NY Times Book Review of ‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’

[proverbialwisdom]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/books/review/imbeciles-and-illiberal-reformers.html

Book Review - ‘Imbeciles’ and ‘Illiberal Reformers’

By DAVID OSHINSKY
David Oshinsky, a professor of history at New York University, directs the division of medical humanities at NYU Langone Medical Center. He is the author of the forthcoming book “Medicine and Mayhem.”

MARCH 14, 2016

IMBECILES
The Supreme Court, American Eugenics and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck
By Adam Cohen
Illustrated. 402 pp. Penguin Press. $28.

ILLIBERAL REFORMERS
Race, Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era
By Thomas C. Leonard
250 pp. Princeton University Press. $35.

Few American jurists are as revered as Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. A United States Supreme Court justice for close to 30 years, Holmes wrote seminal opinions that were clear and clever and elegantly phrased. It was Holmes who defined the limits of free speech in 1919 by noting that the law did not protect someone “falsely shouting fire in a theater.” And it was Holmes who thoughtfully amended those words a decade later by writing that nothing in the Constitution was more sacred than “the principle of free thought — not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate.” By most accounts, Holmes, an upper-crust Bostonian, served the nobler instincts of America’s privileged classes. That is why his reckless majority opinion supporting forced sterilization in a 1927 case remains an enigma. Was it an isolated misstep or something more: an indictment of Justice Holmes and the Progressive movement he appeared to embrace?

America in the early 20th century was awash in reform. As giant corporations took root, so too did calls to check their power. Laws were passed setting maximum hours and minimum ­wages, limiting child labor, preserving natural resources and breaking up the “trusts” that were said to be destroying fair competition. Not all of these laws worked out as planned, and some were eviscerated in the courts. But a new force had been unleashed, aiming to serve the greater good not by destroying big business but by curbing its abuses.

Progressivism was always more than a single cause, however. Attracting reformers of all stripes, it aimed to fix the ills of society through increased government action — the “administrative state.” Progressives pushed measures ranging from immigration restriction to eugenics in a grotesque attempt to protect the nation’s gene pool by keeping the “lesser classes” from reproducing. If one part of progressivism emphasized fairness and compassion, the other reeked of bigotry and coercion.

“Imbeciles,” by Adam Cohen, the author of “Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America,” examines one of the darkest chapters of progressive reform: the case of Buck v. Bell. It’s the story of an assault upon thousands of defenseless people seen through the lens of a young woman, Carrie Buck, locked away in a Virginia state asylum. In meticulously tracing her ordeal, Cohen provides a superb history of eugenics in America, from its beginnings as an offshoot of social Darwinism — ­human survival of the fittest — to its rise as a popular movement, advocating the state-sponsored sterilization of “feeble­minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” According to the New York attorney Madison Grant, whose immensely influential 1916 tract, “The Passing of the Great Race,” became standard reading for eugenicists — Hitler himself is said to have called it “my bible” — about 10 percent of Americans produced unworthy offspring and had to be stopped.

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According to Thomas C. Leonard, who teaches at Princeton, the driving force behind this and other such laws came from progressives in the halls of academia — people who combined “extravagant faith in science and the state with an outsized confidence in their own expertise.” “Illiberal Reformers” is the perfect title for this slim but vital account of the perils of intellectual arrogance in dealing with explosive social issues. Put simply, Leonard says, elite progressives gave respectable cover to the worst prejudices of the era — not to rabble-rouse, but because they believed them to be true. Science didn’t lie.

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[radicalliberal]

1. Excellent!

We need to learn from history (assuming that history hasn't been falsified by those who have an agenda).

[proverbialwisdom]

2. Another look back: Historian refutes claims in new book by journalists John Donvan & Caren Zucker

http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/161992

3-6-16
Yes, There Is an Autism Epidemic

by Jonathan Rose
Jonathan Rose is William R. Kenan Professor of History at Drew University. He has two autistic daughters. On behalf of one daughter he filed a claim under the US National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program. The claim was dismissed on grounds of untimely filing.

Is autism a condition that has always been with us, or is it an epidemic? That is a highly controversial question of medical history, and a hugely important one, for the answer will have a tremendous impact on national health policy.

If the autism rate has been more or less steady throughout history, then you could argue (and many have argued) that autism is a genetic constant, part of the human condition, and something we simply must accept. But if the autism rate has recently risen steeply, then we face a grave health emergency, which could not have been caused by genetics alone – and therefore can be reversed.

Estimates of diagnosed autism have in fact increased dramatically in recent years, from 1 in 2000 US children in the mid-1960s, to 1 in 500 in 1999, 1 in 68 in 2010, and (according to the Centers for Disease Control) 1 in 45 today. But does this represent a real increase? Some insist that it’s an “optical illusion.” They suggest that in the past doctors either overlooked autism, or diagnosed it as something else, or used a narrower definition of the term. So whenever a new and higher autism estimate is reported, public health officials reflexively attribute it to “better diagnosis.” However, skeptical parents and teachers, pointing to the enormous expansion of special education classes, wonder why diagnosis always seems to be getting better and better and better and better and better.

In their recently published history, In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, journalists John Donvan and Caren Zucker don’t absolutely rule out the possibility that autism is increasing, but they are clearly reluctant to call it an “epidemic,” a word they often frame in scare quotes. They question the reliability of statistics that show a steep rise, and they look for a “pre-history” of autism – that is, identifiable cases that existed well before Leo Kanner published the first description of the disorder in a 1943 article.

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Thus the overwhelming preponderance of historical evidence indicates that the autism epidemic is all too real. Future historians will inevitably ask why so many public health officials and journalists refused to see the obvious and failed to pose some elementary questions about autism. Very likely there were some rare cases before the twentieth century, but in recent years the prevalence has skyrocketed. No doubt some individuals have a genetic predisposition to autism, but only environmental factors could have triggered such a sharp increase. Therefore, a prime goal of national health policy must be to identify those factors, eliminate them as far as possible, and roll back the epidemic. The well-being of future generations depends on that.