A Dangerous Idea: The History of Eugenics in America — Transcript

[Applause] Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the National Constitution Center. I'm Jeffrey Rosen, the president of this wonderful institution. We have here some distinguished guests who have not been here before, and therefore it is important that together we recite our inspiring mantra so that they will be buoyed up for the rigorous tasks ahead of them. Ladies and gentlemen, the National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to disseminate information about the US Constitution on a nonpartisan basis. So inspiring, wasn't that wonderful? Job, if it was fabulous. It really was. We could do an encore. In fact, there was another movement that inspired support on a nonpartisan basis at the turn of the last century, and that was the eugenics movement, the science of better breeding. Ladies and gentlemen, you were wise to come tonight because you were about to hear from four of the leading thinkers in America on the history and constitutional significance of this dark period in American history that reminds us that enthusiasm for new technologies, which seem forward-thinking in their times, may have effects that history will come to get down. It's an astonishing story we're gonna hear. We're gonna start with excerpts from a really important new film about the eugenics movement that I can't wait to share with you, and then we will hear from the producer of that film and three of America's leading legal scholars and historians about the eugenics movement. I must tell you, friends, that just today I saw an advanced tour of the new Civil War and Reconstruction gallery, which is opening next week. It is so thrilling. It's so exciting to be able to see Dred Scott's freedom petition with his ex underneath, John Brown's Pike, the flag that flew over Independence Hall when Lincoln said he'd rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and this amazingly moving series of three interactives about the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments where you can touch the text, the individual clauses, see the early drafts as they evolved through Congress, and hear stories about the leading protagonists and heroes who fought for the task. I found it overwhelmingly moving. I think it's going to be the most significant permanent addition to the Constitution Center since I started in 2013, and I can't wait for you to see it. It opens next week, and then we've got a great series of panels with Reconstruction historians on May 20th and lots of other phenomenal programs to end the Town Hall series. So before we begin the movie, I want to thank Mary Morgan and Andrew Kimbrel and Paragon Media who shared their very important film, A Dangerous Idea, with us. We're about to see excerpts from the film, and then we will discuss them. Thank you so much. Okay, this is Lauren's first plane ride. [Music] We was raised in a very rural area of North Carolina where there was no jobs or any work, and the only form of work that was there was farming. We just going to pick cotton or potatoes or beans or something like that. Instead of us being in school, sometimes we had to be in the field. I remember, you know, my hair was unkempt. You know, I used to wear the same thing over and over and over to school at least three times a week. You know, it was really an unkempt little girl like many people growing up in North Carolina in the '50s and '60s. Elaine Riddick Jesse never had the real opportunity she'd been guaranteed as an American citizen. Her fate was bound up with a state built on a system of segregation and Jim Crow laws. The Windfall community suffered in extreme poverty. Elaine watched her parents' marriage fall apart, eventually leading social workers to send her to live with her grandmother. Then Elaine's life took another tragic turn. I was a victim of rape. I was molested when I was 13 years old, and the guy that raped me told me if I told anybody, that you just want to kill me, you know, and so I had to keep it to myself. Eventually, the social worker noticed that Elaine was pregnant, assumed that she was promiscuous, and recommended that Elaine be examined by the state eugenics board. The eugenics board was a board of five men that sit around a table, and of course they were white men too. They sat around the table, and they just marked the paper. Anybody that the social worker would deem feeble-minded or slow or having a problem, the social worker would come in and say, "I want this person sterilized," and boom, they stamped it. And that was it. The board was presented with an evaluation from the social worker who insisted that there was no hope for Elaine, that she got along poorly with other children, and that an IQ test showed that she was feeble-minded. No one asked me, "What's wrong? Can I help you? Are you hungry? Are you cold? Maybe I'm sick." No one took the time to find out what was the problem. Elaine discovered the board had completely ignored another evaluation they received by a psychologist who said her chief problem was her environment. She was doing above average work in school, and any difficulties she had getting along with others was likely due to the fact that she was always being bullied by other students and was generally hungry. The board favored the social worker's recommendation. I had my son, and I woke up in bandages not knowing what it was for. For him, they went inside of me and sterilized me without my knowledge because I was black, poor, and my mother was in prison. My dad was running around. He was an alcoholic. My mother was an alcoholic. Today, I want to bet it will assume that I was going to become an alcoholic, and then with him, when my son is a baby, automatically assume that he was the third generation and that he was gonna be an alcoholic also. What they wanted to do was nip it in the bud right then, stop this family trait, and want to cut the trait. And I want to know who in the world gave these people the right to go and do these sorts of things to another human being. You know, even in Germany, you didn't have it. Hitler didn't have the right to do this. We are the ones that educated Hitler on this stuff. Your sterilization, my interest in eugenics certainly comes in part from the experience of myself being a refugee from Hitler and being keenly aware of what was done in the name of science and specifically in the name of genetics. But that happened in this country as well, of course. In a certain sense, the Nazis imported it from the United States, which had a flourishing eugenics movement at the turn of the 20th century. Eugenics was widely accepted in the United States as solid science among the country's top psychologists, scientists, politicians, and social thinkers during this first Gilded Age. It was the creation of the gene concept itself that ignited what became a powerful eugenics movement. So one reason that the eugenics movement was so influential at the time was because it provided a scientific solution, or a supposedly scientific solution, to a political problem. The Gilded Age was the first time in American history in which you had people sitting on top of the entire economy, vast fortunes made on the backs of average people. At the same time, a new wave of immigrants coming into this country with nothing, and our cities became fetid slums in contrast to the extraordinary wealth that the robber barons, as we called them, were enjoying. We were in danger of losing our economy and our democracy. People forget in 1900 there was no middle class in America. In 1900, there was no weekend in America. There's not one single paid holiday. We had this extreme laissez-faire social Darwinist reality, and the vast majority of Americans were fighting the change. People took to the streets, held massive general strikes, demanded better living and working conditions, and an end to laissez-faire unregulated capitalism. If that's the explanation and the true way to fix that is to pay higher wages and to give people a better environment in which to live, and it was clear which explan-

inspiring mantra so that they will be buoyed up for the rigorous tasks ahead of them ladies and gentlemen the National Constitution Center is the only institution in America chartered by Congress to disseminate information about the US Constitution on a

nonpartisan basis so inspiring wasn't that wonderful job if it was fabulous it really was we could do an encore in fact there was another movement that inspired support on a nonpartisan basis at the turn of the last century and that was

the eugenics movement the science of better breedings ladies and gentlemen you were wise to come tonight because you were about to hear from for the leading thinkers in America on the history and constitutional significance of this dark period in American history

that reminds us that enthusiasm for new technologies which seem forward-thinking in their times may have effects that history will come to get down it's an astonishing story we're gonna hear we're gonna start with excerpts from a really important new film about the eugenics

movement that I can't wait to share with you and then we will hear from the producer of that film and three of America's leading legal scholars and historians about the eugenics movement I must tell you friends that just today I

saw an advanced tour of the new civil war and reconstruction gallery which is opening next week it is so thrilling it's so exciting to be able to see dred Scott's freedom petition with his ex underneath John Brown's Pike the flag

that flew over Independence Hall when Lincoln said he'd rather be assassinated on this spot than abandon the principles of the Declaration of Independence and this amazingly moving series of three Interactive's about the 13 14th and 15th amendments where you can touch

the text the individual clauses see the early drafts as they evolved through Congress and hear stories about the leading protagonists and heroes who fought for the task I found it overwhelmingly moving I think it's going to be a very the most

significant permanent addition to the Constitution Center since I started in 2013 and I can't wait for you to see it it opens next week and then we've got a great series of panels with Reconstruction historians on May 20th

and lots of other phenomenal programs to end the Town Hall series so before we begin the movie I want to thank Mary Morgan and Andrew Kimbrel and Paragon media who shared their very important film a dangerous idea with us we're

about to see excerpts from the film and then we will discuss them thank you so much okay this is Lauren's first plane ride [Music] we was raised in a very rural area of North Carolina where there was Holly

jobs or any work in the only form of work that was there was farming we just going to pick cotton or potatoes or beans or something like that instead of us being in school sometimes we had to be in the film I remember you know my

hair was uncap you know I used to wear the same thing over and over and over to school at least three times a week you know it was really an uncapped little girl like many people growing up in North Carolina in the 50s and 60s

Elaine Riddick Jesse never had the real opportunity she'd been guaranteed as an American citizen her fate was bound up with a state built on a system of segregation and Jim Crow laws the windfall community suffered in extreme poverty

Elaine watched her parents marriage fall apart eventually leading social workers to send her to live with her grandmother then Elaine's life took another tragic turn I was a victim of rape I was molested when I was 13 years old and the guy that

raped me told me if I told anybody that you just want to kill me you know and um so I had to keep it to myself eventually the social worker noticed that elaine was pregnant assumed that she was promiscuous and recommended that

elaine be examined by the state eugenics board the eugenics board was a board of five men that sit around a table and of course they were white men too they sat around the table and they just marked the paper anybody that does it that the

social worker would deem feeble-minded or slow or having a problem the social worker will come in and say I want this person sterilized and boom they stamped it and that was there the board was presented with an evaluation from the social worker who

insisted that there was no hope for Elaine that she got along poorly with other children and that an IQ test showed that she was feeble-minded no one asked me what's wrong can I help you are you hungry are you cold

you know maybe I'm sick no one took the time to find out what was the problem Elaine discovered the Board had completely ignored another evaluation they received by a psychologist who said her chief problem was her environment she was doing above average work in

school and any difficulties she had getting along with others was likely due to the fact that she was always being bullied by other students and was generally hungry the Board favored the social workers recommendation I had my son and I woke

up in bandages not knowing what it was for him they went inside of me and sterilized me without my knowledge because I was black poor and my mother was in a prison my dad was running around he was an alcoholic my mother was

an alcoholic today I want to Matt it will assume that I was going to become an alcoholic and then without him when my son is a baby automatically assume man that he was the third generation and that he was gonna be an alcoholic also

what they wanted to do was nip it in the bud right then stop this family treat and want to cut to treat him and I want to know who in the world give these people the right to go and do these sort

of things to another human being you know even in Germany you didn't have their Hitler didn't have the right to do this we are the ones that educated Hitler on this stuff your sterilization you my interest in eugenics certainly comes

in part from the experience of myself being a refugee from from Hitler and being keenly aware of what was done in the name of science and specifically in the name of genetics but that happened in this country as well of course in a

certain sense the Nazis imported it from the United States which had a flourishing eugenics movement at the turn of the 20th century eugenics was widely accepted in the United States as solid science among the country's top psychologists scientists politicians and

social thinkers during this first Gilded Age it was the creation of the gene concept itself that ignited what became a powerful eugenics movement so one reason that the eugenics movement was so influential at the time was because it provided a scientific

solution or a supposedly scientific solution to a political problem the Gilded Age was the first time in American history in which you had people sitting on top of the entire economy vast fortunes made on the backs of average people at the same time a new

wave of immigrants coming into this country with nothing and our cities became fetid slums in contrast to the extraordinary wealth that the robber barons as we called them were enjoying we were in danger of losing our economy and our democracy

people forget in 1900 there was no middle class in America in 1900 there was no weekend in America there's not one single paid holiday we had this extreme laissez-faire social Darwinist reality and the vast majority of Americans were fighting the change

people took to the streets held massive general strikes demanded better living and working conditions and an end to less a fair unregulated capitalism if that's the explanation and the true way to fix that is to pay higher wages

and to give people a better environment which to live and it was clear which explanation would be preferable to the captains of capitalist industry in the early 20th century and that is the biological explanation the wealthiest families in the country

provided millions and research funding to scientists in an attempt to prove that social problems were primarily a result of defective genetics at the prestigious Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York Harry Laughlin an animal breeder directed the eugenics

Record Office he claimed they could predict who would inherit good or bad traits by using a mathematical formula from Mendel they were also firm believers in Charles Darwin who clearly applied his theory of natural selection to human society new

Genesis saw themselves as agents of evolution doing their duty to ensure that the fittest Americans survived they said we have to find a way to have people who are more evolved make more babies we have to find a way to have

people who are poor and have all these diseases and all this bad genetics structure produce less [Music] laughlin organised exhibits in communities across the country to educate the public about eugenics families underwent detailed physical and mental examinations as they competed to

win the prize for the best heredity [Music] but you Genesis disagreed on what should be done with people they considered unfit some argued that less a fair economic policies might be severe enough to eliminate so-called defectives from the gene pool society should not coddle

in any way the poor don't help them don't help them through charity don't help them through legislation you see if you help them according to the social Darwinists you would only enable them to reproduce more of them society would be

better off if we instituted survival of the fittest we would get stronger just as species becomes stronger when their weakest members die off and their strongest members live on to reproduce but it would take decades before this social Darwinian approach would be

effective so many you Genesis considered a quicker solution one that would eventually be used by the Nazis euthanasia some called for outright execution of the unfit as well as lethal neglect of newborns they considered defective [Music] but in the end they agreed that

euthanasia would be used at too dear a moral price sterilization was the favored alternative biologist Harry Laughlin wrote the model law that North Carolina eventually used to sterilize Elaine Riddick he called for millions of people he considered defective to be forcibly

sterilized as well as relatives who might be carrying supposed recessive genes for inferior traits [Music] in 1927 the Supreme Court upheld Harry Laughlin s model law and ruled 8 to 1 that the Constitution permitted u.s.

citizens to be forcibly sterilized [Music] Congress never passed a federal sterilization law but it's estimated that by the end of World War two under state laws at least eighty thousand Americans had been forced to undergo hysterectomies tubal ligation

vasectomies and castration it was only in 1933 after the Nazis took over the Germany had any eugenic laws at all the first law they passed was for the heredity of future generations and that was their sterilization law and they

modeled it on Lofland model law in fact they were so grateful to Laughlin for his leadership in this area that they gave him an honorary medical degree from Heidelberg in 1936 for research on purifying the germ plasm of the human

population Lawson was an enthusiastic supporter of the Third Reich the eugenic alou's which Lofland edited just fond over Germany and its progressive policies and in fact there was a certain envy Germany is getting too far ahead of us in applying

the conclusions of science to the structure of society the most significant similarity was the emphasis on racial purity strict control of immigration was crucial to eugenic goals in the 1920s Congress debated whether to impose racial quotas and hired Harry

Laughlin as a special agent to investigate the subject and offer his recommendations Laughlin particularly wanted to shut out eastern and southern Europeans immigrants were being castigated as low level people as the dregs of humanity words like this were

used in publications as prestigious as The Saturday Evening Post and the call was very strong politically and economically to restrict immigration what Harry Laughlin provided was charts of data that he took to the congressional committee purporting to show that people from Italy from Poland

from the Slavic countries were genetically inferior to the northern European to the Nordic the area in the anglo-saxon and that this genetic inferiority was going to have a major impact on future generations in the United States Laughlin presented data

from supposedly objective IQ tests that immigrants were forced to take at Ellis Island upon their arrival Laughlin neglected to mention that many of them were reeling from the crowded two-week journey they just made across the Atlantic trips that were often

marked by sickness sleeplessness and hunger if they didn't do well on math problems or abstract image or writing tests immigrants were marked with an X declared feeble-minded and deported and they use eugenics arguments that people who were coming in had these bad

genes but Congress passed overwhelmingly this Latian to limit the capacity of these groups to come in even when it was clear that Jewish people were being persecuted by the Nazis they were a central target of the racial quotas and

were denied entry into the United States in some estimates up to two million Jewish immigrants who died in the Holocaust might have escaped their fate if Congress hadn't passed the racist law in 1939 nearly 1,000 refugees escaped and sailed all the way to Cuba hoping to

eventually enter the United States they were stranded in the waters off of Ana as they awaited news of their fate families rode out to the ship hoping to get a glimpse of their loved ones but the Cuban government turned them away

and the White House was silent the refugees were forced to return to Europe as the Nazis expanded their occupation the same year a bill was introduced that would have allowed 20,000 children most of them Jewish to come to the United States foster

families were ready to take them in but Laughlin and other members of an anti-semitic coalition lobbied against relaxing the racial quotas for any reason the bill was defeated leaving the children no escape from the hands of the Nazis the widespread rejection of Jewish

refugees convinced the Nazis that other nations shared their views of Jewish racial inferiority since being Jewish was considered to be an inherited thing you couldn't convert away from it the only thing to do to rid the body politic

of that burden was kill people and that makes that worst crime of history a piece of bad science among others when Hitler was elected in 1933 in a free election one of his slogans was all politics is applied biology and that's

the red light that one has to see on the road and not go down their road ever [Music] I have no intention of sitting idly by and watching my husband's dream turned into a nightmare and so the forces

appear to be joined the poor people declaring that they have declared war on the administration's efforts to cut off the war on poverty despite the controversy the administration was able to move many war on poverty programs out of the Office of Economic Opportunity to

other agencies and cut funding by more than 50% however Nixon did expand federal support for a war on poverty program he felt very strongly about birth control for the poor as part of its birth control effort the administration quietly

distributed a memo to federal clinics across the country informing them that for the first time war on poverty funds could be used to cover the costs of sterilizations it was a program that became abused because the people at the

top who were distributing the money never bothered to issue the rules and regulations that would have made sure that adult women and men who were interested in family planning and interested in contraception could get what they wanted and instead it became a

program that for many people resulted in forced sterilizations Joseph Levin filed a lawsuit against the Nixon administration after he discovered that two young girls many ralph aged 14 and Mary Alice Ralph aged 12 were sterilized at a clinic in Montgomery

Alabama at no time prior to the surgery did any physician discuss with the girls or their parents the nature of consequences of the surgery to which many and Mary Alice were about to be subjected the girl's mother was given a consent form

by the doctor he knew she couldn't read and clinic workers pressured Minnie to sign a consent form falsely stating she was 21 dr. Warren working at the war on poverty develops these guidelines and these guidelines say that no one can be sterilized

without informed consent and that can be no coercion so these guidelines actually would have prevented the sterilization of the Ralphs sisters but his guidelines were never delivered to the clinic's they were being held up at the White House I

got a call from dr. Cooper telling me that I must refrain from any contact with the White House or OMB and I said I was just trying to do my job and find out where the guidelines were my

attempts to find out about them were met with hostility harassment attempts at intimidation and pointed invitations to resign I finally he realized they weren't gonna distribute them and so he quit so these guidelines were never distributed to clinics even the 200

copies the dr. Hern had himself were taken out of his office and put in a safe place and in the following investigation about what happened to these guidelines the White House response to the questions by saying it suited our purposes it suited our

purposes to suppress these guidelines we came to learn that maybe there were as many as five hundred of these clinics functioning throughout the United States and it was sort of up to the nurses and the doctors as to who got what and they

made their judgment about who was worthy and who wasn't we are suing 8gw for non enforcement non monitoring of the sterilization regulations we are also seeking consent forms in Spanish and I'm talking about the deprivation and the genocide of

American Indian people I'm talking about our women 42% who were sterilized from 1971 to 1975 and not a whimper from the of indignation from this country the u.s. district court judge who resided over the Ralph case found that during

the Nixon administration nearly 400,000 poor people were sterilized without being fully informed there was evidence the judge said that an indefinite number had been coerced into operations under the threat of losing federal assistance many others were sterilized without their knowledge

it almost sounded as if we were talking about some Nazi era plan it really was a practice of eugenics because these clinics didn't see anything wrong with controlling the birthrate of people who they viewed as a burden on society that

simple the rolf lawsuit resulted in judge gearheart ghazal requiring the federal government to issue stringent guidelines on sterilization and that included a ban on the sterilization of any minor anyone under 18 so what we have here is a real triumph for the

royal family they take this case all the way to federal court in Washington DC and they say you know what this happened to our daughters but we're not going to let it happen to anybody else's daughter ever again

after this litigation they win and this stops the entire second wave of sterilizations the United States Wow well Andrew congratulations I'm not extraordinarily powerful movie which both conveys with detail the history of the eugenics movement makes clear the

connection to the Nazi Horrors and then although ladies and gentlemen you realize there was a cut in between the part about the Nazi era and the Nixon era ends with this shocking story that I had not heard about so tell us about

what it was like to discover the Nixon program and how much you contributed to revealing about it and what you hope the audience will take fun learning about it yeah just quickly the the name of the full name of is a dangerous idea

eugenics genetics and the American dream and I'm one of the executive producers the other is Mary R Morgan we are part of this amazing team that put this together and I'm also co-author with the film's director Stephanie Welch so it

was a tremendous creative team to put this together we I have written a book on this Jeffrey and I did not include the Nixon material I really found out about it while we were doing this movie and we didn't intend to make a through

line between Hitler and Nixon but you know it is what it is you know as far as the sterilization is concerned so it really is shocking because we always talk about that 80,000 you know that were the victims of that first wave that

goes up to about world war ii a little bit afterwards this we're talking about 400,000 and we're talking about targeting almost entirely people of color and women of color mostly so it actually Dwarfs the first wave and yet

it has been pretty much been hidden from our history partially because I don't think people want to hear about it then the second it was happening exactly the same time as the Watergate here so it got kind of taken out of the news

literally month by month as this was going on the Watergate was going on but I think it shows us that you know eugenics is and I think we'd be discussing this eugenics is not something of the past you know this

fundamental idea the difference ticket from the anglo-saxon a white male the difference always equals deficiency that if you're not a white anglo-saxon male as you saw you're deficient all right then versus saying our differences is our diversity and our diversity is our

strength that's the dividing line difference from a certain ideal is deficiency that has we dealt with and through the main tools for sterilization immigration restrictions or we celebrate our diversity because in that even as people know ecology we know the

diversity is fundamentally our strength that's the that's one of the dividing line as you see superb so powerful I'm so glad that we had a chance to see this excerpt from the film I was so eager to start that I jumped in without

introducing our panelists so let me remedy that by introducing them and then we'll continue this extremely important discussion so Andrew Kimball as you know is executive producer and co-writer of a dangerous idea he's also the founder and executive director of the Center for

Food Safety and a public interest attorney Daniel Okrent on the left is the prize-winning author of six books including the book which will be released next week the guarded gate available tonight for early purchase Daniel Okrand of course is one of

America's most distinguished commentators journalists and historians he wrote the definitive book on the history of prohibition that was the basis for our prohibition exhibited here at the National Constitution Center and we are extremely honored to have him in

his first appearance about this book he'll be back in Philadelphia next week to talk to Terry Gross on fresh air and were really lucky to have him here at the center Paul Lombardo is Regents professor and Bobby Lee cook professor

of law Georgia State University School of Law and author of many path-breaking articles including definitive studies of the buck V Bell case which you heard about and which we'll delve into more closely and finally our great friend and neighbor Dorothy Roberts is George a

Weiss University professor of law and sociology and the Raymond pace in Sadie tenner Moselle Alexander professor of civil rights at the University of Pennsylvania Law School she is also founding director of the Penn program on race science and society in the center

for africana studies and the author of many articles that are relevant to our topic today including one that I just learned so much from race gender and genetic technologies a new reproductive dystopia please join me in properly welcoming our panelists

let's begin at the beginning as the movie did and Daniel you're over there so you can start us off there's so much to talk about in this history but give us a sense of the political and legal context that produced that North

Carolina law that the court upheld in 1927 and buckin bail I'm always stunned by the statistics so I'll just put them on the table when we begin legislatures in sixteen states between 1907 and 1933 passed laws authorizing the

sterilization of defective people define loosely as idiots and imbeciles during the next five years seven of the state sterilization laws were challenged as unconstitutional by opponents of eugenics and lower courts struck all seven of them down on the grounds that

they were cruel at our usual punishment or they violated the Equal Protection by allowing sterilization of people in state institutions but not others or that they violated the due process rights as we saw about those those remarkable sisters who had no

opportunity to challenge their designation nevertheless states continued to pass the laws fourteen more states passed sterilization laws between 23 and 25 the Supreme Court upheld them in the buck in Bell case 1927 and then the flood gate was open and as many as

13 more states adopted sterilization laws after a buck and Bell bringing the total to 30 it wasn't until the 1942 Skinner case in the middle of World War two that the Supreme Court began to question these laws but they remained on

the books until as we saw the 1980s and as recently as 1985 the sterilization of the mentally challenged was allowed in nineteen states I hope that wasn't too long in intro but those statistics are striking so Daniel give us a sense please of how

this remarkable movement started why it was considered a progressive movement and how some of the leading lights of American progressivism supported it well I'm gonna hand it off to Paul shortly because this is really his specialty but I'll go way back if you don't mind which

is to say to the publication of Origin of Species and 18:59 and the Darwinian revolution which changes the nature of the way that science is perceived particularly in the UK and then it spreads to the US as well

it is the first real challenge to the well come to be known as the creationist view of our origins and it subtly buried within this revolutionary and as we know you know absolutely valid notion it's the idea that we're not all derived from

the same people we're not all derived from Adam and Eve and if we're not derived from Adam and Eve and we're not related some of us are better than others of us and it was a the idea of

eugenics itself was something that was formulated by actually the first cousin of Darwin's name Francis Galton a very interesting and peculiar gentleman scientists of the 19th century who he did studies of he did a beauty map of England where he figured that the least

attractive women in in in in the UK were in Aberdeen Scotland he conducted a series of studies called the frequency of fidget where he would watch people in an audience and he'd note how often they fidget and under what circumstance these

are all among his creations in 1883 he named eugenics and his idea was primarily what came to be known as positive at eugenics which is improving the species by finding the best and having the best breed to the best an

idea that goes back to Plato obviously but in his particular cases his first major recommendation was that the UK would find the most talented handsomest beautiful most morally upright young people and matched them up in marriages and there would be a

wedding ceremony in Westminster Abbey presided over by Queen Victoria and that in all of these couples five thousand couples would get a certain amount of I think was three thousand pounds a year for life so they could get busy doing to

what what needed to be done making a better England that's the beginning it gets distorted it comes to the u.s.

basically around 1900 to 1910 at Cold Spring Harbor we saw the the laboratory there I think that I'll step aside now and hand the ball off to Paul and catch it later when we get to the immigration aspect so fascinating thank

you for that remarkable introduction so Paul you've written an acclaimed study of buck V Bell I must say there are a few books that receive the accolades that yours has but it's been praised as the finest study of buck leave all that

exists and Bucky Bell is infamous for as we saw in the movie Oliver Wendell Holmes is a statement it's better for all the worlds if we cut the fallopian tubes rather than allowing degenerates to reproduce three generations of

imbeciles is enough eight to one the only dissenter is Pierce Butler a Catholic tell us about why the case was 8 to 1 then these are progressives from my hero Louis Brandeis is joining this decision another hero Chief Justice Taft

who as Daniel writes in his book vetoed a 1913 immigration bill because he was Pro immigration but nevertheless saw the cases constitutionally on controversial set the stage the legal stage for why this was an 8 to 1 decision

why'd Butler dissented and what else we should make of the Buckley belkin's well I'll start with Carrie buck Carrie buck is the main character in this drama Carrie is a 17 year old girl in Charlottesville Virginia she finds

herself in the unfortunate position of being pregnant the baby's father has disappeared she has turned out by her foster parents or her mother as no ward nowhere to be found and she eventually very quickly is sent to the Virginia

Colony for the epileptic and the feeble-minded down in Amherst Virginia just south of Charlottesville she meets her mother there she finds that she's also been committed Carrie is designated as her mother was as being feeble-minded being sexually promiscuous you'll see a

pattern here as these cases come around being someone who couldn't control herself and who would have children just like herself she was called a moral degenerate because she did have that baby and she wasn't married and then a

Red Cross nurse visiting sees the baby and reports back there's something something peculiar about I don't know what it is but there's something not right there and based on those observations on Carrie situation and our mothers being there at the colony and

near Lynchburg she has chosen to be the test case for a brand new law which goes into effect just as she arrives in the summer of 1924 Virginia passes this law really as a way to protect the doctor

who wanted it written he had been sterilizing people for years but got sued didn't like that one or immunity wanted to be able to do what he thought was right particularly to get those women off the streets people like Carrie

buck and her mother and so Carrie goes really like a lamb to slaughter she is really only a 17 year old she is has gone to school for about six years done reasonably well but she has no one to

defend her they appoint a lawyer to defend her pay him quite handsomely the case goes to the trial court there in Charlotte's excuse me in Amherst Virginia and the judge finds that in fact the law has been adequately written

that she has received due process she was represented by a lawyer and therefore that the law is constitutional it's then appealed that it goes to the Virginia Supreme Court which in turn also endorses it the lawyers who brought

this case were very concerned that it not be overturned and they wanted to go all the way so they took the case then to the United States Supreme Court where it was met as you just heard by some

real luminaries certainly Justice Taft who the only the only justice Chief Justice who had ever been president of the United States we're not likely to see that again he he was he was met by he was met by it

Justice Brandeis of course was also on the court a number of other justices that you've probably never heard of who are less less famous but the one that you have heard of is Oliver Wendell Holmes jr. really known as the God who

had come down from Olympus that is his admirer as you've heard lots about him he gives us the great phrases of constitutional law about not yelling fire in a crowded theatre among other things and so when this case comes

through he also gives us a line worthy of remembrance and describing the Buc family very briefly talks about Carrie buck one of the poor shiftless poor white trash of the south she's called in some of the court papers and so he

pointing out her mother's problems her own purported deficiencies and the comments made about her baby he says the law seems to be constitutional it does all that we can in matters like this we have a stitch we have a we have

precedent from the stare up from the vaccination cases we can vaccinate people well if we can vaccinated we can sterilize them and he draws a line under all that and says of the buck family three generations of imbeciles are

enough and so Carrie becomes the first person of some 8,000 who were sterilized there in Virginia and as you've already heard thousands more around the country all the way up until the 1980s the right that was being violated there that the

police power of the state was held to be sufficient to ensure the welfare of the community you need to be vaccinated for smallpox in those days right but your complaint was that's an error because I don't want to be vaccinated that was

what its issue but Oliver Wendell Holmes felt that that was legally equivalent to having your basic right of procreation taken away in one sentence is you know Paul you had a great you said it may be the most extraordinary anomaly in in in

Supreme Court history that he would make that Association making the leap between vaccinations the sterilization and even less difficulty justifying the fact that this was really attacking what later became known as a fundamental right the issue in the case

though was whether or not the whether or not due process would allow for a state to pass laws like this and laws that would allow someone to be represented allow someone to challenge the order of the state and to challenge the evidence

that was put forth against them Holmes says that's what laws are supposed to do we execute people we send them off to war people die the state has the power to do that and if that's something we can do we can certainly ask people like

Carrie buck for these lesser sacrifices as he said and so the case was really about due process Holmes said she's gotten due process that's all you get the case has many more turns in it which I won't burden you with now but it was a

sham or lawyer was literally working for the other side and no evidence was put into the record to support carries lack of problems for that matter she was she was a perfectly healthy young woman not that that would have justified what

happened to her or what not that not that if she were disabled it would have nevertheless there was this case was a fraud Dorothy Roberts if I could Holmes was an enthusiastic eugenicist and after the case came down he went

back and wrote to his friend Harold Laski this morning I upheld the law mandating the sterilization of imbeciles nothing I've done all week has given me so much pleasure on the other hand of the whole it was an eight to one case it

was constitutionally uncontroversial the court hadn't yet recognized a right of autonomy it took the forties to bring that about as constitutional lawyers was buck correctly decided at the time or what do we to make of the fact that no

justices except for the conservative Catholics seem to find a constitutionally problematic I think what you have to understand is that they accepted you Genesis logic and that's why it was easy for them to disregard the harm to Carrie buck if they thought

that there was a great harm to her then they may have ruled differently if they recently focused so much on procedural due process is because they didn't see any other problem with the statute and the reason why they didn't see any harm in

sterilizing Carrie buck was not only because Holmes thought it was the best thing for society because he had bought into you Genesis thinking but also he argued it was good for her that his main argument was that it is better for

feeble-minded people to be sterilized now than for their children to end up in prisons and to starve to death because it was assumed that they because of their defective genes they were going to become these people who couldn't survive

in society and so the way he framed what he was deciding was something that was to her benefit and in fact on the Equal Protection claim which was a claim that it was unequal to to sterilize people who were confined to public mental

institutions but not people who were in private ones that was the equal protection claim Holmes said well we're doing good for these people so if the government wants to do good for the people in mental and public mental

institutions and not others that's okay again they didn't even see it as the classification that harmed the supposedly feeble-minded people who are being sterilized and and he said look once we sterilize her she could leave and so they they've twisted the idea

that you would put someone in this institution in order to sterilize her into if we sterilize her we're doing her a benefit and now she can go freely into the world without the fear that she's going to produce another generation of

imbeciles and so you really have to wrap your head around this logic that turns government oppression into a benefit for the very victims of its oppression and that goes back to that's one of the reasons why you Genesis

thinking is so dangerous because it can even make it seem as if violence against people is not only good for society but it's good for them that's a very vivid way of putting us in the shoes of these

progressives and helping us see how a law that seems to us the greatest of all constitutional indignities would be uncontroversial to them and you remind us that if you accept that logic you almost do need some notion of a

fundamental right to personal autonomy in order to resist the law and that just was not part of the doctrine at the time because they could have been an opportunity to create it in that case yes that that's not it we could be that

the court would have decided that even though the state had a police power to impose vaccinations that this wasn't the same as just forcing someone to undergo a vaccination so there would be ways of distinguishing it again it's the this dangerous logic of

eugenics that blames people who are actually the victims of inequality for their position you know that says you're the threat to society not the people who are creating these unequal structures in society that's a very important point it

could have gone the other way and indeed all seven of those state courts did go they don't say here's the science here's the molecular biology here's what we know they go experience the term they use experience teaches us that this must

be hereditary remember this is 1927 DNA was not even discovered until 1953 all of these crimes that were done in the name of the gene were done with no science there was no scientific basis for this it was an

idea that there must be something in the body called a gene that would not find any embodiment that must be causing all these things which makes it to me even we're that there were they did this sheerly unprejudiced they didn't even have

science to back it up Daniel take us back to the immigration law of 24 three years before Buchan bail why did it pass what were its consequences and how did it influence the Nazis well let me back up a bit and elaborate on something that

both Dorothea and Andrew have said there was science it was just junk science but it was promulgated by the leading scientific institutions in the country it came out of Harvard and the American Museum of Natural History and the Cold

Spring Laboratory sponsored by the Carnegie Institute of Washington and at Princeton the people behind it if the the president of MIT in the 1890s you know was or he began by saying that the people of Eastern Europe they lived like

swine they were swine they weren't the same as people it was this perfect marriage of really what was at that time the progressive ideal government using its grand authority and the the brilliance of science to make society better and it was then quickly distorted

and you think of the people who supported eugenics to very varying degrees we saw Margaret Sanger's picture up there Theodore Roosevelt Edward a Ross not remembered today was a socialist Norman Thomas supported eugenics to a degree Edward a Ross was a

very close friend of Senator LaFollette of Wisconsin he was a head of the American Sociological Association he was later the national chairman of the ACLU and he said at one point about the Slovak people they will endure endure

conditions that a white man could not survive and it was this notion of a separateness of certain racial groups that led to the immigration law jumped away it had 1916 a book is published that brings together the anti-immigration movement that has been

bubbling for years and the eugenics movement which is just coming into public prominence a book by a horrible and fascinating man named Madison grant and bringing these two things together it changes the notion of eugenics that not only must we keep that individual

with the X on his jacket out of the country because he's blind he's deaf he's feeble-minded epileptic but all the people of his race of his ethnicity are as well so in 1924 this comes to a hideous head prefigured by a statement

that appeared in of all places Good Housekeeping magazine in 1921 that said that now that biological laws have proven that the eastern and southern Europeans are inferior we have to keep them out of the country to protect our

bloodstream author Calvin Coolidge about to be sworn in as vice president by 1924 the science that isn't science is so widely accepted that in the case of the Supreme Court justices they don't even look at it and in the case of huge

majorities in Congress they accept it and if you read the debate of the time which is a very very discouraging debate it is the American blood stream the American purity invoked over and over and over again there were two hundred

and twenty six thousand Italians on average who came into the u.s. in the three years before the 1924 law the quota reduce it to fewer than four thousand a year and it did the same to all the eastern and southern European

groups what was the legal change that led from buck in twenty seven to the Skinner case in nineteen forty two were William O Douglas noting the Nazi atrocities recognizes an equal protection argument against the sterilization laws and maybe say a bit

if you will about the influence of the American laws on the third right yeah yeah it turns out that the buck case really turns the tide as Jeff said earlier the direction of the law and the states was going against eugenics was

certainly go again sterilization but case changes that and many states passed laws in the wake of of the twenty-seventh decision and everything gears up for sterilization going into the late 20s and certainly into the 30s it turns out by the early 30s as we

were told on the film Hitler comes into power and makes this the very first thing that he wants past so his law for the Prevention of hereditarily diseased offspring his past in 1933 goes into effect in 34 there is a direct line

between certainly Harry Laughlin to work both into buck case as well as in the Nazi law many people are sterilized and then the war breaks out 39 the the second world war breaks out 42 the United States gets in it lots of doctors

are set off people are starting to question to a certain extent whether these laws work the way the eugenicist told them that they did but it doesn't stop sterilizations the case comes to United States Supreme Court from Oklahoma a challenge to a sterilization

statute that that allowed for mandated the sterilization of recidivist criminals people who were repeat criminals in the prisons in Oklahoma the prisoners challenge this fascinating case by itself because it involves some some great characters it gets to the

Supreme Court at a time when America is starting to realize what's going on in Europe there are reports of people being killed there are all kinds of reports of atrocities and the Supreme Court justices are very aware of this the case

is assigned to Justice William O Douglas Douglas has a full package of material that he can draw from for arguments and he decides really on his own to focus on equal protection and he says here we have a criminal from Oklahoma

Jack Skinner and Jack Skinner has been sent to prison for one of his crimes as he's a chicken thief he stole chickens the Oklahoma statute that allows for him mandates for him to be sterilized says that you can if you if you have these

felonies which was a theft of more than $200 at the time you are you are liable to being to being taken into the operating room Jack Skinner's lawyer opposed and pointed out that there are there were there were gaps in the law there

were exceptions if you violated prohibition that didn't count you can still drink if you were an embezzler that didn't count if you had committed some kind of political crime like bribery well that didn't count either so there were certain crimes that were

penalised with sterilization others not and justice Douglas seized on that point and said what is it that's different from being a thief and stealing a chicken and being a clerk and sticking your hand in the till in the bank he

didn't seem he said there's no there's no logic in science or or for that matter jurisprudence to make that distinction the the thief and the bank goes free the chicken thief is sterilized this is not fair this is a

violation of equal protection the undertone of the of the case court really was echoing what was going on in Europe echoing the notion that that and and this comes up in one of the concurring opinions echoing the idea

that the unequal application of the law based on class was also something that these sterilization laws violated and so the Skinner case strikes down the issue of sterilizing people in prison while it lays it leaves on the table

the idea that feeble mindedness as they say is different and the buck case is never overturned for that reason was in that sense was Skinner decided as persuasively as it might have been after all the law does distinguish between

different types of crimes should it have found an autonomy right instead and how does it fare in retrospect does have in dictum a statement that procreation is one of the basic civil rights of man and he also points out that in certain

government hands sterilization could wipe out an entire race of people that's not the basis of the holding because he does not hold that this violates the substantive due process fundamental right to have children and therefore doesn't overturn buck vs. Bell

but it's got great language in it at least of this recognition of the importance of procreation and the political weapon that can be used against whole groups of people by deeming them inferior and appropriate subjects of state sterilization so the

there's good strong language in it of course it's good that the Court struck down this obviously biased law but it could have been a stronger case if the court explicitly struck down Buckley bail on grounds that eugenics sterilization violates a fundamental

right of human beings to have children that would have been a different kind of case and would have been a stronger basis for challenging other grounds for which the state continued then to sterilize people against their will and

of course it wasn't until as you suggested wasn't until later until the 60s in cases like Griswold versus Connecticut that the court begins to recognize a fundamental right to procreation which culminates in the line of cases that included Roe versus Wade

Andrew the court strikes down the sterilization law in 1942 but as the film shows so vividly sterilization continued the Nixon story is shocking and not well known but many of us did know that sterilization laws remained on the books until 1985 if not longer so

tell us about what happened from the 40s through the 80s and how all of this continued under the radar screen yeah just as a quick on the Skinner case it was a three strikes you're out if you had three felonies that were

twenty bucks or more you get sterilized if you have a white so with blue collar crime versus white bullet you get sterilized white Pelle are you fine political crimes embezzlement saying and actually one of the concurring opinions judge Jackson who

later became the chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials he actually uses a wonderful expression as he says we cannot have these biological experiments by a dominant class on mothers not dominant because we risk basically being what we're seeing in Nazi Germany so and

he later became a chief prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials so just a little side thing on the Skinner case that's I teach it and in the case book they don't excerpt the Jackson opinion and thank you for calling our attention to the so

remember we're stalking states right we're talking these are all the states that did it right we've never had a federal law as we say in a dangerous idea of the movie we never had a federal law so Nixon is faced with the problem

which is that during the Great Society they found that the aid to families dependent children was actually not being administered in a legal way in the south they were not allowing many many women who could have been families that

could have been helped help because they didn't want to give them the money because they one of them in these low-paying jobs so hundreds of thousand over three hundred thousand new people on the welfare rolls because of that

well Nixon gets into power and I could 68 the terrible year of all the assassinations and everything else then on a horrible year and he said we got any saying about welfare well here's one answer take women who are on welfare

whether they've been a Native American communities or African Americans and say unless you stop having babies you cannot give me get your welfare check so for their very first time they say just on the movie you know listen we're

gonna be using these these funds to sterilize people and and then you see coercion you know we see people who are not having a form consenting people are actually against well this is the first federal federal sterilization not state

now federal and it goes across the country and the guidelines the doctor her and they've actually with it would have prevented the great abuses were actually held back by the White House we don't know what their purposes were but

they just say our purposes election was coming up were they afraid of that but he don't know but it's because they didn't go out the wealth the Southern Poverty Law Center by the way was the got to hold this case and they

actually filed the litigation when they thought the litigation there were no regulations yet they were still being in that warehouse so all of the first questions they asked for questions and due process their constitutional questions well Weinberger Caspar

Weinberger who then was head of Health and Human Services yes says oh we don't want to do the constitutional questions that could overturn Bucky Bell by the way then we could really get into some serious trouble right so he says they

quickly get these you know sort of ad hoc regulations in place nowhere near as good as the first ones so then the case doesn't become about the constitutional questions it becomes about the adequacy of the regulations see how it this you

switch it from these big questions to whether mine burgers and of course Gerhard gazelle you know and DC discord says these regulations are terrible these regulations don't really protect anybody you're not going to put be able to spend a single dollar more until you

give me good regulations it took a couple years but finally those regulations came into place so again these constitutional questions that would have overturned buck V Bell never we're dealt with by the court the court said I don't have to deal with those

because I can just deal with this by dealing with these regulations and the final regulations did thankfully say no minors you know know people that for because of any particular being mentally challenged they can't be sterilized at all and had fairly strict consent

requirements for adults because of that wealth case you could teach a course of course on Nixon in the Constitution but you've got an entire new seminar week I didn't I wasn't even aware of it it was only in making this movie that we that

the team became aware of this and it's really shocking that it's not better-known saving buck V Bell was remarkable ambition of the administration call you wanted to well I'm not so sure that that had the Supreme Court dealt with us in Ralph's

versus Weinberger which was 74 they didn't get to the Supreme Court but had it gotten their Roe vs. Wade was in 73 I'm not sure that the ROE Court would have been any herewith overturning buck than anyone else was because in fact Buckley is last

cited in a footnote in Roe vs. Wade as being one of the exceptions to the general rule of reproductive freedom before then you end the book around the 1930s and around the holocaust and this is Holocaust Remembrance Day as it

happens so before we you know and too much in the present I'd like you to tell us what else you want us to know about the influence of the eugenics movement on the 3rd right the surprising stories you found about

enthusiasts for the movements including the celebrated editor Maxwell Perkins and and and and what else we should know about this just briefly on Perkins how many people here know the name Maxwell Perkins the most celebrated publisher in American history the editor who brought

this Gerald Hemingway Thomas Wolfe and so many others it to the world's attention Perkins graduates from Harvard in 1907 and his first job is working in a settlement house in Boston teaching English to Russian and polish largely Jewish immigrants he then finds his way

to New York gets hired at Scribner on the recommendation of one of his Harvard professors who says to Charles Scribner I knew all four of his grandparents end of recommendation hired in 1916 Maxwell Perkins is handed in this manuscript by

Madison grant the man I mentioned before as being so peculiar and so wonderfully interesting and he edits the book called the passing of the Great Race the key paragraph in that race in that book says that the marriage between any of the two

any two different of the European ethnic groups will always revert to the lower so if a Nordic marries an Alpine the child will be alpine if an Alpine marries the disgraceful Mediterraneans the child would be a Mediterranean and

the marriage between any of the three European groups and a Jew produces a Jew this was really kind of the key moment in the the in the the merger of the anti-immigration movement and the genex movement and it became a so broadly

accepted the people who I mentioned the Coolidge's article before it was accepted science by all but a very few people who did speak out about her primarily the anthropologist Franz boas but they were ignored because the credentials that was another part of the

progressive movement credentials meant so damn much and the credentials were there Perkins went on to publish many such books in in Scott Berg's prize-winning biography of Maxwell Perkins this isn't mentioned not a word of it it's history that like so much that's

been discussed so much of what Andrews shown just got shoved under the carpet the people who were involved in doing this sort of thing it's you know I spent nearly five years on this book and living with these people was not fun

they're not charming they did some horrible things but it's a story that we need to know we really need to know and many of them were charming but just monsters eugenics and anti-immigration was the marriage between eugenics and

white supremacy and Jim Crow Jim Crow was uprising as the regime in the south and a kind of regime like it although not enforced by law in the north and the in 1924 when Virginia passed the law we've been talking about in buck vs.

Bell on the very same day it passed the racial integrity Act that barred white people from marrying anybody other than a white person and that kind of hierarchy you mentioned at the very bottom of it was black people so if any

of those white people married a black person that was the worst crime that would be the mongrelization of the white race and so it's it's really really important to see how you genesis that were enforcing policies that were supposed to improve society by

keeping certain people from having children were arm-in-arm with white supremacist who were also enforcing policies to keep a pure white race and - which was of course linked to keeping black people separate from white people and talking about US Supreme Court cases

the latest one even after Skinner versus Oklahoma was loving versus Virginia which the US Supreme Court didn't pass and didn't hold until 1967 was when it finally struck down bans on interracial marriage and so that's even later there

the hesitation of the US Supreme Court to touch interracial marriage is evident in correspondence among the judges and also in the litigation strategies because southerners were so averse to the mixing of the races and so with I just want everybody to see these

connections between anti-immigration eugenics and white supremacy all of which we can see in politics today as well it's a crucial point and you're so right to stress the fact that the court waited 13 years from 1954 when Brown

versus Board of Education was decided and to loving because Felix Frankfurter thought that the country wasn't ready that as you said that the South would so resist striking down the anti-miscegenation laws that it should just wait for Prudential reasons which

is the overwhelming what's I'm glad aren't you glad you showed up tonight ladies and gentlemen its this is a very depressing topic but it's shocking to realize how widespread the public support for these laws was and Andrew that's such a powerful beginning and end

of the mood that movie there her sisters african-american women obviously the effect of these Nixon policies which were designed to discriminate against the poor were felt most heavily by African America absolutely the second way was almost entirely people of color and welfare

problem which is the first thing Dixon said that he was gonna deal with and by the way and and and dandled connecting a crate never mom we they didn't actually bring in a new immigration law that actually got rid of the quarters I

believe until 1965 I think that was that was 1965 just 65 so it was 41 years away the law of the land I said it's not just the Supreme Court its Congress didn't say this is even after the Holocaust

said oh no we're still gonna leave all those quotas in place and I you know in the movie we go back and a dangerous idea we go back we say you know what this is not just 1920s this is goes

right back to the planning of this country this country is supposedly based on all are equal and getting rid of the biology is destiny of the aristocracy in Europe that of all the other past recorded history of the leaders in a

royal blood and and you know that your your biology determined your social outcome your social position even your character you know criminal or not we were supposed to get rid of that we were supposed to be saying no but actually if

you look from the very beginning right we were biologically to do that that infected that biological determinism right from the beginning because we said white men right we get all the rights of citizenship oh you're a woman biology oh

sorry maybe the most basic aspects of citizen including whether you can vote that didn't have until August 1920 1770 1920 okay and then as far as a slave population or the Native American population you weren't even people at

all because of your biology yeah and before we used genetics and eugenics we use things like you know craniometry to say the the skulls of you know black people are smaller or a Native American yeah they used phrenology they use a lot

of other pseudo-sciences before the pseudoscience of genetics so this battle between the spouting inequality and the dream of equality is this battle that's been going on from the very beginning this to in an almost two and a half centuries now of trying

to get closer and closer to the dream and then all these regressive forces who say no we're actually okay without founding inequality that defends us from any kind of political will to get more equality because it's biological can't change that so this is a these two

forces have been at play for a very time with eugenics only being one very large and important but as we can see in today's politics only one aspect of this longer you know effort of equality and trying to fight against this biological

determinism that you know versus saying hey we are diverse and we can change our destinies and and everyone should have the opportunity to do that versus of being viewed as biologically inferior and not capable of doing that it's

powerful distinction of biological determinism versus the ideal that all people are equal and can choose our destinies and you're right to stress just the dark history throughout the nineteenth century of these genetic distinctions and in the Civil War

exhibit you'll see the same heroic Justice John Marshall Harlan who objected to the segregation laws and Plessy vs. Ferguson Ferguson the lone dissenter from the court's decision upholding segregation laws in 1896 says of course we're not arguing for complete

equality there's a great race over in the Orient they're known as the Chinese and we've got to keep them out of America and the immigration laws don't allow Chinese people in and that's good because they would really harm American

integrity it just the mind spins because it's the history is so unfamiliar but it's urgent ly important to learn it and you're all eager to learn it look at all these wonderful questions and I know our panelists will be as blown away as I

resent by the rigor and excellence of the questions from the audience and here or I'm gonna just ask oh they're so good well the firt oh you're gonna really okay so the first one is Daniel ask you since eugenics was a cornerstone of

progressivism how can we define the idea that progress is always good and say more about the fact that the progressive religious denominations Jewish Christian and Protestants were enthusiastically Pro eugenics it was only the more conservative denominations the what we call progressivism today is

a different animal from the progressivism where the word was coined progressivism then which would sought to improve society was profoundly anti-democratic it was the smart people and the rich people who would who had decide how to improve society Margaret

Sanger her her part of her eugenic campaign was well look at these slums the slums are terrible if we you know give them birth control then they won't reproduce it wasn't directed at the women on Park Avenue so to make the leap

from from that situation to our current situations for me a difficult one I think that there is the lesson of always questioning expertise however right now I'm really dependent on expertise to keep this planet from burning up so it's a confused and as you

can see I'm very confused about it and can't answer your question at all bipartisan effort eugenics is you had the Lizzie's you were saying that social Darwinist tended to be I mean Carnegie we talked about the Carnegie Endowment

honey actually went to England to get Herbert Spencer and bring him to the United States so this is this right-wing laissez faire no regulations don't don't you touch our businesses they had their own reasons for getting into this so it

was a you know it was the progressive said we're gonna clean the slums are moving the outside our clean people's inside you know they have the arrogance to say that the lazy Fair people said hey this is social dominance we're gonna

do the Lord's work here by just making sure that those workers and those people and by the way you don't with the Italians in because they tend to do labor unions and the Irish they tend to be anarchist we want nice people who

were you know they you know if labor unions were very anti-immigrant very strong as the act remain today to large degree but you were telling me down that Irish Americans urban ones did oppose it and a questioner asked were there any

religious leaders who spoke out against eugenics and I gather appalled that some of the Conservatives nominations didn't speak out at the cancer this is a very difficult thing to partisan in a clean way there is a series of words here we

use that have tremendously broad meanings progressivism being one of them historians can't really agree what that was there's a lot of brands at two different times it morphs into different things same thing for eugenics eugenics is enormous Lee popular not because of

sterilization not because of the things we know about from Hitler but because it was the promise of healthy babies at a time when babies died one in six in England so it's very difficult to wrap your head around what the word meant to

average people but I think that the issue of was this a left-right thing was this a Democrat Republican thing was this conservatives versus liberals it's impossible to do that to I recently finished a piece that that identifies my name every person who

introduced a bill and every person who sponsored a bill that passed for sterilization so that thirty two of them and every governor that signed one or vetoed one and they break out roughly equally between Democrats and Republicans between left and right

between people call themselves progressives and people who didn't so it's very difficult to tease it out that way I don't I don't think that I could put my finger on it and say and the religious side I would say the same

thing there is clearly a pushback from Roman Catholic Roman Catholicism that is subdued up until the 1930s the Pope comes out with a sickle and says this is no good we don't want sterilization and everyone else gets in line but before

that there's a little bit of movement but the Roman Catholics are they want the one group that are the clearly the most against eugenics in the early years and very pro-immigration and very Pro immigration because you're actually talking about people

from those countries like Italy those of us who you know go back to the old country to see these places that's a good point to make in any event I don't think I think that we have had some

excellent research and writing on the mainline Protestant groups that supported eugenics and we've also started to get some some really pointed research from people in the evangelical movement who are writing about the history of evangelicalism and eugenics and it's clearly not it's more complex

than we could summarize in 10 minutes we think of socialism is progressive today but it was could conform with eugenics in the past I think to me the question is what is your position on the relationship between biology and social

inequality and that is a question that scientists today whether they're liberal or conservative debate he is social inequality caused by innate biological differences or do those social inequality come from structural inequities and exactly whether we can determine someone's social position

based on their genes there there's a resurgence of interest in that and a lot of that interest is on the part of people would think of as liberal scientists today so and and in among those liberal scientists there's quite a

debate about it and so sometimes those liberal scientists sound a lot like the conservative scientists who used to say that people are poor or otherwise disadvantaged because of their genes but they would distinguish themselves though the liberal ones from those so it does

get very complicated but I think we have to ask ourselves what is required for social justice what's the f approach to this rather than assume that someone in one political party or the other is going to hold that position

because you can't know for sure there's there's just so many good questions that I want to put a few more on the table and this one is for you Andrew cuz it's raised by the film what constitutional or legal interpretations that Judge

Gesell rely on enforcing the Nixon administration to stop its sterilization great question yeah in the film you saw booth Hubbard the late Republic is one of the great scientists we have these great scientists in the film who completely take apart this the

pseudoscience of of a gene for intelligence or deep gene for poverty and by the way we talked about the Great Society programs with Sargent Shriver leading the war on poverty and the other welfare things we talked about and and

the other programs that we're so extraordinary including legal services those of sort of lawyers love that 40% drop in poverty well nobody was genetic engineering it was a 40% drop in partly because of social programs so if you

want an answer it's not like it's not available it's there this is so so let's just look at the facts and verses as I said we take apart with these great scientist all that's nonsense they're hearing today about genes for this two

genes planet doesn't it's all citizens but the gazelle actually he took apart the government's arguments the government arguments said it's perfectly okay to have a parent consult for a minor or have a parent consult for it before a somebody who's not competent at

certain age not confident you said why how's that true no that's not consent so the answer is no you don't get to sterilize them at all which would have meant no sterilization for the wealth systems right and then for the other

people that said no that they have to be they have to consent Weinberger's ad hoc regulations that the gazelles looking at and he said well wait a minute you say consent what if you're consenting because you're being coerced because

they're taking away you need to say not only no consent no coercion I mean so he lays out what those rules have to be and says no more dollars but I love the way he sort of said in wait a minute that's

not consent of a parent consents for and there's a later case by the way but you know and it's certainly not consented you're coerced into consent be consent so it was that that's the the sort of the gravamen of his decision dan

you started with Queen Victoria and this question asks can you separate social Darwinism from the teachings of Charles Darwin well one of the interesting things is that Charles Darwin never heard the term social Darwinism social Darwin but Spencer never heard the term social

Darwinism that's really an invention in the 1940s first used by Richard Hofstadter in fact the Spencer precedes Darwin Spencer writes his social statics I think in 1851 1852 he says survival of the fittest that's his phrase that's not

Darwin at all so that's just I bring it up to indicate that there was there was a a bubbling ferment that was challenging all sorts of Pristina of accepted fact and accepted social policies Spencer also said you know ever

and this was very common among the American eugenicist so the on the right and said you know every penny we we spend on charity is only perpetuating the inferiors in our culture and we and charity itself is destroying what we

have is welfare is a terrible thing so so in this period you have a struggle a quest for finding answers through analytical means that had never been used before some of the answers they found were phenomenally great heroine

and some of them were really terrible great great to remind us about Herbert Spencer and social statics and Holmes of course in his Lochner descent also memorably said the Fourteenth Amendment does not enact mr. Herbert Spencer's social statics and you see that Holmes

his incredible gift for aphorism which served him so well in Lochner doomed his reputation in buck and Bell because the three generations of imbeciles lion has unfailingly defined and I just wanted two more questions on the table we've

got to do it one it there there two on buck and we'll give him to Paul is buck the 20th century equivalent of Dred Scott in Supreme Court history and and and and did Butler a descent because of

his Catholicism I I would be happy at putting a you know Dred Scott and buck in the same Hall of Shame I think they I think they both qualify in different ways as to Butler I mean I write in my book that he's that

Butler's a peculiar character on lots of ways but the the story that that that I found about him which I didn't know before I wrote the book was that Butler had a brother who became quite wealthy and apparently had a child by a servant

girl who was in his home who was who was spirited away so that nobody would know about it when his brother died Butler the justice was the was the person who was the executor of his will and all of

them and this hit the newspapers it became a great scandal and she was finally paid off and sent away the most of the money went to the children of Peirce Butler's brother so that's the only inkling we've ever had of a reason

and I'm not sure what reason there is there may be he felt you know we could we could speculate but it want to be speculation that he had some soft spot for people like Carrie buck who had been

raped enough to think just as the Catholic opposition to abortion is that the state can't interfere in the process of reproduction it's serious it certainly is except that we don't have any evidence of that either and it's 1927 not 1930 that's true that's true

all right we have one minute left and this is a very large question but it's the subject of Dorothy's paper so the last word will be to you and it's the important question our designer babies the next step of eugenics we think of

designer babies as being the solution to social problems it has those same flaws and also if we think of what the images of designer babies what are what makes a designer baby what makes a perfect baby we see the importation of

all of these racist and sexist and ableist notions of what is a perfect child just look at pictures if you google designer baby you're going to probably come up with a baby with blonde hair and blue eyes that

has some indication they're super smart they have a high IQ and they don't have any disabilities and I think we really have to question what are we saying when we call that baby the ideal what are we saying about children that don't meet

that ideal and also how is that an answer to the problems that we're facing as human beings what about social change will this replace social change in addition to all the questions of who will have the ability to have autonomy

over creating these babies and who will have the the resources the money to be able to do it so there's so many questions of inequality and ethics that go into the very concept of a perfect baby that are very much parallel to all

the trouble we've been talking about today about the dangerous idea of eugenics ladies and gentlemen the Constitution is not always for the cheerful butt but for educating us about this dark but crucially important period in the constitutional history please

join me in thanking our panel and now please go outside and get an early copy of Dan's phenomenal book which he will sign copies and and and one end of the but end of the DVD go buy whatever you can out there and educate

yourself some more