The placing of the boy in the cage with a monkey is an outrage. The Negro race in America has a hard enough time as it is in getting away from the prejudice that is closely related to the monkey without having a member of the race placed on exhibition. Leading men of science from Harvard and Princeton and Columbia University were saying that Africans were midway between an orangutan and a human being.
So a hundred years later, it should not come as much of a surprise that many people still cling to these notions of European superiority, African inferiority. The year was 1859, three months after Charles Darwin published his book on the origin of species. American promoter P.T.
Barnum unveiled a new attraction at his popular museum in New York City. It featured what was described as the What Is It? or Man Monkey. Visitors were told that the creature had been captured by hunters in Africa, who discovered a race of beings roving among the trees and branches, like apes and monkeys.
Museum staff declared that the creature had been pronounced by scientists as a connecting link between African blood and African blood. and lower animals. In reality, Barnum's so-called man monkey was an African-American man named William Henry Johnson. Thanks to Barnum, Johnson spent much of his life on public display as an evolutionary missing link, sometimes in a cage. Many reporters at the time were happy to promote the deception.
The New York Tribune declared that Barnum's performer seemed to be a cross between an ape species and a negro, while another paper declared, The head is shaped like that of a monkey, but the face is more like that of an African negro of the lower order. It has been pronounced by naturalists as a specimen of the connecting link between man and monkey. specimen of the step between man and monkey. Actually, Crow was a young woman from Southeast Asia who suffered from hypertrichosis, a rare genetic condition that produces excessive hair. In the 1900s, there was Congo the ape man, usually exhibited in a cage next to a chimpanzee.
Most of these early presentations of missing links were crude hoaxes put forward by hucksters, not scientists. But the quest to dramatize the lower stages of human evolution eventually reached far beyond freak shows. It ultimately involved the most elite members of the scientific community, and it was given a platform at one of the most celebrated events in early 2010. 20th century America. Today, Forest Park in St. Louis is a place for walking, or riding a bicycle, or spending a quiet Sunday afternoon.
But more than a century ago, it was one of the most visited locations in the entire United States. The site of the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. Attracting more than 19 million visitors, the World's Fair was known for its lavish neoclassical, classical buildings, its 22-story high Ferris wheel, and the public debut of innovations such as the x-ray machine and the ice cream cone. But the fair had a darker side. Organizers imported thousands of indigenous peoples from around the world to be put on public display in what was essentially a giant human zoo.
Unlike freak shows, the human zoo in St. Louis was created with the cooperation of a America's scientific establishment. The man behind the human zoo was anthropologist William McGee. One of the nation's leading scientists, McGee had already served as acting president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
In 1903, he was asked to head the anthropology department for the World's Fair. McGee had grand plans of presenting the story of human evolution by displaying representatives of what he considered lower stages of the human race. McGee's plans reflected the ideas of mainstream anthropology of the time. Anthropology was kind of founded on this idea of mapping civilization from the highest to the lowest, right? With the lowest at that time said to be Africans, and then you sort of move up.
Leading men of science from Harvard and Princeton and Columbia University were saying that Africans were midway between an orangutan and a human being. Like many scientists of his day, McGee drew inspiration for his ideas on human development from Darwin's theory that humans had evolved from ape-like ancestors. Darwin's theory provided a template for categorizing Africans as biological inferiors.
His impact created a bandwagon effect on many scholars on both sides of the Atlantic. Africans were demeaned with terms like savages and compared to animals. Admittedly, some of these comparisons were used before Darwin, but after Darwin, they increasingly took on the authority of science. Darwin argued that the break in evolutionary history between apes and men came between Africans and Australian aborigines and gorillas. In other words, he thought blacks were the closest humans to apes.
German scientist Ernst Haeckel helped popularize the idea. Ernst Haeckel was the leading German Darwinist in the late 19th and early 20th century. He corresponded extensively with Darwin, and Darwin recognized Haeckel's affinity with his own theory. Ernst Haeckel also is known for his raving racism.
And in fact, he had a... graphic of the history of human evolution that, in very pointed terms, really embedded a racist view of human evolution. You have the Teutonic male on the top, the sort of Germanic male, and then at the bottom you had some creatures that looked partly like apes, partly like Jews.
He was also anti-Semitic. And in the middle, you have the transition from the ape-like creatures to the first human creatures. The ape-like creatures look pretty much like they're Africans. And the takeaway point that Ernst Haeckel had from this graph was that the difference between the highest human being and the lowest human being, the gap between the highest Teutonic male and the first human being that was just one step above the apes, was larger than the gap between the lowest human being and the highest ape. At the St. Louis World Fair, William McGee expressed a similar view, arguing that scientists had now shown the structure of the lowest humans more nearly resembles that of the highest ape-like animals than that of the highest humans.
Like other scientists of the era, McGee saw primitive non-white peoples as living evidence of man's evolutionary history. The savage stands strikingly close to subhuman species in every aspect of mentality. as well as in bodily habits and bodily structure. McGee was determined to use primitive peoples at the fair to dramatize for the public the different stages of human evolution, beginning with races he considered lowest on the evolutionary scale. McGee arranged for native peoples to be put on display in villages designed to recreate their native habitats.
These villages were enclosed by fences, making them truly seem like human zoos. More than four million fairgoers reportedly visited these anthropological displays eagerly staring at and poking at the indigenous peoples in their enclosures. Adding to the indignities, native peoples were pressured to participate in a series of athletic contests designed to show they were biologically inferior to whites.
Those on display were also subjected to experiments in a special laboratory set up by the fair's anthropology department. directed by a psychology professor from Columbia University, the lab conducted tests to measure native people's intelligence and physical features, and even their threshold for pain. Some scientists came to the fair with more gruesome plans.
Alish Herdlitschka was an anthropologist at the Smithsonian. He came to St. Louis hunting for dead bodies. Hrdlicka was obsessed with analyzing the brains of other races to gain insight into human evolution. He went on to assemble a collection of hundreds of embalmed human brains, many of them still stored by the Smithsonian.
Hrdlicka extracted a promise from doctors in St. Louis to hand over the brains of any of the natives who might die while on display at the fair. Native peoples were brought to the St. Louis exposition from the far corners of the globe. From Japan came representatives of the Ainu people.
Patagonians came from South America. Igorots and Negritos came from the Philippines. Both were thought by scientists of the time to be near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder for humans.
The Negritos were even marketed at the fair as another missing link between humans and apes. But perhaps the most exotic people group brought to St. Louis for public display were... pygmies from the African Congo.
prove Darwin's theory of the missing link? Will a study of the little black children of the African jungle shed light on the theory evolved by Darwin as regards the evolution of the human race? Dr. W.J. McGee, Chief of the Anthropology Department of the World's Fair is convinced that it will. This is the first time that the Aboriginal people of Africa have been brought to an english-speaking country. This is the first opportunity that has been presented to scientists to study them.
Many characteristics were noticed in the pygmies that closely resemble the ape or the simian type. It is believed that the pygmies who are said to represent the lowest form of human development are next removed from the simian family. The pygmies appearing at the St. Louis World's Fair had been transported from Africa by former missionary turned explorer Samuel Phillips Werner.
Werner had gone to Africa with the explicit goal of finding pygmies to display at the fair. He had gone to the Congo heavily armed and he had gone hunting for these people called Pygmies, these diminutive people of the Central African forest. McGee repeatedly compared the pygmies to monkeys and apes. In the journal Science, he even asserted that pygmies were commonly considered to approach subhuman types more closely than any other variety of the genus Homo. They were considered by men of science at that time to be the lowest form of humans, or in some thought they were sub-human.
The pygmies were less than thrilled by their welcome at the fair. The Americans treat us as they do our pet monkey. They laugh at us and poke their umbrellas into our faces.
They do the same to our monkey. One pygmy at the fair became a special celebrity. His His name was Ota Benga. Samuel Werner had purchased him at a slave market.
Ota Benga was advertised to fairgoers as the only genuine African cannibal in America today. For a nickel, he would display his pointed teeth that supposedly enabled him to eat human flesh. At the end of the fair, the Pygmies returned to Africa with Samuel Werner.
But in 1906, Werner brought Ota Benga back to America. It would prove a fateful choice. Samuel Werner returned from Africa to New York City on July 30, 1906, arriving on the SS Armenian from Liverpool. He was accompanied by two chimpanzees, a snake, a parrot, and 50 boxes of materials from Africa that he hoped to sell to museums.
He was also joined by Ota Benga. Werner quickly departed New York, leaving Benger at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Established in 1869, the museum was already becoming one of the premier scientific institutions in the world. Oter Benger was largely left free to wander the museum's exhibit halls. When Samuel Werner eventually returned to New York, he was fighting off creditors, and the museum wanted him to find new lodgings for Oter Benger.
So Werner worked out an agreement to move Oter Benger to the New York Zoological Park, otherwise known as the Bronx Zoo. Spread over more than 260 acres, the Bronx Zoo had been envisioned by its founders as the largest zoo in the world, and the grandest zoological establishment on Earth. The zoo was directed by William Temple Hornaday.
A noted zoologist, Hornaday formerly worked at the Smithsonian, and he had already founded the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. Overseeing Hornaday was an executive committee chaired by Henry Fairfield Osborne, a distinguished professor at Columbia University. Hornaday and Osborne had dreams of exhibiting more than just animals at their new zoo. Both wanted to install Native Americans on zoo grounds. With Osborne promising that one day the Indian and his tipi would take their place next to the zoological park's buffalo.
Now they had their chance to put their first human on display. Hornaday quickly agreed to purchase one of Werner's chimpanzees and to house both the chimp and Otterbenga at the zoo. Hornaday planned to exhibit the chimpanzees in the zoo.
The pygmy and the chimpanzee together in a cage in the zoo's monkey house. It was presented as science, not as a circus act, because these were men of science who were doing this. Otabenga went on display in the monkey house on Saturday, September the 8th, 1906. The next day, a sign was placed on the cage explaining the new exhibit.
The African Pygmy, Ota Binga. Age, 23 years. Height, 4 feet 11 inches.
Weight, 100 inches. three pounds, brought from the Kasai River, Congo Free State, exhibited each afternoon during September. Thousands of New Yorkers came to stare and laugh and debate the meaning of the display.
Is it a man? Some of them wondered. Newspaper coverage brought even more people, and in just a few weeks, the zoo drew nearly a quarter million visitors. But the notoriety also brought controversy. New York's clergy, in particular, were horrified at what they saw as a dehumanizing spectacle.
First to speak out was the Reverend Robert Stuart MacArthur, pastor of the city's Calvary Baptist Church, one of the most famous churches in the country. the largest Baptist congregations in America. The person responsible for this exhibition degrades himself as much as he does the African. Instead of making a beast of this little fellow, he should be put in school.
Ministers from New York's African American community soon organized a protest committee. After visiting the zoo and seeing Benga for themselves, they were horrified. They thought it was outrageous.
They clearly saw a human being who appeared to be afraid, who was being heckled and jeered at and things thrown at him and he was being, you know, debased on the hallowed grounds of the New York Zoological Society in New York City. The ministers demanded that Otabenga be taken off display and be offered an education. James H. Gordon, superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn, appealed to the zoo to end the spectacle. If Professor Werner found difficulty in disposing of the boy, why did he not apply to us?
We would have seen that he was well cared for. Gordon also denounced the way the young African was being used as a prop to prove Darwinian evolution. This is a Christian country and the exhibition evidently aims to be a demonstration of the Darwinian theory of evolution.
The Darwinian theory of evolution absolutely is opposed to Christianity, and a public demonstration in its favor should not be permitted. Neither the Negro nor the white man is religious. related to the monkeys. Such an exhibition only degrades a human being's manhood.
We do not like this exhibition of one of our race with the monkeys. Our race, we think, is depressed enough without exhibiting one of us with the apes. We think we are worthy of being considered human beings with souls.
Samuel Werner tried to deflect the criticism. denying that he put Otabenga on display to show that he was somehow subhuman. If Otabenga is in a cage, he is only there to look after the animals. Zoo director Horner Day meanwhile declared that the black minister's protest was ridiculous. Though a believer myself in the Darwinian theory, I had no idea of using the exhibition to enforce it.
The boy is on exhibition simply because the public wishes to see him. He is well treated and happy. To say that the boy is placed in the cage to show his similarities to the monkey is nonsense.
He is much more intelligent than many white men whom I have known. Holliday made clear that he wasn't about to shut down the popular exhibit. The exhibition shall certainly be continued, unless the directors of the park decide otherwise.
But the leaders of the New York Zoological Society were pleased by the display. Henry Fairfield Osborne even congratulated Hornaday for the excellent press coverage, commenting that Benga is certainly making his way successfully as a sensation. Spurned by Hornaday, the African-American ministers decided to appeal to George McClellan Jr., the Democratic mayor of New York.
McClellan was the son of the controversial general during the Civil War, who had tried to unseat Abraham Lincoln in the presidential election of 1864. The elder McClellan openly confessed that he was prejudiced in favor of the white race, and said that he couldn't learn to like the odor of either billy goats or negroes. The younger McClellan now refused to even meet with the African-American ministers, sending out an assistant with a dismissive note referring them to the New York Zoological Society. The ministers then went to see Madison Grant, the Zoological Society's secretary. Grant was a prominent member of New York Society. A graduate of Yale, he received a law degree from Columbia.
He was also a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, a counselor of the American Geographical Society, and a founder of the Bronx Zoo. It would have been hard for the ministers to find someone less sympathetic. Grant was an open racist who thought blacks were an inferior race, and regarded those who had parents of different races as mongrels. Within a decade, he would write The Passing of the Great Race.
A book which championed Nordic supremacy and keeping blacks subservient to whites. The book was reportedly praised by Adolf Hitler as his Bible. Grant also rebuffed the ministers. So did the city's most prominent newspaper, the New York Times, which professed to be puzzled by the anger of the protesters.
We do not quite understand all the emotion which others are expressing in the matter. Describing African pygmies as very low in the human scale, the Times made clear that it viewed pygmies as less than fully human. Whether they are really closer to the anthropoid apes than the other African savages, or whether they are viewed as the degenerate descendants of ordinary Negroes, they are of equal interest to the student of ethnology and can be studied with profit. The editors at the Times thought it absurd to make moan over the imagined humiliation and degradation Ota Benga was suffering.
In fact, they claimed the pygmy was probably enjoying himself. The suggestion that Benga should be placed in a school instead of a cage ignores the high probability that school would be a place of torture to him, and one from which he could draw no advantage whatever. The idea that men are all much alike except as they have had or lacked opportunities for getting an education out of books is now far out of date.
After African American ministers criticized the zoo for trying to use Otabenga to prove Darwinian evolution, the New York Times weighed in again. The reverend colored brother should be told that evolution, in one form or another, is now taught in the... textbooks of all the schools, and that it is no more debatable than the multiplication table.
As protests continued, increasingly rowdy crowds came to the zoo in order to visit the pygmy. On Sunday, September 16th, 40,000 people converged on zoo grounds to see the city's newest sensation. According to press reports, the mobs chased Otabenga around the zoo all day, howling, jeering and yelling. Some of them poked him in the ribs, others tripped him. All laughed at him.
Benga responded by shooting. shooting an arrow at his tormentors, after which zookeepers caught him and returned him to his cage. As both crowds and Otabenga became unruly, zoo director Hornaday grew increasingly defensive. He now claimed that he had decided to exhibit Otabenga in a cage simply for convenience. We have no platform that we could place him on, and this big open-air cage was the best place we could find to put him where everybody could see him.
Eventually, the continued controversy made Hornaday want to wash his hands of the whole affair. Ultimately, an agreement was reached to move Ota Benga to the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, and later to a seminary in Lynchburg, Virginia. There, nearly ten years later, Ota Benga shot himself to death. Benga had expressed a desire to return to his native Africa.
But by 1916, the continent was being further ravaged by European powers as they fought World War I. So return was no longer an option. I think the hope was... of it all, the trauma he had sustained, the loneliness, and you know, I can't even imagine.
He had no idea what had become of his people, if his village was still even there. So it's not hard to see that. It's hard to imagine the myriad reasons why he would have sunk into this deep depression that ultimately caused him to take his life. In one final indignity, the New York Times published an obituary assuring readers that during Ottabenga's stay in their city, he was actually an employee of the Bronx Zoo, who had been hired to feed the apes. According to the Times, it was this employment that gave rise to the unfaithfulness of the a well-founded report that Otabenga was being held in the park as one of the exhibits in the monkey cage.
Otabenga was largely forgotten by history until the 1990s. But the passion of social Darwinists in America for putting humans on display continued. And 15 years later, some of the same figures involved in the Otabenga scandal would be involved in another kind of human display.
One whose impact would prove even more horrifying. In September of 1921, leading scientists from around the globe gathered at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City for the Second International Congress of Eugenics. Eugenics was the science of breeding better people. The term had been coined by Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, but Darwin himself helped lay the groundwork for eugenics in his book, The Descent of Man. According to Darwin, human beings develop through a long and cruel process of natural selection or survival of the fittest.
Less fit organisms died, leaving more capable organisms to reproduce and flourish. It was this ruthless process of elimination, not the foresight of a designer, that had propelled human beings to the top of the evolutionary ladder. But Darwin worried that modern society was now doing its best to undermine natural selection.
We civilized men do our utmost to check the process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed and the sick. We institute poor laws.
And our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of everyone to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to smallpox. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.
Hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed. A kindly man, Darwin was troubled by the implications of his theory for society. But his followers had a solution. They thought they could apply Darwinian selection rationally and humanely through the science of eugenics. which became known as the self-direction of human evolution.
Eugenics was eagerly embraced by America's scientific elites. Sometimes today it's argued that eugenics was just fringe science, just a few people believed in it. Of course we don't believe in it now. That ignores the fact that for decades, eugenics was what could be called the consensus view of the scientific community.
The Eugenics Congress at the American Museum of Natural History drew scientists from America's top research institutions, including Harvard, Yale, MIT, the Smithsonian, Ohio State, UC Berkeley, and the University of Texas. Participants included inventor Alexander Graham Bell and Charles Darwin's own son, Leonard, who lashed out at the threat biological defectives pose to modern society. Scientists were welcomed to the Eugenics Congress by then-president of the American Museum of Natural History, Henry Fairfield Osborne, who had been involved in the display of Otabenga at the Bronx Zoo.
A future head of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Osborne had become one of the most celebrated scientific champions of evolution in America. Soon he would become embroiled in a controversy with politician William Jennings Bryan over a fossilized tooth discovered in Nebraska. Osborne insisted that the tooth supplied irrefutable evidence of the existence of man-like apes in ancient North America.
To his embarrassment, the tooth later turned out to be part of an extinct pig. At the Eugenics Congress, Osborne told scientists that eugenics was essential to the future of human evolution. To know the worst as well as the best in heredity. To preserve and to select the best.
These are the most essential forces in the future evolution of human society. Osborne also attacked racial intermarriage. 500,000 years of human evolution have impressed certain distinctive virtues as well as faults on each race.
Put three races together, you are likely to unite the vices of all three as the virtues. Osborne argued that racial groups should be studied to determine what tasks each race is best fitted to accomplish. But it was clear that he already thought he knew the proper place of non-whites.
If the Negro fails in government, he may become a fine agriculturalist or a fine mechanic. The American Museum of Natural History accompanied the Eugenics Congress with a major museum exhibition designed to sell eugenics to the American public. Participants included America's top publishers, insurance companies, government agencies, and private groups like the American Red Cross. As many as 10,000 people attended the special exhibition. There were no live humans put on display at the eugenics exhibit, but it was still a kind of human zoo.
It put human racial groups under the microscope to judge their worth to society. There were displays highlighting differences between black and white babies in the womb, displays comparing the mental stamina of different races, displays reporting on the capabilities of immigrants, and displays showcasing equipment for measuring human intelligence and other features. There also were displays about the human brain.
One compared the brains of criminals and non-criminals. But the most extensive brain display was created by anthropologist Alish Herdlichka from his growing collection of embalmed brains. Herdlichka left his original specimens stored in jars at the Smithsonian, but he brought gelatin models of the embalmed brains of apes and three races of humans.
Herdlichka's presentation filled seven separate display cases. It also included a series of skulls from Native Americans. The skulls purported to show that Native American brains revealed primitive features from earlier stages of evolution.
In the midst of more sophisticated displays were cruder exhibits featuring the blatantly racist books of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddart. Stoddard had published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. Stoddard claimed that whites were in danger of being overrun by the colored races of the world, and he argued that immigration from what he called lower human types had to be rigorously curtailed. Eugenists pretty universally viewed immigrants and people of non-white races as a drag on the human race. Eugenists viewed blacks...
and Mexicans and Hispanics as throwbacks, evolutionary throwbacks that were lower races in evolutionary terms and therefore were a drain on modern society. And they justified this in the name of Darwinian science. You know, there were racists before the eugenists.
The interesting thing about the eugenists was the way that they built on top of Darwinian biology and claimed that there was a scientific justification for racism. The Eugenics exhibition advocated a chilling agenda for public policy, including forced sterilization and harsh new restrictions on immigration. It also promoted a radical proposal advanced by the Eugenics Record Office, one of the eugenics groups participating in the exhibition.
The proposal called for assembling biological profiles on all Americans to determine whether they were biologically fit to mate. The Eugenics Records Office was so extreme, they wanted to hold records on everyone in the United States, biological records showing their family trees, so that if you wanted to marry someone you could write to them and they could tell you whether the person you're wanting to marry had a fit family tree in evolutionary terms so that you could marry them. or if they had bad heredity so that you couldn't. And in fact, they had exercises and packets that were given to biology teachers around the country that one of the exercises you were supposed to do in your biology class when you were studying evolution and then eugenics was to have kids fill out this form with their family tree of who were the black sheep of the family, what diseases they had in the family, so that these could then be sent off to the eugenics record office and their vaults. and so that they could keep records on everyone.
The American Museum of Natural History later called the Eugenics Congress of 1921 perhaps the most important scientific meeting ever held in the museum. A decade later, the museum was at it again, hosting the third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932. This time it put on an even more extensive museum exhibition for the public. At the entrance to the exhibit hall were placed the busts of two men accredited as the founding fathers of eugenics, Francis Galton and Charles Darwin.
Although some scientists raised concerns about eugenics, probably the strongest opposition to the movement came from traditional religion. It's a story that Americans don't know as well as they should, and it's a story that American Christians don't know as well as they should, but... at the basis of opposition to the so-called scientific eugenicist movement in the early 20th century were Christians, Protestants, Baptists, Catholics, who understood the value of every human being.
That's not only a Christian value, that is fundamental to the American experiment itself. When Nebraska's legislature passed a forced sterilization bill in 1913, Governor John Moorhead, a Presbyterian, vetoed it. Moorhead argued that the legislation not only violated the state's Bill of Rights, it also offended a higher law. This proposed legislation seems more in keeping with the pagan age than with the teachings of Christianity. Man is more than an animal.
While many modernist clergy supported eugenics, theologically conservative religious figures were much more skeptical. American evangelical William Jennings Bryan, for example. denounced eugenics as an impossible system for scientific breeding under which a few supposedly superior intellects, self-appointed, would direct the mating and the movements of the mass of mankind. But the most consistent opposition to eugenics came from Roman Catholics.
In 1930, Pope Pius XI strongly condemned forced sterilization for eugenics in one of his encyclicals. The Pope criticized eugenists for asking the government to assume a power which it can never legitimately possess. The most fundamental principle of Catholic social teaching is the intrinsic dignity of every human being.
In other words, people are valuable simply as creatures made in the image and likeness of God. They're not valuable merely because they have economic value, or they're productive or they're smart, they have value in and of themselves as spiritual creatures made in God's image. That idea obviously contradicts the fundamental principle of eugenics which is through either passive or active means to favor particular ethnic groups over others. Across America, Catholic clergy actively resisted the eugenics crusade.
In Louisiana, the Catholic Church played a key role in preventing the passage of a sterilization law. Catholic opposition to eugenics was so pronounced that some eugenics groups targeted the Catholic Church for attacks. The Human Betterment Foundation in California was dedicated to promoting eugenics through forced sterilization.
Its president, E.S. Gosney, lashed out at Catholic efforts to block sterilization laws. Every legislature considering a sterilization bill in the United States is visited by representatives of the bishop or archbishop who lay down the law of Rome to those willing to accept it. The henchmen are prompt to fall in line.
Gosney suggested that the Catholic Church should be asked to pay for Catholics who aren't sterilized. If Catholics do not want their feeble-minded communicants sterilized, it would seem more logical to ask them, as Hitler has done in Germany, To keep these feeble-minded segregated at their own expense, in order that the American commonwealth may be subjected to no unnecessary damage from the presence of a great body of defectives, who increase the amount of human misery, contribute largely to the ranks of the delinquent and criminal, augment the tax burdens, diminish the efficiency of industry, and dilute the quality of American citizenship. The eugenics movement and the supporters of eugenics in the early 20th century actually tried to...
make an anti-Catholic campaign part of their public argument. On the one hand they claimed that their ideas were based firmly in natural science and yet they actually ran a public campaign that was anti-religious. You get the impression that there was something more than simple empirical science at stake in the debate.
Despite opposition from Catholics and others the American eugenics movement continued to flourish in the years leading up to World War II. The eugenics movement eventually led to the forced sterilization of more than 60,000 people in America. Compulsory sterilization in the name of eugenics was ultimately upheld by the United States Supreme Court in a decision that declared, three generations of imbeciles are enough. Many of those sterilized would not be considered mentally handicapped today. The eugenics movement also succeeded in securing the passage of a draconian immigration law that sharply restricted the flow of non-Nordic ethnic groups into the United States.
While considering the legislation, the United States Congress invited testimony by a leading eugenist on the biological aspects of immigration. Starting in the 1920s in particular, there was a huge push for immigration restrictions on people who were coming from non-Nordic ethnic groups. Germanic non-northern European countries and so people coming from Mexico to the United States or people coming from Africa or southern European countries that had people that the eugenics viewed as evolutionarily backwards they had to be stopped because they were going to destroy our society but the most horrifying implementation of eugenics policies took place not in America but in Nazi Germany The Nazis ultimately sterilized more than 300,000 supposed hereditary defectives in the name of eugenics.
They then started gassing the disabled at special medical facilities. It was in these killing centers that the Nazis began to perfect the methods they would later use to exterminate Jews. The sordid history of eugenics and the mainstream scientific community's embrace of it remains completely unknown to many Americans.
So does the scientific community's involvement with social Darwinism and scientific racism, including human zoos. It's a history some people are still trying to cover up. Geneticist James Watson won the Nobel Prize for co-discovering the structure of DNA. But in 2007, he sparked outrage when he suggested that African blacks were genetically inferior to European whites.
Echoing the arguments of scientific racists from the past, Watson claimed that black inferiority was due to evolution. There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. James Watson Watson was widely condemned for his comments, both inside and outside of the scientific community. It was an indication of how times have changed. But although scientific racism no longer receives support from mainstream science, many in the scientific community remain reluctant to honestly discuss the past.
Sharon Weston Broome is mayor of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 2001, she was a member of the Louisiana House of Representatives when she proposed a resolution to encourage teaching students about the history of scientific racism. The resolution highlighted Darwin's views on race, as well as how his views had been exploited by other scientists, such as Ernst Haeckel, to promote racism. The resolution also encouraged teaching students more recent scientific findings supporting racial equality. I'm not asking you to take evolution out of the schools.
I am merely asking the legislature, the State Department of Education, the Board of Regents, and the state university systems that they be made aware that Darwin promoted the justification of racism in his definitive works on the origin of species by means of natural selection and the descent of man. I certainly understand that racism was in effect before Darwin. This has never been denied.
Yet he was the originator of a scientific justification for racism as well as giving wings to modern racism. Harvard University's Stephen Jay Gould wrote, quote, biological arguments for racism may have been common before 1859, but they increased by orders of magnitude following the acceptance. of evolutionary theory. Broome's resolution provoked a firestorm, with supporters of Darwin's theory accusing her of trying to unfairly malign Charles Darwin.
This resolution is not only a product of creationists, but also Christian supremacists, and Christian supremacism is a hate-based ideology, and you can't combat hatred with hatred. I never, ever have emulated any type of hate towards anyone. The resolution only passed after all references to Darwin and Haeckel were deleted. It was as if scientific racism had never happened.
But Louisiana isn't the only state where the past misuse of science has been censored. In 2007, the Kansas State Board of Education rewrote a statewide curriculum standard about the history of science. The standard originally called for students to understand both the positive and negative aspects of science on society, including how science can be abused. As examples of the abuse of science, the original standard cited the eugenics movement, scientific racism, and the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, where government researchers left poor black men untreated for syphilis in order to observe the progression of the disease. The Kansas Board of Education revised the curriculum standard to eliminate any study of the abuses of science.
Now students would only learn about how science had improved society. The original standard did not mention Darwin or Darwin's theory. That did not stop proponents of rewriting the standard from claiming they were defending the teaching of evolution. But public officials aren't the only ones who have tried to cover up the history of scientific racism. Some of the institutions most involved in promoting scientific racism in the past are still suppressing their own history.
The American Museum of Natural History remains one of the world's leading science museums. But to this day, it has never apologized for the role it played in promoting the international eugenics movement. It has also tried to downplay the role of scientists in promoting scientific racism. In 2005, the museum mounted a major new exhibition on the life and legacy of the British.
The legacy of Charles Darwin. The exhibition is still available today as a travelling exhibit. The exhibit contains a section on social Darwinism that fails to acknowledge any involvement by the scientific community in either eugenics or scientific racism. Even more glaringly, the exhibit also fails to disclose the museum's own role in the history of Darwinism.
promoting social Darwinist policies like eugenics. According to the current exhibit, social Darwinism had no real connection with either Darwin or science. The fact of the matter is that if you read the scientists of the day, in the late 19th and early 20th century, many of them were promoting racism and even racial extermination, extinction of races.
They were promoting the gaining of living space. They were promoting competition. The things that we know of as social Darwinism, these were things being promoted by Charles Darwin himself to some degree. Many other leading biologists, Ernst Haeckel in Germany, and many others. You could go on and on.
By the 1920s and 30s, they were becoming very prominent. If you look especially in the field of anthropology and evolutionary anthropology, many of them were promoting social Darwinism. This was not just an idea of some cranks or some political people that didn't really understand the science.
This was an idea that was very prominent in scientific circles. Officials at the American Museum of Natural History declined a request to be interviewed for this documentary. Their stated reason was that filmmakers were unable to purchase two million dollars in insurance.
The museum also turned down repeated requests to answer questions about its history and writing. Officials at the Bronx Zoo are likewise skittish when it comes to discussing its display of Otabenga. They also refuse to be interviewed.
And if you visit the zoo today, you won't find any remembrance of what happened to Otabenga. Instead what they've done is they've closed off the monkey house. So where Ota Benga was housed, you, the public, could not even see it now.
And they have just not had any comment whatsoever. It's as if zoo officials hope that Ota Benga and the scientific racism that dehumanized him will stay forgotten. Others seem to share the same hope. But some things should never be forgotten. Because things that are forgotten have a way of coming back.
Nazi scum on our streets! Nazi scum on our streets! The recent resurgence of white supremacist groups in America has raised chilling echoes of the past. Evolutionary arguments for racism that were rejected by the scientific community are now being resurrected by modern racists.
In 2009, white supremacist James von Brunn drove to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., where he fatally shot an African-American security guard. Von Brunn had published a manifesto arguing that cross-breeding whites with species lower on the evolutionary scale diminishes the white gene pool while increasing the number of mongrels. Richard Spencer is a leader of the so-called alt-right.
He argues that, quote, Darwinism offers a compelling and rational justification for whites to act on behalf of their ancestors and progeny and feel a shared sense of destiny with their extended kin group, unquote. In a 2017 study, more than 400 self-identified members of the alt-right revealed that they view blacks, Mexicans, and other racial and ethnic groups as less evolved and closer to humans'ape-like ancestors than whites. The misuse of science to promote racism is no longer just a sad relic of our history.
It's also an uncomfortable part of our present. One reason. The only reason we should remember the sins of the past is to help us avoid making the same mistakes again. We need to learn from the past, not cover it up.
Thank you.