Ethics and Society


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Eugenics and Other Evils by G. K. Chesterton
Free Lover by Victoria Woodhull
A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Lady Eugenist by Victoria Woodhull
The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective by Margaret Sanger

aseugenics

Eugenics and Other Evils: An Argument Against the Scientifically Organized Society
by G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

In the second decade of the twentieth century, an idea became all too fashionable among those who feel that it is their right to set social trends. Wealthy families took it on as a pet cause, generously bankrolling its research. The New York Times praised it as a wonderful "new science." Scientists, such as the brilliant plant biologist, Luther Burbank, praised it unashamedly. Educators as prominent as Charles Elliot, President of Harvard University, promoted it as a solution to social ills. America's public schools did their part. In the 1920s, almost three-fourths of high school social science textbooks taught its principles. Not to be outdone, judges and physicians called for those principles to be enshrined into law. Congress agree, passing the 1924 immigration law to exclude from American shores the people of Eastern and Southern Europe that the idea branded as inferior. In 1927, the U. S. Supreme Court joined the chorus, ruling by a lopsided vote of 8 to 1 that the forced sterilization of men and women was constitutional.

That idea was eugenics and in the English-speaking world it had virtually no critics among the "chattering classes." When he wrote this book, Chesterton stood virtually alone against the intellectual world of his day. Yet to his great credit, he showed no sign of being intimidated by the prestige of his foes. On the contrary, he thunders against eugenics, ranking it one of the great evils of modern society. And, in perhaps one of the most chillingly accurate prophecies of the century, he warns that the ideas that eugenics had unleashed were likely to bear bitter fruit in another nation. That nation was Germany, the "very land of scientific culture from which the ideal of a Superman had come." In fact, the very group that Nazism tried to exterminate, Eastern European Jews, and the group it targeted for later extermination, the Slavs, were two of those whose biological unfitness eugenists sought so eagerly to confirm.

As the title suggests, eugenics is not the only evil that Chesterton blasts. Socialism gets some brilliantly worded broadsides and Chesterton, in complete fairness, does not spare capitalism. He also attacks the scientifically justified regimentation that others call the "health police." The same rationalizations that justified eugenics, he notes, can also be used to deprive a working man of his beer or any man of his pipe. Although it was first published in 1922, there's a startling relevance to what Chesterton had to say about mettlesome bureaucrats who deprive life of its little pleasures and freedoms. His tale about an unfortunate man fired because "his old cherry-briar" "might set the water-works on fire" is priceless.

That tale illustrates Chesterton's brilliant use of humor, a knack his foes were quick to realize. In their review of his book, Birth Control News griped, "His tendency is reactionary, and as he succeeds in making most people laugh, his influence in the wrong direction is considerable. Eugenics Review was even blunter. "The only interest in this book," they said, "is pathological. It is a revelation of the ineptitude to which ignorance and blind prejudice may reduce an intelligent man."

History has been far kinder to Chesterton than to his critics. It's now generally agree that eugenics was born of a paranoia fed by evolution and by the "ignorance and blind prejudice" of social elites. But never forget that Chesterton was the first to say so, condemning what many of his peers praised.
The completely new edition of Chesterton's classic includes almost fifty pages from the writings of Chesterton's opponents to illustrate just how accurate his attacks on eugenists were. For researchers, it also includes a detailed 13-page index.

The thing that really is trying to tyrannise through government is Science. The thing that really does use the secular arm is Science. And the creed that really is levying tithes and capturing schools, the creed that really is enforced by fine and imprisonment, the creed that really is proclaimed not in sermons but in statues, and spread not by pilgrims but by policeman--that creed is the great but disputed system of thought which began with Evolution and has ended in Eugenics.

ISBN: 1-58742-002-3 (paperback) and 1-58742-006-6 (hardback)
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Lover-Web-90

Free Lover: Sex, Marriage and Eugenics in the Early Speeches of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull (1837-1927)

Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World, was fiction. Victoria Woodhull's Brave New World was to be terrifyingly real.

As the first female Wall Street brokers, Victoria Woodhull and her sister Tennie had reputations to protect. They fretted about Tennie's well-publicized remark, "Many of the best men in [Wall] Street know my power. Commodore Vanderbilt knows my power." She had meant her skill as a fortune teller, but the press quite rightly picked up hints the attractive pair traded sexual favors for assistance in their business. To make matters worse, in their magazine the sisters had published articles promoting free love, while distancing themselves from what was said. Taking the offensive, Victoria moved, step by step, until in a speech on November 20, 1871, she boldly proclaimed:

"And to those who denounce me for this I reply: 'Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional, and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law can frame any right to interfere.'"

Having come out of the closet, she had to defend that lifestyle from those who warned that it meant social ruin. In speeches across the country, she championed a new society that, in its nineteenth-century context, was remarkable similar to Huxley's 1932 classic, Brave New World. Babies were not grown in bottles, but pregnant women were to be treated as "laboring for society," "paid the highest wages," and once the baby was weaned, "the fruit of her labor will of right belong to society and she return to her common industrial pursuits."

To critics who warned that free love meant children growing up without parents, she replied that, "not more than one in ten" mothers was competent, and that parents should be replaced by the State because, "It is but one step beyond compulsory education to the complete charge of children." In her Brave New World, you could have all the sex you could attract, but it would be impossible to be a genuine parent. Victoria was among the first to call for the State to eliminate social ills by controlling who could be a parent.

ISBN: 1-58742-050-3 (paperback); 1-58742-051-1 (hardback); 1-58742-052-X (ebook)
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Keyfac-Web-90

A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting the Original Facts and Documents upon which the Story is Founded Together with Corroborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work (Facsimile) by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

When President Abraham Lincoln met the author of this work, he is said to have remarked that she was, "the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!" That book was Stowe's 1851 bestseller, Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Unable to answer either her arguments against slavery or the emotional appeal of her story, Stowe's critics charged that she had misrepresented Southern slavery. It would have been easy for her to reply that her critics should read the book. Tom's first two owners were decent Southerners. Only the third, the infamous Simon Lagree, was cruel, and he was a transplanted New Englander. Her book didn't say that Southerners were bad. It said that slavery was so inherently evil that it corrupted and fraughted even the good intentions of good people.

But Stowe did not end her campaign against slavery with Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 1853 she published this fact-filled book, A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin, to demonstrate that what happened in her story was precisely what was happening under slavery.

In the interest of historical accuracy, this book is a precise facsimile of an 1853 original, with its small time enlarged to make reading easier. The book is also released under a special education license to ensure that it reaches the largest number of people. "Teachers may freely make copies of up to 25 pages from this book for each student taking courses from them without written permission or royalty payment as long as at least one printed copy of the Inkling edition of this work is available for students in the school's library."

The work which the writer here presents to the public is one which has been written with no pleasure, and with much pain.
In fictitious writing, it is possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature. No such resource is open in a work of fact; and the subject of this work is one on which the truth, if told at all, must needs be very dreadful. There is no bright side to slavery, as such. These scenes which are made bright by the generosity and kindness of masters and mistresses, would be brighter still if the element of slavery were withdrawn. There is nothing picturesque or beautiful, in the family attachments of old servants, which is not to be found in countries where these servants are legally free. The tenants on an English estate are often more fond and faithful than if they were slaves. Slavery, therefore, is not the element which forms the picturesque and beautiful of Southern life. What is peculiar to slavery, and distinguishes it from free servitude, is evil, and only evil, and that continually.-From the Preface

ISBN: 1-58742-038-4 (paperback)
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Lady-Web-90

Lady Eugenist: Feminist Eugenics in the Speeches and Writings of Victoria Woodhull by Victoria Woodhull (1837-1927)

During the last decades of her life, Victoria Woodhull claimed to be the first of either sex to promote eugenics throughout the United States and Great Britain. Even more surprising, she claimed to have been doing so in the early 1870s, three decades before the cause was taken up in earnest by Francis Galton, the eminent scientist that eugenists claim as their founder.
It's obvious why eugenists have adjusted their history. Francis Galton was the respectable, well-bred, well-educated cousin of Charles Darwin. Victoria Woodhull was a twice-divorced woman of uncertain breeding and limited education, a woman with a reputation for sexual and political radicalism. Unfortunately, historians have followed the eugenists and credited Galton rather than Woodhull.

This book investigates Woodhull's claim and presents evidence from her published speeches that she was right. She was speaking on eugenics to large audiences at least as early as 1871, and by the mid-1870s eugenics, which she called "stirpiculture" and "scientific propagation," formed a major part of speeches she was making across the United States and (after 1876) in Great Britain. By his own admission, Galton did not take up the cause until after 1900. This book includes one of her earliest speeches in favor of eugenics, newspaper reports of speeches from the 1870s, and five easily read facsimiles of speeches that until now were available only in a few research libraries in the world.

Even more important, what Woodhull said about eugenics appealed to the same two groups that would later support Margaret Sanger's birth control movement, wealthy and highly educated women. Her speeches and writings laid the eugenic foundation for the forced sterilization laws passed in over thirty states from 1907 on. When the U.S. Supreme Court declared such laws constitutional in 1927, the New York Times reported that Woodhull praised the decision and said she had "advocated that fifty years ago."

ISBN: 1-58742040-6 (paperback) 1-58742042-2 (hardback)
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aspivot

The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective: The Birth Control Classic
by Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) with an Introduction by H. G. Wells (1866-1946). With articles by others, including Victoria Woodhull Martin, George Bernard Shaw, Theodore Roosevelt, Ellen Key, Henry Goddard, G. K. Chesterton, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Archbishop Patrick Hayes, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Margaret Sanger was one of the most influential women of the twentieth century and for many decades her name was a household word. The organization she founded, Planned Parenthood, has received hundreds of millions of dollars from the U.S. government and draws generously from the world's largest foundations. With close ties to similar organizations around the world, its influence is truly global. Yet few Americans know anything about Margaret Sanger, the ideals to which she dedicated her life, or the purpose for which Planned Parenthood was founded.

Unlike any book that has come before, this new study of Margaret Sanger takes her seriously as a thinker and provides a definitive reference to what she believed. It places what she said and did in the proper historical context with no less than thirty chapters of prologue to prepare readers readers to understand the concluding twelve chapters, which are the full text of Sanger's own best-selling 1922 classic, The Pivot of Civilization, introduced by the noted science fiction writer, H. G. Wells.

To give one example, Sanger constantly clashed with a once influential movement that fretted about something called 'race suicide.' A typical biography of Sanger might have a few paragraphs in which the author gives an opinion about that movement that's likely to be only partially accurate. This book does not leave its readers captive to the scholarly fashions and prejudices of the moment. It takes you back to the time when race suicide was fiercely debated and lets you listen in on what was said. It has no less than eleven chapters quoting extensively from all sides of that once heated debate. It takes you back to the first written mention of the term and shows how the concept expanded, year by year, until it became a weapon to alter what was being taught at elite women's colleges and to change what was expected of educated, professional women. Those century-old issues still affect how present-day feminism views the world for good and ill.

These are not isolated quotes that might be taken out of context. Each writer is allowed to argue his point of view in great detail, only irrelevant distractions have been removed. Two of these preliminary chapters are long out-of-print articles by Sanger herself and two are by her arch-foe in the race suicide debate, President Theodore Roosevelt. You would have to spend weeks searching through a large university library to find even part of what's in this provocative book. That makes this book an excellent resource for students with research papers to be written.

Why, you ask, is that long ago clash important? That's like asking why slavery, outlawed almost a century and a half ago, matters to race relations. When you hear a feminist warn of those who intend to "force motherhood" on unwilling women, knowingly or not, she is reacting to that once heated debate. And when she complains that men simply "don't get it" about reproductive issues, she is referring, yet again, to an era when who would and would not have children was an all too public issue. You see that in H. G. Well's own introduction to Pivot, where he notes that as a man interested in promoting a "New Civilization," he can't attach the same importance Sanger does to birth control. This book brings that once familar debate out of its closet and into the cleansing light of day. And, most important of all, it helps you to understand contemporary debates about issues such as abortion and sex. Today's events are based largely on past event.. What happened then influences how each of us thinks and acts today. Understand that, and we better understand ourselves and those around us.

Quotes from Margaret Sanger in The Pivot of Civilization
"But there is a special type of philanthropy or benevolence, now widely advertised and advocated, both as a federal program and as worthy of private endowment, which strikes me as being more insidiously injurious than any other. This concerns itself directly with the function of maternity, and aims to supply gratis medical and nursing facilities to slum mothers."

"On its scientific side, Eugenics suggests the reestablishment of the balance between the fertility of the 'fit' and the 'unfit.' The birth-rate among the normal and healthier and finer stocks of humanity, is to be increased by awakening among the 'fit' the realization of the dangers of a lessened birth-rate in proportion to the reckless breeding among the 'unfit.' . . . . But the scientific Eugenists fail to recognize that this restraint of fecundity is due to a deliberate foresight and is a conscious effort to elevate standards of living for the family and the children of the responsible--and possibly more selfish--sections of the community. The appeal to enter again into competitive child-bearing, for the benefit of the nation or the race, or any other abstraction, will fall on deaf ears."

"Our great problem is not merely to perfect machinery, to produce superb ships, motor cars or great buildings, but to remodel the race so that it may equal the amazing progress we see now making in the externals of life. . . . Every single case of inherited defect, every malformed child, every congenitally tainted human being brought into this world is of infinite importance to that poor individual; but it is of scarcely less importance to the rest of us and to all of our children who must pay in one way or another for these biological and racial mistakes."


More on The Pivot of Civilization in Historical Perspective
(including a detailed table of contents)

ISBN: 1-58742-004-X (paperback) 1-58742-008-2 (hardback)
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