Social Darwinism's autochthon: Teddy Roosevelt
From 1850-1950 +/-, Anglo-Am culture experiences two major transformations that changes everybody's world going forward. The first is the Industrial Revolution, the second, the Victorian empire.
Both transformations are interpreted by technocrats from the perspective of the Descent's "science"; Social Darwinism's central tenet is that biology, technology and culture are subject to the laws of evolution by natural selection.
For the Anglos, and those Europeans competing with them for the world's resources, the overarching Biblical, Lockean and industrial-capitalist goal is to "subdue and improve nature" for the purpose of monetary wealth creation. For this reason, wealth is the proof of "highest" evolutionary status.
Driven by "evolution" and "proven by science!", all of human history is "progressing"/will progress to the total transformation of the earth's biomes by industry into money, controlled by Anglo-Am bankers. > The Victorians, absolutely mad, play a "Great Game" of imperialism against the rest of Europe, and what makes them exceptional is that their colonization leads to freedom:
Britain believed that it was the world's first free society and the most industrially advanced country, and therefore that it had a duty to use its iron, steam power, and cotton goods to take over [the world] and develop it. British goods were to be followed by British values and the respect for private property. With pay for work and security in place, nomads would settle and become tribal herdsman surrounding oasis cities. These were to develop into modern states with agreed borders, as in the European model. "Liberal interventionism" gets its start with the Victorians, who invented freedom and in the missionary fashion have to spread it everywhere.
1890 The forerunner of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory is established in Long Island. It becomes the most influential eugenics i.e. "race science" institution.
1893 "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" was widely read and it told colonialist Americans that the frontier era was over. There was no "free land" left that was untitled by the government or citizens. This was a crisis. Jefferson's equation of "free land" = "free people" no longer worked. Without "free lands", there would be no more "freedom". The USA was going to be like all the European nations: undemocratic, overcrowded, increasing impoverished, with warring classes.
> The "frontier thesis" meant, for Roosevelt, two giant things.
1) The first was "wilderness" needed to be preserved. Otherwise industrial capitalism would destroy it, and the rugged individual that it spawned.
The wilderness that forged the "American spirit" was going to disappear and along with it, the wild creatures who inhabited it. And so the conservationist and natural history museum movement was born. The Social Darwinist could develop and express their autochthonousity by becoming (what we now call) an environmentalist.
2) The second thing the closing of the frontier signaled was that the USA would join the new global frontier the Victorians had opened. The Progressive solution to the "frontier problem" was simple: the USA would use other people's "free land" as its new frontier. The USA would be a global empire that conquered nations to spread democracy. The character of TR, the ubermensch story who went from a weakling to a boxer, bookworm to hunter, a Harvard boy to a Cuba conquering Rough Rider, etc, amalgamated the contradictions in Social Darwinist democracy. The chief contradiction involved human equality and capitalist inequality.
Democracy, in a Social Darwinist culture, is not Edward Hicks' peaceable kingdom; it's Wall Street's warring haves and have nots, who are valued "equally" as commodities and who "free" to sell themselves in the market where natural selection "scientifically" chooses who gets rich and who stays poor. As Darwin indicated, whites are naturally meant to be rich and non-whites to be poor. Social Darwininsm is supposed to include a history of socio-cultural improvement, but it doesn't; all it does is prove that the existing regime is the apotheosis of evolutionary history.
1896
Plessy v. Ferguson: The ruling in this Supreme Court case upheld a Louisiana state law that allowed for "equal but separate accommodations for the white and colored races." > Racist "Jim Crow" laws are legalized. Racism is defended by the federal government. 1898 Roosevelt was our first energetic imperialist leader. As Ass't. Secretary of the Navy he foments the Spanish-American War and then, quitting that position, become cavalry colonel, leading the Rough Riders regiment in the conquering of Cuba.
In the Philippines, the USA promised to help the anti-Spanish fighters establish a democracy. But when the rebels prevailed, the USA denied them nationhood and attacked them. US troops waterboarded them. They razed their villages. Concentration camps were built. All in the name of spreading democracy. (Senator Albert J. Beveridge, one of the most prominent American imperialists at the time, said: "Americans altruistically went to war with Spain to liberate Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Filipinos from their tyrannical yoke.) Using "war powers", Roosevelt set up a version of England's Raj in India wherein the USA would appoint the leaders who were in charge of exporting the lands resources. The USA followed the English path of promising "progress" for those they colonized and then breaking the promise.
1902
While serving as a director of the Sierra Club, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan publishes The Blood of the Nation: A Study in the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit :
"The blood of a nation determines its history. --- The blood which is “thicker than water” is the symbol of race unity. In this sense the blood of the people concerned is at once the cause and the result of the deeds recorded in their history. For example, wherever an Englishman goes, he carries with him the elements of English history. It is a British deed which he does, British history that he makes. Thus, too, a Jew is a Jew in all ages and climes, and his deeds everywhere bear the stamp of Jewish individuality."
> As we see here, eugenicists consider racial character to be immutable. Their dog-breeding goal is to get rid of mutts. It is the job of the Ivy League to train and back the leaders who strive to achieve this.
> A non-colonial nation face a less daunting challenge than colonial one, that must "cleanse itself of indigenous, inferior blood". 1904
"In 1904, the Carnegie Institution of Washington established the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on an adjacent parcel. In 1921, the station was reorganized as the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics.
1906
Ota Benga, a Pygmy, was displayed as the "Missing Link", in the Bronx Zoo, New York City, alongside apes and animals.
1911 "Heredity in Relation to Eugenics is a book by American eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport, published in 1911. It argued that many human traits were genetically inherited, and that it would therefore be possible to selectively breed people for desirable traits to improve the human race. It was printed and published with money and support of the Carnegie Institution. The book was widely used as a text for medical schools in the United States and abroad.
In its time, the book was a success and became one of the most influential books in the early-20th century eugenics movement in the United States. By the 1940s, however, the science in the book had become to generally be regarded as seriously flawed[citation needed], and the book was blamed by some for contributing to widespread eugenic sterilization programs in the United States and to the racist policies of Nazi Germany and Hitler." 1912
Former Princeton University president Woodrow Wilson is elected US president. A Progressivist, he formally institutes racist segregation as national policy, and Jim Crow laws are normalized.
1913 Wilson speaks on July 4th at Gettysburg to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the battle. Without irony, he says: "I have been chosen the leader of the Nation. .... Whom do I command? .... the people themselves, the great and the small, without class or difference of kind or race or origin .... What we strive for is their freedom, their right to lift themselves from day to day and behold the things they have hoped for, and so make way for still better days for those whom they love who are to come after them."
1916
“The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.”
- Madison Grant
Madison Grant publishes a book that Hitler will call "my Bible": The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History". Its publication marks the year that eugenics is embraced by technocrats, academic and bureaucratic.
Grant is immensely productive and influential. He co-founds the American Eugenic Society, the Aristogenic Association, Galton Society for the Study of the Origin and Evolution of Man, the National Parks Association, The Save-the-Redwoods League, and the American Committee for International Wildlife Promotion. He serves as an executive or trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, American Society of Mammalogists, Boone and Crockett Club, Bronx Parkway Commission, Eugenics Research Association, etc. Like Darwin, Grant held that certain humans like himself were the apotheosis of evolution, while most others were not. This was a biological version of the theology of "chosenness" wherein the minority of most evolved must prevent the majority of less evolved to prevent "race suicide". Eugenics provided an application for this racist history and pseudo-science. Grant urged technocrats to breed humans like dogs, to favor and separate pedigrees from mutts who must be sterilized or euthanized: Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race. There were 3 basic races, quacked Grant; the most evolved was the Caucasoids (the other were Negroids and Mongoloids. The Caucasoids were separated into 3 groups; the most evolved were the Nordics, then the Alpines and Mediterraneans. Grant's eugenic goal was ensure the dominance of the Nordics specifically and the Caucasoids generally. > Eugenics allowed all the old blood and soil myths to be retold from the invaders perspective with a language of science called sociobiology.
The days when whites had to refer to the Scriptures to rationalize attacks on non-whites, as Increase Mather and so many others did, was over.
Grant's scientific racism was the same dog-breeding racism found way back in the Abrahamic myth ("you will not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites"), but it was free of the deity;
it was objective, rational, progressivist, academic, modernist:
When it becomes thoroughly understood that the children of mixed marriages between contrasted races belong to the lower type, the importance of transmitting in unimpaired purity the blood inheritance of ages will be appreciated at its full value and to bring half- breeds into the world will be regarded as a social and racial crime of the first magnitude. The laws against miscegenation must be greatly extended if the higher races are to be maintained.
1924: Protecting the soil by protecting the blood
1) no immigrants
Grant is credited for generating the Immigration Act of 1924, or Johnson–Reed Act, including the Asian Exclusion Act and National Origins Act (Pub. L.68–139, 43 Stat.153, enacted May 26, 1924), was a United States federal law that prevented immigration from Asia and set quotas on the number of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe. It also authorized the creation of the country's first formal border control service, the U.S. Border Patrol, and established a "consular control system" that allowed entry only to those who first obtained a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad....
According to the U.S. Department of State's Office of the Historian, the purpose of the act was "to preserve the ideal of U.S. homogeneity."[1] Its chief author and namesake, U.S. Representative Albert Johnson, was a leading proponent of eugenics, justifying the act as a bulwark against "a stream of alien blood"; it likewise found support among racist and nativist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. However, some proponents, such as the American Federation of Labor (AFL), welcomed the act for reducing cheap immigrant labor that would compete with local workers.
2) no sex between whites and non-whites
Grant had another victory the same year, when the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian."
3) no births by "inferior types"
Grant had yet another victory in Virginia that year:
The Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 was a U.S. state law in Virginia for the sterilization of institutionalized persons "afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy”.
1927
These victories for eugenics culminated when the Supreme Court ruled that the government has a right to conduct acts of "genetic hygiene" to protect the health of its citizens.
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes in the coming decades regarding sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell.
“It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
– Oliver Wendell Holmes, Supreme Court Justice
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