What did John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Margaret Sanger, Helen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell
Last edited Mon Oct 17, 2022, 07:50 PM - Edit history (1)
all have in common?
From Ken Burn's "The U.S. and the Holocaust"
"They all subscribed to Eugenics. Colleges and universities taught it, Medical Societies Confirmed it, and Clergies preached it.
........
33 of the 48 states would eventually enact eugenics laws mandating forced sterilization of the wards of the state deemed physically or mentally unfit, and this included people in prisons, hospitals, and asylims. 60000 Americans were sterilized without their consent, until the last Eugenic law was removed from the books in 2014"
It provided a racist rationale, and anti-immigration policy
"Madison Grant a respected conservationalist and friend of presidents was the Founder of the Bronx Zoo, responsible in part for saving the California Redwoodsand preserving the buffalo, and instrumental in creating glacier, Denali, and Everglades National park, and was also a violent anti-Semite, anti-Italian, and pushed his bigotry in his book "The Great Race", where his suppossed "
The Great Race book
His supposed "scientific claims" of a rigid racial hierarchy was ludicrus, but used by people to justify racism and anti-immigration.
After WWI, Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Ford jumped on board the eugenics boat.
Henrgy Ford blamed the Jews for everything from the assassination of Lincoln to the change in the flavor of his favorite candy bar.
He started his own newspaper, "The Dearborn Independent Newspaper", to spread his anti-semitic propaganda, producing 91 articles promoting the Elders of Zion, a Rissian anti-semitic hoax caliming a conspiracy of the Jews to "take over the world"
His newspaper had the second highest circulation in the country
The period we are going through now sure seems like a resurgence of this ideology, resurrected through the republican party. The documentary alto pointed out that were people in that time actually calling for a dictatorship in the U.S.
The country is in serious trouble
= new reply since forum marked as read
Eugenics wasn't taught as a way for hating other races or religions. Eugenics is totally out of favor now, as it should be, but it was regarded as part of biological science, like heredity studies. In the 21st century we have modern treatments for things like mental health, birth deformities, inherited genetic defects etc. They didn't have those treatments in the 19th century, and they dealt with it as best they could. We're better than that now!
