The American eugenics movement caused the forced sterilization of 1,000 people per year and influenced the Nazi party, said visiting scholar Edwin Black.
Black, an investigative reporter, spoke at the School of Medicine’s grand rounds in public health on Tuesday.
Eugenics began as a response to social upheaval in the U.S. at the end of the 19th century, Black said. Populations had started to move from rural to urban locations and the ethnic demographic of the country was changing as Jewish, Mexican and Chinese immigrants made the United States their home.
Black said some intellectuals wanted to change the country back to the way it was. People promoting eugenics were often prominent and respected members of society, such as university presidents and judges. He said other examples include Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, President Theodore Roosevelt and Thomas Edison.
“What they wanted was a white, blonde, blue-eyed, Nordic supreme race,” Black said.
Eugenics was not based on simple racism but the idea that all bad things in society come from people’s genes. Black said it did not matter how educated a person was or how much good he or she had done in society, because his or her offspring could potentially harm society.
“You weren’t born into poverty. Poverty was born into you,” Black said. “It was not about eliminating individuals, but about eliminating your bloodline.”
The goal was to remove Jews, Mexicans, blacks, southern Italians and Caucasians with dark hair, as well as the mentally inferior from society. This was to be done by removing one-tenth of the population at a time until only the supreme race, meaning people who looked like those promoting eugenics, remained.
Black said originally supporters wanted to euthanize the unfit through use of gas chambers. Doctors would have been able to write prescriptions for euthanasia. This plan was never passed in any states. However, 27 states adopted forced sterilization as the optimal way to eliminate those unfit for society. A thousand people were sterilized per year in those states.
Another practice was to ban interracial marriage or to break up marriages of people who would produce genetically unfit offspring. There were also confinement camps for the “feeble-minded.”
Eugenics research was conducted at prominent universities such as Harvard, Stanford and Yale. Black said The Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations provided much of the funding to promote eugenics.
After a time, eugenicists thought the flow of immigrants was too great to keep up with, so they expanded their practices to Europe. Black said Adolf Hitler read eugenics research and believed America had found the solution to the racial problem. This “junk science” gave the Nazi party’s platforms scientific and medical validity. Hitler’s eugenics program sterilized around 1,000 people per week.
The leading eugenics lab helped teach the Nazis how to determine who was a Jew and who was not, Black said. He also said the Rockefeller foundation funded the top Nazi scientists.
Black said eugenics started to lose favor in the United States after the discovery of the Nazi concentration camps. Eugenics departments started to change their titles to genetics departments. However, the practice of forced sterilization continued in some states until the 1960s and 1970s.
In an interview, Black said a newgenics movement is starting.
“In newgenics it will not be racist dogma or national flags that determine who shall live and who shall die. It shall be corporate worth,” Black said.
He said this is the reason for the anti-genetic discrimination act. He said this is to protect people from a genetic ghetto where people cannot get jobs, health care or own property.
“You do not have to put somebody in a gas chamber to kill them. You can just deny them health care because they can’t afford it. You can just avoid a vital transplant. You can rob from the rich and give to the poor,” Black said.
He said once the Santa Fe railroad did genetic testing on prospective employees to see who was genetically disposed to have carpel tunnel syndrome.
During his lecture, Black said people going into fields such as genetics and public health need to know about eugenics in order to prevent similar movements from happening again.
“Do not harm is a good guide post,” Black said.
Black will also be speaking on campus today and Thursday. He will be speaking about the Arab-Nazi alliance as well as about eugenics in the U.S.