Defective

Selection is a fraught word for people with disabilities. Such terms as "prenatal selection," "selective reproduction," and "genetic selection" raise the specter of disability de selection based on normative assumptions about what constitutes "a good life" or "a life worth living." Reproductive selection today is generally framed as an individual choice (although some ethicists maintain that it is an illusion that these kinds of decisions could exist apart from social norms and pressures). Eugenicists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, frankly advocated reproductive selection as a collective decision, to be made at the state or national level, carried out by social pressure and persuasion when possible and by coercion when not. They advanced normative assumptions as scientific fact, confidently categorized human beings into types according to their economic and social value, and regarded the elimination of what they termed "defectives" as common sense.

The intentional improvement of animal stock, what today is usually referred to as "breeding," in the nineteenth century was termed "selection." It was because of the familiarity of the term that Charles Darwin settled on "natural selection" to describe the means by which evolutionary change occurred. Although he worried that the term was "in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice," he believed that its utility as an explanatory device outweighed that disadvantage because "it brings into connection the production of domestic races by man's power of selection, and the natural preservation of varieties and species in a state of nature."

If Darwin began with selection as practiced by animal breeders to introduce the concept of natural selection, eugenicists went in the opposite direction, using natural selection to clarify the necessity of artificially selecting human stock. Natural selection, they explained, ruthlessly eliminated weaknesses and defects in nature, but under the conditions of modern civilization was defanged and declawed. Darwin himself had noted that we "we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws," and as a result "the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind." He attributed these actions, however, to "the noblest part of our nature," and avowed that "to neglect the weak and helpless" would gain merely "a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil." Therefore "we must bear without complaining" the weakest among us "surviving and propagating their kind." To bear without complaining was not part of the eugenicist creed, however. Although actively preventing the survival of the weak was a line most (if not all) eugenicists were disinclined to cross, allowing them to propagate their kind was a different matter, and eugenicists believed that they had tools of selection at hand that were both ethical and practical.

Eugenics was primarily a nationalistic project. Although eugenicists spoke about both the right of the individual to be "well-born" and the imperative that humanity progress, most of their attention focused on the middle ground of the nation. In the United States, as in many other countries, eugenicists carried on a passionate, decades-long debate over the most efficacious and least costly methods of selection for preserving and enhancing "a superior national race." When Henry Fairfield Osborn, Columbia University professor of zoology, wrote to the New York Evening Journal in 1911 to advocate more stringent inspection of immigrants, his opening line — "As a biologist as well as a patriot ..." — perfectly captured the intersection of eugenics and nationalism.

Eugenic selection of worthy citizens occurred along two main tracks. The one most vividly associated in the public imagination with the eugenics movement was the curtailment of reproduction by undesirable citizens through institutionalization, sterilization, marriage laws, and public education campaigns — fitter family and better baby contests, school and college courses, and a steady stream of articles, books, and sermons. Although federal courts became involved from time to time, this aspect of the eugenics movement was carried out mostly at the state and local level. There was, however, another "field in which the federal government must cooperate," wrote Harry Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, "if the human breeding stock in our population is to be purged of its defective parenthood." That field, the other main track of eugenic selection, was the restriction of immigration by means of screening immigrants for defects.

Immigration restriction via selection was the most unambiguous expression of eugenic nationalism. Advocates of institutionalization and sterilization could include among their professed motives altruistic ones: to shelter vulnerable people, relieve parents of terrible burdens, prevent lives of presumed misery, and foster human progress. The popular writer Albert Wiggam was certain that Jesus, were he to return in the present day, would update the golden rule in light of modern eugenic science: "Do unto both the born and the unborn as you would have both the born and the unborn do unto you." Eugenicists were humanitarians, according to a pamphlet from the American Eugenics Society, who did not have "less sympathy for the unfortunate" but rather wished "to alleviate their suffering, by seeing to it that everything possible is done to have fewer hereditary defectives." The sociologist Charles Henderson believed that the state had an obligation to the "unfit" to actively "prevent their propagation of defects and thus the perpetuation of their misery in their offspring." Harry Laughlin maintained that the "sum total of human freedom and human happiness will be greatly promoted [by] the elimination of degenerate and handicapped strains." The physician Harry Haiselden claimed to advocate and practice the euthanasia of disabled infants because he "loves them," death being for them "the kindest mercy." In contrast to these supposed ethical and moral obligations to segregate and sterilize, protecting the nation from defective immigrants, on the other hand, was never plausibly defensible as beneficial either to the individuals affected or to humanity at large. It promised only to keep defectives where they were: elsewhere.

Institutionalization and sterilization, moreover, affected a subset of disabled people, mainly those who fell into the categories of mentally or morally defective, and of those a minority. Deaf individuals were occasionally institutionalized, but because they were mistakenly thought to be mentally defective, not on account of their deafness. People whose physical disabilities were rooted in brain disorders such as cerebral palsy and epilepsy were also sometimes institutionalized and sterilized as mental defectives. Proposals for state eugenic marriage laws occasionally included deaf, blind, and otherwise physically disabled people, but these did not become law in any state. Those that did become law, beginning with Connecticut in 1896, targeted persons considered to be mental and...