Document Type
Article
Publication Date
January 2009
Abstract
At the First International Congress of Eugenics in London in 1912, Bleecker Van Wagenen declared that people of "defective inheritance" should be "eliminated from the human stock." Included among the "socially unfit" were the feebleminded, paupers, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the congenitally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, the deformed, the blind, and the deaf. U.S. Census data from previous decades demonstrated that the number of people in institutions--such as prisons, hospitals, and asylums--totaled over 630,000 and was growing as a percentage of the population. Another three million people of "inferior blood" were not yet in insitutions, and seven million others--10 percent of the total population--were carriers of hereditary maladies. All told, this mass of problematic heredity was "totally unfitted to become parents of useful citizens."
Recommended Citation
Van Wagenen, Bleeker, "Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders' Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population" (2009). Buck v Bell Documents. Paper 74.
http://readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/74