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Eugenics
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Eugenics is a nice-sounding word, combining as it does the Greek words for "good" and "birth." And Francis Galton, who made up the word and the idea, proposed Eugenics "for the betterment of mankind." But that's as far as the nice-sounding stuff goes. The actual definition is rather horrible: the controlled and selective breeding of the human race. Galton based his ideas on the theories of his cousin: Charles Darwin. By the beginning of the 20th century, when Darwin's theory was safely embraced by the scientific establishment, Eugenics was getting good press.
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Eugenics, like "pragmatism," was a new name coined in the late nineteenth century for some old ways of thinking. But while philosophers worked hard to explain what "pragmatism" meant, believers in "eugenics" were satisfied merely to use the new word to advance their varied concerns. Both parents and intellectuals had nearly always expressed hopes and anxieties about reproduction and about the health and quality of the next generation. Marriage guides, medical writings, and social reform literature in nineteenth-century America emphasized the polar terms "amelioration" and "degeneration." They anticipated that healthy, caring parents of European Protestant descent were likely to produce better children than those who were diseased, licentious, or from a less "developed" ethnoreligious group.
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Eugenics has, from the very beginning, meant many different things to many different people. Historically, the term has referred to everything from prenatal care for mothers to forced sterilization and euthanasia. Much debate has taken place in the past, as it does today--as to what exactly counts as eugenics.[6] Some types of eugenics deal only with perceived beneficial and/or detrimental genetic traits. These are sometimes called “pseudo-eugenics’ by proponents of strict eugenics.
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Eugenics has had a religious dimension. Galton suggested that it should function as a religion, and this proposal was echoed by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russel and others. In the United States shortly after the turn of the century, the American Journal of Eugenics advertised itself by noting that it was "formerly known as Lucifer the Light Bearer."
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Eugenics was not very popular until after the rediscovery of the scientific work of Gregor Mendel in 1900. Mendel's work, which led to modern genetics, gave new tools for understanding how heredity worked. Mendel himself experimented on peas, and found that many characterstics of the pea plants, such as their color or their height, could be turned on and off through heredity like a switch. For example, his peas could be either yellow or green, one or the other. When applied to humans, people thought this meant that human characteristics, like being smart or not, could ... be easily turned on or off through heredity.
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Eugenics exhibits typically used "flashing lights" to make the movement's central points. "Some People Are Born To Be A Burden On The Rest" the exhibit proclaimed. Every fifteen seconds a light flashed to mark the $100 in tax money spent on the insane, the feeble-minded, criminals, and "other defectives" with "bad heredity." Another light flashed every sixteen seconds. That was how often a baby was born in the U.S. Few of these were perfect.... Every forty-eight seconds a light flashed, the frequency of babies born who would grow up with the mental age of eight or lower. Every fifty seconds another light flashed.
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Eugenics