Eugenics

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IaH0Ws8RtSc&feature=related

When most people are looking to get a new dog, they find a dog breeder. They go to a breeder pure-bred parenting dogs, notoriously producing healthy dogs. Hearing the word pure-bred gives the impression bigger, stronger and intelligent. The new owner will take the dog to get neutered “sterilized”, so it won’t produce with a mutt running around the neighborhood. Humans control the reproduction of dogs making sure a line of pure-bred dogs is out there. Dog shows such as The Westminister are dedicated too showing a line of superior pure-bred dogs and awarding this accomplishment.

Something they don’t teach in a high school history class is the United States government trying to control people like pure-bred dogs. By the year 1920, 33 states in the U.S. permitted forced sterilization. This means the government could tell who must be on birth control. Scientist found through testing plants and animals degenerate traits can pass through generations. The thought was to make America a utopian society free of mental/physical illness, deaf, and dumb people. They figured the best way to accomplish this was by controlling who was allowed to reproduce. The people prescribing who should be sterilized were making many outlandish assumptions. They would look at things such as head size thinking the larger, the more brain capacity. People were being deemed as imbeciles without proper investigation into their actual lives. The people with power were controlling the weaker American citizens like dogs and running their lives. How would you like someone today to look at your ACT score and deem you unfit to have children because the score was too low?

In the film it talks about how eugenics became integrated into popular culture. Words such as race hygiene became household related words used in everyday life. People were preaching the importance of healthy marriages and how to raise a strong household. A startling display in the film very much related to the idea of the Westminister dog show was the contest on having the healthiest family held at many state fairs. Awards were given out on basis of purest pedigrees and most attractive phenotypes. One other very disturbing aspect of eugenics in the United States was that Nazi Germany based many of their ideas off this. The genocide which took place in Germany was a way they were trying to cleanse their country of what they thought as inferior people. They wanted a country of strong healthy people. It’s crazy to think of the Nazi brainstorming their ideas based off a model already being used in the United States.