How the United States Manufactured Eugenics for the Nazis

The biggest idea of the 21st century – mark my words! – will be a dated neologism from the 20th. Eugenics is set for a come-back and will be the mother of all battles for the human race.

That’s why Edwin Black’s new book The War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls, 2003) is so timely. Black takes us back in depressing detail to the vast and enormously popular eugenics industry that caught the diseased imagination of the United States in the first part of the last century. An epigram - and epitaph – for this time in U.S. history could be Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious words in the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

Carrie Buck’s sad story is well known, immortalized in this judgment which has been compared to Dred Scott in its infamy. We know also that Justice Holmes, the most distinguished jurist of his generation, was that same man whose speech on “The Path of the Law” was a manifesto for positivism and the idea that law should evolve over time to meet the needs of the people. This view was opposed to the prevailing common law viewpoint of the time which believed that law should be based on absolute moral truth. The results of such flawed thinking by Holmes and others could hardly be better illustrated than in the eugenics tale that Edwin Black lays out.

I took Black’s large book away to read on vacation, and on my return to looked again at that fine 1960s movie on the trial of the Nazi doctors, Judgment at Nuremberg. Nuremberg, which is focused chiefly on the Nazi sterilization program, shows the brilliant defense offered by the Nazis’ counsel who argued over and over that they had done nothing that had not been done before in the United States. The sterilization law passed early in Hitler’s regime (and lauded, as Black notes, by American eugenicists) was almost a mirror of the model legislation that had been enacted in many states across America. Sterilization laws led to tens of thousands of forcible sterilizations of U.S. citizens, and were upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Nazis’ lawyer makes it a point to quote Justice Holmes at the American judges who are weighing the fate of his clients.

Black goes much further than Judgment at Nuremberg. He chronicles the history of eugenics in the United States noting things like the Eugenics Record Office, (based at Cold Spring Harbor and purely private despite its name) which accumulated huge quantities of “eugenic” records on unconsenting individuals. He demonstrates U.S. leadership in the worldwide eugenics movement, and the support of American statesmen for the project. Even a U.S. Secretary of State sent out the invitations to the first worldwide eugenics conferences. Blacks sets out in damning detail the intricate links between foundations such as Rockefeller and the eugenics research of the Nazis themselves.

Eugenics is an idea whose time seemed to have come in the early 20^th century. But since the Nazis liked it and took its to its logical conclusion, it soon disappeared from respectable company. Black notes that “eugenics” quickly morphed into “genetics,” and he looks ahead to “newgenics” as the Carrie Buck mindset makes a comeback in the biotech age.

Read the book as, one hundred years later, we devise our strategy for the next round in the “war against the weak.” Because we can be certain that the “Master Race” ideology, sophisticated in its science and rhetoric beyond the dreams of Holmes and Hitler, is on its way.