War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (4 page)

To ensure that all of our information was accurate, we also set about verifying the work of numerous other scholars by checking their documentation. We often asked them to provide documents from their files. In other words, we not only documented my book, we verified other works as well. Most of the authors graciously complied, readily faxing copies of their documents or explaining precisely where the information could be found. During this process, however, we discovered numerous errors in many prior works.

For example, in one book an important speech on the value of heredity is attributed to Woodrow Wilson, president of the United States-the speech was actually given by Jim Wilson, president of the American Breeders Association. I can understand how errors like this occur. Many scholars rely on other scholars’ works. Summaries of summaries of summaries yield a lesser truth with every iteration. Except for the work of a few brilliant world-class documenters, such as Daniel. Kevles, Benno Miiller-Hill, Paul Weindling and Martin Pernick, I largely considered published works little more than leads. What’s more, there is boundless information on eugenics accumulating on the Internet, some of it very prettily presented, much of it hysterical, and unfortunately, most of it filled with profound errors. Hence whenever possible, I acquired primary source material so I could determine the provable facts for myself.

When the research phase was over, I realized that less than half the information I had assembled would even make it into the book. Frankly, I had amassed enough information to write a freestanding book for each of the twenty-one chapters in this volume. It was painful to pick and choose which information would be included, but I am confident that with so many journalists throughout America now aggressively delving into eugenics, the field will soon be as broad and diversified as the investigations of the Holocaust and American slavery. At least one book could be written for each state, starting with California, which was America’s most energetic eugenic state. Critical biographies are needed for the key players. In-depth examinations of the links between Germany and the Pioneer Fund, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution as well as numerous state officials would be welcome. The role of the Chicago Municipal Court must be further explored.

When I began this project in 2001, many in the public were not even aware of eugenics. Indeed, for a while my publisher did not even want me to include the word
eugenics
in the title of this book. In reality, however, the topic has been continuously explored over the past decades by several extremely talented academics and students hailing from a range of disciplines from biology to education. Although most were gracious and supportive, I was surprised to find that many tended to guard their information closely. One such author told me she didn’t believe another book on eugenics was necessary. (“It depends on how nuanced,” she said with some discomfort.) Another professor astonished me by asking for money to answer some questions within his expertise-the first time I had encountered such a request in thirty-five years of historical research. When I contacted a Virginia professor who had written a dissertation decades earlier, she actually told me she didn’t think a member of the media was “qualified” to read her dissertation. One collaborative scholarly eugenic website, ironically funded by a federal grant, restricts media usage while permitting unrestricted scholarly usage.

As I was completing my work, the public was beginning to discover the outlines of eugenics. The
Richmond Times-Dispatch, Winston-Salem Journal,
and several other publications and radio stations, as well as the
Los Angeles Times, New York Times
and
American Heritage
magazine, all produced exemplary articles on various aspects of eugenics. The
Winston-Salem Journal
series was a feat of investigative journalism. As the manuscript was being typed, the governors of Virginia, Oregon, California, North Carolina and South Carolina all publicly apologized to the victims of their states’ official persecution. Others will follow. The topic is now where it belongs, in the hands of hard-driving journalists and historians who will not stop until they have uncovered all the facts.

Now that newspaper and magazine articles have placed the crime of eugenics on the front burner, my book explains in depth exactly how this fraudulent science infected our society and then reached across the world and right into Nazi Germany. I want the full story to be understood in context. Skipping around in the book will only lead to flawed and erroneous conclusions. So if you intend to skim, or to rely on selected sections, please do not read the book at all. This is the saga of a century and can easily be misunderstood. The realities of the twenties, thirties and forties were very different from each other. I have made this request of my readers on prior books and I repeat it for this volume as well.

Although this book contains many explosive revelations and embarrassing episodes about some of our society’s most honored individuals and institutions, I hope its contents will not be misused or quoted out of context by special interests. Opponents of a woman’s right to choose could easily seize upon Margaret Sanger’s eugenic rhetoric to discredit the admirable work of Planned Parenthood today; I oppose such misuse. Detractors of today’s Rockefeller Foundation could easily apply the facts of their Nazi connections to their current programs; I reject the linkage. Those frightened by the prospect of human engineering could invoke the science’s eugenic foundations to condemn all genomic research; that would be a mistake. While I am as anxious as the next person about the prospect of out-of-control genomics under the thumb of big business, I hope every genetic advance that helps humanity fight disease will continue as fast and as furiously as possible.

This is the right place to note that virtually all the organizations I investigated cooperated with unprecedented rigor, because they want the history illuminated as much as anyone. This includes the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, and the Max Planck Institute, successor to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. All gave me unlimited access and unstinting assistance. These organizations have all worked hard to help the world discover their pasts and must be commended. Planned Parenthood worked with me closely day after day, searching for and faxing documents, continually demonstrating their interest in the unvarnished truth. The same can be said for numerous other corporations and organizations. This is a book of history, and corporate and philanthropic America must be commended when they cooperate in an investigation as aggressive and demanding as mine.

Indeed, of the scores of societies, corporations, organizations and governmental agencies I contacted around the world, only one obstructed my work. IBM refused me access to its files. Despite this obstruction, I was able to demonstrate that the race-defining punch card used by the SS in Nazi Germany was actually derived from one developed for the Carnegie Institution years before Hitler came to power.

This project has been a long, exhausting, exhilarating odyssey for me, one that has taken me to the darkest side of the brightest minds and revealed to me one reason why America has been struggling so long to become the country it still wants to be. We have a distance to go. Again I ask, how did this happen in a progressive society? After reviewing thousands upon thousands of pages of documentation, and pondering the question day and night for nearly two years, I realize it comes down to just one word. More than the self-validation and self-certification of the elite, more than just power and influence joining forces with prejudice, it was the corrupter of us all: it was
arrogance
.

EDWIN BLACK
Washington, DC
March 15, 2003

As I wrote in my 2003 Introduction, many books on the topic would follow mine, filling in the details about a given state or region, or centering on special classes of victims. I could have written twenty volumes with the research I had accumulated. But that was not possible. In the decade since
War Against the Weak
was published, more than a dozen good, specifically focused books have appeared. They are welcome. Dozens more are needed to fully chronicle the sagas of the many places ravaged by eugenics, from California, which led the nation in sterilization at the hands of its elite, to Peru, where in the later 1990s some 300,000 Indian women were sterilized in a program funded by $36 million in American foreign aid. More enterprise is needed to tell the plight endured by so many groups targeted for elimination, from the Deaf, considered by Alexander Graham Bell disciples to be a nemesis because they use sign language, to Native Americans, tricked by the Bureau of Indian Affairs as though they were a varmint infestation. Most researchers struggle just to grasp the tragedy and the suffering.

My task is very different. I have already identified the victims and their trail of tears, a trail too often disappearing into a fading future that suddenly turns left into oblivion. My mission is to expose who paid for these bleak episodes, who agreed to them, who made them possible, and who used his lofty status as a university scholar, a medical expert, a governor, a judge, a legislator, a prominent attorney, or a wealthy philanthropic organization to press forward on the gearshift of genocide.

Who controlled the throttle? Who paved the way? Who happily collected a toll when the caravan passed? Who escaped unscathed when the crimes were discovered?

There is much more to do here for the careful independent journalist and independent scholar, because more than a few of the gilded institutions are nervously standing inert and silent. Why? I am asked over and over. The answer is simple. Because too many of the vaulted universities and their funders were among the perpetrators and are too fearful to join the ranks of the illuminators lest they be illuminated.

Eugenics, after all, was a movement of the best and brightest, the elite and the magnified, against those perceived as weak or who became weak after being systematically sapped of their strength by junk science enshrined by the “unruly” of law. This national nightmare was not a movement of men in white sheets burning crosses on lawns at midnight. This was a shining movement of men in white lab coats and three-piece suits at the state-house, the courthouse, and the illustrious name-plated clinic. Pounding gavels, expounding fictitious facts, and propounding genocidal laws they twisted American society into a machine of genocide against a significant segment its own citizenry.

The Treaty on Genocide, Article 2, defines genocide as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial, or religious group.” Eugenics and its mandate of family bloodline termination were repugnant enough to be deemed “genocide” from the first moments the term genocide came into use. Article 2, section D, specifies: “imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.” In Article 3, the treaty states that among the “acts [that] shall be punishable” are “complicity in genocide.” As for who shall be punished, the Treaty specifies the perpetrators in Article 4: “Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article 3 shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials, or private individuals.”

Beyond a distant horizon, justice still waits for the generations robbed of their progeny, for the never-born generations deprived of their existence. The force of justice also awaits the powerful in our past and present that made such misery happen by virtue of their ability to wage a war against the weak.

EDWIN BLACK
Washington, DC
April 02, 2012

W
ar Against the Weak
utilized published and private sources spanning a century, and in several languages, and as such presented numerous textual challenges. We relied upon established style conventions as often as possible, and, when required, adapted and innovated styles. Readers may notice certain inconsistencies. Some explanation follows.

Every phrase of quoted material has remained as true as possible to the original terminology, punctuation and capitalization, even to the point of preserving archaic and sometimes offensive terms when used by the original source. No attempt was made to filter out ethnic denigrations when they appeared in period materials. Eugenicists in America called themselves
eugenicists,
but in Britain referred to themselves as
eugenists,
and sometimes the usage crossed; we used
eugenicists
in narrative but
eugenists
whenever it appeared in a specific quotation. In several instances we quoted from profoundly misspelled handwritten letters, and it was our decision to transcribe these as authentically as possible.

When referring to materials originally published in German, journals and magazines are cited by their legal name in German, such as
Archiv fur Rassen- und Geseilschaftsbiologie,
with the first usage including a translation in parentheses. Titles of books are referred to by their English translations; the first usage includes the original German title in parentheses. When multiple translations of a book title or organization name exist, we selected the most appropriate. We made an exception when a book’s title rose to the public awareness of a
Mein Kampf
We used the German
for
whenever possible but were compelled to use the variant
fuer
when it was used in American headlines.

For most points of style, this book has followed
The Chicago Manual of Style.
Unfortunately, not even the near-thousand pages of standards set forth in
Chicago
could cover all the varied forms in which primary information was received. This is especially true when dealing with electronic sources such as Internet web pages, and actual documents-new and old-reproduced in PDF formats, electronic books and other Internet sources. This is one of the first history books to incorporate widespread use of legitimate materials on the Internet. For example, we obtained copies of Papal encyclicals from the Vatican’s website, PDFs of original historical programs, and electronic books-all on the Internet. These are legitimate materials when used with extreme caution.