Holocaust

I watched The World at War as it was being broadcast on PBS in the 1970s and later purchased the DVDs. I used several episodes in my US History classes when teaching the Second World War. The toughest one for students to watch—and for me to watch again and again—was titled "Genocide." It first screened fifty years ago and was one of the first films to document the Holocaust. From History Today:

First broadcast on 27 March 1974, "Genocide" is credited with introducing the Holocaust (a term still not yet in common use) to the British public. It helped to inculcate an awareness of the Nazi "Final Solution" as a crime directed against a specific group. The episode was screened over four years before the US-produced television miniseries Holocaust, often cited as the televisual milestone promoting Holocaust awareness on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Genocide" provides an account of the Nazi persecution of Jews and the Holocaust that is succinct and accessible, yet not oversimplified. This is even more remarkable given that it preceded much of the foundational scholarship on the subject. It included themes such as the influence of racial science and eugenics on Nazi ideology, the rise of the SS, the role of the Einsatzgruppen ("special task forces" – mobile killing squads) in perpetrating what became known as the "Holocaust by bullets" in the eastern occupied territories, and the "Aktion Reinhard" death camps – Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. ....

"Genocide" was directed by British filmmaker Michael Darlow. The World at War’s producer, Jeremy Isaacs, had initially wanted to direct "Genocide" but, given that members of his family had been murdered in the Holocaust, decided against it, fearing that he would be too "emotionally involved". ....

"Genocide" succeeded in its aim to educate a British public still largely ignorant about the nature of the Holocaust. It would also be unfair to judge "Genocide" by the standards of present-day Holocaust scholarship and memorial culture. In some respects, it was a product of its time, but in many, it was far ahead. The episode’s most significant achievement was to clearly explain who the Nazis targeted and why, and how this persecution developed from exclusion, to expulsion, to extermination. However, "Genocide" also inadvertently encouraged a degree of understanding, perhaps even sympathy, for those who perpetrated the Holocaust. These men were allowed to position themselves as mere "cogs" who had been placed in an impossible situation by a brutal, totalitarian regime; a regime in which the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" was conceived, masterminded, ordered, and approved of by a tiny coterie of the most senior Nazis.

This episode of The World at War can be seen on YouTube but, as you can see, only on YouTube as it is age-restricted:

Joseph Cronin, "Holocaust at 50," History Today, March 3, 2024.

"Human defectives"

His name is all over Madison. The University has chosen not to remove it from one of its more prominent buildings but, instead, install a plaque. From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel this morning:

[Charles] Van Hise received four degrees from UW-Madison, including the first Ph.D. degree granted by the university. He is the university's longest serving leader, serving as president from 1903 until his death in 1918. During his tenure, UW-Madison established a graduate division, founded a medical school and increased its faculty from 200 to 750 professors. ....

[Van Hise's] interest in [eugenics] came from reading Charles Darwin's book, On the Origin of Species. Letters between Van Hise and his wife show he was curious about how to apply the ideas of animal evolution and natural selection to the human race, according to Luccini Butcher.

Van Hise lectured on eugenics, gave public speeches and talked to legislators. In one of his speeches, he said “[h]uman defectives should no longer be allowed to propagate the race" and sterilization "might be the proper method."

In another speech, Van Hise said “[w]e know enough about the breeding of animals so that if that knowledge were applied to man, the feeble minded would disappear in a generation, and the insane and criminal class be reduced to a small fraction of their present numbers.”

Van Hise wasn't the only academic espousing eugenics during this time. Edward Ross, a UW-Madison sociologist, also advanced the idea.

UW-Madison in 1910 established the country's first department of experimental breeding, which was initially led by Leon Cole, another eugenicist. The department is today called the genetics department.

Academics gave the eugenics movement legitimacy and helped drive the Wisconsin sterilization law passed in 1913. The law forced sterilization for "undesirables" at the discretion of medical professionals. The state conducted nearly 2,000 sterilizations, the 11th highest in the country.

Wisconsin repealed its sterilization law in 1978. ....

Eugenics was not widely supported when the law was in place, Luccini Butcher said. Many people saw it as an overstepping by the state. The Catholic Church, in particular, opposed forced sterilization. .... (more)

Kelly Meyerhofer, "A UW-Madison building’s namesake supported eugenics. Campus reckons with legacy of Charles Van Hise," Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, February 29, 2024.

One of our worst Presidents

When I studied American history in high school and college Woodrow Wilson was presented as one of our best Presidents and Harding as one of the worst. That was how I taught them, too. I was wrong. In fact, Harding was pretty good and Wilson was terrible (I was wrong about Grant, too). From "There’s No Defending Woodrow Wilson" responding to an effort to rehabilitate his reputation:

.... Wilson openly scorned our constitutional system in his academic writings; he explicitly ran for governor of New Jersey openly pledging to be “an unconstitutional governor” who would burst restraints on his powers. He was elected president in 1912 with 42 percent of the vote almost entirely as a result of a third-party challenge that split his opposition — and both of his elections depended upon the mass disenfranchisement of black voters in the Solid South. ....

Wilson was not merely a man of his time who shared its common prejudices. He was notably racist even by the standards of the 1910s. Nor was he simply a man who looked the other way at racial injustice: He actively made things worse. In assessing the racism of Wilson’s time, he was not the led but the leader.

Wilson did not just refuse to rock the boat in the noontide of Jim Crow — although he did that, too, bluntly refusing to racially integrate Princeton on his watch — he bent federal law in a pro-segregation direction. He imposed rigid segregation on the federal government where it had not been before. His administration required photos on job applications to spot the black people. Even with hundreds of thousands of black Americans serving their nation in the First World War, Wilson’s policies compelled United States Army units to fight under French command because they were manned by black soldiers. This was a disgrace to the American flag.

Wilson employed, promoted, and allied himself with even worse people, such as the ardently pro-lynching Senator “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman. He did other racist things...including supporting legislation making interracial marriage a felony in the District of Columbia and putting government backing behind eugenic compulsion, decades before the Nazis did so. Wilson made Dr. Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen the chief eugenicist of New Jersey, in pursuit of a campaign of forced sterilizations. Katzen-Ellenbogen ended up working at Buchenwald and was convicted of crimes against humanity in 1947. ....

The central conservative charge against Wilson is that he was, from the beginning to the end of his career, a critic, opponent, and subverter of our constitutional separation of powers. He preferred the unified executive and legislative power of Westminster-model parliamentary systems, such as exist in Britain and in Frum’s native Canada. It was Wilson who bequeathed to us the concept of a “living Constitution,” and who lauded and promoted the unrepresentative power of the administrative state — in the latter case, retracing the footsteps of the Confederacy. His malign influence on American constitutionalism is with us still. ....

Wilson’s record on civil liberties was abysmal, and while Frum leaves a lot of it unmentioned, he makes no effort to justify it. He was the closest thing we ever had to a dictator... Wilson saddled us with J. Edgar Hoover (first hired and promoted under Wilson), the Palmer raids, and the imprisonment of Eugene V. Debs, one of Wilson’s 1912 opponents. It took Harding to pardon Debs and dismantle Wilson’s oppressive apparatus. .... (more)

Dan McLaughlin, "There’s No Defending Woodrow Wilson," National Review, February 6, 2024.

Remember

Tomorrow, January 27, is the "International Day in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust." It is important to remember. Reviewing a new book, The Holocaust: An Unfinished History:

"Survival was the exception, death the norm.” That is how the British historian Dan Stone describes the fate of the Jews in The Holocaust: An Unfinished History. Reading his incisive analysis of the genocidal endgame that unfolded from Nazi antisemitism in the early 20^th century, one would be unsettled at any time. But doing so against the backdrop of the Oct. 7 Hamas massacre that killed some 1,200 Israelis, in the largest mass murder of Jews since World War II, will leave the reader numbly groping for answers. ....

At the core of Hitler’s belief system, Mr. Stone writes, was a “genocidal fantasy” of a “world without Jews.” It was a familiar hatred that was neither new nor confined to Germany—Christians had demonized Jews at least since the Middle Ages—and therefore a prejudice easily tapped into and amplified in service to Hitler’s goal of forging an “ethnically pure nation.”

The nationalistic notion of “pure blood” was also not new to nativist political movements and other groups in either Europe or America. For instance, since its introduction in the 1880s, the racist pseudoscience of eugenics had brought increasingly broad acceptance and intellectual currency to the idea that “bad” genes belonging to “inferior” races and “defective” individuals should be eliminated. The Nazi name for this type of program was racial hygiene.

It was the linkage of all these concepts, taken to their extreme and placed in a neo-religious, quasi-mystical framework of redemption and purity, that gave shape to the Nazi worldview. This mindset melded together the grandiose ideals of Aryan superiority and the malignant visions of Jews conspiring to “replace” them into a struggle dictating that only by destroying all Jews could Aryan blood prevail. From this perspective, Mr. Stone observes, World War II was nothing less than “a fight for racial life or death,” a quest to restore a defeated Germany to greatness. ....

The Nazi invasion of Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, marked the start of World War II, and the Reich’s commencement of the mass killing of Jews began soon after. Mr. Stone emphasizes that the carnage perpetrated in the first years of the war used a different means of savagery from the “factory-line extermination” of yet-to-be-created death camps like Auschwitz. In this early stage of the Holocaust, mobile killing units made up of police officers and SS commandos would advance, town by town, rounding up local Jews, sometimes thousands in number, whom they typically shot in pits that became their mass graves. Mass-shooting operations like these annihilated approximately two million Jews.

Only after 1940, as each of the major death camps at Chełmno, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka, and Auschwitz-Birkenau became fully operational, did poison gas become the chief means of murder. Tens of thousands of other Jews succumbed to starvation, privation and disease in hundreds of ghettos and forced-labor camps.

Mr. Stone makes clear that all these killings, on so vast a scale and in so many locations, could not have been accomplished without the help of collaborators. .... (more)

Diane Cole, "The Road to Genocide," The Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2024.

Boredom

From a First Things review of Why Boredom Matters: Education, Leisure, and the Quest for a Meaningful Life:

Money and honor, the traditional rewards of work, do not satisfy because money begets the need for more money and honor is fleeting. Even pleasure is tiresome after a while. Who, in the waning days of a vacation, has not itched to get back to a “normal” routine? In reaching the limits of work and pleasure alike we are prone to boredom, disillusionment, and depression. Gary proposes that leisure and liberal education can remedy these unpleasant states. I agree. But the escape from boredom may require a still more radical transformation of will, and that transformation may be something we cannot accomplish by ourselves. ....

Why does nothing seem interesting, everything dull and gray? The answer might be not that the world is boring, but that we ourselves are dull, shallow, and malformed. This ignorance and lack of formation is partly due to the usual suspects of modern culture—vacuous television programs, electronic devices in general, the advertising industry—but we have allowed these influences to shape us. ....

The bitter truth is that we modern Americans are privileged to have enormous potential for leisure and liberal education; yet we cannot seem to understand or desire it. ....

The stubborn characters who appear in C.S. Lewis’s book The Great Divorce illustrate the immense difficulty of such an escape. In this short fantasy, heavenly spirits welcome their visitors from Hell, urging them to forget themselves and embrace the great joy and release that await them in Christ.

Instead, almost to a person, the visitors refuse to relinquish their hard-won identities. The bishop wants to continue his intellectual questioning and paper-giving; the painter insists upon continuing to paint; the mother protests that her love for her son is more important than anything else. All perversely refuse to see the beauty that is right in front of them... Perhaps only prayer can really deliver us from our willful pride and self-centeredness, traits that seem to stick with us despite our best efforts. .... (more)

Elizabeth C. Corey, "Leisure and Liberality," First Things, Oct., 2023.

"It all starts from such a kindly place"

Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel, It Can't Happen Here was about Fascism coming to America. He was supposing that the unimaginable might come true. Not so long ago the thought of state-sponsored suicide was unimaginable. Douglas Murray on Canada's MAiD ("Medical Assistance in Dying"):

.... Lovely, liberal Canada actually legalised ‘assisted death’ in 2016, but only for people with terminal illness. As long-term readers will know, this is a slope that I have worried about for some time, for there is a slipperiness to it. Sure enough, two years ago Canada expanded the law to encompass people who had non-terminal conditions. As of next year the criteria will expand again, this time to take in people whose sole underlying condition is mental illness.

You could see this coming. ....

You can expect Canada to find a lot of other ailments to cure in the years ahead. Just last year a Canadian armed forces veteran who has been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) sought support from Veterans Affairs Canada. An employee of the agency asked him if he had considered taking advantage of the new euthanasia options available in Canada. The veteran in question said that this was suggested unprompted. ....

It is a Canadian twist on a Belgian horror I pointed out here last year. That was the case of Shanti De Corte, a young woman who, at the age of 17, had been caught up in the 2016 Brussels airport attack and had seen a number of her classmates die. Last year she opted to be ‘euthanised’. Alleged members of the cell who carried out the 2016 attack are still on trial in Belgium, but whether or not they are found guilty none of course can be given the death penalty. Because Europe, like lovely, liberal Canada, does not believe in the death penalty for criminals. Only for victims.

And so it does seem likely that at some point after March Canada will be able to go down a similar hell-path. As well as being able to kill the victims of crime and terror, they will be able to kill (or award ‘medically assisted suicide’) to people of any age who suffer from anorexia, depression, PTSD or a growing smorgasbord of other debilitating ailments. ....

Naturally I must stress, as does the Canadian government, that this ‘complex and deeply personal issue’ will ‘reflect Canadians’ needs’ and ‘protect those who may be vulnerable, and support autonomy and freedom of choice’. It all starts from such a kindly place. It’s all about bodily autonomy, you see, and freedom – including freedom of choice. That’s why the Canadian government is giving out information for all those who will become eligible for euthanasia in March. ....

Douglas Murray, "Canada’s assisted dying horror story," The Spectator (UK), July 22, 2023.

A slippery slope

From "The Week" by National Review's editors:

In 2016 legal suicide was introduced into Canada, and now that country has one of the most destructively persuasive euthanasia regimes in the world. Of all deaths in Canada, 3.3 percent are now caused by doctors who practice “medical assistance in dying.” The public appears all too enthusiastic. According to polls by Research Co., over a quarter of Canadians believe that their fellow citizens should have access to legal euthanasia because of poverty. Twenty-eight percent believe that an acceptable reason to request a medically assessed death is homelessness. The numbers rise to 43 percent for mental illness, 50 percent for disability, and 51 percent for inability to receive treatment. Progressive societies used to pride themselves on social services and welfare. Should it not trouble the relatively wealthy Canadian nation and its government that state services are now seen as so inadequate that a publicly accepted alternative is death itself?

"The Week," National Review, May 11, 2023.

Nothing new under the sun

Joseph Loconte on Chesterton, CS Lewis, and ‘Following the Science’:

In the 1920s, when he was still an agnostic, C.S. Lewis noted in his diary his latest reading: “Began G.K. Chesterton’s Eugenics and Other Evils.”

A controversial English Catholic writer, Chesterton published his book in 1922, when the popularity of eugenics was at flood tide. Respectable opinion on both sides of the Atlantic embraced the concept: a scientific approach to selective breeding to reduce, and eventually eliminate, the category of people considered mentally and morally deficient. ....

It is hard to overstate the degree to which eugenics captured the imagination of the medical and scientific communities in the early 20th century. Anthropologist Francis Galton, who coined the term — from the Greek for “good birth” — argued that scientific techniques for breeding healthier animals should be applied to human beings. Those considered to be “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” or “feebleminded” would be targeted. Anticipating public opposition, Galton told scientific gatherings that eugenics “must be introduced into the national conscience like a new religion.” Premier scientific organizations, such as the American Museum of Natural History, and institutions such as Harvard and Princeton, preached the eugenics gospel: They held conferences, published papers, provided research funding, and advocated for sterilization laws. ....

...Chesterton acknowledged the historic problem of churches’ enlisting the secular state to enforce religious doctrine. But he turned the issue around by accusing scientific elites of repeating the errors of the Inquisition:

The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that is really proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen — that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.

Under the eugenics vision, society’s most vulnerable would not find compassion and aid; they would find the surgeon’s knife. As Chesterton quipped, there would be no sympathy for the character of Tiny Tim, the crippled boy of the Cratchit family in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. “The Eugenicist, for all I know, would regard the mere existence of Tiny Tim as a sufficient reason for massacring the whole family of Cratchit.” ....

The ultimate political triumph of this idea, of course, arrived with the Nazis and their assault on the handicapped, homosexuals, gypsies, Jews, and anyone considered an enemy of the state. Indeed, Nazi doctors corresponded with American eugenicists as they designed their own sterilization programs.

The eugenics movement, as Chesterton predicted, became a wretched story of the negation of democratic ideals to serve a utopian vision. ....

C.S. Lewis, the Oxford don whose conversion to Christianity was aided by Chesterton’s theological writings, also watched these developments with horror. Like Chesterton, he warned of the scientist untethered from the restraints of traditional morality or religion.

“The man-molders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique,” Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man. In such an age, he predicted, man’s supposed conquest over nature would not lead to his liberation — quite the opposite. “For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.” (more)

Joseph Loconte, "One Hundred Years Ago, ‘Following the Science’ Meant Supporting Eugenics," National Review, July 17, 2022.

The same you

I became an opponent of abortion while in high school, some years before Roe, not because of my religious convictions, but because of what I had learned about biology. Since then my faith has certainly reinforced my belief that the lives of unborn human beings ought to be protected, but I think I would hold the same moral and political position if I were an unbeliever. Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker:

.... Regardless of the unborn child’s stage of development, whether he is four weeks old or thirty-three weeks old, abortion kills the same person. Abortion ends a life—a human life, the life of a distinct and unique human being. The science couldn’t be clearer, nor could the ultrasound photos shared when couples happily announce a new baby is on the way. ....

The pro-life point of view is based on the undeniable biological fact that a human being exists from conception. The human embryo and fetus, no less than the human infant or adolescent, is a living member of the species Homo sapiens—a human being. “Embryo,” “fetus,” “infant,” “child,” “adolescent,” and “adult” are not names for different kinds of beings, they are names for the same kind of being at different stages of their natural development. The adult you is the same you who at an earlier stage of his or her development was the adolescent you, the infant you, the fetal you, the embryonic you.

This is not a religious belief but a scientific fact. Pro-life laws are built on that biological reality and on a moral judgment about the intrinsic equal value of human life—regardless of size, developmental stage, or cognitive abilities. ....

Moral claims are either good or bad, true or false, regarding the dignity of the human person. There’s no escaping it. To be pro-life entails insisting that the law protect the unborn. To extend legal protection to persons according to some other criteria, such as self-awareness or the immediately exercisable capacity to reason, is to place human dignity on a spectrum, an arbitrary spectrum at that. Those who would deny human dignity to unborn human beings—and thus deny them the law’s protection—are the ones who rely on an indefensible ideology (it doesn’t deserve to be called “religious”) that views some human beings as non-persons. How it is that that ideological belief can serve as the basis of our laws, but the moral truth of human equality cannot, is never explained. ....

People are free to have sex or not, but individuals should not be free to kill the children they conceive—at any stage. The child’s right to life entails the adults’ (the parents’) duty to care and thus places limits on our liberties. As a result, there can be no real right to abortion. Rather, there is the right of every child not to be the object of a choice whose specific goal is to end his or her life..... (more)

Ryan T. Anderson and Andrew Walker, "No, Overturning Roe Would Not Establish Theocracy," First Things, May 23, 2022.

"The power of Man to make himself what he pleases..."

"The Best C.S. Lewis Book You’ve Never Read" is the title of a post reviewing a new guide to C.S. Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943). I have read that book, although not recently. It is short—my copy has only 62 pages. It is definitely worth the time. The review inspired me to go looking for quotations from the book and found this one, perhaps even more relevant today than when written:

.... The final stage is come when Man by eugenics, by pre-natal conditioning, and by an education and propaganda based on a perfect applied psychology, has obtained full control over himself. Human nature will be the last part of Nature to surrender to Man. The battle will then be won. We shall have ‘taken the thread of life out of the hand of Clotho’ and be henceforth free to make our species whatever we wish it to be. The battle will indeed be won. But who, precisely, will have won it? For the power of Man to make himself what he pleases means, as we have seen, the power of some men to make other men what they please.

…the man-moulders of the new age will be armed with the powers of an omnicompetent state and an irresistible scientific technique: we shall get at last a race of conditioners who really can cut out all posterity in what shape they please.”

In the older systems both the kind of man the teachers wished to produce and their motives for producing him were prescribed by the Tao [Logos, Absolute, etc.] – a norm to which the teachers themselves were subject and from which they claimed no liberty to depart. They did not cut men to some pattern they had chosen. They handed on what they had received: they initiated the young neophyte into the mystery of humanity which over-arched him and them alike. It was but old birds teaching young birds to fly. This will be changed. Values are now mere natural phenomena. Judgments of value are to be produced in the pupil as part of the conditioning. Whatever Tao there is will be the product, not the motive, of education.

Review: After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’s The Abolition of Man

"Good science"

From an important essay, "Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?":

.... The Nazi euthanasia campaign was publicly justified with four main arguments. First, ridding Germany of the unfit was simply “good science.” Who better to determine what constituted good science than German physicians, who were already the best in the world? The experts knew what was best for the German body.

Second, euthanasia was deemed humane. Since it was supported and implemented by a profession with a long tradition of healing and caring, the argument was even more persuasive. Pediatric euthanasia was often supported by many parents of disabled children for this reason; yet, with mixed motivation, for many wanted to avoid the strong stigma of having a disabled child. This conflict of interest shows how medical culture can influence the ethics of both individuals and society at large. ....

By the end of the “T4” program to euthanize disabled adults and children, between 70,000 and 100,000 persons had lost their lives; stigma against the vulnerable in attitude and language had become codified in law. According to Proctor, these three programs—forced sterilization of the “unfit,” the Nuremberg Laws, and the euthanasia laws—were the primary means the Nazi physicians and scientists used to accomplish “racial hygiene,” and led directly to the technological and medical surge responsible for genocide at the death camps. ....

The physicians who actively aided the Holocaust believed that they were practicing “good science.” But scientific truth alone does not “grasp” the reality of life, and if we believe it so, we are further on the road to what the late Jean Bethke-Elshtain called “scientific fundamentalism.” Physicians and health care professionals must, therefore, remember the Holocaust, but remember, as Pope John Paul II said on his visit to Yad Vashem, to “remember with a purpose.” ....

...[S]ociety is created for the person, not the person for society, and hence the dignity and integrity of the person and her freedom cannot be sacrificed for the sake of society. No contingent factor—race, religion, economic status, disability, or actions of the past, present or future—can rob a person the dignity she is owed. ....

.... Targeted abortion for unborn children with genetic conditions such as trisomy 21 and cystic fibrosis have reduced populations by more than 90%, and are justified on utilitarian grounds. But if a person is the fundamental unit of value of our society, then no “other good” can eclipse her. Politically, legally, and medically, this would mean an expansive and firm definition of person, for it is a far smaller risk to give protection to an entity where personhood is possible, than to destroy the life a person who in the end deserved our protection. ....  (much more)

Why Did So Many Doctors Become Nazis?

Anti-racism

"Rethinking Race" is thought provoking and very much worth your time.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, to be a progressive, right-thinking American intellectual was to believe in the genetic superiority of certain racial groups. Otherwise known as eugenics or race science, the idea that races can be readily sorted along an immutable biological hierarchy had far-reaching policy implications, from marriage laws to immigration, and heavily influenced the racial policies of Nazi Germany. The logical conclusion of the belief that racial groups were inherently distinct from one another was that societal disparities between them must be a consequence of nature, rather than the results of a complex tangle of socioeconomic, cultural, historical and other demographic forces. At the time, to offer a critique of the prevailing vision of race, such as those made by Franz Boas and G.K. Chesterton, could have resulted in social stigma and opened up the critic to the charge of being on the wrong side of history.

What is considered progress at a given point in history can, with the passage of time and the advent of better information, come to look like the opposite. Nowhere is that juxtaposition more stark than on the loaded subject of race in America. ....

The term racecraft refers to all the ways in which we uphold the psycho-social construct of race, from subtle acts of projection to overt discrimination and brutal suppression. “Disguised as race, racism becomes something Afro-Americans are, rather than something racists do.” The one-drop rule under the systems of slavery and Jim Crow—whereby a drop of African blood made a person socially black even if their ancestry was largely European—is a clear example of the mental contortions necessary for racecraft. ....

.... When we look at race through a sociological microscope, isolating it from other associated factors such as culture, ethnic background, national identity and politics—we are left with almost nothing of any meaning or value: it refers to the general region of the world most of a person’s recent ancestors came from and may imply a heightened or reduced risk of certain medical conditions at the margins. But race itself has no human weight. ....

White supremacy was an abomination because it ascribed moral meaning to the arbitrary and unchosen fact of skin color. Yet much of what constitutes antiracism today is effectively an inverse continuation of this misbegotten belief. We see this in the lack of emphasis on concrete policy issues and the focus on totalizing theories of whiteness, privilege and structural oppression. We see this in the conceptual expansion of the term racism from individual discriminatory behaviors to an unconscious systemic bias that is built into the edifice of society itself. We see this in the cynical tokenization of minorities to score political points. We see this in the way the racial double standards of the past are used to justify racial double standards in the present. We see this in the unwillingness to track the astounding racial progress of the past 60 years. ....

Racial categories promote thinking in terms of race. As the ethnic composition of the country rapidly changes over the coming decades, it’s imperative to consider which guiding principles will allow us to see past superficial differences and embrace what we have in common as citizens and human beings. At the moment, we’re doing a terrible job of this. We need a different vision for American society, what Ralph Ellison called a new American humanism, which views the diverse strands of American identity in positive-sum terms and rejects all forms of identity essentialism. .... (more)

Rethinking Race – Areo

Find a common hate

When I studied American history in high school and college Woodrow Wilson was considered one of the good guys, a great President, a Progressive who advanced needed reforms like TR did. Jonah Goldberg, in "Cancel Woodrow Wilson" explains why, in the midst of a lot of stupid "cancelings," he's pretty much OK with this one:

...[T]here’s a difference between a flawed agent of positive change and an unalloyed champion of turning back the clock.

I don’t want to go down that rabbit hole, save to make this point: Wilson was a reactionary on race and the Confederate cause in his own time. The first Southerner to take the White House since before the Civil War—a war in which he thought the good guys lost. When he came to Washington, one of his first priorities was to undo the racial progress made by the Republicans: He restored segregation in the federal government. Blacks were sent to different bathrooms, cafeterias, etc. in the name of racial hygiene. When a delegation of black leaders visited the White House, he told them, “segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen.” When one journalist objected, Wilson snapped, “Your manner offends me,” and he was sent packing.

“I have recently spent several days in Washington,” Booker T. Washington wrote after visiting D.C. during Wilson’s first term, “and I have never seen the colored people so discouraged and bitter as they are at the present time.”

It’s important to note that Wilson’s racism was only partly a function of his Southern heritage. He was a thoroughly modern progressive (as were many Southern politicians). .... More often than not, Wilson justified his racism not in the language of Southern heritage but in the “scientific” language of eugenics. His academic writing is saturated with talk of “inferior races,” “stagnant nationalities” and “Aryan” superiority. Wilson was an unapologetic subscriber to various notions of eugenics (and as governor of New Jersey, he created the Board of Examiners of Feeble-minded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives).

This is an important point because many apologists for Wilson—or progressivism—like to pretend that the original Progressivism and racism were at some fundamental level in conflict. They weren’t. Not all progressives were racists, but a great many racists were progressives, and a great many racist doctrines were central to progressivism.

But it would be a shame to let this crisis for Wilson-lovers go by without seizing the opportunity to point out why he was horrible for reasons beyond his racism.

First of all, he was astoundingly petty. When a British friend asked Col. Edward House—Wilson’s top adviser—for advice on how best to approach Wilson, House told him “Never begin by arguing. Discover a common hate, exploit it, get the President warmed up and then start on your business.” White House physician Dr. Cary T. Grayson said that Wilson was a “man of unusually narrow prejudices,” “intolerant of advice.” “If one urges Wilson to do something contrary to his own conviction, he ceases to have any liking for that person.” Sound familiar? ....

Cancel Woodrow Wilson - The G-File

Abortion and eugenics

Justice Clarence Thomas today (pdf), responding to the Court's decision not to consider an appeals court ruling overturning an Indiana abortion law (I have removed references):

I write separately to address the other aspect of Indiana law at issue here—the "Sex Selective and Disability Abortion Ban." This statute makes it illegal for an abortion provider to perform an abortion in Indiana when the provider knows that the mother is seeking the abortion solely because of the child's race, sex, diagnosis of Down syndrome, disability, or related characteristics. (excluding "lethal fetal anomal[ies]" from the definition of disability). The law requires that the mother be advised of this restriction and given information about financial assistance and adoption alternatives, but it imposes liability only on the provider. Each of the immutable characteristics protected by this law can be known relatively early in a pregnancy, and the law prevents them from becoming the sole criterion for deciding whether the child will live or die. Put differently, this law and other laws like it promote a State's compelling interest in preventing abortion from becoming a tool of modern-day eugenics.

The use of abortion to achieve eugenic goals is not merely hypothetical. The foundations for legalizing abortion in America were laid during the early 20th-century birth-control movement. That movement developed alongside the American eugenics movement. And significantly, Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger recognized the eugenic potential of her cause. She emphasized and embraced the notion that birth control "opens the way to the eugenist." Sanger, "Birth Control and Racial Betterment." As a means of reducing the "ever increasing, unceasingly spawning class of human beings who never should have been born at all," Sanger argued that "Birth Control...is really the greatest and most truly eugenic method" of "human generation." In her view, birth control had been "accepted by the most clear thinking and far seeing of the Eugenists themselves as the most constructive and necessary of the means to racial health."

It is true that Sanger was not referring to abortion when she made these statements, at least not directly. She recognized a moral difference between "contraceptives" and other, more "extreme" ways for "women to limit their families," such as "the horrors of abortion and infanticide." But Sanger's arguments about the eugenic value of birth control in securing "the elimination of the unfit," apply with even greater force to abortion, making it significantly more effective as a tool of eugenics. Whereas Sanger believed that birth control could prevent "unfit" people from reproducing, abortion can prevent them from being born in the first place. Many eugenicists therefore supported legalizing abortion, and abortion advocates—including future Planned Parenthood President Alan Guttmacher endorsed the use of abortion for eugenic reasons. Technological advances have only heightened the eugenic potential for abortion, as abortion can now be used to eliminate children with unwanted characteristics, such as a particular sex or disability.

Given the potential for abortion to become a tool of eugenic manipulation, the Court will soon need to confront the constitutionality of laws like Indiana's. But because further percolation may assist our review of this issue of first impression, I join the Court in declining to take up the issue now. (more, pdf)

Unworthy lives

Robert P. George:

"60,000 Reichsmark is what this person suffering
from a hereditary defect costs the People's
community during his lifetime.
Fellow citizen, that is your money too."

.... The Holocaust—the Shoah—did not begin with the mass killing of Jews or other ethnic or religious minorities, or even Hitler’s political opponents. It began with the killing of the handicapped and infirm. They were, according to Nazi ideology, “useless eaters,” “parasites,” lebensunwertes leben (“lives unworthy of life”). It is important to remember that this eugenic doctrine did not originate with the Nazis. It began with polite, urbane, well-educated, sophisticated people who saw “social hygiene” via, among other methods, euthanasia, as representing progress and modernity. They wanted to ditch the old Judaeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of all human life and replace it with what they regarded as a more advanced and rational philosophy.

This was the view articulated by, for example, noted legal scholar Karl Binding and psychiatrist Alfred Hoche in their treatise Permitting the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life, published in 1920. Binding and Hoche were not Nazis, and when they were writing their book the Nazi party didn’t even exist. In a few years, however, Hitler and the Nazis would adopt their ideas about “social hygiene” (mixing in racialist ideology and nostalgia for a mythical golden age of Teutonic paganism) and carry out the euthanasia program with a remorseless, pitiless fervor. Thus, began what became the Shoah—the murder of six million Jews, two to three million Russians, two million ethnic Poles, and nearly countless other so-called “undesirables.”

Yes, let us truly say, from our hearts and with conviction: “Never again.”

On Holocaust Remembrance Day | Robert P. George | First Things, Life unworthy of life - Wikipedia

"Weeding out the runts"

Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian on "one of the grisliest skeletons in the cupboard of the British intellectual elite" and, it should be noted, not only in Britain.

.... It is eugenics, the belief that society's fate rested on its ability to breed more of the strong and fewer of the weak. So-called positive eugenics meant encouraging those of greater intellectual ability and "moral worth" to have more children, while negative eugenics sought to urge, or even force, those deemed inferior to reproduce less often or not at all. The aim was to increase the overall quality of the national herd, multiplying the thoroughbreds and weeding out the runts.

...[I]n the prewar era it was the common sense of the age. Most alarming, many of its leading advocates were found among the luminaries of the Fabian and socialist left, men and women revered to this day. Thus George Bernard Shaw could insist that "the only fundamental and possible socialism is the socialisation of the selective breeding of man", even suggesting, in a phrase that chills the blood, that defectives be dealt with by means of a "lethal chamber".

Such thinking was not alien to the great Liberal titan and mastermind of the welfare state, William Beveridge, who argued that those with "general defects" should be denied not only the vote, but "civil freedom and fatherhood". Indeed, a desire to limit the numbers of the inferior was written into modern notions of birth control from the start. That great pioneer of contraception, Marie Stopes – honoured with a postage stamp in 2008 – was a hardline eugenicist, determined that the "hordes of defectives" be reduced in number, thereby placing less of a burden on "the fit". Stopes later disinherited her son because he had married a short-sighted woman, thereby risking a less-than-perfect grandchild. ....

.... Harold Laski, stellar LSE professor, co-founder of the Left Book Club and one-time chairman of the Labour party, cautioned that: "The time is surely coming…when society will look upon the production of a weakling as a crime against itself." Meanwhile, JBS Haldane, admired scientist and socialist, warned that: "Civilisation stands in real danger from over-production of 'undermen'." That's Untermenschen in German. ....

...[T]he eugenics movement's definition of "unfit" was not limited to the physically or mentally impaired. It held, he writes, "that most of the behavioural traits that led to poverty were inherited. In short, that the poor were genetically inferior to the educated middle class." It was not poverty that had to be reduced or even eliminated: it was the poor.

Hence the enthusiasm of John Maynard Keynes, director of the Eugenics Society from 1937 to 1944, for contraception, essential because the working class was too "drunken and ignorant" to keep its numbers down. ....

They believed in science and progress, and nothing was more cutting edge and modern than social Darwinism. Man now had the ability to intervene in his own evolution. Instead of natural selection and the law of the jungle, there would be planned selection. And what could be more socialist than planning, the Fabian faith that the gentlemen in Whitehall really did know best? If the state was going to plan the production of motor cars in the national interest, why should it not do the same for the production of babies? The aim was to do what was best for society, and society would clearly be better off if there were more of the strong to carry fewer of the weak. .... [more]

Not unrelated:

Eugenics: the skeleton that rattles loudest in the left's closet | Jonathan Freedland | Opinion | The Guardian

When racism was Progressive

"Harvard's eugenics era," in Harvard Magazine is about the promotion of the theory of eugenics by scientists associated with that school. Harvard was hardly unique. As the article notes, "Eugenics attracted considerable support from progressives, reformers, and educated elites as a way of using science to make a better world." Eugenics "insisted that human progress depended on promoting reproduction by the best people in the best combinations, and preventing the unworthy from having children." The excerpts below show the application of the theory to race and ethnicity, although the article deals with many of the other aspects of the theory as argued by its proponents.

.... Harvard’s geneticists gave important support to Galton’s fledgling would-be science. Botanist Edward M. East, who taught at Harvard’s Bussey Institution, propounded a particularly racial version of eugenics. In his 1919 book Inbreeding and Outbreeding: Their Genetic and Sociological Significance, East warned that race mixing would diminish the white race, writing: “Races have arisen which are as distinct in mental capacity as in physical traits.” The simple fact, he said, was that “the negro is inferior to the white.”

East also sounded a biological alarm about the Jews, Italians, Asians, and other foreigners who were arriving in large numbers. “The early settlers came from stock which had made notable contributions to civilization,” he asserted, whereas the new immigrants were coming “in increasing numbers from peoples who have impressed modern civilization but lightly.” There was a distinct possibility, he warned, that a “considerable part of these people are genetically undesirable.” ....

East’s Bussey Institution colleague William Ernest Castle taught a course on “Genetics and Eugenics,” one of a number of eugenics courses across the University. He also published a leading textbook by the same name that shaped the views of a generation of students nationwide. Genetics and Eugenics not only identified its author as “Professor of Zoology in Harvard University,” but was published by Harvard University Press and bore the “Veritas” seal on its title page, lending the appearance of an imprimatur to his strongly stated views.

In Genetics and Eugenics, Castle explained that race mixing, whether in animals or humans, produced inferior offspring. He believed there were superior and inferior races, and that “racial crossing” benefited neither. “From the viewpoint of a superior race there is nothing to be gained by crossing with an inferior race,” he wrote. “From the viewpoint of the inferior race also the cross is undesirable if the two races live side by side, because each race will despise individuals of mixed race and this will lead to endless friction.” ....

One of Harvard’s most prominent psychology professors was a eugenicist who pioneered the use of questionable intelligence testing. Robert M. Yerkes, A.B. 1898, Ph.D. ’02, published an introductory psychology textbook in 1911 that included a chapter on “Eugenics and Mental Life.” In it, he explained that “the cure for race deterioration is the selection of the fit as parents.” ....

Another eugenicist in a key position was William McDougall, who held the psychology professorship William James had formerly held. His 1920 book The Group Mind explained that the “negro” race had “never produced any individuals of really high mental and moral endowments” and was apparently “incapable” of doing so. His next book, Is America Safe for Democracy (1921), argued that civilizations declined because of “the inadequacy of the qualities of the people who are the bearers of it”—and advocated eugenic sterilization. .... [more]

Eugenics gave "scientific" justification for racism and bigotry. These academics thought themselves "on the right side of history" and undoubtedly despised benighted souls who resisted the "consensus" of science.

G.K. Chesterton, in the same times:

“The thing that really is trying to tyrannize through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statutes, and spread not by pilgrims but by policemen—that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics. Materialism is really our established Church; for the government will really help it to persecute its heretics…I am not frightened of the word ‘persecution’…It is a term of legal fact. If it means the imposition by the police of a widely disputed theory, incapable of final proof—then our priests are not now persecuting, but our doctors are.”
Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized State, 1922.

Harvard's eugenics era | Harvard Magazine

"No moral rudders"

In his review of Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics & American Economics in the Progressive Era the New Republic's Malcolm Harris describes the darker side of certain early 20^th century reformers:

The 1926 case Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes is a favorite liberal American story. On one side, a substitute accused of teaching evolution, the famed progressive attorney Clarence Darrow, and science itself. On the other, the state of Tennessee, creationism, and the populist demagogue William Jennings Bryan, who by the end of the trial was only days from death. Scopes lost the battle, but reason and progress won the war and the film adaptation. ....

When one revisits the primary material, however, the mainstream liberal narrative is far too simple. Jennings Bryan railed against evolution, true, but not just evolution as we understand the theory today. ...[A]t the time evolution came with a social agenda that its proponents taught as fact. Jennings Bryan didn’t use its name; today, we call it eugenics.

Scopes was charged for teaching from a textbook called A Civic Biology: Presented in Problems, published in 1914. The book taught Darwin’s doctrine as fact, but it didn’t leave his conclusions there. The author, George William Hunter, not only asserted the biological difference of races, he insisted on the vital importance of what he called “the science of being well born”—eugenics. Like most progressives of the time, Hunter believed in “the improvement of man” via scientific methods. That meant promoting personal hygiene, proper diet, and reproductive control. A Civic Biology also has suggestions for what to do with “bad-gened” people, in a section called “The Remedy.” “If such people were lower animals,” the books says, “we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity would not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe.”

The textbook was wrong, both about degenerate genes and humanity’s near-term tolerance for genocide. Read between the twin specters of human engineering, The Holocaust and the American slave-breeding industry—the abolition of which was younger than Jennings Bryan—the warning in his closing argument seems not only warranted, but prophetic:

Science is a magnificent material force, but it is not a teacher of morals. It can perfect machinery, but it adds no moral restraints to protect society from the misuse of the machine. It can also build gigantic intellectual ships, but it constructs no moral rudders for the control of storm-tossed human vessels. It not only fails to supply the spiritual element needed, but some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo.

“Some of its unproven hypotheses rob the slip of its compass and thus endanger its cargo” is a near-perfect criticism of evolutionary theory and the era’s progressive thought as a whole. And if today’s liberals were to revisit their ideological foundations with some attention, they might not like what they see. .... It’s impossible to understand early twentieth-century progressives without eugenics. Even worker-friendly reforms like the minimum wage were part of a racial hygiene agenda. The progressives believed male Anglo-Saxons were the most productive workers, but immigrants and women were willing to accept lower wages and displaced white men. Capitalism was getting in the way of human improvement, promoting inferior genes for near-term profits. “Competition has no respect for the superior races,” Leonard quotes the economist John R. Commons on Jews. “The race with lowest necessities displaces others.” Commons found common cause with the xenophobic wing of the organized labor movement.

The minimum wage, in addition to providing some workers with a better standard of living, would guard white men from competition. ....

Oliver Wendell Holmes

.... Charles Cooley, a founding member of American Sociological Association, warned that providing health care and nutrition for black Americans could be “dysgenic” if not accompanied by population control. The eugenicists weren’t just dreaming: Between 1900 and the early 1980s, over 60,000 Americans were involuntarily sterilized under the law.

To bring right-wing fears full circle, the progressive Supreme Court of 1927 (including Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis) ruled 8-1 in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilization was constitutional. Holmes wrote that, “It is better for all the world 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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.” .... [more]

Rod Dreher on this book and "The Return of Eugenics"

The Dark History of Liberal Reform | New Republic

Monkey Trial

Upon arriving this Sabbath at the church where we worship we discovered that our usual location had been taken over as a dressing room by a group performing "Inherit the Wind," a play based on the Scopes trial. That trial took place ninety years ago last week. (The following was previously posted on this site):

In early July, 1925, in Dayton, Tennessee, the trial of John Scopes began. He was charged with violating a Tennessee law against the teaching of evolution in the public schools. He was guilty — he had intentionally violated the law. In this essay, "Revisiting The Scopes Trial," Peter Berger contends that one consequence of the trial "was to fortify a secularist worldview in the American intelligentsia, with a concomitant perception of Evangelicals as backwoods illiterates. The intellectual decline of Evangelicals has stopped. The secularist bias of intellectuals has not. It may be a good time to revisit the event."

The Scopes Trial took place in 1925 in Dayton, Tennessee. John Scopes, a high school biology teacher, was tried for having violated the state’s Butler Act, which prohibited the teaching of evolution. It was a staged event, with Scopes volunteering to test the constitutionality of the law. The American Civil Liberties Union (then as now an ardent defender of free speech and of the separation of church and state) played an important role in the staging. It organized his defense. It recruited the star defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow (1857-1938), who stole the show. To counteract Darrow, the prosecution recruited William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)—a leading Evangelical with an impressive political profile, and a liberal who had three times been a Democratic candidate for the presidency, as well as having served as secretary of state under Woodrow Wilson. Darrow was widely known as a brilliant lawyer, an outspoken agnostic, and a strong opponent of capital punishment.

Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan

Not surprisingly, the trial attracted wide attention. It became a regular media circus. .... An army of journalists descended on the obscure provincial town, including some from Europe. H.L. Mencken reported on the trial for the Baltimore Sun (which, by the way, paid Scopes’ bail). Mencken’s account has become iconic, although (perhaps because) it was very prejudiced. He described the denizens of the town as “yokels” and “morons” (initiating what has been an elite view of Southern Evangelicals ever since). He called Bryan “a buffoon”, spouting “theologic bilge”. By contrast, he was full of admiration for the eloquence and wit of Darrow. Mencken and Darrow not only shared a contempt for the unwashed masses. They also had similar views of religion. Darrow once remarked that he did not believe in God for the same reason he did not believe in Mother Goose. Mencken wrote that the world was a gigantic ferris wheel, man a flea sitting on the wheel, religion as the flea’s belief that the wheel was constructed for the purpose of transporting it. Mencken’s account of the Scopes Trial formed the basis of a successful Broadway play, “Inherit the Wind” (1955), and of an even more successful film of the same name (1960 – there have been at least two later films).

Darrow was the clear winner in his duel with Bryan. History is written by the victors. Mencken’s narrative, enormously enhanced on stage and screen, has become dominant—a dramatic victory of reason over superstitious ignorance. There is another way of looking at this. ....

A year before, in 1924, Darrow headed the defense of the Leopold-Loeb trial in Chicago. That trial too has become well known. It concerned the murder of a fourteen-year old boy by two affluent young men who fancied themselves “supermen” as (they thought) glorified by Nietzsche. (Curiously, this was also a philosopher greatly admired by Mencken.) They wanted the thrill of committing the perfect crime. In this, they failed—they were promptly caught. Darrow realized that he had a “hanging jury” to contend with. .... Darrow’s main argument for the defense, an eloquent plea for mercy, has been deemed one of the great speeches in American legal history. He succeeded in avoiding a death sentence....

I find it very interesting that Bryan actually referred to Darrow’s role in the Leopold-Loeb case during the Scopes Trial. He quoted a rather revealing sentence from Darrow’s argument in the earlier trial: “This terrible crime was inherent in his [that is, one defendant’s] organism, and it came from some ancestor”. Bryan rightly saw this as a reference to evolution. Bryan then proposed that such crimes are the logical result of teaching children that humans are just one species of mammals, descended (he added sarcastically) “not even from American mammals, but from old world monkeys”. Let me paraphrase Bryan’s understanding of Darrow’s argument: We are all animals. Therefore, we should be merciful, and we should not impose the death penalty. ....

...Bryan was right for a very profound reason. Religious faith is not the necessary foundation for the quality of mercy. Darrow’s agnosticism did not prevent his passionate conviction about the inhumanity of capital punishment. But this conviction cannot be derived from science. It is derived from a distinctive perception of the human condition that can neither be validated nor falsified by science. Faith is not the only source of this perception. But it is an important one (historically a very important one). The Biblical view of the human condition, in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, teaches the dignity of every human being as created in God’s image. Bryan, with all his untenable fundamentalist views, understood this. Darrow (and Mencken) did not. [more]

An excellent history of the trial is Summer for the Gods: The Scopes Trial and America's Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion.

Re-posted from another anniversary of the trial: 

Glenn Reynolds notes the anniversary of the Scopes Trial: "...what you think you know about it is probably wrong — especially if what you think you know about it comes from watching Inherit The Wind. One of the comments to his post asserts that the controversy "wasn't about evolution but eugenics" and in support links to a selection of passages from the textbook that caused the controversy. For example:

The Races of Man. — At the present time there exist upon the earth five races or varieties of man, each very different from the other in instincts, social customs, and, to an extent, in structure. These are the Ethiopian or negro type, originating in Africa; the Malay or brown race, from the islands of the Pacific; the American Indian; the Mongolian or yellow race, including the natives of China, Japan, and the Eskimos; and finally, the highest race type of all, the Caucasians, represented by the civilized white inhabitants of Europe and America.

Eugenics. — When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, syphilis, that dread disease which cripples and kills hundreds of thousands of innocent children, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science of being well born is called eugenics.

Parasitism and its Cost to Society. — Hundreds of families such as those described above exist to-day, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease, but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.

Problem: Should the feeble-minded be allowed to marry?

The Remedy. — If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country. [more]

Revisiting The Scopes Trial | Religion and Other Curiosities, Instapundit » Blog Archive » WITH PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE SCOPES TRIAL, let me just note that what you think …, The Scopes Trial:

Marginal children

Jonathan Gruber's infamy results from the numerous times he declared that Obamacare only passed because citizens were too "stupid" to realize what they were supporting. His testimony before a House committee reveals something much worse about what he believes:

The scariest words uttered during Jonathan Gruber’s recent appearance before the House Oversight Committee were “positive selection.” They were read aloud by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, from a 1997 paper the professor co-authored concerning abortion. The opus in question made the Congressman uneasy because of the following passage: “By 1993 all cohorts under the age 19 were born under legalized abortion and we estimate steady state savings of $1.6 billion per year from positive selection.” Rep. Massie asked the professor what was meant by “positive selection.” This question was evidently not anticipated in Gruber’s pre-testimony coaching, so he became evasive.

Considering what it means, this is no surprise. “Positive selection” is no ordinary example of academic jargon. The term is frequently used by evolutionary biologists, who tell us it is responsible for the development of “traits that define our species—notably the enormous brain, advanced cognitive abilities, complex vocal organs, bipedalism and opposable thumbs.” And Gruber refers to mass abortions of unborn babies, whom he describes as “marginal children,” as an example of positive selection that includes the added benefit of saving the government money. ....

Obamacare and Eugenics | The American Spectator