Category: race betterment

CF Dight’s Crusade With Hitler for Genetic Counseling

Many people believe the Nazis were entirely different animals than the rest of humanity, but the truth is that they had many ideological ‘friends’ elsewhere, and no, not in the circles of white supremacy.  Rather, they were doctors and scientists and other professionals of good standing, well regarded in America at the time.  CF Dight …

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Child Labor Laws as Eugenics Policy

Source:  Dr. Frank a Fetter, Cornell University, in a discussion of “Western Civilization and the Birth-Rate”, as found in The American Journal of Sociology, 1907, page 619. The paper mentions but one recent social change which tends definitely and positively to reduce the families of the unskilled classes, namely, child-labor legislation. Such laws as these …

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The Human Betterment Eugenics Society Hides Its Identity

One of the reasons why people fail to understand how much of what the are dealing with today is actually derived from eugenics principles (if not from eugenics organizations, directly!) is because the eugenicists that got things started changed the names of their organizations in a deliberate attempt to distance themselves from the atrocities of …

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Eugenics, Progressives, and Miscegenation: Popenoe’s “Applied Eugenics”

It is very common to hear people speak as though it was Republican/conservatives/Christians that opposed intermarriage between black and whites (miscegenation), and that this attitude represented rank bigotry and amounted to open racism.  This is a white-washing of history.  The truth is that progressives and secularists thoroughly embraced anti-miscegenation.  The reader can be assured that …

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Eugenics Must Begin with the Family: Paul Popenoe

From David Popenoe in War Over the Family p 235-236 (regarding his father, Paul Popenoe): In keeping with the decline of hereditarianism in American intellectual life, Paul Popenoe gradually shifted his professional efforts from genetic improvement to family improvement.  With the help of some influential financial donors, he started the American Institute of Family Relations (then …

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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 …

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Charity a Hindrance to Natural Selection

In the following foreword from a compilation of 12 eugenic lectures (1914), we see that eugenics is perceived as merely applied evolution.  Furthermore, ‘modern man,’ being a sympathetic being, keeps alive those that should die.   With luck, principles of breeding already used with animals will be brought to bear on humans. ——————- Foreword by Lewellys …

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On the Elimination of Defectives: Hitler, in Mein Kampf

Note the utilitarian appeal to the reduction of suffering, the appeal to the ‘common good’, and the basic belief that all he is doing is applying biological principles. Hitler, in Mein Kampf.  [Source] In this field the People’s State will have to repair the damage that arises from the fact that the problem is at …

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The Duty of the State in the Treatment of the Deformed: R. Z. Mason, Appleton WI, 1879

R.Z. Mason, mayor of Appleton, WI, “The Duty of the State in its Treatment of the Deaf and Dumb, the Blind, the Idiotic, the Crippled and Deformed, and the Insane.” [Source / Italics added, bold text added] In the progress of modern civilization, the state has come slowly to a recognition of certain duties and …

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Leon Cole on the Social Body and Our Duty to Future Generations

From The Relation of Philanthropy and Medicine to Race Betterment by Leon J. Cole, University of Wisconsin, at the First Conference for Race Betterment (1914) Among those who have in their treatment of this subject emphasized the importance of the natural selection viewpoint may be mentioned especially Herbert Spencer, Francis Galton, and Karl Pearson, the …

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