Eugenics Part II: License to Breed

In Brief

Last time, nineteenth-century rubes bought Darwinian theory to the point of believing that drunks begat drunks regardless of upbringing. This week, the very same rubes get the ears of select politicians and start passing laws. Laws to restrict drinking, or increase funding to hospitals for the mentally deficient? Of course not! Vasectomies and tubal ligations had just been discovered, and before long thousands of mentally deficient folks, whoremongers and criminals found themselves being scheduled for a little 'appendectomy.' Come read about how some poorly educated eugenicists ruined the reproductive futures of thousands.

Party On

You might also be interested in: Eugenics Part I: You Can’t Keep a Good Idiot Down Nineteenth Century eugenics gives 'good breeding' a whole new meaning. Why Only Women Get Hysterical Medical opinion of women in the nineteenth century was absurd. The Dictionary Wars I: Noah Webster Noah Webster was a boring old snoot and his Dictionary is practically holier than the Bible. Why? Self Love and Cereal I: An Apple a Day Keeps the Hands at Bay Reform-minded Americans advocate vegetarianism as an alternate to masturbation.

In turn-of-the-nineteenth-century America the public and the states were quite concerned with problems posed by the mentally deficient, criminals, drunkards, and whoremongers. The public believed the numbers of these sordid ranks were growing to certain disaster and, flush with nineteenth-century science, believed that these troubled individuals were born that way. In the first installment of this series, we discussed the [rather questionable] reasoning behind this belief -- that such characteristics and behaviors were genetically transmissible. Unfortunately for those afflicted, the medical establishment had already grabbed the ball of prevention and went running with it. It ran far.

Dr. Gideon Lincecum, a self-taught Texas physician, was the first on record to state that castration was the surest and safest cure for criminal behavior. A colleague, Dr. Harry C. Sharp of Indiana, commented that, following the procedure, his patients felt "that they were stronger, slept better, their memory improved, the will became stronger, and they did better in school." Dr. Sharp also expressed the belief that a state institution ought to "render every male sterile who passes through its portals, whether it be almshouse, insane asylum, institute for the feeble-minded, reformatory or prison," and he helped push the first mandatory sterilization bill through a state legislature in 1907. The Indiana law authorized, as Philip J. Reilly discloses in The Surgical Solution:

The compulsory sterilization of any confirmed criminal, idiot, rapist, or imbecile in a state institution whose condition had been determined to be "unimprovable" by an appointed panel of physicians.

The passage of this bill was doubtlessly aided by the testimony of other physicians, like Dr. S. D. Risley of New Jersey, who stated, "not only are vast numbers of hereditary paupers, imbeciles, inebriates, and criminals being born annually in our midst to swell the number of these degenerates, but they are entering through the too widely open door of our immigration system." Connecticut followed Indiana's suit, and before long a horde of states had passed laws calling for the sterilization of their institutionalized citizens, and such procedures were carried out regularly. Where laws did not exist, overzealous physicians snipped anyway. Indeed, the number of actual sterilizations far exceeded the number of reported ones. For example, one state institution in Pennsylvania conducted some 270 involuntary sterilizations over a thirty-year period, despite the lack of a law providing for such activity on the state's books. By some estimates, over 60,000 involuntary sterilizations have taken place in the history of the United States.

Laws, Shmaws: We're Doctors

Certain physicians, convinced that this approach to public health was so efficacious, continued the practice of sterilizing "defective" persons well past governmental intervention to the contrary. Two years after the nation's first mandatory sterilization law the governor of Indiana ordered the only state institution authorized to perform the procedure to stop. Nonetheless the superintendent of this institution, the aforementioned Dr. Harry C. Sharp, continued to slice patients many years after denial of state funds and permission. In Michigan and Vermont state officials declared that the number of sterilizations performed in their states was underreported, and the assistant attorney general of Maine announced, "I know very well that many more operations have been performed [than are reported] but I suppose we shall have to go by the records." Several of the laws were stricken down by critics using the Equal Protection Act: if only institutionalized defectives received sterilization, what of free ones? Some state institutions responded to this criticism by admitting patients for the sole purpose of sterilization and promptly releasing them.

Why Did People Believe This?

Several more state legislatures, such as Pennsylvania, Oregon, and Idaho overwhelmingly passed sterilization bills, only to be vetoed by their respective governors. It can be safely assumed that the state legislatures' voting records reflected public sentiment, suggesting the public swallowed the stories of defectives fathering defectives at alarming rates. Various contemporary polls support this view. Where did this public support come from?

This movement to sterilize defectives, the eugenics movement, was quite active in its use of propaganda. Mass mailings contained phrases like "by sterilization, the inheritance of mental handicap from the mentally diseased and defective can be prevented without sacrifice."[1] Eugenics "experts" published journals and papers and editorials and harangued politicians into subscribing to their views. They proved quite convincing in their oversimplified views of social interaction and their wildly off-base proclamations of the genetic basis for certain traits. Fortunately for posterity's amusement, they did all these things while simultaneously advocating crackpot experiments. Harry Laughlin, a semi-educated biology teacher catapulted to the forefront of the eugenics movement by becoming the head of a eugenics department at the Carnegie Institute, spent his spare time on a scheme to produce the ultimate thoroughbred racing horse. Laughlin outlasted his welcome at the Institute, in part due to his anti-Semitic tendencies. He received a report from higher-ups telling him

There are those who have not considered your work and your attitude, and perhaps your abilities, as representing the level of effectiveness which might be looked upon as the standard to be obtained in the Carnegie Institution.

His superiors rejected a physician's assessment that he was fine to continue work, cut his project's funding by 80%, and guaranteed his salary for only the first fiscal quarter. He left in a huff, trailing a railroad boxcar of personal papers that nobody has looked at since.

Leon Whitney, publisher of The Basis of Breeding, a eugenics book for the layman, also wrote How To Breed Dogs and called for "fitter family contests". Reilly describes:

These contests frequently took place at fairs in the Midwest: judges reviewed human pedigrees to determine the most eugenically positive families, just as the best cattle, chickens, and pigs competed for blue ribbons.

Whitney subsequently published another book, The Case for Sterilization, in which he claimed the United States had to perform ten million sterilizations immediately to avoid rapid societal destruction, and speculated that perhaps one-quarter of humanity was not parental material. Fortunately, legislative action never fully satisfied these views. Whitney agreed with Hitler concerning matters eugenic, and refused to recant his admiration even in his unpublished autobiography, completed in the mid-1970s.

Okay, so maybe it doesn't work

Fortunately, cooler heads prevailed. Even during their heyday, some mandatory sterilization laws were met with incredulity. A law drafted in Kentucky designed to sterilize idiots and habitual criminals met with smart remarks on the Senate floor. "If this had gone through forty years ago," one legislator claimed, "there would not be so many fools here [in the Senate] now." This was seconded by an amendment calling for mandatory sterilization of all Republicans, and the bill collapsed. Catholics, wary of any contraception, routinely dismissed any and all mandatory sterilization laws and were tagged as incontrovertible foes by the eugenicists.[2] Social scientists spoke up against the procedure and the logic behind it. In The Biology of Mental Defect, Lionel Penrose, British scientist, sensibly noted

Owing to the fact that the great majority of defectives of all grades are born to parents who cannot be classed as defective themselves, the reduction of defect in the community by preventing all known cases from having children would not be spectacular.

Physicians began to publish studies of twins and the frequency of defective children begotten by defectives, and quickly found that claims of idiocy's genetic basis were without foundation. Eugenicists found themselves combating the publication of reports asserting, "we do not know enough about heredity, environment and eugenics to decide whether compulsory sterilization is useful or not," and worrying that such-and-such sterilization bill would "be dead in this state and probably all other movements to better the racial stock." They were reduced to the plight felt by "scientific creationists" today, who strain to fit the data to the hypothesis rather than going the other way round.

However, sterilization as a cure for societal ills still can be found today, more so as a method to prevent "unfit" parents from childbearing than as a booster to the collective gene pool. A state institution in Canada performed its last involuntary sterilization in 1977, not all that long ago. A recent development in the United States is the founding of Children Requiring a Caring Kommunity (C.R.A.C.K.), which pays crack addicts $100 to get clipped or go on birth control, so they do not bring children into a [presumably] hostile family environment. While we here at History House find the reduction of unplanned and unwanted births a worthy goal, the task of deciding of who's parental material and who's not daunts. As Daniel Wilker notes in his essay, "The Bright Man's Burden: On the Right of Mere Normals to Restrict the Civil Liberties of the Mildly Mentally Retarded",[3] normal folks make mistakes all the time, but nobody restricts their reproductive rights. Indeed, using much the same logic employed in the above legislative actions, folks testing at the genius level of intelligence have all the right in the world to sterilize those in the normal range. So much for planning humanity's future.

Footnotes

1. We respectfully suggest that the loss of one's testicles does, in fact, constitute sacrifice.
2. Curiously, laws enabling voluntary sterilization during the same period proved elusive, and it was until 1970 before the procedure was available widely [this came on the heels of several lawsuits against hospitals denying it].
3. Macklin and Gaylin, p.149-166

Bibliography

1. Philip R Reilly. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
2. Jonas Robitscher. Eugenic Sterilization. Charles C Thomas, 1973.
3. Ruth Mackin and Willard Gaylin, eds.. Mental Retardation and Sterilization. Plenum Press, 1981. [Out of Print]
4. F. E. Daniel. "Editorial". Texas Medical Journal, 22:347. 1907.

 
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