Exploring the History of Eugenics

um media okay so we are recording uh and this is our second meeting of the fall semester so um i'm i'm getting a little progress made on campus um so so let's look we're gonna go into the learning module uh today since uh we've already covered pretty much the uh syllabus and the uh basics on canvas i am still working on a number of things though that i need to get a handle on and some of that of course has to do with uh just making things more convenient and user friendly for all of you but having said that i did manage to get our recordings um squared away but i couldn't figure out yet with till i talk to it how to put a button on this left side navigation bar i'm going to move the chat box let me move it a little bit okay this left side navigation bar i will at some point put a a link on it or uh there are these buttons down here i've got to rearrange this but i will what i plan to do is put like six of these buttons down here so that you can just click on it and it'll take you right to class recordings announcements whatever modules and so on so that you can just log on and do that stuff pretty fast but in the meantime for now to get class recordings you've got to go to the modules so just remember all the primary content for now is going to be in the modules and there's just really no way around that until i can learn how to do the other method so here's class recordings at the top of the module and then you'll just click on recordings and of course the recording for tuesday is in there here it is um and i will today's uh meeting will be in there by tonight or tomorrow morning sometime so this class is being recorded it will be posted here's your access passcode there's another way to do this and i can do it on blackboard but i'm afraid to try it on canvas because i don't yet know if i'm doing it correctly so at some point this will be revised and you'll just be able to click on the link itself but for now i think you're going to have to copy and paste this link unless from your end you can see it let me look at it from student view and see whether how it looks to your your end uh and then you'll have to put the passcode in which is that extra step that i hoped you wouldn't have to do okay so it looks the same from your side as for mine so so for now that's how to access the uh recordings and i'll make sure i'll load some other recordings in there that we've had in past classes um i have some interesting the guest lectures and i i'll try to get those in now back to modules though i did figure out how to put dr antoinette's uh powerpoint and actually i just realized dr antonin should be in here let me take a look there she is all right let me make her a co-host so she can control this thing okay so i'm going to introduce you to dr leslie antonette who's my dear friend and does all kinds of guest lectures and has for several years she is the expert on eugenics and the pseudo science of eugenics i just want to let you know and for you as well dr antoinette i did put the last powerpoint you gave me i just got it in there learned how to do this yesterday on canvas it's a new obviously so it's here but if it's the same one that let me make sure i've got this new share up wait a minute okay there we go so there it is uh can you see it on there the blessing's gonna uh for the students though it's in there and that um is the powerpoint dr internet showed last year now she may have a new one today um let's see let me make sure you can i i can unmute you here just a second hi bulgarian okay good yep okay i am stuck in your screen this is really weird you suck it it's stuck on the screen yeah it's stuck on my share screen screen let me see if i can put it out okay just a minute i wonder if i make you a host but i did make you a co-host so you should be able to control it yeah i should be um but i think i might have clicked too soon so i'm going to click share and then there it's working and then i'm going to click stop share okay and then i'm going to save as my file yeah i have a slightly different um i have a slightly different powerpoint today just with a few uh uh improvements okay but uh uh for the i mean for the most part okay you've got my uh you can all see my um right we can see your screen okay thank you all right now i am going what i'm gonna do here i think though is mute myself i do have the chat box up in case anyone wants to ask questions during the lecture but i'm going to mute my selflessly and and turn it over over to you i think here um let me exit the full screen uh have we got everybody on there i'm just looking like now i don't see my students but hang on a minute let me make sure nothing so uh i'm showing 161. okay then we're all right um the newer slides may or may not be available leslie are you gonna uh you didn't make that many changes did you no i just put in a couple more slides that provide amplification all right on the older slides um but i can email this to you if you want to replace the old one with this one all right we could do that okay so uh i'm just looking for i need to mute myself but i'll go ahead and do that all right i'm going to turn the uh class over to you leslie thank you so much okay and how much time do i have uh give it an hour we we stop at 10 15 so give yourself time to answer questions okay all right all right okay let's go um this is going to be a very quick trip uh through a very long history so um i'd like to start this presentation by pointing out that the word science is in quotation marks um is there anybody that feels like they want to pop on here and help us understand what it means when we put a word in quotation marks in this way anybody anybody okay when we put a word in quotation marks like this it it is telling the reader that yes this is a word but i'm not going to use it the way you think i am and so i'm using the word science but i'm not talking about a science i'm actually talking about a pseudoscience a a fake science that was developed at the turn of the 20th century to reinforce and produce pseudo scientific results to enforce and justify the marginalization and exclusion of certain human beings from meaningful practice of citizenship uh and humanity uh in the united states of america so i like to start this with uh the um the explanation of eugenics as a pseudo science and why is i'm not clicking come on okay so eugenics was developed the the word eugenics was coined and the practice of eugenics and the philosophy of eugenics was developed by sir francis galton he was a a british citizen he was the cousin of charles darwin and so at this point in world history uh we're really trying to figure out what a human is uh and and what makes humans hum humane or and uh and also or at the organic level at the molecular level what makes a human and so darwin was knighted uh by king edward vii for the development of eugenics as a philosophical uh perspective and as a scientific again in quotation marks scientific because until well i'll go back to that um scientific uh development of eugenics as a method of defining uh what makes a human worthy of reproduction uh and the the science of doing that um and so uh francis galton developed this in in british society eugenics was taught in british universities and colleges um beginning at the at the very end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century and very quickly this idea moved into american culture and so the uh eugenics rested on this idea of well-born that's what uh galton defined eugenics he borrowed uh language from uh ancient greek and uh and eugenics he defined as well born and so the question is what makes a human well born are they fit or are they unfit for reproduction this was the basic question that eugenesists were trying to answer uh it's uh i mean if you believe in the constitution of the united states that all men are created equal then it's kind of a moot question it's not a real question it's a fake question um but it became the question that occupied the minds of americans in positions of power from the very beginning in the 1890s till today it's we're not done with this question and so i have a list of uh characteristics that uh i would like to um now okay that um that i like to start the class with and so basically when we're in the room i ask you all to stand up and so basically i'm gonna ask you all to put your raised hand uh icon up in your window and i'm gonna go through a list of uh characteristics that that make one unfit okay the basic uh gist of being fit means that you are psychologically emotionally and financially healthy all right unfitness takes a variety of forms so you're going to take down your hand when i name a characteristic that applies to you or your family okay because this the science of pseudoscience of eugenics is about being well born so it's about not just who you are but who your extended family is who's part of your gene pool so grandmas grandpas aunts uncles cousins if these characteristics are true of any of these people in your extended family put your hand down okay so the first characteristic is mental health do you or anyone in your extended family have any kind of mental health disorders like depression or ocd or schizophrenia if that is true for you or your extended family put down your raised hand if you or anyone in your family has any substance abuse issues and that is for legal and illegal drug use so prescription drugs as well as street drugs uh you know uh well smoking pot i guess is still can be a substance abuse issue even though it's legal because prescription drugs uh abuse can is legal so uh substance abuse of any kind alcohol or legal or illegal drugs um does you or do anyone you or anyone in your family have uh what is called feeble-mindedness by the eugenicist and feeble-mindedness looks different in men and women so i'm not gonna judge but men if you are deemed by yourself or anybody else as excessively masturbating please put your hand down or any of your cousins when women were considered feeble-minded if they were born illegitimately that means that their parents were not married if you were born while your parents were not married put your hand down if you yourself have given birth uh while you were not married women put your hand down that's considered an illegitimate birth and it was considered a characteristic of being unfit okay if you or anyone in your extended family has a cultural ethnic heritage in southern italy specifically southern italy uh if you have a jewish heritage if you have a a heritage of uh of a kind that somebody would look at you and say you are not white so any hispanic heritage uh with the darker uh complexion uh african american uh asian again we're talking about perception we're talking about the way you look so uh if your skin tone is darker if your eyes are are not um as round as a typical american eye um if your hair is kind of like mine uh and and you know you've got that more kinky curl in it um then put your hand down okay so we've got 14 people with their hands still raised out of 173 people oh 13 we're down to 12 13. okay the number is going down quickly all right so as you can see the category for fitness is extremely narrow it's it's meant to exclude a majority of people and those who fall into the fit category um oh you know what i forgot one of the characteristics uh uh so if you or anyone in your family uh is on uh public assistance of any kind uh if um you live paycheck to paycheck uh if you are carrying significant debt um uh financial health was also a very big part of being characterized as as fit um so all right so now we're down to nine uh people who still have a raised hand and uh and i think i'm still forgetting another characteristic but i think that this uh now we're down to eight uh okay i think that this proves my point that most of us uh in this class today would be considered unfit for reproduction okay so what does that mean well in britain it you were fit if you were financially comfortable meaning no public assistance meaning you had enough money to uh donate to uh to charities you had enough you know income that you could give away some of it um in uh in britain uh you were perceived pretty much uh you weren't perceived of but you were treated as a white person if your financial status was significantly larger than the white people in your social group um and so this also reinforces that idea of the financially fit category of uh fitness um and so you were unfit and here's the list that we went through we can see if i forgot anything um criminal behavior i believe if you or anyone in your family have been arrested uh or uh issued a ticket for a misdemeanor anything from a misdemeanor to a felony then you would not be considered fit genetic disorders ms multiple sclerosis cerebral palsy any genetic disorders in you or in your extended family you would fall into the unfit category and so i think i got most of those and so the idea for dealing with this huge body of unfit people right and this tiny body of fit people british eugenics designed this idea that we'd have positive eugenics practices that would support the increase of the number of people in the fit category and then negative eugenics that would decrease the number of people in the unfit category so positive eugenics were encouragement and even financial support for people who were considered fit and if they would marry and provide multiple births they were given certain financial incentives they were given gifts by the crown they were given uh financial uh support uh by by uh the ruling class um and so negative eugenics was uh in britain charity is runs a little bit different than it does in the united states wealthy people are expected to support charities and and this is signified uh if you guys are all following the markles um in prince harry and uh and duchess megan um they are uh they they are the british people are angry with them because they're not behaving like royal people are supposed to behave they're supposed to be supporting charities and doing charitable works because they're royal and that's what royal wealthy people do and so so the idea of a negative eugenic uh practice is is denying financial charity to the poor because essentially the poor in britain live on this kind of charity they've also got a socialized uh system of support in britain sort of like our welfare system but not exactly like it and so if you cut off that financial charity they would die which is the point um excluding poor children from health care and education why waste education on children that shouldn't be here anyway and so we're not going to provide them health care either so they'll die off sooner and we'll have a smaller number of people in that unfit category and and i added royal births here but i'm going to take it back out royal births are evidence of the eugenic program still in place in british culture brit british royalty are expected to have many children and because that increases the number of people in the fit category um so that uh doesn't really fit in that negative uh category the way i put it there so i'll change that before professor eaton uh posts this so in america i'm going to go into the history of how eugenics began in america but basically what we're going to be talking about here is in this slide positive american eugenics were a identify the fit persons we don't have royalty we don't have aristocrats but we have some really rich people and do they count um and like the uh british category of positive eugenics finding those wealthy people who are fit and getting them to marry each other and have multiple births but america added another eugenic uh positive eugenic program and that was the assimil assimilation of non-white children into um service level uh positions in american culture so you're not going to educate a non-white child to be the ceo of a country or a company you're going to educate them to be the janitor at that time at that company negative eugenics uh are were also as british to identify the unfit um to deny financial charity to the poor because you want to shrink that body of that number of people as quickly as possible so not giving them the money they need to feed themselves clothe themselves and shelter themselves is going to wipe them out quicker than if you let if you give them the support they need to do that again excluding poor children from health care and education why bother they're they're not going to reproduce anyway if eugenicists uh programs uh succeed but american eugenics also took some more proactive steps and they developed iq testing that would identify fit from the unfit um they uh excuse me they developed the institutionalization process for unfit people they designed immigration laws that would not allow people from that they figured were going to bring unfit genes into the country like chinese americans and chinese immigrants like southern europeans specifically southern italians they were believed this group of people were believed by the eugenesis to be genetically unfit and so we needed to limit the number of those people who were going to be allowed to immigrate into the united states um enforced sterilization laws that would sterilize unfit men and women in the beginning but toward the end well we're still in the end um primarily women who are considered unfit and i can include jim crow laws as a eugenics program because it limited the reproductive process for formerly enslaved black americans and their descendants so i'm going to go into more detail on all these categories i saw some questions do we need to stop professor eaton and answer questions no those are primarily questions about uh posting the powerpoint but um just for those of you that maybe just joined us or didn't hear us earlier there is a powerpoint right now posted on canvas but dr antoinette has updated this one so it's a little different and i will post the updated powerpoint for you sometime tomorrow morning so other than that but if you do have questions for dr antonin go ahead and put them in the chat box and we'll we'll get to those because i know the class goes by pretty fast and i want you to have time to answer and if at the end of the lecture you didn't get a chance to ask what you wanted email me those questions and i will email them to dr internet so that your questions will be addressed absolutely thank you thank you okay so how did why why was the institutionalization of eugenics in the united states different than it was in british culture it's because we have a different concept and understanding of race in practical terms so i'm going to talk a little bit about how we'd how that word developed and the way that we understand it now um so the word itself is from you know middle french it's developed out of um cultural uh traditions and histories uh previous to american uh cultures and and histories um and and basically the overall meaning of it originally just meant a different clan a different bloodline a different uh group of people who didn't share either physical attributes or cultural attributes language food milestone coming of age passages and rights um and so the word became uh used by the slave trade to define the difference between the the enslaver and the enslaved so uh very early on in in the history of enslavement which began roughly in the 14th century um we were using this word race to make a race of enslavers and a race of enslaved um and so and so we can see that uh the uh anthropological uh association is currently this this quote from them is current um is a worldview and a body of prejudgment that distorts the way we understand human differences and group behaviors and so i'm going to talk a little bit more about how we do that specifically in the united states um so sorry oh i didn't know i could do that all right um so the way that the race became uh the the difference between white people and non-white people was a direct result of the slave trade and so the slave traders were looking for ways to establish firmly establish a different race of people that were biologically uh biologically uh on the molecular and genetic level different than the white enslavers and so this was done in several ways and um the earliest kind the earliest logic of that kind was the use of biblical scripture um that said that the um that ham the son of noah had uh committed a sin against his father and would thereby be marked and so black um enslaved people um were considered marked by the they had the mark of ham and this biblically separated a race of enslaver and a race of enslaved uh but we didn't stop there so scientific again in quotation marks science in the 16th century did not mean the same thing that science means today um and so we haven't we had it by the 1700s um in developed a universal empirical model of replicatable scientific truths uh science in the 1700s 1800s was still pretty much of what we would call today a philosophy an idea about how the world works and how the people in the world work and so there was ongoing since like i said the 14th century when we started this enslaving on a commercial basis because all cultures in human history have practiced some form of enslavement but in the 14th century when it became a commercial venture uh we were looking for ways to clearly define who got enslaved and who was able to enslave others and so we had several models and the one that kind of stuck was johann blumenbach and he decided he uh scientifically in quotation marks decided that there were five types of humans they were all the same race a race of humans for blumenbach but they were different kinds of race uh and that was caucasian mongolian ethiopian americans and malays so that basically covers the globe as it was known in the in the 1700s there were white people there were asian people there were black people there were these oddly colored people from the americas uh and uh there were sub-asian people um that were referred to as malays so bo in blumenbach's theory the most beautiful people were were the caucasians and these were people who came from the caucasus mountains so the descendants of people who originated in these caucasus mountains and this is where the caucasus mountains are they're in um in southern russia western russia i'm going to say but my sense of direction is backwards so uh don't take that as gospel but the people who originated from this area of the caucasus mountains in in russia in the georgian uh region of russia blumenbach decided were the most beautiful and therefore all other human life forms descended from them but as those beautiful white uh russian caucasus or originating people move further away from that area they became darker and they become dumber and so his logic for that was that white can turn brown but brown can't turn white so this has to be the way humanity started this has to be a reasonable way to define how human human life was organized but he did say there was one race of humans but there were just different categories uh and so the way that we use blumenbach today the way that i was taught about human race and probably professor eaton was taught about human race but fortunately i hope you have not been taught about human race is that there were three races caucasian negroid and and through various routes we came to that list of three via blumenbach and uh the scientists that developed out of the eugenics strategy in the united states said there's three races of humans caucus caucasian those who came from that originated from that caucasus basically white people negroid people um and it's oid the the suffix oid means um uh sort of uh characteristics of um so there's not one negro uh group of people but there's a a lot of people that look non-white uh with a darker complexion and the kinky curly hair and then there's this other group that are kind of oddly colored um ranging from that malay um that that asian uh uh physical appearance all the way to that southern and america northern american indigenous uh complexion and so uh this is what i was taught in school that there were three races of people and they were these three races and they were not to be mistaken they were separate um and not equal and how did we get there because i was being taught that in the 1960s into the 1970s um so how did we get there we got there through american eugenics charles davenport heard uh francis galton speaking about british eugenics and he thought it was brilliant and he and he believed in his heart of hearts that america had to adopt a eugenics stance to american population and american identity and so in 1902 he approached the carnegie institution carnegie institution was funded by andrew carnegie who was this just fabulously wealthy railroad uh and oil tycoon and so carnegie said well we'll give you some money to start it out and let's see what happens and so in 1906 the station for experimental evolution opened and that was with carnegie funding and also along the way j.h kellogg who had fun founded his own uh organization called race betterment uh he said well i'll kick in some money too because this looks promising uh so uh next time you look at the cereal boxes on your breakfast table if it says kellogg's that was the company owned by j.h kellogg and almost all of our most beloved breakfast foods come from the kellogg company and the kellogg company headed by j.h kellogg was committed to a eugenics program for american population uh he wanted us to evolve into a country of fit people and that meant all of the exclusion of all that unfitness that we just talked about a moment ago so in 1910 due to the increased funding uh davenport was able to open the eugenics records office and he hired a man named larry harry laughlin to to organize and run that that organization and so what harry laughlin did was he uh recruited greg uh students undergrad and graduate students from the eight the ivy league uh colleges and universities uh ivy league are those private institutions uh where you know the best of the best get their college educations um harvard yale princeton university of pennsylvania which is technically public but somehow manages to be in the ivy league and so he got these students and during the summer these students would go from house to house in certain neighborhoods and they would interview the families in there kind of like a census taker but what they were interested in was the cultural mental emotional physical history of the people who lived in those houses and their relatives and so thousands of these records thousands of these records were produced and in 1912 davenport puts them all together in a trade book and he publishes it and he markets it as a study of the genetic disorders and unfitness of the american people okay and this book becomes very important because it's about to influence every aspect of american life uh sexual behavioral immigration legal it's about to and to become the basis for decisions that put in place programs that actually limit americans certain kinds of americans ability to reproduce and to exist all right so we're going to get into more detail on that in just a minute uh watch my time let's say you're good it's about a quarter of um a couple of people were asking about latinos uh which category they were uh placed in but weren't they primarily uh considered in the mongolian category unless they had dark skin or yeah i thought so yeah the american or the malay category were for all those people that weren't exactly white and weren't exactly dark um they they were the various uh com complexions because all of this is really based on human perception what i see with my eye and what my brain tells me that means and and so it's got to do with physical features on your face and and the the color of your skin did i answer that yes thank you all physical attribute perceptions and just to remind this class physical attributes are not specific to any group of people there are black people with blonde hair naturally in the solomon islands so all physical attributes are found across the board in all human uh half blood groups and and genetic groups no such thing that that's why there's no such thing as race because it doesn't exist uh i could i could be uh black and have blonde hair by nature or green eyes or i i'm uh three quarters caucasian and i have brown eyes uh but i i'm a quarter shawnee so most of us did well all of us go get your dna done and you'll see how many different ethnicities you carry it's shocking yeah because by now we're all an amalgamation of every culture on the planet pretty much yeah we've all got a little bit of everybody yeah so excuse me so this trait book starts uh uh some traction with developing actual eugenic programs in the united states and so uh by 1918 the carnegie institute says okay move in with us you're going to get the benefit of all of our support we're going to give you staff we're going to give you publishing rights we're going to give you all the money you need to make this work uh carnegie today is understood to be a human human humanist uh who uh whose uh the carnegie institute funds annually humanistic research uh research done that that that betters humanity um but he got to start as a eugenicist um and so uh the eugenics records office and and the seo combine they go to work with the carnegie institute and by 1939 we the eugenics records office is fundamentally subsumed into the cold springs harbor laboratories the eugenics records office was located physically in the cold springs harbor new york laboratory and they as they built more and more scientific laboratories in that physical spot it became known as the cold springs harvard laboratory and that is still in existence today and is considered one of the world-class uh sources of information on american non-american on human uh genetics they do genetic and biological research still to this very day so in effect the the station for experimental evolution and the eugenics requisites never shut down they're still in business and so how did this happen when we got this trait book who did he show this trade book to well he showed it to dave's kellogg who thought that was a great way to go about this race betterment in the united states um uh organizations were started by uh the galton institute that are still in print today the eugenics review that's still being published today and contributed to the american breeders association was a a uh an academic group of eugenicists and they produced the journal of heredity the eugenic the american genetic association is still open for business and the american eugenics society which is now called the society for biodemography demography and that organization is still open and working and publishing academic excuse me academic uh proofs of eugenic uh research so who are some of the other people well david starr jordan right here in california he was the founding president of our stanford university which is considered a almost an ivy league uh university davis star jordan uh in charge of all of these college students uh published uh blood of a nation a study of decay of races by the survival of the unfit right so he's a believer in those negative eugenics programs and his book goes into why and how those should be implemented alexander graham bell oddly enough inventor of the telephone he wrote a memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race uh and uh he he believed that deaf people were unfit and should not be allowed to procreate woodrow wilson when he was the governor of new jersey actually put a bill into law in the state of new jersey in 1911 that would allow for eugenical sexual sterilizations of people who were committed to institutions and jails in the state of new jersey other supporters were helen keller who herself was made deaf and blind by a childhood illness she believed in a physician's juries for defective babies i'm going to go into a little bit more detail about that in just a couple more slides but basically she believed that babies who were born with with defects of any kind should be allowed to uh oh shoot i can't think of what it's called i'll get to it in the next slide they should be allowed to die there's a term for that jason james watson of watson and crick who won nobel prizes for identifying dna um they believed that uh birth control needed to be put in to practice for all unfit categories of humans so that we didn't have to bother about sterilizing them or or euthanizing them later and margaret sanger who founded birth control in the united states believed yes that women should have control of their own bodies and decide when they give birth and when they don't however she also believed that birth control was going to be a primary way of limiting the birth of unfit americans in the long run and she also believed that they should have iq testing for people who could possibly procreate and that the the american government should give out permits like driver's permits uh you would have to have a procreation permit in order to become pregnant and give birth and so how do we do positive eugenics you asked well we went to carnivals not we the eugenicists went to carnivals and state fairs and county carnivals and county fairs and they would put up booths and you would find signs much like this one and and they would get the white people basically white healthy looking people coming into the carnival and they'd say come over here do you know that you could be the key to perfecting the the human quality of the american population that if all marriages were based upon eugenic fitness so we make sure that mom and dad are eugenically fit that all of their progeny would also be fit and that we could breed out there would be no more unfit people in the human american population in three generations which is basically around about 50 years 45 50 years and so they'd hold competitions and they would have the eugenic family of riverside county and you would travel around on the carnival and fair circuit for the next year as the image of the perfect eugenic fit family and and this uh this went on for decades uh well into the 1940s did we have eugenic family competitions all over the united states not just california i just use riverside county as an example all over the united states and so that was how we were systematizing positive eugenics so the other way that we were enforcing that positive eugenics was actually through a negative process called miscegenation laws and miscegenation laws were first put in place to not allow anybody who was epileptic imbecilic or feeble-minded and as i said earlier those were really specious uh categories feeble-minded and imbeciles were for women women who had sex out of marriage and gave birth uh if you were stupid enough to have sex and not get married first you were imbecilic or people-minded uh men were were feeble-minded and imbecilic if they couldn't hold a job if they were financially irresponsible if they were criminal serial criminals anything from misdemeanor to a felony and if they were unable to control their sexual behavior um so uh the first of the miscegenation laws were begun to make sure that those kinds of men and those kinds of women didn't get together and make more of themselves but very quickly miscegenation became in america became about race and it was about keeping white people from marrying black people and having babies together and so this is a quote that explained why white and black americans should not marry and have children and so i'm going fast so i'm gonna let you read that quote on your own uh so i can get through a couple of the more of the uh negative eugenic strategies immigration laws by 1894 we had a legal entity called the league and the league was made up by it was started by three harvard graduates but it was made up by pretty much all of the exclusive families in the united states the extremely wealthy uh politically connected families and they lobbied they lobbied the american political system to make certain changes in the immigration laws and that resulted in the 1924 immigration law and the amendment to the 1882 chinese exclusion act and effectively this excluded it it went from 45 percent uh from all of these southern europeans japanese chinese asian countries 45 were allowed to uh immigrate it went from 45 to 15 and what happened was it effectively by the 1940s the immigration act of 1924 effectively blocked the flow of german jews who were trying to immigrate to the night to the united states to escape the nazi programs that were being put in place beginning in the 1930s and so the united states did not participate in allowing any escape of significance for german jews polish jews russian jews in the 1940s to escape the nazis we didn't do anything to help them and it was by virtue of this immigration law act of 1924. the other negative eugenics that we practiced were institutionalization once people men and women in the early days and up until about the 1940s it was men and women if you were arrested or if you were committed to a mental asylum or any kind of sanitarium because we had back then we had tb sanitariums people with tuberculosis were were segregated in these sanitariums palm springs started as a tb sanitarium and so once you were in one of these institutions you could be sterilized you could be euthanized lethal neglect or you could be killed by lethal neglect uh lethal neglect meant that we know that you had something terminal and we just didn't treat it and let you die uh the immigration laws as i just talked about iq testing began as a eugenic uh uh eugenic strategy so any of you who took a placement assessment in getting into cal state san bernardino uh or a aptitude test that might decide what you might be good at those all came from the original iq testing developed by turman louis turman who was a heavy was a major player in the eugenics institutionalizing the eugenics program in the united states uh iq testing allowed for marginalization and exclusion uh and then in jim crow laws which i'll go into in a little bit more detail in a couple of slides also reinforced exclusion and marginalization and so if we couldn't institutionalize you by saying you were crazy or saying you were a criminal or saying that you were congenitally or otherwise diseased then we would exclude you not allow you to participate in the more powerful positions in american society so euthanasia the eugenicists believe that tuberculosis could only be uh had by unfit people fit people wouldn't get tb and so if you got tb uh you were by definition unfit and they would um in one case in lincoln illinois they would give the the tuberculosis uh people that had tuberculosis they would give them milk from tubercular cows and then basically just let them die that that uh again i hold that fir oops sorry i can't hold that in my head people don't need black thank you uh by they would kill them by lethal neglect uh earlier i talked about uh helen keller and she wanted that physician's jury and basically up until the 1950s uh every hospital had a a group of physicians and if it was decided that your life would turn into a life of an unfit person they would also practice this uh lethal neglect on for the babies so babies that needed life-saving treatments at the time of birth were by definition going to grow up and to unfit adults so they would just be put over in a corner of the nursery to die on their own uh and and thereby save the american people another unfit body to take care of down the road and so the biggest strategy though was sterilization uh sterilization laws were enacted in almost every state in the united states and uh harry laughlin was the uh the uh voice for sterilization and he spoke to all of the influential people and he spoke at congress and this is a a treat from a treatise that he wrote and presented to congress and explained why we need to sterilize people who are institutionalized um and and uh so i'll let you read that on your own um did you say 10 15 or 10 45 10 15. okay so we had sterilization laws across the country uh and this slide will tell you how we did that and how we moved from sterilizing men and women to just sterilizing women the sterilization laws in the united states and practices in the united states states were the basis for the sterilization processes put in place by the nazi regime in germany and specifically they looked at the sterilization practices in california as the model for sterilization in unfit populations in germany and we are still by the way sterilizing women in uh prisons in california uh we have evidence that uh there's there have been up until uh 2014 legal sterilizations and after 2014 illegal sterilizations of female inmates iq testing as i talked about here's some more information about that that can tell you how we managed to marginalize black american soldiers by giving them these iq tests that were purposely written to allow them to be categorized as morons and therefore not eligible for the higher level uh jobs in the america in the american army history of the sterilization laws buck the bell was predominant in that and so you can read about that um more about sterilization oh sorry i'm going in the wrong direction my q testing jim crow laws um basically jim crow laws were based on uh the uh the plessy v ferguson that said that white people are uncomfortable being close to black people and therefore their comfort has to be protected and so we're going to allow for state laws to design separate but equal public public facilities so white fountain drinking fountains black drinking fountains white restrooms and black restrooms white restaurants and black restaurants white schools and black schools and and by definition they would be separate but equal because they were developed out of this legal act uh but they weren't equal uh they never were equal they they started out unequal and they continued unequal and and black school children in the united states not just the southern states there were jim crow laws in virtually every state in the united states up until 1964 uh with the civil rights act and this so this was a major strategy of um marginalization of black americans uh and so i end with this quote from hitler in his masterpiece and i should i'm going to put that in quotations next but mein koff was his um his explanation for why nazism was needed and was a benefit to human to the human race to human people uh and and he said you know we're not there yet we don't know how to how to make all these fit people but the united states does and we need to look at them and and do what they're doing because they are creating a perfect human race by getting rid of all the unfit people and and there all the horrors you talk you hear in your history class about the nazi germany all those ideas were practiced here in the united states first so here are some more links that you can look at that will show you that we have stopped using the word eugenics but we're still doing the doing the practices in the united states questions thank you really fast questions sorry absolutely wonderful okay there are some questions a couple of people wondered why cold springs harbor is still open and operating so cold springs harbor is open and operating because of the eugenics records office and the people that the the elite american people that supported uh this kind of research and they just changed the names to genetics and dna but they're still looking for a definition a clear scientific definition of what makes a human fit and what makes a human unfit uh and and wealthy people in america want that definition and that's why cold springs harbor is still an operation uh someone else wondered if ford was a supporter is he another type of racist ford ford the car guy right yeah ford was also a a large supporter of uh eugenics programs and he even had hiring practices uh that would allow for him to hire fit people um and not hire unfit people and uh he was sort of in the background uh a lot of fords uh uh complicity in eugenics practices is in the history of michigan and i happen to have been born in detroit uh and so i i know about ford's history as a eugenicist but we don't get a lot of that history in the general history books that that we read elsewhere in the united states but yes he was he was a card-carrying member of the eugenics program yeah and uh terry's asking since there are eugenics being done what would the purpose be for this so i'm assuming tara you're saying why would we still be doing eugenics in today's society right because there are still people from southern italy there are still jewish people there are still people who are physically perceived as non-white in the united states so the the the purpose of the eugenics records office has still not been met we we need to according to the eugenicists in the united states who are responsible for law and education and religion we still haven't gotten rid of all of those unfit people and that's why we still use uh iq tests why we still do uh um uh what's that called the the um test when you shoot what's that test you give pregnant women oh the um uh it starts with the p um dang i just wanted to do it oh no amniocentesis that's why we still do amniocentesis so we can uh we can tell a mother oh you're gonna give birth to a kid with problems and and that's code for you're about to have an unfit baby let's not do that uh and they're gonna be uh heavily persuaded to terminate that pregnancy um i hear story after story from students about how their mothers refused to terminate their pregnancies uh and and as a result of the pressure from their physicians uh because of the um uh the perception that there might be an unfit birth so that is why eugenic programs they've changed their names but they're still in place because america still has a large population of unfit humans racism grace is asking the main difference between positive and negative eugenics the the difference between positive and negative is negative is positive creates more fitness and negative reduces unfitness so it's a plus minus system more fit less unfit right and that's why we call it positive negative because there's plus sign for fit and there's a minus sign for negative unfit and can you read that there's a question that just came up in the uh chat box is crisp derived from eugenics you know what i don't know what that is can you tell us what that is um crispr is a technology that is used a lot to edit genes oh absolutely yeah uh anything that has to do with i left medicine out medicine is a hugely eugenic institution um you know they're limited by that first do no harm and and so the eugenics took that first do no harm to mean don't make an unfit baby that would do harm and so these uh any kind of genetic testing genetic modification genetic predispositions any of that is by definition a eugenic practice because it is trying to eliminate the presence of an unfit human okay an amazing lecture thank you so much uh if anyone else has questions now's the time we're at the end of our hour and 15 minutes so i will uh i will make the couple corrections that i noted and then this to professor eaton that know thank you that helps me revise yes well please give me that feedback sounds good thank you so much uh class i'm going to remain in case you um want to ask any more questions or you have questions on just general housekeeping matters to do with the class but you can certainly log off if you are finished i know you have other classes to attend great having everyone here we had a great turnout we really had almost the whole class here so good that was awesome i'm going to go ahead and stop the recording at this point though let me do that

um media okay so we are recording uh and this is our second meeting of the fall semester so um i'm i'm getting a little progress made on campus um so so let's look we're gonna go into the learning module uh today since uh we've already covered pretty much the uh syllabus and the uh basics on canvas i am still working on a number of things though that i need to get a handle on and some of that of course has to do with uh just making things more convenient and user friendly for all of you but having said that i did manage to get our recordings um squared away but i couldn't figure out yet with till i talk to it how to put a button on this left side navigation bar i'm going to move the chat box let me move it a little bit okay this left side navigation bar i will at some point put a a link on it or uh there are these buttons down here i've got to rearrange this but i will what i plan to do is put like six of these buttons down here so that you can just click on it and it'll take you right to class recordings announcements whatever modules and so on so that you can just log on and do that stuff pretty fast but in the meantime for now to get class recordings you've got to go to the modules so just remember all the primary content for now is going to be in the modules and there's just really no way around that until i can learn how to do the other method so here's class recordings at the top of the module and then you'll just click on recordings and of course the recording for tuesday is in there here it is um and i will today's uh meeting will be in there by tonight or tomorrow morning sometime so this class is being recorded it will be posted here's your access passcode there's another way to do this and i can do it on blackboard but i'm afraid to try it on canvas because i don't yet know if i'm doing it correctly so at some point this will be revised and you'll just be able to click on the link itself but for now i think you're going to have to copy and paste this link unless from your end you can see it let me look at it from student view and see whether how it looks to your your end uh and then you'll have to put the passcode in which is that extra step that i hoped you wouldn't have to do okay so it looks the same from your side as for mine so so for now that's how to access the uh recordings and i'll make sure i'll load some other recordings in there that we've had in past classes um i have some interesting the guest lectures and i i'll try to get those in now back to modules though i did figure out how to put dr antoinette's uh powerpoint and actually i just realized dr antonin should be in here let me take a look there she is all right let me make her a co-host so she can control this thing okay so i'm going to introduce you to dr leslie antonette who's my dear friend and does all kinds of guest lectures and has for several years she is the expert on eugenics and the pseudo science of eugenics i just want to let you know and for you as well dr antoinette i did put the last powerpoint you gave me i just got it in there learned how to do this yesterday on canvas it's a new obviously so it's here but if it's the same one that let me make sure i've got this new share up wait a minute okay there we go so there it is uh can you see it on there the blessing's gonna uh for the students though it's in there and that um is the powerpoint dr internet showed last year now she may have a new one today um let's see let me make sure you can i i can unmute you here just a second hi bulgarian okay good yep okay i am stuck in your screen this is really weird you suck it it's stuck on the screen yeah it's stuck on my share screen screen let me see if i can put it out okay just a minute i wonder if i make you a host but i did make you a co-host so you should be able to control it yeah i should be um but i think i might have clicked too soon so i'm going to click share and then there it's working and then i'm going to click stop share okay and then i'm going to save as my file yeah i have a slightly different um i have a slightly different powerpoint today just with a few uh uh improvements okay but uh uh for the i mean for the most part okay you've got my uh you can all see my um right we can see your screen okay thank you all right now i am going what i'm gonna do here i think though is mute myself i do have the chat box up in case anyone wants to ask questions during the lecture but i'm going to mute my selflessly and and turn it over over to you i think here um let me exit the full screen uh have we got everybody on there i'm just looking like now i don't see my students but hang on a minute let me make sure nothing so uh i'm showing 161. okay then we're all right um the newer slides may or may not be available leslie are you gonna uh you didn't make that many changes did you no i just put in a couple more slides that provide amplification all right on the older slides um but i can email this to you if you want to replace the old one with this one all right we could do that okay so uh i'm just looking for i need to mute myself but i'll go ahead and do that all right i'm going to turn the uh class over to you leslie thank you so much okay and how much time do i have uh give it an hour we we stop at 10 15 so give yourself time to answer questions okay all right all right okay let's go um this is going to be a very quick trip uh through a very long history so um i'd like to start this presentation by pointing out that the word science is in quotation marks um is there anybody that feels like they want to pop on here and help us understand what it means when we put a word in quotation marks in this way anybody anybody okay when we put a word in quotation marks like this it it is telling the reader that yes this is a word but i'm not going to use it the way you think i am and so i'm using the word science but i'm not talking about a science i'm actually talking about a pseudoscience a a fake science that was developed at the turn of the 20th century to reinforce and produce pseudo scientific results to enforce and justify the marginalization and exclusion of certain human beings from meaningful practice of citizenship uh and humanity uh in the united states of america so i like to start this with uh the um the explanation of eugenics as a pseudo science and why is i'm not clicking come on okay so eugenics was developed the the word eugenics was coined and the practice of eugenics and the philosophy of eugenics was developed by sir francis galton he was a a british citizen he was the cousin of charles darwin and so at this point in world history uh we're really trying to figure out what a human is uh and and what makes humans hum humane or and uh and also or at the organic level at the molecular level what makes a human and so darwin was knighted uh by king edward vii for the development of eugenics as a philosophical uh perspective and as a scientific again in quotation marks scientific because until well i'll go back to that um scientific uh development of eugenics as a method of defining uh what makes a human worthy of reproduction uh and the the science of doing that um and so uh francis galton developed this in in british society eugenics was taught in british universities and colleges um beginning at the at the very end of the 19th century beginning of the 20th century and very quickly this idea moved into american culture and so the uh eugenics rested on this idea of well-born that's what uh galton defined eugenics he borrowed uh language from uh ancient greek and uh and eugenics he defined as well born and so the question is what makes a human well born are they fit or are they unfit for reproduction this was the basic question that eugenesists were trying to answer uh it's uh i mean if you believe in the constitution of the united states that all men are created equal then it's kind of a moot question it's not a real question it's a fake question um but it became the question that occupied the minds of americans in positions of power from the very beginning in the 1890s till today it's we're not done with this question and so i have a list of uh characteristics that uh i would like to um now okay that um that i like to start the class with and so basically when we're in the room i ask you all to stand up and so basically i'm gonna ask you all to put your raised hand uh icon up in your window and i'm gonna go through a list of uh characteristics that that make one unfit okay the basic uh gist of being fit means that you are psychologically emotionally and financially healthy all right unfitness takes a variety of forms so you're going to take down your hand when i name a characteristic that applies to you or your family okay because this the science of pseudoscience of eugenics is about being well born so it's about not just who you are but who your extended family is who's part of your gene pool so grandmas grandpas aunts uncles cousins if these characteristics are true of any of these people in your extended family put your hand down okay so the first characteristic is mental health do you or anyone in your extended family have any kind of mental health disorders like depression or ocd or schizophrenia if that is true for you or your extended family put down your raised hand if you or anyone in your family has any substance abuse issues and that is for legal and illegal drug use so prescription drugs as well as street drugs uh you know uh well smoking pot i guess is still can be a substance abuse issue even though it's legal because prescription drugs uh abuse can is legal so uh substance abuse of any kind alcohol or legal or illegal drugs um does you or do anyone you or anyone in your family have uh what is called feeble-mindedness by the eugenicist and feeble-mindedness looks different in men and women so i'm not gonna judge but men if you are deemed by yourself or anybody else as excessively masturbating please put your hand down or any of your cousins when women were considered feeble-minded if they were born illegitimately that means that their parents were not married if you were born while your parents were not married put your hand down if you yourself have given birth uh while you were not married women put your hand down that's considered an illegitimate birth and it was considered a characteristic of being unfit okay if you or anyone in your extended family has a cultural ethnic heritage in southern italy specifically southern italy uh if you have a jewish heritage if you have a a heritage of uh of a kind that somebody would look at you and say you are not white so any hispanic heritage uh with the darker uh complexion uh african american uh asian again we're talking about perception we're talking about the way you look so uh if your skin tone is darker if your eyes are are not um as round as a typical american eye um if your hair is kind of like mine uh and and you know you've got that more kinky curl in it um then put your hand down okay so we've got 14 people with their hands still raised out of 173 people oh 13 we're down to 12 13. okay the number is going down quickly all right so as you can see the category for fitness is extremely narrow it's it's meant to exclude a majority of people and those who fall into the fit category um oh you know what i forgot one of the characteristics uh uh so if you or anyone in your family uh is on uh public assistance of any kind uh if um you live paycheck to paycheck uh if you are carrying significant debt um uh financial health was also a very big part of being characterized as as fit um so all right so now we're down to nine uh people who still have a raised hand and uh and i think i'm still forgetting another characteristic but i think that this uh now we're down to eight uh okay i think that this proves my point that most of us uh in this class today would be considered unfit for reproduction okay so what does that mean well in britain it you were fit if you were financially comfortable meaning no public assistance meaning you had enough money to uh donate to uh to charities you had enough you know income that you could give away some of it um in uh in britain uh you were perceived pretty much uh you weren't perceived of but you were treated as a white person if your financial status was significantly larger than the white people in your social group um and so this also reinforces that idea of the financially fit category of uh fitness um and so you were unfit and here's the list that we went through we can see if i forgot anything um criminal behavior i believe if you or anyone in your family have been arrested uh or uh issued a ticket for a misdemeanor anything from a misdemeanor to a felony then you would not be considered fit genetic disorders ms multiple sclerosis cerebral palsy any genetic disorders in you or in your extended family you would fall into the unfit category and so i think i got most of those and so the idea for dealing with this huge body of unfit people right and this tiny body of fit people british eugenics designed this idea that we'd have positive eugenics practices that would support the increase of the number of people in the fit category and then negative eugenics that would decrease the number of people in the unfit category so positive eugenics were encouragement and even financial support for people who were considered fit and if they would marry and provide multiple births they were given certain financial incentives they were given gifts by the crown they were given uh financial uh support uh by by uh the ruling class um and so negative eugenics was uh in britain charity is runs a little bit different than it does in the united states wealthy people are expected to support charities and and this is signified uh if you guys are all following the markles um in prince harry and uh and duchess megan um they are uh they they are the british people are angry with them because they're not behaving like royal people are supposed to behave they're supposed to be supporting charities and doing charitable works because they're royal and that's what royal wealthy people do and so so the idea of a negative eugenic uh practice is is denying financial charity to the poor because essentially the poor in britain live on this kind of charity they've also got a socialized uh system of support in britain sort of like our welfare system but not exactly like it and so if you cut off that financial charity they would die which is the point um excluding poor children from health care and education why waste education on children that shouldn't be here anyway and so we're not going to provide them health care either so they'll die off sooner and we'll have a smaller number of people in that unfit category and and i added royal births here but i'm going to take it back out royal births are evidence of the eugenic program still in place in british culture brit british royalty are expected to have many children and because that increases the number of people in the fit category um so that uh doesn't really fit in that negative uh category the way i put it there so i'll change that before professor eaton uh posts this so in america i'm going to go into the history of how eugenics began in america but basically what we're going to be talking about here is in this slide positive american eugenics were a identify the fit persons we don't have royalty we don't have aristocrats but we have some really rich people and do they count um and like the uh british category of positive eugenics finding those wealthy people who are fit and getting them to marry each other and have multiple births but america added another eugenic uh positive eugenic program and that was the assimil assimilation of non-white children into um service level uh positions in american culture so you're not going to educate a non-white child to be the ceo of a country or a company you're going to educate them to be the janitor at that time at that company negative eugenics uh are were also as british to identify the unfit um to deny financial charity to the poor because you want to shrink that body of that number of people as quickly as possible so not giving them the money they need to feed themselves clothe themselves and shelter themselves is going to wipe them out quicker than if you let if you give them the support they need to do that again excluding poor children from health care and education why bother they're they're not going to reproduce anyway if eugenicists uh programs uh succeed but american eugenics also took some more proactive steps and they developed iq testing that would identify fit from the unfit um they uh excuse me they developed the institutionalization process for unfit people they designed immigration laws that would not allow people from that they figured were going to bring unfit genes into the country like chinese americans and chinese immigrants like southern europeans specifically southern italians they were believed this group of people were believed by the eugenesis to be genetically unfit and so we needed to limit the number of those people who were going to be allowed to immigrate into the united states um enforced sterilization laws that would sterilize unfit men and women in the beginning but toward the end well we're still in the end um primarily women who are considered unfit and i can include jim crow laws as a eugenics program because it limited the reproductive process for formerly enslaved black americans and their descendants so i'm going to go into more detail on all these categories i saw some questions do we need to stop professor eaton and answer questions no those are primarily questions about uh posting the powerpoint but um just for those of you that maybe just joined us or didn't hear us earlier there is a powerpoint right now posted on canvas but dr antoinette has updated this one so it's a little different and i will post the updated powerpoint for you sometime tomorrow morning so other than that but if you do have questions for dr antonin go ahead and put them in the chat box and we'll we'll get to those because i know the class goes by pretty fast and i want you to have time to answer and if at the end of the lecture you didn't get a chance to ask what you wanted email me those questions and i will email them to dr internet so that your questions will be addressed absolutely thank you thank you okay so how did why why was the institutionalization of eugenics in the united states different than it was in british culture it's because we have a different concept and understanding of race in practical terms so i'm going to talk a little bit about how we'd how that word developed and the way that we understand it now um so the word itself is from you know middle french it's developed out of um cultural uh traditions and histories uh previous to american uh cultures and and histories um and and basically the overall meaning of it originally just meant a different clan a different bloodline a different uh group of people who didn't share either physical attributes or cultural attributes language food milestone coming of age passages and rights um and so the word became uh used by the slave trade to define the difference between the the enslaver and the enslaved so uh very early on in in the history of enslavement which began roughly in the 14th century um we were using this word race to make a race of enslavers and a race of enslaved um and so and so we can see that uh the uh anthropological uh association is currently this this quote from them is current um is a worldview and a body of prejudgment that distorts the way we understand human differences and group behaviors and so i'm going to talk a little bit more about how we do that specifically in the united states um so sorry oh i didn't know i could do that all right um so the way that the race became uh the the difference between white people and non-white people was a direct result of the slave trade and so the slave traders were looking for ways to establish firmly establish a different race of people that were biologically uh biologically uh on the molecular and genetic level different than the white enslavers and so this was done in several ways and um the earliest kind the earliest logic of that kind was the use of biblical scripture um that said that the um that ham the son of noah had uh committed a sin against his father and would thereby be marked and so black um enslaved people um were considered marked by the they had the mark of ham and this biblically separated a race of enslaver and a race of enslaved uh but we didn't stop there so scientific again in quotation marks science in the 16th century did not mean the same thing that science means today um and so we haven't we had it by the 1700s um in developed a universal empirical model of replicatable scientific truths uh science in the 1700s 1800s was still pretty much of what we would call today a philosophy an idea about how the world works and how the people in the world work and so there was ongoing since like i said the 14th century when we started this enslaving on a commercial basis because all cultures in human history have practiced some form of enslavement but in the 14th century when it became a commercial venture uh we were looking for ways to clearly define who got enslaved and who was able to enslave others and so we had several models and the one that kind of stuck was johann blumenbach and he decided he uh scientifically in quotation marks decided that there were five types of humans they were all the same race a race of humans for blumenbach but they were different kinds of race uh and that was caucasian mongolian ethiopian americans and malays so that basically covers the globe as it was known in the in the 1700s there were white people there were asian people there were black people there were these oddly colored people from the americas uh and uh there were sub-asian people um that were referred to as malays so bo in blumenbach's theory the most beautiful people were were the caucasians and these were people who came from the caucasus mountains so the descendants of people who originated in these caucasus mountains and this is where the caucasus mountains are they're in um in southern russia western russia i'm going to say but my sense of direction is backwards so uh don't take that as gospel but the people who originated from this area of the caucasus mountains in in russia in the georgian uh region of russia blumenbach decided were the most beautiful and therefore all other human life forms descended from them but as those beautiful white uh russian caucasus or originating people move further away from that area they became darker and they become dumber and so his logic for that was that white can turn brown but brown can't turn white so this has to be the way humanity started this has to be a reasonable way to define how human human life was organized but he did say there was one race of humans but there were just different categories uh and so the way that we use blumenbach today the way that i was taught about human race and probably professor eaton was taught about human race but fortunately i hope you have not been taught about human race is that there were three races caucasian negroid and  and through various routes we came to that list of three via blumenbach and uh the scientists that developed out of the eugenics strategy in the united states said there's three races of humans caucus caucasian those who came from that originated from that caucasus basically white people negroid people um and it's oid the the suffix oid means um uh sort of uh characteristics of um so there's not one negro uh group of people but there's a a lot of people that look non-white uh with a darker complexion and the kinky curly hair and then there's this other group that are kind of oddly colored um ranging from that malay um that that asian uh uh physical appearance all the way to that southern and america northern american indigenous uh complexion and so uh this is what i was taught in school that there were three races of people and they were these three races and they were not to be mistaken they were separate um and not equal and how did we get there because i was being taught that in the 1960s into the 1970s um so how did we get there we got there through american eugenics charles davenport heard uh francis galton speaking about british eugenics and he thought it was brilliant and he and he believed in his heart of hearts that america had to adopt a eugenics stance to american population and american identity and so in 1902 he approached the carnegie institution carnegie institution was funded by andrew carnegie who was this just fabulously wealthy railroad uh and oil tycoon and so carnegie said well we'll give you some money to start it out and let's see what happens and so in 1906 the station for experimental evolution opened and that was with carnegie funding and also along the way j.h kellogg who had fun founded his own uh organization called race betterment uh he said well i'll kick in some money too because this looks promising uh so uh next time you look at the cereal boxes on your breakfast table if it says kellogg's that was the company owned by j.h kellogg and almost all of our most beloved breakfast foods come from the kellogg company and the kellogg company headed by j.h kellogg was committed to a eugenics program for american population uh he wanted us to evolve into a country of fit people and that meant all of the exclusion of all that unfitness that we just talked about a moment ago so in 1910 due to the increased funding uh davenport was able to open the eugenics records office and he hired a man named larry harry laughlin to to organize and run that that organization and so what harry laughlin did was he uh recruited greg uh students undergrad and graduate students from the eight the ivy league uh colleges and universities uh ivy league are those private institutions uh where you know the best of the best get their college educations um harvard yale princeton university of pennsylvania which is technically public but somehow manages to be in the ivy league and so he got these students and during the summer these students would go from house to house in certain neighborhoods and they would interview the families in there kind of like a census taker but what they were interested in was the cultural mental emotional physical history of the people who lived in those houses and their relatives and so thousands of these records thousands of these records were produced and in 1912 davenport puts them all together in a trade book and he publishes it and he markets it as a study of the genetic disorders and unfitness of the american people okay and this book becomes very important because it's about to influence every aspect of american life uh sexual behavioral immigration legal it's about to and to become the basis for decisions that put in place programs that actually limit americans certain kinds of americans ability to reproduce and to exist all right so we're going to get into more detail on that in just a minute uh watch my time let's say you're good it's about a quarter of um a couple of people were asking about latinos uh which category they were uh placed in but weren't they primarily uh considered in the mongolian category unless they had dark skin or yeah i thought so yeah the american or the malay category were for all those people that weren't exactly white and weren't exactly dark um they they were the various uh com complexions because all of this is really based on human perception what i see with my eye and what my brain tells me that means and and so it's got to do with physical features on your face and and the the color of your skin did i answer that yes thank you all physical attribute perceptions and just to remind this class physical attributes are not specific to any group of people there are black people with blonde hair naturally in the solomon islands so all physical attributes are found across the board in all human uh half blood groups and and genetic groups no such thing that that's why there's no such thing as race because it doesn't exist uh i could i could be uh black and have blonde hair by nature or green eyes or i i'm uh three quarters caucasian and i have brown eyes uh but i i'm a quarter shawnee so most of us did well all of us go get your dna done and you'll see how many different ethnicities you carry it's shocking yeah because by now we're all an amalgamation of every culture on the planet pretty much yeah we've all got a little bit of everybody yeah so excuse me so this trait book starts uh uh some traction with developing actual eugenic programs in the united states and so uh by 1918 the carnegie institute says okay move in with us you're going to get the benefit of all of our support we're going to give you staff we're going to give you publishing rights we're going to give you all the money you need to make this work uh carnegie today is understood to be a human human humanist uh who uh whose uh the carnegie institute funds annually humanistic research uh research done that that that betters humanity um but he got to start as a eugenicist um and so uh the eugenics records office and and the seo combine they go to work with the carnegie institute and by 1939 we the eugenics records office is fundamentally subsumed into the cold springs harbor laboratories the eugenics records office was located physically in the cold springs harbor new york laboratory and they as they built more and more scientific laboratories in that physical spot it became known as the cold springs harvard laboratory and that is still in existence today and is considered one of the world-class uh sources of information on american non-american on human uh genetics they do genetic and biological research still to this very day so in effect the the station for experimental evolution and the eugenics requisites never shut down they're still in business and so how did this happen when we got this trait book who did he show this trade book to well he showed it to dave's kellogg who thought that was a great way to go about this race betterment in the united states um uh organizations were started by uh the galton institute that are still in print today the eugenics review that's still being published today and contributed to the american breeders association was a a uh an academic group of eugenicists and they produced the journal of heredity the eugenic the american genetic association is still open for business and the american eugenics society which is now called the society for biodemography demography and that organization is still open and working and publishing academic excuse me academic uh proofs of eugenic uh research so who are some of the other people well david starr jordan right here in california he was the founding president of our stanford university which is considered a almost an ivy league uh university davis star jordan uh in charge of all of these college students uh published uh blood of a nation a study of decay of races by the survival of the unfit right so he's a believer in those negative eugenics programs and his book goes into why and how those should be implemented alexander graham bell oddly enough inventor of the telephone he wrote a memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human race uh and uh he he believed that deaf people were unfit and should not be allowed to procreate woodrow wilson when he was the governor of new jersey actually put a bill into law in the state of new jersey in 1911 that would allow for eugenical sexual sterilizations of people who were committed to institutions and jails in the state of new jersey other supporters were helen keller who herself was made deaf and blind by a childhood illness she believed in a physician's juries for defective babies i'm going to go into a little bit more detail about that in just a couple more slides but basically she believed that babies who were born with with defects of any kind should be allowed to uh oh shoot i can't think of what it's called i'll get to it in the next slide they should be allowed to die there's a term for that jason james watson of watson and crick who won nobel prizes for identifying dna um they believed that uh birth control needed to be put in to practice for all unfit categories of humans so that we didn't have to bother about sterilizing them or or euthanizing them later and margaret sanger who founded birth control in the united states believed yes that women should have control of their own bodies and decide when they give birth and when they don't however she also believed that birth control was going to be a primary way of limiting the birth of unfit americans in the long run and she also believed that they should have iq testing for people who could possibly procreate and that the the american government should give out permits like driver's permits uh you would have to have a procreation permit in order to become pregnant and give birth and so how do we do positive eugenics you asked well we went to carnivals not we the eugenicists went to carnivals and state fairs and county carnivals and county fairs and they would put up booths and you would find signs much like this one and and they would get the white people basically white healthy looking people coming into the carnival and they'd say come over here do you know that you could be the key to perfecting the the human quality of the american population that if all marriages were based upon eugenic fitness so we make sure that mom and dad are eugenically fit that all of their progeny would also be fit and that we could breed out there would be no more unfit people in the human american population in three generations which is basically around about 50 years 45 50 years and so they'd hold competitions and they would have the eugenic family of riverside county and you would travel around on the carnival and fair circuit for the next year as the image of the perfect eugenic fit family and and this uh this went on for decades uh well into the 1940s did we have eugenic family competitions all over the united states not just california i just use riverside county as an example all over the united states and so that was how we were systematizing positive eugenics so the other way that we were enforcing that positive eugenics was actually through a negative process called miscegenation laws and miscegenation laws were first put in place to not allow anybody who was epileptic imbecilic or feeble-minded and as i said earlier those were really specious uh categories feeble-minded and imbeciles were for women women who had sex out of marriage and gave birth uh if you were stupid enough to have sex and not get married first you were imbecilic or people-minded uh men were were feeble-minded and imbecilic if they couldn't hold a job if they were financially irresponsible if they were criminal serial criminals anything from misdemeanor to a felony and if they were unable to control their sexual behavior um so uh the first of the miscegenation laws were begun to make sure that those kinds of men and those kinds of women didn't get together and make more of themselves but very quickly miscegenation became in america became about race and it was about keeping white people from marrying black people and having babies together and so this is a quote that explained why white and black americans should not marry and have children and so i'm going fast so i'm gonna let you read that quote on your own uh so i can get through a couple of the more of the uh negative eugenic strategies immigration laws by 1894 we had a legal entity called the league and the league was made up by it was started by three harvard graduates but it was made up by pretty much all of the exclusive families in the united states the extremely wealthy uh politically connected families and they lobbied they lobbied the american political system to make certain changes in the immigration laws and that resulted in the 1924 immigration law and the amendment to the 1882 chinese exclusion act and effectively this excluded it it went from 45 percent uh from all of these southern europeans japanese chinese asian countries 45 were allowed to uh immigrate it went from 45 to 15 and what happened was it effectively by the 1940s the immigration act of 1924 effectively blocked the flow of german jews who were trying to immigrate to the night to the united states to escape the nazi programs that were being put in place beginning in the 1930s and so the united states did not participate in allowing any escape of significance for german jews polish jews russian jews in the 1940s to escape the nazis we didn't do anything to help them and it was by virtue of this immigration law act of 1924. the other negative eugenics that we practiced were institutionalization once people men and women in the early days and up until about the 1940s it was men and women if you were arrested or if you were committed to a mental asylum or any kind of sanitarium because we had back then we had tb sanitariums people with tuberculosis were were segregated in these sanitariums palm springs started as a tb sanitarium and so once you were in one of these institutions you could be sterilized you could be euthanized lethal neglect or you could be killed by lethal neglect uh lethal neglect meant that we know that you had something terminal and we just didn't treat it and let you die uh the immigration laws as i just talked about iq testing began as a eugenic uh uh eugenic strategy so any of you who took a placement assessment in getting into cal state san bernardino uh or a aptitude test that might decide what you might be good at those all came from the original iq testing developed by turman louis turman who was a heavy was a major player in the eugenics institutionalizing the eugenics program in the united states uh iq testing allowed for marginalization and exclusion uh and then in jim crow laws which i'll go into in a little bit more detail in a couple of slides also reinforced exclusion and marginalization and so if we couldn't institutionalize you by saying you were crazy or saying you were a criminal or saying that you were congenitally or otherwise diseased then we would exclude you not allow you to participate in the more powerful positions in american society so euthanasia the eugenicists believe that tuberculosis could only be uh had by unfit people fit people wouldn't get tb and so if you got tb uh you were by definition unfit and they would um in one case in lincoln illinois they would give the the tuberculosis uh people that had tuberculosis they would give them milk from tubercular cows and then basically just let them die that that uh again i hold that fir oops sorry i can't hold that in my head people don't need black thank you uh by they would kill them by lethal neglect uh earlier i talked about uh helen keller and she wanted that physician's jury and basically up until the 1950s uh every hospital had a a group of physicians and if it was decided that your life would turn into a life of an unfit person they would also practice this uh lethal neglect on for the babies so babies that needed life-saving treatments at the time of birth were by definition going to grow up and to unfit adults so they would just be put over in a corner of the nursery to die on their own uh and and thereby save the american people another unfit body to take care of down the road and so the biggest strategy though was sterilization uh sterilization laws were enacted in almost every state in the united states and uh harry laughlin was the uh the uh voice for sterilization and he spoke to all of the influential people and he spoke at congress and this is a a treat from a treatise that he wrote and presented to congress and explained why we need to sterilize people who are institutionalized um and and uh so i'll let you read that on your own um did you say 10 15 or 10 45 10 15. okay so we had sterilization laws across the country uh and this slide will tell you how we did that and how we moved from sterilizing men and women to just sterilizing women the sterilization laws in the united states and practices in the united states states were the basis for the sterilization processes put in place by the nazi regime in germany and specifically they looked at the sterilization practices in california as the model for sterilization in unfit populations in germany and we are still by the way sterilizing women in uh prisons in california uh we have evidence that uh there's there have been up until uh 2014 legal sterilizations and after 2014 illegal sterilizations of female inmates iq testing as i talked about here's some more information about that that can tell you how we managed to marginalize black american soldiers by giving them these iq tests that were purposely written to allow them to be categorized as morons and therefore not eligible for the higher level uh jobs in the america in the american army history of the sterilization laws buck the bell was predominant in that and so you can read about that um more about sterilization oh sorry i'm going in the wrong direction my q testing jim crow laws um basically jim crow laws were based on uh the uh the plessy v ferguson that said that white people are uncomfortable being close to black people and therefore their comfort has to be protected and so we're going to allow for state laws to design separate but equal public public facilities so white fountain drinking fountains black drinking fountains white restrooms and black restrooms white restaurants and black restaurants white schools and black schools and and by definition they would be separate but equal because they were developed out of this legal act uh but they weren't equal uh they never were equal they they started out unequal and they continued unequal and and black school children in the united states not just the southern states there were jim crow laws in virtually every state in the united states up until 1964 uh with the civil rights act and this so this was a major strategy of um marginalization of black americans uh and so i end with this quote from hitler in his masterpiece and i should i'm going to put that in quotations next but mein koff was his um his explanation for why nazism was needed and was a benefit to human to the human race to human people uh and and he said you know we're not there yet we don't know how to how to make all these fit people but the united states does and we need to look at them and and do what they're doing because they are creating a perfect human race by getting rid of all the unfit people and and there all the horrors you talk you hear in your history class about the nazi germany all those ideas were practiced here in the united states first so here are some more links that you can look at that will show you that we have stopped using the word eugenics but we're still doing the doing the practices in the united states questions thank you really fast questions sorry absolutely wonderful okay there are some questions a couple of people wondered why cold springs harbor is still open and operating so cold springs harbor is open and operating because of the eugenics records office and the people that the the elite american people that supported uh this kind of research and they just changed the names to genetics and dna but they're still looking for a definition a clear scientific definition of what makes a human fit and what makes a human unfit uh and and wealthy people in america want that definition and that's why cold springs harbor is still an operation uh someone else wondered if ford was a supporter is he another type of racist ford ford the car guy right yeah ford was also a a large supporter of uh eugenics programs and he even had hiring practices uh that would allow for him to hire fit people um and not hire unfit people and uh he was sort of in the background uh a lot of fords uh uh complicity in eugenics practices is in the history of michigan and i happen to have been born in detroit uh and so i i know about ford's history as a eugenicist but we don't get a lot of that history in the general history books that that we read elsewhere in the united states but yes he was he was a card-carrying member of the eugenics program yeah and uh terry's asking since there are eugenics being done what would the purpose be for this so i'm assuming tara you're saying why would we still be doing eugenics in today's society right because there are still people from southern italy there are still jewish people there are still people who are physically perceived as non-white in the united states so the the the purpose of the eugenics records office has still not been met we we need to according to the eugenicists in the united states who are responsible for law and education and religion we still haven't gotten rid of all of those unfit people and that's why we still use uh iq tests why we still do uh um uh what's that called the the um test when you shoot what's that test you give pregnant women oh the um uh it starts with the p um dang i just wanted to do it oh no amniocentesis that's why we still do amniocentesis so we can uh we can tell a mother oh you're gonna give birth to a kid with problems and and that's code for you're about to have an unfit baby let's not do that uh and they're gonna be uh heavily persuaded to terminate that pregnancy um i hear story after story from students about how their mothers refused to terminate their pregnancies uh and and as a result of the pressure from their physicians uh because of the um uh the perception that there might be an unfit birth so that is why eugenic programs they've changed their names but they're still in place because america still has a large population of unfit humans racism grace is asking the main difference between positive and negative eugenics the the difference between positive and negative is negative is positive creates more fitness and negative reduces unfitness so it's a plus minus system more fit less unfit right and that's why we call it positive negative because there's plus sign for fit and there's a minus sign for negative unfit and can you read that there's a question that just came up in the uh chat box is crisp derived from eugenics you know what i don't know what that is can you tell us what that is um crispr is a technology that is used a lot to edit genes oh absolutely yeah uh anything that has to do with i left medicine out medicine is a hugely eugenic institution um you know they're limited by that first do no harm and and so the eugenics took that first do no harm to mean don't make an unfit baby that would do harm and so these uh any kind of genetic testing genetic modification genetic predispositions any of that is by definition a eugenic practice because it is trying to eliminate the presence of an unfit human okay an amazing lecture thank you so much uh if anyone else has questions now's the time we're at the end of our hour and 15 minutes so i will uh i will make the couple corrections that i noted and then this to professor eaton that know thank you that helps me revise yes well please give me that feedback sounds good thank you so much uh class i'm going to remain in case you um want to ask any more questions or you have questions on just general housekeeping matters to do with the class but you can certainly log off if you are finished i know you have other classes to attend great having everyone here we had a great turnout we really had almost the whole class here so good that was awesome i'm going to go ahead and stop the recording at this point though let me do that

Transcript for:Exploring the History of Eugenics

Transcript for:
Exploring the History of Eugenics