After Francis Galton’s address to the American Sociological Society, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims” a certain Benjamin Kidd responds thusly: For Mr. Pearson, I think, proposed to give the kind of people who now scribble on our railway carriages no more than a short shrift and the nearest lamp-post. I hope we shall not …
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Eugenics Quote of the Day: Birth Control is about Weeding out the Unfit; so says Margaret Sanger
“Birth control itself … is nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or of those who will become defectives.” So says MARGARET SANGER.
Davenport: Death is Nature’s Great Blessing to the Race. Why Keep Defectives Alive?
Charles Davenport, in The Eugenic Programme And Progress in its Achievement (1914) [italics in original, bold added] The lowest stratum of society has, on the other hand, neither intelligence nor self-control enough to justify the State to leave its matings in their own hands. On the contrary, the defectives and criminalistic are, so far as …
Eugenics Quote of the Day: ‘Eugenics is a great force in the evolution of man.” Francis Darwin (son of Charles)
Francis Darwin in Francis Galton (the Galton Lecture) as found in The Eugenics Review, 1914: But it is time to speak of Galton as a eugenist–on which if we look to the distant future his fame will reset. For no one can doubt that the science of eugenics must become a great and beneficent force …
Eugenics Quote of the Day: Eugenics is Not likely to Infringe on Individual Freedom
Paul Popenoe in his widely used 1920 textbook, Applied Eugenics. pg 364-365. “Not likely” indeed! It is charged that eugenics infringes on the freedom of the individual. This charge (really that of the individualists more than of socialists, strictly speaking) is based mainly on a misconception of what eugenics attempts to do. Coercive measures have …
Helen Keller: Physicians Juries for Defective Babies, Article in the New Republic, 1915
Due to the successful sanitization of the past in regards to eugenics, it is largely unknown how pervasive eugenics attitudes were, and how expansive eugenicists believed their program to be. Here we have Helen Keller, writing in a prominent liberal magazine, advocating explicitly for infanticide–in the name of the race. For more information and the …
Eugenics Quote of the Day: Not likely there will be an Eugenic Inquisition
Herbert E Walter in an essay called “Human Conservation” found on page 483 of Readings in Evolution, compiled by Horatio Hackett Newman. First published in 1921. One needs only to recall the days of the Spanish Inquisition or of the Salem witchcraft persecution to realize what fearful blunders human judgment is capable of, but it …
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