I don’t usually say this, but thanks, New York Times, for this story on North Carolina, which is considering restitution to victims of state-ordered forced sterilization. Charles Kuralt’s father Wallace once headed up a state organization committed to sterilizing the “unfit” in the name of “human betterment”:
Thirty-one other states had eugenics programs. Virginia and California each sterilized more people than North Carolina. But no program was more aggressive.
Only North Carolina gave social workers the power to designate people for sterilization. They often relied on I.Q. tests like those done on Mr. Holt, whose scores reached 73. But for some victims who often spent more time picking cotton than in school, the I.Q. tests at the time were not necessarily accurate predictors of capability. For example, as an adult Mr. Holt held down three jobs at once, delivering newspapers, working at a grocery store and doing maintenance for a small city.
Wealthy businessmen, among them James Hanes, the hosiery magnate, and Dr. Clarence Gamble, heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune, drove the eugenics movement. They helped form the Human Betterment League of North Carolina in 1947, and found a sympathetic bureaucrat in Wallace Kuralt, the father of the television journalist Charles Kuralt.
Just a reminder of what human-rights violations the intellectual class can commit while putting on their white lab coats and asserting that moral opposition is “anti-science.”
This had nothing to do with men in white lab coats. This had everything to do with mis-guided mainstream conservative view points.
Saving tax payers money:
"The rich helped bankroll the program's expansion, and part of the motivation was financial. Awash with inherited money, Hanes and Gamble were concerned about how much welfare mothers and the mentally ill were costing taxpayers."
Punishing undesirable and immoral behavior:
"Contrary to common belief, many of the thousands marked for sterilization were ordinary citizens, many of them young women guilty of nothing worse than engaging in premarital sex."
Punishing women and minorities:
"The program had been racially balanced in the early years, but by the late 1960s more than 60 percent of those sterilized were black, and 99 percent were female."
This was not about science, it wasn't wrapped up in science, it was a front for bad science, it was just plain old moralizing.
"____ is a patient at ___ Hospital for the fourth time. She has been unable to assume the responsibility for her family since the children were placed in foster care in April 1960. The husband is in and out of prison.... When released from the hospital,___ has returned to her old pattern of prostitution. Since there are so few strengths in the family, sterilization will prevent additional children being born for whom there is no care."
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseHowever much you may think these historical atrocities fit your preconceived notions of conservatism, the fact is forced sterilization was a movement of, by, and for Progressives. The descendants of Gamble and Kuralt are Planned Parenthood; Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (who donate vast sums to reduce births of poor brown people in other countries); and Joe "I Understand China's One Child Policy" Biden.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseProgressives are always on the side of right and conservatives are always on the side of wrong, no matter what history you have to change to make it that way.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseAgreed.
We cannot allow mere facts to change our conviction that progressives are always good and conservatives are always bad.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWe don't need to make sweeping unfounded generalizations.
Just look at the actual quotes.
Christianity teaches that life is sacred. Progressives teach that we can have Utopia right here in this world, in this lifetime, by simply allowing the elites to engineer and tamper with the rest of us - and the left wing has a long and glorious history of excusing human rights violations: the ends justify the means, gotta break a few eggs, right?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbusePresident Obama justified Obamacare in part because it will "save taxpayers money,"and he wanted to "punish the immoral behavior" of the greedy insurance companies who drive up costs and kick people off their policies. He didn't want to punish women and minorities, but he certainly did want to punish people with "gold-plated health policies" that cost more than he thought they should cost.
It's certainly true that eugenics was flawed from a scientific perspective, and morally repugnant. But since Democrats are making similar arguments for socialized heath care as they once did for forced sterilization, what does that tell you?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseYou seem to be under the impression that having money makes one a conservative. Tell that to all the fat cats backing Obama.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGeorge Soros is a billionaire, and he is a titular leader of the socialist movement.
You should steal a thimble from a Monopoly game set.
Apparently, your cranium is WAY too big for its gray matter.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseMy first custody client as a court-appointed lawyer was a man with an IQ in the 50s. I still maintain he was light-years ahead of most people with resources to hire a lawyer in terms of understanding the importance of both parents cooperating with one another for the interests of the children.
His daughter hated the mother, and he had ample opportunity to scold her on the unacceptability of talking back and disrespecting the woman, whom he also hated. If attorneys handling divorces and custody could all be so lucky to have a client who perfectly understands how to maturely deal with someone one does not like, for the interests of kids, society and its children would be much better off.
I have yet to meet an adult male who is more capable than he is to appropriately raise his daughter. That includes my own father.
The thought of a social worker -- often a mere high school graduate with a pompous and sanctimonious attitude ( and no children of their own) -- having the authority to choose among society's members who is fit to bear children makes me shutter.
If we were going to have forced sterilization programs, I'd propose that the first on the list should be social workers, whose ignorance on raising children causes more harm to them than certain parents' inabilities.
This story highlights nicely what results from socialists granting themselves ever more power over people's lives -- misery, mayhem, and death.
That -- above all else -- is the socialist legacy. Death of human beings, all of whom socialists despise.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse> That -- above all else -- is the socialist legacy. Death
> of human beings, all of whom socialists despise.
This is not historically in context with the program. This progran had nothing to do with pro-science socialist agenda.
It had to with religious and social moralizing. It was punishment to be meted out to the sexually active minorities and low-class whites. End of story.
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse"It was punishment to be meted out to the sexually active minorities and low-class whites. End of story."
Yeah, that's what I call socialism -- moralizing on the evils of reproducing minorities and "low class whites".
That is socialism. End of story.
PS -- learn some history. You'll come off a lot less ignorant.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWhy don't you spend a little time actually reading the literature of the eugenicists. You might find that what you wish to be true, isn't.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseIs the Human Betterment League covered in Liberal Fascism? Maybe the 2nd or 3rd revised edition? Maybe I should check the concordance? Is there a concordance? Or is that sort of like a slide rule in the age of Kindle and Google.
When there's a Ph. D. thesis referencing a concordance we'll know the culture war has passed the end of the beginning.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseSadly, it drove Charles into adultery on the road.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe evidence is overwhelming that the strongest, leading champions of compulsory sterilization were self-described progressives who invoked the authority of science, while the leading opponents were a bunch of fuddy-duddy moralizing religious people. See, e.g., Holmes's exchange with Laski on the decision--e.g., "the religious are astir," and let's "sterilize all the unfit," especially "fundamentalists." See also, the Michigan Supreme Court decision in Smith v. Command, 204 N.W. 140 (Mich. 1925) , the majority's celebration of the law as a “forward step in the progress of the race" and especially the indignent dissent of Judge Weist, who denounced the practice "as old time cruelties...sugar-coated with a scientific name and heralded as a new thing under the sun. The subject of eugenics is as old as history, and there runs a suspicion that one prime purpose was to save bother and expense.”
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseThe story of course peddles the comforting leftist lie that eugenics were anything other than a progressive movement immensely popular on the left. Wealthy businessmen - their generations' equivalents of Soros, Gates, and Buffet - did indeed back the prgrams (though not their generations Kochs!) But that hardly means businessmen "drove" the movement as the deseprate reporter put it. Eugenics were driven by government.
And not surprisngly, most of the states where eugenics programs thrived were Democrat ones, like North Carolina and Virginia. Anyone ever hear of Maine's eugenics program? Indiana's?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseWanna bet $10,000 Hanes and Gamble were Republicans?
(As if that mattered.)
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseLooks pretty straight-up Progressive to me.
External Link
You could have checked yourself, you know.
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseDo you have any idea how Republican the student body of Princeton was in those days?
Reply to this commentLinkReport AbuseGood grief -- did your church have a fire sale on strawmen today?
Reply to this commentLinkReport Abuse