War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  Eugenics targeted all mankind, so of course its scope was global. American eugenic evangelists spawned similar movements and practices throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. Forced sterilization laws and regimens took root on every continent. Each local American eugenic ordinance or statute-from Virginia to Oregon-was promoted internationally as yet another precedent to be emulated by the international movement. A tightly-knit network of mainstream medical and eugenical journals, international meetings and conferences kept the generals and soldiers of eugenics up to date and armed for their nation’s next legislative opportunity.

  Eventually, America’s eugenic movement spread to Germany as well, where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement. Under Hitler, eugenics careened beyond any American eugenicist’s dream. National Socialism transduced America’s quest for a “superior Nordic race” into Hitler’s drive for an “Aryan master race.” The Nazis were fond of saying “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology,” and in 1934 the Richmond Times-Dispatch quoted a prominent American eugenicist as saying, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”

  Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both velocity and ferocity. In the 1930s, Germany assumed the lead in the international movement. Hitler’s eugenics was backed by brutal decrees, custom-designed IBM data processing machines, eugenical courts, mass sterilization mills, concentration camps, and virulent biological anti-Semitism-all of which enjoyed the open approval of leading American eugenicists and their institutions. The cheering quieted, but only reluctantly, when the United States entered the war in December of 1941. Then, out of sight of the world, Germany’s eugenic warriors operated extermination centers. Eventually, Germany’s eugenic madness led to the Holocaust, the destruction of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.

  But none of America’s far-reaching scientific racism would have risen above ignorant rants without the backing of corporate philanthropic largess.

  Within these pages you will discover the sad truth of how the scientific rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on Long Island at the Carnegie Institution’s eugenic enterprise at Cold Spring Harbor. You will see that during the prewar Hitler regime, the Carnegie Institution, through its Cold Spring Harbor complex, enthusiastically propagandized for the Nazi regime and even distributed anti-Semitic Nazi Party films to American high schools. And you will see the links between the Rockefeller Foundation’s massive financial grants and the German scientific establishment that began the eugenic programs that were finished by Mengele at Auschwitz.

  Only after the truth about Nazi extermination became known did the American eugenics movement fade. American eugenic institutions rushed to change their names from eugenics to genetics. With its new identity, the remnant eugenics movement reinvented itself and helped establish the modem, enlightened human genetic revolution. Although the rhetoric and the organizational names had changed, the laws and mindsets were left in place. So for decades after Nuremberg labeled eugenic methods genocide and crimes against humanity, America continued to forcibly sterilize and prohibit eugenically undesirable marriages.

  I began by saying this book speaks for the never-born. It also speaks for the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to flee the Hitler regime only to be denied visas to enter the United States because of the Carnegie Institution’s openly racist anti-immigrant activism. Moreover, these pages demonstrate how millions were murdered in Europe precisely because they found themselves labeled lesser forms of life, unworthy of existence-a classification created in the publications and academic research rooms of the Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities, and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune. Eugenics was nothing less than corporate philanthropy gone wild.

  Today we are faced with a potential return to eugenic discrimination, not under national flags or political credos, but as a function of human genomic science and corporate globalization. Shrill declarations of racial dominance are being replaced by polished PR campaigns and patent protections. What eugenics was unable to accomplish in a century, newgenics may engineer in a generation. The almighty dollar may soon decide who stands on which side of a new genetic divide already being demarcated by the wealthy and powerful. As we speed toward a new biological horizon, confronting our eugenic past will help us confront the bewildering newgenic future that awaits.

  I first became interested in eugenics while researching my previous books, The Transfer Agreement and IBM and the Holocaust. The Transfer Agreement, published in 1984, documented the tempestuous worldwide anti-Nazi boycott, which included vigorous efforts to stop American organizations from funding medical research. At the time I could not understand why Nazi medical research was so important to American corporate philanthropists. The scope of eugenics escaped me. Then in 2000, while researching IBM and the Holocaust-which revealed IBM’s role in automating Germany’s eugenic institutions-I finally came to see that eugenics was a life and death proposition for Europe’s Jews. Yet I still didn’t realize that this bizarre cult of Nazi race science was organically linked to America.

  As I explored the history of eugenics, however, I soon discovered that the Nazi principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich but on Long Island decades earlier-and then actively transplanted to Germany. How did it happen? Who was involved? To uncover the story I did as I have done before and launched an international investigation. This time, a network of dozens of researchers, mostly volunteers, working in the United States, England, Germany and Canada unearthed some 50,000 documents and period publications from more than forty archives, dozens of library special collections and other repositories (see Major Sources). But unlike the Holocaust field, in which the documentation is centralized in a number of key archives, the information on eugenics is exceedingly decentralized and buried deep within numerous local and niche repositories.

  In the United States alone, the investigation brought my team to the archival holdings of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, to the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, to Truman State University in northeastern Missouri, to numerous obscure community colleges in the Appalachian states, and a long list of state archives, county historical files and institutional archives where personal papers and period materials are stored. I also spent much time in many small, private libraries and archives, such as the one maintained by Planned Parenthood. We examined records at the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. There are probably two hundred important repositories in America, many of them special collections and manuscript departments of local libraries or universities. Because eugenics was administered on the local level, every state probably possesses three to five sites hosting important eugenic documentation. I only accessed a few dozen of these across America. Much more needs to be done and American researchers will surely be kept busy for a decade mining the information.

  In England I visited the British Library, the Wellcome Library, the University College of London, the Public Record Office and other key archives. These not only provided the information on Britain’s eugenic campaigns, but also yielded copies of correspondence with American eugenic organizations that are simply not available in the American holdings. For example, strident propaganda pamphlets long cleansed from American files are still stored in the British records.

  Because the German and American wings collaborated so closely, the German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I learned much about America’s record by examining Reich-era files. For instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has eluded researchers in that state, the information
is readily available in the files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature reveals the Nazis’ understanding of their American parmers. Probing the prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg University and many other repositories in Germany.

  When it was finished, the journey to discover America’s eugenic history had taken me from an austere highway warehouse in Vermont, where the state’s official files are stacked right next to automotive supplies and retrieved by forklift, to the architectonic British Library, to the massive Bundesarchiv in Berlin-and every type of research environment in between. Sometimes I sat on a chair in a reading room. Sometimes I poked through boxes in a basement.

  Even still, I was not prepared for the many profound built-in challenges to eugenic research. My experiences are rooted in Holocaust investigation, where a well-developed infrastructure is in place. Not so with eugenics. In Holocaust research, archives facilitate unlimited speedy photocopying of documents. The Public Record Office in London produces copies within hours. The National Archives in Washington, D.C., allows self-service photocopying. But the most important eugenic archive in Britain, storing thousands of important documents, limits users to just one hundred copies per year. America’s largest eugenic archive, housing vast numbers of papers in numerous collections, limits researchers to just four hundred copies per year. Often the beleaguered and understaffed copy departments in these archives needed between three and four weeks to produce the copies. One archive asked for three months to copy a ten-page document. Fortunately, I was able to circumvent these restrictions by deploying teams of five and ten researchers at these archives, and by virtue of the gracious and indispensable flexibility of archivists who continuously assisted me in this massive project (see Acknowledgments). Only by their special efforts and indulgence was I able to secure as many as five thousand copies from a single archive, and reasonably quickly-thus allowing me to gain a comprehensive view of the topic and shorten my work by years.

  Another profound obstacle has been the fallacious claim by many document custodians, in both state and private archives, that the records of those sterilized, incarcerated and otherwise manipulated by the eugenics movement are somehow protected under doctor-patient confidentiality stretching back fifty to one hundred years. This notion is a sham that only dignifies the crime. Legislation is needed to dismantle such restrictions. No researcher should ever accept assertions by any document custodian that such records are covered by confidentiality protections accorded to medical procedures-whether in Nazi Germany or the United States. The people persecuted by eugenics were not patients, they were victims. No doctor-patient relationship was established. Most of the unfortunate souls snared by eugenics were deceived and seized upon by animal breeders, biologists, anthropologists, raceologists and bureaucrats masquerading as medical men. Mengele’s victims were not patients. Nor were those in America who were caught up in the fraudulent science of eugenics.

  In some instances, records were initially denied to me on this basis. Fortunately, the investigative reporter only gets started when he hears the word no. I demanded full access and was grateful when I received it. I applaud the State of Virginia for allowing me to be the first to receive files on the infamous sterilization of Carrie Buck; copies of those files are now in my office.

  The international scope of the endeavor created a logistical nightmare that depended on devoted researchers scouring files in many cities. For months, I functioned as a traffic cop, managing editor and travel coordinator while simultaneously dispatching researchers to follow leads on both sides of the Atlantic. On the same day that one group might be interviewing mountain people in the hills of Virginia, another might be examining the personal papers of a police chief in California, while another in Berlin scanned the financial records of the Kaiser WIlhelm Institute to identify American financial assistance, while still others reviewed the pamphlets of the Eugenics Society in London.

  We were as likely to scrutinize the visitor registers at the Kaiser WIlhelm Institute’s guest facility, Harnack House, to see which Americans visited Berlin, as we were to review the mailing lists of Carnegie scientists to see who in Germany was receiving their reports. Progress among my researchers was exchanged by continuous use of the Internet and by the extensive use of faxed and scanned documents. Eventually all of the documents came together in my office in Washington. They were then copied and arranged in chronological folders-one folder for every month of the twentieth century. The materials were then cross-filed to trace certain trends, and then juxtaposed against articles published month-by-month in journals such as Eugenical News, Journal of Heredity and Eugenics Review, as well as numerous race science publications in Nazi Germany. By pulling anyone monthly folder I could assemble a snapshot of what was occurring worldwide during that month.

  When we were done, we had assembled a mountain of documentation that clearly chronicled a century of eugenic crusading by America’s finest universities, most reputable scientists, most trusted professional and charitable organizations, and most revered corporate foundations. They had collaborated with the Department of Agriculture and numerous state agencies in an attempt to breed a new race of Nordic humans, applying the same principles used to breed cattle and com. The names define power and prestige in America: the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Harriman railroad fortune, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale University, Stanford University, the American Medical Association, Margaret Sanger, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Yerkes, Woodrow Wilson, the American Museum of Natural History, the American Genetic Association and a sweeping array of government agencies from the obscure Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to the U.S. State Department.

  Next came an obsessive documentation process. Every fact and fragment and its context was supported with black and white documents, then double-checked and separately triple-checked in a rigorous multistage verification regimen by a team of argumentative, hairsplitting fact-checkers. Only then was the manuscript draft submitted to a panel of known experts in the field from the United States, Germany, England and Poland, for a line-by-line review. The result: behind each of the hundreds of footnotes, there is a folder that contains the supporting documentation.

  To ensure that all of our information was accurate, we also set about verifying the work of numerous other scholars by checking their documentation. We often asked them to provide documents from their files. In other words, we not only documented my book, we verified other works as well. Most of the authors graciously complied, readily faxing copies of their documents or explaining precisely where the information could be found. During this process, however, we discovered numerous errors in many prior works.

  For example, in one book an important speech on the value of heredity is attributed to Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States-the speech was actually given by Jim Wilson, president of the American Breeders Association. I can understand how errors like this occur. Many scholars rely on other scholars’ works. Summaries of summaries of summaries yield a lesser truth with every iteration. Except for the work of a few brilliant world-class documenters, such as Daniel. Kevles, Benno Miiller-Hill, Paul Weindling and Martin Pernick, I largely considered published works little more than leads. What’s more, there is boundless information on eugenics accumulating on the Internet, some of it very prettily presented, much of it hysterical, and unfortunately, most of it filled with profound errors. Hence whenever possible, I acquired primary source material so I could determine the provable facts for myself.

  When the research phase was over, I realized that less than half the information I had assembled would even make it into the book. Frankly, I had amassed enough information to write a freestanding book for each of the twenty-one chapters in this volume. It was painful to pick and choose which information would be included, but I am confident that with so many journalists throughout America now aggressiv
ely delving into eugenics, the field will soon be as broad and diversified as the investigations of the Holocaust and American slavery. At least one book could be written for each state, starting with California, which was America’s most energetic eugenic state. Critical biographies are needed for the key players. In-depth examinations of the links between Germany and the Pioneer Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution as well as numerous state officials would be welcome. The role of the Chicago Municipal Court must be further explored.

  When I began this project in 2001, many in the public were not even aware of eugenics. Indeed, for a while my publisher did not even want me to include the word eugenics in the title of this book. In reality, however, the topic has been continuously explored over the past decades by several extremely talented academics and students hailing from a range of disciplines from biology to education. Although most were gracious and supportive, I was surprised to find that many tended to guard their information closely. One such author told me she didn’t believe another book on eugenics was necessary. (“It depends on how nuanced,” she said with some discomfort.) Another professor astonished me by asking for money to answer some questions within his expertise-the first time I had encountered such a request in thirty-five years of historical research. When I contacted a Virginia professor who had written a dissertation decades earlier, she actually told me she didn’t think a member of the media was “qualified” to read her dissertation. One collaborative scholarly eugenic website, ironically funded by a federal grant, restricts media usage while permitting unrestricted scholarly usage.