Eugenics Behind A Veil Of Conservation Essay
Shane Nelson
LIT 349
Prof. Brown
Final paper
Eugenics behind a Veil of Conservation
What may start off having even the best of intentions could end up having some serious negative consequences. Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt seemed to have started his belief in eugenics within a sense of nationalism where it was a woman’s duty to the state to birth and raise a family. He emphasized this view through his conservation programs where white, farming women were the epitome of the ideal type of person that should be procreating. Unlike the weak, feebleminded, retarded, deaf, blind, etc. who should not pass along their unwanted genetics. There are a few other authors in our text book, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, that also followed this program of eugenics masked by a conservationist agenda.
Gifford Pinchot was appointed to the National Forest Commission and developed a plan managing our nation’s Western forest reserves. He also established the Society of American Foresters, but went on to become a member of the American Eugenics Society. Another is Garrett Hardin who was an ecologist and avid writer being published many times within scientific journals. He was not only a member of the eugenics …show more content…
society, he was also their director. In doing my research for this paper, I find it peculiar that these relationships with the American Eugenics Society are not mentioned in any of the Wikipedia listings!?
What exactly is eugenics? Before doing this paper my first thought was scientific racism, or taking it a step further, a potential form of genocide. However, in learning more about the subject, it does not necessarily mean that death has to be involved. In fact, it can be positive in reproduction.
There are recorded selective breeding practices of crops and livestock going back a few thousand years and for some the next logical step may be to breed better humans. Even though there are references to this practice as back as 520 B.C. by Theoguis of Megara, Sir Francis Galton is considered to be the “Father of eugenics”. A 19th century British statistician and meteorologist among other things was influenced by his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton discovered that fingerprints were unique in each individual and he believed intelligence was also inherited. He wrote about the subject and studied inherited intelligence, then coined a word using the Greek language for good or well “eu” and born “genes”, eugenics.
Eugenics seeks to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding based on the assumption that differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament are largely due to the differences in heredity.
Galton said “the first objects of eugenics is to check the birth rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being…the second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and the healthful rearing of children.” He is also quoted as saying “…average Negroes posses too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and
support.”
There are two main views in the implementation of eugenics. One is “positive” eugenics which promotes marriage and breeding between people considered “desirable”. A positive eugenicist may view certain persons undesirable, but they do not advocate such practices as non-voluntary sterilization, genocide, active euthanasia, or any other forms of extermination.
“Negative “ eugenics, on the other-hand, supported lower fertility of those “genetically disadvantaged” through abortions, sterilization, and genocide. It seems Theodore Roosevelt was supporter of both positive and negative eugenics. Within one of his works titled “Twisted Eugenics”, he writes “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them… The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed…”
Desirable people for Roosevelt were those that represented the frontiersman & women who conquered the West and those with agrarian roots. He feared the loss of this special white-American quality of strength & ingenuity and expressed this through the fear of “race suicide”. Edward Ross may have coined the phrase, but Teddy Roosevelt was instrumental in bringing this issue to the national spotlight before the American people. He looked at it as an issue of economics, immigration, and urbanization. In turn, he urged congress to pass immigration restriction legislation, which they did in 1907, and preached at the pulpit of the values & greatness of the American farmer.
There were declining birth rates for “desirables” in the 1890 census and Roosevelt equated a high birth-rate of so called “desirables” with racial progress and strength. In his 6th annual address he warned “willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death.” Roosevelt belittled women who chose to have small families or no children at all. In his eyes it was the primary duty, for citizens of the right type, to produce children for the state to continue the long line of “American stock”, the best stock in Roosevelt’s eyes.
Along with the declining birth rates amongst upper-class white women there also was an urbanization movement moving farming families to the cities for employment. Coinciding was an influx of people moving in from Southern and Eastern Europe. I believe Roosevelt had good intentions and was passionate in his desire to retain the American family farms. Many authors we read about had this view of retaining nature. Roosevelt, however, was different where he had the power of the state and media. Around the same time he was speaking from the bully pulpit telling women it was their patriotic duty to reproduce for the state, there were newspaper headlines reading “No Race Suicide in the Indiana Family” or “President Roosevelt’s Ideal Family”. These captions were accompanied with pictures of large families. The family obviously became a tool of the nation-state.
Because rural families tended to be larger than urban families, preserving the family farm by bettering conditions for the entire farm family became an act of racial preservation. The implementation of Roosevelt’s conservation & country life movements were not accidental. Farming families were a resource to be managed and cultivated (pun intended). Celebrating the rural family ideal became a way of promoting reproduction of the desirable type, positive eugenics.
There seems to be, however, a darker side to Roosevelt in his writings and speeches. It seems to come through even more so after a failed re-election. He had written to Charles Davenport, author of “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics”, in January of 1913: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind… Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum… Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem with civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population… The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity…”
On the topic of eugenics Roosevelt indirectly even agrees with Hitler where they both praise the work of Madison Grant. In response to Grant’s book “The Passing of the Great Race”, a young, aspiring politician, Adolph Hitler, had written Grant stating “The book is my Bible.” This discrimination is articulated in Grant’s best-selling book: “A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit, in other words social failures, would allow us to solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
Roosevelt writes of his friend, Madison Grant’s book “The book is a capital book: in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts that our people must need to realize… It is the work of an American scholar and gentleman, and all Americans should be grateful to you for writing it.” I don’t know about you, but I find the excerpt appalling! Who decides who is fit and who is unfit? I would think there would be varying answers if the question were to ever be purposed!?
Continuing with the theme “Eugenics behind a Veil of Conservation” is Gifford Pinchot. Gifford was a friend and co-worker of President T. Roosevelt’s. Like Roosevelt, Pinchot was a part of the country life reformers directing efforts at the country church, school, and home. Pinchot especially felt the church was a key institution, but also promoted nature study, cooperation, and technical agricultural training through the schools to keep children on the farm and the farmers flourishing. Even though Pinchot seems to have a change of heart later on in life perhaps due to the news of the eugenics atrocities occurring in Germany under the direction of Hitler, he was still a member of the American Eugenics Society and even the Vice President of the first International Congress of Eugenics in 1912.
It is hard for me to place all the blame for this callousness toward another race or the weak at the full fault of these individuals with when they are educated under the scientific truths of their times. These beliefs stemmed from the Ivy League and other nationally renowned universities, how could one argue against that? The scientific evidence was even on display for everyone to see at the Paris International Exposition, which Pinchot was able to attend along with some of the World’s Fairs to follow. It is truly sad to read about the further destruction of the true Native American culture and exploitation of others. One particular year the fair’s anthropology department promised to “represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism.” (Conservation and Eugenics, Orion Magazine) They did a great educational service to humanity taking people from their natural setting and putting them on display in a pigmented progression of black to white within cages.
It more than likely goes much further back in time, but a good foundation for this intellectual thought is Charles Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species: by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. The last half of the title of the book was dropped after the first printing, but his impression of social Darwinism is still with us today. The concept of “survival of the fittest” is engrained and speeds up exponentially through outlets of technology creating more and more of the “dog eat dog” crazy, “rat-race” world we live in today. Now I didn’t use those phrases just to get some more nature quotes within this final paper, because what is more natural than the right to life itself?
This is a problem I see behind those people or groups of people that now put earth ahead of man with a depopulation agenda. The pendulum has swung too far for some. It seems to me there are too many examples once you start to pull the layers back and for some, the outer layer is still conservation. I believe more and more water will be an issue and conservation of it will be at the forefront, so beware. Beware of those that try and tell us that water is becoming scarce. It may be for some in certain areas no doubt. Earth is not static, so humans may have to move to find a source of water or figure out a way to get it to them. We, however, are not losing any water. Water stays here within our atmosphere. In other words, we are recycling dinosaur pee when we take a drink of water. We do, however, have a problem of clean water, so let’s focus on ways to clean water and get those resources out to everyone. What unfortunately has been happening under the radar is that the IMF and other global corporations have been busy buying up water rights in many cities, states, and countries. Therefore, they control it and here lies the problem, control of a basic necessity for life.
Water fluoridation is also eugenics behind a veil of conservation. It is sold to the general public as an efficient means to protect kids from getting cavities. Yet, when you look into it further one finds out that it is an industrial waste by-product that is a poison to the human body. It even says so on the side of a tube of tooth-paste, please look if you don’t believe me. Actually I’d say to check even if you do. How efficient are we in possibly alleviating cavities to some degree, to a small segment of the population, when 100% of it is being poisoned in doing so? Similar to eugenics, water fluoridation of our urban water supplies also hides behind questionable science. It was also disguised as a health benefit by a great propagandist in Edward Bernays.
I will even go as far to question the possibility that CFL light-bulbs are another example of conservation hiding behind a veil of conservation. I don’s know a lot about this, but I do know my bodily reaction is not a good one when I am around this type of light source. In looking into it some, it turns out that these CFL bulbs emit a high amount of what is called “dirty” electricity. These CFL bulbs are sold to us as being eco-friendly yet they contain mercury and emit this “dirty” energy. Why is it that our Federal Government is phasing out the incandescent light-bulb in favor of the CFL? We are told it is conservation of electricity, but at what cost?
I hope to see the day in the not too distant future where I believe science and religion will merge. With quantum physics now coming to the forefront and new fields such as epigenetics, I think we will come to a new understanding of life. We will let go of the belief of genetically hard-wiring and hopefully this grip of trying to oppress others because of the “body suit” we wear in this existence. With this I quote C. S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
Let’s do our due diligence and check behind conservation movements and make sure they and others are within humanities best interest. I fear the conservation effort of emitting CO2 is another deception. It is sold to us through the fear of global warming, but I believe it to be another method of control and an avenue to bring in global governance. Eugenics may not be hidden behind this conservation movement, but then again, it could be!?
Sources: www.infowars.com Lovett, Laura (2007) Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, & the Family in the United States, 1890-1938
Tone, Andrea (1997) Controlling Reproduction, An American History
Wohlforth, C. (2010) Conservation and Eugenics. July/August Orion Magazine
LIT 349
Prof. Brown
Final paper
Eugenics behind a Veil of Conservation
What may start off having even the best of intentions could end up having some serious negative consequences. Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt seemed to have started his belief in eugenics within a sense of nationalism where it was a woman’s duty to the state to birth and raise a family. He emphasized this view through his conservation programs where white, farming women were the epitome of the ideal type of person that should be procreating. Unlike the weak, feebleminded, retarded, deaf, blind, etc. who should not pass along their unwanted genetics. There are a few other authors in our text book, American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau, that also followed this program of eugenics masked by a conservationist agenda.
Gifford Pinchot was appointed to the National Forest Commission and developed a plan managing our nation’s Western forest reserves. He also established the Society of American Foresters, but went on to become a member of the American Eugenics Society. Another is Garrett Hardin who was an ecologist and avid writer being published many times within scientific journals. He was not only a member of the eugenics …show more content…
society, he was also their director. In doing my research for this paper, I find it peculiar that these relationships with the American Eugenics Society are not mentioned in any of the Wikipedia listings!?
What exactly is eugenics? Before doing this paper my first thought was scientific racism, or taking it a step further, a potential form of genocide. However, in learning more about the subject, it does not necessarily mean that death has to be involved. In fact, it can be positive in reproduction.
There are recorded selective breeding practices of crops and livestock going back a few thousand years and for some the next logical step may be to breed better humans. Even though there are references to this practice as back as 520 B.C. by Theoguis of Megara, Sir Francis Galton is considered to be the “Father of eugenics”. A 19th century British statistician and meteorologist among other things was influenced by his cousin, Charles Darwin. Galton discovered that fingerprints were unique in each individual and he believed intelligence was also inherited. He wrote about the subject and studied inherited intelligence, then coined a word using the Greek language for good or well “eu” and born “genes”, eugenics.
Eugenics seeks to improve human heredity by the social control of human breeding based on the assumption that differences in human intelligence, character, and temperament are largely due to the differences in heredity.
Galton said “the first objects of eugenics is to check the birth rate of the unfit instead of allowing them to come into being…the second object is the improvement of the race by furthering the productivity of the fit by early marriages and the healthful rearing of children.” He is also quoted as saying “…average Negroes posses too little intellect, self-reliance, and self-control to make it possible for them to sustain the burden of any respectable form of civilization without a large measure of external guidance and
support.”
There are two main views in the implementation of eugenics. One is “positive” eugenics which promotes marriage and breeding between people considered “desirable”. A positive eugenicist may view certain persons undesirable, but they do not advocate such practices as non-voluntary sterilization, genocide, active euthanasia, or any other forms of extermination.
“Negative “ eugenics, on the other-hand, supported lower fertility of those “genetically disadvantaged” through abortions, sterilization, and genocide. It seems Theodore Roosevelt was supporter of both positive and negative eugenics. Within one of his works titled “Twisted Eugenics”, he writes “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding; and when the evil nature of these people is sufficiently flagrant, this should be done. Criminals should be sterilized and feebleminded persons forbidden to leave offspring behind them… The emphasis should be laid on getting desirable people to breed…”
Desirable people for Roosevelt were those that represented the frontiersman & women who conquered the West and those with agrarian roots. He feared the loss of this special white-American quality of strength & ingenuity and expressed this through the fear of “race suicide”. Edward Ross may have coined the phrase, but Teddy Roosevelt was instrumental in bringing this issue to the national spotlight before the American people. He looked at it as an issue of economics, immigration, and urbanization. In turn, he urged congress to pass immigration restriction legislation, which they did in 1907, and preached at the pulpit of the values & greatness of the American farmer.
There were declining birth rates for “desirables” in the 1890 census and Roosevelt equated a high birth-rate of so called “desirables” with racial progress and strength. In his 6th annual address he warned “willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the nation, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death.” Roosevelt belittled women who chose to have small families or no children at all. In his eyes it was the primary duty, for citizens of the right type, to produce children for the state to continue the long line of “American stock”, the best stock in Roosevelt’s eyes.
Along with the declining birth rates amongst upper-class white women there also was an urbanization movement moving farming families to the cities for employment. Coinciding was an influx of people moving in from Southern and Eastern Europe. I believe Roosevelt had good intentions and was passionate in his desire to retain the American family farms. Many authors we read about had this view of retaining nature. Roosevelt, however, was different where he had the power of the state and media. Around the same time he was speaking from the bully pulpit telling women it was their patriotic duty to reproduce for the state, there were newspaper headlines reading “No Race Suicide in the Indiana Family” or “President Roosevelt’s Ideal Family”. These captions were accompanied with pictures of large families. The family obviously became a tool of the nation-state.
Because rural families tended to be larger than urban families, preserving the family farm by bettering conditions for the entire farm family became an act of racial preservation. The implementation of Roosevelt’s conservation & country life movements were not accidental. Farming families were a resource to be managed and cultivated (pun intended). Celebrating the rural family ideal became a way of promoting reproduction of the desirable type, positive eugenics.
There seems to be, however, a darker side to Roosevelt in his writings and speeches. It seems to come through even more so after a failed re-election. He had written to Charles Davenport, author of “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics”, in January of 1913: “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind… Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum… Some day we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty of the good citizens of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type. The great problem with civilization is to secure a relative increase of the valuable as compared with the less valuable or noxious elements in the population… The problem cannot be met unless we give full consideration to the immense influence of heredity…”
On the topic of eugenics Roosevelt indirectly even agrees with Hitler where they both praise the work of Madison Grant. In response to Grant’s book “The Passing of the Great Race”, a young, aspiring politician, Adolph Hitler, had written Grant stating “The book is my Bible.” This discrimination is articulated in Grant’s best-selling book: “A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit, in other words social failures, would allow us to solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
Roosevelt writes of his friend, Madison Grant’s book “The book is a capital book: in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts that our people must need to realize… It is the work of an American scholar and gentleman, and all Americans should be grateful to you for writing it.” I don’t know about you, but I find the excerpt appalling! Who decides who is fit and who is unfit? I would think there would be varying answers if the question were to ever be purposed!?
Continuing with the theme “Eugenics behind a Veil of Conservation” is Gifford Pinchot. Gifford was a friend and co-worker of President T. Roosevelt’s. Like Roosevelt, Pinchot was a part of the country life reformers directing efforts at the country church, school, and home. Pinchot especially felt the church was a key institution, but also promoted nature study, cooperation, and technical agricultural training through the schools to keep children on the farm and the farmers flourishing. Even though Pinchot seems to have a change of heart later on in life perhaps due to the news of the eugenics atrocities occurring in Germany under the direction of Hitler, he was still a member of the American Eugenics Society and even the Vice President of the first International Congress of Eugenics in 1912.
It is hard for me to place all the blame for this callousness toward another race or the weak at the full fault of these individuals with when they are educated under the scientific truths of their times. These beliefs stemmed from the Ivy League and other nationally renowned universities, how could one argue against that? The scientific evidence was even on display for everyone to see at the Paris International Exposition, which Pinchot was able to attend along with some of the World’s Fairs to follow. It is truly sad to read about the further destruction of the true Native American culture and exploitation of others. One particular year the fair’s anthropology department promised to “represent human progress from the dark prime to the highest enlightenment, from savagery to civic organization, from egoism to altruism.” (Conservation and Eugenics, Orion Magazine) They did a great educational service to humanity taking people from their natural setting and putting them on display in a pigmented progression of black to white within cages.
It more than likely goes much further back in time, but a good foundation for this intellectual thought is Charles Darwin’s book “The Origin of Species: by means of Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life”. The last half of the title of the book was dropped after the first printing, but his impression of social Darwinism is still with us today. The concept of “survival of the fittest” is engrained and speeds up exponentially through outlets of technology creating more and more of the “dog eat dog” crazy, “rat-race” world we live in today. Now I didn’t use those phrases just to get some more nature quotes within this final paper, because what is more natural than the right to life itself?
This is a problem I see behind those people or groups of people that now put earth ahead of man with a depopulation agenda. The pendulum has swung too far for some. It seems to me there are too many examples once you start to pull the layers back and for some, the outer layer is still conservation. I believe more and more water will be an issue and conservation of it will be at the forefront, so beware. Beware of those that try and tell us that water is becoming scarce. It may be for some in certain areas no doubt. Earth is not static, so humans may have to move to find a source of water or figure out a way to get it to them. We, however, are not losing any water. Water stays here within our atmosphere. In other words, we are recycling dinosaur pee when we take a drink of water. We do, however, have a problem of clean water, so let’s focus on ways to clean water and get those resources out to everyone. What unfortunately has been happening under the radar is that the IMF and other global corporations have been busy buying up water rights in many cities, states, and countries. Therefore, they control it and here lies the problem, control of a basic necessity for life.
Water fluoridation is also eugenics behind a veil of conservation. It is sold to the general public as an efficient means to protect kids from getting cavities. Yet, when you look into it further one finds out that it is an industrial waste by-product that is a poison to the human body. It even says so on the side of a tube of tooth-paste, please look if you don’t believe me. Actually I’d say to check even if you do. How efficient are we in possibly alleviating cavities to some degree, to a small segment of the population, when 100% of it is being poisoned in doing so? Similar to eugenics, water fluoridation of our urban water supplies also hides behind questionable science. It was also disguised as a health benefit by a great propagandist in Edward Bernays.
I will even go as far to question the possibility that CFL light-bulbs are another example of conservation hiding behind a veil of conservation. I don’s know a lot about this, but I do know my bodily reaction is not a good one when I am around this type of light source. In looking into it some, it turns out that these CFL bulbs emit a high amount of what is called “dirty” electricity. These CFL bulbs are sold to us as being eco-friendly yet they contain mercury and emit this “dirty” energy. Why is it that our Federal Government is phasing out the incandescent light-bulb in favor of the CFL? We are told it is conservation of electricity, but at what cost?
I hope to see the day in the not too distant future where I believe science and religion will merge. With quantum physics now coming to the forefront and new fields such as epigenetics, I think we will come to a new understanding of life. We will let go of the belief of genetically hard-wiring and hopefully this grip of trying to oppress others because of the “body suit” we wear in this existence. With this I quote C. S. Lewis: “You don’t have a soul. You are a soul. You have a body.”
Let’s do our due diligence and check behind conservation movements and make sure they and others are within humanities best interest. I fear the conservation effort of emitting CO2 is another deception. It is sold to us through the fear of global warming, but I believe it to be another method of control and an avenue to bring in global governance. Eugenics may not be hidden behind this conservation movement, but then again, it could be!?
Sources: www.infowars.com Lovett, Laura (2007) Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, & the Family in the United States, 1890-1938
Tone, Andrea (1997) Controlling Reproduction, An American History
Wohlforth, C. (2010) Conservation and Eugenics. July/August Orion Magazine