Frederick Osborn Quotes
The German sterilization program is apparently an excellent one. Taken altogether, recent developments in Germany constitute perhaps the most important social experiment which has ever been tried.
At the time there were some Americans who supported Hitler and Fascism. Even senior military men like Osborne.
Frederick Osborn, 1890-1981, Army General, President, American Eugenics Society, President of the Pioneer Fund, Deputy U.S. Representative to the United Nations Atomic Energy Commission Summary of the Proceedings of the Conference on Eugenics in Relation to Nursing, February 24, 1937
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400,000 Germans were forcibly sterilized for “mental illness”, “slow learning”. “poor posture”, and a number of other characteristics. Soon, sterilization would be replaced by murders and extermination. Ironically, Hitler and other Nazis would quote American advocates of eugenics to further justify their practice of forced sterilization. A number of American states actually sentenced “defective” people to forced sterization.
This book was the first popular attempt to spread the eugenics concept. Is was translated into German in 1925 and unfortunately read by Adolf Hitler who sent Grant a complimentary letter. See {603544}
Writing a majority opinion allowing forced sterilization of the mentally retarded: In the ultimate tragic irony, the legal opinion in the case never questioned the assumptions of the case—that Carrie Buck, her mother, and daughter were all mentally retarded. Later scientists established that two of the three were normal and there was no real evidence about Buck’s mother. It seems that sexual promiscuity of unmarried women was the evidence upon which mental retardation was reached.
Hitler’s Germany promptly passed the law which was the beginning of their program of human extermination and the Holocaust.
Many Leading American supported forced sterilization of mentally handicapped people. Indiana passed the first forced sterilization laws and other states followed. The Supreme Court upheld the practice. See {603680}.
Warning against directions in which the science of eugenics was developing: Bryan had written the speech, but died before he could deliver it. He anticipated the problem of German Nazi eugenics extremism and abuses such as the Tuskegee experiment here in America before others.
There was a substantial movement to prevent mentally defective and people of low intelligence from being able to reproduce. Over 20 states, with the approval of the then Supreme Court performed forced state sterilizations. Of course the then definition of “degenerates” changed from state to state. A century later, American values changed so much that there is no state that would even consider involuntary sterilization and if they did, the Courts would hold it un-Constitutional.
The Association commissioned a study to develop:
The Eugenics Record Office was an activist organization advocating the forced sterilization of those people who they deemed to be inferior from a hereditary point of view. Most Americans are today shocked to find that this organization and its ideas were so influential that more than 30 states had passed similar laws. Only California and Virginia however were zealous in carrying them out . By 1935, 20,000 forced sterilizations had been carried out in the United States. The Supreme Court at the time even found such laws Constitutional. See {603680}.
There was a small, but very vocal, part of the American population who argued that certain people should not be allowed to have children as they were inferior. Before Hitler started his problem of forced sterilization, many of our states—allowed forced sterilization of people they did not feel were desirable to bear children. Hitler was very complementary to the American pseudo scientists who advocated this.
The Germans were planning to use the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin as a propaganda platform for their Nazi approach. Their perverse notion that the German Arayans were the most superior people and Blacks, Jews, Gypsies at the lower end of the spectrum was called into question by the fact that two of their own champions were Jewish. Goebbels gave orders that no newspaper could mention that fact. Mayer refused to participate. However the Nazi plan backfired when Jews and Blacks won many of the medals. Jessie Owens of America alone won 7 Olympic medals. Adolf Hitler, in order to avoid the “embarrassment” of shaking hands and congratulating Black and Jewish winners, refused to meet any of the athletes.
This is a very important quotation. This was not the ravings of a right wing extremist. It was a normative view. This book was a best seller in Germany. This quotation illustrates the mentality of the conservative, militarist, culture that dominated Germany at the time. Racism was normative then in Germany. It was not the Nazis who introduced the concept of inferior races to Germany. Through this book and much before it, the idea was well established in aristocratic, militaristic culture. Also, note that the “inferior races” were considered a threat to civilization, not just inferior beings.
Major General Frederick Henry Osborn was an American philanthropist, military leader, and eugenicist. He was a founder of several organizations and played a central part in reorienting eugenics in the years following World War II away from the race- and class-consciousness of earlier periods. The American Philosophical Society considers him to have been "the respectable face of eugenic research in the post-war period."(APS, 1983)
