Haunted History of Progressives On Display - Granite Grok

Haunted History of Progressives On Display

Burden-Low-res-APSJeeze the Lefty Progressives are having one helluva week.  First, their messiah’s agenda and followers were annihilated at the polls.  Now their sordid, repulsive past is coming out to haunt them as reported in “’Haunted Files’: The dark side of progressivism”.  The article is on an exhibit at New York University called “Haunted Files: The Eugenics Records Office”. The exhibit:

… recreates an organization once housed in Cold Spring Harbor. Opened in 1910, the office’s purpose was nothing less than the improvement of the human race. Its lead scientist (if you can call him that) was Harvard biologist Charles Davenport, assisted by Princeton alum Harry Laughlin.

Historically curious conservatives know about the dark past of the Progressives, but many, I’d say, most, self described Progressives do not.   Remember when Obama said the following in his 2008 victory speech at the University of Wisconsin, “Where better to affirm our ideals than here in Wisconsin, where a century ago the progressive movement was born?

I’ll give him the benefit of doubt that he had no idea what the Progressives at the University of Wisconsin did or thought.  He probably never looked into it. Because if he did, there’s no way he would have said that line.  They would not have approved of an African American becoming President. These folks were eugenicists and racists.  The idea that a mixed race person becoming President would have revolted them.

From Liberal Fascism:

“He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.” explained Van Hise, a found of the American conservation movement and president of the University of Wisconsin  during its glory days as the premier training ground for American progressives.  Van Hise summarized the American progressive attitude toward eugenics well when he explained: “We know enough about agriculture so that the agricultural production of the country could be doubled if the knowledge were applied; we know enough about disease so that if the knowledge were utilized, infection and contagious diseases would be substantially destroyed in the United States within a score of years; we know enough about eugenics so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation”

They would have thought that Barack Hussein Obama would have fallen into one of the “defective classes”.  Interracial marriage, let alone breeding, was verboten and needed to be exterminated according to the Progressive.

When confronted with this, the usual response I get from today’s Progs, just before they run away, is a gargantuan, “So what. Everybody was like that then.” Which is wrong, but they don’t want to hear it.  So it’s nice to see that someone is reminding the public about Progressive’s cruel racist history in a liberal, Progressive bastion like Manhattan.

… the Eugenics Records Office had the financial backing of the most important and “forward thinking” folks of the time.

With file cabinets, typewriters, meticulously edited letters and baskets for sorting correspondence, the office recreated at NYU seems the model of efficiency for the period.

“forward thinking”…hmmm forward, forward.  Where have I heard that before… Forward oh yea here…anyway back to Progressive history.

Eugenicists applied Mendel’s genetic theories about the inheritance of recessive genes in plants to human beings. There are files on dwarfism, sexual perversion and mulattoes.

Everything is neatly organized — from newspaper clippings about mixed-race children to correspondence from field researchers about rates of degeneracy in particular populations.

The progressive impulse led to tens of thousands of forced sterilizations. This, in the minds of the eugenicists, was for the good of the human race, and even in the best interests of those being sterilized.

“forced sterilizatons” for “the good of the human race” because the Progressive knows best, right?  Reminds me of Angry Annie Kuster when she told the audience she knew what they wanted better than themselves did.  The Progressive self righteous arrogance has a history.  She knows what’s good for you now, they knew what was good for you then.

As another article in the office argues, “Let asexualization [sterilization] be once legalized not as a penalty for a crime but as a remedial measure preventing crime and tending to future happiness and comfort of the defective.”

Sterilization to prevent a crime?  Wow! Paging Party Member O’Brien, Paging Party Member O’Brien…

Christine Rosen, author of “Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.”  explained:

The supposedly scientific tenets of the movement, which sought to improve the human race through better breeding, were heralded as progressive and enlightened by prominent figures such as Margaret Sanger [the founder of what’s now Planned Parenthood] and [Supreme Court Justice] Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

Abortion on demand is an old Progressive policy.  It’s just that today, people say the woman makes the demand, back then someone else made the demand for you. By force.  John Kuo Wei Tchen, the curator of the exhibit explains:

The progressive era was a move from “self-control” to “social control.” Just as the country moved from temperance to prohibition, Tchen says, so there was also a move toward this idea that “if people can’t control themselves, we will do it for them.”

Indeed, “eugenics was very much an essential feature of the American progressive movement at the beginning of the 20th century,” writes William Schambra in The New Atlantis.

Major philanthropists “backed eugenics precisely because they considered themselves to be progressive. After all, eugenics had begun to point the way to a bold, hopeful human future through the application of the rapidly advancing natural sciences.”

So Progressives, it’s time to take a trip to New York and educate yourself on your history.  You also might want to offer an apology for your movements gigantically cruel founding tenet.

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