Final Paper

Philosophy 385- essay/paper (50 pts.)

In an essay format, answer one of the following. This is not intended as a “term paper” or “research paper”. It can be adequately completed simply from the textual materials and class discussions. The purpose of this assignment is simply to present a (more) detailed elaboration of an author’s view; or to explain critical competing views. If you wish you can add explicit commentary, but this is not required. The content can be culled from any of the readings on the syllabus.

On this assignment I would expect any positions being discussed to be adequately explained/detailed. To do this you can use quotes, but do so sparingly (and remember an un-attributed quote is technically plagiarized) and always explain their use. (I.e. explain exactly what is being said and how it fits into your overall presentation.)You should utilize examples to explicate any lines of reasoning or concepts as necessary. Further, since this is meant as a written assignment, the organization of the ideas you present should also be consideration.  Again, if you use any quotes explain their use. (They must be identified as such; remember a quote not cited is plagiarized as is using the ideas of others without attribution- plagiarism will result in an F for this assignment- If you’re unsure as to what constitutes plagiarism consult the student handbook.), Most importantly- Detail any lines of reasoning and explain any important concepts, etc. as necessary.

Below are some suggested questions. If you wish you can modify/add to them. Also, you can address an issue of relevance not specifically referred to here (or explicitly discussed in class) If you’re thinking along those lines however you have to let me know, in advance, what topic/question you’re considering; additionally you should provide me with a list of source material also in advance of beginning. This applies to the use of any outside sources -including for the below questions. This is not a research project, the questions can adequately be addressed solely from our source material. That being said if you do use outside material you need to provide me in advance with the title/author/web-address etc. (I mean this literally—any outside material requires approval---that’s 3 times, so, it should stick!) Finally, any outside source would need to be cited in your essay.

Details-

I suspect to adequately answer any of these questions you should expect to write approx. 4-5 pages- standard margins, fonts, etc. (E.g.- 4 pgs. of text is appx 1400 words--although content is much more important than length). Detail and exposition are key to this assignment. Again, if you use quotes elaborate on their use. Although it may be obvious, be sure to give yourself time to proofread your paper to correct any grammatical or language-use errors. I generally don’t lower grades for minor problems along these lines, but if significant they could make the points you’re discussing difficult to follow which could be a considerable problem. No bibliographic references, etc. required unless you use outside material. If you do, a “works cited” page is required. Again, if you do use outside sources you must provide me with that information prior to beginning. Due the day of the final (late papers will be lowered 3 pts.)  Finally, part of your submission of the paper requires uploading an electronic copy of your paper to the “turnitin” link on moodle. (The assignment is not completed/you will not receive a grade until this is done. For a brief discussion of turnitin refer to the syllabus.)

Some possible suggestions:

Marks, Jonathan Human Biodiversity: Genes, Race and History,

-What is eugenics? Describe the difference between positive and negative eugenics. And describe in detail the specific problems that undermine the eugenicist program. (You needn’t discuss the ‘history’ of the movement; rather discuss the ‘scientific’ and philosophic ideas and assumptions, how they were applied and how these applications embody the specific problems you identify.)

In the later part of the 19th century Francis Galton established a goal for the betterment of the human species through eugenics (pg. 77-78). Eugenics is the sets of beliefs and practices of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics. In the study of eugenics there are two types which are, positive eugenics and negative eugenics. Positive eugenics is the advocating for higher rates among people with desired traits while negative eugenics is the reduction of rates or sterilization of sexual reproduction between people with less desired or undesired traits.  Galton’s goal of bettering the human race was influenced by Charles Darwin and thought he could apply Darwin’s natural selection model among humans.“This was due to Galton’s theory influenced by Charles Darwin given that animals could breed animals to establish characteristics in populations, Galton thought he could do the same with humans. The traits which they sought to get rid of was traits such as laziness, mental illness, stupidity. All of these traits were classified by a term called ‘feeblemindedness’ and the war on feeblemindedness began. Through these studies a study of human genetic variation was born. Through this study of human biology it encoded social values. We saw  how scientists expound on subjects they knew little about, derived results we can now see as thoroughly unjustified, and validated their o+ social prejudices with the “ objectivity” of science”( pg. 77). Through Galton's Eugenics theory the government sought to eliminate these dysgenic traits and the eugenics movement was born. Between 1910 and 1930 eugenics policy were enacted in America and ended with World War II (pg. 77). The study was documented by the Eugenics Record Office where they collected data on biological and social information about the American population with the goal of increasing positive traits through negative eugenics, improving the species by preventing the spread of these traits seen as dysgenic. This study of human biology caused society to adopt social values of seeing some traits as superior to others and were influenced to act on their prejudices and favor to be around people who were like them while trying to get rid of the ones who were seen as dysgenic. The foundations of this theory were based on the belief “that man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance (pg. 78). Charles Davenport was the leading American exponent of Eugenics. His goal of the Eugenics movement was “to improve the race by inducing young people to make more reasonable marriage mates; to fall in love intelligently. It also includes the control by the state of the propagation of the mentally incompetent. It also includes the control by the state of the propagation of the mentally incompetent. It does not imply the destruction of the unfit either before or after birth” (pg.81). Davenport used his power to try and influence the youth to reproduce the genes that were not mentally incompetent and wanted them to think about who they procreate with while making sure mentally unfit people did not have children with state intervention. The next step was that the government participate in “social tinkering of the sort envisioned by the academic eugenicists. It lies in appreciating that once the state has decided that some people have intrinsic qualities that are not passed into the next generation, it is simply more expedient-easier and cheaper to kill them than to operate on them (pg. 81). In this step Davenport is looking to get rid of traits that “should not be passed on” this poses a problem because, what qualities should not be passed on? As well as, who decides what those qualities are? Davenport’s explanation to the former is through the term “feeblemindedness”. Feeblemindedness was defined in the past by Galton and Goddards belief was that once someone has the gene of “feeblemindedness” they will always have it. “They were feeble-minded, and no amount of education or good environment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one, any more that it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock”(pg. 83). According to Goddard those who have the so called “feebleminded” gene cannot do anything about that gene and it will always be with them. Davenport produced studies to support this theory and posted in the Journal Science “It appears probable, from extensive pedigrees that have been analyzed, that feeble-mindedness of the middle and higher grades is inherited as a simple recessive, or approximately so. It follows that two parents who are feeble minded shall have only feeble-minded children” (pg. 83). Davenport’s findings in his study supported what Goddard theory was and through these ideas they formulated a theory that those who are “feebleminded” were more likely to be socially deviant and be a burden on society and that those who are feeble-minded should be eliminated and thus will eliminate the burden on society of crime (pg 83). Herbert E Walters proposed a solution to this issue brought up by Davenport and Goddard and there were two steps to his solution. “The first would be to screen people who were a burden to society and deal with them subsequently; the second, to prevent any more people so afflicted from entering society” ( pg. 84). Walters’s ideas were that these burdens of society were scattered across the world except for northern Europe (pg. 84). With this belief that if someone had a dysgenic trait that they could pass it on to the next generation they tried to get rid of it through different methods. Madison Grant created a fleshed out Eugenics strategy to eliminate the “feebleminded” which “incorporated the Mordicism of Gobineau and the breeding program of Davenport, along with the calculus for emptying jails and balancing the budget” (pg. 84). Grant's strategy was not to kill those who were already born “feebleminded” but to make sure that they had no offspring. His system was as follows: “A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit- in other words social failures- would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with criminal, the diseased, and the insane and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types ( pg 84-85).   In Galton’s eyes this method was seen as practical and merciful because he still let the feeble minded individual be a “burden to society”. However, this individual could never be able to have children. In America this lead to Congress restricting the immigration of dysgenic countries with The Emergency Act of 1921 these beliefs would later develop into the beliefs that the German National Socialists would adopt.

One of the biggest opponent of the eugenics movement was Thomas Hunt Morgan he made his doubts public in a 1924 paper where “ First he noted the dual inheritance system (biological and social) operating in humans, and speculated that ‘our familiarity with the process of social inheritance is responsible, in part, for a widespread inclination to accept uncritically every claim that is advanced as furnishing evidence that bodily and mental changes are also transmitted...For, finally when these other disciplines become actively involved in the nascent field of human heredity ‘I believe that they will not much longer leave their problems in the hands of amateurs and alarmists, whose stock in trade is to gain notoriety by an appeal to human fears and prejudices-an appeal to the worst and not the best sides of human nature” (pg. 86).  Morgan is stating in his paper that the findings by the “scientists” of the Eugenics movement were easy for the public to believe because the findings of these “scientists” experiments seemed to be backed by solid evidence and it made it more believable because they worked side by side with professional biologists. His other critiques is that those who produced these studies were amateurs and alarmists only doing it to gain notoriety by capitalizing on the public's fears. The Eugenics Movement had 3 theoretical flaws in it. There were problems of reification, problems of arbitrariness and the last is hereditarianism. The first problem of reification was shown through “The declaration that social problems are attributable to feeblemindedness, and can thereby bred out of the species” (pg. 89). Feeblemindedness gave all mental disorders a single entity. This would mean that these disorders had to be homozygous which now we know that mental retardation is heterozygous. This means that any trying to breed it out would be unlikely because chromosomal imbalances which cause mental retardation would require tests in utero, not better mattings. The second problem is arbitrariness, it is unclear what a “serious” defect is as well as who decides what is acceptable and not acceptable traits. “Clarence Darrow found it absurd to imagine that an institution that most people acknowledge to be inefficient, if not corrupt, could be relied upon to make wise decisions about who should reproduce” (pg. 89). Time and time again the government shows it cannot be trusted in making autonomous decisions by making decisions that are not well informed or done for their own self-interest. So, with this being said how can the public trust the government to choose who should and shouldn’t reproduce when government officials will in the end, do things for their own self-interest. “Further, it was clear from many of the writings that the qualities the eugenicists hoped to stamp out were not simply violence and mental illness, but contrasting moral codes”  (pg. 89). Some of the eugenicists saw that traits favorable where from one race like Walters while other eugenicists tried to get rid of certain traits like Galton. With this being said, there is no standard to what traits are favorable and unfavorable even among eugenicists. The third flaw is with hereditarianism, eugenicists tried to solve non-genetic problems with a genetic solution. “Though we can identify feeblemindedness with mental retardation and discuss its heterogeneous genetic basis, the eugenicists used the term in a far broader sense-to encompass any behavioral deviation from essentially middle-class standards” ( pg.90). The eugenicists used a genetic solution that had nothing to do with genetics and only had to do with social class. Those who didn’t fit “middle-class standards” were seen as dysgenic and ultimately their genes should be destroyed in some way, shape or form. Other than the theoretical flaws there was also three practical flaws to the eugenics movement. The eugenics program looked to solve social problems with biological answers. After the eugenics movement the Great Depression happened and those who were formerly wealthy and powerful people joined those in poverty. This showed that social problems from social causes need social solutions. “Scientific American” pointed out in 1932“[t]he dairy cow, as a cow is not a very successful animal. While bred for a particular feature, it nevertheless is not a hardy species, and in the wild would certainly fail to thrive” (pg. 90). Humans have drastically changed their environment to fit their needs and to produce other humans who fit this controlled environment would fail to survive if the environment were to change drastically or if a new disease were to be introduced i.e. Europeans who brought diseases to the Native Americans. “Further pure-bred strains experience inbreeding depression, a condition named for a well-known loss of vigor that comes as a consequence of homozygosity, or the loss of genetic variation” ( pg. 90). The Eugenicists belief was that there was a “superior” race or genetics without any proof to show it was true so they tried to decrease genetic variation for the sake of a new evolutionary strategy for the human race. “The last conceptual flaw is the primitive theory of history, or culture change, at the heart of the eugenics program” (pg. 91). Those who are “great” culturally all come from different backgrounds and not all of their parents were “great” and some of them had trait which some eugenicists may see as dysgenic. H.L Mencken points out Beethoven as someone who had dysgenic genes but was “great” “Beethoven, of course, was not only the victim of physical infirmity, but, Menken points out ‘the grandson of a cook and the son of a drunkard” This shows that even though Beethoven’s father was a drunk and his grandfather had a low status job Beethoven was able to be “great”. The eugenics movement only takes into account genetics when there are many other factors to the success of an individual such as access to resources. In conclusion, the eugenics movement was a misguided movement whose goal of improvement of the human race started by encouraging those with “good” traits to reproduce turned into encroaching on citizens civil liberties. There are too many factors that have nothing to do with genetics to propose a genetic solution and the “betterment” of the human race. As we can see genetics and cultural “success” are not correlated and is not worth sacrificing good moral values and human decency.     

Eugenics - the science of improving a human population by controlled breeding to increase the occurrence of desirable heritable characteristics.

Bad/harmful characteristics

laziness

mental illness

physical illness

stupidity

low self-esteem

Positive Eugenics: Improve the species by emphasizing the spread of those traits seen as beneficial

Negative: improve the species by preventing the spread of these traits seen as dysgenic

Eugenics record office (1910)

a  between  about 1910  and 1930, and  died out with World  War II. It is out of the  eugenics move- ment that the  study of human genetic variation  was born.' But tracing the eugenics  movement is not simply an exercise in the  his ( pg 77)

 We see with the eugenics movement  that any study of human biology encodes  social values, a situation that the study of clam  biology or fly biology does not have to face. We see how  scientists expounded on subjects they knew little about, derived results we  can now see as thor- oughly unjustified, and validated their o+ social prejudices  with the "objectivity" of science. While the eugenics movement was certainly an embarrassing  episode ( pg 77)

The work of Francis Galton in the later 19th century established  as a major goal of biology the betterment of the human species (pg 77-78)

The eugenics program was formed as an outgrowth of darwinism . given the persuasive analogy darwin could make between breeding  animals to establish various characteristics in populations, and nature breeding species with different characteristics,  Galton simply rea- soned that humans could be selectively bred for favorable traits as well. Selective breeding is only effective  for inborn attributes, however, and Galton’s first task was to show that favorable traits were indeed inborn in people, which he  did in his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius. Facile in the extreme (Galton claimed to demonstrate that ”prominence” is inborn, because prominent  people, graded by an alphabetic scale, appear to be derived from prominent families), the empiricism in the work is of little value. Of greater  importance are the ideas that underlay the empirical findings:

that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance, under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the whole organic world.2

that the men who achieve eminence, and those who are naturally capable, are, to a large extent, identical.'

that the average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own.4

that the average ability of the [ancient] Athenian race is, on the lowest pos­sible estimate, very nearly two grades higher than our own-that is, about as much as our race is above that of the African Negro. ( pg78)

Galton proceeded to rank English (and other European) men of note by the quality of their reputations, F and G being unique and eminent, and A being mediocre. He then provided thumbnail biographies of eminent people who had eminent relatives. Given the connection between repu­ tation and ability, the inheritance of ability, and the linear scale upon which to assess them, Galton could persuasively argue for the desir­ ability of moving as far up the scale as possible: certainly a nation of Os would be better than a nation of Bs! ( pg78)

Yet lacking in his analysis was a fundamental scientific necessity: a control. Any body of data requires something with which to compare it, in order to assess whether the explanation for the pattern apparent within the data is valid or not. In this case, Galton would have needed to show not only that men of high reputation have relatives of high reputation, but also that they outnumber men of high reputation who do not have relatives of high reputation. Calton constructed a consid­ erably arbitrary list of 37 thumbnail sketches of eminent "Literary Men" with prominent relatives, including Friedrich Carl Wilhelm von Schlegel, Seneca, the Marquise de Sevigne (a woman, as it suited his purpose), and Mme. Anne Germaine de Stael (likewise)-but not Suetonius, Spinoza, or Sir Walter

Scott; likewise, as "Poets": Mack­ worth Praed, Jean Racine, and Torquato Tasso-but not William Blake, John Keats, or William Shakespeare.

When, several decades later, biologist Raymond Pearl fell away from the eugenics movement Calton had founded, he redid Galton's study and came to opposite conclusions. For example, Shakespeare was surely a G (a one-in-a-million guy), but what about his father? ( pg 78-79)

As a matter of fact [he] was the greengrocer and butcher . of the town, doubtless an amiable and useful citizen, but after all probably not greatly different from greengrocers and butchers in general. Whereas Shakespeare himself was really a quite superior man in his chosen line of endeavor.• (Pg79)

.

When, several decades later, biologist Raymond Pearl fell away from the eugenics movement Galton had founded, he redid Galton's study and came to opposite conclusions. For example, Shakespeare was surely a G (a one-in-a-million guy), but what about his father?

As a matter of fact [he] was the greengrocer and butcher . of the town, doubtless an amiable and useful citizen, but after all probably not greatly different from greengrocers and butchers in general. Whereas Shakespeare himself was really a quite superior man in his chosen line of endeavor. ( Pg79)

Pearl went on to use the Encyclopaedia Britannica as a source of information on prominence, and to ask: Given poets of reputation sufficient to be mentioned in the Encyclopaedia, how many of their fathers earned a listing of their own? Of the 72 poets listed whose fathers were known, only three had fathers of enough repute to receive a separate listing in the encyclopedia . Pearl concluded that neither the parentage nor the offspring of eminent individuals is particularly noteworthy, and therefore that genetics plays a far smaller role in achieving notoriety than Galton thought. ( pg 79)

Galton's work, however, managed to support several common sense assumptions of the European intellectuals and gentry: They were constitutionally superior to the "common man," they must be derived from good stock, and people and groups could be linearly ranked along a sin­gle scale-with themselves, and their race, at the top.

Galton's originality lay in two areas. First, in his use of quantification: as noted, statistics developed largely as a result of this work. Two other major figures in the development of statistics, Karl Pearson and Ronald Fisher, acquired their interest in the manipulation of scientific data through an interest in eugenics.7 Galton's second original contribution was in grafting contemporary advances in biology (namely, natural selection) on to old social prejudices, and using the newly emerged theory of how species change adaptively to address. the old problem of how to change society for the better. ( pg 79-80)

Anthropologist Leslie White analyzed  the scope of science in an essay in 1947, and observed  that the earliest-maturing sciences were the ones whose subjects  were sufficiently far removed from the observer that they could  be studied with the greatest dispassion-such as astronomy and chemistry. The latest sciences to mature, the "soft" sciences, are the ones that concern  themselves most explicitly with the questions of who we are and why we do things, and the ones that are most difficult to study with sufficient  rigor and dispassion.( pg 80)

Connecting the hard and soft sciences, however, is a bridge of pseu­doscience: Once we have learned something fundamental about the periodicity of heavenly bodies, for example, it is only a very natural extension to try to apply that knowledge to questions we have not been able to answer, the questions of human behavior. In other words, the oldest science, astronomy, generates the oldest pseudoscience, astrology, by the simple process of applying what we have learned about the uni­verse to the questions we can't yet answer about human behavior: Like­wise the science of chemistry validates the pseudoscience of alchemy. We use what we do know to explain what we don't know. ( pg 80)

What we witness in eugenics is a simple extension of this principle. When Darwinism emerged, it was applied to human behavior by Gal­ ton (and independently by Spencer and others). But the application of an advance in science is simply a means of validating the social program that actually preceded it. Galton's program differs little at root from Gobineau's or from any other social tract of the 19th century that saw the wrong people proliferating and the destiny of civilization localized in their constitutions. Where the programs differed was in Galton's framing his work with Darwinism. In the next generation of eugenicists, the program remained the same, but the work was framed by Mendelism. The point is clear to all readers: Those old things you always thought were true about your own noble heritage and your superiority to others are now proven by the latest advances in science! ( pg 80-81)

The leading American exponent of eugenics was Charles B. Daven­ port, Harvard-educated and well-funded by private foundations; his 1911 Heredity in Relation to Eugenics was a major early work that helped establish eugenics as a scientific program in America. Davenport's work is very instructive as a frank demonstration of the ways in which scientific ideas could be manipulated to lend credence to a set of social values.

First, he lays out the goals of eugenics, which are somewhat naive, to be sure:

The general  program of the eugenicist  is clear-it is to improve the race by  inducing young people to make a more  reasonable selection of mar­ riage mates; to fall in love intelligently. It  also includes  the control by  the state of the propagation of  the mentally incompetent. It does not imply the destruction  of the unfit either before or after birth.

Davenport's naivete lies first, fairly obviously, in  the hope that he could convince anybody "to fall  in love intelligently." Indeed, accord­ing to a historian  of the eugenics movement, Davenport had trouble even convincing  his own daughter.11( pg81)

The second bit of naivete in the quotation, however, consists in the Faustian bargain of involving the government in social tinkering of the sort envisioned by the academic eugenicists. It lies in appreciating that once the state has decided that some people have intrinsic qualities that are best not passed into the next generation, it is simply more expedi­ent-easier and cheaper-to kill them than to operate on them. And since the state is under constant pressure to trim its expenditures and spend those tax dollars (or Deutschmarks) wisely, the relative mer­

its of birth control versus death control become a great deal fuzzier than Davenport recognized. ( pg 81-82)

The question that immediately comes to mind, once we agree that cer­tain qualities should not be passed on, is: What are those qualities? Here we can see the flaw of eugenics at its most obvious, namely, the arbi­trariness of the traits it wishes to promote or limit. Davenport, for exam­ple, worried about the effects of syphilis on the populace:

Venereal  diseases are disgenic agents of  the first magnitude and of grow­ ing  importance. The danger of acquiring  them should be known to all young men. Society  might well demand that before a marriage license is issued  the man should present a certificate, from a reputable physician, of freedom  from them. Fortunately, nature protects most of her best blood from these diseases; for the acts that lead to them are repugnant  to strictly normal persons; and the sober-minded young women who have had a fair opportunity to make a selection of a consort are not attracted by the kind of  men who are most prone to sex-immorality.12 ( Pg 82)

Thus, as Davenport is known to have been something of a prude, even by the standards of his own day, we can read him as declaring any sexually active person "abnormal".IJ One could easily wonder how Dav­enport's eugenics program would have emerged if he had been a vege­tarian: Would he have declared all those who eat hamburgers abnormal and fit for sterilization? ( pg 82)

Davenport  and the eugenics  movement circumvented  the problem of arbitrariness  and subjectivity with a brilliant  construction: feeblemind­edness. Feeblemindedness encompassed  any mental defect, be it social, behavioral, or intellectual,  and (since it was a phenotype) was easily diagnosable.14 In  this  nebulous  term, the  eugenicists could  isolate all forms of  "abnormal" behavior, and  then focus discussion  on whether it was genetic  or environmental in origin.  Thus, in one infamous study purporting   to demonstrate the heredity of feeblemindedness,  Henry Goddard described some of his subjects in The  Kallikak  Family:

The father, a strong, healthy, broad-shouldered man, was sitting helplessly in a comer. The mother, a pretty woman still, with remnants of ragged garments drawn about her, sat in a chair, the picture of despondency. Three children, scantily clad and with shoes that would barely hold together, stood about with drooping jaws and the unmistakable look of the feeble-minded.'5 ( Pg 82)

Since feeblemindedness was an unmistakable phenotype, it made the next questions sensible: Is feeblemindedness inborn? Is it a Mendelian unit character? Goddard answered the first question with respect to his good- and bad-blooded Kallikak lines bombastically:

They were feeble-minded, and no amount of education or good environ­ ment can change a feeble-minded individual into a normal one, any more than it can change a red-haired stock into a black-haired stock. ... Clearly

it was not environment that has made that good family. They made their environment; and their own good blood, with the good blood in the fam­ilies into which they married, told.16 ( pg 82-83)

And Davenport answered the second question readily in the pages ol the journal Science:

It   appears  probable,  from extensive  pedigrees that have  been analyzed, that feeble-mindedness of  the middle and higher grades is inherited  as a simple recessive, or approximately so. It  follows that two parents who are feeble-minded shall  have only feeble-minded children and this is what is empirically  found.17 ( Pg 83)

Goddard and others maintain that there is a very intimate relation between crime, vice, and feeble-mindedness. Wipe out the feeble-minded­ ness, say they, and you wipe out most of the vice and crime.

Feeble-mindedness has come to be the most pressing of all eugenic problems-one that should at once be recognized and solved if possible. Statistics seem to indicate that this defect is on the increase; certainly it is far too common to be ignored .... It has been estimated by one expert that

in the United States one person in every 294 is feeble-minded; by another expert, one in every 138. . . . Calculations indicate that in the United States

as a whole there are not less than half a million feeble-minded individu­ als, and several times that many individuals phenotypically normal but carrying the gene or genes for feeble-mindedness. A large proportion of these individuals are charges of the various states and cost the public many millions of dollars annually without contributing anything of value to the community.1 ( pg 83)

Logically it stood to reason that feeblemindedness, as an inborn

deformity condemning its bearer to a lifetime of misery, and condemn­ ing society to pay for it, could be curbed in two ways. The first would be to screen the people who were a burden on society and deal with them subsequently; the second, to prevent any more people so afflicted from entering society. Thus in a textbook on genetics published in 1913, Herbert E. Walter wrote:

It is not enough to lift the eyelid of a prospective parent of American cit­ izens to discover whether he has some kind of an eye-disease or to count the contents of his purse to see if he can pay his own way. The official ought to know if eye-disease runs in the immigrant's family and whether he comes from a race of people which, through chronic shiftlessness or lack of initiative, have always carried light purses....

The national expense of such a program of genealogical inspection would be far less than the maintenance of introduced defectives, in fact it would greatly decrease the number of defectives in the country. At the present time this country is spending over one hundred million dollars a year on defectives alone, and each year sees this amount increased.

The  United  States Department  of Agriculture already  has field agents scouring every land for desirable animals and plants to introduce into this country, as well as stringent laws to prevent the importation  of dangerous weeds, parasites, and organisms of various kinds. Is the inspection and supervision of human blood less import ant?20 ( pg 84)

There was another piece to the puzzle, however. Those defective peo­ ples were not scattered across the globe at random. Feebleminded peo­ ples seemed to be most prevalent among the world's populations not located in or derived from northern Europe. And it was Madison Grant, in The Passing of the Great Race, who assembled the full-blown eugenics platform, incorporating the Nordicism of Gobineau and the breeding program of Davenport, along with a calculus for emptying the jails and balancing the budget. His words at the time of the First World War have a sobering effect when one reflects upon the Second:

A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit-in other words, social failures-would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual him­ self can be nourished, educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the crimi­ nal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types ." ( pg 84-85)

The words,  however, are those of an American, and an influential American (bearing the names of two Presidents), to boot. While Grant was himself a dilettante, his book carried a glowing preface by his friend, the leading evolutionary biologist of the generation, Henry Fair­ field Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History. Here we find the eugenics program at its most lurid , with the validation of modern science, in the form that would be put into action by the German National Socialists: (1) Human groups are of unequal worth; (2) the dif­ ference in their relative value is constitutional; (3) the constitutionally defective groups should be kept out; (4) those which are already in require other measures.

In some cases, a work ostensibly on scientific matters of eugenics would degenerate into a diatribe against foreigners. In the case of Racial Hygiene by Indiana University bacteriologist Thurman Rice, the geneti­ cal science discussed in the rest of the book is simply forsaken in favor of pompous xenophobia seemingly derived from the science. But the bottom line is always the same, having to do with restricting the input of alien elements from southern Europe into America :

In early days there came the English, the German, Swede, Welsh, Irish, Scotch, Dutch, and related peoples, and while these related stocks were coming to the "melting pot" was a reality. It was an easy matter to fuse these people biologically; their customs were at least similar; there were no intense racial prejudices to overcome; their ideals were already essentially American; they were able to understand one another; they were home­ makers and land-owners; they believed in education and democratic gov­ ernment, in law, order and religion. . . .

To-day the man who believes that the so-called "melting pot" will fuse the heterogenous mass dumped from the corners of the earth, in defiance of all laws of biology and sociology, into a desirable national type is either utterly ignorant of all the laws of Nature or is laboring under a most extra­ ordinary delusion. . . .

We formerly received practically a!I of our immigrants from northern Europe. They were for the most part of an exce!Ient type and would blend well together.... The situation is very different to-day; most of the recent immigrants who are coming to-day, or at least before the present law was passed, have come from eastern and southern Europe, and from other lands even less closely related; they do not mix with our stock in the "melting pot," and if they do cross with us their dominant traits submerge our native recessive traits; they are often radicals and anarchists causing no end of trouble; they have very low standards of living; they disturb the labor problems of the day; they are tremendously prolific.22 ( pg 84-85)

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