CHAPTER 13: Eugenicide

Murder was always an option.

Point eight of the Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section
of the American Breeders Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical
Means fir Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population
specified euthanasia as a possibility to be considered. I Of course euthanasia
was merely a euphemism-actually a misnomer. Eugenicists did not see
euthanasia as a "merciful killing" of those in pain, but rather a "painless
killing" of people deemed unworthy of life. The method most whispered
about, and publicly denied, but never out of mind, was a "lethal chamber."

The lethal chamber first emerged in Britain during the Victorian era as
a humane means of killing stray dogs and cats. Dr. Benjamin Ward
Richardson patented a "Lethal Chamber for the Painless Extinction of
Lower Animal Life" in the 1880s. Richardson's original blueprints show a
large wood- and glass-paneled chamber big enough for a Saint Bernard or
several smaller dogs, serviced by a tall slender tank for carbonic acid gas,
and a heating apparatus. In 1884 the Battersea Dogs Home in London
became one of the first institutions to install the device, and used it continuously
with "perfect success" according to a sales proposal at the time. By
the turn of the century other charitable animal institutions in England and
other European countries were also using the chamber.2

This solution for unwanted pets was almost immediately contemplated
as a solution for unwanted humans-criminals, the feebleminded and other
misfits. The concept of the lethal chamber was common vernacular by the
turn of the century. When mentioned, it needed no explanation; everyone
understood what it meant.

In 1895, the British novelist Robert Chambers penned his vision of a
horrifying world twenty-five years into the future. He wrote of a New York
where the elevated trains were dismantled and "the first Government
Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square." 0 explanation of
"Government Lethal Chamber" was offered-or necessary. Indeed, the
idea of gassing the unwanted became a topic of contemporary chitchat. In
1901, the British author Arnold White, writing in Efficiency and Empire,
chastised "flippant people of lazy mind [who] talk lightly of the 'lethal
chamber' .... "3

In 1905, the British eugenicist and birth control advocate H. G. Wells
published A Modern Utopia. "There would be no killing, no lethal chambers,"
he wrote. Another birth control advocate, the socialist writer Eden
Paul, differed with Wells and declared that society must protect itself from
"begetters of anti-social stocks which would injure generations to come. If
it [society] reject the lethal chamber, what other alternative can the socialist
state devise?"4

The British eugenicist Robert Rentoul's 1906 book, Race Culture; Or,
Race Suicide?, included a long section entitled "The Murder of Degenerates."
In it he routinely referred to Dr. D. F. Smith's earlier suggestion that
those found guilty of homicide be executed in a "lethal chamber" rather
than by hanging. He then cited a new novel whose character "advocate[d]
the doctrine of 'euthanasia' for those suffering from incurable physical diseases."
Rentoul admitted he had received many letters in support of killing
the unfit, but he rejected them as too cruel, explaining, "These [suggestions]
seem to fail to recognize that the killing off of few hundreds of
lunatics, idiots, etc., would not tend to effect a cure."5

The debate raged among British eugenicists, provoking damnation in
the press. In 1910, the eugenic extremist George Bernard Shaw lectured at
London's Eugenics Education Society about mass murder in lethal chambers.
Shaw proclaimed, "A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in
an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to
be put out of existence, simply because it wastes other people's time to look
after them." Several British newspapers excoriated Shaw and eugenics
under such headlines as "Lethal Chamber Essential to Eugenics."6

One opponent of eugenics condemned "much wild and absurd talk
about lethal chambers .... " But in another article a eugenicist writing
under the pseudonym ofVanoc argued that eugenics was needed precisely
because systematic use of lethal chambers was unlikely. "I admit the word
'Eugenics' is repellent, but the thing is essential to our existence .... It is
also an error to believe than the plans and specifications for County
Council lethal-chambers have yet been prepared."7

The Eugenics Education Society in London tried to dispel all "dark
mutterings regarding 'lethal chambers.'" Its key activist Saleeby insisted,
"We need mention, only to condemn, suggestions for 'painless extinction,'
lethal chambers of carbonic acid, and so forth. As I incessantly have to
repeat, eugenics has nothing to do with killing .... " Saleeby returned to
this time and again. When lecturing in Battle Creek, Michigan, at the First
National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914, he emphasized a vigorous
rejection of "the lethal chamber, the permission of infant mortality,
interference with [pre]-natallife, and all other synonyms for murder."8

But many British eugenicists clung to the idea. Arthur F. Tredgold was a
leading expert on mental deficiency and one of the earliest members of the
Eugenics Education Society; his academic credentials eventually won him a
seat on the Brock Commission on Mental Deficiency. Tredgold's landmark
Textbook on Mental Deficiency, first published in 1908, completely avoided
discussion of the lethal chamber. But three subsequent editions published
over the next fourteen years did discuss it, with each revision displaying
greater acceptance of the idea. In those editions Tredgold equivocated:
"We may dismiss the suggestion of a 'lethal chamber.' I do not say that
society, in self-defense, would be unjustified in adopting such a method of
ridding itself of its anti-social constituents. There is much to be said for
and against the proposal. ... " By the sixth edition, Tredgold had modified
the paragraph to read: "The suggestion [of the lethal chamber] is a logical
one .... It is probable that the community will eventually, in self-defense,
have to consider this question seriously." The next two editions edged into
outright, if limited, endorsement. While qualifying that morons need not
be put to death, Tredgold concluded that for some 80,000 imbeciles and
idiots in Britain, "it would be an economical and humane procedure were
their existence to be painlessly terminated .... The time has come when
euthanasia should be permitted .... "9

Leaders of the American eugenic establishment also debated lethal
chambers and other means of euthanasia. But in America, while the debate
began as an argument about death with dignity for the terminally ill or those
in excruciating pain, it soon became a palatable eugenic solution. In 1900,
the physician W. Duncan McKim published Heredity and Human Progress,
asserting, "Heredity is the fundamental cause of human wretchedness ....
The surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing
reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of this high privilege
[reproduction], is a gentle, painless death." He added, "In carbonic acid
gas, we have an agent which would instantaneously fulfill the need."lo

By 1903, a committee of the National Conference on Charities and
Correction conceded that it was as yet undecided whether "science may
conquer sentiment" and ultimately elect to systematically kill the unfit. In
1904, the superintendent of New Jersey's Vineland Training School, E. R.
Johnstone, raised the issue during his presidential address to the
Association of Medical Officers of American Institutions for Idiotic and
Feebleminded Persons. "Many plans for the elimination [of the feebleminded]
have been proposed," he said, referred to numerous recently published
suggestions of a "painless death." That same year, the notion of
executing habitual criminals and the incurably insane was offered to the
National Prison Association. I I

Some U.S. lawmakers considered similar ideas. Two years later, the
Ohio legislature considered a bill empowering physicians to chloroform
permanently diseased and mentally incapacitated persons. In reporting
this, Rentoul told his British colleagues that it was Ohio's attempt to "murder
certain persons suffering from incurable disease." Iowa considered a
similar measure.12

By 1910, the idea of sending the unfit into lethal chambers was regularly
bandied about in American sociological and eugenic circles, causing a
debate no less strident than the one in England. In 1911, E. B. Sherlock's
book, The Feebleminded: a guide to study and practice, acknowledged that "glib
suggestions of the erection of lethal chambers are common enough .... "
Like others, he rejected execution in favor of eugenic termination of bloodlines.
"Apart from the difficulty that the provision of lethal chambers is
impracticable in the existing state law ... ," he continued, "the removal of
them [the feebleminded] would do practically nothing toward solving the
chief problem with the mentally defective set ... , the persistence of the
obnoxious stoCk."13

But other eugenicists were more amenable to the idea. The psychologist
and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard seemed to almost express regret that
such proposals had not already been implemented. In his famous study, The
Knllikak Family, Goddard commented, "For the low-grade idiot, the loathsome
unfortunate that may be seen in our institutions, some have proposed
the lethal chamber. But humanity is steadily tending away from the possibility
of that method, and there is no probability that it will ever be practiced."
Goddard pointed to familywide castration, sterilization and segregation as
better solutions because they would address the genetic source. 14

In 1912, Laughlin and others at the Eugenics Section of the American
Breeders Association considered euthanasia as the eighth of nine options.
Their final report, published by the Carnegie Institution as a two-volume
bulletin, enumerated the "Suggested Remedies" and equivocated on
euthanasia. Point eight cited the example of ancient Sparta, fabled for
drowning its weak young boys in a river or letting them die of exposure to
ensure a race of warriors. Mixing condemnation with admiration, the
Carnegie report declared, "However much we deprecate Spartan ideals and
her means of advancing them, we must admire her courage in so rigorously
applying so practical a system of selection .... Sparta left but little besides
tales of personal valor to enhance the world's culture. With euthanasia, as
in the case of polygamy, an effective eugenical agency would be purchased
at altogether too dear a moral price."15

William Robinson, a New York urologist, published widely on the topic
of birth control and eugenics. In Robinson's book, Eugenics, Marriage and
Birth Control (practical Eugenics), he advocated gassing the children of the
unfit. In plain words, Robinson insisted: "The best thing would be to gently
chloroform these children or to give them a dose of potassium cyanide."
Margaret Sanger was well aware that her fellow birth control advocates
were promoting lethal chambers, but she herself rejected the idea completely.
"Nor do we believe," wrote Sanger in Pivot of Civilization, "that the
community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny
resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding."16

Still, American eugenicists never relinquished the notion that America
could bring itself to mass murder. At the First National Conference on Race
Betterment, University of Wisconsin eugenicist Leon]. Cole lectured on
the dysgenic effects of charity and medicine on eugenic progress. He made a
clear distinction between Darwin's concept of natural selection and the
newer idea of simple "selection." The difference, Cole explained, "is that
instead of being natural selection it is now consciousselection on the part of
the breeder. ... Death is the normal process of elimination in the social
organism, and we might carry the figure a step further and say that in prolonging
the lives of defectives we are tampering with the functioning of the
social kidneys!"17

Paul Popenoe, leader of California's eugenics movement and coauthor of
the widely-used textbook Applied Eugenics, agreed that the easiest way to
counteract feeblemindedness was simple execution. "From an historical point
of view," he wrote, "the first method which presents itself is execution .... Its
value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated."18

Madison Grant, who functioned as president of the Eugenics Research
Association and the American Eugenics Society, made the point clear in
The Passing of the Great Race. "Mistaken regard for what are believed to be
divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to
prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of
such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of
nature require the obliteration of the unfit and human life is valuable only
when it is of use to the community or race."19

On ovember 12, 1915, the issue of eugenic euthanasia sprang out of
the shadows and into the national headlines. It began as an unrelated medical
decision on Chicago's Near North Side. At 4 A.M. that day, a woman
named Anna Bollinger gave birth at German-American Hospital. The baby
was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal
abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians
awakened Dr. Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came
in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement
over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was
too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The
method-denial of treaunent.20

Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Anna Bollinger's, heard the news
and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named
Allan, alone in a bare room. He was naked and appeared to have been lying
in one position unattended. Walsh urgently called for Haiselden, "to beg
that the child be taken to its mother," and dramatically recalled, "It was condemned
to death, and I knew its mother would be its most merciful judge. "21

Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding
treaunent. "It was not a monster-that child," Walsh later told an inquest.
"It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant
lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. She kissed
his forehead. "I knew," she recalled, "if its mother got her eyes on it she
would love it and never permit it to be left to die." Begging the doctor
once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling
has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate and
save it?"22

Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well."
He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in
Chicago, and now chief of the hospital's medical staff. He was also an
ardent eugenicist.23

Chicago's health commissioner, Dr. John Dill Robertson, learned of the
deliberate euthanasia. He went to the hospital and told Haiselden he did
not agree that "the child would grow up a mental defective." He later recollected,
"I thought the child was in a dying condition, and I had doubts
that an operat>m then would save it. Yet I believed it had one chance in
100,000, and I advised Dr. Haiselden to give it this one chance." But
Haiselden refused.24

Quiet euthanasia of newborns was not uncommon in Chicago. Haiselden,
however, publicly defended his decision to withhold treatment as a
kind of eugenic expedient, throwing the city and the nation into moral turmoil
amid blaring newspaper headlines. An inquest was convened a few
days later. Some of Haiselden's most trusted colleagues were impaneled on
the coroner's jury. Health Commissioner Robertson testified, "I think it
very wrong not to save life, let that life be what it may. That is the function
of a physician. I believe this baby might have grown up to be an average
man .... I would have operated and saved this baby's life .... "25

At one point Haiselden angrily interrupted the health commissioner's
testimony to question why he was being singled out when doctors throughout
Chicago were routinely killing, on average, one baby every day, under
similar circumstances. Haiselden defiantly declared, "I should have been
guilty of a graver crime if! had saved this child's life. My crime would have
been keeping in existence one of nature's cruelest blunders." A juror shot
back, "What do you mean by that?" Haiselden responded, "Exactly that. I
do not think this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I
know it."26

After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled, "We believe that a
prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the
child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have
become mentally or morally defective." The doctor jurors concluded that the
child had at least a one-in-three chance-some thought an "even chance"-of
surviving. But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional
rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child.
The doctor was released unpunished, and efforts by the illinois attorney general
to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor.27

The medical establishment in Chicago and throughout the nation was
rocked. The Chicago Tribune ran a giant banner headline across the width of
its front page: "Baby Dies; Physician Upheld." One reader in Washington,
D.C., wrote a letter to the editor asking, "Is it not strange that the whole
country should be so shaken, almost hysterical, over the death of a babe
never consciously alive ... ? " But the nation was momentarily transfixed.28

Haiselden considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for
eugenics. "Eugenics? Of course it's eugenics," he told one reporter. On
another occasion he remarked, "Which do you prefer-six days of Baby
Bollinger or seventy years ofJukes?"29

Emboldened, Haiselden proudly revealed that he had euthanized other
such newborns in the past. He began granting high-profile media interviews
to advertise his determination to continue passively euthanizing
infants. Within two weeks, he had ordered his staff to withhold treatment
from several more deformed or birth-defected infants. Haiselden would
sometimes send instructions via cross-country telegraph while on the lecture
tour that arose from his eugenic celebrity. Other times he would handle
it personally, like the time he left a newly delivered infant's umbilical
cord untied and let it bleed to death. Sometimes he took a more direct
approach and simply injected newborns with opiates.3o

The euthanasia of Allan Bollinger may have begun as one doctor's controversial
professional decision, but it immediately swirled into a national
eugenic spectacle. Days after the inquest ruling, The Independent, a Hearst
weekly devoted to pressing issues of the day, ran an editorial asking "Was
the Doctor Right?" The Independent invited readers to sound off. In a special
section, The Independent published supportive letters from prominent
eugenicists, including Davenport himself. "If the progress of surgery,"
wrote Davenport, "is to be used to the detriment of the race ... it may conceivably
destroy the race. Shortsighted they who would unduly restrict the
operation of what is one of ature's greatest racial blessings-death."31

Haiselden continued to rally for eugenic euthanasia with a six-week
series in the Chicago American. He justified his killings by claiming that
public institutions for the feebleminded, epileptic and tubercular were
functioning as lethal chambers of a sort. After clandestinely visiting the
Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded at Lincoln, Illinois, Haiselden
claimed that windows were deliberately left open and unscreened, allowing
drafts and infecting flies to swarm over patients. He charged that Lincoln
consciously permitted "flies from the toilets, garbage and from the eruptions
of patients suffering from acute and chronic troubles to go at will over
the entire institution. Worse still," he proclaimed, "I found that inmates
were fed with the milk from a herd of cattle reeking with tuberculosis."32

At the time, milk from cattle with tuberculosis was a well-known
cause of infection and death from the disease.33 Lincoln maintained its
own herd of seventy-two cows, which produced about 50,000 gallons of
milk a year for its own consumption. Ten diseased cows had died within
the previous two years. State officials admitted that their own examinations
had determined that as many as half of the cows were tubercular, but
there was no way to know which ones were infected because "a tubercular
cow may be the fattest cow in the herd." Lincoln officials claimed that
their normal pasteurization "by an experienced employee" killed the
tuberculosis bacteria. They were silent on the continuous handling of the
milk by infected residents.34

Medical watchdogs had often speculated that institutions for the feebleminded
were really nothing more than slow-acting lethal chambers. But
Haiselden never resorted to the term lethal chamber. He called such institutions
"slaughterhouses. "35

In tuberculosis colonies, residents continuously infected and reinfected
each other, often receiving minimal or no treatment. At Lincoln, the
recently established tuberculosis unit housed just forty beds for an estimated
tubercular population of hundreds. Lincoln officials asserted that
only the most severely infected children were placed in that ward. They
stressed that other institutions for the feebleminded recorded much higher
mortality rates, some as high as 40 percent.36

Eugenicists believed that when tuberculosis was fatal, the real culprit
was not bacteria, but defective genes. The ERO kept special files on mortality
rates resulting from hereditary tuberculosis, compiled by the Belgian
eugenicist Govaerts and othersY

Tuberculosis was an omnipresent topic in textbooks on eugenics.
Typical was a chapter in Davenport's Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911).
He claimed that only the submerged tenth was vulnerable. "The germs are
ubiquitous .... Why do only 10 percent die from the attacks of this parasite?
... It seems perfectly plain that death from tuberculosis is the result of
infection added to natural and acquired non-resistance. It is then highly
undesirable that two persons with weak resistance should marry .... "
Popenoe and Johnson's textbook, Applied Eugenics, devoted a chapter to
"Lethal Selection," which operated "through the destruction of the individual
by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold,
or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency."38

Some years earlier, the president of the National Conference on Charities
and Correction had told his institutional superintendents caring for the
feebleminded, "We wish the parasitic strain ... to die out." Even an article
in Institution Quarterly, Illinois's own journal, admitted, "it would be an act
of kindness to them, and a protection to the state, if they could be killed."39

No wonder that at one international conference on eugenics, Davenport
proclaimed without explanation from the podium, "One may even
view with satisfaction the high death rate in an institution for low grade
feeble-minded, while one regards as a national disaster the loss of. .. the
infant child of exceptional parents."40

Haiselden himself quipped, "Death is the Great and Lasting Disinfectant."
41

Haiselden's accusations of deliberate passive euthanasia by neglect and
abuse could neither be verified nor dismissed. Lincoln's understaffed,
overcrowded and decrepit facility consistently reported staggering death
rates, often as high as 12 percent per year. In 1904, for example, 109 of its
epileptic children died, constituting at least 10 percent and probably far
more of its youth population; cause of death was usually listed as "exhaustion
due to epileptic seizures." Between 1914 and 1915, a bout of dysentery
claimed eight patients; "heat exhaustion" was listed as the cause.
During the same period, four individuals died shortly after admission
before any preliminary examination at all; their deaths were categorized as
"undetermined."42

For some of its most vulnerable groups, Lincoln's death rate was particularly
high. As many as 30 percent of newly admitted epileptic children
died within eighteen months of admission. Moreover, in 1915, the overall
death rate among patients in their first two years of residence jumped from
4.2 percent to 10 percent.43

Tuberculosis was a major factor. In 1915, Lincoln reported that nearly
all of its incoming patients were designated feebleminded; roughly 20
percent were classified as epileptics; and some 27 percent of its overall
population were "in the various stages of tubercular involvement." No
isolation was provided for infected patients until the forty-bed tuberculosis
unit opened. Lincoln officials worried that the statistics were "likely to
leave the impression that the institution is a 'hot-bed' for the spread of
tuberculosis." Officials denied this, explaining that many of the children
came from filthy environments, and "the fact that feebleminded children
have less resistance, account(s) for the high percentage of tuberculosis
found among them."44

Lincoln officials clearly accepted the eugenic approach to feeblemindedness
as gospel. Their reports and explanations were laced with scientific
quotations on mental deficiency from Tredgold, who advocated euthanasia
for severe cases, and Barr, who extolled the wisdom of the Kansas castrations.
Lincoln officials also made clear that they received many of their
patients as court-ordered institutionalizations from the Municipal Court of
Chicago; as such, they received regular guidance from the court's supervising
judge, Harry Olson. Eugenical News praised Olson for operating the
court's psychopathic laboratory, which employed Laughlin as a special consultant
on sterilization. Olson was vital to the movement and hailed by
Eugenical News as "one of its most advanced representatives." In 1922,
Olson became president of the Eugenics Research Association.45

Moreover, staff members at Lincoln were some of the leading eugenicists
in Illinois. Lincoln psychologist Clara Town chaired the Eugenics
Committee of the Illinois State Commission of Charities and Corrections.
Town had helped compile a series of articles on eugenics and feeblemindedness,
including one by her friend Henry H. Goddard, who had invented
the original classifications of feeblemindedness. One reviewer described
Town's articles as arguments that there was little use in caring for the institutionalized
feebleminded, who would die anyway if left in the community;
caring for them was little more than "unnatural selection."46

For decades, medical investigators would question how the death rates
at asylums, including the one in Lincoln, Illinois, could be so high. In the
1990s, the average life expectancy for individuals with mental retardation
was 66.2 years. In the 1930s, the average life expectancy for those classified
as feebleminded was approximately 18.5 years. Records suggest that a disproportionate
percentage of the feebleminded at Lincoln died before the
age of tenY

Haiselden became an overnight eugenic celebrity, known to the average
person because of his many newspaper articles, speaking tours, and his outrageous
diatribes. In 1917, Hollywood came calling. The film was called
The Black Stork. Written by Chicago American reporter Jack Lait, it was produced
in Hollywood and given a massive national distribution and promotion
campaign. Haiselden played himself in a fictionalized account of a
eugenically mismatched couple who are counseled by Haiselden against
having children because they are likely to be defective. Eventually the
woman does give birth to a defective child, whom she then allows to die.
The dead child levitates into the waiting arms of Jesus Christ. It was unbridled
cinematic propaganda for the eugenics movement.48

In many theaters, such as the LaSalle in Chicago, the movie played continuously
from 9 A.M. until 11 P.M. National publicity advertised it as a
"eugenic love story." Sensational movie posters called it a "eugenic photoplay."
One advertisement quoted Swiss eugenicist Auguste Forel's warning:
"The law of heredity winds like a red thread through the family history of
every criminal, of every epileptic, eccentric and insane person. Shall we sit
still ... without applying the remedy?" Another poster depicted Haiselden's
office door with a notice: "BABIES NOT TREATED." In 1917, a display
advertisement for the film encouraged: "Kill Defectives, Save the Nation
and See 'The Black Stork.'''49

The Black Stork played at movie theaters around the nation for more
than a decade. 50

Gassing the unwanted, the lethal chamber and other methods of
euthanasia became a part of everyday American parlance and ethical debate
some two decades before President Woodrow Wilson, in General Order 62,
directed that the "Gas Service" become the "Chemical Warfare Service,"
instructing them to develop toxic gas weapons for world war. The lethal
chamber was a eugenic concept more than two decades before Nevada
approved the first such chamber for criminal executions in 1921, and then
gassed with cyanide a Chinese-born murderer, the first such execution in the
world. Davenport declared that capital punishment was a eugenic necessity.
Popenoe's textbook, Applied Eugenics, listed execution as one of nine suggested
remedies for defectives-without specifying criminals. 5 I

In the first decades of the twentieth century, America's eugenics movement
inspired and spawned a world of look-alikes, act-alikes and thinkalikes.
The U.S. movement also rendered scientific aid and comfort to
undisguised racists everywhere, from Walter Plecker in Virginia right
across Europe. American theory, practice and legislation were the models.
In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, each
clique of raceological eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles
into national life; perhaps more importantly, they could always point
to recent precedents established in the United States.

Germany was no exception. German eugenicists had formed academic
and personal relationships with Davenport and the American eugenic establishment
from the turn of the century. Even after World War I, when
Germany would not cooperate with the International Federation of Eugenic
Organizations because of French, English and Belgian involvement, its
bonds with Davenport and the rest of the U.S. movement remained strong.
American foundations such as the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller
Foundation generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands
of dollars, even as Americans stood in breadlines. 52

Germany had certainly developed its own body of eugenic knowledge
and library of publications. Yet German readers still closely followed
American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced
sterilization, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia.
As America's elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally
unfit as "bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman," a superior race
of Nordics was increasingly seen as the final solution to the globe's eugenic
problems.53

America had established the value of race and blood. In Germany, the
concept was known as Rasse und Blut.

U.S. proposals, laws, eugenic investigations and ideology were not
undertaken quietly out of sight of German activists. They became inspirational
blueprints for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based
hatemongers, be they white-coated doctors studying Eugenical News and
attending congresses in New York, or brown-shirted agitators waving banners
and screaming for social upheaval in the streets of Munich.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. He
was an extreme nationalist who also considered himself a race biologist and
an advocate of a master race. He was willing to use force to achieve his
nationalist racial goals. His inner circle included Germany's most prominent
eugenic publisher. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob
action. 54While in prison, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks,
which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American raceological
stalwarts.55 Moreover, he closely followed the writings of Leon
Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant,
who extolled the ordic race and bemoaned its corruption by Jews,
egroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes.
The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail. 56

In The Passing of the Great Race, Madison Grant wrote: "Mistaken
regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in
the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective
infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no
value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of
the unfit and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community
or race."57

One day in the early 1930s, AES president Whitney visited the home of
Grant, who was at the time chairing a eugenic immigration committee.
Whitney wanted to show off a letter he had just received from Germany,
written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political
scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from
the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race.
The fan letter stated that Grant's book was "his Bible."58

The man writing both letters to the American eugenic leaders would
soon burn and gas his name into the blackest corner of history. He would
duplicate the American eugenic program-both that which was legislated
and that which was only brashly advocated-and his group would consistently
point to the United States as setting the precedents for Germany's
actions. And then this man would go further than any American eugenicist
ever dreamed, further than the world would ever tolerate, further than
humanity will ever forget.

The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.59

TOP
Francis Galton's original
scrap of paper inventing the
term eugenics. UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE LO, DON ARCHIVES

BOTTOM LEFT
Gregor Mendel, discoverer
of the principles of heredity.
AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY

BOTTOM RIGHT
Francis Galton, father
of eugenics. UNIVERSITY
COLLEGE LONDON ARCHIVES

First Race Betterment Conference Banquet, 1914. AMERICAN PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Chicago Tribune report of Dr. Harry Haiselden's infant euthanasia, November 1915.
COURTESY OF MARTIN PERNICK

TOP
Movie industry ad for
The Black Stork, April 1917.
COURTESY OF MARTIN
PERNICK

BOTTOM
Image from The Black Stork
depicting a euthanized baby
floating to Jesus. "ARE YOU
FIT TO MARRY" PRESERVATION
FUNDED BY THE UNIVERSITY
OF MICHIGAN HISTORICAL
FILM COLLECTION; COURTESY
OF MARTIN PERNICK AND
JOHN ALLEN

RIGHT
Harry H. Laughlin
PICKLER MEMORIAL LIBRARY

Charles B. Davenport leads a training session with field workers at the ERO, 1913.
COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ARCHIVE

Harry H. Laughlin and Charles B. Davenport pose with ERO field workers, 1914.
COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ARCHIVE

Eugenics Record Office files. COLD SPRING HARBOR LABORATORY ARCHIVE

Exhibit poster
showing
dwellings of
the so-called
Tribe of Ishmael.
AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY

Exhibit: "Some
people are born
to be a burden
on the rest,"
circa 1926.
AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY

Exhibit poster:
"Marriages, Fit
and Unfit."
AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY

ERO copy of the September
1910 edition of Archiv fur
Rassen- und Gesellschafts-
Biologie, featuring articles by
German eugenics founding
father Alfred Ploetz, Ernst
Rudin (who later became president
of the International
Federation of Eugenic
Organizations), and Roderick
Plate (who would become a
demographic and statistical
expert for Nazi killer Adolf
Eichmann). AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

Eugenics, March 1929 edition,
featuring articles by Virginia racist
Walter Plecker and birth control
advocate Margaret Sanger.
VERMONT STATE PUBLIC
RECORDS DIVISION

Carrie Buck standing in a park, date unknown.
AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Code list for IBM
Hollerith punch card
system used in the
Jamaica Race Crossing
Study, 1928. AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY

TOP LEFT
Margaret Sanger
PLANNED PARENTHOOD
FEDERATION

TOP RIGHT
ERO's copy of
German eugenicist
Erwin Baur
photograph.
AMERICAN
PHILOSOPHICAL
SOCIETY

BOTTOM
Ernst Rudin,
director of the
Kaiser Wilhelm
Institute for
Anthropology,
Human Heredity
and Eugenics. MAX
PLANCK INSTITUT
FUR PYSCHIATRIE,
HISTORISCHES
ARCHIV DER KLINIK

Edwin Katzen-Ellenbogen at Buchenwald with a warm hat he claimed he never wore.
NATIONAL ARCHIVES

TOP LEFT
Nazi Interior Minister
Wilhelm Frick propagandizing
for forced sterilization
in Eugenical News,
March-April 1934.
AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

TOP RIGHT
Lavish praise for and
photos of "Verschuer's
Institute" in Eugenical
News, June 1936.
AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

BOTTOM
Enthusiastic essay about
Nazi breeding experiments
in Journal of
Heredity, 1942.
AUTHOR'S COLLECTION

Human Betterment Foundation Annual Report for 1935 citing a letter from
board member C. M. Goethe to racist eugenicist E. S. Gosney, bragging: "You
will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the
opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making
program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated
by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment
Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the
rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60
million people." VERMONT STATE PUBLIC RECORDS DIVISION

ABOVE AND BELOW, LEFT
Nazi eugenicist Dr. Otrnar Freiherr von Verschuer examining twins; his assistant, Josef
Mengele, continued the experiments at Auschwitz. MAX PLANCK GESELLSCHAFT ARCHIV

Auschwitz's murderous
doctor, Josef Mengele.
AUSCHWITZ ARCHIV

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