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Sir Francis Galton /ˈfrɑːnsɪs ˈgɔːltn̩/ FRS (16 February 1822 – 17 January 1911), cousin of Douglas Strutt Galton, half-cousin of Charles Darwin, was an English Victorian polymath: anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician.
Carrie Buck (1906–1983) was a plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), and was ordered to undergo compulsory sterilization for purportedly being "feeble-minded." The surgery was carried out while Buck was an inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded under the authority of the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, part of the state of Virginia's eugenics program
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Carrie Buck (1906–1983) was a plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case, Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), and was ordered to undergo compulsory sterilization for purportedly being "feeble-minded."
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"More than 60,000 Americans were sterilised, many against their will, as part of a eugenics movement that finished in 1979, aimed at keeping the poor and mentally ill from having children. Now, decades on, one state is considering compensation."
"January 3rd, 1913. Former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt writes to the founder of the Eugenics Record Office, prominent eugenicist Charles Davenport, and offers his views on eugenics; a highly controversial movement whose aim - essentially the eradication of "defective" humans in society by way of selective breeding - gained much attention in the 1930/40s when more than 400'000 Germans were sterilised against their will, and over 70'000 others killed, as part of Adolf Hitler's quest to rid the country of "life unworthy of life." "
"In a 1926 article in American Anthropologist, E.A. Hooten reviews the brand new journal Annals of Eugenics, a publication devoted to "racial problems" that "every anthropologist will welcome.""
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To put this into context, since Hofstadter published his book in 1944 the term social Darwinism has appeared 4,258 times. This history gives every indication that social Darwinism as a theory was invented by Hofstadter and that it had only negligible influence prior to his book.
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Previous social planners have come from the assumption that humans were different from all other creatures in the natural world. When they constructed our modern civilizations, what I often refer to as the human zoo, they assumed that understanding how humans interact in their "natural habitat" wasn't important. They made decisions based on economics and utility, not smart science. Some theorists in the past may have borrowed terms from the hottest science of the day to justify their own malevolent goals. That should be a warning for us, but it shouldn't discourage us from using the best information available to construct a world that we all want to live in.
In this series it is my goal to raise some questions about the usefulness of social Darwinism and the way it has been applied. This is a history that is full of contradictions (as history often is) and I encourage people to both challenge and offer suggestions as I develop these ideas. : The Primate Diaries
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There is a widespread myth that Darwin wrote a letter to Karl Marx thanking him for sending a copy of Das Kapital. The reality is that a letter from Darwin to Edward Aveling (a biology lecturer who was in a long term relationship with Marx's daughter Eleanor) was accidentally mixed in with a box of Marx's correspondence that was in Eleanor's care.
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In his 1851 bestseller Social Statics, Spencer developed most of the ideas attributed to social Darwinism when he argued that the poor should not be helped through government programs, but should be allowed to die for the betterment of society:
It seems hard that a labourer incapacitated by sickness from competing with his stronger fellows should have to bear the resulting privations. It seems hard that widows and orphans should be left to struggle for life or death. Nevertheless, when regarded not separately, but in connection with the interests of universal humanity, these harsh fatalities are seen to be full of the highest beneficence--the same beneficence that brings to early graves the children of diseased parents, and singles out the low-spirited, the intemperate, and the debilitated as the victims of an epidemic. . .
Blind to the fact that, under the natural order of things society is constantly excreting its unhealthy, imbecile, slow, vacillating, faithless members, these unthinking, though well-meaning, men advocate an interference which not only stops the purifying process, but even increases the vitiation--absolutely encourages the multiplication of the reckless and incompetent by offering them an unfailing provision and discourages the multiplication of the competent and provident by heightening the prospective difficulty of maintaining a family. And thus, in their eagerness to prevent the really salutary sufferings that surround us, these sigh-wise and groan-foolish people bequeath to posterity a continually increasing curse.
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see http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wellerst/laughlin/Laughlin_Model_Law.pdf
"The article he had stumbled across was about two sisters sterilized in the 1920s by the state of Virginia for being "feeble-minded." The younger sister hadn't even known she'd had a tubal ligation. She didn't learn until she was in her late 60s that the surgery hadn't been for appendicitis. The older, more famous sister — Carrie Buck — was the subject of the now infamous lawsuit over the legality of the operation, Buck v. Bell, that was decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. "
" Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court's affirmative decision of this landmark case, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted” stating that “her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.” "
"By merging Galtonian eugenics with Mendelian heredity, the new American eugenics under Davenport’s leadership focused as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding”[2] and gave an institutional base for the movement with the establishment of the Carnegie Institution’s Station for the Study of Experimental Evolution (SEE), and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbour in Long Island, New York. "
Created for the 2007 NHD Competition. Following the theme "Triumph & Tragedy", this documentary depicts the U.S. Eugenic legislation throughout the early 20th Century and chronicles the compulsory sterilization faced by many Americans. "War on the Weak" continues to analyze negative eugenics by discussing the U.S. Supreme
N.C. Woman Among 65,000 Sterilized by Gov't., Often Without Their Knowledge, in 20th Century\n
One of the deep, dark secrets of America's past has finally come to light. Starting in the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of American children were warehoused in institutions by state governments. And the federal government did nothing to stop it.\n\nThe justification? The kids had been labeled feeble-minded, and were put away in conditions that can only be described as unspeakable.
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A second objection is that there is no core theoretical framework that would make the theory a coherent set of principles. A political theory only possesses utility if its general principles exist independent of the thing to be explained. Without this the theory is a mere amalgamation of tenuously related ideas that do not form a unified structure.
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while scholars universally acknowledge Spencer as central to any definition of social Darwinism and have filled multiple volumes of critical analysis based on his views, every word Sumner ever wrote on the subject was cited in Hofstadter's book, and his single chapter on him is less than sixteen pages.
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The Nazi policies enacted three-quarters of a century ago today were certainly bad enough, we don't need to spread the blame onto those who had no connection with them. Given the long history of creationist scholarship based on principles rather than propaganda, I'm certain we will no longer see attempts to smear Darwin's legacy with the taint of Nazi ideology once these facts become more generally well-known. But, of course, I'm being sarcastic. : The Primate Diaries
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