60 Minutes: America's Flirtation with Eugenics

Eugenics, a spurious philosophy that cannibalized Darwin, popular at the end of the nineteenth and top of the twentieth century, and American business executives (and academics at prestigious universities, showered with corporate money to lionize their exploits intellectually) did a flirtatious dance all the way into the 1970s. The philosophy goes as follows: businessmen and the wealthy are at the top of the intellectual food chain (Paris Hilton, Donald Trump?) because they can "survive" with the fittest, and, by contrast, the poor are mentally retarded and prone to criminality, and are thus unnecessary to the society. CBS' Bob Simon tackles the thorny issue if Eugenics in America on 60 Minutes on Sunday.

The 60 Minutes website reads:

"The Nazis became infamous for it, but even before Hitler plotted his master race, America practiced eugenics and it's a secret that a 60 Minutes report brings back to center stage in all its ugly shame.

"Bob Simon's report on a state institution that once kept thousands of children away from the rest of society will be broadcast Sunday, May 2, at 7 p.m. ET/PT."

CBS' site continues:

"The Walter E. Fernald School in Waltham, Mass., was once part of nationwide system of state-run institutions that warehoused children deemed "feeble-minded" -- in some cases right up until the 1970s.

"Michael D'Antonio writes in his new book, The State Boys Rebellion, that eugenics was an idea that peaked in the 1920s and 1930s.

"People were told, 'We can be rid of all disease...lower the crime rate...increase the wealth of our nation, if we only keep certain people from having babies,'" D'Antonio tells Simon."

The Tech at MIT wrote on itself in 1995:

"At the Oct. 3 news conference that announced the completion of the committee's nearly 1,000-page report, (President Bill) Clinton made a formal apology to the thousands of subjects of radiation experiments reviewed by the committee.

"The report stated that children at the Fernald School were 'unfairly burdened' by researchers from MIT and Harvard, who encouraged the children to take part in tests with promises of gifts or trips to Red Sox games.

"The researchers also appeared 'unwilling to respect' some children's wishes not to participate in experiments, according to the report. The parents of the children involved in the experiments were not told that the tests involved radiation."

Fuck. The 60 Minutes site:

"In fact, many of the children were not mentally impaired, but merely wayward or poor and uneducated with no place to go. Such children were often subject to the abuse inherent in large institutions.

"Fred Boyce was committed to Fernald at 8 years old when his foster mother died. 'It was the easy way out. They didn't have to look for homes for you so they could dump you off in these human warehouses and just let you rot,' he tells Simon.

"Boyce spent 11 years there and was labeled a 'moron,' even though his intelligence was within the normal range. There were many others kept at Fernald who were not mentally deficient.

"'We thought for a long time that we belonged there, that we were not part of the species...[not]supposed to be born,' says Boyce, who describes a vicious cycle at Fernald of abuse and harsh punishments for trying to run away from the abuse.

"Moreover, the normal inmates like Boyce had to work long, hard hours in Fernald's gardens, orchards and other work areas and thus were denied a proper education."

They weren't deemed educable. They were poor.

Finally:

"Joe Almeida was at Fernald at the same time as Boyce was. He relates a similar experience, but talks about another secret both men share: They were unknowingly subjected to radiation experiments at Fernald.

"'We were getting special treatment...extra dessert...extra milk,' says Almeida of the 'science club' they were recruited for. The food was radioactive, part of an experiment conducted by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the government and the Quaker Oats company.

"Boyce, Almeida and others in the 'science club' filed and won a lawsuit over the experiments. The $60,000 they each received was small, says Almeida, but no amount can replace the precious thing taken from him and thousands of others.

"'They took the most important thing in my life away...my childhood and my education,' Almeida tells Simon. 'The two things that you need in life to make it, they took from me'."

Mad scientist geekboys with human guinnea pigs in supply and business titans drunk on their invulnerability, deeming a class of people useless to their profit margins. A sad alliance. Of Eugenics, at the height of the Eugenicist movement during the Industrial revolution, the conservative -- surprise! --GK Chesterton wrote:

" I take one case of a more or less Eugenist sort from a paper that lies open in front of me --- a paper that still bears on its forehead the boast of being peculiarly an organ of democracy in revolt. To this a man writes to say that the spread of destitution will never be stopped until we have educated the lower classes in the methods by which the upper classes prevent procreation. The man had the horrible playfulness to sign his letter 'Hopeful.'"

Watch 60 Minutes Sunday at 7pm, and, hopefully, America never lowers itself into that Nietzchean pit again.