Arthur Howard Estabrook | |
|---|---|
 Arthur H. Estabrook in 1921 | |
| Born | May 9, 1885 [1] |
| Died | December 6, 1973 (aged 88) [1] |
| Burial place | Mount Hope Cemetery, Bangor, Maine, U.S. [1] |
| Nationality | American [1] |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Education | Clark University [1] |
| Alma mater | Johns Hopkins University [1] |
| Occupation | Researcher [1] |
Arthur Howard Estabrook (May 9, 1885-December 6, 1973) was an American researcher and eugenist.
Arthur Estabrook was born on May 9, 1885, in Leicester, Massachusetts. His parents were Susan Rebecca (Beck) and Arthur Francis Estabrook. [1]
Estabrook earned his bachelor's and master's degrees at Clark University, the latter in 1906. He remained at Clark after graduating, serving as a fellow and assistant in the zoology department until 1907. In 1910, he completed his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University. He married Jessie McCubbin on October 25, 1911. He also studied at the School of Philanthropy at Columbia University in 1914. [1]
After completing his doctorate in 1910, Estabrook joined the Carnegie Institution, working in the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. During his work at Carnegie, he was a special investigator for the Indiana State Commission on Mental Defectives for two years, from 1916 until 1918. That year, he served in World War I in the United States Army as a Captain in the Sanitary Corps. His service ended in 1920. [1]
In 1924, Estabrook traveled to Amherst County, Virginia, where he served as an expert witness during the first trial regarding the forced sterilization of Carrie E. Buck. He spoke in favor of the sterilization. [2] Estabrook served as president of the Eugenics Research Association from 1925 until 1926. Estabrook returned to Virginia to represent the Eugenics Record Office during Buck v. Bell in 1927. [3] He did research around the court case in Virginia, researching sterilization and its use in Virginia. [1] Estabrook worked at Carnegie in the Eugenics Record Office until 1929, when he joined the American Society for the Control of Cancer. By 1931, his wife, Jessie McCubbin, had died. He married his second wife, Anne Ruth Medcalf, on July 8, 1931. [1]
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Estabrook was a eugenist and studied dysgenics. In 1912, he and Charles Davenport studied the Nam family. The Nam family, the name which is a pseudonym, for a New York "degenerate family" with high rates of crime, disease and poverty in the family. He published a work about the family with Davenport, advocating eugenics. In 1915, Estabrook published a re-analysis of Richard Louis Dugdale's work about the Jukes family. While Dugdale's work supported improving the environment which led to the Jukes family having high rates of crime among family members, Estabrook took Dugdale's research and created a proposal for forced sterilization to be used to prevent Jukes family members from reproducing. [4]
Estabrook's researched interracial relationships which included mixed race people, Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans in North Carolina. He also studied the proposed connections between race and intelligence. Estabrook studied the Lumbee in Pembroke, North Carolina. His researched resulted in the work Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe, published in 1926 and co-authored with Ivan E. McDougle. [5]
Estabrook also researched eugenics and sterilization of children with disabilities in Erie County and Buffalo in New York. He also studied housing in Buffalo. [5]
Estabrook died in Chatham Center, New York, on December 6, 1973. He is buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Bangor, Maine. [1]
The papers of Estabrook are held in the collections of the Indiana State Library, [1] the Carnegie Institution, the American Philosophical Society, and the University at Albany, SUNY. [5]
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 (1927), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., in which the Court ruled that a state statute permitting compulsory sterilization of the unfit, including the intellectually disabled, "for the protection and health of the state" did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Despite the changing attitudes about sterilization, the Supreme Court has never expressly overturned Buck v. Bell. It is widely believed to have been weakened by Skinner v. Oklahoma, 316 U.S. 535 (1942), which involved compulsory sterilization of male habitual criminals. Legal scholar and Holmes biographer G. Edward White, in fact, wrote, "the Supreme Court has distinguished the case [Buck v. Bell] out of existence". In addition, federal statutes, including the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, provide protections for people with disabilities, defined as both physical and mental impairments.
The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness was a 1912 book by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, dedicated to his patron Samuel Simeon Fels. Supposedly an extended case study of Goddard’s for the inheritance of "feeble-mindedness", a general category referring to a variety of mental disabilities including intellectual disability, learning disabilities, and mental illness, the book is noted for factual inaccuracies that render its conclusions invalid. Goddard believed that a variety of mental traits were hereditary and that society should limit reproduction by people possessing these traits.
Carrie Elizabeth Buck was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, after having been ordered to undergo compulsory sterilization for purportedly being "feeble-minded" by her foster parents after their nephew raped and impregnated her. She had given birth to an illegitimate child without the means to support it. The surgery, carried out while Buck was an inmate of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, took place under the authority of the Sterilization Act of 1924, part of the Commonwealth of Virginia's eugenics program.
In 1924, the Virginia General Assembly enacted the Racial Integrity Act. The act reinforced racial segregation by prohibiting interracial marriage and classifying as "white" a person "who has no trace whatsoever of any blood other than Caucasian". The act, an outgrowth of eugenicist and scientific racist propaganda, was pushed by Walter Plecker, a white supremacist and eugenicist who held the post of registrar of the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics.
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO), located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States, was a research institute that gathered biological and social information about the American population, serving as a center for eugenics and human heredity research from 1910 to 1939. It was established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution, and subsequently administered by its Department of Genetics.
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was an American educator and eugenicist. He served as the superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception in 1910 to its closure in 1939, and was among the most active individuals influencing American eugenics policy, especially compulsory sterilization legislation.
Charles Benedict Davenport was a biologist and eugenicist influential in the American eugenics movement.
Joseph Spencer DeJarnette was the director of Western State Hospital from 1905 to November 15, 1943. He was a vocal proponent of racial segregation and eugenics, specifically, the compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill.
The Monacan Indian Nation is one of eleven Native American tribes recognized since the late 20th century by the U.S. Commonwealth of Virginia. In January 2018, the United States Congress passed an act to provide federal recognition as tribes to the Monacan and five other tribes in Virginia. They had earlier been so disrupted by land loss, warfare, intermarriage, and discrimination that the main society believed they no longer were "Indians". However, the Monacans reorganized and asserted their culture.
Richard Louis Dugdale was an American merchant and sociologist, best known for his 1877 family study, The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity.
The Jukes family was a New York "hill family" studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The studies are part of a series of other family studies, including the Kallikaks, the Zeros and the Nams, that were often quoted as arguments in support of eugenics, though the original Jukes study, by Richard L. Dugdale, placed considerable emphasis on the environment as a determining factor in criminality, disease and poverty (euthenics).
Three International Eugenics Congresses took place between 1912 and 1932 and were the global venue for scientists, politicians, and social leaders to plan and discuss the application of programs to improve human heredity in the early twentieth century.
Paul A. Lombardo is an American legal historian known for his work on the legacy of eugenics and sterilization in the United States. Lombardo’s foundational research corrected the historical record of the 1927 U.S. Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. He found Carrie Buck’s school grades and the grades of her child Vivian. He was the last person to interview her, and he discovered the pictures of all three generations of the Buck family. In 2002, he sponsored and paid for a memorial plaque that was installed in Buck’s hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia.
Morris Steggerda was an American physical anthropologist, who served as Assistant Professor of zoology at Smith College (1928-1930) and Professor of anthropology at Hartford Seminary Foundation (1994-1950). Between professorships, Steggerda worked closely with Charles Davenport, a biologist and eugenicist, during his time at the Carnegie Institution of Washington at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. He worked primarily on Central American and Caribbean Black and native populations.
Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States from the late 19th century into the mid-20th century. The cause became increasingly promoted by intellectuals of the Progressive Era.
The names "Ben Ishmael Tribe," and "Tribe of Ishmael", were applied to poor, Upland Southern residents of Indianapolis, Indiana during the late 19th and early 20th century because of their supposed association with the Ishmael family. Records of the Ishmael family show that it originally hailed from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that its patriarch, Benjamin Ishmael, served in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.
The history of eugenics is the study of development and advocacy of ideas related to eugenics around the world. Early eugenic ideas were discussed in Ancient Greece and Rome. The height of the modern eugenics movement came in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Roswell Hill Johnson (1877–1967) was an American eugenics professor in the early twentieth century. Born in Buffalo, New York in 1877 and educated at Brown University, Harvard, and the University of Chicago and University of Wisconsin–Madison, Johnson conducted research at the Anatomical Laboratory of the University of Wisconsin and at the Carnegie Institution's Station for Experimental Evolution. He joined the Carnegie staff in July 1905 as an assistant to Charles Davenport, the nation's most influential eugenicist in the first quarter of the twentieth century. Johnson's early work involved ladybugs, whose short life cycle made them ideal for studying evolution. He also developed techniques for locating underground petroleum reserves.
The Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 was a U.S. state law in Virginia for the sterilization of institutionalized persons "afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity that are recurrent, idiocy, imbecility, feeble-mindedness or epilepsy”. It greatly influenced the development of eugenics in the twentieth century. The act was based on model legislation written by Harry H. Laughlin and challenged by a case that led to the United States Supreme Court decision of Buck v. Bell. The Supreme Court upheld the law as constitutional and it became a model law for sterilization laws in other states. Justice Holmes wrote that a patient may be sterilized "on complying with the very careful provisions by which the act protects the patients from possible abuse." Between 1924 and 1979, Virginia sterilized over 7,000 individuals under the act. The act was never declared unconstitutional; however, in 2001, the Virginia General Assembly passed a joint resolution apologizing for the misuse of "a respectable, 'scientific' veneer to cover activities of those who held blatantly racist views." In 2015, the Assembly agreed to compensate individuals sterilized under the act.
Gertrude Anna Davenport, was an American zoologist who worked as both a researcher and an instructor at established research centers such as the University of Kansas and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory where she studied embryology, development, and heredity. The wife of Charles Benedict Davenport, a prominent eugenicist, she co-authored several works with her husband. Together, they were highly influential in the United States eugenics movement during the progressive era.
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