T
Turk
Guest
He was a big believer in eugenics, which was a term coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, nephew of Charles Darwin. He perceived it as a moral obligation to improve humanity by encouraging the ablest and the healthiest to have more children - what is now described, rather glibly, as "positive" eugenics. The more sinister and virulent strain of the philosophy, "negative" eugenics, was ultimately to find its most nourishing home on the other side of the Atlantic.
For many years, the beating heart of the American eugenics movement was
the Eugenics Record Office, set up in 1910 at Cold Spring Harbour
(incidentally the modern centre for research into the Human Genome Project)
with a grant from Mary Harriman. She was later described by its founder,
Charles Davenport, as "the principal patron of the ERO". Mary was the wife of
Edward Harriman, a well-known railroad magnate, and mother of Averell, the
powerful Wall Street industrialist who, in 1921, decided to restart Germany's
Hamburg-Amerika Line, which became the world's largest shipping line in the
years leading up to the Second World War.
In 1926, Averell Harriman welcomed a familiar name into his Wall Street firm
(W A Harriman and Co) as senior partner - Prescott Bush, father to one
American president and grandfather to another. The association was to end
simultaneously in fabulous wealth and temporary ignominy - at the height of
the Second World War, in 1942, the New York Herald Tribune reported that
the Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush was a director and E
Roland Harriman a 99 per cent shareholder, was holding a small fortune
under the orders of Adolf Hitler's financier. Under the Trading with the Enemy
Act, all of Union Banking Corporation's capital stock was seized.
Perhaps the American who had the most influence on German policy after
1933 was Harry Laughlin, the publisher of the Model Eugenic Sterilisation
Law in 1922, which led to the sterilisation of about 20,000 Americans by the
mid-1930s. Laughlin's law provided the blueprint for Nazi Germany's statute
of 1933, allowing for the legal sterilisation of more than 350,000
"undesirables".
See:
http://www.zmag.org/content/Repression/proberteugenics.cfm
More at:
(Google search)
http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/01_columns/013001.htm
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=401
http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/06/moderate/
http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0007/conventions/wasp.cfm
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20010120.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2412/eugenics/Bush.html
For many years, the beating heart of the American eugenics movement was
the Eugenics Record Office, set up in 1910 at Cold Spring Harbour
(incidentally the modern centre for research into the Human Genome Project)
with a grant from Mary Harriman. She was later described by its founder,
Charles Davenport, as "the principal patron of the ERO". Mary was the wife of
Edward Harriman, a well-known railroad magnate, and mother of Averell, the
powerful Wall Street industrialist who, in 1921, decided to restart Germany's
Hamburg-Amerika Line, which became the world's largest shipping line in the
years leading up to the Second World War.
In 1926, Averell Harriman welcomed a familiar name into his Wall Street firm
(W A Harriman and Co) as senior partner - Prescott Bush, father to one
American president and grandfather to another. The association was to end
simultaneously in fabulous wealth and temporary ignominy - at the height of
the Second World War, in 1942, the New York Herald Tribune reported that
the Union Banking Corporation, of which Prescott Bush was a director and E
Roland Harriman a 99 per cent shareholder, was holding a small fortune
under the orders of Adolf Hitler's financier. Under the Trading with the Enemy
Act, all of Union Banking Corporation's capital stock was seized.
Perhaps the American who had the most influence on German policy after
1933 was Harry Laughlin, the publisher of the Model Eugenic Sterilisation
Law in 1922, which led to the sterilisation of about 20,000 Americans by the
mid-1930s. Laughlin's law provided the blueprint for Nazi Germany's statute
of 1933, allowing for the legal sterilisation of more than 350,000
"undesirables".
See:
http://www.zmag.org/content/Repression/proberteugenics.cfm
More at:
(Google search)
http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/01_columns/013001.htm
http://www.womensenews.org/article.cfm?aid=401
http://www.salon.com/politics2000/feature/2000/03/06/moderate/
http://www.modernhumorist.com/mh/0007/conventions/wasp.cfm
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn20010120.shtml
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/Exhibit/2412/eugenics/Bush.html