Robin Phillips - September 7, 2009

To an outsider, the Fernald school in Waltham Massachusetts looked like any other educational institution. During the school’s hay day in the 1920’s and 30’s, few passers-by would have guessed the dark secret lurking behind the brick walls – a secret penetrating to the heart of American liberalism.

Fernald was no ordinary school. Set up in 1848 with funds from the Massachusetts State Legislature, the institution was designed for the incarceration of “feeble-minded” children. Throughout the early 1900s, hundreds of thousands of low-intelligence (though not necessarily retarded) children were warehoused at Fernald in unspeakable conditions. Treated like animals and denied any affection, these “human weeds” were considered genetically inferior from the rest of society.

In his book The State Boys Rebellion, Michael D’Antonio shows that one of the purposes behind the Fernald school was to prevent these “idiots” from reproducing and diluting the gene pool. Margaret Sanger, icon of the American left and founder of Planned Parenthood, put it even more succinctly: “The undeniably feeble-minded should, indeed, not only be discouraged but prevented from propagating their kind.”

It was not until the 1960s that the school began releasing their children to live in the outside world.

Eugenics: The Dark Secret of the American Left

The ideology behind Fernald was supplied by the American Eugenics movement. It was customary for American liberals of the 1920s and 30s to identify human beings as either hereditarily valuable or inferior. Taking Darwin’s theory of natural selection and applying it to human society, they typically classed Jews, Gypsies, Blacks, Native Americans and those of low-IQ as harmful to the human gene pool.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 16th, 2009 at 6:53 pm and is filed under Eugenics, Social Control. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.