Transcript History of Eugenics and Disability Joanne Woiak, [email protected] Disability Studies, University of Washington Eugenics and Disability website http://eugenics.washington.edu.

History of Eugenics
and Disability
Joanne Woiak, [email protected]
Disability Studies, University of Washington
Eugenics and Disability website
http://eugenics.washington.edu
“Eugenics” coined by Francis Galton
(1883), from the Greek “well-born”
Overview of history of eugenics,
1900-1945
• Goal to improve the biological quality of the human
race.
• Methods involved controlling reproduction.
• Organized in 30+ countries, including diverse ideas and
policies.
• Key components of eugenics:
– Scientific knowledge claims.
– Ideological beliefs.
– Social practices aiming to reduce “social problem
groups” for “the public good.”
Overview of eugenics: policies to improve
the hereditary make-up of the “race”
• Positive eugenics
– Encourage “fitter” people to have more kids
who share their “good” genes.
• Negative eugenics
– Persuade, pressure, or compel “unfit”
people not to pass on “defective” genes.
• Permanent institutionalization.
• Forced sterilization (surgery to make infertile).
• Murder of disabled people and ethnic minorities.
Overview of disability studies
• Framework for answering “what is disability?”
• Disability is defined as restricted participation
caused by social barriers.
– “The right to live in the world.”
• Society is the problem.
– Negative attitudes and stereotypes (ableism),
architectural barriers, social policies, cultural
representations... oppress people with disabilities.
Overview of DS: models of disability
“Medical model” (or “individual model”):
•
Problem is the individual’s impaired body or mind.
–
•
The solution is medical treatment (or prevention).
The individual is expected to make efforts to
“overcome” her disability in order to be accepted
by society.
“Social model” of disability:
•
Equality comes about by changing the
environment, not the individual’s body/mind.
Eugenics analyzed by disability studies
We can identify these core components of eugenics:
1. Biological (genetic) cause of social problems.
– Disability is pathology; dealt with by medical-scientific professionals .
2. Some people are a burden on society.
– Disability is dependency; unproductive people; institutionalized.
Medical and economic framings of disability produced
ideas and practices that labeled many kinds of
people unfit for citizenship (and unfit to be born).
So who were the “unfit” / “defective” / “socially
inadequate”?
List of undesirable traits,
from the Eugenics Record Office, 1911,
“The Study of Human Heredity”
What counted as “normal”?
Fitter Families Contests as positive eugenics
Eugenics Image Archive, hosted by the
Human Genome Project Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory,
formerly the Eugenics Record Office:
http://eugenicsarchive.org
Eugenics targeted people with disabilities:
e.g. pedigree of “feebleminded” family
Social problems blamed on impoverished
individuals: class & disability
• Degenerate family pedigrees
– Mental & behavioral “defects”
– High birth rate
– The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and
Heredity (1877 & 1915), found 2800 family members in
New York, estimated welfare costs $2 million.
Disability was believed to be the cause of other
“social ills”: crime, poverty, prostitution
“The brighter class of the
feebleminded, with their
weak will-power and
deficient judgment, are
easily influenced for evil,
and are prone to become
vagrants, drunkards, and
thieves…. It is better and
cheaper for the community
to assume the permanent
care of this class before they
have carried out a long
career of expensive crime.”
The “public good” of relieving the economic
burden of disability
“It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should
have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded,
epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000
paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year.”
-Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office, 1910
History of state institutions for
disabled people
• 19th century goal of treating “lunatics” and training
“idiots” gave way by 1900 to long-term confinement and
“care” in vast state institutions.
– Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children: “brutes in the human
shape, but without the light of human reason.”
• 1886 Washington School for Defective Youth
– 1906 State School for the Deaf and Blind
– 1906 State Institution for the Feebleminded
(1933 Custodial School)
Mental hospitals:
Columbus Ohio Lunatic Asylum (1835)
• By 1900, Columbus housed 1300 people with
mental disability; 800 with intellectual disability;
800 blind or deaf.
– Across the US by 1900: 300 asylums, 200,000 residents.
– Peak in 1950s: 550,000 residents.
IQ testing: who was “feebleminded”?
• 1905 IQ invented by Alfred
Binet: “abnormal” children can
be educated.
• 1910s US psychologists
corrupt this goal: Intelligence
is hereditary, unchangeable.
Label & institutionalize.
• “Menace” to society.
– By 1900, in US there were
328 institutions housing
200,000 people labeled
mentally ill or mentally
deficient.
• 1918 IQ tests
• US Army
• For recruits who were
non-English speaking or
illiterate.
• Complete the picture.
• 40% found to be FM.
Actual Test Questions, Army Alpha
SAMPLE People hear with their
eyes\ears\nose\mouth
1. Pinochle is played with
rackets\cards\pins\dice
2. Habeus corpus is a term used in
medicine\law\pedagogy
3. Bud Fisher is a famous
actor\author\athlete\comic
4. Velvet Joe appears in ads for
tooth powder\soap\dry goods\tobacco
5. The number of a Kaffir’s legs is . . . 2\4\6\8
Outcome of Army mental tests:
ranking by race / national origin
1913 Ellis Island mental testing
Eugenicists as “moron detectors”
80% of immigrants scored feebleminded
Disability was sometimes defined in terms
of race and ethnicity
• 1924 Immigration Restriction Act
• Mental testing and “expert” testimony to Congress
legitimized the law.
• Set quotas for Eastern and Southern European
immigrants allowed into the US.
• Congressman Albert Johnson, R-WA, 1924, head
of the immigration committee:
“With this act, the US is undertaking to regulate and control the great
problem of the commingling of races. Our hope is in a homogeneous
nation. At one time we welcomed all and all helped to build the
nation. But now asylum ends. This nation must be as completely
unified as any nation in Europe or Asia. Self-preservation demands it.”
Negative eugenics: 30 states had compulsory
sterilization laws by 1930s
Eugenicist Harry Laughlin’s
model law for compulsory sterilization (1922)
• AN ACT to prevent the procreation of persons socially
inadequate from defective inheritance, by authorizing and
providing for the eugenical sterilization.
• Persons Subject. All persons in the State who, because of
degenerate or defective hereditary qualities are potential
parents of socially inadequate offspring, regardless of
whether such persons be in the population at large or
inmates of custodial institutions, regardless also of the
personality, sex, age, marital condition, race, or possessions
of such person.
• “Feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate,
diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, orphans, ne’er-do-wells,
homeless, tramps, and paupers.”
Forced sterilization for “public health”
• 1927 Buck v. Bell, US Supreme Court.
• This ruling upheld the Virginia sterilization
statute and set precedent for more states.
– “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
– “For the protection and health of the state.”
– “The principal that sustains compulsory
vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the
Fallopian tubes.”
Washington sterilization victims,
1909-1942 (2009 symposium)
• Official number of surgeries under the law: 685
– 184 Male
– 501 Female (73%)
• 403 “Insane” (Male 147, Female 256)
• 276 “Feebleminded” (Male 33, Female 243)
Morality: disability was sometimes defined in
terms of regulating sexual behavior
1.
Female, 20. Parents not married. Mother drank constantly before
conception and during pregnancy. Child was neglected and
abused. Patient’s sexual condition: passionate. Lived with a man
to whom she was not married. Hard to control where men are
involved. Might easily become a prostitute.
2.
Male, 20. Masturbator. Up to this time his parents have been able
to care for this boy by keeping him closely at home. Now they are
afraid that he will do harm to some of the little girls in his
neighborhood.
Cases from the archives of the Human Betterment
Foundation, California
Most extreme: eugenics in Nazi Germany
• 1933 Forced sterilization law:
• applied to 400,000 “hereditary defectives.”
• 1939 T4 killing programs (so-called “euthanasia”
or “mercy death”):
• More than 200,000 institutionalized adults and
children with disabilities.
• Economic logic: “lives not worth living,” “useless
eaters.”
• 1941 Final Solution
• Gas chambers from Action T4 were moved to the
concentration camps to murder 6 million Jewish
people and other groups.
Links between German and American
eugenics movements
• Nazi regime seeking “racial purity” (1933) borrowed
the idea of forced sterilization from the American
eugenicists and used Laughlin’s model law (1922).
• Hitler: “I have studied with great interest the laws of
several Am. states concerning the prevention of
reproduction by people whose progeny would be of
no value or be injurious to the racial stock…. The
possibility of excess and error is no proof of the
incorrectness of these laws.”
“Euthanasia” practiced in US:
1917 pro-eugenics doctor and his film
The Black Stork
Crimes against humanity?
• Doctors and nurses who performed the
sterilizations: none charged with crimes.
• “Euthanasia” and human experimentation: 23
physicians were tried, 15 found guilty, 7
hanged. They argued their actions were
“humane” to kill the disabled.
Conclusions: where was “disability” in the
history of eugenics?
• History of people with disabilities:
– Institutionalization
– Sterilization
• Constructions of the category “disability”:
– In medical and economic terms .
– Overlaps / intersections with class, race, gender
categories. “Disability” was determined based on
ideological needs, tied to racism, sexism, beliefs about the
“civilized white race” or Aryan purity.