I was watching Rock Center with Brian Williams earlier this week when they reported on a story that was unimaginably sad and disturbing. The report focused on the story of Elaine Riddick who was 13 years old when she was raped and impregnated by her attacker. If that wasn’t enough horror for one person to endure Elaine was later sterilized, without her consent, immediately after giving birth to the baby boy that had resulted from the rape. That was in Winfall, N.C., in 1967. This summer Elaine along with several others told their stories at a public hearing held in North Carolina and it was the first time many had ever heard about the sordid past of North Carolina much less Americas dark history with eugenics. North Carolina was only one of 31 states in the US to have a government run eugenics program.
Eugenics was started as a scientific curiosity during the Victorian age. Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, theorized that if talented people married only other talented people they would have measurably better offspring. Galton's ideas were imported into the United States at the turn of the last century. Eugenics was, quite literally, an effort to breed better human beings by encouraging the reproduction of people with "good" genes and discouraging those with "bad" genes. Eugenicists effectively lobbied for social legislation to keep racial and ethnic groups separate, to restrict immigration, and to sterilize people like Elaine Riddick, considered "genetically unfit." In a proud moment for our country the Germans adapted elements of the American eugenics movement as a model for the Nazi movement, and their radical adaptation of eugenics culminated in the Holocaust.
Now The victims in North Carolina are telling their stories publicly and waiting for NC to come to some sort of agreement on compensation, as if any amount would make up for what they did. Many believe that NC is just buying time hoping to let nature run its course and victims die of old age in an effort to avoid paying victims. The government swears that is not the case but only time will tell I guess.
Elaine was only 13 when they decided she wasn’t fit to have more children. The state social workers declared a 13 year old rape victim as “mentally retarded” and “promiscuous”. She didn’t even know what they had done until years later when she married and visited a doctor about her inability to get pregnant. Her doctor told her that she’d been sterilized; that she had been “butchered”. In spite of her traumatic past she went on to live a fairly normal life. She went to college and raised the only son she would ever have. She is extremely proud of the man she raised and he is equally as proud of his mother.
In a time when we have a group calling themselves the 99 percenters and the other side saying that it’s class warfare, I feel like I have to mention that some of America’s wealthiest citizens were eugenicists in its day. Dr. Clarence Gamble of the Procter and Gamble fortune and James Hanes of the hosiery company were both eugenicists. Hanes even helped found the Human Betterment League which promoted the cause of eugenicists. Seeing as how they believed that poverty, along with promiscuity and alcoholism, were traits that were inherited, if that isn’t class warfare I don’t know what is!
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