Michale Crichton is one of my favorite authors. I read "State Of Fear" this spring and I've wanted to share a few bits and pieces with the folks who may not get the chance to read the whole thing. I also want you to know if you do pick up a copy, it's a slow, rather dry, and drawn out beginning, before the pace picks up, but then ... hang on, you are in for a wild ride.



The story was/is a good read. It was the authors message after the story that rather knocked my socks off. and particularly one series of unfortunate events in history that I had not ever heard about before.



"A century ago a scientific theory warned of a crisis and pointed to a way out," Says Crichton. "The theory gained support from leading scientists politicians, and celebrities, including, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Winston Churchhill.



It was approved by Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis, who ruled in it's favor.



Alexander Graham Bell, Margret Sanger, Leland Stanford, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and hundreds of others, including Nobel prize winners gave support.



Research was backed by the Carnegie and Rockefeller foundations. The Cold Springs Harbor Institute was built to carry out the research but work was also done at Harvard, Yale, Princeton , Stanford, and John Hopkins. Legislation to address the crisis was passed in states from New York to California.



These efforts were supported by the National Academy of Science, The A.M.A. and the National Research Council. It was said that if Jesus was alive he would have supported this effort.



Those who opposed the theory were shouted down, called reactionary, blind to reality, or just plane ignorant.



What is surprising is that so few people objected. Today we know that the theory was actually pseudoscience. There was no crisis and the action taken was morally and criminally wrong. Ultimately they led to the deaths of millions of people.



The theory was EUGENICS. It's history is so dreadful and so embarrassing that it is rarely discussed, but it should be well known to every citizen so that it's horrors are not repeated.



The theory of EUGENICS postulated a crisis of the gene pool leading to the deterioration of the human race. The best human beings were not breeding as quickly as the inferior ones... The foreigners, immigrants, Jews, degenerates, the unfit, and the feeble minded.



The British scientist Francis Galton first speculated about this area, but his ideas were taken beyond anything he ever intended.



Science -minded Americans and those who were worried about the immigration of inferior races or dangerous human pests, and the rising tide of imbeciles who were polluting the best of the human race, jumped on that band wagon.



The EUGENICS and the IMMIGRATIONISTS joined forces to identify individuals who were feeble minded.... Jews were agreed to be largely feeble minded but so were many foreigners as well as blacks... and stop them from breeding by isolation in institutions or by sterilization.



"A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit -- in other words social failures -- would allow solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums.

The individual himself can be nourished, educated and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever increasing load of misguided sentimentalism. This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane, and extending gradually to types which may be called weaklings rather than defectives, and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types."



Margaret Sanger spoke of the burden of caring for "the dead weight of human waste." H.G. Wells spoke against the ill trained swarms of inferior citizens.



Sterilization could be ordered any time after a patient had been examined by a eugenics committee that was composed of a lawyer or family member representing the individual, a judge, and a doctor or other eugenic "expert." More than 30 states had enacted such compulsory sterilization laws by 1940. Indiana was the first with a eugenical sterilization and it went into effect in 1907. By 1941, more than 60,000 eugenical sterilizations were performed in the United States. Most state sterilization laws were not repealed until after the 1960s.

Following are the remarks Mr. Platt made to the California senate judiciary committee, June 24, 2003, regarding senate resolution no. 20 - relative to eugenics.


The grounds for sterilization included such vague classifications as "feeblemindedness," "idiocy," "excessive masturbation," "immorality," and "hereditary degeneracy." In 1926, for example, the superintendent of Riverside's Bureau of Welfare and Relief advocated sterilization of "feebleminded," unmarried women as a means to halting the "menace to the race at large." At the Sonoma State Home, sexual activity by single women was perceived as evidence of mental defect, irrespective of whether or not a patient met medical or psychological standards of "feeblemindedness."

Eugenicists strongly supported limits on immigration from non-European countries, a restriction on welfare benefits to poor families, and bans on interracial marriage or "miscegenation." As Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, a founder and sponsor of the Eugenics Society of Northern California and Pasadena's Human Betterment Foundation, noted in 1929, the Mexican is "eugenically as low-powered as the Negro. … He not only does not understand health rules: being a superstitious savage, he resists them."

The proponents of eugenics were not obscure cranks or fringe right-wingers, but the best and brightest civic reformers and professional leaders.

The Rockefellers funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. The Rockefeller Institute supported Alexis Carrel, who advocated the use of gas to get rid of the unwanted. John D. Rockefeller III founded the Population Council.

California not only led the nation in forced sterilizations, but also in providing scientific and educational support for Hitler's regime. In 1935, Sacramento's Charles M. Goethe praised the Human Betterment Foundation for effectively "shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler

California's eugenicists could not claim ignorance that Germany's sterilization program was motivated primarily by racial politics. For example, in 1935, the Los Angeles Times published a long defense of Germany's sterilization policies, in which the author noted that the Nazis "had to resort to the teachings of eugenic science" because Germany had been "deprived of her colonies, blessed with many hundreds of defective racial hybrids as a lasting memory of the colored army of occupation, and dismembered all around." Not only did California eugenicists know about Nazi efforts to use sterilization as a method of "race hygiene" -- targeted primarily at Jews -- they also approved efforts to stop "race-mixing" and increase the birth rate of the "Northern European type of family." The chilling words of Progressive reformer John Randolph Haynes anticipated the Nazi regime's murder of 100,000 mentally ill patients: "There are thousands of hopelessly insane in California, the condition of those minds is such that death would be a merciful release. How long will it be before society will see the criminality of using its efforts to keep alive these idiots, hopelessly insane, and murderous degenerates.