The Boston Brahmins, WASPs, and Nazis: The Pursuit of Eugenics
During the progressive era, academia hastily adopted the inhumane pseudoscience of eugenics, and its results on the world were devastating. The influence of the Boston Brahmins in New England can explain the fervent adoption of this malignant belief. This elite and well-educated class of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants reeked of pomp and snobbery.
The origin of the term “Boston Brahmin” came from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. in his 1861 novel Elsie Venner. He chose the unique word “Brahmin” because in India they are the most distinguished caste. This is how the northeastern nobles wanted to be perceived in their neck of the woods.
There was no shortage of academics who propagated the eugenics movement. Richard T. Ely was a Columbia University graduate and persistently proselytized eugenic dogma. In 1901, he favored a bill proposed by an Indiana state senator, Thomas J. Lindley, to regulate marriage with the intent that the couple would not have “unfit” children. The state would examine their physical, mental, racial, and moral attributes to decide whether they could wed.
The US Army would conduct a test called the Army Alpha to evaluate soldiers’ intelligence. Richard Ely was pleased to learn the state could evaluate the hereditary status of human livestock. Ely blatantly disapproved of the “unfit” in his book Studies in the Evolution of Industrial Society. He states, “The sad fact, however, is not that of competition, but the existence of these feeble persons.” When India was amidst a famine, Ely called for their starvation to continue for the sake of “race improvement.” He also claimed black people were “grown up children and should be treated as such.”
Ely’s academic prowess, heavily seasoned with racism and eugenics, would unfortunately be passed on to his students. While at Johns Hopkins University, Ely mentored Woodrow Wilson. Eventually becoming Princeton University’s president, Wilson excluded black students from enrolling. Having absorbed the skewed beliefs of Ely, New Jersey governor Wilson signed a sterilization bill targeting the “hopelessly defective and criminal classes.”
Wilson was not the only university president to accept these beliefs. Stanford’s David Starr Jordan, Harvard’s Charles William Eliot, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Charles Van Hise shared similar sentiments. Spewing his hate in San Francisco, Eliot told the crowd, “Each nation should keep its stock pure.” Van Hise declared that “human defectives should no longer be allowed to propagate the race.” Jordan believed entering into World War I was detrimental because the physically fit men would die and America would “breed only second-rate men.”
Serving
Article from Mises Wire
