Why Fish Don't Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

by Lulu Miller

Still, the actual rate of sterilization was low. The policies David helped to put in place required an “unfit” person to first come into contact with the law or the medical, education, or welfare system before a sterilization could take place. Then, in 1916, an American eugenicist named Madison Grant published a book that a German guy named Hitler would later call his “bible.” In the book, The Passing of the Great Race, Grant proposed a policy that, in certain ways, resembled Galton’s sci-fi vision: that all the nation’s “moral perverts, mental defectives and hereditary cripples” be rounded up under the guise of charity and sterilized. American eugenicists thought it was brilliant. When over a decade later Hitler passed Germany’s first mandatory sterilization law, American eugenicist and doctor Joseph DeJarnette whined, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”