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Alexander Graham Bell’s Eugenics



Speaking of eugenics, I just found out a much-beloved American inventor was all about it:

Along with many very prominent thinkers and scientists of the time, Bell was connected with the eugenics movement in the United States. From 1912 until 1918 he was the chairman of the board of scientific advisors to the Eugenics Record Office associated with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York, and regularly attended meetings. In 1921 he was the honorary president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics held under the auspices of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Organizations such as these advocated passing laws (with success in some states) that established the compulsory sterilization of people deemed to be, as Bell called them, a “defective variety of the human race.” By the late 1930s about half the states in the US had eugenics laws, the California laws being used as a model for eugenics laws in Nazi Germany.

His ideas about people he considered defective centered on the deaf. This was due to his feelings for his deaf family and his contact with deaf education. In addition to advocating sterilization of the deaf, Bell wished to prohibit deaf teachers from being allowed to teach in schools for the deaf, he worked to outlaw the marriage of deaf individuals to one another, and he was an ardent supporter of oralism over sign language. His avowed goal was to eradicate the language and culture of the deaf so as to force them to assimilate into the hearing culture for their own long-term benefit and for the benefit of society at large. Although this attitude is widely seen as paternalistic and arrogant today, it was mainstream in that era.

Speaking of which, Margaret Sanger, the founder of what later became Planned Parenthood was also a very vocal eugenicist. Think about that the next time you put a condom on or take a birth control pill. Also check out this interesting passage I found online about another woman from the same era, Charlotte Perkins Gilman:

Gilman’s feminist eugenics, what she called “Humaniculture,” envisions women as the enlightened society’s eugenic agents. Women have a two-fold role: they select fitter men for marriage men and, and they collectively supervise the raising of fitter children. Women select fitter mates with the help of state certification of men’s biological fitness; males are required to be
eugenically certified, so that women have good information when selecting a mate, and are less likely to make a dysgenic match. Gilman also envisioned that all parenting would be given over to a cadre of professionally trained women, what she called “social parentage.”

Would be interesting to try and relate this early eugenics trends into later cultural movements such as feminism and changing gender roles, a subject which we have touched on here in the past…

On a related note, I am trying to locate the website for a book I found online a while back. But I can no longer remember what it is called. It dealt with the modulation of eugenics into genetics, and chronicled people like Sanger, the birth control movement, and I think may have even gone into the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. I believed there were several articles and sample chapters on this website as well. Does this ring any bells for anyone? If you know the book or website I am referring to, please let me know!

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11 Reader Responses

  1. Andrew Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 1:31 pm

    Speaking of which, Margaret Sanger, the founder of what later became Planned Parenthood was also a very vocal eugenicist. Think about that the next time you put a condom on …

    Mmmm … Margaret Sanger.

  2. Post3r Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 3:51 pm

    Another thing that fascinates me is the media as an eugenic system. I think it was on Breakinh Open the Head, where Pinchbeck argues that mass media is a sort of return of shamanic themes at a large scale.

    Perhaps it works like an attractor that selects some kind of mental profiles and mixes them up, like a massive DNA recoding.

    Or something like that …

  3. Terry Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 3:52 pm

    Not sure what book online book your looking for, but here’s some more detailed info on Graham and Eugenics:

    The American Consultative Committee was appointed at the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912. It was responsible for organizing the Second International Congress which was scheduled for 1915 but not held till 1921 due to the war. The committee members were: C.B. Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, William Castle, C.R. Henderson, A. Meyer, F.A. Woods, Ales Hrdlicka, and Vernon Lyman Kellogg. Henry Fairfield Osborn was President of the Congress, which appointed the “Ad Interim Committee”.

    Eugenics is often advanced by families. For example, the Osborn family (Henry Fairfield Osborn, Fred Osborn, Fairfield Osborn, John Jay Osborn) is related to the Dodge family (Cleveland E. Dodge) and to Newell Brown. In England this tendency is very marked, especially in relation to the Darwin family. The Darwins are related to the Wedgwoods, the Huxleys, the Keynes (the family of John Maynard Keynes), the Langdon Downs (the family of the discoverer of Downs syndrome), the Brains, the Adrians, the Arthurs (the family of the doctor who starved to death John Pearson, a Downs syndrome baby), and the Barlows. According to Philip Bloom of the English Eugenics Society, the Darwins and other family grouping like them run England. (see Uncommon Families)
    Similarly, Bates’ wife was a descendant of Alexander Graham Bell, a family which has always been much involved in eugenics.

    Alexander Bell himself supported eugenics. The National Geographic magazine is controlled by his descendants, the Grosvenors. The National Geographic has been advocating contraception as the solution for the problems of displaced native peoples for some time. In the December 1988 issue, it pledged itself to work what it calls “a better knowledge of geography”.

    But by “a better knowledge of geography” is meant eugenics as outlined above by Marston Bates. In “Will We Mend Our Earth” Gilbert Grosvenor explains that “the dark side of technology” comes from the number of people using it. He says that “electric lamps … automobiles … air conditioning … refrigerators … Their destructive impact has come with the surge in their popularity, in the world’s bulging population … “. But experts feel that the problems are not a cause for despair because “examples of success were cited frequently. China, once considered the vanguard of the population explosion, has curbed its growth to near replacement level.” Grosvenor pledged to use National Geographic resources “to alert the public to the dangers outlined … With all the tools at our disposal …”.

    The National Geographic Society and magazine became a force under Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone. He was on the Board of Directors of the Eugenics Record Office and wrote several articles on eugenics for the National Geographic magazine. His descendants, the Grosvenors, still edit and control the magazine. Eugenics has been dropped as a topic but comments supportive of family planning appear frequently in the midst of articles on far away places. In 1988 a symposium held by the National Geographic discussed conservation and resource issues in relation to the “population explosion” in the Third World. The National Geographic pledged to do more on this issue. C. Haskins was at this symposium, which was reported in the December 1988 issue of the National Geographic.

    These quotes are from “The American Eugenics Society - Members, Officers And Directors Activites Database,” which was gleaned from an important research site, Eugenics Watch. They used to have lists of all the Eugenics Society’s directors, officers and members (basically a who’s who of the English/Eastern Establishment during the 20th century). It isn’t accessible anymore in its entirety - broken links all over the place. So I went through the internet archive of their old address and compiled it all, with structure, into a single doc file.

    If you want to do research on eugenics, I can’t recommended it enough. The whole field of genetics, and organizations with genetics in their title - most of them were instituted and run by those involved with the eugenics movement as well.

  4. Tim Boucher Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 5:05 pm

    Thanks Terry, great quotes and research as usual! Too few people understand the connections between eugenics and genetics I think.

    mass media is a sort of return of shamanic themes at a large scale.

    In what sense? I read that book but don’t remember that part too well…

    the media as an eugenic system

    Absolutely, I think part of the purpose of the media is to select for a certain neurotype of person to be more successful and denigrate those who don’t fit it

  5. alistair Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 6:07 pm

    http://www.amazon.com/Vitalogy-Pearl-J...2-5760335-0438531?ie=UTF8&s=music

    this album cover was an actual book published in the early part of the last century that dealt with similar subjects as phrenology. interesting that pearl jam would choose it as an album cover.

  6. alistair Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 6:09 pm

    http://www.phrenology.org/

    for clarity……*/*

  7. Insecto Says:
    November 8th, 2006 at 6:52 pm

    Tim:

    Greetings. First post here. There are two books that come to mind in regards to the last paragraph of your entry:

    War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race by Edwin Black
    (not sure if online chapters available.)

    Flesh Machine; Cyborgs,Designer Babies, Eugenic Consciousness
    by Critical Arts Ensemble
    (this was available online in its entirety at one point.)

  8. Post3r Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 7:39 am

    Tim, now i don’t have BOTH here, but I remember it well because it hit me (i was thinking simillar things in that time).

    I have a friend that says that schizophrenia+money=art on in better cases, a spiritual life, and schizophrenia+no money=mental ill.

    The mass media, in my view, has enlarged the possibilities of these neurotypes to know each others, and recombine themselves with his own world visions, ideas an neural functions, not to talk of the new modes of relation (in a physiological sense) with the tecnhosphere, that appear to bring back altered states of conciuosness to the masses.

    So maybe the media, yes, it is a selector of more succesful genotypes/neurotypes (or more adequated to this moment of the history). Now, what we need is to take conciousness of this fact and appeal to these “elected” an agenda that ivolves all the rest of society.

  9. brekin Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 4:43 pm

    I’m not sure if this is the same book, but E. Michael Jones’s book Libido Dominandi deals with all of the above mentioned: http://www.amazon.com/Libido-Dominandi...3-2015455-0394248?ie=UTF8&s=books

  10. Terry Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 10:04 pm

    E. Michael Jones’s book Libido Dominandi [: Sexual Liberation and Political Control] deals with all of the above mentioned

    Incredible book! Some good info on the Illuminati from German prime sources in that book as well where Jones talks about the similarities between Freud’s psychoanalysis and the methods used by the Illuminati (Seelenspionage or Semiotik der Seele: “Soul Espionage”, “Semiotics of the Soul”).

  11. brekin Says:
    November 9th, 2006 at 10:13 pm

    Yeah his stuff is pretty far reaching and apt, although I don’t agree with everything he says I keep reading him, Monsters Of The Id, Living Machines, The Slaughter of Cities, all incredible.



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