MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
So good afternoon.
I'd like to welcome you to
the Medical Center Hour.
I'm Marcia Day Childress
from the Center
for Biomedical
Ethics and Humanities
here in the School
of Medicine at UVA,
and I'm delighted to welcome
you to today's program.
This is a program entitled
The Continuing Relevance
of America's Eugenic Legacy.
The history of eugenics
is often characterized
as a cautionary tale
about the bad old days
when pseudoscientific
assumptions
about genetic determinism and
engineering human improvement
permeated science, medicine,
and social attitudes,
and provided a
respectable veneer that
enabled barely submerged
racism, xenophobia,
and blatant discrimination
against persons
with disabilities to take
root in American law.
Some argue that more recently
our science is sound,
our attitudes enlightened.
We need not be
hobbled by fear of
debunked, bad eugenic habits.
Paul Lombardo, the Regents
Professor and Bobby Lee Cook
Professor of Law at Georgia
State University in Atlanta,
has written extensively
on eugenics and the law
in America.
As one of the undisputed
experts on this subject,
he continues to track our
nation's eugenic legacy
as this evolves in the
early 21st century.
He joins us here to look
again at eugenics assumptions
and ask some questions
critical for us today.
What is eugenics legacy
in our country now?
Are the same
underlying tendencies
that led to a century of
eugenic law and policy
to be found in our public
debate about democratic values
and social policies?
And what is the proper role of
science and medicine as tools
for solving social problems?
Professor Lombardo's
presentation
is one of our history
of the health sciences
lectures produced in partnership
with historical collections
in the Claude Moore
Health Sciences Library.
His talk is also the second
annual Joan Echtenkamp Klein
Memorial Lecture in the
history of the health sciences.
This lecture is named for
our longtime dear colleague
and inimitable friend who
as Alvin V. And Nancy Baird
curator was the heart and
soul of historical collections
for the period from 1982 until
her untimely death in December
of 2015.
As one who understood
that history is always
a crucial component,
sometimes even
a driver of the
present moment, Joan
was a co-conspirator
with many of us
on some great projects
over a great many years.
She was also a generous
friend of and contributor
to the Medical Center Hour.
We miss her and are
honored to honor
her memory with this lecture.
It's fitting that Paul Lombardo
is presenting this year's
lecture, for it was Joan who
decades ago worked closely
with him when he was another
of our colleagues here at UVA
and he was just starting
his research into eugenics
in America and
indeed into eugenics
place, power, and practical
impact in local Charlottesville
and University of
Virginia history.
I'll also say
before welcoming him
that Professor Lombardo has no
financial conflicts of interest
to disclose.
So please welcome Paul Lombardo,
who spent many years here
at UVA before he headed
south to Georgia.
Welcome back, Paul.
[APPLAUSE]
PAUL LOMBARDO:
Thank you, Marcia.
I think maybe one of
these days when I grow up,
I'm going to have a conflict of
interest that I can disclose.
But since the kids are
graduated from college,
it's probably too late.
I want to thank Marcia and
Dan for the invitation,
particularly for the
honor of speaking here
at the Joan Echtenkamp
Klein Memorial Lecture.
As Marcia said, Joan
was a friend of mine
and a colleague for
more than 35 years.
And in the time
that she was here,
she figured very significantly
in my own research
on the history of eugenics.
And so as I prepared
for this talk,
I was repeatedly reminded of
how often I relied on Joan,
how often she directed me
to material that I used
in my own scholarships,
how regularly she
invited me to be involved in
meetings and symposia and the--
some of you will remember
many, many parties which
she put together,
and those were places
where I met other
archivist, other librarians,
and other scholars.
And so it's only fitting that
I note some of those occasions
as part of my remarks
today, with apologies
for too many
personal references,
but because the material that
I discovered with Joan's help
became inextricably
intertwined with
the historical
explorations in eugenics
that I'm going to
talk about today.
So I will talk later a bit
more about Joan and some
of those things, but I
want to take everybody
to the same at
least starting line,
and that is this word eugenics.
You have to start
in the same place.
You've got Gregor
Mendel, who tells us
what the rules of heredity
are with his pea plants,
and his ideas happen to come
back about the same time
that Francis Galton comes up
with this new word meaning well
born.
And so you really have to
start with Galton and Mendel.
I think of the
biostatistics of Galton
as married to the
heredity of Mendel
as really being the foundation
for what happens in America
under the label of eugenics.
Within a generation, people
were looking at Galton,
looking at his ideas,
and proposing ways
to make eugenic ideas
a practical reality.
Here the clergy
discuss the issuance
of marriage certificates
that would be proof
that couples were fit to
marry and had been so declared
by medical experts.
Before long, the idea
becomes more widespread,
and every newspaper is full
of articles about eugenics.
There were
organizations initiated
to promote the so-called
eugenic ideal of good birth,
and describing your tot as a
eugenic baby was all the rage.
In this particular
case, contest winners
were betrothed in
their early years
by their parents who said,
what better could we do,
a couple of gold
prize winners, we'll
get them together
in eugenics' name.
Even the federal government
gets in on the act
in the person of the Surgeon
General of the Public Health
Service who issues the first--
perhaps the only official
eugenic marriage
certificate to this man
Palmer Terrill, an employee
of at that time the Treasury
Department.
Families who pursued the
eugenic ideal, meaning
healthy, happy babies, were
celebrated in their communities
in these Fitter Family
contests which I
suspect you may have heard of.
The media coverage
of those fairs
looked something like this.
Science applies to human
stock the same principles
which have developed championed
cows and horses and prize hens
to lay the foundation for
proposed laws to regulate
the rules for human mating.
It is difficult--
it is very difficult
to exaggerate how pervasive
the word eugenics was
early in the 20th century
and the extraordinary numbers
of meanings it took on having
to do with health and hygiene
and prosperity.
How eugenics was
used in advertising
gives us just one clue about
the popularity of the concept,
and I have a whole show
on this, but I'll just
share a few of these with you.
For example, there were eugenic
cosmetics and pharmaceuticals,
from lemon shampoo
to hair tonic.
There was, of
course, eugenic corn.
There were even
eugenic diamonds,
which just like
eugenic marriages,
required a certificate
of fitness.
It was not surprising that
with sentiments like these
the American Magazine
of wit and satire
would say on its cover in 1913
"Eugenics Makes The World Go
Round."
So this is the image
of health, which
is linked with the eugenic ideal
and highlighted as a promise
to future generations.
And the impulse for social
improvement, the wish
to eradicate suffering,
and the life problems that
plagued society was a large
part of what attracted people,
many, if not most,
Americans to eugenics.
But that ideal, of course,
had other implications, which
I like to describe as made up
of equal parts hope and hate,
equal parts aspiration and fear.
The side that represented
people's fears
often included a very
heavy handed kind
of biological determinism
that played out
in propaganda like this.
And I'm going to spend my time
talking to a large extent,
about this side, showing us
that unfit human traits can all
be breeded it out, it says.
What your environment
is is what you have.
Your education is what you do.
But what you really are,
that's your heritage.
And if you didn't have
good parents, too bad,
you're too late.
So I'm going to look
at the legal result
of this propaganda,
but I do want
to stop for just a second
to remember our friend
Joan, the person this
lecture is named for,
and how important she was
both to my own scholarship
but also how she made it certain
that Virginia would not forget
its own history in this field.
Joan and I came to UVA at about
the same time in the late '70s,
and we met in 1980 in the
basement of Alderman Library.
While I was dealing
with learning
how to breathe in dust in an
archive, Jonah already knew.
I was in the process of writing
on the topic that would become
my dissertation on
Virginia's eugenic history
in the case of Buck vs. Bell.
I got to know Joan
a bit better when
she took over the
special collections
at the medical school and
I went on to law school
and conferred with
her a couple of times.
She was extraordinarily helpful
in the first two law review
articles that I wrote.
One was on Buck.
The other was on
Loving vs. Virginia.
And it is an
interesting coincidence
that we are now
celebrating anniversaries
of both those Supreme Court
cases in eugenics this year,
Buck 90 years and Loving
vs. Virginia 50 years.
And there's even an Academy
Award nominated film on that
out there.
So a lot happened
here in eugenics.
I went off to practice law.
But when I came
back here in 1990,
Joan and I picked up
where we left off.
And I'd often find myself in
the medical school library
where she usually shared her
most recent acquisitions.
And in 1993 she
asked me if I would
agree to participate
in a symposium
on the infamous
Tuskegee syphilis study.
Well, I said yes.
And because of Joan, I got to
join scholars like Jim Jones
and Vanessa Northington Gamble,
John Fletcher and others
in discussing
Tuskegee, and I got
to watch over the
next several years
as the momentum grew toward
a Presidential repudiation
of the study.
And that finally
did occur in 1997,
and Joan is shown here
meeting President Clinton
as the movement culminates
in a Presidential apology.
My time at Joan's symposium led
me in a different direction.
It provided me a
motive to look back
into the part of
the Tuskegee history
that had not been explored.
I was surprised to discover
that the three architects shown
here, Hugh Cumming, Raymond
Vonderlehr, and Taliaferro
Clark--
they had all been UVA
medical graduates.
And with Joan's
help, I eventually
marshalled the evidence
for this article, which
I did with my then student
Gregory Dorr, which attributed
some of the results of
Tuskegee and certainly
a lot of its longevity
to the training
that these men had in racial
medicine in public health
and in eugenics here at UVA.
The spring after
that symposium Joan
asked me to give a lecture
on the history of Health
Sciences on eugenics,
and so I did,
following a screening
of the Lynchburg story,
a film that documented eugenical
sterilization here in Virginia.
And Joan later
invited me to present
at a meeting of the
Mid-Atlantic Regional Archivist
Conference, a group that I
knew nothing of at the time.
But there I met an archivist who
suggested a couple of databases
and said maybe you should look
at those for source materials.
And as a result,
when I returned home,
just learning how
to use the internet,
I was able to find
a batch of records
that included this
picture of Carrie
Buck and her mother, Emma,
taken before the trial in 1924.
I'd been looking for a photo
of Carrie Buck for 20 years
by then.
So this was a big day for me.
And when I showed it to
Joan, she immediately
said, oh, you've got to do a
paper for the history meeting.
What history meeting, I said.
She said the
American Association
for the History of Medicine.
And so I did, and I presented
this-- a paper and this picture
and began an involvement which
has lasted ever since then.
In early 2002 Joan asked me to
showcase the Buck story again
in her lecture series,
and she used that occasion
to kick off an exhibit on
eugenics that was displayed
in the medical library
for a number of months
and subsequently became a web
exhibit which you can still
find online.
Later in the semester on the
75th anniversary of the Buck
case, Joan came to join
me over on Preston Avenue
at an event that marked the
dedication of the Buck marker I
put up, which is now
permanently located there
in front of Region 10.
And Governor Warner
used that occasion
to make Virginia the
first state to apologize
to the victims of
sterilizations.
So it should be
obvious that Joan
was a key player in
focusing attention
on the history of eugenics, and
I personally have a great deal
to thank her for.
But she also showcased the
historical work of others.
UVA Grad Gregory Dorr from the
history department here also
presented at the History
of Health Sciences Lecture
on Virginia eugenics,
and his dissertation--
later this book--
highlighted a number of
prominent UVA grads and members
of the faculty who were active
in the 20th century movement.
Prominent among
them Harvey Jordan,
the person for whom this
building was originally named.
And you might ask,
as students usually
do, well, how did he get here?
And the answer is
relatively straightforward.
Dr. Alderman, the
first president of UVA,
following the German model that
had been transplanted to Johns
Hopkins, took it upon
himself to raise UVA
into the rank of
elite universities.
And he started by looking
for young scholars.
He started by looking for
people who are doing research
and who are publishing and
who had a national profile,
and he hired Dr.
Harvey Earnest Jordan
because he was exactly
one of those people.
He came here in 1907 directly
from summer study of the Cold
Spring Harbor Laboratory, the
home of the eugenics record
office.
Jordan was
internationally known.
He give papers at conferences
such as the First International
Congress of Eugenics,
and his articles
were published in
those proceedings.
He was also very interested
in embedding eugenics
in the medical curriculum,
as Greg Dorr has documented.
And he was very successful.
He was particularly
interested in studying STDs
as a disgenic influence.
More on that later.
And he took his place among
the most prominent scholars
of eugenics in the country.
He was around
like-minded people.
Another important member
of the faculty at one time
was John Powell,
composer, pianist,
really important
musician in the 1920s.
But another part of his
contribution to American life
had little to do
with music, and that
was the foundation of this
group, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs
of America, who sponsored
and advocated the 1924 Racial
Integrity Act that prohibited
marriage between whites
and all other races.
A bit more on that later, too.
One of the first chapters
of that organization
was here at UVA,
and this document,
which is its
constitution, called
for the maintenance of
Anglo-Saxon institutions
and ideals, the wise
limitation of immigration,
and the complete exclusion
of unassimilable immigrants,
the principles of honor and fair
play in all relations of life,
and the supremacy
of the white race
in the United States of America.
Powell wrote other things
such as this track which
amplified fears of
intermarriage when
Virginia's Native American
population interbred
with people who had been from
families formerly enslaved.
Powell wrote editorials,
one called Is America
to Become a Negroid Nation?
which he published in the
Richmond Times Dispatch.
And he said it is not
enough to segregate
the Negro on railway cars
and streetcars and schools
and theaters.
It is not enough to restrict
his exercise of the franchise
as long as the
possibility remains
of the absorption of Negro
blood into our white population.
And he went on to
say that it was
the development of
eugenical science
that paved the way for this
new law that would be passed.
Powell was praised for
his work in passing
that act and others
described him
for his distinct and
distinguished service
to the Anglo-Saxon race
that would, they said,
ensure him a place in history.
Powell was here at the
same time as Jordan,
as was Dr. Robert Bennett Bean.
Bean took his time
learning and becoming
known as a racially focused
physical anthropologist.
He too thought that
this is what ought
to be taught in
every medical school,
and he wrote an article to
that effect that was published
in Science magazine in 1921.
He too was concerned
about interracial marriage
and the degradation
of the white race,
and he continued
to pay attention
to what was known
as race suicide
in most famous book,
The Races of Man:
Differentiation and Dispersal,
which was published while he
was here on the faculty.
In it he emphasized specific
distinguishing characteristics
of different racial groups.
He thought whites
had large brains,
were active,
physically vivacious,
had strong ambitions and
passions and idealism.
He also thought that their
industry was incessant
and elaborate.
In contrast, he described
blacks as people
who had a strong and
somewhat irrational egoism,
but whose worst diseases
came from sexual promiscuity
and contact with the white race.
Dr. Bean is generally
known as one
of the fathers of scientific
racism in America.
Another faculty
member whose time
overlapped with all the
people I've mentioned
was, of course, Biologist
Ivey Forman Lewis,
who later became
dean of the college.
He came to UVA in 1915, and
in his nearly 40 years here
he left a record as a staunch
hereditarian, a convinced
eugenicist, and a proponent
of white racial purity.
This is what Greg Booher
has to say in his book
Segregation Science
about Dr. Lewis.
In his professional swan
song performed in 1951
on a national stage at
the annual convention
of the American Association
for the Advancement of Science,
Lewis incited a
tremendous controversy.
His talk called Biological
Principles and National Policy
hammered eugenical themes,
outraged listeners, and caused
the AAAS to break
precedent and refused
to publish his speech in its
flagship journal Science.
Lewis had argued that
those who contribute least
to the general welfare have the
largest families and selection
of the worst rather
than the best as parents
of the next generation flies
in the face of biological laws.
Now, that's not
a pretty picture,
and the things that I
have pointed out to you
you might say were unusual,
unique, and particularly
bothersome, but I
have to remind you
that having spent this time
talking about UVA faculty
members who were entrenched
in the eugenics movement
and having reminded
you that Joan Klein was
a key person in making
sure that the history was
available for this
community, I do not
want to leave you with
the false impression
that UVA was somehow an
anomaly in its engagement
on this topic.
What I have presented
only scratches the surface
of how common such scholars were
in colleges and universities
at the time.
The survey of colleges in
1920 showed more than 300
who taught eugenics as
part of the curriculum.
I'm convinced if you did a
survey today and went back
to the records that number
would probably double.
We just didn't have the surveys
that were as good back then.
It is certainly true that
Virginia and this university
provided national leadership
in the ranks of eugenics,
but what happened here also
happened around the country
at many elite universities.
And here are just
a few examples.
There's Charles W. Eliot, the
famous president of Harvard
University, known
for his-- what is it,
five-foot bookshelf of wisdom.
He was one of the strongest
proponents of the Immigration
Restriction Act.
Irving Fischer, first PhD in
political science at Yale,
a strong proponent not only
of immigration restriction
but also sterilization, a
member of the scientific board
of directors of the
Eugenics Record Office.
David Starr Jordan founded--
was one of the
founders of the very
first eugenic professional
organization in America
around 1905.
He was the first president
of Stanford University.
Victor Vaughan, a
giant in public health,
dean of the University of
Michigan Medical School,
also strong in this field.
And at the bottom, Edward
Thorndike, the psychologist who
did so much to make sure that
mental measurement testing
became part of the American
educational landscape.
And then finally, William Welch,
the grandfather-- the godfather
of medical education, the
president of the American
Public Health
Association, Mr. Who's
Who on every letterhead of every
organization you can imagine.
He too was on the first
scientific board of directors
for the Eugenics Record Office.
So the point is all
of these men provided
a public face for the eugenics
movement on American campuses
from about 1905 until
at least World War II,
and all of these
universities, just like UVA,
were proud of the courses, the
research, and the publications
in eugenics that their
faculty produced.
This set of ideas,
complex set of ideas
was part of the mainstream
of medicine and science
for a very significant time
during the 20th century.
And in the broader
population, these ideas,
both the hopeful ones,
the aspirational ones,
as well as the hateful
ones and the fearful ones,
captured the attention
of an enormous group
of prominent, noteworthy people
who at one time or another,
in different forms and for
widely divergent reasons,
embraced the ideas
that were part
of the so-called eugenic ideal.
Now, you might ask, so what?
Why should we care?
Well, as a historian
and as a lawyer,
I care because the ideas that
we associate with eugenics
were imprinted on
hundreds of American laws
that lasted in some cases
for an entire century.
Here's a list of
just five categories
laws passed in the
name of eugenics,
and I'm going to walk
through each one of those.
The first ones starting
with Connecticut in 1895
were passed to prevent marriages
by people who were disabled.
Connecticut law specifically
prohibited marriage
by anyone who was
diagnosed with epilepsy.
And one of the first proposals
of the official eugenics
committee would have
extended those laws
to prohibit the
blind from marrying.
This proposal came from W. M.
Hayes, the Assistant Secretary
of Agriculture under
Teddy Roosevelt
and a member of the American
Breeders Association.
Others wanted to battle
the spread of STDs.
Ministers advocated
for eugenics screenings
before marriage
as early as 1905.
One reason for
the clergy support
was that there was a
long and rich mythology
about sexual
misbehavior and heredity
in every manner of
disability, from this man's
premature decline caused by
syphilis to his son's blindness
and his daughter's withered
limb were bundled together
as if all of a piece,
results of immoral living,
evidence of an
intergenerational curse
that cascaded through
families from parents
to children as part of
an hereditary legacy.
Even baseball player turned
evangelist Billy Sunday
pushed eugenic themes, and
one of his most famous sermons
playing to packed
crowds, hammering away
at the dangers of sexual excess.
The sermon was called The
Chickens Come Home to Roost,
and it invoked the
famous Jukes family,
that legendary problem
family of criminals and ne'er
do wells marked by immorality
and feeble mindedness,
and of the two people who
started that family he bemoaned
the power of one godforsaken
vicious, corrupt man
and woman to breed and propagate
and damn the whole world
by their offspring.
The public health implications
of STDs were also obvious.
The relationship between
having healthy babies--
remember, eugenics
means well born--
and the dangers of
so-called venereal diseases
led many to attempt
to educate people
about the careful choice
of marriage mates.
The graphic in this publication,
take off the hoodwink,
don't go blindly into marriage
illustrates a pamphlet in 1924
urging couples to be
more aware of the health,
including the eugenic health,
of prospective spouses.
Beginning in about 1910, most
of the states in the country
passed public health laws to
prevent marriage between people
with STDs, and those
laws were uniformly known
as the Eugenic Marriage Laws.
Among the first
states and the one
that was the most
controversial was Wisconsin.
That law was eventually
tested in court,
and as you can see
from this headline,
the court found in 1914 that
the eugenic law was valid.
It, of course, was
legislation that
would guard innocent
women and their even more
innocent babies.
Another kind of
marriage restriction law
emphasized the means of
preventing the purportedly
harmful mixture between races.
These laws called The
Anti-miscegenation Laws were
in place in more than 20
states, and many of them
relied on the arguments of
this man, Madison Grant,
known as the father of
racial anthropology, who
in 1916 published his
famous and wildly successful
book, The Passing
of the Great Race
or The Racial Basis
of European History.
Grant gave the eugenics
movement a new set
of arguments to support existing
restrictions on marriage,
and he warned that racial
mixing was one avenue down
the slope toward
so-called racial suicide
and the eventual disappearance
of white civilization.
In his book he provided
a formula which we still
refer to today to
determine who should be
able to claim a white heritage.
"The cross between a white man
and an Indian is an Indian;
the cross between a white
man and a Negro is a Negro.
The children of mixed marriages
between contrasted races
belong to the lower type."
That is the formula which
became known as Grantism,
and it's the formula that is
built into Virginia's 1924
Racial Integrity Act, which
was passed as a public health
measure shown here on the cover
of the Virginia Health Bulletin
that year.
And it was thought to
present the spread of what
were thought to be
deficiencies that
would pollute the
white race via contact
with other inferior races.
So this is a very clear
example of the racial side
of eugenics law.
Grant's thinking was also
critical in another piece
of eugenic legislation, the 1924
Immigration Restriction Act,
curiously known as the Johnson
Reed Act or the National Quotas
Act.
Politicians like Calvin
Coolidge had read Grant,
and this is what he said.
"Biological laws tell us
that certain divergent people
will not mix or blend.
Nordics propagate
themselves successfully.
With other races,
the outcome shows
deterioration on both sides.
Quality of mind
and body suggests
that observance of ethnic
law is as great a necessity
to a nation as immigration law."
And so beginning in
the 1880s American laws
became more and more
harsh with various tests
meant to sort out the
useful immigrants from those
who were thought not
fit for American Life.
Here recently landed immigrants
or travelers are lined up
in the Great Hall
of Ellis Island
for processing, literally being
marked with a piece of chalk
so they can be screened for
insanity and other defects.
Eventually they
move on to be tested
for physical problems such
as trachoma of the eye,
and then they're given
IQ tests to screen out
the mentally suspect.
The man shown in this picture
is a member of the Public Health
Service Corps.
His name is Howard Knox, and
he wrote about his experience,
giving IQ tests and articles
like this, "How the Public
Health Service
Prevents Contamination
of our Racial Stock by Turning
Back Feeble-Minded Immigrants."
So you can see that this is part
not only of public sentiment
but certainly public
policy and law.
This law is a model, it
turns out, for others.
This particular
quotation is taken
from some of the comments made
in his book Mein Kampf, which
Hitler wrote while he was
languishing in prison,
and he says then, at present
there exists one state which
manifests at least some modest
attempts to show a better
appreciation of how
things ought to be done.
It is not our model
German Republic,
it's the US of A,
which is making efforts
to conform at least partly to
the counsels of common sense.
By refusing immigrants
to enter there if
they are in a bad
state of health.
By excluding certain
races from the right
to become naturalized,
they have begun
to introduce principles similar
to those on which we wish
to ground the people's state.
That he said, of course,
before he came to power.
Support for immigration
restriction, for sterilization,
for marriage restriction,
for all kinds
of racially based
restrictions and quotas
were meant to address the demise
of the majority Anglo-Saxons
whose decrease would mark,
as Madison Grant said,
the passing of a great race.
And this widespread
anxiety was popularly
known as race suicide was
on display, especially
between the two world wars.
The last law I
want to talk about
is the one I probably
spent the most time on,
and that's the eugenic
sterilization laws.
And to introduce
that topic, I've
taken a paragraph from
the Scientific American
in February of 1875.
The date is important because it
shows that even before the word
eugenics exists,
there is a movement
to apply principles that the
eugenicists would glom onto.
This is an article called
"The Knife Remedy."
We can only regard it as an
illustration of the power
of popular prejudice.
The people are ready
to hold up their hands
in horror at the most guarded
suggestion of the advisability
of making it impossible
for lusty savages
to inflict upon the community a
brood of ill-balanced organisms
destined to swell the
ranks of vice and crime.
Yet society may
be driven to adopt
just such radical
measures in self-defense.
So the knife remedy,
as they call it,
is recommended even in
a scientific publication
before the formal ideas
of eugenics take place.
So the point is policies that
are made into law don't really
require us to use that
word, but eugenics
does give those who would
argue for sterilization
an entire ideology on which
to found public policy.
Now, in 30-odd years of
talking about these cases,
I think I can distill what I
know into a short statement.
The arguments in favor of
eugenics were about two things.
They were about
sex almost always,
and they were
about money always.
Let me show you
what I mean by that.
The state of
Alabama went to pass
one of the last sterilization
laws in the 1930s,
and they proposed a bill.
I'll read you what
that bill says.
This was a bill in 1935 to
sterilize any sexual pervert,
sadist, homosexualist,
masochist, sodomist,
or any other grave form
of sexual perversion
or any prisoner who has
twice been convicted
of rape or thrice
imprisoned for any offense
or any mental deficient of
any grade who habitually
and constantly is dependent
upon public relief
or supported by charity.
If you look at all of the
sterilization laws that
were passed between 1907 in
Indiana and 1937 in Georgia,
you will find that
they all include,
from different eras
and different places,
the categories enumerated in the
bill that I just quoted from.
They all focus on
what was at the time
considered
unconventional sexuality,
disability of various types.
Either in the way they
were described at the time
or in the very
language they use,
they include attention to the
social cost generated by people
who embody those behaviors.
So it is always to me at some
level about sex and money,
and it's often also
about people living
on the margins of society
because of their race
or their ethnicity
or their disability.
People who violated social
norms in the realm of sexuality
were defined as deviant
and/or criminals.
They filled the jails, the
poor houses, the asylums,
and other institutions that
were paid for with tax dollars.
Wiping out that behavior or
the possibility of children
who would inherit such
behavioral propensities
and those costs were a
big part of the motive
force behind eugenical
sterilization laws.
And so the first one
is passed in 1907
with the help of Dr.
Henry Sharp here,
the physician at the
Indiana reformatory
whose great concern was
masturbation in the prisons.
Sterilize those people, we
won't have any more prisoners.
They have this propensity.
We can cut it out of them.
And so his law was
entitled an act
to prevent procreation of
confirmed criminals, idiots,
imbeciles, and rapists.
And the preamble said, heredity
plays a most important part
in the transmission of crime,
idiocy, and imbecility.
That idea was taken
forward by other people,
most noteworthy
was the Model Law
that was written by this
man Harry Laughlin in 1914,
seven years later
after the Indiana law.
And in his model
sterilization law,
Laughlin said, we've got to get
rid of the socially inadequate
classes.
The socially
inadequate people were
those like the feeble-minded,
the insane, the criminalistic,
the inebriate, the epileptic,
the diseased, the blind,
the deaf, the deformed,
the dependent, orphans,
ne'er do wells, tramps,
the homeless, and paupers.
Laughlin covered the waterfront.
Laughlin got a chance
to speak to this issue
legally when he
appeared as a witness
by deposition in the famous
case of Buck vs. Bell.
Here's Carrie Buck, the
picture I showed you earlier,
on the left, her mother,
Emma, on the right.
Carrie was 17 at
the time when she
was committed to
the Virginia Colony
for the Epileptic
and Feeble-Minded.
She met her mother, who had
been declared a moral degenerate
because she was suspected
of being a prostitute.
Her mother had been declared
feeble-minded and unable
to take care of herself.
Carrie was also
called feeble-minded
because only three months before
her arrival she had a baby,
and the problem was
she wasn't married.
So she too was called
a moral degenerate.
The baby shown here in a
companion picture taken
the same day was examined
by doctors and other experts
and called not normal,
not quite right,
which made the Buck family
the perfect example of what
Virginia's brand new
1924 Sterilization
Act had been meant to address.
Problem families suffering
from mental and moral defects,
intergenerational poverty,
criminality, sexual excess,
and probably most
importantly a tendency
to consume more than their
small share of tax support
and services.
That was what the
eugenics law was about.
It was meant over
time to eliminate
all those conditions as well
as the people who carried them.
So Carrie was the person
picked to test the law.
The person who wrote the law
was this man Aubrey Strode,
who drafted the statute
and then later defended
it all the way through
the Supreme Court.
Strode, of course,
is the person who
was a graduate-- was
a student here at UVA
and also a law student.
And it's his papers
over at Alderman Library
that first got me interested
in this whole matter.
In the case that Strode
brought against Carrie Buck,
he said that these
things-- poverty, disease,
inappropriate sexuality--
could be wiped out by surgery.
And he showed the
Buck family history.
It's been captured after
the fact in this slide.
He showed this in court.
He said, we have hereditary
world degeneracy, illicit sex,
mental defect that reverberates
through three generations
of the Buck family.
The case was decided
several years later in 1927,
and the opinion was written
infamously by Justice--
then Senior Justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes, who said,
it is better for all
the world, instead
of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime
or let them starve
for their imbecility,
society can prevent
those who are
manifestly unfit from
continuing their kind.
And in one of the great
non-sequiturs of Supreme Court
opinions, he then
reached for precedent
and found one in the
smallpox vaccination
case of several years
earlier and said,
the principle that sustains
compulsory vaccination
is broad enough to cover
cutting the fallopian tubes.
He described the Buck family
again with their three
generations of defect and said,
three generations of imbeciles
are enough.
Now, Carrie Buck
for herself went on
to live another 63 years, and
all her life she was poor.
And when she died, she and
her family that survived still
carried the shame of
the Holmes' opinion.
Here she is a few
weeks before she died.
When I met her in 1983,
she confirmed to me
that she was pregnant
in 1923 not because
of her moral failings but
because she had been raped,
and she died in this hospital.
Her daughter, Vivian,
left her own records,
such as this second
grade honorable record
over from the Venerable School
showing that she was not
feeble-minded after all.
And there were other
records, probably
the most distressing,
if you're a lawyer,
are the ones from Irving
Whitehead, the man who
was appointed and paid very
well to represent Carrie Buck
but, in fact,
betrayed his client
and defrauded the court,
leaving the record
as a fraud and a sham.
We also didn't learn
until years later
that Harry Laughlin, the
man who wrote the Model Law
and then testified
against Carrie Buck,
had received an honorary
degree from the Nazis
in 1936 for his
work in what they
called the science
of racial cleansing.
So we're left with
the Buck case,
the shame of the states, 8,300
or so sterilized in Virginia,
some 60,000, 65,000--
who knows how
many-- sterilized nationally
under eugenic sterilization
laws.
And by the time
the last state had
passed a law, the
practice had, of course,
spilled over into Europe.
Another 14 places passed laws.
But, of course, the Nazi law
was the most important one
because it was used to sterilize
some 400,000 to 500,000 people,
and we also know that
the Nazis practiced
eugenic euthanasia of those
with mental impairments
and redefined eugenic
exclusion to include genocide.
So if we look back at
the sterilization laws,
we can see how they covered
all the problematic groups,
the sexually deviant, criminals,
the feeble-mindedness--
people with
feeble-mindedness who
were blamed for every
manner of social ill
and the costs of the juvenile
court or the infirmary
and the workhouse
and the police,
and of course,
the very expensive
institutionalized mentally ill.
These are headlines
from New York,
Wisconsin, Indiana, and
Arizona, and the story
is pretty much the
same wherever you go.
Taking care of disabled
people is expensive.
The economic motive is
never far from the surface.
Better breeding through tax cuts
was a common eugenic mantra.
So where are we today?
Well, we have lots
of new technologies
and they are exciting
technologies,
and they are technologies
that those of us who
have the privilege of
working in universities
get to argue about
and get to question
on all kinds of grounds,
ethical, political,
and otherwise.
But I put those off to
the side for a moment
because as important as they
are and as important as it
is for us to argue
about them, they're
not what I'm worried about.
When people ask me what
eugenics is still here
and what I should
worry about, I'm not
worried about cloning so much.
I'm really not worried about
the sensational and sometimes
irresponsible
speculations that fill
the popular press about the
potentially genetic basis
for crime or even the
potential for somebody's
idea of super babies and a
hypothetically created master
race.
As I said, it's important
to debate the ethical impact
of all those technologies.
But what concerns me that we
spend so much time arguing over
whether we should call
those things eugenics.
My concerns about
eugenics in the future
is not about new technologies.
It's about old attitudes,
very old attitudes,
some very old-fashioned
bigotry that is still
focused on the least powerful
people in our society
and the attempts to blame
them for all of our problems.
If we focus on
those attitudes, we
would realize that they were
the most important foundation
for the practices that
we condemn as the worst
result of eugenic thinking now.
So again, if you ask me what
is the contemporary relevance
of eugenics, this is my answer.
We have seen too often lately--
we have seen public displays
of unabashed contempt
for the disabled.
We have seen a chorus of hate
focused on people who violate
conventional sexual norms.
We hear daily about the need
to eradicate social welfare
programs that are aimed at
addressing crime or poverty
or disease.
And the nation's
attention is now focused
on an unvarnished
campaign to ramp up
the rhetoric of decay
and fear and hate
to justify closing the
borders against people
whose presence would threaten
the white demographic balance.
We also hear the old
mantra, all of this
has to be done to make us
safe in future generations
and to lower our taxes today.
Race suicide hangs
in the balance.
So because all these
strains of thought
remain a part of our
current political landscape,
I still think that
eugenics continues
to be worth our attention as
a field of historical study.
Thank you.
I'll take questions now.
[APPLAUSE]
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
That was quite a trip
to the late 19th
and 20th centuries.
And for our audience now,
there's plenty of time
for us to entertain your
questions and comments.
When I bring you the mic,
please identify yourself.
MICHAEL SWANBERG: My
name is Michael Swanberg.
I'm from the School of Nursing.
And first I'd like to thank you
for acknowledging Joan Klein.
She was so important to
so many of us in our work,
and through Joan Klein I first
became familiar with Gregory
Michael Dorr's work.
And you talked about attitude.
What was the attitude
of the university
to Gregory Dorr's work?
PAUL LOMBARDO: That's
a hard question
because I'm not sure
I know the answer.
He was a PhD graduate.
His work, while he was still a
student, won national prizes.
I know his teachers
were proud of that.
I know the people on the
dissertation committee,
along with me, were
proud of what he did.
I think that these are
topics that are always
discomforting in an
institutional sense
because they're not fun.
They're just not fun
things to talk about.
I mean, I go and talk
places, and they say,
well, we've got
so-and-so who's going
to talk about the
wonderful new technology
and we've got
so-and-so who's going
to talk about other issues,
and then Lombardo's the downer.
And I understand what they say.
These are not happy stories.
But as I think I said
earlier this morning--
and I know I said this to
Greg, but history is not
a happy greeting
card from the past
with nothing but good news.
And he did good history.
I know the historians
here were proud of him.
There were probably people
who didn't like what he said,
but that wouldn't be
unusual in any field.
JEFF WEISS: Jeff Weiss,
retired physician.
Some of you may have seen that
the current issue of National
Geographic talks about
accelerated evolution
of the human, and
as I read, it seemed
to be kind of a thinly
veiled promotion of some
of the concepts of eugenics.
My question for you is, does--
is there still
evidence in your mind
that there are academic
supporters of eugenics
that exist in the
current time frame?
PAUL LOMBARDO: Well, the
hard part about that question
is it focuses me to ask another
question, which is, what do you
mean by eugenics?
Because it's such a broad field.
And one of the things
I've tried to do
is to point out that it's a
mistake for us to vilify people
and say, oh, they were involved
with eugenics because it's
almost everyone, and that's
why I put up the slide
with the list of people.
You can find people
on that slide--
there are over 30 of them--
who at some time said
something good about eugenics.
You can find people from
every field of life.
You can find Presidents.
You can find Nobel
Prize winners.
You can find lots of physicians
and lawyers and scientists.
Each one of whom is
revered in their field one
way or the other.
So I think when you ask me, is
there something that's going on
in the Academy having
to do with eugenics,
the answer is almost
certainly yes.
What I am interested in and what
I hope I've focused on today
is the use of science as a
panacea for social problems
and the promise that we can
figure it out scientifically.
Just leave us alone, we'll
take care of this part,
and we will make those
scientific insights
into public policy.
If I've said anything more
than once in my career--
and I've said most
things 100 times--
it is that is a mistake.
It is a mistake to think
that we can use science
to fix our social problems in
the absence of a re-examination
or reflection on the
kind of attitudes
that I was talking
about this morning.
I've had academic food
fights with people
at different institutions
about what eugenics means
or whether or not they
represented something
that I thought looked an awful
lot like the old eugenics.
If you're really
interested in this stuff
and you're having a
problem with insomnia,
I've got a 100-page
article out there
about the Pioneer Fund that
goes through this stuff
in great and dreary detail.
But I don't think
that's necessary.
I think that, again, you
don't have to be a scientist
or even-- you
certainly don't have
to be an academic to
understand that what
drives the most repressive
parts of this agenda and was
part of our law is
a set of attitudes
which doesn't go away.
JOHN DAVIS: My
name is John Davis.
I used to work here.
I thought that was a great
review of bringing out
how widespread
eugenics-- how it was
supported throughout
this country
and the great institutions.
Harvard was a real leader.
Many of the churches were
very strongly behind it
because they took care of
the disabled and the poor.
I want to bring up
something that you haven't
mentioned, which is abortion.
And I wonder what you
think about abortion
on choices such as
sex or color of eyes
or some other mild
defect or anything
that is part of our life
today and fully accepted
by the majority of our people.
I think there's some real
moral questions here.
And I'd like to know what
your thoughts might be.
PAUL LOMBARDO: The
very first course
that I took that had anything
to do with biomedical ethics
was actually in this
building, and Jim Childress
was running it.
And he had just spent
some time in Washington.
As I recall, he said to us, we
used to have lunch every day
up at the Kennedy Center, and
the Kennedy Center luncheons
were wonderful because we
had all these great scholars.
But there was one topic
we never talked about,
and that was abortion.
I think I remember
you saying that, Jim.
And the point was it was
an inflammatory topic that
was hard to get through without
people getting very upset.
Obviously it still is today.
I have concentrated a
fair amount of effort
in the last two years at
going back in granular detail
and reading in the
popular press, as well
as professional journals, what
people thought about eugenics,
what people thought
about birth control,
and what they thought about
abortion, say, in 1916.
And the answer that I
have is, most of them
thought they could
find something
good to say about eugenics.
It would be hard to know
what it was unless you
ask them further questions.
Many people in the
eugenics movement
were split on the
question of birth control.
Some said it was a bad idea.
Teddy Roosevelt went ballistic
every time you mentioned it.
He said, oh, that's
race suicide.
All those girls going
to Harvard should
be out there having babies.
We can't have that, and a
long, long literature on that.
But then there were
people on the other side,
also part of the
movement, who said,
we think this is a good idea.
It's not about quantity.
It's about quality.
We should be selective.
On the question
of abortion, there
is almost universal
silence because in 1916
either because people didn't
talk about such things--
although they did talk
about it in the newspapers
when someone died.
There was no debate about
eugenics and abortion.
So when people ask me questions
about eugenics and abortion,
I say, as a historian,
there was nobody
in the eugenics movement
who ever came out publicly
in favor of abortion.
So it's fine for us to
have the debates today,
and obviously they will go
on regardless of what I say.
But the abortion
debate and eugenics
are topics which don't fit the
historical frame that I look at
at all, and I would rather
that we argue about abortion
and use other words because
the other words are not so
freighted with pictures
of Hitler and swastikas.
PRESTON REYNOLDS: Hi.
I'm Preston Reynolds.
It's a real honor to meet
you and listen to this talk.
I'm a physician.
I'm also very professionally
trained as an historian,
and I teach a course
on grounds on race,
health disparities in the
history of African-Americans
in the health professions.
And was invited to
serve on the President's
Commission on Slavery in the
university and was invited--
part of a newly created
course on slavery
and its legacy at UVA to
teach a lecture on eugenics
and its impact here on grounds.
And I approached that
lecture as a historian,
coming from my other
course, thinking,
well, I knew about race
science and then read
Gregory Dorr's book
and your material
and was really impacted
by what I learned.
That lecture reverberated a lot.
I ended up meeting with
President Sullivan, gave her
a copy of Gregory Dorr's book,
talked with Dr. Rick Shannon.
And a lot of that scholarship
that you pioneered
and published really was
instrumental in the renaming
of Jordan Hall in
honor of Vivian Penn.
So I really want to
thank you and let
you know that the
work that you did,
while it was controversial,
actually I think
is contributing to a
much larger conversation.
I've been invited to
give that same lecture
now five times to
undergraduate courses
and to the medical students.
And people are
saying, why aren't we
talking about this
more and the impact
it continues to have in the
conversations or the lack
of conversations here on ground.
So I hope your lecture today
is part of that ongoing need
to open up this topic
for further exploration
and to make sure that we
right the wrongs of what's
happened in the past.
So thank you.
PAUL LOMBARDO: Well, thank
you for that comment.
Obviously I'm flattered,
but I should say, though,
that we had--
there was a course that
was given usually--
it was held in one of
the pavilions, sometimes
the rotunda, in the '90s and
early 2000s on the history
of the university.
And every year that I can
remember for about 10 years
somebody in the
history department
asked me come over and
give a lecture on eugenics.
So there wasn't any--
nobody was shying away from it.
It was out there, and people
were talking about it.
And I agree with you that
this is the sort of thing
that if one thing has
been constant in my life,
it's been giving talks
like this and then somebody
coming up to me--
usually someone who is
as old or older than me
and then someone who was in
high school and both of them
said the same thing, why did
nobody ever tell me about this?
So it's obvious that
it bears repeating.
Thank you.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
I completely echo all
of the wonderful things,
and it's an honor to be
here in your lecture today.
My name is Caitlin Spock.
I'm a doctoral student
in the School of Nursing,
and I've done a lot of personal
investigation for coursework
in the School of Nursing on
nursing's role in eugenics,
particularly in the
Buck v. Bell case.
What is your narrative or
argument as to why there
isn't--
there aren't stories of
nurses involved in eugenics?
We hear a lot about
physician involvement
and physician-driven medicine,
and knowing the essential role
that nurses play in
that patient care,
where are the nursing stories?
PAUL LOMBARDO: You
probably know better than I
because there are some
missing characters in all
these stories.
Nurses are one group missing.
And it's not because
they weren't there
because we know they were there.
We know they were there,
as nurses have always
been in health
care, standing side
by side with whoever was doing
the surgery, whoever was doing
the diagnosis, et cetera.
So it's always been
a challenge to me
to find the voice of nurses.
I never did.
You're in a better
position to do that now,
and I think probably know
where the sources are.
So good luck.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
Wasn't there a play
done about Nurse Rivers
with the Tuskegee?
PAUL LOMBARDO: Yes,
yes, Miss Evers' Boys.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
Right, right.
And that nurse died
just a few years ago,
but I think lived
to see the apology.
Other comments and questions?
So again, taking things,
as Joan often wanted to do,
why does this matter to
us today and tomorrow?
You made some
closing remarks that
suggested that we be a little
more tuned into the talk,
the rhetoric, and the
underlying assumptions
in our national and
international scene today.
Any thoughts you have about
ways that we might best
help the public conversation
be a more reasonable one
and perhaps embrace
some attitudes
that are not these historic
ones you've talked about?
PAUL LOMBARDO:
Yeah, I think that--
I gave a talk about
this not too long ago,
and someone in
the crowd asked me
if I was trying to
make a political point.
And what I said
to them was yeah,
I'm always trying to
make a political point.
But actually the material
that I read at that talk
was that something I'd
written 10 years ago.
Most of what I said today--
the pictures are new.
But most of what
I said today was
stuff that is in articles
that are a decade or more old.
When I wrote my book on the
Buck case, it came out in 2008,
and there were five or
six pending controversies,
if not pieces of
legislation, that
had been proposed-- one right
here in Virginia-- to sterilize
people.
So it's not like
we miss examples.
It's not like there
aren't enough out there.
It's not like we have to focus
on any person as the embodiment
of these problems.
It does seem to me that
there are some things that
are relatively straightforward.
We don't have to use
the word eugenics when
we talk about the
level of contempt
that we dredge up to
blame people with because
of their station in life.
And if we've learned
anything over the 250
years of this
experiment, we probably
should have learned that
finding scapegoats and making
them the brunt of our
fears always has a bad end.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
Does anyone
have a closing
comment or question?
AUDIENCE: Does the
topic of eugenics
come up in conversations
about capital punishment?
PAUL LOMBARDO: It does, yes.
It does because the earliest
arguments for eugenics
relied on two things.
One was segregation, which
Greg Dorr has spelled out
so well in his book, and
the other was sterilization.
Imprison was thought to
be the ideal segregation.
You lock people up, they
can't have children.
So that's an area that
you can think about.
When you execute people, they
certainly can't have children.
And in the case of so-called
eugenic euthanasia,
that's what the Nazis did.
Whether or not that rule
applies in 21st century America,
whether we should use
eugenics to talk about capital
punishment, again
to me I don't really
care to argue about
what the Nazis did
and whether we should
call it eugenics.
I think that if you have an
argument of capital punishment,
you should make it
on moral grounds.
You don't even need the word.
MARCIA DAY CHILDRESS:
So I'd like
to thank Paul Lombardo for
this enlightening lecture
and some things to think
about going forward certainly.
I'll also remind you this
is the last Medical Center
Hour of the spring semester
of this academic year.
We will resume in
early September,
and we hope that
you'll be back with us.
In the meantime, I'd
like to thank all of you
for your patronage
and your participation
through this year.
It's been a wonderful
year-long conversation,
and we anticipate more
of the same next year.
So thank you all for being
here, and again please join me
in thanking Paul Lombardo.
[APPLAUSE]
