancy name for something that is quite familiar. It goes: 1 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 ... "Geometric progression" can be simple doubling: 1 - 2 - 4 - 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 ... But there is another form of "geometric progression" that is found throughout nature. It starts 1 - 2 . . ., but then proceeds not by doubling the previous number, but by adding the two previous numbers. The series of numbers is called the Fibonacci series. You can carry this out for as long as you want, and use it to generate a number that the Greeks called the "golden mean." a 1 b 2 b/a 2 c (=a+b) d (=b+c) e (=c+d) f (=d+e) g (=e+f) h (=f+g) 3 c/b 1.5 5 d/c 1.66667 8 e/d 1.6 13 f/e 1.625 21 g/f 34 h/g

1.61538 1.61905

The "golden mean" ratio is found all over nature, in petals, leaves, shells and elsewhere. There is an important difference between this series and simple doubling; with the Fibonacci series, each new item (or, in biology, each new cell) has a unique "heritage." Jonathan Swift's "Modest Proposal"

The callous attitude that Malthus adopted was not new with him. In fact, 70 years before Malthus published his Essay on the Principle of Population, another clergyman, Jonathan Swift, wrote a blistering satire of the callous attitude he saw developing in England. Swift wrote "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from Being a Burden to Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Public." In it, he wrote that it is a "melancholy object" to see women begging everywhere, "followed by three, four, or six children, all in rags." Anyone who could find "fair, cheap and easy method of making these children sound and useful members of the commonwealth" should have a statue set up. He had a scheme that would not only end the scandal of having beggars everywhere, but would "contribute to the feeding, and partly to the clothing, of many thousands." Incidentally, the plan would also prevent abortions. How does the remarkable proposal work? Swift's sarcastic proposal was cannibalism. "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child, well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout." Infant's flesh might be somewhat more expensive than other meat, but it could be served at "merry meetings, particularly weddings and christenings." Thrifty shoppers can also use the skin to make "admirable gloves for ladies, and summer-boots for fine gentlemen." Swift was not serious about cannibalism, but he was very serious about criticizing a callous attitude toward the poor. He was appalled that many comfortable people were ready to ignore the difficulties of their neighbors. Charles Darwin Charles Darwin (1809-1882) was a British scientist whose theories about evolution and natural selection became the foundation of modern biology. The idea of evolution, or the gradual development of life forms from earlier, simpler ancestors, was not new with Darwin; other scientists had explored it. In fact, Charles Darwin's grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, had proposed a theory of evolution in the 1790s. But Charles Darwin presented evolution in a new and more convincing way, including a theory about the mechanism that drives evolution, a process which he called "natural selection." Darwin accepted the idea put forward by Malthus, that populations of living creatures including humans propagate geometrically, so that they are always pushing the limits of the food supply. But he went beyond Malthus, saying that when animals compete in this life-or-death struggle for food, the strongest and most fit survive, and the weak are weeded out. In his view, this brutal competition is the natural breeding process, selecting the best and letting the others die out. In this way, the "survival of the fittest" promotes steady progress: slow but steady evolution.

Darwin's put his ideas forward in 1859, in a book entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. In this book, he wrote about the evolution of animals. Later, in 1871, he applied the same ideas explicitly to humanity, in The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Darwin's work had huge implications for religious thought. His account of evolution assumes that the world is millions of years old, but many clerics of his time believed that the world was created in 4004 BC (as calculated by Archbishop James Ussher). His description of how various living creatures developed requires millions of years, but the Bible describes creation taking place in just six days. His theory of natural selection seems to diminish God's role in watching over and guiding the universe. Further, it seemed that Darwin erased or minimized the distinctions between animals and humans. Darwin closed his book on the preservation of favored races with a summary of the grandeur of evolution. Contemplating the variety of different living things, he found it interesting that they "have all been produced by laws acting around us." These laws included: . . . a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its various powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. One key question about the works of Thomas Malthus was the value that he placed on the individual person, as opposed to the whole race. Reading Darwin, you have to ask the same question. In the summary at the end of his book, Darwin writes (about animals), "And as natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection." Clearly, Darwin takes the long view, and is really overlooking the individual even when he writes about "each being." Obviously, whatever natural selection -- meaning war and famine -- may do for the race as a whole, it is not good for the individual. When Darwin enthused about the benefits of violence and death, he was writing about animals and lower life forms. But still you have to ask, if they are all improved steadily over time by war and famine, why should humans be different? And in fact, Darwin did not see a different set of rules for humans. In The Descent of Man, chapter II, Darwin wrote, "The early progenitors of man must also have tended, like all other animals, to have increased beyond their means of subsistence; they must, therefore, occasionally have been exposed to a struggle for existence, and consequently to the rigid law of natural selection." He was cautiously optimistic about the evidence that civilization was winning the struggle for life. He wrote, "There is great reason to suspect, as Malthus has remarked, that the reproductive power is actually less in barbarous, than in civilised races."

Darwin thought that war and famine played a role in keeping down the population of "savages," but saw another mechanism at work that Malthus had skipped. He wrote that Malthus "does not lay stress enough on what is probably the most important of all, namely infanticide, especially of female infants, and the habit of procuring abortion. These practices now prevail in many quarters of the world; and infanticide seems formerly to have prevailed, as Mr. M'Lennan has shewn on a still more extensive scale. These practices appear to have originated in savages recognising the difficulty, or rather the impossibility of supporting all the infants that are born." Darwin's attitude toward infanticide and abortion was not simple. He did not approve of them any more than he approved of war and famine. However, he linked them with the beginning of rational thought: "If we look back to an extremely remote epoch, before man had arrived at the dignity of manhood, he would have been guided more by instinct and less by reason than are the lowest savages at the present time. Our early semi-human progenitors would not have practised infanticide or polyandry [having more than one husband]; for the instincts of the lower animals are never so perverted as to lead them regularly to destroy their own offspring." In other words, Darwin condemned infanticide, even though his theories led others to do it. Before turning to the work of Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, we should take note of Darwin's attitude toward eugenics, which Galton championed. Some writers have worked hard to separate Darwin's views on evolution from his cousin's views on eugenics. However, in the closing paragraphs of his book The Descent of Man, Darwin quoted his cousin and endorsed his views. Referring to humans, not to animals, he expressed the same concern that Plato had voiced: "Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them; but when he comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care." He noted that "free choice" can drive racial improvement: "He [man] is impelled by nearly the same motives as the lower animals, when they are left to their own free choice, though he is in so far superior to them that he highly values mental charms and virtues. On the other hand he is strongly attracted by mere wealth or rank." He believed that a selection process could improve the human race, if a socially acceptable mechanism for selection could be found, but did not see clearly how the selection process might work: "Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realised until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does good service, who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not consanguineous marriages [marriages between close relatives] are injurious to man."

He accepted the view that measured value by wealth: "The advancement of the welfare of mankind is a most intricate problem: all ought to refrain from marriage who cannot avoid abject poverty for their children; for poverty is not only a great evil, but tends to its own increase by leading to recklessness in marriage. On the other hand, as Mr. Galton has remarked, if the prudent avoid marriage, whilst the reckless marry, the inferior members tend to supplant the better members of society." He spoke about struggle among humans as the driving force for improvement. His words are not completely clear about what the "struggle" was supposed to look like; it is not clear that he meant to say that warfare and genocide are necessary tools in the improvement of the human race. His words may not have been as chilling in his own day as they are in retrospect. In any case, what he wrote was: "Man, like every other animal, has no doubt advanced to his present high condition through a struggle for existence consequent on his rapid multiplication. If he is to advance still higher, it is to be feared that he must remain subject to a severe struggle." It is worthwhile noting that his views about our ancestors are complimentary to some animals but insulting to some humans: The main conclusion arrived at in this work, namely, that man is descended from some lowly organized form, will, I regret to think, be highly distasteful to many. But there can hardly be a doubt that we are descended from barbarians. The astonishment which I felt on first seeing a party of Fenians on a wild and broken shore will never be forgotten by me, for the reflection at once rushed into my mind -- such were our ancestors. These men were absolutely naked and bedaubed with paint, their long hair was tangled, their mouths frothed with excitement, and their expression was wild, startled, and distrustful. They possessed hardly any arts, and like wild animals lived on what they could catch; they had no government, and were merciless to everyone not of their own small tribe. He who has seen a savage in his native land will not feel much shame, if forced to acknowledge that the blood of some more humble creature flows in his veins. For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper, or from that old baboon, who descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs -- as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions. Given his views about the people of Tierra del Fuego, it is fair to wonder who he thinks has risen "to the very summit of the organic scale": Man may be excused for feeling some pride at having risen, though not through his own exertions, to the very summit of the organic scale; and the fact of his having thus risen, instead of having been aboriginally placed there, may give him hope for a still higher destiny in the distant future. But we are not here concerned with hopes or fears, only with the truth as far as our reason permits us to discover it; and I have given the evidence to the best of my ability. We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system --

with all these exalted powers -- Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Darwin spoke of our "lowly origin," but we don't have to give him the last word. By contrast, Psalm 8 says: What is man that thou art mindful of him, or the son of man that thou dost take thought of him? And yet thou hast made him little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. Review of Chapter One: Pedigree of Eugenics 1. What does "equality" mean? 2. What does "eugenics" mean? 3. What did the ancient Greeks say about eugenics? What does Scripture say? 4. Who was Thomas Malthus, and what was his key idea about population? 5. Who was Charles Darwin, and what did he say about evolution and human life? Discuss: Is the life of a poor man valuable? What were the views on this question held by Plato, Malthus and Darwin? Were their views like or unlike Christianity? Were their views like or unlike the American ideal?

Malthus on God and evil

To furnish the most unremitted excitements of this kind, and to urge man to further the gracious designs of Providence by the full cultivation of the earth, it has been ordained that population should increase much faster than food. This general law. . . undoubtedly produces much partial evil, but a little reflection may, perhaps, satisfy us, that it produces a great overbalance of good. . . . I should be inclined, therefore, as I have hinted before, to consider the world and this life as the mighty process of God, not for the trial, but for the creation and formation of mind, a process necessary to awaken inert, chaotic matter into spirit, to sublimate the dust of the earth into soul, to elicit an ethereal spark from the clod of clay. And in this view of the subject, the various impressions and excitements which man receives through life may be considered as the forming hand of his Creator, acting by general laws, and awakening his sluggish existence, by the animating touches of the Divinity, into a capacity of superior enjoyment. The original sin of man is the torpor and corruption of the chaotic matter in which he may be said to be born. The partial pain, therefore, that is inflicted by the supreme Creator, while he is forming numberless beings to a capacity of the highest enjoyments, is but as the dust of the balance in comparison of the happiness that is communicated, and we have every reason to think that there is no more evil in the world than what is absolutely necessary as one of the ingredients in the mighty process. It seems highly probable that moral evil is absolutely necessary to the production

of moral excellence.

Malthus's views on the poor

The poor laws of England tend to depress the general condition of the poor in these two ways. Their first obvious tendency is to increase population without increasing the food for its support. A poor man may marry with little or no prospect of being able to support a family in independence. They may be said therefore in some measure to create the poor which they maintain, and as the provisions of the country must, in consequence of the increased population, be distributed to every man in smaller proportions, it is evident that the labour of those who are not supported by parish assistance will purchase a smaller quantity of provisions than before and consequently more of them must be driven to ask for support. Secondly, the quantity of provisions consumed in workhouses upon a part of the society that cannot in general be considered as the most valuable part diminishes the shares that would otherwise belong to more industrious and more worthy members, and thus in the same manner forces more to become dependent. These excerpts are from the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) by Thomas Malthus.

Chapter Two:
Francis Galton and the Eugenics Society

Francis Galton (1822-1911) was an English scientist who studied heredity and intelligence. He was the person who coined the word eugenics, using Greek words to express what was originally a Greek concept. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. Erasmus Darwin was Francis Galton's maternal grandfather and also Charles Darwin's paternal grandfather. Erasmus Darwin developed a theory of evolution that Charles Darwin later expanded and refined. Galton defined his new word this way: "Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally." But he wanted more than a little study. In 1905, he wrote about

the three stages of eugenics first an academic matter, then a practical policy, and finally "it must be introduced into the national consciousness as a new religion." In Memories of My Life, Galton said that the publication of Darwin's book on evolution stirred a rebellion against religious dogma: "The publication in 1859 of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science." He became an openly anti-Christian bigot. For example, he wrote about prayer, dismissing the idea that God would ever listen to anyone's prayers for good weather, basing his argument on mockery, not data: "I do not propose any special inquiry whether the general laws of physical nature are ever changed in response to prayer: whether, for instance, success has attended the occasional prayers in the Liturgy when they have been used for rain, for fair weather, for the stilling of the sea in a storm, or for the abatement of a pestilence. The modern feeling of this country is so opposed to a belief in the occasional suspension of the general laws of nature, that most English readers would smile at such an investigation." Is English scorn a reliable measure of truth? Galton's chief intellectual contribution was laying the foundations of eugenics. He described his ideas in an article entitled "Hereditary Character and Talent" (published in two parts in MacMillan's Magazine, vol. 11, November 1864 and April 1865, pp. 157166, 318-327), expressing his frustration that no one was breeding a better human race: If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create! We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties. While the reader ponders who might be in charge of this breeding program which is supposed to produce geniuses and "prophets and high priests of civilization," Galton continued with chilling language: The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind; and even the best of these, so far as we know them, seem unequal to their work. The average culture of mankind is become so much higher than it was, and the branches of knowledge and history so various and extended, that few are capable even of comprehending the exigencies of our modern civilization; much less of fulfilling them. We are living in a sort of intellectual anarchy, for the want of master minds. The general intellectual capacity of our leaders requires to be raised, and also to be differentiated. We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers.

When Galton said that it is necessary for the "feeble nations" to give way before the "nobler varieties of mankind," was that a justification for genocide? Further on, he wrote, No one, I think, can doubt, from the facts and analogies I have brought forward, that, if talented men were mated with talented women, of the same mental and physical characters as themselves, generation after generation, we might produce a highly-bred human race, with no more tendency to revert to meaner ancestral types than is shown by our long-established breeds of race-horses and fox-hounds. It is interesting to note that the animals he mentioned were the same as those that Plato mentioned. He continued: It may be said that, even granting the validity of my arguments, it would be impossible to carry their indications into practical effect. For instance, if we divided the rising generation into two castes, A and B, of which A was selected for natural gifts, and B was the refuse, then, supposing marriage was confined within the pale of the caste to which each individual belonged, it might be objected that we should simply differentiate our race - that we should create a good and a bad caste, but we should not improve the race as a whole. I reply that this is by no means the necessary result. There remains another very important law to be brought into play. Any agency, however indirect, that would somewhat hasten the marriages in caste A, and retard those in caste B, would result in a larger proportion of children being born to A than to B, and would end by wholly eliminating B, and replacing it by A. Let us take a definite case, in order to give precision to our ideas. We will suppose the population to be, in the first instance, stationary; A and B to be equal in numbers; and the children of each married pair who survive to maturity to be rather more than two and a half in the case of A, and rather less than one and a half in the case of B. This no extravagant hypothesis. Half the population of the British Isles are born of mothers under the age of thirty years. The result in the first generation would be that the total population would be unchanged, but that only one-third part of it would consist of the children of B. In the second generation, the descendants of B would be reduced to two-ninths of their original numbers, but the total population would begin to increase, owing to the greater preponderance of the prolific caste A. At this point the law of natural selection would powerfully assist in the substitution of caste A for caste B, by pressing heavily on the minority of weakly and incapable men. The customs that affect the direction and date of marriages are already numerous. In many families, marriages between cousins are discouraged and checked. Marriages, in other respects appropriate, are very commonly deferred, through prudential considerations. If it was generally felt that intermarriages between A and B were as unadvisable as they are supposed to be between cousins, and that marriages in A ought to be hastened, on the ground of prudential considerations, while those in B ought to be

discouraged and retarded, then, I believe, we should have agencies amply sufficient to eliminate B in a few generations. I hence conclude that the improvement of the breed of mankind is no insuperable difficulty. If everybody were to agree on the improvement of the race of man being a matter of the very utmost importance, and if the theory of the hereditary transmission of qualities in men was as thoroughly understood as it is in the case of our domestic animals, I see no absurdity in supposing that, in some way or other, the improvement would be carried into effect. On Indians, he wrote: Excellent observers have watched the American Indians under all these influences, and their almost unanimous conclusion is as follows:The race is divided into many varieties, but it has fundamentally the same character throughout the whole of America. The men, and in a less degree the women, are naturally cold, melancholic, patient, and taciturn. A father, mother, and their children, are said to live together in a hut, like persons assembled by accident, not tied by affection. The youths treat their parents with neglect, and often with such harshness and insolence as to horrify Europeans who have witnessed their conduct. The mothers have been seen to commit infanticide without the slightest discomposure, and numerous savage tribes have died out in consequence of this practice. The American Indians are eminently nongregarious. They nourish a sullen reserve, and show little sympathy with each other, even when in great distress. The Spaniards had to enforce the common duties of humanities by positive laws. They are strangely taciturn. When not engaged in action they will sit whole days in one posture without opening their lips, and wrapped up in their narrow thoughts. The usually march in Indian file, that is to say, in a long line, at some distance from each other, without exchanging a word. They keep the same profound silence in rowing a canoe, unless they happen to be excited by some extraneous cause. On the other hand, their patriotism and local attachments are strong, and they have an astonishing sense of personal dignity. The nature of the American Indians appears to contain the minimum of affectionate and social qualities compatible with the continuance of their race. Here, then, is a well-marked type of character, that formerly prevailed over a large part of the globe, with which other equally marked types of character in other regions are strongly contrasted. Take, for instance, the typical West African Negro. He is more unlike the Red man in his mind than in his body. Their characters are almost opposite, one to the other. The Red man has great patience, great reticence, great dignity, and no passion; the Negro has strong impulsive passions, and neither patience, reticence, nor dignity. He is warm-hearted, loving towards his master's children, and idolised by the children in return. He is eminently gregarious, for he is always jabbering, quarrelling, tom-tom-ing, or dancing. He is remarkably domestic, and he is endowed with such constitutional vigour, and is so prolific, that his race is irrepressible. Amidst the condescending and insulting generalities, Galton states that the Negro is outgoing, and so his race is irrepressible. But Indians do not have good social skills, so

their survival may be threatened. In fact, they are so lacking is social graces that infanticide is common, and has caused the demise of some tribes. He later returns to this idea, that their moral character, built into their being, is defective and threatens their survival: In strength, agility, and other physical qualities, Darwin's law of natural selection acts with unimpassioned, merciless severity. The weakly die in the battle for life; the stronger and more capable individuals are alone permitted to survive, and to bequeath their constitutional vigour to future generations. Is there any corresponding rule in respect to moral character? I believe there is, and I have already hinted at it when speaking of the American Indians. Galton wrote in 1864 that the American Indians were too reserved for their own good, and that their survival was threatened by their behavior. The following year, with the close of the Civil War, the American military turned its attention to the Indians. One of the tactics that Gen. George Sherman had used in Georgia, and which Gen. Philip Sheridan also had used in the Shenandoah Valley, was destroying supplies. They had attacked the power of the Confederacy by destroying the crops that fed the army (and the civilians). After that war, as the railroads and white civilization pushed west, the same tactic was used against the Indians. Sharpshooters began slaughtering the principal source of food for the Plains Indians herds of buffalo. According to Gen. Sheridan, the buffalo hunters did more to settle "the vexed Indian question than the entire army has done in 35 years." In 1875, Sheridan addressed the Texas legislature on the matter of buffalo hunters, and had strong words of support: For the sake of a lasting peace, let them kill, skin and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies can be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as a second forerunner of an advanced civilization. By 1890, the Plains Indians were subdued, pushed aside to make way for an "advanced civilization." In 1893, efforts began to rescue the buffalo from extinction, since there may have been fewer than one thousand left (down from 40 million in 1830). Galton is not responsible for brutality against American Indians, attacking them by destroying their food supply. There is no evidence that buffalo hunters or even Gen. Sheridan ever read Galton's essay. But it is important, when evaluating his theories, to understand that he wrote about the Indians in 1864, noted that their very survival was endangered, and blamed them for their own problems. Then over the next 30 years, their problems increased dramatically, for reasons that had nothing to do with melancholy, reticence, or paddling techniques. During his life time, Galton had the opportunity to compare his theories to reality. In the face of miserable realities that might have shamed him, he stuck to his theories. Galton started a "biometric laboratory" at London University, and funded a research fellowship. In his will, he also left money to found the Chair of Eugenics there. He studied medicine, but never practiced as a physician. He traveled in Africa, but kept his distance from the people and studied them. He wrote about weather (coining the term

"anticyclone"). His pioneering work on fingerprints led to their use in identifying people. He devised new statistical methods, including correlational calculus. His work included use of a statistical tool called the "bell curve." Galton's mathematical approach to life was sometimes absurd and offensive. Once, when he saw a woman in Africa with large breasts, he walked around her with a sextant, measuring angles. He kept track of how many pretty girls he saw as he walked down the street, grading them on a scale of one to ten, and later charting the results. His books include Hereditary Genius (1869), English Men of Science (1874), and Inquiries into the Human Faculty (1883), Noteworthy Families (1906), Memories of My Life (1908) and Essays in Eugenics (1909). "Nature vs. Nurture" In three of his books, Galton studied what happened in families that were, in his view, desirable. He understood that a child who is raised among wealthy and educated people, among people who think and talk about ideas and about large plans for the future of the world, are likely to benefit from what they see and hear. They will benefit from their environment. But he was convinced that intelligence is inherited, and that brilliant parents were likely to have brilliant children. Some of his contemporaries believed that brilliant people were likely to have dull children, so he collected as much data as he could to make his point. From Galton's time forward, there have been debates about whether heredity or environment plays the major role in shaping a child. Sometimes this is called the "nature versus nurture" debate. If a child is very smart, is that because the parents were smart and the child inherited intelligence? This would be the "nature" position. Or is the child shaped more by the good habits of the intelligent parents? This is the "nurture" position. Galton and all of his followers have been very interested in "twin studies" as a way to sort out the effects of heredity and environment. Identical twins, of course, have the same genes. If a pair of identical twins are separated at birth and raised apart, then the similarities and differences between them can be very interesting. The similarities are more likely to be due to heredity, and the differences are more likely to be due to environment. The nature-nurture debate may overlook the most important forces that shape human life: (1) the grace of God in the heart of the individual, and (2) human freedom, which responds to heredity and environment but is not bound by them. Eugenics Society Francis Galton wanted to make sure that people kept thinking about eugenics, so he took several steps to make sure that the study would continue after his death. As noted above, he left money in his will for research in eugenics at London University. Perhaps his most

important legacy, though, was that he inspired the Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1907. In 1926, the name was simplified, and it became the "Eugenics Society." In 1989, the name was changed again, to the "Galton Institute." The Eugenics Society brought together many powerful and influential people from various disciplines to exchange ideas about eugenics. Anyone who wants to understand the history of eugenics must study the Eugenics Society (ES). Even a quick look through the membership of the ES shows how far eugenics ideas spread. A more careful study of the membership shows how the pieces of the eugenics movement fit together. Some examples follow. ES Member: Lord Beveridge William Henry Beveridge (1879-1963) was a British economist who was interested in social security and full employment. During World War II, the government invited him to help make plans for a new approach to many problems in society to draw the blueprints for the new welfare state. The "Beveridge Report" (formally, Social Insurance and Allied Services) set a goal of making poverty a thing of the past, and it had a tremendous impact on all social services in Britain. Anyone influenced by Malthus would have to give careful thought to a proposal to balance population and food. Malthus had taught that population growth would always tend to outstrip food. Did Beveridge disagree, or did he have some ideas about how to get around the Malthusian dilemma? In 1906, Beveridge had written a paper called "The Problem of the Unemployed," with a solution. Men who can't take their place in industry should be recognized as unemployable, and should be maintained as "the acknowl-edged dependents of the State." But the price for government support was "complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood." In other words, if you couldn't work, the government would feed you, but would not allow you to have children. The Beveridge Report does not call for forced sterilization of non-workers. But from the beginning, the men who designed the welfare state were thinking about how to balance jobs and population partly by lowering the population. Beveridge was the Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science for almost 20 years, from 1919 to 1937. That position gave him the ability to influence the thinking of students preparing for careers in many different fields, including economics, government and foreign service. He was succeeded by Prof. Sir Alexander M. CarrSaunders (1886 to 1966), also an officer of the Eugenics Society, who was director of the London School of Economics from 1937 to 1956. Efficient Administration of an Empire The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) was not just a fine little college turning out well-trained accountants. It is hard to grasp the grand scale of its

ambition. The LSE was founded in 1895 by Beatrice and Sidney Webb, leaders of the Fabian Society. It was then that the British, referring to their colonies and possessions around the globe, said proudly, "The sun never sets on the British Empire." Educated British citizens thought about how to run the world. The task of the LSE was to train people to apply scientific principles to global responsibilities. Economics, like any science, must try to understand patterns. But economics looks at money and people, so there is a tremendous mental and spiritual struggle built right into its very core. It is very hard to make general statements about humans and at the same time to hold fast to the importance of individuals. It is even harder to study finances and hold fast to the dignity of individuals. It is possible, but it is hard. To make matters worse, the founders of the LSE were Socialists, who were exploring ideas about society as a whole. They did not mean to ignore individual people, but the temptation was always there. At the LSE, people thought about the problem of running the world, or at least a large part of it not the problems of individuals. The tools of economics deal with general principles, not individuals. Their politics were focused on society, not the individual. Into this fell eugenics, a new ideology that could work like a religion, and it too focused on society as a whole, not on the individual. Their questions, their training, their politics and their "religion" all tended to focus on the challenges of society as a whole, not on the dignity and worth of the individual. When the LSE became a stronghold of eugenics, a curious and very important thing happened. The politics of the time were about money and the control of money. There were conservatives who still believed in some kind of aristocracy, and they adopted eugenics ideas because the ideology of arrogance fitted them. Eugenics told them that they were on top because they deserved to be on top. They were opposed by progressives, who talked about the working man and about a more just distribution of wealth. But the progressives talked about society as a whole, not about the individual. So the progressives at the LSE also adopted eugenics. From that time, people in both major British parties have supported eugenics. ES Member: John Maynard Keynes John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) was perhaps the most influential economist of the 20th century. His ideas had a huge impact in the United States during and after the Great Depression, and in Britain after World War II. This influential economist was an officer of the Eugenics Society (Vice President in 1937, and a Director from 1937 to 1944). Like Beveridge, he was concerned about full employment, balancing population and jobs. He argued for a national policy on population, and looked forward to a time when it would be possible to measure and improve the genetic qualities of a society, as well as controlling their size.

After World War II, the industrialized nations met to consider how to assist reconstruction and to stabilize global finances. Keynes represented Britain at the meetings, and helped to lay the foundations for the new World Bank. Over time, the World Bank became a powerful force for population control, providing funds but also putting pressure on governments to adopt national policies with population targets. ES Member: Richard M. Titmuss Richard Titmuss (1907-1973) taught Social Administration at the London School of Economics from 1950 until his death. He has been called the "high priest of the welfare state," and according to the Dictionary of National Biography he influenced an entire generation of social administration students, affecting university teachers, administrators and social workers from New York to Toronto to Mauritius and Tanganyika. He wrote a report on Mauritius in the 1950s, and said that family planning should be the first priority. The government of Mauritius followed his advice, and Mauritius became a hotbed of activity for Planned Parenthood. ES Member: Eliot T. O. Slater Eliot T. O. Slater (1904-1983) was a psychiatrist, and editor in 1972 of the British Journal of Psychiatry. Slater was a student of Dr. Ernst Rdin in Munich, the founder of the German eugenics society (Society for Racial Hygiene), who received the Goethe Medal for Art and Science from Adolf Hitler "in recognition of his achievements in the development of German Racial Hygiene." Slater wrote in support of the German eugenics program in 1935-36. In later years, he promoted a change in the abortion laws and he signed "A Plea for Voluntary Euthanasia" in 1971. Twnety-seven members of the ES were in the Abortion Law Reform Association, which worked to end the prosecution of abortionists in Britain, an effort that succeeded in 1967. Journals edited by ES members have included: Behaviour Research and Therapy Brain British Heart Journal British Journal of Clinical Practice British Journal of Inebriety British Journal of Psychology British Journal of Psychiatry Economic Journal Ibis International Journal of Sexology Journal of Asian Demography Journal of Biosocial Sciences Journal of Medical Genetics

Mankind Quarterly Medical Digest Prenatal Diagnosis Prison Medical Journal Quarterly Journal of Medicine Realist Samajaswathya Sociological Review Women's Own One of the most prestigious medical journals in the world is the Lancet. It was not among the journals edited by an ES member. But when Sir Squire Sprigge, editor of the Lancet for 30 years, died, the ES expressed their gratitude for his work, saying that "the progressive policy which the Lancet under his guidance adopted towards the problems of negative eugenics, was from the beginning reflected in that journal's favorable attitude towards sterilization and in the space devoted in its columns to the birth control movement." Sprigge was not a member of the ES, but his wife was. Since eugenicists were writing and teaching in every corner of the social sciences, students either resisted it consciously, or absorbed some eugenics thought. But since 1945, there has been little or no organized resistance to eugenics. So it is fair to expect that everyone working in any social science in the English-speaking world has some taint of eugenics. Suppose it is true that tomatoes and horses and humans all progress into the future by natural selection. Suppose improvement depends on this "law of the jungle." What happens when a species disrupts natural selection? Charity keeps the poor alive, so that war and famine do not weed out the "unfit" in the human race. Eugenicists fear that charity can disrupt human evolution. One solution is to replace natural selection with artificial selection, so that thoughtful leaders of society can decide who should have children and who should not. This does not mean that every textbook in economics, sociology, psychology and all the rest must be scrapped. But it does mean that a student who wants to avoid eugenics must read textbooks with a critical eye. At each step, it is important to identify eugenics, and to ask, "What would change in this book if we replaced eugenics here with a firm commitment to the dignity of the individual?" One more ES member: Lord Dawson In 1936, King George V was weak and despondent, perhaps dying. He asked his physician, Lord Dawson, to kill him. The King of England is also the head of the Church of England, which frowned on killing anyone. But King George was not terribly keen on the teaching of the Church of England, and wanted euthanasia regardless. So Lord Dawson, according to his memoirs published years later, killed the king.

King George had not wanted a funeral at Westminster Abbey, but he got one anyway. The funeral procession included a carriage with his crown. As the carriage turned into the abbey, the crown was jostled and fell off into a gutter, and the cross broke off the crown. From Positive to Negative Eugenics Francis Galton was the Honorary President of the Eugenics Society for several years, and he spoke hopefully about persuading people with desirable genes to marry and have large families. Galton's successor at the helm of the Eugenics Society was Major Leonard Darwin (1850-1943), a son of Charles Darwin. Leonard Darwin, who ran the Eugenics Society until 1928, made the transition from positive to negative eugenics, and promoted plans for lowering the birthrate of the unfit. Built into the idea of natural selection is a competition between the strong and the weak, between the fit and the unfit. The eugenicists believed that this mechanism was thwarted in the human race by charity, by people and churches who fed the poor and the weak so that they survived and thrived and reproduced. To be effective, artificial selection had to consider two different questions. (1) How do you ensure that the strong and fit have more children? This is called positive eugenics. (2) How do you ensure that the weak and unfit have fewer children? This is called negative eugenics. After a century of eugenics, it is fair to look back and draw some conclusions: positive eugenics is much harder than negative eugenics. Negative eugenics is easier, but is based on brutality. Sometimes, programs that started out promoting positive eugenics ended in negative eugenics. Galton himself preferred to emphasize positive eugenics. In 1925, Leonard Darwin wrote an article for the journal of the Eugenics Society, Eugenics Review, pushing the idea of locking up everyone whose genes might be considered defective. To save the human race, he said, force or compulsion "would be necessary in many cases." He promoted a policy that he called segregation, but he did not mean separating whites from blacks; he meant separating the fit from the unfit. "Compulsion is now permitted if applying to crimi-nals, lunatics, and mental defectives; and this principle must be extended to all who, by having offspring, would seriously damage future generations," he argued. Leonard Darwin's ideas were not dismissed; one of the British leaders who supported segregation was Winston Churchill. The leaders of the progressive movement in Britain also supported negative eugenics. The people who had founded the London School of Economics, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, were also leaders of the Fabian Society. (The Fabian Society later became one of Britain's major political parties, the Labour Party.) As early as 1909, the Fabians, led by the Webbs, said, "What we as eugenists have got to do is to 'scrap' the old Poor Law with its indis-criminate relief of the destitute as such and replace it by an intelligent policy of so altering the social environ-ment as to discour-age or prevent the multiplication of those irrevocably below the National Minimum of Fitness." In 1930, a Fabian leader,

Archibald Church, introduced a bill for eugenic sterilization. The purpose of the bill was to make sure that "those who are in every way a burden to their parents, a misery to themselves and in my opinion a menace to the social life of the community" would be unable to have children. If it was difficult to get more children from the fit, it might be easier to get fewer children from the unfit. Eugenics Abroad Britain was not the only nation affected by the eugenics movement. In 1912, delegates from around the world met for the First International Eugenics Congress. The second world eugenics congress met in 1921, and the third in 1932. Nations with eugenics activists included India, Australia, Canada, the United States, Germany, France, Japan, Mauritius, Kenya, South Africa. In 1908, an American group called the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene was established, triggering a new international movement for mental hygiene. It had two aims: to improve treatment for the insane, and to safeguard the mental health of the public. No one would argue with the first goal. But how do you guard the mental health of the public? In practice, this sweet-sounding goal became eugenics. By 1930, there were mental hygiene associations devoted to protecting the public from mental problems in 24 countries. The eugenics movement in Germany was very strong. In 1904 Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded a journal called the Archiv fur Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, or the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. In 1905, Ploetz and Dr. Ernst Rdin founded a German eugenics society, called the "Society for Racial Hygiene." Later they changed the name a little, adding the word suggested by Francis Galton: the "Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)." In his book Fundamental Outline of Racial Hygiene, Ploetz called for the elimination of "counter-selective processes." He was concerned about social processes that reversed the work of natural selection by eliminating the strong and favoring the weak. He did not like war, because it eliminates the strong. And he opposed charitable programs to protect the weak and the ill. He suggested that doctors who were present at the birth of a weak or malformed child could provide an easy death with a small dose of morphine. In 1922, a German lawyer named Karl Binding and a German psychiatrist named Alfred Hoche published a slim book with a clumsy title: Permission to Destroy Life Not Worth Living (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens). They argued in favor of euthanasia, or mercy killing. The cost of maintaining useless people was too high, and the government could spend the money on better things. Religious barriers should be pushed aside, so that the government could get on with the job of killing the physically and mentally defective (painlessly). Destroying useless lives was necessary for the survival of society as a whole, they wrote.

In 1935, a French-American Nobel Prize winner, Dr. Alexis Carrel, wrote Man the Unknown, in which he advocated building euthanasia institutions to deal with criminals and the mentally ill, using some suitable gas. Step by step, positive eugenics gave way to negative eugenics. In 1910, Francis Galton and the President of the new Eugenics Society, Montague Crackanthorpe, gave a reception for Ploetz in London. Later, Ploetz and his colleague Rdin built the German racial hygiene program, and both were ardent supporters of Hitler. Review of Chapter Two: Galton and the Eugenics Society 1. Who was Francis Galton? 2. What is positive eugenics? What is negative eugenics? 3. Identify the Eugenics Society and explain its influence briefly. 4. What is the London School of Economics, and what is its relevance to eugenics? 5. Did the idea of a master race affect other nations as well as Britain? Discuss: How much damage can ideas about a master race do?

Chapter Three:
Eugenics Takes Shape in America

From the beginning of American history, the goals and ideals of the nation have always been high, higher than Americans could reach easily. The Founding Fathers stated their belief that "all men are created equal," although John Adams and others had to force their friends to talk about the obvious inequality of slavery. From the first days of our history, there was a tension between high ideals and painful reality. Would Americans lower their ideals, or improve the real world? Every year, Americans have celebrated the Declaration of Independence, and repeated the inspiring words it contains. But at the same time, Americans held slaves, lied to Indians and drove them off the land, and took half of Mexico away in a display of contempt for neighbors south of the shifting border. Slavery, war against the Indians and contempt for the Mexicans all came before the eugenics movement. But when you look at these shameful parts of American history that do not in any way reflect respect for equality, it is easier to understand how eugenics could take root in a nation devoted to the principle of equality.

Slavery began in the English colonies in first generation. Colonial accounts record that in 1619, a Dutch ship arrived at Jamestown, and "sold us twenty negars." By the time of the Revolutionary War, there were nearly 700,000 slaves, in a total population of 2.5 million. In 1860, as the war that would free them approached, there were almost four million slaves. When the Constitution was adopted, it included a complicated formula for counting people in order to decide how many Representatives each state should have. The figure to be used was "determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons." The "three-fifths of all other persons" was a reference within the Constitution itself to the "peculiar institution" of slavery. Americans found it very hard to choose between the ideal of equality and the reality of slavery. The arrivals from Europe and their descendants who called themselves Americans had trouble with the Native Americans also. George Washington got his first military experience in a war against the French and Indians. Andrew Jackson entered history fighting the Indians in Florida. When William Henry Harrison ran for President, his campaign was based largely on his leadership in fighting Indians in the Midwest. American history includes a long list of broken promises, broken treaties, broken lives. Sometimes historians say that wars are inevitable when different ways of life collide, that the Indian way of life simply had to give way before the more advanced civilization of the European immigrants. But there are alternatives. In Mexico, for example, there is a spot called the Plaza of the Three Cultures, marking a battle between the Spanish conquistadores and the natives they encountered. After that battle, a new culture blending two old cultures was born. In much of Latin America -- in Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Bolivia and Peru -- over half of the population is Indian or people with mixed ancestry. To be sure, the Spaniards killed and enslaved many Indians, and racial and cultural difficulties persist; but the Indians were not wiped out or driven into reservations. American treatment of Mexico was not a source of pride. What happened was very simple: the United States wanted the land which is now New Mexico, Arizona and California, and took it. In his Memoirs, President Grant, who fought in the Mexican War, said, "For myself, I was bitterly opposed to the measure, and to this day regard the war, which resulted, as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory." One of the earliest and best known incidents in America's rich tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience was the act of Henry David Thoreau, who went to jail for a night when he refused to pay taxes to support the Mexican War. The justification for the war was summed up in the idea of "manifest destiny." The nation was destined for growth. The phrase was first used by John L. Sullivan in an article about Texas, but many other people seized upon it. The idea was that the United States was

superior in numbers, wealth and power; therefore, it could and should and would rule the continent. Might may not make right, but it builds nations. These shameful parts of American history are not examples of eugenics. Rather, they show that the nation has always been somewhat ambivalent about equality, and has not always lived up to its high ideals. Destructive ideas can take root here. When the eugenics movement began, there was precedent for such ideas, even though the nation had struggled to maintain its commitment to equality. American Eugenics Society When the idea of eugenics began to spread around the world, the United States was not left behind. Here, as in England, a group of people met to think about it and to make plans to implement it. In 1910, the Eugenic Record Office (ERO) was founded in New York. In 1916, the Birth Control Review was founded, a monthly journal advocating eugenics. There was a blizzard of groups set up to improve the human race that did not mention eugenics in their names, but still promoted it: the Brush Foundation for Race Betterment, the Dight Institute ("To promote Biological Race Betterment"), the Race Betterment Foundation (using money from Kellogg's corn flakes), the Human Betterment Foundation (advocating sterilization). Eugenics was everywhere. One way to get a handle on eugenics is to look at one organization, the American Eugenics Society (AES). It was and remains an influential group, bringing together many different strands of a sprawling movement. The AES was founded in 1922, building a network connecting many people involved in the eugenics movement. Officers of all the groups listed above joined the AES. The founders of the AES included Madison Grant, Henry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Henry Fairfield Osborn and Henry Crampton. Madison Grant was the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and wrote the preface to The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. These books promoted white supremacy, but with some urgency, explaining that the white "race" was losing ground to other people. Grant's words in The Passing of the Great Race explain one of the chief goals of the eugenics movement, including the AES, in the 1920s. Grant wrote that sterilization could "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." Henry H. Laughlin had been the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to 1921; later, he was President of the Pioneer Fund, a eugenics organization that still functions today. So the AES brought together activists from different eugenics groups. Irving Fisher taught political economy and economics at Yale University for 40 years. He said that the purpose of the AES was to "stem the tide of threatened race degeneracy" and

to protect the United States against "indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and race suicide." He affected the thinking of generations of leading economists. Henry Fairfield Osborn was the president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1933. He wrote about evolution in From the Greeks to Darwin. In 1923, during a national debate on restricting immigration, Osborn spoke enthusiastically about the results of intelligence testing carried out by the Army: "I believe those tests were worth what the war [World War I] cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice. . . . We have learned once and for all that the negro is not like us." The work of the AES included: racism and white supremacy, limiting births among the dysgenic, restricting immigration, sterilizing people with disabilities, and looking for ways to increase the number of people with good genes. Intelligence Tests To understand the impact of eugenics on the thinking of leaders, you have to look at IQ tests -- where they came from, who developed them, why, and what they expected from them. In particular, you need to understand what people expected from IQ testing. Lothrop Stoddard, for example, believed that millions of years of evolution were at stake, that the work of evolution could be lost irretrievably if the racial heritage of the intelligent people was lost. Stoddard believed that he had identified the most valuable treasures on earth: white people. He wanted to protect their heritage, with vast schemes. The schemes included laws restricting immigration and more laws against marriages between whites and nonwhites. He wanted to contain the spread of Asians and maintain white power over the wealth of the developing world. Intelligence testing can strengthen a destructive lesson that can be drawn from evolution. Evolution puts all life on a sliding scale that ascends step by step from tiny organisms to larger and more complicated life forms, and then finally to humanity. Darwin's followers in the early 20th century believed that the greatest achievement of the evolutionary process was the white race. By their understanding of the process, if whites were the best, then it was acceptable to ignore the welfare of non-whites, or even to hasten their extinction. Similarly, measuring intelligence puts everyone on a sliding scale of measurable value, and makes it tempting to encourage those with higher IQs while setting aside -- and even phasing out -- those with lower IQs. Mental Hygiene Movement

At the turn of the century, a new movement began, to address the problem of mental problems and treatment. The movement called itself the "mental hygiene" movement. Its starting point as an organized body was the Connecticut Society for Mental Hygiene, founded in 1908. The group had two goals, and both of them sound good: improving treatment of the insane, and safeguarding the public's mental health. But in practice, these goals can be polar opposites. The first goal, protecting the insane, is about the care and treatment of individuals. But the second goal is about the society which is afflicted by the presence of mental disease. That society can be "treated" by removing or by sterilizing the mentally ill -- or even by exterminating them. The central question is evaluating a program to address "mental hygiene" is whether it protects the dignity and worth of each patient, or whether the purpose is to "protect" society. The second goal can be used to justify barbarity. From the beginning of the mental hygiene movement, the first goal has served to shield the movement from scrutiny, sometimes making barbarity palatable. The Jukes and Kallikaks "studies" In 1877, Richard Dugdale published a study of a family whom he called the "Jukes" family. He referred to a mother several generations back in the family as "Margaret, the mother of criminals," and then studied her descendants. He said that in 75 years, her descendants had cost the state of New York over $1.25 million -- which, at the end of the 19th century, was a stupendous sum of money. Dugdale's book became very fashionable, and many other people wrote similar studies. Henry Goddard, a member of the AES, published one in 1912, tracing the descendants of a man whom he called Martin Kallikak, a fictitious name for a Revolutionary War soldier. According to Goddard's account, Martin seduced a feeble-minded girl, and she produced a feeble-minded son, who had 480 descendants (as of 1912). Of the 480, Goddard said, 33 were sexually immoral, 24 were drunkards, three were epileptics, and 143 were feeble-minded. To clarify the case, Goddard claimed that Martin married a young woman of normal intelligence, and they had 496 descendants, with no feebleminded children at all. Goddard's study seemed to provide evidence for a link between bad genes, feeble-mindedness and immoral behavior. Among the books in the new literary genre, the Kallikak case history was the most dramatic, and was cited often. The point of all the stories, of course, was that feebleminded people multiply like hamsters, dragging society down more and more in each generation. Allowing them to breed just makes a bad problem worse. Writers used Goddard's study to stir up prejudice against the disabled and to build support for eugenics programs. For example, in her book Woman and the New Race, Margaret Sanger (AES member) wrote: "The offspring of one feebleminded man named Jukes has cost the public in one way and another $1,800,000 in seventy-five years. Do we want more such families?"

Goddard's work went beyond his effort to link bad genes, weak brains and poor morals. He was one of the pioneers in the effort to measure intelligence. Like Galton, he believed that intelligence was an innate ability, rather than a set of abilities that a child develops under supervision and training. Like Galton, he thought that intelligence could be measured on a sliding scale. Galton's ideas about measuring intelligence attracted researchers in Europe and America. In France, Alfred Binet (1857-1911) developed tests to measure intelligence, and Lewis Terman (1877-1956) of Stanford University revised them for the United States. Terman was also a member of the Advisory Council of the AES. The Stanford-Binet tests are still used to measure one's intelligence quotient, or IQ. Goddard did research at the Training School for Feebleminded Boys and Girls in southern New Jersey, and he invented the word "moron" to describe some of the children there. Moron is the Greek word for fool, and Goddard used it to refer to people with an IQ of 50 to 75. Goddard was on a committee that developed IQ tests for the Army in World War I. Robert Means Yerkes (AES member) organized IQ testing for 1.7 million US Army recruits in 1919, and summarized his findings in Psychological Examining in the United States Army. This was the report that led to Henry Fairfield Osborn's nasty remark that World War I was worth the bloodshed because this book came out of it, and showed "once and for all that the negro is not like us." AES member: Lothrop Stoddard Stoddard was an eloquent white supremacist. He wrote a book explaining why he thought it was urgent for all white people to work hard to keep non-white people in their place. Many of his ideas were carried out. In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Stoddard summarized his views of global events, especially World War I, and their impact on what he called Red Man's Land, Black Man's Land, Brown Man's Land and Yellow Man's Land. Overall, he thought that the situation just before the war had been good. The white man had been "the indisputable master of the planet." White men had "swarmed for centuries to plant their laws, their customs, and their battle-flags at the uttermost ends of the earth." North America and Australia "had been made virtually as white in blood as the European motherland.; two other continents, South America and Africa, had been extensively colonized by white stocks; while even huge Asia had seen its empty northern march, Siberia, pre-empted for the white man's abode." And where the white man did not own the land, things were still not bad according to Stoddard's understanding, because there were vast areas where "uncounted myriads of dusky folk obeyed the white man's will." He summed it up: "In other words, of the 53,000,000 square miles which (excluding the polar regions) constitute the land area of the globe, only 6,000,000 square miles had non-

white governments." Nearly two-thirds of that was represented by China and its dependencies. However, World War I had spilled a great deal of white blood, and non-whites were asserting their strength. So Stoddard hoped to see several things happen. His plan included several short-term goals: (1) rework the treaty that ended World War I so that there would not be more war; (2) prevent any emigration (migration out) from Asia; and (3) strictly control immigration within the white areas. In the future, he hoped to see a new idealism based on biology, with more and more people understanding the importance of heredity and the "supreme value of superior stocks" (i.e., Galton's religion). He hoped that it would be possible to "exorcise the lurking spectre of miscegenation." He also wanted "segregation of defectives." Stoddard was casting about in his mind for a new way to think about humanity, a new consciousness. When he spoke of civilization, he skipped over the individual, and valued "germ-plasm" and the whole civilization. He said, "Civilization of itself means nothing. It is merely an effect, whose cause is the creative urge of superior germ-plasm." In chapter 11 of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Stoddard wrote: Fortunately, the majority of thinking Americans are to-day convinced that Oriental immigration must not be tolerated. Most of our leading men have so expressed themselves. For example, Woodrow Wilson, during his first presidential campaign, declared on May 3, 1912: "In the matter of Chinese and Japanese coolie [a disrespectful term for cheap laborers from Asia] immigration, I stand for the national policy of exclusion. The whole question is one of assimilation of diverse races. We cannot make a homogeneous population of a people who do not blend with the Caucasian race. Their lower standard of living as laborers will crowd out the white agriculturist and is in other fields a most serious industrial menace. The success of free democratic institutions demands of our people education, intelligence, and patriotism, and the State should protect them against unjust and impossible competition. Remunerative labor is the basis of contentment. Democracy rests on the equality of the citizen. Oriental coolieism will give us another race-problem to solve and surely we have had our lesson." (Quoted by Montaville Flowers, The Japanese Conquest of American Opinion, p. 23 (New York, 1917).) Fear of Babies Parents who love and cherish their children can often find it hard to understand how much fear they can inspire. But for centuries, ambitious rulers looking at babies have been able to see them as threats. The Egyptian Pharaoh who saw Hebrew children as serious enemies was only one example. The racist eugenics movement in the United States also displayed such a fear of babies. The following example is taken from an article (quoted by Stoddard) about Japanese immigration:

There may have been a time when an anti-Japanese land bill would have limited Japanese immigration. But such a law would be impotent now to keep native Japanese from possessing themselves of the choicest agricultural and horticultural land in California. For there are now more than 30,000 children in the State of Japanese parentage, native-born; they possess all the rights of leasing and ownership held by white children born here. . . . The birth statistics seem to prove that the danger is not from the Japanese soldiers, but from the picture brides. The fruitfulness of those brides is almost uncanny. . . . Here is a Japanese problem of sufficient gravity to merit serious consideration. We are threatened with an over-production of Japanese children. First come the men, then the picture brides, then the families. If California is to be preserved for the next generation as a 'white man's country' there must be some movement started that will restrict the Japanese birth-rate in California. When a condition is reached in which two children of Japanese parentage are born in some districts for every white child, it is about time something else was done than making speeches about it in the American Senate. . . . If the same present birth-ratio were maintained for the next ten years, there would be 150,000 children of Japanese descent born in California in 1929 and but 40,000 white children. And in 1949 the majority of the population of California would be Japanese, ruling the State. (The Literary Digest, August 9, 1919.) Infanticide The worst part of eugenics is that it calls for killing some people -- the weak, the "defective," the people with bad genes, those judged to be unfit. Galton preferred to talk about happier aspects of eugenics, but the dark side was always there. And in fact, some physicians did start practicing infanticide, killing -- or refusing to treat -- newborns they judged to be defective. One of the most dramatic cases of infanticide was the Baby Bollinger case. On November 12, 1915, Anna Bollinger gave birth to a boy with several serious problems. The child could live if a surgeon corrected some of the problems right away. But the hospital surgeon, Dr. Harry J. Haiselden, found the baby "defective," and decided not to operate. The baby's death five days later was the lead story in the Chicago Daily Tribune, and opened a national debate. In the extensive press coverage of the baby's death, Haiselden said that this was not the first case. He said he had diagnosed many other "defectives" over the previous decade, and had let them die. Other physicians came forward to say that they had done the same. Newspapers all over the nation covered the stories, and many of them supported infanticide. Some of Haiselden's supporters were predictable, including Charles Davenport, the founder of the Eugenics Record Office; Irving Fisher, a prominent eugenicist (and AES founder, a decade later); and Clarence Darrow, who would later defend eugenics in the Scopes trial. But there were many surprises. Helen Keller, who had been been blind and deaf, defended Haiselden, while John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Race Betterment Foundation, criticized infanticide. With the help of a friend, Haiselden wrote and starred in a motion picture about infanticide. It was entitled The Black Stork. Ads described it as

"a vivid pictorial drama that tells you why Dr. Haiselden is opposed to operating to save the lives of defective babies." One ad proclaimed that "Dr. Haiselden's photoplay The Black Stork will drive deformed babies from the country." It was shown from 1916 through the 1920s; a revised edition was shown in small theaters for another decade. Further Reading The annotated membership lists of the English and American eugenics societies are invaluable tools for anyone working to understand modern eugenics. They are available from LeMaitre Press, or on line at www.eugenics-watch.com. For more on eugenics and infanticide, see The Black Stork, by Martin S. Pernick, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Review of Chapter Three: Eugenics Takes Shape in America 1. What are the problems in American history that are like eugenics? What happened to the Indians? What happened to Americans of African descent? What is "manifest destiny"? 2. Identify the American Eugenics Society. 3. What is the "black stork"? 4. Explain the response of the eugenics movement to World War I. 5. What are IQ tests used for? Discuss: What is special about a human being?

Chapter Four:
Slamming the Doors Shut

Since it was dedicated in 1886, the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor greeted millions of immigrants sailing to the United States. In 1903, a poem by Emma Lazarus was inscribed on the pedestal, stating America's welcome for immigrants: Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame, With conquering limbs astride from land to land; Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand

Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame. "Keep ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!" The eugenics movement brought a desire for Greek-like fame, a desire for conquest -and a determination to avoid the contagion of the dysgenic tired, poor and huddled masses. The statue stayed in place, but in 1924 the doors of welcome slammed shut to many. Henceforward, immigrants would be scrutinized for their ability to enrich the nation. Lothrop Stoddard urged white Americans to stop ruining the country by letting weak people come in. A similar voice was Madison Grant, who wrote The Passing of the Great Race, published in 1916. Grant was concerned about blacks, but also about unrestricted immigration. In the first great wave of immigrants, from the 1830s to 1850, about five million people came to the United States from northern Europe -- from Germany, Ireland and Great Britain. In the second great wave, another ten million immigrants came, still with a majority from northern Europe. But more and more immigrants arrived from southern and eastern Europe -- from Italy, Russia and Austria-Hungary. Then between 1890 and 1930, 22 million people arrived, and this time the majority were from Greece, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Portugal, Russia and Spain. During this influx of non-blondes, Grant wrote about white supremacy, but more specifically about Nordic superiority. His book was a best-seller, and was reprinted many times, with revisions in 1918, 1920, and 1921. It was translated into German, French and Norwegian. There had been some concern about immigration before, but the eugenics movement brought a new, sharp focus. In 1882, Congress had passed two laws about immigration, one barring convicts and people likely to need public care, the other barring the Chinese. In 1907, the government made an agreement with Japan to limit Japanese immigration. In 1917, Hindus and some other Asians were excluded. But in 1921, Congress passed restrictions limiting the number of immigrants to 357,803 (not counting immigrants from North and South America). And that year, U.S. Rep. Albert Johnson, head of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, opened hearings on immigration. Johnson appointed Harry Laughlin as an expert witness on eugenics. Laughlin had worked with Charles B. Davenport to start the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in New York in 1910. Their intention was to provide statistical data for the study of human traits, and Davenport developed a questionnaire used by trained workers in door-to-door interviews, amassing 750,000 records by 1924. The mass of data -- the sheer

bulk of it -- was impressive even if it was worthless, and it gave credibility to pronouncements from the ERO. In his testimony to the Congressional committee, Laughlin relied heavily on intelligence tests, particularly the extensive testing that Robert Yerkes had done with Army recruits. He used them to argue that southern and eastern Europeans were not as intelligent as northern Europeans. He made racist arguments, but dressed them up as science. The eugenics movement persuaded policy-makers in the United States -- the nation of immigrants -- that unrestricted immigration was a serious threat to the nation's health. In 1924, the government passed the Johnson Act, setting limits on the number of immigrants who could come here from various nations. The limits were designed to encourage immigration from northern Europe and to discourage immigration from the rest of the world, southern Europe included. The law was effective; the number of immigrants plummeted. The Johnson Act turned out to be one of the most lethal bills ever passed. Fifteen years after its passage, Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany were refused asylum in America. It is not possible to know how many Jews would have fled to the United States if they had been welcome. Of the six million Jews who died under Hitler, would 10,000 have been saved by a more hospitable policy? Would half a million people have been saved? The annual immigration quota for Germany was 25,957. That is, 25,957 German people were allowed to move into the United States each year, but no more. The number of people who applied for visas during one year under Hitler was six times the quota. That is, well over 100,000 people applied for visas and failed to get them. Further, besides the people who applied, there must have been others who knew they were not welcome and did not even bother to try. A clear understanding of the impact of the Johnson Act requires a quick review of the expansion of Nazi power. Adolf Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933, assumed dictatorial power in March, and began to take steps against the Jews in April. In September 1935, Germany passed the Nuremberg laws, stripping Jews of the right to vote and prohibiting marriage between Jews and non-Jews. It is not fair to expect that everyone in the world would understand what was about to happen in Germany, but it was clear that the Jews there were in trouble. So in July 1938, representatives from 32 countries met in France to discuss the problem of refugees. They failed to get much done; in fact, most Western countries made it clear that they would not welcome Jewish refugees. On November 9-10, 1938, there was a night of terror for Jews, remembered as "Kristallnacht," or the "Night of the Broken Glass," when Nazis smashed Jewish shops all over Germany and Austria. The following spring, in 1939, there was a bill in Congress to permit an additional 20,000 refugees -- children -- to come to the United States. The bill died in committee.

In May 1939, the British government issued a new policy concerning Palestine, which they governed: no more than 75,000 Jewish refugees would be admitted there over the next five years. There is no doubt that the anti-immigration policy contributed to the deaths of many Jews. To say that the Johnson Act killed hundreds of thousands of people is a good guess, but only a guess. However, there were hundreds of people whose names are known without guesswork who sailed to the United States and were refused entry, who then returned to Europe and were killed by the Nazis. On May 15, 1939, the S.S. St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg, carrying 936 Jewish refugees bound for Cuba. Many of them hoped to go the United States eventually, but planned to wait for permission in Cuba. The ship arrived in Havana on May 27, and the refugees learned that the Cuban government had tightened its anti-immigration policies. Only 22 people were allowed to disembark. Police used spotlights on the harbor to make sure no one jumped overboard and tried to swim to relatives waiting in boats nearby. One passenger committed suicide. On June 2, the ship steamed out of Havana and sailed toward the United States. Despite frantic pleas to the government as they sailed slowly past Florida, the refugees never got permission to land. In fact, the Coast Guard shadowed the ship to make sure no one tried to swim ashore. On June 6, the ship turned back toward Europe, 913 refugees still aboard, while friends around the world tried desperately to open doors anywhere outside Nazi domination. At the last moment, France, Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands agreed to take them. However, Germany conquered three of these nations shortly afterwards, and many of the well-traveled fugitives were caught. Over 600 of the refugees who had seen the lights of Miami died in Nazi concentration camps. Further Research The Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, has deeply moving material about the plight of the S. S. St. Louis passengers. The tragedy was also described in Smithsonian Magazine, June 1995. Review of Chapter Four: Slamming the Doors Shut 1. What was the Eugenics Record Office? 2. Who was Harry Laughlin? 3. What was the Johnson Act? 4. What was the effect of the Johnson Act on Hitler's work? 5. When refugees were fleeing from Hitler, how close did they get before they were sent back to die?

Discuss: What is the impact of laws that restrict immigration on a program of eugenics?

Chapter Five:
Sterilizing the Unfit

The eugenics movement began as a pseudo-scientific study, but one with some practical applications. Restricting immigration was one practical step. The other major eugenics initiative of the 1920s was promoting sterilization of the unfit. Sterilization is a medical term which refers to killing germs. To keep a wound from becoming infected, physicians work hard to keep everything sterile. Before penicillin was discovered, wounds were sterilized by cauterization, searing the exposed flesh with redhot metal. Surgeons preparing to operate are scrupulous about the sterile field, the area covered with sheets that have been heated to kill all bacteria, and they use instruments that have been sterilized by heat or by immersion in alcohol. The eugenic sterilization campaign was not about colonies of bacteria; it was about colonies of feeble-minded people. The "germs" that the eugenicists wanted to kill were the germ cells of the unfit. When eugenicists talked about sterilization, they meant a procedure that would make a person incapable of having children. To sterilize someone, you can remove part of his or her reproductive system. If a surgeon removes the womb or uterus from a young woman, she cannot have children. This operation is called a hysterectomy. A responsible physician caring for a patient who has cancer of the uterus may treat her by removing her uterus; a eugenicist caring for the human race might remove a healthy uterus to rid society of future difficulties. Similarly, if a physician removes a young man's testicles -- or castrates him -- he will not have children. Castration is routine on farms; for example, beef comes from steers, which are castrated males. Routine or not, the operations can be physically and emotionally traumatic. It is possible to sterilize men and women using less serious operations. A doctor can cut the tubes that deliver the germ cells, the woman's ovum and the man's sperm. Cutting the tubes between a woman's ovaries and her uterus is called a salpingectomy. The comparable operation for a man is called a vasectomy. After these operations, the patient can still engage in sexual activity, but will not have children. In the 1920s, eugenicists in the United States and elsewhere pressed hard for sterilization laws, to give physicians and the heads of institutions the authority to sterilize their patients, with or without their consent. With (and sometimes without) these laws, they

sterilized tens of thousands of vulnerable people. Most of the operations were salpingectomies and vasectomies. American laws permitting sterilization of the feeble-minded began in Pennsylvania, in 1905. Fortunately, the governor vetoed the law immediately. But other states passed laws and began to implement them. The push for sterilization did not gain full steam, though, until after World War I. Then, with the IQ tests available, the mental health lobby began promoting eugenic sterilization. By 1930, 27 states had started sterilization campaigns. Other countries that passed or at least debated similar laws included Britain, South Africa, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Finland and Sweden, Norway and Switzerland. In the United States, eugenic sterilization continued for decades. In some states, laws permitted the operation, but few were done. Some states ended the practice. But by the mid-1950s, 27 states reported almost 60,000 sterilizations performed. California led the way, with two fifths of the total, or 19,985. More women than men were sterilized: 23,667 men compared to 35,519 women. Sterilizations reported in the U.S. at the height of the eugenics program up to January 1, 1957 Alabama Arizona California Connectic ut Delaware Georgia Idaho Indiana Buck v. Bell 871 a 2,490 pi 33 2,325 Montana Nebraska 256 852 South Carolina Mississip Minnesot 224 30 19,98 5 542 Iowa Kansas Maine Michigan 1,68 New 2 Hampshire 3,02 New 5 York 305 North Carolina 670 42 4,47 2 961 556 n 2,17 West 7 Virginia 201 Wisconsin 98 1,79 3 South Dakota Utah Vermont Virginia Washingto 779 732 252 6,68 3 685

3,55 North 0 Dakota 2,31 Oklahom 3 a 602 Oregon

The statistics do not show the inhumanity of the sterilization campaign. To understand what the eugenics movement did, it is important to look at specific examples. One of the most destructive dramas in the eugenics movement played out in central Virginia. Virginia's forced sterilization law was challenged in court immediately. The case involved a young woman named Carrie Buck, who lived in an institution for the feeble-minded near Lynchburg. The head of the hospital was enthusiastic about eugenics, and many women were sterilized there without their knowledge, let alone consent. The hospital decided to sterilize Carrie Buck openly, under the new law. There was a trial in Amherst, Virginia, and "experts" testified that she was feeble-minded. In fact, the experts testified that she was from a family of immoral degenerates. Carrie and her mother and her "illegitimate" daughter were all judged to be unfit. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, where Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the decision that opened the floodgates of forced sterilization and permitted 30 states to assault 60,000 people over the next 40 years. The key sentence in the decision was simple: "Three generations of imbeciles is enough." The Court voted 8-1 (with only Pierce Butler dissenting) to allow the states to sterilize the dysgenic. Who were these "three generations of imbeciles"? Generation of imbeciles #1. Emma Buck was not a model citizen. She lived in Charlottesville, with no fixed address, and got in various kinds of trouble. At some point, social workers decided that the time had come to get her off the streets, and there was a hearing to determine whether she was feeble-minded. The hearing was little more than a formality, but it was still degrading. Her inquisitor tested her ability to carry out simple tasks by demanding that she pick up a book and deliver it to someone else in the room. She ignored this demeaning request. Her refusal -- dignified or spunky or sullen, take your pick -- was taken as evidence of feeblemindedness, and Emma Buck was locked up in a hospital near Lynchburg. Generation of imbeciles #2. Emma had three children: Carrie, Doris and Roy. Carrie became pregnant when she was a teenager, so the Commonwealth sterilized her. Doris was also sterilized, although she didn't even know what they had done to her until a reporter showed her and her husband the hospital records decades later. Finally understanding why they had no children, she wept. Roy had three children, so the Buck family may have survived despite the grim determination of the eugenicists. When the mother, Emma, was locked up, Carrie was placed in foster care in Charlottesville. Things worked passably until she became pregnant. Years after the event, when she had no reason to lie (although there was no way to corroborate her story), she said that she became pregnant when her guardian's nephew raped her. Her guardian, whether or not he knew the father's identity, was apparently mortified by her pregnancy and swept her out of society along with her mother. Carrie was institutionalized because she was pregnant, which indicated to some people that she was an immoral, feebleminded, syphilitic Jukes & Kallikaks epidemic in the making. After some years in

the hospital near Lynchburg, she wangled her way out as a domestic worker, and made her way in the world. She married a local sheriff named William Eagle. After his death, she moved north to Front Royal, Virginia, where she picked apples and married Charles Detamore, an orchard worker. She did some cleaning and nursing. Her life was not extraordinary, but no one who knew her after she left Lynchburg ever considered her feeble-minded. Generation #3. Carrie's child, Vivian, was declared feeble-minded because she did not smile and coo at a social worker who visited her as an infant one afternoon. Vivian went to school in Charlottesville, and was a normal student. Despite her failure to coo as an infant, she was on the honor roll one spring. She died of the measles when she was eight. Three generations of imbeciles: a street person who didn't jump when ordered to do so, a rape victim, and an honor student. There was enough resistance to eugenic sterilization to prevent the campaign from sweeping the entire nation. And there were some heroes, including the lone dissenter on the Supreme Court, Justice Pierce Butler. Butler was a Roman Catholic, and while the decision was pending, critics wondered aloud whether he would be ruled by Rome and would vote against sterilization. In the end, Butler did not explain his vote; he simply noted that he dissented from the ruling. Eugenicists made repeated efforts to pass sterilization laws in Alabama, but they were stymied repeatedly by the Catholics there. Catholics were not a strong voting bloc; only three percent of the people were Catholic. But that handful worked very hard on this issue, and beat back the laws for several years. Further Reading This story of Carrie Buck is told in detail in an excellent book by J. David Smith and K. Ray Nelson, The Sterilization of Carrie Buck (Far Hills, NJ: New Horizon Press: 1989). The entire text of the Supreme Court decision follows.

Buck v. Bell
No. 292 SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES 274 U.S. 200 April 22, 1927 May 2, 1927

ERROR TO THE SUPREME COURT OF APPEALS OF THE STATE OF VIRGINIA

Syllabus 1. The Virginia statute providing for the sexual sterilization of inmates of institutions supported by the State who shall be found to be afflicted with an hereditary form of insanity or imbecility, is within the power of the State under the Fourteenth Amendment. P. 207 . 2. Failure to extend the provision to persons outside the institutions named does not render it obnoxious to the Equal Protection Clause. P. 208 . 143 Va. 310, affirmed. Opinions ERROR to a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia which affirmed a judgment ordering [p*201] the Superintendent of the State Colony of Epileptics and Feeble Minded to perform the operation of salpingectomy on Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in error. [p*205] HOLMES, J., Opinion of the Court Mr. JUSTICE HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court. This is a writ of error to review a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia affirming a judgment of the Circuit Court of Amherst County by which the defendant in error, the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck, the plaintiff in error, for the purpose of making her sterile. 143 Va. 310. The case comes here upon the contention that the statute authorizing the judgment is void under the Fourteenth Amendment as denying to the plaintiff in error due process of law and the equal protection of the laws. Carrie Buck is a feeble minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony above mentioned in due form. She is the daughter of a feeble minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded child. She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case in the Circuit Court, in the latter part of 1924. An Act of Virginia, approved March 20, 1924, recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, &c.; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who, if now discharged, would become [p*206] a menace, but, if incapable of

procreating, might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting with benefit to themselves and to society, and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, &c. The statute then enacts that, whenever the superintendent of certain institutions, including the above-named State Colony, shall be of opinion that it is for the best interests of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, &c., on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse. The superintendent first presents a petition to the special board of directors of his hospital or colony, stating the facts and the grounds for his opinion, verified by affidavit. Notice of the petition and of the time and place of the hearing in the institution is to be served upon the inmate, and also upon his guardian, and if there is no guardian, the superintendent is to apply to the Circuit Court of the County to appoint one. If the inmate is a minor, notice also is to be given to his parents, if any, with a copy of the petition. The board is to see to it that the inmate may attend the hearings if desired by him or his guardian. The evidence is all to be reduced to writing, and, after the board has made its order for or against the operation, the superintendent, or the inmate, or his guardian, may appeal to the Circuit Court of the County. The Circuit Court may consider the record of the board and the evidence before it and such other admissible evidence as may be offered, and may affirm, revise, or reverse the order of the board and enter such order as it deems just. Finally any party may apply to the Supreme Court of Appeals, which, if it grants the appeal, is to hear the case upon the record of the trial [p*207] in the Circuit Court, and may enter such order as it thinks the Circuit Court should have entered. There can be no doubt that, so far as procedure is concerned, the rights of the patient are most carefully considered, and, as every step in this case was taken in scrupulous compliance with the statute and after months of observation, there is no doubt that, in that respect, the plaintiff in error has had due process of law. The attack is not upon the procedure, but upon the substantive law. It seems to be contended that in no circumstances could such an order be justified. It certainly is contended that the order cannot be justified upon the existing grounds. The judgment finds the facts that have been recited, and that Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization, and thereupon makes the order. In view of the general declarations of the legislature and the specific findings of the Court, obviously we cannot say as matter of law that the grounds do not exist, and, if they exist, they justify the result. 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 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11. Three

generations of imbeciles are enough. [p*208] But, it is said, however it might be if this reasoning were applied generally, it fails when it is confined to the small number who are in the institutions named and is not applied to the multitudes outside. It is the usual last resort of constitutional arguments to point out shortcomings of this sort. But the answer is that the law does all that is needed when it does all that it can, indicates a policy, applies it to all within the lines, and seeks to bring within the lines all similarly situated so far and so fast as its means allow. Of course, so far as the operations enable those who otherwise must be kept confined to be returned to the world, and thus open the asylum to others, the equality aimed at will be more nearly reached. Judgment affirmed. MR. JUSTICE BUTLER dissents. Review of Chapter Five: Sterilizing the Unfit 1. What is "sterilization"? What is coercive sterilization, and why would anyone do it? 2. Describe briefly the American campaign for coercive sterilization. 3. Who was Carrie Buck, and why was she sterilized? 4. Identify Oliver Wendell Holmes. What did he say in his opinion in the Buck v. Bell case? 5. Who resisted coercive sterilization? Discuss: Is sexual activity public or private? Is marriage public or private? Is having children a public decision, or a private decision?

Chapter Six:
Eugenics Captures Feminism

One of the most important developments in the expansion of eugenics was its relationship with feminism. The alliance between the two movements was a curious tangle from the very beginning, and remains a tangle today. Feminists and eugenicists had very different goals, but some of them agreed about some things that they wanted in the short run. The person who brought the two movements together in an alliance that has lasted to this day was Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger was an eloquent writer, but Planned Parenthood has not made much of an effort to publish and distribute her books for the last 50 years. But if her followers did not want people reading her books,

her opponents did. When the copyright on her books finally expired and it became legal for anyone to publish them, Planned Parenthood's critics began to distribute her books, precisely because she was an eloquent eugenicist. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the legacy of Margaret Sanger still plagues us; she was an effective leader in the war to inflict contraception, sterilization and abortion on the world. She talked about the exaltation of joyful sex, but ended by trivializing human sexuality into barnyard activity. She talked about service to the poor, but she built an organization that has killed millions and millions of people, tiny children who were executed for the crime of being conceived in poverty. She helped to lay the foundations for global population control, pitting wealthy white nations against the rest of the world. Despite her influence, her work is often misunderstood. She is generally seen as some kind of feminist hero, when most of her work is better understood in terms of eugenics. She subverted feminism, betraying the idealists to power-hungry men. One way to understand her life's work is to examine the alliance between feminists and eugenicists that she built, an alliance that lasts to this day. Sanger wrote many things, but there were two books that show her thought especially clearly. Both were published when the American eugenics movement was just hitting its stride, and both were written to get feminists excited about eugenics. The title of one of these books, Woman and the New Race (New York: Brentano's 1920), shows exactly what Sanger is setting out to do, but readers today are so unaware of eugenics that they miss what was obvious then. The title would be clearer to us today if she had named the book Feminism and Eugenics, but it would not have been clearer to readers of the 1920s. They understood the title without difficulty, since there was so much talk at the time about building a new race, improving the human species through eugenics. The other book, Pivot of Civilization (New York: Brentano's 1922) has a less revealing title, but is nonetheless transparent when the reader knows a little about eugenics. The "pivot" is womankind. The new civilization that they can bring in, if they choose to do so, is one in which the next generation will be a new and improved product. Sanger's defenders, who are properly uncomfortable when her commitment to eugenics is exposed, make much of the fact that she offered some criticisms of eugenics. She asserted that the vision of the eugenicists was too limited or was impractical. But her criticisms of other eugenicists do not mean she was not one herself. She criticized eugenics, but from the inside. You can criticize your own ideology or religion in the third person. If a Catholic were to say, "The Catholic Church ought to pay a lot more attention to [pick a problem]," it would not in any way indicate distance from or disloyalty to the Church. Sanger was a member of the [English] Eugenics Society and the American Eugenics Society, and she joined those societies because she believed in their ideas. In the end, though, it does not matter whether she referred to eugenicists as colleagues or as competitors; what mattered was what she believed and taught. So what did she think?

She accepted the Malthusian theory that overpopulation is the root of all evil. In her view, a glut of humans was the root cause of warfare, low wages, famine and plague, to mention just a few. In Woman and the New Race, she wrote, "No despot ever flung forth his legions to die in foreign conquest, no privilege-ruled nation ever erupted across its borders, to lock in death embrace with another, but behind them loomed the driving power of a population too large for its boundaries and its natural resources." Her attitude toward human individuals is full of contempt, charging that "woman has, through her reproductive ability, founded and perpetuated the tyrannies of the Earth. Whether it was the tyranny of a monarchy, an oligarchy or a republic, the one indispensable factor of its existence was, as it is now, hordes of human beings -- human beings so plentiful as to be cheap, and so cheap that ignorance was their natural lot." Women who fail to adopt Sanger's theories were also objects of her scorn: "The creators of over-population are the women, who, while wringing their hands over each fresh horror, submit anew to their task of producing the multitudes who will bring about the next tragedy of civilization." Sanger charged that these uncooperative women are guilty not only of bringing in the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, but also a list of other evils: "While unknowingly laying the foundations of tyrannies and providing the human tinder for racial conflagrations, woman was also unknowingly creating slums, filling asylums with insane, and institutions with other defectives. She was replenishing the ranks of the prostitutes, furnishing grist for the criminal courts and inmates for prisons. Had she planned deliberately to achieve this tragic total of human waste and misery, she could hardly have done it more effectively." At the end of Woman and the New Race, Sanger described her goal, and again put feminism in a fascinating context. "What is the goal of woman's upward struggle?" she asked, then offered three possible answers: "Is it voluntary motherhood? Is it general freedom? Or is it the birth of a new race?" She embraces all three goals, and dozens of others, including an end to every evil known to humanity. But over and over, feminism is a means, and the end is an improved race: freedom and "voluntary motherhood" will "remake the world." Neither of these books has been easy to get in recent years. Planned Parenthood held the copyright on these books until they expired, and did not promote them, despite their eloquence. Slowly, the truth will come out: Sanger and her followers brought death and destruction for unborn children -- not to assert women's rights, but to build a master race. Further Reading Margaret Sanger's two books, Pivot of Civilization and Woman and the New Race, are now in the public domain, and are available (on disk please email for a copy) so that readers may judge for themselves what Margaret Sanger was about.

A Plan For Peace

by Margaret Sanger
Sanger's "Plan for Peace" was published in the journal she had founded, the Birth Control Review (April 1932, p. 107-8). A note with the article said it was a summary of an address before the New History Society, January 17th, in New York City. Her "Plan for Peace" as published in BCR is reproduced in its entirety here, with notes inserted. First, put into action President Wilson's fourteen points, upon which terms Germany and Austria surrendered to the Allies in 1918. [Sanger takes note of the existence of other peace plans.] Second, have Congress set up a special department for the study of population problems and appoint a Parliament of Population, the directors representing the various branches of science: [Sanger thought that the work of controlling population was a matter for science] this body to direct and control the population through birth rates and immigration, and to direct its distribution over the country according to national needs consistent with taste, fitness and interest of the individuals. [Is Sanger referring to religious opposition as a matter of taste?] The main objects of the Population Congress would be: a. To raise the level and increase the general intelligence of population. [positive eugenics] b. to increase the population slowly by keeping the birth rate at its present level of fifteen per thousand, decreasing the death rate below its present mark of 11 per thousand. c. to keep the doors of immigration closed to the entrance of certain aliens whose condition is known to be detrimental to the stamina of the race, such as feebleminded, idiots, morons, insane, syphilitic, epileptic, criminal, professional prostitutes, and others in this class barred by the immigration laws of 1924. [Sanger supported the antiimmigration laws.] d. to apply a stern and rigid [!] policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring. [Sanger supported eugenic sterilization.] e. To insure the country against future burdens of maintenance for numerous offspring as may be born of feebleminded parents by pensioning all persons with transmissible disease who voluntarily consent to sterilization. [Aware of the resistance to sterilization, Sanger supported paying bribes or "incentives."] f. To give certain dysgenic groups in our population their choice of segregation or sterilization. [What did she mean by a "dysgenic group"? Indians? How is this different

from objective "d" above?] g. to apportion farm lands and homesteads for these segregated persons where they would be taught to work under competent instructors for the period of their entire lives. The first step would thus be to control the intake and output of morons, mental defectives, epileptics. [Sanger used impersonal terms from industry -- intake, output -referring to the birth of vulnerable people. What is "intake"?] The second step would be to take an inventory of the secondary group such as illiterates, paupers, unemployables, criminals, prostitutes, dope-fiends; classify them in special departments under government medical protection, and segregate them on farms and open spaces as long as necessary for the strengthening and development of moral conduct. [Sanger proposed to use medical personnel for a government program that was not designed for the benefit of the patients.] Having corralled this enormous part of our population and placed it on a basis of health instead of punishment, it is safe to say that fifteen or twenty millions of our population would then be organized into soldiers of defense -- defending the unborn against their own disabilities. [The "defense" is that the unborn will be kept out of existence. Sanger's language inspires cynicism.] The third step would be to give special attention to the mother's health, to see that women who are suffering from tuberculosis, heart or kidney disease, toxic goitre, gonorrhea, or any disease where the condition of pregnancy disturbs their health are placed under public health nurses to instruct them in practical, scientific methods of contraception in order to safeguard their lives -- thus reducing maternal mortality. [Sanger proposed to use maternal health programs to push contraception.] The above steps may seem to place emphasis on a health program instead of on tariffs, moratoriums and debts, but I believe that national health is the first essential factor in any program for universal peace. With the future citizen safeguarded from hereditary taints, with five million mental and moral degenerates segregated, with ten million women and ten million children receiving adequate care [in her view, care is adequate if it includes contraception], we could then turn our attention to the basic needs for international peace. There would then be a definite effort to make population increase slowly and at a specified rate, in order to accommodate and adjust increasing numbers to the best social and economic system. In the meantime we should organize and join an International League of Low Birth Rate Nations to secure and maintain World Peace.

A short article following Sanger's "Plan for Peace" in the Birth Control Review referred to the views of a prominent economist and officer of the Eugenics Society: "Professor John Maynard Keynes, eminent authority on post-war economic problems, speaks of contraceptive information as the most important aid on the political horizon and says that without it we might as well throw all treaties into the waste basket." Sanger had powerful support for her view that peace required population control. Review of Chapter Six: Eugenics Captures Feminism 1. Who were the "suffragists" and what did they do? 2. Who was Margaret Sanger? Was she a feminist or a eugenicist? 3. What is the "pivot" of civilization, in Sanger's view? When Sanger wrote about a "new race," what did she mean? 4. What did Sanger mean by "segregation"? Describe Sanger's "Peace Plan." 5. What are the links between Planned Parenthood and the American Eugenics Society? Discuss: What is the relationship between eugenics and feminism?

Chapter Seven:
Laws Against Mixing Races

The Children of the Slaves Racial tension in America has a long history, and it certainly did not end when the Civil War (or War between the States) was over in 1865. One powerful white supremacist group, the Ku Klux Klan (or KKK), was started within a year of the end of the war, led by Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general. The Klan grew for several years, but was suppressed by the Federal government after Congress passed the Force Bill in 1871, giving Federal troops authority to attack the Klan. In 1877, Federal troops withdrew from the South, and in 1890 Southern states began passing laws that took away the voting rights of blacks. Blacks organized in many different ways to protect their gains. In 1881, Booker T. Washington organized a new school for blacks, Tuskegee Institute. In 1909, W.E.B. Du Bois, the first black to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard, was among the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The following year, the National Urban League was founded to help blacks who were moving from rural to urban life.

In 1915, the Ku Klux Klan was re-organized, and it attracted over two million members. It opposed everything and everyone it considered un-American, including blacks, immigrants, Jews and Catholics. The KKK was strongest in the South, but had followers across the country. So the eugenics movement did not invent racism. However, it did strengthen it, and provided a pseudo-scientific basis for it. The great push of the eugenics movement to stop marriages between blacks and whites drew from the racism of the time. In the 1920s, eugenicists passed laws in more than half of the states that prohibited such marriages. The language of race The English language has a variety of words that refer to children whose parents have different racial backgrounds. Creole refers to a person born in an area that was not native to his ancestors, like the descendants of French-Canadians in Louisiana or descendants of the Spanish in Jamaica. A mestizo is a person with one white (especially Spanish or Portuguese) parent and one Indian parent. Other terms that were used in years past included: mulatto, referring to a person with one white parent and one black parent; quadroon, referring to a person with one white and one mulatto parent; and octoroon, referring to a person with one white and one quadroon parent. (Today, when any such identification is thought necessary, the terms that people generally use are bi-racial or mixed-race.) The eugenics movement drew some of its inspiration from the Greeks, who had discussed breeding horses, dogs and humans, and breeding horses remained a matter of interest. Harry Laughlin did research on thoroughbred horses. One of the mottoes used by the American Birth Control League was "breeding a race of thoroughbreds," referring to humans but using the language of stables and barnyards. One of the stable-based terms formerly used to refer to a person with one white and one black parent was mulatto. The word was used before the eugenics movement developed. It is taken from the Spanish word for a young mule, mulato. A mule is the offspring of a male donkey and a female horse (or mare). The progeny of a female donkey (or jennet) and a male horse (or stallion) is a hinny. Crossing the breeds is an old practice with familiar results; few breeders want hinnies, but many breeders produce mules, which combine the strength and hardiness of the parent species. Mules are usually sterile, because of the mixture of genes. The use of the word mulatto to refer to humans with mixed parents brings up a series of questions. The word was used because the parents are different. But just how different are they? These are the questions that lead to racism: Are whites and blacks from different species? Will their offspring be an improvement over the parents like a mule, or a step down like a hinny? Eugenicists understood that biracial people are not sterile like mules, but still they feared that if whites and blacks intermarried, both of them could disappear over time.

Lothrop Stoddard (author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy) stated his concern, and was characteristically blunt: if intermarriage continued unchecked, the whites would disappear. Recall that for Stoddard and many others, the most advanced species on earth was not mankind in general, but the white man.* In their understanding, wiping out or weakening the most advanced creature on the face of the earth would set back the clock of evolution -- not by a few centuries, but by ages. Progress -- which was God's great work, or was perhaps the real name of God -- could be defeated by inter-racial marriage. The opponents of mixed marriages dispensed with fine distinctions; they opposed any mixing of races or genes, which they called miscegenation. And they wrote laws to ban the practice. In all, 30 states passed anti-miscegenation laws that stayed on the books until the advent of the civil rights movement. Of these, 16 kept their laws on the books until the Supreme Court threw them out in 1967: Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia. Another 14 states passed antimiscegenation laws, but repealed them in the 1950s or 1960s: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Indiana, Maryland, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. For example, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 made it "unlawful for any white person in this state to marry any save a white person, or a person with no other admixture of blood than white and American Indian." In writing the statute, one of the challenges that the Virginia racists faced was their own proud history. According to a publication from the Registrar of the State Bureau of Vital Statistics, the law had to take account of "the desire of all to recognize as an integral and honored part of the white race the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas." Because of the Pocahontas loophole, you could have a little Indian blood (one great-great-grandparent) and still be counted as white. But "every person in whom there is ascertainable any negro blood shall be deemed and taken to be a colored person." The law automatically voided all marriages between whites and blacks. The law prohibited leaving the state to get married and then returning, and specified that the "fact of their cohabitation here as man and wife shall be evidence of their marriage." The penalty was stiff: "If any white person intermarry with a colored person, or any colored person intermarry with a white person, he shall be guilty of a felony and shall be punished by confinement in the penitentiary for not less than one nor more than five years." Virginia judges continued to defend anti-miscegenation laws for decades. In 1955, the State Supreme Court of Appeals decided that the laws served legitimate purposes, including: "to preserve the racial integrity of its citizens," and to prevent "the corruption of blood," "a mongrel breed of citizens," and "the obliteration of racial pride."

The trial that eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, where antimiscegenation laws were overturned, involved a Virginia couple, Mildred Jeter and Richard Loving. On January 6, 1959, they pleaded guilty to the charge of miscegenation, and were sentenced to a year in jail, which they could avoid by leaving Virginia and staying out for 25 years. The trial judge said: Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix. The Lovings left Virginia for awhile, but in 1963 they challenged the law in Federal court. When the anti-miscegenation laws were finally toppled in 1967, the U.S. Supreme Court said (in Loving v. Virginia) that distinctions between citizens solely because of their ancestry was "odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality." The Tuskegee Scandal Racism and eugenics came together to produce odious laws, but also to create one of the worst scandals in the history of medicine. In 1929 researchers from New York decided to observe the course of a disease if it was not treated at all. They recruited hundreds of poor black men with syphilis, and watched them for 40 years -- without treating them. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease; untreated, it can lead to tumors, blindness, deafness, paralysis and death. In 1925, there was a meeting of the Advisory Council of the Milbank Fund, a philanthropic group that worked "for the promotion of health, the lowering of the death rate, the increasing of the efficiency rate and the lengthening of the average American life." The council discussed care of the elderly, and the meeting was downbeat. According to a report in Birth Control Review (January 1925, p. 22), they were asking questions like, "Is it really worthwhile to live long?" and "How much are we willing to pay, in cash, for added years of existence?" One participant, Dr. William H. Welch, Director of the School of Hygiene of Johns Hopkins University, asked, "Aren't we just keeping the unfit alive at the expense of the fit instead of letting nature do the weeding?" While that meeting was about care of the elderly, a few years later, the Milbank Fund put up cash for a callous study of "letting nature do the weeding." Starting in 1929, Milbank provided the funds to recruit the victims of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, by offering to pay $50 apiece for their burial expenses. In 1932, the federal government took over the study, but Milbank continued to pay for the burials. After treatment for syphilis became available in 1936, the men were still not told they had syphilis, still not treated. They were told only that they had "bad blood." The governmental body that took charge of the study was the U. S. Public Health Service, which is led by the U. S. Surgeon General. The Surgeon General at that time was Dr.

Hugh S. Cumming, who had been a member of the Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society in its early days and lent his prestige to the organizers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics. The purpose of the Public Health Service is to protect the health of society. When an epidemic is spreading, it is the PHS that has responded, by necessary but inconvenient means like imposing quarantines on ships that may be carrying infected passengers. A quarantine -- isolating people who may be carrying a contagious disease -- makes sense when you are fighting smallpox. But there is a danger of abusing quarantines. For example, many eugenicists wanted to impose a quarantine of the "feeble-minded," in order to keep them from breeding. When Robert Yerkes ran his intelligence tests that were used to justify laws restricting immigration, he was working for the Public Health Service. And the anti-immigration laws were understood at least in part as a public health measure. Apparently, it was easy for public health concerns to blur the differences between contagious diseases, mental problems, and even unwanted ethnic groups. And syphilis among blacks seemed to combine these issues. Different Ways to Accommodate Tuskegee was built by Booker T. Washington, a great man who became a controversial figure. Washington urged blacks to be accommodating, to work hard to excel in a predominantly white culture. This approach came under fire from more aggressive leaders, including W. E. B. DuBois, a founder of the NAACP. But DuBois made a number of accommodations himself. He was a Harvard graduate, and had lived among people who considered themselves to be the natural leaders of the nation and world. At some point, he adopted the view that eugenics made sense. But obviously, his version of eugenics was not pure white supremacy like Lothrop Stoddard's. Instead, DuBois thought that each race had some desirable and some undesirable citizens. His view of eugenics was not explicitly racist, but was still useful to racists, who could argue that one race had many desirable citizens, and another race had many undesirables. Review of Chapter Seven: Laws Against Mixing Races 1. Explain the terms half-breed, mulatto, quadroon, octoroon, miscegenation. 2. What is the KKK? 3. What was the purpose of anti-miscegenation laws? 4. What was the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and who ran it? 5. What is the Public Health Service, and how did they get involved in the Tuskegee experiment? Discuss: Which of the following is a social disease, and why: syphilis, miscegenation, racism.

Did the Surgeon General Know? Hugh S. Cumming was U.S. Surgeon General from 1920 to 1936, the period when the Tuskegee Syphilis Study began, under the U.S. Public Health Service. He was succeeded by Thomas Parran, who was Surgeon General during twelve years of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, from 1936 to 1948. In 1944, Parran wrote an extensive paper on how to reorganize the U.S. Public Health Service for the next ten years. Venereal disease takes only one page out of well over 500 pages; the subject was minor in the government's organizational scheme. But Parran was an expert on syphilis; he wrote two books about it. He was keenly aware of the devastation caused by the disease, and wrote about the need to treat patients at all stages. However, the Tuskegee syphilis study, in which hundreds of poor black men with syphilis were left untreated so that researchers could observe the course of the disease, went forward while he was running the Public Health Service, and reports about the progress of the study went to the PHS regularly. This cruel experiment is among the most outrageous abuses of trusting patients in medical history.

*Havelock Ellis, a prominent eugenicist, wrote an article about Stoddard's book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy in which he criticized Stoddard's fixation on "the Nordic peoples." But Ellis does not challenge the idea of white supremacy, he just thinks that non-Nordic Europeans should get their due. (See Birth Control Review, October 1920, p. 15.) BACK

Chapter Eight:
The Scopes Trial

In 1925, there was a minor criminal trial in a small town in Tennessee that riveted the attention of the nation, because it focused on some issues of eugenics. The focus was not clear and sharp; neither side presented its arguments with complete clarity, and the word eugenics was never used in the trial. But many issues came out clearly. The trial was The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes. It was sometimes called more simply "the monkey trial." It concerned a teacher who broke the state's law against teaching the theory of evolution in a public school. The trial lasted eight days, getting press coverage all over the nation. Scopes was convicted, but that was a trivial detail. The real question was about the relationship between science and faith in American life. A play about the trial, called Inherit the Wind, simplified and distorted the real events; this

bit of fiction left many people thinking that they had to choose between scientific progress and religious teaching. Clarence Darrow, who was recognized as one of the best trial lawyers in the nation, defended Scopes; he spoke of the trial "as if it was a death struggle between two civilizations." William Jennings Bryan, a Midwest politician who had been candidate for President of the United States three times, took part in the prosecution; he said the case was a "battle-royal between unbelief that attempts to speak through so-called science and the defenders of the Christian faith." The Offending Book Scopes taught science, including biology, at the Rhea County Central High School in Dayton, Tennessee. In 1925, during the spring semester of his first year as a teacher, the state passed a law against teaching evolution. Scopes thought that he could not teach biology properly without teaching evolution, and considered the law to be unconstitutional. He broke the law, and was arrested for it. The statute said that it was unlawful "to teach any theory that denies the story of Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible, and to teach instead that man has descended from a lower order of animals." The book that Scopes used was A Civic Biology Presented in Problems, by George William Hunter. The book, published in 1914, had been used in Tennessee for some years. The book presents standard biological facts about cells, muscles, respiration and such topics; but it also teaches eugenics. The title Civic Biology is similar to one of the phrases used to refer to eugenics, "social biology." In a front page of the book, facing the title page, there is a mild but clear piece of propaganda. There are two photographs, a city street and a country lane. The caption: "Compare the unfavorable artificial environment of a crowded city with the more favorable environment of the country." Chapter 14 includes the material on evolution, with protozoa, worms, insects, reptiles, birds and mammals. Man is grouped with the apelike mammals. Hunter writes that "there is an immense mental gap between monkey and man" [emphasis added]. He adds that monkeys "seem to have many of the mental attributes of man," and this "justifies his inclusion with man in a separate mental genus." Hunter states that "early man must have been little better than one of the lower animals." The chapter concludes with a claim of white supremacy. Later in the book, in chapter 17, Hunter returns to the subject of eugenics. "If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved upon, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection."

In marriage, Hunter says, there are some things that "the individual as well as the race should demand." To have children with tuberculosis, syphilis, epilepsy or feeblemindedness is "not only unfair but criminal." He reviews the Jukes and Kallikaks stories, the family trees that were supposed to show the need for eugenics (see chapter 3), and says that there are hundreds of families like them. He calls them "true parasites," and says, "If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading." The book would not be acceptable in any school system in the United States today, because of the things that it says about the poor, blacks, and people with disabilities. When people talk about the Scopes trial, their ideas are usually shaped by the distorted propaganda in the movie, not by the actual trial. The real event concerned a book that asserted the supremacy of whites, encouraged contempt for the poor, and hinted at forced sterilization or even more violent acts. Testimony at the Trial The first witness for the defense was Maynard M. Metcalf, a member of the American Eugenics Society. Metcalf was a zoologist, and he described evolution in general terms. Darrow intended to teach the jury about evolution with a series of witnesses, but the judge excluded all such testimony and asked the jury to ignore as much of it as they had already heard. Darrow submitted a series of statements by scientists, which became part of the public debate but not the criminal trial. Scopes himself never testified at his own trial. He spoke briefly when he was sentenced -he was convicted and got the minimum penalty ($100 fine), which he called unjust. The real action at the trial was a debate between William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow. In fact, Darrow called Bryan (a lawyer for the prosecution) as a witness and interrogated him. Their whole debate was stricken from the official record of the trial, when the judge decided it was all irrelevant to the charge against Scopes. But for the press and for history, this was the real show. On the witness stand, Bryan defended the Bible, but did not insist on a literal interpretation of every line in Genesis. When Darrow asked about the six days of creation, Bryan said "I do not think it necessarily means a twenty-four hour day." When Darrow pressed him about whether they were literal days, Bryan replied, "My impression is that they were periods, but I would not attempt to argue as against anybody who wanted to believe in literal days." The debate referred to evolution in general, but it was the beginnings of human life that people really cared about. The Tennessee law did not prohibit teaching that monkeys were descended from protozoa; it prohibited teaching that man is descended from lower animals. Bryan wrote a summation of the case for the jury (which he did not give, because both sides agreed to dispense with arguments) which was later published. In it,

he attacked "evolution," saying, "Its only program for man is scientific breeding, a system under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind -- an impossible system!" Bryan's word was evolution, but he described eugenics. Bryan said that the views taught by Scopes were the unrelenting enemy of the Gospel: "Darwin says that science has nothing to do with the Christ ... and yet this spirit is the only hope of human progress. A heart can be changed in a twinkling of an eye and a change in the life follows a change in the heart. If one heart can be changed, it is possible that many hearts can be changed, and if many hearts can be changed, it is possible that all hearts can be changed -- that a world can be born in a day. It is this fact that inspires all who labor for man's betterment. It is because Christians believe in individual regeneration and in the regeneration of society through the regeneration of individuals that they pray, 'Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.'" Bryan charged that evolutionary views "if taken seriously and made the basis of a philosophy of life ... would eliminate love and carry man back to a struggle of tooth and claw." He quoted a recent publication from Britain which said, "The greatest danger menacing our civilization is the abuse of the achievements of science. Mastery over the forces of nature has endowed twentieth century man with a power which he is not fit to exercise. Unless the development of morality catches up with the development of technique, humanity is bound to destroy itself." At the end of the 20th century, most readers would agree with Bryan's point that science without morality can destroy humanity, because we have seen the power of the nuclear bomb. But there is still a great deal of debate about whether biological sciences without morality can be as destructive as physics without morality. "Science," Bryan said, "has made war more terrible than it ever was before. ... If civilization is to be saved from the wreckage threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene [i.e., Jesus Christ]."

William Jennings Bryan and the gold standard

Bryan ran for President three times as the candidate of the Democratic Party. He is remembered principally for arguing against the gold standard. The gold standard was not eugenics in disguise, but there is a point worth noting. The question was: should paper money be backed up by gold sitting in a vault somewhere, or would it be acceptable to have paper money backed by silver as well? Bankers in the East wanted to stick with the gold standard; Bryan spoke for people who wanted a more relaxed money policy.

The point that is relevant here is simple. Malthus and his followers argued that the resources of the world are limited, and that a growing population will eventually bump against that ceiling and people will starve. More hopeful people argue that the resources of the world are immense, and can be increased by care and hard work. There is a limited amount of gold in the world. If the wealth of the globe is measured in gold, then the wealth is limited. Bryan spoke for the people who looked at the vast nation and saw immense wealth that could not and should not be limited by the amount of gold in a vault somewhere. Pushing Faith and Science Apart Bryan defended the Bible, and made predictions about the eugenics ideology that were borne out a few years later. However, he did not make a clear distinction between real science and false ideologies promoted by some scientists. He described at length how Charles Darwin had lost his faith as he developed his theories, and defended the Bible against Darwin's ideas. In retrospect, some people argue that Bryan might have served the truth better if he had defended the Bible and also urged more careful scientific research that might have answered Darwin's questions. Darrow and the other lawyers who were defending Scopes offered a number of interesting ideas about how to reconcile religion and science. However, they undercut any impact those ideas might have had by picking unnecessary fights. Twice, Darrow spent time objecting to the prayers that different pastors offered at the beginning of the day in court. He made himself look like an opponent of religion in general. Darrow and the others put a lengthy series of statements from various scientists into the record of the trial. After introducing the expert testimony, Darrow picked an unnecessary fight about religion, asking that the judge remove a sign that said, "Read Your Bible." The extensive testimony from experts -- that Darrow was urging the nation to read, whether or not the jurors heard it all -- included many arguments about ways that you could fit the Bible and evolution together. But all those lengthy and sometimes technical arguments were completely boring compared to Darrow's antics and the response he got. One of the attorneys for the prosecution argued for keeping the sign up, speaking out heatedly against "a force that is aligned with the devil." If people cannot remind each other to read the Bible, he said, "that then is time for us to tear up all of the Bibles, throw them in the fire and let the country go to Hell." An officer trying to restore order in the court said, "People, this is no circus. There are no monkeys up here." Darrow suggested that they put up a second sign, saying, "Read your evolution." How do you get back from that to an analytical study of variation and heredity, or 129 different species of beetles on the island of St. Helena, in the testimony of the scientific

expert whose testimony was submitted for the record just before the ruckus? The judge had the sign removed, but the damage was done. To this day, the trial is often remembered as "the monkey trial." An exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington about the history of science has a panel about the trial. As you walk past the exhibit, the image that catches your eye is a monkey. Review of Chapter Eight: The Scopes Trial 1. What was the Scopes trial about? 2. What did the textbook used in Tennessee say about eugenics and white supremacy? 3. In the trial, what predictions did William Jennings Bryan make? Was he right? 4. What impact did the American Eugenics Society have on the Scopes trial? 5. During the trial, did reporters focus on monkeys or on white supremacy? Since then, has the emphasis changed? Discuss: In 1998, an article in Newsweek explored the ways scientists (including physicists and astronomers) and theologians were getting past the sense that science and faith are at war. But none of the scientists in the article were biologists. Why? Was this just an accident?

A Civic Biology Presented in Problems

by George William Hunter, A.M.
American Book Company -- New York, Cincinnati, Chicago -- copyright 1914 The book that John Scopes was using when he broke Tennessee's law banning the teaching of evolution was Hunter's Civic Biology. Most of the book is straightforward biology, but it also presents some of the author's views and values, including eugenics, white supremacy, contempt for people with disabilities and an impatience with charity. Excerpts follow. Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 195-196 Evolution of Man. -- Undoubtedly there once lived upon the earth races of men who were much lower in their mental organization than the present inhabitants. If we follow the early history of man upon the earth, we find that at first he must have been little better than one of the lower animals. He was a nomad, wandering from place to place, feeding upon whatever living things he could kill with his hands. Gradually he must have learned to use weapons, and thus kill his prey, first using rough stone implements for this purpose. As man became more civilized, implements of bronze and of iron were used. About this time the subjugation and domestication of animals began to take place. Man then began to cultivate the fields, and to have a fixed place of abode other than a cave. The beginnings of civilization were long ago, but even to-day the earth is not entirely

civilized. The Races of Man. -- At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; The American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest type of all, the caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America. Hunter's Civic Biology, p. 261-265 Improvement of Man. -- If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of the future generations of men and women on the earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection. This improvement of the future race has a number of factors in which we as individuals may play a part. These are personal hygiene, selection of healthy mates, and the betterment of the environment. Eugenics. -- When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeblemindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics. The Jukes. -- Studies have been made on a number of different families in this country, in which mental and moral defects were present in one or both of the original parents. The "Jukes" family is a notorious example. The first mother is known as "Margaret, the mother of criminals." In seventy-five years the progeny of the original generation has cost the state of New York over a million and a quarter dollars, besides giving over to the care of prisons and asylums considerably over a hundred feebleminded, alcoholic, immoral, or criminal persons. Another case recently studied is the "Kallikak" family. (Footnote: The name Kallikak is fictitious.) This family has been traced back to the War of the Revolution, when a young soldier named Martin Kallikak seduced a feeble-minded girl. She had a feeble-minded son from whom there have been to the present time 480 descendants. Of these 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feeble-minded. The man who started this terrible line of immorality and feeble-mindedness later married a normal Quaker girl. From this couple a line of 496 descendants have come, with no cases of feeble-mindedness. The evidence and the moral speak for themselves! Parasitism and its Cost to Society. -- Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on

society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites. The Remedy. -- If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with some success in this country. Blood Tells. -- Eugenics shows us, on the other hand, in a study of the families in which are brilliant men and women, the fact that the descendants have received the good inheritance from their ancestors. The following, taken from Davenport's Heredity in Relationship to Eugenics, illustrates how one family has been famous in American History. ... Euthenics. -- Euthenics, the betterment of the environment, is another important factor in the production of a stronger race. The strongest physical characteristics may be ruined if the surroundings are unwholesome and unsanitary. The slums of a city are "at once symptom, effect and cause of evil." A city which allows foul tenements, narrow streets, and crowded slums to exist will spend too much for police protection, for charity, and for hospitals. Every improvement in surroundings means improvement of the chances of survival of the race. ... In the final section of the excerpts from Hunter's book, notice the way he talks about the environment. First, even when he is focusing on the environment, his concern is about how to strengthen the race. Second, he talks about the race and then about "characteristics" of a person, skipping any mention of the person. Third, although he does not state it explicitly, it is clear that the damage to the environment which he describes is caused by dysgenic people. Finally, note that he is concerned not only about improving life, but about the survival of the race.

Chapter Nine:
World War II and the Nazi Holocaust

The massive slaughter that Adolf Hitler caused in Germany and all Europe is well known. His unreasoning and violent hatred of Jews is also well known. The purpose of

this chapter is not to describe World War II in detail, nor to describe the Holocaust in detail. The purpose of this chapter is to put German eugenics in context, to see how much evil came of Social Darwinism (in conjunction with other causes), and to understand some of the links between eugenics in Germany and eugenics elsewhere. One of the bizarre aspects of education in America today is that so many students have heard of World War II, but have not heard of eugenics. World War II was in many ways a continuation of World War I; both wars were started by Germans who believed in a version of eugenics theory, and felt that a racially superior people deserved more land. The most horrifying aspects of World War II were the labor camps and death camps, designed to use and kill people considered to be inferior, particularly Jews. To understand the camps, you must understand Europe's long history of antisemitism -- and also the shorter history of eugenics. Adolf Hitler hated Jews and tried to exterminate them. Much of his explanation for hatred is based on eugenics. How can anyone begin to understand World War II if they don't understand eugenics? Further, Hitler and his supporters knew that their ideas about building a better race had support outside Germany. French and British eugenicists did not want a war with Germany, but they understood Hitler's racial goals. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in England, Marshal Philippe Ptain in France, and the leading advocate of neutrality in the United States, Charles Lindbergh, were all supportive of eugenics and were all members of eugenics societies at some point. At the end of the nineteenth century, Europe was confidently carving up the globe, establishing empires. There were both winners and losers among the Europeans: Spain's empire had shrunk, Portugal's had shrunk and France's had declined, while the British Empire had grown. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was huge. Italy, Belgium and the Netherlands had ambitions. On the other side of the ocean, America had spread across an entire continent, and had acquired Cuba and the Philippines. But Germany had been left out of the land grabs. Germany had access to the ocean, but had never been a great sea power. When Germans thought about expansion, they did not plan expeditions overseas; they looked at their neighbors. So when they launched World War I, they attacked other European nations. A mixture of motives drove Hitler and his followers. They wanted land for the German people, land like the colonies that their neighbors had amassed overseas, land to grow into -- lebensraum. They had a lust for power, the desire to establish themselves as the rulers of the continent, imitating the heroic Romans -- and using the title Kaiser, or Caesar. They wanted a rematch to end the humiliation of Versailles, the treaty that ended World War I and imposed crippling conditions on Germany. Eugenicists in other parts of the world argued that the desire for land was a failure of their movement. They said that a proper regimen of population control would keep people content within their borders, and would make wars of conquest unnecessary. So it

may be unfair to charge the eugenics movement with encouraging the Germans to go to war for land. However, Hitler's lust for power was unmistakably a form of eugenics. He believed passionately in improving the human race. His conviction that the Aryans were the peak of evolution, and that the world would be better off if the Aryans controlled more of the world more firmly, were ideas that circulated in the eugenics movement. It is nonsense to try to understand World War II without looking at the thinking of the man who led Germany to war. To understand how this huge slaughter came about, we must understand the thinking of Adolf Hitler. And his thinking was not hidden.

Ideas Have Consequences

Within German society, there were many people who took eugenics into realms not experienced elsewhere. German eugenics was influenced by an aristocratic French writer, Arthur Count de Gobineau (1816-1882). In the mid-1850s, Gobineau had published a racist tome entitled Essay on the Inequality of Human Races. He argued that a tiny fairhaired Aryan aristocracy had always been the flower of Europe, but it had lost its vigor by intermarriage with inferior races. The French generally ignored the book, but Germans loved it. In 1890, the book was revived, and in 1894 admirers founded the Gobineau Association, which included many teachers. In 1899, an Englishman holding German citizenship, Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855-1927), published a book building on Gobineau, entitled The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century. He argued that the Germans were the purest of the Aryans, and he attacked Jews and blacks. The book was reprinted over and over. When Adolf Hitler wrote Mein Kampf -- exalting the Aryans, promoting eugenics, and damning the Jews -- his writing was powerful, but not original. Antisemitism in Mein Kampf In 1923, Adolf Hitler was the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis. He led an uprising that earned him international attention and a prison term. While he was in the Landsberg prison, he wrote a book about his life and his hopes called Mein Kampf (or My Struggle). The book includes Hitler's well-known hatred of Jews, or antisemitism. He wrote, for example: "Was there any form of filth ... without at least one Jew involved in it? If you cut even cautiously into such an abscess, you found, like a maggot in a rotting body, often dazzled by the sudden light -- a kike!" His language was inflammatory and insulting, appealing to gutter instincts. He described a time of "the greatest spiritual upheaval" when he "had ceased to be a weak-kneed cosmopolitan and become an anti-Semite." He brought the fervor of a convert to the cause of antisemitism, and described it as a spiritual question.

Characterizing hatred as the requirement of religious faith may seem bizarre to many people, but Hitler was vehement about it: "I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord." One of the curious aspects of Mein Kampf is that a casual reader who had never heard of the Jews might well come away from the book with a great desire to meet these remarkable people. Hitler hated them, and blamed them for a variety of things, including pornography, prostitution and syphilis. But he also blamed them for Communism and for its opposite, capitalism. He blamed them for democracy: "The Jewish doctrine of Marxism rejects the aristocratic principle of Nature and replaces the eternal privilege of power and strength by the mass of numbers and their dead weight." Hitler said that the Jews ran everything, and that unless there was a change, the Jews would one day "devour the other nations and become lords of the earth." If a Martian dropped in and read Hitler's book, he might catch on that Hitler was consumed by hatred and set aside all the criticisms of Jews, and hope to meet one of these powerful lords. Eugenics in Mein Kampf The antisemitism in Hitler's book is well known, but the eugenics is less familiar. He described the Jews as the best example of eugenics at work: "The mightiest counterpart to the Aryan is represented by the Jew. In hardly any people in the world is the instinct of self-preservation developed more strongly than in the so-called 'chosen.' Of this, the mere fact of the survival of this race may be considered the best proof. ... What people, finally, has gone through greater upheavals than this one -- and nevertheless issued from the mightiest catastrophes of mankind unchanged? What an infinitely tough will to live and preserve the species speaks from these facts!" And yet, in the name of eugenics, Hitler set out to wipe them off the face of the earth. Hitler's book makes the Jews sound like fascinating and in many ways attractive people. However, the hatred in the book cannot be treated as a joke. Hitler and his Nazis drove the Jews into work camps and death camps, where about six million Jews were killed. Millions of other people died in the war, including other targets of Nazi eugenics -- Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, the mentally ill. But the Jews were particular targets, and the Nazis caught and killed about one third of all the Jews in the world. One of the great puzzles about the Nazi Holocaust is its horrific efficiency. Europe has a long and shameful history of antisemitism. Why was the Nazi assault so much worse than anything before? Part of the explanation is that the Germans are efficient, taking pride in "getting the job done," whatever the job is. But part of the explanation, surely, is that Nazi antisemitism was mixed with eugenics. Throughout most of the history of Christianity, there has been antisemitism. The scripture read by Christians has passages that say "the Jews" did various things. These passages can be taken out of context and used to stir up antisemitism. This has happened many

times in the history of Christianity. But the texts are being abused, and read in ways that the author did not intend. The passages would not be changed much (if at all) if you said instead that "all the people there" or "the crowd" did these things. St. Paul's letters report various times that "the Jews" undercut his work, but the modern reader would probably understand the passages better if we substituted the phrase "our own people" for "the Jews." That is, Paul is eloquent about his disappointment in many of his own people (the Jews). The use of scripture as a basis for antisemitism has been common in history, but it requires ignorance. Antisemitism based on the Gospel has another problem, a built-in contradiction: Jesus was Jewish, along with all of his apostles. And still further, Jesus commanded solemnly that we love each other. Christians must admit that there has been a long history of antisemitism, but antisemitism among the followers of Jesus the Nazarene is obviously wrong. In Nazi Germany, on the other hand, the seeds of antisemitism were planted in the soil of eugenics. Eugenics tends to increase one's contempt for other individuals or other nations. To take a single example, look at the words of the first man chosen for the chair of eugenics established by Francis Galton at London University. Karl Pearson, a preeminent eugenicist, wrote that the evolutionary progress of the human race requires warfare. He argued that war was necessary to get rid of inferior humans. He wrote: "This dependence of progress on the survival of the fitter race, terribly black as it may seem to some of you, gives the struggle for existence its redeeming features; it is the fiery crucible out of which comes the finer metal. [When wars cease] mankind will no longer progress [for] there will be nothing to check the fertility of inferior stock; the relentless law of heredity will not be controlled and guided by natural selection." Pearson also wrote: "History shows me one way and one way only, in which a high state of civilisation has been produced, namely the struggle of race with race, and the survival of the physically and mentally fitter race." That is different from Christianity, even from Christianity tainted with the evil of antisemitism. Mein Kampf: Eugenics and Antisemitism Together Hitler echoed standard eugenics thought about miscegenation: "Any crossing of two beings not at exactly the same level produces a medium between the level of the two parents. This means: the offspring will probably stand higher than the racially lower parent, but not as high as the higher one. Consequently, it will later succumb in the struggle against the higher level. Such mating is contrary to the will of Nature for a higher breeding of all life. The precondition for this does not lie in associating superior and inferior, but in the total victory of the former. The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel ..."

Like eugenicists from the Greeks on, he used animal models in an attempt to clarify his thinking about humans: "The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc., and the difference can lie at most in the varying measure of force, strength, intelligence, dexterity, endurance, etc., of the individual specimens. But you will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice." In other words, it is permissible for Germans to kill the unfit, because the Germans belong at the top, and the way to get there is to kill, and we should not be sentimental about such natural events. In his understanding of eugenics, evolution justified or even demanded violence: "Therefore, here, too, the struggle among themselves arises less from inner aversion than from hunger and love. In both cases, Nature looks on calmly, with satisfaction, in fact. In the struggle for daily bread all those who are weak and sickly or less determined succumb, while the struggle of the males for the female grants the right or opportunity to propagate only to the healthiest. And struggle is always a means for improving a species' health and power of resistance and, therefore, a cause of its higher development." Like other white supremacists, he was extremely concerned about the possible damage to evolution that miscegenation could do: "No more than Nature desires the mating of weaker with stronger individuals, even less does she desire the blending of a higher with a lower race, since, if she did, her whole work of higher breeding, over perhaps hundreds of thousands of years, night be ruined with one blow." Like white supremacists in the United States, he took it for granted that the history of North and South America proved the importance of opposing miscegenation. "Historical experience ... shows with terrifying clarity that in every mingling of Aryan blood with that of lower peoples the result was the end of the cultured people. North America, whose population consists in by far the largest part of Germanic elements who mixed but little with the lower colored peoples, shows a different humanity and culture from Central and South America, where the predominantly Latin immigrants often mixed with the aborigines on a large scale. By this one example, we can clearly and distinctly recognize the effect of racial mixture. The Germanic inhabitant of the American continent, who has remained racially pure and unmixed, rose to be master of the continent; he will remain the master as long as he does not fall a victim to defilement of the blood." Hitler's ideas about miscegenation were the same as the white supremacist ideas in America, but the application was different. In America, racists feared contamination from blacks. By contrast, Hitler's principal fear was contamination from the Jews. He considered the Jews to be the threat to Aryan success, but also saw them as the source of arguments against eugenics. After laying out his view of eugenics, he turned to the critics: "Here, of course, we encounter the objection of the modern pacifist, as truly Jewish in its effrontery as it is stupid! 'Man's role is to overcome Nature!' ... Millions thoughtlessly parrot this Jewish nonsense."

When Hitler said, "All who are not of good race in this world are chaff," the thought was not original, nor specifically Nazi. It was simple eugenics. Cooperation with Hitler, Support for Eugenics Hitler's main opponents were France, Russia, England and the United States. But in three of these nations, he found national leaders who were ready to get along with him. These three men were all eugenicists. Henri Philippe Ptain (1856-1951) was a French hero in World War I who is credited with holding Verdun against the German assault. But he did not like parliamentary governments, and preferred dictatorships. After Hitler's armies defeated France in 1940, he led the French government. His admirers say that he protected France as well as possible after a military defeat, but others consider him a traitor who cooperated with the Nazis. After the war, the French government put him on trial for collaboration with the enemy; he was convicted and imprisoned for the rest of his life. Ptain was a member of a French eugenics society. Arthur Neville Chamberlain (1869-1940) was the British Prime Minister just before World War II. He is remembered chiefly for his policy of "appeasement" toward Germany. He tried to negotiate with Hitler, rather than go to war. To be fair to him, it is important to say that his policies were popular in Britain at the time. However, on September 30, 1938, he agreed to let Germany take over most of Czechoslovakia in order to satisfy the Germans and prevent war. This ill-fated decision, called the Munich agreement, has become a byword for naivete, retreat and cowardice in the face of an unscrupulous and greedy enemy. Hitler took what he was given in peace, then launched a war to take some more. Chamberlain was a member of the Eugenics Society. Charles Augustus Lindbergh (1902-1974) was the first person to fly nonstop across the Atlantic, from New York to Paris. The flight made him an international hero. However, he later used his fame to oppose America's entry into World War II, and his arguments were extremely disturbing. Between 1931 and 1935, Lindbergh worked with Alexis Carrel (1873-1944) on an artificial heart, and the two men deserve great credit for it. However, during this same period, Carrel was working on the book Man, the Unknown, published in 1935. He suggested building euthanasia institutions for killing the mentally ill with some suitable gas. Lindbergh did not break off his relationship with Carrel because of this savage proposal; in 1938, they coauthored a book, The Culture of Organs. In 1938, Lindbergh visited Germany, and accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, a Nazi official. This caused an outcry in the United States. In 1939, Lindbergh returned to the United States after years in Europe, and immediately began speaking out against America's entry into the war. He made arguments echoing

eugenics themes, that the war would kill the wrong people. He charged that America was being dragged into the war by Jews (among others). In 1940, Hermann Goering, Air Minister and chief of the Luftwaffe, launched the "Battle of Britain," bombing the British in preparation for an invasion across the English Channel. This included bombing civilians, to terrorize them. Nevertheless, in 1941, Lindbergh became a leading spokesman for a newly founded peace group called the America First Committee. Lindbergh was later a Director of the American Eugenics Society.

excerpt from "Social History and the Eugenics Societies" by Katharine S. O'Keefe
Research on the history of eugenics and the eugenic societies could affect our understanding of crucial events in this century. For example, Neville Chamberlain was a member of the English Eugenics Society in 1935 while Chancellor of the Exchequer; and Marshal Ptain, who led the Vichy government in France, was a member of the French eugenic society in the 1930s. Charles Lindbergh, the leading exponent of appeasement in America in 1940, was a director of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s. To write the history of the period of appeasement while not knowing that the architect of appeasement in England (Chamberlain), the would-be architect of appeasement in America (Lindbergh), the architect of the Vichy government (Ptain), as well as the architect of the Nazi party (Hitler), were all eugenicists, is as if we were to write post-war history without mentioning that Stalin, Tito and Mao TseTung were all Communists. Similarly, we will never understand population control, if we do not know that the main agent of this biopolicy, the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), spent the first seventeen years of its existence in rent free quarters at the headquarters of the English Eugenics Society and even was a member of that Society in 1977. The Machinery of Death Hitler's writing was not original. He took the ideas of others and applied them effectively, without mercy. The machinery of death begins with an ideology that permits or encourages killing, and the murderous ideology of eugenics took root in Germany before Hitler. As we saw above (see chapter two), in 1922, before anybody had ever heard of Adolf Hitler, Hoche and Binding published a book calling for the destruction of lives that were not worth living. Two of the chief architects of the racial policies of the Nazis were Dr. Alfred Ploetz and Dr. Ernst Rdin. In 1904, Ploetz founded the journal Archiv fr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (or Archive for Racial and Social Biology to publish articles about eugenics. The following year, Ploetz and Rdin founded a society to promote eugenics,

called the "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene" (or Society for Racial Hygiene). They understood term "racial hygiene" to be a German translation of the English word "eugenics," but they also used the phrases "racial biology" and "social biology" to refer to the same collection of ideas. Their ideas did not become the foundation of public policies until Hitler came to power. But by that time, they had already been thinking for three decades about how to use sterilization and euthanasia. They were ready to act. Just a few months after Hitler came to power, Germany passed the "Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Disease in Posterity," the Sterilisation Law. The chief architect of the law was Rdin, who had pushed his ideas in a variety of posts, including Professor of Psychiatry at the Munich University, Director of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography, and Director of the Research Institute for Psychiatry. Others who had pushed for eugenics before Hitler came to power were Professors Dr. Erwin Baur, Dr. Eugen Fischer, and Dr. Fritz Lenz. In 1921, the published a textbook that was used around the world: Human Hereditary Teaching and Racial Hygiene. In 1923, Munich University established a chair for racial hygiene. The first Professor for Racial Hygiene was Dr. Lenz. He called for the introduction of racial hygienic education into high schools and universities, saying: "As soon as racial hygienic conviction has become a living ideology, then the racial hygienic organisation of life, even public life, will happen by itself." Baur and Fischer also worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute (KWI) for Anthropology, Human Hereditary Teaching and Eugenics. The KWI was a hotbed of eugenics. Another man who worked at the KWI was Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. In 1934, Von Verschuer was invited to take the ideas from the KWI to a new university, to be the founder and first director of the Institute for Hereditary Biology and Racial Research at Frankfurt University. There, von Verschuer trained an assistant named Josef Mengele. When Fischer retired as the head of the KWI, von Verschuer returned from Frankfurt and took over the post. Mengele went on to the Auschwitz camp in Poland. Originally, Auschwitz had been planned as a slave-labor camp, to provide workers for IG Farben (a company that produced Zyklon gas, for the gas chambers), but it was turned into a death camp. When Mengele arrived at the camp, there was a typhoid epidemic that required his immediate attention. He selected out hundreds of the sick immediately and sent them to the gas chamber. He conducted experiments that still horrify the world, including some experiments on living and fully conscious prisoners. But he was not isolated in his barbarity: he sent data and even body parts back to the KWI, where various people wrote papers based on what Mengele had done. Von Verschuer was particularly interested in Mengele's tuberculosis experiments, injecting the bacteria into identical twins and watching the course of the disease.

After the war, Mengele fled to Argentina and lived for some years on gold and jewelry taken from prison inmates, including gold fillings. Von Verschuer was rehabilitated. He was not able to return to Berlin, but he founded a new genetics institute in Munster, and worked there until his death in 1968. He did not turn away from his old ideas. When a white supremacist journal, Mankind Quarterly, was founded, he was on the masthead as an advisor. He was a member of the American Eugenics Society in the 1950s. Further Reading For more about German eugenics, read Murderous Science, by Benno Mller-Hill (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988) and Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis, by Robert N. Proctor (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1988) Mein Kampf is available on line at http://www.alpha.org.

Review of Chapter Nine: World War II and the Nazi Holocaust

1. As eugenics grew in Britain and the US, what was happening in German eugenics? 2. Did the systematic killing of innocent people in Germany start under the Nazis? 3. What was the attitude toward Hitler of eugenicists in France, Britain and the USA? 4. Identify Josef Mengele and Otmar von Verschuer. What happened to them after the war? 5. In what ways was Nazism based on eugenics? Discuss: What are the ingredients necessary for war or other massive violence? Which ingredients did anti-Semitism supply in World War II? Which ingredients did eugenics

What does it take to make war?

In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler said, "In 1914 as long as the German people thought they were fighting for ideals, they stood firm; but as soon as they were told to fight for their daily bread, they preferred to give up the game." Different people give very different explanations for war. To persuade or induce millions of people to risk their lives, you need a mixture of motives and abilities, including an enemy, weapons, a practical goal, and an ideal. In World War II, the Nazis used eugenics for three of the four critical ingredients of war. There must be a clearly defined enemy, someone to oppose and to shoot at. Eugenics provided that: dysgenic Jews and their Marxist allies. There must be weapons; eugenics did not provide that. There must be a practical goal, something to be achieved by the bloodshed. Eugenics offered that: living space for the master race. There must be an inspirational ideal, greater than material goods, to justify sacrifice and bloodshed. Eugenics provided that: a better world populated by an improved race and run by the best people.

Chapter 10:
Eugenics after World War II

Eugenics has been one of the major forces shaping this century. Despite that, very few people have ever heard of it. One reason for this dangerous ignorance is a mistaken belief that eugenics died when Hitler lost the war. So at the end of the 20th century, a key question about eugenics is: what was left of it after World War II? If it had changed, what were the changes? The eugenics movement had worked in several areas, such as promoting white supremacy, forced sterilization and immigration control. What happened to these projects? Did they flourish, or disappear, or change? What happened to the overall vision of humanity, the "anthropology" of eugenics, focusing on genes and the race but ignoring the individual? What happened to the twin programs of getting "more from the fit, less from the unfit"? The organizations that were established to promote eugenics -- including the Eugenics Society in Britain and the American Eugenics Society here -- were damaged by their association with Nazism; did they recover? These are some of the obvious questions about post-war eugenics. The answers to some of these questions were clear within a few years. Katharine O'Keefe, an American researcher, began working in the late 1980s to understand post-war eugenics. She has challenged the view of many historians, who assume that eugenics ended with the defeat of Hitler. She has focused attention on the eugenics societies, and we will follow her lead. C. P. Blacker and "Crypto-Eugenics" In the late 1950s, a leader of the British eugenics movement put forward an interesting idea. Dr. Carlos Paton Blacker had been an officer in the Eugenics Society since 1931; he had been Secretary, then General Secretary, then Director, then Chairman. His proposal to the ES was: That the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics, which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics Society. "Crypto-" means "hidden." The phrase "crypto-eugenics" was not invented by critics of the movement; the word came from an officer of the ES. Some years later, English eugenicists debated whether it was fair to characterize "crypto-eugenics" as sinister. But Blacker himself described it as a policy of pursuing eugenic goals "by less obvious means."

In 1960, the Eugenics Society adopted Blacker's idea, passing a resolution which stated (in part): The Society's activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously, and specifically that the Society should increase its monetary support of the FPA [Family Planning Association, the English branch of Planned Parenthood] and the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation] and should make contact with the Society for the Study of Human Biology, which already has a strong and active membership, to find out if any relevant projects are contemplated with which the Eugenics Society could assist. At the time this resolution was adopted by the Eugenics Society, Blacker was the Administrative Chairman of IPPF. When IPPF was founded in 1952, it was housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society. From Blacker's proposal, we can see several things. Leaders of the eugenics movement were concerned about their public image, but were continuing at least some of their work. One of their tools was the International Planned Parenthood Federation, which promoted access to birth control. Eugenicists were still interested in biology, or some part of biology. And there was something like "crypto-eugenics" in the United States, a success story that the British wanted to imitate. So what was happening in the United States? The Fraudulent Reform The dominant figure in American eugenics after World War II was a complex individual, Frederick Osborn (1889-1981). He is credited with reforming eugenics, removing the taint of racism and putting the field back on a firm scientific footing. But during his "reform," from 1947 until 1956, he was president of the Pioneer Fund, a secretive white supremacist group. So he did not oppose racism; he opposed open racism. His reform of eugenics, then, would disguise, not remove, the taint of racism. Osborn was a Major General. But he never made much of his military rank after World War II, perhaps because he was a little uncomfortable holding such a high rank without ever seeing combat. He was in charge of boosting troop morale during World War II, and got his exalted rank by politics. He spent most of his life boosting eugenics. In 1956, Osborn traveled across the Atlantic to give the annual Galton Lecture at a meeting of the Eugenics Society. The speech was later published in the Eugenics Review (volume 48, number 1, April 1956). His words were well received then, and remain fascinating today. In the address, entitled "Galton and Mid-Century Eugenics," Osborn stated his devotion to the cause. Galton had envisaged a movement to raise the average of human intelligence and character that would "sweep the world and make man at least the master of his own destiny on earth." But it had not happened, and the movement was reduced to "a few small handsful of men in various countries . . . not influencing public opinion." In

fact, Osborn noted, "The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters." Despite these problems, Osborn affirmed that "I still believe in Galton's dream." Then Osborn posed the key question: "What have we done wrong?" He was concerned because "we have all but killed the eugenic movement."

The Pioneer Fund

The first president of the Pioneer Fund was Harry Laughlin, from the Eugenics Record Office in New York. Laughlin had promoted coercive sterilization and racist immigration controls. The Pioneer Fund promoted white supremacy, but did not do so openly. For example, in 1939 the Pioneer Fund offered to guarantee a college education to any child born to an Air Force officer in 1940 if the officer had three children already. That does not sound racist. But memos from the Pioneer Fund show that before the Pioneer Fund made the offer, they ran a study to see what kind of people would benefit. They made the offer after they were convinced that in most cases it would benefit white people whose ancestors were in America before the Constitution was signed. It is hard to imagine such moral blindness. Speaking just a decade after World War II, when tens of millions of people died fighting the savagery of a master race ideology, is Osborn concerned about the deaths of the Jews? Is he sorry about what happened to that the Nazis killed the feeble-minded? Is he ashamed of the role that eugenics played in Germany and Japan, churning out death for civilians? No, he is troubled because they had almost killed the eugenics movement. So what went wrong, according to Osborn? He said that they had "failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused ... they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate." As you try to understand why people may have been slow to accept that they were secondrate, keep in mind that Osborn considered the upper five or ten percent of the population to have the intelligence and character that the entire human race should have. Osborn's response to the challenge was a proposal he called "voluntary unconscious selection." The idea was to alter laws, customs and social expectations, so that individuals would decide for themselves that they did or did not want to have children. The way to persuade people to exercise this voluntary unconscious selection was to appeal to the idea of "wanted" children. Osborn said, "Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care." In this way, the eugenics movement "will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it."

Osborn's speech shows that the eugenics movement was hurt, but not dead. They still held to Galton's dream, they were trying to find new ways to achieve it, and they were still making plans. Planned Parenthood and the Population Council In Britain, one tool for crypto-eugenics was the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Starting in 1952, IPPF gradually built birth-control organizations in most of the nations of the world. One of the affiliates, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, was the new name of the old Birth Control Federation of America, founded by Margaret Sanger. Planned Parenthood promoted birth control, but also worked unceasingly to develop more effective contraceptives. In the United States, Planned Parenthood funded research that led to the development of the oral birth control pill. While Blacker worked with IPPF, his counterpart in the United States, Frederick Osborn, worked with a similar group. Osborn was among the founders of an effective organization called the Population Council. The Population Council was founded in 1952, the same year as IPPF, at a meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was the brainchild of John D. Rockefeller III. Its purpose was to control population growth around the world. John D. Rockefeller's leadership in the Population Council was not the first Rockefeller foray into eugenics. When Alexis Carrel wrote his book advocating euthanasia institutions with a suitable gas for exterminating various people, he was on the staff of the Rockefeller Institute. The Rockefellers financed the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in the 1920s, and provided funds for Ernst Rdin for genetic research in the 1920s. The founding conference brought a very powerful group together in Williamsburg. Rockefeller brought with him several officers of the Rockefeller Institute, including Detlev W. Bronk, then president of both the Rockefeller Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. There was a representative from the Carnegie Institution. Two members of the wealthy Osborn family were there -- Fairfield Osborn, representing the Conservation Foundation, and Frederick Osborn, Secretary of the American Eugenics Society. Warren S. Thompson came, as director of the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems. Thomas Parran, former Surgeon General during the Tuskegee syphilis study, was there. Pascal K. Whelpton from the Population Division at the United Nations came, and so did two men who ran the UN Population Division in later years, Frank Notestein and Kingsley Davis.

The Population Council began its first years of operation with $2.6 million in capital contributions, primarily from John D. Rockefeller III and the Ford Foundation, along with an endowment of approximately $1.5 million. The Population Council put some funds into developing the contraceptive Pill, but was far more enthusiastic about the intrauterine device, or IUD. An IUD is a piece of metal or plastic inserted into a woman's uterus. It inflames the uterus, and prevents implantation of a newly conceived baby into the mother's uterus. A feminist author, Germaine Greer, commented on the post-war movement, saying: "It now seems strange that men who had been conspicuous in the eugenics movement were able to move quite painlessly into the population establishment at the highest level, but if we reflect that the paymasters were the same -- Ford, Mellon, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Rockefeller and Shell -- are still the same, we can only assume that people like Kingsley Davis, Frank W. Notestein, C. C. Little, E. A. Ross, the Osborns Frederick and Fairfield, Philip M. Hauser, Alan Guttmacher and Sheldon Segal were being rewarded for past services." In other words, the population control movement was the same as the old eugenics movement -- the same money, the same leaders, the same activities -- but with a new excuse. United Nations Involvement One of the places where the eugenics movement made strides after the war was in the new global peace-keeping operation, the United Nations. In 1948, when the United Nations was founded, the Americans and British pushed through a provision for population studies as an official function of the UN. Some other countries resisted the idea, but the U.S. and Britain succeeded in making a Population Commission part of the international body. Another part of the new UN was the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, or UNESCO. Its first director was Julian Huxley, a determined eugenicist who used his global platform very effectively. His family had worked with the Darwins for decades promoting eugenics, and he spoke of the ideology in religious terms. The Shift to Genetics Before the war, in 1938, the American Eugenics Society had laid out its research aims, including many investigations in sociology, psychology, anthropology and biology. But they noted especially the important new fields: population study and genetics. These two fields corresponded with the chief aims of the eugenics movement -- "more from the fit, less from the unfit." The eugenics movement discovered (or invented) the population explosion after the war, and used it to whip up global hysteria. From 1952 on, a major part of the eugenics movement was the population control movement. The population explosion made it possible for the eugenics movement to continue its work on one of the two new fields

discussed in 1938. The field of genetics offered the hope (or illusion) of improving the human race, and after the war the field of genetics also grew. One of the leaders in the field of genetics was Dr. Franz J. Kallmann. According to the journal of the Eugenics Society in Britain, Kallmann had been "associated with Dr. Ernst Rdin, investi-gating in genetic psychiatry." He was half Jewish, so he was driven out of Germany in 1936 by Hitler. Nonetheless, he testified on behalf of von Verschuer after the war, and he became a member of the American Eugenics Society. Kallmann moved to the United States and taught psychiatry at Columbia University. In 1952 he was president of the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG), a group started by eugenicists. Society members later developed hundreds of prenatal tests without looking for cures, although every test was hyped as a potential lead toward a cure. Detecting prenatal problems often leads to eugenic abortion, so the impact of the ASHG was destructive, not medicinal. Over the next years, at least 124 people were members of both Kallmann's American Society of Human Genetics and the American Eugenics Society. Open Racism Declined Open white supremacy declined after World War II outside the American South. The idea that Aryans or Nordics should rule the world sounded too much like Hitler, and people shied away from it when they recognized it. It continued in many subtle forms which we will study later. White supremacy declined, but did not disappear completely. In 1960, a member of the Eugenics Society, Reginald Ruggles Gates, founded a new periodical to advance racist ideas. The Advisory Council of the new journal, Mankind Quarterly, included yet another member of the Darwin family, Charles Galton Darwin. One idea advanced in the journal is the belief that anthropology, if it is understood honestly, shows that mankind is divided into four species. An early issue of the journal stated that desegregation happened because "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races ... until the uninstructed public were gradually misled. Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports, was replaced by a doctrine of genetic and social equality, which is something quite different."

Review of Chapter 10: Eugenics After World War II

1. What organizations rebuilt the eugenics movement after World War II? 2. What is "crypto-eugenics"? 3. What was the key to post-war recovery for the eugenicists? 4. Identify Maj. Gen. Frederick Osborn. Summarize his 1956 Galton Lecture. 5. Identify the Pioneer Fund. Discuss: What is the difference between "voluntary unconscious selection" and "freedom of choice," other than the length of the words?

"Voluntary Unconscious Selection"

excerpt from Frederick Osborn's Galton Lecture Conclusion It is eighty-six years since Galton published his Hereditary Genius; eighty-six years since he gave us the hope that the average of human intelligence and character could be raised to the level of the upper five or ten percent today; since he envisaged the eugenic movement as something that would sweep the world and make man at last the master of his own destiny on earth. It has not happened. The eugenic movement is nothing but a few small handsful of men in various countries; here in England, in the United States, in India, in France. They are not influencing public opinion. The very word eugenics is in disrepute in some quarters. Yet I still believe in Galton's dream. Probably most of you do. We must ask ourselves, what have we done wrong? I think we have failed to take into account a trait which is almost universal and is very deep in nature. People simply are not willing to accept the idea that the genetic base on which their character is formed is inferior and should not be repeated in the next generation. We have asked whole groups of people to accept this idea and we have asked individuals to accept it. They have constantly refused, and we have all but killed the eugenic movement. People will accept the idea of a specific hereditary defect. They will go to a heredity clinic and ask what is the risk of our having a defective child. They balance that risk against the chance of their having a sound child, and they usually come up with a pretty sound decision. But they won't accept the idea that they are in general second rate. We must rely on other motivation. Given the right circumstances, people will have children in proportion to their ability to care for them. If they feel financially secure, if they enjoy accepting responsibility, if they have warm affectional responses, if they are physically strong and competent, they are likely to have large families, provided they have reasonable psychological conditioning to this end. If they are unable to feed the children they have, if they are afraid of responsibility, if their affectional responses are weak, people don't want many children. If they have effective means of family planning, they won't have many. Our studies have shown this to be true all over the world. On such a base it is surely possible to build a system of voluntary unconscious selection. But the reasons advanced must be generally acceptable reasons. Let's stop telling anyone that they have a generally inferior genetic quality, for they will never agree. Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care, and perhaps our proposals will be accepted. It seems to me that if it is to progress as it should, eugenics must follow new policies and state its case anew, and that from this rebirth we may, even in our own

lifetime, see it moving at last toward the high goals which Galton set for it.

Chapter 11:
The Drive to Develop the Pill and the IUD

Without doubt, the most difficult topic to discuss in a study of eugenics is the matter of birth control. The motives of the people who developed various birth control methods do not necessarily resemble the motives of the people who use them. There are few topics that have been addressed with so much heat and so little light. And yet, we have been able to discuss race, religion and politics, so we will plunge ahead and address this topic as well. In 1939, a Swedish population expert described for Americans what her nation was doing, and made a distinction between two strategies of negative eugenics. Alva Myrdal addressed the Birth Control Federation of America on January 19, and her paper was published in the Birth Control Review in April 1939. Her intent was to describe a governmental population policy that was appropriate for a democracy, in contrast to "the turmoil of contemporary fascist and communist experiments." Sweden's birthrate was below replacement level; parents were not having enough children to replace themselves. Measuring the replacement level is a little tricky. At first glance, you would think that if each set of parents has two children, that is replacement level: two parents in one generation produce two children in the next generation. But that is not enough, because some of those children will die young or be sterile. So replacement level is a little over two. That year, though, Alva Myrdal said that Sweden "faces a catastrophic decline in her population in the future." So many parts of the population plan concerned ways to make parenting easier and more attractive. But some of the plan was about undesirables. According to Myrdal, "a small bottom layer of society could rightly be regarded as biologically inferior," and "the scope for negative eugenics thus becomes narrow." However, she explained, a complete plan for improving the quality of the Swedish people had to do something about mid-grade undesirables, not just those at the very bottom of the heap. Part of the Swedish approach was coercive sterilization, which was "utilized with a residuum of all social classes whose perpetuation is considered least desirable. A law was enacted in 1934 enforcing sterilization of persons suffering from grave hereditary character and themselves incapable of consent. So far, these cases have not outnumbered 250 annually and have consisted mainly of mental defectives."

In addition to forced sterilization of some, there was a provision for voluntary sterilization when a person suffered from an illness, deformity, epilepsy or "would be incapable of caring for or rearing children." Sweden's plan was not limited to sterilization, though: Next to be considered is a border-line group, probably the most difficult to handle in any eugenic program. The hereditary capacities of this group are doubtful and thus do not indicate sterilization, but its social capacities are unfavorable to child rearing. It is officially planned, but not yet put into effect, to influence this group to severe family limitation through direct propaganda and instruction in contraceptive methods. The Swedish model, an approach to population planning in a democracy, included forced sterilization supplemented by some voluntary steriliation and propaganda for contraception for the borderline group. Myrdal was by no means the first to identify this problem group. In 1931, a four-volume series The Science of Life by H. G. Wells (still popular today for his science fiction) and Julian Huxley provided a popularized approach to eugenics. In volume four, they write that there are "ten thousand certifiable defectives in every million of the English population" but the "increase of idiots and imbeciles" is "easily controllable." On the other hand: All those who have had experience of birth-control work in the slums seem to be convinced that there is a residuum, above the level of the definable "defective," which is too stupid or shiftless or both to profit by existing birth-control methods. These "unteachables" constitute pockets of evil germ-plasm responsible for a large amount of vice, disease, defect, and pauperism. But the problem of their elimination is a very subtle one, and there must be no suspicion of harshness or brutality in its solution. Many of these low types might be bribed or otherwise persuaded to accept voluntary sterilization. Eliminating the pockets of evil germ-plasm subtly and without coercion was a familiar problem. Myrdal said the Swedes had a solution: propaganda and contraception. But there were problems with using contraceptives for population control. One large problem was the persistent opposition of Roman Catholics and some other religious groups. Another problem was technical: contraceptives were unreliable. Barrier methods condoms, cervical caps and diaphragms were available, but did not work with 100 percent efficiency. During World War II, the Nazis ran experiments in their camps in a search for effective birth control agents. After the war, whatever data they had amassed was lost to the public. It may have been worthless, or may have been destroyed, or may have made its way into the hands of researchers who waited a few years and then used the morally tainted information. Pill Research

In the 1950s, Margaret Sanger and her organization, Planned Parenthood Federation of America, began funding research to develop a contraceptive that would be more effective than condoms. One of the early researchers was Dr. Carl Djerassi, who worked at Syntex, a drug firm. In 1951, the Syntex team succeeded in synthesizing a sex hormone. Dr. Gregory Pincus and Dr. Min Cheu Chang from the Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology were also interested in birth control research. The Searle drug firm invited Pincus to do research for them, and in 1953 Searle patented a compound similar to Djerassi's. Pincus teamed up with Dr. John Rock from Harvard, and they began work on preventing ovulation using a sex hormone. Pincus, Chang and Rock were all funded in part by Planned Parenthood. Also, in 1952, Margaret Sanger persuaded a wealthy donor, Katherine Dexter McCormick, to provide substantial funding for Pill research. From the beginning, the idea was a little odd. The reproductive system is complex. The idea was to upset the system using hormones taken by mouth. There is no direct connection between the mouth and the ovaries. The question then and now is, how many systems in the body will be disrupted before a drug taken at the top end of the body alters the way an organ works in the middle of the body? Pincus and Rock developed an oral contraceptive, Enovid, that did suppress ovulation and did not have massive and obvious side effects. They tested their drug on volunteers and psychotics for one year, then moved to Puerto Rico, where they had a huge number of women to use as potential lab rats. Puerto Rico had been a target for population controllers for decades before Pincus's Pill project arrived. In the 1930s, population controllers had opened a sterilization campaign there, and had pushed through a law permitting the distribution of contraceptives by trained eugenicists. Testing the Pill there was the obvious course to take. In 1956, they began testing in Puerto Rico. On April 22, 1960, the Food and Drug Administration approved Enovid for use in the United States. IUD Research An IUD is a piece of plastic or metal that is inserted into the woman's uterus. It inflames the uterus, and prevents implantation. From the perspective of population control advocates, IUDs have a huge advantage over other forms of birth control. Once they are in place, no one has to do anything else to prevent births for some years. Barrier contraceptives require that the user put something in place before sexual activity, and oral contraception requires that the woman take a Pill every day. The IUD goes in and stays. In 1961, the Population Council began funding research into the IUD. In 1963, International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council funded a world

tour for Alan Guttmacher and his wife, to study birth control methods. He returned recommending IUDs, and the Population Council expanded its funding dramatically, spending almost two million dollars on them over the next decade. The IUD was effective for population control, but was not good for individual women. One IUD after another was driven off the market by damage suits. The most notorious IUD was the Dalkon Shield, which was responsible for 18 deaths in the United States, many cases of permanent sterility, and various other complications. In 1974, after little more than a decade selling the device, the manufacturer A. H. Robins pulled the Dalkon Shield off the market. But damage claims continued to pile up; before the end, 334,863 women were participating in a class action lawsuit against the company. A. H. Robins went bankrupt. The other major IUD manufacturers, including G. D. Searle, which sold IUDs as well as oral contraceptives, settled some lawsuits with large payments and then got out of the business. However, since it was the American legal system with its expensive lawsuits that drove the IUD off the market, women overseas did not have the same protection. IUDs remained in use around the world. (Twenty years later, IUDs began to make their way slowly back into the American market.) How They Work The Pill and the IUD are both described as "contraceptives," but that is not accurate. The Pill works to prevent birth in three ways, and one of them is by causing an early abortion of a tiny human embryo. With an IUD, the principal (and perhaps only) mode of action is to cause an early abortion. In the early days of oral contraception, the principal mode of action was the prevention of ovulation. That still happens, although the new low-dose pills are less effective at this than the 1960s pills. If there is no ovum, there can't be any conception. This is genuine "contraception." The second mode of action is a thickening of the mucus in the woman's cervix, so that sperm cannot reach the uterus. This too is "contraception." But the third mode of action is different. Oral contraceptives affect the lining of the uterus and prevent implantation (or nidation). Normally, at the time of ovulation, the walls are soft and spongy, ready to receive and nourish an embryo, and implantation occurs several days after fertilization. But the hormones in oral contraceptives make the uterine wall inhospitable to new life. If a sperm reaches an ovum and fertilization takes place, the newly conceived embryo will not be able to attach to the uterus (or implant) and draw nourishment; the embryo will be flushed out and will die. This is not "contraception"; it is an early abortion. The IUD has the same problem, magnified. It does not prevent ovulation or thicken cervical mucus; it works by preventing implantation. Verbal Engineering

It would seem clear that the only things that should be called "contraceptives" are things that prevent conception (contra-ception = against-conception). In his 1961 book, Birth Control and Love, Alan Guttmacher wrote: "Contraception and sterilization accomplish the control of family size by preventing the union of sperm and egg, in this way not allowing conception to occur. Once pregnancy is initiated, family limitation is still possible by employing a wholly different procedure induced abortion." At that time, he accepted the standard definition of conception, and contraception. Conception is the "union of sperm and egg"; "contraception is interference with conception." At that time, Guttmacher accepted that contraception was different from abortion. In the 1960s, abortion was illegal. There were some social groups within the country who accepted abortion, and practiced it extensively. But the law, reflecting the moral code of the majority, prohibited abortion. So if the Pill and the IUD caused abortions, that would have made it very hard at that time to promote them. The solution to this problem was a change in the language. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists changed the definition of conception in the late 1960s. Under the old definition, conception was a synonym for fertilization, the union of sperm and ovum. Under the new definition, conception was a process beginning with fertilization and lasting until implantation was complete. The definition of pregnancy was also changed slightly. Previously, a woman was considered to be pregnant when she was carrying a newly conceived human within her body. Under the new definition, she was not pregnant until implantation. And the definition of contraception was changed: now it referred to preventing either fertilization or implantation. Birth control advocates and drug companies deliberately confused these two very distinct and separate human events (implantation and fertilization) so that they could market their wares as "contraceptives." In this way, they were able to sell silent abortions even to women who were adamantly opposed to abortion, and still keep a good public image. Who Wanted Better Birth Control? The push for effective birth control cannot be understood without reference to two related subjects: the place of sexual activity in human life, and attitudes toward population. In the 1920s, Margaret Sanger's books The Pivot of Civilization and Woman and the New Race described ways to bring the eugenics movement and some parts of the feminist movement together. Coming from different directions, they both wanted birth control. In the 1950s and 1960s, the funding came from eugenics. The Population Bomb

To understand why Planned Parenthood and the Population Council funded research into more effective methods of birth control, it is important to understand the propaganda about a population explosion. The person whose name is most often associated with the "population explosion" is Paul R. Ehrlich, who taught biology at Stanford University. He wrote The Population Bomb, published in 1968, which was circulated widely and reprinted many times. He says that the terms "population bomb" and "population explosion" were first used in 1954, in a publication with the same name issued by the Hugh Moore Fund. He says that over two million copies of that earlier tract were distributed. Hugh Moore had made his fortune with his Dixie Cup Corporation. He established a fund to bring American businessmen into the fight against population growth, and worked with Planned Parenthood both nationally and internationally. In the 1950s, the United States and Russia were locked in an arms race, building bigger atom bombs and hydrogen bombs and missiles. The Federal government had started moving offices outside Washington, to minimize the chance that a few Russian bombs would destroy the whole government. School children were taught how to react to air raids. For Americans, the great fear of the age was not about famine or plague or invasion, but about the bomb. The Hugh Moore tract (actually written by T. O. Greissemer) played on this fear: "The population bomb threatens to create an explosion as disruptive and dangerous as an explosion of the atom, and with as much influence on prospects for progress or disaster, war or peace." Improved contraception was supposed to keep the bomb from exploding. Changing Attitudes Toward Sex Who has failed to notice that sexual activity can seem very attractive, without any plans for children? Who has failed to notice that literature from the whole world throughout history is full of difficulties and challenges associated with sexual activity, pregnancy and babies? Throughout history, sex has been a blessing and a challenge. And yet, quite suddenly in the years after World War II, social warfare broke out over sex, pitting the new and progressive attitudes of relaxed sexual mores against traditional attitudes. The struggle was most visible in the 1960s, when hippies urged the world to "make love not war." But the changes began earlier. One key to the change was the sex research of Alfred Kinsey. Kinsey worked at Indiana University, collecting data about sexual practices that he published in two volumes, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Kinsey claimed that sexual practices that had previously been considered aberrant were in fact quite common. His work helped to break down taboos against public discussion of sexual activity, and to end much resistance to various practices. One

example: the Boy Scouts had a manual that encouraged leaders to help boys avoid masturbation, but Kinsey persuaded them to end this counseling. The Kinsey Report went beyond editing the Boy Scout manual, though. Kinsey said that 95 percent of American men were sex offenders, and that the laws should be set aside. He argued that any sexual practice that was not harmful (by his definition) should be permitted, that fornication and adultery were widespread and beneficial. He and his followers worked to end public resistance to obscenity, pornography, pedophilia and homosexuality. Kinsey's data has been challenged. His effectiveness and his impact have not. And the central idea in all his work was that sexual activity in all its various forms should be embraced, for healthy fun. In his view, there was no connection whatsoever between sexual activity and having children. In practice, though, sexual activity does often lead to pregnancy and birth. People who accepted Kinsey's view of sex, and who wanted to engage in sexual activity without any subsequent pregnancy, were very much interested in effective contraception. It would seem, then, that the push for contraception came from a libertine view of sex as much as from eugenics. This is not a complete picture, because Kinsey's "research," laying the groundwork for sexual revolution, was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. That is, even the libertine ideas that were part of the sexual revolution are rooted (historically) in eugenics. Robert Yerkes, whose intelligence tests were used in the 1920s to pass racist anti-immigration laws, was chairman of the committee that funneled Rockefeller funds to Kinsey. Resistance from the Catholic Church Most of the resistance to new forms of birth control came from the Roman Catholic Church. Birth control was not invented by the eugenicists; it was embraced enthusiastically and exploited by them. But Catholics had resisted birth control long before the explosion. They were not alone in their opposition, but they were the most visible opponents, and they paid a very high price for it. The Catholic Church in the early 1960s was full of optimism. From 1962 until 1965, Catholic bishops from around the world met in Rome for the Second Vatican Council. The Council produced a series of documents that thoroughly changed the way the Church presented itself and its message to the world. For several hundred years, the Catholic Church had kept its distance from the rest of the world; the Council ended that. The election of a Catholic as President of the United States was evidence of a huge and welcome change. The most quoted document from the Council is The Church in the Modern World. Its official Latin name is Gaudium et Spes, which means "joy and hope." Pope John XXIII,

who summoned the Council, was a rotund man from a peasant family; people around the world loved him, and approved of his call to "throw open the windows" of the Church. Most of the teaching of the Council was positive in tone, a change from previous denunciations. The Council did speak out against evils in the modern world, especially nuclear weaponry and abortion, but focused on the call to proclaim the good news that God loves the world. Pope Paul VI took over the leadership of the Church and the Council when John XXIII died. Initially, he was seen as a progressive voice. He visited the United Nations and praised their work, called for peace, urged a global commitment to help the poor. But in 1968, Pope Paul VI released an open letter (an "encyclical") entitled Humanae Vitae. He repeated the Church's ancient opposition to artificial methods of birth control. He argued that sexual activity is sacred, that it must be left open to the possibility of procreation. He warned that if people approved of contraception, they would turn around to find that it had become mandatory. His encyclical caused an uproar. Overnight, his relations with many world leaders turned sour; he went suddenly from hero to villain. What happened to the Pope affected the rest of the Church. At the close of the decade, the Catholic Church in America and in other developed nations was bitterly divided. The joys and hopes of the Second Vatican Council were eroding, replaced by anger. Millions of church-going couples who had grown up in the Catholic Church and professed a deep love for the Church now turned away from the Church itself or at least from the teaching. Laws against Contraception Swept Away By 1961, birth control was readily available throughout the country. Connecticut still tried to enforce their anti-contraceptive laws, and Planned Parenthood decided to challenge the law directly. They opened a clinic in New Haven to distribute contraceptives illegally. The director was arrested, tried and fined. Planned Parenthood appealed the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in their favor in 1965 in Griswold v. Connecticut. The Connecticut law said that "Any person who uses any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception shall be fined not less than fifty dollars or imprisoned not less than sixty days nor more than one year or be both fined and imprisoned." Also, "Any person who assists, abets, counsels, causes, hires or commands another to commit any offense may be prosecuted and punished as if he were the principal offender." The Supreme Court ruled in Griswold v. Connecticut that the law was a violation of the right to privacy. Although there is no "right to privacy" in the Constitution, they argued,

"specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras [partial shadows], formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance." The Court concluded that the Connecticut law was a repulsive invasion of privacy: "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship." This decision, which put an end to all laws against contraception, was issued on June 7, 1965. All laws against abortion fell eight years later, on January 22, 1973, in Roe v. Wade and the companion case, Doe v. Bolton. Alan Guttmacher Switches on Conception Alan Guttmacher was an officer in the American Eugenics Society during the period after World War II when the eugenics movement was being re-structured. He was a Director of the AES in 1955, Vice President from 1956 to 1963, and then a Director again from 1964 to 1966. When the International Planned Parenthood Federation was founded in 1952, Guttmacher became a consultant for their medical publications and their newsletter. He also served on their Medical Committee in the 1960s. He was President of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America from 1962 to 1974, during the period when the Supreme Court decided Griswold v. Connecticut and also Roe v. Wade. In 1961, when he was promoting contraception, he wrote that after fertilization had taken place, there was a baby. But in 1968, when the contraception fight was apparently over and he was promoting abortion, he said, "My feeling is that the fetus, particularly during its early intrauterine life, is merely a group of specialized cells that do not differ materially from other cells." (See Law, Morality and Abortion, 22 Rutgers Law Review, 436.) Change at Lambeth: Dean Inge Triumphs Until 1930, nearly all Christian churches taught that contraception was immoral. The first major crack in this unanimity appeared at the 1930 Lambeth conference of the Anglican Church. The Church of England gave approval for the use of contraception by married couples. The change was a triumph for Rev. William Ralph Inge, the Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, a member of the Eugenics Society. Margaret Sanger, in her Pivot of Civilization, said that Inge "pointed out that the doctrine of Birth Control was to be interpreted as of the very essence of Christianity." According to Sanger, Dean Inge said: We should be ready to give up all our theories if science proved that we were on the wrong lines. And we can understand, though we profoundly disagree with, those who

oppose us on the grounds of authority. ... We know where we are with a man who says, 'Birth Control is forbidden by God; we prefer poverty, unemployment, war, the physical, intellectual and moral degeneration of the people, and a high deathrate to any interference with the universal command to be fruitful and multiply'; but we have no patience with those who say that we can have unrestricted and unregulated propagation without those consequences. It is a great part of our work to press home to the public mind the alternative that lies before us. Either rational selection must take the place of the natural selection which the modern State will not allow to act, or we must go on deteriorating. When we can convince the public of this, the opposition of organized religion will soon collapse or become ineffective. In fact, Dean Inge found eugenics in the Sermon on the Mount: We do wish to remind our orthodox and conservative friends that the Sermon on the Mount contains some admirably clear and unmistakable eugenic precepts. "Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? A corrupt tree cannot bring forth good fruit, neither can a good tree bring forth evil fruit. Every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire." Inge's interpretation is not credible. It is simply impossible to imagine Jesus Christ summoning the little children to himself, then inspecting them and casting the thorny ones into the fire. For more on this topic, read: Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny, Harper & Row (New York: 1984) Robert Marshall and Charles Donovan, Blessed are the Barren, Ignatius Press (San Francisco: 1991)

Excerpts from Humanae Vitae

Writing to "all men of good will," Pope Paul VI said: "The most serious duty of transmitting human life, for which married persons are the free and responsible collaborators of God the Creator, has always been a source of great joys to them, even if sometimes accompanied by not a few difficulties and by distress." He wrote that sexual activity within a marriage, which he called the "conjugal act," was not a random act, but had meaning. Further, he said that there is an "inseparable connection, willed by God and unable to be broken by man on his own initiative, between the two meanings of the conjugal act: the unitive meaning [expressing love for each other] and the procreative meaning [being open to having children]." His understanding of marriage, which has meaning and purpose, led to the conclusion that contraception is always wrong: "To use this divine gift destroying, even if only partially, its meaning and its purpose is to contradict the nature both of man and of woman and of their most intimate relationship, and therefore it is to contradict also the

plan of God and His will." Pope Paul VI predicted some problems that would arise from practicing artificial birth control. It would lead to "conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality." Another problem was the the impact on women: "It is also to be feared that the man, growing used to the employment of anti-conceptive practices, may finally lose respect for the woman and, no longer caring for her physical and psychological equilibrium, may come to the point of considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment, and no longer as his respected and beloved companion." And finally, there was the danger of population control: Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies. Who could blame a government for applying to the solution of the problems of the community those means acknowledged to be licit for married couples in the solution of a family problem? Who will stop rulers from favoring, from even imposing upon their peoples, if they were to consider it necessary, the method of contraception which they judge to be most efficacious? Review of Chapter 11: The Drive to Develop the Pill and IUD 1. Identify John Rock and Gregory Pincus. 2. Who funded the development of oral contraception? Who funded the development of the IUD? 3. What is "implantation"? Why would anyone confuse implantation with fertilization? 4. Describe the meaning of the term "population explosion." 5. How long did it take to go from nationwide contraception to nationwide abortion? Discuss: Is contraception an alternative to abortion, or the gateway to abortion?

Chapter 12:
Funding the Eugenics Movement

When Francis Galton coined the word eugenics 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 thinktanks. 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 antiimmigration 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, 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. 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.

Wealth Opens Doors to Wealth Rich people generally don't get rich by being dumb. The people who funded the eugenics movement were smart enough to use their power and influence to develop additional sources of funding for their projects. Two huge sources of additional funds for eugenics are tax dollars and corporate donations. Today, a large part of the eugenics movement is involved in population control, a form of negative eugenics. The funds that international bodies and national governments spend on population control stagger the imagination. A few examples follow. From its beginning, the United Nations was a major battleground for population control. The Vatican and many Catholic countries resisted population control there, as did many Muslim nations. Still, the flow of funds from the United Nations for eugenics purposes has grown steadily. The United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) puts out an Inventory of Population Projects every year, which gives a quick view of programs and their financial support around the world. The inventory shows "multilateral" support from international bodies, "bilateral" support from one nation to another, and support from "non-governmental organizations," or NGOs. To take one random example: in Egypt in 1988-89, there was support from three multilateral organizations. The World Bank had supported two projects over a period of years, with a cost of over $45 million (costs split with the Egyptian government). UNFPA had provided support for eleven projects, expending over $30 million. The World Health Organization (WHO) had provided approximately $2.5 million over the previous 17 years. Egypt received bilateral agency assistance from three nations. The United States provided $25 million over a two-year period. Germany and Japan provided much smaller sums. There were 17 NGOs providing funds for population assistance in Egypt that year. The NGOs are much more flexible than national governments; they can get funds approved faster than donor nations, and can work around laws in recipient nations. One clear example is the Pathfinder Fund in the United States, which provided funds for abortion equipment when the American government refused to do so, and provided the equipment in a nation where abortion was illegal (by saying that the suction devices were for "menstrual regulation). NGOs active in Egypt that year included:

Association for Voluntary Surgical Sterilization (formerly the Human Betterment Foundation, founded by E. S. Gosney, a member of Advisory Council of the American Eugenics Society), which provided about $125,000 for six sterilization projects; Family Planning International Assistance, which reported "a cumulative total of $2,952,940 in family planning commodities [that is, condoms, Pills, IUDs, etc.] to 27 institutions in Egypt"; International Planned Parenthood Federation, which spent $588,500 in Egypt that year; John Snow, Inc, which was spending $4.5 million over seven years to save children from diarrhea, plus another $532,000 in one year to strengthen family planning programs; Pathfinder Fund, which was spending $300,226 over two years helping to build or improve 258 family planning clinics; Population Council, which reported four projects in Egypt that year, including one on Norplant and two on IUDs, at a cost of $59,000; Rockefeller Foundation, which was spending $55,000 on two projects over several years to study Norplant and Pill usage.

In Kenya, to take another example, the same multilateral agencies provided population control funds that year (World Bank, UNFPA and WHO). Bilateral support came from the United States, Sweden, Norway, Britain, Finland, Germany and Canada. There were 22 NGOs funding population control in Kenya that year, including all the groups mentioned above. In the years since the report used in these example, population funding has increased substantially, from all sources. The major international population control funders are the World Bank and UNFPA. The leader among the national governments that have made a serious commitment to population control has been the United States, but Japan has been catching up. The Scandinavian nations have made the largest per capita contributions. The British and the Canadians are also large donors to population control. Corporate Support Each year, corporations in the United States make a long list of charitable donations. These donations are a way that the companies can share their wealth with the community, but they also get good public relations. When people watch a television program funded by an oil company, they don't automatically switch their gas purchases, but the company gets name recognition and good feelings that can generate more sales over time. As a result, it is often possible to persuade companies that make controversial donations to stop it. So it would be a mistake to put out a list of companies that fund eugenics today; they may stop tomorrow, and the list would change. However, there are hundreds of companies on the list.

Drug companies that manufacture oral contraceptives and other birth control material are not likely to change their ways quickly. American corporations that make birth control Pills include American Home Products, Johnson & Johnson, Bristol Myers Squibb, Monsanto, Alza, Warner Lambert and Pharmacia-Upjohn. The products both good and bad of these huge companies are in every household in America. In fact, virtually every household in the nation buys their products every time they go shopping. The drug companies have provided funds and lobbyists in Washington for eugenicsrelated work. But today, they are joined by biotechnology companies. The fastest growing companies in the nation are computer firms and biotechnology firms. Dark Clouds on the Horizon There may be huge sums of new money coming to the eugenics movement in the beginning of the 21st century. Three of the richest men in the world have indicated that they intend to use their wealth to improve the quality of life (for some). Ted Turner became a billionaire by developing a television network, CNN. He is giving one billion dollars to the United Nations, doled out over ten years by his own foundation, and is steering a large portion of it to population control. Warren Buffett has discussed plans for a foundation to distribute his money after he dies. The foundation is to focus on two issues: world peace and population control. His fortune in early 1999 was reported to be over $30 billion and growing steadily. Other billionaires have begun funding parts of the eugenics movement. Bill Gates, the richest man in the country, and George Soros, the financier, have started putting their money into population control projects. The struggle over eugenics is a battle for minds and hearts, and can be won by telling the truth with courage and love. But it is prudent to assess the strengths of our opposition. They do have money and power. Review of Chapter 12: Funding the Eugenics Movement 1. List some of the major individuals or families who funded the eugenics movement. 2. List some of the corporations that manufacture birth-control products. 3. List some of the foundations that have funded eugenics projects. 4. What governments and governmental bodies have been most supportive of population control? 5. What is a non-governmental organization, or NGO? What has been their role in promoting eugenics? Discuss: Some of the new billionaires have indicated that they support various parts of the eugenics movement. What would you say to them if you had the opportunity?

Chapter 13:
The Abortion Debate

In 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court announced decisions in two abortion cases, Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. The decisions swept aside the laws restricting abortion in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. There was an immediate outcry against the decisions, from the growing "right to life" or "pro-life" movement. When people speak about the decisions, they often refer only to Roe v. Wade, because it was the first of two decided. But Doe v. Bolton was also important. Roe v. Wade ended almost all legal protection for unborn children or fetuses. It divided pregnancy into three "trimesters," and said that abortion in the first trimester was a matter to be decided by the woman and her physician. In the second trimester, the states could pass laws to protect the woman during an abortion (e.g., requiring that abortions be performed in hospitals). Under Roe, the states could restrict or even ban abortion in the third trimester unless the abortion was necessary to protect the life or health of the woman. Under Doe v. Bolton, however, health is defined, and the definition is so broad ("medical judgment may be exercised in the light of all factors physical, emotional, psychological, familial, and the woman's age") that abortion is effectively legal until birth. If emotional and psychological factors are weighed, then every unwanted pregnancy is a threat to health, because an unwanted pregnancy is a huge emotional and psychological burden. When health is defined this way, then the state can ban abortion in the third trimester unless the mother wants an abortion. Justice William Rehnquist (later the Chief Justice) and Justice Byron White dissented. Justice White called the rulings "an exercise of raw judicial power." Decisions Based on Deceit Both abortion cases were based on lies, like the 1927 Buck v. Bell sterilization case. What happened to the women who were used in these cases Roe and Doe was quite distant from what their attorneys told the court. The attorneys were not paying attention to the dignity of their individual clients, but to their own ideas about how to improve society. Norma McCorvey (born 1947) is currently a Roman Catholic pro-lifer and the mother of three girls, but in 1970 she was a troubled, poor Texan woman in search of an abortion. In 1970 she was introduced to Sarah Weddington and Linda Coffee, two young lawyers looking for an unwed woman who wanted an abortion so that they could challenge Texas

law banning abortion. McCorvey agreed to become "Jane Roe," the plaintiff in the lawsuit Roe vs. Wade, and was told she could get an abortion when the lawsuit was over. McCorvey never got an abortion and had little communication with either Weddington or Coffee until her baby was over a year old. Meanwhile, the two lawyers had challenged the Texas law banning abortion and had won the case. The appeal went all the way to the Supreme Court, and McCorvey found out that abortion had been decriminalized thanks to "her" case, Roe vs. Wade, on January 22, 1973, when she saw it on the news. McCorvey became highly involved in the abortion industry during the 1980s. She was an active member of several pro-abortion organizations and worked in an abortion clinic in Dallas, Texas. There, she became acquainted with Pastor Flip Benham, the head of Operation Rescue, who spent time regularly outside the abortion facility where Norma worked, praying and offering help to the women who approached the place. In August 1995, Pastor Benham baptized Norma into the Christian faith. Soon after, she became a Roman Catholic and is now a pro-life speaker, the founder of "Roe No More," and a great witness for life. Sandra Cano was poor and alone in Atlanta, Georgia in 1970. Her husband was in jail, two of her children had been taken away from her by welfare workers, and she was pregnant. She went for help to a legal aid clinic where she met ACLU lawyer Margie Pitts Hames, who promised to help her get a divorce and get her two children out of foster care. Hames asked Cano what she thought of abortion, and Cano replied that she was against it. In any case, she agreed to have her name put on an affidavit, and although she did not actually know exactly what she was doing became "Mary Doe," in Doe vs. Bolton, the landmark Supreme Court case which opened the floodgates of abortion through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason. Hames and others collected money to help Cano get an abortion, which Cano didn't even want. The day before she was scheduled to abort her baby, she ran away. She later gave birth to a daughter. Meanwhile, Hames lied about her in court and claimed that Cano could not get the abortion due to lack of funds. For many years, Sandra Cano felt guilty about her role in American abortion, even though she was a victim of manipulation. In 1989, she came forward and exposed the fact that Doe vs. Bolton was based on lies. Both women now speak out against abortion. Eugenics in Roe v. Wade The 1973 Supreme Court decisions that ended all legal protection of unborn children were based on eugenics. Despite that, comments about the decisions usually focus on

privacy and women's rights, not on eugenics. So we should look carefully at the ways in which eugenics shows up in the decisions. (1) The appearance of eugenics in the abortion decisions that is easiest to see is the reference in a footnote to Buck v. Bell, the 1927 case that opened the floodgates for sterilizing people who were considered to be unfit. In Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court said that the Constitution protects a "right to privacy" and that the decision to have an abortion is an exercise of this right. But, the Court stated, the right to privacy is not absolute; it can be limited in some cases, such as vaccination and sterilization. So the abortion decision was not about women's rights; it cited a case permitting forced sterilization. (2) The abortion decisions were written by Justice Harry Blackmun. Blackmun's approach to abortion follows the lead of Glanville Williams. Glanville Williams, who taught law at Cambridge University, was a member of the Eugenics Society. In 1954, the Eugenics Society voted to support the Abortion Law Reform Association, which set out to remove legal restrictions against abortion. Williams became president of the ALRA from 1962, and was successful within a few years; the British law was changed in 1967. The longest part of the decision written by Justice Harry Blackmun was his history of abortion laws. This is not a bizarre approach, but it is not the obvious approach either. If it was his intention to discuss abortion at length before examining the case that had come to the Supreme Court, he could have written about the development of the child, or about the methods of abortion, or about various birth control methods. He decided to dwell at length on the history of abortion laws. This is noteworthy, because this is the approach taken by Glanville Williams, in his book The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law, which Blackmun cited. Williams's history of abortion: Abortion in Greece and Rome, quoting Plato and Aristotle Abortion and early Christianity, especially Augustine Aquinas and speculation about life at 40-80 days after conception English law, with reference to Bracton and Blackstone 3. Common law, quoting Bracton, Blackstone and Coke 4. English statutory law, and special attention to Rex v. Bourne American law 5. The American law. Blackmun's history of abortion: 1. Ancient attitudes, especially Greeks and Romans, referring to Plato and Aristotle 2. The Hippocratic Oath, and Christian use of it

Exception for therapeutic abortion; Bourne case 6-8. The positions taken by the American Medical Association, the American Public Health Association, and the American Bar Association A startling aspect of Roe v. Wade is its insistence that laws against abortion are recent. But this view is taken from Glanville Williams. Williams wrote: "It is not generally realized that this rule is not older than the beginning of the last century." Blackmun wrote: "It perhaps is not generally appreciated that the restrictive criminal abortion laws in effect in a majority of states today are of relatively recent vintage." The Hippocratic Oath is a stumbling block for historians who want to argue that only Christians oppose abortion. Williams and Blackmun deal with the Hippocratic Oath in different ways. Williams, incredibly, simply skips over it; he quotes Hippocrates on some other matter, but does not mention the Oath. Blackmun addresses it, but finds a way to set it aside. He explains that it represented a minority view among the Greeks, but was later taken up by Christians. (3) Most importantly, the whole idea of humanity accumulating over time, from zero person at conception through various levels of value in each trimester up to 100% person at birth, is eugenics. The idea of evolution through stages from insignificance to humanity is pure eugenics, based on Darwin's theories. The whole trimester scheme in Roe v. Wade, with different rules at three stages in pregnancy, is blatantly arbitrary, and that has always struck pro-lifers as a fatal flaw in the decision. But eugenicists are not bothered by arbitrary decisions, since their view is that rights are invented by society, by a social contract based on consensus, not given by God. Eugenics devalues humans by rating people on a sliding scale. There are different sliding scales, but they all dehumanize vulnerable people and justify various crimes against humanity. The eugenics in Roe v. Wade is not a sliding scale based on racism; it does not assert that whites > yellows > reds & browns > blacks. And it is not a sliding scale based on IQ testing, placing the highly intelligent over the normal, the normal over morons, and morons over imbeciles. It is like the sliding scale in evolution, from protozoa to vegetable life to animal life to mammals to primates to savages to civilized mankind. Roe v. Wade reflects a belief in the idea that each individual passes through developmental stages that imitate evolution: egg and sperm become a zygote, which becomes a blastocyst, then an embryo, then a fetus, then an infant, then a child, then an adult, then an old person, then a corpse. Of course each person goes through different stages in life; the critical question is whether the person's worth also rises and falls. The 1973 decisions on abortion reflect the idea that size and weight and complexity and value and rights all accumulate gradually.

Review of Chapter 13: The Abortion Debate 1. Summarize Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton. 2. Identify Norma McCorvey and Sandra Cano. 3. Roe v. Wade refers to the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell. What does that show? 4. Who was Glanville Williams, and what was his influence on Roe v. Wade? 5. In Justice Blackmun's trimester scheme, does life have a clearly defined beginning? Discuss: People who identify themselves as pro-life take a substantive position, making clear statements. What are these points? People who identify themselves as pro-choice focus on the procedure for handling a disagreement. But they rarely make clear substantive statements. So what is the disagreement?

Chapter 14:
Social Biology Today - DNA and the Race

When Galton launched the eugenics movement, he used one word to refer to the science (or pseudo-science) and also to policies based on that science, and also to a new comprehensive world view that could function as a new religion. Today, though, the movement is larger and more complicated. The theoretical work gets done in one place, and the applications are attempted elsewhere. The "science" of eugenics is called social biology or sociobiology. After World War II, the word eugenics fell into disrepute. Major General Frederick Osborn commented wryly that genetic counseling, or "heredity clinics," were "the first eugenic proposals that have been adopted in a practical form and accepted by the public." They were accepted, but not at face value: "The word eugenics is not associated with them." In fact, he stated bluntly, "Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics." The word had to go. The journals of the eugenics societies shifted first. In 1968, the American eugenics journal switched from the Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biology. The same year, the English journal switched from Eugenics Review to the Journal of Biosocial Science. Then the societies changed their own names. In 1973, the American Eugenics Society was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology. And in England in 1989, the Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute. The shift to social biology or sociobiology was supposed to get rid of any taint of Nazi connections. But it is not clear that the new labels could do the job, because they are in fact old labels.

In 1904, at the beginning of the German eugenics movement, Dr. Alfred Ploetz founded a journal called the Archiv fr Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, or the Archive for Racial and Social Biology. The following year, he and Dr. Ernst Rdin founded a German eugenics society to carry on the same work as the journal, called the "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene" or "Society for Racial Hygiene." Later they added a word "Gesellschaft fr Rassenhygiene (Eugenik)" or "Society for Racial Hygiene (Eugenics)." So the first phrase that the Germans used for eugenics was "social biology." The various phrases race biology, social biology, racial hygiene, eugenics certainly have slightly different connotations, but they were used to refer to the same collection of ideas. To get away from Hitler, the eugenics movement went back to Ploetz and Rdin. E. O. Wilson: Harvard's Sociobiologist A key sociobiology theorist, and certainly one of the most intellectually attractive, is Edward O. Wilson, who taught at Harvard for a generation. His writing and speaking were sophisticated, witty and challenging, and his classes were always well attended. He insisted that he was not a eugenicist, although it is not clear what he meant by that, except that he did not want to be associated with Hitler. He may also have been referring to a distinction from the earliest days of the eugenics movement, between science and policy. Galton had said that eugenics was a science that led to policy, and could become a religion. Wilson wanted his work to be considered science, although he knew well that his ideas had political implications. Further, he was explicit about the theological implications. Wilson has written many books and articles, including fascinating tales about ants. In 1991, a book he had written (coauthored with Bert Hlldobler) entitled simply The Ants won a Pulitzer Prize. Wilson's exploration of the world of ants is intriguing and delightful, full of surprises. For example, ants (and wasps and bees) have a peculiar method of determining the sex of their offspring, and are able to produce a caste whose task is to rear their sisters. "Sterile castes engaged in rearing siblings are the essential feature of social organization in the insects," Wilson writes. "The societies of wasps, bees, and ants have proved so successful that they dominate and alter most of the land habitats of the Earth. In the forests of Brazil, their assembled forces constitute more than 20 percent of the weight of all land animals, including nematode worms, toucans, and jaguars." You probably didn't know that. But if you did know it, you learned it from Wilson. Wilson, like Darwin, amassed vast quantities of new information, but again like Darwin did not stop with the data. He offers an array of intellectual challenges, including a very effective assault on individuality. An individual ant is an incomprehensible bit of matter, lost in the cosmos, like a strand of hair or a fingernail clipping. To understand the ant, you must understand the colony. Is the same true of humans?

Wilson put his thoughts clearly, stating that the individual is just DNA's way of replicating itself from one generation to the next. The remark sounds like a joke, but it is not. Wilson is serious in his conviction that the things that matter are DNA and the race, not the individual. Wilson's ideas are challenging partly because he was candid about the problems he was causing, and met criticisms head on, patiently. He was aware that ideas like his had been used (or abused) to justify genocide, and he was careful to "affirm human freedom and dignity." In his book On Human Nature, Wilson discusses how to be proud even if you accept his beliefs. He wanted to explore the differences between Asians, Europeans and Africans (he hesitated to call them different "races"). Further, he wanted to explore whether there are any "racial" differences in behavior. For example, Navaho children are often described as relatively passive, unlike playful and easily aroused European children. 'It has been conventional," writes Wilson, "to ascribe the passivity of Navaho children to the practice of cradleboarding, a device that holds the infant tightly in place on the mother's back." But which is cause and which is effect? Does the practice of cradleboarding make Navaho children somewhat passive, or did the passivity of Navaho children make cradleboarding possible for them? Wilson was keenly aware that questions like this can cause huge problems very quickly. It may be possible to understand cradleboards without picking a huge fight. But once you start exploring the genetic predisposition to various forms of behavior, it is difficult to fend off swarms of racists. In 1995, J. Philippe Rushton published Race, Evolution, and Behavior. He asserted that blacks have small brains, large genitals and tendency to commit rape. Transaction Publishers, a respectable publishing house, put out the book, and it was discussed soberly. Wilson would not have done that; he was aware that he was dealing with a topic that was "emotionally explosive and politically dangerous." Still, he was insistent that there are differences among humans and that some of the different ways that people act are based on physical and mental properties that they inherited. To understand modern eugenics, you have to see and understand Wilson's sensitivity: Given that humankind is a biological species, it should come as no shock to find that populations are to some extent genetically diverse in the physical and mental properties underlying social behavior. A discovery of this nature does not vitiate the ideals of Western civilization. We are not compelled to believe in biological uniformity in order to affirm human freedom and dignity. The sociologist Marvin Bressler has expressed this idea with precision: "An ideology that tacitly appeals to biological equality as a condition for human emancipation corrupts the idea of freedom. Moreover, it encourages decent men to tremble at the prospect of 'inconvenient' findings that may emerge in future scientific research. This unseemly anti-intellectualism is doubly degrading because it is probably unnecessary."

I will go further and suggest that hope and pride and not despair are the ultimate legacy of genetic diversity, because we are a single species, not two or more, one great breeding system through which genes flow and mix in each generation. Because of that flux, mankind viewed over many generations shares a single human nature within which relatively minor hereditary influences recycle through ever changing patterns, between the sexes and across families and entire populations. To understand the enormous significance of this biological unity, imagine our moral distress if australopithecine manapes had survived to the present time, halfway in intelligence between chimpanzees and human beings, forever genetically separated from both, evolving just behind us in language and the higher faculties of reason. What would be our obligation to them? What would the theologians say or the Marxists, who might see in them the ultimate form of an oppressed class? Should we divide the world, guide their mental evolution to the human level, and establish a two-species dominion based on a treaty of intellectual and technological parity? Should we make certain they rose no higher? But even worse, imagine our predicament if we coexisted with a mentally superior human species, say Homo superbus, who regarded us, the minor sibling species Homo sapiens, as the moral problem. Wilson is subtle and sensitive. But what does he say about humanity, especially in his book about human nature? First, he is committed to scientific materialism, and believes that mankind is a product of genes and the environment, not God: If the brain is a machine of ten billion nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect we are biological and our souls cannot fly free. If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. Wilson is extremely ambitious in his determination to explain humanity by reference to biology alone. He discusses what happens when two philosophers talk about justice. "Like everyone else, philosophers measure their personal emotional responses to various alternatives as though consulting a hidden oracle," Wilson writes. Other people have called this "oracle" our conscience, and have seen its existence as one indication of God's presence in our world. But Wilson has a different explanation: "That oracle resides in the deep emotional centers of the brain, most probably within the limbic system, a complex array of neurons and hormone-secreting cells located just beneath the 'thinking' portion of the cerebral cortex." Wilson's belief that he can find the conscience in the limbic system is a detail. He believes that biology and sociobiology can (and soon will) explain human nature. "Biology is the key to human nature," he writes, "and social scientists cannot afford to ignore its rapidly tightening principles." Wilson dodges the nature-nurture debate, and affirms that both genes and the environment shape a person. In a chapter on "Development," he writes: "The newly fertilized egg, a corpuscle one two-hundredth of an inch in diameter, is not a human being. It is a set of instructions sent floating into the cavity of the womb. ... In nine months a human being has been created. Functionally it is a digestive tube surrounded by

sheaths of muscle and a skin. ... The newborn infant is now seen to be wired with awesome precision. ... This marvelous robot is launched into the world under the care of its parents. Its rapidly accumulating experience will soon transform it into an independently thinking and feeling individual." It is noteworthy that in his description of the individual, a person emerges some time after birth. It is a curiosity of history that Wilson has been dead set against being labeled a eugenicist. But whatever label the polite reader applies to him, it is important to understand his thinking. He is a serious scientific materialist, who believes that science biology following Darwin in particular explains humanity. He has an impact through his books and articles, but also in his classes, teaching some of the brightest students in the country for decades. Mankind Quarterly: White Collar White Supremacy The eugenics movement today is not all as urbane and polished as Wilson. There are still some theorists ready to explain white supremacy. The Pioneer Fund, run by Harry Laughlin and then by Major General Frederick Osborn, has continued its work. And in 1960, English eugenicists launched a new journal, Mankind Quarterly. The editor was R. Gayre of Gayre. There were two associate editors: Professor Henry E. Garrett and Professor R. Ruggles Gates. Gates had been married to Marie Stopes, whose career in England was similar to that of Margaret Sanger in the United States. That is, Stopes was committed to eugenics, and built an alliance with feminists to promote birth control. Before they parted ways, Gates had helped Stopes to launch the Society for Constructive Birth Control and Racial Progress. The lead article in the inaugural issue of Mankind Quarterly was part one of "World Population," by Sir Charles Galton Darwin. He was a grandson of the renowned biologist for whom he was named. (Numerous Darwins had promoted the work started by Charles Darwin and Francis Galton; the Eugenics Society membership list includes a bewildering array of Darwin cousins.) The article did not make any exciting new points; it was classical Malthusian doctrine that the population will soon outstrip food, unless we take preventive action now. One of the most important ideas in the journal was stated explicitly in a book review. Mankind Quarterly was launched at a time when there was a great deal of discussion about integrating schools, ending a practice of running separate (but theoretically equal) schools for blacks and whites. Gayre of Gayre and Gates wrote a review together (of Race and Reason, by Carleton Putnam), in which they said that "separate schools are better for both races." They complained that "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races . . . until the uninstructed public were gradually misled." Then they made a

distinction: "Equality of opportunity, which everyone supports was replaced by a doctrine of social and genetic equality, which is something different." This is a false dichotomy, presenting two possibilities as the only choices. In the French Revolution, the slogan for which people fought was "libert, galit, fraternit," or "liberty, equality and brotherhood." When they spoke of equality, they were rejecting the concept of aristocracy, the idea that some people are better than others because they were born better, and deserve more simply because they were born into better families. As a practical matter, you can work toward a more egalitarian society by providing equal opportunity. But the French revolution was not about job applications; it was a fierce and bloody rejection of arrogance. Equality can be expressed in theological terms: we were created by one God, we are children of one Father. Our dignity is based on God's love for us, not on our height, weight, IQ or accomplishments. But as the French showed, theology is not necessary to grasp the idea firmly. And many grubby street urchins can get to the heart of the matter in a few seconds: "Do you think that you're better than me, just because you're smarter?" White supremacists reject the idea of equality as it is understood by most people. In Mankind Quarterly, the concept is rejected very cleverly: the editors embrace equal opportunity and make fun of equal endowment and simply overlook equal dignity. The Bell Curve: Ponderous Update of Eugenics Theory Harvard provided a platform for updating eugenics, now called sociobiology. Harvard was also home for Professor Richard Herrnstein, who amassed data to update eugenics research in the social sciences. In 1994, Herrnstein and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, Charles Murray, published a 845-page volume entitled The Bell Curve, exploring links between intelligence and other aspects of human life. The subtitle of The Bell Curve is Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. Murray and Herrnstein argued that there is a "cognitive elite," a class of people with above-average intelligence, who have power and influence. When the book came out, there was a national outcry, focusing on chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability." The chapter is about data which indicates measurable differences in intelligence among blacks, whites and Asians. They summarize the data in statistical terms: "this means that the average white person tests higher than about 84 percent of the population of blacks and that the average black person tests higher than about 16 percent of the population of whites." The chapter was troubling, to put it mildly. However, the national debate about racism in chapter 13 overlooked a much larger matter. The entire book, from the beginning to the end, is eugenics theory. Racism is a grave evil, with a long and sordid history in the United States. But today, it is a single piece of a larger whole, called eugenics.

The conclusion of the book includes an assault on the Declaration of Independence. The authors discuss different ideas about equality, but eventually slip into the same false dichotomy that was evident in Mankind Quarterly: equal opportunity versus equal endowment. They embrace the first, and reject the second. Their language is a little confusing, because they talk about dignity: "At the heart of our thought is the quest for human dignity." But in their view, the role of the government, the measure of success, "is to permit people to live lives of dignity not to give them dignity, for that is not in any government's power, but to make it accessible to all." The word they use here is dignity, but the idea is equal opportunity. With regard to endowments, they are straightforward: "Inequality of endowments, including intelligence, is a reality. . . . It is time for America once again to try living with inequality." Murray and Herrnstein made a serious effort to find a way to assert the intrinsic value of a human being. They chose to talk about "letting people find valued places in society." It is interesting that intelligent writers trying to express a fundamental aspect of human life ended up using their own new and idiosyncratic language. But their effort, however sincere and inventive, had serious flaws. They wrote: The broadest goal is a society in which people throughout the functional range of intelligence can find, and feel that they have found, a valued place for themselves. For "valued place," we offer a pragmatic definition: You occupy a valued place if other people would miss you if you were gone. The fact that you would be missed means that you were valued. The most glaring problem with value defined this way is that society confers value. What if people don't miss you when you are gone: are you valuable anyway? What about cases of genocide: if your whole community is wiped out, so that all the people who knew you and would have missed you are gone, what happens to your value? What about abortion: the decision about terminating a pregnancy is made before the unborn child is known, before any strengths or foibles are visible. These are practical questions for the mentally ill who have been institutionalized, for the targets of genocide in many places (Kosovo, Sudan, Tibet, East Timor, Armenia ...), and for unborn children. In the concluding chapter of the book, the authors write about "Dealing with Demography." Like Malthus, they urge an end to welfare programs that make it easier for the poor to scrape along having more and more babies. In the same paragraph, as part of the same thought, they repeat Sanger's sugar-coated eugenics proposal: "The other generic recommendation, as close to harmless as any government program we can imagine, is to make it easy for women to make good on their prior decision not to get pregnant by making available birth control mechanisms that are increasingly flexible, foolproof, inexpensive, and safe." In the same section, they urge a shift in immigration laws, toward a system that emphasizes "competency." The book has original thought, but most of it is a collection of research done by other social scientists in many fields over decades. And the experts who are quoted in the book

are, overwhelmingly, members of the Eugenics Society (in England) or the American Eugenics Society. The book is a collection of eugenics research. The authors are forthright about the fact that they are dealing with controversial topics, but they shy away from the term eugenics. After summarizing a century of debate over intelligence tests, beginning with Darwin and Galton, they write: "Given these different ways of understanding intelligence, you will naturally ask where our sympathies lie and how they shape this book." The answer they give is almost honest: "We will be drawing most heavily from the classical tradition." They meant the tradition of eugenics, carried forward by members of eugenics societies. One Faith, Many Works The theories expounded by E. O. Wilson, by Mankind Quarterly and in The Bell Curve are very different from each other. Wilson spoke of insights from biology and from social biology. R. Gayre of Gayre and friends held fast to the Nordic myths. Murray and Herrnstein amassed a heavy tome of data from social scientists (overwhelmingly, members of eugenics societies). But they all took it for granted that it is possible to evaluate humans not just to check height and weight, but to get at the essential quality of a human being and measure that. They all took it for granted that intelligence is the key quality of humanity, and that intelligence can be charted, displaying how up along the evolutionary scale a particular person has climbed. They all took it for granted that improving IQ scores is the way to improve the human race. And they all took it for granted that progress toward an improved human species, by increasing intelligence from one generation to the next, is the central goal of the human race. Whatever these men may have thought of the label eugenics, they all held a coherent body of beliefs and goals that is hard to distinguish in any significant way from the views of Francis Galton. Review of Chapter 14: Social Biology Today 1. What is social biology? During the Nazi era, what was the German name for eugenics? 2. Identify E. O. Wilson. Describe his work on ants and other living things briefly. 3. Identify Mankind Quarterly, and explain the use of the word equality. 4. Identify The Bell Curve, and describe its comment on the Declaration of Independence. 5. Is there a single, unified view of humanity shared by all eugenicists today? Discuss: The word "dignity" means different things to different people. Give one definition of the word, and describe its importance in the teaching of at least one religious community.

An Alternate View: The Dignity of Each Person

Sometimes when people live within a society that holds a series of views, it is hard to see them clearly. You can't see the air you breathe, and it takes a little mental effort to be

aware of the air. Similarly, it may take a little effort to see a body of belief if most of the people around you take it for granted. So, in order to make the key views of eugenics today easier to isolate, we should look at an alternative. What follows is an exploration of the teaching of one religious body, the Roman Catholic Church, about human dignity. This is an excerpt from "Human Dignity: A Fuzzy Concept?" a chapter in Ban Human Cloning, published in 1997 by the American Bioethics Advisory Commission, a private organization in Stafford, Virginia. ... Dignity refers to the intrinsic worth or value of a person or thing, and the idea is accessible by anyone, regardless of religion. However, it may be worthwhile looking at the way the word is used in the Catholic Church. The word has immense richness in that tradition. Pope John XXIII, who initiated immense changes in the way the Catholic Church relates to the modern world, situated human dignity squarely in heart of the Church's social teaching: [T]he Catholic Church's social teaching ... rests on one basic principle: individual human beings are the foundation, the cause and the end of every social institution. ... On this basic principle, which guarantees the sacred dignity of the individual, the Church constructs her social teaching (Mater et Magistra, #119-120, May 15, 1961). Dignity, as he understood it, was an attribute of an individual. Pope John Paul II also understands human dignity to be key to the whole idea of humanity. In his address to the United Nations on October 5, 1995, he recalled the struggle for freedom in central Europe, a struggle that had shaped his life, and a major triumph of his papacy. In that speech, he linked dignity and freedom, and in fact described dignity as the basis for the quest for freedom. Further, he described totalitarianism as an assault on dignity. The moral dynamics of this universal quest for freedom clearly appeared in Central and Eastern Europe during the nonviolent revolutions of 1989. Unfolding in specific times and places, those historical events nonetheless taught a lesson which goes far beyond a specific geographical location. For the nonviolent revolutions of 1989 demonstrated that the quest for freedom cannot be suppressed. It arises from a recognition of the inestimable dignity and value of the human person, and it cannot fail to be accompanied by a commitment on behalf of the human person. Modern totalitarianism has been, first and foremost, an assault on the dignity of the person, an assault which has gone even to the point of denying the inalienable value of the individual's life. These excerpts show the centrality of dignity in Catholic teaching. In fact, in a list of 22 Vatican documents about various topics related to the field of bioethics, the word recurs 420 times. Dignity is discussed at length in the Vatican Council document Gaudium et Spes, or The Church in the Modern World (December 7, 1965), a document that was addressed not to the Church, but to everyone. There, the basis for dignity is specified, and is tied to human origins: [T]he very dignity of man postulates that man glorify God in his body and forbid it to serve the evil inclinations of his heart.

19. The root reason for human dignity lies in man's call to communion with God. From the very circumstance of his origin man is already invited to converse with God. For man would not exist were he not created by God's love and constantly preserved by it; and he cannot live fully according to truth unless he freely acknowledges that love and devotes himself to His Creator. Still, many of our contemporaries have never recognized this intimate and vital link with God, or have explicitly rejected it. Thus atheism must be accounted among the most serious problems of this age, and is deserving of closer examination. The Church holds that the recognition of God is in no way hostile to man's dignity, since this dignity is rooted and perfected in God. For man was made an intelligent and free member of society by God Who created him; but even more important, he is called as a son to commune with God and share in His happiness. She further teaches that a hope related to the end of time does not diminish the importance of intervening duties but rather undergirds the acquittal of them with fresh incentives. By contrast, when a divine substructure and the hope of life eternal are wanting, man's dignity is most grievously lacerated, as current events often attest; riddles of life and death, of guilt and of grief go unsolved with the frequent result that men succumb to despair. A more recent document (March 25, 1995), Pope John Paul II's letter The Gospel of Life, reaffirms the connection between human dignity and origin, and adds that human dignity is also connected to human destiny (at #38): The dignity of this life is linked not only to its beginning, to the fact that it comes from God, but also to its final end, to its destiny of fellowship with God in knowledge and love of him.

Chapter 15:
Population Control Today

The long effort of the eugenics movement to get "more from the fit and less from the unfit" is by no means ended, although both parts of this program are frequently overlooked. The savage and bloody part, of course, is the assault on the "unfit," the unwanted, the surplus people, the useless bread gobblers. Some of this elitist selection goes on within the United States, but most of it occurs overseas. This does not mean, though, that Americans can leave the problem to others; the American government has promoted racist population control policies for decades. Some Americans today argue that we should take care of our own problems, and not try

to fix the world. Other people, including most churches, urge a more generous engagement with the entire human family. But even the new isolationists must admit that since the United States pushed depopulation programs for decades, we have an obligation to undo the damage. So what is population control, and where is it a problem? For many years now, the worst population control program has been in China. The Chinese government decided to reduce population, and set out to do so systematically, with an official policy of permitting only one child per family. The policy has had loopholes at various times for various reasons; for example, the ethnic Mongolians are treated more leniently. But the policy is nationwide, and it is very strict. The Chinese family policy uses forced abortion, forced sterilization and forced insertion of IUDs. Family planning workers monitor menstrual periods for the women in their assigned areas or workplaces, and start to ask questions when a woman misses her period. In some factories, menstrual periods are charted on the wall, so that everyone can keep track of everyone else. In 1985, The Washington Post ran a three-part series (January 6-8) on China's brutal policy. Michael Weisskopf reported, "Any mother who becomes pregnant again without receiving official authorization after having one child is required to have an abortion, and the incidence of such operations is stunning 53 million from 1979 to 1984, according to the Ministry of Public Health a five-year abortion count approximately equal to the population of France." Family planning workers prefer to avoid pregnancy, and they have pushed sterilization. According to Weisskopf, "local officials use methods ranging from cash rewards to coercion to get those eligible to the operating table." And these methods produced results. "Official statistics show a high level of success: 31 million women and 9.3 million men were sterilized between 1979 and 1984, totaling almost one third of all married, productive couples in China." The policy was not based on "choice." The Washington Post reported: A roundup in frigid northern China near the Mongolian border illustrates how the process works. The campaign, which was described by a participating doctor, began in November 1983, when officials from every commune in the county searched their records for women under the age of 45 who had two or more children. Then they broadcast their names over public loudspeakers and set dates by which each had to report to the clinic for surgery. There was a warning to potential evaders: a loss of half of their state land allotment, a fine of $200 equal to about a year's income and a late fee of $10 for every day they failed to report.

Several couples initially defied the warning but were quickly brought into line. Officials went to their homes, confiscated valuables, such as sewing machines and building materials, and threatened to sell them within three days unless they submitted to the operation. The surgical team left in early January after completing its goal of 16,000 sterilizations in two months, according to the doctor. Despite the reports in the Washington Post, and similar stories in the New York Times and other respected media, the Chinese government and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) have continued to deny that there is coercion in their program. Steven Mosher worked in southern China when he was a graduate student at Stanford University. He broke the story of forced abortion and coercive population policies. The Chinese government was outraged and demanded that Stanford punish him. Stanford found reason to throw Mosher out of their doctoral program. The savage program did not come to an end in the 1980s. In 1998, Rep. Christopher Smith, Chairman of the Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, held Congressional hearings on forced abortion and sterilization in China. One of the witnesses at the hearing was Gao Xiao Duan, who had been the administrator of a planned birth office in Fujian Province in China just two months before. Mrs. Gao worked in an office with a sign over the entrance: "No permit, no marriage; no permit, no pregnancy; no permit, no baby." She had a box where informers could drop reports about their neighbors who were pregnant without authorization. The building had a detention facility to hold violators. Mrs. Gao's testimony was detailed and powerful, with stories like the following: I vividly remember one time that I led my subordinates to Yinglin Town Hospital to check on births. I found that two women in Zhoukeng Town had extra-plan births. I led a planned-birth supervision team composed of a dozen cadres [trained personnel] and public security agents. With sledge hammers and heavy crowbars in hand, we went to Zhoukeng Town and dismantled their houses. We were unable to apprehend the women in the case so we took their mothers in lieu of them and detained them in the planned birth offices detention facility. It wasn't until about a half a month later that the women surrendered themselves to the planned birth office. They were sterilized, fined heavily, and their mothers were finally released. I myself did so many brutal things, but I thought that I was conscientiously implementing the policy of our party and that I was an exemplary citizen and a good cadre. Once I found a woman who was nine months pregnant, but did not have a birth-allowed certificate. According to the policy, she was forced to undergo an induced abortion. In the operating room, I saw the child's lips were moving and how its arms and legs were also moving. The doctor injected poison into its skull and the child died and it was thrown

into the trash can. Afterwards the husband was holding his wife and crying loudly and saying, "What kind of man am I? What kind of husband am I? I can't even protect my wife and child. Do you have any sort of humanity?" Whenever I saw these things, my heart would break, and I felt like to help the tyrant do evils was not what I wanted. I could not bear seeing all these mothers grief-stricken by induced delivery and sterilization. I could not live with this on my conscience because I too am also a mother. These cruel actions are against what I believe in. All of those 14 years I was a monster in the daytime, injuring others by the Chinese Communist authorities' barbaric planned birth policy. But in the evening I was like all other women and mothers, enjoying my life with my children. I couldn't go on living with such a dual life anymore. Here to all those injured women and to all those children who were killed, I want to repent and say sincerely that I'm very sorry, sincerely sorry. I want to be a real human being. Just a few months before the Congressional hearings, the UNFPA announced its cooperation in a four-year, $20 million family planning program in China, and stated that China wanted an approach "based on the principles of free and voluntary choice." Nafis Sadik, executive director of the UNFPA, told Rep. Chris Smith that the Chinese policy was "purely voluntary," and denied that there was any such thing as a license to have a birth. It is tempting to set aside the words of Nafis Sadik as flat lies. They may be, but to understand the debate over population control, it is important to know about a variety of subtle distinctions in the language. For example, when Mrs. Gao led a team to Zhoukeng town, where they smashed two houses and arrested the mothers of the pregnant women, was that coercion? The women eventually came to the birth center on their own feet; they were not dragged in by the police. They could have chosen to leave their mothers in jail while they gave birth to their own children. Most people would consider smashing your house or jailing your mom to be coercive. But to some people, coercion means using physical force on another person's body. There are other tools and terms used in population control debates. One of the most important tools for national policy-makers is setting targets for the whole program and quotas for their subordinates. Quotas set at the national level can lead directly to coercion at the local level. At the national level, the government can establish a target of reducing births to an average of three per family within the next five years. To achieve that target, they might tell regional or local family planning workers that they will be expected to meet a quota of so many IUDs inserted and so many people sterilized. If the quotas are too ambitious, the local workers might decide that they must use coercion but the national program does not say anything about force. In such a program, everyone involved in the work can be fully aware that the program is coercive, but spokesmen at

the national level can deny it with a straight face, or dismiss documented reports of coercion as occasional abuses at the local level. Sometimes population planners make a distinction between incentives and disincentives. An incentive is a reward for cooperating, a "carrot." In some nations, poor women are paid cash or given gifts if they get sterilized; such payments (or bribes) are incentives. A disincentive is some kind of punishment for failing to cooperate, a "stick." Fines, loss of work or promotion, and loss of farmland are examples of coercion. In the debate over population policy, some funders argue for an approach based on voluntarism, and insist that they will not support a program that has any coercion, quotas or disincentives, but will tolerate incentives. It is possible to blur the difference between incentives and disincentives, though. In one Chinese village, the government installed water heaters at the town well. People who cooperated with the family planning program were rewarded with access to hot water for washing. That sounds like an incentive. But suppose most of the town cooperates? Then it might be more accurate to say that the few holdouts are being punished, losing access to hot water. That would be a disincentive. A substantial amount of population control work is accomplished through simple manipulation. Recall the words of Alva Myrdal, the Swedish population expert, who said that her government planned to address the problem of defectives reproducing themselves by encouraging "severe family limitation," reaching them "through direct propaganda and instruction in contraceptive methods." In 1999, the UNFPA announced its support for a family planning program in 32 counties in China (out of about 2,000). In those counties, the one-child-only population policy will be suspended. Or will it be? Nafis Sadik, as Executive Director of the UNFPA, said, "In the project counties, couples will be allowed to have as many children as they want, whenever they want, without requiring birth permits or being subject to quotas." However, the Chinese government may still use economic pressure to encourage compliance. In Sadik's words, couples in these counties "may still be subject to a 'social compensation fee' if they decide to have more children that recommended by the policy." The Golden Venture incident In June, 1993, the ship Golden Venture ran aground near New York harbor. It was carrying 300 passengers who had paid high prices to smugglers to help them flee the onechild-only family policy in China. Several passengers died trying to swim to shore; the others made it, but were arrested as illegal immigrants. They applied for political asylum. The United States will grant asylum to refugees who can show that they have a well-grounded fear of persecution if they are sent home. Immigration judges had to decide whether a well-grounded fear of forced sterilization or

abortion was sufficient reason for granting asylum. The government held the Chinese refugees in federal prisons during the hearings and appeals. The matter dragged on for four years. The Clinton administration was determined not to offend the Chinese government, and tried to send most of the refugees back to China. Some of the refugees were sent back, and went to re-education camps. Some did finally receive asylum in the U.S. Others sought and received asylum in other nations. In the end, the message to Chinese refugees was clear. If you flee to the United States, you will suffer for it. In 1997, a young Chinese woman named Li Xuemei became pregnant without authorization. She had already given birth to one child, and had been fined for that. She had become pregnant a second time, and been forced to undergo an abortion. This was her third pregnancy, and she knew that she faced severe punishment. In early 1998, she fled from China. She went to a gang of "Snakeheads," and paid them to smuggle her out. The Snakeheads got her out of China, and landed her in Japan with a large group of other refugees. Japanese authorities learned about the illegal entry, and arrested them almost immediately. Li Xuemei was the only one in the group who managed to stay in Japan; the rest were deported quickly. But Li asked for asylum, saying that if the Japanese sent her back, she would be forced to abort her child. The Japanese courts debated her case for months, and her child was born while she was in jail. Eventually she was released from jail, but not granted asylum. The Japanese, like the Americans, were not eager to offend the Chinese. Nor did they want to encourage a mass exodus. The Japanese do not have anything like America's tradition of welcoming refugees. Further, Chinese refugees who intend to reach the United States have to cross the largest ocean in the world, but the distance to Japan is much shorter. Still, at least one judge admitted his admiration for Li Xuemei, who suffered so much to keep her child alive. The case may have been resolved quietly when she dropped out of sight. Ambivalence in the United States Since 1985, the American public has been aware that forced abortion occurs in China. During those years, there has been a fierce national fight about abortion. The people in the abortion battle describe themselves as "pro-life" and "pro-choice," so the Chinese policy should be extremely offensive to the activists on both sides of the abortion issue. Forced abortion is an assault on life and is also an assault on freedom. It would seem obvious for all Americans to denounce the practice. In fact, few of the people who identify themselves as "pro-choice" have spoken out. And when the Chinese government decided that they wanted to host the Fourth World

Conference on Women in Beijing, women's rights groups cooperated. Twenty percent of the women in the world (that is, Chinese women) live under a government that considers pregnancy to be the government's business, that is prepared to monitor menstrual periods, that brutalizes women regularly, that has no respect at all for privacy or choice or women's rights. The Chinese population campaign is bloody and oppressive. To permit Beijing to host an international conference on women is like permitting Germany to host a summit meeting on antisemitism in 1939. And yet, women's groups went along with it. Hillary Clinton went to the Beijing meeting, and in her speech she did refer obliquely to forced abortion. But her words were muted, and did not mention China explicitly. Still, the U.S. State Department was quick to say that even her muted words were her own, and should not be understood as an official criticism of the Chinese from the American government. When Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, he made human rights a part of American foreign policy. In our dealings with other nations, we would look at their record on human rights. In official meetings with diplomats or heads of state from other nations where there were serious abuses, Americans would make sure that one of the topics they discussed was human rights. American relations with the Communist government of China were not smooth. For years, American diplomats met with the Chinese to talk about trade and similar issues, and raised a list of complaints, including concern about genocide in Tibet, abuse of prison labor, the export of nuclear technology, the export of weapons and forced abortion. But under Clinton, Americans stopped raising the forced abortion issue, except for occasional pro forma complaints. Since the early 1980s, there has been a great deal of support and praise for the Chinese population policy at the United Nations. Under Clinton, the American government has not made any serious effort to signal to the Chinese that our view of the one-child-only policy is different from the UNFPA view. Support for the Chinese population policy may be widespread. Good polling data is not available, but there were some informal surveys of several hundred people in Wisconsin and Maryland in the early 1990s. The surveys asked a random cross-section of people, "Do you SUPPORT or OPPOSE China's population policy, which includes forced abortion?" Over 20 percent of respondents said they supported the Chinese policy. NSSM 200: Fear of Non-White Babies In 1975, the United States decided that protecting the nation required that we decrease population growth around the world. The government defined population growth in developing nations as a threat to our national security. The official policy was not put in the terms used by Lothrop Stoddard, who had written at the beginning of the century about the "rising tide of color against white world supremacy." But the new policy was designed to protect the power of the people in land Stoddard had called "White Man's Land" against encroachments from Black Man's Land, Brown Man's Land and Yellow Man's Land.

UN conferences on population
Few topics, if any, have received as much attention at the United Nations as population. Since its founding, the UN has shown remarkable tenacity, organizing one conference per decade on population. The extraordinary series began in Rome (1954), the continued through Belgrade (1965), Bucharest (1974), Mexico (1984), and Cairo (1994). The Cairo conference was about "population and development," continuing a long debate. The Catholic Church had forced population control advocates to weigh development issues. Pope Paul VI insisted that "development is the new name for peace," and that international development would address the problems that worried the depopulationists. Shortly after Pope Paul VI issued a formal letter (or encyclical) entitled On the Development of Peoples laying out his approach, the Population Council started a scholarly journal called Population and Development. The fight was on: does population growth help or hinder development, or is it neutral? In the 1990s, the UN also sponsored international conferences on population and the environment (Rio de Janeiro), population and women (Beijing), and population and housing (Copenhagen). Population controllers were determined to establish themselves as the leaders in the environmental movement and the feminist movement, and were also ready to start a new battle over housing policies. The recycled racism appears in a collection of official documents, including National Security Study Memorandum 200, or NSSM 200. The "study" memo led in 1975 to a "decision" memo, National Security Decision Memorandum 314, or NSDM 314. The purpose of national security studies like this was to make clear for everyone involved, including American diplomats overseas, what the national government thought about issues and more specifically about possible threats. In 1975, the government saw various threats to American safety, or national security. Some threats were obvious; the government was concerned about maintaining military power in the Pacific, countering the threat of Communism in Europe, containing Communist rebels in Latin America. While it did not say so explicitly, NSSM 200 put non-white babies on the list of threats. The Memorandum called for increased funds for international population control programs, and also noted that funds from other programs could be used to study ways to reduce fertility. After the document was declassified in 1989, the Information Project for Africa distributed it to journalists all over the world. Many people found the document extremely offensive, and used NSSM 200 to challenge the United States at the UN population conferences. Review of Chapter 15: Population Control Today

1. Describe the one-child-only family policy in China. 2. Explain the following terms: coercion, quota, manipulation, disincentives, incentives. 3. Is the United States government clearly opposed to China's population policy? Are the American people unanimously opposed to the policy? 4. What is NSSM 200, and what does it say about population? 5. Summarize the Golden Venture incident briefly. Identify Li Xuemei, and explain the significance of her flight from China. Discuss: What is the link between population policy in China and immigration policy elsewhere?

Chapter 16:
"Modem Genetics Is Eugenics"
"Modern genetics is eugenics." George Annas, M.D., bioethics professor at Boston University, speaking at the U.S. Holocaust Museum in Washington Genetics is a relatively new science. The great pioneer in the field, whose experiments provided a foundation for this branch of science, was Rev. Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), an Austrian monk. He grew peas, and saw that various traits (size, color, wrinkles) were passed from one generation to the next. Much more importantly, he saw that peas have pairs of some kind of hereditary factor. The pairs do not compromise with each other; either one or the other will be dominant. That is, if you cross a tall pea with a dwarf pea, you get some tall and some dwarf peas, but no peas of medium height. Further, in the first generation of cross-pollinated peas, they will all be tall, and in the next generation there will be three tall pea plants for every one dwarf. Rev. Mendel's data, collected painstakingly over years, made it possible to understand that "genes" (the hereditary factors in the pea) are units, that they come in pairs, and that there are "dominant" and "recessive" traits. He presented his work to a natural science society in 1865, but at that time, his audience missed the importance of his work completely. In fact, when he died in 1884, the importance of his work was still unrecognized. In 1909, the Danish botanist W. L. Johanssen gave the name gene to Mendel's units of heredity. The study of genes and heredity was called genetics. Blessing or Curse Genetics holds immense promise. It can explain many things about life, and can provide insights to cure diseases. But like "mental hygiene," genetics also holds huge dangers. Genetics can be used (or abused) to operate on the human race at the expense of the

individual. Some scientists expect that genetics will make it possible to engineer improvements in the human race. basic research ... The most ambitious project of basic scientific research in genetics is the Human Genome Project. In 1988, Congress provided funds for the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and other groups to begin mapping out human DNA. The project began officially on October 1, 1990, with a projected budget of $3 billion over the next 15 years. The task is to map the human genome, the whole collection of genes carried by each person. Each cell in the human body has a strand of DNA, a large molecule with more than 200 billion atoms. That long molecule, bundled inside a cell, has about 80,000 genes that are associated with various traits, such as eye color and height. Where are those genes, and what is in between them along the strand of DNA? Mapping the human genome is an ambitious scientific project, like mapping the entire globe or going to the moon. The knowledge will surely lead to many benefits that we cannot foresee now. treatments and cures ... It seems reasonable that growing understanding of human genetics should lead to many new and successful treatments. However, the historical record of medical use of genetic information is horrendous. One of the simplest problems to detect genetically is Down syndrome, which includes some recognizable facial characteristics and some mental retardation. Genetic detection is easy, because a person with Down syndrome has an extra chromosome. But detection did not lead to treatment; for years, in nearly all cases, detection led to eugenic abortion. The response to Down syndrome set the pattern. Now, thousands of problems, diseases or conditions can be detected genetically, but very few can be treated before birth. Detection means destruction. Genetics is undoubtedly an exciting field, but focusing too much research funding on genetics has done huge damage. For example, there is a medical condition called spina bifida that can cause difficulty walking and other impairments. Spina bifida almost disappeared in Britain during World War II. An alert researcher who knew that could have begun looking for the changes in diet or daily habits that wiped out the disease. Instead, nearly all research money was focused on genetics, and researchers who were interested in spina bifida had to focus on genetics to get funds. So for two generations, scientists looked for the genetic basis of a disease that is caused by dietary problems. What happened during World War II, apparently, is that there was rationing, and everyone ate bread that had folic acid in it. If a mother does not get folic acid during pregnancy, her child's spine may be damaged. But this insight was blocked for years by a

research bias, a fixation on genetics. Anyone born with spina bifida after 1945 has reason to complain about genetics. Basic research in genetics will lead to cures and treatments other than eugenic abortion. But the track record so far is shameful. genetic engineering ...Genetics is not always seen as a great blessing; it may be the beginning of many nightmares. Like nuclear power, which could bring cheap and safe electricity or city-destroying bombs, genetics offers to cure diseases or usher in the new Hitler. Genetics run amok is a threat because genetic engineering makes racial engineering possible. If it is possible to engineer a better human baby, it is tempting to try to engineer a better human race. Much of the basic research is genetics is poorly understood by the general public. Often, there will be few people with the ability to oversee the scientists, who understand clearly what their work is about. The people best equipped to detect abuses by geneticists are other geneticists. This raises a problem, because so many geneticists are members of eugenics societies, or were trained by eugenicists. The organization that led the push for the Human Genome Project was the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). The ASHG journal and annual meetings have done much to encourage prenatal genetic testing, which often leads to eugenic abortion. One of the leaders in the ASHG for years was Franz Kallmann. In 1938, the newsletter of the American Eugenics Society reported that Kallmann, "who was formerly associated with Dr. Ernst Rdin," was working in New York. He had fled from Germany in 1936, because he had Jewish parentage. But in both Berlin and the United States, he promoted eugenic sterilization. In fact, he thought that society should sterilize the healthy relatives of patients with schizophrenia, as well as the patients themselves. Kallmann was among the zealots who tried to find the genetic basis for everything, such as spina bifida. He thought that tuberculosis was genetically based. In order to trust geneticists to oversee their colleagues responsibly, you have to trust Franz Kallmann's society. Undoubtedly, the ASHG has had many members who disagreed with Kallmann about tuberculosis, about schizophrenia, about negative eugenics and forced sterilization but the society never criticized him or denounced his hateful and dangerous views. Why worry about genetic engineering? Genetic engineering has already been used to improve some fruits and vegetables, and some animals. Why not use it to improve humans? Suppose that genetic engineers can

make sure your next child is not short, bald or nearsighted like you: what's wrong with that? There are many concerns, but we will look at three: 1. Specific techniques of human genetic engineering can be grave abuses. 2. Genetic engineering and reproductive technology are dehumanizing, turning a complex human relationship into a laboratory process. 3. Genetic engineering seems to make positive eugenics possible, but in practice it will be linked to negative eugenics. 1. If genetic engineers could intervene to treat nearsightedness in a tiny human child living in the mother's womb, that might be a great medical advance. But affecting sight genetically might require manipulating the new human at the single-cell (or zygote) stage. It might require having the single-cell human on a petri dish in the laboratory, outside the mother's womb. In a society that is accustomed to in vitro fertilization, it is not uncommon to have human zygotes and embryos in dishes in labs. Nonetheless, some people consider this practice offensive, inhuman and immoral. 2. One of the problems with genetic engineering is suggested in the phrase "reproductive technology." The phrase refers to a whole list of procedures for starting human life in ways other than sexual intercourse. The idea that human sexual activity can be reduced to techniques is obscene. Obscenity is offensive, not because it shows sexual activity, which is a beautiful and precious thing. It is is offensive because it strips sexual activity of meaning, taking it out of the context of a tender and private human relationship. "Reproductive technology" does the same thing. 3. Genetic engineering seems to make positive eugenics possible, at long last. But it is sobering to look at the cutting edge of reproductive technology in different communities. For the rich, the cutting edge is in vitro fertilization, artificial or assisted insemination, genetic counseling, and perhaps genetic engineering and cloning on the horizon. But for the poor, the cutting edge of reproductive technology is new birth control technology, like Norplant implants or Depo-Provera injections. Mary Lyman Jackson, president of Exodus Youth Services, Inc., a street ministry serving runaways and latchkey kids on the streets on Washington, talked about genetic engineering and cloning. In testimony before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (May 2, 1997), she said:

I live in Gaithersburg, Maryland, in a nice suburban community, but spend a lot of time on the streets in Washington. I am very conscious of the way the differences between these two communities are developing, and it worries me. I hear people talking about life in the suburbs in ways that are very different than from life in the streets. And it is the differences that concern me. I do not know of anyone in the suburbs who has birth control pushed on them, but my girls in the inner-city do. They tell me a different story. And I do not know of anyone in the city who expects to get any benefit from genetic engineering. ... I tell you one thing my street kids know. They know they have dignity. They know when you treat them with respect, and they appreciate it. But they see a lot of disrespect. I think they can see some things that great scientists might miss. Cloning is not a very respectful way to treat human life. A researcher can get lost in charts and graphs and test tubes and petri dishes and might forget that human life is very precious. These kids get treated as specimens and research objects enough that they have a different attitude towards all this science. These children know that scientists can treat people like things. They know it, because they have seen how much work goes into persuading them to get on birth control or have an abortion. Mrs. Jackson saw clearly that genetic engineering has revived the central eugenics agenda: "more from the fit, less from the unfit." Artificial insemination may not be such a wonderful service. It may distort and destroy human relationships, and make children into salable commodities. One generation ago, human sex was fairly straightforward, with a father and a mother engaging in sexual activity and producing a child. Now, technicians stand ready to help, obtaining sperm from one source (the father or a sperm donor) and an ovum from another source (the mother or an egg donor), bringing the sperm and ovum together in a uterus (the mother's, or a surrogate mother's) or in a petri dish. If fertilization occurs, growth can go forward in the mother's or the surrogate mother's womb. At birth, the child could have a father who commissioned the whole project, a natural father who donated the sperm, a mother who is legally connected to the father, a natural mother who donated the egg, and a surrogate mother who provided the child with a home in her uterus for the first nine months of life. The child's "parents" might be half a village, and that is before anyone gets divorced. The new birth control methods available for the poor include Depo-Provera and Norplant. Depo-Provera is an injection that is effective for three months. Norplant is a long-acting birth control system. It consists of six plastic rods that are inserted under the woman's skin. For the next five years, birth control hormones leach out of the rods. With birth control Pills, gynecologists spend much time adjusting dosage levels to prevent complications; but Norplant cannot be adjusted that way; it is a one-size-fits-all system,

designed to last for years. In the first few years after distribution began in the United States, five percent of users complained and then sued the manufacturer. Norplant was developed by the Population Council, a group heavily influenced by eugenics which had worked on IUDs in previous years. IUDs and Norplant are effective depopulation tools: once a user accepts them, the family planning worker does not have to do anything else for a long time to prevent births from that woman. But IUDs were once driven off the American market (at least for a time) by lawsuits, because they damaged women, and the same thing may happen with Norplant. Causing Sterility with Acid Burns Norplant is not the worst birth control method available. Two men in North Carolina have traveled around the world promoting something even worse. It is called quinacrine. Quinacrine is a drug that was used to treat malaria suffered by U.S. troops in World War II. It is also effective against tapeworm. But in the 1980s, a Chilean doctor began using it to sterilize women. When quinacrine is formed into small pellets and inserted into a woman's uterus, it burns and scars her uterus. If scar tissue forms across the mouth of the fallopian tubes, this will sterilize the woman, either by preventing fertilization or by preventing a newly conceived embryonic human from entering the uterus. This barbaric method of birth control has many potential side effects for women. It works by burning women's insides, and this is often quite painful. It causes cell mutation, and therefore may be a cancer-causing drug. It causes bleeding, backaches, fever, abdominal pain and headaches among other problems. It causes ectopic pregnancies, which are always fatal for the child and often fatal for the mother. So the World Health Organization opposes its use. Using quinacrine for population control is cheap; it costs about a penny per pellet to produce. It can be administered to a woman during a routine pelvic examination. In fact, family planning specialists who care more about the population explosion than about their patients can administer quinacrine without the patient's knowledge. Thousands of women have discovered that they were sterilized using quinacrine without their knowledge or consent. For years, two American crusaders, Stephen Mumford and Elton Kessel, flew around the world with quinacrine pellets in their suitcases, distributing them in Third World countries like Vietnam, India and Bangladesh. They were responsible for mass sterilization programs affecting thousands and thousands of women in several poorer countries. According to Mumford, quinacrine is "essential to population-growth control." Speaking about the population of the United States, he said, "This explosion in human numbers which . . . will come entirely from immigrants and the offspring of immigrants, will dominate our lives. There will be chaos and anarchy."

Sipharm Sesseln AG, a Swiss drug company, produced the quinacrine pellets for Mumford and Kessel. However, due to the worldwide public outcry against quinacrine, they no longer produce it, and no other company offered to do so (at least publicly, as of 1999). But Mumford said that he had bottles of it stored in the basement of his North Carolina home. Human Cloning It may seem unfair to insist on looking at various methods of negative eugenics in a discussion of genetic engineering. But when you look at the debate over human cloning, you see that positive eugenics cannot be separated from negative eugenics. In 1997, a Scottish researcher announced that he had cloned a sheep, Dolly. This was the first time that anyone had been able to clone a mammal successfully, although scientists had been cloning amphibians for decades. The announcement led to an international debate over human cloning. If it is possible to clone mammals, would anyone clone humans? Should anyone clone humans? A few months before the announcement, President Clinton had appointed a new National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC). He asked them to study the new development in Scotland and give him advice about American policy on cloning, in 90 days. The Commission's advice was not easy to understand. They proposed a new definition of "cloning," and recommended a ban not on cloning, but on implantation of cloned embryos. This recommendation, if implemented, would change human cloning research (if it is indeed possible) in several very significant ways. First, it means that human cloning research would proceed on the assumption that human embryos are not human beings. Many people do accept that assumption, but not everyone; and the assumption is based on the eugenic interpretation of evolutionary biology. Second, it means that human cloning research would involve a great deal of destruction; human embryos would be created for research only, and would then be destroyed. There is a third problem, that is subtle but important. Consider what happens if you permit a little cloning of tiny human entities. When a researcher has a cloned human embryo in his laboratory, that is exactly like being a little bit pregnant. That embryo will die, or become an adult human being. Cloning researchers assure us that they will kill all the embryos, and not start raising cloned humans. But who wants the embryos killed? Aside from a temporary concern about public relations, the only reason for killing those human embryos would be eugenics, a concern about quality control. Pro-lifers would demand that they live, and fertility clinics would want to use them. Researchers would want to continue their work on them. It is dishonest to clone human embryos and pretend that you will not clone adults.

Problems with the Clone-and-Kill Option

When President Clinton launched his National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC) in 1996, American Life League responded by forming a citizens' group called the American Bioethics Advisory Commission (ABAC). In 1997, the two groups published reports on human cloning. The NBAC's pro-cloning report was called Cloning Human Beings. The ABAC's response was Ban Human Cloning. An excerpt from the ABAC report follows: The meeting of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission on May 17, 1997, concerned a number of proposed recommendations to the President on human cloning. Among them was a call for a legislative ban. But the proposal, as worded at that time, was extremely mischievous. The proposal was to ban "cloning" defined as "creation of a child by nuclear transfer from a somatic cell." The problem in this definition arises over the question of when one has created a child. Some people consider a child to come into existence at birth or later, perhaps at age three; others think a child comes into existence at fertilization. As of May 17, it appeared that the position of the NBAC was that a child comes into existence at some point after fertilization, perhaps at implantation. So the definition of "cloning" referred to nuclear transfer followed by implantation. By that definition, a researcher or clinician who initiates a human embryo by nuclear transfer but does not implant the embryo is not violating a ban against cloning. The researcher violates the ban only when he implants the cloned embryo. A critique of the proposal to ban cloning, as defined this way, follows. 1. The proposal protects a clone-and-kill option. The ban on cloning as defined would permit a researcher in the United States to use the technique pioneered in Scotland (i.e., to transfer a nucleus from a somatic cell to an enucleated ovum) on humans, but with the proviso that any human embryo (any embryonic child) whose life began in this way must not be implanted (i.e., must be killed). In the human embryo research battle three years ago, many people pointed out the evil of initiating human life not as a service to infertile couples but solely for research purposes. Members of the NBAC frequently stated their determination to avoid that fight. And yet, the proposal to ban cloning defined this way amounts to approval for human cloning solely for research purposes. With this language, it would be legal to clone as long as you kill. 2. The proposal would ban implantation, not cloning. Ian Wilmut's new technique is not implanting an embryo in a uterus; many researchers and many infertility clinics can do that. What Wilmut did that was new was to transfer a strand of DNA from a somatic cell to an enucleated ovum, and then keep the zygote alive. The proposed language would not ban using this new technique with humans;

rather, it would ban the implantation of cloned embryos. It would be deceptive, therefore, to call this language a "cloning ban." 3. The proposal would be, in effect, a two-step approval process for cloning adult humans. It is hard to tell whether the proposal is designed to prevent or permit cloning adult humans. If it is designed to prevent cloning adults, it will fail. If it is designed to permit cloning human adults, it would be more intellectually honest to say so clearly. The proposed definition of "cloning" lumps together two separate actions: (1) nuclear transfer and (2) implantation. Hence, a ban on "cloning" under this definition would permit the first step but not the second step. The first step is very complicated; the second step is routine in IVF clinics all over the country. Most people who are discussing a ban on human cloning mean, quite simply, banning nuclear transfer, the Wilmut technique, for humans. This proposal permits nuclear transfer, but ban the combination of nuclear-transfer-and-implantation. If you lump the two steps together and ban the combination, as proposed, then you have effectively permitted step one, which is the complicated and new technique. But if you permit the first step, you will be unable to prevent the second step. Pressure to approve implantation or to implant the embryo without approval, or to implant the embryo overseas will build steadily, and you will not be able to prevent it. If you approve the nuclear transfer technique, you will eventually approve implantation. And whether you approve of implantation or not is irrelevant; it will occur. The proposal of May 17 included a sunset provision in the cloning legislation. It would be more honest to call the sunset provision a "step two" provision. 4. The arguments against implantation of a human embryo are hard to maintain. Polls after the Scottish experiment showed that about 90% of Americans wanted a ban on human cloning. The proposed language separates that opposition into component pieces: some may oppose nuclear transfer, and some may oppose implantation, but perhaps it would be possible to oppose nuclear-transfer-and-implantation. But this is not an honest maneuver unless you can explain the reasons to oppose implantation of a cloned embryo. Consider the shape of the argument after nuclear transfer has taken place (assuming it succeeds): Pro-lifers, who oppose cloning, would argue fiercely that once you have a living embryo, you have a grave obligation to protect his or her life. Pro-lifers, who oppose cloning, would argue fiercely that implantation is a moral obligation. Recall that when the British were approaching their time limit for frozen embryos and preparing to discard thousands

in a single day, the Vatican worked to recruit prospective parents to adopt the abandoned kids. Privacy advocates such as John Robertson would argue that the privacy rights of infertile couples include a right to this new technique, that implantation was the parents' right. Pro-lifers and privacy advocates would be arguing for the same conclusion: permit implantation. It is hard to imagine researchers arguing against implantation if pro-lifers and privacy advocates argue for it. Eugenics may offer an argument against implantation: the child whose life began with cloning might be abnormal in some way, or have a low quality of life. The eugenics argument, however, would be an argument against implantation in some circumstances, not against implantation of cloned embryos in general. If the arguments against implantation are weak, then it is an error (at best) to permit nuclear-transfer-without-implantation, and to pretend that this is an effective barrier to cloning adult humans. 5. A ban on implantation is unenforceable. If the United States were to ban cloning in this way, a team of researchers could carry out nuclear transfer in one place, and then ship the embryo to another clinic for implantation. It is not clear that either party would be violating the proposed ban on nuclear-transferand-implantation. Even if you were to tighten the language in some way to make clear that nuclear transfer in a laboratory followed by implantation in a clinic somewhere else is illegal, it is still hard to imagine how you would check on the source of the embryos. During meetings of the NBAC, various people noted many times that in vitro fertilization clinics do not meet the standards of the rest of the medical profession. 6. The proposed ban is not compatible with international cooperation. At the May 17 meeting, the NBAC discussed recommendations to be forwarded to the President, including one suggested by Alexander Capron, that the United States cooperate with other nations that also ban cloning, in order to prevent international or transnational abuses. But the proposed definition of cloning is very different from the definitions used elsewhere, and would make honest cooperation more difficult. In fact, the proposed ban on implantation is an invitation to international abuse. If a team of researchers were to carry out nuclear transfer in this country, then ship the embryo to another country where nuclear transfer is problematic but implantation is not, they might be able to clone, implant, and bring the child to birth without violating any laws although both countries tried to ban cloning. This scam would not work everywhere,

since Germany bans nuclear transfer and also bans implantation, and Spain bans importing embryos. But England might be a possibility. It would be a scandal if the United States passed a "ban" on human cloning, only to become the most attractive location for human cloning research. If other nations hear that we have banned cloning, who will explain to them that we didn't mean it, that our ban applies to implantation, although it says "cloning"? It would be a scandal to ban but not ban, to write a ban with a wink. 7. A ban on implantation amounts to forced abortion. Many people (though not everyone) consider a human embryo to be a member of the human family, possessing all of the God-given rights that any human has. From that perspective, a requirement that some embryos (in this case, cloned embryos) be discarded is the same as forced abortion. Obviously, discarding cloned embryos does not end a pregnancy, and is not abortion in that sense. But discarding embryos does end the life of human beings, and is abortion in that sense. To require such deaths by law would be new in this country, although the Chinese have had forced abortion for some years. 8. Two wrongs don't make a right. Many people argue that experimenting upon or killing embryos is gravely evil. It would be cynical to pretend to accommodate that position in any way by approving of one evil (nuclear transfer) on the condition that it is followed by another evil (discarding or killing the embryo). Two wrongs do not make a right. 9. The proposal would make education and communication harder, not easier. One of the tasks of a national bioethics group, discussed at several meetings of the NBAC, is to facilitate the national dialogue about bioethical issues. But this proposal is centered on a quirky definition of "cloning" that would make it much harder to communicate. At NBAC meetings, members felt it was necessary to specify "cloning in the baby-making sense" when they were referring to nuclear-transfer-and-implantation. Speakers at their meetings used the word "cloning" to refer to: (1) the whole process of making genetically identical adults by asexual replication, or (2) more specifically to the critical technique that initiates life, "nuclear transfer." (Of course, there are other unrelated meaning, referring to cloning cells and other entities). None of the experts who testified before the NBAC used the word "cloning" to refer to nuclear-transfer-andimplantation. There is a great need for precise language, but this proposal would obfuscate the discussion. If this language were adopted, anyone who wished to refer to Wilmut's new procedure would have to use some clumsy circumlocution. What Wilmut did that was new is generally called "cloning." It is hard to understand why anyone would use the word in this novel way unless they intended to cause confusion.

10. The proposal invites cynicism. A quirky definition of "cloning" would make it possible to appear to ban cloning even as you actually permitted it. Polls that showed 90% of Americans were in favor of a ban on cloning. On the other hand, none of the professional societies polled by the NBAC supported legislative restrictions of any kind. It seemed impossible to bridge these two radically opposed views. But if one were to redefine cloning, it would be possible to ban something, and assure the public that you were responding to their concerns, but still permit the researchers to move ahead without restraint. That would be a scam. It could work, because it would be very clever, but it would still be a scam.

Human Cloning and Eugenics

On June 17, 1997, Sen. Bill Frist held a Senate hearing on "Ethics and Theology: A Continuation of the National Discussion on Human Cloning." The following argument offered by John Cavanaugh-O'Keefe is from that hearing, as reported in the Congressional Record. 1. Eugenics One nightmare scenario built on human cloning that is in the back of many people's minds is Brave New World, a science fiction novel about a world shaped by eugenics written by Aldous Huxley, whose family were leaders in the British Eugenics Society for at least three generations. In that novel, cloning is used to produce workers efficiently. But no one today is openly planning to manufacture workers that way, so a concern about eugenics may strike some people as misplaced. It is not misplaced; eugenics is a real threat. Cloning could be used to breed slaves, but could also be used to breed an elite. Many white supremacists studying global demography have noted that 95 percent of the next generation will be born in developing nations. For eugenicists, this is a nightmare, and cloning northern Europeans could relieve their anxieties. There is a more immediate problem than cloning either drones or elites, though. In reproductive technology today, the cutting edge for the rich is genetic counseling and artificial or assisted insemination and now, perhaps, cloning. By painful contrast, the cutting edge of reproductive technology for the poor includes Norplant and DepoProvera. This is true within the United States and around the world. It is foolish to pretend that plans to improve the quality of life for the rich can be separated from plans to decrease the population of the poor; the issues are related. The old eugenics slogan still applies: "More from the fit, less from the unfit: that is the chief aim of birth control." Further, the whole idea of human cloning is based on a flawed vision of humanity, a twisted kind of anthropology, that is immensely dangerous even though it is not always easy to see. The key idea in eugenics is to treat humans like animals. It is obvious that breeding roses and tomatoes and cattle to improve the species is a good idea; why do we hesitate to breed the world's most valuable species? The proponents of this idea have

rarely stated it so baldly since the fall of Berlin. But the idea is simple: humans are smart animals. So the proponents of human cloning made an immediate leap from a report of sheep cloning to plans for human cloning, stepping over the bright line animal versus human that divides legitimate science from horror. An alternative view of humanity is that humans are made in the image of God, and are invited to live with God forever. It is standard in the field of bioethics to insist that such religious views have no place in a dialogue in a pluralistic society. So religious speakers often use a word that everyone can understand, that can refer to humanity's unique relationship with God but is also accessible to everyone in the culture. That word is "dignity." Opponents of cloning who testified before the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (Leon Kass, Gilbert Meilaender, Rev. Albert Moraczewski and several members of the public) used the word frequently. But the supporters of cloning (John Robertson and Ruth Macklin) and the NBAC members themselves never used the word in their dialogue, except to disparage it (until the final meeting when Dr. Bernard Lo intervened with great determination to get the word into their report). Dr. James Childress was pulled reluctantly into a discussion of human dignity at the NBAC meeting on May 2, 1997. His remark was fascinating, because he situated dignity in society rather than in the individual. He said that when critics of cloning express a concern that the practice would "undermine human dignity," that "suggests to me that we are talking about a value in the society that would be seriously subverted. But I don't think it would be subverted by five, ten, perhaps even 100 acts of human cloning. But it might well be subverted by a social practice of cloning." By contrast, the Catholic Church teaches that the touchstone by which all social policies in all fields should be measured is the impact on the dignity of the individual. 2. Penetrating through denials about eugenics In his remarks about the cloning hearing, Sen. Ted Kennedy noted that cloning might "give rise to unacceptable forms of eugenics." One wonders what forms of eugenics are acceptable. Throughout the discipline of bioethics today, there is discussion of a resurgence of benign eugenics. The NBAC report mentions that some people are concerned about eugenics, but then it quickly falls into a trap, denouncing the bad science that was used by eugenicists earlier this century. Eugenics fell into disrepute after World War II, not because of bad science but because Hitler lost the war. Most histories of eugenics say that the field was reformed by Frederick Osborn, a leader in the American Eugenics Society, who drove out the racism and bad science. But in fact, Osborn was President of the Pioneer Fund, a secretive white supremacist organization, during this "reform." And at least 126 members of the American Eugenics Society (AES) were also members of the American Society of Human Genetics ... In the 1960s, Osborn urged that the AES continue its work, but under a different name. In a speech in 1956, he said people "won't accept the idea that they are in general, second

rate. We must rely on other motivation [to reduce the birth rate of the dysgenic]." He called the new motivation "a system of voluntary unconscious selection." The way to persuade people to exercise this voluntary unconscious selection was to appeal to the idea of "wanted" children. Osborn said, "Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care." In this way, the eugenics movement "will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it."*1 Osborn stated the public relations problem bluntly: "Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics."*2 He pointed to genetic counseling as a prime example: "Heredity clinics are the first eugenic proposals that have been adopted in a practical form and accepted by the public. . . . The word eugenics is not associated with them."*3 The effort to understand eugenics today is still plagued by the flat denials of its most articulate proponents. For example, the Eugenics Quarterly was renamed Social Biology in 1969, and the American Eugenics Society was renamed the Society for the Study of Social Biology in 1973. And yet the nation's most prominent teacher of social biology, E. O. Wilson at Harvard University, says he is not eugenicist. It is impossible to define the word in a way that respects history and excludes Wilson's views. He teaches that there is a continuum from animals to humans, that intelligence is what makes us special, and that "[t]he organism is only DNA's way of making more DNA." He has written studies of ants that are delightful until you grasp that his understanding of ants is a metaphor for the human race: in his view, the race is what matters, and the individual is insignificant. 3. New issue: forced abortion The NBAC recommended that research go forward on somatic cell nuclear transfer as long as the process did not result in "creating a child." But embryos become adults (after being children at some undefined intermediate stage) unless they die along the way. A policy that permits human cloning (i.e., somatic cell nuclear transfer) but prohibits making children requires the death of embryonic (or fetal or infant?) human beings. The NBAC did not discuss the issue of forced abortion at all, although their recommendation requires it. Note that forced abortion is not compatible with a pro-life position, nor with a "pro-choice" position. It is compatible with eugenics. Alexander Capron said that embryos die all the time in in vitro fertilization (IVF), and that this is not new. He misses the point. IVF clinics are not currently required by law to kill embryos. The issue of government-mandated killing of humans at any stage is new in the United States (although the practice is not new to the oppressed people of China). 4. New issue: objectification by law The NBAC report includes a professional discussion of objectification, or treating people as things. It is one of the concerns that some critics raise about human cloning. But the

NBAC did not discuss the fact their recommendations are very specific in demanding that cloned humans be treated as things. The policy of the President and of Congress, expressed in law, is that human embryos can be neither created nor used solely for research purposes in Federally funded projects (at least under HHS). The NBAC proposed not only that cloned embryos could be used for research purposes in the private sector, but that they must be used solely for research purposes. This is mandated objectification. This is a mandate to discriminate against human beings whose lives are initiated by cloning to treat embryonic humans whose lives began normally in one way, and to treat embryonic humans whose lives began by cloning in a (lethally) different way. The recommendation to mandate objectification may have been an accidental oversight by the NBAC. However, it is worth noting that treating people like animals is compatible with eugenics. Eugenics, which denies that there is a significant difference between animals and humans, would permit such mandated objectification. 5. Protect legitimate science The technology of cloning is immensely exciting. It may save billions of dollars in animal husbandry. Perhaps it can be used to rescue some endangered species. Certainly it offers powerful insights into basic biology. But the excitement has been overshadowed by immense concern about the horrors of a brave new world. It is the task of policy makers to discern, explain and defend the bright line between the legitimate excitement of science and the horror of technology run amok. Fortunately, the bright line in this situation is familiar to every human being on the globe. It is the line between animals and humans. Eugenics would resist drawing a sharp line between animals and humans. The obvious line should be strengthened, not only for the sake of the human race but also for the sake of science. Those who seek to draw the line anywhere else are attacking science, demanding that scientists operate under a cloud of suspicion. 6. Freedom from fear Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, we have known that technology makes many new and wonderful things possible. But it seems that the great servant of technology became our master in 1945. Two generations have grown up with the bomb, living with constant if quiet fear. Many people have an expectation or belief, often unstated, that whatever can be done, will be done. This is a form of slavery. In his testimony before the NBAC, Leon Kass spoke about human freedom and dignity, and noted that the prospect of human cloning offers the human race a tremendous opportunity to fight for freedom. Human freedom is not in cloning, but in refusing to clone, making a choice for the whole human race. If we look at sweet technology and see

fascinating possibilities, and then refuse to go down that road because it is wrong, and if we can make that refusal stick if we can do that even once the slavery of the bomb will be broken. We will know once again that humanity can use technology without being overwhelmed. What can be done, need not be done. Fight for freedom. Review of Chapter 16: Modern Genetics Is Eugenics 1. What is the cutting edge of reproductive technology for the rich? What is the cutting edge of reproductive technology for the poor? 2. What is artificial or assisted insemination? 3. Who developed Norplant? What else has this group done? 4. What is quinacrine, and who promotes it? 5. What was the recommendation about human cloning from President Clinton's bioethics advisory group (NBAC)? Discuss: If the NBAC proposal is adopted and cloning is permitted for experimental purposes, what is the argument against implantation?
1 Osborn, Frederick, Galton Lecture, Eugenics Review, 1956-1957, p. 21-22. Back 2 Osborn, Frederick, Future of Human Heredity (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968), p. 104. Back Back 3 ibid, p. 91.

Chapter 17:
Bioethics, Shaping the Battle Field
We have seen how anti-immigration policy supports depopulation policies. The Johnson Act passed by the eugenics movement in the 1920s kept out Jewish fugitives when Hitler was preparing to kill them. Anti-immigration laws today support the Chinese one-childonly population policy. Bioethics functions in a way that is similar to anti-immigration policies. Just as antiimmigration policies support population control (negative eugenics), so bioethics defends "positive" eugenics in the area of genetics and reproductive technology. Bioethics is a new discipline. The word first appeared in the late 1960s, and it has been used in two ways. Van Rensselaer Potter was probably the first person to put the word in print, in his book Bioethics: Bridge to the Future (Prentice-Hall Biological Science Series: Englewood Cliffs, 1971). Other people began using the word at about the same time, and it is interesting to look at the different ways they used the word.

Potter's concern was Malthusian. He did not see how the world could survive if mankind continued to populate and pollute at a great rate, and wanted a way to talk about the problem. He was looking for an ethical framework that would incorporate the new insights of biology. But more, he wanted an ethical scheme that would pay attention to all life, pay attention to life as a unity, pay attention to the future of the whole planet with its precious but fragile veneer of life spread in a thin layer over the surface. Traditional ethics did not take account of the needs and rights of the entire biosphere, the whole web of life. Potter saw a need for a new ethical framework that would develop ways to talk about such questions. Another group of people began using the word at about the same time, including the bioethics pioneers who began work at an institute called the Hastings Center to explore the new field. This group included Daniel Callahan, Willard Gaylin, Robert Veatch, Marc Lapp and many others. It is not easy to characterize the views of such a group; they were all intelligent and complex individuals, taking different approaches. But in general, they were interested in developing a new discipline called bioethics because they wanted to find ways to handle new ethical questions raised by progress in biology and medicine. For example, respirators and other sophisticated new equipment made it possible for hospitals to keep a heart beating and lungs going after the brain shut down and the patient appeared to be dead. If you could keep a heart pumping after a person died, or even outside the body, then you could not say that a person is dead when the heart stops. So when is a person dead? How do you define death? That question did not vex philosophers in past centuries. Advances in medicine brought new ethical questions. Bioethics was supposed to provide the tools to deal with the new questions.

Getting rid of anomie

... It reminded me of a conversation more than 30 years ago with Harry McPherson, a wise Washington lawyer, then on Lyndon Johnson's White House staff. I asked him about the criticism that the "War on Poverty" was was not getting at the fundamental dysfunction that trapped families in blighted neighborhoods. Employing a single-word definition from sociological literature for "a breakdown or absence of social norms and values," McPherson replied, "If you think it's hard to eliminate poverty, just try getting rid of anomie." David S. Broder, Washington Post, p. A31, June 30, 1999 Does bioethics lead to anomie? The questions that the early bioethicists wrestled with included abortion, coercive birth control, genetic engineering, organ transplants, artificial insemination, euthanasia, and

many other similar matters. Population was among the concerns of the Hastings Center group, although it was not the starting point for them, as it was for Potter. When you look through the articles and papers written in the first years of bioethics, there are two striking characteristics about them. First, the issues that they were discussing were all issues that mattered within the eugenics movement, with only one significant exception. The exception is truth-telling, the limits of what a physician was ethically required to tell a patient: this question runs through bioethics literature, but not previous eugenics literature. Second, very few of the new bioethicists asserted traditional ethical conclusions like the Hippocratic Oath with any vigor. You can't say that every bioethicist parroted the views of the eugenics movement. But what you can say is that bioethics did not offer any serious resistance to any evil that developed within the eugenics movement. Bioethicists would quibble and caution and wring their hands and especially "develop new safeguards," but "stop it" was not in their vocabulary. Bioethicists have been able to say no when things have stopped already. For example, in the 1990s, bioethicists at Johns Hopkins University put together an excellent study of the ethical problems in a radiation study conducted by the military in the 1950s. When the United States was developing nuclear weapons, some soldiers were deliberately exposed to radiation so that researchers could study the problem. The soldiers who were used as guinea pigs were not told what the experiments were. The research was inexcusable, and 40 years later some bioethicists said so, firmly. It would be easier to take bioethics at Johns Hopkins seriously if they were able to speak as forthrightly about more recent problems. It would be especially useful if bioethicists at Johns Hopkins could examine grave bioethical abuses right at their own institution. In the 1960s, when population control groups were developing and promoting IUDs, scientists associated with Johns Hopkins worked on a new design. They came up with an IUD that resembled a louse, called the Dalkon Shield. The Dalkon Shield was introduced in January 1971, and about 2.2 million women used it over the next four years. But the device turned out to be deadly, not only for tiny embryos but also for women. Thousands were hurt, and some died. The women sued, and in the end the class action suit had 334,863 claimants. The manufacturer, A. H. Robins, went bankrupt. The complaints against the Dalkon Shield drove it off the American market in 1974, but population control groups continued to use it overseas. Researchers at Johns Hopkins had a role in the development of the Dalkon Shield, and in the distribution overseas. But what was their role, exactly? Did anyone at Johns Hopkins make any effort to pull the Dalkon Shield, at least, off the shelves in developing nations? There are many tough questions, still unanswered, about the scandal. Joseph Fletcher and Situation Ethics

Bioethics is based at least in part on situation ethics, developed by Joseph Fletcher (19051991). Fletcher taught ethics at Episcopal Theological School and at Harvard Divinity School from 1944 to 1970, and then at the University of Virginia until 1977. He was a member of the American Eugenics Society, and also of a series of groups promoting various parts of the eugenics agenda, including three euthanasia societies (he was president of the Society for the Right to Die from 1974 to 1976), two abortion societies, and one sterilization association. During his academic career, Fletcher became increasingly concerned about legalism, an excessive concern about the letter of the law. In his book Situation Ethics he argued that the only rule that really matters is love, a serious commitment to love. An ethical person should examine each unique situation, and try to figure out the loving thing to do, without applying rigid rules. He argued that all efforts to formulate unchanging moral laws have failed. Obviously, he had to address the Ten Commandments in some way, and he attacked each and every one of them, showing that there are always some circumstances in which all reasonable people would agree that the law should be set aside. Jesus of Nazareth, whom some believe to be the son of God and all consider a great moral teacher, also spoke about summing up the whole Law briefly. His brief summary had two commandments: love God with your whole heart and soul and strength and mind, and love your neighbor as you love yourself. Fletcher went a step beyond Jesus, and reduced the law to a single principle: love. And indeed, withing a few years after the book came out, Fletcher renounced his belief in God.

The prefix bioTo understand the new term bioethics, look at some other words with the prefix bio-. biology: the science of life biochemistry: branch of chemistry dealing with the life processes of plants and animals biography: history of a person's life biodegradable: able to be decomposed by biological means biosphere: living beings together with their environment, an entire system including different forms of life biotechnology: applied biological science, like bioengineering or recombinant DNA technology biotherapy: treatment of disease using substances from living organisms, like herbs and penicillin biosocial: concerned with the interaction of the biological aspects and social relationships of living organisms biorhythm: a rhythm inside a living thing that seems to control its biological processes biodiversity: the numbers of different species of plants and animals in a particular location

It is interesting to note that his first concrete example is abortion, and his concluding example is the use of nuclear weapons. He justified both, in certain circumstances abortion in the case of rape, and nuclear weapons in Hiroshima. The book was published in 1966. The previous year, the Roman Catholic Church, Fletcher's chief adversary, had concluded the Second Vatican Council, a long meeting of all the bishops, and had released a number of documents stating the teaching of the Church. One was called Gaudium et Spes [Joy and Hope], or The Church in the Modern World. In general, the Council was very upbeat, and so is this historic document. But it does contain two statements that contrast sharply with Fletcher's methods and conclusions. In section 51 of Gaudium et Spes, the Pope and bishops together taught that "abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes." In section 80, they declared, "Any act of war aimed indiscriminately at the destruction of entire cities or of extensive areas along with their population is a crime against God and man himself. It merits unequivocal and unhesitating condemnation." The Belmont Principles In 1974, just a few years after the field of bioethics began to organize, the Federal government financed a huge bioethics project. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare (or HEW, later called the Department of Health and Human Services, or HHS) put together a commission to think about how to protect people used in research. The group was called the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. The Commission met and studied and exchanged ideas for some years, and in 1979 they released a paper, "Ethical Principles and Guidelines for the Protection of Human Subjects of Research," or more simply the "Belmont Report." The name was taken from a conference center in Elkridge, Maryland, where the commission thrashed out some ideas during four days of intensive discussion in February 1976. The Belmont principles are not supposed to be about the whole of life, like the Decalogue from Mount Sinai; they are limited to a specific need, protecting human subjects in research. Still, to understand bioethics and modern eugenics, you must understand the Belmont principles. First, it is noteworthy that the Belmont Report speaks of "principles and guidelines," not rules. This is the language of Joseph Fletcher. Further, the principles are supposed to "assist in resolving the ethical problems," rather than "resolve the problems." This is characteristic of Fletcher's post-Sinai approach. The Belmont Report identifies three basic ethical principles that are "among those generally accepted in our cultural tradition." In other words, ethical principles depend on social consensus. The three principles are: respect of persons, beneficence and justice. Some bioethicists have since divided beneficence in two, adding non-maleficence as a fourth basic ethical

principle. These words sound impressive, but it is not clear that they convey much meaning. The first principle, respect of persons, sounds a little like a concern about the overwhelming dignity of each individual. But in 1976, the nation was already torn apart over the question of who is and who (or what) is not a person. The abortion debate was often phrased in terms of personhood: is the child or fetus in the mother's womb a person? In eugenics theory, offspring accumulate value over a period of months, and personhood is a legal status conferred by the State at an arbitrarily set time; in many other world views, personhood is part and parcel of being alive and human, and comes with the beginning of life at fertilization. Is abortion moral? Is it ethical to use human beings in the first days of life for research? Speaking of respect of persons does not begin to answer these key issues of our time. The second principle, beneficence, is Latin for doing good. No one is opposed to it, but what does it mean? Take, for example, one of the major issues that bioethics tackled, euthanasia. If a person is in pain and you try to relieve it, that certainly sounds like doing good. But if you "relieve the pain" by killing them, that may not be good, especially since you cannot guarantee that a dead person is free of pain and suffering. Throughout the world, throughout history, there have been stories about life after death, including the possibility of eternal suffering. It is not possible here to prove or to disprove theories about life after death, but it is foolish and narrow-minded to dismiss them. Euthanasia may be beneficent if humans are merely smart animals; euthanasia may be eternally harmful if humans are eternal creatures. The second principle of bioethics does not help to resolve this matter. Non-maleficence is Latin for not doing evil; this is the part of beneficence that some bioethicists use as a fourth principle. But the Report cuts the heart out of the Hippocratic Oath, and even claims that the Oath is a basis for situation ethics, pointing out that the Oath says that physicians should benefit their patients "according to their best judgment." What Hippocrates had in mind, surely, were questions like when to rest and when to exercise, or when to wait and when to operate. But the Belmont Report expands the idea of "best judgment." The original Oath had clear prohibitions, including unmistakable words against abortion and euthanasia. But the Belmont Report refers to a vague beneficence. Further, beneficence can mean doing good for the individual or for society, possibly even harming the individual for the good of society. The third principle, justice, also turns out to be elusive for the authors. The Belmont Report rounds up a variety of theories about justice, and does not put them together. In fact, the Report poses questions about equality, asking, "Who is equal and who is unequal?" It follows this question by asking, "What considerations justify departure from equal distribution? Almost all commentators allow that distinctions based on experience, age, deprivation, competence, merit and position do sometimes constitute criteria justifying differential treatment for certain purposes." But in the United States exactly two centuries after the Declaration of Independence, why did the matter of distinctions based on various conditions lead bioethicists to ask, "Who is equal?"

What did emerge from the Belmont Report was a set of guidelines about informed consent. Before a person is used in research, the person must understand what it is all about, and agree in writing to permit it. This has led to an increase in the paperwork that patients sign when they enter a hospital. At least one member of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission calls the informed consent process "an empty secular ritual," but sticks to it faithfully anyway. The Role of Bioethics Today Bioethics is still a new field, but it is well established in universities and hospitals.More than 25 universities offer programs leading to degrees in bioethics, or to degrees in a larger field (such as philosophy or history) with a concentration in bioethics. There are dozens of professional journals in bioethics. Medical schools generally include a variety of bioethics courses in the curriculum. Divinity schools that train pastors also teach bioethics. In many hospitals, chaplains have been replaced by bioethicists, who have been trained to help people deal with death. They may or may not believe in life after death, but are ready to talk at length about the feelings that patients have as they approach death, and are ready to help families cope with grief. They are also trained to help physicians, patients, families and hospital administrators make decisions about whether or when to turn off life-sustaining equipment. Such issues include medical and legal complications. Insurance companies and managed-care organizations have more and more influence on decisions about medical care, and bioethicists are trained to help everyone involved to understand each other's needs and interests. Under President Clinton, bioethics expanded its role in national policy-making. Clinton's predecessors had appointed various ad hoc commissions to advise the government on specific issues, such as protecting research subjects. But in 1996, President Clinton created a new body, the National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC). The idea was to establish a permanent group that would deal with a wide variety of bioethical issues, to replace the temporary groups of previous years. The NBAC was supposed to advise the government on bioethical issues, but it would also have some power to focus public attention on specific questions and problems. Obviously, in a free country with a vigorous free press, no single institution can end any discussion. But the NBAC would be able to set the agenda for public debate, decide which topics to discuss. The first chairman of the NBAC was Harold Shapiro, president of Princeton University. There were a total of 18 members, experts in medicine, law and public policy. One member was an expert in comparative religions, but none were priests or rabbis or ministers. This, surely, was among the most bizarre events of the recent history: a nation in which the overwhelming majority of the citizens believe in God and go to church or synagogue assembled a group of experts to give advise on life and death issues without any clergy.

In the first few months, as the NBAC was just getting itself organized, a scientist in Scotland reported that he had cloned a sheep. For decades, efforts to clone mammals had failed, and the report from Scotland was revolutionary. It raised the possibility of cloning other mammals, including humans. President Clinton turned to his brand-new advisory body and asked for their advice about a national policy on human cloning. This gave the NBAC much publicity, and probably ensured that it would survive. The NBAC not only sets the agenda for public discussion of issues, but also lays down some of the ground rules. During their meetings on human cloning, they invited representatives from various churches to give their views. But over and over, they asked people to put their views in nonreligious terms, so that they could be understood by everyone in a pluralistic nation. The chairmen of NBAC subcommittees did not ask speakers who offered their ideas in secular terms to rephrase their remarks in religious terms. In other words, it is the view of the NBAC that completely nonreligious language is neutral. The members of the commission did not include clergy, and the language they sought to use was specifically nonreligious. As we saw in Chapter 16, the NBAC recommended that this nation permit human cloning as long as the cloned embryos were destroyed before they got very large. This "cloneand-kill" recommendation is pure eugenics. It assumes that human beings in the first days of life are less than human or other than human, and that value accumulates over time. But also, the NBAC recommended that cloned embryos should be destroyed because they were likely to be defective in a variety of ways. It is worth dwelling on this point. Suppose that researchers do succeed in cloning humans, and in a few years there are clinics and laboratories all over the country churning out cloned embryos. The question then is not whether to start cloning, but whether to kill the embryos or to try to keep them alive. What are the arguments for and against implanting cloned embryos in a mother's womb? Infertile parents would want to proceed with implantation. Pro-lifers would demand implantation, since anything else kills a living human being, however tiny. Researchers would be curious about the results. The only argument for hesitating before implanting a cloned embryo is a concern about quality control. And the NBAC adopted this purely eugenic recommendation unanimously. People who offer themselves as experts on matters like the beginning of life (cloning, human sexuality) and the end of life (euthanasia) are performing some of the functions of a priestly class. Bioethics today functions as the priesthood of the eugenics movement. Review of Chapter 17: Bioethics, Shaping the Battle Field 1. Identify Joseph Fletcher, and explain the term "situation ethics" briefly. 2. List words that have "bio-" as a prefix. Explain the term "bioethics," giving two different definitions. 3. What are the "Belmont Principles"?

4. What is the role of bioethics today? Who trains bioethicists, and where does a bioethicist work? 5. Identify the National Bioethics Advisory Commission, and describe its initial work briefly. Discuss: If you try to build an ethical framework in which everyone in your society has a veto over any statement of principles, is there a way to avoid having your statement degenerate into toothless and meaningless platitudes?

Chapter 18:
What Do We See Today?

The eugenics movement has a long history, and now it is easy to find its influence everywhere. For example, one of the most popular tabletop magazines in the country, National Geographic, is regularly loaded with eugenics propaganda. The beautiful pictures in the familiar yellow-bordered cover are everywhere. Every month, millions of people read articles describing problems that would be fixed by population control. People read the articles, enjoy them, and keep them for years rarely if ever noticing that they are taking poison! One of the clearest examples of eugenics in National Geographic was an article in 1991 about elephants. It described how poachers have been killing the huge and fascinating animals just to get their tusks, leaving the carcasses to rot. The article is full of information, easy to read, well illustrated really delightful. But if you take time to look at it critically, there are glaring problems everywhere. And when you see them, you wonder how you missed them at first, and why no one else saw them. In fact, you might wonder why there aren't any protesters picketing in front of National Geographic's offices. The article is racist. There are four pictures in the article of people who kill elephants. In two, the people are white, and they are called "hunters" or "marksmen" who are culling the herd. In two, the people are black, and they are called "poachers." The article starts out talking about poachers, and draws readers to sympathize with the victimized elephants. In fact, in one photo, there are armed men jumping out of a helicopter and killing the poachers. But as the article goes on, it turns out that elephants have an enemy even more dangerous than poachers the growing human population. Elephants in the wild need a lot or room, and they are being crowded out by people. Surely, if it makes sense to kill people to protect elephants, it also makes sense to keep the population down to protect them.

There is a map that shows how much space the elephants need to live properly. It is a little less than a quarter of the continent of Africa. Does that mean that all the African people should vacate a quarter of the continent? Not exactly. The ideal arrangement suggested in National Geographic is that a few natives should stay to work as servants when wealthy Europeans come there on safaris. It is hard to believe how bad the article is until you see it for yourself. But once you do see it, then you start to notice that National Geographic is always describing the world as overpopulated, always links people with pollution, always paints humanity as a threat to the health of the earth. Protecting elephants from poachers does not require population control throughout Africa. Elephants and humans can live together peacefully. National Geographic is by no means the only magazine that pushes eugenics. Nearly every newspaper and magazine and news outlet does the same thing. The ideology of eugenics is deeply ingrained in American culture today, everywhere. It will stay there until people challenge it. To see eugenics in the media, watch for stories about problems that would be fixed completely or partially by population control. With each story, ask yourself whether there are solutions other than population control. Eugenics in the Science Curriculum In the summer of 1999, there was a battle in Kansas about how to teach science in the public schools. A school board subcommittee proposed standards that all the schools were to meet. The standards included teaching about evolution and natural selection, and some Christians who believe in the literal interpretation of the Bible resisted. The fight between the two sides resembled the Scopes trial in many ways, including one-sided reporting of the event. What people hear about the Scopes trial today is that Christians in Tennessee resisted teaching evolution. Almost no one today is aware that the book John Scopes used taught evolution and eugenics, white supremacy, forced sterilization. In the same way, stories about the confrontation in Kansas reported that the Christians have a narrow agenda, but did not examine the proposal from the committee that wrote the science standards for the Kansas State Board of Education. That proposed curriculum included a great deal of eugenics Malthusian doctrine, population propaganda and environmental extremism. For example, in third and fourth grades, "All students will demonstrate an awareness of changes in the environment. Through classroom discussions, students can begin to recognize pollution as an environmental issue, scarcity as a resource issue, and crowded classrooms or schools as a population issue." This is sheer lunacy. Anyone who sees a population problem in Kansas is out of touch with reality. The educators who wrote this into the curriculum are fanatics who are deeply committed to a belief system that is not based on verifiable facts. It is not possible to defend this item by saying that students are

supposed to recognize a population issue "in classrooms and schools," not elsewhere. Overall, Kansas is sparsely populated; if some school is crowded, that's a construction issue. The committee proposed that students in the fifth through eighth grades learn: "When an area becomes overpopulated by a species, the environment will change due to the increased use of resources. Middle level students need opportunities to learn about concepts of carrying capacity. They need to gather evidence and analyze effects of human interactions with the environment." The "carrying capacity" of Kansas is substantial, and a better question might be, "How many continents can Kansas feed?" The committee's proposed curriculum was uniformly critical of human interaction with the environment. Students were to learn that humans are altering parts of the ecosystem, and that "the changes may be detrimental to ecosystem function." This is certainly true as far as it goes, but it is unbalanced. Humans can improve the world in many ways by farming that takes immense quantities of food from the ground, by gardening that arranges natural beauty in new ways, by architecture that lifts stone into the sky, by art and music and medicine (for humans and animals). To discuss ways that humans damage the ecosystem without any mention of the good humans do is not honest, and therefore not science. The proposed curriculum describes humans as "complex, soft machines that require many systems to operate properly." It pounds away at a distinction between things that are natural and things that are "human-made," but then describes humans simply as animals without ever looking at the ways in which we are different from animals. Are we part of the ecosystem or not? Do we belong here or not? The message of the curriculum seemed to be that we fit badly (if at all) on the earth, and we must tread lightly or we are trespassing. The educational standards proposed by the science committee writing for the Kansas State Board of Education were based largely on the work of national organizations, the National Research Council (NRC) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). The idea that humans are smart animals that pollute is likely to show up in every state's science curriculum. The Family Cap in Welfare Reform In 1993, New Jersey was the pioneer in a controversial experiment in welfare reform. Throughout the country, at the state and national levels, there was a push to reform a system for helping the poor that had grown unwieldy. Most of the reform was aimed at breaking the habit of depending on the government, and moving people from welfare to work just getting people back to work. But one relatively minor piece of welfare reform in New Jersey and elsewhere later was a provision called the "family cap." The family cap was supposed to be a response to the numbers of children who were born to single mothers on welfare. It ended the practice of automatically increasing benefits

whenever another child was born. Proponents of the family cap said that the old system had rewarded the wrong behavior, and had encouraged "illegitimacy." The amount of money involved was small. It varied from state to state, but in general a woman receiving help from the government would get cash, rent assistance, food stamps and medical care adding up to about $20,000 each year. For each child she had, she would receive an additional $1,000 per year, or a five percent increase. The family cap did not change the additional benefits that a woman received for children who were already alive; it affected children yet to come. A woman would not receive additional benefits if the child was conceived and born while she was on welfare. The clear intent of the family cap was to discourage women from having more children while the mother was unmarried and dependent on the state. It was supposed to change her behavior. But it was not clear how she was supposed to avoid having more children, or what behavior she was supposed to change. Did the social planners want her to use barrier contraception, or modern birth control methods like Norplant and Depo-Provera, or get sterilized, or get an abortion if she became pregnant, or be chaste? The message of the family cap provision was not specific; she was just supposed to avoid more births. In the event, the birth rate for women on welfare in New Jersey did in fact drop. But why? The number of surgical abortions did not change much. The Population Council and Wyeth-Ayerst, a drug company, promoted Norplant in New Jersey very aggressively, but it did not catch on. Depo-Provera did become very popular, though, and probably explains the decline. When the family cap provision was debated at the national level in 1996, an odd thing happened. Pro-lifers were divided on the idea. Some opposed it because it might encourage women to have abortions, or because they had been telling pregnant women for decades that the pro-life movement was ready to help a pregnant mother in need with no strings attached. But others supported it as a "pro-family" law that would "fight illegitimacy." The intent of the law was to drive down births among people on the margins of society. The arguments for the law sounded like Margaret Sanger's hostility to welfare. Champions of the law included Charles Murray, author of the eugenics update, The Bell Curve. The result of the law was to increase chemical abortions via Depo-Provera. If prolifers could support the family cap, then clearly the eugenics movement is alive and well! Locating and understanding eugenics in modern politics can be a little frustrating, since everyone resists the "eugenics" label, and because many of the people now pushing eugenics proposals are doing so without any clear understanding of what they are doing. But in general, look for eugenics whenever a law is supposed to drive down the birthrate of the poor. Eugenics Resurgence at Princeton

At the beginning of the 20th century, the London School of Economics laid the foundations for generations of eugenics theory, guaranteeing that anyone who studied economics or indeed any social science in English in this century would be taught eugenics. Today, there is a massive resurgence of eugenics, with little organized opposition. One institution that is especially worth watching is Princeton University, which could become a focal point like the London School of Economics, with a number of overlapping eugenics programs and initiatives. Princeton, like most of the Ivy League schools, has a long history of involvement in eugenics. For example, Dr. Carl C. Brigham was among the leaders in the use of intelligence tests to screen out immigrants in the 1920s; he taught psychology at Princeton at the time. Princeton took a leadership role in negative eugenics when the Osborn and Milbank families helped to fund the Office of Population Research (OPR) there. (The Osborn family includes Major General Frederick Osborn, the postwar "reformer"; the Milbank Fund provided the money for the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study.) OPR was extremely influential in shaping American foreign policy regarding population. Today, OPR is housed in Notestein Hall, named for Frank Notestein, who promoted population control through the Milbank Foundation as a researcher, the Population Council as a founding trustee and later president for nine years, and the United Nations Population Division as the Director. Princeton remains deeply committed to population control. When President Clinton launched his National Bioethics Advisory Commission (NBAC), he appointed Harold Shapiro as chairman. Shapiro, a calm and urbane leader, is president of Princeton University. As chair of the NBAC, Shapiro was in a position to shape the debate over human cloning, and must take a major share of responsibility for the commission's "clone-and-kill" recommendation (proceed with somatic cell nuclear transfer, but kill the human embryos before they become recognizable to the naked eye). In 1998, Shapiro gave the opening talk at an international bioethics conference in Tokyo, and called for an "aggressive, serious conversation" between bioethics and social sciences but not between bioethics and theology. By "aggressive, serious conversation," he meant an exchange of views that was vigorous, with ideas put forward with some passion, with a real intent of changing the way people think. If social scientists follow Shapiro's proposal, that could strengthen the eugenics movement in the academic world. When Shapiro spoke in Tokyo, he had already begun to implement his own proposal at Princeton, by bringing in animal-rights activist Peter Singer to teach there. Singer was the founder of the International Association of Bioethics (IAB), which sponsored the Tokyo meeting. The IAB takes no official position on any matter of substance; rather, it offers itself as a forum for a free exchange of ideas. The only position that the IAB takes is opposition to censorship. Singer himself is forthright and aggressive in his view that intelligence is the quality that matters most, and that some apes have more intelligence than some humans and are

therefore more worthy of legal protection. He supports infanticide for eugenic purposes. Some critics have responded to his proposals by trying to censor them, which is a little like throwing Br'er Rabbit in the briar patch. Shapiro's call for an aggressive conversation will encourage social scientists especially Princeton professors to consider how to incorporate Singer's views into their work.

Declining family size

Your own generation How many children did your parents have? Include yourself, brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters. Your parents' generation How many children were in your father's family (including himself and his brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? How many children were in your mother's family (including herself and her brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? What is the average family size for your parents? (Add the family size for your mother and for your father, and divide by 2.) Your grandparents' generation How many children were in your paternal grandfather's family (that is, in your father's father's family, including himself and his brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? How many children were in your paternal grandmother's family (that is, in your father's mother's family, including herself and her brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? How many children were in your maternal grandfather's family (that is, in your mother's father's family, including himself and his brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? How many children were in your maternal grandmother's family (that is, in your mother's mother's family, including herself and her brothers, sisters, half-brothers and half-sisters)? What is the average family size for your grandparents? (Add the family size for your grandparents, and divide by 4.) This is a not a scientific survey; the sample is far too small to prove anything statistically. But many people can see in their own families that average family size has declined. There are many personal and specific reasons for this always interesting, sometimes painful. But sometimes, people can look in their own families and see one major effect of the eugenics movement. Overall, family size has declined, because of population explosion propaganda. This is not a criticism of your parents; the point is that you need not look far to find the effects of eugenics. Review of Chapter 18: What Do We See Today?

1. National Geographic magazine describes two threats to elephants. What are the two threats, which is most serious, and what is their solution? 2. Describe the Malthusian and eugenicist ideas found in the science standards proposed by the science committee writing for the Kansas State Board of Education. 3. What is the "family cap"? What is it for, and how is success measured? 4. Identify Peter Singer, Frank Notestein and Harold Shapiro. Explain the phrase "aggressive serious conversation." 5. Compare family size over three generations. How many brothers and sisters do you have? How many first cousins do you have? How many siblings did your father have, and how many did your mother have? How many siblings did each of your grandparents have? Is there a trend? Discuss: Can Princeton University promote eugenics as effectively as the London School of Economics did?

Conclusion

Eugenics is a grim reality, but I find that understanding it clearly is a source of great joy and hope. For nearly everyone, to see it clearly is to reject it firmly. In the 20th century, there were huge struggles against Fascism and then against Communism, and both were swept away. Holdouts remain, but the future will not be shaped by these anti-human ideologies. Eugenics will also be swept away. It has done as much damage as Fascism and Communism; it has a longer history and a tighter grip. But it too will fall. It cannot keep the allegiance of intellectuals, because it is based on nonsense. And it cannot maintain the support of anyone else either, because it is joyless. Consider the human dilemma as described by sociobiologist E. O. Wilson: We keep returning to the subject with a sense of hesitancy and even dread. For if the brain is a machine of ten million nerve cells and the mind can somehow be explained as the summed activity of a finite number of chemical and electrical reactions, boundaries limit the human prospect we are biological and our souls cannot fly free. If humankind evolved by Darwinian natural selection, [then] genetic chance and environmental necessity, not God, made the species. ... However much we may embellish that stark conclusion with metaphor and imagery, it remains the philosophical legacy of the last century of scientific research. Wilson's physics and astronomy are relics of the 19th century; he is wrong about the philosophical legacy of science. Astronomers are not troubled by a Creator, and physics since Heisenberg has room for human freedom. It is only biologists, out of touch with physics, who still think that faith and science may be in conflict. Religion is at peace with

science, except with biology as it is taught by eugenicists. The truth will come out, and perhaps in just a few years. Wilson's description of humanity is degrading, enslaving and joyless (as well as wrong). To his credit, he recognizes that it is "admittedly unappealing." It is interesting to look at the careers of two men who examined human nature with a scientific bent. Alfred Kinsey, whose writing helped launch the sexual revolution, was raised as a Christian, but in college he came under the influence of eugenicists, including the Huxleys. Then he spent his life studying sex, but without joy. Walker Percy, one of the great novelists of the century, was also shaped for years by eugenics. He was especially impressed by the sweeping vision of the universe painted by H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley in The Science of Life. But Percy later rejected eugenics. He was a physician and an observer of humanity, skeptical and ready to listen to science, but he came to see that science cannot explain the glorious tangle of the human mind. He converted to Catholicism. When you recognize eugenics, you find that Percy's novels are full of blistering satires of the joyless ideology of arrogance. The contrast between the joy of the believer and the joylessness of the materialist is easy to see. Kinsey's biographer records an incident when Kinsey corrected his son's religious bent. The innocent little boy said, "Look at the pretty flower, Daddy. God made it." "Now, Bruce," dad replied, where did the flower really come from?" Bruce knew the right answer: "From a seed." The implication, notes Judith A. Reisman, "is that if one believes in God, one cannot believe in seeds." The poet Piet Hein certainly knew about the existence of seeds (and bulbs), but noted: Brown earth To yellow crocus Is undiluted Hocus-pocus. The truth will prevail, and eugenics will be swept away with the other bloody failures of the 20th century. Freedom and dignity are not illusions. Human life is a great gift from a loving God, and it is full of wonder and awe and joy.

Final essay (choose one):

Is genocide implicit in the theory of natural selection? Will eugenics always lead to massive bloodshed? Read over the Magnificat (Luke 1: 46-55), and then write an imaginary conversation about it between a eugenicist and a Christian. (The simplest way to structure the conversation is to go through the Magnificat line by line, responding to each line with a sentence or two from each side.)

Locate eugenics theory in a chapter of any standard social science textbook, and explain what would change in the book if the taint of eugenics were replaced with an unswerving commitment to the overwhelming dignity of each person.