Eugenics and Shame
Note: For the complete list of posts, go HERE.
There is a context to my grandparents’ story — and the secrecy around it — that is likely to feel alien to contemporary audiences.
Consider, for example, the following quotes, and as you read them, guess who might have been the source.
(1) Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and insane in a more economical manner?
(2) [The insane] are specimens of humanity who really ought to be exterminated …[America] must stop trying to cure malignant biological growths with patent sociological nostrums. The emergency demands a surgical operation.
(3) Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
Modern minds would likely attribute these kinds of sentiments to Hitler or Goebbels or Himmler.
In fact, they are attributable to three Americans…
(1) Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning physician at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, 1935
(2) Earnest Hooton, Harvard University, American physical anthropologist, Apes, Men and Morons, 1937
(3) Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, 1932
This kind of thinking — which ultimately reached its horrible conclusion in the Nazi death camps — didn’t begin in Germany. It began in the United Kingdom and the United States with the “Eugenics” movement.
Per Wikipedia, “eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population by excluding (through a variety of morally criticized means) certain genetic groups judged to be inferior, and promoting other genetic groups judged to be superior.” Modern use of the term is attributable to Francis Galton in 1883, although the concept goes back millenia.
While eugenic principles have been practiced as early as ancient Greece, the contemporary history of eugenics began in the early 20th century, when a popular eugenics movement emerged in the United Kingdom, and then spread to many countries, including the United States, Canada, and most European countries. In this period, eugenic ideas were espoused across the political spectrum. Consequently, many countries adopted eugenic policies, intended to improve the quality of their populations’ genetic stock. Such programs included both positive measures, such as encouraging individuals deemed particularly “fit” to reproduce, and negative measures, such as marriage prohibitions and forced sterilization of people deemed unfit for reproduction. Those deemed “unfit to reproduce” often included people with mental or physical disabilities, people who scored in the low ranges on different IQ tests, criminals and “deviants,” and members of disfavored minority groups.
Robert Whitaker notes in Mad in America that the eugenics movement spread quickly in the United States:
The American Eugenics Society (AES) was incorporated in 1926. John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed $10,000 to help launch it. George Eastman, of Eastman Kodak fame, gave $20,000. Yale professor Irving Fisher, the best-known economist of his time, served as the first president. In a short period, it grew into a truly national organization, with chapters in twenty-eight states…
From the beginning, American eugenicists had a clear-cut agenda for preventing the mentally ill from having children. States would need to make it illegal for the insane to marry, segregate them into asylums, and release them only after they had been sterilized. Only then would they cease to be a threat to the country’s genetic makeup.
All of which reversed the tide of moral care for the mentally ill initiated by the Quakers and codified by Thomas Story Kirkbride in the 19th century, the tide of moral care that created institutions like Buffalo and Rockland Asylums.
By the 1920s and 1930s, Americans were done with the idea of moral care — the centerpiece of which was to try to individually care for the mentally ill and help them move back into the mainstream. By the 1920s and 1930s, Americans were intent on removing “malignant poisonous growths” (Earnest Hooten) from their midst and simply warehousing the mentally ill — preferably somewhere out of sight and out of mind and often for life.
And so my grandparents not only confronted a society fearful of their Italian otherness and fearful of the potential dilution of the purity of the American/Northern European “race.” They also confronted a society intent on removing the “mentality unfit” from their midst, and doing so as cheaply as possible. Multiply the tension of their Italian otherness and lack of English skills by the racial purity objectives of the eugenics crowd and the outcome is not that surprising. Add poverty to the mix, and you have a trifecta of awful possibilities. The result was often a life sentence for those who did not fit the proper mold of “normalness” — in underfunded and understaffed and overcrowded facilities.
Perhaps the resultant shame felt by families — and all of the secrets that surrounded that shame — are a bit easier to understand in that context.
And so Frank and Elizabeth sank into the quicksand of family memory.
And disappeared.
