History of Eugenics and Disability

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History of Eugenicsand Disability

• Joanne Woiak, jwoiak_at_uw.edu
• Disability Studies, University of Washington
• Eugenics and Disability website
• http//eugenics.washington.edu

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Eugenics coined by Francis Galton (1883), from
the Greek well-born
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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.

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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.

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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.

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Overview of DS models of disability

• Medical model (or individual model)
• Problem is the individuals 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 individuals body/mind.

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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?

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List of undesirable traits, from the Eugenics
Record Office, 1911, The Study of Human
Heredity
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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
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Eugenics targeted people with disabilitiese.g.
pedigree of feebleminded family
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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.

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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.

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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
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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)

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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.

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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.

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• 1918 IQ tests
• US Army
• For recruits who were non-English speaking or
  illiterate.
• Complete the picture.
• 40 found to be FM.

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Actual Test Questions, Army Alpha

• SAMPLE People hear with their eyes\ears\nose\m
  outh
• 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 Kaffirs legs is . . . 2\4\6\8

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Outcome of Army mental tests ranking by race /
national origin
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1913 Ellis Island mental testingEugenicists as
moron detectors80 of immigrants scored
feebleminded
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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.

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Negative eugenics 30 states had compulsory
sterilization laws by 1930s
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Eugenicist Harry Laughlins 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, neer-do-wells, homeless, tramps, and
  paupers.

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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.

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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)

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Morality disability was sometimes defined in
terms of regulating sexual behavior

• Female, 20. Parents not married. Mother drank
  constantly before conception and during
  pregnancy. Child was neglected and abused.
  Patients 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.
• 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

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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.

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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 Laughlins
  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.

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Euthanasia practiced in US1917 pro-eugenics
doctor and his filmThe Black Stork

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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.

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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.