Daniel J. Flynn: Sterilizing the Left’s Eugenics History

Daniel J. Flynn is the author of numerous books, including "Blue Collar Intellectuals: When the Enlightened and the Everyman Elevated America," forthcoming from ISI Books this fall. He writes a Monday column for HumanEvents.com and blogs at www.flynnfiles.com.

North Carolina offered reparations on Tuesday to victims of its nearly-half-century sterilization campaign. Starting with Indiana in 1907, more than half of the states codified eugenics programs of varying degrees of fervor during the twentieth century. But North Carolina is thus far the only state to offer to compensate the victims.

“We are attempting to achieve a level of financial compensation and other services that can provide meaningful assistance,” explained Dr. Laura Gerald, chair of the state’s Eugenics Task Force. “Compensation also serves a collective purpose for the state and sends a clear message that we in North Carolina are a people who pay for our mistakes and that we do not tolerate bureaucracies that trample on basic human rights.”

But the state tolerated trampling on “basic human rights” under the guise of progress between 1929 and 1974. The task force’s recommendations have the endorsement of Governor Bev Perdue and await the approval of the state legislature. Support in the legislature appears both wide and bipartisan.

The Tarheel State’s press has been instrumental in exposing decades-long legislative and bureaucratic malfeasance. The role of their journalistic forebears in propagandizing for eugenics hasn’t piqued their curiosity as much. The editorial page editor of the Durham Morning Herald, for instance, was a member of the Human Betterment League as late as the 1960s. The same Charlotte Observer, Winston Salem Journal, and Raleigh News and Observer that inveigh against the state’s eugenic past also played a role in creating that past....