This seems to have been something of an open secret, but it is getting a significant bit of new attention.
The news story seems to struggle with the juxtaposition of Kuralt’s reputation as a progressive with his actions in this area, as if unaware that eugenics in America was often practiced by people professing progressive values.
Anyway, today the welfare offices of Mecklenburg County are located in the Wallace Kuralt Centre. Now, I am not a fan of sanitizing history, but it seems to me that renaming the building so that it doesn’t honor a practicing eugenicist might be appropriate.
Prohibition was also born from progressive ideals but most people these days seem to think it came from a bunch of religious conservatives who had a problem with other people having fun.
Margaret Sanger was a staunch advocate of eugenics as well but Planned Parenthood stills hands out an award named after her each year.
Meh, if we changed the name of everything in the US named after a racist, we’d end up having to rename half the placenames in the country. I mean, we have an active slave-owner on the one dollar bill!
Social mores have changed for the better over time, but I don’t think its particularly productive to try and purge anyone who wasn’t up to current standards. If anything, I think they serve as a good reminder of where we’ve come from, and make us consider what currently accepted views today might be viewed as abhorrant by future generations.
I think the most telling part of the article was the part that mentioned that when birth control pills became available, that Kurault “leapt” at the chance to use them.
I didn’t get the impression that he was a eugenicist, a la Lebensborn type stuff, or even from a perspective of removing the mentally deficient from the gene pool, but rather from an extremely pragmatic perspective of getting at the root causes of poverty, one of which is more children than you can afford.
I agree. Do you realize that there’s both an airport and a library named after Ronald Reagan? I mean, I’m an enjoyer of irony, but let’s be appropriate, here.
Charles Kuralt himself lived a double life for nearly 30 years, including paying for the education of his mistress and her children, passing about a half-million dollars in cash to her and diverting other assets away from his legal wife and children that resulted in a highly embarrassing court case. Should we also repudiate Kuralt’s contributions to journalism and television because of his hypocrisy?
I know some Native Americans here in North Carolina who refuse to carry $20 bills because of Andrew Jackson’s likeness, but have to drive to work on the Andrew Jackson Highway. And then there are a lot of black folks who have to live next to one of the dozens of monuments “sacred to the memory of our confederate dead” honoring people who fought so that black people could remain slaves.
Plus, you’ve got to figure that the people Wallace Kuralt sterilized 50 years ago are all getting pretty old, and I’m assuming have few descendents, so 20 years from now it won’t be a big deal.
Not the same thing. Had he been a plagiarist, then one might question his journalistic career. His father advocated eugenics against the poor, and we’re talking about the Welfare Offices in the county he practiced his craft. Those two are inter-related in a way that a journalist’s work and his personal life are not.
I’m all for removing names of idiots that are popular with some but unpopular with others from buildings. This would be fine with me. Rename it for a deceased local librarian.
Yea, I didn’t really get the sense he was a eugenicist in the usual sense of the word either. The article didn’t have any quotes from the man himself advocating sterilization as a means to prevent the genetic material of mentally handicapped from being passed to the next generation, rather in all the examples in the article, sterilization seemed to have been performed as means of preventing the state from having to care for the children of handicapped parents. And I imagine in the age before birthcontrol and strong anti-rape laws, the problem of mentally handicapped people being serially raped and producing offspring they were unable to care for was a pretty difficult one to deal with.
Obviously sterilizing people that were incapable of giving informed consent is still not a great solution, but its pretty far thing from the more aggressive and explicitly eugenic efforts of the 20’s and 30’s.
Its pretty hard to find someone with no skeletons in their closet. Gandhi used to beat his wife, MLK was an adulterer, Mother Thersa took money from mobsters. I’m sure the local librarian would end up being a member of NAMBLA or something.
We’ll have to diagree on this one. Much of Kuralt’s career (and all of his fame) came from telling stories of solid, substantial, community-minded Americans. Charles Kuralt would not have told the story of Charles Kuralt. Yet the University of North Carolina has all his papers, and built a replica of his office to house them.
If it wasn’t for Hitler going totally over the top with it (and, perhaps, for some people tying it to racist shit in general, or classist shit, neither of which are really inherent to it) eugenics would probably still be considered a perfectly respectable ideology.
Look, in early-20th-Century America, “eugenics” usually meant “finding ways to discourage negroes from breeding.” Not everybody involved in the movement was racist, but it was difficult to disentangle racism from it, from the very beginning.