By Nigel M. de S. Cameron
October 17, 2003
The biggest idea of the 21st century – mark my words! – will be a dated neologism from the 20th. Eugenics is set for a come-back and will be the mother of all battles for the human race.
That’s why Edwin Black’s new book The War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York:
Four Walls, 2003) is so timely. Black takes us back in depressing
detail to the vast and enormously popular eugenics industry that caught
the diseased imagination of the United States in the first part of the last century. An epigram - and epitaph – for this time in U.S. history could be Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ notorious words in the Supreme Court decision Buck v. Bell: “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”
Carrie Buck’s sad story is well known, immortalized in this judgment which has been compared to Dred Scott
in its infamy. We know also that Justice Holmes, the most distinguished
jurist of his generation, was that same man whose speech on “The Path
of the Law” was a manifesto for positivism and the idea that law should
evolve over time to meet the needs of the people. This view was opposed
to the prevailing common law viewpoint of the time which believed that
law should be based on absolute moral truth. The results of such flawed
thinking by Holmes and others could hardly be better illustrated than
in the eugenics tale that Edwin Black lays out.
I took Black’s large book away to read on
vacation, and on my return to looked again at that fine 1960s movie on
the trial of the Nazi doctors, Judgment at Nuremberg. Nuremberg,
which is focused chiefly on the Nazi sterilization program, shows the
brilliant defense offered by the Nazis’ counsel who argued over and
over that they had done nothing that had not been done before in the United States.
The sterilization law passed early in Hitler’s regime (and lauded, as
Black notes, by American eugenicists) was almost a mirror of the model
legislation that had been enacted in many states across America. Sterilization laws led to tens of thousands of forcible sterilizations of U.S. citizens,
and were upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court. The Nazis’ lawyer makes it a
point to quote Justice Holmes at the American judges who are weighing
the fate of his clients.
Black goes much further than Judgment at Nuremberg.
He chronicles the history of eugenics in the United States noting
things like the Eugenics Record Office, (based at Cold Spring Harbor
and purely private despite its name) which accumulated huge quantities
of “eugenic” records on unconsenting individuals. He demonstrates U.S. leadership
in the worldwide eugenics movement, and the support of American
statesmen for the project. Even a U.S. Secretary of State sent out the
invitations to the first worldwide eugenics conferences. Blacks sets
out in damning detail the intricate links between foundations such as
Rockefeller and the eugenics research of the Nazis themselves.
