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 non-whites. 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 feeble-minded 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 feeble-minded 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.
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?
