Dr. Dennis Cuddy -- Eugenics: Part 2

EUGENICS
PART 2

By Dennis L. Cuddy, Ph.D.
March 21, 2011
NewsWithViews.com

In the late 1970s, Dr. Harmon Smith of Duke University said that North Carolina had one of the most thorough involuntary sterilization programs in the nation. This is about the time that the Eugenics Board of North Carolina was disbanded. It was begun in 1933 when the General Assembly enacted a sterilization law (eventually about 38 states had such laws). Under this law, sterilizations were performed supposedly “for the public good.” Most, but not all, of those sterilized were of an I.Q. under 70. In Moya Woodside’s Sterilization in North Carolina (1950), it states: “The duty to institute sterilization proceedings is mandatory on ‘the responsible head of any State penal or charitable institution,’ (In practice, this means the correctional schools, county homes, and mental institutions.) or on the county superintendent of public welfare…. The law appears to have a compulsory character, since it is made the duty of institution or welfare superintendents to bring forward suitable cases for sterilization; and sworn consent is not required from the individual if he or she is a minor or inmate of a state mental institution.” Under the law, the Eugenics Board had jurisdiction in cases of “feeble-mindedness.”

Part of the eugenic sterilization movement was the Human Betterment League of North Carolina founded in 1945. Director and charter member of the League was Alice Shelton Gray, who had worked with the infamous Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. Alice Gray had a significant role in rearing Gordon Gray, son of Alice’s cousin Bowman Gray, founder of the Bowman Gray Medical School in Winston-Salem. In 1940-41, C. Nash Herndon was a Carnegie Fellow there, and later worked with Alice Gray in the eugenic sterilization effort before succeeding her for quite a few years as Director of the Human Betterment League beginning in 1948. He was President of the American Eugenics Society from 1952-1955.

This was during the same period that Gordon Gray was President of the Greater University of North Carolina (1950-1955) after being Secretary of the Army in 1949. While head of UNC, Gordon Gray (whose college degree was in psychology) was appointed by President Truman to be Director of the Psychological Strategy Board in Washington, D.C., in 1951. Gordon Gray was later made President Eisenhower’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. He was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a Democrat, though one of his sons, Boyden Gray, became a Republican in 1977 (after serving as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren) and was counsel and Deputy Chief-of-Staff for Vice President George H.W. Bush for 8 years (and has been chief counsel for President Bush at the White House). It is not known to what extent Boyden Gray shared the eugenic philosophy of Alice Gray, or to what extent he disagreed with it, but it is interesting to note the high level of government contacts the Gray family had over the years with both Democrats and Republicans.

On the national level, eugenics was at least part of one plan for the future of the United States. In August 1963, high-ranking officials in the Kennedy administration appointed a secret commission (called the Special Study Group) “to determine the nature of the problems that would confront the United States if and when a condition of ‘permanent peace’ should arrive, and to draft a program for dealing with this contingency.” The work of the commission was later described in Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (1967), which describes Iron Mountain, New York, as “an underground nuclear hideout for hundreds of large American corporations… such firms as Standard Oil of New Jersey, Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and Shell.” The commission concluded that “Lasting peace… would almost certainly not be in the best interests of a stable society…. War fills certain functions essential to the stability of our society; until other ways of filling them are developed, the war system must be maintained…. The following substitute institutions, among others, have been proposed for consideration as replacements for the nonmilitary functions of war—an omnipresent, virtually omnipotent police force,… massive global environmental pollution, fictitious alternate enemies,… new religions or other mythologies,… and a comprehensive program of applied eugenics….”

The author of the Report, Leonard Lewin, later claimed it was a hoax, but in “News of War and Peace You’re Not Ready For” (Washington Post Book World, November 26, 1967), Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, writing under the pen name of Herschell McLandress, said the Iron Mountain meeting did take place because he was invited to it and told to keep the invitation “strictly confidential.”

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But eugenics was only the tip of the iceberg, because what was occurring was the development of a comprehensive population control strategy. Do you think the breakup of the family just happened to have occurred? In Many Missions (1991), C.X. Larrabee, writes that the Research Triangle Institute (RTI) of North Carolina and the Carolina Population Center “took the position that effective population control relies on aspects of national development that offer greater incentives to have fewer children, incentives such as… a bigger role for women in the workplace. It’s no accident that ‘Integrated Population and Development Planning’ was the name of a decade long (1980-1988) RTI/USAID project that provided technical assistance on policy analysis and planning to 50 countries in all regions of the developing world.” Larrabee’s book also indicates that concerning education, RTI not only conducted and administered the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) from 1969 to 1983, but also that “RTI’s association began in 1966, not 1969, and the assessment’s name then wasn’t NAEP but ECAPE. This Exploratory Committee on Assessing the Progress of Education was already being financed by the Carnegie Corporation and Ford Foundation.” For part one click below.

Click here for part -----> 1, 2,

Dennis Laurence Cuddy, historian and political analyst, received a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (major in American History, minor in political science). Dr. Cuddy has taught at the university level, has been a political and economic risk analyst for an international consulting firm, and has been a Senior Associate with the U.S. Department of Education.

Cuddy has also testified before members of Congress on behalf of the U.S. Department of Justice. Dr. Cuddy has authored or edited twenty books and booklets, and has written hundreds of articles appearing in newspapers around the nation, including The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and USA Today. He has been a guest on numerous radio talk shows in various parts of the country, such as ABC Radio in New York City, and he has also been a guest on the national television programs USA Today and CBS's Nightwatch.