War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (110 page)

On page 29, a list of actionable “medical defects” includes “sexual promiscuity” and “pauper.” A four-page appendix compares North Carolina’s sterilization rate with those of all other American states and again cites Laughlin as the source. As much as North Carolina gauged its progress within the national and international eugenics movement, likewise the global movement maintained a close watch on North Carolina’s progress.

Laughlin and others held the view that the state’s population was riddled with unfit humans, and that their spawn had infiltrated the entire United States. In 1936, Laughlin was commissioned by Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross to undertake a “Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut.” The purpose? To bring Nazi-style ethnic cleansing to Connecticut in an organized, scientific fashion. The plan was to trace the ancestry of all 1.75 million residents of Connecticut. Page 63 of the 1938 final report stated that the eugenic commission would “determine the racial decent of the present population of the state with particular reference to social value—good and bad.” The final report continues: “Make a special study of alien blood in Connecticut … The nonwhite blood in the state constitutes the subject of a survey of particular value. Investigation should include … their origin, numbers and interracial mixtures, and rates of increase.” The unfit would be denounced as “aliens.”

Those “aliens” would be rounded up, their assets seized, and they would then be “deported” to their ancestral states or regions under a program called “Intertown, intercommunity, and interstate deportation.” This would be the modern equivalent, the state plan asserted, “of being run out of town.” This policy also mirrored the Nazi approach of the day. Page 56 of the report states, “If exile, or ‘encouraged emigration,’ or ‘dumping’ were no longer possible” due to the large numbers to be internally deported, American states that “now permit the production of certain types of human defectives and inadequates would be compelled to consider more seriously a practical means for the reduction of their supply.”

Compelled? How? Reciprocal legislation between states was envisioned.

When the limit of re-absorption of the deported masses was reached, special “population control” measures were to be undertaken. Five measures were cited: 1) Migration Control “to enforce deportation”; 2) Marriage Restriction; 3) Sterilization; 4) Segregation and Incarceration “for the prevention of their living again in their handicapped offspring in the next generation,” which would necessitate confinement camps; and 5) Euthanasia. Laughlin explained, “In some communities ‘mercy death’ has been advocated in certain extreme cases … but the modern American state has not yet worked out ‘due process of law’ nor has it yet decided on who should sit in judgment.” The final report added, “The legality and protection finally found in the eugenical sterilization laws after twenty years of experimental legislation gives some hope that a similarly sound basis for euthanasia might be worked out … for states or communities which desire it.”

Reciprocal “treaties” would be engineered with like-minded eugenic advocates in the legislatures of Connecticut and alien-recipient states using the robust interstate cooperation model perfected during the quest to achieve mass sterilization. To that end, on page 66, in a section headed “Needed Researches,” project 8 “Euthanasia—Mercy Death,” the task was set forth: “Compile and analyze all past and existing statues of all nations which bear upon the subject.”

Euthanasia had been the holy grail of eugenics since the movement’s inception at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1906, the first state euthanasia law was introduced in the Ohio legislature, but defeated. A leading eugenicist described the proposal as Ohio’s attempt to “murder certain persons suffering from incurable disease.” Iowa considered a similar measure. In 1911, the leading pioneer eugenicists, supported by the US Department of Agriculture, the American Breeders Association, and the Carnegie Institution, met to propound a battle plan to create a master race—a race of white, blond, blue-eyed Americans devoid of “undesirables.”

Point eight of the
Preliminary Report of the Committee of the Eugenic Section of the American Breeders Association to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population
specified “euthanasia.” Of course, euthanasia was merely a euphemism—actually a misnomer. Eugenicists did not see euthanasia as a “merciful killing” of those in pain, but rather a “painless killing” of people deemed unworthy of life. The method most whispered about, and publicly denied, but never out of mind, was a “lethal chamber” utilizing gas. Laughlin became a strident advocate for such killing from the outset. Indeed, advocacy for eugenicide was widespread and ceaseless in the eugenic literature and echoed in the formal proposals of various state welfare officials across the country.

Among the many ancestral states long under particular scrutiny for their Appalachians and freed slaves were Kentucky, Indiana, Virginia, and North Carolina. These were to receive thousands of Connecticut’s deportees. If the notion spread, similar deportation policies would be adopted by other states.

The plan took its first step with mass registration of nearly all 2,190 citizens of the town of Rocky Hill, Connecticut. About half of them were fingerprinted.

But the mass deportations, recipient-state incarceration camps, and euthanasia mills never happened. Within weeks of the plan’s launch in Rocky Hill, Governor Cross lost the 1938 election. With Cross out of office, Laughlin’s entire project was quietly abandoned. World War II broke out in 1939. Nazi atrocities and eugenic fascism shocked the world. After World War II, as the smoke cleared from millions murdered in the name of racial supremacy, international law officially declared that hampering reproduction of any ethnic group constituted “genocide.”

After World War II, most states drastically curtailed or abolished their eugenic campaigns and sterilization programs—but not North Carolina. Many North Carolinians were still targeted for bloodline termination because of their poverty, ancestry, or appearance. The prospect became a passion for hold-out eugenicists across the nation. They found common cause with confirmed eugenicists in several of North Carolina’s best universities. Several leading doctrinaire eugenicists found a home at Bowman Gray School of Medicine, now known as Wake Forest University School of Medicine. The school hosted the first department of medical genetics in America. These eugenicists included Dr. William Allan and Dr. Nash Herndon, both senior members of the genetics faculty. Allen had been an unrepentant race eugenicist for decades and throughout the Nazi era. He was a leader in the Eugenics Research Association and an international giant of medical genetics. Herdon, who succeeded Allan, served as president of the American Eugenics Society and helped to found North Carolina’s Human Betterment League.

Since both professors were rabid eugenicists, they attracted the support of Wycliffe Draper, an unabashed Nazi enthusiast and heir to a New England textile fortune. Draper donated money to Bowman Gray School of Medicine. “In 1950,” according to a confidential university investigation, “Draper made a gift of $40,000 in response to a proposal by Dr. Herndon to conduct a genetics study of an all-white North Carolina mountain population. The research focused on groups of geographically isolated mountain families, who tended to have defined concentrations of certain genetic traits and were thus of significant interest to medical genetics researchers. In 1951, Draper made an additional $40,000 grant for this project.” Among Draper’s stipulations for additional funding, he demanded that “the department not officially advocate interracial marriage.” The school agreed to the conditions, according to the report, and eventually, Draper granted an additional $100,000.

According the university report, further funding was to be contingent upon three provisos: “1) To seek to have race and immigration laws maintained, enforced, and strengthened; 2) To justify (explore) by scientific research the attitudes they reflect; 3) To explain and defend these attitudes by teaching and publicity.” In other words, the new Draper grants would establish the school as a prestigious outpost of racial eugenics. It is unclear if Draper paid any additional monies.

Others around the nation rallied to North Carolina’s eugenic crusade.

Racist Massachusetts financier Clarence Gamble, heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and a Nazi zealot, donated large sums to finance research and individual sterilizations as well as related state efforts. Gamble believed that most of North Carolina’s unfit were still roaming free of institutions—and needed to be apprehended. In a 1951 article for the
North Carolina Medical Journal,
Gamble wrote, “There are undoubtedly more persons outside of institutions for whom the operation [sterilization] is appropriate than there are within.” In that article, Gamble calculated, “the 468 sterilizations of the last biennium will mean 390 fewer feebleminded North Carolinians, an important accomplishment of this public health procedure.” It was always about population control.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, sterilizations continued at a startling pace. Some 8,000 were approved, and about 7,600 were actually performed, the last circa 1973. This systematic action was taken in spite of the fact that the term
genocide
was actually developed in North Carolina by Raphael Lemkin, on the campus of Duke University, during the Holocaust era. Lemkin identified interfering with births as one of the five major crimes of genocide. North Carolina knew the thick red line they had crossed.

The last reference to euthanasia in the archived files of the Human Betterment League is probably found in Folder 29, marked “Euthanasia.” The folder contains several letters, written in 1975 and 1976, between one of the state’s leading law firms and Bowman Gray School of Medicine. Eugenicist and hosiery magnate James Gordon Hanes, a founder of the Human Betterment League, was openly copied on all the correspondence. A working committee was exploring new and better definitions of when to apply the concept of mercy killing to medical patients, starting with the vegetative. Discussions about euthanasia commonly focused first on the most obvious medical candidates at the rim of the slippery slope.

In 2002, the
Winston-Salem Journal
published a riveting newspaper series exposing the deep veins of eugenic sterilization undertaken during the twentieth century. The mainly dormant sterilization law was finally repealed in 2003. Governor Michael Easley issued a formal apology for the state’s campaign. The apology led to a call for compensation for “the victims.” The case for compensation was especially energized by two determined and tireless North Carolina citizens, State Representative Larry Womble and
Winston-Salem Journal
reporter John Railey. The compensation call attracted worldwide media and political attention throughout 2011. At press time for this expanded edition—April 2012—the state legislature is roiling over whether they will pay compensation of as much as $50,000 to each of a few thousand people victimized by the blade of North Carolina’s sterilization statute. Their vote is a chapter that will be written only after this book is printed.

But the question is: Can you really write a check for genocide? If so, who should write it? Who should receive it? Certainly, those who survived the surgeries should receive reparation as a down payment on justice. But the larger question is adjudicating the role of the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Pioneer Fund, a cohort of prominent universities, medical and legal societies, and many other esteemed organizations that energetically helped North Carolina execute a campaign of genocide against its own citizens. They weren’t following orders—they were giving the orders. More compelling questions exist: What will be done in North Carolina and other states to ensure that society will be sufficiently educated to never again allow such a crime to occur? This calls for the type of education now addressing slavery and the Holocaust. But the universities remain silent, perhaps hoping no one will notice their historic roles.

When will those with compensation on their mind understand who the real victims are? Is it the men and women who survived the knife, the people we can still hear and see? Or are the most important and most numerous victims the innocent, never-born generations that cannot be seen or heard—that is, not easily. Listen carefully; you might hear them faintly or sense their translucent presence. They too might be asking one question: Why?