War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race
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America’s romantic “melting pot” notion was a myth.
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“Race suicide”
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As the nineteenth century closed, women still could not vote, Native Americans who had survived governmental genocide programs were locked onto often-barren reservations, and Blacks, as well as despised “white trash,” were still commonly lynched from the nearest tree-from Minnesota to Mississippi. In fact, 3,224 Americans were lynched in the thirty-year period between 1889 and 1918-702 white and 2,522 black. Their crimes were as trivial as uttering offensive language, disobeying ferry regulations, “paying attention to [a] white girl,” and distilling illicit
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While Dugdale’s book spared no opportunity to disparage the human qualities of both the simple paupers and the accomplished criminals among the Jukes family, he blamed not their biology, but their circumstances.
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Rejecting notions of heredity,
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Dugdale cautioned against statistics that inspired false conclusions.
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But Dugdale’s cautions were ignored.
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“The taint is in the blood,” Fletcher staunchly told his audience, “and there is no royal touch which can expel it…. Quarantine the evil classes as you would the
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“good Americans” could be bred like good racehorses.
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Galton had first pronounced his theory of the well-born in 1883. For the next twenty years, eugenics bounced around America’s intellectual circles as a perfectly logical hereditary conclusion consistent with everyday observations. But it lacked specifics. Then, as one of the first sparks of the twentieth century,
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Homo sapiens. Height, hair color, eye color and other physical attributes could be partially explained in Mendelian terms. But intelligent, thought-driven humans beings were too subtle, too impressionable, too variable and too unpredictable to be reduced to a horticultural equation. Man’s environment and living conditions were inherent to his development.
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Nutrition, prenatal and childhood circumstances, disease, injury, and upbringing itself were all decisive,
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“The writers of this paper are fully conscious of the slenderness of their data; they have themselves stated that many of their conclusions are probabilities … rather than demonstrations. They will no doubt be upbraided with publishing anything at all, either on the ground that what they are dealing with is ‘crude and worthless material’ or that as ‘mathematical outsiders,’ they are incapable of dealing with a medico-social problem.”
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Indeed, the racism of America’s first eugenic intellectuals was more than just a movement of whites against nonwhites. They believed that Germans and Nordics comprised the supreme race, and a typical lament among eugenic leaders such as Lothrop Stoddard was that Nordic populations were decreasing.
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In The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy, Stoddard wrote that the Industrial Revolution had attracted squalid Mediterranean peoples who quickly outnumbered the more desirable Nordics.
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Race mixing was considered race suicide. Grant warned: “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”
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racial purity and supremacy doctrines embraced by America’s pioneer eugenicists were not the ramblings of ignorant, unsophisticated men. They were the carefully considered ideals of some of the nation’s most respected and educated figures, each an expert in his scientific or cultural field, each revered for his erudition.
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Enter Andrew Carnegie. Steel made Andrew Carnegie one of America’s wealthiest men.
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Now another scientific endeavor would be added: negative eugenics. The program would quickly become known as “the practical means for cutting off defective germ-plasm” and would embrace a gamut of remedies from segregation to sterilization to euthanasia.37 This radical human engineering program would spring not from the medical schools and health clinics of America, but from the pastures, barns and chicken coops-because the advocates of eugenics were primarily plant and animal breeders. Essentially, they believed humans could be spawned and spayed like trout and horses.
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Davenport saw ethnic groups as biologically different beings-not just physically, but in terms of their character, nature and quality. Most of the non-Nordic types, in Davenport’s view, swam at the bottom of the hereditary pool, each featuring its own distinct and indelible adverse genetic features.
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Italians were predisposed to personal violence. The Irish had “considerable mental defectiveness,” while Germans were “thrifty, intelligent, and
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He disputed the value of improved conditions for those considered genetically inferior. He readily admitted that with schooling, training and social benefits, “a person born in the slums can be made a useful man.” But that usefulness was limited in the evolutionary scheme of things. No amount of book learning, “finer mental stuff” or “intellectual accumulation” would transfer to the next generation, he insisted, adding that “permanent improvement of the race can only be brought about by breeding the
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“We have in this country the grave problem of the negro,” he wrote, “a race whose mental development is, on the average, far below the average of the Caucasian. Is there a prospect that we may through the education of the individual produce an improved race so that we may hope at last that the negro mind shall be as teachable, as elastic, as original, and as fruitful as the Caucasian’s? Or must future generations, indefinitely, start from the same low plane and yield the same meager results? We do not know; we have no data. Prevailing ‘opinion’ says we must face the latter alternative. If this ...more
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Billings and the Carnegie Institution would now mobilize their prestige and the fortune they controlled to help Davenport usher America into an age of a new form of hygiene: racial hygiene. The goal was clear: to eliminate the inadequate and unfit. Now it was time to search the nation, from its busiest metropolises to its most remote regions, methodically identifying exactly which families were qualified to continue and which were not.
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Robert Chambers
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Arnold “White,
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In 1905, the British eugenicist and birth control advocate H. G. Wells published A Modern Utopia.
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Eden Paul,
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He made a clear distinction between Darwin’s concept of natural selection and the newer idea of simple “selection.” The difference, Cole explained, “is that instead of being natural selection it is now conscious selection on the part of the breeder…. Death is the normal process of elimination in the social organism, and we might carry the figure a step further and say that in prolonging the lives of defectives we are tampering with the functioning of the social
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Haiselden himself quipped, “Death is the Great and Lasting Disinfectant.”
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For decades, medical investigators would question how the death rates at asylums, including the one in Lincoln, Illinois, could be so high. In the 1990s, the average life expectancy for individuals with mental retardation was 66.2 years. In the 1930s, the average life expectancy for those classified as feebleminded was approximately 18.5 years. Records suggest that a disproportionate percentage of the feebleminded at Lincoln died before the age of ten.
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Germany was no exception. German eugenicists had formed academic and personal relationships with Davenport and the American eugenic establishment from the turn of the century. Even after World War I, when Germany would not cooperate with the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations because of French, English and Belgian involvement, its bonds with Davenport and the rest of the U.S. movement remained strong. American foundations such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation generously funded German race biology
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As America’s elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as “bacteria,” “vermin,” “mongrels” and “subhuman,” a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the final solution to the globe’s eugenic problems.
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America had established the value of race and blood. In Germany, the concept was known as Rasse und Blut.
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Negative eugenic solutions appeared in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century.
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By the mid-1880s, Ploetz had propounded a eugenic racial theory. Galton’s term eugenics had not yet been translated, and Ploetz coined the term Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene). He articulated his notions of racial and social health in a multivolume 1895 work, The Foundations of Racial Hygiene. Volume one was entitled Fitness of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak. His colleagues later argued that the term Rassenhygiene should not be translated into English as race hygiene, but as eugenics. The two were one and the same.
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But efforts by German eugenicists to join America’s international movement were still hampered by the aftershocks of the war. Under the Treaty of Versailles, Germany agreed to pay the Allies massive war reparations, 132 billion marks or 33 billion dollars. This crippled the finances of all of Germany, including its raceologists. Meanwhile, German nationalists were enraged because France and Belgium now occupied the Rhineland. France’s army had long included African soldiers from its colonies-such as Senegal, Mali and North Africa-who were now mingling with German women and would ultimately ...more
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Weimar continued to print money around the clock, creating hour-to-hour hyperinflation. Fabulous stories abounded of money being carted around in wheelbarrows and being used to stoke furnaces. One famous story centered on a Freiburg University student who ordered a cup of coffee listed on the menu for 5,000 marks; by the time he ordered a refill, the second cup cost 9,000 marks. Another told of an insurance policy redeemed to buy a single loaf of bread. The American dollar, which had traded for 1,500 marks in 1922, was worth 4.2 trillion marks by the end of 1923.
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Where did Hitler develop his racist and anti-Semitic views? Certainly not from anything he read or heard from America. Hitler became a mad racist dictator based solely on his own inner monstrosity, with no assistance from anything written or spoken in English. But like many rabid racists, from Plecker in Virginia to Rentoul in England, Hitler preferred to legitimize his race hatred by medicalizing it, and wrapping it in a more palatable pseudoscientific facade-eugenics. Indeed, Hitler was able to recruit more followers among reasonable Germans by claiming that science was on his side.
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When Hitler used the term master race, he meant just that, a biological “master race.” America crusaded for a biologically superior race, which would gradually wipe away the existence of all inferior strains.
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Hitler proudly told his comrades just how closely he followed American eugenic legislation. “Now that we know the laws of heredity,” he told a fellow Nazi, “it is possible to a large extent to prevent unhealthy and severely handicapped beings from coming into the world. I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock…. But the possibility of excess and error is still no proof of the incorrectness of these laws. It only exhorts us to ...more
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Moreover, as Hitler’s knowledge of American pedigree techniques broadened, he came to realize that even he might have been eugenically excluded. In later years, he conceded at a dinner engagement, “I was shown a questionnaire drawn up by the Ministry of the Interior, which it was proposed to put to people whom it was deemed desirable to sterilize. At least three-quarters of the questions asked would have defeated my own good mother. If this system had been introduced before my birth, I am pretty sure I should never have been born at all!”
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On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler seized power following an inconclusive election.
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During the twelve-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilization, euthanasia, eugenic courts and eventually mass termination of germ plasm in lethal chambers. During the Reich’s first ten years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler’s plans as the logical fulfillment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilizing hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilization ...more
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Nine categories of defectives were identified for sterilization. At the top of the list were the feebleminded, followed by those afflicted by schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington’s chorea, epilepsy, hereditary body deformities, deafness and, of course, hereditary blindness. Alcoholism, the ninth category, was listed as optional to avoid confusion with ordinary drunkenness. The Reich announced that 400,000 Germans would immediately be subjected to the procedure, beginning January 1, 1934.
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Sterilizations had begun January 1 of that year. Within forty-eight hours, the Reich Interior Ministry’s eugenics expert announced that the list would include a vast cross-section of the population-from children as young as ten to men over the age of fifty. The ministry added that the first to be sterilized would not be residents of “institutions,” but those who were “at large.” Quickly, the procedure became known as the Hitlerschnitte, or “Hitler’s cut.” During 1934, the Third Reich sterilized at least 56,000 individuals-approximately one out of every 1,200 Germans.
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The news was everywhere and inescapable. Centuries of religious prejudice had now been quantified into science. Even if Germans of Jewish ancestry had been practicing Christianity for generations-as many had-henceforth, they would all be legally defined as a race, without regard to religion. That was in 1935.
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“As is well known, the Nazi viewpoint on race and the resultant policies are set forth by Adolf Hitler himself in the pages of Mein Kampf, the Bible of National Socialism. The future Führer therein wrote: “It will be the duty of the People’s State to consider the race as the basis of the community’s existence.
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As Hitler’s divisions smashed through Europe, his eugenic ideal would be enforced not only against those in Germany, but also against those in conquered or dominated countries. In country after country, Hitler rounded up the defective Jews and other subhumans, systematically making one region after another judenrein—Jew free. As Hess insisted, “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”152 For decades, Hitler’s bloody regime, the Holocaust and the Second World War would be perceived as merely the outgrowth of the unfathomable madness and blind hatred of one man and his movement. But ...more
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