NYC Ban Private Toxic Sampling?
Intro 650 will require permits for the possession or use of any instruments which monitor chemical, biological or radiological contamination. The NYC Police Department has testified that the impetus for the bill came from the Department of Homeland Security. Intro 650 will give NYPD the power to authorize, deny, or delay any workplace or environmental sampling. NYPD has testified that the Department of Homeland Security intends to use this legislation, if enacted, as a model for other cities throughout the country. We believe the bill, if enacted, will restrict, and could prevent altogether, independent environmental monitoring by unions, community organizations, and others, including university programs. We believe this would pose a significant threat to our civil liberties.
Homeland Security is taking away the public's ability to monitor our poisoning by the government. I don't see how independent sources threaten our national security unless our government has something to hide...and it does.
1. Intro 650 is aimed at fixing a problem that does not exist. The stated purpose of
the bill is to reduce “excessive false alarms and unwarranted anxiety.” No data
are presented to support the claim of “excessive false alarms,” nor are the types
of alarms that are presumed to be excessive defined. No evidence is presented
to document “unwarranted anxiety.” It is likely that no such data or evidence
exist. Neither press reports nor the scientific literature nor the city’s own web site
provides any support for the assertion that “excessive false alarms and
unwarranted anxiety” have been or are real-world problems.
2. Intro 650 would make it more difficult for the public, and for government
agencies, to obtain environmental sampling data in a timely manner. The inability
of government agencies to rapidly deploy air monitoring instruments is well
documented. For example, the earliest sampling of workers’ breathing zones at
Ground Zero was conducted by the National Hazmat Program of the International
Union of Operating Engineers, which came in from West Virginia. OSHA did not
begin taking personal samples until September 20. Had Intro 650 been in effect
on September 11, 2001, it would have been illegal for technical experts from
West Virginia to respond at Ground Zero.
3. Intro 650 would make it more difficult for the public to obtain independent
environmental sampling data and to assess the accuracy of government
statements. For example, elected officials representing the areas of Manhattan
most affected by the September 11th attack, including members of this City
Council, employed nationally-recognized experts to conduct indoor sampling of
residences adjacent to Ground Zero within days of the attacks. Sampling results
indicated dangerously high levels of WTC-derived asbestos in downtown
residences. At the time, EPA was proclaiming that the air was safe to breathe
and NYCDOH was stating that indoor dust could be cleaned up by residents.
Government agencies did not conduct indoor tests in residences until December.
Had Intro 650 been in effect on September 11, 2001, it would have been illegal
for the City Council and other elected officials to bring in technical experts from
outside the city to test downtown residences.
4. Intro 650 would inappropriately and impossibly task NYPD with assessing the
capabilities of air monitoring instruments and of the individuals, agencies, and
organizations that utilize them. It would put NYPD in the position of determining
which employers, unions, landlords, tenants, community-based organizations,
and others would be entitled to conduct independent environmental
assessments. For example, community-based organizations in Harlem and
Chinatown concerned about the incidence of asthma and other respiratory
diseases would have to obtain police permits to monitor diesel emissions in the
public streets outside bus depots.
5. Intro 650 would immediately make illegal scores of thousands of safety devices
already in place in homes, schools, businesses, and public buildings. These
devices include carbon monoxide detectors and legally required smoke
detectors.
NYPD testified earlier today that it may ultimately exclude certain yet to be determined
monitoring equipment and activities from the permitting requirements. However, as
Councilpersons Liu and Garodnick correctly noted, the current legislation would grant
NYPD a “blank check” on rule-making, not subject to further City Council oversight or
direction.
NYPD testified that its interest is detection of chemical, biological, radiological, and
nuclear weaponry agents. However, this bill is not that. It is not a CBRN bill. As currently
written, it covers emergency response, industrial, environmental, and academic
activities unrelated to CBRN warfare. It would significantly curtail public access to
independent environmental data, in line with the post-9/11 Bush agenda.
In conclusion, the goal in science is generally to obtain more data, not less. Intro 650
would serve to drastically impede independent collection of and public access to
environmental sampling data. There is no danger to public safety or public health from
the acquisition of additional data. NYCOSH and NYCCLC urge this Committee and the
City Council to reject this bill in its entirety.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
The Roots of the I.Q. Debate: Eugenics and Social Control
Whatever the Jukes stand for, the Edwards family does not. Whatever weakness the Jukes represent finds its antidote in the Edwards family, which has cost the country nothing in pauperism, in crime, in hospital or asylum service.
—Albert E. Winship, Heredity: A History of the Jukes-Edwards Families, Boston, 1925
During the first three decades of this century, a small but influential social/scientific movement known as the eugenics movement extrapolated from the new science of human genetics a complex set of beliefs justifying the necessity for racial and class hierarchy. It also advocated limitations on political democracy. The eugenicists argued that the United States was in immediate danger of committing racial suicide as a result of the rapid reproduction of the unfit coupled with the precipitous decline in the birthrate of the better classes. They proposed a program of positive and negative eugenics as a solution. Positive genetics would encourage the reproduction of the better-educated and racially superior, while a rigorous program of negative eugenics to prevent any increase in the racially unfit would include compulsory segregation and sterilization, immigration restriction, and laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage (anti-miscegenation statutes).
I will argue that the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century was primarily a political movement concerned with the social control of groups thought to be inferior by an economic, social, and racial elite. I reject the contention that the movement was primarily scientific and apolitical. I have looked here primarily at the organized eugenics movement and its leading figures, rather than at the average rank-and-file follower within the movement.
My interest in the eugenics movement stems from my fear that the basic principles of the eugenics debate, even its most discredited aspects, are resurfacing in the 1990s. To revisit the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century is to be reminded of the harm the movement intended toward those members of society least able to defend themselves. History, in this case, may help to provide an antidote to contemporary manifestations of eugenicist arguments--the I. Q. debate and the right’s anti-immigrant campaign.
Any historical appraisal of the eugenics movement needs to step carefully to avoid imposing the values of the late 20th-century upon eugenicists, especially concerning the question of motivation. The legitimate, scientific framework of the eugenics movement, a mainstream view at the beginning of the century, has been for the most part abandoned by scientists in the years since then.
Similarly, to a great extent, racialist thinking, and in particular white supremacy, was neither questioned nor challenged among the white-dominated intelligentsia of the time. At the same time, the fact that white supremacist views were more acceptable in white society at the turn of the century still allows for gradations of focus and virulence; the question of the extent to which hereditarian arguments may have functioned as a pretext for a movement primarily concerned with the continuation of social and political dominance by upper-class, Protestant men of Anglo-Saxon background is unavoidable.
The roots of the eugenics movement have been traced variously to social Darwinism; social purity, voluntary motherhood, and the perfectionists; the naturalist tradition; Malthus and the neo-Malthusians; and the Progressive political and social movement.
This paper emphasizes instead that the roots of the eugenics movement can be traced to the 19th-century scientific racism movement.
Scientific racism is a term capable of diverse definitions. For this discussion, I have adopted a slightly modified version of historian Barry Mehler’s definition: [Scientific racism is] the belief [often based on skin color, country of origin, or economic class] that the human species can be divided into superior and inferior genetic groups and that these groups can be satisfactorily identified so that social policies can be advanced to encourage the breeding of the superior groups and discourage the breeding of the inferior groups.
It is possible to argue that notions of control by a racial and economic elite were key to the eugenics movement without embracing reductionist or conspiratorial theories that do damage to the diversity and scope of the movement.
It has been the diversity of the eugenics movement--the wide range of followers it was able to encompass--that has proved most difficult to explain. The eugenics movement was not monolithic: conservatives, progressives, and sex radicals were all allied within a fundamentally messianic movement of national salvation that was predicated upon scientific notions of innate and ineradicable inequalities between racial, cultural, and economic groups.
These scientific notions tended to maintain the status quo by obscuring the racial and class basis of poverty and advancement in the United States. The middle- and upper-class professionals of Anglo-Saxon descent who were leaders in the eugenics movement acted in and out of their own interests.
Those interests led to the development of a political program in which an extreme economic conservatism was marked by a virulent anti-communism linked to an embrace of the untrammeled, unregulated capitalist state. Some eugenicist leaders rejected democracy in favor of the corporate state and, in the 1920s and 1930s, several leaders of the eugenics movement were active in the promotion of German and Italian fascism.
The eugenics movement put forth a coherent, consistent social program in which eugenical sterilization, anti-immigrant advocacy, and anti-miscegenation activism all played crucial roles in the primary eugenicist goal of advancing social control by a small elite. Particularly now, when familiar eugenicist arguments echo within contemporary scientific and political circles, questions of motivation and intent are compelling.
Background of the Movement
The American eugenics movement came into being primarily through the efforts of Charles Benedict Davenport, a biologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. While at Harvard as an instructor in the 1890s, Davenport became familiar with the early eugenicist writings of two Englishmen, the independently wealthy Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson.
By 1869, Galton had published several articles and a book, Hereditary Genius, which argued that human traits, and particularly great ability, can be inherited from previous generations.
It was not until 1883 that Galton coined the term eugenics, and it was 1904 before he formulated his classic definition of eugenics as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.
Galton had been tremendously influenced by his cousin, Charles Darwin, whose study of human evolution, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859. The eugenicists, led by Galton in England and Davenport in the US, were fascinated more by the idea of the inheritability of human traits than by Darwin’s focus on the evolution of species over time.
Charles Darwin thought highly of his cousin’s book on the inheritance of genius; he wrote, I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.
Eugenicists originally believed in the inheritability of virtually all human traits. Charles Davenport’s work provided a typical list of hereditary traits: eye color, hair, skin, stature, weight, special ability in music, drawing, painting, literary composition, calculating, or memorizing, weakness of the mucous membranes, nomadism, general bodily energy, strength, mental ability, epilepsy, shiftlessness, insanity, pauperism, criminality, various forms of nervous disease, defects of speech, sight, hearing, cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, skeletal deformities, and other traits.
Davenport is reported to have hypothesized that thalassophilia, love of the sea, was a sex-linked recessive trait because he only encountered it in male naval officers.
For the most part, the eugenicists emphasized inheritance and trivialized the importance of environment. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, an important American eugenicist, was typical in his dismissal of environmental arguments:
No doubt poverty and crime are bad assets in one’s early environment. No doubt these elements cause the ruins of thousands who, by heredity, were good material of civilization. But again, poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material. It is not the strength of the strong, but the weakness of the weak which engenders exploitation and tyranny. The slums are at once symptom, effect, and cause of evil. Every vice stands in this same threefold relation
In the same vein, another eugenicist wrote:
The. . .social classes, therefore, which you seek to abolish by law, are ordained by nature; that it is, in the large statistical run of things, not the slums which make slum people, but slum people who make the slums; that primarily it is not the church which makes people good, but good people who make the Church; that godly people are largely born and not made. . . .
The US eugenics movement grew out of the American Breeders’ Association (later the American Genetics Association), which was founded in 1903 to apply the new principles of inheritance to the scientific breeding of horses and other livestock. In 1906, at Davenport’s urging, the ABA established a Eugenics Section (later the Committee on Eugenics). Stanford University president David Starr Jordan chaired the committee and Davenport was its secretary. These men and others active in the Committee on Eugenics (including the founders of the Nativist Immigration Restriction League, Robert DeCourcey Ward and Prescott F. Hall; Henry H. Goddard and Walter E. Fernald, who both joined a subcommittee on feeble-mindedness; Alexander Graham Bell; and Edward L. Thorndike) would form the core of the eugenics movement for the next 25 years. y The organized eugenics movement revolved around Davenport’s Station for Experimental Genetics, at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York, which itself came increasingly to focus on eugenical studies. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was established with Davenport as director and Henry H. Laughlin, key eugenicist and leader of the eugenical sterilization movement, as its superintendent. Two other important eugenics organizations were the Eugenics Research Association (with Davenport and Laughlin as its key members) and the American Eugenics Society (AES).
The Eugenics Research Association described itself as a scientific rather than political group and the AES, established in 1921, was visualized as the propaganda or popular education arm of the eugenics movement.
The eugenics movement advocated both positive and negative eugenics, which referred to attempts to increase reproduction by fit stocks and to decrease reproduction by those who were constitutionally unfit. Positive eugenics included eugenic education and tax preferences and other financial support for eugenically fit large families. Eugenical segregation and, usually, sterilization (a few eugenicists opposed sterilization); restrictive marriage laws, including anti-miscegenation statutes; and restrictive immigration laws formed the three parts of the negative eugenics agenda.
Virtually all eugenicists supported compulsory sterilization for the unfit; some supported castration. By 1936, when expert medical panels in both England and the US finally condemned compulsory eugenical sterilization, more than 20,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor people (and disproportionately on black people) confined to state-run mental hospitals and residential facilities for the mentally retarded. Almost 500 men and women had died from the surgery. The American Eugenics Society had hoped, in time, to sterilize one-tenth of the US population, or millions of Americans. Based on the American eugenical sterilization experience, Hitler’s sterilization program managed to sterilize 225,000 people in less than three years.
Eugenics’ Racial Bias
From the beginning, the eugenics movement was a racialist (race-based) and elitist movement concerned with the control of classes seen to be socially inferior. In proposing the term eugenics, Galton had written, We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving the stock. . .to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.
Galton believed that black people were entirely inferior to the white races and that Jews were capable only of parasitism upon the civilized nations.
Karl Pearson, Galton’s chief disciple, shared his racial and anti-Semitic beliefs. For example, in 1925, Pearson wrote The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, which argued against the admission of Jewish immigrants into England.
In the US, the eugenics movement started from a belief in the racial superiority of white Anglo-Saxons and a desire to prevent the immigration of less desirable racial stocks. In 1910, the Committee on Eugenics solicited new members with a letter that read, The time is ripe for a strong public movement to stem the tide of threatened racial degeneracy. . . .America needs to protect herself against indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and. . .race suicide. The letter also warned of the impending complete destruction of the white race.
Eugenical News, which was published by the Eugenics Research Association and edited by Laughlin, welcomed racist and anti-immigrant articles. At the Second International Congress on Eugenics in 1921, one of the five classifications of exhibits was The Factor of Race.
Similarly, the American Eugenics Society’s Ultimate Program, adopted in 1923, placed chief emphasis on three goals:
1. a brief survey of the eugenics movement up to the present time;
2. working out and enacting a selective immigration law;
3. securing segregation of certain classes, such as the criminal defective.
The Eugenics Research Association included among the major issues its members addressed [im]migration, mate selection. . .race crossings, and. . .physical and mental measurement.
When the World War I-era IQ testing of all soldiers indicated that almost half of all white recruits were morons according to the newly developed Stanford Binet test, as were 89 percent of all black recruits, the eugenics movement seemed more important and believable.
Although some commentators questioned the validity of the test, and noted that questions on such topics as the color of sapphires and the location of Cornell University might reflect qualities other than intelligence, the statistics, when released, created great anxiety and gave the eugenics movement a substantial boost.
19th-Century Scientific Racism
The scientific racism movement of the mid-nineteenth century provided a number of important legacies to the eugenics movement. American scientific racism was primarily preoccupied with the attempt to establish that blacks, Orientals, and other races were in fact entirely different species of man, which the scientific racists claimed should be seen as a genus, rather than a species. The theory that the integrity of the human species derived from the creation of one Adam and one Eve was called monogenism or specific unity; monogenists believed that the races arose as a result of the degeneration of human beings since creation. The separate races were essentially the same human material, but different races had degenerated to different extents. Polygenists, by contrast, believed that the races were created separately in a series of different creations. The separate races were entirely different animals. The mid-century theory of polygenism, or specific diversity, was one of the first scientific theories largely developed in the US and was approvingly called the American School of anthropology by European scientists.
Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, a prominent natural historian of the 19th-century, was the most important promoter of polygenism. Agassiz, an abolitionist, insisted that his adoption of polygenism was dictated by objective scientific investigation. Nevertheless, historian Stephen Jay Gould’s translation of Agassiz’s letter to his mother in 1846 shortly after his emigration to the US, reveals a profound, visceral aversion to blacks.
Not surprisingly, Agassiz was also passionately opposed to racial miscegenation. He believed that racial inter-mixture would result in the creation of effeminate offspring unable to maintain American democratic traditions. Agassiz wrote:
The production of half-breeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character. . . .No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality.
In part because the classic definition of a species revolved around the ability to mate and produce children with each other but not with others, and in part because of a drive toward racial hierarchy, the questions of hybridization and fecundity were of great import to the early American scientific racists. For the eugenicists, these questions were also tremendously important. Much of the early scientific racist rhetoric on hybrids later reappeared in eugenicist writings where it came to form the basis of eugenicist arguments against racial miscegenation. The early concern with fecundity fueled later eugenicist claims that differential racial fecundity was leading to white racial suicide.
The eugenicist recapitulation of earlier scientific racist arguments was not cursory, but deep and enduring. In one of many examples, a 1925 bibliography on eugenics published by the American Eugenics Society recommended the book, Uncontrolled Breeding, Or Fecundity versus Civilization.
At the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, author V. G. Ruggeri, despite his concern with race-mixing, put forth Mendel’s monogenism to bolster his own argument in favor of monogenism; and Lucien March spoke on The Fertility of Marriages According to Profession and Social Position. The opening of Raymond Pearl’s lecture on The Inheritance of Fecundity made clear his position within this tradition:
The progressive decline of the birth rate in all, or nearly all, civilized countries is an obvious and impressive fact. Equally obvious and much more disturbing is the fact that this decline is differential. Generally it is true that those racial stocks which by common agreement are of high, if not the highest, value to the state or nation, are precisely the ones where the decline in reproduction rate has been most marked.
Family Studies, Social Darwinism, and Race Suicide
Eugenical family studies were an important component in the movement’s political development; family studies functioned as an objective, scientific basis for the twin myths of a feeble-minded menace and an impending white race suicide. The invention of feeble-mindedness, typically used as a term of art to cover broader issues related to social control, allowed the eugenicists to claim that social (and racial) classes were biological and hence immutable.
The first important eugenicist works in the US were a series of studies of American families supposedly plagued by hereditary feeble-mindedness, beginning with Richard Dugdale’s exposition of the Jukes family, published in 1877.
All of the family studies claimed to prove that a single feeble-minded ancestor could (and did) result in generations of poverty-stricken and degenerate offspring. The families in the studies were rural families, of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent, and for the most part, their lineage dated to the colonial settlers. The families were remarkably similar to the eugenicist activists in these traits; the main difference between the two was the poverty of the rural families. The equation by the eugenicists of poverty with degeneracy was quite explicit. Eugenicists believed that poverty was no more than a manifestation of inner degeneracy. Charity was therefore unlikely to lead the pauper out of poverty and, in fact, misguided charity might prove very costly to society. In the heightened tone that is common to writers in the family studies, one eugenicist wrote, It is impossible to calculate what even one feeble-minded woman may cost the public, when her vast possibilities for evil as a producer of paupers and criminals, through an endless line of descendants is considered.
Another writer said, for example, A habit of irregular work is a species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.
In the same vein, a third wrote, Pauperism and habitual criminality are respectively passive and active states of the same disease.
Feeble-mindedness for the eugenicists was a designation that created a difference between the eugenicists and the families they studied. One group of social reformers described in detail the nature of the feeble-mindedness which they had found characterized prostitutes:
The general moral insensibility, the boldness, egotism and vanity, the love of notoriety, the lack of shame or remorse. . .the desire for immediate pleasure without regard for consequences, the lack of forethought or anxiety about the future--all cardinal symptoms of feeble-mindedness--were strikingly evident.
Thus the prostitute’s failure to adhere to social conventions of behavior for women is here called feeble-mindedness.
The deliberate and even fraudulent misrepresentations of the people in the family studies have been established. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has shown that H. H. Goddard, author of The Kallikak Family, retouched photographs to make the Kallikaks appear mentally retarded.
Family studies were used to support the myth of the feeble-minded menace, which claimed the US was in imminent danger of being swamped by the degenerate and dangerous masses of the feeble-minded. When the feeble-minded menace was linked at the end of the 19th-century to the idea that the better stocks were failing to produce enough children, the idea of race suicide emerged. Race suicide captured the US imagination and lent support to the entire eugenics agenda.
The race suicide theory which developed during the first decade of the new century claimed that the greatly lowered birthrate of the better classes, coupled with the burgeoning birthrates of immigrants and the native-born poor, endangered the survival of the race. The race was clearly a term that referred to the white, Anglo-Saxon race and a deep racism permeated the racial suicide period from its beginning in 1900 to 1910. One classic racial suicide work is Robert Reid Rentoul’s Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn), published in New York and London in 1906. Rentoul speaks of the terrible monstrosities created by racial intermarriage and points out that the Americans are poor patriots for repealing their racial miscegenation statutes.
The concept of the feeble-minded menace provided a way to make the rural families, who were neither institutionalized, foreign, nor colored, into people who were different from the eugenicists. Underlying the family studies and the myth of the feeble-minded menace was the theory of Social Darwinism, which assumed the existence of a struggle between the individual and society, and of an adversarial relationship between the fit and unfit classes. Eugenical family studies and social Darwinism both involved a transmutation of nature into biology and the eugenics movement frequently acknowledged its debt to Social Darwinism.
The deeply conservative implications of such philosophies included the rejection of government welfare programs or protective legislation on the grounds that such reforms as poorhouses, orphanages, bread lines, and eight-hour days enabled the unfit to survive and weakened society as a whole. From the beginning, the eugenics movement accepted the regressive implications of Social Darwinism. Karl Pearson believed that such measures as the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, free medical advice, and reductions in infant mortality encouraged an increase in unemployables, degenerates, and physical and mental weaklings.
Pearson’s friend, Havelock Ellis, known as a sex radical and free thinker, shared Pearson’s elitist views, writing in his 1911 eugenicist book, The Problem of Race Regeneration, These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them. Ellis suggested in the same book that all public relief be denied to second generation paupers unless they voluntarily consented to be surgically sterilized.
One American eugenicist said harshly:
The so-called charitable people who give to begging children and women with baskets have a vast sin to answer for. It is from them that this pauper element gets its consent to exist. . . .So-called charity joins public relief in producing stillborn children, raising prostitutes, and educating criminals.
The economic conservatism of the movement was very clear. Faced with a social problem, the eugenicist leapt to the conclusion that it was the individual who must change to accommodate society (which is one reason why conservative commentators frequently argued that eugenics was a liberal movement committed to the supremacy of the community over the individual). The prevalence of the appeal to economics in eugenics writings led G. K. Chesterton to claim that the eugenicist was, at heart, the employer. Chesterton wrote:
[N]o one seems able to imagine capitalist industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. . . .[the eugenicist] tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them, marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market.
The eugenicists’ family studies were one aspect of the movement’s domestic program of scientific racism. The eugenics movement concentrated on differences: its roots in scientific racism looked to the differences between the white and other races, while the family studies created a distinction between fit and unfit white folks. At the same time, eugenicists and other scientific racists were discovering many different races among the foreign immigrants, all previously conceived as members of a single, white race.
The Eugenicist Role in Anti-Immigrant Organizing
The involvement of the organized American eugenics movement with the advocacy of immigration restriction was deep and long-standing. Although the organized anti-immigrant movement predated eugenical organizations by a few years, immigration restriction was from the beginning a key component of the eugenics program. For example, the American Eugenics Society published a wide variety of materials on immigration restriction and the 1923 Original Ultimate Program to be Developed by the American Eugenics Society listed immigration restriction as one of the top three goals of the society.
The first organized anti-immigrant group, the Immigration Restriction League, was founded in 1894 in Boston by a small group of Harvard-educated lawyers and academics; Prescott Hall and Robert DeCourcey Ward were the driving forces behind the League. The Immigration Restriction League was based on a belief in the superiority of the white races. Ward summed up the group’s philosophy when he wrote the question [of immigration] is a race question, pure and simple. . . .It is fundamentally a question as to what kind of babies shall be born; it is a question as to what races shall dominate in this country.
Most eugenicists agreed, and Yale Professor and prominent eugenicist Irving Fisher’s comment that The core of the problem of immigration is. . .one of race and eugenics was typical of the eugenicist position.
In the first decade of the century, the men of the Immigration Restriction League became active members of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association and other eugenics organizations, focusing their attention primarily on immigration issues. The connection was so compatible that the Immigration Restriction League almost changed its name to the Eugenic Immigration League. Hall and Ward even had sample stationery drawn up with the new name, but found the Board of Directors was unwilling to adopt the name of a movement younger than its own.
In 1918, Davenport and his fellow eugenicist, and virulent racist, and anti-immigration activist Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race and The Alien in Our Midst) set up the Galton Society. The Society was established for the promotion of study of racial anthropology and from the beginning, immigration restriction was a subject of much interest.
As John Higham has noted, one strand of nativism in the US derived from a conviction that the immigrant was a political and social radical, importing communistic or anarchistic ideas into the United States. Grant and Davenport both shared this conviction and established the Galton Society in part to bar such foreign radicals. The independently wealthy Grant wrote to the other organizers, My proposal is the organization of an anthropological society. . .confined to native Americans, who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound, no Bolsheviki need apply.
Other prestigious members of the Galton Society included Henry Fairfield Osborn (who wrote the introduction to Grant’s book) and Grant’s friend and protégé, Lothrop Stoddard. Like his friend Grant, Stoddard was a strong anti-communist. His book The Rising Tide of Color argued that Bolshevism was a dangerous theory because it advocated universal equality rather than white supremacy.
H. H. Laughlin, of the Eugenics Research Association and Eugenics Record Office, was also very involved in anti-immigrant work. He produced many pamphlets on immigration, including Biological Aspects of Immigration, Analysis of America’s Melting Pot, Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent, The Eugenics Aspects of Deportation, and American History in Terms of Human Migration. Because Laughlin had been appointed the Expert Eugenics Agent for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization by the committee’s chair, Congressman Albert Johnson, many of these nativist pamphlets were published by the Government Printing Office in Washington, DC. In 1923, Johnson, a confirmed eugenicist, was appointed to the presidency of the Eugenics Research Association, a post held before him by Grant.
The immigration restrictionists were motivated by a desire to maintain both the white and the Christian dominance of the US. A year after the eugenicists’ victory in securing passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which established entry quotas that slashed the new immigration of Jews, Slavs, and southern Europeans, Davenport wrote to Grant, Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also they burned the witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population. Meanwhile we have somewhat diminished the immigration of these people.
Similarly, the racial nature of the anti-immigration position was not veiled. In 1927, for instance, three years after the restrictive act of 1924 was passed, Grant, Robert DeCourcey Ward, and other eugenicists were still anxious to cut non-white immigration further. They signed a Memorial on Immigration Quotas, urging the President and Congress to extend the quota system to all countries of North and South America. . .in which the population is not predominantly of the white race.
The early 20th-century eugenics movement, often dismissed as a fad, provided a coherent and consistent political program to enforce the racial, class, and sexual dominance which was perceived to be under attack in American society. Its program has, in large part, reasserted itself in the late 20th-century, at a time when racial and economic elite dominance of US society is again under attack. The continuing vigor of scientific racism in the United States is in part a testimony to its strong, deep roots.
—Albert E. Winship, Heredity: A History of the Jukes-Edwards Families, Boston, 1925
During the first three decades of this century, a small but influential social/scientific movement known as the eugenics movement extrapolated from the new science of human genetics a complex set of beliefs justifying the necessity for racial and class hierarchy. It also advocated limitations on political democracy. The eugenicists argued that the United States was in immediate danger of committing racial suicide as a result of the rapid reproduction of the unfit coupled with the precipitous decline in the birthrate of the better classes. They proposed a program of positive and negative eugenics as a solution. Positive genetics would encourage the reproduction of the better-educated and racially superior, while a rigorous program of negative eugenics to prevent any increase in the racially unfit would include compulsory segregation and sterilization, immigration restriction, and laws to prohibit inter-racial marriage (anti-miscegenation statutes).
I will argue that the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century was primarily a political movement concerned with the social control of groups thought to be inferior by an economic, social, and racial elite. I reject the contention that the movement was primarily scientific and apolitical. I have looked here primarily at the organized eugenics movement and its leading figures, rather than at the average rank-and-file follower within the movement.
My interest in the eugenics movement stems from my fear that the basic principles of the eugenics debate, even its most discredited aspects, are resurfacing in the 1990s. To revisit the eugenics movement of the early 20th-century is to be reminded of the harm the movement intended toward those members of society least able to defend themselves. History, in this case, may help to provide an antidote to contemporary manifestations of eugenicist arguments--the I. Q. debate and the right’s anti-immigrant campaign.
Any historical appraisal of the eugenics movement needs to step carefully to avoid imposing the values of the late 20th-century upon eugenicists, especially concerning the question of motivation. The legitimate, scientific framework of the eugenics movement, a mainstream view at the beginning of the century, has been for the most part abandoned by scientists in the years since then.
Similarly, to a great extent, racialist thinking, and in particular white supremacy, was neither questioned nor challenged among the white-dominated intelligentsia of the time. At the same time, the fact that white supremacist views were more acceptable in white society at the turn of the century still allows for gradations of focus and virulence; the question of the extent to which hereditarian arguments may have functioned as a pretext for a movement primarily concerned with the continuation of social and political dominance by upper-class, Protestant men of Anglo-Saxon background is unavoidable.
The roots of the eugenics movement have been traced variously to social Darwinism; social purity, voluntary motherhood, and the perfectionists; the naturalist tradition; Malthus and the neo-Malthusians; and the Progressive political and social movement.
This paper emphasizes instead that the roots of the eugenics movement can be traced to the 19th-century scientific racism movement.
Scientific racism is a term capable of diverse definitions. For this discussion, I have adopted a slightly modified version of historian Barry Mehler’s definition: [Scientific racism is] the belief [often based on skin color, country of origin, or economic class] that the human species can be divided into superior and inferior genetic groups and that these groups can be satisfactorily identified so that social policies can be advanced to encourage the breeding of the superior groups and discourage the breeding of the inferior groups.
It is possible to argue that notions of control by a racial and economic elite were key to the eugenics movement without embracing reductionist or conspiratorial theories that do damage to the diversity and scope of the movement.
It has been the diversity of the eugenics movement--the wide range of followers it was able to encompass--that has proved most difficult to explain. The eugenics movement was not monolithic: conservatives, progressives, and sex radicals were all allied within a fundamentally messianic movement of national salvation that was predicated upon scientific notions of innate and ineradicable inequalities between racial, cultural, and economic groups.
These scientific notions tended to maintain the status quo by obscuring the racial and class basis of poverty and advancement in the United States. The middle- and upper-class professionals of Anglo-Saxon descent who were leaders in the eugenics movement acted in and out of their own interests.
Those interests led to the development of a political program in which an extreme economic conservatism was marked by a virulent anti-communism linked to an embrace of the untrammeled, unregulated capitalist state. Some eugenicist leaders rejected democracy in favor of the corporate state and, in the 1920s and 1930s, several leaders of the eugenics movement were active in the promotion of German and Italian fascism.
The eugenics movement put forth a coherent, consistent social program in which eugenical sterilization, anti-immigrant advocacy, and anti-miscegenation activism all played crucial roles in the primary eugenicist goal of advancing social control by a small elite. Particularly now, when familiar eugenicist arguments echo within contemporary scientific and political circles, questions of motivation and intent are compelling.
Background of the Movement
The American eugenics movement came into being primarily through the efforts of Charles Benedict Davenport, a biologist with a Ph.D. from Harvard University. While at Harvard as an instructor in the 1890s, Davenport became familiar with the early eugenicist writings of two Englishmen, the independently wealthy Francis Galton and his protégé Karl Pearson.
By 1869, Galton had published several articles and a book, Hereditary Genius, which argued that human traits, and particularly great ability, can be inherited from previous generations.
It was not until 1883 that Galton coined the term eugenics, and it was 1904 before he formulated his classic definition of eugenics as the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally.
Galton had been tremendously influenced by his cousin, Charles Darwin, whose study of human evolution, The Origin of Species, was published in 1859. The eugenicists, led by Galton in England and Davenport in the US, were fascinated more by the idea of the inheritability of human traits than by Darwin’s focus on the evolution of species over time.
Charles Darwin thought highly of his cousin’s book on the inheritance of genius; he wrote, I do not think I ever in all my life read anything more interesting and original.
Eugenicists originally believed in the inheritability of virtually all human traits. Charles Davenport’s work provided a typical list of hereditary traits: eye color, hair, skin, stature, weight, special ability in music, drawing, painting, literary composition, calculating, or memorizing, weakness of the mucous membranes, nomadism, general bodily energy, strength, mental ability, epilepsy, shiftlessness, insanity, pauperism, criminality, various forms of nervous disease, defects of speech, sight, hearing, cancer, tuberculosis, pneumonia, skeletal deformities, and other traits.
Davenport is reported to have hypothesized that thalassophilia, love of the sea, was a sex-linked recessive trait because he only encountered it in male naval officers.
For the most part, the eugenicists emphasized inheritance and trivialized the importance of environment. Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, an important American eugenicist, was typical in his dismissal of environmental arguments:
No doubt poverty and crime are bad assets in one’s early environment. No doubt these elements cause the ruins of thousands who, by heredity, were good material of civilization. But again, poverty, dirt, and crime are the products of those, in general, who are not good material. It is not the strength of the strong, but the weakness of the weak which engenders exploitation and tyranny. The slums are at once symptom, effect, and cause of evil. Every vice stands in this same threefold relation
In the same vein, another eugenicist wrote:
The. . .social classes, therefore, which you seek to abolish by law, are ordained by nature; that it is, in the large statistical run of things, not the slums which make slum people, but slum people who make the slums; that primarily it is not the church which makes people good, but good people who make the Church; that godly people are largely born and not made. . . .
The US eugenics movement grew out of the American Breeders’ Association (later the American Genetics Association), which was founded in 1903 to apply the new principles of inheritance to the scientific breeding of horses and other livestock. In 1906, at Davenport’s urging, the ABA established a Eugenics Section (later the Committee on Eugenics). Stanford University president David Starr Jordan chaired the committee and Davenport was its secretary. These men and others active in the Committee on Eugenics (including the founders of the Nativist Immigration Restriction League, Robert DeCourcey Ward and Prescott F. Hall; Henry H. Goddard and Walter E. Fernald, who both joined a subcommittee on feeble-mindedness; Alexander Graham Bell; and Edward L. Thorndike) would form the core of the eugenics movement for the next 25 years. y The organized eugenics movement revolved around Davenport’s Station for Experimental Genetics, at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island, New York, which itself came increasingly to focus on eugenical studies. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office was established with Davenport as director and Henry H. Laughlin, key eugenicist and leader of the eugenical sterilization movement, as its superintendent. Two other important eugenics organizations were the Eugenics Research Association (with Davenport and Laughlin as its key members) and the American Eugenics Society (AES).
The Eugenics Research Association described itself as a scientific rather than political group and the AES, established in 1921, was visualized as the propaganda or popular education arm of the eugenics movement.
The eugenics movement advocated both positive and negative eugenics, which referred to attempts to increase reproduction by fit stocks and to decrease reproduction by those who were constitutionally unfit. Positive eugenics included eugenic education and tax preferences and other financial support for eugenically fit large families. Eugenical segregation and, usually, sterilization (a few eugenicists opposed sterilization); restrictive marriage laws, including anti-miscegenation statutes; and restrictive immigration laws formed the three parts of the negative eugenics agenda.
Virtually all eugenicists supported compulsory sterilization for the unfit; some supported castration. By 1936, when expert medical panels in both England and the US finally condemned compulsory eugenical sterilization, more than 20,000 forced sterilizations had been performed, mostly on poor people (and disproportionately on black people) confined to state-run mental hospitals and residential facilities for the mentally retarded. Almost 500 men and women had died from the surgery. The American Eugenics Society had hoped, in time, to sterilize one-tenth of the US population, or millions of Americans. Based on the American eugenical sterilization experience, Hitler’s sterilization program managed to sterilize 225,000 people in less than three years.
Eugenics’ Racial Bias
From the beginning, the eugenics movement was a racialist (race-based) and elitist movement concerned with the control of classes seen to be socially inferior. In proposing the term eugenics, Galton had written, We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving the stock. . .to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.
Galton believed that black people were entirely inferior to the white races and that Jews were capable only of parasitism upon the civilized nations.
Karl Pearson, Galton’s chief disciple, shared his racial and anti-Semitic beliefs. For example, in 1925, Pearson wrote The Problem of Alien Immigration into Great Britain, Illustrated by an Examination of Russian and Polish Jewish Children, which argued against the admission of Jewish immigrants into England.
In the US, the eugenics movement started from a belief in the racial superiority of white Anglo-Saxons and a desire to prevent the immigration of less desirable racial stocks. In 1910, the Committee on Eugenics solicited new members with a letter that read, The time is ripe for a strong public movement to stem the tide of threatened racial degeneracy. . . .America needs to protect herself against indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and. . .race suicide. The letter also warned of the impending complete destruction of the white race.
Eugenical News, which was published by the Eugenics Research Association and edited by Laughlin, welcomed racist and anti-immigrant articles. At the Second International Congress on Eugenics in 1921, one of the five classifications of exhibits was The Factor of Race.
Similarly, the American Eugenics Society’s Ultimate Program, adopted in 1923, placed chief emphasis on three goals:
1. a brief survey of the eugenics movement up to the present time;
2. working out and enacting a selective immigration law;
3. securing segregation of certain classes, such as the criminal defective.
The Eugenics Research Association included among the major issues its members addressed [im]migration, mate selection. . .race crossings, and. . .physical and mental measurement.
When the World War I-era IQ testing of all soldiers indicated that almost half of all white recruits were morons according to the newly developed Stanford Binet test, as were 89 percent of all black recruits, the eugenics movement seemed more important and believable.
Although some commentators questioned the validity of the test, and noted that questions on such topics as the color of sapphires and the location of Cornell University might reflect qualities other than intelligence, the statistics, when released, created great anxiety and gave the eugenics movement a substantial boost.
19th-Century Scientific Racism
The scientific racism movement of the mid-nineteenth century provided a number of important legacies to the eugenics movement. American scientific racism was primarily preoccupied with the attempt to establish that blacks, Orientals, and other races were in fact entirely different species of man, which the scientific racists claimed should be seen as a genus, rather than a species. The theory that the integrity of the human species derived from the creation of one Adam and one Eve was called monogenism or specific unity; monogenists believed that the races arose as a result of the degeneration of human beings since creation. The separate races were essentially the same human material, but different races had degenerated to different extents. Polygenists, by contrast, believed that the races were created separately in a series of different creations. The separate races were entirely different animals. The mid-century theory of polygenism, or specific diversity, was one of the first scientific theories largely developed in the US and was approvingly called the American School of anthropology by European scientists.
Harvard Professor Louis Agassiz, a prominent natural historian of the 19th-century, was the most important promoter of polygenism. Agassiz, an abolitionist, insisted that his adoption of polygenism was dictated by objective scientific investigation. Nevertheless, historian Stephen Jay Gould’s translation of Agassiz’s letter to his mother in 1846 shortly after his emigration to the US, reveals a profound, visceral aversion to blacks.
Not surprisingly, Agassiz was also passionately opposed to racial miscegenation. He believed that racial inter-mixture would result in the creation of effeminate offspring unable to maintain American democratic traditions. Agassiz wrote:
The production of half-breeds is as much a sin against nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin against purity of character. . . .No efforts should be spared to check that which is abhorrent to our better nature, and to the progress of a higher civilization and a purer morality.
In part because the classic definition of a species revolved around the ability to mate and produce children with each other but not with others, and in part because of a drive toward racial hierarchy, the questions of hybridization and fecundity were of great import to the early American scientific racists. For the eugenicists, these questions were also tremendously important. Much of the early scientific racist rhetoric on hybrids later reappeared in eugenicist writings where it came to form the basis of eugenicist arguments against racial miscegenation. The early concern with fecundity fueled later eugenicist claims that differential racial fecundity was leading to white racial suicide.
The eugenicist recapitulation of earlier scientific racist arguments was not cursory, but deep and enduring. In one of many examples, a 1925 bibliography on eugenics published by the American Eugenics Society recommended the book, Uncontrolled Breeding, Or Fecundity versus Civilization.
At the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, author V. G. Ruggeri, despite his concern with race-mixing, put forth Mendel’s monogenism to bolster his own argument in favor of monogenism; and Lucien March spoke on The Fertility of Marriages According to Profession and Social Position. The opening of Raymond Pearl’s lecture on The Inheritance of Fecundity made clear his position within this tradition:
The progressive decline of the birth rate in all, or nearly all, civilized countries is an obvious and impressive fact. Equally obvious and much more disturbing is the fact that this decline is differential. Generally it is true that those racial stocks which by common agreement are of high, if not the highest, value to the state or nation, are precisely the ones where the decline in reproduction rate has been most marked.
Family Studies, Social Darwinism, and Race Suicide
Eugenical family studies were an important component in the movement’s political development; family studies functioned as an objective, scientific basis for the twin myths of a feeble-minded menace and an impending white race suicide. The invention of feeble-mindedness, typically used as a term of art to cover broader issues related to social control, allowed the eugenicists to claim that social (and racial) classes were biological and hence immutable.
The first important eugenicist works in the US were a series of studies of American families supposedly plagued by hereditary feeble-mindedness, beginning with Richard Dugdale’s exposition of the Jukes family, published in 1877.
All of the family studies claimed to prove that a single feeble-minded ancestor could (and did) result in generations of poverty-stricken and degenerate offspring. The families in the studies were rural families, of Anglo-Saxon, Protestant descent, and for the most part, their lineage dated to the colonial settlers. The families were remarkably similar to the eugenicist activists in these traits; the main difference between the two was the poverty of the rural families. The equation by the eugenicists of poverty with degeneracy was quite explicit. Eugenicists believed that poverty was no more than a manifestation of inner degeneracy. Charity was therefore unlikely to lead the pauper out of poverty and, in fact, misguided charity might prove very costly to society. In the heightened tone that is common to writers in the family studies, one eugenicist wrote, It is impossible to calculate what even one feeble-minded woman may cost the public, when her vast possibilities for evil as a producer of paupers and criminals, through an endless line of descendants is considered.
Another writer said, for example, A habit of irregular work is a species of mental or moral weakness, or both. A man or woman who will not stick to a job is morally certain to be a pauper or a criminal.
In the same vein, a third wrote, Pauperism and habitual criminality are respectively passive and active states of the same disease.
Feeble-mindedness for the eugenicists was a designation that created a difference between the eugenicists and the families they studied. One group of social reformers described in detail the nature of the feeble-mindedness which they had found characterized prostitutes:
The general moral insensibility, the boldness, egotism and vanity, the love of notoriety, the lack of shame or remorse. . .the desire for immediate pleasure without regard for consequences, the lack of forethought or anxiety about the future--all cardinal symptoms of feeble-mindedness--were strikingly evident.
Thus the prostitute’s failure to adhere to social conventions of behavior for women is here called feeble-mindedness.
The deliberate and even fraudulent misrepresentations of the people in the family studies have been established. Stephen Jay Gould, for example, has shown that H. H. Goddard, author of The Kallikak Family, retouched photographs to make the Kallikaks appear mentally retarded.
Family studies were used to support the myth of the feeble-minded menace, which claimed the US was in imminent danger of being swamped by the degenerate and dangerous masses of the feeble-minded. When the feeble-minded menace was linked at the end of the 19th-century to the idea that the better stocks were failing to produce enough children, the idea of race suicide emerged. Race suicide captured the US imagination and lent support to the entire eugenics agenda.
The race suicide theory which developed during the first decade of the new century claimed that the greatly lowered birthrate of the better classes, coupled with the burgeoning birthrates of immigrants and the native-born poor, endangered the survival of the race. The race was clearly a term that referred to the white, Anglo-Saxon race and a deep racism permeated the racial suicide period from its beginning in 1900 to 1910. One classic racial suicide work is Robert Reid Rentoul’s Race Culture; or, Race Suicide? (A Plea for the Unborn), published in New York and London in 1906. Rentoul speaks of the terrible monstrosities created by racial intermarriage and points out that the Americans are poor patriots for repealing their racial miscegenation statutes.
The concept of the feeble-minded menace provided a way to make the rural families, who were neither institutionalized, foreign, nor colored, into people who were different from the eugenicists. Underlying the family studies and the myth of the feeble-minded menace was the theory of Social Darwinism, which assumed the existence of a struggle between the individual and society, and of an adversarial relationship between the fit and unfit classes. Eugenical family studies and social Darwinism both involved a transmutation of nature into biology and the eugenics movement frequently acknowledged its debt to Social Darwinism.
The deeply conservative implications of such philosophies included the rejection of government welfare programs or protective legislation on the grounds that such reforms as poorhouses, orphanages, bread lines, and eight-hour days enabled the unfit to survive and weakened society as a whole. From the beginning, the eugenics movement accepted the regressive implications of Social Darwinism. Karl Pearson believed that such measures as the minimum wage, the eight-hour day, free medical advice, and reductions in infant mortality encouraged an increase in unemployables, degenerates, and physical and mental weaklings.
Pearson’s friend, Havelock Ellis, known as a sex radical and free thinker, shared Pearson’s elitist views, writing in his 1911 eugenicist book, The Problem of Race Regeneration, These classes, with their tendency to weak-mindedness, their inborn laziness, lack of vitality, and unfitness for organized activity, contain the people who complain they are starving for want of work, though they will never perform any work that is given them. Ellis suggested in the same book that all public relief be denied to second generation paupers unless they voluntarily consented to be surgically sterilized.
One American eugenicist said harshly:
The so-called charitable people who give to begging children and women with baskets have a vast sin to answer for. It is from them that this pauper element gets its consent to exist. . . .So-called charity joins public relief in producing stillborn children, raising prostitutes, and educating criminals.
The economic conservatism of the movement was very clear. Faced with a social problem, the eugenicist leapt to the conclusion that it was the individual who must change to accommodate society (which is one reason why conservative commentators frequently argued that eugenics was a liberal movement committed to the supremacy of the community over the individual). The prevalence of the appeal to economics in eugenics writings led G. K. Chesterton to claim that the eugenicist was, at heart, the employer. Chesterton wrote:
[N]o one seems able to imagine capitalist industrialism being sacrificed to any other object. . . .[the eugenicist] tacitly takes it for granted that the small wages and the income, desperately shared, are the fixed points, like day and night, the conditions of human life. Compared with them, marriage and maternity are luxuries, things to be modified to suit the wage-market.
The eugenicists’ family studies were one aspect of the movement’s domestic program of scientific racism. The eugenics movement concentrated on differences: its roots in scientific racism looked to the differences between the white and other races, while the family studies created a distinction between fit and unfit white folks. At the same time, eugenicists and other scientific racists were discovering many different races among the foreign immigrants, all previously conceived as members of a single, white race.
The Eugenicist Role in Anti-Immigrant Organizing
The involvement of the organized American eugenics movement with the advocacy of immigration restriction was deep and long-standing. Although the organized anti-immigrant movement predated eugenical organizations by a few years, immigration restriction was from the beginning a key component of the eugenics program. For example, the American Eugenics Society published a wide variety of materials on immigration restriction and the 1923 Original Ultimate Program to be Developed by the American Eugenics Society listed immigration restriction as one of the top three goals of the society.
The first organized anti-immigrant group, the Immigration Restriction League, was founded in 1894 in Boston by a small group of Harvard-educated lawyers and academics; Prescott Hall and Robert DeCourcey Ward were the driving forces behind the League. The Immigration Restriction League was based on a belief in the superiority of the white races. Ward summed up the group’s philosophy when he wrote the question [of immigration] is a race question, pure and simple. . . .It is fundamentally a question as to what kind of babies shall be born; it is a question as to what races shall dominate in this country.
Most eugenicists agreed, and Yale Professor and prominent eugenicist Irving Fisher’s comment that The core of the problem of immigration is. . .one of race and eugenics was typical of the eugenicist position.
In the first decade of the century, the men of the Immigration Restriction League became active members of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association and other eugenics organizations, focusing their attention primarily on immigration issues. The connection was so compatible that the Immigration Restriction League almost changed its name to the Eugenic Immigration League. Hall and Ward even had sample stationery drawn up with the new name, but found the Board of Directors was unwilling to adopt the name of a movement younger than its own.
In 1918, Davenport and his fellow eugenicist, and virulent racist, and anti-immigration activist Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race and The Alien in Our Midst) set up the Galton Society. The Society was established for the promotion of study of racial anthropology and from the beginning, immigration restriction was a subject of much interest.
As John Higham has noted, one strand of nativism in the US derived from a conviction that the immigrant was a political and social radical, importing communistic or anarchistic ideas into the United States. Grant and Davenport both shared this conviction and established the Galton Society in part to bar such foreign radicals. The independently wealthy Grant wrote to the other organizers, My proposal is the organization of an anthropological society. . .confined to native Americans, who are anthropologically, socially, and politically sound, no Bolsheviki need apply.
Other prestigious members of the Galton Society included Henry Fairfield Osborn (who wrote the introduction to Grant’s book) and Grant’s friend and protégé, Lothrop Stoddard. Like his friend Grant, Stoddard was a strong anti-communist. His book The Rising Tide of Color argued that Bolshevism was a dangerous theory because it advocated universal equality rather than white supremacy.
H. H. Laughlin, of the Eugenics Research Association and Eugenics Record Office, was also very involved in anti-immigrant work. He produced many pamphlets on immigration, including Biological Aspects of Immigration, Analysis of America’s Melting Pot, Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent, The Eugenics Aspects of Deportation, and American History in Terms of Human Migration. Because Laughlin had been appointed the Expert Eugenics Agent for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization by the committee’s chair, Congressman Albert Johnson, many of these nativist pamphlets were published by the Government Printing Office in Washington, DC. In 1923, Johnson, a confirmed eugenicist, was appointed to the presidency of the Eugenics Research Association, a post held before him by Grant.
The immigration restrictionists were motivated by a desire to maintain both the white and the Christian dominance of the US. A year after the eugenicists’ victory in securing passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which established entry quotas that slashed the new immigration of Jews, Slavs, and southern Europeans, Davenport wrote to Grant, Our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also they burned the witches but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population. Meanwhile we have somewhat diminished the immigration of these people.
Similarly, the racial nature of the anti-immigration position was not veiled. In 1927, for instance, three years after the restrictive act of 1924 was passed, Grant, Robert DeCourcey Ward, and other eugenicists were still anxious to cut non-white immigration further. They signed a Memorial on Immigration Quotas, urging the President and Congress to extend the quota system to all countries of North and South America. . .in which the population is not predominantly of the white race.
The early 20th-century eugenics movement, often dismissed as a fad, provided a coherent and consistent political program to enforce the racial, class, and sexual dominance which was perceived to be under attack in American society. Its program has, in large part, reasserted itself in the late 20th-century, at a time when racial and economic elite dominance of US society is again under attack. The continuing vigor of scientific racism in the United States is in part a testimony to its strong, deep roots.
The Start of Iranian Depopulation
Well we've done a decent job of depopulation in Iraq, why not Iran. So we try to invoke another Gulf of Tonkin. Then too we can bomb with depleted uranium not only killing supposed enemies, but our own soldiers. This will set up generations of birth defects in Iran and American Military personal in the theatre of war.
9/11 and America's Depopulation
There are hundreds of New Yorkers who have died since 9-11 of related illness secondary to the dust cloud of 3 asbestos laced buildings being pulled in a professional fashion. Thousands more will die slowly over the next few years as toxins in the air on and after 9-11 conquer their bodies. This staged event is laughable when looked at in retrospect. How do we allow this to continue?
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The polio vaccine, AIDS, and their US-made viruses
| By Jerry Mazza Jan 11, 2008, | |
When I was a teenager growing up in Brooklyn, my parents warned me every summer to stay away from public pools or taking any chances running under opened fire hydrants to cools us from the brick-and-tar baking heat. Their fear was the epidemic of polio that haunted the US -- 52,000 cases in 1952 alone. My parents worried that polio “germs” could be carried in the highly used and abused public waters.
Yet in April 1955, in my 17th year, lo and behold Dr. Jonas Salk, a funny looking guy from Pittsburgh, announced from the University of Michigan that he had developed a polio vaccine for distribution. Eureka. Thousands of families like mine flooded to the local doctors, clinics, and hospitals. It seemed all those rosaries my friends’ mothers and mine gave up to the Holy Mother paid off. But did they?
As William Carlsen reports in his SFGATE article “Rogue virus in the vaccine:” Salk’s vaccine was produced by actually growing live polio virus on kidney tissue from the Asian rhesus monkey. The virus was then killed with formaldehyde. Thus, when the vaccine was injected in humans, the dead virus generated antibodies that could fend off live polio. What a simple, beautiful idea. Or so it seemed.
What the millions of people who were injected didn’t know, nor would they until 1959, when Bernice Eddy, looking in her microscope at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), found that monkey kidney cells, the very same kind used to make the vaccine, were dying with no known cause. So she experimented.
She prepared extracts from kidneys from eight to 10 rhesus monkeys. She then injected tiny amounts beneath the skin of 23 newborn hamsters. In nine months, “large, malignant, subcutaneous tumors” showed up on 20 of the animals -- and the world shook. Or did it?
Eddy tried to spread the word
Horrified that a monkey virus could be contaminating the famous polio vaccine, on July 6, 1960, Eddy shared her findings with Dr. Joseph Smadel, chief of NIH’s biologics division, who summarily dismissed the tumors as harmless “lumps.” Meanwhile at a Pennsylvania Merck lab, Dr. Maurice Hilleman and Dr. Ben Sweet isolated the virus. They named it Simian Virus 40 or SV40 for being the 40th virus found in rhesus kidney tissue. So much for miracle drugs.
Nevertheless, by then we seemed to be winning the polio war. Sixty percent of the population, some 98 million Americans, had gotten at least one shot of the Salk vaccine and the number of cases was diving downwards.
Concurrently, an oral polio vaccine developed by virologist Albert Sabin was in its final trials in Russia and Eastern Europe. Tens of millions of people had been given it, and it was ready to be licensed in the US. Its big difference was that unlike the Salk vaccine, Sabin’s version contained a live but weakened form of polio virus that “promised” lifelong immunity.
Fortunately, US Public Health Service (PHS) officials had conducted tests and found SV40 in both the Sabin and Salk vaccines. The US PHS estimated that a third of the Salk vaccine was tainted, and that SV40 was causing cancer in lab animals. Picture the corporate and government panic at this news, which was less than mildly shared with the public.
Early in 1961, PHS officials met quietly with the agency’s top vaccine advisers. Strangely, the agency found no evidence the virus had been harmful to humans. Yet in March, officials ordered manufacturers to eliminate SV40 from all future vaccine. New plans to neutralize the tainted polio virus seed stock were adopted and SV40-free African green monkeys were used to make the bulk vaccine instead of rhesus monkeys. More monkey business.
Amazingly, officials didn’t recall the contaminated Salk vaccine, that is, more than a year’s supply. It stayed in the hands of the country’s doctors. And they didn’t notify the public of the contamination and SV40’s effect on new born hamsters. Their strange reasoning was that any negative information could start a panic and put the vaccination campaign in danger. What about the millions of people who took the vaccines? Weren’t they being put in danger?
The first disclosure
The Salk vaccine contamination story crept on cat’s feet on July 26, 1961, onto page 33 of the New York Times. It reported Merck and other manufacturers had halted production until they could get “monkey virus” out of the vaccine. Asked for comments, the US PHS said there was no evidence the virus was dangerous. Except, of course, to the 20 baby hamsters it blew away.
In 1962, a Harvard epidemiologist, Dr. Joseph Fraumeni, joined the National Cancer Institute and was assigned to find out if there was any cancer increase among those injected with the Salk vaccine. With two Colleagues, Fraumeni tested vaccine samples from May and June of 1955, the first months of the national immunization campaign. Then they ranked the samples according to “no,” “low” or “high” amounts of SV40 they contained.
It was the only time US health officials would measure such level in the 55-62 vaccine. Stored samples were later dumped. Fraumeni pinpointed states where contaminated vaccines were distributed during the key months. California received a vaccine with a low level of the virus. The study also looked at cancer death rates for 6-to-8-year olds vaccinated during that narrow time frame and tracked the group for four years.
Findings, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed no significant difference in cancer deaths in states with high or low levels of SV40 in the vaccine when compared with cancer deaths in states with no SV40 in the vaccine.
Yet some 14 years later, after “isolated reports” linking the virus to human cancers, Fraumeni deemed another group should be looked at that had received contaminated vaccine. This group was the subject of trials conducted in the early '60s at Cleveland Metropolitan general Hospital. To see the effect of different amounts of SV40 in vaccines, hospital researchers inoculated newborns from mostly lower-income black families. Noticeably, doses ranged up to more than 100 times the dose recommended for adults, not a nice thing to do to those black kids.
The experiments spanned three years, involving 1,073 infants. The majority were given Sabin oral, which later was shown to contain SV40. A 1982 report in the New England Journal of Medicine hedged the study’s limitations: that a majority of the kids had not responded; but SV40-realted cancers could take longer than 17 to 19 years to appear; and SV40 appeared less likely to infect humans through the oral vaccine.
Despite these critical caveats, the whitewash called the findings “reassuring and consistent with the prevailing view that SV40 is not carcinogenic in human beings.” Then they called a halt to the studies, claiming “mountains of complexities and obstacles in tracing this particular group and the negative results to date.” This is not to mention their destructive racism, which would remain part of the government’s position for years.
BOOM, 1988
In Boston, Dr. Robert Garcea and assistant, Dr. John Bergsagel, used a new tool, a polymerase chain reaction, PCR, to look for a pair of common human viruses in kids’ brain tumors. A different DNA footprint popped up in more than half the tumors. It finally hit them that they were seeing SV40.
The PCR was capable of amplifying the smallest fragments of DNA, making detections far more credible than earlier more primitive tests for SV40-like proteins in human tumors. The findings were disturbing, indicating that the children were too young to have received the contaminated vaccine, yet somehow the virus infected them and embedded itself in their tumors.
In that same year, Dr. Michele Carbone found a milky, rind-like tumor in a laboratory at the National Insitutes of Health in Bethesda, Md. Carbone performed a variety of experiments showing that sixty percent of hamsters, after having SV40 injected into their hearts, contracted the fatal cancer, mesothelioma. Something awful was happening.
Carbone finally used PCR to test 48 human mesotheliomas stored at the NIH. He was stunned when 28 of them contained SV40. PCR went on to unleash a wave of SV40 discoveries. By the end of 1996, dozens of scientists reported SV40 in a variety of bone cancers and a wide range of brain cancers, a rise of 30 percent over the previous 20 years.
At the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, officials were growing increasingly concerned about the SV40 discoveries. And these findings were of particular interest to Fraumeni, who had been promoted to director of the NCI (National Cancer Institute)’s Division on Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. His early studies concluding that SV40 posed little or no health risk were now under challenge . . .
More about the NCI, National Cancer Institute
The deadly truth is that the National Cancer Institute (NCI-Frederick) and 37 mission partners are located at Fort Detrick, about 20 minutes from Bethesda, Maryland. The Fort is home to the United States Army Medical Research and Materiel Command (ISAMRMC). The primary missions include biomedical research and development. This is where the AIDS virus was developed, but not from monkeys.
In my 2005 Online Journal article, The AIDS virus: Made in the USA?, I reported that “Dr. Robert Strecker indicated that the AIDS virus was in fact developed by the National Cancer Institute, in cooperation with the World Health Organization (WHO), in a laboratory at Ft. Detrick in Maryland. From 1970–74, this laboratory facility was part of the U.S. Army’s germ warfare unit, known as the Army Infectious Disease Unit, or Special Operations Division, also referred to as the Army’s Chemical and Biological Warfare Laboratory. Post 1974, the facility was renamed the National Cancer Institute (NCI). According to researcher William Cooper (former Navy Intelligence officer), noted in Larry Jamison’s article Is The AIDS Virus Man Made?, this work was supervised by the CIA under a project called MK-NAOMI. [To get to this site click link, then “All News,” then “Next page”].
“Dr. Strecker has also traced some of the research and researchers at Ft. Detrick/NCI to a group of Japanese scientists captured at WW II’s end and given amnesty in exchange for information on racial and ethnic bio-weaponry, their research dating back to 1930. What’s more, expatriated Russian scientists were brought in to help as well.
“Dr. Strecker, one of the original and foremost authorities on the AIDS virus, found that the virus creation was conducted under the leadership of Dr. Robert Gallo, who later claimed to discover the virus. Dr. Gallo and his team created the AIDS virus by combining the bovine (cattle) leukemia virus and visna (sheep) virus, and injecting them into human tissue cultures.
“They discovered, as Strecker did, that bovine leukemia virus is lethal to cattle, but not to humans. And the visna virus is deadly to sheep, but not to man. However, when combined, they produce a retro-virus that can change the genetic composition of the cells they enter. In fact, as Larry Jamison points out, early field tests on prison convicts led to sickness then death, which inspired Gallo and friends to bigger and more terrible things, including injecting brothers and sisters with the tainted vaccine to see who died first. This was done to study HLA (human leukocyte antigen processing), to see how related people reacted. Frighteningly, whole families got sick at once! And there was worse to come.
“The AIDS retro-virus works, as Dr. Strecker states, by causing the destruction of the immune system, fundamentally the body's white blood or T-cells essential to the effectiveness of the immune system particularly against opportunistic infections diseases. The B-cells deal with more benign, bacterial infections. AZT, the drug which is a kind of junk food that starves the AIDS virus, often kills the patient as well. It provides dubious consolation. . . ."
As an updating underscore, I quote from Dr. Alan Cantwell’s 11/4/04 article at Rense.com, The Man-Made Origin Of AIDS -- Important Notes . . . in which he unqualifiedly states: “VISNA VIRUS WAS MOVED INTO PORCINE, BOVINE, AND HUMAN CELLS CAUSING PRODUCTIVE INFECTION PRIOR TO ANY ADVENT OF HIV ANYWHERE.
“ . . . The capital-lettered statement above is uncontestable. It is a fact.”
The polio virus was monkey-derived, but AIDS was not . . .
I repeat the above so that the idea of a monkey biting an African’s butt or of Simian Virus 40 being the culprit for HIV-AIDS is not the case. There is a desire to surrender to this idea because it seems convenient. African populations live in jungle areas and are largely black and may be in contact with monkeys. Unfortunately, to a lesser degree AIDS has struck white communities in America as well, either white and/or gay in addition to black and/or Latino, i.e. minorities, ergo expendable to the elites. The question is, was the CIA/NCI behind the polio virus as well? It’s timeline flows into and parallels the AIDS virus.
Again, the AIDS virus was weaponized at Fort Detrick. As Cantwell reports, “I believe, based on now some 16 years of investigation of this whole thing that HIV is a strategic biological weapon designed to kill billions of people in a slow-unfolding relentless holocaust which was released in two different vaccination programs: a) the smallpox vaccination program in Africa commencing in the late 1960s, b) the hepatitis-B vaccination program in the United States in the mid-to-late 1970s.
“Moreover, so it is perfectly clear, this contamination was no accident. It was done on purpose with the goal of ‘thinning the herd’ in a Nazi-like mindset that has covertly governed population control politics since the 1870s. These same politics had pervaded the WHO [World Health Organization] and most of western medical experimental science throughout the 20th century. And, to be very pointed: the same political ideology is still there. Non-whites [and gay whites] are detrimental to the gene pool's evolution so says the political philosophy. To see a bit of this in history, go here:
“http://members.aol.com/Pantheism0/haekrace.htm
http://www.islamdenouncesantisemitism.com/thesocial.htm
http://emporium.turnpike.net/C/cs/hsneg.htm
http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web1/hossain.html
http://womenshistory.about.com/library/bio/blbio_margaret_sanger.htm
http://blackgenocide.org/sanger04.html
http://www.cwfa.org/library/life/2001-05_pp_n-project.shtml
http://www.scils.rutgers.edu/~lyonsm/tuskegee.html
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/f02/tucker.html
http://www.ferris.edu/isar/Institut/pioneer/forbes.htm
http://www.pioneerfund.org/speak2.html
http://www.lrainc.com/swtaboo/stalkers/jpr_rghrs.html
http://www.beloit.edu/~biology/genethics/eugenics.html
http://www.interactivist.net/housing/war_2.html
http://directory.google.com/Top/Society/Philosophy/Ethics/Applied/Bioethics/Eugenics/
http://www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/0997web/tenure.html
http://members.aol.com/_ht_a/lillithsrealm/myhomepage/Eugenics/HistoryEugenics.htm
http://www.breggin.com/Mehlerart.html
http://www.zmag.org/ZMag/articles/sferiosjune98.htm
“This belief system is pervasive in the molecular sciences as it is at the heart of eugenics, cloning, evolution, and heritability.”
Yet, little did my Brooklyn family, friends, myself and America know what darker forces were lurking about us in the 50s and 60s, especially in the post WW-ll surge in our economy, military strength, intelligence community and the confidence that America was the best, safest, the most noble place to grow up in and ultimately defend.
In fact, was the polio vaccine weaponized from the get-go with SV40 the way the World Health Organization laced a smallpox vaccine for millions of Africans with the AIDS virus? Or was the polio virus a Pandora’s box opened by a well-meaning Salk? If so, why did it take so long to unearth and never really correct it? And how many millions of Americans have paid with their lives via the SV40 cancer-link? Here is one doctor’s answer, again from my article . . .
“Also, concerning green monkeys, Dr. William Campbell Douglass, MD, writes in 1987 in W.H.O. Murdered Africa: “This is the origin of the green monkey theory. The polio vaccine was grown on green monkey kidney cells and the geniuses who brought us polio vaccine said: ‘We got away with it once so let's use it again.’ But they didn't get away with it and in spite of the fact that polio was rapidly disappearing without any medical intervention, 64 million Americans were vaccinated with SV-40 contaminated vaccine in the 60s. An increase in cancer of the brain, possibly multiple sclerosis and God only knows what else is the tragic result. The delay between vaccination and the onset of cancer with this virus is as long as 20–30 years. Nineteen sixty-five plus 20 equals 1985. Get the picture?”
Unfortunately, it’s a rather grim picture, but as close as the truth as I can get on this awful subject. I suggest you read the entirety of my first AIDS article, including all links. Knowledge is power as they say. And even back in 2005, I reported Bilderberger involvement in all this, the power beyond the powers that rule, going about its deadly business.
Rogue virus in the vaccine: Early polio vaccine harbored virus now feared to cause cancer in humans
Rogue virus in the vaccine / Early polio vaccine harbored virus now feared to cause cancer in humans
Students at St. Vibiana's school in Los Angeles were among the first to receive the Salk vaccine. Associated Press File Photo
Students at St. Vibiana's school in Los Angeles were among the first to receive the Salk vaccine. Associated Press File Photo
A growing number of medical researchers fear that a monkey virus that contaminated polio vaccine given to tens of millions of Americans in the 1950s and '60s may be causing rare human cancers.
For four decades, government officials have insisted that there is no evidence the simian virus called SV40 is harmful to humans. But in recent years, dozens of scientific studies have found the virus in a steadily increasing number of rare brain, bone and lung-related tumors - the same malignant cancer SV40 causes in lab animals.
Dr. Howard Strickler, chief investigator for the National Cancer Institute, said that none of his studies of SV40 have shown "an inkling of an effect on the population." Photo by Craig Allen, special to the Chronicle
Even more troubling, the virus has been detected in tumors removed from people never inoculated with the contaminated vaccine, leading some to worry that those infected by the vaccine might be spreading SV40.
The discovery of SV40 in human tumors has generated intense debate within the scientific community, pitting a handful of government health officials, who believe that the virus is harmless, against researchers from Boston to China who now suspect SV40 may be a human carcinogen. At stake are millions of research dollars and potential medical treatments for those afflicted with the cancers SV40 may be causing.
In April, more than 60 scientists met in Chicago to discuss the controversial virus and how it works to defeat certain cells' natural defenses against cancer.
"I believe that SV40 is carcinogenic (in humans)," said Dr. Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill. "We need to be creating therapies for people who have these cancers, and now we may be able to because we have a target - SV40."
"I belives that SV40 is carcinogenic (in humans). We need to be creating therapies for people who have these cancers, and now we may be able to because we have a target -- SV40." -- Dr. Michele Carbone of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, ILL.
But scientists at the National Cancer Institute say their studies show almost no SV40 in human tumors and no cancer increase in people who received the contaminated vaccine.
"No one would dispute there's been a widespread, very scary exposure to the population of potentially cancer-causing virus," said Dr. Howard Strickler, NCI's chief investigator. "But none of our studies and other major analyses have shown an inkling of an effect on the population."
Critics charge, however, that the few studies done by the government are scientifically flawed and that health officials have downplayed the potential risks posed by SV40 ever since they learned in 1961 that the virus contaminated the polio vaccine and caused tumors in rodents.
"How long can the government ignore this?" asked Dr. Adi Gazdar, a University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center cancer researcher. "The government has not sponsored any real research. Here's something possibly affecting millions of Americans, and they're indifferent.
"Maybe they don't want to find out."
The recent SV40 discoveries come at a time of growing concern over the dangers posed by a range of animal viruses that have crossed the species barrier to humans, including HIV, which scientists now believe came from chimpanzees and ultimately caused the AIDS epidemic.
Based on dozens of interviews and a review of the medical research, this is the story of how the campaign to eradicate polio may have inadvertently permitted another potentially deadly monkey virus to infect millions of people - and why the government for years discounted the accumulating evidence suggesting that SV40 may be a health risk for humans.
Polio epidemic, 1955
During the first half of the 20th century, polio struck down hundreds of thousands of people, leaving many paralyzed - some in iron lung machines - and killing others. The worst year was 1952, when more than 57,000 polio cases were reported in the United States. Three thousand died.
Then on April 12, 1955, Dr. Jonas Salk, a slightly built, soft-spoken researcher from Pittsburgh, mounted the podium at the University of Michigan and announced that he had developed a vaccine. That afternoon, the government licensed the vaccine for distribution.
Salk's vaccine was made by growing live polio virus on kidney tissue from Asian rhesus monkeys. The virus was then killed with formaldehyde. When the vaccine was injected in humans, the dead virus generated antibodies capable of fending off live polio.
Dr. Dwight Murray, then chairman of the American Medical Association, called Salk's announcement "one of the greatest events in the history of medicine."
Within weeks, the stockpiled vaccine was being injected into the arms of millions of people worldwide.
Virus and the tumors, 1959
Four years later, Bernice Eddy, a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, noticed something strange while looking through her microscope. Monkey kidney cells - the same kind used to make the vaccine - were dying without apparent cause.
So she tried an experiment. She prepared kidney extracts from eight to 10 rhesus monkeys and injected tiny amounts under the skin of 23 newborn hamsters. Within nine months, "large, malignant, subcutaneous tumors" appeared on 20 of the animals.
On July 6, 1960, concerned that a monkey virus might be contaminating the polio vaccine, Eddy took her findings to Dr. Joseph Smadel, chief of the NIH's biologics division. Smadel dismissed the tumors as harmless "lumps."
The same year, however, at a Merck laboratory in Pennsylvania, Dr. Maurice Hilleman and Dr. Ben Sweet isolated the virus. They called it simian virus 40, or SV40, because it was the 40th virus found in rhesus kidney tissue.
Immunization campaign, 1961
By then, the nation was winning the war against polio. Nearly 98 million Americans - more than 60 percent of the population - had received at least one injection of the Salk vaccine, and the number of cases was plummeting.
At the same time, an oral polio vaccine developed by virologist Albert Sabin was in final trials in Russia and Eastern Europe, where tens of millions had been inoculated, and it was about to be licensed in the United States. Unlike the Salk vaccine, the oral version contained a live but weakened form of polio virus and promised lifelong immunity.
But U.S. Public Health Service officials were worried. Tests had found SV40 in both the Sabin and Salk vaccines - it was later estimated that as much as a third of the Salk vaccine was tainted - and that SV40 was causing cancer in lab animals.
In early 1961, they quietly met with the agency's top vaccine advisers. The agency found no evidence that the virus had been harmful to humans, but in March, the officials ordered manufacturers to eliminate SV40 from all future vaccine.
New procedures were adopted to neutralize the tainted polio virus seed stock and SV40-free African green monkeys were used to produce the bulk vaccine instead of rhesus monkeys.
But officials did not recall contaminated Salk vaccine - more than a year's supply - still in the hands of the nation's doctors.
And they did not notify the public of the contamination and SV40's carcinogenic effect on newborn hamsters.
Hilleman would later explain that government officials were worried that any potentially negative information could ignite a panic and jeopardize the vaccination campaign.
The first public disclosure that the Salk vaccine was contaminated came in the New York Times on July 26, 1961. A story on Page 33 reported that Merck and other manufacturers had halted production until they could get a "monkey virus" out of the vaccine.
When asked to comment, the U.S. Public Health Service stressed there was no evidence the virus was dangerous.
No cause for alarm, 1962
The next year, a young Harvard-trained epidemiologist named Dr. Joseph Fraumeni joined the National Cancer Institute and was assigned one of the agency's most important projects: to determine if there was any cancer increase among those injected with the Salk vaccine.
His research would form the basis of the government's position for decades.
Working with two colleagues, Fraumeni tested stored vaccine samples from May and June of 1955, the first months of the national immunization campaign, then ranked the samples according to how much SV40 they contained - no, low or high amounts.
It would be the only time U.S. health officials measured the level of SV40 in the 1955-1962 vaccine. Stored samples from that period were later discarded.
Fraumeni identified the states where the SV40-contaminated vaccines had been distributed during those two months. California, for example, received vaccine with a low level of the virus.
The study looked at cancer mortality rates for 6- to 8-year-old children vaccinated during that narrow time frame, tracking the group for four years.
The findings, which were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, showed no significant difference in cancer deaths in states with high or low levels of SV40 in the vaccine when compared with cancer deaths in states with no SV40 in the vaccine.
Cleveland children, 1976
Fourteen years later, after isolated reports linking the virus and human cancers, Fraumeni decided to look at another group that had received contaminated vaccine.
The group had been the subject of experiments conducted in the early 1960s at Cleveland Metropolitan General Hospital. To determine the effect of different amounts of the vaccines, researchers at the hospital inoculated newborns from mostly lower-income black families with doses ranging up to more than 100 times the dose recommended for adults.
The experiments took place over three years and involved 1,073 infants. Most were given Sabin oral vaccine later determined to contain SV40.
From 1976 to 1979, Fraumeni and his associates sent letters to the children - now age 17 to 19 - but fewer than half responded. The researchers found no SV40-related health problems from exposure to contaminated vaccine.
However, their 1982 report published in the New England Journal of Medicine acknowledged the study's limitations: A majority of the children had not responded; SV40-related cancers might take longer than 17 to 19 years to develop, and SV40 appears less likely to infect humans through the oral vaccine.
Nevertheless, they called their findings "reassuring and consistent with the prevailing view that SV40 is not carcinogenic in human beings."
Then they decided to end the study, citing "the mounting complexities and obstacles in tracing this particular group and the negative results to date."
The study's closure appeared to end the government's research into the virus. But a few years later there would be a tectonic shift in SV40 research.
First discovery, 1988
In Boston, two researchers stumbled onto something disturbing.
Dr. Robert Garcea and his assistant, Dr. John Bergsagel, were using a powerful new tool called polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, to look for a pair of common human viruses in children's brain tumors.
But a different DNA footprint kept popping up in more than half the tumors. They finally realized they were seeing SV40.
For more than a decade, scientists had reported sporadic findings of SV40- like proteins in human tumors. But the earlier tests were primitive and the results suspect. PCR, however, is capable of amplifying infinitesimal fragments of DNA, which makes detections far more credible.
The findings were troubling. The researchers noted in their published report that the children were too young to have received the contaminated vaccine. But somehow the virus had infected them and embedded itself in their tumors.
Mesothelioma, 1988
That same year, Dr. Michele Carbone was surprised to find a milky, rindlike tumor in a laboratory hamster at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md.
The animal was one of a group given an SV40 injection directly into their hearts. Sixty percent of those hamsters developed the fatal cancer called mesothelioma.
Carbone, a postdoctoral fellow at the institute, knew that SV40 caused tumors in hamsters but only in specific locations where large doses of virus were injected. Here the mesothelial membrane lining the lungs apparently became cancerous from minuscule amounts of SV40 shed by the tip of the needle on the way to the hamsters' hearts.
So he tried another experiment, this time injecting SV40 directly into the thin mesothelial walls of another group of hamsters. Within six months, every animal developed mesothelioma.
Carbone was puzzled. Mesothelioma is a rare cancer. Few human cases were reported before the 1950s, but its incidence had been increasing steadily, reaching several thousand cases a year in the United States by 1988.
Studies had linked mesothelioma to asbestos exposure - with tumors usually appearing many decades later. Yet 20 percent of victims had no asbestos exposure.
Carbone decided to use PCR to test 48 human mesotheliomas stored at the NIH.
He was stunned: 28 of them contained SV40.
More cancers, 1996
PCR unleashed a wave of SV40 discoveries.
By the end of 1996, dozens of scientists reported finding SV40 in a variety of bone cancers and a wide range of brain cancers, which had risen 30 percent over the previous 20 years.
Then, Italian researchers reported finding SV40 in 45 percent of the seminal fluid samples and 23 percent of the blood samples they had taken from healthy donors.
That meant SV40 could have been spreading through sexual activity, from mother to child, or by other means, which could explain how those never inoculated with the contaminated vaccine, such as the Boston children, were being infected.
Government assurances, 1996
At the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, officials were growing increasingly concerned about the SV40 discoveries.
The findings were of particular interest to Fraumeni, who had been promoted to director of NCI's Division on Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics. His earlier studies concluding that SV40 posed little or no health risk were now under challenge.
But the scientific community was skeptical of the recent SV40 discoveries. As a potent carcinogen in lab animals, SV40 had been used for years as a tool to study cancer. Therefore, the powerful PCR test was suspected of finding stray SV40 fragments that might have contaminated laboratories.
So Dr. Howard Strickler, one of Fraumeni's epidemiologists, led a study using PCR on 50 mesotheliomas from Armed Forces hospitals across the country. And he found no SV40.
Although the findings bolstered the government's long-standing position that SV40 did not appear to be a health risk, federal officials decided to convene a conference on the virus.
In January 1997, 30 scientists gathered at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland. Garcea, Carbone and others presented their evidence showing SV40 in tumors and pleaded for research funding.
Strickler presented his mesothelioma study, as well as new research he had just completed, this time working with Fraumeni.
Their new study compared 20 years of cancer rates of people born between 1947 and 1963, and therefore likely to have been exposed to the contaminated polio vaccine, with people born after 1963, who they believed weren't exposed.
Their study found no significant difference between the two groups.
Letter of protest, 1998
But when Susan Fisher read Strickler and Fraumeni's study in the Journal of the American Medical Association, she fired off a letter of protest to the publication.
An epidemiologist at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, Ill., Fisher challenged the study's methodology, calling it "an error in judgment" and misleading.
Using the same 20-year national cancer database for the two groups, Fisher compared people of the same age - "because these cancers are highly correlated with age" - and she came up with very different results.
Studying 18- to 26-year-olds who probably had been exposed to the contaminated vaccine, Fisher found a 19.6 percent greater incidence of the two major brain cancers linked to SV40 when compared with the incidence in people the same age who were not exposed. She also found 16.6 percent more bone cancers and 178 percent more mesotheliomas among those exposed to the vaccine.
But Fisher cautioned against comparing the two groups. She argued that if SV40 is being transmitted and circulating in the population, then many people in the "unexposed" group would also be carrying the virus and that would undermine the comparison.
Two types of SV40, 1999
For years, researchers had believed that all SV40-contaminated Salk vaccine made between 1955 and 1963 had been used or discarded.
Then in 1999, Carbone was contacted by a former public health director in Oak Park, Ill., who said he had seven sealed vials of vaccine dated October 1955 in a refrigerator in his basement.
Carbone, who had left the NIH and joined the faculty at Loyola University Medical Center, ran tests on the vaccine and made a startling discovery: Not only was the vaccine contaminated, it contained a second form of the virus - an "archetypal" SV40 strain.
Although manufacturers switched from rhesus monkeys to SV40-free green African monkeys to grow the bulk vaccine in 1961, they have continued to use potentially contaminated polio seed strains originally grown on the rhesus monkey tissue to start the bulk vaccine process.
Manufacturers check the purity of their vaccine with a series of 14-day tests to detect whether any SV40 slipped through.
But when Carbone replicated the tests, he found that the second, slower- growing "archetypal" strain took 19 days to emerge.
It was possible, Carbone noted in a published report, that this second strain of SV40 had been evading manufacturers' screening procedures for years - and infecting vaccine recipients after 1962.
Controversial study, 2000
Meanwhile, a new study led by Strickler had bogged down in bitter internal conflict.
After the NIH's 1997 conference, nine laboratories were recruited to participate in a government-sponsored study to determine if tests were really finding SV40 in tumors or whether earlier detections were the result of laboratory contamination.
Carbone and other researchers considered the study unnecessary. A similar multilab study led by Dr. Joseph Testa of Philadelphia had just been completed, and it virtually eliminated the contamination theory. The prestigious journal Cancer Research published Testa's findings in 1998.
But Strickler pressed on.
An independent laboratory in Maryland prepared mesothelioma samples for the nine labs.
When tests revealed almost no SV40 in the tumor samples, some participants questioned the preparation methods used by the Maryland lab. They also challenged Strickler's written conclusion implying that contamination had caused the earlier findings of SV40 in tumors.
If Strickler was right, the earlier SV40 detections were probably the result of stray SV40 in the labs. But critics argued that the study was scientifically flawed and should be scrapped.
The dispute became so contentious that FDA officials were forced to intervene and a neutral arbitrator assigned to mediate.
Finally, in early 2000, more than two years after the study was initiated, a carefully rewritten report emerged for publication.
It concluded that contamination was an unlikely explanation for earlier SV40 findings. Then it struggled to explain the discrepancy between earlier detections of SV40 in about half of all mesotheliomas tested and the fact that the nine labs found the virus in only slightly more than 1 percent of the study's tumor specimens.
The report noted that discrepancy might be because of the inefficiency of the method used by the Maryland lab to recover DNA - like the genetic sequences of SV40 - from the mesothelial tissue to create the test samples.
The Maryland lab also had inadvertently contaminated some of the laboratory controls and "theoretically" could have contaminated others.
The report concluded by calling for further research.
Despite the study's ambivalent conclusions and technical problems, the NCI submitted it to Cancer Research, the journal that had published Testa's study.
It was rejected.
Further discoveries, 2000
In laboratories around the world, researchers continued to find SV40 in a widening range of tumors that now included pituitary and thyroid cancers and some lymphomas.
Meanwhile, an NCI investigator named Dr. David Schrump was able to gut a common respiratory virus and use it to deliver genetic material called "antisense" into SV40-infected mesothelial cells and stop the cells' malignant growth.
His discovery, which was patented by the government, strongly suggested that SV40 contributed to mesothelioma and that a treatment might be possible.
Then in August, Carbone and several colleagues published a major study providing a "mechanistic" explanation of how SV40 contributes to the uncontrolled growth of mesothelial cells. The key, they found, was the large number of "tumor suppressor" proteins found in the mesothelial cells that makes them unusually susceptible to SV40.
In most human cells, they said, the virus reproduces itself and kills the infected cell in the process. But in mesothelial cells, SV40 is especially attracted to the "tumor suppressor" proteins and binds to them, knocking them out of action. The virus then lives on in the cell.
The result, they said, is a rate of malignant cell transformation in tissue cultures 1,000 times higher than has ever been observed.
In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Carbone further explained that asbestos fibers appear to act as a co- carcinogen in mesothelioma by somehow suppressing the immune system's response, which is designed to kill the infected cells.
Chicago conference, 2001
Carbone and others believed that the time had come for another conference on the virus he calls "a perfect little war machine."
In April, more than 60 scientists gathered on a warm weekend at the University of Chicago's downtown conference center. Despite numerous faxes and certified letters inviting him, Strickler declined to attend.
Carbone opened the conference by confronting the question of whether SV40 is present in humans.
"Sixty-two papers from 30 laboratories from around the world have reported SV40 in human tissues and tumors," he said. "It is very difficult to believe that all of these papers, all of the techniques used and all of the people around the world are wrong."
For two days, scientists from as far away as China and New Zealand presented the results of their studies, with almost every speaker concluding that SV40 was present in the tissues they examined.
One of the newest discoveries came from Dr. Jeffrey Kopp, an NIH scientist who reported finding SV40 in a high percentage of patients with kidney disease. The virus was also present, he said, in 60 percent of a new "collapsing" type of renal disease that was unknown before 1980 but has since increased rapidly in incidence.
There were also reports on efforts to develop a vaccine, recently funded by the NCI, that would allow the immune system to target and eliminate SV40.
At times, the meeting took on almost revivalist overtones as scientist after scientist said he or she was initially very skeptical of SV40's presence in human tumors but was now a believer.
"I was a hard sell," said Testa, the Philadelphia geneticist who conducted the first multilaboratory tests, noting that the study had convinced him.
Gazdar, the cancer researcher from Texas, showed a slide describing his transformation: "Nonbeliever -- Believer - Zealot."
The conference concluded with a consensus among the leading scientists that SV40's presence in human tumors was no longer in question. They were more circumspect about the virus' possible role in causing cancer.
If SV40 is a human carcinogen, they said, the virus probably requires interaction with other cancer-causing substances like asbestos.
Dr. Janet Butel from Baylor Medical College in Houston said that it simply might be too soon to make a determination, citing the many years it has taken to establish that other viruses cause cancer.
But even renowned tumor biologist George Klein from Sweden said he was impressed by Carbone and Schrump's work.
"This strongly suggests that the virus plays a role (in causing tumors)," said Klein, a former chairman of the Nobel Assembly.
Low priority, 2001
In May, shortly after the conference, Strickler's multilab study was published in a small journal called Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention.
Carbone and other SV40 experts dismissed the study.
"A garbage paper in a garbage journal," said Garcea, now on the faculty at the University of Colorado School of Medicine.
But Strickler strongly defends the study. He said it was the first to use strict controls not used in other studies. He acknowledged, however, that the study "doesn't prove that SV40 is not out there."
Strickler, who now teaches at Albert Einstein School of Medicine in New York, said he remains skeptical about whether SV40 has infected humans, a suspicion he says is shared by the broader scientific community.
But the NCI recently acknowledged that there is evidence to suggest that SV40 "may be associated with human cancer." The NCI statement, released last month, also said that SV40's interaction with "tumor suppressor proteins" indicates "possible mechanisms that could contribute to the development of cancer."
Top NCI officials declined to be interviewed on the record for this report. Fraumeni also declined several requests for an interview.
Dr. James Goedert, the chief of the NCI's Viral Epidemiology Branch who supervised Strickler's work, said that if SV40 is in human tumors, it must be at extremely low levels. To critics who claim the government has downplayed SV40's potential health risks, Goedert responded: "Absolutely not."
He acknowledged that research is needed to resolve the question of whether SV40 is prevalent in the human population and, if so, how it might be spreading. But Goedert said he has no plans for such studies.
"It's not our highest priority," he said.
Key figures in developing vaccines and tracing SV40
Dr. Jonas Salk Developed the first polio vaccine using killed virus in 1955.
Virologist Albert Sabin Developed an oral vaccine using weakened live virus.
Dr. Robert Garcea Used new technology to trace SV40 in children's brain tumors.
Q&A on polio vaccine contaminated with SV40 Q: How widespread is the SV40 infection?
A: Scientists and government health officials don't know because no comprehensive studies have addressed the question.
What is known: During the 1950s and '60s, more than 100 million people worldwide were given SV40-contaminated polio vaccine. The virus also has been found in people who did not receive contaminated vaccine, as well as laboratory workers and monkey handlers. No studies, however, have examined how SV40 might be transmitted between people, or if somehow humans might have become infected with SV40 before the introduction of the tainted vaccines.
Q: Can I be tested for SV40?
A: An accurate blood test does not exist. Current antibody blood tests can be inaccurate, scientists say, because they may also detect the presence of other closely related viruses, and SV40 may be present at such a low level that no antibodies are produced. Researchers are working to create an effective test.
Q: Is the current
polio vaccine safe?
A: Vaccine producers, health officials and most scientists believe that it is safe. Manufacturers say they take elaborate steps to test their vaccine for SV40, and the government says it recently tested vaccine samples back to 1972 and found no trace of SV40.
Some scientists, including Dr. Michele Carbone, have raised questions about whether manufacturers' testing techniques have been adequate. Carbone, however, tested vaccine from 1996 and found no SV40. He has had his children inoculated.
Q: In which kinds of cancers has SV40 been found?
A: The virus has been detected in rare cancers:
-- Mesothelioma, a fatal tumor of the membrane surrounding the lungs. Few cases were reported prior to 1950, but the incidence has grown in the United States to 2,000 to 4,000 cases a year, with greater incidence in Europe.
-- Brain cancers: Primarily ependymoma and choroid plexus tumors, but also astrocytoma, glioblastoma, medulloblastoma and meningioma. These make up a total of less than 1,000 U.S. cases each year.
-- Bone cancers: Primarily osteosarcoma but also chondrosarcoma and giant cell tumors. These also make up less than 1,000 cases annually.
-- Other cancers: A few detections in pituitary and thyroid tumors and lymphomas.
Report sources
The sources for this report include the books "The Saga of Jonas Salk" by Richard Carter and "The Health Century" by Edward Shorter; articles in Atlantic Monthly and New York magazine; newspaper archives at The Chronicle and the New York Times; transcript of the 1997 National Institutes of Health Conference in Bethesda; a review of dozens of scientific journal articles and scores of interviews.
Related series: Quest for the Origin of AIDS.
How SV40 contaminated polio vaccine
When Dr. Jonas Salk introduced the first polio vaccine in 1955, it was hailed as "one of the greatest events in medicine." Within 10 years, U.S. polio cases plummeted from 30,000 to less than 1,000. But in 1960, a monkey virus called SV40 was found in the Salk vaccine. As much as one-third of the vaccine was contaminated. SV40 was also found in earlier versions of an oral vaccine developed by Dr. Albert Sabin that replaced the Salk vaccine in the 1960s. When it was discovered that SV40 caused cancer in lab animals, U.S. health officials ordered vaccine manufacturers in 1961 to eliminate the virus from all future vaccine, although questions remain about whether they succeeded with the Sabin vaccine. .
Making the Sabin vaccine: 1955-1961 Starting in the mid-1950s, both Sabin and Salk vaccines are made by growing polio virus on kidney tissue from Asian rhesus monkeys, which are natural hosts for the simian virus known as SV40. Special weakened seed strain of polio virus developed by Sabin is grown on rhesus kidney tissue to make large bulk amounts of vaccine. SV40 from the kidney tissue contaminates the vaccine. .
Making the vaccine safe: 1961 In 1961, after SV40 is discovered in the vaccines, U.S. health officials order manufacturers to eliminate SV40. Antiserum is used to neutralize SV40 in seed stock, and SV40-free African green monkeys are used to grow bulk vaccine. But some researchers believe small amounts of SV40 may have survived. .
Testing Manufacturers check the safety of the vaccine pools by using a series of 14- day growth tests to see if SV40 is present.
Making the Salk vaccine: 1955-1961 Full strength polio virus is grown on rhesus kidney to make bulk Salk vaccine. SV40 from the kidney tissue contaminates the vaccine. The polio virus is then killed with formaldehyde, but some SV40 survives. .
Making the vaccine safe: 1961 In the original vaccine, the SV40 survives, contaminating up to 30 million Americans. But after 1961, African green monkeys are used to grow bulk vaccine and SV40 is eliminated.
Sources: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia; SEER; virus images by Jean Yves Sgro, University of Wisconsin; Chronicle research
BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE
For more information about the simian virus SV40, the following studies or scientific reviews were published during that past year:
A multicenter evaluation of assays of detection of SV40 DNA and results in masked mesothelioma specimens. Strickler H, Goedert J., Cancer Epidemiology, Biomarkers & Prevention. Vol. 10, 523-532, May 2001.
Simian virus 40 and human cancers, Strickler H., Einstein Quarterly J. Biol. and Med. (2001) 18:14-21. This includes a detailed bibliography that will lead readers to earlier scientific articles.
Oral polio vaccine and human cancer: a reassessment of SV40 as a contaminant based upon legal documents. Kops S., Anticancer Research (2000) 20: 4745-4750.
Human mesothelial cells are unusually susceptible to SV40-mediated transformation and asbestos cocarcinogenicity. Bocchetta M, Di Resta I, Powers A, Fresco R, Tosolini A, Testa J, Pass H, Rizzo P, Carbone M., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, Issue 18, 10214-10219, Aug. 29, 2000.
In addition, a bibliography of journal articles by leading SV40 researcher Dr. Michele Carbone can be viewed by clicking on the following link: www.chestsurg.org/carbone7.htm
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