We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,705,717.98 | Books Available: 749,115 | Members Online: 121

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Better for All the World : The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity

Better for All the World The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity
Author: Harry Bruinius

In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius charts the little-known history of eugenics in America—a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans. — Bruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in poverty and caught up in a new scien... more »tific quest for racial purity. Buck v. Bell became a test case brought before the Supreme Court, which voted 8–1 to make sterilization a constitutionally valid way for the state to prevent anyone deemed “unfit” from having children.

The court’s majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eugenicists believed that the human race must begin to take control not just of human reproduction, but of ethnic intermingling. With the natural and objective methods of science they hoped to breed only the biologically best of the races and prevent the propagation of the worst. The result: marriage restriction, anti-miscegenation, and immigration laws.

In Better for All the World, Harry Bruinius shows how reformers across the nation transformed haphazard, locally run systems of charity and welfare—mostly church handouts and town asylums—into government-run systems of welfare that aspired to make America a place where social and moral purity could reign, free from the “hereditary defectives” of the past.

Those who supported the programs included Theodore Roosevelt; Margaret Sanger; Alexander Graham Bell; the heads of the Harriman, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations; and scholars from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.

Bruinius writes how many of the leaders of the eugenics movement were New England Protestants who used an evangelical tone that harked back to their Puritan forebears, and who proclaimed their goal to keep the “American stock” pure by excising the causes of immoral behavior.

Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and documents never before used, the author writes of the three scientists who developed the theories and practices of eugenics: Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the word “eugenics” to describe the science of better breeding; Charles Davenport, the first influential eugenic thinker in America, professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, direct descendant of Reverend John Davenport, the founder of the city of New Haven; and Harry Laughlin, Davenport’s protégé, the nation’s foremost expert in eugenic sterilization and also a leader in the movement to stop the tide of immigrants coming to this country.

The author makes clear how America’s quest for racial purity influenced Nazi Germany: one of its first laws, the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, followed the work of California’s Human Betterment Foundation and Harry Laughlin’s Model Law. In less than two years, more than 150,000 German citizens were sterilized, preparing the way for the genocide to come. In 1936, the Nazi regime awarded Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University for his contributions to “racial hygiene.” During the Nuremberg Trials, the Allied prosecutors were doubtful they could convict Nazi doctors of “crimes against humanity”—since those accused had carried out acts based on theories of eugenics that had been practiced for decades in the United States.

ISBN-13: 9780375413711
ISBN-10: 0375413715
Publication Date: 2/21/2006
Pages: 416
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Knopf
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 1
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Read All 1 Book Reviews of "Better for All the World The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and Americas Quest for Racial Purity"

Genres:

Politics & Social Sciences >> Government >> Social Policy
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Discrimination & Racism
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> General
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Sociology >> Race Relations >> America
Nonfiction >> Social Sciences >> Sociology >> Race Relations >> General
Medical Books >> Medicine >> Medical Ethics

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Better for All the World : The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity

Loading...