D
dosdog
Guest
(This article first appeared in the January 20, 1992 edition of Citizen magazine)
At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the “black” and “yellow” peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
Sanger’s other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as “scientific” and “humanitarian.” And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America’s human “breeding stock” and purging America’s “bad strains.” These “strains” included the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South.”
While Planned Parenthood’s current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928), and many others
blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
Eugenics traces its roots to Britain in the early 1880s, when Sir Francis Galton coined the term to mean “well-born”.his book Studies of Hereditary Genius (1869)
Advocacy in favor of sterilization was one of Harry Laughlin’s first major projects at the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914
Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist, warned that racial mixing was "a social and racial crime. In his immensely popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916)
Buck v. Bell supplied a precedent for the eventual sterilization of approximately 8,300 Virginians. Borrowing from Laughlin’s Model Law, the German Nazi government adopted a law in 1933 that provided Laughlin proudly published a translation of the German Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny in The Eugenical News
Social Darwinism had attempted to explain away social and economic inequalities as the “survival of the fittest.” However, by the turn of the century, this simplistic idea had been turned on its head. A declining birthrate among the wealthy and powerful indicated that the captains of industry were, in fact, losing the struggle for existence. The working class not only was organizing against them, but they were also outreproducing them
Many prominent Americans saw eugenics as a progressive solution to social problems – including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank (the California seed producer), Henry Fairfield Osborn (president of the American Museum of Natural History), and David Starr Jordan (first president of Stanford University). *Sophisticated geneticists – including Thomas Hunt Morgan, Hermann Muller, and William Ernest Castle – supported eugenics In 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds for the constructon of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. The director, appropriately named Eugen Fischer, collaborated with Charles Davenport in the management of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.
eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay6text.html
At a March 1925 international birth control gathering in New York City, a speaker warned of the menace posed by the “black” and “yellow” peril. The man was not a Nazi or Klansman; he was Dr. S. Adolphus Knopf, a member of Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League (ABCL), which along with other groups eventually became known as Planned Parenthood.
Sanger’s other colleagues included avowed and sophisticated racists. One, Lothrop Stoddard, was a Harvard graduate and the author of The Rising Tide of Color against White Supremacy. Stoddard was something of a Nazi enthusiast who described the eugenic practices of the Third Reich as “scientific” and “humanitarian.” And Dr. Harry Laughlin, another Sanger associate and board member for her group, spoke of purifying America’s human “breeding stock” and purging America’s “bad strains.” These “strains” included the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South.”
While Planned Parenthood’s current apologists try to place some distance between the eugenics and birth control movements, history definitively says otherwise. The eugenic theme figured prominently in the Birth Control Review, which Sanger founded in 1917. She published such articles as “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics” (June 1920), “The Eugenic Conscience” (February 1921), “The purpose of Eugenics” (December 1924), “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics” (July 1925), “Birth Control: The True Eugenics” (August 1928), and many others
blackgenocide.org/sanger.html
Eugenics traces its roots to Britain in the early 1880s, when Sir Francis Galton coined the term to mean “well-born”.his book Studies of Hereditary Genius (1869)
Advocacy in favor of sterilization was one of Harry Laughlin’s first major projects at the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914
Madison Grant, a leading eugenicist, warned that racial mixing was "a social and racial crime. In his immensely popular book The Passing of the Great Race (1916)
Buck v. Bell supplied a precedent for the eventual sterilization of approximately 8,300 Virginians. Borrowing from Laughlin’s Model Law, the German Nazi government adopted a law in 1933 that provided Laughlin proudly published a translation of the German Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny in The Eugenical News
Social Darwinism had attempted to explain away social and economic inequalities as the “survival of the fittest.” However, by the turn of the century, this simplistic idea had been turned on its head. A declining birthrate among the wealthy and powerful indicated that the captains of industry were, in fact, losing the struggle for existence. The working class not only was organizing against them, but they were also outreproducing them
Many prominent Americans saw eugenics as a progressive solution to social problems – including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank (the California seed producer), Henry Fairfield Osborn (president of the American Museum of Natural History), and David Starr Jordan (first president of Stanford University). *Sophisticated geneticists – including Thomas Hunt Morgan, Hermann Muller, and William Ernest Castle – supported eugenics In 1927, the Rockefeller Foundation provided funds for the constructon of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Genetics, and Eugenics in Berlin. The director, appropriately named Eugen Fischer, collaborated with Charles Davenport in the management of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations.
eugenicsarchive.org/html/eugenics/essay6text.html