Before Harm Reduction
Before Harm Reduction
William Walter Kay
Here we trace British-American eugenics (and crypto-eugenics) from 1900 to 1975. While this movement’s hostility toward persons of colour is rightfully notorious, its enmity toward poor whites is neglected. Harm Reduction dates to the late-1970s. Marginalized whites bear the brunt of casualties in the opioid pogrom.
Eugenics
Early 20th century “eugenics mania” swept-up scientists, doctors and lawmakers in a swirl of books and lectures. Popular novels depicted intergenerational sagas of bad bloodlines. (1) Eugenics courses invaded college curricula. Politicians demanded “defectives” be segregated and the “unfit” sterilized. (2) President Teddy Roosevelt expounded on the dangers of degenerate breeding.
Eugenicists obsessed over the impoverished white women they often classified as “morons.” More intelligent than imbeciles, morons presented problems because they appeared normal. Female morons working in well-to-do homes might get impregnated by proper young men. This was a crisis. Experts debated whether to sterilize morons or confine them to asylums. (3)
In 1916 Albert Priddy, Superintendent of Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded railed against the “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites.” Priddy drafted tests for sterilization candidates and co-wrote the Carnegie-published, Mongrel Virginians. (4)
Eugenicists demanded unemployables be “stamped out.” Harvard’s Frank Taussig wrote in Principles of Economics (1921) that if politicians wouldn’t subject misfits to “chloroform once and for all,” they could at least prevent them from “propagating.” (5)
In 1921 New York’s Museum of Natural History hosted the Second International Congress of Eugenics – Henry Fairfield Osborn and Leonard Darwin co-presiding. Attendees included Alexander Graham Bell, Herbert Hoover and Democratic Party kingmaker, Averell Harriman.
Averell’s mom, Mrs. E. Harriman, the convention’s benefactress, co-hosted the Ladies’ Auxiliary. They summoned US Congress’s immigration committees to see exhibits, hear tirades, and dine at Long Island’s Piping Rock Club; at Mrs. Harriman’s expense. (6)
The Museum’s special exhibition was remounted in the US Capitol Building. One exhibit placed statues of Harvard athletes beside those of average Americans. (7) The New York Times ran supportive articles headlined: “Tainted Aliens” and “Deterioration of Race.”
The Second International Congress aimed at the: “prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society.” (8)
“Pedigrees of pauper stocks” was a central theme. One much-cited paper stressed the existence of a “definite race of chronic pauper stocks” while protesting the “charity madness” allowing this race to proliferate.
Craniologist and Jew-baiting Nordicist, Count Vacher de Lapouge informed the assembled:
“…classes of people which are the least gifted turn on the elite …creating a civilization that multiplies their desires far beyond our capacity to fulfill them. A movement has begun among the inferior classes; it is directed against the whites, the rich, the intellectually superior stock, and against civilization itself. The war of the classes is in fact a war of the races.” (9)
Sanger
Bios of Margaret Sanger invert power structures. Oligarchic dynasties (Rockefellers, Dukes, Scaifes, Laskers, Sulzbergers, Duponts etc) justified their fabulous inheritances as the entitlements of selective breeding. They disdained overbreeding “mongrel” drudges. Sanger didn’t recruit oligarchs – au contraire.
In 1921 Sanger became the face of the American Birth Control League (ABCL) which represented several Northeastern clinics. Founders directors included Count Lapouge, Clarence Little, Lothrop Stoddard and Guy Irving Birch
Little, an extreme racist even for the times, later ran the American Eugenics Society.
Stoddard (a Harvard PhD) argued famine and disease properly checked population growth of inferior races. Governments must restrict living quarters and food supplies of surplus people.
The notorious racist Burch was a) a charter member of the Population Association of America; b) a director of the American Eugenics Society; and, c) a registered lobbyist for federal birth control legislation. Descending from colonial-era pilgrims, Burch despised poverty-stricken whites.
ABCL synonymised “maternal health” with ethnic cleansing. ABCL’s inaugural paper sloganeered:
“More children from the fit, less from the unfit – that is the chief issue of birth control.”
Denouncing the “dependent, delinquent, and unbalanced masses” Sanger intoned:
“We cannot improve the race until we first cut down production of its least desirable members.” (10)
British eugenicists invited Sanger to preside over Birth Control International (BCI). This center studied contraceptive efficacy, with funding from patrons seeking to thwart socialist revolution.
Sanger’s notoriety facilitated fundraisers such as Princess Alice’s Malthusian Ball, and a dinner thrown by Lady Dhanvanthi Rama Rau. Such galas bankrolled Sanger’s mission to India which received coverage in 377 American newspapers.
The Democratic Party
The 1924 US Immigration Act mimeographed the words of House eugenics expert, Harry Laughlin. While barring Asians the Act also targeted Italians. During its first year of operation Italian immigration decreased 89%. The Act barred 6 million immigration applicants.
Immigration stoked heated debate and even fisticuffs during the Democratic Party’s 1924 national leadership convention at Madison Square Gardens. Frontrunner, William McAdoo, accepted the Ku Klux Klan’s endorsement. KKK racism resonated in small towns but not in northern cities. Klansmen maintained a menacing presence inside and outside the Gardens. After defeating a motion denouncing Klan terror, thousands of hooded conventioneers paraded. Crosses burned through the night.
McAdoo almost won on the first ballot. The convention then ground-on for days until little-known compromise candidate John Davis emerged victorious. Davis lost the 1924 presidential election to Republican Calvin Coolidge by a landslide.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 1932 triumph followed the Democrat’s break with the Klan and consequent capture of the Catholic vote. Nevertheless FDR, like cousin TR, embraced eugenics, as did every president betwixt them; …as did most congressmen. FDR swept the polls in the segregated Klan-terrorized South.
The Roaring Twenties
The Sixth International Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference (New York, 1925) received extensive reportage. Lord Keynes, Baroness Ishimoto and Julian Huxley attended. Supportive messages from Bertrand Russell and Upton Sinclair were read aloud.
As state legislatures reverberated with calls for sterilizing degenerates, Buck v Bell (1927) tested the constitutionality of state eugenics legislation. Carrie Buck had been impregnated via rape. She was designated “unfit” and slated for sterilization. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (seven Justices concurring) ruled:
“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 is enough.” (11)
Soon after 27 states mandated sterilization; 34 categories of persons were subjected to the procedure. (12)
Meanwhile, philanthropists accelerated contraceptive technology. Rockefellers funded research into contraceptives for “dull-minded” housewives. (13)
The Dirty Thirties
In 1932 New York hosted the third, and final, International Congress of Eugenics. Few attended. (Catholic eugenicists convened separately.) What attendees lacked in numbers they made-up for in pedigree. Harrimans, Roosevelts, Osborns, Dodges, and fellow denizens of the social register showed. Margaret Mead, Margaret Sanger and Pioneer Fund founder Colonel Draper listened to Henry Osborn deliver his famous “over” speech:
“Over-destruction of natural resources… Over-construction of warehouses, ships, railroads, wharves and other means of transport… Over-production both of food and the mechanical wants of mankind… Over-population beyond the land areas, or the capacity of the natural and scientific resources of the world, with consequent permanent unemployment.” (14)
Osborn’s jeremiad came amidst the Great Depression with 20 million Americans unemployed; hence, the following passage is revealing:
“While some highly competent people are unemployed, the mass of unemployment is among the less competent, because in every activity it is the less competent who are first selected for suspension while the few highly competent people are retained... In Nature these less-fitted individuals would gradually disappear, but in civilization we are keeping them in the community...” (15)
Dr. Theodore Robie’s presentation seconded these views:
“A major portion of this vast army of unemployed are social inadequates, and in many cases mental defectives, who might have been spared the misery they are now facing if they had never been born.”
Another presenter called for castrating 14 million unemployed American men.
1930s British eugenics movement organizations included: Eugenics Education Society, National Birth Control Association, Birth Control Investigation Committee, Malthusian League etc. In 1935 the British Eugenics Society elected Lord Horder (Edward VIII’s physician and confidante) as president – a position he then held for 14 years. Horder eulogised Malthusian League staff as gospel-spreading missionaries. He considered indiscriminate child-bearing a disease of the body politic. Poverty resulted solely from incompetence. The challenge was infusing the inevitably emerging welfare state with programs suppressing fertility.
In 1936 Frederick Osborn induced Princeton University to create the Office of Population Research – the first policy-oriented Demography faculty.
In 1936 US courts overturned laws impeding postal shipments of contraceptives.
In 1937 the American Medical Association endorsed “family planning.”
A 1939 Royal Commission designated reducing birth rates to be the British Caribbean’s most pressing need. Simultaneously, Ernest Gruening, Director of US Territories and Island Possessions, declared birth control to be Puerto Rico’s only hope. Gruening worked with ABCL to make birth control, including sterilization, available at government clinics – a rare defeat of the island’s Catholic hierarchy.
(Population Council-funded doctors in Puerto Rico later perfected the psychological technique of pressuring women, immediately postpartum, into consenting to sterilization. It proved easy to “capture” women as they lay bedridden. A third of Puerto Rican women of childbearing age were then surgically sterilized during a ten-year program considered integral to the anti-communist crusade.) (16)
Pre-WWII English-speaking eugenicists enjoyed comradely relations with German Nazis. Hitler referred to Madison Grant’s The Passing of a Great Race as his “Bible” – reprinting passages from it in Mein Kampf. Henry Osborn visited Nazi Germany to accept an honorary degree. Nazis loved American sterilization zealot Paul Popenoe. (He later became a talk-show regular in the US, after launching Ladies Home Journal.)
In 1935 Nazis invited 500 raceologists to Berlin for the International Congress for Population Science. American delegates included the pro-Hitler head of the Eugenics Research Association, Dr. Clarence Campbell; plus Dorothy Swaine Thomas and Warren Thompson. The Congress wrapped-up with rousing shouts of “Heil Hitler.” (Thomas and Thompson later co-founded the Rockefeller-funded Population Council.) (17)
Nazi eugenics laws copied verbatim America’s Model Eugenic Sterilization Law. (Eugenics Reichskommissar Dr. Ernest Rudin, had been elected President of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations at the Third Eugenics Congress in New York.) ABCL’s Stoddard sat as a guest judge on Germany’s Eugenics Court. He wrote favourable reviews, and later supported the Holocaust.
With war approaching, however, Nazism compromised the eugenics movement. The British Eugenics Society castigated Nazi-symps as “the most dangerous enemies of the eugenics movement.” (18) The Carnegie Institute ejected Nazi-symps from their Eugenics Record Office. Julian Huxley circulated a petition denouncing Nazism (while defending eugenics).
Conversely, Laughlin, Burch and other leading eugenicists founded the Coalition of Patriotic Societies (CPS). In 1942 CPS along with the KKK, Silver Shirts, German-American Bund, American Nazi Party, and Black Legion were indicted for sedition by a DC Federal Court.
Birth of Crypto-Eugenics
The post-war marriage of ABCL and Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau to form the International Planned Parenthood Fund (IPPF), moved Henry Fairchild to opine:
“…these two great movements [eugenics and birth control] have now come to such a thorough understanding and have drawn so close together as to be almost indistinguishable.” (19)
The marriage spawned crypto-eugenics:
“Blacker believed that they had to pursue a strategy he called ‘crypto-eugenics.’ In essence: “You seek to fulfill the aims of eugenics without disclosing what you are really aiming at and without mentioning the word.” This is how the Eugenics Society conceived of its funding for the IPPF. Blacker credited Frederick Osborn with the idea.” (20)
Psychologist C.P. Blacker ran several eugenics and sterilization outfits before taking command of IPPF.
The Swinging Sixties
The elite’s 1960s pro-abortion blitz wasn’t about abortions for elites. Upper stratums already had access to abortion. Rather, the 1960s push was motivated by fears of high fertility remnants (inner-city blacks and poor rural whites) swelling welfare rolls.
The US Government’s Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) began cooperating with Planned Parenthood in 1965. Four years later, OEO funded a Population Council effort to promote domestic postpartum sterilization. According to an insider, the grant’s rationale was “not one which can publicly be advanced.” (21)
In 1970 Nixon launched a population coordinating office and massively increased “family planning” expenditures. (22) Also in 1970, Nixon asked John Rockefeller III to convene a Commission on Population. Rockefeller’s 1972 Report warned welfare-dependent, criminalistic subpopulations were breeding out of control and demanded government-funded abortion on demand, now.
Federal “family planning” program recipients “welfare moms” increased sevenfold between 1965 and 1973. Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) doled-out contraceptives. State legislators called for sterilizing all AFDC recipients.
After the Supreme Court struck down abortion restrictions, America’s teaching hospitals provided abortion services only if patients accepted sterilization. 40% of US doctors wanted all welfare moms sterilized. Doctors unlawfully threatened to cut-off benefits of women refusing sterilization. In 1974, Federal Judge Gerhard Gesell confirmed:
“…an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs … an indefinite number of poor people have been improperly coerced into accepting a sterilization operation under the threat that various federally supported welfare benefits would be withdrawn unless they submitted to irreversible sterilization.” (23)
The 1965 British Eugenics Review article, “Toward a New Eugenics” revived “scientific racism.” The US revival received media and academic support, but was short-lived. Crypto-eugenicists opposed this tack arguing it: “corroded the popular faith in science that had been essential to the cause of population control.” (24)
Class warfare, however, continued to pervade “population control.” C. Lalor Burdick, a major donor to Planned Parenthood and contraceptive research, described welfare programs as:
“…breeding pads and free sustenance for the proliferation of the kind of people that hate us and would destroy us if they could.” (25)
Dalkon Shield inventor, Hugh Davis, considered middle class contraceptive use a genetic disaster. Davis designed contraceptives for: “the poor.” (26)
Planned Parenthood’s research manager, Fred Jaffe, calculated that government-funded abortions were cheaper than poor offspring. (27)
Planned Parenthood President Dr. Alan Guttmacher led the Population Council’s medical committee and chaired the Association for Voluntary Sterilization’s scientific committee. Guttmacher admitted “overpopulation hysteria” was a smoke-screen for anti-communism. (28)
Overpopulation hysterics proved the most determined pro-abortion fighters. The Population Crisis Committee early-on defined abortion as a human right. Zero Population Growth lent crucial support toward establishing the National Abortion Rights Action League. (29)
On the other side of the barricades, Black Panthers, National Farm Workers et al viewed birth control as genocide. Activists picketed OEO offices.
A counter-strategy was engineered by Louisiana’s Family Health Foundation (FHF) which ran clinics in black and catholic slums. FHF’s Joe Beasley (an honorary Harvard prof) chaired Planned Parenthood’s executive committee. FHF grants from Ford and Rockefeller Foundations (with matching federal funds) topped $50 million. This paid for a private jet; two condos; endless parties in the French Quarter; and Beasley’s innovation: hefty bribes to “community leaders.” (30)
Footnotes
1. Isenberg, Nancy. White Trash. The 400-year Untold History of Class in America, Penguin Random House, New York, 2017, page 203
2. Ibid, p. 193
3. Ibid, p. 196-7
4. Ibid, p. 199
5. Ibid, p. 195
6. Zubrin, Robert. Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalism, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism. New Atlantic Books, New York, 2012. Page 60
7. Isenberg, p. 202
8. Chase, Allan. The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism. Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976. Page 278
9. Ibid, p. 280
10. Mosher, Steven. Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, USA, 2009. Page 34
11. Isenberg, p. 174
12. Ibid, p. 195
13. Connelly, Matthew. Fatal Misconception: the Struggle to Control World Population; Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 2008. Page 96
14. Zubrin, p. 63-4
15. Ibid, p. 64
16. Mosher, p. 34
17. Zubrin, p. 66-7
18. Connelly, p. 105
19. Ibid, p. 109
20. Ibid, p. 136
21. Connelly, p. 251
22. Chase, p. 406
23. Ibid, p. 20-1
24. Connelly, p. 272
25. Ibid, p. 248
26. Ibid, p. 208
27. Ibid, p. 333-4
28. Ibid, p. 248
29. Ibid, p. 270
30. Ibid, p. 307-8