Nazi Germany wasn’t the first nation to be enamored with racial purity and a master race.
It was America.
Proponents of eugenics gained immense influence here in the early 20th century. They hoped to incarcerate millions of “unfit” Americans in colonies, forbid them from marrying, or forcibly sterilize them so that, within several generations, only white Nordics would remain. For them, this was ultimately a global enterprise.
Historian and prolific author Edwin Black chronicles this dark phase of American history in his extensively researched book War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. He charts how dubious scientific studies gained support and led to forced sterilizations, segregation, marriage prohibitions, and immigration restrictions for targeted populations.
The book was published in 2003; an expanded version emerged in 2012. Black writes that the material he gathered could have resulted in a standalone book for each chapter. Indeed, his detailing of the American programs alone – the first chapter describes a sheriff sweeping up Appalachian hillbillies for sterilization – makes one shudder at the casual cruelty. And his presentation of the eugenicists behind the programs and the billionaires who supported them makes one wonder if they were any different from the Nazis.
The idea of improving humans by weeding out the worst and the science underpinning it were of British origin. Indeed, 19th-century British scientist Sir Francis Galton coined the term ‘eugenics,’ in which the EU (Greek for good) later acquired a dystopian dimension. But it was in the U.S. that its practice began, backed by the fortunes of the Carnegies, Rockefellers, Harrimans, and other billionaires. It also enjoyed support from the Department of Agriculture.
Charles Davenport, a devotee of Galton and Gregor Mendel and then head of the Carnegie Institution, joined forces with animal breeders and seed experts to set up the American Breeders Association in 1903. This organization, with the full support of the American government, was the first to pursue eugenic research. Davenport also established the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910, with a $10,000 donation from the widow of E.H. Harriman. The ERO soon became “the epicenter of the American eugenics movement.”
From 1903 to 1910, however, the ABA identified the most defective and undesirable Americans, 10% of the population by its estimate. Forced sterilization gained favor as a means of eventually eliminating criminals, the mentally disturbed, and even the poor (deemed genetically prone to laziness).
In 1907, Indiana became the first jurisdiction in the world to legislate forced sterilization for these populations. In 1909, Washington mandated sterilization of habitual criminals and rapists; Connecticut legislated for sterilization of the feebleminded and insane at two asylums; and California, too, legislated sterilization of state convicts and residents of a children’s home for the feebleminded. Nevada, New Jersey, and New York followed suit a few years later, allowing sterilization of similar groups. Some states did not spare drunkards and epileptics.
Much to the eugenicists’ frustration, few states carried out the procedures. They probably reasoned that such radical, irreversible action would not pass constitutional muster and may not have wanted to risk lawsuits.
From 1910, the ERO provided funding and institutional support to the eugenics movement. Inventor Alexander Graham Bell headed its board and eugenicist Harry Laughlin, who brought zeal to its functioning, served as a director. Through surveys and by coding family trees for special social and medical qualities, the organization swept up records of those deemed defective. It was committed to “drying up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm,” and believed that doing so would save the U.S $100 million annually.
The underlying science was dubious and prevalent measures of intelligence faulty, but many elite scientists, medical experts, and educationists nevertheless crusaded for eugenics. Ten groups were chosen for elimination: the feebleminded, the pauper class, the deformed, the insane, the constitutionally weak, alcoholics, criminals, epileptics, those with defective sense organs, and those predisposed to specific diseases. Their extended families, believed to have “defective germ plasm,” were not to be spared.
Attempts were also made to stem the inflow of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, for it was believed their genes would debase the American stock. But a short-lived program to establish a network of eugenic investigators abroad to warn of them had little success.
Top universities supported the eugenics program, big thinkers endorsed it, and rich capitalists enthusiastically financed it. The Eugenics Research Association, set up in 1913 with members drawn from Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Emory, Brown, and Johns Hopkins universities, pursued legislative and administrative action and produced propaganda to advance eugenics. During World War I, Dr John Kellogg, the breakfast cereal magnate, founded the Race Betterment Foundation (RBF), which advocated creating a super race through sterilization, mass incarceration, and immigration restrictions.
These efforts culminated in two 1920s landmarks. Virginia passed the Racial Integrity Act in 1924, requiring the registration of one’s race with the authorities. Race would dictate where one could live, whom one could marry, which school one could attend, and where one could be buried. It was the epitome of white supremacy; false registration would lead to a year’s incarceration. The second landmark was the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision of the Supreme Court, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, permitting sterilization of the “unfit.” After this, 30,000 sterilizations took place in the U.S., with 14,568 in California.
Black shows it was America that established the values of race and blood, which by the 1920s and 1930s were embraced throughout Europe. Eugenics and its methods were bandied about in newsletters, books, journal articles, and scientific conferences. The elimination of ‘undesirables’ and the idea of lethal chambers became acceptable.
The Nazis clearly drew on these values and methods. But it might also be said that America literally took those ideas to Germany in the 1920s. The efforts of German “race hygienists” received funding and support from America, particularly from the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Harrimans. As Black puts it, “by the late twenties, Davenport and other Americans had created a whirlwind of joint projects and entanglements with German eugenics.”
The most ambitious of these was one conceived to make eugenic measurements of every individual of mixed race in the world. IBM’s emerging technology – with which 25,000 Hollerith punch cards could be cross-tabulated in an hour – was to be used to process the data. In the next decade, it was IBM that custom-designed the system used by Nazis to locate and exterminate Jews.
Besides these collaborations, there were two major carriers of eugenic ideas: physician Gustav Boeters, who learned of America’s castration, sterilization, and marriage restriction laws while working as a ship’s doctor in the U.S. from 1895-1900; and Alfred Ploetz, also a physician, who visited America and was fascinated by the quest to breed better humans. Returning to Germany, both worked to institute similar measures there. About that time, German social theorist Adolph Jost was arguing that the state had the right to kill the unfit.
Of the greatest significance, however, was the influence of American eugenic ideology on a corporal in the German army, then imprisoned for inciting mob violence. His name was Adolph Hitler, and he praised the American quest for Nordic purity, declaring in his book Mein Kampf that he wanted to duplicate the program. Eventually, he seized power in 1933; the Holocaust followed.
Once the world realized what the Nazis had unleashed, the American public recoiled from eugenics in horror. American eugenicists retreated from their positions, relabeling themselves geneticists, and their ideas died away. But, as Black explains in the final section of his book, devoted to ‘Newgenics,’ the modern miracle of DNA testing once again raises the specter of a new genetic caste system of inequalities. Are we on our way to another war against the weak?
Image: Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Picryl / public domain
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