THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
NOVEMBER 16,2011
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 2012
PAGE 9C
Eugenics loses popularity following WWII
FROM "GENERAL PSYCHOLOGY" The "good" and the "bad" Kalikaks demonstrate the influence of heredity.
IAN CUMMINGS icummings@kansan.com
Kansas was once a leader in the forced sterilization of the mentally disabled, and the University supported it from the beginning.
The last known case of the practice in Kansas occurred 50 years ago, according to a database created by Lutz Kaelber, associate professor of sociology at the University of Vermont.
At least 2,851 people were castrated or otherwise sterilized in Kansas hospitals between 1913 and 1961. Compulsory sterilization gradually fell out of favor and the Kansas legislature repealed the law authorizing it in 1965.
The asylum was originally conceived as a boarding school with goals of education and rehabilitation. Over the years, the schools function turned to employing students in farm labor or simply institutionalizing them, according to a 1965 issue of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine.
The Kansas State Asylum for the Education of Idiotic and Imbecile Youth opened in North College Hall on the University campus Sept. 1, 1881. Ten-year-old Belle Abott of Johnson County entered the asylum as its first student six days later.
Within six years, the asylum had moved to Winfield, where superintendent F Hoyt Pilcher performed 58 castrations and 150 sterilizations of patients. According to the database, many of those people were mentally ill rather than mentally disabled. Abbot died at the Winfield hospital at age 29.
The asylum's move to Winfield was viewed at the time as a loss by the University. Lawrence lost the asylum in a political battle with representatives from elsewhere in the state.
"It was a coup to get one of these institutions in your town," Michael Wehmeyer, a professor in special education, said. "It was one of those politically desirable things; it would
mean jobs, prestige. Back then, it wasn't quackery, it was cutting edge, like bioscience is now"
With 30,000 sterilization across the country in 30 states, Kansas ranked sixth
"What seems like clean-cut violations of basic human rights was part of a progressive agenda."
nationally. The Kansas Legislature passed a law in 1913 allowing for the sterilization of "habitual criminals, idiots, epileptics, imbeciles, and insane." These procedures were widely accepted at the time and promoted through the philosophy of eugenics, which teaches that societies can be improved by selective breeding. The law was amended in 1917 to remove courts from the process and make it easier for health boards to have people sterilized. Even so, widespread uncertainty about the law kept the number of sterilizations in the dozens until the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell clearly approved of it.
ed those of many people considered, then and now, to be politically progressive.
"Then youve got wholesale sterilizations," Wehmery said. Instead of dozens of sterilizations each year in Kansas, there were hundreds. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' views reflect-
Holmes wrote the opinion of the court.
MICHAEL WEHMEYER
Professor of Special Education
"It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them stave for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly
unfit from continuing their kind" he wrote. "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
rights was part of a progressive agenda,
it made for some strange bedfellows."
In the 1920s, Kansas families competed in eugenics-inspired fitness contests at state fairs. Wehmer displayed in his office a prize medal from a "Fitter Families Contest," presented by the American Eugenics Society,
"Yea, I have a goodly heritage," the medal read in part.
Wehmeyer said he bought the medal on Ebay. The image of the medal also appears in "The Child," a book written by Florence Sherbon, a University professor of home economics and a Fitter Families proponent.
Wehmeyer said that the eugenics movement was driven by a complex intersection of movements. Psychology and the science of genetics were emerging together, and the industrial revolution inspired people to believe that science could solve all of their problems. The progressive movement, which was powerful in Kansas, encouraged people to work for the improvement of society. Some progressives, such as Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist William Allen White, for whom the University School of Journalism was named, fought against the eugenics movement, but its popularity carried it through the 1940s.
The eugenics movement fell out of favor and the number of sterilizations performed each year dropped drastically following World War II. This was partly because the philosophy of eugenics was similar to the rhetoric associated with the Holocaust, Wehmeyer said. Courts now consider forced sterilization to be clearly unconstitutional.
Whemeyer said pointing the finger at a few policy makers and physicians of the past would be "the easy thing to do."
"There was widespread adoption and acceptance of eugenics," he said. "In the 1950s, it was hard to find anyone who wasn't."
Wehmeyer said it was hard to imagine such things happening again. Attitudes about disability have changed and states have added legal protections for disabled people. But he doesn't discount the danger of abuse whenever some people are identified as defective.
KJHK
"When you think of people as different, you run a risk" he said.
Student radio station adapts to new formats, stays ahead
—Edited by Jennifer DiDonato
HANNAH PIERANGELO
hpierangelo@kansan.com
KANSAN FILE PHOTO
The nationally recognized university radio station, 90.7 KJHK, wasn't always the station we know now.
KJHK was organized through the journalism school in 1952 and was known as KDGU. It started out as just a carrier current, which was a medium-frequency AM signal broadcast to a very small area. The name changed to KUOK in 1956, and featured news, sports programs and entertainment. When FM caught on nationally in the 1970s, the station saw a potential for a larger audience, and became KJHK in 1975. In the '80s, the station saw the opportunity to play independent music rather than compete with local stations for mainstream media.
KJHK today is no longer affiliated with any one school at the University of Kansas, and is completely student run. Close to 200 student volunteers keep it running 24 hours a day and seven days a week during the school year. The station made the Princeton Review's list of Top 20 College Radio Stations for the last two years, and it was named number two on the 2011 Washington Post list of 10 Great Student-Run College Radio Stations.
"Historically speaking, beyond the awards KJHK has seen across all of its years, the most world-changing success that KJHK has to its credit is that in December 1994, it was one of the first radio stations in the nation to stream its content on the internet via a stable online stream," said General Station Manager Tom Johnson, who is managing KJHK for his seventh year.
The online component of KJHK
was created to broaden their audience, and is proving successful. The station has a blog-format website featuring online streaming capabilities, in-studio performance videos, and new rotation album reviews. General staff and DJ applications are on the website every semester, and are open to all students.
Freshman Adam Yoerg from Hudson, Wis., likes to listen to the standard rotation while doing homework. "They play different music you don't usually hear on other stations, and they play newer stuff." Yoerg said.
"That helps diversify our sound, the fact that anyone can be a DJ," Station Manager Kaitlin Brennan said. "It's a floodgate of majors and whoever wants to be here. That's what makes KJHK so creative."
This semester holds programming in local music, world music, sports, news, jazz, hip-hop, indie, essentially a bit of everything. The programming changes by semester based on student DIs, but it still caters to the desire for something different.
The station nearly lost its FM license in 2003 when operating costs became unaffordable. The next year, however, the KU
"The real success of the station is that any KU student, no matter their major or interests, can join KJHK, learn what they'd like to learn about any or all particular areas of broadcasting, and leave here with an experience they never forget," Johnson said.
Memorial Unions stepped forward to help remodel KJHK's funding and allowed the station to move from its previous location in Sudler Annex to its new studio in the Kansas Union in 2010.
- Edited by Madison Schultz
KANSAN FILE PHOTO
KANSAN FILE PHOTO