Eugenics and the Firewall: Catching on in Canadian media

Eugenics and the Firewall: Good discussion begins

Jane Harris-Zsovan writes to say that her just-published book Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), has received favourable reviews so far.

Ian Stewart, reviewer for the Winnipeg Free Press opens,

IN this suggestive piece of investigative journalism, Albertan Jane Harris-Zsovan exposes one of her home province’s wretched little secrets.
Published, oddly enough, by a Winnipegbased house, Eugenics and the Firewall retells the story of how Alberta’s progressive and populist Social Credit government abused some of its most vulnerable citizens’ basic human rights for almost half the 20th century. Its message is clear: somebody’s Utopian vision can lead to another’s Orwellian hell.


In 1928, Alberta elected its first Social Credit government, led by the apocalyptic "Bible Bill" Aberhart. The government was under the sway of the burgeoning eugenics movement and quickly passed the British Empire’s first sexual sterilization legislation, which was not rescinded until 1972.

He also cheered her on personally, no surprise from a seasoned reporter who knows when someone is taking a risk to just start talking about the documentary evidence.

Similarly, Lana Michelin for the Red Deer Advocate did, in Harris Zsovan’s view, “an amazing job sorting out all those facts and figures I gave her in lightening time.”

While B.C. used eugenics sparingly, sterilizing only a few hundred citizens, Alberta seized the opportunity from 1928 to 1972 to target nearly 3,000 “undesirables,” including the mentally disabled, chronically ill and sexually promiscuous.


Many of these 2,832 sterilizations were done at Red Deer’s Michener Centre, said Harris-Zsovan.

The author has been interested in Alberta’s dark eugenics history since she overheard, as a young girl, her parents discussing a neighbour’s son who they suspected was sterilized.

I first became interested in the early1970s, when I noticed that the whole episode was a memory hole as far as just about everyone was concerned.

Why does it matter?, some ask. Compulsory sterilization was done in Alberta a long time ago, and the enabling laws were repealed in 1971. Well, two reasons it matters:

First, for the sake of the facts: Social Darwinism (the belief that a government-directed application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to a human population would produce a fitter human) is far more often denounced than it is explained. There is a good reason for that. As Harris Zsovan shows, progressives and evangelical Christians promoted and enabled it, not just goose stepping Nazis. Everyone was wrong, but the last group was socially despised, thus in line to take the fall. While everyone else acted self-righteous, false history drove out true history.

Second, social amnesia is no way to prevent a similar occurrence. Put simply, it happened because it was widely popular, and a similar event would happen today, if it were as popular. So we really must look at what made it popular and with whom. And that’s a fascinating read.

Many Canadians are in the process of recovering our history, and no, it is not always fun, but - as with our bodies - the less fun parts may be the most necessary.

Note: Eugenics and the Firewall, about the history of social Darwinism in Alberta (province of Canada), is distributed by University of Toronto Press.

Eugenics and the Firewall: History is about the future, not the past ...

Jane Harris Zsovan, the author of a recent book on the surprising history of Social Darwinist eugenics (= forced sterilization) in Canada, talks about a recent interview (not available on line in total):

Paula Kirman interviewed me recently for her article: "A not so proud history." The interview appears in the Fall Winter 2010 issue of Prairie Books Now! As I told Paula, "History isn't about the past at all. It's about charting a future in which our children are not unwitting victims of our mistakes.``


The Province of Alberta’s Eugenics Board existed in the context of a populist political culture that viewed political dissent as something nearing treachery (eg: William Aberhart`s Accurate News and Information Act and the Manning government`s lawsuit against the IODE over its publication of criticisms of Alberta Social Services). That culture helped political `leaders` to create a dual sense of self-righteousness and victimization among the electorate.


As I tell Prairie Books Now!: ...

Well, hear it from her.

I’ve now read her book, and alert readers generally to it for this reason, among others: The key figures in making eugenics law in the Canadian province of Alberta were evangelical Christians. That’s not what people would expect based on recent history, but it demonstrates an important principle: People can be carried away by the idea of doing good, and find themselves locked out of their own culture without a key. Anyone interested in the history of dangerous do-goodism should get and read this book.

Excerpt from Firewall, exposing social Darwinist eugenics in Canada

Recently, I advised readers of Jane Harris Szovan’s new book on the shameful secrets of social Darwinist eugenics in Canada. The Alberta-based author tells me,

People have been asking me what Eugenics and the Firewall is about. Basically, it is about the history of eugenics in the Western countries. But it looks specifically at what happened in Alberta, how our province's somewhat bizarre political culture allowed it to happen (and why the vulnerable are still at risk for disaster, not just here but worldwide.) Then it compares Alberta to British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Ontario. Then, we look at how Alberta's experience compared to the rest of the Commonwealth, specifically the U.K. where forced sterilization was judged contrary to our shared constitution.(How a province in a dominion was allowed to get away with violating the constitution just shows how far the federal gov. will go in not challenging 'provincial rights.'

Hmmm, it shows that for sure.* But it shows something else too.

Here is the gist of the book:

It’s a dirty little secret the heirs to Alberta’s populist legacy don’t want Canadians to talk about.

In 1928 the non-partisan United Farmers of Alberta passed the first Sexual Sterilization Act. The UFA’s successor, the Social Credit party, led by a radio-evangelist William Aberhart, and later by his protégé Ernest Manning, removed the need to obtain consent to sterilize “mental defectives” or Huntington’s Chorea patients with dementia.

Between 1928 and 1972 nearly three thousand citizens were sterilized, lied to, experimented on, and subjected to daily abuse at the hands of provincial staff in Alberta. Most Albertans have forgotten the victims whose names made headlines in the 1990s, and politicians and pundits have shown little empathy for the victims.

The Eugenics Board horror story has largely been buried in Canada’s mainstream national media. Conservative bloggers and columnists in Canada continue to blame the Liberals and CCF for Canada’s barbaric eugenics program. The tar sands, oil royalties, health care budgets, environmental policies, and making sure the province’s interests remain high on the federal agenda top the provincial headlines.

But the questions must be answered: How did a province that claims “strong and free” as its motto deny basic freedoms to so many of its own citizens? Why does the extent of Alberta’s eugenics past and its link to the UFA/Social Credit legacy remain the unacknowledged moral blind spots in Canadian politics?

It’s time to set the record straight.

It is past time, and many people here have probably guessed that.

Jane has quite reasonably been thinking/hoping that people won’t go after her, but ... A straight record can mean crooked bunch. If you care about setting the record straight, spare a thought for her, and buy the book for a library and/or for yourself.

* They say this about us: If a Canadian species were in danger of extinction, the British would come up with matchless essays on the problem, the French would fly Brigitte Bardot to scream up a storm on the ice pack, the Germans would write an encyclopedia, on the problem, the Americans would set up a plan to save the species that cost three trillion dollars and employed one hundred thousand people ... And the Canadians? Oh, we’d be arguing about whether the species and its woes are a federal or a provincial responsibility. That’s part of how big problems get started here, when they do.

Social Darwinism: Canada's firewall of silence on eugenics human rights abuses has been breached

Jane Harris-Zsovan's book, Eugenics and the Firewall: Canada`s Nasty Little Secret (J. Gordon Shillingford, 2010) is now in print. It details the surprising reach of the compulsory sterilization movement in early twentieth century Canada. Many across the political spectrum participated, until the practice was finally derailed by informed public opinion and the courts.

The book's national launch will be Wednesday, November 17, 2010, 1:30-3:30, Galt Museum & Archives Store, Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Harris-Zsovan chose that locale because "the Galt archives have been helping me from time I wrote my first history paper at University."

Harris-Zsovan, who spent many hours poring over decades-old newspaper clippings, is bracing herself for controversy:

I'm inviting everyone I know and that includes people on the left, right and centre in Canada. I can't wait to see them all chit-chatting in the gallery at the Galt! I've warned them all that they will be uncomfortable with parts of this book. They seem okay with that so far. But I hope that discomfort leads to a healthy discussion.

Well, I hope so too. Many of us have found that discussion of eugenic sterilization - discussion that includes any mention of the social Darwinism that underlies it - often leads to the frantic defense of some Shrine to Evolution. To say nothing of attacks on anyone who offers evidence. Indeed, the spin now turns so fast that in the United States, museum goers are informed that Darwin was not a racist or eugenicist, when there is simply no escaping the facts of the case.

Anyway, Jane's is hardly a "take no prisoners" approach to unsavoury history:

I treat my home province, Alberta, B.C., and the architects of the only Sexual Sterilization Acts in the British Empire fairly gently. They made bad decisions, but we make worse ones. This behaviour continued from 1928 until 1972. (Actually it continued well after that until the Supreme Court put a stop to it.)

My sense is that too many people in Canada, generally a"low threat" society, assumed that it Couldn't Be Happening Here. Surprise, surprise.

Harris Zsovan is confident that

The lesson of the book: As bad as our past was, especially in Western Canada, we can be an example to other countries, most particularly the U.S. and Western Europe, if we own up to this.

Sure, Jane, if all Hull doesn't break loose first.

And if you think what happened in Canada was bad, consider what happened when social Darwinism hit Africa ...

Are formerly tone-deaf people finally getting the picture about Darwinian eugenics?

In the first half of the 20th century, the U.S. 60,000 sterilized Americans, to which California contributed a very robust 20,000. One of the more haunting features of an excellent new cable documentary coming out this summer, What Hath Darwin Wrought?, is the setting where many of its interviews with scholars were conducted: the grounds of the old Stockton State Hospital in Stockton, California.

[Yes, that same California in which, today, stars boast proudly of out of wedlock pregnancies. ... Not that I make it my business; I do not pay taxes there, and they do make lots of money, so I assume that deadbeat dads can be brought to justice.]

A leading center for coerced sterilization in that dark era, the hospital today looks quite picturesque as the backdrop to conversations with my Discovery Institute colleagues, political scientist John West and historian Richard Weikart (who teaches at the Cal State University campus of which the state hospital building is now a part). Along with philosopher and mathematician David Berlinski, another Discovery fellow, they do a remarkably lucid and informative job of sketching a side of 20th-century history -- the malign cultural and moral influence of Darwinian evolutionary thinking -- that tends to get overlooked.

A huge scandal. All worth reading.

The sad part is, all most people actually want is an acknowledgement of what happened. If many people never had children due to a failed ideology, well, those people have now died and they are dead. Best let the dead rest in peace.

But the living want an acknowledgement of the Darwinist eugenics scandal. It really happened, and we want an admission. Darwin's followers were wrong. They thought they knew who should live and who should die.

Oh, so, you are God now? When did He vacate his throne and a bunch of tax-funded Darwinist profs take it over?

[- 30 -]

Maybe the mosquitoes drove the eugenicists off?

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

David Warren: Darwin and our lady

Darwin was an honest, capable, plodding man. Alas, of his great hypothesis of "the origin of species, by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life," it must be said that what was true in it was not original, and what was original was not true.

Go here for more.

Find out why there is an intelligent design controversy:

A high school biology textbook in use in 1917 said this: ...

Read it and try to guess which one:

Promise you won't cheat by Googling this quote. Or if you do, fine, but don't post an answer that makes it sound like you had figured out the origin using brain power or historical knowledge or such. I'll find you out eventually, because you won't be anywhere near that smart later, when Google can't help you:

Improvement of Man. - If the stock of domesticated animals can be improved, it is not unfair to ask if the health and vigor of future generations of men and women on th earth might not be improved by applying to them the laws of selection.

Eugenics. - When people marry there are certain things that the individual as well as the race should demand. The most important of these is freedom from germ diseases which might be handed down to the offspring. Tuberculosis, that dread white plague which is still responsible for almost one seventh of all deaths, epilepsy, and feeble-mindedness are handicaps which it is not only unfair but criminal to hand down to posterity. The science is of being well born is called eugenics.

As an old woman who lived my life in the latter, not the former, half of the twentieth century, I must say this sounds plenty weird, and it has about as much to do with science as evolutionary psychology does = not at all.

There isn't a science of being well born. Your parents either got rocks or they don't. Nice if they do. Apart from that, absolutely nothing beats just being alive, plain and simple. So go live your life and be happy!

Later tonight, I will put up the answer to the question: What book is this quotation from?

(Okay, here we are: Yes, it was indeed Hunter's Civic Biology, the text at the centre of the Scopes Trial. Never mind "Inherit the Wind." How about "NOT Inherit the Racism and Class Prejudice?" )

Darwin and the Nazis: The Final Solution as an exercise in evolutionary biology? ...

Over the years, the Post-Darwinist blog has received many attacks from people who insist that the Nazis owed nothing to Darwin's theory of evolution (which, to Darwin believers is, of course, the fount of all good things).

As I have pointed out elsewhere, the Nazis owed the very definition of who and what they were to Darwin's theory of evolution. They saw themselves as the more fit, more highly evolved master race, after all.

That does NOT mean that the Nazis couldn't have murdered without Darwin. Of course they could have. They could have taken their inspiration for mass murder from anyone who offered it. Charlie Manson, for example. But, as it happens, they found Darwin's "survival of the fittest" or "natural selection" instead.

Anyway, a friend wrote to alert me to the Nazis' Wannsee Protocol for the "Final Solution" (= murdering 6 million Jewish people), and I am assured by historian of the period Richard Weikart (California State University) that it is genuine:

My friend writes

The debt that the Nazis owed to the Theory of Evolution is clearly stated in the protocol of the Final Solution (Endloesung) of the Jewish question formulated on January 20, 1942. This document was produced as a result of a conference among leading Nazis which considered how the Jewish problem could be solved in its entirety.

and draws my attention particularly to this section:

Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.

The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)

In other words, the Nazis even used the terminology of Darwinian evolutionists (= explaining the worry that those Jews who survived forced labour would be naturally selected as the more "fit" population).

Now, museum curators and Darwin hagiographers, airbrush that!

See also:

Darwin Day in America - a Review, especially the systematic attempts to "spin" Darwin's racism and support for eugenics.

Darwin and the Nazis: Nazism as a "biological" political program

Further stories here (scroll down below the one immediately above).