The American People: Volume 1: Search for My Heart

by Larry Kramer

  In defense of his actions, Herman, in his will, quotes the Vernah:

  “Sometimes the mistakes of man are so great that a generation must be skipped, if only for the air to be cleared with the fresh air necessary to cleanse history.”

  History, of course, is never cleansed. Yvonne never stops her bleedings. They will become increasingly rare, true, weeks or months may pass, but one day she will stand at the top of the landing on the second floor in her white nightgown, blood dripping down her legs, and cry out, “Again! They come again!” until the ever-faithful Nate Bulb (Abe will be seldom home) picks her up in his arms and lays her on the table, with the candles, with the trancelike imprecations and shreiings, with the forefinger poked into her vagina to bring forth blood for him to taste and kiss and impress upon the center of her forehead and his own. The sendek has learned every trick in the trade. Then, as if after some sexual act that is completed, its climax reached, the parties thereto exhausted and bored to satiation with each other, with all this, she pulls herself off the table and goes upstairs to a bedroom, she cares no longer which, there are so many, and as is commanded in the Vishnah and the Vernah and even the Mishnah, in every long list of commandments ever commanded, she takes her own mikva, the ages-old ritual bath for cleansing, and tries without success to go to sleep.

  * * *

  This then is the heritage of Abraham Masturbov, who will soon learn—in a tiny room in a tiny house not far from this house and from the vanished house of his birth just a block or so away—of Doris Hardware’s own story, her own hideous history, and her decision—could it ever have been otherwise?—not to marry him.

  GOOD BREEDING?

  In the richly appointed living room of Mrs. E. H. (Mary) Harriman, widow of the exceedingly wealthy railroad tycoon and early supporter of all things eugenic, a group of people sit sipping tea and discussing what to do about the approximately 300,000 “defectives” of all sorts who had already been tabulated by New York State at the request of Mrs. Harriman, a woman of great energy, conviction, power, and of course wealth. Her husband owned most of the railroads in America. She is also the daughter of a rich man. And she controls a fortune of between $70 million and $100 million. She is sixty-three years old and will live until 1932 at 1 East Sixty-ninth Street. She is a direct woman and minces no words. It is April 8, 1914.

  She opens the gathering by welcoming everyone and reminding them, with a touch of pride in her voice, “My late husband’s fortune has paid for many local charities, as you know. I cite the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which seeks out Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants to our crowded cities in order to deport them or at the least confine them, should they be candidates, which unfortunately so many of them are, for forced sterilization.”

  She pauses to modestly acknowledge the polite applause, before proceeding. “The agenda of the meeting today concerns the topic ‘What can be done to prevent the continuing occurrence of sexual perversities, including homosexuality, also known as sodomy?’ A representative from the Tally Office, Mr. Eagen Odemptor, is present to help direct our discussion.”

  Edwin Black’s monumentally important work, War Against the Weak, to which we owe much of our information on the hideous history of the eugenics movement, unfortunately does not deal with the movement’s additional interest in ridding the world of homosexuals. This subject, just beginning to interest gay scholars, and just as slowly beginning to appear out of the very wormy woodwork of the groves of academe, is addressed in Proof Positive: The American Government’s Active Role in the Extermination of Homosexuals, by Waldo Strummer and Mellissa Evinrude, to which much is owed.

  “They are mentally deficient, at the very least,” Odemptor explains patiently to the group, which is not terribly familiar with homosexuals but has a nodding acquaintance with sodomites, a word several admit to knowing, “but only from church and of course the Bible.” But once enunciated out loud, homosexuality is nervously added to the list of unpleasant items to attend to. Has not the former president Theodore Roosevelt himself written just last year that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind”? “I’ll know one when I see one,” Roosevelt is quoted in The Washington Monument as saying to the Temperance First and Last Society at the Willard Hotel for its annual Founders Tea on May 1, 1914. “And so will all of you. Just as we have all come to recognize a drunk.” Never one to put down that big stick, Teddy Roosevelt goes even further: “Someday, we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type, is to leave his blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

  As this movement of “betterment” grows like wildfire and as it’s debated what exactly constitutes a degenerate, the definitions do not exactly blur, so much as coalesce into the all-inclusive. Why leave anything or anyone out? As long as we’re getting rid of them, let’s get rid of them all. Whoever they are. One has the sense that these well-meaning people are eager to get riled up about something awful simply because in their febrile imaginations the world must be filled with awful things to get riled up about and hence get rid of. Money does strange things to people who haven’t had it before, or even when they have. There is a terrible impulse to “do something.” Is it not the same today? And if a Harriman and a Rockefeller and a Ford are doing it, it must be okay.

  “I would like to introduce Mrs. DeWitt Waldschein from our sister organization in Milwaukee,” Mrs. Harriman says. “The topic of her remarks, as I understand them, is ‘How to Define the Disastrous.’”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Harriman. Wisconsin is honored to be represented here. I bring with me today a noble gentleman, an inspired mind, Mr. Jeshua Brinestalker, of the Brinestalker Ranches in Los Angeles—”

  “San Diego County, actually, Mrs. Waldschein,” Brinestalker interrupts.

  “I am so sorry. San Diego County, of course. It is all so … large out there that we east of it are often geographically deficient. Do you have as much degeneracy in San Diego County as we have in Milwaukee and Mrs. Harriman speaks of here in New York?”

  Brinestalker nods. “I come to you today to speak about the very same. I come to you today to speak about ending all across the country the bloodlines of people deemed unfit. In my position as president of the Western Breeders Association I have noticed that people are not so dissimilar to horses. These are strong words. It is not so important for us to waste our time describing precisely what degeneracy entails. We have higher minds to guide us on this journey. Where I live we just go out and do it, get rid of them. We shoot horses, don’t we?”

  There is more and more talk like this, and there are more and more meetings like this. The Hearst syndicate of newspapers, never known for its humanitarian concerns, proclaims in September 1915: “14 million to be sterilized!” It suggests first trying it out on “the sons of the billionaires.” Are they being facetious or serious?

  It is difficult to believe in hindsight what furious stupidities are masquerading as intelligent discourse, much less science. Major intellectuals, corporations, and institutions—Yaddah, the Carnegie Institute, Cold Spring Harbor, Alexander Graham Bell, Rockefellers—are endeavoring to rid “the race” (the Yaddah economist Irving Fisher—Philip Jerusalem, Amos Standing, and Nehemiah Brinestalker all take classes with him before they graduate in 1920— actually calls himself a “raceologist”) of everything from too-small Jewish infants to ships’ captains prone to shipwrecks caused by an inherited love for the sea, identified as “thalassophilia,” or “captain’s curse,” the riddance of which would increase navigational safety on the high seas and, according to Professor Fisher, “save so many lives.” Check out the minutes of this very meeting, located in the Harriman archive at the New York Public Library, also a major recipient of Harriman funds.

  Yes, the list of those deemed worthy of riddance surfaces and coalesces as an all-inclusive “only for the moment. We promise you more
.” The blind. The deaf. Deaf-mutes. The “socially inadequate.” German, Polish, and Russian Jews. Negroes. (Don’t Negroes already have a death rate twice that of whites?) Mulattoes. American Indians. “Mountain” people. (“The white race in this land is the foundation upon which rests its civilization, and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst the nations of the world. Is it not, therefore, just and right that this group decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has, to maintain its purity?” in the words of a Virginia State Health Bureau pamphlet of 1924.) Illegitimate children. Interracial married couples. Unmarried couples living together in sin. The maimed and malformed. Immigrants. Political malcontents. Dirt-poor debtors. The “strange-colored skinned.” Men dressed as women. Women dressed as men. And of course, now that there is a word for them, homosexuals, although this word is spoken softly, being so new and uncomfortable to palates.

  Vasectomies, tubectomies, castrations proliferate in their execution and in the widespread locations of their execution. The wholesale removal of sexual organs is championed and celebrated and actually performed in remote parts of our country. Grange, Arkansas, a town in the Ozarks, has a hospital that advertises, “You tell us to take out what you want taken out and point him out and we’ll take it out,” as attested in Arkansas Traveller, the memoirs of Dr. Abraham Vorgessenin, published in 1935. Yes, we must not forget that our very president had proclaimed, “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind.”

  Single men now find themselves suspect wherever they go and wherever they live. It is only natural for a man to be married. A Dr. Sanis in Grange specializes in castration. Several of his male “patients” have died, and it is thought the good doctor murdered them when he suspected homosexual proclivities, quoting Teddy Roosevelt’s permission, our very president’s “permission.”

  * * *

  In 1910 the Eugenics Record Office had been launched by the American Breeders Association. “Its first mission was to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, estimated to be at least 10 percent of the population. When identified, they would be subjected to appropriate eugenic remedies to terminate their bloodlines. Leading solutions will be, at the least, compulsory segregation and forced sterilization” (Black, described later).

  Jeshua Brinestalker is one of the founders of the ABA. He is a California rancher and horse breeder, the owner of the monstrously large Brinestalker Ranch. Jeshua is a handsome man. A large portrait of him hangs in the statehouse in Sacramento. Jeshua, who is a relatively young man, neverthless maintains that he has painstakingly learned to develop and breed horses of great perfection, endurance, intelligence, and beauty. “I can do this for man, too, now that I have thought about it and new organizations are raising this issue of getting rid of the defective,” he says in his acceptance speech upon being made a first vice president. “I’ll get to work on it right away. I own a great amount of land to try out a great many things.”

  In 1909, California adopts forced sterilization, segregation laws, and marriage restrictions. Why not? Twenty-seven states already have them. But California will be the leader in these policies. Before the visible power of this movement ceases, some 60,000 Americans will be coercively sterilized, nearly half of them in California, a healthy number supervised by Jeshua Brinestalker himself. Why, the very president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, who in his 1902 book, Blood of a Nation, originated the notion of “race and blood,” declares emphatically that all bad traits are passed through the blood. He is joined by academics at Yaddah and Princeton and every wealthy philanthropist one can possibly name. The eugenics bandwagon is rolling ahead and all the best people are climbing on board.

  Who is this Jeshua Brinestalker? Where did he come from, and why? Does no one detect the faint hint of an accent in his clipped, well-composed English? So many from so many places far and near, even if Americans themselves, are learning, as a group, to speak better, cleaner, purer, English unaccented by regional differences. Why, there are schools for it, in New York and other towns and cities: people want to sound “high-class,” sound pure 100 percent top-drawer American. Dale Carnegie and Fulton Oursler and Arthur Murray and Norman Vincent Peale and Billy Graham and other “teachers” for fun and profit and God are still a few years away, but this self-improvement stuff has been around in one way or another since the Bible, and the Wynotsky Schools for Elocution and High-Toned Betterment (“We are in a town near you!”) are certainly part of that trend. Why, after Wynotsky you could sound like Edwin Booth.

  In 1911, Peter Evelyn Ruester is born. His childhood hero is General George Custer. “He had the courage of his convictions and took a ‘last stand’ and he got killed for believing so strongly that he was right.” Ruester, who speaks admiringly of Custer until his death, is never to know that Custer was a homosexual and was in love with an actor. Peter Ruester is to become an actor himself before he becomes a president. He brought his own crusading background with him into politics. He was a man who adhered strictly to the Bible as interpreted by his mother, who even took him with her to proselytize in prisons, “so that all may see the world as Christians.” He taught Sunday school, went to a Christian college, and tithed 10 percent of every dollar he ever made to his church until his death. Or so it’s said.

  Yes, this is a Pay Attention moment, to this birth, this man.

  In 1913 the Eugenics Research Association is founded out of the Eugenics Record Office on Mrs. Harriman’s land. Charter members only are allowed, each a generous benefactor “determined to escalate our work into action.” A list is made of the particular topics of concern on which these charter members, numbering sixty-three, wish to concentrate. One of the top items of interest is labeled “Sexual Abnormalities.” At the next tea in her lavish home, a representative from the Tally Office, the aging Eagan Odemptor, is again present. “This is a moral issue of the highest order,” Eagan declares. “I have devoted my entire working life to dealing with it. My devoted associate of all these years, Turpa Diamond, gave her life to it. I have been sent to tell you that President Taft approves of your sincere activities, although of course he will not say so publicly. He has also quite humbly requested that you remove ‘the obese’ from your categories of concern for rectification.” A representative from Nordic Race Supremacy, Hirst Gillie, says in his remarks, “It will be a hard job turning everyone’s skin white and everyone’s hair blond. It will be a harder job locating those males who persist in using their most personal of instruments on each other. I have no doubt that we can succeed on this latter if not the former. I bring you word from Angstrom, North Dakota, that they have terminated the lives of twelve sodomites and twelve niggers of light skin passing as white.”

  None of this is a secret. The records of the ERA and the ERO are housed in the Willis Collection at Yaddah.

  Jeshua Brinestalker also accepts the first vice presidency of the ERA. “Might as well keep my eye on everything, not just horses,” he writes to Gillie. “I think we’re on to something grand, don’t you?”

  Where does this Jeshua Brinestalker come from?

  We don’t know. Much of this country consists of people to whom this curt statement applies. One day they are not here and another day the land records of San Diego and Orange counties list Brinestalker holdings of more than half a million acres. Inheritance? But from whom? Theft? Corruption? Forgery? Probably, and possibly all three. It was easy to perform—or should we say arrange—deeds of any sort in California in those days. California was far enough away from eastern morality, if that is what it can be called, or from eastern watchdogs at any rate. Really quite amazing, all this land owned by someone no one knows much about. One wonders how much of America is this historyless. Or stolen, or out of the blue. That’s why historians wind up finding ways to put their own view of things front and center. Pay dirt is often just that, dirt, for lack of anything cleaner. Well, as we’re seeing, there is never anything cleaner.<
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  Does no one wonder how such stalwart stock of such an Aryan disposition should appear in advance of World War I? Are Jeshua and his son, Nehemiah (there appear to be only the two of them), establishing some sort of American beachhead, should America win, or lose? We know now that this certainly is a trick much utilized, particularly in advance of wartime. A trick to do what? To achieve what? For whom? But who could have been this farsighted? So early on? Farsighted about what?

  In any event, Brinestalker, the father, is also in attendance in 1912 when Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan, founder in 1906 of the Race and Betterment Foundation, organizes the First Race Betterment Conference to lay the foundation for his version of a super race. “We have wonderful new races of horses, cows, and pigs. Why should we not have a new and improved race of men?” Kellogg demands. At the Second Race Betterment Conference, held the following year, Brinestalker is there to hear the Yaddah economist Irving Fisher say, “Gentlemen and ladies, you have not any idea unless you have studied this subject mathematically, how rapidly we could exterminate the contamination of this country if we really got at it, or how rapidly the contamination goes on if we do not get at it.” A particularly stirring and insidious oration about “race-suicide” is delivered by David Starr Jordan, that first president of Stanford University, a virulent anti-Semite and a “major influence inflaming Henry Ford’s ‘insane prejudice,’” according to Neil Baldwin in Henry Ford and the Jews. In his book Unseen Empire and the Reversion to a Hideous Past, Jordan writes about the necessity of ridding the world of “splintered men who claim to be men, but who are not men, and cannot be men.” Yes, life was like that. Christians spoke like this. You could say things like this out loud then. But let us return to Mrs. Harriman.