War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (9 page)

Mendel’s scientific paper, describing ten years of tedious work, was presented to a local scientific society in Brno and mailed to several prominent biologists in Europe, but it was ignored by the scientific world. Mendel grew more unhappy with the rejection. His combative exchanges with local officials on unrelated issues were so embarrassing to the order that when Mendel died in 1884, the monastery burned all his notes.
¹⁸

In May of 1900, however, the esteemed British naturalist and Darwin disciple William Bateson unexpectedly discovered references to Mendel’s laws of heredity in three separate papers. The three papers were independently researched and simultaneously submitted by three different students. Amazed at Mendel’s findings, an excited Bateson announced to the world through the Royal Horticultural Society that he had “rediscovered” Mendel’s crucial studies in plant heredity. The science that Bateson called
genetics
was born. Mendel’s laws became widely discussed throughout the horticultural world.
¹⁹

But Galton’s eugenic followers understood that the biological arithmetic of peapods, cattle and other lower species did not ordain the futures of the most complex organism on earth:
Homo sapiens.
Height, hair color, eye color and other physical attributes could be partially explained in Mendelian terms. But intelligent, thought-driven humans beings were too subtle, too impressionable, too variable and too unpredictable to be reduced to a horticultural equation. Man’s environment and living conditions were inherent to his development. Nutrition, prenatal and childhood circumstances, disease, injury, and upbringing itself were all decisive, albeit not completely understood, factors that intervened in the development of any individual. Some of the best people came from the worst homes, and some of the worst people came from the best homes.

Hence, during the first decade of the twentieth century, as Mendel was being debated, most Galtonian eugenicists admitted that their ideas were still too scantily clad to be called science, too steeped in simple statistics rather than astute medical knowledge, too preliminary to even venture into the far-reaching enterprise of organized human breeding. Eugenics was all just theory and guesswork anyway. For example, in 1904 Galton wrote to his colleague Bateson seeking any initial evidence of “Mendelianism in Man,” suggesting that any data could contribute to what he still called a “theoretical point of view.” In another 1904 letter, Galton reminded Bateson, “I do indeed fervently hope that exact knowledge may be gradually attained and established beyond question, and I wish you and your collaborators all success in your attempts to obtain it.”
²⁰

As late as 1910, Galton’s most important disciple, mathematician Karl Pearson, head of the Eugenics Laboratory, admitted just how thin their knowledge was. In a scientific paper treating eugenics and alcoholism, Pearson confessed, “The writers of this paper are fully conscious of the slenderness of their data; they have themselves stated that many of their conclusions are probabilities … rather than demonstrations. They will no doubt be upbraided with publishing anything at all, either on the ground that what they are dealing with is ‘crude and worthless material’ or that as ‘mathematical outsiders,’ they are incapable of dealing with a medico-social problem.” Pearson added in a footnote that he also understood why some would find the linkage of eugenics and alcoholism an act of inebriation in itself. He went on to quote a critic: “The educated man and the scientist is as prone as any other to become the victim … of his prejudices…. He will in defense thereof make shipwreck of both the facts of science and the methods of science … by perpetrating every form of fallacy, inaccuracy and distortion.”
²¹

Galton himself dismissed the whole notion of human breeding as socially impossible-with or without the elusive data he craved. “We can’t mate men and women as we please, like cocks and hens,” Galton quipped to Bateson in 1904. At the time, Galton was defending his recently published
Index to Achievements of Near Kinfolk,
which detailed how talent and skill run in the same celebrated families. Wary of being viewed as an advocate of human breeding, Galton’s preface cautioned Mendelian devotees with strong conditionals, ifs and buts. “The experience gained in establishing improved breeds of domestic animals and plants,” he wrote, “is a safe guide to speculations on the theoretical possibility of establishing improved breeds of the human race. It is not intended to enter here into such speculations but to emphasize the undoubted fact that members of gifted families are … more likely … to produce gifted offspring.”
²²

Nor did Galton believe regulated marriages were a realistic proposition in any democratic society. He knew that “human nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage,” and admitted as much publicly. In his published memoir, he recounted his original error in suggesting such utopian marriages. “I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation,” he conceded, “and not enough of the effects of self-interest and of social and religious sentiment.”
²³

Unable to achieve a level of scientific certainty needed to create a legal eugenic framework in Britain, Galton hoped to recast eugenics as a religious doctrine governing marriages, a creed to be taken on faith without proof. Indeed, faith without proof constitutes the essence of much religious dogma. Eugenical marriage should be “strictly enforced as a religious duty, as the Levirate law ever was,” wrote Galton in a long essay, which listed such precedents in the Jewish, Christian and even primitive traditions. He greeted the idea of a religion enthusiastically, suggesting, “It is easy to let the imagination run wild on the supposition of a whole-hearted acceptance of eugenics as a national religion.”
²⁴

Many of Galton’s followers agreed that founding a national religion was the only way eugenics could thrive. Even the playwright George Bernard Shaw, a eugenic extremist, agreed in a 1905 essay that “nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization.” Late in his life, in 1909, Galton declared that eugenics in a civilized nation would succeed only as “one of its religious tenets.”
²⁵

But in America, it did not matter that Galton and his followers found themselves fighting for intellectual acceptance with little evidence on their side. Nor did it matter that British eugenic leaders themselves admitted that eugenics did not rise to a level of scientific certainty sufficient to formulate public policy. Nor did it matter that Mendel’s newly celebrated laws of heredity might make good sense for peapods, but not for thinking, feeling men, women and children.

In America, racial activists had already convinced themselves that those of different races and ethnic backgrounds considered inferior were no more than a hereditary blight in need of eugenic cleansing. Many noted reformers even joined the choir. For example, in a 1909 article called “Practical Eugenics,” the early twentieth-century education pioneer John Franklin Bobbitt insisted, “In primal days was the blood of the race kept high and pure, like mountain streams.” He now cautioned that the “highest, purest tributaries to the stream of heredity” were being supplanted by “a rising flood in the muddy, undesirable streams.”
²⁶

Bobbitt held out little value for the offspring of “worm-eaten stock.” Although considered a social progressive, he argued that the laws of nature mandating “survival of the fittest” were constantly being countermanded by charitable endeavors. “Schools and charities,” he harangued, “supply crutches to the weak in mind and morals … [and] corrupt the streams of heredity.” Society, he pleaded, must prevent “the weaklings at the bottom from mingling their weakness in human currents.”
²⁷

Defective humans were not just those carrying obvious diseases or handicaps, but those whose lineages strayed from the Germanic, Nordic and/or white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideal. Bobbitt made clear that only those descended from Teutonic forefathers were of pure blood. In one such remonstration, he reminded, “One must admit the high purity of their blood, their high average sanity, soundness and strength. They were a well-born, well-weeded race.” Eugenic spokesman Madison Grant, trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, stated the belief simply in his popular book,
The Passing of the Great Race,
writing that Nordics “were the white man par excellence.”
²⁸

Indeed, the racism of America’s first eugenic intellectuals was more than just a movement of whites against nonwhites. They believed that Germans and Nordics comprised the supreme race, and a typical lament among eugenic leaders such as Lothrop Stoddard was that Nordic populations were decreasing. In
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy,
Stoddard wrote that the Industrial Revolution had attracted squalid Mediterranean peoples who quickly outnumbered the more desirable Nordics. “In the United States, it has been much the same story. Our country, originally settled almost exclusively by Nordics, was toward the close of the nineteenth century invaded by hordes of immigrant Alpines and Mediterraneans, not to mention Asiatic elements like Levantines and Jews. As a result, the Nordic native American has been crowded out with amazing rapidity by these swarming, prolific aliens, and after two short generations, he has in many of our urban areas become almost extinct.” Madison Grant agreed: “The term ‘Caucasian race’ has ceased to have any meaning.”
²⁹

By no means did the eugenics movement limit its animus to non-English speaking immigrants. It was a movement against non-Nordics regardless of their skin color, language or national origin. For example, Stoddard denigrated the “swart cockney” in Britain “as a resurgence of the primitive Mediterranean stock, and probably a faithful replica of his ancestors of Neolithic times.” All mixed breeds were vile. “Where the parent stocks are very diverse,” wrote Stoddard, “as [in] matings between whites, Negroes and Amerindians, the offspring is a mongrel-a walking chaos, so consumed by his jarring heredities that he is quite worthless.”
³⁰

Grant’s tome lionized the long-headed skulls, blue eyes and blond hair of true Nordic stock, and outlined the complex history of Nordic migrations and invasions across Eurasia and into Great Britain. Eventually, these Nordic settlements were supplanted by lesser breeds, who adopted the Nordic and Anglo-Saxon languages but were in fact the carriers of corrupt human strains.
³¹

Indeed, those Americans descended from lower-class Scottish and Irish families were also viewed as a biological menace, being of Mediterranean descent. Brunette hair constituted an ancestral stigma that proved a non-Nordic bloodline. Any claims by such people to Anglo-Saxon descent because of language or nationality were considered fraudulent. Grant railed, “No one can question … on the streets of London, the contrast between the Piccadilly gentleman of Nordic race and the cockney costermonger [street vendor] of the Neolithic type.”
³²
Hence, from Ulster County to the Irish slums of Manhattan, to the Kentucky and Virginia hills, poor whites were reviled by eugenicists not for their ramshackle and destitute lifestyles, but for a heredity that supposedly made pauperism and criminality an inevitable genetic trait.

Even when an individual of the wrong derivation was healthy, intelligent and successful, his existence was considered dangerous. “There are many parents who, in many cases, may themselves be normal, but who produce defective offspring. This great mass of humanity is not only a social menace to the present generation, but it harbors the potential parenthood of the social misfits of our future generations.”
³³

Race mixing was considered race suicide. Grant warned: “The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”
³⁴

The racial purity and supremacy doctrines embraced by America’s pioneer eugenicists were not the ramblings of ignorant, unsophisticated men. They were the carefully considered ideals of some of the nation’s most respected and educated figures, each an expert in his scientific or cultural field, each revered for his erudition.

So when the facts about Mendel’s peapods appeared in America in 1900, these influential and eloquent thinkers were able to slap numbers and a few primitive formulas on their class and race hatred, and in so doing create a passion that transcended simple bigotry. Now their bigotry became science-race science. Now Galtonian eugenics was reborn, recast and redirected in the United States as a purely and uniquely American quest.

To succeed, all American eugenics needed was money and organization.

Enter Andrew Carnegie.

Steel made Andrew Carnegie one of America’s wealthiest men. In 1901, the steel magnate sold out to J.P. Morgan for $400 million and retreated from the world of industry. The aging Scotsman would henceforth devote his fortune to philanthropy. The next year, on January 28, 1902, the millionaire endowed his newly created Carnegie Institution with $10 million in bonds, followed by other endowments totaling $12 million. The entity was so wealthy that in 1904, Washington agreed to reincorporate the charity by special act of Congress, chartering the new name “Carnegie Institution of Washington.” This made the Carnegie Institution a joint incarnation of the steel man’s money and the United States government’s cachet.
³⁵

The Carnegie Institution was established to be one of the premier scientific organizations of the world, dedicated by charter “to encourage, in the broadest and most liberal manner, investigation, research, and discovery, and the application of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.” Twenty-four of America’s most respected names in science, government and finance were installed as trustees. The celebrated names included National Library of Medicine cofounder John Billings, Secretary of War Elihu Root and philanthropist Cleveland Dodge. Renowned paleontologist John C. Merriam became president. Merriam and his staff were required under the bylaws to closely scrutinize and preapprove all activities, audit all expenditures and regularly publish research results.
³⁶