RARE "Eugenicist" General Frederick Osborn Signed Cut Signature For Sale

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RARE "Eugenicist" General Frederick Osborn Signed Cut Signature:
$149.99

Up for sale a RARE! "Eugenicist" General Frederick Osborn Signed Cut Signature. Residual Mounting glue on reverse. 

ES-8617

Major General Frederick Henry Osborn (21 March 1889 – 5 January

1981) was an American philanthropist, military leader, and eugenicist. He was a

founder of several organizations and played a central part in reorienting eugenics

in the years following World War II away from the race- and class-consciousness

of earlier periods. The American Philosophical Society

considers him to have been "the respectable face of eugenic research in

the post-war period."(APS, 1983) Osborn

graduated from Princeton University in 1910 and attended Trinity College, Cambridge, for a

postgraduate year. His family had made their fortune in the railroad business,

and he went into the family business up until the outbreak of World War I,

when he served in the American Red Cross in France

as Commander of the Advance Zone for the last 11 months of the war. In 1928, he

became a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History

studying anthropology and population.

He was one of the founding members of the American

Eugenics Society in 1926 and joined the Galton

Institute in 1928, serving as its Secretary in 1931. He played a

central role in the 1936 founding of the Office of Population Research at Princeton University, a leading demographic

research and training center. Osborn was one of the founding trustees of the Pioneer Fund

in 1937, a charitable foundation charged with promoting eugenics. According to J. Phillipe Rushton, Osborn was the first to

point out that although African Americans scored lower than whites on the Army intelligence

tests, those from five urban

northern states scored slightly higher

than whites from eight rural southern states did, demonstrating the

influence of cultural factors on IQ scores. In the following decades,

Osborn remained skeptical of the hereditarian

hypothesis of the variance in IQ scores found between racial groups. He

suspected that environment played a greater role than genetics in the shaping

of human beings, and thought eugenics should take place within groups

(well-adapted families should be given the means to have more children) rather

than between them (inferior races should be replaced). An admirer of the

reforms instituted in 1930s Sweden through the efforts of economist Gunnar Myrdal

and his wife Alva Myrdal, Osborn emphasized the eugenic

potential of extended state support in childcare, recreation, housing, nursery

services, and education as a means of stimulating fertility among desirable

populations. He argued that the aim of eugenics

should be to ensure that every child was wanted. Osborn believed that in this

system, which he called the "true freedom of parenthood," the parents

most capable of rearing children would be likelier to have more.(Ramsden 2003) Many

civil rights leaders alleged that, even after the revelation of genocide in

World War II, eugenic influences remained strong in the United States because

of Osborn and others of the Population Society (including John D. Rockefeller,

Lewis Strauss, Karl Compton, and Detlev Bronk). He also encouraged and endorsed

programs in Nazi Germany that sterilized Jews, Poles, and others deemed

"unsuitable" to breed. Although Hitler's genocidal tactics and acts

caused revulsion in the United States, he continued to promote eugenic ideals. In

1940, Osborn was selected by Franklin Roosevelt to chair the Civilian

Advisory Committee on Selective Service. Five months later, he took over as

Chair of the Army Committee on Welfare and Recreation, responsible for

information and education services for military personnel. In September 1941,

he was commissioned as Brigadier General and appointed Chief of the Morale

Branch of the War Department (later called the Information and Education

Division of Special Services). By the war's end, he had earned promotion to

Major General and had been awarded a bronze star

in Paris, the Distinguished Service Medal,

and the Selective Service Medal, and he was made Honorary Commander in the Most

Excellent Order of the British Empire. Osborn served

at Princeton, as a charter trustee from 1943 to 1955, and as a member of

several advisory boards, including the Curriculum Committee and Psychology

Department Council.

RARE "Eugenicist" General Frederick Osborn Signed Cut Signature

$104.99

Havelock Ellis physician, eugenicist, writer, RARE SIGNED AUTOGRAPH DISPLAY

$124.95