On 11/28/2011 12:42 PM, Jeff M wrote:


It's a very long leap from voluntary family planning and genetic
research into disease, which were the kinds of things mainline American
progressives were working on, and the wholesale extermination of those
politically deemed undesirable, as practiced by German right-wing Fascists.

You need to research this a bit, especially regarding The US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

"As the science continued in the 20th century, researchers interested in
familial mental disorders conducted a number of studies to document the
heritability of such illnesses as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and
depression. Their findings were used by the eugenics movement as proof
for its cause. State laws were written in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries to prohibit marriage and force sterilization of the mentally
ill in order to prevent the "passing on" of mental illness to the next
generation. These laws were upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927 and
were not abolished until the mid-20th century. All in all, 60,000
Americans were sterilized.

In 1907 Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt
legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain
individuals.[76] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme
Court in 1921,[77] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality
of a Virginia law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients
of state mental institutions in 1927.[78]

Beginning with Connecticut in 1896, many states enacted marriage laws
with eugenic criteria, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile
or feeble-minded" from marrying. In 1898 Charles B. Davenport, a
prominent American biologist, began as director of a biological research
station based in Cold Spring Harbor where he experimented with evolution
in plants and animals. In 1904 Davenport received funds from the
Carnegie Institution to found the Station for Experimental Evolution.
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) opened in 1910 while Davenport and
Harry H. Laughlin began to promote eugenics.[79]

The Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) was the first
American entity associated officially with eugenics. The League sought
to bar what it considered dysgenic members of certain races from
entering America and diluting what it saw as the superior American
racial stock through procreation. They lobbied for a literacy test for
immigrants, based on the belief that literacy rates were low among
"inferior races". Literacy test bills were vetoed by Presidents in 1897,
1913 and 1915; eventually, President Wilson's second veto was overruled
by Congress in 1917. Membership in the League included: A. Lawrence
Lowell, president of Harvard, William DeWitt Hyde, president of Bowdoin
College, James T. Young, director of Wharton School and David Starr
Jordan, president of Stanford University. The League allied themselves
with the American Breeder's Association to gain influence and further
its goals and in 1909 established a eugenics committee chaired by David
Starr Jordan with members Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell,
Vernon Kellogg, Luther Burbank, William Earnest Castle, Adolf Meyer, H.
J. Webber and Friedrich Woods.[80] The ABA's immigration legislation
committee, formed in 1911 and headed by League's founder Prescott F.
Hall, formalized the committee's already strong relationship with the
Immigration Restriction League."

All this was strongly supported by the Progressives(sic) of their time
who then, just like now, knew what was best for the rest of us.

David