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Abstract:
Recent media attention to the history of the eugenics movement in American has resulted in apologies from the governors of Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, South Carolina and California for state mandated surgical sterilizations under eugenics laws. This article tracks the genesis of the eugenics apology movement, which began with a monument to the infamous case of Buck v. Bell that was erected just as heightened media coverage of milestones in human genome research filled the headlines.

The article also explores the involvement of most early geneticists in the eugenics movement, attempting to put into historical context both the hopeful side of eugenics that made it so popular early in the 20th Century, as well as the dark memories we normally associate with eugenics in that era.

The article draws parallels between the urge to eradicate disease embraced within the eugenics movement,and the similar urge often used to argue for new genetic technologies, such as prenatal genetic diagnosis.It is concluded with an echo of the Buck case, exhorting readers to avoid simplistic moralisms in reflecting on historic cases like Buck, in favor of a more searching analysis that would require us to understand our own eugenic impulses.

Abstract:
The eugenics movement provided the motive for dozens of laws that remained in force for more than a century in the United States, a significant number of which specifically targeted people with disabilities for legally sanctioned discrimination. Similar laws were adopted around the world, perhaps most notably as part of Hitler’s prelude to the Holocaust. Consequently, we tend to associate the word “eugenics” with all things evil. Yet the underlying message of eugenicists was popular for so long not solely because it denoted coercive legislation but more often because it signaled a hopeful future devoid of social problems. This paper describes how the word “eugenics” is now coming back into common use, and how it has been revived in the service of political objectives, divorced from the period in which it developed and the meaning it had within its earlier historical context. The resulting distortions - directly traceable to the ongoing “culture war” over reproductive rights - suggests that we should be careful when we play the “eugenics card” lest rhetorical zeal eliminate the possibility for honest debate.

eugenics, reproductive rights, rhetoric, involuntary sterilization

Abstract:
Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v. Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press) tells the story of the 1927 U. S. Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which approved laws allowing states to perform surgery in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. In the Buck case the Supreme Court endorsed involuntary sterilization as a tool of government eugenic policy, setting the stage for similar laws in the majority of states. The case is most often remembered by the Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., opinion, which ended in the rhetorical climax: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Paul Lombardo sets out in this book to challenge the accuracy of the Holmes opinion, and recount in detail the events that brought Buck to the Supreme Court.

The Introduction to the book retraces the author's path in discovering the major documents and records that revealed the story of the Buck case, and sets forth a summary of the book's thesis and direction. The Prologue provides a brief description of the trial of Carrie Buck, and the role of Arthur Estabrook as expert eugenic witness.

eugenics, legal history, sterilization, involuntary sterilization, Carrie Buck, Arthur Estabrook, Buck v. Bell, legal history

Abstract:
In 1929 Charles B. Davenport, a prominent biologist and leader in the American eugenics movement, carried out an experimental castration of a "Mongoloid dwarf" at a New York State mental institution. His goal was to retrieve tissue for chromosomal analysis in an attempt to understand the basis of syndromal mental retardation. Davenport was assisted in the research by cytologist T.S. Painter, who later achieved scientific celebrity for his work in counting human chromosomes. Davenport also invited George Washington Corner, who eventually contributed to the discovery of progesterone, to participate in the experiment. Davenport planned and carried out the surgery using the questionable promise of therapeutic benefit to elicit consent from a parent with limited mental capacity on behalf of an even more seriously impaired institutional resident. Archival evidence demonstrates that even at that date scientists like Davenport and the physicians he collaborated with were sensitive to ethical issues such as the necessity for consent and questions of decisional capacity, as well as the potential for negative publicity for mistreatment of "research subjects."

ethics, informed consent, eugenics, chromosome analysis, medical ethics, medicine

Abstract:
The goal of this article is to fill the existing gap in the history of eugenics by presenting a detailed analysis of the origins of the Pioneer Fund. Pioneer is a foundation chartered in 1937 to support and publicize study on "heredity and eugenics" and "the problems of race betterment." The paper focuses on the role of Harry Laughlin, one of he most successful publicists of the "racial radical" branch of the American eugenics movement, and Wickliffe Draper, a wealthy New Yorker who endowed the Pioneer Fund. The paper explores several archival collections, tracing contacts among Laughlin, Draper and the Nazi scientists whose work informed Hitler's "racial hygiene" movement.

Harry Laughlin received an honorary degree from the Nazi-controlled University of Heidelberg as "a pioneer in the science of race cleansing," only three months before the Pioneer Fund was incorporated. Wickliffe Draper recognized Laughlin's successes in the eugenics movement by then naming him as the first President of Pioneer. Laughlin's captivation with "Nordic" survival and attempts to develop a "white's only" legal definition of "the American Race" are reflected in Pioneer's corporate charter.

Draper's vision for eugenics matched Laughlin's. Draper traveled to Berlin to view a Nazi "Population Conference" in 1935 in the company of an American eugenicist who publicly saluted Hitler. Draper's funding supported immigration restriction, eugenical essay contests, and distribution of books advocating the repatriation of Blacks to Africa. The notoriously racist U.S. Senator Theodore Bilbo [1877-1947] of Mississippi provided public advocacy for Draper's secretly financed repatriation effort.

The early program of Pioneer "research" and publicity is described through minutes of Pioneer Board meetings in 1937-'38. The Fund's first project was an incentive plan to encourage Army aviators, a group of "eugenically superior" white men, to have additional children. Though his personal sympathy concerning the Pioneer agenda is unclear, future Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan was a founding Director and sat on the Pioneer Board for seventeen years. Pioneer support and publicity for racially charged research continues today and is reflected in books like The Bell Curve, as well as more recent publications such as The Science of Human Diversity: A History of the Pioneer Fund,and Eugenics: A Reassessment, both by Richard Lynn. The records described in this paper belie the attempts of Pioneer apologists to portray their founders as scientifically disinterested in issues of race. Men with Nazi sympathies began the Pioneer Fund; their patently eugenic aspirations continue to guide Pioneer today.