posted
For those interested in the underpinnings of some of Hitler's ideology, the following article is very educational. By coincidence, it opens with a description of a piece of Chicago history. I touched on it briefly two weeks ago when I did my exchange with Peter Singer at a local school.
quote: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." ***
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 sterilisation, 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.
I recommend the article and the book the article draws on:
War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Scary stuff - few ideological movements get to see the logical consequences of their views taken to their extreme end.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Scary stuff indeed. This is one of my favorite parts of the article:
quote:On January 30 1933, Hitler seized power. During the 12-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilisation, 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 fulfilment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilising hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation 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."
The American eugenics movement set the course. Extermination (referred to as "euthanasia") of the "unfit" was on the table. They were very successful in their promotion of segregation, since we still live with the conseqences of that advocacy today, in states like Illinois. And they were really frustrated that sterilization laws were applied to so few - 60 or 70,000. They wanted to sterilize millions.
Black also gets into the philanthropists who funded all this. It's a "who's who" of rich dogooders of the time. Or that's what they called themselves, anyway. Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
But while the eugenics movement and associated history (and present) sickens me, I believe that it is essential to know as much as possible. Those who don't learn history, yada yada. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Funny you should bring that up. I played with that quote when writing about a modern organization that sanitizes its history out of all recognition in an article I wrote (it was originally a branch of the eugenics movement, but you wouldn't know it from the history on the website):
quote:George Santayana said "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
He didn't say anything about whitewashing or sugarcoating the past and what it might mean.
posted
Eugenics is a natural offshoot of evolutionary biology, merely one that has been historically misapplied. Any objective survey reveals that positive gene traits exist in every traditional "race" classification. Meanwhile truly antisocial genes, such as the one responsible for hogging the passing lane, are allowed to propagate in the name of "human rights."
Posts: 1839 | Registered: May 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
Eugenics is obviously wrong, but what's the problem with the ambition to create a "master race," if all that means is that no one is ever born with a hereditary illness? The problem with eugenics is not the goal -- it's the gruesome method.
We just have to find a way to prevent deformities that doesn't require killing.
Posts: 4600 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
I think the most important issue in the article is the historical aspect - i.e. Hitler's policies, so reviled in hindsight, were a result of ideology (masquerading as science)that was promoted first and foremost in the U.S.
We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.
Posts: 4344 | Registered: Mar 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Eugenics is a warped view of evolutionary genetics.
In evolution--nature picks out who makes it or what genes make it. In eugenics, man decides to play nature and pick it.
I can see why that guy killed that baby, because he so firmly believed in his precious eugenics. But, was it right? Of course not.
As humans, we hold the sanctity of life. Or most of us, at least. Animals, in a way, are similar, in that they don't kill something unless they can eat it. Though, I have seen birds kill another bird that was sick or deformed, but I think that is more of a survival mechanism--kill the ill one, so the rest of us won't become ill ourselves.
Granted, again. Humans are not birds.
Posts: 463 | Registered: Oct 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Warning: This is an old thread I'm bumping, so some of the previous participants may or may not still be reading Hatrack and may or may not respond.
I didn't see this thread way back when - we didn't have internet at home. sndrake linked to it from the other thread.
I didn't know about the history behind eugenics, and I'm finding the article sndrake linked to in the OP is quite interesting and enlightening, although also quite frightening.
Canada has its own share of eugenics in its history. Inuit people from the north (North West Territories, Yukon, and now Nunavut) were flown to Edmonton when they needed surgery, whether it be tonsillectomies or anything else, and routinely sterilized at the same time without the knowledge or consent of the patient as a matter of policy. That happened up until the 1970s.
Posts: 8355 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
quote:And they were really frustrated that sterilization laws were applied to so few - 60 or 70,000. They wanted to sterilize millions.
And, if you consider sterilisation ethically acceptable in the first place, they were quite right. Sterilising a mere few tens of thousands is completely useless, from a eugenic point of view. So in fact, they were getting both the moral disaster and the genetic 'problems' they were trying to cure. When you think about it that way, you might consider Hitler to at least have had the courage of his convictions: He really did succeed at making Europe 'Judenfrei'.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
posted
Although I knew (in a distant, would-get-right-on-a-MC-test kind of way) that eugenics had some deep roots in the USA, I didn't get a really big whiff of just how deep until reading one of Michael Crichton's books a couple of years back. This is a full-nostril smell, and it's not pleasant.
Nonetheless, thanks for the info-history is important, and eugenics is a big part of racism.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Possible story, not completely confirmed: My grandmother apparently had some dealings with the American eugenics movement. The mom & pop took her in for a breeding inspection as a kiddo, and they gave her a physical and phrenological checkup, and awarded her a shiny lil' medal that announced that she had been checked and confirmed to be one of "God's Chosen."
Looking at the American eugenics movement is so fun -- it's poking at our own seedy underbelly, just to see what stirs from beneath the surface of sugarcoated history. By gum, what's that it says about Charles Lindbergh?
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by Starla*: As humans, we hold the sanctity of life. Or most of us, at least. Animals, in a way, are similar, in that they don't kill something unless they can eat it. Though, I have seen birds kill another bird that was sick or deformed, but I think that is more of a survival mechanism--kill the ill one, so the rest of us won't become ill ourselves.
Granted, again. Humans are not birds.
I kind of agree with the general thought of this thread, if not some of the details. But this post in particular really irritated me, perhaps due to its naivety.
Sanctity of life is a nice ideal, a concept that we should aspire to. But it is not remotely held universally. Humans are inherently selfish and most of us given a set of circumstances that actually tested our survival against another's life would in the end choose our own survival. This is not a bad thing or a good thing, it just is and we would be poor products of evolution if were not selfish. (And to cut off a poor quick retort, the genetic basis for altruism is well defined in books such as The Selfish Gene)
The animal link is even more poorly thought out. The myth that animals do not kill except for food is just that, a myth. Animals kill to increase their survival and their odds of reproducing. Animals such as chimpanzees conduct war, all mammals have an immune system that kills all sorts of viruses, bacteria, and eukaryotic parasites everyday, male lions will kill the young of other males when they take over a pride, and even the lowly mold will excrete penicillin to kill bacteria.
Animals kill for many reasons other than food, we simply happen to be good at inventing even more reasons.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
I think the most important issue in the article is the historical aspect - i.e. Hitler's policies, so reviled in hindsight, were a result of ideology (masquerading as science)that was promoted first and foremost in the U.S.
We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.
This is 100% correct.
However, I must add that in the end, science is a tool (in a way, much like religion) which can be used for good or for evil. The only thing that distinguishes science (and religion for that matter) from other tools like, for example your mattress, is its larger potential in either direction. Luckily, science is based on rational principles, and our best defence is to think rationally about anything that develops, in either extreme.
This includes not simply applying the call of eugenics as a blunt hammer via the principle of "Reductio ad Hitlerum" (or more simply, a Godwin argument) against anything that may offend some and be related to eugenics, such as say GM foods or genetic counseling.
Posts: 7593 | Registered: Sep 2006
| IP: Logged |
quote:We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.
But there does exist a science of eugenics. Hitler was not applying it, but there is nothing to stop you from scientifically breeding humans from any desired trait. It's immoral, but not unscientific.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
| IP: Logged |
quote:Originally posted by sndrake: 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.
That should say "The young, short, dark haired, dark eyed German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail."
Posts: 12266 | Registered: Jul 2005
| IP: Logged |
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Wave]](graemlins/wave.gif)
![[Hail]](graemlins/hail.gif)
<-- King of Men
