Tag Archives: #breeding

Eugen­ics is the study of hered­i­tary improve­ment of the human race by con­trolled selec­tive breed­ing. More spe­cific to the sci­en­tific move­ment, it was the early twen­ti­eth cen­tury effort to improve the human race by selec­tive mat­ing of allegedly supe­rior peo­ple and forced ster­il­iza­tions of “unfit” individuals.

A British man, Sir Fran­cis Gal­ton, bar­rowed Darwin’s ideas of “survival-of-the-fittest” and Gre­gor Mendel’s research in plant genet­ics to deter­mine a method for genet­i­cally improv­ing the human race.

Gal­ton wanted to rid the pop­u­la­tion of unde­sir­able traits and allow only the more desir­able ones to con­tinue to exist, just as Mendel had done with plants.

Galton’s ideas were taken very seri­ously, and even­tu­ally state leg­is­la­tures passed eugen­ics laws allow­ing for the forced ster­il­iza­tion of those indi­vid­u­als who pos­sessed unde­sir­able qualities.

The pub­lic were told that Eugen­ics would weed out such unfa­vor­able qual­i­ties as promis­cu­ity, incom­pe­tence, prone­ness to crime, poverty, stu­pid­ity, and illness.

The eugen­ics move­ment was sup­ported by trusted mem­bers of the Amer­i­can com­mu­nity, such as Pres­i­dent Roo­sevelt and promi­nent sci­en­tists and doc­tors who were trusted and respected in their fields. Peo­ple trust doc­tors in med­ical mat­ters, so when many doc­tors agreed that ster­il­iza­tion of cer­tain indi­vid­u­als would improve life and the human race, few objected.

Thirty-three states even­tu­ally insti­tuted eugen­ics laws, and 65,000 indi­vid­u­als were legally ster­il­ized in the United States. More than 8,000 were in Vir­ginia, and it is not know how many were per­formed with­out being documented.

It was sug­gested by some extrem­ist eugeni­cists that not only indi­vid­u­als should be ster­il­ized, but their entire blood­lines. Some optometrists wanted to test the vision of every­one in the pop­u­la­tion and put all those with even the slight­est vision defects and their fam­i­lies into con­cen­tra­tion camps for ster­il­iza­tion, but this was thought to be to extreme for the public.

In 1933, Hitler, impressed with the eugen­ics move­ment in the US, insti­tuted a eugen­ics law sim­i­lar to that in Vir­ginia, called the “Law for the Pre­ven­tion of Defec­tive Prog­eny,” under which over 350,000 peo­ple were forcibly ster­il­ized. Hitler took Amer­i­can eugen­ics ideas to extremes in order to reach his final solu­tion to the Jew­ish “prob­lem” in Germany.

Hitler’s party plat­form before he came into power stressed the same idea for genetic purity, stat­ing that “only by purg­ing Ger­man soci­ety of the cor­rupt­ing non-Aryan pol­luters of our cul­ture can Ger­many be cleansed and our tra­di­tional val­ues protected.”

Unlike the Amer­i­can eugen­ics move­ment, Hitler believed that those “unde­sir­able” indi­vid­u­als were a threat to Ger­man unity. Amer­i­cans came to largely accept eugen­ics as a cred­i­ble sci­en­tific the­ory, and Hitler’s Ger­man sup­port­ers sup­ported his meth­ods of cleans­ing the Ger­man race.

Ideas of eugen­ics became essen­tially cor­rect in the minds of the major­ity of peo­ple who had a voice in Ger­many and the United States. The prob­lem with that fact was that the opin­ions of peo­ple with­out a voice were, obvi­ously, not heard, and so a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of opin­ions from a dif­fer­ent point of view were never allowed any credibility.

The only per­spec­tive that was able to pre­vail was one that favored only a small per­cent of the population.

Why were peo­ple, in both Gemany and in the United States, so will­ing to accept eugenics?

• Related Arti­cles
• http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/1103/1103ft1.html
• http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/list2.pl