BOOK REVIEWS
[*] Breeding Better Vermonters
  Nancy Gallagher
[*] Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract
  Marta Russell
[*] Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America
  Steven Selden

VIDEO REVIEWS
[*] Selling Murder
  The Killing Films of the Third Reich
[*] The Lynchburg Story
  Over 8,000 involuntary sterilizations performed on handicapped youth
[*] Against Her Will
  The Carrie Buck Story
[*] L'Operaçion
  Sterilization in Puerto Rico; a model for the Third World

The publication of Nancy L Gallagher's Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State (University Press of New England, 1999) is a milestone in revealing the history of Vermont's and this nation's eugenics movement. The eugenics movement in `Green Mountain State' was one of the better organized ones, its evolution unique to Vermont's conditions. Unlike the situation of many other states, Vermont's eugenicists left a considerable amount of valuable documented evidence. A number of excellent articles preceded, Gallagher's publication, especially those by Kevin Dann (see for example: `From Degeneration to Regeneration:The Eugenics Survey of Vermont' in Vermont History (1991): 59:1:5-29), but this is the first longer and in depth probing of this subject.

Before proceeding to review the book itself, some personal, pertinent observations.

My own interest and knowledge of the Vermont eugenics movement began a number of years back, 1994 to be precise, when I had the good fortune to spend a month's vacation with my wife and two daughters in Rutland Vermont. During that time, I became vaguely acquainted with the broad outlines of what had been the state's eugenics movement which I stumbled upon in the Rutland Public Library. The library had a number of what might be called `eugenic-related' surprises, the first being several volumes of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont on its shelves, much of which I have since read. The name of Henry Perkins', Vermont's foremost eugenics advocate played large in these publications. Another curious thing: the library's computer system was organized in both French and English. I concluded that Vermont - or at least Rutland - had a sizeable enough French speaking population for the library to have a bi-lingual data base. That this population must be French-Canadian and probably related to French speakers north of the Vermont-Canadian border was the next logical (and in this case accurate) piece of reasoning. But where were these French Vermonters? And what role did they play in the state's history? They seemed to have a rather restrained, conservative presence almost as if they were shy or hiding.

But they were there.

Shortly thereafter, I came across Kevin Dann's above mentioned article `From Degeneration To Regeneration: The Eugenics Survey of Vermont'. Well researched and hard-hitting, it gave a concise summary of the course of the Vermont eugenics movement pointing out how, besides Vermont's mentally and physically handicapped, Vermont's eugenicists targeted the state's French Canadian and Abenaki Native American citizens. The Abenaki were referred to as `gypsies' in the state Eugenics survey and as `worthless' and `hardly fit to help populate the earth' by Henry Perkins.

One example Dann gives of Vermont's elitist attitudes came from Middlebury College president, Paul Moody. Commenting to Henry Perkins, the state's leading eugenicist, Moody said `the whole of the French Canadian population could be wiped out of Middlebury and no one would miss it.'(Dann, op cit. p. 16). Perkins views followed the same logic. Of French-Canadians, he shares with us. `You cannot believe a thing they tell you... They are pretty genial folk but many have a pretty low I.Q....The French are a complacent people; it would be impossible to have a French Mussolini (quite a tragedy no doubt), for instance. That kind of drive is lacking.' Thus spoke Henry Perkins to his trusted aid and researcher, Harriet Abbot, giving the usual class and ethnic bigotry endemic to eugenics everywhere a special Vermont flavor.

I did not know about Ms. Gallagher's work till she was interviewed in National Public Radio in the late summer - early fall of this year (1999). In short order though, several friends in Vermont and elsewhere , knowing my interest in the subject generally, alerted me to the book's publication. Shortly thereafter a number of reviews arrived at my home in the mail. Excited about its potential, I bought and read Breeding Better Vermonters rather quickly, as did several of my students in the course Culture and Biology in 20^th Century America, which was offered this past fall.

While I will discuss the content of substance below in some detail, I must admit at the outset to sharing some of my students' initial disappointment with the volume, which reads a bit like some one's doctoral dissertation. The heart of the criticism is that the book on tells only part of the story. That there is much useful information and original research is true enough, yet on a number of rather basic levels, the book is disappointing. Although the carefully constructed campaign to pass eugenic legislation in Vermont is well developed as are the ties between Vermont and the national there is virtually no discussion of the actual Vermont eugenics program itself. As if to preempt the criticism, Gallagher informs us that the book is not about Vermont's sterilization program from the outset. We learn nothing about how the program was carried out, what challenges were raised, who more precisely was actually sterilized. Given that it appears that information is available, this is a regrettable omission.

Interestingly, I have read (Mike Anton's article in the Rocky Mountain News `Colorado's Dark Secret' 11/2199) that after Ms. Gallagher's book appeared she was contacted by many of the victims of Vermont's eugenics program, thanking her for writing about it at all. They were not seeking damages or revenge, simply acknowledgment of the scope of state crimes committed against their bodies and souls. Yet in the book itself, the voices and the situation of the victims go unheard. Perhaps she plans to cover this aspect of the story in a future volume. She is in an excellent position to do so.

Among those stung into action by this book was Abenaki chief Homer St. Francis began combing the state records to see how badly his people had been victimized by involuntary sterilization. He found the names of at least 50 of his fellow tribespeople - men and women - in the state's eugenic survey. St. Francis thinks that many more than that were sterilized without knowing it. Commenting to a reporter from the British newspaper, The Guardian (September 8, 1999 - magazine section), St. Francis said `It made me sick just to read those lists.' Referring to eugenics, the Abenaki chief said pointedly, `why don't they call it by its right name - genocide'. He spoke of many of his fellow tribespeople who had emerged from the state's reform schools, prisons and psychiatric institutions unable to have children. He believes that two sisters and a brother suffered this fate, with his brother being offered sterilization as a condition of release from prison. He is convinced that his sisters were sterilized without their knowledge while they were being treated for unrelated medical problems in state hospitals. If this seems unnecessarily paranoid, in fact it isn't. History is rather clear on this point. This is exactly how many people were sterilized, without their knowledge to say nothing of their consent or as a condition of release from a state institution.

Gallagher does discuss the victimization of French Canadians and Abenaki Indians some, but other than that they are targeted by the eugenics movement, from her, we learn little about their fate as victims and nothing about whatever efforts emerged from these communities to counter the eugenic tide, nor the role of others who might have been a part of the opposition. Vermont rejected approving eugenic legislation before 1931 and when it finally did pass it was the result of a kind of stealth effort that played down the eugenic goals of the legislation. In the same spirit, the social forces supporting eugenics in Vermont are not clearly detailed. While Perkins and his little group of eugenic scouts undoubtedly did play a kind of vanguard role in the movement's Vermont success, there were others who supported its goals and gave it the eventual political legitimacy it gained in 1931.

OK. There remains plenty of value in this little volume. Let's turn to it.

This book is crafted around the life and work of Henry Perkins, the `engine' of the Vermont eugenics movement. Like many in his field, Perkins was drawn to eugenics through his study of biology at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> and the beginning of the 20<sup>th</sup> century and saw in it as others did, a biological approach to the resolution of social problems, most especially poverty, homelessness and mental illness. Using a simplistic and false logic, they argued that eugenics was simply applying Darwin's theory of `survival of the fittest' to the human condition.

There was nothing particularly unusual about this point of view at the turn of the century. Indeed those in the intellectual community, the field of biology and beyond were wont to see the world through hereditarily determined eyes. This trend had been building steadily and with growing strength since the early 1880s. A pessimism about human nature and reform had replaced its opposite - a simplistic optimism that mental, physical handicaps and crime could be `cured'. Fed by an increasingly polarized class structure and the rise of an especially virulent form of social Darwinism, eugenics became a way to explain social discrepancies and deep seated structural social problems. Shaped as biological rather than social or political dilemmas, such social problems thus demanded biological solutions. By the early 1900s a movement, especially strong among the medical and psychiatric community, to eliminate the reproductive capacities of large groups of Americans through the technical miracle of vasectomies and tubal ligations, began to grip the country. Ending crime, prostitution, homelessness and mental illness by cutting the vas deferens became the `in-thing' to do!<

Perkins embraced eugenics early on. It would have been difficult for him to avoid it for a number of reasons:

• it was broadly accepted nationwide within his profession⁽¹⁾. Charles Davenport, a respected Harvard-trained biologist, was one of the movement's national leaders and key figures for a quarter of a century. Few were those biologists who escaped eugenics' grip in this time period
  
• he was `culturally susceptible'. His New England `Brahmin' roots were fertile ground. Watching the wave of Eastern and Southern European immigrants rewrite American demographics was difficult for many of them. As Irish poured into Boston and Jews into New York, that old Anglo Saxon Protestant `stock' developed a permanent case of spiritual heartburn, and began to dread what Teddy Roosevelt used to rail about `race suicide'. Race Suicide did not mean whites marrying blacks at the time - it meant Protestants marrying Catholics, Englishmen marrying Irish, Italian or Jewish women. A part of this late 19^th century cultural elite, Perkins was only reflecting their deeper fears, fears not only of intermarriage and mating, actually, but of a new mix of political democracy in which this old guard might play a far less prominent role than they had throughout the 19^th century. They resisted the changes. Eugenics and anti-immigration bills were their solution to the new America.

Gallagher appreciates how important Henry Perkins was to the Vermont eugenics project and says so quite pointedly at the outset of the book. `Without Henry F. Perkins, there probably would never have been a eugenics survey of Vermont', she begins. This is not an exaggeration. The national movement was centered in an obscure research center on Long Island's north shore - Cold Spring Harbor. Although the Eugenics Research Association enjoyed significant funding for a good 25 years, its staff was always rather small, its organizational potential on a nationwide basis somewhat limited. It needed `point people' in different states to take up the banner and do the grunt work of popularizing the movement and more importantly, getting state legislation passed legalizing eugenic sterilization. A prominent and open member of a state's elite, preferable someone with a degree in biology or medicine was the perfect choice. Such a figure lent scientific and political credibility to the project, both important.

Charles Davenport, the Harvard trained biologist who would play a key national role, knew exactly what he was doing when he recruited Perkins to his cause. By way of contrast, it is interesting that here in Colorado (where this web page is based), Davenport was unable to find such an open prominent figure, but he tried. One of the objects of his attention was Professor Theodore Cockerell, an internationally famed entomologist (and avowed socialist) at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Correspondence between Davenport and Cockerell in the early 1920s suggested that the latter considered the offer, but backed away from it at the last moment and from then on distanced himself more and more from the eugenics leadership. Although there is more too it than this, it is interesting that with Perkins' leadership, Vermont passed a eugenics law. Without Cockerell's, Colorado did not, despite at least 4 attempts, the last being in 1928.

So Perkins was the perfect man for the job and he did it well and with relish. That Gallagher would provide so many details of the man's life (but omit the fact he died a drunkard - this according to Gann - one of the groups Perkins himself argued should be sterilized) is certainly merited and reveals much about the movement's evolution and history. What interested me most about this book were two themes - first, that Perkins positioned himself more or less among the eugenics' movements `reformers', those who in the late 20s and early 1930s were looking to salvage eugenics from its earlier hysterical and unscientific claims about the `threat of the feebleminded'. That Perkins would take this position is not surprising. It would be a mistake to portray him as some kind of flaming reactionary, a kindred spirit to the KKK and the like. He wasn't. Like so many other eugenicists of that period, Perkins was rather on the liberal side of the political spectrum, a progressive Republican a la Teddy Roosevelt in his day, but one of those who so firmly believed in the power of `social engineering'.

The second point follows somewhat from the first: the eugenics movement in Vermont in fact did very little or no biology at all and instead did what amounted to a number of sociological studies of Vermont rural life. Some of these, especially those done by Elin Leija Anderson, one of Perkin's assistants, were quite good as sociological studies. Perkins would then have to give these studies a kind of genetic gloss, which he did. As the years went by, his ability to give eugenic spins to Anderson's analyses seemed to become more and more difficult and the `eugenic logic' he tried to add to those studies seemed oddly out of place. But by this time - the mid 1930s, the eugenics movement and elsewhere began to teeter. Its funding base shrank, national interest waned - although in many states the actual practice of sterilization actually increased - , and the shadow of the Nazi eugenics program began to spread around the world discrediting the efforts of Perkins and his ilk. After detailing the rise and development of the movement in Vermont with such detail and insight, Gallagher actually tells us little about its descent back into the black of hole of obscurity. How did the movement unravel in Vermont and why? What happened to Dr. Perkins, the main protagonist? Did he, like others, move on to population control, or did he spend the last 20 years of his life studying Vermont's mushrooms? Some detail here would have been useful.

OK enough. For all that, I'd recommend the book and just might use it, worts and all, as a text next year for the eugenics class. Wish it had not shied away from some relavent themes, more areas, but, what it did cover, it did very well.

R. Prince/ Denver/ December 7, 1999 :  This is not to `pick on' biologists. The eugenics mantra was spouted by virtually every branch of the natural and social sciences at the time. My field, Anthropology, was certainly no exception. But among biologists, doctors, psychiatrists and social workers the eugenics virus was especially strong.

Finding new textual material for ANT 4400 has proven to be something of a challenge. Still, some old stuff - or relatively so - John Higham's Stranger's in the Land has mingled with some more recent titles like Michael Burleigh's Death and Deliverance, a chilling and well documented expose of the Nazi eugenics program that targeted Germany's mentally and physically disabled in the 1930s. It is with no small pleasure that this review introduces a new text for the Fall, 2000 session of `Culture and Biology in 20^th Century America. Marta Russell's Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press. 1998). I think it an excellent addition to the course. So first to some background and then some comments on the book itself.

A good deal of the material in this class examines how mentally and physically disabled people in the United States were treated from the middle of the 19^th to the middle of the 20^th century. To say that it is a sorry record for most of this nation's history would be a understatement of some proportions. In fact, except for a few rays of light here and there, the record is consistently atrocious. Concerning such matters, the good state of Colorado is no better than most others. Two news articles within the past year hint of a dark past are worth citing as examples. Last November (1999), RM News investigative reporter Mike Anton produced a fine piece exposing 40 years of involuntary sterilization at the state's main mental hospital in Pueblo that victimized hundreds, and this inspite of the fact that there was no law permitting such practices. More recently - several weeks ago (end of March, 2000) a little article appeared in the same newspaper. A suit had been filed against the state's mental hospitals for their failure to provide adequate housing for inmates. Despite a court decision 20 years ago mandating the state to comply, this - one of the richest states in the United States - has consistently refused to cough up the pittance necessary (although the state's guardian's prefer to return tax moneys rather than invest in such activities).

This is all a part of a larger picture of national abuse and neglect of mentally and physically disabled that has plagued this nation almost from the outset. While in this class (ANT 4400) we look at a good deal of this history, students have continually asked, `has the situation changed?, isn't all this out of the past and that now, since the passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act, most of these abuses are all history? Fair enough questions that deserve straightforward answers.

Informally I have known for some time that the situation for mentally and physically disabled remained very tenuous. A number of anecdotes come to mind:

a. a friend who used to work in the mental health field told me about the funding cuts in the early 1980s, - of how he told a group of mildly retarded residents at Ft. Logan Mental Hospital the day before they were going to be `released' on to the streets of Denver, `Forget this place ever existed"

b. the news of the growing percentage of mentally and physically disabled people spending time in jail, because they can't fend for themselves or don't have the proper medicine

c. the growing viciousness expressed towards homeless people - a growing percentage of which are handicapped. here in Denver we had a spat of murders of homeless people. The whole concept of `public space' seems in the process of being redefined..

One could on at length.

Historically the treatment of disabled people has been somewhat cyclical. Long periods characterized by social abuse (and often fear) followed by shorter periods of national shame and modest reform. For almost the last 20 years - since the election of a `grade B' actor whose main skill seemed to be his ability to read other people's scripts - the `plight' of the disabled has entered one of its worst historical phases. In the years immediately after the election of Ronald Reagan, national funding for mentally and physically handicapped people has plummeted, their care in public institutions has collapsed with many of them being forced into destitution. The funding cuts are only a part of the picture. Attitudes towards disabled people - including their very right to live and work - have hardened considerably over these past two decades.

For all this, good studies on the plight of the disabled are not so easy to come by. All this makes the publication of Marta Russell's Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Common Courage Press: 1998) timely and informative. It is a major work in its field, not only because it details the situation of disabled Americans on the eve of the millennium, but because it goes further - placing the situation of disabled people within the broader context of the `Reagan (counter) Revolution' and raising all kinds of questions about how some Americans look at the very humanity of others.

The book starts out with a few hard-hitting facts: The Russell Index, just inside the cover, gives the reader a series of useful little darts that set the stage for what is to come. (I will publish the index in its entirely on the web page: http://clem.mscd.edu/~princer. They are worth repeating here for their shock value and as a hint of what is to come (besides - I found this quite a useful educational tool). So here is a sampling:

% of persons in the US who have an impairment: 20

% of the population who will experience a disabling condition in the course of their lives: 80

# of Americans said to be disabled: 43 million in 1989; 49 million in 1995; 54 million in 1997

# of `voluntary' euthanasia deaths in Holland that are involuntary: an estimated 25,000 have

been killed by their physicians when they did not request it

% of US insurance applicants genetically screened for `defects' who were denied health

insurance: 47

% of the national poverty guideline represented by the federal SSI benefit: 74% for individual

82% for a couple

# of days SSA takes to process a disability claim: 348

% of first time applicants turned down by SSA: 69

# of disabled people purged from disability rolls in 1981 under President Ronald Reagan:

490,000

The list goes on... and all that information is provided even before cracking the first page of the text...

Beyond Ramps covers a lot of ground.

It begins with some useful historical background, a bit on how handicapped people were treated in the USA prior to WWII and a good deal on the Nazi eugenics program (and its connection to the US eugenics movement). After an interesting summary of the Nazi program, Russell points out one of the limits of the Nuremberg trials, how the Nuremberg judges failed to consider the killing of handicapped people on the same level as the broader genocide. "The treatment of disabled people by the (Nuremberg) court was discriminatory; no reparations were ever made to the families of those killed, no one was ever punished for their murders".

The next two chapters "Backhanded Social Darwinism" and "The Politics of Perfect Babies" look at the residue of eugenics thought in American life in the 1980s and 1990s. It includes a thoughtful critique of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, good discussion of the economic pressures that contribute to suicide in the USA, the new insurance realities and `the perfect baby ' phenomenon. Concerning the latter, Russell explores the fears of new parents who might not have a `perfect baby' and the pressures to abort. I thought these parts of the book were relevant and her view point well considered. There is so much pressure on prospective parents to have a `perfect baby' that when they don't the results are often quite traumatic. The discussion of these issues was especially well done.

From this point on the book - which never really hides its political bent - becomes even more political. It examines what Russell refers to as `The Mechanism of Poverty'. Rather than rejecting these chapters as extraneous (or worse), I found the political analysis in them to be about as good as it gets in a book of this kind (ie. dealing with disability). For the fact of the matter is that economic and political realities have profoundly shaped both attitudes and funding patterns or lack of them towards handicapped people. To separate the political realities of the 1980s and 1990s - a period of unabashed gluttony for a few, with a declining living standard for the majority of Americans - is to miss a mighty big point. So don't be afraid of a little `radical analysis'.

Indeed, I can't help thinking the nation would be far better off if more people had the kinds of political understandings that come through in Russell's writings. She pulls no punches, true, but she also documents virtually every statement she makes and I would be very surprised if any reader could disprove any of it. Besides, it is pretty `intuitive' that economic policy has a great impact on the disabled. Russell just shows how much and with an arsenal of detail.

Russell's political savvy comes through in several other ways. This is not just a history of how disaabled people in the USA have been treated, it is also the story of the social and political struggles of handicapped people to participate in shaping their own future. There is a social movement of disabled people that has not only changed the way the handicapped think about themselves and their potential, but have also shaped the way the `broader' society view disabled people. The disabled demand that their humanity be respected. They are not looking for `Jerry Lewis'- type handouts (some of the most stinging words in this little book zero in on Lewis' annual telethon), but respect and a chance to fully participate in the broader society.

The analysis of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1989 should be read by everyone. Russell gives us a frank view of that law's scope and more particularly its limitations. Passed in the years of the Bush Presidency, ADA has been used by Republicans as an example of what has become a kind of mantra `compassionate conservatism', ie. that even Republicans care about the disabled in the United States. Russell's observations of how the ADA came into force and what it means and doesn't mean provides a penetrating critique of that little piece of legislation. Reading that chapter, I kept thinking of back on a piece of legislation I had worked on in the 1970s. It was called the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment and was meant to give jobs (or some form of income) to all Americans. Well the bill DID pass - indeed when Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan gives his semi annual `the-American-economy-is-just-humming-along' tape dance before Congress, it is because he is obliged to do so by the Humphrey-Hawkins legislation. Unfortunately while the bill did pass, all the sections that would have insured Americans job security were gutted. Something like that happened to the ADA. Russell gives the details and tells the story well.In the same vein, the logic of repeated frustration is probably a factor pussing Russell - and the disabled community as a whole - continually further to the left of the political spectrum as liberal and conservative solutions prove unsatisfactory.

The title of the book `Beyond Ramps', kept coming back to me as I read on. This is only about providing needed services to the disabled, but about reminding the world of their basic humanity, their fundamental human rights to both earn a living and to enjoy a wholesome quality of life. But this, it turns out only comes through struggle. Sounds polemical I know. I happen to believe it, for the mentally and physically disabled and for another category that for the moment seems to embrace a rather large chuck of our people - the politically disabled-. At least the mentally and physically disabled have learned what they have to do to effect change and reassert their humanity...and in this, we can all learn from them.

R. Prince/Denver/ April 7, 2000

Some time ago, poking through the threads of the eugenics movement in Colorado in the early 20^th century I came across a masters thesis written by an aspiring teacher at what was then called Colorado Teachers College (which is now the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley). The young author was worried about the impact of Mexican immigration to the Greeley area on gene pool of the good people of Greeley - a city founded 50 years prior as one of Colorado's own home grown utopian communities (modeled in part on the Oneida Community from upstate New York).

The concerns expressed in this paper, written in 1924, reflected the national paranoia well: fears of race mixing, of immigrants with their different languages, religions and racial `stock' as the term used to be. Written in the same year that the nation's most restrictive anti-immigration bill breezed through Congress slamming the door shut on a new wave of immigrants, this thesis left me with an eery and uncomfortable feeling. It was a racist tract pure and simple, this time targeting Mexican immigrants outright. It warned, in the eugenic tradition, that too many Mexicans in Colorado could have catastrophic consequences for the state and should be guarded against.

The influence of the racist intellectual aristocracy of the day - Madison Grant (The Passing of a Great Race) and Lothard Stoddard (The Rising Tide of Color) - seeped through every page as did that `anglo-saxon defensiveness' - that bigoted nostalgia for an American democracy minus the Greeks, Russians, Poles, Irish, Jews, Mexicans, Blacks, Chinese and of course Native Americans. If only those poor, huddled hords hadn't made the great journey across the waters to pollute the old English vapid gene pool, this country would be a dandy place indeed! Nor can I let pass that in the year 1924, the good state of Colorado sported one of the largest chapters of the Ku Klux Klan anywhere in the country. While not to be outdone by racists elsewhere in the country - Colorado's triple K-ers did maintain the traditional Klan hatred for Blacks - Denver's white sheet crowd was faced with a social situation of no small irony. Colorado's Black population was terribly small, suggesting that this little vanguard of former slaves threatened to overthrow the then existing social order was pushing the limits of credibility. Colorado's Klan had other, often forgotten targets - Catholics and immigrants, especially those from Eastern and Central Europe.

Yet it was one thing to read the hyperbole of Madison Grant, whom, in the American tradition, invoking `the right of free speech', puts his prejudices on paper for anyone to purchase and consider and quite another thing, to think that such nonsense was the subject matter of a masters' thesis at an American university and as such, an officially condoned and intellectually respectable point of view. I wondered then why a paper on eugenics was being accepted for Masters degree level work at a university with a reputation as a teachers' college. Did eugenics influence extend to the realm on public education? One would have thought, - or at least I thought - that a eugenics position on public education would simply be to oppose it (too many feebleminded immigrants getting free rides - their logic would go) as they did free health care and other social services. Yet such thinking while not inaccurate, actually characterizes the earlier more radical eugenicists - the ones who would have liked to have gassed the mentally ill (see Russell Hollander's writings in this web site's bibliography), let the poor immigrants die of starvation, tuberculosis or whatever, thus fulfilling their somewhat skewed views of Darwinian evolution (ie. survival of the fittest)

But the 1920s, mainstream eugenic bigotry was somewhat more refined in its attitudes towards public education than it had been earlier in the century, this due in large part to impact of a social disease still with us on the verge of the next century, even millennium: intelligence tests! While not opposing it outright, the eugenicists believed public education should be applied in varying doses to the different elements within the population, based, of course, on that great discriminating concept potential. Those with more of it, should get better, more expensive and extensive educations. Those with less - what Murray and Herrstein might refer today as the cognitive lumpen proletariat - should be rewarded proportionally less.

Lest you think that such ideas had little impact on the shape of our public educational institutions in the decades that follow, a dose of Steven Selden's book (see - I finally got to it), would suggest quite another reality. Many of those who shaped our nation's thinking of teaching `gifted and talented' and special education were firmly within the eugenics' camp and influenced by eugenic thinking, among them Dr. Helen Putnam, an early president of the National Education Association and Leta Hollingworth, one of the nation's leading authorities on the teaching of gifted and talented and a professor in education at Columbia Teacher's College.

Putnam argued that teachers should be educated in eugenics and should in turn teach its `values' to the new generations of students. Although compared to some other eugenicists of her day, much of her biological determinism is relatively benign, she was able to bring the fields of education and eugenics much closer together and open the door for the likes of Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin to a new generation of teachers who - as our Colorado Masters' Degree candidate suggest - proved to be receptive to their ideas. Hollingworth's adhesion to eugenics is - to use the language of disease - more malignant. A much more zealous eugenics adherent, Hollingworth basically dedicated her energies to providing the best education possible for the biological elite `the best two per cent'. Those gifted and talented according to Hollingworth, did not acquire their skills at an early age or listening to an over weaning mother - they inherited them pure and simply. The eugenic logic which led Hollingworth to agitate in favor of the `best two per cent' led her to be some what less than charitable when it came to funding the mentally or physically handicapped.

Under the influence of Putnam and Hollingsworth, America's schools became one of the main testing grounds for the eugenics movement. This happened in a number of ways. Eugenics had a way of `piggy backing' other movements. In Colorado eugenicists (Drs. Mary Bates, Minnie CT Love) advocated public health care to schools in part as a way of identifying the `eugenically unfit' among the student body. Identification was a first step towards isolation and deprivation of reproductive rights. Similarly, there was a strong eugenic bias in the intelligence tests just then being applied to America's school age children with the idea of channeling the eugenically fit off from the unfit into a tracked public education system. There are some (the author included) who would argue that such a model was indeed applied in the decades that followed.

Turning now with more concentrated energy to Selden's fine - if exorbitantly overpriced - little volume, his little expose on Helen Putnam's role in the eugenics movement is only one example of many fascinating and original little insights he gives on the movement's history. What I consider the most original part of this book follows the brief pages on the NEA's flirtation with eugenics (there is the basis for a masters' or doctoral thesis there: The Impact of Biological Determinism in Early 20^th Century American Public Education - there! - I've already provided the title!). In Chapter 4 of his book, Selden gives us a rare view of early 20^th century high school biology texts. It is here we see just how pervasive eugenics thinking had become. Although there were some exceptions, the overwhelming majority of those texts discussed eugenics, with most of them viewing the movement favorably. Selden even gives figures - 87% of the texts he was able to view included eugenics as a topic, and a full 70% of them recommended eugenics as a science.

These texts were short on genetics and long on the famous family studies, so influential in establishing the eugenics model in the first place. So a reader could chose among America's finest uneugenically unfit families - the Jukes, the Kallikaks, etc. - and see pedigrees of thieves, murderers, rapists and general profligates that made America the great nation it is today. The psychological power of such lists has appeared to be almost irresistible. To simply list a family that had 3 or 4 generations of crime - as Richard Dugsdale did in his famous study (The Jukes 1877) - is enough to nail the heritage to the wall genetically, despite the obvious (or should be obvious) little piece of logic that such studies in and of themselves prove nothing as the trend can either have an inherited, environmental or combination-of-the-two cause.

And yet biology texts in the 1920s and 1930s leaned heavily on such `stuff'.<

All this becomes even more curious when considering the advances in genetics which were already known at the time. Selden's explanation of these developments is succinct and to the point. Thanks to those little reproductive wonders - drosophila - or as they are more commonly called, fruit flies, by 1920, the world of science knew considerably more about genetics than it did at the turn of the century when the first eugenic wave burst upon the American scene. By 1915 already Thomas Morgan had learned that simple `Mendelian dominance and recessiveness' was actually not that simple. It turned out that a simple allele could influence more than one trait, and that likewise, a number of traits drew their genetic formuli from more than one gene. The genetics of feeblemindedness itself had gone through an interesting evolution, earlier on considered a dominant trait (one that could lead to race suicide), later considered a simple Mendelian recessive characteristic. Yet even if considered recessive, hereditary feeblemindedness, as the eugenic trait was called, would require 2000 years or so of constant monitoring and reproductive control to be eliminated. By the 1920s, the genetic basis of hereditary feeblemindedness was so weakened that it begins to slip from the scientific literate. By 1936, in a famous study (Myerson et.al. Eugenic Sterilization: A Reorientation of the Problem), the term would be totally discredited and, with the exception of Nazi Germany, where US-developed eugenics ideas, would have a great future, laid to rest.

Back to Selden's biology texts, even if the Myerson study had not yet appeared, by 1920, there was already substantial genetic and biological information available to undermine the eugenic premise, this information combined with new studies in Cultural Anthropology and Sociology

to scientifically undermine the eugenic paradigm. Selden briefly mentions Cultural Anthropologist Robert Lowie's 1917 series of lectures attacking eugenics. Selden cites the comments of Hamilton Craven's, who asserts that Lowie's speeches mark the open shots of the `hereditary-environment' controversy. Lowie and like him, Kroeber in California, built on the work of their mentor, Franz Boaz, whose life work is one of the more elegant refutations of eugenic (and racist) thinking. He had been challenging many of the hereditary ideas on which eugenics was based long before 1917.

So before 1920 America's Cultural Anthro's under Boas' influence and guidance, along with a growing number of geneticists (not only Morgan) were already in the forefront of attacks on eugenics. Not that Anthropology's hands are clean. The field of Physical Anthropology was steeped in the stuff (eugenics) and were key players in developing early physical models to identify the eugenically unfit. Indeed the field was strangely divided. The physical anthros based at Harvard (Hrdicka, Hooten) were heavily involved in the key organizations Selden mentions in Chapters One and Two (The Galton Society, The American Eugenics Society). As late as the late 1940s, Hooten - an unrepentant eugenicist - was still writing copious nonsense (a two volume work) on criminal physical types. Even today that eugenics theme seems to worm its way back to the surface in new forms in the thinking of some in the field.

Selden's discussion of eugenics' opponents (Chapter 6) shows us important intellectual opponents to eugenics even at the height of the movement's influence. This is encouraging for at its zenith, this movement permeated the thinking of both the social and natural sciences in this country. Do not think that the fact that eugenics is a little known field of endeavor, that it was always the case. It was a powerful model and those who challenged it showed a certain amount of intellectual courage. There is a certain misconception - I know, I had it - that eugenics was a project on some level of the political right. It certainly seems conservative on cultural grounds, profoundly undemocratic on political grounds and yet, its defenders crossed political boundaries. Many of them were liberal and left in orientation, a fact many find hard to swallow, but true none the less. This was a result of the eugenics movement's successful effort place itself within the turn of the century political movement called progressivism.

In fact, in its day, the opponents of eugenics were few and far between. Civil libertarians, women's organizations rarely opposed it. There was no organized liberal or left opposition of any substance and much support from those quarters. The only consistently organized opposition comes from the Catholic Church, most of it interestingly coming before, the Pope's famous papal letter of 1930 condemning eugenic sterilization was issued. Here in Colorado four attempts to pass eugenic legislation were thwarted mainly by church activists, - the Knights of Columbus coming in for special mention. So much for eugenic's grass roots opposition. Selden omits much of this. But his information on the intellectual opposition to eugenics is still very useful. He sits biologists (HS Jennings), educators (Thomas Dewey), and political commentators and moralists (Walter Lippman's). Lippman's attacks on eugenics in general and inaccuracy of intelligence tests in particular which appeared in the October and November 1922 issues of the liberal magazine New Republic, are some of the finest and most humane polemics of this century. Should be required highschool reading (and if I helped shaped curriculum it would be).

There's more. But this review - or that part of it which is a review - is already too long. What we have here is a fine little overpriced volume with some fresh information shedding more light on the extent to which eugenic thinking and attitudes influenced early 20^th century American culture. Drop the price and there is a real jewel.

R. Prince/Denver/ December 24, 1999

Availability at Metro State College: private collection of instructor (call 303-556-6887 or email princer@mscd.edu)

The numbers are - as with eugenic statistics throughout the world - notoriously inaccurate and understated. The official statistics indicate that 250,000 Germans deemed `eugenically unfit' or `mentally, physically or socially feebleminded' were gassed to death, the overwhelming majority of them killed in the 1930s in six secret death facilities scattered through the country as part of the national system of national mental hospitals and clinics. However after Hitler was forced to cut back on the gassing program in 1941 other methods - forced starvation combined with powerful drug treatment produced the same results. The number of people so victimized is unknown. The forced starvation program was very carefully organized so that the exact caloric intake of each targeted victim was continually lowered to produce the intended result - death - within a proscribed period of time (usually a few months).

There are a number of striking themes about this program explored by Burleigh in his book and in the video he made from it - ie - Selling Murder: The Killing Films of the Third Reich.

• The program was developed in close cooperation with the eugenics program in the USA. In both countries the eugenics movement fluctuated between targetting mentally, physically handicapped people and the indigent on the one hand with a kind of cultural target on the other. The practical solutions: mating separation, castration, sterilization and `euthanasia' were all discussed as options in both countries. In the USA sterilization became the method of choice and gassing - which was actually proposed by a number of doctors and psychiatrists at the end of the 19<sup>th</sup> century - was rejected. The Nazi program begins with sterilization but shifts after a few years to outright mass murder.
• it was an unusual program for the Nazis in that it targeted Germans, whom it condemned to death in a manner like that it dispatched with `foreigners' - Jews, Gypsies, Slavs. The objectification of the `other', the foreigner, the outsider, which so many Germans in the Nazi period bought into rather easily could not be used in this case. An added complication resulted from the fact that Nazism claimed to be a kind of German nationalism that represented Germans of all classes. The result was that there was considerable unease about this program that went about slaughtering not Jews or Soviet Communists, but `good Germans'.
• Because their eugenics program targeted and executed so many German nationals, the Nazi authorities worried about the impact of public opinion. They tried to sway it in favor of the extermination program by a series of powerfully well made propaganda films, which argued that `death and deliverance' were in the best interest of the German nation. Knowledge of some of these films has existed in West Germany for some time. But with the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the reunification of Germany, the archives of the former East German secret police, the Stasi, revealed a treasure trove of secret film footage and eugenics records from the Nazi era, hidden away and not available for public perusal or consideration until after 1989. It is this material that contributes much to the originality of Burleigh's contribution
• Curiously, the program never achieved open status even in Nazi Germany; while it was run by a close assistant of Hitler it never had formal legal or open status. It was something of a cloak and dagger `CIA' type covert operation that the Nazi government could continue to deny. At the same time, the German people were aware of the program. Strong opposition to it grew, most especially from the families of the victims who were given rather flimsy official excuses as to the final fate of their loved ones.
• In many fundamental ways the extermination of the mentally and physically handicapped and those unfortunate enough to be labeled as `socially' feebleminded was a prelude to the Holocaust against the Jews, Gypsies and Slavic people carried out in the death factories of the Third Reich. The mechanics and chemistry of poison gas was worked out on these victims as were the methods of disposal (cremation, mass burials).

So, no, not a fun video but one of considerable social value and originality. To a certain respect - admittedly with certain differences - the video sheds light on the current debate over euthanasia in the USA that has centered around the life and work of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. Kevorkian's public thrust is to develop a campaign around `the right to die', ie. placing the whole issue of euthanasia with the context of individual decision-making, indeed, attempting to make the choice of death - or suicide as it is more commonly called - a `human right'. But it is precisely along these lines that the Nazi euthanasia propaganda films argued. What is less clear here in the USA in the coming decades are what institutional forces are at work that might as in the 1930s turn the voluntary act of suicide into the involuntary act of mass murder. How for example will underfunded nursing homes and public healthcare facilities deal with life and death decisions that could effect many people. ok. At this point, this is only a suggestion. A look at history is hopefully instructive if only to give the smallest modicum of respect and decency to those who died such horrible and tragic deaths.

R. Prince/Denver/ December 24, 1999