The Eugenics Crusade | Full Documentary | AMERICAN EXPERIENCE | PBS

[Music] [Music] on August 18th 1934 20-year-old Anne Cooper huitt AIS to one of the largest Fortunes in the United States was admitted to a San Francisco Hospital Hospital for an emergency appendectomy she later learned the surgeons not only had removed her appendix but also a length of her Fallopian tubes rendering her incapable of ever becoming pregnant the story of the sterilized ays hit the papers just after the New Year in 1936 when Anne filed a half million damage claim against the surgeons and her own mother for sterilizing her without her knowledge or consent an's mother denied any wrongdoing she'd done what she'd done for society's sake she insisted because her daughter was feeble-minded it was the sort of bizarre High Society Scandal that would have captured the national imagination under any circumstances but that one word feeble-minded struck a familiar chord for Americans and linked an's plight to a decades old campaign to control human reproduction known as Eugenics what is the bearing of the laws of heredity upon human Affairs Eugenics provides the answer Eugenics was proposed as the scientific solution for social problems it was a combination of Hope and aspiration on one side and on the other side it was about fear in some cases about hate they are identified early categorized feeble-minded imbecile idiot it would have been better by far if they had never been [Applause] born people tend to think that Eugenics was a doctrine that originated with Nazis that it was grounded in Wild claims that were far outside the scientific mang stream both of those impressions are fundamentally not true it was almost a Mania that sort of swept through the country and there was that kind of naive optimistic vision of eugenics like hey let's all get together and make better people the Eugenics movement was about having healthy children about having a stronger Society there's nothing wrong with that you have to look at the underbelly of what was implemented in the name of eugenics to see what was so problematic about it at Liberty Mutual We Believe progress happens when people feel secure that's why we exist to help people Embrace today and pursue tomorrow liy liyy Liberty Mutual Insurance is a proud sponsor of American Experience [Music] in the fall of 1902 an American biologist named Charles Benedict Davenport arrived in London on a sort of pilgrimage he was 36 Harvard educated and like many biologists of his generation absorbed with the study of evolution he'd been traveling in Europe with his wife collecting seashells for research on species variation but this was to be the highlight of the trip a meeting with the world renowned gentleman scientist Sir Francis gton a pioneering statistician gton had lived his 80 years by a single motto whenever you can count his obsession with measurements and patterns had led him to create the world's first weather maps establish fingerprinting as a means of identification and set databack parameters for the perfect cup of tea Charles Davenport had come to discuss another matter gon's work on heredity Francis gton was a great quantifier he liked to quantify height hair color you know what is the chest size of an average man what is the thigh length of an average man even things like intelligence gton had a theory that Talent as he called it what we would call intelligence seemed to run in families and so it quickly occurred to him if we can get people with high talent to mate with each other prevent people with low Talent from mating with each other we will within a few Generations create this race of Supermen Francis gton was borrowing ideas and kind of riffing off of the work of his half cousin Charles Darwin Darwin believed that Evolution was this natural process that was inevitably leading towards what they call the survival of the fittest gton really turns that idea on its head and says you know natural selection isn't working very well we need to do a form of selection we need to intervene to name the effort gon had coined the term Eugenics a hybrid derived from two Greek words meaning well and born Charles Davenport believed as gton did that selective breeding could transform the human race what was needed was a scientific understanding of how heredity actually worked and over dinner at galton's home Davenport declared his intention to get to the bottom of it Davenport said I'm going to create a new kind of Institution a station for experimental Evolution not darwinian natural selection that you just go out and observe but can we figure out how inheritance Works can we do experiments and find the patterns of heredity when Davenport sailed for home in December 1902 he carried with him not only a letter of of recommendations signed by gton but also he later wrote A Renewed courage for the study of evolution Davenport and gton really did imagine that the idea of improving human heredity was of almost religious significance of profound moral importance they also believed they were qualified to to breed a better race because they believed that they were the best and the brightest scarcely more than a year later with funding from the Carnegie Institution Davenport opened his research station on the North Shore of Long Island at Cold Spring Harbor situated on 10 acres along Oyster Bay the place had been purpose-built for the breeding and analyzing of plants and animals complete with sprawling garden plots an Aviary and a half dozen tidy enclosures housing chickens goats and sheep by mating organisms with unusual characteristics a tailess mans cat or a rooster with a black comb and then studying their offspring generation after generation d Davenport hoped to unlock the mystery of evolution Davenport wasn't yet thinking much about humans he was just absorbing all these different theories of heredity and trying to figure out which ones applied when and under what conditions after scores of experiments one Theory seemed to stand out from the rest the recently discovered work of an Austrian monk named Gregor mendle who'd spent a decade in the mid 19th century experimenting with peas Mendel learned that there was a pattern to how pea plants pass down certain traits and you could come up with certain ratios to predict How likely it was that a pea plant would look one way or another Davenport took that and ran with it he goes about breeding all kinds of animals looking for the mandelian ratio and and in trait after trait he seems to find the melan ratio suddenly they're beginning to see a mathematical scientific explanation for things that had been merely conjectural before it's becoming obvious that in fact there are these things called genes these units are being transmitted from parents to their offspring and they're giving rise to physical traits by 1906 the work at Cold Spring Harbor had caught the attention of the press and established Charles Davenport as a rising star in the new science of genetics thanks to mle's laws of heredity Davenport told one reporter agricultural breeders could now precisely select for desirable traits to develop a strain of protein Rich wheat or chicken that laid more eggs the same methods Would One Day lead he predicted to a rapid and thoroughgoing Improvement of the human race D Port was tantalized by the possibility that you could take charge of human Revolution and then Along Comes melan genetics which seems to offer a very powerful tool so extrapolating from from the work that the Breeders were doing in animals to the breeding of better human beings was a natural step in 1909 Davenport informed his funer the Carnegie Institution that he' shifted his Focus From the breeding of cats and roosters to an investigation of human traits having already found the mandelian ratio in early studies of eye color and hair color and convinced he was on the right track he now began to collect data on a wide range of other human characteristics he sent out a family history questionnaire to hundreds of individuals and solicited prisons hospitals and educational institutions for their records you can't really do breeding experiments with human beings aside from the ethics you just can't live long enough to see generations and generations so it was Davenport's genius to realize if he could collect family pedigrees he could trace family inheritances and try to prove that Evolution works for human beings the way it works for Animals Davenport's plan was to analyze the pedigree charts for mandelian patterns and to identify the desirable traits human beings might encourage through careful breeding and the undesirable ones they could breed [Applause] out wouldn't it be a better world if we could wipe out poverty wouldn't it be a better world if we didn't have criminals wouldn't it be a better world if everyone behaved themselves and if the reason we have poverty and crime is something that's determined by our genes if we can change that and make it so that the people who have those bad traits don't pass them down wouldn't that be a better [Music] world a among Americans of Charles Davenport's class and generation there was perhaps no word that had more currency at the turn of the century than Improvement they had come of age in the midst of a revolution a seismic shift that had made the United States the most prosperous and Powerful Nation on Earth and in the eyes of many had simultaneously plunged it into chaos it's the beginning of the 20th century we have rampant urbanization rampant industrialization rampant immigration the old order is passing and wherever you look Society seems to be deteriorating more and more Farms were giving way to factories and the cities were overrun with newcomers many from the countryside many hundreds of thousands more from abroad there was impure water and the schools were awful and the disease was rampant and immigrants were pouring in people were apprehensive about rapid change about the kinds of people you saw on the streets slums crime alcoholism prostitution native white Protestants felt that they were losing control of American [Music] society determined not only to meet the new challenges but to Master them a veritable Army of educated middle and upper middle class Americans had launched a crusade to remake Society to eliminate corruption Stamp Out disease and vice assimilate The Immigrant and uplift the poor all in the name of [Music] progress the world had never seen invention as powerful and remarkable and as influential as the last three decades of the 19th century this fueled an already existing American optimism about what can be improved and it directed it into a particular track which was scientific Improvement there was a great belief in science there was a great belief in government in bureaucracy as a tool for solving social problems and also a belief in collectivism that the population needs to work together to improve Society the Progressive Movement said we can use state power and expert advice and knowledge to solve things like poverty to solve things like alcoholism so that was an incredibly hopeful and optimistic idea Eugenics was part of that when the letter from Charles Davenport arrived in 1909 at New Jersey vinin training school for the feeble-minded the staff hadn't known quite what to make of it a mere two-line note requesting hereditary information one of hundreds Davenport had sent Davenport investigated any and all traits eye color weight mood habit temperament diseases anything and then he finds this psychologist in New Jersey and he begins to zero in on low intelligence something known as feeble-mindedness psychologist Henry Godard Vin's director of research had no family histories to share but what he lacked in data he more than made up for for with enthusiasm Not only was Goddard interested in the new science of heredity he asked Davenport to guide him in making his own study of feeble-mindedness like lots of people who are working in institutions doctors or social workers Henry Godard was interested in identifying the kinds of conditions that were passed down in heredity and preventing them Henry Goddard was 42 and a one-time teacher in Quaker schools it was in part an interest in education that had brought him to vinand in 1906 he'd spent the three years since trying to parse the many varieties of feeble-mindedness an all too common mental deficiency associated with antisocial Behavior some of Vin's 300 inmates were violent or deranged others unruly still others merely slow hoping to improve their individual care and training Goddard had pioneered the use of an intelligence test which purported to measure a person's mental abilities in relation to that of so-called normal people of the same age the scores enabled him to sort his charges into categories to the existing classifications of idiot and imbecile which long had been used to describe debilitating mental impairment Godard had added a third a higher functioning group he called morons that was actually a diagnostic term and not just an insult Henry Goddard argued the high-grade is high functioning enough to act normal but they're kind of stuck in this evolutionary phase and they don't emerge as true adults what's missing is moral judgment so Godard constructs that term and mental deficiency and immorality become basically interchangeable now with Davenport's tutoring Goddard began to survey the family histories of 35 of his students at vinand what he found made him an instant believer in eugenics not only did morons seem clearly to pass on their feeble-mindedness to their offspring their family trees often were Rife with alcoholics prostitutes criminals and poppers as Godard put it to the New Jersey state conference of Charities and Corrections in 1910 feeble-mindedness is at the root of probably 2/3 of the problems that you have before you the cause was defec Ive ancestry Henry Gard puts forward this idea that if you got rid of feeble-mindedness you would get rid of all of these problems or at least greatly reduce them and we love explanations like that it's so simple oh it's just feeble-mindedness so let's you know that's the fix Godard reasoned that if the test he devised to better care for the feebleminded instead were used to identify them the contagion could be halted and future Generations spared the scourges of mental [Music] deficiency Henry Gard said you know it takes an expert to identify the true Menace of feeble-mindedness so someone you're sitting next to at a restaurant or in a theater could look perfectly normal to you and it only takes one feeble-minded person marrying another one even someone who's not feeble-minded to create generations of feeble-mindedness what it did is up the stakes of feeble-mindedness by claiming that it was a hidden Menace that was more difficult to pinpoint than people might think by early 1910 Charles Davenport was convinced that certain human traits were passed down down in a predictable way and that American society could be dramatically improved if only reproduction were controlled anxious to spread the word he began to lay plans for a new institution dedicated to eugenic research and education in February in search of a patron Davenport traveled to New York to lunch with Mrs eh Harman Widow of a recently deceased railroad magnate Davenport's pitch to Mrs Harman was to say right now you give your money to all kinds of good organizations they feed the poor they clothe the poor they do many wonderful things but it's never ending with Eugenics we eventually won't need your philanthropy and charity because we'll solve the problems that right now you're just throwing money at he persuaded Mrs Harman that the future of the country was at stake and that only a eugenic project could save it Charles Davenport says all you people who think that if we just educate the poor if we just give them charity if we just reform their environment even the poor can rise to our level forget about it that's just sentimental hogwash it's not the environment that makes you what you are it's your genetic inheritance from your parents so now yes let's regulate the matings of human beings eliminate the bad genes from the population and keep the fittest genes in the gene pool by limiting the birth of people who were deemed to be unfit you were by definition enhancing the stock of human society and so there was this social mission of really fighting dependency fighting crime through Eugenics the idea was that Eugenics would solve all of these broader social problems if enacted in a robust way Mrs Harman was a great believer in the importance of proper matings she credited her late husband's interest in horse breeding for that and she enthusiastically pledged to finance Davenport's eugenic Enterprise it was was Davenport later wrote in his journal a red letter day for Humanity the impulse to perfect humanity is an ancient aspiration the idea that somehow or the other that you can get the best humans by selectively breeding the best um most fit uh hardiest most beautiful it's an ancient desire you find it in Sanskrit texts you find it in Greek texts the trouble is that only some human beings can dictate or or or decide uh what those what the correct features might be who decides Charles Davenport thought by breeding a superior race of people we can bring about the millennial Kingdom on Earth Earth the problem with Utopias is that they set a set of aspirations that then blind you to a certain set of consequences and that can be dangerous in October 1910 on an 80 acre plot adjacent to the Cold Spring Harbor campus Charles Davenport opened the doors of his new Institute it was a modest structure built for a grand purpose to house hereditary information on American families and use it to guide the reproductive choices of the nation he called it the Eugenics record office eugenic ideas were very much floating around as early as 1880 but Davenport gave eugenic teeth he was institutionalizing Eugenics he was marshalling people around a research program Davenport already had assembled a prestigious Board of scientific directors among them prominent scientists Physicians and famed inventor Alexander granell day-to-day operations meanwhile would be overseen by Harry Laughlin a high school superintendent from the Midwest with a life long passion for poultry breeding Laughlin was a very zealous proponent of eugenics and in that sense he got along well with Davenport they both believed in the mission they believed in the cause for Davenport a lot of it was about what you could do in the laboratory and how you can analyze the data for laugh a lot of it was about well how are we going to get out there in the world and change the direction of History to gather new disciples to the cause and to Aid in the collection of data Laughlin and Davenport launched an academic program which offered training in eugenic field research techniques over the course of six weeks each summer recent college graduates from Vasser Harvard Oberlin were taught how to investigate family histories how to conduct interviews and make eugenically useful measurements and how to chart family pedigrees and analyze them then at a salary of $75 a month came a Year's work in the field armed with the official trait book which assigned numerical codes to a broad spectrum of human characteristics the newly minted researchers fanned out to study delinquents in the juvenile Psychopathic Institute of Chicago the insane at the New Jersey state hospital at mwan albinos in Massachusetts circus families at Cone Island the Amish in Pennsylvania they would go into some holler in Virginia and find some family that seem to have a lot of Alcoholics and criminals and you know other Naro Wells and they would go aha we found a family with terrible jeans and they'd interview someone and they'd say oh yeah you know John seems a little slow but I knew his uncle and his uncle was a big drunk and they'd write that down Uncle a big drunk so they would come back with all this evidence of the way in which human traits were inherited of course the reliability of the data was not questioned even though it was based on interpretation and impression recollection by the living members of the family with whom they spoke no checking year by year as trainees rotated out of the summer program and into positions at universities hospitals and mental institutions Davenport's assumptions and methods of fieldwork gain currency all across the country and year by year the data accumulated stored in fireproof cabinets and intricately indexed it comprised as Scientific American noted a sort of inventory of the blood of the community and supplied Grist for a multitude of books pamphlets lectures and press releases regarding the danger of so-called inferior germ plasm they are using the family records that are stored in the fireproof Vault to prove all these traits not just physical but mental traits moral traits are caused by gen means there's nothing you can do about it this is cold hard pure science just as we have strains of Scholars of military men Davenport told the New York Times we have strains of poppers of sex offenders strains with strong Tendencies toward Larsen assault lying running away the cost to Society of these strains is enormous Davenport took this basic idea applied it far more widely than it had ever been before and really promoted this probabilistic idea as if it were a deterministic one that is to say it's not just likelihoods but in some ways we're dealing with certainties um and that idea really sold by the time the Eugenics record office issued issued its first official report in 1913 many Americans had begun to see the wisdom in Eugenics I agree with you that Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote Davenport that year it is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding [Music] if you're going to be in the business of breeding you're going to have to convince thought leaders and politicians most especially the government uh to begin a kind of unprecedented program so they understood from the beginning that they needed to persuade those who were in a position to do something about it that it was possible indeed desirable the eugenesis thought that people's base interests are just self-serving selfish right and if you just leave them to themselves they're going to evolve in all these random dumb directions the Eugenics record office recommended both widespread eugenic education and aggressive government intervention laws that would keep defectives out of the country prohibit them from marrying and prevent them from becoming parents by segregating them in asylums throughout their reproductive years also recommended was a new and somewhat controversial surgical procedure known as sterilization by cutting and sealing organs involved in reproduction both men and women could be made infertile so far the technique had been used primarily on criminals particularly sex offenders and it was thought to have a Curative effect Harry Laughlin in envisioned a broader application as a eugenic tool that would eliminate defective germ plasm once and for all Harry Laughlin really has this political vision of what we can do with Eugenics and he said in order for eugenic sterilization to really do what had to be done 15 million Americans would have to go under the knife the idea was that Eugenics was for the common good and by implementing the science of heredity they could Protect America and strengthen America they thought of it as the beginning of a revolution of a religious movement you have to start with a few converts and then you try to grow it into a bigger movement all that seemed exciting and full of uh possibility and they were going to create a new world the Eugenics movement that Charles Davenport had launched rested on mle's laws of inheritance which assumed each trait was governed by one Gene and was passed down in predictable patterns but for all of Davenport's certainty about the gene there remained open questions about the Gene's physical properties and its location within the cell and the means by which it accomplished its function all over the world scientists look to fast breeding organisms in search of clues some Focus their experiments on the sea urchin which turned out a new generation each year others on the even speedier meal worm with its larva to larva cyle cycle of 4 months for zoologist Thomas Hunt Morgan the organism of choice was the fruit fly which was capable of reproducing in just 10 days the organism breeds so quickly that Morgan is able to see things that the eugenesis cannot because he's watching mutations move across multiple Generations by 1913 Morgan had been studying fruit flies for so long long that his laboratory at Columbia University was known simply as the fly room and his assistant the fly boys for nearly a decade they'd been holed up there on the sixth floor of skimmer horn Hall breeding flies in half pint milk bottles pilfered from the campus cafeteria thousands upon thousands of mutants were crossed and the results meticulously recorded white eyes bristled redyed short-winged when the data was collated Morgan made a startling Discovery the mechanism of heredity in flies was far more complex than in mle's peas Gregor mle thought that every Gene was its own unique discrete entity Morgan showed that in fact that's not the case that in fact genes live genes have a physical entity they live in chromosomes because they live in chromosomes often they travel in packs Morgan's work complicates the idea of simple Eugenics because you don't just pick one thing out of one drawer a second thing out of another drawer until you get your ideal child it's not so easy to pick and choose what your next Generation might be it makes sense in pee plants that makes sense in cattle it should make sense in humans but there were no experiments that really could support Davenport's Theory Thomas Hunt Morgan was a believer in the transformative power of eugenics he had served on the board at the Eugenics record office since it opened but based on the lessons he'd learned in the fly room it seemed clear that eugenic science such as it was had no business in forming American laws if the eugenicists want to do this sort of thing well and good morgan wrote a friend but I think it is just as well for some of us to set a better standard and not appear as participators in the show Morgan writes a letter saying I'm going to asked to be taken off this letterhead I study fruit flies and I can't can't figure out how their eyes work I can't figure out which one's going to inherit certain kinds of wings and you seem to be saying you can understand who's going to inherit something as vague as criminality or popism so he backed away but privately Morgan's withdrawal from the record office was regrettable but Davenport was undeterred at this point the Eugenics movement would not be called by the minutia of science what genes are is a great biological and biochemical question but there's a kind of Yankee practicality about um Eugenics let's get this job done um and so they move right [Music] along when the Panama Pacific International Exposition opened in San Francisco on the morning of February 20th 1915 100,000 people streamed through its term Styles over the next 9 months the number would reach more than 18 million build as an encyclopedia of modern achievement the fair offered a dizzying array of diversions and Curiosities a 23-minute ride over a functioning replica of the recently completed Panama Canal an assembly line that turned out 18 model T's a day a 57 tier Tower built entirely of Hines condiment products the Panama Pacific Expo was a celebration of science efficiency engineering it was an opportunity for the United States to demonstrate the power of Science and Technology and also so a utopian Vision looking towards the future nowhere did the future look brighter than from the race betterment exhibit housed in the Palace of Education the display featured imposing plaster casts of Atlas Venus and Apollo a collection of medical instruments used to gauge human biological capacity and a Welter of charts graphs and lists that outline the way Eugenics would better the human race all of it was the work of Dr John hori Kellogg a fierce proponent of what he called biologic living John Harvey Kellogg was an incredibly energetic man he was a health reformer and a physician and an amazing entrepreneur and he developed all these regimens and invented different medical instruments had a whole dietary plan he was obsessed with cleanliness with Purity and he believed that the key to reforming Society is to cleanse our bowels on a regular basis he invents something called Corn Flakes to help cleanse your bowels and he had a spa in Battle Creek Michigan lots of eugenicists came to the Battle Creek sanatorium to have their bowels cleansed and to talk about Eugenics for Kellogg Eugenics made perfect sense it was about health he linked these views about heredity which were difficult to change with these ideas about what human beings can do to improve themselves John Harvey Kellogg believed that the environment can affect the gene that consuming alcohol or consuming meat could lead to genetic inferiority in Offspring so there's more than one way to improve heredity at the Expo Kellogg sought to Usher his brand of eugenics onto the national stage with assistance from Charles Davenport who had supplied him with both data and Conta s Kellogg had organized not only the race betterman exhibit but also a major Eugenics conference at the fair the turnout exceeded expectation drawing reform-minded medical professionals University presidents conservationists and Business Leaders from all over the country and across the political Spectrum Eugenics had a little bit of something for everyone one so if you're a social hygienist you're interested in wiping out prostitution Eugenics is interested in that too if you're a prohibitionist and you want to get rid of alcohol because alcohol breaks up families makes men unemployable eug genx wants to get rid of all those things too so it manages to match up with the concerns of many other different kinds of reforms what led people to get behind the Eugenics campaign wasn't just their Ardent belief in the science or in heredity it was a fundamentally Broad and sweeping social and political agenda to try to recreate Society one might say in their own image they're almost all white almost all Protestant middle to upper middle class and they tended to equate human worth with the qualities that they themselves possessed over 5 days in August the 60 odd conference delegates delivered talks on everything from proper toothbrushing to eugenic sterilization unless we weed out the weaklings one speaker warned we will reach a point where many of those born and helped to survive will be a burden to the race all told the race betterment conference Drew an estimated 10,000 people and generated more than a million lines of press your efforts on behalf of eugenics are certainly beginning to bear fruit Kellogg told Charles Davenport the public is beginning to understand better and appreciate more the Panama Pacific Expo was really a defining moment for the American Eugenics movement the Eugenics movement was coalescing it was solidifying F these Elites are all saying yes you know we believe in progress and this is progress Eugenics gave them a way to view the world and to say okay you know all these vague anxieties I have about the present and particularly the future this is what the problem is well let's get to work on solving that in May 1917 as new converts spread the eugenic Creed in cities and towns Across America a half dozen psychologists gathered at the vinand training school for the feeble-minded to meet with Henry Goddard by now considered the nation's leading expert on mental deficiency his groundbreaking 1912 study the calac family had awaken the public to the Menace of the feeble-minded with its true life tale of an old stock American am a feeble-minded Tavern girl and a fateful trist that over several Generations had spawned more than a 100 mental defectives among them one of goddard's own patients at vinand a girl he diagnosed as a the calac family was a huge bestseller for many many years references to the calics were in the speeches of politicians books scholarly journals popular magazines everyone knew what the calics meant you have to watch out who you m with or your descendants could turn out to be feeble-minded criminals alcoholics and so forth Goddard was eager to demonstrate the value of intelligence testing as a diagnostic tool and he'd spent the years since his books publication administering tests to scores of institutional inmates immigrants School children now with his colleagues he designed a program to carry out intelligence testing on a mass scale just 7 weeks earlier the United States had plunged into the first world war and the draft ultimately would swell the Army's ranks by nearly 3 million men the aim of the testing program was to classify them for service and to identify the mental defectives lurking among them they began in late September 1917 at camp Lee and Camp Taylor camp devans and Camp dicks first new recruits were sorted according to their level of literacy and then administered one of two tests they had one test called the alpha test for draes who were literate in English and another called a beta test for draes who were not literate in English or illiterate completely one of the questions on the alpha test was the night engine is used in the Ford the Pierce Arrow or The Lure car now tell me is that known to you while the literate testers puzzled over multiple choice questions the others attempted to draw their way out of ma and sketch in the missing bits of simple pictures one Sicilian recruit a Catholic considered an image of a house and Drew a crucifix where a chimney might be he was marked wrong it was touching to see the intense effort put into answering the questions an army examiner later recalled Often by men who never before had held a pencil in their hands the tests were by no means measures of intelligence whatever that may mean how well you did on them depended upon your degree of Education how many years you've been in school and also how attuned you were with middle class culture administered to 1.7 million Army Personnel over the course of the conflict officers and enlisted men black soldiers as well as white the test led to a shocking conclusion roughly half of the draes were considered to be morons the Army's experience became a headline America is degenerating we have to somehow interrupt this swamp of defect there was a movement to institutionalize more people at this time driven by Eugen you can see how an IQ test can really Grease the wheels if you're going to start moving people into institutions if you're going to start sterilizing and all that you need some numbers and the IQ tests provided that by 1919 intelligence testing was a full-fledged craze an adapted version of the army test the national intelligence test sold half a million copies in one year businesses administered mental tests to prospective employees schools and universities evaluated their students and ever more poppers prostitutes drunkards and delinquents found themselves suddenly with pencil in hand feeble mindedness was a big fear in that era there was a thought that there were a lot of these people out there who were deficient who were morons and they were not only out there they were reproducing much more rapidly than other people the trouble is that in practice the word could be anyone who was not part of the uh you know the the so-called social Norm so the word begins as a scientific attempt to classify intelligence but very soon becomes usable as a means of social control by 1920 the vast majority of those committed to institutions for the feeble-minded were classified as [Music] morons to some extent Humanity's always been about othering and about you know there's us and there's the other the Eugenics movement really gave this scientific you know punch to this idea that they're us and they are the others and we're the right people we're the people that it's important not only to favor now but we're the people who have to own the future suddenly Eugenics comes along and gives them a scientific basis for believing that Eugenics is easy to accept because it preserves existing hierarchies it doesn't seek to overturn them what it did was lend new weight to established hierarchies I don't think there has ever been a time when people didn't think that some people were simply better than others the Eugenics Movement Like a chameleon took on the colors of those attitudes which existed before the word Eugenics was coined and certainly exists today they'd been swarming the ports of Entry since 1890 as many as a million of them a year in flight from poverty and oppression lured by the promise of equality and opportunity the Great War had staunched the flow but with the Armistice the tap had been opened Once More by 1920 some 75,000 new immigrants were landing at Ellis Island each mon month that may at Cold Spring Harbor Charles Davenport penned a letter to a friend can we build a wall high enough around this country he wondered so as to keep out these cheaper races Charles Davenport was born into a very fancy Old Stock family so he was someone brought up to believe that family m mattered and that you know uh good qualities ran in good families like his Charles Davenport was very focused on wanting to maintain the traditional American Stock and he wasn't alone in that there was this fear that the right sort of American wasn't having enough children and the race as it existed was being diluted and polluted by incoming waves of immigrants most immigrants used to come from Northern and Western Europe from the British Isles from Germany and then all of a sudden in the 1890s immigrants started coming here from Eastern Europe from southern Europe these are Catholics these are Jews these are peasants and Davenport feels correctly that his race is losing the demographic game on the receiving end of Davenport's letter was Madison Grant a zealous convert to the Eugenics cause with a sterling in American pedigree and an abiding preoccupation with endangered species Madison Grant was a very wealthy lawyer his ancestors are traced back to the original Puritan founders of the United States some of his ancestors signed a declaration of independence he was a committed conservationist he saved the Redwoods from Extinction at some point he realized I'm spending all my time and effort trying to save our nation's flora and fauna while my own race is dying out when Madison Grant walks out the door of his Wall Street law office he is accosted by thousands of foreign speaking peasants they don't know and they don't care that Madison Grant's ancestor sign the Declaration of Independence and he is offended Grant had sounded the alarm for Old Stock Americans in 1916 with the passing of the great race a 476 page elegy for what he called the white man par Excellence his vision is one of America as a country rought by Great Men Who ventured from Europe and an America that is facing an onslaught from from the undesirable hordes from most of the rest of the world he invents this race called the nordics This Tall blond-haired blue-eyed race according to Grant the nordics are the most recently evolved of all the races that means their genetic traits are still fragile they're not fully formed and so if a blond-haired blue-eyed Nordic mates with a more primitive race a Mediterranean a Jew certainly a negro or an Asiatic the more primitive genes of the inferior race will actually overwhelm the superior but not yet stable genes of the nordics so this is a threat and a threat not just you know hey I look around the city it looks a little different this is a genetic Invasion as Grant saw it the threat from the Negro race was mostly neutralized by laws already on the books in many states that forbid marriage between blacks and whites the threat posed by the foreign born however was at once more Insidious and more pressing we Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals and the modlin sentimentalism that has made America an asylum for the oppressed are sweeping the nation toward a racial Abyss Grant declared this generation must completely repudiate the proud boasts of our fathers that they acknowledged no distinction in race Creed or color or else Turn the page of history and write fine America Madison Grant takes Eugenics which had hitherto been concerned only with survival of the fittest individual and he says we need to be concerned with the survival of the fittest race we need to preserve the Nordic race Grant's mission in 1920 was to Rally his fellow eugenicists and convinced the federal government to drastically reduce immigration he began with a charm offensive directed at Congressman Albert Johnson the chairman of the house committee on immigration and naturalization inviting Johnson to New York plying him with whiskey and cigars and gradually persuading him of the urgent need for eugenics once Johnson was in the fold Grant suggested he bring Harry Laughlin the superintendent of the Eugenics record office to Washington DC to testify on the so-called biological aspects of immigration Johnson was so impressed with the presentation he named Laughlin expert Eugenics agent and commissioned him to make a study of the foreign born in the meantime amid a rising anti-immigrant clamor from labor unions social workers conservationists Congress curbed the influx with the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 this was supposedly a one-year temporary measure but in 1922 the bill is renewed for another two years and that gave Madison Grant and the eugenesis time to launch a massive propaganda campaign convincing the Americans that immigration restriction must be permanent in September 1921 at New York's American Museum of Natural History Grant convened an international Eugenics Congress to whip up support for the cause organized in tandem with Charles rport the week-long event drew some 300 delegates from 28 foreign countries numerous members of the Senate and House immigration committees were in attendance as was actress Lillian Russell who now informed her Legions of fans that the American Melting Pot was a catastrophe if we don't put up the bars and make them higher and stronger she warned there no longer will be an America for Americans there are all kinds of exhibits of the Congress showing that negro fetuses have smaller skulls Italians have a higher level of criminality than other people and at the end of the Congress the exhibits are packed up and shipped to Washington DC where they are prominently displayed in the committee rooms so the congressman could not help but consciously or not embi all the latest scientist findings of eugenics but it was Harry Laughlin's return to Capitol Hill and the reports on his study that convinced many on the house Committee of The Perils of unchecked immigration he had numbers that purported to show that rates of insanity were different among immigrants from different countries that certain nationalities were much more likely to have their immigrants become prison inmates and he also o argued that just biologically because we were largely a Nordic northern European country it was harder to assimilate immigrants from other parts of the world citing data from the Army intelligence tests Laughlin claimed that foreign born whites and in particular Jews were intellectually inferior to native born Americans and therefore likely over time to diminish the intelligence of the nation the Jews on the immigration committee object they claim correctly that the eugenesis have first come up with their theory that Jews are inferior and then found the data to back it up but Congress is converted to the cause of eugenics the Congressional Record is filled with congressmen reading excerpts from the passing of the great Race Madison Grant's book on the floor of Congress and so the restrictionists win the day and Congress passes immigration restriction legislation on May 26 1924 President Calvin kulage signed the Restriction act into law Madison Grant hailed it as one of the greatest steps forward in the history of this country they shut the door and reduced immigration to the United States by 97% the door was shut and it didn't open again for 40 years and in a very real sense this was a political policy victory for eugenics the new policy would help the nation to remain as one Congressman said on the house floor the home of a great people English-speaking a white race with great ideals the Christian religion One race one country one destiny it was really a reversal of you know give us your tired and your huddled masses and it sends a message that the Open Arms of Ellis Island are now closed for many of those across the Atlantic who would pin their hopes on America in the years to come the consequences would be dire Congress passed this law and closed the door on Jews in Eastern Europe and Germany who who were trying to flee the Nazis Otto Frank wrote to the US state department trying to get visas for his family and he wrote repeatedly and he had connections and he was turned down because of this law we think about Anne Frank dying in a concentration camp because the Germans thought the Jews were genetically inferior but to some extent an Frank died in a concentration camp because the US Congress believed that as well we believe that married people who have transmissible diseases should not have children no couple who has the disease of feeble-mindedness or Insanity or epilepsy should have children babies should not be brought into the world when the father's income is obviously inadequate to provide for its food clothing or shelter on August 5th 1926 a crowd gathered at Vasser College to hear a lecture given by Margaret Sanger the controversial founder of the American birth control League sanger's reputation preceded her in her dozen years as a crusader for contra reception and Family Planning she'd been denounced Jered and jailed repeatedly now she'd undertaken a CrossCountry speaking tour intended to bolster her cause by linking it to Eugenics Margaret Sanger was laser beam focused on promoting birth control which she saw as a liberatory agent for women it was a hard push Reproductive Rights contraception her Embrace of the eugenesis was a way of getting some influential and Powerful allies behind her cause the question of race betterment Sanger told the Vasser audience is one of immediate concern and I am glad to say that the government has already taken certain steps to control the quality of our population through the DraStic immigration laws but while we close our gates to the so-called undesirables from other countries we make no attempt to discourage or cut down the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home marget Sanger is struggling to open a conversation at a time when public discussion of birth control let alone access to birth control was illegal but her views are fairly persistent with regard to issues of biological inferiority You could argue that they're strategic but the difference is not that significant from the standpoint of those listening to her words once birth control is packaged as a way of improving the human race it seems more manageable and there are a lot of people that were on the fence that she convinced to embrace birth control because of its eugenic potential it was being labeled a birth control activist that was truly controversial being a eugenicist was far more [Music] acceptable amid the many American enthusiasms of the 1920s skimpy dresses dance marathons maang breeding a better human race was perhaps the most unlikely but by the middle years of the decade the notion was everywhere included in the curriculum at more than 350 American colleges and universities among them Harvard Northwestern and the University of California at Berkeley Eugenics also was preached from pulpits promoted on lecture circuits and appropriated to sell everything from new fangled beauty treatments to children's toys disseminated by a host of popularizers and at times diluted distorted or both the eugenic Creed filtered down to the masses through magazine articles advice manuals even a movie called are you fit to [Music] marry this was really something that permeated the culture it was really a craze it was something people were excited about Eugenics starts to trickle into mainstream ex popular culture in the 1920s and it says to individual Americans if you want your Society to improve you have to marry the right person you have to have healthy children you have obligations to the human race and to your country as one newlywed confessed in a letter to his local eugenic Society my wife and I are both extremely tall and this worries us as we do not wish to bring abnormally tall children into the [Music] world at State and county fairs across the country in Massachusetts Kansas Georgia Texas a human stock contest known as fitter families for future firesides Drew [Music] throngs sponsored by the American eugenic society a propaganda organization run by the movement's evangelists Harry Laughlin and Madison Grant the competition offered a primer on Eugenics disguised as wholesome family entertainment what the American eugenic society realized is that if you're going to spread a message about Eugenics you have to get people involved in more than just reading something in a popular magazine Eugenics is an all encompassing Creed it's a faith it's a religion Harry Laughlin and Madison Grant understood we need the people to be converted to this religion so that everyone will understand if I am eugenically Superior I cannot date and certainly cannot mate with a eugenically unfit person fitter families contestants came from miles around often dressed in their Sunday Best and submitted themselves to a rigorous 3-hour inspection straight healthy teeth earn them high marks as did musical Talent or a family history of longevity disease or disability even a lame grandmother or an epileptic uncle was a demerit while the stock judges are testing the holstein's jerseys and white faces in the stock Pavilion one contest organizer said we are judging the Joneses Smiths and the Johnson's just as they would have a contest who had bred the best cows who had bred the best sheep who had bred the best children and at the end of the State Fair the eugenic winning family the fer family would be driven down the Midway and wave the people and show off their ribbons by the 1920s e genenic was a household word a generation of people grows up thinking of this word as a aspiration healthy babies and as a warning they've read it in school they've heard it a church it has become part of the consciousness of the country so pervasive was the impulse to human Improvement even prominent African-Americans took up the theme web dubo one of the founders of the national associ iation for the advancement of colored people maintained that the best of the black race what he called The Talented 10th was the hope for the future the Negro Deo declared must begin to breed for brains for efficiency for beauty deo's ideas are fundamentally about combating Prejudice but at the same time he talked about and embraced ER the notion that not all blacks were equally gifted and equally talented and that the future of African-Americans should hinge on the future procreation of The Talented those ideas really are resonant with eugenic ideals of the time Eugenics became a really powerful ideology because it made sense to a lot of of different groups who are concerned about disperate things part of the draw is how science can make us better human beings that we can engineer ourselves into being even better than we are and viewing that as a source of progress the Eugenics movement of the early 20th century got traction because the slogans were simple things like better babies and happy families on the face of it you know better babies healthier babies what's not to like it would have taken considerable effort to demonstrate to people what that simple slogan was actually hiding in September 1924 at the Virginia colony for the epileptic and feeble-minded the colony's board of directors met to discuss the case of patient 1692 a 17-year-old named Carrie Buck she'd been admitted to the Colony several months before at the request of her foster parents who claimed that they could no longer control or care for her Carrie Buck had been raised by a foster family not a nice family she is rented out to other people in the community to do house cleaning and she's pulled out of school after fifth grade even though she's doing very well and is a perfectly good student then a nephew of her foster mother rapes her and she gets pregnant and they want to get rid of her by the time her daughter was born the state had labeled Buck morally delinquent for having given birth out of wedlock diagnosed her a middle-grade and confined her to the Colony sexual delinquent sexually immoral these terms are intentionally vague immoral tendency could be that a woman had been sexually abused it could mean she was going out late at night it could mean she's a prostitute if you're morally deficient that's evidence that you're mentally deficient and vice versa so the state needs to intervene the question before the colony's board of directors now was whether or not to sterilize Carrie Buck she lands at the colony for epileptics of feeble-minded right when Virginia has passed a eugenic sterilization law and the lawyer for the state hospitals really wants there to be a test before sterilizations occur so the superintendent of the colony basically needs an inmate that he can say I'm going to sterile ize you have that person challenge the law and then hopefully Prevail against her so he's looking for someone and Carri Buck checks a lot of boxes from the board's perspective the Menace posed by Buck's own feeble-mindedness was doubled by her lineage her mother who was alleged to have engaged in prostitution was likewise an inmate at the colony by the laws of heredity the board concluded Carrie Buck is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate Offspring it was recommended she be sterilized for both her own welfare and the good of society then Buck was assigned an attorney friendly to the eugenic cause who would appeal her sterilization ideally all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States across the country eugenicists would be watching to see if the Virginia test case could create a national consensus on sterilization sterilization was a radical procedure between 1915 and the mid 1920s you have a dozen or more states that passed laws that allowed for mandatory sterilization of people and institutions some of them were used actively many of them were just on the books but nobody was being operated on some of them have been struck down by state courts so it wasn't at all clear what was going to happen to eugenic sterilization there was a hope among eugenist is if we could just get a case that goes up to the Supreme Court one ruling from the Supreme Court and suddenly we've got a national legal standard that eugenic sterilization is acceptable so that became high on the wish list of the Eugenics movement no one was more interested in the Virginia test case than Harry Laughlin who had spent much of the previous decade promoting sterilization as a cheap effective way to rid the nation of what he called the socially inadequate classes Harry Laughlin believes that to really move the needle on the national genetic pool and really improve things sterilization was the answer eugenical sterilization was Laughlin's life work he published a book in 1922 a compendium of every law that had been passed of every case that had been brought excruciating detail about the history of eugenical sterilization and it became the Bible for people who wanted to pass sterilization laws it was only a matter of time before Laughlin was asked to serve as an expert witness in the case against Carrie buck and though he was unable to appear in person he was more than happy to help Laughlin never met Carrie Buck Laughlin never traveled to Virginia to see her his testimony was read into the record of the car Buck case as a deposition the buck family Laughlin argued was mentally defective members of what he described as the shiftless ignorant and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South as such Carrie was certainly likely to give birth to defective children no doubt with her infant daughter Vivien she already had Laughlin's testimony proved persuasive as the eugenicists hoped first the County judge then the state supreme court upheld Virginia's sterilization law the next and final ruling would come from the Supreme Court of the United States poor Carrie Buck there's no weaker person perhaps who's ever come before The Supreme Court she is poor and she is alone and her mother is an inmate and she has a lawyer that's been chosen by her enemies to not represent her and she's asking the font of Justice in our society don't let them forcibly operate on me so I can't have children and they say go ahead sterilize her in May 1927 the Court's majority opinion was rendered by the venerable Oliver Wendell Holmes who at 86 was widely regarded as America's most brilliant legal [Music] mind it is better for all the world Holmes wrote If instead of waiting to execute degenerate Offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility Society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind three generations of imbeciles are enough Justice Holmes says if she is allowed to reproduce or if the carry bucks of the world in general are allowed to reproduce this will be deleterious to American society and so therefore the government has the authority to step in and in pursuit of the greater public good to suppress her individual right to reproduce Carrie Buck was sterilized on October 19th 1927 less than a month afterward she was paroled from The Colony thanks to Carrie Buck a jubilant Laughlin declared eugenical sterilization experimental period had come to an end over the two decades that preceded the Carri Buck case only about 6,000 sterilizations had been performed Nationwide in the 6 years that followed it as States across the country rushed to enact sterilization laws that number would more than double if you look back at all the sterilization laws passed the easiest way to sum up who their targets were is Round Up The Usual Suspects you are generally going to be dealing with poor people people who are part of a disfavored minority people who were on private charity or public welfare people who had disabilities mental or physical and people who were generally considered somehow on the margins of [Music] society the conceit of eugenics was that scientists understood what traits were ass proceeded with health and well-being over the long term but hereditary science in the early 20th century was still emerging Eugenics led the public discussion promoted the science of human heredity in a time when hereditarian scientists were themselves developing their craft and I think for a period of time they saw this as a positive development Society taking interest in the kind of science that they were doing and then I think by the 20s there's a problem it was the fall of 1926 and geneticist Herman J Mueller a former Columbia University Fly Boy was looking for ways to speed his experiment along he was still working with flies though now on his own and at the University of Texas in Austin so far he'd been using the technique he'd learned in the fly room from Thomas Hunt Morgan hunt for naturally arising mutations then track them across Generations breed a generation peer at its members one by one through a Jeweler's Loop repeat but at this point Mueller had lost patience it took an enormous amount of time time to generate these mutants you had to wait until you basically found one it was a process of of Discovery so Mueller began to wonder whether he could actually create mutants denovo from scratch by doing something to the genes one night on a whim Mueller switched on the X-ray machine and began irradiating male fruit flies once they'd been exposed he slid them into to glass bottles with a roughly equal number of female flies then he waited when the larva began to appear on day five it was clear the whim had worked Mueller by using the exact right dosage of x-rays finds that he can make dozens of mutations mutations that would have taken months or years to find he becomes a mutant maker he can't do it in a predictable way but the principle that human gene material was malleable was changeable is an idea that Mueller understands and Embraces if an insect's genes could be altered by a blast of radiation Mueller realized human genes one day might be manipulated as well and heredity would no longer be the prerogative he said of an unreachable God playing pranks on us [Music] the idea of controlling human heredity had captivated Mueller since his earliest days in Morgan's lab he'd been aware of the flaws in so-called eugenic science for nearly as long and his doubts about the American Eugenics movement had been steadily mounting Mueller began to think that you couldn't have a Eugenics movement without asking questions about equality what was the criteria for judging a better human being than a worse human being and thereby sterilizing the the worst human being or selectively breeding the better human being who would ensure that the Eugenics movement was selecting the best features when the when the best features were dictated by the elites concerns about the Eugenics movement had been raised before but they'd come mainly from Lone voices shouting into the wind now increasingly hereditary scientists began to speak as one more and more scientists are realizing that heredity is not something that you can understand simply like mendal understood his PE plants that some human traits are real really complex and you can't predict whether they're going to appear or reappear that some conditions that we think of is hereditary are really about social issues nobody really discards the idea that heredity is important but there is a growing chorus of scientists who are being more careful in the way that they talk about heredity even the father of the intelligence test Henry da who had done so much to stoke fears of hereditary feeble-mindedness disavowed his earlier conclusions in particular he regretted having coined the term with proper education he now believed such individuals were perfectly capable of managing their own Affairs eugenic scientists were doing what they understood to be reliable science and it turned out that in many cases their science was mistaken science is a process people make claims they Advance evidence for it and then others come along who have a more sophisticated understanding of the methodological problems and they say hey prostitution may result from a woman's having no other choice economically or alcoholism may arise from all sorts of stresses in one's life you don't need genetics all to explain these [Music] things as the 1920s came to a close and the Great Depression radically rearranged American society the dogma of the Eugenics movement rang ever more Hollow 25% of the country is unemployed people's life savings have been wiped out by both the stock market crash and the bank failures the person who's now on the breadline might have been a lawyer who graduated from Harvard and this was a clear indication that poverty was not biological when in 1932 yet another Eugenics Congress convened in New York most in the scientific Community declined to attend they hold this conference to propagate the idea of eugenics all the same guys are there Madison Grant Charles Benedict Davenport Harry Laughlin espousing the same ideas their ideas have not changed in 25 years and almost nobody comes because among scientists Eugenics is now viewed as the purview of a bunch of old white cranks whom science has passed by impr probably Herman Mueller did turn up at the Congress though only to deliver a scathing 10-minute speech there is no scientific basis for the conclusion that the socially lower classes have genetically inferior intellectual equipment he insisted certain slum districts of our cities are veritable factories for the production of criminality among those who happen to be born in them under these circumstances it is society not the individual which is the real criminal and which stands to be judged the problem of eugenic thinking was an utter ignorance of social causes of social problems a tendency to over biologized to Think Through the biological lens about everything in society Eugenics might yet perfect the human race Mueller told the audience but but only in a society consciously organized for the common good in July 1933 in Germany Adolf Hitler came to power and immediately enshrined eugenics in state policy with a law that mandated the sterilization of men and women suffering from any one of nine presumably heritable conditions it had been based on a Model law written by Harry Laughlin before Hitler there was a German Eugenics movement but it did not have a sterilization law the sterilization law was ultimately enacted with the inspiration of what American states had been doing Harry Laughlin is corresponding with German scientists all along and encouraging them he's proud of the fact that when the Nazis adopt eugenic sterilization law it's strongly modeled on his own law the United States has the reputation of being on the Forefront of scientific Endeavor when Adolf Hitler was in prison he read Madison Grant's the passing of the great race wrote Madison Grant a fan letter saying this book is my Bible and when he wrote mine com his autobiography he said we Germans must emulate what the Americans are doing Nazi officials estimated no fewer than 400,000 Germans would be sterilized roughly 25 times the number sterilized ized in the United States so far the more zealous American eugenicists applauded the Nazi law which applied to all people whether institutionalized or not as one Virginia sterilization Advocate put it the Germans are beating us at our own game but for many Americans the news from Germany was accompanied by an uncomfortable Revelation many interviewed about the Hitler proposal expressed shock The Daily News reported they were surprised to find out that 27 of our 48 American states have laws permitting the performance of sterilization upon the [Music] feeble-minded the 1930s was the peak of eugenic sterilization and that was after geneticists professional scientific geneticists had large L abandoned the eugenic program there's this trend that discredits the doctrine on which eugenic sterilization is based at the same time paradoxically sterilization rates shot up in the United States because of the depression it costs money to keep people in homes for the feeble-minded so if you want to reduce the cost of keeping people you sterilize them and that's what happened I'd like to know just what sterilization is so would I just how do they do it well I'll tell you as public awareness of eugenic sterilization spread a controversial Hollywood film opened in theaters a cautionary tale about Good Intentions gone dangerously wrong and you mean they're going to stop me from having children ever exactly released in 1934 tomorrow's children told the story of 17-year-old Alice Mason the sole functional member of an otherwise drunken crippled feeble-minded family who is slated for sterilization along with her parents and siblings three generations of unfit are enough and saved from the scalpel only by the Revelation that she'd been adopted look at me can't you see that I'm well in strong and I'll be a good mother to judge honest I will tomorrow's children raises the question of whether or not you always get it right when you sterilize someone how much can you really know about someone's background without getting into the details of how much do we understand about genetics in 1934 it simply says sometimes people make mistakes with these things and so maybe we should be more careful tomorrow's children was still playing on screens across the country when in 1935 a committee of scientists turned up at Cold Spring Harbor they had been sent by the Carnegie Institution which had sponsored the eugenic record office since 1918 and had long been embarrassed by its political activities now Carnegie's board of directors had ordered a review of the work being done there the the visiting committee's report was decidedly unfavorable from a scientific Vantage They concluded the thousands of heredity records stored in the famed fireproof Vault were useless for the study of human [Music] genetics they rightly saw that this Eugenics fieldwork was largely ridiculous and was not scientific but they also were troubled by the degree to which clearly Harry Laughlin was acting not as a scientist but as a evangelist for eugenics and this was a clear indication that the tide was really turning against Eugenics for the movements faithful the message was plain if they were going to continue to call the unfit they would need a new justification for [Music] it from the moment the case of the sterilized ays first hit the news in January 1936 Americans were enthralled by it first there was the girl Anne Cooper hwit a San Francisco socialite who stood to inherit 2third of her late father's vast estate and her shocking claim that her mother had had her sterilized to gain control of that inheritance an Cooper huitt is sent to the hospital for an emergency appendectomy and she comes out sterilized and when she discovers it uh she is understandably horrified and she sues both her mother and the two surgeons she claims that her mother has done it because her father's will stipulates that if an should die childless The Inheritance would go to her mother equally intriguing was the claim of the mother Maran that her daughter Anne was feeble-minded a diagnosis based on an intelligence test she'd been given just hours before her sterilization an says that she's ring in pain and then a woman walks in the room and the woman starts asking her all these questions what's the longest river in the United States and how many years is a presidential term and Ann's reaction is why are you asking me these asinine questions what does this have to do with appendicitis and she doesn't answer most of the questions although her score identified the girl as a high-grade a court appointed psychiatrist at a preliminary hearing found her to be well read fluent in French and Italian and perfectly normal in every respect the Cooper U sterilization case was was one of those cases that people call the trial of the century headlines all over the country and if you weren't paying attention to what sterilization was by then you would have heard in that story aner huitt is not emblematic of the typical sterilization patient and for that very reason she gets a lot more attention by eugenic standards Anne was the very definition of well well born she was the Scion of the successful white wealthy seemingly sound in both body and mind on what grounds then those following the case may well have wondered could her sterilization possibly be justified attorney IM golden who represented the surgeons named in the suit wondered much the same and he decided to solicit the opinion of an expert in May 1936 he composed a letter to one of California's leading eugenicists Paul papino and laid out for him the details of the case among them the reasons Maran Cooper huitt had given for wanting her daughter sterilized Maran makes three charges about her daughter's behavior that she sees as indicative of someone who is mentally defective the first is that she becomes infatuated with a chauffeur the second is that she is infatuated with men in uniform and then finally that she has plans to run off with a negro Porter on a train these are not people that probably Maran believed her daughter should be associating with not somebody she should have children with in your opinion golden asked Papo was it proper to sterilize her as a matter of medical and scientific procedure Paul papino long had been a proponent of eugenic sterilization but the argument that an immoral oversexed girl would pass on those traits genetically could no longer plausibly be made so Papo offered another rationale one that had been recently formulated and recommended by the American American Eugenics Society heredity Papo told golden is not particularly the issue in this case but I suppose we should all answer negatively the question whether a young woman such as you describe would be a desirable mother in the 30s the eugenic rationale for sterilization begins to morph into a kind of more generalized understanding that this person isn't fit to be parent that turns the whole argument about eugenic on its head because the determining question was not will she spread her genetic defect but will she make a desirable mother when the trial of the two surgeons got underway in San Francisco an's questionable capacity to mother was the centerpiece of the defense the girl's sexual behavior alone golden argued cast grave doubt on her ability to provide good moral and intellectual training to her Offspring in the end the argument had little effect on the judge who after 6 days of listening to testimony abruptly called a halt to the proceedings and dismissed the case on the grounds that sterilization was legal in California but in the public mind sterilization had been effectively recast as a preventative measure against inept parenting this is not a story that happens in an institution it's a story about a socialite nevertheless the same themes of needing to sterilize people for their own good come up forget about heredity these people will be unable to take care of their children so the Humane thing to do is not let them have any Eugenics simply becomes part of the Machinery of how these State institutions function hereditary defect is no longer part of the conversation and it's simply a question of a state attempting to use all the tools available to limit the number of people who are seen to be a social and economic burden by the close of the 1930s more than 30,000 Americans had been sterilized [Music] Nationwide I think Eugenics appeals to some real strong elements in the human psyche one part of that the positive part is that there is a desire among people to perfect things the negative side is we're also a species that is very prone to tribalism we're very prone to believe that you know uh our people are the right people and other people are a [Music] threat for a Time the enemies within American society were eclipsed by those without and the Nations attention diverted by a conflict that consumed much of the world then came the liberation of buk andal and DCA and the chilling evidence of eugenic policies carried to a monstrous extreme by the mid 1940s the full horror of what happens in Nazi Germany becomes apparent the movement from St sterilization to extermination the killing of several Millions based on this kind of idea of the betterment of human race and it creates a vast embarrassment for the American Eugenics movement people were repelled and began to turn away from Eugenics and Eugenics became a dirty word the Holocaust being tied to a wide range of eugenic practices is a blemish on humans as a species and it undercuts any notion that Eugenics was a positive force in American society surgical sterilization was thought to be too slow and too expensive to be used on a mass scale after the war when the Allies put the Nazis on trial at nberg one of the charges was eugenic sterilization and the lawyer for the Nazi who was charged said you know how can you charge my client with the crime of eugenic sterilization when your own US Supreme Court said this was okay by the end of the 1940s the Eugenics movement had faded from the mainstream of American Life but the laws that had been passed in the name of eugenics would remain on the books for decades barring some people from entering the country and others from marriage and subjecting thousands to force sterilization at the hands of the state by the time such practices finally came to an end in the 1970s the total number of sterilized Americans would exceed 60,000 and no matter the cost or the casualties the scientific betterment of humanity would remain an irresistible aspiration tempting generations to come with the promise of [Music] perfection we believe in science we want science to solve social problems and we want to make our eles better I think everybody wants to do that there is this idea that remains a kind of hope that if we just get the science right if only the right people are put in charge that we can engineer our way to a better world some of the greatest social changes that have ever been accomplished have occurred because people were really willing to imagine impossible things but the future that American eugenesis imagined was only a future for some and so now the debate is are we going to use technology to try to fulfill galton's dream if you will of taking charge of our own Evolution and of course it was a pipe dream but nevertheless his it is a dream that persists we have reason to be apprehensive about this and the test Tu Bears [Music] watching [Music] for [Music] [Music]

Channel: American Experience | PBS

Views: 1,410,503

Keywords: eugenics, charles darwin, sir francis galton, natural selection, selective breeding, heredity, pseudoscience, thomas hunt morgan, carrie buck, buck v bell, john harvey kellogg, charles davenport, forced sterilization, ann cooper hewitt, margaret sanger, w.e.b. dubois, improvement, american history, us history, history documentary, pbs

Id: vmRb-0v5xfI

Length: 113min 58sec (6838 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 05 2024