War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  “I’ll never understand why they sterilized me,” Buck Smith disconso-lately told the local reporter. “I’ll never understand that. They [Lynchburg] gave me what life I have and they took a lot of my life away from me. Having children is supposed to be part of the human race.”11

  The reporter noticed a small greeting card behind Buck Smith. The sterilized man had eventually married and formed a lasting bond with his stepchildren. The card was from those stepchildren and read: “Thinking of you, Daddy.” Through tears, Buck Smith acknowledged the card, “They call me Daddy.”12

  Mary Donald was equally pained when she recalled her years of anguish following her sterilization at Lynchburg when she was only eleven. Several years later, she was “released” to her husband-to-be, and then enjoyed a good marriage for eighteen years. But “he loved kids,” she remembered. “I lay in bed and cried because I couldn’t give him a son,” she recounted in her heavily accented but articulate mountain drawl. “You know, men want a son to carry on their name. He said it didn’t matter. But as years went by, he changed. We got divorced and he married someone else.” With these words, Mary broke down and wept.13

  Like so many, Mary never understood what was happening. She recalled the day doctors told her. “They ask me, ‘Do you know what this meeting is for?’ I said, ‘No, sir, I don’t.’ ‘Well this is a meeting you go through when you have to have a serious operation, and it’s for your health.’ That’s the way they expressed it. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘if it’s for my health, then I guess I’ll go through with it.’ See, I didn’t know any difference.” Mary didn’t learn she had been sterilized until five years after her operation.14

  The surgeon’s blade cut widely. Sometimes the victims were simply tru-ants, petty thieves or just unattended boys captured by the sheriffs before they could escape. Marauding county welfare officials, backed by deputies, would take the youngsters into custody, and before long the boys would be shipped to a home for the feebleminded. Many were forced into virtual slave labor, sometimes being paid as little as a quarter for a full week of contract labor. Runaways and the recalcitrant were subject to beatings and torturous ninety-day stints in a darkened “blind room.” Their release was generally conditional on family acquiescence to their sterilization.15

  Mary Donald, “Buck Smith,” the brothers from Brush Mountain and many more whose names have long been forgotten are among the more than eight thousand Virginians sterilized as a result of coercion, stealth and deception in a wide-ranging program to prevent unwanted social, racial and ethnic groups from propagating. But the agony perpetrated against these people was hardly a local story of medical abuse. It did not end at the Virginia state line. Virginia’s victims were among some sixty thousand who were forcibly sterilized all across the United States, almost half of them in California.16

  Moreover, the story of America’s reproductive persecution constitutes far more than just a protracted medical travesty. These simple Virginia people, who thought they were isolated victims, plucked from their remote mountain homes and urban slums, were actually part of a grandiose, decades-long American movement of social and biological cleansing determined to obliterate individuals and families deemed inferior. The intent was to create a new and superior mankind.

  The movement was called eugenics. It was conceived at the onset of the twentieth century and implemented by America’s wealthiest, most powerful and most learned men against the nation’s most vulnerable and helpless. Eugenicists sought to methodically terminate all the racial and ethnic groups, and social classes, they disliked or feared. It was nothing less than America’s legalized campaign to breed a super race-and not just any super race. Eugenicists wanted a purely Germanic and Nordic super race, enjoying biological dominion over all others.17

  Nor was America’s crusade a mere domestic crime. Using the power of money, prestige and international academic exchanges, American eugenicists exported their philosophy to nations throughout the world, including Germany. Decades after a eugenics campaign of mass sterilization and involuntary incarceration of “defectives” was institutionalized in the United States, the American effort to create a super Nordic race came to the attention of Adolf Hitler.

  Those declared unfit by Virginia did not know it, but they were connected to a global effort of money, manipulation and pseudoscience that stretched from rural America right into the sterilization wards, euthanasia vans and concentration camps of the Third Reich. Prior to World War II, the Nazis practiced eugenics with the open approval of America’s eugenic crusaders. As Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia’s Western State Hospital, complained in 1934, “Hitler is beating us at our own game.”18

  Eventually, out of sight of the world, in Buchenwald and Auschwitz, eugenic doctors like Josef Mengele would carry on the research begun just years earlier with American financial support, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. Only after the secrets of Nazi eugenics horrified the world, only after Nuremberg declared compulsory sterilization a crime against humanity, did American eugenics recede, adopt an enlightened view and then resurface as “genetics” and “human engineering.”19 Even still, involuntary sterilization continued for decades as policy and practice in America.

  True, the victims of Virginia and hundreds of thousands more like them in countries across the world were denied children. But they did give birth to a burning desire to understand how the most powerful, intelligent, scholarly and respectable individuals and organizations in America came to mount a war against the weakest Americans to create a super race. Just as pressing is this question: Will the twenty-fIrst-century successor to the eugenics movement, now known as “human engineering,” employ enough safeguards to ensure that the biological crimes of the twentieth century will never happen again?

  CHAPTER 2

  Evolutions

  Mankind’s quest for perfection has always turned dark. Man has always existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength. The instinct is to “play God” or at least mediate His providence. Too often, this impulse is not just to improve, but to repress, and even destroy those deemed inferior.

  Eventually, the Judeo-Christian world codified the principle that all human life should be valued. A measure of our turbulent civilization and even of our humanity has always been how well people have adhered to that precept. Indeed, as societies became more enlightened, they extended respect for life to an ever-widening circle of people, including the less fortunate and the less strong.

  Racism, group hatred, xenophobia and enmity toward one’s neighbors have existed in almost every culture throughout history. But it took millennia for these deeply personal, almost tribal hostilities to migrate into the safe harbor of scientific thought, thus rationalizing destructive actions against the despised or unwanted.

  Science offers the most potent weapons in man’s determination to resist the call of moral restraint. To forge the new science of human oppression-a race science-several completely disconnected threads of history twined. Indeed, it took centuries of development for three disciplines-socioeconomics, philosophy and biology-to come together into a resilient and fast-moving pseudoscience that would change the world forever.

  Perhaps the story truly begins with the simple concept of charity. Charity is older than the Bible.1 Organized refuges for the poor and helpless date to the Roman era and earlier.2 The concept of extending a helping hand was established in the earliest Judeo-Christian doctrine. “There will always be poor people in the land, therefore, I command you to be open-handed toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land,” declared Deuteronomy.3 Jesus Christ based his ministry on helping the helpless-the lame, the blind, lepers, the mentally deranged, and social outcasts such as thieves and prostitutes. He proclaimed, “The meek… shall inherit the earth.”4

  After the Roman Empire adopted
Christianity, the Canones Arabici Nicaeni of 325 A.D. mandated the expansion of hospitals and other monastic institutions for the sick and needy.5 During medieval times, the church was chiefly responsible for “houses of pity.”6 In England, such charitable institutions for the poor were abundantly required.

  The Black Death killed millions across Europe between 1348 and 1350. Labor shortages motivated bands of itinerant workers and beggars to wander from town to town in search of the highest paying pittance. As they wandered, many resorted to petty thievery, highway robbery, and worse. With their impoverished existence came the associated afflictions of illiteracy, poor health, rampant disease and physical disability.7

  During the early and mid-1500s, economic upheavals took their toll on all but the richest of the nobility. Silver from the New World and official coinage debasements caused prices to rise, increasing the suffering of the poor. Tribes of vagrants migrated from the countryside to villages. Later, in response to the booming wool market, England’s landowners switched from estate farming to vast sheep breeding enterprises. Consequently, great numbers of farm workers were evicted from their peasant domiciles, bloating the hordes of the unemployed and destitute. This teeming hardship only increased the church’s role in tending to a multitude of the wretched and poor.8

  Everything changed in the 1530s when Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry VIII’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Furious, King Henry seized church property and monasteries in England, and charitable institutions slowly became a governmental responsibility.9 Tending to the poor was expensive but the alternative was food riots.10

  By the early sixteenth century, the first poor laws were enacted in England. Such measures categorized the poor into two groups. The deserving poor were the very young and the very old, the infirm and families who fell on financial difficulties due to a change in circumstances. The undeserving poor were those who had turned to crime-such as highwaymen, pick-pockets, and professional beggars-and also included paupers who roamed the country looking for a day’s work. The undeserving poor were considered an affliction upon society, and the law laid out harsh punishment. Poverty, or more precisely, vagrancy, was criminalized. Indeed, the concept of criminal vagrancy for those with “no visible means of support” has persisted ever since.11

  Despite all attempts to contain welfare spending, England’s enormous expenditures only escalated. In 1572, compulsory poor law taxes were assessed to each community to pay for poor houses and other institutions that cared for the deranged, diseased and decrepit among them. These taxes created a burden that many resented.12 Now it was the poor and helpless against the rest of society.

  Indeed, a distinct pauper class had emerged. These people were perceived by the establishment as both an arrogant lot who assumed an inherited “right to relief,” and as seething candidates for riot and revolution. Overcrowded slums and dismal poorhouses caused England to reform its poor laws and poverty policies several times during the subsequent three hundred years. The urbanization of poverty was massively accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, which established grim, sunless sweatshops and factories that in turn demanded-and exploited-cheap labor. Appalling conditions became the norm, inspiring Charles Dickens to rouse the public in novels such as Oliver Twist. Despite progress, by the mid-1800s the state was still spending £1,400 a year (equivalent to about $125,000 in modern money) per 10,000 paupers. The ruling classes increasingly rebelled against “taxing the industrious to support the indolent.”13

  Soot-smeared and highly reproductive, England’s paupers were looked down upon as a human scourge. The establishment’s derogatory language began to define these subclasses as subhumans. For example, a popular 1869 book, The Seven Curses of London, deprecated “those male and female pests of every civilized community whose natural complexion is dirt, whose brow would sweat at the bare idea of earning their bread, and whose stock-in-trade is rags and impudence.”14

  England’s complex of state-sponsored custodial institutions stretched across a distant horizon. Over time, the proliferation of poor houses, lunacy asylums, orphanages, health clinics, epilepsy colonies, rescue shelters, homes for the feebleminded and prisons inevitably turned basic Christian charity into what began to be viewed as a social plague.

  While Britain’s perceived social plague intensified, a new social philosophy began evolving in Europe. In 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus published a watershed theory on the nature of poverty and the controlling socioeconomic systems at play. Malthus reasoned that a finite food supply would naturally inhibit a geometrically expanding human race. He called for population control by moral restraint. He even argued that in many instances charitable assistance promoted generation-to-generation poverty and simply made no sense in the natural scheme of human progress. Many who rallied behind Malthus’s ideas ignored his complaints about an unjust social and economic structure, and instead focused on his rejection of the value of helping the poor.15

  In the 1850s, agnostic English philosopher Herbert Spencer published Social Statics, asserting that man and society, in truth, followed the laws of cold science, not the will of a caring, almighty God. Spencer popularized a powerful new term: “survival of the fittest.” He declared that man and society were evolving according to their inherited nature. Through evolution, the “fittest” would naturally continue to perfect society. And the “unfit” would naturally become more impoverished, less educated and ultimately die off, as well they should. Indeed, Spencer saw the misery and starvation of the pauper classes as an inevitable decree of a “far-seeing benevolence,” that is, the laws of nature. He unambiguously insisted, “The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, and to make room for better…. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die.” Spencer left no room for doubt, declaring, “all imperfection must disappear.” As such, he completely denounced charity and instead extolled the purifying elimination of the “unfit.” The unfit, he argued, were predestined by their nature to an existence of downwardly spiraling degradation.16

  As social and economic gulfs created greater generation-to-generation disease and dreariness among the increasing poor, and as new philosophies suggested society would only improve when the unwashed classes faded away, a third voice entered the debate. That new voice was the voice of hereditary science.

  In 1859, some years after Spencer began to use the term “survival of the fittest,” the naturalist Charles Darwin summed up years of observation in a lengthy abstract entitled The Origin of Species. Darwin espoused “natural selection” as the survival process governing most living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments. He confirmed that his theory “is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case, there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage.”17

  Darwin was writing about a “natural world” distinct from man. But it wasn’t long before leading thinkers were distilling the ideas of Malthus, Spencer and Darwin into a new concept, bearing a name never used by Darwin himself: social Darwinism. 18 Now social planners were rallying around the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act.

  Since ancient times, man has understood the principles of breeding and the lasting quality of inherited traits. The Old Testament describes Jacob’s clever breeding of his and Laban’s flocks, as spotted and streaked goats were mated to create spotted and streaked offspring. Centuries later, Jesus sermonized, “A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.”19

  Good stock and preferred traits were routinely propagated in the fields and the flocks. Bad stock and unwanted traits were culled. Breeding, whether in grapes or sheep, was considered a s
kill subject to luck and God’s grace.

  But during the five years between 1863 and 1868, three great men of biology would all promulgate a theory of evolution dependent upon identifiable hereditary “units” within the cells. These units could actually be seen under a microscope. Biology entered a new age when its visionaries proclaimed that good and bad traits were not bestowed by God as an inscrutable divinity, but transmitted from generation to generation according to the laws of science.

  Spencer, in 1863, published Principles of Biology, which suggested that heredity was under the control of “physiological units. “20

  Three years later, the obscure Czech monk Gregor Mendel published his experiments with smooth-skinned and wrinkled peas; he constructed a predictable hereditary system dependent on inherited cellular “elements.”21

  Finally, in 1868, Darwin postulated the notion that “the units throw off minute granules which are dispersed throughout the entire system…. They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations.” Darwin named these minute granules gemmules. 22

  By any name, science had now pulled away the shroud covering the genetic realities of mankind.

  Far-flung notions of social planning, philosophy and biology-centuries in the making-now gravitated toward each other, culminating in a fascinating new ideology that sought to improve the human race-not by war or charity, but by the progressive logic of science and mathematics. The driving force behind this revelation was not really a scientist, although his scientific methodology influenced many scientists. He was not really a philosopher, although his ability to weave scientific principles into social philosophy spawned fiery movements of dogma. He was not really a physician, although his analyses of human physiology ultimately governed much of the surgical and medical profession. The man was Francis J. Galton. He was above all a clever and compulsive counter-a counter of things, of phenomena, of traits, of all manner of occurrences, obvious and obscure, real and conjured. If any pattern could be discerned in the cacophony of life, Galton’s piercing ratiocination could detect it and just maybe systemize it to the level of predictability.