Eugenics Following the Civil War...

[5fish]

The Eugenics movement in America stated after our Civil war and after Darwin published his famous work in 1859 and later Mendel works was published in 1865, two years after his death. These were used by Darwin's younger cousin Francis Galton to create Eugenics in 1869... which all let to Social Darwinism and Scientific racism...

snip... from wiki...

He was a pioneer in eugenics, coining the term itself[3] and the phrase "nature versus nurture".[4] His book Hereditary Genius (1869) was the first social scientific attempt to study genius and greatness.[5]

http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay1text.html

Snip...

American eugenics developed in the wake of turbulent economic and social problems following the Civil War. The rapid growth of American industry, coupled with the increased mechanization of agriculture, created the first major migration away from farms, and cities expanded faster than adequate housing.

Social Darwinism had attempted to explain away social and economic inequalities as the "survival of the fittest." However, by the turn of the century, this simplistic idea had been turned on its head. A declining birthrate among the wealthy and powerful indicated that the captains of industry were, in fact, losing the struggle for existence. The working class not only was organizing against them, but they were also out-reproducing them.

Solving the new problems of industrialization demanded a change from laissez-faire to managed capitalism – toward the increased role of government and planning in the economic and social sphere. This new philosophy became known as progressivism. Embedded in progressivism was the idea of scientific management – long-range planning by university-trained experts. This new managerial class became increasingly vital to the economic process. In a country that had nurtured a reverence for invention, the use of scientific management had a special appeal. Progressive reformers had a strong faith in science as the cure-all that would herald in a new era of rational control of both nature and human society.

Snip... wealthy named peopled supported...

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-forgotten-lessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement

A sloppy reading of Gregor Mendel’s pea pods and Charles Darwin’s theories gave a scientific veneer to the conclusion that many social ills were caused by the proliferation of the wrong sort of people and that they could be neatly nipped in the bud with the intervention of eugenics—a term coined, in 1883, by Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton, who declared it “a virile creed, full of hopefulness.” Soon, the United States, along with Germany, was at the forefront of the movement to improve the human species through breeding. Scientific American ran articles on the subject, and the American Museum of Natural History hosted conferences. Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and many other prominent citizens were outspoken supporters. Eugenics was taught in schools, celebrated in exhibits at the World’s Fair, and even preached from pulpits. The human race, one prominent advocate declared in 1909, was poised “to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.”

https://www.nature.com/scitable/for...dden-history-the-eugenics-movement-123919444/

Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes opined, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind....Three generations of imbeciles is enough” (Black 2003). This decision legitimized the various sterilization laws in the United States.

 

[5fish]

Scientific Racism... its berth following our civil war...

Link: https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/hays/summary.html

Nonetheless, others, such as Herbert Spencer, "who first coined the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' reasoned that Darwinist principles were intended to buttress the case that biological evolution could be equally applicable to human societies"
Given the heightened anxiety surrounding race relations in the late nineteenth century, the application of Darwin's philosophies to human societies most often led to a supposedly scientific racism in which Caucasians were always the "fittest" for survival.
One of the many attempts to use a form of social Darwinism to rank the races was published by Dr. Benjamin K. Hays (1887-1918).

In Hays's opinion, "the African" had reached that "state of lethargy": "at the dawn of history, he was fully developed, and during the past three thousand years he has not made one step of progress" (p. 8). Hays argues that "the superiority of the American negro to his African brother, who is a savage and a cannibal, is due to slavery" as "the present attainment of the American negro has been solely the result of his close personal contact with the white man" (p. 8).

Claiming that the "negro has been domesticated," Hays goes on to question whether or not African-Americans can become an "integral part of Anglo-American civilization" (p. 10). Hays claims that the Anglo-Saxons have been most successful in dealing "with the many barriers to development which nature had placed"

Hays argues that the black man "has never been a competitor, but has always been subservient to the white race. And just so long as he remains subservient his position is secure, and just so soon as he becomes a competitor his fate is sealed"

Using an analogy to further emphasize this supposed and required subservience while furthering the dehumanization of the race, Hays acknowledges that African Americans can serve masters, a municipality, or a State, and "so long as the negro renders this service he is protected by the white man as a gardener protects his hot-house plants" (pp. 10-11).

As the "beneficent hand" of the Southern white master and Northern liberal recedes into history, Hays envisions the downfall and end of the African American "race" (p. 18). Such a downfall, for Hays, is inevitable: "The weak has ever been dominated by the strong, and where the strong cannot control it will destroy" (p

Hays' piece is clear evidence of the use and misuse of scientific theories in order to bolster social bias and personal racism.

 

[5fish]

You know there was a Black Eugenics movement in the early 20th century... it is shocking...

Link: https://www.blackagendareport.com/about-us

Snip.. leaders like...

What few realize is that even before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 there existed a Black Mis-leadership class that worked as race managers for America’s power elite. The originator of “race management” as a concept was Booker T. Washington as the tool of the White industrialist class. With the crie de guerre issued by W.E.B. DuBois published in 1903 in the “Souls of Black Folk,” the Black college educated “Talented Tenth” came together to manage the affairs of the less fortunate Black masses and weaponized the idea of “race management,” giving birth to the first generation of the Black Mis-leadership Class.

Snip... Black organization too...

The Black Mis-leadership Class is a term usually referring to the race management elite that developed out of the Civil Rights Movement to handle the political and social affairs of the Black masses. This group tailors its world view and policy prescriptions to the demands of America’s majority power elite to the detriment of those same Black masses. The Congressional Black Caucus, The NAACP, The National Urban League, Black petite-bourgeois membership organizations, and the Black Church all work as the ideological and organizational mechanisms of the Black Mis-Leadership Class.

Snip...

Dr. Shantella Y. Sherman illustrates the tragic history of how some of the early 20th Century Black Mis-leadership class fully supported eugenic theory using racial sterilization couched in language supporting birth control to limit the ability of poor Black women to have children.

A veritable who’s who of early 20th century Black history from W.E.B. Dubois, Mary McCloud Bethune, Charles Drew and more were supporters of this widely supported Black Eugenics movement to basically rid America of the Black poor.

This Black Eugenics policy was not merely a plan for race purity but if implemented to the full desires of that Black Mis-leadership class, it could have meant race genocide.

These Eugenics sentiments were shared by a man who is considered one of the greatest intellectuals in Black American History. W.E.B. DuBois was fully vested in these horrid Eugenics schemes:
“[Negroes] are led away by the fallacy of numbers. They want the Black race to survive. They are cheered by the Census return of increasing numbers and a high rate of increase. They must learn that among human races and groups, as among vegetables, quality and not mere quantity really counts.”--W. E. B. Du Bois”

The link of course has more details...

 

[jgoodguy]

Interesting for sure

 

[5fish]

Here is a click bate list of famous people that supported Eugenics in it heyday...

Link: https://listverse.com/2015/07/10/10-widely-admired-people-who-supported-eugenics/

Social Darwinism is making a come back...

Link: https://inequality.org/research/american-social-darwinism/

The ideas that coalesced into Social Darwinism — as popularized in the United States by sociologist William Graham Sumner, businessman Andrew Carnegie, and Supreme Court justice Stephen J. Field — helped to justify the vast financial inequities that characterized the Gilded Age. Social Darwinism defended concentrations of economic power into corporate monopolies and resisted efforts to alleviate immediate suffering and institute reforms that might mitigate some of industrialization’s more extreme consequences.

Social Darwinists applauded such disparities as the expected outcomes of a natural system of economic competition that identifies the biologically fit and benefits the social good by rewarding the most able, a system best left alone.

Social Darwinists define the essence of life as an unceasing struggle for survival. At the center of that struggle stands the inviolate individual. Any perceived intrusion, by government or anyone else, into this natural process threatens the essential sorting of the worthy from the unworthy.

Economic inequality, to Social Darwinists, becomes simply the necessary consequence of a system designed to delineate the “fit” (the rich), upon whom the survival and improvement of the species depends, from the “unfit” (the poor). The consolidation of economic and political power in the hands of the wealthy — Ryan’s “makers” — rewards those whose financial accumulations mark their worthiness.

Bauer’s outburst expresses the crux of the Social Darwinist argument. Sumner’s “drunkard in the gutter,” Romney’s “47 percent,” Ryan’s “takers” and “makers,” and Bauer’s “stray animals” all evoke a biological imperative under the guise of economic policy. Those who do not demonstrate the requisite character traits that allow them to amass wealth should not survive.

 

[5fish]

The American seed.... https://www.history.com/topics/germany/eugenics

In the late 19th century, Galton—whose cousin was Charles Darwin—hoped to better humankind through the propagation of the British elite. His plan never really took hold in his own country, but in America it was more widely embraced.

Eugenics made its first official appearance in American history through marriage laws. In 1896, Connecticut made it illegal for people with epilepsy or who were “feeble-minded” to marry. In 1903, the American Breeder’s Association was created to study eugenics.

John Harvey Kellogg, of Kellogg cereal fame, organized the Race Betterment Foundation in 1911 and established a “pedigree registry.” The foundation hosted national conferences on eugenics in 1914, 1915 and 1928.

As the concept of eugenics took hold, prominent citizens, scientists and socialists championed the cause and established the Eugenics Record Office. The office tracked families and their genetic traits, claiming most people considered unfit were immigrants, minorities or poor.

The start Plato...

Eugenics literally means “good creation.” The ancient Greek philosopher Plato may have been the first person to promote the idea, although the term “eugenics” didn’t come on the scene until British scholar Sir Francis Galton coined it in 1883 in his book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development.

In one of Plato’s best-known literary works, The Republic, he wrote about creating a superior society by procreating high-class people together and discouraging coupling between the lower classes. He also suggested a variety of mating rules to help create an optimal society.

For instance, men should only have relations with a woman when arranged by their ruler, and incestuous relationships between parents and children were forbidden but not between brother and sister. While Plato’s ideas may be considered a form of ancient eugenics, he received little credit from Galton.

 

[Matt McKeon]

I recall in the long correspondence between Jefferson and John Adams after their retirement, Jefferson wrote Adams he had finally got around to reading Plato and was horrified. Adams agreed with something like relief: he had always thought Plato was nonsensical, "a satire."

 

[5fish]

You know science fiction writers caught the Social Darwinism bug in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here is an overview of science fiction writers on Social Darwinism... the link...

SFE: Social Darwinism

Welcome to the fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

sf-encyclopedia.com

Social Darwinism is the thesis that social evolution and social history are governed by the same principles that govern the Evolution of species in Nature, so that conflict between and within cultures constitutes a struggle for existence which is the motor of progress. Such ideas are inherent in the socio-economic theories of Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), who actually coined the phrase "the survival of the fittest", borrowed by Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Darwin himself was not a Social Darwinist, preferring to stress the survival value of cooperation in human societies. Social Darwinism was popularized in the USA by ardent political champions of laissez-faire capitalism, notably William Graham Sumner (1840-1910) – whose pessimistic anticipation of a coming war between the social classes echoed the Marxist theory of history, and presumably inspired Ignatius Donnelly's apocalyptic Caesar's Column (1890; early editions as by Edmund Boisgilbert) – and the industrialist Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919). Émile Gautier popularized the term in France with his Le Darwinisme social (1880). Social Darwinist rhetoric was co-opted to the justification of race hatred by the German writer Heinrich von Treitschke (1834-1896), a major source of inspiration for Hitler's Mein Kampf (1925-1926 2vols; trans 1939) and the political ideology of Nazism. There is, however, no logically necessary connection between Social Darwinism and right-wing Politics; it is a versatile analogy which lends itself to many differing opinions as to which group ought to be designated "the fittest", and its arguments can be deployed both for and against calculated Eugenic selection.

The most important sf writer who might be termed a Social Darwinist was the socialist H G Wells, who had no doubt that the "laws of evolution" discovered by Darwin applied to human society. His account of the future evolution of society in The Time Machine (1895) is based on a Social Darwinist logic, and in such Utopias as A Modern Utopia (1905) a "struggle for existence" is artificially maintained – here in the ascetic training of the elite "samurai". Many of Wells's blueprints for the future assume that a better society can emerge only out of the destruction of the present one, by a process of rigorous winnowing; such future histories are sketched in The World Set Free (1914), Men Like Gods (1923) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933). When Wells finally despaired of his world-saving mission it was the logic of Darwinian law that he invoked to condemn society for its failure in Mind at the End of its Tether (1945). L

Opposition to Darwinist analogies is evident in Claude Farrère's late Imperial Gothic tale Useless Hands (1926), a lurid warning of the ultimate effects of applying Darwinian logic to human society, and in Raymond Z Gallun's Pulp-magazine story "Old Faithful" (December 1934 Astounding), which argues that intellectual kinship is more important than biological difference. A fierce attack on Social Darwinism is mounted by C S Lewis in his Ransom trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus 1953) and That Hideous Strength (1945). The last volume – in which the organization N.I.C.E. begins to mould UK society along Social Darwinist lines – is the most direct.

 

[5fish]

@rittmeister ... Your buddy Robert A. Heinlein was a Social Darwinism... An early leftist becomes wealthy with sex fetishes and becomes a libertarian to justify sex habits and protect his wealth. Many wealthy people to justify their wealth embrace Social Darwinism because they must be genetically superior to common humans that is why they are successful...

"Starry-eyed internationalists" versus the Social Darwinists: Heinlein's transnational governments - The Heinlein Society

Heinlein Society This is copyrighted material and may not be copied or reproduced in any form, including on other websites, without permission of the copyright holder. "Starry-eyed internationalists" versus the Social Darwinists: Heinlein's transnational governments by Rafeeq O. McGiveron ©Kent...

www.heinleinsociety.org

A libertarian who wanted a one-world government... most likely a dictatorship...

Heinlein’s Conservatism | National Review

Ask a science-fiction fan who the three greatest writers of the 20th century were and you’ll start an argument that will last all day, but the consensus remains that they were Isaac Asimov, Sir Art…

www.nationalreview.com

 

[rittmeister]

@rittmeister ... Your buddy Robert A. Heinlein was a Social Darwinism... An early leftist becomes wealthy with sex fetishes and becomes a libertarian to justify sex habits and protect his wealth. Many wealthy people to justify their wealth embrace Social Darwinism because they must be genetically superior to common humans that is why they are successful...

"Starry-eyed internationalists" versus the Social Darwinists: Heinlein's transnational governments - The Heinlein Society

Heinlein Society This is copyrighted material and may not be copied or reproduced in any form, including on other websites, without permission of the copyright holder. "Starry-eyed internationalists" versus the Social Darwinists: Heinlein's transnational governments by Rafeeq O. McGiveron ©Kent...

www.heinleinsociety.org

A libertarian who wanted a one-world government... most likely a dictatorship...

Heinlein’s Conservatism | National Review

Ask a science-fiction fan who the three greatest writers of the 20th century were and you’ll start an argument that will last all day, but the consensus remains that they were Isaac Asimov, Sir Art…

www.nationalreview.com

he always had libertarian leanings but he never was a died in the wool libertarian like l neil smith

 

[5fish]

he always had libertarian leanings but he never was a died in the wool libertarian like l neil smith

I do not care much about is Libertarians but I am saddened by his embracing of Social Darwinism...

 

[5fish]

Francis Galton the father of eugenics wrote a Si Fi book promoting his eugenics... We only have a little of the text of the book called

Kantsaywhere

Click on the link and have a short read...

Kantsaywhere by Francis Galton

www.abelard.org

​

Kantsaywhere by Francis Galton From Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton by Karl Pearson [1930] [1], vol IIIA pp. 414 - 424 From Galton’s effects [not published in his lifetime]​ This rather desultory sally into fiction seems to have embarrassed Galton to the extent of him destroying much of it. This document reproduces what still remains. Recovered from his effects by his biographer, by Karl Pearson, Kantsaywhere was probably written very close to the end of Galton’s life [1822 - 1911]. As far as I know, this is the first time that this text has been reproduced anywhere as an independent item. There is another document at abelard.org giving background to Francis Galton’s work, including a copy of his statistical paper on the efficacy of prayer. Text in yellow is based on Karl Pearson’s commentary on the extracts.

Here are some more details...

Francis Galton's eugenic novel Kantsaywhere published online

Francis Galton's eugenic novel Kantsaywhere has been published for the first time by UCL.

www.ucl.ac.uk

After his death, parts of Kantsaywhere were destroyed by Galton's niece due to fears about the reaction to the love scenes, ideas of a 'eugenic marriage' and eugenics in general. The single copy that survived was passed to Galton's biographer, Professor Karl Pearson, and later to UCL Special Collections.

 

[5fish]

Here is a Pro eugenics who pushed and wrote a book called Human Harvest...

The Problematic Legacy of David Starr Jordan

An Academy researcher reckons with the racist legacy of Academy president and ichthyologist David Starr Jordan.

www.calacademy.org

David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) was a widely revered ichthyologist, founding president of Stanford University, and intermittent president and curator of fish at the California Academy of Sciences. Perhaps less well-known, however fairly well-documented, was his leadership role in the American eugenics movement. Jordan believed that people with traits he deemed desirable deserve to have children. He thought that people he deemed "unfit" should not reproduce and, in many cases, should undergo compulsory sterilization—or be surgically prevented from having children, even against their will. In addition to his beliefs and practices rooted in eugenics, Jordan held other racist, sexist, ableist, and colonialist ideas. Our research into the archives at the Academy and at Stanford revealed a fuller picture of the life of Jordan and his influence that affects the Academy and science as a whole to this day.

I found the book...

The Human Harvest : David Starr Jordan : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Book digitized by Google from the library of the University of California and uploaded to the Internet Archive by user tpb.

archive.org