The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  After more than one hundred years of abduction, abuse, and slavery, the absence of a native culture (and, implicitly, records) in the African American population represented for Grant a sign of African inferiority. The key point for him was that the African American adoption of Anglo-Saxon culture proved its superiority.

  Similarly, Grant’s eugenics was built on a muddled version of evolution and heredity. These new ideas were being imperfectly applied in a world that had for all of recorded history been committed to the idea that some humans were superior to others. Darwin’s theory, Mendel’s science, and the implicit use of genealogy were never the real problem; it was the way they were used to give long-standing social divisions a scientific rationale. The world in which these men lived was already one of great inequity, where poor people were considered to be poor because of their own inadequacies, not because of society’s. Even Darwin made a distinction between “savage” and “civilized” races, and this was typical for his time.

  At the core of Grant’s fears and his ideology was the idea of purity and the way in which it could be tainted. This was a common preoccupation of the day, and it was compounded by the 1918 flu epidemic, which killed twenty-one million people all over the world, creating much anxiety about contagion and hygiene.

  The notion of racial purity was enshrined by law in many American states, particularly in the South, where legislation was used to segregate black people on public transportation and in schools, public restrooms, and other public places. In its most extreme version, known popularly as the “one drop” rule, race was reduced to a formula based on parentage, as Grant explained: “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.” Grant invented the term “the Nordic race” to describe his own blue-eyed, light-haired stock.

  In 1916 Grant outlined his philosophies in The Passing of the Great Race. The book was translated into German in 1925 and was much quoted by scientists in the eugenics movement there. It was also read by a young Adolf Hitler, who—so goes the story—later wrote a fan letter to Grant to tell him that The Passing of the Great Race was his Bible.

  • • •

  Madison Grant remains the darkest and most disturbing figure of turn-of-the-century American genealogy and eugenics, but the movement didn’t end with him. At the beginning of the twentieth century, eugenics societies in many states were formed to try to influence government and promote the betterment of humanity. The Eugenics Society of America held Fitter Family competitions at state fairs, which families entered by undergoing psychometric, dental, and other examinations and by filling in a Fitter Families examination form listing their “physical, mental or temperamental defects” and their “special talents, gifts, tastes or superior qualities.”

  The competitions were a little less stringent than such qualifications might suggest. In Massachusetts in 1925 a family that won the “average family cup” admitted to suffering from myopia but fortunately numbered among their special gifts mathematics, languages, literacy, and golf. The winners received a medal on which the classical, athletic-looking figures of a man and woman in flowing robes stretched out their arms to a naked toddler; above them was the inscription “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

  Of course, the celebratory focus on breeding good traits went hand in hand with concerns about not only the flood of bad traits that accompanied the huge influx of immigrants but also the declining rate of childbirth in the middle and upper classes (“the most valuable classes,” according to Madison Grant). One eugenics poster at a state fair asked: “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance, or to ‘blind’ sentiment?”

  Certainly the tendency to confuse social conditions with “essential traits” and then give them a biological explanation looked even more scientific when it was placed in a Mendelian framework. A poster about “fit” and “unfit” marriages presented the equation like this:

  Pure + Pure: Children Normal,

  Abnormal + Abnormal: Children Abnormal

  Pure + Abnormal: Children Normal But Tainted,

  Some Grandchildren Abnormal

  Tainted + Abnormal: Children 1/2 Normal But Tainted,

  1/2 Abnormal,

  Tainted + Pure: Children 1/2 Pure Normal, 1/2 Normal

  But Tainted

  Tainted + Tainted Children: Of Every Four, 1 Abnormal,

  1 Pure Normal, And 2 Tainted

  So closely knit were the ideas of trait selection in humans and in animals that the many subcommittees of the American Breeders Association, whose interests spanned humans and animals, included the Committee for Heredity of Insanity, the Committee for Heredity of Eye Defects, the Committee for Heredity of Criminality, and the Committee for Immigration. The association published a magazine, which in the third issue of 1912 included articles like “Domestication of the Fox,” “The Breeding of Winter Barleys,” and “Heredity of Feeblemindedness.” In a piece titled “A Study in Eugenic Genealogy,” the writer spoke of vigor and virtue as dominant Mendelian traits and weakness and vice as recessive. The journal included detailed family trees to illustrate the transmission of “defective strains,” which included traits like epilepsy, insanity, juvenile delinquency, and wanderlust/vagabondism.

  The neatness of Mendelian explanations—the way true pitch seemed innate, the way color blindness was genetic—made people giddy with its possibilities. Alexander Graham Bell, best known for inventing the telephone, was passionately interested in the application of heredity and eugenics but worried that the public was put off by the eugenics movement’s emphasis on the negative and advised the pursuit of positive traits. He opened a genealogical records office in his laboratory and studied hereditary deafness in Martha’s Vineyard. He became chairman of the Eugenics Records Office in New York, which was devoted to studying human longevity. Bell and his workers carefully examined the lineages of families with members who lived to be over eighty.

  Paul Popenoe, a close associate of Madison Grant, wrote extensively about America’s great eugenic future, in which genealogy would play a crucial role as nothing less than the “handmaid of evolution.” The traits recorded in a pedigree were not just “personal matters,” he argued; “upon such traits society is built; good or bad they determine the fate of our society.”

  In addition to birth and death dates, names, and relationships, Popenoe advised that genealogies should also include notations of traits, talents, and flaws. Americans should send their genealogies to a central office, where researchers could use the material to learn more about heredity and apply their findings to medicine, law, sociology, and statistics. “The alliance between eugenics and genealogy is so logical that it can not be put off much longer,” he wrote.

  Genealogists understood themselves better, experienced broader outlooks, and led worthier lives, claimed Popenoe. Society could use genealogies to make decisions about the education of children, who could be directed based on their inborn abilities (which we now know meant not the child’s abilities at all but the abilities that had been previously measured in the parents).

  Remarkably, Popenoe moved on from eugenics to invent the field of marriage counseling, in which he later worked exclusively, advising people to first choose marriage candidates based on genealogical information and only then fall in love. (A 1925 book reviewer summed up the approach: “Keep a card index of all the candidates . . . draw up a list of wifely qualifications . . . Health, Motherhood, Intelligence, Appearance, Homemaking, Disposition, Age, Family, Vivacity, Comradeship . . . assign a value of ten points to each of these . . .” Eliminate anyone whose total is less than seventy-five points.)

  From a distance Popenoe’s program is unfeeling, mechanical, and, for
all its seeming pragmatism, completely impractical. But there was grandeur in his vision too, and the way that he thought about genealogy and relationships prefigured the social-network thinking of the early twenty-first century. Genealogists saw their families not just as an “exclusive entity, centered in a name dependent on some illustrious man or men of the past; but rather as an integral part of the great fabric of human life, its warp and woof continuous from the dawn of creation and criss-crossed at each generation.” Genealogy helped people gain perspective on “the sacred thread of immortality, of which they were for a time custodian.”

  Unfortunately, some threads were more sacred than others, and if the great warp and woof of the human fabric was tattered at its edges, Popenoe advised trimming those edges off. He examined the question of the extermination of dysgenic people (“From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution. . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.”) although in the end ruled it out: “To put to death defectives or delinquents is wholly out of accord with the spirit of the times, and is not seriously considered by the eugenics movement.”

  Popenoe, like Grant, did advocate segregation and, as a useful next step for special cases, sterilization. That remedy was taken up by many states, beginning in Indiana in 1907. The first American to be forcibly surgically sterilized was seventeen-year-old Carrie Buck, who was described as belonging to the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites in the South.” Buck had one child, who had been conceived as a result of rape. Despite this, and the fact that her first-grade school report revealed a B average, she was described by the men who decided to sterilize her as promiscuous and feebleminded. Others who were subjected to this process included criminals, the blind and the deaf, orphans, the very poor, and people who were institutionalized. Between 1907 and the 1970s at least sixty thousand Americans were judged inadequate and forcibly sterilized by their states. The consequences are still playing out. In 2014, residents of North Carolina who had been sterilized by the state between 1929 and 1974 were able to file for reparation from a state fund.

  • • •

  Eugenics was taken up with great enthusiasm in Norway, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, Russia, France, Mexico, Brazil, and Japan. Many nations sought to bureaucratize human breeding and control heredity by establishing federal offices to track genealogy, like the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in the United States and the Swedish State Institute for Race Biological Investigation.

  Sterilization policies were implemented throughout the world, and everywhere the spread of eugenics was considered part of the grand project of bringing science to the masses. Much as they had been featured at American state fairs, science and eugenics were presented in other countries as a combination of education and entertainment. Women competed in eugenic beauty contests and attended hygiene exhibitions.

  In Japan in the 1920s, eugenic marriage-counseling centers were opened in many cities, some in department stores so that shoppers could browse clothing, home goods, and the latest news about race hygiene. Eugenic marriage counselors served as matchmakers too, bringing couples together if they had the right genealogy and health certification. In the absence of a certifiable match, the Japanese used detectives to scout out the genealogy of a potential partner, ensuring that any non-Japanese contribution was discovered before contracts were signed.

  There was a Eugenic Exercise/Movement Association and in 1935 a Eugenic Marriage Popularization Society, a smaller part of the Japanese Association of Race Hygiene. Eugenic journals included Jinsei-Der Mensch (“Human Life”), and eugenic marriage questionnaires were distributed in magazines. As Popenoe encouraged Americans to collect and submit their genealogies for the greater good, so Japanese women were asked to assemble an account of all their relatives, so the information could, among other things, help prevent accidental inbreeding. In 1928 the twenty-first of December was declared “Blood purity” day, and free blood tests were offered to women.

  In Germany the tangled threads of genealogy, heredity, and evolution developed along similar lines. Today people in the West tend to think of the impulses that led to World War II and the Holocaust as quite distinct from the character and preoccupations of people in the rest of the world. In fact there was much in common on both sides, especially as regards ancestry and its significance. Before World War II toxic beliefs about kinship, heredity, and race hygiene had led to mass sterilization of unwitting or unwilling people all over the world. In Germany the Nazi regime took the process to its horrifying extreme.

  Chapter 4

  The Reich Genealogical Authority

  In due course, all Volksgenosse [racial comrades] will be placed in the position of having to show proof of their ancestry. For many racial comrades, it is of vital importance to be able to show this proof as quickly as possible.

  —1939 German civil registrar’s instructions, from

  Eric Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof

  When I met seventy-three-year-old Joe Mauch, he took a slim brown book out of his black briefcase and placed it on the table. The faded image of a gold eagle sat in the middle of its cover. At the top were the words Deutsches Einheitsfamilienstammbuch. It was a German family tree book.

  The book listed Mauch’s parents, Maria Lutz and Alfons Mauch and their parents and their forebears through to the late 1700s, Johann Michael Weider to Eleonora Weiss to Balthazar Luz. They were all good Germans, Mauch said, raising his eyebrows—they had good German names and they never traveled outside the country. The Einheitsfamilienstammbuch was a family tree, a document album, and a kind of passport for the entire family. It had slots for all the family births and marriages. Official stamps certified the marriage of Mauch’s parents and the details of their parents’ marriage. Mauch and his siblings—his brother, Jürgen, and their sister, Elisabeth, who died of diphtheria when she was three years old—had a page each, certifying when and where they were born. Mauch, born “Joachim” in 1940, had four official Stuttgart stamps on his page, one with a red horse rearing back, another depicting an eagle with wings spread wide above a swastika enclosed in a circle.

  The book also contained a list of good German names for boys and girls: Joachim, Jobit, Julius, Jürgen. Essays at the front and back advised the citizens of 1930s Germany how to live productive lives. “Look,” Mauch said, pointing at an essay title, “Die Familie im Dienst der Rassenhygiene.” He said, “This word here, family in the service of Rassen, it means ‘race,’ and so ‘race hygiene.’ Keep it clean.” We looked at another essay that explained why citizens should not marry people with genetic defects lest they pass them on to their children.

  Mauch was open and thoughtful, and his conversation was punctuated by somber pauses and the occasional sweet grin that changed his whole face. His light blue eyes looked off in different directions; they both see, he explained, but his brain just won’t use what his right eye looks at. He was born in Stuttgart on a street full of apartment blocks, and four years into the Second World War, when he was three, the street was bombed. “There were two signals,” he said, “one a long, drawn-out siren, which means ‘find shelter,’ and one which went very quick, dah, dah, dah, dah. That meant that they were virtually arriving with their bombs.”

  He asked me if I’d seen the film Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Kurt Vonnegut’s novel about the bombing of Dresden. Whoever created that film, he said, must have lived through it. “The bombing raid in the film, I nearly had to walk out of the cinema. It was very realistic, and it wasn’t showing the fireworks. It showed a group of people going into this shelter underground, and then suddenly everything shakes, and then the mortar comes down, and there’s a light globe hanging there, and then it starts to swing, and then it goes out. It’s complete darkness. That was just how I remembered it.”

  On the day of the bombing, the apartment block next door to Mauch’s was hit. A service tunnel i
n the basement of Mauch’s apartment building linked it to the basement of the building next door, so after the bomb fell, Mauch recalled, they were dragging half-dead people through the tunnel into his basement. He paused. “What really got me upset was all the adults. My mother went hysterical and screamed, and for a kid I think that is not a good thing, the parents going to pieces.” They were underground for probably half an hour, and when they came out, the apartment building on the right was completely gone, and Mauch’s once-straight eyes were pointing in different directions. No one knew how it happened.

  At the time, Mauch’s brother had been sent to stay with a relative, and his father was on the Russian front. The only time Mauch met his father was when he returned home for his daughter’s funeral. Some months later Mauch’s mother, Maria, received a letter from the German government informing her that her husband was a hero, which meant that he was no longer alive. He died in a good cause, the letter explained. It did not say how.

  Mauch grew to hate Germany. He and his friends grew up amid rubble and confusion, in a nation where eleven million people were murdered and many more incarcerated in death camps. But, Mauch said, “No one would tell us what happened.” He kept asking questions, but no one gave him a good answer. “Everybody we queried, adults we called and talked to, they would always say they were goody-goodies, they had nothing to do with it.” When his mother reluctantly told him something about the horrors visited on Jews by all the good Germans, Mauch would ask, “Why didn’t you do something about it?” “Which of course is totally unfair,” he said now, smiling sadly. His mother would say, “You wouldn’t understand it.”