Eugenics and The Big Lie

Ben Carson, Republican candidate for president and retired neurosurgeon, appeared on ABC News to spread another historical inversion about Eugenics and Margaret Sanger. Bob Cesca called out the good doctor's inaccuracies and pointed out that these crazy ideas come straight out of the fevered imagination of agent provocateur and conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. Cesca pointed out that the quote from Sanger was grossly taken out of context and the only other piece of evidence ever presented by the glossy-eyed true believers of this mythology is a completely doctored map manufactured by a propaganda outfit purporting to show that Planned Parenthood clinics are largely sited in predominantly black neighborhoods. These falsehoods are also exposed by a study from FactCheck.org already in 2011 when they were uttered by the last GOP Forkboy Herman Cain. The reason for all these attacks on Planned Parenthood are simple, PP and Margaret Sanger were the "good guys" in Eugenics history, and need to be destroyed as part of the larger war on women declared by the fascist right.

Ideology is a set of guiding ideas that inform the actions and beliefs of adherents. Ideological conflict can occur within and between these ideas, which compete to drive politics and government policy. The free market fundamentalism guiding government and corporate policy in the United States is an ideology that has been internalized to such a degree that it has lost it's identity as one of many guiding sets of ideas, much to the detriment of living things in this country and on Earth. It has many commonalities with Eugenics' competing ideology, Social Darwinism. As Planned Parenthood represents the positive side of Eugenics and was supported by many Progressives at the turn of the century as well as today, it is naturally an enemy that must be destroyed. Contraception, family planning, and yes, even abortion were liberal in that they empower individuals at the expense of elites. However much family planning empowers elites as well, working-class people gain a great deal from controlling the size and composition of their families. Children in Progressive Era America were coming to be seen as economic liabilities as many families crammed into urban tenements and no longer worked their own land. As such, having control over the number of mouths to feed was a positive for parents as well as a social good in itself.

To backtrack a little, Eugenics was Greek for "good in birth" and was coined as a name for certain principles by Sir Francis Galton, the British scientist who coalesced many ideas about genetics and evolution into this ideology. In short, Galton was influenced by his distant cousin, Charles Darwin, about natural selection and wanted to improve humanity through artificial selection. Galton was not exactly a heroic character, his own childless marriage led him to the hypothesis that aristocratic women failed to produce enough offspring from husbands of genius on their own and needed to be compelled in some way to have larger families and thereby increase intelligence in society. Conversely, imbeciles should be prevented from marrying and reproducing, thereby improving the race through guided breeding.

Two things can be taken away from this foundation story. First is that these "negative" eugenicists were elitist, they would use the power of the state to enforce who can have children and how many. Sanger and other "positive" eugenicists would use the power of the state to improve sanitation, medical care, the distribution of milk, education about hygiene and so on, but depend on the power of self-interest for people to voluntarily use contraception to limit the size of their families. Negative eugenicists were often progressives but in elite positions like doctors, prison wardens, social workers and were therefore used to making decisions for other people. In the US eugenics was less concerned with encouraging the strong and intelligent to have more children but much more concerned with stopping the "feeble-minded" from reproducing. And their methods were confined mostly to wards of the state, segregating by sex in mental asylums and prisons, prohibiting marriage between the indigent, and ultimately sterilization of social work cases that could be deemed "degenerate." After all, eugenics was concerned with improving the (white) race and arresting degeneration in white people, a prevalent idea that many in the lower classes were actually de-evolving after some golden age of enlightened superiority. Actually much of the supposed degeneration was caused by problems in the environment, not genetics, from poor working conditions to crowded living spaces.

I was as surprised as anyone after doing research that historic eugenics in the US and English-speaking world was not concerned with eradicating the inferior races. In every instance I found, eugenic sterilization and segregation measures were about purging degeneracy among white people, they didn't care about African-Americans or other races. Why would one expend energy studying or "improving" other races that you were supposedly competing with? In any case, eugenic ideas had a very difficult time gaining hold in "backward" areas of the US like the South because of entrenched religion. Eugenic sterilization did occur in the South but it was limited compared to a "frontier" area like California, which as a newer area of the US lacked the strong traditions that opposed new-fangled ideas like evolution or engineered breeding.

So when Ben Carson or anyone carrying water for Alex Jones tries to project Nazi holocaust images onto historical eugenics in the US, they are selling a big lie. The contradictions of pitching this idea that Planned Parenthood is carrying out an extermination of the African-American community to the Republican base that frequently complains about the very existence of African-Americans is mind-boggling. It must take an enormous amount of ideological discipline to believe that an under-funded organization can carry out such a feat through the voluntary actions of individual patients. But contradictions are at the heart of anyone claiming to be "pro-life" yet supports the death penalty, mass incarceration, police brutality, the proliferation of firearms, "stand your ground" and the republican enthusiasm for endless war. It is a good example of the compartmentalized thinking from right wing authoritarian followers that they can separate these contradictory ideas.

Belief in the zombie lie that Planned Parenthood targets blacks for extermination while ignoring actual history is strong evidence that ideology trumps facts in the minds of partisans. What exactly do Forkboys like Dr. Carson and Mr. Cain achieve through this particular lie?

For further reading

Horwitz, Howard. “Always with Us.” American Literary History 10 (1998): 317-334.

Klausen, Susanne. “’For the Sake of the Race:’ Eugenic Discourses of Feeblemindedness and               Motherhood in the South African Medical Record, 1903-1926.” Journal of Southern                   African Studies 23 (1997): 27-50.

Nye, Robert. “The Rise and Fall of the Eugenics Empire: Recent Perspectives on the Impact of Biomedical Thought in Modern Society.” The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 687-700.

Sandall, Roger “Sir Francis Galton and the Roots of Eugenics.” Society 45 (2008): 170-176.

Soloway, Richard. “Counting the Degenerates: The Statistics of Race Deterioration in Edwardian           England.” Journal of Contemporary History 17 (1982): 137-164.