The Curious Case of Eugenic Pacifists
Readers Respond to “Nazi Ideals and the Disabled Inmates of Oregon's Fairview Home”
Listen to this week’s article here, or read on below.
Last week’s final installment of the three-part series about disabled inmates who escaped institutions prompted important reader replies and questions about the types of people who supported eugenic sterilization and murder, and why.
This brief follow-up to the series is hardly exhaustive, but does offer up a few thoughts, starting with a summary of some of reader Jack Yates’s important additions, which he sent after reading the series.
A longtime student of this history and teacher of workshops about eugenics (among many important subjects) Yates reminds us that “no one is immune from deciding that there are some kinds of people who should not exist.” As he often teaches, eugenics was (and has always been) attractive to folks across the ideological spectrum.
A young Winston Churchill was a eugenicist and actively advocated for a sterilization provision in Britain’s Mental Deficiency Act of 1913. He was defeated by eugenicists who did not support sterilization—with some help from America, from Walter Fernald, the subject of my forthcoming biography—but that doesn’t mean Churchill’s personal beliefs changed.
Famously, birth control advocate Margaret Sanger and disability rights leader Helen Keller were also both proponents of eugenic murder. In 1922, Sanger wrote, “All over the country we have asylums and institutions where we nourish the unfit instead of exterminating them. Nature eliminates its weeds, but we turn them into parasites and allow them to reproduce.”
Sanger and Keller are powerful examples of why eugenics was so terrifying pervasive and effective. They genuinely believed that they were being caring and compassionate, and they are exactly why it’s so important to explore the history of those who claim to be motivated by love as much as those who have embraced hatred and violence.
To that end, readers expressed surprise at the fact that Willamette University Professor Sceva Laughlin—the man who called for killing the disabled in Oregon in 1936—was a Quaker and a pacifist. Rightly, they asked, how could a champion for eugenic murder see himself as a pacifist?
It would be an important question no matter what, but it’s all-the-more important because Laughlin was not alone. Pacifists represented a powerful sect within the eugenics movement. For instance, in a 2018 article, I wrote about the anti-war Baptist minister Reverend Kenneth C. MacArthur, who in 1930 said, “One of the worst things about war, it kills off so many of the physically fit and leaves the physically unfit.”
MacArthur’s comment is revealing. After World War I, many people believed that America had just sent its best and brightest “stock” off to slaughter. Many people believed that the war had deprived America of future generations of healthy babies born to superior individuals. Left behind were those who many upper-class, progress-focused Americans were angry to be stuck with and they believed that many Americans were unfit to propagate. Among pacifists, there was a belief that all of this proved that war was against the laws of nature because it unnaturally imbalanced the species. The only way to get back in balance with nature was to forcibly step in and rebalance things by responding to the violence caused by war with the peaceful mercy of killing the disabled and unfit. If that seems like a huge logical leap, the last piece in the series reminds us that many people subscribed to it whether it was logical or not, and few others did the hard work of resisting and confronting it.
But it would be wrong to assume that this idea was limited to one era of American history. In fact, one reason scientific eugenics gained such a fast foothold in early 20th century America is that it came on the heels of an idea called degenerationism” that was widely held in religious, academic, and reform circles. The heart of the pacifists’ beliefs about the decline of good racial stock can be traced to this idea that generation by generation, the human species was becoming more and more flawed.
Scholars often point to sociologist Richard Dugdale’s 1877 book, “The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, and Heredity” as an early example. It birthed a strain of American writing that aimed to show, much like Sceva Laughlin’s class tried in Oregon in 1936, that certain families were a natural burden on the species and the state.
But the idea goes back deeper in our history. It can be found among religious social reformers like Samuel Gridley Howe and Dorothea Dix in the early-mid 19th century. Howe was an avowed foe of racism and slavery, but believed in some odd ideas like the pseudoscience of skull-measuring called phrenology. Among his ideas was the degenerationist belief that masturbation drained the human life force, resulting in so-called “idiocy.” It wasn’t all quackery. For instance, buried in this bizarre set of beliefs was the recognition of fetal alcohol syndrome and the negative impacts of industrial labor on poor peoples’ physical health.
In the present day, degenerationist beliefs are held by people like the philosopher Peter Singer, the doctor Ezekiel Emmanuel (brother of Rahm) and the transhumanist tech devotees we see; all of them, much like their predecessors in history, wealthy and deeply concerned about using their power to reshape humanity with claims of a utopia far out over the horizon.
All of those things are for other articles in (Un)Hidden down the road, but hopefully these quick reflections help to cast a man like Sceva Laughlin among his friends, colleagues, forbears, and descendants in his own dark place in our history.