Reckoning With the History of Eugenics

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. There's a Centennial in American history and New York history this week that you probably don't know about but is being observed in a week-long series of events. It's the 100th anniversary of something called the Second International Eugenics Congress, which took place at the Museum of Natural History. Now, if that sounds like something you didn't learn about in school, you probably didn't and if a Eugenics Congress sounds like nothing to be celebrated, right again, that's why the organizers are calling it a counter centennial.

The series of events is being sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Rutgers University, the MacArthur Foundation, and others, and it's remembering the history of the eugenics movement from a century ago, which tried to exclude people with traits perceived as undesirable from even being born, connected to exclusionary practices of today, including some that even now have to do with reproductive rights. Joining me to discuss some of this history and this week's series of events called Dismantling Eugenics, are two of the organizers, Jack Tchen, the Clement Price professor of public history and humanities at Rutgers.

He was also appointed last year by Mayor de Blasio to the New York Panel on Climate Change and is a co-founder of the Museum of Chinese in America here in New York, and Cara Page grassroots organizing director of the Anti-Eugenics project and founding director of the Cultural Memory project called Changing Frequencies. Jack, welcome back. Cara, welcome to WNYC. Thank you for joining us today.

Jack Tchen: Thank you, Brian.

Cara Page: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Jack, as a refresher, what is eugenics, and what was the 1921 International Eugenics Congress?

Jack Tchen: Well, eugenics comes out of American elite breeding practices. Just imagine breeding racehorses, and showcase dogs, champion dogs and it was really an effort to breed, "Well breed, well breed" to maximize the qualities that the elite patricians were seeking and to minimize or dysgenic practices of bad breeds. In other words, sorting out the good from the bad, getting rid of the bad, and maximizing the good and it was applied towards humans. Eugenics was the brave new world sense among these elites that they needed to do this to improve society and part of it was really this moral panic of the great numbers of Europeans coming into the United States, into New York City, and essentially invading their city.

These were people, of course, coming from all parts of Europe, Jews, Italians especially seeking a better life and they were trying to find jobs that were being advertised and manufacturing businesses and elsewhere and the elites who have established Fifth Avenue as their domain and just think of the Carnegie mansions and the Astor's and all the other, the Rockefellers who had kind of settled from around the country into Fifth Avenue and thinking that this was their city on a hill, it kind of goes back to in some ways, kind of Puritan practices and really believing that they were the select people.

Brian Lehrer: Well, how are they going to stop Jews and Italians, for example, and there are others but the two groups you mentioned, how are they going to stop Jews and Italians who are coming in through Ellis Island from having kids?

Jack Tchen: Well, there was that and they also instituted the 1924 Immigration Act, which basically dropped the numbers coming through in 1890. Drop the numbers to 2% of the "inferior Europeans" which were classified by Madison Grant as Alpines or central Eastern Europeans and those even more inferior "the Mediterraneans." They were all dropped to 2% of that number.

Brian Lehrer: Sure, but that's immigration law and when we talk about eugenics, I think we're talking about somehow limits on reproduction?

Jack Tchen: As well, yes. That a lot of the sterilization advocacy policies and population control policies begin to emerge out of these same very same logics as well as the carceral practices of segregating those who are "unfit or the dysgenics" from keeping the mainstream society as a place for the "fit."

Brian Lehrer: Cara, I wonder what else you see as the political or social backdrop of the eugenics movement of a century ago? Because Jack mentioned the immigration but other things happening at that time in this country included women getting the right to vote one year earlier, Jim Crow laws taking deeper root in the south right at the same time, the flu pandemic, and World War II had just ended. What else connects with people taking eugenics seriously in 1921?

Cara Page: Thank you. It's an honor to be here. What you're really wrestling with is looking at post-slavery, post-emancipation, understanding the regulatory laws and policies that were still implicitly racist, that were still trying to establish an us and them society. Using eugenic ideologies to really differentiate between those that were still perceived as having a predilection to criminalities or disabilities or disease which included right formerly enslaved African people, indigenous people, immigrants, people with disabilities, and incarcerated people, that eugenics was used to really create this perversive idea in society that some communities would always, based on their genetic materials, have a predilection to becoming criminals or dependence on society, and therefore should be genetically removed.

Brian Lehrer: Why Cara was this eugenics Congress held at the Museum of Natural History? That would suggest and I know Jack started to get at this but for people today, it would be, "What? Really? That horrific thing at the Museum of Natural History?" It would suggest it was of interest to mainstream scientists and not just to what today we might consider right-wing style, white or gender supremacists?

Cara Page: Right. Well, what better place than an institution that informs and shapes cultural beliefs and ideologies there you have the museum that is literally holding the bones of communities from all over the world and holding them as if they were objects to be exotified or objectified, which is deeply related to this idea of scientific racism, and a scientific ideology from a long time ago that was used that I am pro-science, but the misuse of science when it's used to create an idea that some bodies are more expendable or invaluable than others. Which included constructs of race, ability, sexuality, gender that to really show literal bone "deficiency and efficiency" to prove that these communities were somehow less than and use science, and museums and institutions like circuses, and sideshows to create that us and them social categorization.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners if you're just joining us, we're talking to two of the organizers of this week's what they're calling a Counter Centennial, to the 100th anniversary this week of the Second International Eugenics Congress, drawing attention to that history as well as to its remnants today, which we will get to. Jack Tchen, the Clement Price professor of public history and humanities at Rutgers-- and Jack, by the way, I'm so glad you got that position. I miss Clement Price, who was a guest on this show I'd say at least four times before he died, talking about very important New Jersey civil rights issues when he was alive.

Jack Tchen: A much-beloved man and he was speaking at a Jewish Film Festival when he had a heart attack. He was someone committed to of course black history and critiquing anti-blackness but also for the rich mix of people that we have, of course, in New Jersey, New York. It's an honor to be in this position, yes.

Brian Lehrer: Cara Page, grassroots organizing director of the Anti-Eugenics project and founding director of the cultural memory project called Changing Frequencies. Listeners, we have little time for phone calls in this but if anybody has a question or thought about eugenics, a century ago or today 646-435-7280 and we'll try to sneak a couple of you in. 646-435-7280. Cara, one of the web pages for this week's convening says eugenics was discredited in the post-Nazi Era Nuremberg trials but has emerged again in the social and political crises of today. Let's take each piece of that. What happened at Nuremberg?

Cara Page: I'm actually going to defer to Jack on this since he's more an expert on this, and then I'll talk a little bit more about contemporary practices.

Brian Lehrer: Great. Jack?

Jack Tchen: The Nuremberg trials gave testimony in which some of the Nazis who had been deep, deep within the power structure were saying that these ideas, many of the ideas and the practices they had built upon came from the United States. Madison's Grant's book, The Passing of the Great Race published in 1916 was said by Hitler to be his Bible. That in some ways is the one-line description. There was an enormous amount of interaction between Charles Davenport, who is the director of the Eugenics Record Office, and Harry Locklin, who was the architect behind a 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, and many, many other American academics but also curators. Henry Fairfield Osborn, who is a president of the American Museum of Natural History was deeply involved. Rockefeller was funding and Ford were funding Nazi science.

We're talking about a moment in which many Americans who were freaking out, as I said with this moral panic were looking for solutions of how to control the population, how to build an administration, an administrative state that would keep people under control, and how to create a system of experts top-down experts who would then play out those kinds of roles.

This was very much a part of American culture and Nuremberg in some ways was so embarrassing, because it pointed the arrow back to the United States that those eugenic operations that were still active in the United States and the funding that was given to them through the Carnegie Institution and other places, Herman of the Herman State Park and the railroad fortune, they basically started shutting down those operations and they were deeply embarrassed with the disclosure of the death camps. There's a intimate relationship between American Eugenesis and the German scientists in a range of ways. Americans were not necessarily advocating the death camps, but they were advocating clearly carceral systems, segregational systems, and ways of mass sterilization and immigration control.

Brian Lehrer: Cara, I don't think anyone mainstream today talks about eugenics in the way of a hundred years ago, or certainly not in the way of the Nazis. How do you see it reemerging?

Cara Page: Certainly, I don't think it ever went away. The Eugenic Records Office of the Cold Spring Harbor and the early 1900s and the universities and colleges that had eugenics in their studies that really became embedded inside of science and sociology but still, it was still a pervasive ideology. I don't often talk about eugenics without talking about population control ideology.

Particular to the US, what we've seen over the last century is the understanding that philosophers like Francis Galton who perpetuated theories on eugenics, and Robert Thomas Malthus, the Malthusianism theory that women of color and Indigenous women's fertility is the root cause of global degradation. Fast forward, what you see in the heightened fear of disease and global pandemics and heightened fear of climate injustice that you are seeing arise of continued blame on people of color and Indigenous communities all over the world, and this justification to use sterilization abuse as one idea of how to contain populations.

Again, the same idea that Jack mentioned on the preservation of whiteness and fear of who is fit or unfit to survive. We're really looking at-- My studies or my organizing work for the past 40 years or so has been focused on understanding the relationship to prisons, to psychiatric wards, to orphanages, to the injustices that have been projected onto disabled communities, Indigenous people of color, poor communities with this assumption that we are to be controlled and contained or imprisoned.

Brian Lehrer: Let me follow up on the population aspects of that because many progressives would certainly disagree with the interpretation of what you just said and said the overpopulation of the world is a contributor to the environmental crises that we have today and the advent of modern birth control methods, or at least education about birth control in countries that may be largely Black and brown, but where the rates of childbearing were not in the interests of the women in those countries. Would you say they were doing something other than working on behalf of trying to control Black and brown numbers?

Cara Page: What we're not talking about is the root cause of environmental degradation is from the environmental toxins of war from US imperialism and globalization. There is always the blame on overpopulation without really understanding these histories of war and how much that has deeply impacted our environments. We can't talk about a counter Centennial without centering indigenous immigration justice environmental justice analysis, which we've done in the Dismantling Eugenics convening to really understand what kinds of myths we're going to need to break to really disrupt eugenic ideas and population control ideas

Brian Lehrer: Marina in Greenpoint, you're on WNYC marina. Thank you for calling in.

Marina: Thank you so much for this program. My name's Marina Kaplina. I so appreciate this conversation and I just want to highlight just how embedded and to support what the speakers are saying. That just how embedded Neo-eugenics are. For example, bioethicists the common language in the field is to refer to biology, natural reproduction as inefficient. As if the natural cycle of how a woman gives birth, the body is inefficient. The way that that impacts how we view embryos, how in IVF procedures, imperfect embryos are discarded who does impact how disability is perceived and how disabled people are treated.

Of course, that intersects with Black Indigenous POC communities. Also, I just want to make the final point that this completely is fundamentally is interwoven with the environmental crisis. Our forest service believes that they could have replaced an old-growth tree with a new sapling, a new growth. We don't honor the way that the rot is actually part of life, the way illness, disease, and disability is a part of life, a critical portion of life. All of these logics are perpetuated by all of our systems of knowledge whether it's medicine, bioethics, education, or environmental policies. Just thank you so much for having this program

Brian Lehrer: Marina can I ask you, is the question of abortion rights relevant to what you were just talking about?

Marina: Abortion rights are absolutely relevant in terms of the capacity for a woman to have agency over her body but if there's an undercurrent philosophy in our entire culture, which there is, which is that disability must be discarded with and that there's a belief that we can create better and more perfect human beings that becomes a part of the discourse that we must have when we think about a woman's agency over her own body

Brian Lehrer: Marina, thank you very much. Jack Tchen, in the timeline that I saw on one of the web pages connected with your series of events you note the founding of planned parenthood around a hundred years ago in that timeline, and as marina raises one of the marginalized groups, that's part of the anti-eugenics community that you're centering this week is people born with disabilities who don't want to be seen as unfit to live. Is there a complex issue there

Jack Tchen: There's a complexity of issues that go back to certain simple kinds of ideas that were played out by the Eugenesis. First of all, Brian, it's really important to note that they thought of themselves as progressives, and they thought of themselves as coming up with socially efficient solutions for the good of their society. Their society was predefined as basely white Protestant, not all white Protestants but a certain kind of strain of who were considered the proper superior race of mankind and of the United States. Underlying the whole idea of maturity, efficiency, administrative expertise was really the premise that certain people, self-selected clearly who had gained a lot of wealth and power going back to the analogy of the gilded age, were the ones who could make the rightful decisions.

They had imagined universities in the days in which they were the elite gentlemen universities that would train the proper people to administer society, that they were the true deciders and therefore, the ability of women, for example, to make decisions about their own body or the decisions of families of color to make decisions about what they wanted to do. Those were really taken out of their hands. It was really the premise that somehow the white elite who knew better would be making those decisions for them. They were not capable of making their own decisions.

Brian Lehrer: Where does that fit, Cara? If you want to give one more thought on this, to what we hear and to what we hear from anti-abortion rights, who claimed that they are on the side of disability rights because they don't want it to be a valid reason for abortion under the law that a fetus is seen to have down syndrome or whatever deformities people sometimes abort for.

Cara Page: Wow, you're going to the core of it. I just want to offer that where I stand, where I'm firmly rooted is as a Black queer feminist inside of social justice movements in this country that are pro-choice, but are also abolitionist and understand that bodily autonomy comes with a relationship to a social justice frame that is not only looking at the value of people based on abilities, sexuality, gender, race, migrant status, but also is looking at what is the power we're trying to build as communities to fight against oppressive ideas of the devaluation of our existence.

To understand that we're not just talking about abortion for abortion sake, but the justice frame is to understand we're talking about having the autonomy to make decisions about our quality of life, how we are treated with dignity and respect, and that we are actually pushing up against the capitalist idea that we're only producing labor for the wealthy elite.

I just don't want to enter through a pro-abortion frame, I want to enter through an economic and racial justice frame that really is understanding what this convening is about, is really disrupting notions of economic devaluation of anyone who is perceived as having a disease or being less than human. That is the fight we are having. It is larger than beginning-- Well, we could start it at fetus because those of the assumption that those of us that have disability, gender sexuality that is non-binary, race that is outside of white, a wealthy elite is often perceived as already being born as a less than a human. We are challenging this construct.

Brian Lehrer: From jump to this moment when we are out of time in this segment, listeners, if you've just joined us along the way where we were talking about what is being called a counter Centennial to the 100th anniversary this week of what was called the Second International Eugenics Congress, which took place at the Museum of Natural History. This series of events called Dismantling Eugenics is sponsored by the Ford Foundation, Rutgers University, the MacArthur Foundation, and others.

Our guests have been Cara Page, who is a grassroots organizing director of the Anti-Eugenics project, and Jack Tchen, the Clement Price professor of public history and humanities at Rutgers. Jack, do you want to just tell people how they can participate in any of the events if they choose to now that we've just scratched the surface of some of the issues involved?

Jack Tchen: We've only scratched the surface. Now I just appreciate our being on. People should go to www.antieugenicsproject-- one-word, .org. They'll see the six days of programming that began this morning powerfully with Chief Mann who's the chief of Turtle Clan Ramapough Lenape Indians. It continues on into the evening and into Saturday. Please join us. I think you'll see the range of perspectives and efforts to document what happened but also to talk about our collective futures and how we have to really be also fighting algorithmic bias and so many other biases that are already in the works.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you both for joining us.

Cara Page: Thank you for having us.

Jack Tchen: Thank you, Brian.

 

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