With Carrie’s test results in hand, Dr. John Bell, the superintendent of the Virginia colony, determined that she should be sterilized. Although about 80 people had already been sterilized in Virginia, eugenicists wanted to strengthen the state’s law by testing it in court. On November 18, 1924, the Circuit Court of Amherst County heard the case. One of the first to testify was Harry Laughlin, who had traveled down from the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor. Laughlin said that Carrie was “immoral, untruthful, and a low-grade moron,” even though he had never met her. At the time of the hearing, Carrie routinely read the newspaper and did the crossword puzzles. Laughlin said that Carrie’s ancestors belonged to “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites in the South,” arguing that the Bucks were living proof of “Mendelian inheritance.” Another ardent eugenicist said that Carrie’s sterilization would “raise the standard of intelligence in the state.” The social worker who had examined six-month-old Vivian Buck also testified. “There is a look about it that is not quite normal,” she said. “But just what it is, I can’t tell.” The district court was impressed, ordering Carrie’s sterilization. On November 12, 1925, the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals supported the verdict.
In September 1926, the United States Supreme Court accepted the case of Buck v. Bell for review. The Chief Justice was former president William Howard Taft. But the man who wrote the opinion for the majority wasn’t Taft; it was Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., one of the clearest-thinking, most respected jurists in the land. A proud defender of the Constitution and individual liberties, Holmes had authored nearly a thousand valued opinions. (One contained a phrase that is still used today. Regarding an individual’s First Amendment right to speak freely and without restraint, Holmes wrote, “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man from falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing panic.”) At the time of Buck v. Bell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., a veteran of the Civil War, was 86 years old.
During the trial, Carrie Buck’s lawyer made an ominous prediction about what would happen if forced sterilizations were allowed to proceed. “A reign of doctors will be inaugurated in the name of science,” he warned, “even races may be brought within the scope of such regulation, and the worst forms of tyranny practiced.” The Court was unmoved. On May 2, 1927, by a vote of 8 to 1, justices ruled in favor of Carrie Buck’s sterilization. Even Louis Brandeis, the Court’s most liberal justice, sided with the majority. Holmes, an enthusiastic eugenicist, wrote the opinion: “Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crimes, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” Then Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., wrote the words that placed Buck v. Bell in the pantheon of America’s most embarrassing Supreme Court decisions: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” he wrote, effectively solidifying laws that even the most ardent eugenicists thought were unenforceable. One critic later wrote that Holmes’s opinion represented “the highest ratio of injustice per word ever signed on by eight Supreme Court Justices.” (The United States Supreme Court has never officially overturned the verdict in Buck v. Bell.)
On October 19, 1927, her legal options exhausted, Carrie Buck was sterilized; she thought she was having an appendectomy. Twenty years later, the United States Supreme Court’s verdict in Buck v. Bell would be presented in support of SS officer Otto Hofmann during the Nuremberg Military Tribunal investigating Nazi war crimes.
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BEFORE 1916, AMERICAN EUGENICISTS had focused on individuals and their families. It was all about bloodlines and pedigrees. But in 1917—with the passage of the first of a series of restrictive immigration laws—the focus began to change. And when it did, the stage was set for a level of evil that was unprecedented and will likely remain forever unmatched.
The person responsible for this shift in thinking was a New York City lawyer and conservationist named Madison Grant. In 1916, Grant wrote The Passing of the Great Race. Framed as a scientific treatise, Grant made the case that Americans were committing what he called “race suicide.” Undesirable traits weren’t just shared among certain families; according to Grant’s book, they were shared among certain races. If Americans really wanted to purify the gene pool, they needed to prohibit the entry of undesirable races into their country. Grant argued that America needed to become America again. And that the only way this was going to happen was if we removed the weeds and allowed people of Grant’s race to flourish.
A decade later, when Madison Grant’s book was translated into German, no one would embrace his notion of race purity more than a young soldier imprisoned in a fortress in Landsberg.
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MADISON GRANT WAS BORN ON November 19, 1865, in the exclusive Murray Hill section of New York City. His mother was descended from the first band of colonists to settle in the New Netherland who, after securing land grants on Manhattan Island, founded the city of New Amsterdam (later called New York City). His father was descended from the first Puritan settlers of New England, whose family included a colonial governor of Connecticut and the founder of Newark, New Jersey. During the Civil War, Grant’s father won the congressional Medal of Honor, the highest military award given for bravery in the United States.
Throughout his youth, Grant was educated by private tutors. When he was 16—to complete his classical education—he was sent to Dresden, Germany. Once back in the United States, he applied to Yale University, where he was grilled for three days in mathematics, German, Greek, and Latin. He passed with flying colors. Later, Grant attended Columbia Law School, opened his own law practice, and joined the elite clubs in New York City, interacting with some of the nation’s most powerful men. Affable, charming, considerate, soft-spoken, well liked, and with little interest in practicing law, Grant turned his attention to his first love: conservation.
Before he wrote The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant was the single most effective conservationist in America. He founded the Bronx Zoo as well as the Wildlife Conservation Society, which designed zoos in Queens, Prospect Park, and Central Park as well as the New York Aquarium. Grant singlehandedly saved the American bison from extinction and played a key role in creating Denali National Park in Alaska, Everglades National Park in Florida, Olympic National Park in Washington, and Glacier National Park in Montana. He also devoted himself to saving whales, bald eagles, and pronghorn antelopes. When Grant launched his campaign to preserve America’s wilderness, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming was called “The National Park.” At the time of Grant’s death, and due largely to his efforts, a vast system of national parks stretching over more than eight million acres provided refuge to tens of thousands of large game animals.
Perhaps Grant’s greatest accomplishment followed a trip to northern California, where he saw the tallest living things on Earth: the California redwoods. When he first visited the redwoods in 1917, Grant witnessed trees that were more than 2,000 years old, alive at the time of Jesus. But Grant was sickened by the fact that many of these trees were being cut down for wood, so he founded the Save the Redwoods League, one of the most successful conservation efforts in the history of the United States, and a model for similar efforts that followed. Redwood National Park, created in 1968, was the culmination of his work.
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WHEN MADISON GRANT was coming of age, he could walk down the streets of New York City surrounded by people who, like him, had ties to colonial America; people who he believed were upright, who understood the rules of the republic and wanted to abide by them; people who had character. By the late 1880s, according to Grant, all of that had changed. The rate of immigration had doubled to more than half a million people every year. Worst of all, no longer were immigrants coming from countries in northwestern Europe
like the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Germany, but they were coming from southern and Eastern Europe. Jonathan Spiro, in his book Defending the Master Race, described how Grant must have felt while strolling through his beloved city: “Grant felt increasingly beleaguered by the waves of swarthy immigrants engulfing his city. They were filling up almshouses, cluttering the streets, and turning Manhattan into a dirty, lawless, turbulent cacophony of foreign barbarians…Grant was disgusted by what he saw as he braved the congested sidewalks of his native city. He was repulsed by the bizarre customs, unintelligible languages, and peculiar religious habits of the foreigners. As he was jostled by Greek ragpickers, Armenian bootblacks, and Jewish carp vendors, it was distressingly obvious to him that the new arrivals did not know this nation’s history or understand its republican form of government.” Grant’s world was collapsing. He had to do something to conserve America for natives like himself—to make America America again.
Of all the new immigrants, no group drew Grant’s attention more than the Jews. Between 1880 and 1914, one-third of Eastern Europe’s Jews immigrated to the United States. The Jewish population in New York City, which numbered about 80,000 in 1880, was more than a million only 30 years later; half were packed into an area of only 1.5 square miles in New York’s Lower East Side—a population density greater than any other city in the world, including Bombay.
Madison Grant had a label for people who, like himself, were descended from Scandinavia and Germany; he called them Nordics. And, like his efforts to preserve the American bison or the California redwood, he wanted to preserve America’s Nordic race. This was the theme of what was to become his best-selling book. (What American eugenicists called the Nordic race, Europeans called the Aryan race.) In the end, Grant’s campaign to save his America would be an excuse for the homophobia, misogyny, anti-Semitism, and anti-Catholic sentiments that were so common in the 1920s—most ardently expressed by the Ku Klux Klan, a major political force in the South with more than five million members. Madison Grant would provide a scientific basis for their prejudices, as well as for the prejudices of a rising National Socialist Party in Germany.
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IN THE SPRING OF 1916, Charles Scribner’s Sons published The Passing of the Great Race. The book was reprinted in 1922, 1923, 1924, 1926, 1930, 1932, and 1936, selling more than 1.6 million copies—one of the most popular scientific treatises in history. In it, Grant explained that genes determined character and that character determined history. He proposed three scientific “facts”:
1. The human species is divided into biologically distinct races, with the Nordic race at the top.
2. The intellectual, moral, and temperamental traits of each race are unaffected by the environment. (Nature is everything. Nurture is irrelevant.)
3. If a member of an inferior race mates with a member of a superior race, the result is a member of the inferior race. “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian,” wrote Grant. “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.” (This last phrase provided the basis for a law that would later be passed in Nazi Germany.)
Grant had perverted Gregor Mendel’s experiments on peas to an explanation of European history. Mendel had taken pea plants with green leaves and painted them yellow. He wanted to see if any of the painted plants had offspring with yellow leaves. They didn’t. Genes were everything. Grant used this finding to advance his notion that genes were inviolate, immutable—that what’s bred in the bone will always come out in the flesh. “It has taken us fifty years to learn that speaking English, wearing good clothes and going to school and to church does not transform a Negro into a white man,” he wrote in The Passing of the Great Race. “Nor was a Syrian or an Egyptian freedman transformed into a Roman by wearing a toga and applauding his favorite gladiator in the amphitheater. Americans will have a similar experience with the Polish Jew, whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest are being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.”
To Madison Grant, it was easy to tell who was Nordic and who wasn’t. All you had to do was look. Nordic people had “wavy brown or blond hair and blue, gray or light brown eyes, fair skin, [and a] high narrow and straight nose, [all of] which are associated with great stature and a long skull as well as with abundant head and body hair.” These characteristics, according to Grant, could easily be found in some of the world’s greatest paintings. “It would be difficult to imagine a Greek artist painting a brunette Venus,” he wrote. “In church pictures, all angels are blond, while the denizens of the lower regions revel in deep brunetness. In depicting the crucifixion, no artist hesitates to make the two thieves brunet in contrast to the blond Saviour.” Jesus of Nazareth, apparently, was Nordic.
Nordics were hunters, sailors, explorers, painters, soldiers, and kings—the very best the human species had to offer. According to Grant, Alexander the Great was Nordic; so were Dante, Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, da Vinci, Sophocles, Aristotle, and even King David (because of biblical references to his “fairness”).
Americans loved Madison Grant’s book, which was praised by the Yale Review, the American Historical Review, the New York Herald, the Nation, the New York Sun, and Science. Presidents Herbert Hoover and Theodore Roosevelt were both impressed by Grant’s rigor and insight; Roosevelt even sent him a letter. “This book is a capital book,” he wrote. “In purpose, in vision, in grasp of facts our people most need to realize.” Calvin Coolidge, also taken by the book, said that America must cease to become “a dumping ground for advancing hordes of aliens.”
Grant’s theories appeared in poems, paintings, scientific journals, and ladies’ magazines. Margaret Sanger included quotes from Grant’s book in her speeches. In 1924, when Clarence Darrow stood up to defend Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb—two Jewish students at the University of Chicago who had kidnapped and killed a 14-year-old boy—he argued that bad genes had been responsible for their crimes. At the same time, Hiram Wesley Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, included quotes from Grant’s book in his white supremacist pamphlets.
Grant’s book also contained a fourth scientific “fact”: Only eugenics could preserve the Nordic race. “This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution to the whole problem,” he wrote, “and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards…and perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.” Grant had used the words “practical,” “merciful,” and “inevitable” in describing his solution to the problem. In Nazi Germany, the phrase that would later emerge was “final solution.”
Grant’s book ended with a plea for his kind of America: “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals, which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian in the age of Pericles and the Viking in the days of Rollo.” Grant’s lament was in direct contradiction to the poem emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty written by Emma Lazarus, an American Jew.
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me.
ALTHOUGH MADISON GRANT’S BOOK swept a nation, not everyone bought into his deception.
Thomas Hunt Morgan, a geneticist who would later win the Nobel Prize for his work on chromosomes, noted that there was no such thing as the Nordic race or the Aryan race. Biologically speaking, all humans were products of an intermixture of many genetic backgrounds. There was only one race: the human race.
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Emily Greene Balch, a Wellesley economist who would also later win the Nobel Prize, saw eugenics as just another sad example of the powerful exploiting the weak: “Rash is the man who passes lightly from skull measurements to vast unprovable sociological and historical generalizations. The pseudoscience [that] makes it the function of the strong man to purge the world of the weak, might, one hoped, by this time have gone out of date.”
H. L. Mencken, a satirist, essayist, and editor of the American Mercury, was sickened by the hauteur and superiority of those who had been born on third base and thought they had hit a triple: “My impression, though I am blond and Nordic myself, is that the genuine member of that great race, at least in modern times, is often indistinguishable from a cockroach.”
Perhaps the most withering dissent came from the pen of G. K. Chesterton, a British author and poet. Regarding pending immigration laws, Chesterton drove a wedge between the science of Gregor Mendel and the pseudoscience of Madison Grant: “One does not need to deny heredity in order to resist such legislation any more than one needs to deny the spiritual world in order to resist an epidemic of witch burning.” Unfortunately, the voices of Morgan, Balch, Mencken, and Chesterton were lost in the cacophony of support for Madison Grant and his theories.
In the end, Madison Grant’s theories were refuted by history. Grant had predicted that it would “take centuries” for immigrants to assimilate into the American culture. It took one generation. European immigrants quickly lost their accents, earned their degrees, and rose to prominent positions in business, medicine, and the law. Environment, as it turned out, mattered.
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