Pandora Revisited

National Review, Sept 29, 2003 by Wesley J. Smith

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race , by Edwin Black (Four Walls Eight Windows, 592 pp., $27)

Edwin Black has written what may well be the best book ever published about the American eugenics movement and the horrific events it spawned. Combining exhaustive research, a very readable style, and just the right touch of moral outrage, Black splendidly conveys the evil depth and breadth of eugenics philosophy, the pseudo-science and social theory that unleashed a half-century of war against society's most vulnerable citizens.

Eugenics (the name means "good in birth") originated with an English statistician named Francis Galton. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of his cousin Charles Darwin, and also by Gregor Mendel's genetic experiments with peas, Galton hoped to improve the human gene pool through "positive eugenics," that is, encouraging those he deemed to have the best genetic stock, i.e., people like him, to marry and procreate bountifully. This may sound to some innocuous at first blush, but, as history repeatedly has demonstrated, once we accept the pernicious premise that some people are "superior" to others -- the core principle of eugenic thinking -- we open the door to great evils.

The eugenicist who was first to move through that open door was not Galton himself but Charles Benedict Davenport -- one of the true villains of the 20th century. As director of the Station for Experimental Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., from its founding in 1904 until his retirement in the mid 1930s, Davenport energetically promoted eugenics. For three decades Cold Spring Harbor was command- central for forces striving to "redirect human evolution," a euphemism for the war waged by the strong in America and other countries against people with developmental and physical disabilities and those with allegedly inheritable moral failings such as criminality, alcoholism, promiscuity, and pauperism. (Cold Spring Harbor was made possible by generous funding from the Carnegie Institute. Carnegie realized the error of its ways only after Davenport retired; it pulled the plug on its eugenics funding in 1939.)

Involuntary sterilization was the primary weapon that practicing eugenicists wielded against those whom they judged "unfit." Indiana in 1907 became the first state to legalize forced sterilization; several other states followed suit. But it took a ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court, the infamous Buck v. Bell (1927), to whip the winds of eugenics into full hurricane strength. Black's 15-page rendition of the profound injustice done to Carrie Buck by the very people in medicine and law who should have protected her is heartbreaking. The daughter of a prostitute, Carrie became pregnant, allegedly after being raped by her foster cousin. After the baby's birth, her foster family, who appear to have been exceptionally cruel, had Carrie declared "feebleminded by the laws of heredity" and forcibly institutionalized.

Virginia had just legalized eugenic sterilization. Here was a splendid case for eugenic action: A woman whose prostitute mother was also institutionalized for feeblemindedness had given birth out-of-wedlock to an infant who would undoubtedly also be feebleminded. This was precisely the kind of down-the-generations history that eugenicists were determined to halt. But Carrie's tormentors saw an even greater opportunity in her plight: They decided to make Carrie a federal test case to gain explicit constitutional sanction for eugenic-sterilization laws. Toward that end, they picked a well-known eugenicist to serve as her lawyer: a man with close ties to Carrie's institution who had himself approved many eugenic sterilizations.

Unfortunately, these predators got precisely what they were looking for when the misanthropic Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for an 8-1 Supreme Court, eagerly ruled in favor of sterilizing Carrie Buck: "We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence . . . The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles is enough."

As we have seen many times in our history, Supreme Court decisions play an important role in social leadership -- toward moral redemption or moral ruin, as the case may be. In this case, it was the latter: The Supreme Court's imprimatur opened the eugenics floodgates. There had been about 6,000 eugenic sterilizations in the U.S. between 1907 and 1927. By 1940, the total had climbed to nearly 36,000. By the time eugenic sterilizations ended in this country in the 1970s, nearly 70,000 Americans had been sterilized, all under the color of law.

One of Black's most interesting sections details Margaret Sanger's close ties to eugenics. Black is a fan of Sanger, believing her to have been a "visionary reformer." He also unequivocally states his support for Planned Parenthood (apparently ignoring that organization's support for late-term eugenic abortion). Thus, he clearly has no "pro-life" ax to grind, no desire to besmirch Sanger's memory. This renders his clear and impeccably documented recitation of Sanger's heartless eugenic beliefs and her tight embrace of social Darwinism -- she opposed charitable efforts to assist the poor and downtrodden -- all the more devastating.