Peddy is correct, a lot of conservative parents DO want eugenics returned to the k-12 history curriculum. Nazi and eugenics are interchangeable names for the same ideology.
Here in America, white-supremacy was re-packaged – given a new name, new logos, new spokespersons, and a new image. Under the BRAND name “eugenics” white-supremacy was established as a formal course of study at elite universities, including:
Harvard
Princeton
Yale
MIT
CalTech
Stanford
While eugenics is just another name for white supremacy, it sold like hotcakes. Its most famous customer would be a man named Adolf Hitler.
Long before Hitler, here in the United States, beginning in 1907, more than 60,000 people would be forcibly sterilized under eugenic legislation (passed in more than 30 states). The last forced sterilization in America was 1981 (just 7 years before my first child, a millennial, was born).
In America’s elite circles, the 1925 publication of Adolf Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, was a celebrated achievement.
In 1934, the eugenicist, Paul Popenoe, also known as “America’s Founding Father of Marriage Counseling” had this to say about the Nazis eugenics program (now known as the Holocaust).
“Germany’s eugenic sterilization law, which went into effect on January 1, 1934, is no hasty improvisation of the Nazi regime. It has been taking shape gradually over many years, in the discussions of eugenicists. From one point of view, it is merely an accident that it happened to be the Hitler Administration which was ready to put into effect the recommendations of specialists.”
-- Published by the Human Betterment Foundation, Pasadena, California.
Also in 1934, eugenics leader, Charles Matthias Goethe returned from a trip to Nazi Germany with this message for his fellow eugenicists. “You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought ... I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”
Eleven years later, The Nazi Eugenics Program, known as the Holocaust, had murdered more than 6 million innocent people.
A closer look at just one Ivy League University’s eugenics program is instructive. From Stanford University, in California, came these eugenicists.
Lewis Terman, professor of education and a key figure in the development of educational psychology. Terman designed the IQ test to secure gifted children (white, Aryan) the necessary resources to reach their fullest eugenic potential (and removing resources from those deemed “feeble-minded" or unintelligent). These IQ tests are still in use today.
Terman’s son, Frederick Terman, a professor of engineering at Stanford University was the Founder of Silicone Valley.
Ellwood Cubberley, professor and dean at Stanford’s School of Education. In his 1919 Public Education in the United States, Cubberley portrayed Eastern Europeans immigrants (mostly Jewish and working class) as a eugenic threat to the nation, describing them as “largely illiterate, docile, lacking in initiative, and almost wholly without the Anglo-Saxon conceptions of righteousness, liberty, law, order, public decency, and government, their coming has served to dilute our national stock and to weaken and corrupt our political life.”
Thomas A. Storey, professor of hygiene. In his classes, Storey taught theories of eugenics and racial health.
Edward Ross, professor of economics. Ross's contribution to the Eugenics Movement was the theory of race suicide: the belief that low birth rates and increased immigration would lead to the extinction of the white race.
Ray Lyman Wilbur, Dean of the School of Medicine and third president of Stanford University.
In his 1931 speech to the Annual Congress on Medical Education, Wilbur purported that “there is so much we might do if intelligence rather than emotions controlled the quality of the oncoming race.” Wilbur also served in the Hoover Administration as Secretary of the Interior (1929 – 1933).
William Shockley, professor of engineering and applied sciences. Known for inventing the transistor, Shockley was obsessed with proving the intellectual superiority of white people, using IQ data to “prove” the existence of an intellectual deficiency among black people.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Shockley wrote extensively of his fears that unintelligent populations (non-white populations) were reproducing at a rate faster than their intelligent peers.
To pass on his “superior” genes, Shockley donated his sperm to the eugenic organization Repository for Germinal Choice which sought to collect and pass on the “superior” genes of Nobel Laureates.
As I said, in America, eugenics is the BRAND name for white supremacy. Hitler branded it the Master Race. Germans branded it the Aryan Race. The Holocaust is just another name for eugenics. The history of eugenics is Holocaust history.
Once you absorb the history of eugenics, the battle over CRT in public schools is a whole lot clearer. This battle did not start at the grassroots. It was launched by elites. You see, a lot of older conservative millionaires and billionaires (think Koch brothers) private k-12 schools and elite Universities that taught eugenics. These elites literally studied white supremacy ideology. And none of them want to explain that, let alone answer for it now. Today, these elites cannot afford to be branded eugenicists, white supremacists or racists.
Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project posed a powerful threat to these elites carefully crafted “image”.
The 1619 Project IS THE OPPOSING VIEW OF NAZI IDEOLOGY, AND AMERICAN EUGENIST IDEOLOGY THAT RESULTED IN THE THE HOLOCAUST = and that is the reason, conservative elites went ballistic.
Conservative billionaire funded Think Tanks, launched a national campaign against non-existent CRT education in public schools to protect themselves from examination. By targeting Hannah-Jones, the elites are directing attention away from themselves.
All I have to say, is too effing bad, I don’t feel sorry for these elites, I have no desire to understand them - I feel nothing but loathing.
If you want to fact-check me, google eugenics and start reading. I recommend you start with this...
What became known as eugenics in America was imported from European Scientific Race theory way back in the late 1700s. Thomas Jefferson had great admiration for European scientists and their influence on his thinking is obvious in his Notes on the State of Virginia, 1781-1782.
You can find Thomas Jefferson, in his own words here.
https://mason.gmu.edu/~zschrag/hist120spring05/jeffersonquery14.htm
