War on the Weak: Eugenics in America

This documentary depicts the U.S. Eugenic legislation throughout the early 20th Century and chronicles the compulsory sterilization faced by many Americans. "War on the Weak" continues to analyze negative eugenics by discussing the U.S. Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell. Furthermore, the parallels present among U.S. and Nazi ideologies on the nature of eugenics are presented, along with an exposition on the affinity Nazi scientists had for U.S. eugenics laws. The documentary concludes with a look at modern genetic research and leaves the viewer with the hopeful message of a society free of ailments but warns of the dangers on science that is not kept in check with the moral values of humanity.

FULL RES DOWNLOAD: http://www.archive.org/details/WarOnTheWeak

At the turn of the 20th Century, rapid industrialization and urbanization led to a social upheaval,

defined by goals for a civilization free of violence, disease, and mental ailments.

However, the means by which this Utopian society would be attempted would include some of

the most profound ethical violations in the history of the United States.

The President was behind it, liberals were behind it, conservatives were behind it.

Even the Catholic Church at one point was behind it.

Intense growth of American industry, agricultural mechanization, and widespread immigration

led to the first major migration away from the farms and into the city which was now expanding

faster than adequate housing could be provided.

The solution to the modern problems of an industrialized society required increased

government involvement in the social sphere, a philosophy known as progressivism.

The construct of scientific management offered a methodical means of social engineering.

Geneticists of the age could prove, through the use of human pedigrees and their knowledge

of plant and animal genetics, that degeneracy was an inheritable trait.

It seemed only right that if a society free of all mental and physical ailments,

free of violence and crime, illiteracy and foolishness, it seemed only right to end the reproductive

capabilities of people expressing these traits.

Eugenics was the result of an America unwilling to make social changes, an upper class

fearful of its laboring counterparts.

Eugenics placed the blame of a social quandary on individual races and classes

and thus freed from culpability, the industrial, scientific, and political bearings of the time.

Cold Spring Harbor, New York, 1910.

Charles B. Davenport along with Harry H. Laughlin, both biologists and members of The

American Breeders Association, found the Eugenics Record Office, with financial help

from the Carnegie Institution.

The ERO would be the headquarters of eugenic research in the United States for

the next 34 years.

Using various research methods including human pedigrees, hereditary questionnaires,

interviewing groups of special interest such as circus performers, and collecting census data,

the ERO was able to justify the administration of eugenic laws nationwide

including immigration and marriage restrictions, race segregation, and forced sterilization

of criminals and other undesirables.

The ERO, however, was not only able to justify the eugenics atrocities, but integrated them

into popular culture to make eugenics and related terms, such as race hygiene, household words.

Popular literature published in the 20's, often donned eugenics in their subject matter

such as these manuals on raising a healthy family.

Clergymen preached of the necessity for good marriages.

Perhaps even more disturbing were the contests held at many state fairs, where awards

were given to the fittest family. Those with the purest pedigrees and undoubtedly the most

attractive phenotypes would receive awards such as this medal with an inscription reading,

'Yea, I have a goodly heritage.'

The eugenics movements spawned lots of people who were considered even in their own time,

out on the fringe. Who even endorsed such things as euthanasia, but that was not a mainline

part of the movement. It certainly became parts of the movement internationally,

but not so much here in America.

On March 9, 1907, the Indiana State Senate in a vote of 28 to 16, made history by being the first

jurisdiction in the world to force the sterilization of citizens it deemed unfit.

Unfit to exist, unfit to reproduce.

Connecticut was soon to follow.

By the time Laughlin of the ERO, had published his suggestion on how to implement legislation

for forced human sterilization, 12 states had already put into place sterilization laws of their own.

By 1924, 3000 socially inadequate people had been sterilized.

That same year based on Laughlin's model, Aubrey E. Strode, drafted Virginia's Eugenical

Sterilization Act in an attempt to rid the state of defective persons.

It passed in Virginia's General Assembly by a landslide.

Immediately, the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feeble-Minded, selected 17-year-old

Carrie Buck to be the first human sterilized under the act.

Carrie had a feeble-minded child, the result of a raping by one of her relatives, and was the

daughter of a feeble-minded mother, Emma, already a resident on the Virginia colony.

Carrie, purportedly carrying the genetic traits of feeble-mindedness and sexual promiscuity,

was a fine candidate as the law stated those to be sterilized must be probable potential

parents of socially inadequate offspring.

Carrie's feeble-mindedness was based on a mailed disposition by Laughlin who had never met Carrie

and her sexual promiscuity was based on the testimony of her school teacher,

that she sent flirtatious notes to school boys.

Carrie became the first person in Virginia to be sterilized under the new law

on October 19, 1927.

In the words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, official deliverer of the opinion of the United States

Supreme Court in the case of Buck v. Bell, "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to

execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent

those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.

Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Vivian, Carrie's feeble-minded daughter, received B's on her first grade report card.

Buck v. Bell justified the sterilizations of over 8000 Virginians.

Over the history of the United States, 33 states have enacted statutes under which 60,000

Americans underwent compulsory sterilizations.

To this day, Buck v. Bell has never been overruled.

"Nazi Germany embraced the eugenics movement from the United States and just upped it in

its efficiency."

It should now be apparent that Germany's racial theories did not take place in a vacuum.

Nor can the fundamental philosophies and beliefs that would eventually lead to the atrocities

of the Nazi state be attributed solely to German authorities.

In fact, German scientists expressed a great affinity towards the US eugenic laws.

A young Adolph Hitler wrote positively of the US's immigration restrictions.

More specifically, how the law refuses immigration on principle by simply excluding certain races

from naturalization, in his book, "Mein Kampf".

Shortly prior to mobilizing the most comprehensive eugenics legislation in modern history,

Gerhard Wagner, head of the National Socialist Physician League, stated that America's

eugenic policies should be used as a model for Germany to follow.

Marie Kopp, of the American Committee on Maternal Health, proclaimed that the Nazi system

of seeking out those to be sterilized was administered in entire fairness and was

formulated after careful study of the California Experiment which had been responsible

for 2500 of the 3000 involuntary sterilizations in the US prior to 1924.

The ERO boasted on how the German statute on race hygiene read almost identical to

Laughlin's Model Sterilization Law.

Laughlin had such a significant impact on Nazi racial legislature that he was awarded an honorary

degree from the University of Heidelberg.

Laughlin thanked the university for reaffirming the common understanding of German and American

scientists of the nature of eugenics.

This common understanding would be translated into the law on preventing hereditarily ill progeny

which would be responsible for over 375,000 sterilizations in the Nazi state.

A number so impressive, one American eugenics advocate complained:

The sterilization program of the Nazi state modeled after Laughlin's Law and other

US eugenic theories, would be a gross prelude to the exterminations of the Holocaust.

But even before the gas chambers were open for the racist and anti-Semitic persecutions

we know all too well, they were opened in October 1939, for the systematic murder of the

mentally ill citizens of Germany.

Sadly, this practice was not faced with nearly as much stigmatism within the states

as euthanasia had long been discussed by American eugenicists as a solution for the feeble-minded.

"So, when people saw how eugenics can be easily be abused by the power of the state, they said

that's it, this is a monstrous idea that we should keep a distance from."

It is now the dawn of the 21st Century and advancements in technology and medicine

have excelled beyond even the most ambitious of projections.

Science that eugenicists of the 20th Century could only have dreamed of appear in our news

every single day.

"of stem cell research..."

"and picking the genes of our children..."

"Cloning of embryos for the destruction..."

"discovered stem cells in a new place..."

"if the embryo has a genetic disease..."

"genetic tests..."

Is it a danger? It's always a danger when there are technologies that can be used and abused.

And I think the history of the eugenics movement tells us when a technology actually exists,

people will try to use it - sometimes for reasons it was never intended to be used.

With the mapping of the human genome, prenatal testing, implantation genetic diagnosis,

therapeutic cloning, and stem cell therapy we find ourselves entering a promising world

of genetic medicine. It is with this great power, however, that comes the need for even

greater responsibility, sensitivity, and accountability.

Humanity truly does now possess a powerful tool for good. However, we must heed the warnings

founded by the coercive legislation and beliefs of the eugenics movement before we may venture into

the frontier of modern genetic medicine. Tragedy may very well give way to triumph but

how that will be recorded in the history books of tomorrow,

will be determined by our actions today.