Charles Van Hise, UW President (1903-1918)
Advocated the Wisconsin 'Eugenics' Idea
Extract from my draft book: Lavender Rising: An Intersectional History of the LGBTQI+ Struggle
Eugenics
Definition Delta: ‘Eugenics’ is the immoral and scientifically flawed theory of “racial or human stock improvement” and “planned or enforced breeding,” which was thus named by Francis Galton in 1883.
Eugenics gained popularity during the early 20th century following the Second Boer War (1899-1902) and the Namibian medical experiments and genocides (1904-1908), The UK Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 led to the incarceration of tens of thousands of unfortunate people who were judged to be ‘feeble-minded’ or ‘morally defective’. See Whitaker (2019) for a concise and lucid history of eugenics and its relevance to bad psychiatry. The intersectionality of eugenics and social change is discussed by Phoenix (2021).
Following the infamous First International Eugenics Congress during July1912 in the Imperial Institute on what is now Imperial College Road in South Kensington, London , eugenicists in the U.S., Germany, and worldwide, believed that they could perfect human beings and eliminate so-called social ills through genetics and heredity, for example by sterilization, incarceration, genocide, or by economic discrimination against indigenous people, people of colour, LGBT+ people, or intelligent underclass children with low IQ scores.
Eugenics was rife in the Department of Genetics (founded in 1910), of the University of Wisconsin-Madison after the department was founded in 1910 (see Genetics [1] and Genetics [2] ) . The earliest members of the department advocated marriage restriction and forced sterilization. Almost 2,000 primarily institutionalized Wisconsinites who were sterilized on account of their ‘feeble-mindedness’ or ‘moral imbecility’.
Founding chairman Leon J. Cole did lasting harm to the people of Wisconsin by promoting toxic eugenic thought and legislation, such as the Wisconsin forced sterilization statutes. The university president (1903-1918), Charles Van Hise, should have stuck to his career as an academic geologist. He vocally advocated for eugenic laws as a part of the ‘Wisconsin Idea’ whereby university experts informed the public and legislators of relevant ‘science’, and further further promoted eugenic thought by founding the UW School of Criminology.
Many doctors treating patients on federal social welfare followed eugenic ideas about the reproduction of ‘burdensome, unfit’ people or groups, and indigenous tribes were discriminated against. The teaching and promoting of eugenics in the UW departments of sociology, criminology, genetics, and zoology began in the early 1900’s and continued until 1948. The eugenicists’ attitude towards the poor seems to have continued until more recently. In 1992, I bailed out a young gay man with mental health issues from the jail on the top floor of Dane County Courthouse who’d been left there simply because he was impoverished.
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