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20th Century Progressives &

Eugenics

Historical Contradictions

–

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Thinking Historically

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Progressive Leader

Graduated Yale with honors Law Degree from Columbia Law Naturalist Friend of Teddy Roosevelt Friend of Herbert Hoover Referred to in F. Scott Fitzgerald’

Great Gatsby Conservationist Founding Member of the Boone

and Crocket Club Formed Yellowstone Park

Saved the Giant Redwoods 1st Deer hunting license in NY

Regulate the deer herd (save the deer)

Created Wildlife Management

Helped found the Bronx Zoo Built the Bronx River Parkway Secretary of the N.Y. Zoological

Society Helped organize the American

Bison Society to save the Bison Helped create the Glacier National

Park and Denali National Park in Alaska

A Caribou species named after him

On Board of Trustees of the American Museum of Natural History

National Research Conference Council of Anthropology

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Contemporary Genetics Leader 1916 – Wrote the Passing of the Great Race

Translated into German, 1925 By 1937, 1,600,000 copies were sold Adolf Hitler wrote, “This Book is my Bible.”

President of the American Eugenics Society V.P. Immigration Restriction League from 1922 until his death

Responsible for the Immigrant Act of 1924 Worked to get Anti-Miscegenation Laws

Notably: Racial Integrity Act of 1924 Tried to get his “One Drop Rule” codified

Treasurer of the 2nd Eugenics Conference of 1921 Put Uta Benga, an African Pygmy, in the

Bronx Zoo as the “missing link”

Excerpts

In a 1912 article in the North American Review

In the 1916 The Passing of a Great Race

In the 1920 book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy

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"Darwinism and Anti-Italian Sentiment"   Excerpt OneIn a 1912 article in the North American Review, Prescott F. Hall of the Immigration Restriction League wrote that immigrants brought with them “. . . political and social institutions very different from ours [Americans]. The Southern Italian, which constitutes the largest element in our present immigration, is one of the most mixed races in Europe and is partly African, owing to the negroid migration from Carthage [who were really Semitic Phoenicians] to Italy. . . . The negro strain in the South Italians has already been mentioned . . . What would happen if a large Mediterranean [Italian] population should be colonized in our Southern States and should inbreed with the negro population it finds there? This is not an imaginary possibility, for the dark-skinned races are more likely to settle in the southern part of the country. . . . Let us suppose that some inbreeding with the negro takes place. Will the descendents of the emotional, fiery Italians submit to the social judgment that a man with a sixteenth or a thirty-second part of negro blood is a colored man who must occupy a position socially, if not politically inferior? Excerpt TwoIn 1916 Madison Grant, author of The Passing of a Great Race told his readers the highly evolved American people would become a diluted race, once new immigrants came into the United States and started to intermarry with Americans. He claimed that European leaders had taken the “. . . opportunity to unload upon careless, wealthy, and hospitable America the sweepings of their jails and asylums. The result was that the new immigration . . . contained a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of all races drawn from the lowest stratum of the Mediterranean [southern Italy and Sicily] basin. . . . These immigrants adopt the language of the native [born] American, they wear his clothes, they steal his name and they are beginning to take his woman, but they seldom adopt his religion [Protestant Christianity] or understand his ideals.”Excerpt ThreeIn a 1920 book, “The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Lothrop Stoodard warned against allowing immigrants into the country. He divided the White Race into three branches, the Nordic (blonde, blue-eyed English and Northern Germanics) the Alpines (stocky, brown- haired Austrian Germans, Swiss, etc,) and the Mediterranean (Southern Italians and Sicilians). He ranked the Mediterraneans as the most inferior branch of the White Race and warned against allowing them and immigrants of color into the United States. He worried that Mediterraneans would mix with Americans and, “Hence, when a highly specialized stock (superior white branches) interbreeds with a different stock (lower white branches or with people of color), the newer less stable, specialized characters are bred out, the variation, no matter how great its potential value to human evolution, being irretrievably lost [author‘s emphasis].

 

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Excerpts

Prescott Farnsworth Hall

Madison Grant

Lothard Stoddard

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Mainstream Authors, Academics, Scientists,

Politicians, etc. How do we put this in Historical Context? Madison Grant is a Progressive All his beliefs were mainstream thought “Settled Science”

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Progressive Era

Progressives looked to control NATURE Science can control nature They based their beliefs on Darwinian

theories

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Darwinism is very much a factor! A factor for Communism

A factor for Nazism

Save the Deer, the Redwood, the Caribou through human control

Through:

Central PlanningCentral Planning Save Humanity through Central Save Humanity through Central

PlanningPlanning Based on science and technologyBased on science and technology

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Breeding of:Breeding of:Plants, Animals, and PeoplePlants, Animals, and People

Sterilize and/or imprisonment

The “feeble-minded” The handicapped The criminals

Contraception– Immigration restriction Lower Races Highest Races

NordicAlpinesMediterraneanJapaneseChineseNegroesGorillasCelts

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Aristotle Society seeks:

An AdvantageA JustificationThe “Good”

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Eugenics

American Medical Association British Prime Minister Arthur Balfour Leonard Darwin Winston Churchill Alexander Graham Bell John Maynard Keynes

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American Eugenics Teddy Roosevelt Gifford Pinchot Woodrow Wilson Herbert Hoover Franklin D Roosevelt Emma Goldmann Margaret Stanger Oliver Wendell Holmes

Historian Walter McDougall wrote that the U. S. Constitution lasted so long because it was written by men with a great comprehension of human nature:

“They envisioned no utopias, put little trust in republican virtue, and believed the only government liable to endure was one taking mankind as it was and making allowance for passion and greed.”

Madison’s Checks and Balances, Federalism, etc.

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand

Early 20th Century Progressive Thought

Wilson Regarding Individual Rights:

“No doubt, a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual. And a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as a fundamental principle.”

“Some citizens in this country have never gotten beyond the Declaration of Independence..”

Imperialist Progressivism Wilson had applauded the annexation of Puerto Rico and the Philippines

after the Spanish-American War.

“They are children and we are men in the deep matters of government and justice.”

He denounced “. . . Anti-imperialist weeping and wailing that came out of Boston.”

Wilson idolized both Otto von Bismarck and Abraham Lincoln. Wilson believed a nation needs a strong leader– a personification of the state.

He loved Lincoln because Lincoln could impose his will on the entire nation.Lincoln centralized, modernized, and used power to build a new United States. He had:

•Suspended Habeas Corpus• Imprisoned opponents

• Instituted a Draft

Historian Walter McDougall: “If any trait bubbles up in all one reads about Wilson, it is this: he loved, craved, and in a sense glorified power.”

In his book Congressional Government ,Wilson wrote: “I CANNOT imagine power as a thing negative, not positive.”

At 29 in 1885 Wilson wanted a British-like Centralized Parliamentary System of Government. BUT

In 1908, after watching Teddy Roosevelt use the Bully Pulpit, Wilson wrote:

“The President is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can. His capacity will set the limit and if Congress be over borne by him, it willbe no fault of he makers of the Constitution . . .

But only because the President has the nation behind him and Congress has not.”

Wilson believed that the state was a natural, organic and spiritual expression of the people themselves. Not a Newtonian machine - rather it was a Darwinian, evolving organism.

Increases in state power were evolutionary.

Wilson to John Dewey to FDR talked of governmental experimentation.Try everything- to best ideas will rise to the top, just like some mutants survive and others die off. “Government does now whatever experience permits or the times demand.” 1912

Woodrow Wilson (Leaders of Men, 1890 ) on progressive leadership:

“He (the leader) supplies the power; others supply only the materials upon which the power operates. . . It is the power which dictates, dominates: the materials yield. Men are a clay in the hands of the

commutate leader.”

On the Constitution, on the campaign trail in 1912Darwin not Newton

“. . . living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice. Society is a living organism and

must obey laws of Life. . . It must develop. . . all that progressives ask or desire is permission– in an era when

‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian

principle, all they ask is recognition of the fact that a nation is a living thing and not a machine.”

Progressive Leaders -- Bitter RivalsTeddy Roosevelt Great actor on the world

stage The BULL Moose Led men in battle More Mars

Warrior ruling class, Strenuous life of Leaders Strict Meritocracy

Woodrow Wilson More of a Director

The Schoolmaster Led a graduate seminar More Venus

Disinterested Technocrats Bureaucrats Social Workers

Two Sides of the Same Progressive Coin Albert Beveridge

Nationalist side of the coin Strong Imperialist Strong Militarist Strong believer in Anglo-Saxon racial superiority

Social Reform side of the coin Leader in the 1906 Federal Meat Inspection Act Fought to end child labor Worked for the 8 hour work day Teddy Roosevelt’s biggest ally against “Conservatives” Left the GOP to ran as a Progressive in 1912, with TR.

Progressives as Social Darwinists - Mold a New Society;

Control and Conquer Nature

Eugenics Conservationist

Imperialism Planned Economies,Corporatists

• In 1911, New Jersey passed a sterilization law:• The law was signed by Governor Woodrow Wilson. • It authorized the sterilization of insane, epileptic, and retarded persons, as well as certain criminals.

• Criminals could be sterilized, including repeat offenders.

• A board of examiners would rule if there was sufficient evidence of criminal tendencies.

•Over 50,000 people in the USA were sterilized during this period.

“Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce.” -

Theodore Roosevelt

"I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely

from breeding“ - Theodore Roosevelt

In an opinion for the Carrie Buck case, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote:

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Margaret Sanger "No woman shall have the legal right to bear a

child… without a permit for parenthood."her proposed The American Baby Code, intended law.

"The most merciful thing that a family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.“The Woman Rebel, Volume I, Number 1. Reprinted in Woman and the New Race. New York: Brentanos Publishers, 1922.

"Birth control must lead ultimately to a cleaner race."Woman, Morality, and Birth Control. New York: New York Publishing Company, 1922. P. 12.

There’s more: "We should hire three or four colored ministers,

preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don't want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population. and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members."

December 19, 1939 letter to Dr. Clarence Gamble, 255 Adams Street, Milton, Massachusetts. Original source: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, North Hampton, Massachusetts. Also described in Linda Gordon's Woman's Body, Woman's Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976.

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Madison Grant

Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation [sic] of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race."

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The film called The Birth of the Nation was released in 1915. It was based on a 1905 novel called The Clansman.

The success of the film at the box-office was uncertain until it was viewed at the White House, by Woodrow

Wilson

During the film, Wilson had jumped to his feet and shouted that “It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”

Papers reported that Wilson loved the film and the money started to roll in.

William J. Simmons formed a new (the second) Ku Klux Klan in Georgia.

The 2nd Klan was by far the largest. It had a big presence in New Jersey and especially in the Midwest.

The prime focus of hatred went towards Catholic & Jewish immigrants and against any Catholics in America.

The Klan marched on Washington, DC in 1925.

Wilson’s Racial Attitudes He believed that giving African Americans the right to vote was “…

the foundation of every evil in this country.” During his first term in office, the House passed a law making racial

intermarriage a felony in the District of Columbia. His Postmaster General also ordered that his Washington offices be

segregated, with the Treasury and Navy soon doing the same. Photographs were required of all applicants for federal jobs. When

pressed by black leaders, Wilson replied, "The purpose of these measures was to reduce the friction. It is as far as possible from being a movement against the Negroes. I sincerely believe it to be in their interest."

The Eugenics Movement

Lost a lot of credibility during the 1930s. as Nazis in Germany pointed to American state laws and research as models.

Adolf Hitler: Now that we know the laws of heredity, it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.

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Ended with Revulsion of the Nazis Concentration Camps as the local extension

of Eugenics

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American Civil Rights Movement

Non violent Revolution

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Thinking Historically

No Presentism Use Historical Context

St. Isaac Jorges Cinque Thomas Jefferson Southern Whites