Fade the Butcher
03-30-2006, 03:28 AM
"This is a story in many ways uniquely American. Purity and innocence have long been great motifs of American life, and may explain in part why this country, more than any other, first grasped Galton's science and become the pioneer in marriage restriction, forced sterilization, and other methods of eugenic engineering. Since the time of the Puritans, a subtle and pervasive self-understanding has shaped the belief that Americans are a "peculiar people", chosen by God to come to this land of Edenic lushness, where material abundance, good health, and moral purity can reign free. Americans have often defined their civic and spiritual lives through this biblical image, and have remained relentlessly optimistic, ever confident that the burdens of history and the evils of the past can be swallowed up in this New Jerusalem, this paradise regained in America.
But this self-understanding has always carried with it a "sweeping prophecy of doom." The consequences of impurity and disobedience could shatter the foundations of this paradise regained, turning its promise into a curse. On the ship Arbella, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in 1630, the Puritan minister John Winthrop preached a sermon entitled "A Model of Christian Charity" to a group of shivering families heading out to an unknown world. It was a message of hope and desire, words of promise outling the settlers' understanding of the epic task before them. This sermon would become a kind of myth, a founding document for the civilization to come, proclaiming America as the new Israel, the radiant, innocent bride entering into a marriage covenant with her God, and bound to keep His precepts. But if she failed, she would be consumed.
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
Celebrated and critiqued in later American literature, this myth of innocence and purity, this image of a peculiar people called to traverse a spiritual wilderness and conquer a new Promised Land, evolved over the years from Puritan social utopianism to the inner, transcendent solitude of the soul. The purified individual -- expressed in the revivalism of the Great Awakening, the individualism of the pioneers pressing west, as well as the Transcendentalism of nineteenth century New England -- could transform the American landscape and continue to make this land as a city upon a hill. The image would be cited by politicians and reformers well into the twentieth century, and would contribute to a relentless American drive for technological innovation as well as self-improvement.
This American self-understanding lingered on in the thinking of many of those who promoted eugenics. In America, a number of the movement's leaders were New England Protestants, and, using an evangelical tone which harked back to their Puritan forebearers, they proclaimed that the goal of their scientific program was to keep the "American stock" pure by excising the causes of immoral behavior. Their warnings of genetic deterioration echoed Winthrop's prophecy of doom. In effect, they saw the eugenic quest as a way to keep the country from being made a "story and a by-word through the world," and to keep its people form being "consumed out of the good land."
Eugenics first took hold around the time when Carrie Buck was born. The first influential eugenic thinker in America was Charles Davenport, a direct descendent of the Reverand John Davenport, the man who had founded the city of New Haven in 1638 after leading another ragged company of five hundred Puritan settlers to the New World only eight years after Winthrop. Charles's father, Amzi, steeped his son in the traditions of his forefathers, men whose sermons and political discourses helped shape the literary tradition that defined this national self-understanding. Amzi was also a religious enthusiast, a man committed to an intense and solitary relationship with Christ, a relationship which he believed could transform the evils of drink and slavery.
But his son Charles became a lover of natural science and a devotee of Francis Galton -- a "modern" person, wrestling with the Puritan vision of his deeply pious past. Yet, while rejecting the American faith of his fathers, Charles in many ways simply retranslated it into a secular and scientific form. He was not just one of the first Americans to trumpet the Utopian vision of eugenics, however."
Harry Bruinius, Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp.13-15
But this self-understanding has always carried with it a "sweeping prophecy of doom." The consequences of impurity and disobedience could shatter the foundations of this paradise regained, turning its promise into a curse. On the ship Arbella, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean in 1630, the Puritan minister John Winthrop preached a sermon entitled "A Model of Christian Charity" to a group of shivering families heading out to an unknown world. It was a message of hope and desire, words of promise outling the settlers' understanding of the epic task before them. This sermon would become a kind of myth, a founding document for the civilization to come, proclaiming America as the new Israel, the radiant, innocent bride entering into a marriage covenant with her God, and bound to keep His precepts. But if she failed, she would be consumed.
We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, "the Lord make it like that of New England." For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us, so that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God, and all professors for God's sake. We shall be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.
Celebrated and critiqued in later American literature, this myth of innocence and purity, this image of a peculiar people called to traverse a spiritual wilderness and conquer a new Promised Land, evolved over the years from Puritan social utopianism to the inner, transcendent solitude of the soul. The purified individual -- expressed in the revivalism of the Great Awakening, the individualism of the pioneers pressing west, as well as the Transcendentalism of nineteenth century New England -- could transform the American landscape and continue to make this land as a city upon a hill. The image would be cited by politicians and reformers well into the twentieth century, and would contribute to a relentless American drive for technological innovation as well as self-improvement.
This American self-understanding lingered on in the thinking of many of those who promoted eugenics. In America, a number of the movement's leaders were New England Protestants, and, using an evangelical tone which harked back to their Puritan forebearers, they proclaimed that the goal of their scientific program was to keep the "American stock" pure by excising the causes of immoral behavior. Their warnings of genetic deterioration echoed Winthrop's prophecy of doom. In effect, they saw the eugenic quest as a way to keep the country from being made a "story and a by-word through the world," and to keep its people form being "consumed out of the good land."
Eugenics first took hold around the time when Carrie Buck was born. The first influential eugenic thinker in America was Charles Davenport, a direct descendent of the Reverand John Davenport, the man who had founded the city of New Haven in 1638 after leading another ragged company of five hundred Puritan settlers to the New World only eight years after Winthrop. Charles's father, Amzi, steeped his son in the traditions of his forefathers, men whose sermons and political discourses helped shape the literary tradition that defined this national self-understanding. Amzi was also a religious enthusiast, a man committed to an intense and solitary relationship with Christ, a relationship which he believed could transform the evils of drink and slavery.
But his son Charles became a lover of natural science and a devotee of Francis Galton -- a "modern" person, wrestling with the Puritan vision of his deeply pious past. Yet, while rejecting the American faith of his fathers, Charles in many ways simply retranslated it into a secular and scientific form. He was not just one of the first Americans to trumpet the Utopian vision of eugenics, however."
Harry Bruinius, Better for all the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), pp.13-15