| I think you have learned this incorrect statement from 'An Underground History Of American Education' by John Taylor Gatto. What you described matches what's published at https://archive.org/details/AnUndergroundHistoryOfAmericanEd... . However, 1) Arnold Gessel did not write "The Family and the Nation". That 1909 book was written by Whetham and Whetham - https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.22800/page/n7/... . 2) That book does not mention the American Birth Control League, though it is definitely in favor of eugenics. 3) Gessel's eugenics quote comes from "The Village of a Thousand Souls" in The American Magazine, October 1913, at https://archive.org/details/american-magazine/American%20mag... . > ... there is a real possibility that the State will soon make a systematic attempt to secure a registration of the unfit and prevent the mating of the unfit. Only the rankest pessimists and believers in noninterference will condone the increase of feeble-mindedness and insanity which is occurring everywhere in the villages of the land. We need not wait for the perfection of the infant science of eugenics before proceeding upon a course of supervision and segregation which will prevent the horrible renewal of this defective protoplasm that is contaminating the stream of village life. The entire article is a call for state-controlled eugenics, and proposing that what is now called "negative eugenics" should start soon, without waiting until the field of eugenics is fully fleshed out. See also "ARNOLD GESELL’S PROGRESSIVE VISION: Child Hygiene, Socialism and Eugenics", August 2011, History of Psychology 14(3):311-34 at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ben-Harris-6/publicatio... for a biography, historical context, the effect of the publication, and the distortions Gesell made in his telling. 4) That article does not mention the American Birth Control League. 5) Because it couldn't ... Sanger didn't found the American Birth Control League until 1921. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Birth_Control_League How could a 1909 book or 1913 article refer to something that wouldn't happen for years? 6) Sanger was against the state-imposed negative eugenics advocated by Gesell. This makes your source highly suspect, and strongly suggests you do not know much about the history beyond that source. |
Thank you for the citations! I appreciate your research into the topic.