Category: racial progress

Taussig: The breeding of men, eugenics, and progress. 1911

SOURCE: Frank Taussig, Principles of Economics, Volume II, 1911.  Pages 233-237. This movement is steadily extending, and is gradually affecting not only those who are usually thought of as being in a more special sense “native born,” but the descendants of the immigrants as well. The influence of free institutions and of free opportunities is …

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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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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 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 …

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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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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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Eugenics is Darwinism and Evolution Applied

In the essay on the definition of eugenics hosted on this site, it is shown that eugenics was merely seen as Darwinism intelligently applied to the human race.  On this page, further corroboration of this will be provided in the words of the eugenicists themselves.  Emphasis is added. —————————– R.Z. Mason, mayor of Appleton, WI, …

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Definition of Eugenics

Eugenics Defined Eugenics is “the study of, or belief in, the possibility of improving the qualities of the human species or a human population by such means as discouraging reproduction by persons having genetic defects or presumed to have inheritable undesirable traits (negative eugenics) or encouraging reproduction by persons presumed to have inheritable desirable traits …

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