The American Eugenics Society created booklets to promote eugenics to children in public schools
After the 1921 Second International Congress on Eugenics, many prominent eugenicists joined to form a U.S. national eugenics society to promote eugenics to the public. In a 137-page booklet called “Tomorrow’s Children,” designed to serve as the society’s “catechism,” schoolchildren and other readers were encouraged to think of the American Eugenics Society as a “Society for the Control of Social Cancer.” The mentally ill and other defectives were an “insidious disease,” and each time they had children, they created “new cancers in the body politic.” In a modern society, cancer needed to be treated with a “surgeon’s knife.” At the moment, though, American society was failing to respond to this threat: “Crime and dependency keep on increasing because new defectives are born, just as new cancer cells remorselessly penetrate into sound tissue.” Consider this with the fact that the US public schooling system has its roots in Prussia, the predecessor to Nazi Germany, which was established between 1905 and 1915, directly preceding these events. Furthermore, eugenics had spread from America to Nazi Germany when their economy fell after world war I and they couldn’t afford to place mentally ill soldiers in asylums. Tells you a lot about the trajectory the U.S. was on. Maybe the U.S. wasn’t so different from Nazi Germany after all.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 89). New York, NY: Basic Books.