Eugenics Not Possible Without The Power Of The State

War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edward Black. 550 pp, with notes, appendices and bibliography. Four Walls Eight Windows, New York.

With vigor and eloquence, Pope John Paul II has spoken against the "culture of death." Without too much thought, one might believe that culture is of recent vintage and found in legal abortion and the debate over legalizing euthanasia.

But the culture of death is much older, and may well have its roots in the eugenics programs of the early 20th century. Writing in "War Against The Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create A Master Race," Edwin Black casts an unwelcome spotlight on an ugly time when American leaders and philanthropic institutions virtually created eugenics and sought to stop the "unfit" from reproducing.

As valuable as the book is, however, Black doesn’t draw, at least explicitly, one important connection: Without the State, eugenics is impossible.

The book begins with a chilling description of a government sweep into southwestern Virginia’s Brush Mountain, where sheriff’s deputies ran down "imbeciles" for state eugenicists.

The authorities had prescribed forced sterilization, an idea that had humble beginnings in the theories of late 19th-century British statistician Francis Galton.

A pioneering meteorologist who also discovered that fingerprints were unique in each individual, Galton believed intelligence was inherited. He wrote about the subject and studied inherited intelligence, then coined a word using the Greek words for "well" and "born": eugenics.

The idea soon found fertile ground in the minds of American sympathizers, who thought controlling the birth of "imbeciles" and the "feebleminded" would "better society." Anyone could be a target for the eugenicists. Epileptics, also considered "feebleminded," were a particular eugenicist concern.

The man who launched American eugenics was Yankee Congregationalist Charles Davenport, born on the soil of New England Progressivism, which spawned feminism, prohibitionism and other reformist isms that plagued the 20th century.

With the help of the American Breeders’ Association, an animal husbandry group, Davenport drew support from such luminaries as Andrew Carnegie, the Harriman heirs and eventually the Rockefeller philanthropy. Alexander Graham Bell even rang in.

Davenport’s "first mission," Black writes, "was to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, at least 10 percent of the population."

After identifying this "submerged tenth," appropriate "remedies" would be used to identify "defective germ plasm" and "terminate their bloodlines."

Davenport and his eugenicists "plotted a bold campaign of ‘purging the blood of the American people of the handicapping and deteriorating influences of these anti-social classes’," meaning the "socially unfit," such as epileptics, the "feebleminded," the deformed, the deaf, mute and blind.

The eugenicists believed "the great mass of humanity is not only a social menace … but it harbors the potential parenthood of the social misfits of our future generations."

The first round of sterilization and other remedies targeted 11 million "unfit" Americans.

Thus did the State, and the states, step in, beginning with Indiana, where yet another Congregationalist led the eugenicist charge. Indiana gave America its first sterilization law.

President Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey’s sterilization law, and one of his deputies descended to greater fame as a Nazi collaborator at Buchenwald.

Pennsylvania’s legislature passed an "Act for the Prevention of Idiocy," but the governor vetoed it, saying the state may as well start chopping off heads. Other states, however, joined the crusade.

And again, eugenics attracted the support of prominent Americans. Progressive Theodore Roosevelt summed up eugenicist theory: "Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce." Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the famous opinion upholding Virginia’s decision to sterilize a woman named Carrie Buck: "Three generations of imbeciles," he averred, "are enough."

Other supporters were Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, and in Britain, Winston Churchill and Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles, postulator of evolution. Britain originated the idea of "lethal chambers" for its "unfit."

Eventually, the eugenicist virus found a hospitable host in Germany. There, Black concludes, it led to the death chambers of Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

Thanks to the Nazis, highly praised by eugenicists here, the movement eventually collapsed. But not before nearly 50,000 Americans were sterilized.

An irony of this book is that its publisher hails itself as "progressive." As the late economist and historian Murray Rothbard wrote, "Progressivism" was a movement in New England born of Yankee Pietism in the early 19th century. By the early 20th, it had matured into a Messianic ideology of pervasive social controls to better the world: prohibition of alcohol, statist government regulation of business, even the "war to end all wars," World War I. And, of course, eugenics was there, too.

Religion is important to the story of eugenics, which is often incorrectly perceived as dealing strictly with matters of race. Eugenics involved race, and as Black writes, it was also a war against the weak: the retarded, the blind, the deaf, all those whom Christ enjoined us to treat with charity, meaning love of God.

But eugenics also veered into cultural and religious fanaticism. The "unfit" not only included swarthy southern Europeans, particularly Italians, but also the fair-skinned Irish. They were Catholics having too many babies, outpacing the Yankee Progressives, who imbibed the hoary anti-Catholic creed of the Know Nothings and Pietists.

Unsurprisingly, eugenics coincided with Sanger’s birth control movement and with Progressivist dominion of public schools in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Progressivists wanted public schools to "Christianize" their pupils, particularly Catholics and Lutherans. Thus, the same people who would ensure that all children would sing the right Christian hymns in public school, and extirpate "Romish superstition," as Rothbard explained, also wanted to ensure the wrong children were never born.

Despite too much detail and too many pages, which led to some dry, laborious prose more suitable to a term paper, the book proves the verity of Lord Acton’s admonition: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. The power to control human reproduction may be the most absolute power of all. Government had it.

Not one involuntary sterilization could have occurred just because a few obsessed ideologues or rich industrialists wanted it. They hadn’t the legal power to sterilize anyone. They needed the omnipotent State.

Its elected and hired managers (politicians and bureaucrats), a high-minded elite believing itself omniscient, arrogated illegitimate authority and unjust dominion over others that defied Scriptural and natural law and the tradition of limited government, the cornerstones of American liberty.

That is the valuable lesson of Black’s important book, and until today’s "progressives" learn it, ventilating outrage over eugenics is a futile exercise.

This review first appeared in Harrisonburg, Virginia's Daily News-Record, where Kirkwood is managing editor.

The issue is kind of on the dark side, and murky like around stagnant ponds at the end of the fall season, but the eugenicists are already moving on. Cloning is coming, and what we have seen so far from the eugenicists is just batting practice. The World Series of eugenics lies just ahead.

"..but the eugenicists are already moving on. Cloning is coming, and what we have seen so far from the eugenicists is just batting practice. The World Series of eugenics lies just ahead."

I look at it differently. Eugenics (like any other idea) is dangerous ONLY if it is backed by "the power of the state". What would be wrong with "libertarian eugenics" (i.e. providing genetic information to prospective parents and leaving the decision as to how to proceed (or not proceed) up to them)???

If it is left up to individuals, then that is along the lines of the goal of progress anyway, which is fine. The state is jumping into the middle of development and use of cloning tech so the individual won't have much say as things stand now. We could take power back from the state anytime, of course, but we would have to give up most of our technology and standard of living and there would be universal scarcity again. Tough choice.

I'm practicing voluntary eugenics. There's too much history of mental illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, and kidney disease in the last 3 generations on both sides of my family for me to want to reproduce. In the USA though, I see reverse eugenics going on. Succesful, intelligent,healthy young couples don't have children while substance abusing welfare recieving illegal aliens have them by the dozen.

I see reverse eugenics going on

Absolutely. In some contries, bad eyes is a good enough reason to drop out of the gene pool. Not so this country. Here, put these contacts in and produce all the blind as a bat offspring you want. We're okay until the day the technology fails for one reason or another.

"Without the State, eugenics is impossible."

Wow, really?! So you mean that Tsutsis won't massacre Hutus if there is no government in Rwanda?!

This is a foolish article. Typical Rockwellite moronism. By combining fetal testing and abortion, today's America does practice eugenics. Compulsory eugenics was a horrible practice, but we can't feel too superior to those who imposed it. If they had the tools present day Americans have, they would have behaved more as we do now. One can argue that our practices are morally preferable if one wishes, but the end is the same, and the means more effective today.

With the incredible advances in genetics that are coming, eugenics will inevitably play a major role in the human future.
If one country bans certain practices, the scientists will just move their operations to a more friendly jurisdiction.
However, I don't think most practices will be banned. The multinational elites strongly favor eugenics, since they will be able to afford the procedures, and it will give their children huge advantages over the competition.
If you could give your child a 200IQ, excellent health, and a special talent in some artistic or scientific field, wouldn't you?
Rent the film "Gattaca" at the video store to get a glimpse of the future.

"What would be wrong with "libertarian eugenics" (i.e. providing genetic information to prospective parents and leaving the decision as to how to proceed (or not proceed) up to them)???"

I think we already have that. It's called abortion.

"I think we already have that. It's called abortion."

"Eugenics" (basing the decision to have children based on accurate genetic information) does NOT need to involve abortion, and in fact I would say that in the US, the relationship is only minor. By FAR the majority of abortions (I would guess in the high 90 percentages) are for "convenience" or "lifestyle" reasons--not genetic factors.

As valuable as the book is, however, Black doesn’t draw, at least explicitly, one important connection: Without the State, eugenics is impossible.

Programs of mass sterilization and mass murder require the state. Eugenics does not require mass sterilization or mass murder, only encouraging good DNA to be spread and/or discouraging the spread of bad DNA.

If a married couple wants to have children, but the man is sterile, and they choose to have a baby by implanting sperm in the wife from a sperm bank, and she chooses sperm from a rich, smart, psychologically and physically healthy man, she is practicing Eugenics. And that's a good thing, because her child will almost certainly grow up to be healthy, smart, and rich.

Eugenics is simply man's taking a direct interest in and artificially speeding-up evolution.

Uhm, as of 2002 forced sterilization is not illegal in this country on a federal level, rather it is not being practiced as eugenics has fallen out of favor. And it is not the times when a dangerous matter is unpopular one should be worried about, rather it is the times when an idea is popular when it may be dangerous.

Eugenics is America's best kept secret.

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