The operator of this website is the highly motivated community-minded Martin Mitchell from Australia (himself an instititionalised and abused minor in church institutions in the former West Germany) |
(
10.03.2004 )
Cleansing
of the unfit : War Against The Weak : Eugenics and America’s
Campaign to Create A Master Race : Eradication by sterilisation and
institutionalisation of all perceived "scum" and the
so-called "dumb" and "worthless" (and all those
who were not considered suitable for exploitation or as "service
personnel" for the rich and mighty).
Extracted
from an Australian newspaper the Green Left Weekly, March 10, 2004 @
http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2004/574/574p24.htm
Cleansing of the
unfit
REVIEW BY PHIL SHANNON
War Against The
Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create A Master
Race
By Edwin Black
Four Walls Eight Windows, New York
550
pages, [Aus] $58.20 (hardback)
The Montgomery county
sheriff’s office in Virginia was kept busy in the 1930s,
driving up to the rural “hillbilly” settlements and
bringing back hundreds of brothers, sisters and cousins to the county
hospital to have their tubes cut or tied to prevent reproduction of
more of their “kind”.
This “cleansing of the
unfit” of the US, says Edwin Black in War Against the Weak,
caught up hundreds of thousands of poor “white trash”,
Blacks, Native Americans, people with a mental disability,
epileptics, prisoners, the deaf, blind and mute, in mass forcible
sterilisation, institutional segregation and marriage restriction
during the first seven decades of the twentieth century under the
banner of “eugenics”.
Elite universities provided
the “science” of eugenics, wealthy capitalists the money,
and government officials the political and legal sanction to create a
“superior race” by eliminating the reproductive
opportunities of those deemed inferior. Black’s book is a very
black history of how the wealthy and powerful of the US attempted to
control the racial groups and social classes they disliked and
feared.
US bigots took passionately to eugenics, a
pseudo-science adapted and twisted by the British scientist, Francis
Galton, in the 1880s from biologist Gregor Mendel’s theory of
heredity. They found in it proof that the “inferior” were
so because of genetic defect and that to stop the “race
suicide” of “quality bloodstock”, the genetic
inheritance of the “defective” and “degenerate”
must be terminated. To turn prejudice into policy, however, the
eugenicists needed money. Those most fearful of the lower classes
were those with the most money, and three of America’s
wealthiest capitalist dynasties came to the eugenic party.
The
massive fortune of steel boss Andrew Carnegie was successfully tapped
in 1904 by Charles Davenport, a Harvard zoologist obsessed with
racial breeding, to support his eugenic research laboratories at Cold
Spring Harbour in Long Island, New York. The Rockefeller millions
were eagerly sought after and no less eagerly provided. The estate of
railroad capitalist E.H. Harriman funded the Eugenics Research Office
(ERO), set up by the American Breeders’ Association to conduct
the data-gathering phase of the eugenic crusade by identifying
successive “lower tenths of humanity” for bloodline
termination, and so “improve” the human breeding stock as
was done with “horses, cows and pigs”.
Prisons,
institutions for the sensory-impaired, psychiatric hospitals and
poorhouses turned over their confidential records to ERO field
officers, who set up vast file indexes of the physically, medically,
morally, culturally or socially inadequate, or those just
“different”. The different included albinos, the Amish in
Pennsylvania, the shy, stutterers, people with poor English —
all lumped into a giant eugenic underclass of the unfit. The
“defective germ-plasm” of alcoholics and paupers was also
indexed by the ERO. None of the people interviewed knew they were
being added to a list of candidates for sterilisation, segregation in
special camps or restrictive marriage laws.
As Harry Laughlin,
Davenport’s chief activist, put it, they had to end the
reproduction of those people “unfitted to become parents of
useful citizens”. Not all of them, of course, because a master
race needs its slave race to do all the work. Davenport proposed that
“some tens of thousands of ‘Black fellows’ from
central Australia might be induced to come to this country” as
a “worker strain”.
Some of the world’s
cultural elite carried the eugenic standard. George Bernard Shaw and
H.G. Wells were eugenicists. Telephone inventor Alexander Graham Bell
was a prominent leader. Prestigious American psychologists developed
an “objective” way of measuring “feeblemindedness”,
their intelligence tests predictably, given the cultural and class
biases of IQ testing, identifying vast numbers of “morons”
amongst eugenically “inferior” groups.
State
bureaucracies created their own eugenic organisations, and forced
sterilisations became legal in dozens of states. Public opposition,
however, and some state officials’ concerns that eugenic
sterilisation may be unconstitutional, slowed the eugenic pace until
a 1925 decision by the US Supreme Court to uphold the compulsory
sterilisation by Virginia state of teenage sole mother Carrie Buck as
a “mental defective”. Through the Supreme Court
floodgates flowed pent-up waves of eugenic sterilisations, 30 000 in
the 15 years to 1940.
The eugenic movement also had success
with US immigration policy. For decades, race-based immigration
quotas heavily discriminated in favour of the blond, blue-eyed
“Nordic” races (from Germany, Scandinavia and
north-western Europe) and against eastern and southern Europeans, and
Jews, with fatal [consequences in the]
1930s.
The US vigorously exported its eugenic
doctrines. Although Britain was sluggish, tens of thousands of
eugenic sterilisations were lawfully carried out in Canada,
Switzerland, Finland, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
But
the tearaway success story was in Germany. Hitler closely followed US
eugenic legislation — “I have studied with great interest
the laws of several American states concerning prevention of
reproduction by people whose progeny would be of no value or be
injurious to the racial stock”. After the Nazis seized power in
1933, Hitler modelled his ‘race cleansing’ sterilisation
laws on US legislation.
US eugenicists looked at Nazi Germany
with both “parental fascination” and “Nordic
admiration”. Communication and scientific exchanges flowed
across the Atlantic, as did Rockefeller funds to numerous
Kaiser-Wilhelm Institutes which were scientific fronts for Nazi
eugenic and anti-Semitic ideology. Eugenical News, the official voice
of the American eugenic movement, praised Hitler for his “ideological
salvation of humanity”.
The executive secretary of the
American Eugenics Society lamented that US was “pussyfooting
around” with terminology whereas Hitler’s Germans were
“calling a spade a spade”, a sub-human a sub-human, a
“useless mouth a useless mouth”.
Nothing could
dampen the US eugenic ardour for its Nazi prodigy, not the
anti-Semitic persecution, nor the inhumane sterilisations (which
topped 200 000 by 1937 before they stopped counting), not the gassing
of 100 000 aged, mentally disabled and other “useless”
people.
After the war, however, Hitler’s “eugenicide”,
and the hideous eugenic medical experiments of Dr Josef Mengele at
Auschwitz on Jews, Russian POWs, Romany (Gypsies), homosexuals and
the mentally disabled, took the wind out of the US eugenic
sails.
Four decades of funding of racial eugenics by
capitalist wealth dried up but America’s eugenic laws did not —
for 30 post-war-years tens of thousands of Americans continued to be
forcibly sterilised, and untold others institutionalised and legally
prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws.
Seven decades into the 20th century and 70,000 Americans had been
sterilised, most of them women. Many laws still remain on the
books.
Stripped of its scientific cover, eugenics is nothing
but bigotry. [The] practice [of eugenics] is recognised as a crime
against humanity by the UN. Whilst a racist eugenic fringe lives on
(a West Coast sperm bank “caters exclusively to Americans who
desire Scandinavian sperm from select and screened Nordics”),
and whilst “corporate eugenics” conducts genetic-based
discrimination in insurance, credit and employment, geneticists now
try to understand heredity to preserve life rather than end it, and
public revulsion at the eugenic “war against the weak” is
a healthy sign of moral progress.
When the head of the Third
Reich’s eugenic ‘Race and Settlement Office’, in
the dock at the Nuremberg Trials after the war, could not understand
why the US prosecutors were after him, he quite reasonably cited the
sterilisation laws which had been passed in 29 US states and the 30
states which outlawed inter-racial marriages. He got 25 years, but
there should have been many others up there with him.
[
Date of first publication on this Website: 10
March 2004 ] [ Main heading
added by the editor ]