Throughout the West, pressure to limit the number of social undesirables grew out of the burgeoning public health movement, which propagated the idea that such individuals contributed to the spread of disease. Reflecting this development, Germany’s social hygiene movement came to dominate its state welfare system in the 1920s under its umbrella of benign-sounding goals, such as protecting the health of mothers and children and combating psychiatric disorders.
But beneath the noble goals of improving national public health lay a darker mission. In America, this would take the form of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments beginning in 1932; in Germany, it manifested itself in the quest to attain German racial purity even before Hitler and the Nazis were in power.61 Venereal disease and tuberculosis were the two most common targets of public health officials in both countries since these were usually associated with “lower classes,” poverty, and overcrowding. In Germany, these were largely dealt with through emergency legislation until a permanent anti-VD law was passed in 1927, which, among other things, abolished compulsory medical exams for prostitutes but required medical treatment for anyone infected with a sexually transmitted disease. A “healthy lifestyle” became a state concern in Weimar Germany, especially when tied to the post–World War I epidemic of venereal disease. This provided a convenient target and enabled a further extension of German state power, as “voluntary welfare services that had proliferated during the war were institutionalized as professional careers in social work.”62 Demonstrating a pattern common to all welfare state bureaucracies, the German system first and foremost benefited not the clients but the welfare workers themselves, with social control transcending the rights of individuals and “defin[ing] new spheres for the exercising of coercion.”63 Thus, Weimar produced one of those historical ironies in which the “concerned” social hygienists and health experts were often easily converted to eugenicists under the Nazis.
But sterilization as a means of enhancing social health saw its largest growth in the United States, where eugenics talk was disguised in the titles of nonthreatening, even benign-sounding institutional names: the American Conference for the Prevention of Infant Mortality, or the National Mental Hygiene Committee. Others, such as the American Eugenics Society, made their purposes more obvious. Founded in 1922 by Madison Grant, with the support of Alexander Graham Bell, biologist Charles Davenport, economist Irving Fisher, and Luther Burbank, the Society promoted sterilization of unsuitable groups (the mentally retarded and the “feeble minded,” a flexible definition that could include almost anyone at a given time). Establishing state chapters, the American Eugenics Society saw its greatest successes in California, where the record of cleansing undesirables was exceeded only by Germany. Biologist Paul Popenoe, who published with E. S. Gosney a favorable report on the California sterilization program, was widely cited by the Nazi government in Germany.64 By 1920, some fifteen states mandated that rapists and imbeciles face compulsory sterilization. Another sixteen states passed sterilization measures in the 1920s, particularly after the Buck v. Bell Supreme Court case upheld a Virginia state law that required compulsory sterilization of the retarded “for the protection and health of the state.” Sterilization operations shot up tenfold.
Race was also an issue. Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, founder of the Northern California Eugenics Society and the Human Betterment Foundation, campaigned against blacks and Mexicans as “low-powered” and “socially unfit.”65 The Tuskegee syphilis experiments were directed only at blacks, for example. This clear racial component to eugenics was nothing new: the Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) had been at work for almost thirty years seeking to bar other racial groups from entering the United States due to the view that they were “inferior races,” and as Larson points out, the same criteria were enthusiastically applied to blacks in the deep South.66
Eugenics found powerful supporters—if a somewhat lukewarm public reception—among elite biologists and sociologists, not to mention government professionals. It appealed to the current of scientific rationalism, which held that science could solve every problem. Legislators were attracted to the ideas because they offered low-cost and clear-cut answers to social ills. The Kansas Free Fair in 1929 included exhibits and charts outlining genetic inheritance of “pure” and “abnormal” parents; the Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia featured a booth sponsored by the American Eugenics Society that had a counter-board with flashing lights revealing how many tax dollars were spent every fifteen seconds on people with “bad heredity,” that every forty-eight seconds a “mental deficient” was born, and that only once every seven and a half minutes was born a “high grade person…who will have the ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership.”67
Race, Eugenics, and Margaret Sanger
Support for the eugenics movement was generally restricted to leftist intellectuals in the United States and remained weak among average Americans, except when it came to immigrants. In one of the great ironies of history, Asian immigration was restricted in an effort to limit the number of “feebleminded” in the population through the Chinese Exclusion Acts of 1882 and 1902, and continued by the “Gentleman’s Agreement” of 1907–8. Yet over a century later, California would exclude Asian college applicants on the grounds that they were, in essence, too smart and outperformed whites, blacks, and Hispanics. During immigration debates, genetic racial differences became a recurring theme, with witnesses emphasizing the genetic weaknesses of eastern and southern European races. Even then, attracting the middle class with genetics arguments proved more difficult than the threat of lower wages.
The most fertile ground was plowed among the intellectuals and radicals, particularly feminist Margaret Sanger, a New Yorker who blamed her mother’s death on excessive childbirth and became the guiding light for and founder of Planned Parenthood. Sanger’s theories of racial culling and procreation reached a large audience through her newspaper, The Woman Rebel, where she pounded the institution of marriage, labeled Italians and Jews unfit to breed, and suggested certain political figures be assassinated.68 While the presumption that she favored abortion is a mistake (she labeled it “barbaric,” and said it resulted in “the killing of babies,” an “outrageous slaughter”), she certainly approved of her friend Lothrop Stoddard’s recommendation to “isolate bacterial invasions” of people by “limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.”69 Upon reading this, Sanger promptly put Stoddard on the board of directors of the American Birth Control League, which she had founded in 1921 and presided over until 1928.
Sanger’s pornographic writings violated the 1873 Comstock Law (which made it illegal to send lewd or obscene materials through the mail), leading to her indictment in 1913. She promptly fled to England, where she engaged in multiple affairs while simultaneously absorbing Malthusian overpopulation nostrums. By that time, it was clear that “lower” groups would not buy her recommendation that they limit their birthrates to ensure that “higher” races remain in positions of power, so she adopted the language of liberation. Charity was too successful: “The dangers inherent in the very idea of humanitarianism and altruism…have today produced their full harvest of human waste.”70 Benevolence perpetuated “defectives, delinquents, and dependents,” while birth control offered a means to weed out “the unfit,” aiming toward the “creation of a superman.”71 Her Birth Control Review (1917) endorsed eugenics through its articles, including “Some Moral Aspects of Eugenics,” “The Eugenic Conscience,” “Birth Control and Positive Eugenics,” and “Birth Control: the True Eugenics,” all of which made the critical link between birth control and selective race breeding. Sanger’s journal contained a favorable review of Stoddard’s book The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy (1923).
Sanger’s view of blacks was more guarded but still unabashedly racist. As the keynote speaker to a Ku Klux Klan rally in 1926, she wrote in her autobiography t
hat she had “accomplished her purpose.” What that purpose was was unclear, but she added, “A dozen invitations to speak to similar groups were proffered,” so clearly the Klan agreed with what she had to say. Perhaps it was something close to her statement that black children were “destined to be a burden to themselves, to their family, and ultimately to the nation.”72 Sanger was sensitive enough to the criticism that her policies were designed to target blacks that in 1939 she wrote a letter to Clarence Gamble in which she argued for hiring “three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds,” to promote birth control in black communities, or as she called it, “The Negro Project.” Suitable ministers were, in fact, found, including Adam Clayton Powell Sr. Using an organization called the Birth Control Federation, Sanger embarked on whittling down the black population. The “mass of significant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes…is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit,” the Federation’s report noted. But that sounded shockingly like eugenics, and Sanger added, “We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”73 To aid in covering its origins and basic thrust, Sanger’s Planned Parenthood gave its Margaret Sanger Award to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1966, surely one of history’s most calculated attempts to mislead the public. Later Sanger’s disciples supported (and continue to support) government-funded abortion, since it provided a ready solution for lowering the black population, while demonizing white Christians who consider all life precious.
Twenty-eight states did have miscegenation laws on the books, and briefly in 1912 a movement to amend the Constitution to prohibit interracial marriage appeared, then faded. However strong racial eugenics were beneath the surface, they were not institutionalized in America the way they were in Europe, which was only a few years away from Adolf Hitler arguing that the Spartans’ “abandonment of sick, frail, deformed children—in other words, their destruction—demonstrated greater human dignity and was in reality a thousand times more humane than the pathetic insanity of our time, which attempts to preserve the lives of the sickest subjects….”74
Instead, a watered-down “Social Darwinism” gained popularity, beginning in the 1870s in America and attaining international prominence with the formation of the Monist League in Germany in 1904. Ironically, the term “Social Darwinism” was always reserved for the “Right,” due to its origin and writings by William Graham Sumner, but it was actually a creature of the liberal/left/Progressive wings of the American political system insofar as it was implemented and used to control, manipulate, and abuse the lower classes. Far from being “Darwinian,” business leaders (demonized as “Robber Barons”) were usually influenced by Christianity and its practices of charity. Carnegie, though not a practicing Christian, argued in his “Gospel of Wealth” that the duty of the rich was to make money so they could give it away to the poor. Virtually all of them believed that capitalism lifted all boats, and this belief dwelled constantly on how their product could help the common man, usually through lower prices. John D. Rockefeller stressed providing kerosene to the average worker (“We are refining oil for the poor man and he must have it cheap and good”) while Samuel Insull went broke and nearly to jail trying to drive down the cost of electricity for the “common man.”75 “Here is an industry,” said Insull, “which supplies convenience and comforts to the day laborer, which kings could not command but a century ago.”76
Nothing in Insull’s or Rockefeller’s views contains a hint about leaving the poor to die—quite the contrary, the captains of industry only got rich by providing the poor with more goods and services at lower prices. Often, however, the offspring of the “Captains of Industry” bought into eugenics. Mary Harriman, daughter of railroad tycoon E. H. Harriman, brought Charles Davenport together with her mother, successfully persuading her to fund the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Where Harriman had toiled to help common men and immigrants, his wife and daughter now sought to eliminate them through genetic sifting.77 When the Record Office was up and running, Davenport giddily wrote Mrs. Harriman with a macabre prophecy: the fire “you have kindled…. [is] going to be a purifying conflagration some day!”78
That “some day,” of course, was only twenty years away when the Holocaust began, and Davenport had spoken in metaphorical terms and would have recoiled at the work of the Third Reich with its gas chambers and ovens. Although most businessmen felt no animosity toward the lower classes, a strain of anti-Semitism crept in by the early 1900s, much of it associated with concerns over the power of large Jewish banking houses in New York City. Henry Ford was among the most notable of the Jew-hating American businessmen, with his views made well known through the Dearborn Independent, a Detroit newspaper he financed. The Independent ran a series of anti-Semitic articles highlighted by “The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem” (1920). Hitler supposedly came to admire Ford, reportedly having a picture of the American on his wall. At the same time, however, Ford personally was never accused of discrimination against Jewish workers, and Ford Motor Company was one of few major companies that hired African-American workers during the twenties.
There had been an undercurrent of fear about the power of Jews in the banking system prior to the creation of the Federal Reserve, with the term “New York Money Power” code lingo for “Jewish Money Power” throughout the 1890s. It was all vague, of course, and common to almost all nations. French poet Charles Maurras decried the Versailles Treaty as a combination of “Anglo-Saxon finance and Judeo-German finance…our Demos flanked by its two friends, the German and the Jew.”79 Simultaneously, the Germans worried about the influence of American Jewish financiers, and the French fretted about the power of German Jewish financiers.
Social Engineering in Europe
American eugenicists, while influential in science, academia, and leftist society, never went to the extremes with their eugenic views that Europeans did. The British government touted a study in the 1930s called Heredity and the Social Problem Group, where it was claimed that the poor were a distinct biological group. But neither the American nor British anti-Semites ever achieved the critical mass they did elsewhere in Europe, where health advocates, sexual reformers, ardent nationalists, pacifists, and leftists all warmly embraced eugenics. Even large numbers of Jewish scientists (supposedly the “secular” Jews) accepted principles of eugenics, as did “many eugenic radicals,” including Julius Schwalbe, Eduard David and Victor Adler (the leader of the Austrian Socialists), Max Hirsch, Martin Hahn, Arthur Crzellitzer, and Julius Tandler.80 This would prove a fatal attraction: even the delegate from the Jewish Welfare Organization did not oppose sterilization measures at the 1932 conference on sterilization in Prussia. Many of the Jewish eugenicists eventually paid for their folly with their lives. Crzellitzer, for one, died in a concentration camp.
Anti-Semitism has, of course, existed for centuries, but it was the rise of the centralized state, and its machinery of “public health,” that transformed European anti-Semitism into organized murder.81 In the nineteenth century, as long as cities and towns were geographically isolated, and the mandates of court and king difficult to enact, Jews as individuals or as groups retained some protection. Pogroms in Russia, riots in Poland, discrimination in France and Germany were all real, often deadly, always unjust, but they never achieved the horror of Hitler’s attempt at total eradication because government lacked both the administrative apparatus and the technological machinery to pull it off. For more than a century, Jews had practiced two forms of survival: assimilation and isolation. Assimilationists were Jews who considered themselves more Polish, more German, more French than Jewish. High rates of intermarriage and industriousness in business had incorporated Jews into the fabric of many European societies. By the 1920s, for example, one third of all German Jewish marriages and one fifth of all Hungarian Jewish marriages were to Gentiles. In fact, many states removed
barriers to Gentile-Jewish marriage: Germany was the last major country outside of Russia and Hungary to maintain such laws, and it removed them in 1875.
On the other hand, isolationists—usually Orthodox Jews—stood out through their dress and behavior, and in times of persecution became easy targets. In the long run, neither strategy proved effective, either in diminishing suspicion in native lands or commanding respect for adherence to the faith.
Europe in particular had seen an uptick in anti-Semitic books, novels, articles, “scientific” papers, and political discussions as the nineteenth century wore on. And increasingly, the language of the eugenicists bubbled up, as in a Reichstag debate in 1895, where one deputy referred to Jews as “cholera bacilli,” and called for their extermination. A few years later—long before Hitler would do so—the German Social Reform Party announced its goal of a “final solution” to the “Jewish question,” with the “annihilation” of the race as the ultimate objective.82 The use of the term “bacilli” is as instructive as it is common. Paul de Lagarde (1887) referred to the Jews as “bearers of decay,” and “trichinae and bacilli.” It was not enough to categorize Jews as a subpopulation of France, Germany, Poland, or Russia, but rather it was necessary to portray their very existence as a disease—something that must be eradicated. Hence, it would not only be Hitler calling for the “purification of the blood,” but also ordinary people during World War II who insisted on “No extermination of the German People and of Germany [by the Allies] but the complete extermination of the Jews.”83
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