By BRIAN CLOWES
(Editor’s Note: Brian Clowes has been director of research and training at Human Life International since 1995. For an electronic copy of more than a thousand pro-eugenics quotations, including those by Margaret Sanger, e-mail him at bclowes@hli.org.)
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“Everything must be examined from this [utilitarian] point of view and used or rejected according to its utility” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf.
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Even as the Nazi nightmare gathered strength across the Atlantic during the 1930s, the elite in the United States had already been busy for some time drawing their grand plan for humanity. This strategy culminated in a vision for the world that paralleled that of the Germans — a world without room for the “imperfect.”
German eugenicists had expressed their admiration for their American counterparts even before World War I. In 1913, German Werner Feilchenfeld wrote approvingly:
“The forceful and decisive North American does not consider the traditional moral code and does not consider the individual in order to implement what he thinks is right. After he recognizes the importance of heredity in determining mental and physical traits for the entire population, he does not hesitate to proceed from theoretical reflection to energetic practical action and to enact legislation which will lead to ennoblement of the race.”
As early as 1905, German eugenicist Dr. Alfred Ploetz opposed caring for the sick and poor because, as he asserted, it led to degeneration of the Aryan race, an attitude that paralleled Margaret Sanger’s. In the same year, Germany formally recognized eugenics as a respectable science by establishing the Society for Racial Hygiene, which Ploetz cofounded.
The American eugenics experienced its own “great leap forward” after receiving its “imprimatur” from the land’s highest court. In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its Buck v. Bell decision, upholding the enforced sterilization of poor black women.
In his majority opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote infamously: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices….Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Within the next six years, 30 states enacted laws that mandated sterilization for the poor. These laws followed the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law, promulgated by Harry H. Laughlin, director of the Eugenics Record Office. They called for the sterilization of criminals, mental patients, the retarded, the blind, deaf, diseased, and alcoholics, and dependents upon society — the homeless, orphans, and tramps.
It was not coincidental that blacks were sterilized in numbers that were grossly out of proportion to their actual representation in such “undesirable classes.”
From 1924 to the early 1970s, more than 7,500 poor men and women (almost all of them black) were forcibly sterilized in the state of Virginia alone. Of course, these operations were performed only under the most impeccable of auspices — in approved “mental health facilities” on “unwed mothers, prostitutes, petty criminals and children with disciplinary problems.”
Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer was involuntarily sterilized in 1961 by a white doctor, and coined the term “Mississippi appendectomy” to describe such involuntary sterilizations of black women.
Other laws drafted by American eugenicists mandated segregation of those with birth defects and mental disabilities in state-run institutions. Few inmates ever left these places with their reproductive organs intact — they were neutered like stray animals. In some states, all inmates who carried hereditary disabilities were sterilized. Other state regulations mandated contraceptive use by all whose family history indicated a predisposition toward serious hereditary defects.
The Church Responds. Several Christian denominations had already clearly perceived the threat that eugenics posed to humanity before the beginning of World War II, and they moved swiftly to condemn it.
The best known of these documents was the Vatican’s Decree of the Sacred Congregation of the Holy Office on Eugenics, issued on March 18, 1931. This document was released only months after Pope Pius XI’s magnificent defense of marriage in his encyclical Casti Connubii.
In question and answer format, it held that:
Question: “What is thought of the theory called ‘eugenics,’ whether positive or negative, and of the means indicated by it to improve the human race without taking into consideration neither natural or divine or ecclesiastical laws relative to marriage and individual rights?”
Answer: “The theory of `eugenics’ is to be held entirely blamable, false and condemned, in accordance with the Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti Connubii, December 31, 1930.”
Seeds of Destruction. Most people do not know that the philosophy and framework of the Nazi eugenics program were paralleled right here in the United States. In fact, the Nazis stated many times that they modeled their extermination programs upon American thinking.
In July of 1931, a member of the German Mental Hygiene Movement remarked:
“We Germans cannot totally ignore events which occur outside our borders. A whole series of nations have positively accepted that the laws of heredity do affect the development of mental abnormality and have understood the consequences of that and created [compulsory] sterilization laws. The Americans have been reproached with relentless pluck because of laws they have passed in 22 of their States.”
Next to Hitler, Ernst Rüdin was most responsible for the Nazi sterilization apparatus. He was cofounder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene and the Third Reich’s director of genetic sterilization, and wrote the Nazis’ sterilization laws.
In April 1933, Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review published extracts from a pamphlet Rüdin wrote and entitled it “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.” In this publication, he wrote that those with “occupational inefficiency, distaste for life, suicidal tendencies, cruelty, sex perversions, and grave criminal tendencies,” as well as “mental defectives” and the “feeble-minded” should all be sterilized — a number that would run into millions of Americans.
In another article, he described the situation in Germany as “proceeding towards a policy that will be in accord with the best thought of eugenicists in all civilized countries,” and asserted that sterilization of the “unfit” was a “gift” from the American eugenics movement.
In the United States, renowned philosopher H.L. Mencken urged that “a resolute attack be made on the fecundity of all the males on the lowest rung on the social ladder.”
Charles Davenport, another prominent American eugenicist, proclaimed that “our ancestors drove Baptists from Massachusetts Bay into Rhode Island, but we have no place to drive the Jews to. Also, they burned the witches, but it seems to be against the mores to burn any considerable part of our population.”
Finally, a significant number of American eugenicists actually lobbied for Adolf Hitler to be “made an honorary member of the [American] Eugenics Record Office.”
The Nazi Response. According to leading German eugenicists, Americans Madison Grant and Sanger adviser and board member Lothrop Stoddard exerted great influence “in awakening in Germany…the movement for the preservation and increase of the Nordic race.” In fact, Hitler’s closest advisers were “avid” readers of Grant and Stoddard in German publications, “years before the Third Reich.”
After voraciously consuming the works of such American eugenicists, is it any wonder that Nazis Rudolf Hess and Fritz Lenz stated simply that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology?”
But there was much more than “applied biology” and “the improvement of the race” in Nazi theory — there was a pathological loathing of the Jews.
The Nazis welcomed Henry Ford as “a great anti-Semite” primarily because of his extensive writings defaming Jews, most notably his lengthy book The International Jew: The World’s Foremost Problem. Hitler praised Ford and hung his picture in his Munich headquarters. Ford ran for president in the 1920s, and part of his platform was ridding the country of the “Jew bankers” whom he blamed for causing World War I and the Depression. On his 75th birthday, in 1938, Ford became the first American to receive Hitler’s Supreme Order of the German Eagle.
Eventually, the Nazis began to believe that eugenics could accomplish two major objectives for das Vaterland: 1) the practice could drastically cut the costs of caring for “hopeless idiots,” thereby releasing more funds for the war effort, and 2) eugenics could ensure Third Reich world domination by actively breeding a superior race of human beings, variously entitled the Master Race, the Aryan Race, and Homo Superior.
As one famous Nazi physician postulated, “The destiny of the German people was to be assembling and preserving the most valuable Aryan stocks…slowly and surely raising them to a dominant position.”
By the beginning of the Second World War, American eugenicists realized that their window of opportunity had arrived, and demanded that our own eugenics program be implemented as quickly and as widely as possible. Gen. Frederick Osborn, a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, called for the mandatory segregation of those persons with birth defects and mental disabilities in state run institutions. Even if such unfortunates recovered, a condition of their release would be mandatory sterilization.
Osborne also demanded mandatory sterilization of all those who carried hereditary disabilities (which would account for more than 20 percent of the population), and mandatory contraceptive use by all those whose family history indicated a predisposition towards serious hereditary defects (another 20 percent of the nation’s population).
A person with common sense might think that this type of thinking would have died out after the eugenics inspired horrors of World War II. Unfortunately, those who long for a man-made Utopia invariably build it at the expense of those they consider inferior to themselves.
And so, sadly, even after the Nazi Holocaust had been crushed and its principles and practices exposed, the eugenicists did not cease their work.
In fact, as the next article will show, they are busier than ever in the 21st century.
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