Black Women and Reproductive Rights

DOROTHY ROBERTS: In contemporary America there is a prevalent belief that poor black women shouldn't have children. And that their having children is the cause of black people's problems, well, indeed, of America's problems. I think for a long time the denigration of black women's reproduction was just ignored by mainstream feminists because they had the image of the white mother in mind. Even though there are restrictions on white mothers, it's a fundamentally different kind of regulation. And then there are other feminists who are so wedded to abortion rights as the most important issue and to abortion as the be all and end all of reproductive freedom that there s a resistance to seeing coercive birth control policies as also being oppressive. They don't get that distributing Norplant and Depo-Provera in poor communities and telling women, "This is what you should use," could be oppressive. (source: MS Magazine)

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty

DOROTHY ROBERTS: A perfect example is sterilization. In the seventies, a group of feminists opposed waiting periods and rigid informed consent procedures for sterilization. Women of color said, "Let's put limits on sterilization because doctors are guilty of abuse." But this just didn't register with some of the mainstream reproductive rights groups that had been pushing for greater access to sterilization for white, middle-class women. While poor black women were, in some cases, forcibly sterilized, sometimes without their knowledge, let alone consent, white women had a hard time getting sterilized. There were all sorts of formulas to figure out if you should allow a white woman to be sterilized. This exemplifies how diametrically opposed the experience of the struggle for reproductive rights has been for these two groups. (source: MS Magazine)

DOROTHY ROBERTS: And now there is this boom in popularity for the fertility business, which was primarily designed to help white, middle-class couples have children. That seems like a fundamental moral contradiction that people should be grappling with. We need to think about whether there should be limits on the fertility industry. It's virtually unregulated. The multiple births that result from these technologies point to the contradiction of a public not willing to pay the expenses of one additional child born to a welfare mother, yet willing to support seven children born to a white couple. (source: MS Magazine)

Between 1929 and 1974 over 7,600 people were sterilized by the state of North Carolina.

DOROTHY ROBERTS: Why shouldn't we be able to at least think about, debate, and consider whether there should be limits on the fertility business, which requires public expense so that a particular group of people can have children? But white men, especially, get very upset when you start questioning their right to have children. I can't tell you the number of red faces I've encountered. People get very defensive when you suggest that their decisions about having children might have some racial implications. The response I get all the time is, "This has nothing to do with racism. I just want children like me." (source: MS Magazine)

DOROTHY ROBERTS: The thing about reproduction is that, more than anything else, it tells you how a society values people. When many black groups read my book and invite me to speak, their focus is on genocide. I actually don't claim that these are policies designed to eliminate black people. I think it functions more on the ideological level to support a whole host of policies that keep blacks at the bottom. But I'm not so sanguine as to say that they couldn't have that aim at some point. There is a danger that when the public gets used to policies that use reproduction as a solution to social problems, they might be more amenable in the future to actual policies of genocide. Around the time Norplant came out, an editorial in the Philadelphia Inquirer suggested it was a solution to black poverty. The paper did issue an apology, but a lot of people supported it. And there was legislation proposed all over the country to use Norplant to keep poor black women from having children. And then there's CRACK, Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity, a private organization that offers women who use drugs and alcohol $200 to be sterilized. People jumped on that as the solution to drug use during pregnancy. It is scary that people will leap to these drastic solutions involving reproduction when we dont have adequate health care or drug treatment. These policies support high incarceration rates for black people, high removal rates of black children from their homes by the child welfare system, and a horrible education system. They say we don't need to spend money on social welfare programs or figure out racism and poverty; the solution is to keep these people from having children. (source: MS Magazine)

DOROTHY ROBERTS: I am a firm believer that you start with the experiences of the most oppressed people. It expands our view of what reproductive liberty is. And the [job of feminists] has to be to expand the way we think about reproductive freedom. I've had lots of debates with activists who argue that the way to appeal to a broad white audience is to place white middle-class women's issues at the forefront, because those women are more likable and empathetic. One example is in the prosecution of substance abuse during pregnancy. Even though most of the prosecutions were against poor black women who smoked crack, the strategy in California, for example, was to make this about the infringement on the liberties of white middle-class women. They tried to make the argument that if this kind of policy keeps going on, in time, you wont be able to drink coffee while you re pregnant. But you don't get any fundamental change this way. You have to focus on the people who are being hit the hardest and figure out an agenda that centers on them. The difficult question is, how do you get around the fact that many white Americans won't do anything that they see as benefiting black people? (source: MS Magazine)

North Carolina Sterilization Program Sponsor Wickliffe Draper

From Journal Now, Against their Will: North Carolina's Sterilization Program, "Benefactor With a Racist Bent: Wealthy recluse apparently liked the looks and potential of Bowman Gray's new medical-genetics department," by Kevin Begos:

The official version of the story from Wake Forest University has long been that a "New York philanthropist with a deep interest in population genetics" made a $100,000 gift of stock to the fledgling Department of Medical Genetics in 1953 - the equivalent of more than $650,000 today.

The whole story is this: The philanthropist was Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy recluse with a record of paying for research that tried to "prove" that whites were superior to blacks. The Bowman Gray School of Medicine got the money, but as part of the deal one of the most controversial patrons of racist science got his identity hidden.

"There appears to be some association with Draper. We don't know what the total amount was. We don't know specifically what it was used for," Dr. William B. Applegate, the dean of Wake Forest University School of Medicine, said last week.

Scholars taking hard looks at Draper say that his visit to a Nazi eugenics conference, his bankrolling of the racist tract "White America" and support for sending black Americans back to Africa are part of a pattern - the money promoted the now-discredited eugenics movement and radical racial politics.

"Draper wished to use science as a way to stop the civil-rights movement," said William Tucker, a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and author of The Funding of Scientific Racism: Wickliffe Draper and the Pioneer Fund, published this year.

Applegate said he couldn't condone the school's acceptance of money from Draper, but didn't want to judge his predecessors.

"Clearly the Bowman Gray School of Medicine took a gift from a source in those days that we would not take from that source today, for ethical reasons," said Applegate, who is creating a faculty committee to investigate Draper's ties to the school. "It would be impossible to accept money from a source with those views at this school today. It's absolutely, totally unacceptable."

The official history of the school of medicine is The Miracle on Hawthorne Hill, by Dr. Manson Meads. It refers to an anonymous patron and a gift of $100,000 to be spread over 30 years to pay for the first professorship of medical genetics at the school.

Bowman Gray School of Medicine Amphitheater

It was 1949 when Draper met Dr. C. Nash Herndon of Bowman Gray. Little is known about their meetings, but Herndon was playing a major role in the expansion of the North Carolina eugenic sterilization program at the time.

Research by the Winston-Salem Journal shows that in 1951, Dr. C.C. Carpenter, the dean of the medical school, sent Herndon a memo about grants. The school policy was to assume responsibility if the other source terminated, Carpenter wrote, and "this would be true in your case in regard to payment of your salary through the Draper grant."

Paul Lombardo, the head of the University of Virginia's Center for Biomedical Ethics, said that before Draper gave money to Bowman Gray, a similar offer to another school had raised ethical questions and fallen through.

In 1948 Draper suggested a gift of $100,000 to officials at the Dight Institute at the University of Minnesota to begin a "human genetics project," but director Shelton Reed wrote in a letter that year that Dight probably wouldn't get the money.

"Colonel Draper has very definite ideas as to what the subject of human genetics encompasses," Reed wrote, adding that meant "improvement of the American people by shipping the Negro inhabitants back to Africa. My remark about Colonel Draper is not flattering, but I think you will agree it is generally correct."

Wickliffe Preston Draper

Born in Massachusetts in 1891, Draper had old Kentucky blood on one side of the family, old Puritan on the other, and was sure that kind of family tree represented the true American. He inherited a multimillion-dollar textile fortune in the early 1920s and never worked at a job other than military service in World War I and World War II. A lifelong bachelor described as extremely reclusive by even his admirers, Draper lived in a huge New York apartment filled with stuffed big-game trophies he'd shot on trips to exotic parts of the world.

The $100,000 gift to Wake Forest was one of Draper's largest, Lombardo said, and an examination of what kind of science he was interested in raises questions about what he expected in return for his money.

In 1935 Draper attended the Nazi's International Congress for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems in Berlin, Lombardo said. The Honorary Chairman of the meeting, Wilhelm Frick, was later convicted during the Nuremberg war-crimes tribunal and hanged in 1946.

Draper's companion at the conference, Dr. Clarence C. Campbell, gave a speech that resounded across the Atlantic. "The difference between the Jew and the Aryan is as unsurmountable (sic) as that between black and white," and closed with a rousing "To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!" Time magazine noted.

The next year Draper chose Campbell as a judge for an essay contest he funded, and in 1937 Draper and eugenicists Harry Laughlin and Frederick Osborn launched the Pioneer Fund as a vehicle for distributing grants. Tucker notes that a proposed Pioneer budget for 1937 mentions "two German films referred to by Colonel Draper have been received," and that one, The Hereditary Defective, was shown at 28 U.S. high schools through Laughlin's efforts. Draper continued to work with Laughlin to find ways to use his money to further science that focused on racial issues. Lombardo said there is conclusive evidence that Draper funded a special printing of Earnest Sevier Cox's racist tract "White America" that was sent to every member of Congress in 1937.

Tucker has shown that Draper gave $215,000 to the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission in the 1960s, a group that used the money for a failed effort to stop the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

In the late 1950s Kinston, N.C., native Harry Weyher became the president of the Pioneer Fund, a position he held until his death this year.

Through Weyher, Draper gave $500 to Wesley Critz George, a staunch advocate of segregation and a professor at the University of North Carolina, to help distribute a 1961 anti-integration pamphlet. Draper sent George $1,000 Christmas checks every year until 1972, Tucker notes.

Pioneer Fund ties to North Carolina expanded in later years, as Marion Parrott of Kinston and Tom Ellis, a Raleigh lawyer, served on Pioneer's board of directors. Ellis' Coalition for Freedom, a part of the Jesse Helms political machine, received $195,000 in Pioneer grants in the 1980s, the equivalent of more than $300,000 today. Ellis did not return calls seeking comment.

Pioneer Fund grants paid for much of the research that supported The Bell Curve, a 1994 best-seller that argued that blacks are genetically inclined to be less intelligent than whites.

J. Philippe Rushton, the current Pioneer president, said there's no doubt some of Draper's past is a public-relations embarrassment, but "that has absolutely nothing to do with the Pioneer Fund."

Because the Pioneer Fund doesn't take stands on political issues, Rushton said it makes no sense to apologize for Draper's past.

"We wouldn't condemn Draper's views on segregation or somebody else's views on integration," he said. Those who attack Draper and Pioneer downplay details that don't fit allegations of racism, Rushton said.

One of the original members of the Pioneer Board of Directors was John Marshall Harlan, who later became a Supreme Court justice and voted for the landmark 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education school-desegregation ruling.

Draper's critics reject those defenses. "(He) made a point of funding people who shared his views on race, and he also made a point of trying to hide what he did," Lombardo said.

Draper was extremely secretive, but even his scant correspondence suggests that he must have believed that Herndon shared his general views on race. Tucker quotes from a 1954 letter to Osborn:

"I should be reluctant to assist investigators whose personalities and view points were markedly alien to my own," Draper wrote, adding that he believed in "measures to promote considerable ethnic homogeneity...."

North Carolina Highway Historical Marker (Raleigh, NC) to commemorate the victims of the state's Eugenics Sterilization Program ( 1933) between 1929 and 1974, over 7,600 individuals were sterilized.

Rushton said he knew nothing about Draper's gift to Bowman Gray, or Herndon's role in the expanded eugenic sterilization program in North Carolina that would become dramatically more racist in the 1950s and 1960s.

"Maybe that's good or bad charity, depending on your values," he said of possible links between Draper's gift and sterilizations in North Carolina.

Applegate is just beginning to look into ties between the school, Draper and sterilizations in North Carolina, but he rejected the entire concept of eugenics.

"To me, the whole concept of involuntary sterilization sends a chill down my spine," Applegate said. "I just think that it's morally wrong. The very concept of that is profoundly upsetting to me and to the leadership and the faculty of the school."

(source: http://extras.journalnow.com/againsttheirwill/parts/two/story3.html)

Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

Black Bodies, White Science: Louis Agassiz's Slave Daguerreotypes

In March 1850, Louis Agassiz, celebrated Harvard natural scientist and widely admired Cambridge intellectual, arranged through the good offices of Dr. Robert W. Gibbes for a local daguerreotypist in Columbia, South Carolina, J.T. Zealy, to take a series of pictures of African-born slaves at nearby plantations. Zealy made the pictures in his studio, turned them over to Gibbes, who shipped them to Agassiz at Harvard, where in 1976, at the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, they were found in storage cabinet.

Louis Agassiz

… Agassiz had visited several plantations in 1850 while in South Carolina to address a meeting of scientists in Charleston on the topic of the “separate creation” of the human races. That notion, which denied the unity of mankind, seemed to provide a scientific or natural basis for racial inequality and slavery. After the meeting, at which the Harvard scientist thrilled his Southern audience by endorsing the doctrine that mankind had no common origin, Agassiz expressed interest in examining African-born slaves.

… He wanted firsthand evidence of anatomical uniqueness and also to see if these distinct traits would survive in American-born offspring. “Agassiz was delighted,” wrote Gibbes, “with his examinations of Ebo, Foulah, Gullah, Guinea, Coromantee, Mandingo, and Congo Negroes,” satisfying himself that “they have differences from other races.” He asked Gibbes to arrange for the photographs, and took his leave.

“Jack (driver), Guinea, Plantation of B.F. Taylor, Esq., Columbia, S.C.”

… The Zealy daguerreotypes reflect the unusual circumstances of Agassiz’s request. They show a conventional studio setup with a patterned carpet and the headrest stand usually hidden behind the sitter’s back. The daguerreotypes themselves feature the gold-plated overmat and wooden case typical of the commercial artifact.

However, the persons portrayed here are standing naked: not “representative” in [Mathew] Brady’s sense of an imagined and desired America, but examples of specimens of a “type” — a type, moreover, of complete otherness. It is difficult to view these images now without a sense of outrage at the indecency of the poses and the system of bondage they reflect — the absolute power of masters over the bodies of their slaves. The response is heightened by the extraordinary fact of male nudity, of genitals presented directly to that daguerrean eye in what must have been a genteel Columbia, S.C., daguerrean gallery or “parlor,” of women asked to disrobe not for prurient purposes but for “science.”

“Delia, born in the USA of enslaved

African parents, daughter of Renty, Congo“

… Without a public mask to mediate their encounter with the lens, the eyes of the enslaved Africans can only reveal the depths of their being — for, as naked slaves, they are permitted no social persona. In the absence of the clues which define Brady’s portraits as formal, heroic, at once individual and illustrious, and yet in the presence of certain conventional signs — the carpet, the stand, the case and framing mat — we confront a disturbing contradiction. The illustrations are trapped within a system of representation as firmly as the sitters are trapped within a system of chattel slavery. And they powerfully inform us of our own entrapment. We know how to view conventional portraits — but to gaze upon naked bodies, male and female, of persons dispossessed of themselves, is another matter.

The effect even now can be confusing, erotic response mingling with moral disgust and outrage. Above all, the pictures suggest a potentially subversive power within the daguerrean effect of immediacy — including its eroticism — a power to subvert the very conventions of portraiture which the works of commercial studios shaped. Often we feel a similar effect in anonymous images found in old shops or studied in collections — an uncanny rapport with vibrant shadowy traces of persons on a silver-coated plate, who continue to live in spite of stilted poses and stiffness.

The Zealy pictures reveal the social convention which ranks blacks as inferior beings, which violates civilized decorum, which strips men and women of the right to cover their genitalia. And yet the pictures shatter that mold by allowing the eyes of Delia and the others to speak directly to ours, in an appeal to a shared humanity.

His name is Renty, he was born in the Congo, and enslaved on the plantation of B.F. Taylor, in Columbia, South Carolina

… By allowing their subjects to gaze through the lens directly at us, the Zealy portraits immobilize the physiognomic theory which supports [Marcus Aurelius] Root’s confidence. Stripped of everything deemed intrinsic to selfhood and “character,” if not humanness itself, they are simply themselves — what we see. The photographer takes no pains to “portray” them or to elicit an expression.

Agassiz commissioned these images to use as scientific visual evidence to prove the physical difference between white Europeans and black Africans. The primary goal was to prove the racial superiority of the white race. The photographs were also meant to serve as evidence for his theory of “separate creation,” which contends that each race originated as a separate species.

By obeying his commission to present them as bodies rather than persons, as biological specimens, Zealy allows them to be as they are: black slaves constrained to perform the role of specimen before the camera. The absoluteness of their confinement to this role has the unintended effect of freeing their eyes from any other necessity but to look back at the glass eye staring at them. Their gaze defies the scrutinizing gaze aimed at their nakedness, and challenges the viewer of these daguerreotypes to reckon with his or her responses to such images.

Portrait of Louis Agassiz. In this photo he is seen demonstrating his theory of jelly-fish, corals and starfish. So where did it all go wrong for this workaholic who once declared he could not afford to waste his time making money and was ready to sacrifice everything to science? Two words sum it up: Darwin and racism. He was considered the most important scientific opponent of Darwinism, refusing to admit the evolutionary theory of the English naturalist.

Louis Agassiz's Public racism

Swiss scientist Louis Agassiz was one of the most influential researchers of the 19th century, promoting the Ice Age and boosting science in the United States.

Yet 200 years after his birth his legacy is almost invisible, tainted by his opposition to Darwinism and his publicly stated racism.

Agassiz's racism proved more problematic and is probably what has seen him vanish as a public face of American science. After arriving in the US, he felt confronted by black people and wrote to his mother that he felt physically ill in their presence.

Published at the height of polygenism's popularity, Josiah Nott and George Gliddon's 800-page illustrated volume, Types of Mankind, reproduced the work of Louis Agassiz and Samuel Morton, spreading racist views to a popular audience. The work sold well and nine editions were printed. Some slave owners found justification for slavery in the Bible, and others used this new "science" to defend it.

He certainly believed in the separation of the races and his own theory was blacks and whites had different origins.

While it was not an unusual position at the time, his influence meant that his words had a major impact on the debate about racial equality and slavery.

"His behaviour stank," Kaeser told swissinfo. "His use of the media was hypocritical and his mixing of science and politics was unethical."

This probably goes a long way to explaining why Agassiz lies almost forgotten in Mount Auburn cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, while the tercentenary of the birth of Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler is being celebrated around the world. (source: swissinfo, Scott Capper)

Eugenics Comes to the Movies

The New England Journal of Medicine article entitled, "The Black Stork: Eugenics and the death of “defective” babies in American medicine and motion pictures since 1915,"by Barron H. Lerner, M.D: A physician helps a suffering patient die. Newspapers across the country cover the story, engendering a nationwide debate over whether the doctor is a murderer or a humanitarian.

These events have a modern ring, but they actually occurred in 1915. Long before Jack Kevorkian there was Harry Haiselden, a Chicago physician and eugenicist who not only let a baby with severe disabilities die, but also wrote and starred in a movie to publicize the need to withhold aggressive treatment from all such “defective” babies. In this excellent book, Martin Pernick has resurrected the long-forgotten story of the Bollinger baby, Haiselden, and his movie, which was entitled The Black Stork. In so doing, Pernick gives us an essential historical perspective on two pressing issues: the possible abuses of new forms of genetic technology and physician-assisted suicide.

Haiselden's decision to forgo lifesaving surgery on the Bollinger baby, who was born with multiple physical anomalies, was made at the pinnacle of the eugenics movement in early-20th-century America. By limiting the reproduction of so-called unfit populations, eugenicists hoped to prevent the propagation of traits such as mental retardation and criminality, which they believed were genetically transmitted. In allowing or facilitating the death of the Bollinger baby and several other infants born with various deformities, Haiselden emphasized the eugenic goal of building a more perfect race of Americans.

Dr. Harry Haiselden

Although other historians have examined the eugenics movement, Pernick's book breaks important new ground. Most notably, he demonstrates how an understanding of eugenics requires an analysis not only of the writings of its professional advocates but also of the popular response to eugenic thought. Quite helpful here is Pernick's analysis of The Black Stork and other films of the era that either promoted or mocked eugenic doctrines. This aspect of the book was clearly a labor of love for Pernick, who found the only remaining viewable print of The Black Stork in a film collector's garage. By showing how eugenics was portrayed in the media and on film, Pernick gives a much more nuanced treatment of the topic than previous authors. For example, he demonstrates that many eugenicists believed that heredity was determined by both one's genetic inheritance and one's environment, and he shows how movies such as The Black Stork actually succeeded in humanizing the “defectives” they were designed to pillory.

There is little to criticize in Pernick's book. It is clearly written and copiously referenced. One minor point is that he has chosen to leave his actual analysis of the movie The Black Stork (and a wonderful collection of still photographs from the film) until the end of the book. Since he discusses the film throughout the book, it is somewhat confusing to learn the plot's details only at the book's conclusion.

If Pernick has provided a subtle reading of the popular response to eugenics and euthanasia in the 1910s, he ultimately is highly critical of a mind-set that could claim, as Haiselden did, that “horrid semi-humans drag themselves along all of our streets” and that shared numerous concepts and images with Nazism. Pernick's final chapter is an eloquent discussion of the cautionary tale that Haiselden's story represents. No matter how sophisticated genetic or medical techniques become, they can never provide truly objective data. Medical decision making will continue to be infused with value judgments, which we must constantly scrutinize.

(source: New England Journal of Medicine, by Barron H. Lerner, M.D., Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, New York, NY 10032, 15 August 1996)

The Black Stork: Eugenics and the death of “defective” babies in American medicine and motion pictures since 1915, by Martin S. Pernick. 295 pp. New York, Oxford University Press, 1996.

$29.95. ISBN: 0-19-507731-8

Hitler's Debt To America

From the UK Guardian: The Nazis' extermination programme was carried out in the name of eugenics - but they were by no means the only advocates of racial purification. In this extract from his extraordinary new book, Edwin Black describes how Adolf Hitler's race hatred was underpinned by the work of American eugenicists.

At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The method: denial of treatment.

Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate to save it?"

Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well." He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago. He was also an ardent eugenicist. Allan Bollinger duly died. An inquest was convened a few days later. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child's life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature's cruellest blunders." A juror shot back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden responded, "Exactly that. I do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it."

After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled: "We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective." But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child. He was released unpunished, and efforts by the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor. The doctor considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he told one reporter.

Haiselden became an overnight celebrity, known for his many newspaper articles, his speaking tours and outrageous diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called The Black Stork. Written by Jack Lait, a reporter on the Chicago American, it was produced in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalised account of a eugenically mismatched couple whom he advises not to have children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually, the woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die. The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement; the film played at movie theatres around the country for more than a decade.

National publicity advertised it as a "eugenic love story". One advertisement quoted Swiss eugenicist Auguste Forel's warning: "The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family history of every criminal, of every epileptic, eccentric and insane person. Shall we sit still ... without applying the remedy?" In 1917, a display advertisement for The Black Stork read: "Kill Defectives, Save the Nation and See 'The Black Stork'." Various methods of eugenic euthanasia - including gassing the unwanted in lethal chambers - were a part of everyday American parlance and ethical debate some two decades before Nevada approved the first such chamber for criminal executions in 1921.

As America's eugenics movement gathered pace, it inspired a host of imitators. In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the United States.

Germany was no exception. From the turn of the century, German eugenicists formed academic and personal relationships with the American eugenics establishment, in particular with Charles Davenport, the pioneering founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, New York, which was backed by the Harriman railway fortune. A number of other charitable American bodies generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the depression had taken hold.

Germany had certainly developed its own body of eugenic knowledge and library of publications. Yet German readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilization, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America's elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as "bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman", a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe's eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.

In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: "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 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."

One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter called Grant's book "his Bible". The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.

Hitler displayed his knowledge of American eugenics in much of his writing and conversation. In Mein Kampf, for example, he declared: "The demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of clearest reason and, if systematically executed, represents the most humane act of mankind. It will spare millions of unfortunates undeserved sufferings, and consequently will lead to a rising improvement of health as a whole."

Mein Kampf also displayed a familiarity with the recently passed US National Origins Act, which called for eugenic quotas. "There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of immigration] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but [the US], in which an effort is made to consult reason at least partially. By refusing immigrants on principle to elements in poor health, by simply excluding certain races from naturalisation, it professes in slow beginnings a view that is peculiar to the People's State."

Hitler proudly told his comrades how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. "Now that we know the laws of heredity," he told a fellow Nazi, "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."

Nor did Hitler fail to grasp the eugenic potential of gas and the lethal chamber, a topic that was already being discussed in German eugenic circles before Mein Kampf was published. Hitler, who had himself been hospitalized for battlefield gas injuries, wrote: "If at the beginning of the war and during the war 12,000 or 15,000 of these Hebrew corrupters of the people had been held under poison gas, as happened to hundreds of thousands of our best German workers in the field, the sacrifices of millions at the front would not have been in vain. On the contrary: 12,000 scoundrels eliminated in time might have saved the lives of a million real Germans, valuable for the future."

On January 30 1933, Hitler seized power. During the 12-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilization, euthanasia, eugenic courts and eventually mass termination in lethal chambers. During the Reich's first 10 years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

Most of all, American raceologists were proud to have inspired the strictly eugenic state the Nazis were constructing. In those early years of the Third Reich, Hitler and his race hygienists carefully crafted eugenic legislation modeled on laws already introduced across America and upheld by the supreme court. Nazi doctors, and even Hitler himself, regularly communicated with American eugenicists from New York to California, ensuring that Germany would scrupulously follow the path blazed by the US. American eugenicists were eager to assist.

This was particularly true of California's eugenicists, who led the nation in sterilization and provided the most scientific support for Hitler's regime. In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenic leader and immigration activist CM Goethe was ebullient in congratulating ES Gosney of the San Diego-based Human Betterment Foundation for his impact on Hitler's work. Upon his return in 1934 from a eugenic fact-finding mission in Germany, Goethe wrote Gosney a letter of praise. The foundation was so proud of Goethe's letter that they reprinted it in their 1935 annual report.

"You will be interested to know," Goethe's letter proclaimed, "that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the intellectuals behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation.

"I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people." (source: UK Guardian, 8 Feb. 2004)

Eugenics

"Ethnic Cleansing in Connecticut: Our state's role in the Nazi eugenics movement," by Edwin Black, 11 September 2003: Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated millions in his quest for a co-called "Master Race." But the concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Hitler's. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in Connecticut, two to three decades before Hitler came to power, the product of the American eugenics movement. Hartford and indeed the state of Connecticut played an important albeit unknown role in this country's campaign of ethnic cleansing. What's more, Connecticut was an important player in America's eugenic nexus with Nazi Germany.

Eugenics was the racist American pseudoscience determined to wipe away all human beings except those who conformed to a Nordic stereotype. The philosophy was enshrined into national policy by forced sterilization and segregation laws, as well as marriage restrictions enacted in 27 states. In 1909, Connecticut became the third state to adopt such laws. Ultimately, eugenics coercively sterilized some 60,000 Americans, barred the marriage of thousands, forcibly segregated thousands in "colonies," and persecuted untold numbers in ways we are just learning. In Connecticut, only some 600 were coercively sterilized, but hundreds of thousands more were slated for the surgery before the plan was abandoned.

Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for massive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Harriman railroad fortune. They were all in league with America's most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians faked and twisted data to serve eugenics' racist aims. Connecticut was considered both an epicenter for eugenic propaganda and a test case for ethnic cleansing.

The Carnegie Institution literally invented the American movement by establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. This complex stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans as the movement carefully plotted the removal of families, bloodlines and whole peoples. From Cold Spring Harbor, eugenics advocates agitated in the legislatures of America, as well as the nation's social service agencies and associations.

The Rockefeller Foundation helped found and fund the German eugenics program and even funded the program that ultimately sent Josef Mengele into Auschwitz.

Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American movement came from the American Eugenics Society of New Haven, and the Eugenics Research Association of Long Island, which coordinated much of its activity with the AES. These organizations -- which functioned as part of a closely-knit network, published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis.

In an America demographically reeling from massive immigration upheaval and torn by post-Reconstruction chaos, race conflict was everywhere in the early 20th century. Elitists, utopians and so-called "progressives" fused their smoldering race fears and class bias with their desire to make a better world. They reinvented Galton's eugenics into a repressive and racist ideology. The intent: populate the earth with vastly more of their own socio-economic and biological kind -- and less or none of everyone else.

The superior species the eugenics movement sought was not merely tall, strong, talented people. Eugenicists craved blond, blue-eyed Nordic types. This group alone, they believed, was fit to inherit the earth. In the process, the movement intended to subtract Negroes, Indians, Hispanics, East Europeans, Jews, dark-haired hill folk, poor people, the infirm and really anyone classified outside the gentrified genetic lines drawn up by American raceologists.

How? By identifying so-called "defective" family trees and subjecting them to lifelong segregation and sterilization programs to kill their bloodlines. The grand plan was to literally wipe away the reproductive capability of those deemed weak and inferior -- the so-called "unfit."

(source:http://www.whale.to/b/black5.html )

Eugenics Nuts Would Have Loved Norplant

The Los Angeles Times, "Eugenics Nuts Would Have Loved Norplant : The coercion of women on welfare to avoid child-bearing smells of '30s social cleansing," by Alexander Cockburn, 30 June 1994:

The original (six capsule) Norplant was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1990 and marketed in the United States in 1991 by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals having been developed by Sheldon Segal.

"With bated breath, the entire civilized world is watching the bold experiment in mass sterilization recently launched by Germany. It is estimated that some 400,000 of the population will come within the scope of this law, the larger portion of whom fall into that group classed as inborn feeblemindedness. . . . It is estimated that, after several decades, hundreds of millions of marks will be saved each year as a result of the diminution of expenditures for patients with hereditary diseases."

Thus in 1935 spake Dr. J.N. Baker, state health officer, as he addressed the Alabama Legislature on prospective laws for compulsory sterilization of a category vaguely sketched as the "feebleminded," but also including "any sexual pervert . . . or any prisoner who has been twice convicted of rape" or imprisoned three times for any offense. Similarly scheduled for sterilization were those "habitually and constantly dependent on public relief or support by charity."

Norplant is a form of birth control developed by the Population Council

Before Hitler and his fellow Nazis (who said they learned much from U.S. sterilization laws) made the discipline unfashionable, eugenics and the prevention of socially unworthy babies were hot topics among American social engineers. The keenest engineers were not Southern crackers but Northern liberals. Eugenic sterilization was most energetically pushed by progressive politicians, medical experts and genteel women's groups. States pioneering sterilization laws early in the century included Robert M. LaFollette's Wisconsin and Woodrow Wilson's New Jersey.

It is conservatively estimated that between 1907 and 1960, 60,000 people were involuntarily sterilized. The science was bogus but its enthusiasts chanted that, within a few generations, society would be purged of imbeciles, criminals, the congenitally idle and other burdens on public patience and the public purse.

Norplant distribution in the United States ended in 2002; limited supplies still remained in the U.S. until 2004. Norplant was withdrawn from the UK market in 1999

Today we are seeing a renewal of the same vile eugenic passions. Just as, at the turn of the century, vasectomy allowed eugenicists to abandon advocacy of crude castration, so today Norplant--capsules inserted in a woman's upper arm, preventing pregnancy for up to five years and approved by the FDA in 1990--substitutes for grosser attacks on women's fertility.

The argument of the social cleansers is that welfare mothers have babies to accrue more benefits. A few years down the road, they say, these babies ultimately repeat the cycle of dependency and insensate, benefit-related reproduction. Response: Curtail the babies by cutting the welfare benefits; end the cycle by ending welfare.

We are at a critical stage on the evolution of these policies. On April 25, Arizona and Nebraska both prohibited Aid to Families With Dependent Children benefit increases for recipients having further babies while on the dole, though in Arizona, the Legislature finally dropped an outright prohibition on welfare assistance for mothers with more than two children.

By 1996, more than 50,000 women had filed lawsuits, including 70 class actions, against Wyeth and/or its subsidiaries, or doctors who prescribed Norplant

.

In Connecticut, a bill providing subsidies for AFDC recipients accepting Norplant ($700 when it's implanted, plus $200 annually) recently died. New Jersey, a pioneer in the old sterilization crusade, is eliminating its tiny increases for mothers having children while on welfare. Georgia has done the same, and similar proposals are being considered in at least 21 other states. Wisconsin, another sterilization pioneer, is also experimenting with exclusions of children born on welfare.

Vicious myths about greedy overbreeders fuel this legislative craze, which ignores the truth: Welfare recipients average fewer than two children per family and fertility rates of AFDC recipients are lower than among the general population. The prospect of additional benefits is statistically insignificant as a factor in the choice of a mother on welfare to have a baby.

The NORPLANT (levonorgestrel implants unavailable in USA or UK) SYSTEM is a progestin-only product and does not contain estrogen.

Beyond these, there is the profoundest myth of all, which blames young, poor, unmarried mothers for drug abuse, slums, poverty, a stagnant economy and the falling rate of profit; as with the vasectomist's knife, Norplant will turn society around. These are gas-chamber economics and social prescriptions. At this fraught moment, strong leadership from the White House would surely help in putting the social cleansers to flight. But under the most recent draft of President Clinton's welfare proposals, states will no longer have to seek a waiver from the federal government when embarking on a "child disincentive" program.

The door is swinging open and all the old filth seeping through: Wait for the social engineers to start insisting that poor black female teen-agers accept Norplant as a condition for probation or any form of social benefit, or for living in public housing, or for existing. (source: The Los Angeles Times, 30 June 1994)