A Troublesome Inheritance

by Nicholas Wade

  In the 1927 case, known as Buck v. Bell, the Supreme Court found for the state, with only one dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, endorsed without reservation the eugenicists’ credo that the offspring of the mentally impaired were a menace to society.

  “It is better for the world,” he wrote, “if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

  Eugenics, having started out as a politically impractical proposal for encouraging matches among the well-bred, had now become an accepted political movement with grim consequences for the poor and defenseless.

  The first of these were sterilization programs. At the urging of Davenport and his disciples, state legislatures passed programs for sterilizing the inmates of their prisons and mental asylums. A common criterion for sterilization was feeblemindedness, an ill-defined diagnostic category that was often identified by knowledge-based questions that put the ill educated at particular disadvantage.

  Eugenicists perverted intelligence tests into a tool for degrading people. The tests had been first developed by Alfred Binet to recognize children in need of special educational help. The eugenics movement used them to designate people as feebleminded and hence fit for sterilization. Many of the early tests probed knowledge, not native wit. Questions like “The Knight engine is used in the: Packard/Stearns/Lozier/Pierce Arrow” or “Becky Sharp appears in: Vanity Fair/Romola/A Christmas Carol/Henry IV” were heavily loaded against those who had not received a particular kind of education. As Kevles writes, “The tests were biased in favor of scholastic skills, and the outcome was dependent upon the educational and cultural background of the person tested.” 15 Yet tests like these were used to destroy people’s hopes of having children or deny them entry into military service.

  Up until 1928, fewer than 9,000 people had been sterilized in the United States, even though the eugenicists estimated that up to 400,000 citizens were “feeble minded.” 16 After the Buck v. Bell decision, the floodgates opened. By 1930, 24 states had sterilization laws on their books, and by 1940, 35,878 Americans had been sterilized or castrated.17

  Eugenicists also began to influence the nation’s immigration laws. The 1924 Immigration Act pegged each country’s quota to the proportion of its nationals present in the 1890 census, a reference point later changed to the 1920 census. The intent and effect of the law was to increase immigration from Nordic countries and restrict people from southern and eastern Europe, including Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia. In addition, the act barred all immigration from most East Asian countries. As Congressman Robert Allen of West Virginia explained during the floor debate, “The primary reason for restriction of the alien stream . . . is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.” 18

  The eugenicists had inspectors installed in the major capitals of Europe to screen prospective immigrants. Almost a tenth were judged to be physically or mentally defective. The inspectorate collapsed after a few years because of its expense, but its preferences lingered on in the minds of U.S. consuls. When Jews in increasing numbers tried to flee Germany after 1936, U.S. consuls refused to grant visas to them and other desperate refugees.19

  Many supporters of the 1924 Immigration Act were influenced by a book called The Passing of the Great Race. Its author, Madison Grant, was a New York lawyer and conservationist who helped found the Save the Redwoods League, the Bronx Zoo, Glacier National Park and Denali National Park. Despite his lack of scholarly credentials, Grant was powerful in anthropological circles and clashed frequently with Franz Boas, the founder of American social anthropology and a champion of the idea that significant differences between societies are cultural, not biological, in origin. Grant tried to get Boas fired from his position as chair of the anthropology department at Columbia University and fought a losing campaign with him over control of the American Anthropological Association.

  Grant’s beliefs were starkly racist and eugenic. He considered that Europeans, based on the skull and other physical traits, consisted of three races, which he called Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean. The Nordics, with their brown or blond hair and blue or pale eyes, were the superior type, in part because the harsh northern climate in which they evolved “must have been such as to impose a rigid elimination of defectives through the agency of hard winters and the necessity of industry and foresight in providing the year’s food, clothing and shelter during the short summer.”

  It followed that “such demands on energy if long continued would produce a strong, virile and self-contained race which would inevitably overwhelm in battle nations whose weaker elements had not been purged.” 20

  England’s decline was due to the “lowering proportion of its Nordic blood and the transfer of political power from the vigorous Nordic aristocracy and middle classes to the radical and labor elements, both largely recruited from the Mediterranean type,” Grant wrote. The “master race” was threatened by the same dilution in the United States: “Apparently America is doomed to receive in these later days the least desirable classes and types from each European nation now exporting men.”

  Emma Lazarus saw the United States as a beacon of hope for the refugees from Europe’s savage wars and hatreds. Grant had a less expansive vision to offer: “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss. If the Melting Pot is allowed to boil without control and we continue to follow our national motto and deliberately blind ourselves to all ‘distinctions of race, creed or color,’ the type of native American of Colonial descent will become as extinct as the Athenian of the age of Pericles, and the Viking of the days of Rollo.” 21

  Grant’s book was little read by the 1930s, when Americans began to turn against eugenic ideas. But its shaping of the 1924 Immigration Act was not the least of its malignant effects. Grant received a fan letter one day from an ardent admirer who had incorporated many ideas from The Passing of the Great Race into a work of his own. “The book is my Bible,” the writer assured Grant. Grant’s fan, the author of Mein Kampf, was Adolf Hitler.22

  The drift toward eugenics was not inexorable. In England, eugenic ideas never left the realm of theory. The Galtonian version of eugenics at first attracted a wide following among the intelligentsia, including the playwright George Bernard Shaw and social radicals such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Winston Churchill, then home secretary, told eugenicists during discussion of the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 that Britain’s 120,000 citizens deemed feebleminded “should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.”

  But Parliament did not favor sterilization. In 1931 and 1932 the Eugenics Society managed to get bills introduced to allow voluntary sterilization, but they went nowhere. There was no taste for such extreme measures and, in any case, surgical sterilization of anyone, even with the person’s consent or that of a court-appointed guardian, would have been considered a criminal act under English law.

  The Eugenics Society in Britain had far less success in influencing public opinion than Davenport’s eugenic lobby did in the United States. One reason was that most English scientists, after an initial infatuation with Galton’s ideas, turned against eugenics, particularly the kind being promoted by Davenport.

  Davenport believed that ill-defined traits such as “shiftlessness” or “feeblemindedness” were caused by single genes and had the simple patterns of inheritance that Mendel had described in his experimental pea plants. But complex behavioral traits are generally gove
rned by many genes acting in concert. While a Mendelian trait could in principle be almost eliminated by sterilizing its carriers, were it ethical to do so, complex traits are much harder to influence in this way.

  A 1913 article by a member of the Galton laboratory, David Heron, attacked certain American work for “careless presentation of data, inaccurate methods of analysis, irresponsible expression of conclusions and rapid change of opinion.” Many recent contributions to the subject, in the writer’s view, threatened to place eugenics “entirely outside the pale of true science.” 23

  The English critics were correct about the quality of Davenport’s science, although it continued to hold sway in the United States for many years more. When the Carnegie Institution got around to obtaining an objective review of Davenport’s work at the Eugenics Record Office in 1929, its reviewers too found that the office’s data were worthless. A second review committee concluded in 1935 that eugenics was not a science and that the Eugenics Record Office “should devote its entire energies to pure research divorced from all forms of propaganda and the urging or sponsoring of programs for social reform or race betterment such as sterilization, birth control, inculcation of race or national consciousness, restriction of immigration, etc.”

  By 1933, eugenics had reached a fateful turning point. In both England and the United States, scientists had first embraced the idea and then turned against it, followed by their respective publics. Eugenics might have withered to a mere footnote in history if scientists in Germany had followed their colleagues in rejecting eugenic ideas. Hitler’s rise to power foreclosed any such possibility.

  German eugenicists kept in close touch with their American colleagues both before and after the First World War. They saw that American eugenicists favored Nordic races and sought to keep the gene pool unsullied. They watched with keen interest as many state legislatures in the United States set up programs for sterilizing the mentally disabled, and as Congress changed the immigration laws to favor immigrants from northern Europe over other regions of the world.

  U.S. eugenic laws and ideology “became inspirational blueprints for Germany’s rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers,” wrote the author Edwin Black.24 Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and Germany’s eugenics program quickly got under way. In the Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny, decreed on July 14, 1933, Germany identified nine categories of people to be sterilized—the feebleminded and those with schizophrenia, manic depression, Huntington’s disease, epilepsy, deafness, hereditary deformities, hereditary blindness and alcoholism. The latter aside, these were the same illnesses targeted by Davenport and the American eugenicists.

  Some 205 local Hereditary Health Courts were set up in Germany, each with three members—a lawyer who served as chairman, a eugenicist and a physician. Doctors who failed to report suspect patients were fined. Sterilizations began on January 1, 1934, and covered children over ten and people at large, not just those in institutions. During the first year, 56,000 people were sterilized. By 1937, the last year that records were published, the total had reached 200,000 people.

  The purpose of the 1933 law, according to an official at the Reich Ministry of the Interior, was to prevent “poisoning the entire bloodstream of the race.” Sterilization would safeguard the purity of the blood in perpetuity. “We go beyond neighborly love; we extend it to future generations,” the official said. “Therein lies the high ethical value and justification of the law.” 25

  The sterilization program involved doctors and hospitals and created a legal and medical system for coercive treatment of those whom the National Socialists deemed unfit. With this machinery in place, it was much easier to extend the eugenics program in two major directions. One was the transition from sterilization to killing, prompted in part by the growing shortage of hospital beds as the Second World War got under way. In 1939 some 70,000 mentally disabled patients in asylums were designated for euthanasia. The first victims were shot. Later ones were forced into rooms disguised as showers, where they were gassed.26

  The other departure in Germany’s eugenics program was the addition of Jews to the list of those considered unfit. A succession of punitive laws drove Jews from their jobs and homes, isolated them from the rest of the population, and then confined those who had not already fled to concentration camps where they were murdered.

  The first anti-Jewish decree, of April 7, 1933, provided for the dismissal of “non-Aryan” civil servants. The term “non-Aryan” offended foreign nations such as Japan. Future laws referred to Jews explicitly but plunged the Reich Ministry of the Interior into the problem of deciding who was a Jew. The National Socialist Party proposed that half-Jews be considered Jews, but the Ministry of the Interior rejected the idea as impractical. It divided half-Jews into two categories, considering them as full Jews only if they belonged to the Jewish religion or were married to a Jew. Using this definition, the Nuremberg Law of September 13, 1935, otherwise known as the Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor, prohibited marriage between Jews and citizens of “German or related blood.” 27

  These measures were followed by others that in a few years escalated to a program of mass murder of Jews in Germany and the European countries occupied by Hitler’s troops. Of the 9 million Jews who lived in Europe before the Holocaust, nearly 6 million were killed, including 1 million children. The killing machine engulfed a further 4 to 5 million victims in the form of homosexuals, Gypsies and Russian prisoners of war. It was Hitler’s aim to depopulate the countries of Eastern Europe so as to make room for German settlers.

  Many of the elements in the National Socialists’ eugenics program could be found in the American eugenics program, at least in concept, though not in degree. Nordic supremacy, purity of the blood, condemnation of intermarriage, sterilization of the unfit—all these were ideas embraced by American eugenicists.

  The destruction of the Jews, however, was Hitler’s idea. So too was the replacement of sterilization with mass murder.

  The fact that antecedents for the ideas that led to the Holocaust can be found in the American and English eugenics movements of the 1920s and 1930s does not mean that others share responsibility for the crimes of the National Socialist regime. It does mean that ideas about race are dangerous when linked to political agendas. It puts responsibility on scientists to test rigorously the scientific ideas that are placed before the public.

  In Germany, scientists played a major role in paving the way for the destruction of the Jews but were not solely culpable. Anti-Semitic statements mar the writings of leading German philosophers, including even Kant. Wagner ranted against the Jews in his operas and essays. “By the end of the First World War,” writes Yvonne Sherratt in her survey of intellectual influences on Hitler, “anti-Semitic ideas pervaded every aspect of German thought from the Enlightenment to Romanticism, from nationalism to science. Men of logic or the passions, Idealists or Social Darwinists, the highly sophisticated or the very crude, all supplied Hitler with the ideas to re-inforce and enact his dream.” 28 Anti-Semitism was not an idea that German scientists found in science; rather, they found it in their culture and allowed it to infect their science.

  Scientia means “knowledge,” and true scientists are those who distinguish meticulously between what they know scientifically and what they don’t know or may only suspect. Those involved with Davenport’s eugenics program, including his sponsors at the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation and their reviewers, failed to say immediately that Davenport’s ideas were scientifically defective. Scientists’ silence or inattention allowed a climate of public opinion to develop in which Congress could pass restrictive immigration laws, state legislatures could decree the sterilization of those judged mentally infirm and the U.S. Supreme Court could uphold unwarranted assaults on the country’s weakest citizens.

  After the Second World War, scientists resolved for the best of reasons that ge
netics research would never again be allowed to fuel the racial fantasies of murderous despots. Now that new information about human races has been developed, the lessons of the past should not be forgotten and indeed are all the more relevant.

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  ORIGINS OF HUMAN SOCIAL NATURE

  Humankind’s behavioral unity exists, but it lies deeply buried under several thousand years of cumulative cultural evolution and is barely visible from the human realm.

  —BERNARD CHAPAIS1

  It deserves notice that, as soon as the progenitors of man became social . . . the principles of imitation, and reason, and experience would have increased, and much modified the instinctual powers in a way, of which we see only traces in the lower animals.

  —CHARLES DARWIN2

  One of the strangest features of human anatomy, when people are compared with the other 200 monkey and ape species in the primate family, is the sclera, or the white of the eye. In all our primate cousins, the sclera is barely visible. In humans it stands out like a beacon, signaling to any observer the direction of a person’s gaze and hence what thoughts may be on their mind.

  Why should such a feature have evolved? A signal that reveals a person’s thoughts to a competitor or to an enemy on the battlefield can be a deadly handicap. For natural selection to have favored it, there must be a compensating advantage of overwhelming magnitude. And that advantage must have something to do with the social nature of the interaction, the abundant benefit conferred on all members of a group by being able to infer what others are thinking just by sizing up the direction of their gaze. The whites of the eyes are the mark of a highly social, highly cooperative species whose success depends on the sharing of thoughts and intentions.