Teddy Roosevelt, eugenicist

[WildNovember]

I'm reading "War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race," a history of the eugenics movement. This quotation made me sit up:

In a letter to Charles Davenport, a leader of the US eugenics movement and head of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, the epicenter of the movement, TR says:

"I agree with you...that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind...Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen type of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."

Other things that made me sit up: US financing for German eugenics research and other direct ties (including shared personnel) between the US eugenics movement and Nazi extermination programs; my own state's eugenics/sterilization laws, which stayed on the books until 1967 & similar laws in many other states; the presence of eugenicists in science, political office, and media, and; discussion of the "lethal chamber" for "degenerates" in the US.

Also the sheer scope of US programs, which sent hundreds of nosy parkers out across the country to snoop into people's backgrounds generations back -- investigating them for ancestors who might have been "feeble-minded," criminal, "degenerate", over-sexed, black...

Not to mention the extra-legal sterilizations....initiated by the same nosy parkers and officious "scientists"....

All funded by the "best and the brightest," our ruling class...

Alexander Graham Bell loaned his prestige to the effort until the muckracking Hearst papers made it a bit too hot for him...here's an editorial from the SF Daily News, 1915:

"The millions of Mrs. Harriman, relict of the great railroad 'promoter', assisted by other millions of Rockefeller and Carnegie, are to be devoted to sterilization of several hundred thousands of American 'defectives' annually, as a matter of eugenics.

It is true that we don't yet know all that the millions of our plutocracy can do to the common folks. We see that our moneyed plutocrats can own the governments of whole states, override constitutions, maintain private armies to shoot down men, women and children, and railroad innocent men to life imprisonment for murder or lesser crimes. And IF WE SUBMIT TO SUCH THINGS, we ought not to be surprised if they undertake to sterilize all those who are obnoxious to them..."

Can you imagine seeing anything like that in a major paper today? Not the expose, but the naming of the names of the monied/powerful funders?

In school I was taught the Hearst papers were "yellow journalism" (as opposed, I imagine, to "serious journalism" represented by East Coast papers like the NYT) -- but I think there was a bit more to it than that. I imagine the Hearst papers at the time represented interests opposed to the funders mentioned.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Davenport

[WildNovember]

1. kicking this

[Sinistrous]

2. Kicking it again.