Eugenics

Occurring in the early twentieth-century United States was a movement that had its source in social Darwinism, known as eugenics. Men like the nineteenth-century Darwinist Herbert Spencer believed medicine and charity had unnaturally protected the unfit of society, implying that we should allow nature to take its course and root out the weak. Going a step further, eugenicists asserted that it was necessary to assist nature in this task. The aim of eugenics advocates was to improve human heredity through social measures, and was therefore a mix of utilitarian and evolutionary principles. The result in the United States was, among other things, forced sterilization laws for the handicapped, the insane, and criminals, as well as marriage restriction and anti-immigration laws (1). Given the substantial changes taking place in progressive America, then, along with the promotion of eugenic ideas, it should not be surprising to find that a movement to prevent suicide could coexist with efforts to legalize the killing of “idiots,” criminals, and other defectives (2).

Go back much farther and you find that eugenics is not such a new issue. In his Republic, Plato, too, believed that a government should shape the nature of a society by controlling who married whom. Consider his words:

"Why, I said, the principle has been already laid down that the best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior, as seldom as possible; and that they should rear the offspring of the one sort of union, but not of the other, if the flock is to be maintained in first-rate condition. Now these goings on must be secret which the rulers only know, or there will be a further danger of our herd, as the guardians may be termed, breaking out into rebellion."

How would this take place? Plato thought the rulers could organize festivals in which unmarried people would take part in marriage lots contrived to ensure that the "best" would end up with those like them, "and then they will accuse their own ill-luck and not the rulers (3).

Equally interesting is that Plato agreed with Socrates that it was necessary to deceive the people into believing in "the myth of the metals." According to this myth, each person's soul had mixed within it a specific type of metal: gold, silver, bronze, or iron. The gold-souled people were meant to rule, the silver souls meant to be soldiers, and the bronze- or iron-souled people meant to be producers. It was necessary to observe children to determine the group to which they belonged.

Eugenics in the United States lost popularity with its promotion in Nazi Germany, but it is still shocking to us to hear words from our leaders who promoted it. Listen to Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell which allowed forced sterilization in the United States:

"It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles are enough"(4).

1. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 22; Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 14-15; Stephen L.Kuepper, “Euthanasia in America, 1890-1960: The Controversy, the Movement, and the Law,” PhD diss., (New Jersey: Rutgers: 1981), 62.

2. Kuepper, 27; Pernick, 24.

3. Plato. The Republic, Book V. Produced by Sue Asscher and David Widger. Web. 20 February 2012.

4. "The Sterilization of America: A Cautionary History." The Center for Individual Freedom. 17 May 2002. Web. 20 February 2012.