1. History of Eugenics and Disability
Joanne Woiak,
Disability Studies, University of Washington
Eugenics and Disability website

2. “Eugenics” coined by Francis Galton (1883), from the Greek “well-born”

3. Overview of history of eugenics, 1900-1945
Goal to improve the biological quality of the human race.
Methods involved controlling reproduction.
Organized in 30+ countries, including diverse ideas and policies.
Key components of eugenics:
Scientific knowledge claims.
Ideological beliefs.
Social practices aiming to reduce “social problem groups” for “the public good.”

4. Overview of eugenics: policies to improve the hereditary make-up of the “race”
Positive eugenics
Encourage “fitter” people to have more kids who share their “good” genes.
Negative eugenics
Persuade, pressure, or compel “unfit” people not to pass on “defective” genes.
Permanent institutionalization.
Forced sterilization (surgery to make infertile).
Murder of disabled people and ethnic minorities.

5. Overview of disability studies
Framework for answering “what is disability?”
Disability is defined as restricted participation caused by social barriers.
“The right to live in the world.”
Society is the problem.
Negative attitudes and stereotypes (ableism), architectural barriers, social policies, cultural representations... oppress people with disabilities.

6. Overview of DS: models of disability
“Medical model” (or “individual model”):
Problem is the individual’s impaired body or mind.
The solution is medical treatment (or prevention).
The individual is expected to make efforts to “overcome” her disability in order to be accepted by society.
“Social model” of disability:
Equality comes about by changing the environment, not the individual’s body/mind.

7. Eugenics analyzed by disability studies
We can identify these core components of eugenics:
1. Biological (genetic) cause of social problems.
Disability is pathology; dealt with by medical-scientific professionals .
2. Some people are a burden on society.
Disability is dependency; unproductive people; institutionalized.
Medical and economic framings of disability produced ideas and practices that labeled many kinds of people unfit for citizenship (and unfit to be born).
So who were the “unfit” / “defective” / “socially inadequate”?

8. List of undesirable traits, from the Eugenics Record Office, 1911, “The Study of Human Heredity”

9. formerly the Eugenics Record Office: http://eugenicsarchive.org
What counted as “normal”? Fitter Families Contests as positive eugenics
Eugenics Image Archive, hosted by the Human Genome Project Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory,
formerly the Eugenics Record Office:

10. Eugenics targeted people with disabilities: e. g
Eugenics targeted people with disabilities: e.g. pedigree of “feebleminded” family

11. Social problems blamed on impoverished individuals: class & disability
Degenerate family pedigrees
Mental & behavioral “defects”
High birth rate
The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity (1877 & 1915), found 2800 family members in New York, estimated welfare costs $2 million.

12. Disability was believed to be the cause of other “social ills”: crime, poverty, prostitution
“The brighter class of the feebleminded, with their weak will-power and deficient judgment, are easily influenced for evil, and are prone to become vagrants, drunkards, and thieves…. It is better and cheaper for the community to assume the permanent care of this class before they have carried out a long career of expensive crime.”

13. The “public good” of relieving the economic burden of disability
“It is a reproach to our intelligence that we as a people should have to support about half a million insane, feebleminded, epileptic, blind and deaf; 80,000 prisoners and 100,000 paupers at a cost of over 100 million dollars per year.”
-Charles Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office, 1910

14. History of state institutions for disabled people
19th century goal of treating “lunatics” and training “idiots” gave way by 1900 to long-term confinement and “care” in vast state institutions.
Massachusetts School for Idiotic Children: “brutes in the human shape, but without the light of human reason.”
1886 Washington School for Defective Youth
1906 State School for the Deaf and Blind
1906 State Institution for the Feebleminded
(1933 Custodial School)

15. Mental hospitals: Columbus Ohio Lunatic Asylum (1835)
By 1900, Columbus housed 1300 people with mental disability; 800 with intellectual disability; 800 blind or deaf.
Across the US by 1900: 300 asylums, 200,000 residents.
Peak in 1950s: 550,000 residents.

16. IQ testing: who was “feebleminded”?
1905 IQ invented by Alfred Binet: “abnormal” children can be educated.
1910s US psychologists corrupt this goal: Intelligence is hereditary, unchangeable. Label & institutionalize.
“Menace” to society.
By 1900, in US there were 328 institutions housing 200,000 people labeled mentally ill or mentally deficient.

17. 1918 IQ tests
US Army
For recruits who were non-English speaking or illiterate.
Complete the picture.
40% found to be FM.

18. Actual Test Questions, Army Alpha
SAMPLE People hear with their eyes\ears\nose\mouth
1. Pinochle is played with
rackets\cards\pins\dice
2. Habeus corpus is a term used in
medicine\law\pedagogy
3. Bud Fisher is a famous
actor\author\athlete\comic
4. Velvet Joe appears in ads for
tooth powder\soap\dry goods\tobacco
5. The number of a Kaffir’s legs is \4\6\8

19. Outcome of Army mental tests: ranking by race / national origin

20. 1913 Ellis Island mental testing Eugenicists as “moron detectors” 80% of immigrants scored feebleminded

21. Disability was sometimes defined in terms of race and ethnicity
1924 Immigration Restriction Act
Mental testing and “expert” testimony to Congress legitimized the law.
Set quotas for Eastern and Southern European immigrants allowed into the US.
Congressman Albert Johnson, R-WA, 1924, head of the immigration committee:
“With this act, the US is undertaking to regulate and control the great problem of the commingling of races. Our hope is in a homogeneous nation. At one time we welcomed all and all helped to build the nation. But now asylum ends. This nation must be as completely unified as any nation in Europe or Asia. Self-preservation demands it.”

22. Negative eugenics: 30 states had compulsory sterilization laws by 1930s

23. Eugenicist Harry Laughlin’s model law for compulsory sterilization (1922)
AN ACT to prevent the procreation of persons socially inadequate from defective inheritance, by authorizing and providing for the eugenical sterilization.
Persons Subject. All persons in the State who, because of degenerate or defective hereditary qualities are potential parents of socially inadequate offspring, regardless of whether such persons be in the population at large or inmates of custodial institutions, regardless also of the personality, sex, age, marital condition, race, or possessions of such person.
“Feebleminded, insane, criminalistic, epileptic, inebriate, diseased, blind, deaf, deformed, orphans, ne’er-do-wells, homeless, tramps, and paupers.”

24. Forced sterilization for “public health”
1927 Buck v. Bell, US Supreme Court.
This ruling upheld the Virginia sterilization statute and set precedent for more states.
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
“For the protection and health of the state.”
“The principal that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

25. Washington sterilization victims, 1909-1942 (2009 symposium)
Official number of surgeries under the law: 685
184 Male
501 Female (73%)
403 “Insane” (Male 147, Female 256)
276 “Feebleminded” (Male 33, Female 243)

26. Morality: disability was sometimes defined in terms of regulating sexual behavior
Female, 20. Parents not married. Mother drank constantly before conception and during pregnancy. Child was neglected and abused. Patient’s sexual condition: passionate. Lived with a man to whom she was not married. Hard to control where men are involved. Might easily become a prostitute.
Male, 20. Masturbator. Up to this time his parents have been able to care for this boy by keeping him closely at home. Now they are afraid that he will do harm to some of the little girls in his neighborhood.
Cases from the archives of the Human Betterment Foundation, California

27. Most extreme: eugenics in Nazi Germany
1933 Forced sterilization law:
applied to 400,000 “hereditary defectives.”
1939 T4 killing programs (so-called “euthanasia” or “mercy death”):
More than 200,000 institutionalized adults and children with disabilities.
Economic logic: “lives not worth living,” “useless eaters.”
1941 Final Solution
Gas chambers from Action T4 were moved to the concentration camps to murder 6 million Jewish people and other groups.

28. Links between German and American eugenics movements
Nazi regime seeking “racial purity” (1933) borrowed the idea of forced sterilization from the American eugenicists and used Laughlin’s model law (1922).
Hitler: “I have studied with great interest the laws of several Am. states concerning the prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock…. The possibility of excess and error is no proof of the incorrectness of these laws.”

29. “Euthanasia” practiced in US: 1917 pro-eugenics doctor and his film The Black Stork

30. Crimes against humanity?
Doctors and nurses who performed the sterilizations: none charged with crimes.
“Euthanasia” and human experimentation: 23 physicians were tried, 15 found guilty, 7 hanged. They argued their actions were “humane” to kill the disabled.

31. Conclusions: where was “disability” in the history of eugenics?
History of people with disabilities:
Institutionalization
Sterilization
Constructions of the category “disability”:
In medical and economic terms .
Overlaps / intersections with class, race, gender categories. “Disability” was determined based on ideological needs, tied to racism, sexism, beliefs about the “civilized white race” or Aryan purity.