“Large family” winner, Fitter Families Contest, Texas State Fair (1925)

“Small family” winner, Fitter Families Contest, Eastern States Exposition,

Springfield, MA (1925)

The Irish Diaspora

Eugenics and the Fear of “degenerate” populations

United States: 1912 Britain: 1868

“A Harvard class does not reproduce itself and at the present rate, one thousand graduates of today will have only fifty descendants two hundred years hence. On the other hand, recent immigrants and the less effective descendants of the earlier immigrants still continue to have large families; so that from one thousand Roumanians today in Boston, at the present rate of breeding, will come a hundred thousand two hundred years hence to govern the fifty descendants of Harvard’s sons.”

—Heredity and Eugenics by William Castle, E.J.M. Coulter, Charles Davenport,

E.M East and W.L. Porter

“The careless, squalid, unaspiringIrishman multiplies like rabbits: the frugal, foreseeing, self-respecting, ambitious Scot, stern in his morality, spiritual in his faith, sagacious and disciplined in his intelligence, passes his best years in struggle and in celibacy, marries late, and leaves few behind him. Given a land originally peopled by a thousand Saxons and a thousand Celts – and in a dozen generations five-sixths of the population would be Celts, but five-sixths of the property, of the power, of the intellect, would belong to the one-sixth of Saxons that remained. In the eternal ‘struggle for existence,’ it would be the inferior and less favoured race that prevailed – and prevailed by virtue not of its good qualities but of its faults.”

—“On the Failure of ‘Natural Selection’ in the Case of Man” by W.R. Greg

Ellis Island

Between 600,000-1,250,000 immigrants entered the United States per year through

Ellis Island in the years before World War I.

Little Italy in New York City, circa

1900

The “American

Dream” or a Eugenic

Nightmare?

Harry Laughlin and

the “Biological”

Case for Immigration Restrictions

Laughlin Testifies to Congress:

“Scientific” Testimony in Support of Immigration

Restrictions

1

Indiana: 9 March 1907

Michigan: 1 April 1913

12

Carrie and Emma Buck, 1924

A.H. Estabrook, field researcher for the Eugenics Records Office, tests Carrie’s baby Vivian, determining the infant suffered from

feeblemindedness

Vivian was only 7 months oldEstabrook

Vivian

Pedigree provided by Harry Laughlin

of the Eugenics Record Office as expert testimony

in Buck v. Bell

The Expert Testimony of Harry Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office

Carrie Buck and her

forebears “belong to the

shiftless, ignorant, and

worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”

The U.S. Supreme Court upholds Virginia’s Sterilization Law in a 8 to 1 Decision

“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

From the opinion by Chief Justice Oliver

Wendell Holmes

Graph by Henry Laughlin of the

Eugenics Record Office, c. 1935

Jan. 1, 193521,539

Jan. 1, 193419,285

Jan. 1, 1933 16,688

Jan. 1, 19288,515

July 1, 19256,244

Dec. 1, 193115,136

Jan. 1, 19213,233

By 1941, 36,000 Americans were sterilized in 35 states

German pamphlet on eugenics

A “Sincere Wish” from Minneapolis to Berlin

“Eugenics ultimately proved a tragedy for

humankind. … Eugenics had lost its credibility in the scientific community

long before the Nazis appropriated it for their

own horrific purposes. The science underpinning it

was bogus, and the social programs constructed

upon it utterly reprehensible.”

James D. Watson with Andrew Berry, DNA: The

Secret of Life (2003)

“Inventory of the Blood of the Community”: the Archives of the Eugenic Records Office

“The challenge of this situation is obvious. Can man gain intelligent control of his own power? Can we develop so sound and extensive a genetics that we can hope to breed, in the future, superior men? Can we obtain knowledge of the physiology and psychobiology of sex so that man can bring this pervasive, highly important, and dangerous aspect of life under rational control? Can we unravel the tangled problem of the endocrine glands, and develop, before it is too late, a therapy for the whole hideous range of mental and physical disorders which result from glandular disturbances? Can we solve the mysteries of the various vitamins so that we can nurture a race sufficiently healthy and resistant? Can we release psychology from its present confusion and ineffectiveness and shape it into a too which every man can use every day? Can man acquire enough knowledge of his own vital processes so that we can hope to rationalize human behavior? Can we, in short, create a new science of man?”

— Warren Weaver, the head of the natural sciences division of theRockefeller Foundation, in an internal foundation report (February 14, 1936)

Warren Weaver, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Dream of a “New Science of Man”

Proposals made by Francis Crick at a

1963 meeting on “Man and His Future”:

Make parents pay a tax on children so the (genetically inferior) poor would limit their reproduction

License reproduction to limit unsuitable parents to one or at most two offspring

Suggestion made in a 1968 public lecture:

Perhaps babies should be legally “born” after they are, say, 2 days old and after passing an “acceptance test”

“Honest Jim”Gets in Hot Water over

Race Comments

“[James Watson] says that he is ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa’because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really’, and I know that this ‘hot potato’ is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that ‘people who have to deal with black employees find this not true’. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because ‘there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level’. He writes that ‘there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so’.

Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe, “The elementary DNA of Dr Watson”Sunday Times Magazine (London), 14 October 2007

James Watson responds to the

controversy:

“To all those who have drawn the

inference from my words that Africa, as a continent, is

somehow genetically inferior,

I can only apologise

unreservedly. That is not what I meant. More importantly,

there is no scientific basis for

such a belief.”

And a peculiar postscript:

“A new analysis of Dr. Watson’s genome shows that he has 16 times the number of genes considered to be of

African origin than the average white European does — about the same amount of African DNA that would show up if one great-grandparent

were African, said Kari Stefansson, the chief executive of deCODE

Genetics of Iceland, which did the analysis.”

John Schwartz, “DNA Pioner’s Genome Blurs Race Lines”, New York Times (12 December 2007)

Michael Crichton

“Why Politicized Science is Dangerous”

Appendix I to State of Fear (2004)

Imagine that there is a new scientific theory that warns of an impending crisis, and points to a way out.This theory quickly draws support from leading scientists, politicians, and celebrities around the world. Research is funded by distinguished philanthropies, and carried out at prestigious universities. The crisis is reported frequently in the media. The science is taught in college and high school classrooms.I don’t mean global warming. I’m talking about another theory, which rose to prominence a century ago. […]All in all, the research, legislation, and molding of public opinion surrounding the theory went on for almost half a century. Those who opposed the theory were shouted down and called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plain ignorant. But in hindsight, what is surprising is that so few people objected.Today, we know that this famous theory that gained so much support was actually pseudoscience. The crisis it claimed was nonexistent. And the actions taken in the name of this theory were morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately, they led to the deaths of millions of people. […]The theory was eugenics, and its history is so dreadful—and, to those who were caught up in it, so embarrassing—that it is now rarely discussed. But it is a story that should be well known to every citizen, so that its horrors are not repeated. […] I am not arguing that global warming is the same as eugenics. But the similarities are not superficial. And I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed. Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. […]That is the danger we now face. And that is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.