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Civilisation, science and social engineering The legacy of eugenics: from evolution to genocide and its rebirth in the population control movement
CIVILISATION, SCIENCE AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING
The legacy of eugenics: from evolution to genocide and its rebirth in the population control movement
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by LIAM GIBSON
Widespread concerns regarding the management of public schools in the United States have been mounting for years. But when school authorities dealt dismissively with questions over their Covid restrictions, the anger of American parents boiled over and helped turn education into the major electoral issue of 2021.1 Throughout the year, parents complained about their children being exposed to explicit material, transgender ideology, school closures and mask mandates. But most serious of all were the objections to the influence of critical race theory (CRT) and the depiction of America as irredeemably racist.2
CRT’s portrayal of Americans of European descent as the class enemies of ethnic minorities has made this one of the most explosive issues in contemporary US politics and has borne out Thomas Sowell's observation that:
“Few mixtures are more volatile than race and politics. The normal frictions and resentments among individuals and groups seldom approach the magnitude of frenzy and violence produced by the politicisation of race.”3
Resistance to the introduction of CRT in Democrat-dominated districts has led some left-wing commentators to warn that Republicans are becoming “the party of parents”.4 In November, the Republicans gained a historic victory when Glenn Youngkin was elected governor of Virginia. His first official action, after being sworn in on 16 January 2022, was to sign an executive order banning CRT and similar “divisive concepts” from the schools.
"The eugenists wanted to shift the birth control emphasis from fewer children for the poor to more children for the rich. We went back on that and sought first to stop the multiplication of the unfit. This appeared the most important and greatest step towards race betterment.” — Margaret Sanger, An Autobiography (Pergamon, 1938) pp 374-5.
Currently, across the US, around 137 Bills have been introduced to curtail the teaching of contentious subjects such as CRT.5 According to The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Education experts say a flood of new laws and proposals to curb discussions of
racial and LGBTQ issues is the worst classroom scare since Scopes Monkey Trial.”6 However, legislation may not be enough to end CRT in schools. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has made clear its intention to challenge such laws as it did almost 100 years ago when it sought to overturn Tennessee’s ban on teaching evolution in what came to be known as the “Scopes Monkey Trial”.7 Although the ACLU lost its case, the media ensured its success in the court of public opinion. A fictional version of this story was presented in the stage play Inherit the Wind, later made into a film starring Spencer Tracy and Gene Kelly.8 In the popular understanding of the trial, ill-educated Christian zealots unjustly sought to persecute men of science for daring to teach the discoveries of Charles Darwin. However, this version of events masks some of the darkest aspects of the 20th century, the effects of which are still felt today in the areas of law, science and human dignity.
EVOLUTION AND SOCIAL ENGINEERING In 1925, Tennessee passed the Butler Act, named after its author John Washington Butler, a farmer by trade and a “Primitive” Baptist by religious affiliation. It made it a misdemeanour for schools, colleges and universities funded by tax-payers to teach: “any theory that denies the story of Divine creation of man as taught in the Bible and to teach instead that man descended from a lower order of animals”. It received substantial political support, being passed in the lower chamber by 71 votes to 5 and by 24 to 6 in the state senate. Although the controversy around the Act would later be viewed in terms of a conflict between faith and science,
John Thomas Scopes, on the right, is pictured with George Washington Rappleyea in photograph taken a month before the trial in June 1925.
during its passage the legislation highlighted the divisions within Protestant denominations. While Baptists and Presbyterians opposed the teaching of evolution, Methodists and Episcopalians spoke out against the Bill.9 This was reflected in Butler’s later remarks:
“…the Bible is the foundation upon which our American Government is built… The evolutionist who denies the Bible story of creation, as well as other Bible accounts, cannot be a Christian… It goes hand in hand with Modernism, makes Jesus Christ a fakir, robs the Christian of his hope and undermines the foundation of our Government…”10
The speed with which the Butler Act was adopted may explain why it failed to take into account the fact that Tennessee mandated the use in state schools of a textbook which contained a section on evolution, G W Hunter’s Civic Biology.11
Almost immediately the ACLU set out to challenge the law by advertising in Tennessee newspapers for a teacher willing to help them test the Butler Act in court. Assuming that a high profile trial on a controversial issue would attract nationwide attention for their town, a group of businessmen from Dayton persuaded a local teacher, John Thomas Scopes, to claim he had broken the law and invite prosecution. In reality, Scopes taught physics, mathematics and sports. He had taught a few biology lessons as a substitute teacher but didn’t believe he had referred to the section in Hunter’s book that dealt with evolution. Nevertheless, he disapproved of the law and the ACLU had promised to pay the fine if he was convicted.
Both the prosecution and the defence brought in nationally renowned figures for the case – William Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defence.12 Both sides sought to make the veracity of Darwin’s theory the focus of the trial. But the judge was equally determined that it would only deal with the alleged violation of the Butler Act. The American press descended on Dayton and a carnival atmosphere surrounded the opening of the trial with trained chimps performing for the spectators on the steps of the packed courthouse.
H L Mencken, the syndicated and incendiary columnist for the Baltimore Evening Sun, who dubbed the proceedings the “Scopes Monkey Trial”,13 convinced the defence team that it was less important to win the case than to make their opponents look like fools. Mencken led the efforts of Northern papers to “portray the South as a backward-looking relic of pre-modern society”. In a series of vitriolic reports, Mencken did more than anyone else to ensure that the Christian fundamentalists he despised, would not only be mocked but regarded as a threat to democracy, branding them “morons”, “hillbillies” and the “Ku Klux Klergy”.14
After eight days of debate, the jury returned a guilty verdict in just nine minutes and the judge fined Scopes $100. An appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the conviction but struck out the fine since fines over $50 had to be decided by the jury rather than the judge.
Ironically, the textbook that Scopes was supposed to have used, and which had provoked such a heated discussion, said surprisingly little on the subject of evolution. In fact, Darwin’s theory is used merely as the pretext for the author’s promotion of social Darwinism. In a passage headed Eugenics, it explains the legacy of immorality and “feeblemindedness” that results when “mental defectives” have children. It illustrates this by relating the spurious story of the Kallikak family:15 a soldier in the American Revolutionary War, Martin Kallikak, was said to have seduced a “feebleminded girl” who bore him a “feebleminded” son. A study of this child’s descendants seems to have remarkably detailed information on all 480 of them – 33 were sexually immoral, 24 confirmed drunkards, 3 epileptics, and 143 feebleminded. Kallikak later married a “normal Quaker girl” from whom he had 496 descendants with no cases of “feeblemindedness” – a favourite catchall term that could be applied to anyone with socially undesirable traits. “The evidence and the moral,” the author declares, “speak for themselves!” But the following paragraphs would leave the children in no doubt as to the lesson they were supposed to learn:
“Parasitism and its Cost to Society. – Hundreds of families such as those described above exist today, spreading disease, immorality, and crime to all parts of this country. The cost to society of such families is very severe. Just as certain animals or plants become parasitic on other plants or animals, these families have become parasitic on society. They not only do harm to others by corrupting, stealing, or spreading disease but they are actually protected and cared for by the state out of public money. Largely for them the poorhouse and the asylum exist. They take from society, but they give nothing in return. They are true parasites.
“The Remedy. – If such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading. Humanity will not allow this, but we do have the remedy of separating the sexes in asylums or other places and in various ways preventing intermarriage and the possibilities of perpetuating such a low and degenerate race. Remedies of this sort have been tried successfully in Europe and are now meeting with success in this country.”16
While he could hardly state it plainly in a book for children, the remedy that Hunter had in mind was sterilisation. By 1914 the eugenics lobby had succeeded in having sterilisation laws passed in 12 states. But they had also faced setbacks – four Bills were vetoed by governors and two had been invalidated by the courts. By 1922 five more states had enacted laws, two attempts vetoed, three overturned by the courts and one had been repealed. Around 3,200 inmates of prisons, insane asylums, homes for the epileptic or “feebleminded” and similar institutions had been sterilised, almost 80 per cent of them in California.17 Yet the patchwork of statutes remained constitutionally threadbare and in some places full of holes. In Cold Spring Harbour, New York, Harry H Laughlin, assistant director of the Eugenics Research Office (ERO), was convinced that what was needed was model legislation, a law that had been tried, tested and approved by the Supreme Court so it could be implemented by states across the nation. In 1922, he published Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, which included a Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, described as: “An Act to prevent the procreation of feebleminded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons by authorising and providing by due process of law for the sterilisation of persons with inferior hereditary potentialities, maintained wholly or in part by public expense.”18
The book made the case for the adoption of such a law and the use of the state power to “limit human reproduction in the interests of race betterment” and the protection of the common good. The state, he argued, regularly executed criminals. It also imposed military conscription to send citizens to their death to preserve the safety of the nation – a far greater sacrifice than what was required for “the elimination of degenerate and handicapped strains from the racial stocks”.19
“In compulsory minor surgical treatment and in infringement upon personal liberty, in the interests of the general welfare, the state’s work in vaccination and quarantine is found to be pertinent. Compulsory Vaccination is analogous to compulsory eugenical sterilisation to the extent that both are non-punitive and that both involve the seizure of the individual and subjecting him or her to surgical treatment. Both vaccination and sterilisation are done supposedly for the public good. Vaccination protects the individual and his associates from a serious and loathsome disease in the more immediate future; eugenical sterilisation protects society from racial degeneracy in the more remote future.”20
Laughlin worked tirelessly to propagate his ideas and one of those to whom he sent his book was Dr Albert Priddy, Superintendent of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. A former state legislator and still active in the Virginia Democratic party, Priddy’s previous efforts to sterilise his patients had been frustrated by the courts. But, armed with Laughlin’s model legislation, he and a party colleague, Aubrey Strode, succeeded in passing a law promoting the sterilisation of “mental defectives” for “both the health of the individual patient and the welfare of society”. The cost to the state of caring for “degenerate persons” in institutions was a consistent theme and sterilisation was held out as the possibility of inmates being released into society without the risk of them bearing children who would inevitably become a drain on the state.
As soon as it was enacted, Priddy selected 16 of the Colony’s residents he considered suitable. Then he put 15 aside and chose the one most likely to provide a positive outcome in a test case that would secure compulsory sterilisation under the constitution. The person on whom the axe was first to fall was inmate number 1692, Carrie Buck.21 Buck was 17. Her mother was illegitimate but her parents had been married for 10 years by the time she was born in 1906. Her father abandoned the family while she was still very young and had since died. When her mother, Emma, could no longer cope, she was committed to the Virginia Colony and Carrie was raised in a foster family. After Carrie became pregnant, they no longer wished to care for her and she too was labelled “feebleminded” and placed in the Virginia Colony after giving birth to a daughter, Vivian. Carrie was poorly educated (she spent only five years in school) yet it is not clear whether she had an intellectual disability, hereditary or otherwise. Her parentage and the illegitimacy of her baby was all the proof that was needed.
Recent speculation has suggested that Carrie may have been raped by a member of her foster family and sent away to cover up the crime. We may never know the truth. Either way, it is unlikely to have changed what happened next. BUCK V BELL Once Priddy’s choice of Carrie was approved by the Colony’s board of directors, he set out to build a case that would place her in the worst possible light. The ERO dispatched a fieldworker to gather background information on her family history, which included unsubstantiated gossip from her neighbours. In his records, Priddy summed up her condition as “typical of a low-grade moron”. “These people,” he wrote, “belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of antisocial whites of the South.”
It was also necessary for the lawyer representing Carrie to be in on the plan. Priddy needed someone who would offer only token resistance but consistently appeal each defeat until it reached the Supreme Court. Irving Whitehead got the job despite his obvious conflict of interests. He was a legal adviser to the Colony’s Board, a personal friend of both Priddy and Aubrey Strode and an advocate of compulsory sterilisation. Strode, as the sponsor of the Virginia Law, would appear for the Board. Betrayed by the man charged with defending her, the verdict was a foregone conclusion – it was not necessary for Carrie, or anyone like her, to consent to sterilisation. Whitehead immediately filed for an appeal, this next milestone on the road to the US
Carrie and Emma Buck at the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, taken by A.H. Estabrook before the Buck v. Bell trial in Virginia, 1924.
Eugenics is shown as freeing humanity from its parasitic and diseased elements in this Eugenics Society poster of the1930s.
Supreme Court. Priddy, however, would not live to see that and Dr John Bell, his successor at the Colony, would take his place.
The case finally reached Washington DC, in 1927. By that time, it had generated considerable controversy and its national implications were widely recognised. Whitehead, who had consistently failed to address the case against sterilisation, to cross-examine witnesses or even to refute false claims, now warned of the kind of world that would be created if the Virginia law was upheld:
“If this Act be a valid enactment, then the limits of the power of the State (which in the end is nothing more than the faction in control of the government) to rid itself of those citizens deemed undesirable according to its standards, by means of surgical sterilisation, have not been set. We will have ‘established in the State the science of medicine and a corresponding system of judicature.’ A reign of doctors will be inaugurated and, in the name of science, new classes will be added, even races may be brought within the scope of such regulation, and the worst forms of tyranny practised.”22
The decision in favour of the Colony was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes.
“The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck ‘is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilised without detriment to her general health and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilisation,’ and thereupon makes the order. …We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead
of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Jacobson v Massachusetts, (197 US 11.)23 Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”24
Just one of the nine judges, Pierce Butler, the only Catholic on the court, dissented but made no comment. The Catholic press was generally hostile to the judgement but was not entirely united. Commonweal warned that the broad categories of the eugenicists could turn sterilisation into the preferred remedy for poverty. America rejected the idea of the country “being swamped with incompetence” but did not rule out sterilisation in all cases.
The only serious opposition to the judgement came from the National Council of Catholic Men (NCCM), which filed a petition for a rehearing. Less than two per cent of such petitions were successful but the NCCM felt the issue was too important to concede without a fight. With the need to file its petition within 40 days of the verdict, the group quickly gathered material that could be used. It was, perhaps, the only genuine defence that anyone had made on behalf of Carrie Buck. Conscious of anti-Catholic prejudice, however, the group concluded that it would be advisable to submit the brief anonymously and unaware of Whitehead’s duplicity they approached him to present it. When Whitehead pointed out that he would not be paid to draft a petition, the NCCM promised $100 and the possibility of more. Whitehead took the money and the material but excluded any evidence that contradicted the opinion of the eugenics experts on the pretext that he would be criticised for not presenting it sooner. When the court refused to rehear the case the plan to secure mass sterilisation across America was finally complete.
On 19 October 1927, shortly after the petition to rehear the case was denied, Carrie Buck was taken to the infirmary of the Virginia Colony and sterilised. Not long afterwards, Doris Buck, Carrie’s 12-year-old sister and, by that time, Colony inmate number 1968 was told she had to have her appendix removed. Her medical records, however, showed that the true reason for the procedure was to sterilise her. Vivian, Carrie’s daughter whom the Supreme Court regarded as a third-generation imbecile, showed no signs of learning disabilities and was an average student. At the age of 8, she contracted measles and then a secondary, fatal intestinal infection. When she was buried, on 3 June 1932, her mother was not informed. Carrie herself lived to the age of 77, dying on 31 January 1983.
AFTER THE CASE – CANADA The Supreme Court ruling cleared the path for the Virginia law to be adopted across the greater part of the US but it also had influence internationally. The Vancouver Sun applauded the decision and called for Canada to adopt the same policy “…the sooner the better”.25 The following year Alberta passed the Sexual Sterilisation Act, which established a Board of Eugenics to select inmates from institutions who might be released upon their consent (or the consent of a legal guardian) to be sterilised. However, in 1937, the requirement of consent would be dropped when the number of operations proved to be disappointingly low – about 400 – and the government led by the Social Credit Party decided that more drastic measures were needed.26
The only other Canadian Province to introduce eugenic sterilisation was British Columbia.27 On 1 April 1933, a Bill was introduced to the Legislative Assembly and, by 7 April, it had been adopted. The Archbishop of Vancouver, William Duke did not speak out until two weeks after it had passed.28
It is not clear why the Church in Canada was so slow to voice its opposition. In 1930, Pius XI had explicitly condemned sterilisation and other violations of bodily integrity, stating in his encyclical, Casti Conubii:
“Public magistrates have no direct power over the bodies of their subjects; therefore, where no crime has taken place and there is no cause present for grave punishment, they can never
directly harm, or tamper with the integrity of the body, either for the reasons of eugenics or for any other reason. St Thomas teaches this when, inquiring whether human judges for the sake of preventing future evils can inflict punishment, he admits that the power indeed exists as regards certain other forms of evil, but justly and properly denies it as regards the maiming of the body. ‘No one who is guiltless may be punished by a human tribunal either by flogging to death, or mutilation, or by beating.’”29
The records of sterilisations in British Columbia have largely been lost or destroyed. The records of the Alberta Board of Eugenics, which are more extensive, show that 64 per cent of those sterilised were women, 60 per cent were under the age of 25, 20 per cent under 16 and the majority were single, unemployed or unskilled. Once involuntary sterilisation was introduced in 1937, a disproportionate number of Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Albertans were sterilised, along with eastern Europeans. Most revealing of all, however, the native Metis people, who represented only 2.5 per cent of Alberta’s population, accounted for over 25 per cent of those sterilised.30
RASSENHYGIENE It would be an oversimplification to suggest that the success of the eugenics movement in the US inspired the proponents of what Germans called Rassenhygiene – “racial hygiene” – but the connections between the two nations were broad, deep and mutually beneficial. Even before the First World War, intellectuals in Germany viewed human nature through the lens of Darwin’s theories.31 The economic crisis, brought on by the defeat of the Central Powers, made the false promises of eugenics seem all the more appealing to the Weimar government. While German proponents of racial hygiene could learn from the failures, as well as from the victories, of their American colleagues, both countries were able to draw on a range of policies, legislative proposals and research from the international eugenics movement which published papers and organised conferences. Perhaps the most important contribution Americans made to the success of German eugenics was financial. Wealthy donors and philanthropic funds, such as the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations, made large grants to eugenics research in Germany as well as Britain, France, Romania and other countries.
Close ties between the US and Germany were well established when the Nazi regime came to power. In July 1933, a little less than six months after Hitler became Chancellor, the Gesetz zur Verhütung erbkranken Nachwuchses (Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring) was introduced. Eugenicists in both countries were ardent supporters of the law.
Californian eugenicist Paul Popenoe, who had been instrumental in legalising sterilisation in Alberta and British Columbia, quoted from Mein Kampf as examples of how Germany was “proceeding toward a policy that will accord with the best thought of eugenicists in all civilised countries”. Popenoe also helped organise an exhibit featuring sterilisation initiatives in Germany for the 1934 meeting of the American Public Health Association.
Harry Laughlin, who received an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1936, returned with the Nazi propaganda film Erbkrank (The Hereditary Defective)32 and distributed it in the US for the next three years. He also published translations of German articles in his journal, Eugenical News. One of those articles was a speech delivered by Wilhelm Frick, a member of Hitler’s cabinet.33 Laughlin told his colleague, Madison Grant (author of The Passing of the Great Race), that Frick sounded like a perfectly good American eugenicist but with the difference that Frick was not a mere scientist but a “powerful Reichsminister in a dictatorial government which is getting things done…”34 It was an important difference. From 1934 until the outbreak of the war, roughly 360,000 Germans were sterilised – more than thirty-five times the number estimated in the US between 1907 to 1930.35
The National Socialist state was ushering in “the reign of doctors” that Irving Whitehead had predicted and, indeed, “the worst forms of tyranny” were soon to follow. The Eglfing-Haar asylum near Munich started selecting inmates for sterilisation in
Poster published by Neues Volk ("New People"), a magazine published by the Rassepolitischen Amt der NSDAP (Office of Racial Policy of the Nazi Party), while they were in power, c.1937. The poster says: "60 000 RM is what this person suffering from hereditary illness costs the community in his lifetime. Fellow citizen, that is your money too. Read Neues Volk. The monthly magazine of the Office of Racial Policy of the NSDAP"
late 1933. Of the 150 patients sterilised in 1934, 97 were men and 53 were women. Of these, 108 were diagnosed as schizophrenic, 22 were congenitally “feebleminded”, seven suffered from depression, nine from epilepsy, three from alcoholism and one was said to have hereditary blindness. These proportions were to remain fairly steady in subsequent years.36 By 1939, its director, Hermann Pfannmüller, also ran a eugenic advisory clinic in Augsburg where local medical, youth and welfare services referred individuals with undesirable traits to be assessed. Pfannmüller began by separating “asocial drinkers, grumblers, refractory parasites and work-shy psychopaths” and sent them to concentration camps. The rest were sent for compulsory sterilisation.
Before the Butler Act, schoolchildren in Tennessee were taught that the inmates of poorhouses and asylums were “parasites” and “[i]f such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading”. While this was never a realistic option for the eugenics movement in the US, it became a reality in Nazi Germany. To educate the public about the burden the “unfit” placed on German society, tours of institutions were regularly organised. In the autumn of 1939, which the Nazis declared the year of “the duty to be healthy”, Ludwig Lehner was a visitor to the Eglfing-Haar asylum near Munich. He later gave an account of what he saw.
“After we had visited a number of other wards, the asylum director, who was called Pfannmüller led us into a children’s ward. …In about fifteen beds there were as many children, all aged between about one and five years old. …I remember the following as a condensed account of the sense of what Pfannmüller had to say: ‘As a National Socialist, these creatures (he meant the aforementioned children) naturally only represent to me a burden upon the healthy body of our nation. We don’t kill (he may have used a more circumlocutory expression instead of the word ‘kill’) with poison, injections etc, since that would only give the foreign press and certain gentlemen in Switzerland new hate-propaganda material. No: as you see, our method is much simpler and more natural.’ With these words, and assisted by a nurse who worked in this ward, he pulled one of the children out of bed. As he displayed the child around like a dead hare, he pointed out, with a knowing look and a cynical grin, ‘This one will last another two or three days.’ The image of this fat, grinning man, with the whimpering skeleton in his fleshy hand, surrounded by other starving children, is still clear before my eyes. Furthermore, the murderer declared that they were not suddenly withdrawing food, but rather gradually reducing the rations. A lady who also took part in the tour asked, with an outrage she had difficulty suppressing, whether a quick death aided by injections would not be more merciful. Pfannmüller sang the praises of his methods once more, as being more practical in terms of the foreign press.”37
Pfannmüller was an active participant in the euthanasia programme. In the children’s ward at Eglfing-Haar, more than 300 children were killed by 1940. In two of the “hunger houses” of the institution, he let 440 patients die of starvation or drug overdoses from 1943 onwards. Lehner’s testimony was presented at Pfannmüller’s trial in 1951. He was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. This was reduced to four years on appeal. He would die in Munich in 1961.38
The apparent purpose of asylum tours was to persuade the public that a quick death of the inmates would be a better outcome for everyone. On 1 September 1939, around the time of Lehner’s visit to Eglfing-Haar, the so-called “adult euthanasia” programme was initiated in the belief that the war would deflect opposition to the policy. And yet it was not undertaken openly. The state medical bureaucracy was bypassed and instead, Hitler instructed people from his inner circle – Philip Bouhler, a senior official in the Chancellery and Dr Karl Brandt, his personal physician – to authorise specified doctors to grant Gnadentod – “mercy death” – to patients judged to be incurably sick.39 Bouhler would take his own life in Allied custody in 1945, but Brandt would later be executed for his medical experiments and the killing of inmates in the concentration camps. US prosecutors, however, chose not to pursue crimes directed at German civilians. At his trial, Brandt quoted the works of eugenicists as justification of Nazi policies. This included excerpts from The Passing of the Great Race by Harry Laughlin’s friend and colleague, Madison Grant.40
“Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often result in serious injury to the race. At the existing stage of civilisation, the legalising of birth control would probably be of benefit by reducing the number of offspring in the undesirable classes. …Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilisation of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race.
“…the remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied. A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit – in other words, social failures – would solve the whole question in a century, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals and insane asylums.”41
Brandt also submitted excerpts from Human Selection and Eugenics by Fritz Lenz, which reproduced passages from Harry Laughlin’s Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. The section chosen by Brandt, reveals the true magnitude of Laughlin’s ambitions. It states:
“…approx 100,000 annual sterilisations should be made in the United States during the first years, rising to approx 400,000 annually until 1980. By then about 15 million mentally deficient persons would have been sterilised. … It cannot be denied that the carrying-out of such an elaborate program would substantially contribute to the health of the nation. It is not possible, however, to put this into effect in America at present. It only fails because in America public opinion has not yet been sufficiently informed
Portrait of Karl Brandt as a defendant in the Medical Case Trial at Nuremberg, 1947.
“Leading American eugenicists quietly sought to distance themselves from their past but they did not go away. They were moved to the fringes of academia, or at least forced to drop their openly racist agenda and change their terminology: instead of eugenics and sterilisation, they now supported ‘genetics’ and ‘family planning’. ”
Madison Grant
of the urgency of an elaborate program of eugenics. I hold that a 10% sterilisation in every generation is by no means too great.”42
He also submitted material on the use of X-rays for sterilisation. He may well have been aware that Laughlin had already carried out similar experiments in the US. Indeed, inmates in US institutions, including the Virginia Colony, had been the subject of experiments by both civilian and military scientists.
While it was not made public at the time, one such experimental surgery was performed by Charles Davenport, Laughlin’s boss at the ERO. In 1929, Davenport castrated a resident who suffered from dwarfism, at New York’s Letchworth Village for the “feebleminded”. The procedure was expected to provide some insight into the “inherited defect” of Down syndrome.43 Fifteen years later Karl Brandt was on trial for his life for similar experiments.44
Other defendants at the Doctors Trial also pointed to American support for their racial hygiene measures but, rather than strengthen their defence, this only succeeded in further damaging the already tarnished image of eugenics, which was never to recover.
The crimes of the Nazi era “outraged the conscience of mankind”,45 and led directly to the adoption of the Nuremberg Code46 which, among other things, prohibits experiments on unwilling subjects and the reaffirmation of Hippocratic ethics in the Declaration of Geneva, binding doctors to respect all life from conception.47
Ironically, while the eugenic laws were repealed in Germany, sterilisations under pre-war legislation carried on in Canada, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia.48 This was also true in the US, where the precedent set in the Buck case remained in place. In the 1940s and 50s, Fr John Coogan SJ, a professor of sociology at Detroit University, became convinced that the case was wrongly decided. Since the 1920s, the intelligence tests used to label Carrie’s mother as “feebleminded” had been discredited. He had written to Harry Laughlin but received no response from him; and the ERO, which provided the damning history of the Buck family, claimed to have no information. He questioned why Carrie’s defence had consistently failed to challenge the accusations levelled at her and he criticised Holmes’ mischaracterisation of the evidence. But Fr Coogan’s efforts failed to persuade the Supreme Court
to overturn its ruling, even though Holmes’ words were cited by the defendants in Nuremberg.
Madison had died in 1937, which spared him the disgrace of being cited in Brandt’s defence. Harry Laughlin died in 1943, having retired three years earlier when the Carnegie Foundation cut his funding. By that time, he was suffering from epilepsy, a condition that, under his own Model Law, would have made him a target for compulsory sterilisation. He and his wife were childless. Paul Popenoe took to calling himself an expert on family and marriage counselling. Other leading American eugenicists quietly sought to distance themselves from their past but they did not go away. In the words of Egbert Klautke from University College London, they were “moved to the fringes of academia, or at least forced to drop their openly racist agenda and change their terminology: instead of eugenics and sterilisation, they now supported ‘genetics’ and ‘family planning’.”49 The historic links between the eugenics movement and the abortion and birth control industry in both the US and Britain are well documented.50
In North America and Europe, sterilisation laws intended to prevent the ignorant, the “feebleminded” and even the poor from having children remained on the statute books until the 1970s. It may not be a coincidence that abortion was becoming widely available at roughly the same time these laws were repealed – a point, highlighted in 2009 by the US Supreme Court Justice, Ruth Bader Ginsberg when she told a journalist at the New York Times: “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”51
While compulsory sterilisation is still compatible with the US Constitution, laws like the Butler Act are considered a violation of the First Amendment.52 While prayers in public schools are banned, families find their children being subjected to increasingly radical theories and social engineering, something William Jennings Bryan had foreseen in 1925. Preparing his closing statement in the Scopes trial, he wrote:
“If civilisation is to be saved from the wreckage, threatened by intelligence not consecrated by love, it must be saved by the moral code of the meek and lowly Nazarene. His teachings, and His teachings, alone, can solve the problems that vex the heart and perplex the world….”53
This too is the lesson of Casti Conubii. Pius XI’s uncompromising condemnation of sterilisation was of crucial importance. Without it, eugenics could well have spread into southern and eastern Europe, nor would the Catholic laity have mobilised to fight the culture of death that grew everywhere its philosophy took root. However, the Church’s relationship with secular powers and institutions is not as unambiguous as it once was. In 2015 the Holy See declared its support for the anti-life, anti-family UN Sustainable Development Goals which include target 3.7, aimed at ensuring universal access, to sexual and reproductive healthcare services, that is birth control and abortion by 2030. In turn, Pope Francis’ focus on the environment has been warmly welcomed by advocates of population control. (There is no clearer illustration of this new approach than Pope Francis’ appointment of Prof Jeffery Sachs, the architect of the SDGs, to the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences.) The goals of the modern eugenicists extend far beyond the boundaries of North America and Europe and deep into the developing world. Without the leadership
of the Holy See, the “reign of doctors” today could see forms of tyranny on a scale so terrible that they could surpass even those of the 20th century.
ENDNOTES:
1. Anya Kamenetz, “Why education was a top voter priority this election” NPR 4 November 2021. 2. See, for example, Peter Wood, “Teaching That America Is Hopelessly Racist”.
Minding the Campus: Reforming our Universities, 9 September 2019. https://www. mindingthecampus.org/2019/09/09/teaching-that-america-is-hopelessly-racist/ 3. Thomas Sowell, Race and Culture: A World View (Basic Books, 1994), p 117. 4. “Democrats Say They Must Prevent Republicans from Becoming the ‘Party of Parents’ in 2022”, The Post Millennial, 4 November 2021. 5. Gustaf Kilander, “US states have introduced 137 bills limiting what schools can teach on race, history, sexual orientation, and gender”. The Independent, 6 February 2022. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ schools-teach-race-history-gender-b2008438.html 6. Will Bunch, “‘Gag orders’ for US teachers are becoming our new McCarthyism”. 27 January 2022, The Philadelphia Inquirer. 7. Julia Carrie Wong, “The ACLU on fighting critical race theory bans: ‘It’s about our country reckoning with racism’”, The Guardian, 1 July 2021. https://www. theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/01/aclu-fights-state-bans-teaching-criticalrace-theory 8. Inherit the Wind, Stanley Kramer (Director), Lomitas Productions Inc, 1960. 9. Kenneth K Bailey, “Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes by Ray Ginger: Review”, The Journal of Southern History, 24, 4 (1958), p 529-31. 10. Ray Ginger, Six Days or Forever? Tennessee v John Thomas Scopes (OUP, 1974) p 4. 11. George William Hunter, Civic Biology: Presented in Problems (American Book Co, 1914). 12. Bryan, a distinguished speaker, had run three times for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in the elections of 1896, 1900, and 1908. In 1924, Darrow acted as the defence attorney of two wealthy teenagers and disciples of Fredrick Nietzsche who randomly murdered the 14-year-old Bobby Franks. Darrow saved the killers from the death penalty after a 12-hour long closing statement. 13. H L Mencken, A religious orgy in Tennessee: a reporter’s account of the Scopes “monkey” trial. Articles originally published in The Baltimore Sun, The Nation, or The American
Mercury. (Melville House, 2006). 14. Mencken was a racist and eugenicist but disapproved of the kind of violence associated with the Ku Klux Klan. Nevertheless, his views on race went handin-hand with his views on evolution. In a review of a book of essays by leading black intellectuals, he wrote: “The vast majority of people of their race are but two or three inches removed from gorillas: it will be a sheer impossibility, for a long, long while, to interest them in anything above pork-chops and bootleg gin.”— H L Mencken, “The Aframerican: New Style”, The American Mercury, February 1926, p 254-55. 15. Hunter p 262 Kallikak is a fictional name. The academic credibility of the study of the Kallikak Family by H H Goddard has been widely questioned, see: James W Dennert, “The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1912), by Henry Herbert Goddard”. Embryo Project Encyclopedia, 30 July 2021. 16. Ibid, p 263. 17. Jonas Robitscher, (ed), Eugenic Sterilization (Springfield, IL: Charles C Thomas, 1973), p 123, cited by Lombardo. 18. Harry H Laughlin, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago, 1922). Laughlin’s “Model Eugenical Sterilization Law” was used as the basis by more than 30 states in America who passed sterilization legislation and by Germany in 1933. See Rachel Gur-Arie, "Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943)". Embryo Project Encyclopedia, 19 December 2014. 19. Ibid, p 339. 20. Ibid. 21. Information on Carrie Buck cited here is mainly from Paul A Lombardo Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court and Buck v Bell (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008). 22. US Reports: Buck v Bell, 274 US 200 (1927), p 202. 23. “It is within the police power of a State to enact a compulsory vaccination law, and it is for the legislature, and not for the courts…” US Supreme Court, Jacobson v Massachusetts, 197 US 11 (1905) 20 February 1905, p 197. 24. Ibid, p 207. 25. Vancouver Sun, 25 May 1927, p 16, cited by Angus McLaren, Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada 1885-1945 (OUP, 1990). 26. McLaren, p 100. 27. In 1978, however, it was discovered that despite the absence of any legislation hundreds of sterilisations were, nonetheless, being carried out each year in Ontario. 28. Ibid, p 104. 29. Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 31 December 1930, 70. 30. McLaren, p 160. 31. For example, German zoologist Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919) promoted the erroneous idea that foetal development progressed through various stages of the evolutionary process before emerging as human. The theory was discredited and Haeckel was accused of falsifying his research. Despite this, such claims remained influential with proponents of eugenics and especially eugenic abortion. See Nick Hopwood, Haeckel’s embryos: images, evolution, and fraud (Chicago Uni, 2015). 32. Erbkrank, Herbert Gerdes (Director), NSDAP, “Reichsleitung, Rassenpolitisches Amt” (Office of Racial Policy) 1936. 33. Frick was executed at Nuremberg on 16 October 1946. 34. Lombardo, p 202. 35. Sheila Faith Weiss, Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm
Schallmayer (Uni California Press, 1987), p 154-5. 36. Michael Burleigh, Death and Deliverance: ‘Euthanasia’ in Germany 1900-1945 (CUP, 1994), p 61. 37. Ibid, p 45. 38. Ibid, various pages. 39. Robert N Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Harvard Uni Press, 1988), p 177. 40. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936). 41. Ibid, ex pp 49-51. The text above is quoted in the word of the 1936 English language version. The text as it was submitted by Brandt is available at the website of the Harvard Law School Library - Nuremberg Trials Project. NMT 1, Exhibit Code: Brandt, K. 60, HLSL Item No: 2706. 42. Harvard Law School Library – Nuremberg Trials Project. NMT 1, Extracts from a book concerning eugenics and sterilization Excerpt from Fritz Lenz: “Human Selection and Eugenics” Defendant: Karl Brant. Exhibit Code: Brandt, K. 60, HLSL Item No: 2706. 43. Lombardo, p 240. 44. He was executed on 2 June 1948 at Landsberg Prison, Landsberg am Lech, Germany. 45. Preamble, Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 10 December 1948 (General Assembly res 217 A). 46. The Nuremberg Principles (From Trials of War Criminals Before the Nuremberg Military Tribunals Under Control Council Law No 10. Nuremberg, October 1946 – April 1949. Washington, DC: US, GPO 1949–1953). 47. The Doctor’s Oath, Declaration of Geneva, Adopted by the 2nd General Assembly of the World Medical Association, Geneva, Switzerland, September 1948. 48. Nils Roll-Hansen notes: “It is striking how the introduction of sterilization laws in Europe in the 1930s was a phenomenon of Protestant countries. Under liberal democratic political conditions such laws were introduced only in countries where the Lutheran denomination was dominant, namely Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Estonia. Germany has a northern Lutheran part and a southern part dominated by Catholics. Here the sterilization law was introduced only after the Nazis had taken over. In some other countries with strong Protestant traditions sterilisation laws were up for serious consideration but rejected, as, for instance in England, Holland, and Czechoslovakia.” Nils Roll-Hansen in “Norwegian Eugenics:
Sterilization as Social Reform”, Gunnar Broberg & Nils Roll-Hansen (eds) Eugenics and the welfare state: sterilization policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland, (Michigan State Uni Press, 2005), p 186. 49. Egbert Klautke “‘The Germans are beating us at our own Game’: American Eugenics and the German Sterilization Law of 1933”, History of the Human Sciences, 02, 2016, p 13. 50. See, for example, Ann Farmer, By Their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the
Abortion Campaign (Catholic University of America Press, 2008). 51. Emily Bazelon, “The Place of Women on the Court”, New York Times Magazine, (7 July 2009). 52. In Engel v Vitale, 370 US 421 (1962) the Supreme Court ruled that school-sponsored prayer in public schools violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment and in 1968, it accepted a case challenging a 1928 Arkansas law that banned the teaching of evolution in public schools. In Epperson v Arkansas, the court declared the law to be unconstitutional because it violated the establishment clause. The Butler Act had been repealed the previous year. 53. Frank A Pattie, “The Last Speech of William Jennings Bryan.” Tennessee Historical
Quarterly, (6) 3, Tennessee Historical Society, 1947, pp 265–83.
