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Eugenics Based Sterlizations
Admitted by Virginiaby Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
February 2, 2001When people read my articles mentioning eugenics, many think I am referring to some conspiracy theory or am unfairly juxtaposing a legitimate scientific interest in genetics with the horrors of Nazi Germany. The following Washington Post article makes the reality of the American eugenics movement unambiguously clear. Hundreds of thousands of American citizens, most of whom were normal, were forcibly sterilized based on laws in 30 different states. The sterilizations were just one small aspect of American eugenics.
Much of psychiatric medicine is based on eugenics and on the work done by Nazi scientists-quite a few of who were imported into the US following WWII. The US military has its own very extensive eugenics program. Many of the population control agencies of the US and UN are fronts for eugenics. Our current Presidents' family has been in the forefront of the eugenics movement for 70 years. The Human Genome Project admits on its own website that eugenics was the origin of this scientific project. This article from the most mainstream of newspapers just begins to open this aspect of the hidden history of racial genocide in the US.Robert Lederman
Va. House Voices Regret for Eugenics
State Was Once a Leader in Forced Sterilizations
By Craig Timberg
Del. Mitchell Van Yahres (D-Charlottesville) sponsored the resolution. "Scientifically we're greatly advanced, but morally we have a problem," he said. (Bob Brown - AP)
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Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, February 3, 2001; Page A01
RICHMOND, Feb. 2 -- The House of Delegates voted today to express regret for Virginia's policies of selective breeding during the 20th century, including the forced sterilization of 8,000 mostly poor, uneducated men and women for supposed hereditary "defects."
The 85 to 10 vote came after some of the hundreds of victims of Virginia's forced sterilizations spoke out in television and newspaper reports spotlighting the state's leading role in a movement called eugenics. It sought to use government power to breed away such chronic social problems as poverty, immorality, crime, addiction and ignorance.
The resolution, which requires the approval of the state Senate, would make Virginia the first among the 30 states that once had forced sterilization laws to formally express regret. The resolution passed today would declare "profound regret over the Commonwealth's role in the eugenics movement in this country and the incalculable human damage done in the name of eugenics."
It was a remarkable moment for a state whose leaders prefer to talk about Virginia's role in helping found the nation -- and lately, its high-tech dominance -- instead of its prominent role in such historic evils as slavery, segregation and forced sterilizations.
Even today's resolution was changed to remove the word "apology." Some House members, including Del. Harry J. Parrish (R-Manassas), wanted to go further and remove the passage expressing regret, though he called the resolution's intentions admirable.
"We're offering regrets for something that was done legally," Parrish said. "It's improper for us to now second-guess the General Assembly then."
Virginia officials and academics had a leading role in the American eugenics movement, which paralleled the Nazi drive for a super race. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum has requested documents from Virginia as it prepares an exhibit in 2004 tentatively called "Nazi Race Science."
The eugenics movement began in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century. Indiana passed the nation's first sterilization law based on eugenics in 1907. Over the next seven decades, government hospitals sterilized 60,000 men and women. Only California, with 20,000 sterilizations, had more than Virginia.
Virginia passed its Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924 -- which targeted "socially inadequate offspring" -- on the same day it passed the Racial Integrity Act prohibiting marriage between whites and nonwhites. Both grew out of eugenicists' drive for what they deemed a superior stock of humans.
"Virginia eugenicists saw themselves as the vanguard of the future," said Gregory M. Dorr, a University of Alabama historian who studied Virginia's role in the eugenics movement.
More than half of Virginia's sterilizations happened at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded in Lynchburg, though others happened at hospitals in Petersburg, Staunton, Williamsburg and Marion. Most victims were white, but some African Americans and Indians also were sterilized, historians say.
"People were sterilized not because they were feebleminded, but because they were 'poor white trash,' " said Steven Selden, a University of Maryland professor who wrote a book on eugenics that was published last year.
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization at the Lynchburg facility in a case involving a woman named Carrie Buck, who had become pregnant as a teenager. In allowing her sterilization in 1927, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes assessed Buck, her mother and her daughter, then declared, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
A surge of sterilizations followed nationwide, tapering off when Nazi brutality in World War II turned public opinion against eugenics.
"The Nazis took great comfort from the eugenics movement in America," said Paul A. Lombardo, a University of Virginia historian.
Forced sterilizations continued on a very limited basis in Virginia until 1979. Today's resolution calls on society to "reject absolutely any such abhorrent pseudo-scientific movement in the future."
State lawmakers urged particular vigilance at a time when scientists are decoding the human genome and making possible far more profound manipulation of genetic traits than envisioned by eugenicists during the last century.
"We're tampering with DNA, with genes. And scientifically we're greatly advanced, but morally we have a problem," warned Del. Mitchell Van Yahres (D-Charlottesville), the resolution's sponsor. "We don't want to go down that road again."
A key supporter of House Resolution 607 was the chamber's top Republican, Speaker S. Vance Wilkins Jr., a veteran lawmaker from the small town of Amherst, just north of Lynchburg. He helped the resolution get past a reluctant committee this week.
"It's the right thing to do," said Wilkins before today's session. "They're facts of history . . . and we shouldn't try to cover them up."
Claude A. Allen, Virginia's secretary of health and human resources, said Gov. James S. Gilmore III's administration had taken no position on the eugenics resolution and is seeking a legal opinion on the threat of civil liability for the state before taking a stand. He said forced sterilizations "clearly were atrocious."
One Virginia victim of sterilization was Jesse Meadows. He was sent to the Lynchburg colony in 1940 after his mother died and his father remarried. Meadows was just 17. More than 60 years later, he can remember the names and faces of the two doctors and the nurse who performed a vasectomy against his will.
Meadows married after leaving the facility and made a living as a house painter, but he could never have children. Now 78, he lives alone in Lynchburg, in the same neighborhood as several others who were sterilized at the colony there.
"They ought to apologize for doing something like that, treating them like animals," Meadows said. "They ruined a lot of people's lives."
© 2001 The Washington Post Company To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Robert Lederman is an artist, writer and activist and is also the President of the street artist advocacy group, A.R.T.I.S.T.
Click here for an archive of A.R.T.I.S.T. related news articles on the Freedom Forum websiteHis essays and Op-Eds have appeared in hundreds of alternative publications as well as the Daily News, Penthouse, Africa Sun Times, Street News and The Shadow.
Lederman was falsely arrested 41 times for his anti-Giuliani activities and was never convicted of any of the charges. As a result of the arrests, he's won four Federal lawsuits and overturned three laws.
He is best known for having created hundreds of paintings of Mayor Giuliani as a Hitler like dictator which were carried in demonstrations throughout the eight years of the Giuliani administration. Images of his paintings and articles about his arrests and lawsuits have appeared on all of the major television networks hundreds of times as well as frequently appearing in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Newsday, Newsweek, People, The Washington Post, LA Times and NY Magazine.Robert Lederman,
President of A.R.T.I.S.T.
(Artists' Response To Illegal State Tactics)
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
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