by Edwin Black
A government commission reexamined the sterilization issue in 1926, looking to America for guidance. In November of 1927, Laughlin arranged for his lengthy legislative guide on sterilization to be sent by Chicago judge Harry Olson directly to a member of the Danish sterilization commission. In 1929, Hansen proudly reported to Eugenical News that his country had finally adopted what he termed, “the first ‘modern’ eugenical sterilization law to be enacted in Europe.”35
Shortly after the passage of Denmark’s legislation, the Rockefeller Foundation began supporting eugenic research in that country. Denmark’s leading eugenic scientist, Dr. Tage Kemp, received much of the financial support. The first grants were awarded in 1930 for blood group research. The next year Kemp received a special Rockefeller fellowship to continue his research. In 1932, Kemp traveled to Cold Spring Harbor for further study. He wanted eugenic and genetic research to achieve greater scientific and medical exactitude. “I was notably impressed by the importance of the careful execution of the several observations,” he wrote Rockefeller officials, adding, “these ought as far as possible to be carried out and reexamined (after-examined) by an investigator with medical education.” Rockefeller officials agreed, granting Kemp a second fellowship in 1934. They would continue to fund race biology and human genetics in Denmark throughout the 1930s.36
Kemp was among the new breed of eugenic geneticists the Rockefeller Foundation was cultivating to lift eugenics out of mere racial rhetoric and into the realm of unemotional science. A Rockefeller report explained their confidence in Kemp. “Race biology today suffers immensely from its mixture with political dogmas and drives. Dr. Kemp, through his personality and training, is as free from these as possible.”37
In Norway, the raceologist Jon Alfred Mjeen endorsed American eugenics from the outset. He propounded his theories from a well-equipped animal and human measurement lab as well as a grand personal library, crammed floor to ceiling with books and files. At the second congress in New York, Mjeen suggested the resolution that ultimately led to the formation of the American Eugenics Society. In his opening address to the convention, Osborn singled out Mjeen and Lundborg. “It is largely through the active efforts of leaders like Mjeen and Lundborg,” he acknowledged, “that there is a new appreciation of the spiritual, moral and physical value of the Nordic race. “38
Davenport toured eugenic facilities in Norway, and Mjeen visited New York on several occasions. Mjeen was also a frequent contributor to, and topic of, Eugenical News. The dapper Norwegian was often pictured arm-in-arm with leading American eugenicists, such as Leon Whitney. Norway passed its sterilization law in 1934, and in 1977 amended it to become a mostly voluntary measure. Some 41,000 operations were performed, about 75 percent of them on women.39
The Swedish government’s State Institute of Race-Biology opened its doors in 1922. It was an entire school dedicated to eugenic thought, and it would leave a multilayered movement in its wake. Sweden alternately shared and coordinated its programs with the IFEO. Sweden’s first sterilization law was passed in 1934. It began by sterilizing those who had “mental illness, feeble-mindedness, or other mental defects” and eventually widened its scope to include those with “an anti-social way of life.” Eventually, some 63,000 government-approved sterilizations were undertaken on a range of “unfit” individuals, mainly women. In some years women represented a mere 63 percent of those sterilized, but in most years the percentage who were women exceeded 90 percent.40
American influence rolled across the Continent. Finland, Hungary, France, Romania, Italy and other European nations developed American-style eugenic movements that echoed the agenda and methodology of the font at Cold Spring Harbor. Soon the European movements learned to cloak their work in more medically and scientifically refined approaches, and many were eventually funded by such philanthropic sponsors as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution. In the late twenties and thirties, these foundations liberally granted money to studies that adhered to a more polished clinical regimen.41
Throughout the twenties and thirties, America’s views were celebrated at the numerous international gatherings held in America, such as the Third International Congress of Eugenics, which in 1932 was hosted once again at New York City’s American Museum of Natural History. Theory became doctrine when proliferated in the many eugenic newsletters, books, and journal articles published by the American movement. America’s most venerable universities and academic authorities also reinforced the view that eugenic science was legitimate.42
Some nations, such as France and Italy, rejected their native eugenic movements. Some, such as Holland, only enacted broadly-based registration laws. Some, such as Lithuania and Brazil, enacted eugenic marriage laws. Some, such as Finland, went as far as forced sterilization.43
One nation, Germany, would go further than anyone could imagine.
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 for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population specified euthanasia as a possibility to be considered.1 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.” No 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 su
pport 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 of Vanoc 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]-natal life, 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.”10
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 feeble-minded] 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.11
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 blood-lines. “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 Kallikak 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 J. 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 conscious selection 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
