War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (109 page)

In the period leading up to the October 1938 report, Laughlin had discreetly surveyed 160 towns in 8 counties, 46 town farms, 10 jails, 18 institutions, and many other population and residential dynamics. He also investigated 8 complete Connecticut families, generation by generation, as prime examples of undesirable bloodlines. Based on Laughlin’s first assessment, the state was spending 24.2 percent of its budget on “the care, maintenance, and treatment of its socially inadequate classes.”

The first 11,962 citizens selected to be sterilized were residents of penal institutions, unqualified for work, disabled, morally unacceptable, or otherwise “socially inadequate.” About two-thirds of those targeted were males. All were prioritized for eugenic action with one of three labels:
Urgent
,
Less Urgent
, or
Undetermined
. The grand total amounted to roughly 10 percent of the state’s populace, an approach in keeping with the classic eugenic drive to eliminate the “bottom tenth.” Color-coded cards—white, red, and blue—were readied for each citizen.

Laughlin’s goal was to sterilize approximately 175,000 Connecticut residents—or, once again, about 10 percent of the state’s population. The state’s eugenical laws did not require a court order, so eugenicists had a free hand. The Connecticut program emulated Hitler’s eugenical regime whereby doctors were required to denounce those citizens considered racially or medically “unfit.”

The plan’s most startling feature involved external and internal deportation. To save expense, large numbers of candidates would not be sterilized but simply thrown out of the state. Immigrants would be deported to their native countries. “Unfit” American citizens would be declared “aliens” in their own country. They would then be expelled to their family’s original ancestral locale. For example, an American adjudged an “unfit alien” might be traced generations back to Indiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, or North Carolina. That person and his entire family, under the guidelines, would be rounded up and deposited into the so-called “originating state.” The legal and biological justification for this action was set forth in report volume 1, on page 53, in section 12, entitled “The Intertown and Interstate Deportation of Socially Inadequate and Handicapped Person.”

In other words, the joint Carnegie Institution-Connecticut plan was to create domestic refugees or displaced persons in a fashion identical to that employed by the Nazis at that very moment in refugee-torn Europe. Just as in Germany, based upon the same ideals and principles, the unwanted would be stripped of their citizenship, and then declared “aliens” to be deported—somewhere. Legal precedents, according to Laughlin in the report, were based on Sec. 1690 of the 1930 Connecticut Revised Statutes, a section entitled “Deportation,” which called for paupers and other undesirables to be exiled from the state to their previous or ancestral locale.

Ultimately, so many people would be dumped into ancestral towns and states, creating so vast a social displacement problem, that concentration camps would be needed to handle the uprooted population. Property was to be seized to pay for the economic drain on the state. Once again, the process was a mirror image of the genocidal Nazi program implemented against Jews.

Page 56 of the report states, “If exile, or ‘encouraged emigration,’ or ‘dumping’ were no longer possible” due to the masses 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.”

The next page itemized five special remedies for “population control.” These included segregation in camps, forced exile, sterilization, and marriage prohibition. Item 5 was entitled “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.” He went on to suggest, “The legality and protection finally found in the eugenical sterilization laws after twenty years of experimental legislation give some hope that a similarly sound basis for euthanasia might be worked out … for states or communities which desire it.” Inevitably, the concentration camps for deportees to be set up in North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and other states of “defective” human origination were to be converted into eugenicide mills—that is, death camps. Whether these death camps were to be operated in Connecticut or the state receiving the expelled aliens was a detail to be worked out by “interstate treaties.” These “treaties” would be engineered by like-minded eugenic advocates in the legislatures of Connecticut and recipient states, such as North Carolina and Virginia, 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.”

During these same days, the Third Reich was considering a program, which was ultimately launched the next year, 1939, under the codename “T-4.” Under T-4, Nazi doctors gassed tens of thousands of so-called “defectives.” One of the nations Laughlin was always willing to proffer as a shining example in his deliberations and suggestions was Nazi Germany.

As Laughlin’s report to Connecticut’s governor trumpeted, “The elimination or reduction of members of degenerate human stocks” was the social imperative. Since the first years of the twentieth century, euthanasia had always been the official holy grail of the American eugenics movement. Gas was the preferred method. In 1906, the first eugenicide legislation was proposed in the Ohio legislature. Iowa also tried to pass such legistlation. In 1912, the Carnegie Institution, at the First International Eugenics Congress, held in London, established euthanasia as official doctrine within the movement. Creating the legal underpinnings for systematic extermination was a constant struggle for advocates.

Until euthanasia could be legalized, sterilization, segregation, and/or deportation would have to suffice. Connecticut officials wasted no time.

One Connecticut town, Rocky Hill, was selected as a model for biological surveillance. Nearly all of the town’s 2,190 citizens were registered and almost half fingerprinted. A proposed racial registration card for IBM technology was part of the state’s study. IBM had established a record as expert in deadly population control, designing and executing Hitler’s efforts to identify Jews, find their assets, and deport them. Ironically, IBM’s Nazi technology was actually first tested by the company in a pilot program in Jamaica in 1928, five years before the Hitler regime. The Carnegie Institution’s 1928 Jamaica Race-Crossing Project introduced the race classification card that evolved into the SS card that IBM used in Germany. The Jamaica Race-Crossing Project was the first step in a plan to wipe out all black people on earth. Indeed, the American eugenics movement was less successful precisely because it lacked the punch-card technology that IBM so carefully developed for the Nazi eugenic and extermination campaigns.

Connecticut’s project was never implemented on the scope desired, not much beyond the first surveillance steps taken in Rocky Hill. Governor Cross lost his 1938 re-election bid. With Cross out of office, Connecticut cast aside Laughlin’s project. Just a few copies of the full secret report were ever circulated. State officials hoped no one would ever discover their plans.

Of the more than thirty American states that violated one of the most basic rights of their citizens—the right to procreate—few were as pernicious as North Carolina. Yet the nature of North Carolina’s history also illustrates the challenge of obtaining modern-day justice, even when the most energetic efforts are undertaken. The state has been on a decades-long collision course with its own campaign to eliminate the existence of a significant portion of its population. Most importantly, the crimes committed by the state in conjunction with the leading academic, scientific, judicial, legal, and medical authorities were never about just improving perceived conditions in North Carolina. Rather, it was always about the state doing its fair share to achieve international race purification. This meant close coordination, cooperation, and synchrony with the most virulent eugenic leaders around the world, from California to Connecticut to Nazi Germany. What North Carolina did was never a local transgression; it was part of a global aggression in pursuit of a master race.

North Carolina’s first step from mere eugenic attitudes about race supremacy to active legislation began with a 1919 law enabling coercive sterilization. But that first law was so vague, not even mentioning the term
sterilization
, that it was considered unusable. While there may have been some ad hoc and maverick sterilizations done at the time, state files show no officially-sanctioned sterilizations during that period.

The sterilization statute was updated in 1929, resulting in forced surgeries on forty-nine individuals. That law was overturned by the North Carolina Supreme Court for its lack of due process, leading to a prompt revision by the legislature. In this effort, the legislature was assisted by a number of local law schools, including the University of North Carolina Law School in association with the Duke Legal Aid Clinic. They followed Virginia’s law as a model. Virginia gave rise to the infamous
Buck v. Bell
case, a collusive lawsuit ultimately sanctified as the law of the land by the notorious 1927 Supreme Court ruling. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for the majority, wrote, “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 generation of imbeciles are enough.” With that, a mother, daughter, and granddaughter were sterilized.

Buck vs. Bell
opened the floodgates of mass sterilization in America, and states, such as North Carolina, felt they could proceed at high velocity to subtract unwanted citizens.

In addition to using Virginia as a model, North Carolina legislators and its eugenic advocates worked closely with Harry Laughlin, the head of the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenic Record Office located at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Laughlin was arguably the central irrepressible force in America framing state-by-state legislation designed to eliminate “unwanted” segments of society. He worked in conjunction with the Municipal Court of Chicago, distributing a massive guidebook to passing similar legislation—now found constitutional—in every state in the union. He was also a principle conduit for Nazi eugenic theories in the United States. In 1937, Laughlin received an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg for helping devise the Nuremberg Laws formulas that designated who was a full Jew and who possessed just a fraction of Jewish blood.

North Carolina eugenic officials also worked closely with the Human Betterment Foundation, a collection of openly rabid Nazi stalwarts located in Pasadena, California. Human Betterment Foundation founder and president, E. S. Gosney, had counseled Germany’s newly installed Reich leaders on proper eugenic enforcement, including courtroom “trials” where individuals were accused by prosecutors of hereditary defects and were obliged to prove otherwise with “evidence.” Gosney also maintained regular, congenial, and encouraging communication with Hitler’s chief Nazi doctor, Otmar von Verschuer, renowned for eugenic twin research. Verschuer’s assistant, Josef Mengele, continued his boss’s twin research with monstrous experiments in Auschwitz. The Human Betterment Foundation Annual Report for 1935 cited a congratulatory letter from fellow California eugenicist Charles Goethe to Gosney. After a 1934 trip to Nazi Germany, Goethe wrote: “You [Gosney] will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought, and particularly by the work of the Human Betterment Foundation. I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.”

North Carolina’s Eugenics Board seemed less conscious of any state role, but was rather part of the broad movement of ethnic cleansing, in lockstep with Laughlin of Long Island, the Human Betterment Foundation in Pasadena, national race purification trends, and German eugenics. The Eugenics Board’s 1935 report,
Eugenical Sterilization in North Carolina, A Brief Survey of The Growth of Eugenical Sterilization and a Report on The Work of The Eugenics Board of North Carolina through June 30, 1935
, was typical of dozens of similar agency reports and publications. In the forty-page 1935 report, its first textual page quotes two long pseudo-scientific explanations for the Board’s work. The first was from a publication openly attributed to “the Human Betterment Foundation, Pasadena,” and the second quoted the publication
Eugenics
, controlled by Laughlin and the American Eugenics Society. On page 7 of the report, Eugenics Board secretary R. Eugene Brown explains that North Carolina has patterned its efforts after Virginia, and indeed in a long block quote displays the opinion of Holmes, ending with the exhortation “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

On page 8, Brown confirms that the law was done in tandem with “the model statutes set forth in
The Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization
prepared by Dr. H. H. Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office as a supplement to the annual report of the Municipal Court of Chicago for the year 1929.” On page 9, Brown sets forth the state’s sterilization targets, namely, “moral degenerates,” the so-called “feebleminded,” and “hereditary criminals.” On the same page, Brown quotes two paragraphs from the Nazi sterilization law. On page 10, the report guesstimates how many future unsavory citizens could be subtracted by sterilizing just one unwanted family, labeled the “Wake Family”: taxpayers could expect to save about $30,000 in social expenditures. On page 11, Gosney’s Human Betterment Foundation is again referenced, this time in a nine-point rationale for mass sterilization.