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WAR AGAINST THE WEAK: EUGENICS AND AMERICA'S CAMPAIGN TO CREATE A MASTER RACE
Introduction
 
Voices haunt the pages of every book. This particular book, however,
speaks for the never-born, for those whose questions have never been
heard-for those who never existed.
 
Throughout the first six decades of the twentieth century, hundreds of
thousands of Americans and untold numbers of others were not permitted
to continue their families by reproducing. Selected because of their ancestry,
national origin, race or religion, they were forcibly sterilized, wrongly
committed to mental institutions where they died in great numbers, prohibited
from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried by state bureaucrats.
In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought
not by armies with guns nor by hate sects at the margins. Rather, this pernicious
white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities,
wealthy industrialists and government officials colluding in a
racist, pseudoscientific movement called eugenics. The purpose: create a
superior Nordic race.
 
To perpetuate the campaign, widespread academic fraud combined
with almost unlimited corporate philanthropy to establish the biological
rationales for persecution. Employing a hazy amalgam of guesswork, gossip,
falsified information and polysyllabic academic arrogance, the eugenics
movement slowly constructed a national bureaucratic and juridical infrastructure
to cleanse America of its "unfit." Specious intelligence tests, colloquially
known as IQ tests, were invented to justify incarceration of a
group labeled "feebleminded." Often the so-called feebleminded were just
shy, too good-natured to be taken seriously, or simply spoke the wrong language
or were the wrong color. Mandatory sterilization laws were enacted
in some twenty-seven states to prevent targeted individuals from reproducing
more of their kind. Marriage prohibition laws proliferated throughout
the country to stop race mixing. Collusive litigation was taken to the U.S.
Supreme Court, which sanctified eugenics and its tactics.

The goal was to immediately sterilize fourteen million people in the
United States and millions more worldwide-the "lower tenth"-and then
continuously eradicate the remaining lowest tenth until only a pure Nordic
super race remained. Ultimately, some 60,000 Americans were coercively
sterilized and the total is probably much higher. No one knows how many
marriages were thwarted by state felony statutes. Although much of the
persecution was simply racism, ethnic hatred and academic elitism, eugenics
wore the mantle of respectable science to mask its true character.

The victims of eugenics were poor urban dwellers and rural "white
trash" from New England to California, immigrants from across Europe,
Blacks, Jews, Mexicans, Native Americans, epileptics, alcoholics, petty
criminals, the mentally ill and anyone else who did not resemble the blond
and blue-eyed Nordic ideal the eugenics movement glorified. Eugenics
contaminated many otherwise worthy social, medical and educational
causes from the birth control movement to the development of psychology
to urban sanitation. Psychologists persecuted their patients. Teachers stigmatized
their students. Charitable associations clamored to send those in
need of help to lethal chambers they hoped would be constructed.
Immigration assistance bureaus connived to send the most needy to sterilization
mills. Leaders of the ophthalmology profession conducted a long
and chilling political campaign to round up and coercively sterilize every
relative of every American with a vision problem. All of this churned
throughout America years before the Third Reich rose in Germany.

Eugenics targeted all mankind, so of course its scope was global.
American eugenic evangelists spawned similar movements and practices
throughout Europe, Latin America and Asia. Forced sterilization laws
and regimens took root on every continent. Each local American eugenic
ordinance or statute-from Virginia to Oregon-was promoted internationally
as yet another precedent to be emulated by the international
movement. A tightly-knit network of mainstream medical and eugenical
journals, international meetings and conferences kept the generals and
soldiers of eugenics up to date and armed for their nation's next legislative
opportunity.

Eventually, America's eugenic movement spread to Germany as well,
where it caught the fascination of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi movement.
Under Hitler, eugenics careened beyond any American eugenicist's dream.
National Socialism transduced America's quest for a "superior Nordic
race" into Hitler's drive for an "Aryan master race." The Nazis were fond
of saying "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology," and in 1934
the Richmond Times-Dispatch quoted a prominent American eugenicist as
saying, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

Nazi eugenics quickly outpaced American eugenics in both velocity and
ferocity. In the 1930s, Germany assumed the lead in the international
movement. Hitler's eugenics was backed by brutal decrees, customdesigned
IBM data processing machines, eugenical courts, mass sterilization
mills, concentration camps, and virulent biological anti-Semitism-all
of which enjoyed the open approval of leading American eugenicists and
their institutions. The cheering quieted, but only reluctantly, when the
United States entered the war in December of 1941. Then, out of sight of
the world, Germany's eugenic warriors operated extermination centers.
Eventually, Germany's eugenic madness led to the Holocaust, the destruction
of the Gypsies, the rape of Poland and the decimation of all Europe.

But none of America's far-reaching scientific racism would have risen
above ignorant rants without the backing of corporate philanthropic largess.

Within these pages you will discover the sad truth of how the scientific
rationales that drove killer doctors at Auschwitz were first concocted on
Long Island at the Carnegie Institution's eugenic enterprise at Cold Spring
Harbor. You will see that during the prewar Hitler regime, the Carnegie
Institution, through its Cold Spring Harbor complex, enthusiastically
propagandized for the Nazi regime and even distributed anti-Semitic Nazi
Party films to American high schools. And you will see the links between
the Rockefeller Foundation's massive financial grants and the German scientific
establishment that began the eugenic programs that were finished
by Mengele at Auschwitz.

Only after the truth about Nazi extermination became known did the
American eugenics movement fade. American eugenic institutions rushed
to change their names from eugenics to genetics. With its new identity, the
remnant eugenics movement reinvented itself and helped establish the
modern, enlightened human genetic revolution. Although the rhetoric and
the organizational names had changed, the laws and mindsets were left in
place. So for decades after Nuremberg labeled eugenic methods genocide
and crimes against humanity, America continued to forcibly sterilize and
prohibit eugenically undesirable marriages.

I began by saying this book speaks for the never-born. It also speaks for
the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees who attempted to flee the
Hitler regime only to be denied visas to enter the United States because of the
Carnegie Institution's openly racist anti-immigrant activism. Moreover, these
pages demonstrate how millions were murdered in Europe precisely because
they found themselves labeled lesser forms of life, unworthy of existence-a
classification created in the publications and academic research rooms of the
Carnegie Institution, verified by the research grants of the Rockefeller
Foundation, validated by leading scholars from the best Ivy League universities,
and financed by the special efforts of the Harriman railroad fortune.
Eugenics was nothing less than corporate philanthropy gone wild.

Today we are faced with a potential return to eugenic discrimination,
not under national flags or political credos, but as a function of human
genomic science and corporate globalization. Shrill declarations of racial
dominance are being replaced by polished PR campaigns and patent protections.
What eugenics was unable to accomplish in a century, newgenics
may engineer in a generation. The almighty dollar may soon decide who
stands on which side of a new genetic divide already being demarcated by
the wealthy and powerful. As we speed toward a new biological horizon,
confronting our eugenic past will help us confront the bewildering newgenic
future that awaits.

I first became interested in eugenics while researching my previous
books, The Transfer Agreement and IBM and the Holocaust. The Transfer
Agreement, published in 1984, documented the tempestuous worldwide
anti-Nazi boycott, which included vigorous efforts to stop American organizations
from funding medical research. At the time I could not understand
why Nazi medical research was so important to American corporate philanthropists.
The scope of eugenics escaped me. Then in 2000, while researching
IBM and the Holocaust-which revealed IBM's role in automating
Germany's eugenic institutions-I finally came to see that eugenics was a
life and death proposition for Europe'sJews. Yet I still didn't realize that this
bizarre cult of Nazi race science was organically linked to America.

As I explored the history of eugenics, however, I soon discovered that
the Nazi principle of Nordic superiority was not hatched in the Third Reich
but on Long Island decades earlier-and then actively transplanted to
Germany. How did it happen? Who was involved? To uncover the story I
did as I have done before and launched an international investigation. This
time, a network of dozens of researchers, mostly volunteers, working in the
United States, England, Germany and Canada unearthed some 50,000 documents
and period publications from more than forty archives, dozens of
library special collections and other repositories (see Major Sources). But
unlike the Holocaust field, in which the documentation is centralized in a
number of key archives, the information on eugenics is exceedingly decentralized
and buried deep within numerous local and niche repositories.

In the United States alone, the investigation brought my team to the
archival holdings of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, to
the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, to Truman State
University in northeastern Missouri, to numerous obscure community colleges
in the Appalachian states, and a long list of state archives, county historical
files and institutional archives where personal papers and period
materials are stored. I also spent much time in many small, private libraries
and archives, such as the one maintained by Planned Parenthood. We
examined records at the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie
Institution. There are probably two hundred important repositories in
America, many of them special collections and manuscript departments of
local libraries or universities. Because eugenics was administered on the
local level, every state probably possesses three to five sites hosting important
eugenic documentation. I only accessed a few dozen of these across
America. Much more needs to be done and American researchers will
surely be kept busy for a decade mining the information.

In England I visited the British Library, the Well come Library, the
University College of London, the Public Record Office and other key
archives. These not only provided the information on Britain's eugenic
campaigns, but also yielded copies of correspondence with American
eugenic organizations that are simply not available in the American holdings.
For example, strident propaganda pamphlets long cleansed from
American files are still stored in the British records.

Because the German and American wings collaborated so closely, the
German archives clearly traced the development of German race hygiene
as it emulated the American program. More importantly, because the
American and German movements functioned as a binary, their leaders
bragged to one another and exchanged information constantly. Therefore I
learned much about America's record by examining Reich-era files. For
instance, although the number of individuals sterilized in Vermont has
eluded researchers in that state, the information is readily available in the
files of Nazi organizations. Moreover, obscure Nazi medical literature
reveals the Nazis' understanding of their American partners. Probing the
prodigious files of Nazi eugenics took my project to the Bundesarchiv in
Berlin and Koblenz, the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, Heidelberg
University and many other repositories in Germany.

When it was finished, the journey to discover America's eugenic history
had taken me from an austere highway warehouse in Vermont, where
the state's official files are stacked right next to automotive supplies and
retrieved by forklift, to the architectonic British Library, to the massive
Bundesarchiv in Berlin-and every type of research environment in
between. Sometimes I sat on a chair in a reading room. Sometimes I poked
through boxes in a basement.

Even still, I was not prepared for the many profound built-in challenges
to eugenic research. My experiences are rooted in Holocaust investigation,
where a well-developed infrastructure is in place. Not so with eugenics. In
Holocaust research, archives facilitate unlimited speedy photocopying of
documents. The Public Record Office in London produces copies within
hours. The National Archives in Washington, D.C., allows self-service
photocopying. But the most important eugenic archive in Britain, storing
thousands of important documents, limits users to just one hundred copies
per year. America's largest eugenic archive, housing vast numbers of papers
in numerous collections, limits researchers to just four hundred copies per
year. Often the beleaguered and understaffed copy departments in these
archives needed between three and four weeks to produce the copies. One
archive asked for three months to copy a ten-page document. Fortunately, I
was able to circumvent these restrictions by deploying teams of five and ten
researchers at these archives, and by virtue of the gracious and indispensable
flexibility of archivists who continuously assisted me in this massive
project (see Acknowledgments). Only by their special efforts and indulgence
was I able to secure as many as five thousand copies from a single
archive, and reasonably quickly-thus allowing me to gain a comprehensive
view of the topic and shorten my work by years.

Another profound obstacle has been the fallacious claim by many document
custodians, in both state and private archives, that the records of
those sterilized, incarcerated and otherwise manipulated by the eugenics
movement are somehow protected under doctor-patient confidentiality
stretching back fifty to one hundred years. This notion is a sham that only
dignifies the crime. Legislation is needed to dismantle such restrictions.
No researcher should ever accept assertions by any document custodian
that such records are covered by confidentiality protections accorded to
medical procedures-whether in Nazi Germany or the United States. The
people persecuted by eugenics were not patients, they were victims. No
doctor-patient relationship was established. Most of the unfortunate souls
snared by eugenics were deceived and seized upon by animal breeders,
biologists, anthropologists, raceologists and bureaucrats masquerading as
medical men. Mengele's victims were not patients. or were those in
America who were caught up in the fraudulent science of eugenics.

In some instances, records were initially denied to me on this basis.
Fortunately, the investigative reporter only gets started when he hears the
word no. I demanded full access and was grateful when I received it. I
applaud the State of Virginia for allowing me to be the first to receive files
on the infamous sterilization of Carrie Buck; copies of those files are now
in my office.

The international scope of the endeavor created a logistical nightmare
that depended on devoted researchers scouring files in many cities. For
months, I functioned as a traffic cop, managing editor and travel coordinator
while simultaneously dispatching researchers to follow leads on both
sides of the Atlantic. On the same day that one group might be interviewing
mountain people in the hills of Virginia, another might be examining
the personal papers of a police chief in California, while another in Berlin
scanned the financial records of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to identify
American financial assistance, while still others reviewed the pamphlets of
the Eugenics Society in London.

We were as likely to scrutinize the visitor registers at the Kaiser
Wilhelm Institute's guest facility, Harnack House, to see which Americans
visited Berlin, as we were to review the mailing lists of Carnegie scientists
to see who in Germany was receiving their reports. Progress among my
researchers was exchanged by continuous use of the Internet and by the
extensive use of faxed and scanned documents. Eventually all of the documents
came together in my office in Washington. They were then copied
and arranged in chronological folders-one folder for every month of the
twentieth century. The materials were then cross-filed to trace certain
trends, and then juxtaposed against articles published month-by-month in
journals such as Eugenical News, Journal of Heredity and Eugenics Review, as
well as numerous race science publications in Nazi Germany. By pulling
anyone monthly folder I could assemble a snapshot of what was occurring
worldwide during that month.

When we were done, we had assembled a mountain of documentation
that clearly chronicled a century of eugenic crusading by America's finest
universities, most reputable scientists, most trusted professional and charitable
organizations, and most revered corporate foundations. They had
collaborated with the Department of Agriculture and numerous state agencies
in an attempt to breed a new race of Nordic humans, applying the same
principles used to breed cattle and corn. The names define power and prestige
in America: the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the
Harriman railroad fortune, Harvard University, Princeton University, Yale
University, Stanford University, the American Medical Association,
Margaret Sanger, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Robert Yerkes, Woodrow
Wilson, the American Museum of Natural History, the American Genetic
Association and a sweeping array of government agencies from the obscure
Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics to the U.S. State Department.

Next came an obsessive documentation process. Every fact and fragment
and its context was supported with black and white documents, then
double-checked and separately triple-checked in a rigorous multistage verification
regimen by a team of argumentative, hairsplitting fact-checkers.
Only then was the manuscript draft submitted to a panel of known experts
in the field from the United States, Germany, England and Poland, for a
line-by-line review. The result: behind each of the hundreds of footnotes,
there is a folder that contains the supporting documentation.

To ensure that all of our information was accurate, we also set about
verifying the work of numerous other scholars by checking their documentation.
We often asked them to provide documents from their files. In
other words, we not only documented my book, we verified other works as
well. Most of the authors graciously complied, readily faxing copies of their
documents or explaining precisely where the information could be found.
During this process, however, we discovered numerous errors in many
prior works.

For example, in one book an important speech on the value of heredity
is attributed to Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States-the
speech was actually given by Jim Wilson, president of the American
Breeders Association. I can understand how errors like this occur. Many
scholars rely on other scholars' works. Summaries of summaries of summaries
yield a lesser truth with every iteration. Except for the work of a few
brilliant world-class documenters, such as Daniel]' Kevles, Benno Miiller-
Hill, Paul Weindling and Martin Pernick, I largely considered published
works little more than leads. What's more, there is boundless information
on eugenics accumulating on the Internet, some of it very prettily presented,
much of it hysterical, and unfortunately, most of it filled with profound
errors. Hence whenever possible, I acquired primary source material
so I could determine the provable facts for myself.

When the research phase was over, I realized that less than half the
information I had assembled would even make it into the book. Frankly, I
had amassed enough information to write a freestanding book for each of
the twenty-one chapters in this volume. It was painful to pick and choose
which information would be included, but I am confident that with so
many journalists throughout America now aggressively delving into eugenics,
the field will soon be as broad and diversified as the investigations of
the Holocaust and American slavery. At least one book could be written for
each state, starting with California, which was America's most energetic
eugenic state. Critical biographies are needed for the key players. In-depth
examinations of the links between Germany and the Pioneer Fund, the
Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution as well as numerous state
officials would be welcome. The role of the Chicago Municipal Court must
be further explored.

When I began this project in 2001, many in the public were not even
aware of eugenics. Indeed, for a while my publisher did not even want me
to include the word eugenics in the title of this book. In reality, however, the
topic has been continuously explored over the past decades by several
extremely talented academics and students hailing from a range of disciplines
from biology to education. Although most were gracious and supportive,
I was surprised to find that many tended to guard their information
closely. One such author told me she didn't believe another book on eugenics
was necessary. ("It depends on how nuanced," she said with some discomfort.)
Another professor astonished me by asking for money to answer
some questions within his expertise-the first time I had encountered such
a request in thirty-five years of historical research. When I contacted a
Virginia professor who had written a dissertation decades earlier, she actually
told me she didn't think a member of the media was "qualified" to read
her dissertation. One collaborative scholarly eugenic website, ironically
funded by a federal grant, restricts media usage while permitting unrestricted
scholarly usage.

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.
It was 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, D. C.
March 15, 2003