Progressive genocide

March 4, 2006 | Among the many concerns that captivated the American educated class early in the last century, few were thought to be as urgent as the threat posed to the nation by sexually insatiable female morons. This may sound silly; today, our fear of morons is rather abstract, and on a national scale confined mostly to whomever is the current resident of the White House. But a hundred years ago, morons were public enemy No. 1, seen as a drain on the nation's resources and a grave danger to its stability. The situation was most keenly appreciated by progressives -- scientists, businessmen, feminists and liberal politicians -- who, as even the best of us sometimes do, feared that within a short time, the nation would be overrun by simpletons.

But how do you solve a problem like the moron? These poor people, for one, weren't easy to spot. "Feeblemindedness," the medical condition from which morons suffered, was chiefly manifested by subtle, difficult-to-diagnose symptoms, such as poor judgment and a susceptibility to deviance. The only way to tell if you were dealing with a certifiable moron -- an actual medical term -- was by administering an intelligence questionnaire (an early version of the IQ test), which scientists believed could accurately assess a patient's "mental age." Unlike idiots and imbeciles (who were characterized by significant, obvious mental defects), morons, who were grown-ups who showed mental ages that were far below their physical maturity, might do well in school, they might hold down jobs, and they might even manage to raise children -- but all this was to be thought of as a ruse, because sooner or later, they'd go astray.

As the journalist Harry Bruinius explains in "Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity," his comprehensive new history of the American eugenics movement, the problem wasn't just that morons were given to crime and poverty; because feeblemindedness was a genetic condition passed on from one generation to the next, their children, and their children's children, and on and on, were similarly suspect as well. Of particular concern were the afflicted women, in whom scientists had found the symptoms of feeblemindedness more pronounced. Female morons gave in to their sexual urges more quickly than feebleminded men, and they sometimes deceived normal men into consorting with them; in addition, they were "hyper-fecund," as doctors termed their apparent tendency to become pregnant easily. Put this all together, as many smart Americans did, and you had a big problem on your hands: an extremely fertile, extremely needy, apparently permanent underclass.

It's lately become fashionable to reckon with growing ignorance among one's countrymen by threatening to emigrate to Canada; for American intellectuals of an earlier generation the more obvious solution was forced sterilization. At the dawn of the medical age, when scientists were just beginning to discover both the evolutionary basis to biology as well as painless, "humane" procedures to render humans infertile, it was the nation's rationalists who hit upon the idea of sterilization as a way to solve the problem of multiplying morons, Bruinius explains; the main opposition to the horrific idea came from religious fundamentalists.

Progressives saw sterilization as having natural advantages over traditional methods of helping the poor, such as charity. Sterilization was "scientific" -- its rationale could be found in the writings of Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton, the father of eugenics, who mused that superior people, like superior crops and farm animals, were the product of good breeding. The term "gene" had not yet been coined -- among the surprises in Bruinius' book is that the science and the word "genetics" were born of the pseudoscience eugenics, and not vice versa -- but any well-read person could understand that if you wanted to rid the world of inferior people, you ought to stop them from passing on their characteristics to future generations. Whereas charity only prolonged and deepened the problem of poverty by allowing the "unfit" among us to survive and procreate, sterilization presented what you might call a permanent, final solution. Give a man a fish and he eats for one day; cut his mother's fallopian tubes and you can be pretty certain not to need any fish, or fishing lessons, in the first place.

Much of the story of the American eugenics movement has been forgotten, and this is the main thing Bruinius' book has going for it. Though it's at times discursive and repetitive, tends toward the melodramatic, and is probably too long by half, "Better for All the World" tells a story few Americans know or have considered much. Bruinius says the history is "secret," but there isn't much deliberate obfuscation in the record -- indeed what's most surprising about our eugenics past is how public, proud and prominent its proponents were about their aims. There's perhaps a better explanation for why we've forgotten the story: Eugenics in America can be seen as something like a tragedy deferred, a terrible path that we veered toward, but, like the presidency of Charles Lindbergh, wisely averted at the last minute. To the extent that we remember the eugenicists now, we think of them as faddists; like phrenologists before them or, in a later generation, dot-com evangelizers, eugenicists caught some attention by peddling a simple and attractive solution to many of the world's ills, and while they may have caused a good deal of trouble in the process, they were eventually outwitted. Eugenics in America is a historical blemish, not an open wound, and it's the open wounds one tends to remember. Another way of saying this is, at least we're not Germany.

And yet in Bruinius' telling American eugenicists don't look nearly so inconsequential. Importantly, Bruinius points out, we were the first to pick up the eugenics bug. Galton, a Brit, provided the intellectual basis for eugenics, but Americans, who fancied themselves a chosen people and whose blood has always run hot on matters of utopia, actually implemented the plans. In 1907, Indiana passed "the first sterilization law in human history," Bruinius writes, and "in the next two decades, the United States became the pioneer in state-sanctioned programs to rid society of the 'unfit.'" At least 30 states enacted similar laws, and sterilization became routine. California, which ran the most aggressive program, sterilized more than 2,500 people in a 10-year period; in all, more than 65,000 Americans were rendered infertile.

Next page: Why did sanity about eugenics eventually prevail in America, but not in Germany?