War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  The dispersal of the records of the Cold Spring Harbor enterprise did not end the flow of letters to the ERO. For decades, people continued to send requests for eugenic information, updates of their pedigrees, and proof of their family’s biological worth. In 1952, a dozen years after the ERO’s closure, Clifford Frazier, an attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote offering to “bring my family data heretofore furnished up to date.” In 1953, James Brunn, a realtor in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote requesting information to help trace his lineage back to the Revolutionary War. In 1959, Minnie Williams of Harrison, Ohio, wrote to say that she had finally assembled as much information as she could about her family pedigree; she had been working at it for years. In 1966, Elsie Van Guilder addressed a letter to “American Breeders Association, Eugenics Section, Cold Spring Harbor” seeking to trace her family. In 1976, E. Taylor Campbell of St. Joseph, Missouri, explained that he had been working on his family tree for fifty-one years, and he still needed nine more forms.46

  Indeed, eugenic enthusiasts continued remitting family traits and proffering inquiries for decades. Letters continued into the 1980s, forty years after the ERO was dismantled. They probably never stopped. In February of 2003, a North Carolina attorney told this reporter than he had just discovered old ERO forms from his father’s day; the attorney said his daughter was working with them to advance the family genealogy. Laughlin’s work was that engrained in America. It persevered-not only in the mind-sets of generations of Americans, but also in America’s laws.47

  Although the ERO stopped functioning in 1939, America’s eugenic laws did not. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized and legally prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws. During the 1940s, some 15,000 Americans were coercively sterilized, almost a third of them in California. In the fifties, about ten thousand were sterilized. In the sixties, thousands more were sterilized. All told, an estimated 70,000 were eugenically sterilized in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; the majority were women. California consistently outdistanced every other state.48

  Victims, especially those who only discovered their sterilizations years after the fact, eventually began to initiate litigation. One such victim was Joseph Juhan, a Tennessee war veteran with little formal education but with a pointed message for the Carnegie Institution. In late 1976, he penned a letter filled with poorly formed characters and numerous misspellings, randomly employing parentheses for emphasis, that nevertheless poignantly asserted his legal rights. The letter was addressed to “Dr. Charles Davenport, Dept of Experimental Evolution” at Cold Spring Harbor.

  Dear Sir: I write to “request” your help. In the year of ”1954” while a patient at the (State Hospital), at Milledgeville, Ga, a visectomy or sterilization operation was performed upon me, by orders of a state (eugenics board). A mental (deficiency dygnoses was made of my case. At the time I was only 18 years old.

  I was wondering as the (Carnegie Instutions Dep. of experimental evolution or (eugenics studies) have have been ingaged in the study of (state mental inistutions records of (certain mental deficiency cases, if to your “knowledge” there has been in (eugenic’s studys connected with the (Carnegie Inistutions at the (Milledgeville State Hosp in the State of Ga, in 1954.

  The purpose of this “inquirey” is to obtain records for the American Civil Liberty’s Union, in order to present befor a (U.S. Court of Law the (circumstances of my case, in 1954, whereby a (State Hospital acting under orders of a (Eugenics) Board did cause a (vocectomy) or sterlization operation, upon me at the age of 18.

  I feel this was uncessary, in violation of the (Fundimental, or basic freedoms guaranteed under the (U.S, Contitution) as no mental deficiency of a genetic nature has ever exzisted in my case.

  Your help in this matter will be greately appriecated.

  I am Sincerely

  Joseph Juhan

  c/o U.S., VA Hospital

  Murfreesboro, Tenn 3713049

  A response came from Agnes Fisher, the Record Office’s secretary.

  Dear Mr. Juhan,

  I am writing in reply to your letter addressed to Dr. Charles Davenport.

  (Dr. Davenport retired from the Carnegie Institution in 1934, and died in 1944.)

  You inquired about the possibility that eugenic studies were made by the Carnegie Institution at the Milledgeville State Hospital in 1954.

  The Eugenics Record Office, formerly connected with the Department of Genetics in Cold Spring Harbor, was closed in 1939 upon the retirement of its director, Dr. H. H. Laughlin. At that time all studies and activities carried on by the Record Office or its staff were discontinued. Therefore no such studies could have been made in 1954.50

  The American Civil Liberties Union never filed a sterilization suit in Georgia. But a few years later, in 1980, the ACLU in Richmond did file a historic suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of the victims of the Lynchburg Training School where Carrie Buck was sterilized. The ACLU ultimately forced Virginia to confront its history. In May of 2002, the governor of Virginia formally apologized to victims living and dead for decades of eugenic sterilizations. The governors of California, Oregon, North Carolina and South Carolina have followed suit.51

  Nonetheless many of the laws are still on the books. For example, North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization law, although not used for years, remains in force and was even updated in 1973 and 1981. Chapter 35, Article 7 still allows for court ordered sterilization for moral as well as medical improvement. While most states stopped enforcing sterilization statutes in the sixties and seventies, the practice did not stop everywhere. Across the country, additional thousands of poor urban dwellers, Puerto Rican women and Native Americans on reservations continued to be sterilized-not under state laws, but under special federal provisions.52

  In the seventies, for example, a group of Indian Health Service physicians implemented an aggressive program of Native American sterilization. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, hospitals in just four cities sterilized 3,406 women and 142 men between 1972 and 1976. The women widely reported being threatened with the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted to sterilization. A federal court ordered that all future Indian Health Service sterilizations employ the proper safeguards of legitimate therapeutic procedures, and that “individuals seeking sterilization be orally informed at the outset that no Federal benefits can be withdrawn because of failure to accept sterilization.” During the same four-year period, one Oklahoma hospital alone sterilized nearly 8 percent of its fertile female patients. No one will ever know the full scope of Indian sterilization in the postwar period because medical records were either not kept or were incomplete.53

  Eugenics left behind more than sterilization laws. Marriage prohibitions remained in force. For example, Walter Plecker’s Racial Integrity Act and numerous similar state statutes endured long after the ERO and Plecker disappeared. These laws potentially affected millions in ways that society can never measure. In 1958, two Virginians, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving, were married in Washington, D.C., to avoid violating Plecker’s law. Upon their return to Virginia, they were arrested and indicted by the Caroline County grand jury. The trial judge suspended their one-year jail sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for twenty-five years.54

  From their new residence across the river in Washington, D.C., the Lovings appealed the infringement of their civil rights. Appellate courts, one after another, affirmed Virginia’s law and the couple’s conviction. Finally, almost nine years later in 1967, the United States Supreme Court considered the case.55

  Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Earl Warren declared: “There can be no doubt that restricting the freedom to marry solely because of racial classifications violates the central meaning of the Equal Protection Clause…. The freedom to marry has long been recognized as one of the vital per
sonal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness by free men. Marriage is one of the ‘basic civil rights of man,’ fundamental to our very existence and survival.… To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these [Virginia] statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State’s citizens of liberty without due process of law…. These convictions must be reversed. It is so ordered.”56

  After the Lovings’ victory in 1967, other states’ racial integrity laws became unenforceable. In 2000, Alabama became the last state in the union to repeal its antimiscegenation statute57

  With the science stripped away, all that remained to justify eugenic legislation was bigotry. Late in the twentieth century, in an enlightened post-war era, the eugenic notions that gripped a nation and then a world were finally understood. It had all just been colossal academic hubris masquerading as erudition.

  * * *

  By the late 1920s, the Carnegie Institution had confirmed by its own investigations what many in the scientific world and society at large had long been saying: that the eugenic science it helped create was a fraud.58 Nevertheless, Carnegie allowed its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise to supply the specious information needed to validate Virginia’s legal crusade to sterilize Carrie Buck. Relying on Laughlin’s pseudoscience and his own prejudices, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes had established the law of the land. In 1927, Holmes’ famous opinion decreed:

  It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate off-spring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.59

  With Holmes’ decision in hand, Carnegie’s Cold Spring Harbor enterprise had unleashed a national campaign to reinforce long dormant state laws, enact new ones and dramatically increase the number of sterilizations across America. Sterilizations multiplied, marriage restrictions were broadened. Hundreds of thousands were never born. Untold numbers never married. The intent had been to stop the reproduction of targeted non-Nordic groups and others considered unfit. It continued into the 1970s, probably even later. It was all said to be legal, based on science, sanctioned by the highest courts. But what was it really?

  As early as December of 1942, the Nazi plan was obvious. In a highly-publicized warning simultaneously broadcast in more than twenty-three languages the world over, the Allies announced that the Nazis were exterminating five million Jews and murdering millions of other national peoples in a plan to perpetrate a master race. The Allies vowed to hold war crimes trials to punish the Nazis and all those who abetted them.60 Ultimately, the trials would bring to justice more than just the executioners, but those who ordered them, financed them, inspired them, facilitated their crimes and gave them scientific and medical support. These war crimes trials would ultimately include bankers, industrialists, philosophers, a newspaper editor, a radio propagandist, and many doctors and scientists.

  By 1943, humanity needed a new word for the Third Reich’s collective atrocities. The enormity of Nazi butchery of whole peoples by physical extermination, cultural obliteration, biological deracination and negative eugenics defied all previous human language. Nothing like it on so sweeping a scale had ever occurred in history.

  Raphael Lemkin, a Jewish refugee at Duke University, formerly a prosecutor from Warsaw and an expert on international law, was commissioned by human rights organizations to study the crime. After a few months fighting as a partisan, Lemkin had fled Poland for Sweden and ultimately settled in the United States. His new word describing the overall Nazi campaign in Europe sprang from the same Greek root Galton had used. Eugenics was the study of “well-born life.” Lemkin’s new word, contemplated by him since 1940, encompassed the systematic destruction of an entire group’s life. His new word was genocide.61

  On October 30, 1943, as Lemkin was finalizing his study, the Allies met in Moscow and issued a joint declaration reconfirming that there would be war crimes trials for Nazi perpetrators, to be conducted in both the victimized countries and in Germany. The Allies demanded that all such crimes cease during the final turbulent days of Europe’s liberation. “Let those who have hitherto not imbrued their hands with innocent blood beware lest they join the ranks of the guilty, for most assuredly the three Allied powers will pursue them to the uttermost ends of the earth and will deliver them to their accusors in order that justice may be done.” The declaration was signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Josef Stalin.62

  Days later, on November 15, 1943, Lemkin completed his study, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe, which was published a year later. In a chapter entitled “Genocide,” Lemkin listed the several physical and administrative “techniques of genocide.” Among the techniques was a section labeled “Biological.” Lemkin later explained the principle: “The genocidal policy [of the Nazis] was far-sighted as well as immediate in its objectives. On the one hand an increase in the birth rate, legitimate or illegitimate, was encouraged within Germany and among Volksdeutsche in the occupied countries…. On the other hand, every means to decrease the birth rate among ‘racial inferiors’ was used. Millions of war prisoners and forced laborers from all the conquered countries of Europe were kept from contact with their wives. Poles in incorporated Poland met obstacles in trying to marry among themselves. Chronic undernourishment, deliberately created by the occupant, tended not only to discourage the birth rate but also to an increase in infant mortality. Coming generations in Europe were thus planned to be predominantly of German blood, capable of overwhelming all other races by sheer numbers.”63

  Axis Rule in Occupied Europe even quoted a relevant Hitler speech: “We are obliged to depopulate as part of our mission of preserving the German population. We shall have to develop a technique of depopulation. If you ask me what I mean by depopulation, I mean the removal of entire racial units. And that is what I intend to carry out…. Nature is cruel, therefore we, too, may be cruel.… I have the right to remove millions of an inferior race that breeds like vermin! And by ‘remove,’ I don’t necessarily mean destroy; I shall simply take the systematic measures to dam their great natural fertility…. There are many ways, systematical and comparatively painless, or at any rate bloodless, of causing undesirable races to die out.”64

  Some five months later, Lemkin’s chapter on genocide was popularized in an article entitled “Genocide-A Modem Crime,” appearing in Free World, a new United Nations multilingual magazine. In Free World, Lemkin again cited “Biological” techniques as a means of genocide. By this time Lemkin had become an advisor to the Judge Advocate General of the u.s. Army, and military tribunal planners were working with him and his concepts as they prepared to bring Nazi war criminals to justice.65

  Within a month of the publication of “Genocide-A Modern Crime,” the Third Reich fell. Lemkin’s codified principles of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity became pivotal. In August of 1945, the victorious Allies met in London and chartered an international military tribunal to bring the highest-ranking Nazi war criminals to justice. The so-called Nuremberg Trials began just three months later. The dock was hardly limited to those Nazis who pulled triggers and ordered murders-such as Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Governor-General of Poland Hans Frank-but also included key propagandists and facilitators, such as newspaper editor Julius Streicher and radio director Hans Fritzche. At the same time, international justice groups continued to further define the prior acts of genocide in anticipation of more war crimes tribunals, these for individuals oflesser stature who were nonetheless instrumental in Nazi genocide. These additional trials would prosecute doctors, scientists and industrialists. Many of these tribunals would be conducted exclusively by the United States.66

  On December 11, 1946, as the United States was readying its own prosecutions, the United Nations ap
proved Resolution 96 (I), which embedded the concept of “genocide” into international law. It proclaimed: “Genocide is a denial of the right of existence of entire human groups, as homicide is the denial of the right to live of individual human beings; such denial of the right of existence shocks the conscience of mankind, results in great losses to humanity in the form of cultural and other contributions represented by these human groups, and is contrary to moral law and the spirit and aims of the United Nations.”67

  Shortly thereafter, the articles of a forthcoming Treaty Against Genocide were formulated and later adopted through a succession of resolutions, conventions and treaties to become settled international law. The international convention enumerated crimes against humanity and crimes of genocide in five categories; the last two categories-in subsections (d) and (e)-squarely confronted eugenic policies: sterilization and the kidnapping of eugenically qualified children to be raised as Aryans. Article II stated: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: