Most Americans don’t know our country’s dark history and love affair with Eugenics – the forcible castration or sterilization of citizens deemed undesirable, made possible, of course, by the power of the state.
William Faulkner obliquely railed against these monstrous policies in many of his novels.
“Eugenics attracted the support of prominent Americans. Progressive Theodore Roosevelt summed up eugenicist theory: ‘Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce.’ Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the famous opinion upholding Virginia’s decision to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck: ‘Three generations of imbeciles,’ he averred, ‘are enough.’
Other supporters were Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and in Britain, Winston Churchill and Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, postulator of evolution. Britain originated the idea of ‘lethal chambers’ for its ‘unfit.’ . . .
Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized. . . .
An irony of this book is that its publisher hails itself as ‘progressive.’ As the late economist and historian Murray Rothbard wrote, ‘Progressivism’ was a movement in New England born of Yankee Pietism in the early 19th century. By the early 20th, it had matured into a Messianic ideology of pervasive social controls to better the world: prohibition of alcohol, statist government regulation of business, even the ‘war to end all wars,’ World War I. And, of course, eugenics was there, too.” (Read more from waragainsttheweak.com)
I’m wary of the over-educated. They’re the ones, when they seize the reins of power, who think the rest of us need to be saved from ourselves, who think they can socially engineer a better world through the power of the state. Freedom works best.
I see eugenics in the same light as obsession with world over-population in the 80’s, or global warming today. Politicians lead very empty lives and need problems to solve, real or imagined. Pseudo science provides an endless source of pseudo crises for which politicians can take money and power and pretend to save the world.
You proffer that Faulkner writes against Eugenics in may of his novels but do not go on to prove it. I am writing a dissretation on William Faulkner and Eugenics arguing just that, that Faulkner was against it and was wondering where you had found this evidence?
Hi erb!
Fascinating dissertation topic. I get the impression from Benjy in Sound & the Fury, and the character (forget the name) in As I Lay Dying. I know there’s at least one short story example too, but I can’t recall it well.
In all these examples, it seems to me that the mentally retarded character is the most loving and emotionally capable. It’s especially pronounced because all the characters around him are thoughtless, selfish and cruel. Also, at least in the two novels I cited, the issue of that character getting sterilized is in the story too.
Good luck.