The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

the early 1930s, Carl Brigham and Lewis Terman had also begun questioning the validity of IQ testing. In 1930, Brigham denounced his views on the intellectual superiority of the “Nordic Race” and disowned the findings of his 1923 book on the U.S. army IQ tests and American intelligence (Brigham 1930; Barkan 1992; Gould 1996). Terman found Nazi racial policies to be “beneath contempt” and became a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s liberal New Deal politics, the welfare state, and the civil rights movement (Zenderland 1998).

The immigration of foreigners into the United States had begun to be seen as a problem as early as the 1870s, when there was a movement to limit immigration of Chinese and Japanese because of the economic competition they posed. Chinese immigrants had first arrived during the gold rush and then were imported as laborers, mainly to work on building railroads and in other low-wage jobs.

By the 1870s, as the post–Civil War economy declined, anti-Chinese sentiment had become politicized, and Chinese were blamed for depressed wage levels, especially in California.

In 1882, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed. As more Japanese immigrants began to enter the United States, opposition to them increased as well, and an executive order was passed in 1907 to restrict their immigration. In 1913 and again in 1920, the state of California passed Alien L...

Eugenicists believed that most immigrants who entered the United States after 1890 were genetically undesirable (Black 2003). In the three decades after that year, over twenty million immigrants had entered the United States. These new immigrants were mainly from Europe, where economic and ethnic problems were causing upheavals. More than eight million of these had arrived from 1900 to 1909; more than a million arrived each year in 1910, 1913, and 1914 (Black 2003).

And Spiro (2009, 227) further points out: “Like his colleagues, Grant bolstered his argument for Nordic superiority by referring to the army intelligence tests and the testimony of Harry H. Laughlin, and thus the circle was complete: Grant cited Laughlin, who had based his analysis on Brigham’s statistics, which were in turn based on Grant’s calculations of the racial composition of the European population. What seemed … to be a plethora of independent studies by reputable scientists was actually a series of self-referential claims that, like the worm Ouroboros, constantly fed upon itself.”

Thus, after massive rhetoric and propaganda was dumped on the politicians, a combined House and Senate bill, the Johnson-Reed Act, passed on May 15, 1924, by a vote of 308 to 69 in the former and 69 to 9 in the latter. The bill was approved as the Johnson-Lodge Act and was signed into law by President Calvin Coolidge on June 30, 1924. This law remained the major immigration policy in the United States until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

Eastern Europe between 1881 and 1924 (Hardwick 2002), this, of course, was before the Nazis took over Germany. The immigration policies of the United States were not lifted during the Holocaust, news of which began to reach the country in 1941 and 1942. It has been estimated that at least 190,000–200,000 Jews could have been saved during World War II alone (Weiner 1995), not including those who were unable to leave Europe between 1924 and the beginning of the war.

Chase (1977) estimates that 6,065,704 Italians, Jews, Poles, Hungarians, Balts, Spaniards, Greeks, and other European people were trapped in Europe when the war began in 1939.

He states (Chase 1977, 301): “How many of these 6,065,704 immigrants excluded by the racial quotas of 1924 would have emigrated to America between 1924 and 1939 will, of course, never be known. One thing is certain: most of the Jews, Poles, Russians, and other people marked by the Nazi race biologists as dysgenic who were trapped in territories controlled by Germany bet...

The plight of the passengers of the German transatlantic ship MS St. Louis is a good example of the fallout of U.S. immigration policies. On Saturday, May 13, 1939, 937 passengers boarded the MS St. Louis in an attempt to escape persecution and start a new life, first in Cuba and ultimately in the United States. Almost all were Jews fleeing the Third Reich. ...

At great expense and after giving up their homes, possessions, and past lives, they were subjected to a long ...

Upon reaching Cuba on May 27, all but twenty-eight passengers were refused entry (one passenger had died during the voyage). They then attempted to seek asylum in Florida. However, because of the quotas set by the 1924 immigration laws, the U.S. government refused to allow the passengers to disembark. The MS St. Louis was forced to s...

Instead, Jewish organizations (particularly the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee) were able to secure entry visas from four European governments, Great B...

Of the 288 passengers Great Britain admitted, all but one survived World War II. Of the 620 passengers who returned to the continent, eighty-seven (14 percent) were able to emigrate before Germany invaded Western Europe in May 1940. However 532 remained trapped on the continent. Over half (279) of these survived the Holocaust, but 254 died at the...

Thus, the immigration laws eugenicists inspired and influenced had a direct influence on the death of millions of Europeans. As Stephen Gould (1996, 262) has stated: “The eugenicists battled and won one of the greatest victories of scientific racism in American history.” One could add that they aided and abetted one of the greatest tragedies in world history. Nash (1999, 155) summarizes: “Hitler had done exactly what Madison Grant ...

Eugenics and the Nazis American immigration restriction legislation that was framed during the last quarter of the nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth century was directly influenced by Gobineau’s “reasoning.”

Similarly, there was a direct linear connection between Gobineau’s reasoning and the verbiage of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf of 1925 (Biddiss 1970, 258; Brace 2005, 122). Thus, the “center of gravity” of the ideology of the eugenics movement, which began in Europe with early polygenic theories such as those of Hume and Kant, moved to the United States with the Mortonites and their fight to preserve slavery, then back to Europe with Sir Francis Galton soon after Darwin’s Origin was published.

Virtually every aspect of eugenic thought and practice—from ‘euthanasia’ of the unfit and compulsory sterilization to positive welfare—was developed during the turmoil of the crucial years between 1918 and 1924.”

When Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933, he was hindered by the Weimar constitution. However, the burning of the German parliament (Reichstag) building shortly thereafter was blamed on communists and radicals and this enabled Hitler to demand emergency powers by decree. This swept away any vestiges of parliamentary control. It was later determined that the fire most likely was set by the Nazis (Bahar and Kugel 2001). Hitler’s eugenic ideals, fueled by the writings and theories of Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Grant; the “science” of Davenport and Laughlin; and the German racial hygienists Ploetz, Baur, Fischer, and Lenz then could be carried out without the restrictions imposed by a democracy (Weiss 2010).

He and his Nazi Party’s racism and ethnic cleansing could proceed unabated. The focal points of the Nazi Party (the National Socialist German Worker’s Party, or NSDAP) were “race” and “heredity,” and its goal was to develop a genetically healthy and racially pure German national community, or Volk (Weiss 2010). Thus, Nazi Germany moved into dominance of the eugenics moveme...

As Black (2003, 318) states, “The war against the weak had graduated from America’s slogans, index cards and surgical blades to Naz...

American eugenicists, who realized that their policies would never move as fast or be carried out as thoroughly as was being done in Germany, envied the Nazis and became cheerleaders for Hitler. For example, Leon F. Whitley of the AES wrote that “many far-sighted men and women … have long been working toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory.… And this represents but a small beginning we are told!”

continued: “While we are pussyfooting around,” the Nazis were accomplishing great things. Dr. Joseph DeJarnette (who had testified in the Carrie Buck case) exclaimed that the “Germans are beating us at our own game!” (quotes in Spiro 2009, 364). Laughlin told Grant that “he was thrilled that the speeches of Nazi leaders … ‘sound exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,’ but he admitted that he was jealous that he and Grant were only humble researchers,” while in the German dictatorship, scientists were actually getting things done (quoted in Spiro 2009, 364).

Army tester and primatologist Robert Yerkes, who thought the Nazis were upstaging Americans by properly using mental testing for military purposes, stated: “Germany has long led in the development of military psychology.… The Nazis have achieved something that is entirely without parallel in military history.… What has happened in Germany is the logical sequel to the psychological and personnel services in our own Army during 1917–1918” (Yerkes 1941, 209). As Spiro (2009) has pointed out, Frederick Osborn believed that the program of the Nazis was an excellent one and that “taken t...

Osborn emphasized that “Germany’s rapidity of change with respect to eugenics was possible only under a dictator” (quoted in Spiro 2009, 368). Although many would later deny knowledge of the Nazi atrocities, Germany was quite proud of its treatment of Jews and others, and the Nazi fascist program was widely reported in the ...

Thus, from the early beginnings of Nazism in Germany through the atrocities carried out by Hitler and his followers, even to the end of World War II, many American eugenicists supported Hitler and Nazism intellectually, with moral (or we might say immoral), political, and financial support. After all, American eugenicists had essentially written Nazi ideology and policy. As Dr. Heinz Kürten, the Nazi physician in charge of training other doctors in Nazi medicine, pointed out in 1933, U.S....

As Weiss (1990, 14) has noted, German eugenicists with expertise in medicine proposed a national comprehensive eugenics program to improve national health. Toward the end of World War I, around 1917, the leading racial hygienists in Germany began to ally themselves with the political right.

They began to use science and medicine as weapons for racial purity (Weindling 1989). Using a “selectionist” brand of Social Darwinism allowed German eugenicists to convert social and economic problems into a scientific crisis. The depression brought home to the elite classes the high costs of social welfare, and eugenics was recognized as a means of cutting these costs. Defeat in World War I and middle-class impoverishment were central factors in the rise of German racism.

The eugenicists reached a high point of influence in Germany from 1929 to 1932, du...

By 1932, only approximately one-third of the population of Germany was working (Weindling 1989; Weiss 2010). Eugenicists asserted that only eugenics-based elimination of the unfit, or “rational selection,” could remedy the growing crisis. A eugenics ideal in Germany also made it possible for “science” to keep “a large and milit...

No other country used science and medicine, under the guise of racism and eugenics, with the degree of wanton disregard f...

As Poliakov (1971, 327) has pointed out: “During the Renaissance, the Spanish statuses relating to ‘purity of blood’ brought about a type of segregation similar to that of the racial laws promulgated in the twentieth century by the Nazis and Fascists.… Even so, the ‘inferior race’ of ...

In Nazi Germany, at first, emigration (“self-deportation”) of those designated as “racial degenerates,” such as Jews, was encouraged (Weindling 1989). However, as emigration became increasingly impossible in the years preceding and durin...

The Reich’s biological enemies were simply deemed genetically subhuman. “There was never the degree of wanton disregard for human life that existed in Nazi Germany. Such practices were also never seen as eugenic measures” (Weiss 2010, 267). While masses were being eliminated, patients from “racially elite” groups were receiving the highest-quality medical care. As Weindling (1989) has noted: “The Nazis rapaciously plundered elements from pre-existing movements for ...

… Nazi concepts of health meant that Jews, gypsies and homosexuals were stigmatized as ‘alien parasites’ or as ‘cancerous growths’ in the German body politic. Health care was selectively to promote a Nordic elite, which would lead a purged but fitter and healthier nation to military victories.… Social, economic and ...

One individual who was particularly distinguishable as a catalyst for the German eugenics movement was Alfred Ploetz (Weiss 1990). Ploetz (1860–1940), a German physician and biologist, was one of the earliest proponents of the German eugenics movement; it was he who coined the term Rassenhygiene, or racial hygiene (Weindling 1989; Weiss 2010). He was fascinated with Darwinism and was profoundly influenced by Haeckel and his mo...

Ploetz had helped lay the groundwork for the First International Congress for Eugenics at the International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1911. The 1911 meeting was organized by the International Society for Racial Hygiene, a group dominated by German racial hygienists (Kühl 1994). Ploetz was given an honorary doctorate at the University of Munich in 1930. He welcomed the Nazis’ seizure of power and wrote in 1933 that Hitler would bring racial hygiene from its previous marginality into the mainstream.

In the same year, the Third Reich’s minister of the interior, Wilhelm Frick, established an Expert Advisory Council for Population and Racial Policy comprising Ploetz, Lenz, Rüdin, and Hans Günther. This council provided advice on all legislation related to racial and eugenic issues and on enforcement and justification of national policies (Weiss 2010). In 1936, Ploetz was nominated, unsuccessfully, for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on racial hygiene (Cornwell 2003).

Ploetz’s contacts with international and U.S. eugenicists were long and extensive. In the 1880s, he lived in the United States, where he studied U.S. utopians and practiced medicine in Massachusetts. He also bred chickens and began getting interested in the eugenics belief in breeding humans. He served as one of the vice-presidents of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, and the next year, he became a member of the elite Permanent International Eugenics Committee, which later evolved into the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO).

In 1939, when German eugenics graduated from sterilization to euthanasia, Lenz helped draft the guidelines allowing “misfits” to be killed “by medical measures of which he (the victim) remains unaware” (Müller-Hill 1998, 15). He was one of Josef Mengele’s mentors (see later in this chapter) (Lifton 1986). It seems, however, that Lenz was not particularly anti-Semitic; he claimed that the German term for anti-Semitism was pseudo-scientific, since there was no Semitic race (Weindling 1989, 553).

This was after the Nazi concentration camps and the brutality being carried out in them were well known to the world. In 1938, von Verschuer had agreed to join the advisory committee of the EN at the invitation of Davenport and was becoming an essential link between American eugenics and Nazi policy. In 1940, he was welcomed as a foreign member of AES (Weiss 2010). Von Verschuer considered genes in a holistic context as units striving for unity, order, and higher ideals in service to the state, or Volk (Weindling 1989).

Interestingly, his theory has some similarities to the modern theory of the selfish gene (Weiss 2010).

In January 1945, Auschwitz was liberated and Mengele was listed as a war criminal. However, he evaded an Allied manhunt and escaped to South America, where he lived in hiding until his death in 1979. Tragically, he was never brought to justice. In February 1945, von Verschuer managed to ship equipment, his library, and boxes of records to his home in Solz (Müller-Hill 1998). He had other documents destro...

In March 1945, Hitler killed himself. The Third Reich and its eugenic horrors came to an end, and Nazi doctors and scientists began to reinvent the past. Von Verschuer denied that he and Mengele had complied with the Nazis in any way (Lifton 1986). He also sought support from his American eugenics colleagues, even attempting to obtain a faculty po...

Funding of the Nazis by American Institutions and Businesses From its beginnings, eugenics in the United States was an elitist movement and was supported and funded by a number of very rich individuals, institutions, and corporations.

One of the earlier supporters of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime was the American millionaire Henry Ford (1863–1947), inventor of the assembly line production of automobiles, manufacturer of the Ford motor car, and founder of Ford Motor Company.

Ford was a eugenicist and virulent anti-Semite who believed that Jews had a secret plot to take over world finances and politics by deceit and subterfuge. In 1920, Ford began publishing a series of ninety articles entitled “International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” (later published as a set o...

His evidence for this worldwide plot presumably came from Protocols of the Meetings of the Learned Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic book that was ultimately derived from a series of novels traced back to the 1840...

Ford’s International Jew was translated into German soon after its original publication and became very popular in Germany. Hitler read both it and Ford’s autobiography and was extremely impressed. In fact, some passages of Mein Kampf are essentially identical to what appears in International Jew, and it appears that Hitler copied directly from it (Pool and Pool 1979)....