October 5, 2003
'War Against the Weak': Here Comes the Master Race
By DANIEL J. KEVLES
WAR AGAINST THE WEAK
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.
By Edwin Black.
Illustrated. 550 pp. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows. $27.
ugenics -- the idea of manipulating human genes to the end
of improving individuals, groups or entire populations -- is strongly
associated with the Nazi programs of sterilization, euthanasia and
genocide. But during the first third of the 20th century, eugenics
movements flourished in many nations, including the United States. In
the last few years, newspaper articles have called attention to -- and
prompted official apologies for -- state-mandated sterilizations done
legally to rid society of its alleged human trash, the ''weak'' in the
title of Edwin Black's new book, notably in Virginia, North Carolina,
South Carolina, Oregon and California.
Black is the author previously of ''IBM and the Holocaust,'' a work
strongly suggesting that the company, with its punch-card machines,
knowingly assisted Hitler's brutalities. His ''War Against the Weak,''
apparently written with similar intent, is a muckraking book about a
subject incontestably awash in muck. In the vein of the genre, it is a
stew rich in facts and spiced with half-truths, exaggerations and
distortions. The most pungent ingredient is its central thesis: eugenic
doctrines and policies favoring ''Nordic superiority'' were in fact
invented in the United States, were developed in alliance with American
wealth and power, and were then exported, inspiring Hitler and
achieving their ultimate realization in the Holocaust.
Black pursues his thesis across largely familiar ground -- the eugenic
theories that attributed costly physical conditions and socially
deleterious behaviors to genetics, accounting for many of them as
expressions of ''feeble-mindedness''; the claims in the United States
that such deficiencies occurred with particularly high frequency among
African-Americans and immigrants from eastern and southern Europe; the
respectable standing of eugenic science at leading universities, state
agencies and institutions, public interest organizations and research
installations, notably the Eugenics Record Office, which was part of
what became the department of genetics at the Carnegie Institution of
Washington and which was financed in the main by the widow of the
railroad magnate E. H. Harriman and in part by grants from the
Rockefeller philanthropies. Black rightly observes that eugenic
research into heredity combined ''equal portions of gossip, race
prejudice, sloppy methods and leaps of logic, all caulked together by
elements of actual genetic knowledge to create the glitter of a genuine
science.''
The eugenics movement provided a biological rationale for the
Immigration Act of 1924, which discriminated against immigrants from
eastern and southern Europe, and for laws in a number of states that
restricted interracial marriage. It scored a major victory with the
case of Buck v. Bell in 1927, in which the United States Supreme Court,
by a vote of 8 to 1, upheld the constitutionality of Virginia's eugenic
sterilization law, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. writing for
the majority that the principle that upheld vaccination for the good of
the community's physical health could sustain cutting the fallopian
tubes for the benefit of its social health.
Black has used the considerable work on eugenics, assiduously checking
sources, including my own, and drawn on original published and archival
materials in the United States and Europe, collecting some 50,000
documents, he tells us, with the aid of numerous volunteers working in
several dozen repositories. If he covers what is in the main a
well-known story, he adds to it substantial new detail, much of it
chilling in its exposure of the shameless racism, class prejudice and
cruelties of eugenic attitudes and practices in the United States. Some
American eugenicists argued for killing the ''unfit,'' and a few indeed
practiced it by subjecting newborns to euthanasia (not a merciful death
for those in pain, Black points out, but a painless death for those
''deemed unworthy of life'').
In support of his main thesis, Black stresses that European eugenicists
were linked with their American counterparts through international
organizations, meetings, correspondence and visits several made to the
United States, some to work at the Eugenics Record Office. German
eugenicists praised American policies, research and writings and
incorporated accounts of them into their works. In ''Mein Kampf,''
Hitler himself praised America's sterilization laws and immigration
restriction act. Black also emphasizes that beginning in the 20's and
continuing well into the Nazi period, the Rockefeller Foundation
provided sizable funds for research at three eugenically oriented
research institutes in Germany. All, he writes, would ''make their mark
in the history of medical murder.''
True enough, eugenic actions were pioneered in the United States, and a
number of American eugenicists praised the Nazi sterilization law,
noting it was devoid of racial intent and robustly consistent with Buck
v. Bell. But it greatly oversimplifies matters to say that the American
example pointed Nazi Germany down the road to the Holocaust. Many
American eugenicists opposed the Nazis outright, and even the most avid
enthusiasts of sterilization turned against them after the proclamation
of the Nuremberg Laws. Black basically argues that because the mad
beast had some American markings, its chief features must have all been
bred in the United States. But as he himself acknowledges, the nations
of Europe had their own, indigenous eugenics movements. Notions of
Nordic superiority had strong, independent roots abroad, and so did
ideas of racial improvement through measures like sterilization. The
Nazis did draw on American precedents, but Black neglects to weigh the
impact of the imports against the force of native impulses.
Black writes that in the 30's refugees were denied entry to the United
States ''because of the Carnegie Institution's openly racist
anti-immigrant activism,'' ignoring the far more powerful forces,
including anti-Semitism and economic fears, that kept the gates closed.
While some Rockefeller Foundation money did go, at least indirectly, to
some anti-Semitic scientists and racially oriented research in Nazi
Germany, the foundation increasingly aimed at supporting individuals
engaged in objective investigations of the genetics of nonhuman
organisms as well as of human beings, part of a broad trend then
beginning elsewhere in Europe and in the United States to liberate
human genetics from socially prejudicial eugenics. Black deals with
these efforts dismissively, writing that the Rockefeller Foundation,
for instance, remained committed to the goal of ''creating a superior
race.''
More important, the fundamental dynamics of the eugenics movement are
only partly illuminated by compilations of its cruelties, its
philanthropic patronage and its institutional footholds. Eugenics was
an insidious doctrine, unabashed in its aim of deploying up-to-date
science to solve social problems, even if that meant writing the
ostensible dregs of society out of the American social compact. It
nevertheless attracted many adherents among the white middle class, not
only conservatives but also a number of disparate progressives,
including, for example, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and Rabbi
Stephen Wise. Despite its imperfections, Black's book does prompt us to
wonder what in medical genetics and biotechnology we are taking
socially and morally for granted today that our descendants might
indict us for tomorrow.
Daniel J. Kevles's books include ''In the Name of Eugenics:
Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity.'' He teaches history at Yale.
|