Social Engineering and the Dark Side of American Liberalism

This article will give you nightmares: Social Engineering and the Dark Side of American Liberalism.

It begins with this:

To an outsider, the Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts looked like any other educational institution. During the school’s hay day in the 1920’s and 30’s, few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.

Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions.

Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society. In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D'Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.” It was not until the 1960s that the school began releasing their children to live in the outside world.

The ideology behind Fernald was supplied by the American Eugenics movement. It was customary for American liberals of the 1920s and 30s to identify human beings as either hereditarily valuable or inferior. Taking Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applying it to human society, they typically classed Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Native Americans and those of low-IQ as harmful to the human gene pool.

“People were told, we can be rid of all disease, we can lower the crime rate, we can increase the wealth of our nation, if we only keep certain people from having babies,” said Michael D'Antonio.
In his New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg shows that before Hitler gave eugenics a bad name, almost all the leading progressive intellectuals of the early 20th century interpreted Darwin’s theory as a writ to “interfere” with human natural selection. Indeed, when the National Socialist sterilized over 50,000 “unfit” Germans, a former advisor to Teddy Roosevelt exclaimed, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

Although contemporary left-wingers have tried to hush it up, it is a fact of history that the National Academy of Sciences, the American Medical Association, the National Research Council, Planned Parenthood and the pre-1960's Democratic Party, all supported the right of the US government to engage in Eugenic selection, while thirty states adopted legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals or classes. Conservatives, orthodox Roman Catholics and radical libertarians, on the other hand, were routinely ridiculed for their opposition to such policies.

The underlining premise behind the American eugenics movement was the view that irresponsible individualism in breeding would act as a cancer on the human gene pool, harming posterity. Government held the future of the human race in its reigns and could improve the evolutionary direction of the nation – and indeed the world - through strategic intervention.

The Fernald school is no longer operating and by the 1960’s all the states had canceled their sterilization laws. After Hitler gave the politics of race hygiene a bad name, American and British “progressives” stopped defending government’s right to direct the gene pool.

Nevertheless, the ideological coordinates behind these abuses remain as intact as ever within the minds of American left, although they have found a myriad of different expressions.

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