Eugenics in America
What do you think of when you hear the word eugenics? Well, one thing that should come to mind is Hitler and what he did with the Jews and other people he thought were noncompliant to what he had in mind was the perfect human race. Not only did Hitler do this, but the American people thought it was ok in the mid 19th century. Even in our time there are some things that people are doing that could be considered as eugenics, such as genetic testing. These things and others will be talked about in this paper, and they will attempt to be better explained. What a few people think about eugenics is not necessarily what everybody else thinks about it. The reason for saying this is because from the mid 20th century up to the present, geneticists have been doing genetic testing. One main question that will be addressed is how have we as Americans and other societies of the world tried to control the science of improving the human stock for social and political reasons since 1865. To answer this question I guess we will have to start at the beginning. Eugenics was probably really started when Alfred Binet came up with the intelligence test in France. The test was made up of a series of short tasks that were in some way related to
Every intelligence test that followed was based on these two tests, and these tests also showed that the United States faced a real problem from immigration, and the results of the tests were mentioned again and again, in the debates of the Immigration Restriction Act. While there he came up with the Army Alpha and the Army Beta exams and tested 1. " Another thing that he found was that people of darker skin had a lower average test score than light-skinned people. Yerkes, who was a professor of Psychology at Harvard in 1915, straight to the rank of colonel. This act severely limited immigration through firm quotas. Some of the reasons blacks didn't go to school during this time because schools were segregated, the education was not equal to what the whites were getting, and many of the black schools were poor. If they still failed the Army Beta exam they had their individual IQ tested. He also came up with a scale that showed that anyone with an IQ lower than seventy was a "moron" and anyone with an IQ of one hundred and thirty and higher was considered a genius. Finally, if someone got a D and E, Yerkes said that they should not be expected to read and understand written directions. The people were a pauper family in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey. Also, what has been happening very recently, is doctors are scared not to do the testing because they don't want to be sued by women who give birth to a child with a birth defect. So, after reading this you should have some more idea of how the United States got the idea of eugenics when Goddard took Binet's IQ test and used it to distinguish mentally feeble people. Goddard had a group of people that he thought was a good example of the gene being passed from one generation to the next. Yerkes had confused cause and effect when he said this.
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