A Patriot's History of the Modern World (35 page)

Under a thorough reformulation of concepts of racial hygiene, health professionals were mobilized to identify the problems of the underclasses, in the process using science to tag and police undesirable groups. Weimar's eugenics movement found itself melded into Nazism with surprising ease, co-opting the doctors and scientists. As Paul Weindling, the historian of the German eugenics movement, observed, a Faustian pact was signed between the scientists and the Nazis. The more “scientific their outlook, the more politically naive they were. The more scientists tried to maintain authority and status, the more concessions had to be made to Nazism.”
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By 1933, compulsory sterilization was formalized with the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Progeny, which over the next twelve years would sterilize a third of a million people on the basis of schizophrenia, deafness, epilepsy, and a host of other disabilities. (Two years later, castration for homosexuals was added under the legislation.) This law not only cemented the relationship between the state's authority and the machinery of the medical profession, but enjoyed a massive publicity campaign about heredity and race. Doctors set up more than 250 tribunals to administer the sterilization drive, sucking in many of the eugenicists of the 1920s who had championed public health measures, all wrapped in yet more surveys and studies. Subsumed under the Reich Office for Family Research, which issued official certificates of Aryan ancestry, the Nazi Party had essentially corralled all authority over race by 1934. Within five years, compulsory registration and identification cards were instituted—all carefully sorted to determine who was permitted to settle in occupied territories (when Germany obtained them). The reaction of the American Eugenics Society was to praise Hitler's courage and statesmanship by tackling such an important issue.
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Supporters of the California eugenics law, including the head of Riverside's Bureau of Welfare and Relief, cited sterilization as a weapon to halt the “menace to the race at large.”
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Sacramento banker Charles Goethe, a leading supporter of eugenics in the state, noted in 1936 that the United States and Germany were the leaders in eugenics (“two stupendous forward movements”) but that despite having a quarter-century head start, California was passed quickly by the Germans. That same year, Paul Popenoe, a partner with Gosney in the Human Betterment Foundation, actively corresponded with Nazi officials so as to make certain that
“conditions in Germany are not misunderstood or misrepresented.”
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California eugenicists knew that the Nazis were targeting the Jews in particular and still approved of Germany's approach to “race hygiene,” and, given the law's passage, few can doubt the politicians' support of the programs.

Underclass and Empire

Long before the Third Reich would employ eugenics for its own purposes, the new thinking about race and population control throughout Europe was already intertwined with the issue of the colonies. Race and citizenship, population and childbirth policies all became different facets of the same dilemma—whether to liberate people of other ethnicities or incorporate them into the motherland and “civilize” them. The surprising loyalty of the colonies to Britain and France during the Great War only complicated matters. India and the African territories had sent waves of troops, most of whom were mistreated and poorly used at the fronts. France especially came to view the colonies as a source of manpower, and hence emancipation or liberation was unthinkable. Algeria and French-occupied Arab lands, especially, received massive investment after the war due to the ease of extracting profits from countries just across the Mediterranean. French-controlled North Africa and the Middle East received four times as much investment as other French provinces in Africa.
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In theory, French citizenship eventually awaited Algerians. Realistically, France never intended to grant equal status to Arab Africans, and when the first test came in 1936, under a Popular Front bill to grant citizenship to a handful of Muslim veterans, it was scuttled in Parliament by the deputies of French settlers in Algeria.

In the colonies themselves, a ruling class emerged among the Europeans. France's resident-general of Morocco, Marshal Hubert Lyautey, who had served there since 1912, however, despised the Algerian French colonists. Many who settled in Algeria and Morocco ended up in administration, where their numbers exceeded those of British officials in India. England's colonial administrators, in comparison, came from a particular social class that stood apart from the French or Belgians. Its landed groups dominated the army, the bureaucracy, and the judicial system, and its young men were all trained at elite schools in public leadership, steeped in heroism, sacrifice, and disdain for physical comforts on behalf of the empire. Rudyard Kipling's line about sending “forth the best ye breed” typified the British colonial administrators: they were prepared educationally and psychologically
for foreign service. But the extensive demands of foreign service also opened the doors for people from other classes to advance through assignments overseas. At the same time, a small but growing chorus urged Britain to divest itself of foreign territories. These voices included John Ruskin, a professor of fine arts at Oxford, Arnold Toynbee, Arthur Glazebrook, and Albert (Lord) Grey, heads of what was known as the “Little Englanders.” Most of those in government or with influence, however, shared the imperialistic views of Cecil Rhodes. An undergraduate when Ruskin delivered his inaugural address (Rhodes copied it longhand and kept it for more than two decades), Rhodes advanced through the ranks to become prime minister of Cape Colony in 1890. He controlled the South African diamond mines and made a fortune from them.
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Rhodes and Alfred (Lord) Milner, however, were also responsible for a program of “equal rights for all civilized men south of the Zambezi,” thereby introducing a degree of fair treatment of natives. While he brooked no tolerance for Zulu practices such as those that required a young male to kill someone or steal cattle to be eligible for marriage, he urged Zulus to direct their energies to working in the mines, convincing them that it was onerous and difficult (which it was) and itself constituted a display of heroism (it did). After five years, the Zulu miners returned with enough money to buy cattle for marriage eligibility.

Politicians such as Rhodes set England on a course to gradually prepare native populations for freedom, and, as Lionel Curtis, secretary to Lord Milner, put it, “the peoples of India and Egypt…must be gradually schooled on management of their national affairs…. I regard this challenge to the long unquestioned claim of the white man to dominate the world as inevitable and wholesome.”
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Curtis became one of the leading voices for “Imperial Federalism,” or a commonwealth system of independent former colonies still tied to England.

Lord Milner and Secretary of State for India Edwin S. Montagu took a similar view. As early as 1917, Milner argued that the goal of the British government was to increase “association of Indians in every branch of the administration and [to ensure] the gradual development of self-governing institutions…with a view to…responsible government in India,” a code phrase everyone understood as “independence.”
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England established a Dominion Department to govern the colonies, complete with conferences every four years to monitor progress. Even Canada received a high degree of autonomy with the Statute of Westminster in 1931, which established
nearly complete legislative independence from Parliament (although full independence did not come until well after World War II).

In most African colonies, of course, movements toward dominion status produced radical disparities between the masses of blacks and the handful of whites. Kenya had over two million blacks and only three thousand whites in 1910, most of whom were government employees. The British hoped that as natives learned English and acquired an education, they would leaven their home countries and lift others up. Instead, educated natives used their skills as a passport to escape to England or the United States.

Dislocations produced by Versailles established numerous protectorates and mandates throughout Africa and the Middle East, mostly to the benefit of England and France, and often blindsided the hopeful colonials who had arrived at the peace conference in 1919 expecting to receive a path to independence. One of the most profound pieces of mismanagement involved the dissection of the Ottoman Empire. At the peak of its power, the Ottoman Empire was larger than any contemporary European state in area and population, stretching from Morocco to the Persian Gulf, from the Balkans as far north as Poland and to the northern shore of the Black Sea. These vast provinces were administered by twenty-one governments overseeing seventy
vilayets
(subprovinces), each under a pasha. The Turkish state was strictly Islamic in religious practices, secular in orientation and government processes, and impervious to genuine reform.
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One group longing to escape from under the Turkish thumb, the Arabs, constituted a disparate band of tribes whose animosity to one another strongly resembled that of the Plains Indians in America. During World War I, the British had established an Arab Bureau, which promised important and self-promoting Arabs, such as the Saudi-born Faisal bin Hussein, assistance and recognition once the fighting ended. Facilitated by an unorthodox and uncontrollable British colonel fluent in Arabic, T. E. Lawrence, the Arab Bureau gave birth to a group called the “Intrusives,” whose objective was to “shape the Arab world to fit the needs of the Empire.”
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Lawrence's reputation first rose after he rescued a British force that had marched from India only to be ambushed outside of Baghdad. Functioning inside Arabia (later Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Syria), Lawrence concluded that an Arab revolt could be led only by one of Hussein's sons, Emir Faisal, with his army of some four thousand irregulars. In a well-known transformation, permanently glamorized in David Lean's 1962 film,
Lawrence of
Arabia
, the British colonel “went native,” donning robes, the kaffiyeh (headdress), and sporting a gold, curved dagger. Despite Lawrence's cash disbursements to Faisal, a rival in Riyadh named Ibn Saud mounted his own program with the British to head postwar Arabia. Harry St. John Bridger Philby, the British emissary to the region, backed Saud so much that he converted to Islam. Thus Lawrence and the Hashemite tribe under Hussein bin Ali were pitted against Saud and the Wahhabis supported by Philby, in the process fanning their tribal hatreds. To make matters worse, Britain and France had, in the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, already sliced up the Middle East even before the Ottoman Empire had fallen. This arrangement contradicted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (which established a national homeland for the Jews in the region) by recognizing an Arab state in the place. It also promised Russia control of Constantinople and the Turkish Straits. Nevertheless, across the Atlantic, Wilson's own report writers were producing a “Report on the Proposals for an Independent Arab State” that suggested Arabia be united with a caliphate located in Mecca. When the Versailles Conference actually started, however, Ibn Saud was in Riyadh while Faisal and Lawrence were lobbying in France for Hashemite dominance. For a moment it appeared they might successfully coax the Allies into forming a united Arabian state, but the French held firm in their determination to have a chunk of the Ottoman Empire (Syria), and Wilson was beaten down through the need to repeatedly concede points in return for support for his League of Nations.

Saud's forces attacked Hussein's troops while the dignitaries met in Versailles, and Lawrence hustled back to negotiate a cease-fire before the House of Saud took over everything. Faisal established a freely constituted government in Damascus—in French territory—but the French crushed his troops and forced him into exile. In 1921, the British colonial secretary, Winston Churchill, installed Faisal as the king of Mesopotamia (now Iraq), a British protectorate, after a rebellion against direct British rule there had been put down at great cost. Ibn Saud eventually controlled all of the largely desert wasteland later known as Saudi Arabia, and the region probably would have remained insignificant internationally for centuries had it not possessed vast resources in oil. Following centuries of precedence in which successful revolutions afterward eliminate their more radical adherents, in 1929 Saud destroyed the followers who had brought him to power, the troublesome Ikhwan brotherhood, when they attempted to extend the borders of his Wahhabist realm.

Britain, Balfour, and Israel

Of course, one other issue complicated all the other tribal and national struggles already laid upon the table: the national Jewish homeland promised by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour to Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organization. Weizmann became a convert to Zionism in 1896 when he met Theodor Herzl, author of
Der Judenstaat
(“The Jewish State”). Weizmann thereafter dedicated himself to its creation. A chemist who had sold his discoveries to I. G. Farben, Weizmann moved to England where he met Balfour in 1906, the year Balfour won his seat in Parliament. Spurred by C. P. Scott, the editor of the influential
Manchester Guardian
, Weizmann and Balfour developed a compelling argument that Britain should encourage the formation of a Jewish state, and in the process provide a regional protector for the Suez Canal and an outpost for British power in the Middle East. Weizmann labored to line up a coalition inside Parliament for his cause.

In 1918 the British government sent a Zionist Commission to Palestine to lay the groundwork that would implement the Balfour Declaration. Dodging German U-boats in the Mediterranean, the Commission, including Weizmann, set up shop in Tel Aviv. Weizmann immediately met General Edmund Allenby, but overall found the officer corps unfriendly to his cause. Many had arrived with copies of the fraudulent
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
. Despite their opposition, Weizmann won over the general. Other unfriendly encounters occurred with the former Jerusalem official Musa Kazim al-Husayni, who carried a copy of the
Protocols
with him, as well as the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Kamel Bey al-Husseini, a rabid anti-Semite and future acolyte of Adolf Hitler. Weizmann's meeting with Faisal in the Sinai went somewhat better, with the Jewish leader shepherded about by Lawrence of Arabia. Both Lawrence and the Arabs thought the Zionists could be instrumental in advancing Arab objectives with Britain at a future peace conference.