Roosevelt was an ardent eugenicist

 

 

Jeffrey St. Clair

+ As FDR was considering whether to approve a plan to round up American citizens of Japanese descent and place them in concentration camps (his term), he consulted with an anthropologist friend named Alex Hrdlicka, then director of the Smithsonian Institution. Hrdlicka was a phrenologist, who believed that intelligence, morality and criminal proclivity could be determined by the shape of people’s skulls and other racial characteristics. FDR offered his opinion that as a race the Japanese were “devious and treacherous.” Hrdlicka confirmed FDR’s bigotry and explained that this racial deficiency was because of the shape of Japanese heads, which were “two thousand years behind Caucasians.” FDR asked Hrdlicka if this was something that “could be dealt with surgically?”

+ It’s clear that FDR was an ardent eugenicist. Toward the end of WW II, FDR suggested during a cabinet meeting that as many as 50,000 German men, political, business and military leaders, should be sterilized. He later explained to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau: “You either have to castrate the German people or you have got to treat them in a manner so they can’t go on reproducing people who want to continue the way they have in the past.” (See: Infamy: Shocking Story of the Japanese American Internment During World War II by Richard Reeves.)