Label:
The promotion of the American Eugenics movement by prominent Americans, James Watson
Description:
Interviewee: James Watson
DNAi Location:
Chronicle>Threat of the unfit>epilogue
Progressive eugenics
Many Americans accepted eugenics social policy as a rational solution to the problem of what to do with the "unfit."
Epilogue
Many prominent Americans saw eugenics as a progressive solution to social problems – including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell, Luther Burbank (the California seed producer), Henry Fairfield Osborn (president of the American Museum of Natural History), and David Starr Jordan (first president of Stanford University). Sophisticated geneticists – including Thomas Hunt Morgan, Hermann Muller, and William Ernest Castle – supported eugenics at one time or another, but rejected coercive legislation based on an incomplete knowledge of genes involved in complex behaviors.
In general, eugenicists were lax in defining the criteria for measuring many of the "traits" they studied, and they were too quick to force their data to fit into simple Mendelian templates. American eugenicists sought genetic explanations of human behavior to the almost total exclusion of environmental or social circumstances. Thus, Davenport amusingly concluded that naval captains were influenced by a gene for "thalassophilia" (love of the sea), rather than childhoods spent around ships. More ominously, "pauperism" and "social dependency" were interpreted as genetic problems, rather than a financial ones. In retrospect, eugenicists' pedigrees of faulty genes are striking examples of lack of education and opportunity.
The Johnson Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 made cunning use of statistics to change the complexion of American immigration. It limited immigrants from each country according to their proportion in the U.S. population in 1890, a time prior to the major waves of southern and eastern European immigration when the U.S. was decidedly more Anglo-Nordic in composition. This had the eugenicists’ desired effect of cutting off immigration from southern and eastern Europe. This xenophobia persisted for half a century – U.S. immigration did not reach pre-Johnson Act levels again until the late 1980s.
James Watson discusses the failure of eugenics to identify genetic differences between people they considered "fit" and "unfit."
Biological elements:
Concepts precesses:
eugenics
Tools & methods :