A Patriot's History of the Modern World (32 page)

Although scholars differ over a comprehensive definition of fascism, a usable description would be a system wherein the government controls the production and distribution of goods and services through regulation, financial support, and the management of public money to benefit the state and its citizens as a whole. Fascism is centered on a state, nation, or group of nations, with top-down control of the citizenry, determining laws and managing education, employment, health, and social welfare. Often fascism includes a certain racial or religious component, but not always.

Once economic, and to an extent, social control was ceded to the state without intermediary institutions, such as legitimate courts, bills of rights, or the church, anything became acceptable in the “public interest.” Particularly when it came to the newly unfolding field of public health, fascist states could easily meld nationalism into ethnic purification. After all, what was a German? Who was an Italian? Now the state decided. Ultimately, such definitions almost invariably involved calculations of who was of greater value to society, and from there, it was a short step to adopting eugenics in the name of improving public health. It also entailed a certain sterile judgment that appealed to statisticians, sociologists, and economists. (German economists and the statisticians at the German Institute of Business-Cycle Research, whose chief, Ernest Wagemann, advocated Keynesian-style reflation, were particularly attracted to Nazism.)
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Characteristic of these trends was
Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life
(1920) by Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, which calculated the cost of one “idiot” to GNP.
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Hoche went so far as to argue that some were “mentally dead,” including the “incurably stupid,” that is, people lacking imagination or self-consciousness.

American and English Progressives found these elements of fascism appealing, and were drawn to their own variants of selective breeding, eugenics, race purification, or other such programs to ensure that only the “right” people (that is, those like them) survived. Keynes was at the forefront of the English eugenics movement, along with H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, the Webbs, Huxleys, and Havelock Ellis. British Socialist economist Sidney Webb insisted the “wrong” people were out-breeding the “right” ones, a trend putting Britain at risk of “national deterioration” or of falling into the hands of the “Irish and the Jews.”
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H. G. Wells would regulate the right of an individual to bring a child into the world based on what he called “a certain minimum of personal efficiency,” namely whether the parents were worthy, based on “a certain minimum of physical development,” and free of disease.
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For society to attain Wells's perfection, “swarms of black and brown, and dirty-white and yellow people” would have to go: the “sterilisation of failures [sic]” was the only hope for improvement of “human stock.”
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In America, similar ideas were embraced by the likes of Margaret Sanger, Charles B. Davenport, and Madison Grant, whose book
The Passing of the Great Race
(1916) propounded a Nordic approach to history, in which Aryan races were the most evolved, and embraced eugenics wholeheartedly.
A “rigid system of selection,” Grant argued, would eliminate the “weak or unfit.” (Hitler wrote Grant, saying, “The book is my Bible.”) Woodrow Wilson himself had written of “progressive races” versus “stagnant nationalities,” Progressive code words for racial superiority. While governor of New Jersey, his Board of Examiners of the Feebleminded had established criteria for the state to decide when “procreation was inadvisable” for those living in poverty, for criminals, or for mental defectives. Herbert Croly, a leading intellectual, lobbied for enforcing celibacy on lunatics and criminals; one of Teddy Roosevelt's advisers, Charles Van Hise, took it even further, declaring, “He who thinks not of himself primarily, but of his race, and of its future, is the new patriot.”
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One of the leading American race-suicide theorists, sociologist E. A. Ross, having already authored a book called
Social Control
(1901), in 1914 described immigrants as “hirsute, low-browed, big-faced persons of obviously low mentality…ox-like men [who] are the descendants of those who always stayed behind.”
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Sentiments such as these lay behind the sterilization laws for “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists” passed by thirty states, Canada, and many countries in Europe from 1907 to 1937. This was not far from the Nazi racial program against Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs, nor from the Third Reich's program of sterilization of all undesirables: both invested doctors and medical science with a new and powerful authority as experts who could give the final word on mental capacities and inherited, unchangeable characteristics.
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American Progressives copied the Europeans and the British by implementing racial control through economics and public health. Margaret Sanger and others specifically targeted Negroes and mental defectives for extinction through their programs. Other early American Progressives, including Jane Addams and Theodore Roosevelt, as well as labor leader Samuel Gompers, had first invoked racial quotas to combat what they viewed as unfair competition in the labor market in the late 1800s. As Ross explained when advocating the minimum wage, “The Coolie cannot outdo the American, but he can underlive him.”
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A minimum wage was also advocated by many in the American Economic Association who thought they could exclude an “unemployable class,” in the words of Sidney Webb, from the workforce using a higher wage, thereby putting them on the path to extinction. “Of all the ways of dealing with these unfortunate parasites,” Webb contended, “the most ruinous…is to allow them unrestrainedly to compete as wage earners.”
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The subject of inferior breeding also loomed large
in the writings of many Progressives, including Princeton economist Royal Meeker, who favored a minimum wage that would lock out undesirable workers. “Better the state should support the inefficient wholly and prevent the multiplication of the breed than subsidize incompetence and unthrift, enabling them to bring forth more of their kind.”
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John R. Commons, the dean of American labor economists, likewise feared immigrants' competition: “competition has no respect for the superior races,” he intoned, and the race with the “lowest necessities” displaces the others. Ironically, Commons identified Jews as the source of unfair low-wage competition (the “Jewish sweat-shop is the tragic penalty paid by that ambitious race”).
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American Progressives called for the limitation of the reproduction of “undesirables” as an effort to protect the public health. Edward Larson's extensive 1996 study of Progressive eugenics in the South revealed how pervasive the sentiment was even in the medical community for controlling what were viewed as undesirable populations. One Alabama doctor at the turn of the century advised his colleagues, “People who have [dysgenic] hereditary traits ought not to be allowed to get married, and men who persist in [degenerate behavior] ought to be confined in reformatory institutions, or have their testicles removed….”
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Another Georgia pediatrician recommended, “Sterilize all individuals who are not physically, mentally or emotionally capable of reproducing normal offspring.”
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These views were not confined to rural areas or the “backward” South. Chicago surgeon A. J. Ochsner advised that sterilization “could reasonably be suggested for chronic inebriates, imbeciles, perverts and paupers.”
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North Dakota and Nebraska established central registries for mental defectives and would not allow them to get marriage certificates unless one of the partners was sterilized.

California had one of the most advanced sterilization programs, performing procedures on 2,500 patients in state institutions by 1920, and ultimately more than 20,000 by the 1930s. Originally passed in 1909, the first sterilization law focused on the mentally retarded and convicted sex offenders. A second law, passed in 1913, repealed the first and broadened the range of people to be considered for sterilization, including anyone “afflicted with hereditary insanity or incurable chronic mania or dementia,” as well as those included in the 1909 categories.
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The state's general superintendent of the Commission on Lunacy, F. W. Hatch, sought to expand the program even more, calling for the sterilization of “confirmed criminals, habitual drunkards, and drug habituates, epileptics, sexual and moral perverts.”
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Hatch was supported by such academic leaders as Stanford's president David Starr Jordan and philanthropist E. S. Gosney, who founded the Human Betterment Foundation, a California organization which distributed information about compulsory sterilization “for the protection and betterment of the human family in body, mind, character, and citizenship.”
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Hatch also had the backing of the California State Board of Charities and Corrections, which noted that for the benefit of society, children of the insane were better off “not to be born.”
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In the Deep South, only one top mental health official publicly opposed eugenics, while the proceedings of the southern states' medical associations revealed a deep commitment to hereditary causes of criminal behavior, epilepsy, and mental disease. Thomas Haines, of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, stated that “the way to prevent much of the crime, immorality and degeneracy of the community today is to
prevent this class of persons from propagating
(emphasis in original).”
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Throughout the West, pressure to limit the number of social undesirables grew out of the burgeoning public health movement, which propagated the idea that such individuals contributed to the spread of disease. Reflecting this development, Germany's social hygiene movement came to dominate its state welfare system in the 1920s under its umbrella of benign-sounding goals, such as protecting the health of mothers and children and combating psychiatric disorders.

But beneath the noble goals of improving national public health lay a darker mission. In America, this would take the form of the Tuskegee syphilis experiments beginning in 1932; in Germany, it manifested itself in the quest to attain German racial purity even before Hitler and the Nazis were in power.
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Venereal disease and tuberculosis were the two most common targets of public health officials in both countries since these were usually associated with “lower classes,” poverty, and overcrowding. In Germany, these were largely dealt with through emergency legislation until a permanent anti-VD law was passed in 1927, which, among other things, abolished compulsory medical exams for prostitutes but required medical treatment for anyone infected with a sexually transmitted disease. A “healthy lifestyle” became a state concern in Weimar Germany, especially when tied to the post–World War I epidemic of venereal disease. This provided a convenient target and enabled a further extension of German state power, as “voluntary welfare services that had proliferated during the war were institutionalized as professional careers in social work.”
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Demonstrating a
pattern common to all welfare state bureaucracies, the German system first and foremost benefited not the clients but the welfare workers themselves, with social control transcending the rights of individuals and “defin[ing] new spheres for the exercising of coercion.”
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Thus, Weimar produced one of those historical ironies in which the “concerned” social hygienists and health experts were often easily converted to eugenicists under the Nazis.

But sterilization as a means of enhancing social health saw its largest growth in the United States, where eugenics talk was disguised in the titles of nonthreatening, even benign-sounding institutional names: the American Conference for the Prevention of Infant Mortality, or the National Mental Hygiene Committee. Others, such as the American Eugenics Society, made their purposes more obvious. Founded in 1922 by Madison Grant, with the support of Alexander Graham Bell, biologist Charles Davenport, economist Irving Fisher, and Luther Burbank, the Society promoted sterilization of unsuitable groups (the mentally retarded and the “feeble minded,” a flexible definition that could include almost anyone at a given time). Establishing state chapters, the American Eugenics Society saw its greatest successes in California, where the record of cleansing undesirables was exceeded only by Germany. Biologist Paul Popenoe, who published with E. S. Gosney a favorable report on the California sterilization program, was widely cited by the Nazi government in Germany.
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By 1920, some fifteen states mandated that rapists and imbeciles face compulsory sterilization. Another sixteen states passed sterilization measures in the 1920s, particularly after the
Buck v. Bell
Supreme Court case upheld a Virginia state law that required compulsory sterilization of the retarded “for the protection and health of the state.” Sterilization operations shot up tenfold.

Race was also an issue. Sacramento banker Charles M. Goethe, founder of the Northern California Eugenics Society and the Human Betterment Foundation, campaigned against blacks and Mexicans as “low-powered” and “socially unfit.”
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The Tuskegee syphilis experiments were directed only at blacks, for example. This clear racial component to eugenics was nothing new: the Immigration Restriction League (founded in 1894) had been at work for almost thirty years seeking to bar other racial groups from entering the United States due to the view that they were “inferior races,” and as Larson points out, the same criteria were enthusiastically applied to blacks in the deep South.
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