the reality was much different

In 1936, after years of campaigning, numerous arrests, and multitudes of newsletters and publications called things like The Woman Rebel, Sanger won a court battle that had the effect of making birth control more accessible to American women. Because of her interest in the whole question of reproduction, or more specifically the lack thereof, she was also an advocate for eugenics and the enforced sterilization of the unfit. 

It’s worth noting that she was an advocate for this at a moment in history when eugenics was not just a hypothetical theory to be speculated about in classrooms, but a bloody and vicious experiment in the midst of being carried out in Germany—an experiment that several hundred thousand American men gave their lives to stop…

Merkle, Rebekah. Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity (p. 48). Canon Press. Kindle Edition. 

I want to be careful of making overblown accusations. I don’t want to say that this author has lied. But even if she isn’t lying in knowingly spreading untruth, as someone writing about history in her book, even if it’s only a brief summation of history, she should do better.

If one reads only the above excerpt (and this is all she writes concerning eugenics in this book), one might get the impression that eugenics was a German thing, that eugenics experiments were happening only in Germany, more particularly Nazi Germany, and that one reason America fought in World War II was to stop those experiments in Germany.

The truth is much, much more complicated, and America played a much bigger and much darker role in eugenics than this author’s words might even hint at.

I’ve recently started reading a book called “War Against The Weak” by Edwin Black, a book about the history of eugenics. I’ve not gotten far into it, but I’ve read about the early days of eugenics.

Eugenics was a British idea at the first, and it made its way to the US. In the US, it found very ripe soil; the racial conflicts and overall arrogance of Americans against anyone they already deemed inferior was very welcoming to the idea of finding ways to get rid of those inferior people. And “inferior” should not automatically be read as “race”, thought that was a large part of it, but the ill and those considered weak-minded or mentally sick and those who were criminals and those in poverty were also considered unfit.

As the twentieth century opened for business, the eugenic spotlight would now swing across the ocean from England to the United States. In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers. Galton could not have envisioned that his social idealism would degenerate into a ruthless campaign to destroy all those deemed inadequate. But it would become nothing less than a worldwide eugenic crusade to abolish all human inferiority.

Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race-Expanded Edition (pp. 60-61). Dialog Press. Kindle Edition.

The Eugenics Record Office went into high gear even before the doors opened in October of 1910. Its first mission was to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, estimated to be at least 10 percent of the population. This 10 percent was sometimes nicknamed the “submerged tenth” or the lower tenth. At the time, this amounted to millions of Americans. When found, they would be subjected to appropriate eugenic remedies to terminate their bloodlines. Various remedies were debated, but the leading solutions were compulsory segregation and forced sterilization.

Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race-Expanded Edition (pp. 103-104). Dialog Press. Kindle Edition. 

It is simply dishonest history, even if it was done only with lack of knowledge, for the author to write as if America was only the “good guys” on the issue of eugenics. When it comes to eugenics, the US is not the hero; if anything, the US was also very much a part of the "bloody and vicious experiment" of eugenics.

This hurts the author’s credibility. calling into question other things she wrote in this book. If she’s so very incorrect about this, what else is she wrong about, or what else is she misrepresenting? Of course, we readers should be questioning the things we read, and that includes this blog post as well the books quoted in this post. We should not believe something simply because a particular person wrote it. We should not allow someone else to do our thinking for us.