concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power.”94
U.S. eugenicist Harry Laughlin shaped U.S. immigration policy with pseudo-science about the inferiority of races, in particular Jews. Various people -- non-morons, I guess you’d call them -- including various Jews, pointed out at the time that Laughlin had fixed the facts around the policy and not pursued actual scientific findings.95 The U.S. Congress didn’t have to ignore those wiser voices.
Most eugenicists supported strict and racist immigration laws, as well as sterilization and the prevention of reproduction through the segregation of “feeble-minded” men and women into separate asylums. Eugenics was also used to support anti-miscegenation laws. Some eugenicists also promoted the idea of extermination. A report by the Carnegie Institute in 1911 proposed euthanasia.96 While eugenicide never gained mainstream popularity, it was practiced. According to Edwin Black:
“The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a ‘lethal chamber’ or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, [Paul] Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, ‘Applied Eugenics,’ which argued, ‘From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.’ . . . Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.”97
Straying for a moment from eugenics to gas chambers, here’s a passage from a long article about Hitler in The New Yorker in 2018:
“In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, ‘Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.’ Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.”98
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1927, in the case of Buck v. Bell (which has yet to be overturned), that a healthy and intelligent rape victim abused by her society could be forcibly sterilized, the ruling was reported in the press as a step toward “a super race.”99
When Hitler came to power, he put in place a sterilization law based on a model law written by Harry Laughlin and the laws that 27 U.S. states had put in place. Hitler had read Madison Grant and written him a fan letter, and referred to his book as “my Bible.” Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that Germany must follow the United States in immigration and segregation:
“At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State.”100
"I have studied with great interest," Hitler told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."101
Laughlin bragged about his role in creating the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, and in 1936 was given an award by the Nazis.102
U.S. eugenicist Paul Popenoe published a report on forced sterilizations in California that was widely cited by the Nazis.103 Many eugenicists in California promoted their work in Germany. The Rockefeller Foundation, as well as Carnegie, funded and helped develop German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he worked at Auschwitz gassing people to death and experimenting on them, as well as the German Psychiatric Institute where Ernst Rüdin worked before he became the architect of Hitler’s eugenics program. Edwin Black recounts that:
“In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, ‘You 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 . . . 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.’"104
Winston Churchill was an honorary vice president of the British Eugenics Society and a true believer in its power to solve “race deterioration.” In 1910, he proposed sterilizing 100,000 “mental degenerates,” and confining tens of thousands more to state-run labor camps.105
It took Nazism to give eugenics a bad name in the United States, but neither Nazism nor the prosecution of its members for crimes including forced sterilization ended such practices in the United States, where over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized up through 1963, a third of them in California. In fact, eugenics saw something of a revival in the United States after WWII under the banner of “neo-eugenics,” targeted at the poor and minorities, with possibly 80,000 people forcibly sterilized in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s (up through 1981 in Oregon), and many more sterilized without consent up to the current day.106 From the 1930s to 1970s a third of the female population in Puerto Rico was sterilized.107 In the 1970s, 40% of Native American women and 10% of Native American men were sterilized.108 Even in recent years, such as 2013 in California, scandals pop up revealing the sterilization of prisoners without proper consent.109
After WWII, eugenics organizations and associations in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere were renamed using the term “genetics.” Nazi scientists resumed respectable careers and international collegiality. But the dark sides of the work, and the reliance on dubious science, never disappeared. Humans have only about one-fifth as many DNA sequences as wheat, and 90 percent of them identical to those of mice. Claims that DNA determines your future are extremely weak but extremely widespread, especially among those seeking to use “genetics” -- rather than, say, the distribution of money -- to solve such problems as poverty.110
Human experimentation, like eugenics, and often connected to it, also had a home in the United States before, during, and after WWII. Non-consensual experimentation on institutionalized children and adults was common in the United States before, during, and even more so after the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Nazis for the practice in 1947, sentencing many to prison and seven to be hanged. The tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, standards for medical practice that were immediately ignored back home. Some American doctors considered it “a good code for barbarians.”111
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