War Against the Weak Page 3
As I was completing my work, the public was beginning to discover the outlines of eugenics. The Richmond Times-Dispatch, Winston-Salem Journal, and several other publications and radio stations, as well as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times and American Heritage magazine, all produced exemplary articles on various aspects of eugenics. The Winston-Salem Journal series was a feat of investigative journalism. As the manuscript was being typed, the governors of Virginia, Oregon, California, North Carolina and South Carolina all publicly apologized to the victims of their states’ official persecution. Others will follow. The topic is now where it belongs, in the hands of hard-driving journalists and historians who will not stop until they have uncovered all the facts.
Now that newspaper and magazine articles have placed the crime of eugenics on the front burner, my book explains in depth exactly how this fraudulent science infected our society and then reached across the world and right into Nazi Germany. I want the full story to be understood in context. Skipping around in the book will only lead to flawed and erroneous conclusions. So if you intend to skim, or to rely on selected sections, please do not read the book at all. This is the saga of a century and can easily be misunderstood. The realities of the twenties, thirties and forties were very different from each other. I have made this request of my readers on prior books and I repeat it for this volume as well.
Although this book contains many explosive revelations and embarrassing episodes about some of our society’s most honored individuals and institutions, I hope its contents will not be misused or quoted out of context by special interests. Opponents of a woman’s right to choose could easily seize upon Margaret Sanger’s eugenic rhetoric to discredit the admirable work of Planned Parenthood today; I oppose such misuse. Detractors of today’s Rockefeller Foundation could easily apply the facts of their Nazi connections to their current programs; I reject the linkage. Those frightened by the prospect of human engineering could invoke the science’s eugenic foundations to condemn all genomic research; that would be a mistake. While I am as anxious as the next person about the prospect of out-of-control genomics under the thumb of big business, I hope every genetic advance that helps humanity fight disease will continue as fast and as furiously as possible.
This is the right place to note that virtually all the organizations I investigated cooperated with unprecedented rigor, because they want the history illuminated as much as anyone. This includes the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Max Planck Institute, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. All gave me unlimited access and unstinting assistance. These organizations have all worked hard to help the world discover their pasts and must be commended. Planned Parenthood worked with me closely day after day, searching for and faxing documents, continually demonstrating their interest in the unvarnished truth. The same can be said for numerous other corporations and organizations. This is a book of history, and corporate and philanthropic America must be commended when they cooperate in an investigation as aggressive and demanding as mine.
Indeed, of the scores of societies, corporations, organizations and governmental agencies I contacted around the world, only one obstructed my work. IBM refused me access to its files. Despite this obstruction, I was able to demonstrate that the race-defining punch card used by the SS in Nazi Germany was actually derived from one developed for the Carnegie Institution years before Hitler came to power.
This project has been a long, exhausting, exhilarating odyssey for me, one that has taken me to the darkest side of the brightest minds and revealed to me one reason why America has been struggling so long to become the country it still wants to be. We have a distance to go. Again I ask, how did this happen in a progressive society? After reviewing thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation, and pondering the question day and night for nearly two years, I realize it comes down to just one word. More than the self-validation and self-certification of the elite, more than just power and influence joining forces with prejudice, it was the corrupter of us all: it was arrogance.
EDWIN BLACK
Washington, DC
March 15, 2003
As I wrote in my 2003 Introduction, many books on the topic would follow mine, filling in the details about a given state or region, or centering on special classes of victims. I could have written twenty volumes with the research I had accumulated. But that was not possible. In the decade since War Against the Weak was published, more than a dozen good, specifically focused books have appeared. They are welcome. Dozens more are needed to fully chronicle the sagas of the many places ravaged by eugenics, from California, which led the nation in sterilization at the hands of its elite, to Peru, where in the later 1990s some 300,000 Indian women were sterilized in a program funded by $36 million in American foreign aid. More enterprise is needed to tell the plight endured by so many groups targeted for elimination, from the Deaf, considered by Alexander Graham Bell disciples to be a nemesis because they use sign language, to Native Americans, tricked by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as though they were a varmint infestation. Most researchers struggle just to grasp the tragedy and the suffering.
My task is very different. I have already identified the victims and their trail of tears, a trail too often disappearing into a fading future that suddenly turns left into oblivion. My mission is to expose who paid for these bleak episodes, who agreed to them, who made them possible, and who used his lofty status as a university scholar, a medical expert, a governor, a judge, a legislator, a prominent attorney, or a wealthy philanthropic organization to press forward on the gearshift of genocide.
Who controlled the throttle? Who paved the way? Who happily collected a toll when the caravan passed? Who escaped unscathed when the crimes were discovered?
There is much more to do here for the careful independent journalist and independent scholar, because more than a few of the gilded institutions are nervously standing inert and silent. Why? I am asked over and over. The answer is simple. Because too many of the vaulted universities and their funders were among the perpetrators and are too fearful to join the ranks of the illuminators lest they be illuminated.
Eugenics, after all, was a movement of the best and brightest, the elite and the magnified, against those perceived as weak or who became weak after being systematically sapped of their strength by junk science enshrined by the “unruly” of law. This national nightmare was not a movement of men in white sheets burning crosses on lawns at midnight. This was a shining movement of men in white lab coats and three-piece suits at the state-house, the courthouse, and the illustrious name-plated clinic. Pounding gavels, expounding fictitious facts, and propounding genocidal laws they twisted American society into a machine of genocide against a significant segment its own citizenry.
The Treaty on Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Eugenics and its mandate of family bloodline termination were repugnant enough to be deemed “genocide” from the first moments the term genocide came into use. Article 2, section D, specifies: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” In Article 3, the treaty states that among the “acts [that] shall be punishable” are “complicity in genocide.” As for who shall be punished, the Treaty specifies the perpetrators in Article 4: “Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.”
Beyond a distant horizon, justice still waits for the generations robbed of their progeny, for the never-born generations deprived of their existence. The force of justice also awaits the powerful in our past and present that made such misery happen by virtue of their ability to wage a war against the weak.
EDWIN BLACK
Washington, DC
April 02, 2012
A Note on the Text
W ar Against
the Weak utilized published and private sources spanning a century, and in several languages, and as such presented numerous textual challenges. We relied upon established style conventions as often as possible, and, when required, adapted and innovated styles. Readers may notice certain inconsistencies. Some explanation follows.
Every phrase of quoted material has remained as true as possible to the original terminology, punctuation and capitalization, even to the point of preserving archaic and sometimes offensive terms when used by the original source. No attempt was made to filter out ethnic denigrations when they appeared in period materials. Eugenicists in America called themselves eugenicists, but in Britain referred to themselves as eugenists, and sometimes the usage crossed; we used eugenicists in narrative but eugenists whenever it appeared in a specific quotation. In several instances we quoted from profoundly misspelled handwritten letters, and it was our decision to transcribe these as authentically as possible.
When referring to materials originally published in German, journals and magazines are cited by their legal name in German, such as Archiv fur Rassen- und Geseilschaftsbiologie, with the first usage including a translation in parentheses. Titles of books are referred to by their English translations; the first usage includes the original German title in parentheses. When multiple translations of a book title or organization name exist, we selected the most appropriate. We made an exception when a book’s title rose to the public awareness of a Mein Kampf We used the German for whenever possible but were compelled to use the variant fuer when it was used in American headlines.
For most points of style, this book has followed The Chicago Manual of Style. Unfortunately, not even the near-thousand pages of standards set forth in Chicago could cover all the varied forms in which primary information was received. This is especially true when dealing with electronic sources such as Internet web pages, and actual documents-new and old-reproduced in PDF formats, electronic books and other Internet sources. This is one of the first history books to incorporate widespread use of legitimate materials on the Internet. For example, we obtained copies of Papal encyclicals from the Vatican’s website, PDFs of original historical programs, and electronic books-all on the Internet. These are legitimate materials when used with extreme caution.
Citing the Internet is a profound challenge. Given the lack of style consensus, and the fact that websites are continuously updated and rearranged, it was necessary to create a new style for Internet citations. We decided to include just two key elements: the website’s home page address and the title of the document. General search engines such as Google and site-specific search engines will be the best means of locating the content of these cited pages. Naturally we retained printouts of all cited web materials.
PART ONE
From Peapod to Persecution
CHAPTER 1
Mountain Sweeps
When the sun breaks over Brush Mountain and its neighboring slopes in southwestern Virginia, it paints a magical, almost iconic image of America’s pastoral splendor. Yet there are many painful stories, long unspoken, lurking in these gentle hills, especially along the hiking paths and dirt roads that lead to shanties, cabins and other rustic encampments. Decades later, some of the victims have been compelled to speak.
In the 1930s, the Brush Mountain hill folk, like many of the clans scattered throughout the isolated Appalachian slopes, lived in abject poverty. With little education, often without running water or indoor plumbing, and possessing few amenities, they seemed beyond the reach of social progress. Speaking with the indistinct drawls and slurred vestigial accents that marked them as hillbillies, dressed in rough-hewn clothing or hand-me-downs, and sometimes diseased or poorly developed due to the long-term effects of squalor and malnutrition, they were easy to despise. They were easily considered alien. Quite simply, polite Virginia society considered them white trash.
Yet Brush Mountain people lived their own vibrant rural highlands culture. They sang, played mountain instruments with fiery virtuosity to toe-tapping rhythms, told and retold engaging stories, danced jigs, sewed beautiful quilts and sturdy clothing, hunted fox and deer, fished a pan full and fried it up.1 Most of all, they hoped for better-better health, better jobs, better schooling, a better life for their children. Hill people did produce great men and women who would increasingly take their places in modern society. But hopes for betterment often became irrelevant because these people inhabited a realm outside the margins of America’s dream. As such, their lives became a stopping place for America’s long biological nightmare.
A single day in the 1930s was typical. The Montgomery County sheriff drove up unannounced onto Brush Mountain and began one of his many raids against the hill families considered socially inadequate. More precisely, these hill families were deemed “unfit,” that is, unfit to exist in nature. On this day the Montgomery County sheriff grabbed six brothers from one family, bundled them into several vehicles and then disappeared down the road. Earlier, the sheriff had come for the boys’ sister. Another time, deputies snared two cousins.2
“I don’t know how many others they took, but they were after a lot of them,” recalled Howard Hale, a former Montgomery County supervisor, as he relived the period for a local Virginia newspaper reporter a half century later. From Brush Mountain, the sheriff’s human catch was trucked to a variety of special destinations, such as Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia. Western State Hospital, formerly known as the Western Lunatic Asylum, loomed as a tall-columned colonial edifice near a hill at the edge of town. The asylum was once known for its so-called “moral therapy,” devised by Director Dr. Francis T. Stribling, who later became one of the thirteen founding members of the American Psychiatric Association. By the time Brush Mountain hillbillies were transported there, Western housed not only those deemed insane, but also the so-called “feebleminded.”3
No one was quite sure how “feebleminded” was defined.4 No matter. The county authorities were certain that the hill folk swept up in their raids were indeed mentally-and genetically-defective. As such, they would not be permitted to breed more of their kind.
How? These simple mountain people were systematically sterilized under a Virginia law compelling such operations for those ruled unfit. Often, the teenage boys and girls placed under the surgeon’s knife did not really comprehend the ramifications. Sometimes they were told they were undergoing an appendectomy or some other unspecified procedure. Generally, they were released after the operation. Many of the victims did not discover why they could not bear children until decades later when the truth was finally revealed to them by local Virginia investigative reporters and government reformers.5
Western State Hospital in Staunton was not Virginia’s only sterilization mill. Others dotted the state’s map, including the Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded near Lynchburg, the nation’s largest facility of its kind and the state’s greatest center of sterilization. Lynchburg and Western were augmented by hospitals at Petersburg, WIlliamsburg and Marion. Lower-class white boys and girls from the mountains, from the outskirts of small towns and big city slums were sterilized in assembly line fashion. So were American Indians, Blacks, epileptics and those suffering from certain maladies-day after day, thousands of them as though orchestrated by some giant machine.6
Retired Montgomery County Welfare Director Kate Bolton recalled with pride, “The children were legally committed by the court for being feebleminded, and there was a waiting list from here to Lynchburg.” She added, “If you’ve seen as much suffering and depravity as I have, you can only hope and pray no one else goes through something like that. We had to stop it at the root.”7
“Eventually, you knew your time would come,” recalled Buck Smith about his Lynchburg experience. His name is not really Buck Smith. But he was too ashamed, nearly a half century later, to allow his real name to be used during an interview with a local Virginia reporter. “Everybody knew it. A lot of us just joked about it…. We weren’t growed up enoug
h to think about it. We didn’t know what it meant. To me it was just that ‘my time had come.”‘8
Buck vividly recounted the day he was sterilized at Lynchburg. He was fifteen years old. “The call came over the dormitory just like always, and I knew they were ready for me,” he remembered. “There was no use fighting it. They gave me some pills that made me drowsy and then they wheeled me up to the operating room.” The doctor wielding the scalpel was Lynchburg Superintendent Dr. D. L. Harrell Jr., “who was like a father to me,” continued Buck. Dr. Harrell muttered, “Buck, I’m going to have to tie your tubes and then maybe you’ll be able to go home.” Drowsy, but awake, Buck witnessed the entire procedure. Dr. Harrell pinched Buck’s scrotum, made a small incision and then deftly sliced the sperm ducts, rendering Buck sterile. “I watched the whole thing. I was awake the whole time,” Buck recalled.9
Buck Smith was sterilized because the state declared that as a feeble-minded individual, he was fundamentally incapable of caring for himself. Virginia authorities feared that if Buck were permitted to reproduce, his offspring would inherit immutable genetic traits for poverty and low intelligence. Poverty, or “pauperism,” as it was called at the time, was scientifically held by many esteemed doctors and universities to be a genetic defect, transmitted from generation to generation. Buck Smith was hardly feebleminded, and he spoke with simple eloquence about his mentality. “I’ve worked eleven years at the same job,” he said, “and haven’t missed more than three days of work. There’s nothing wrong with me except my lack of education.”10