Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED

Author: Robert Whitaker Publisher: New York, NY: Basic Books. Publish Date: 2002 Review Date: 2023-5-21 Status:📚

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Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminal and insane in a more economical manner?

—Dr. Alexis Carrel,
Nobel Prize winner,
Rockefeller University

Note: Rockefeller University

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1 Alexis Carrel, Man the Unknown (Harper and Brothers, 1935), 318.

MORAL TREATMENT HAD represented a profound change in America’s attitude toward the mentally ill. For a brief shining moment, the mentally ill were welcomed into the human family. The mad, the insane, the manic-depressive—those with mental disorders were perceived as suffering from great distress, yet still fully human. This was an attitude consonant with the no-blest impulses of democracy, and with the spirit of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” Even the mad were worthy of being treated with respect and decency.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, that generous attitude toward the mentally ill disappeared in American society. It was replaced by a belief—touted as grounded in science—that the severely mentally ill were carriers of defective “germ plasm,” and as such, posed a perilous threat to the future health of American society. In a stream of scientific articles, newspaper editorials, and popular books, the mentally ill were described as a degenerate strain of humanity, “social wastage” that bred at alarming rates and burdened “normal” Americans with the great expense of paying for their upkeep. America’s embrace of that notion led to a wholesale societal assault on the severely mentally ill. They were prohibited from marrying in many states, forcibly committed to state hospitals in ever greater numbers, and, in a number of states, sterilized against their will. America’s eugenicists even encouraged Nazi Germany in its massive sterilization of the mentally ill, a program that led directly to the crematoriums of the Holocaust.

It all began with a rather muddle-headed scientific study by Sir Francis Galton, cousin to Charles

The Rise of Eugenics

In 1859, when Galton was safely back in England, Darwin turned the Western world upside down with his elegant, wonderfully documented theory of evolution. Although Darwin did not specifically address humankind’s beginnings in Origin of Species, the implication was clear: Humans had not been fashioned in one grand stroke by God but rather had evolved over time from lower animals. The agent of change in evolution was a struggle for survival, with the winners of that struggle—the fit—able to pass on their genes. In nature, the unfit were eliminated before they had an opportunity to procreate.

To Galton, this new understanding of human evolution raised an exciting possibility. If humans were not a fixed species, but one that had evolved, future change in the human makeup was not only possible but inevitable. Farmers had already demonstrated that they could breed more desirable plants and domestic animals through careful breeding practices. By applying such practices to humans, he wondered, “could not the race of men be similarly improved? Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?”2

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2 As cited by Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics (University of California Press, 1985), 3. Biographical details on Galton are primarily from Kevles’s book.

Even in asking the question, Galton assumed two critical things. The first was that human society could agree on traits that were desirable. The second was that such complex traits as intelligence were intrinsic to the person rather than the result of a nurturing environment. If environment—social and educational programs—could turn out accomplished people, then society would be wise to devote its resources to improving such programs in order to improve the “race.” But if intelligence and other “superior” characteristics were simply inborn, then a nation could, at least in theory, improve itself by breeding for such characteristics, much as a line of pigs might be bred for its tendency to put on weight quickly.

In 1869, Galton published a scientific work, Hereditary Genius, in which he concluded that it was nature, rather than nurture, that made the superior man. Galton had tracked familial relations among nearly 1,000 prominent English leaders—judges, statesmen, bankers, writers, scientists, artists, and so forth—and found that this top class came from a small, select group of people. Many were closely related. A poor person who looked at Galton’s data might have decided that his study simply revealed the obvious—that in class-conscious England, privilege begat success. Galton’s own life exemplified this. He had been able to make his mark as an explorer, and subsequently as a scientist, because of the wealth he had inherited. But to Galton, the data provided proof that intelligence was inherited and that a small group of successful English families enjoyed the benefits of a superior germ plasm.

Galton’s notions had pronounced political implications. Humans, he had determined, were decidedly unequal. Democratic ideals that men were of “equal value,” he said, were simply “undeniably wrong and cannot last.” Even the average citizen was “too base for the everyday work of modern civilization.”3 Indeed, if a superior race were to be bred, then it would be necessary for English society—and other white societies—to encourage their fit to procreate and prevent their unfit from doing the same. Galton, for his part, imagined penning up the unfit in convents, monasteries, and asylums to prevent them from breeding. Any charity to the poor and ill, he wrote, should be conditional upon their agreeing to forgo producing offspring.

I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their compatriots with all kindness, so long as they maintained celibacy. But if these [compatriots] continued to procreate children inferior in moral, intellectual and physical qualities, it is easy to believe the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.4

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3 As cited by Allan Chase, The Legacy of Malthus (University of Illinois Press, 1980), 85, 101.

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4 As cited by Peter Medawar, Aristotle to Zoos (Harvard University Press, 1983), 87.

In 1883, Galton coined the term “eugenics,” derived from the Greek word for “well-born,” as a name for the “science” that would “improve the human stock” by giving “the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had.”5 It was to be a science devoted, in large part, to dividing the human race into two classes, the eugenic and the cacogenic (or poorly born). The latter group would be tagged as having inherited bad germ plasm, and thus as a group that, at the very least, should not breed. Galton saw eugenics as a new religion, and indeed, it was a science that would have eugenicists, in essence, playing God. “What Nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly,” he boasted.6

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5 As cited by Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 13.

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6 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 12.

In this new eugenic view of humankind, the severely mentally ill were seen as among the most unfit. Negroes, the poor, criminals—they were all viewed as unfit to some degree. But insanity, it was argued, was the end stage of a progressive deterioration in a family’s germ plasm. “Madness, when it finally breaks out, represents only the last link in the psychopathic chain of constitutional heredity, or degenerate heredity,” said Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing. 7 Henry Maudsley, the most prominent English psychiatrist of his day, conceptualized insanity in similar terms. The insane patient “gets it from where his parents got it—from the insane strain of the family stock: the strain which, as the old saying was, runs in the blood, but which we prefer now to describe as a fault or flaw in the germ-plasm passing by continuity of substance from generation to generation.”8

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7 As cited by Edward Shorter, A History of Psychiatry (John Wiley and Sons, 1997), 96.

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8 Henry Maudsley, The Pathology of the Mind (reprint of 1895 edition; Julian Friedmann Publishers, 1979), 47.

Although eugenics stirred much intellectual debate in England, with a few writers whipping up plays and novels on the Superman to be bred, there was little support in England, at least not before the 1920s, for eugenic laws that would prohibit the “unfit” from marrying or bearing children. But that was not the case in the United States. It was here that a society would first develop laws for compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill and other “unfit” members of society. The U.S. eugenics movement was funded by the industrial titans of America—Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller Jr., and Mary Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate Edward Harriman—and was championed, to a remarkable extent, by graduates of Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League universities.

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Eugenics in America

The asylums were a particularly glaring example of all that was seemingly going wrong in America. In 1850, the U.S. census counted 15,610 insane in a total population of 21 million, or one out of every 1,345 people. Thirty years later, 91,997 people, in a population of 50 million, were deemed insane, or one out of every 554 people. The incidence of insanity had apparently more than doubled in thirty short years. It was a disease on the loose. And who was to blame for this frightening increase in mental illness? Although only 14 percent of the general population were immigrants, nearly 40 percent of those in state mental hospitals were foreign born.9 Mental illness appeared to be spreading throughout the population, and from the WASP perspective, it was immigrants who were the most common carriers of this defect in germ plasm.

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9 Gerald Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (Princeton University Press, 1983), 8.

At the turn of the twentieth century, melting-pot America provided fertile soil for eugenics. The first great wave of immigration, in the mid-1800s, had brought more than 5 million Irish and Germans to this country. Now a second great wave of immigration was underway, with nearly 1 million immigrants arriving yearly in the first decade of the twentieth century. And this time the immigrants were even more “foreign”—Jews, Italians, Slavs. The ruling class—white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs)—saw that the United States was undergoing a great transformation, one that threatened their dominance. The country was becoming less Protestant, less English, and less white.

Not only that, the ruling class only had to look at the country’s crowded slums to see which groups were breeding at the fastest rate. Once the immigrants got here, economist Francis Amasa Walker concluded in 1891, they had more children, on average, than the native born. Meanwhile, no group seemed to be less fecund than upper-class WASPs. They might have two or three children, while the Irish and their ilk kept on reproducing until their tiny walk-up apartments were filled with eight and nine children. All this resulted, the well-to-do believed, in their having to unfairly shoulder ever more costly social programs for immigrants and misfits—public schools, almshouses, and innumerable insane asylums.

To the affluent, eugenics offered an explanation for what had gone wrong and a solution to the problem. In nature, the clutch of patients in the state mental asylums—along with the mentally handicapped and other misfits—would have been swiftly eliminated. But American society, with its asylums, poorhouses, and other charitable services for the weak, had—just like England—gone against nature and supported a “bad-seed” strain of humans. Any society that wanted to remain strong would do well to avoid spending on its “defectives” and would seek to keep them from breeding as well. When Andrew Carnegie read the writings of English eugenicist Herbert Spencer, who railed against social programs for the unfit, the light bulb went on for him. It was, he said, as though he had finally “found the truth of evolution.”10

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10 As cited by Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 8.

As early as 1891, American feminist Victoria Woodhull, in her book The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, argued that the “best minds” of the day agreed that “imbeciles, criminals, paupers and (the) otherwise unfit … must not be bred.”11 For that to occur, the unfit would have to be prohibited from marrying, segregated into asylums, and forcibly sterilized.

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11 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 85.

However, that was an agenda at radical odds with democratic principles. It could only be seriously advanced if wrapped in the gauze of “neutral” science,

and in 1904, Andrew Carnegie gave Harvard-educated biologist Charles Davenport the money to provide that wrapping.

Davenport, who earned his Ph.D. at Harvard and had taught zoology there, was extremely proud of his WASP heritage. He traced his ancestry back to early settlers in New England and liked to boast that he had been an American “over 300 years,” for his “I” was “composed of elements that were brought to this country during the seventeenth century.”12 He was an avid reader of the writings of English eugenicists and on a trip to England dined with Galton. That excursion left him invigorated with the cause of eugenics, and upon his return, he successfully lobbied the Carnegie Foundation for funds to establish a center for the study of human evolution at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Davenport received an annual salary of $3,500, making him one of the best-paid scientists in America.

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12 As cited by Charles Rosenberg, No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 90.

Davenport approached his study of human inheritance with a Mendelian understanding of genetics. Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, had shown through experiments with 30,000 pea plants that inherited physical characteristics were regularly controlled by a pair of elements (or genes), with both the “male” and “female” parent (or part of the plant) contributing a gene. In plants, such physical characteristics might include size, color, and texture. In many instances, one gene type was dominant over the other. A “tall” gene for the height of a plant might be dominant over a “short” gene, and thus a combination of tall-and-short genes for height would produce a tall plant, although that plant could now pass on a short gene to its offspring. If another tall plant did the same, a short plant would result. Davenport applied this Mendelian model to complex behavioral traits in humans, each trait said to be controlled by a single gene. Moreover, he was particularly intent on proving that immigrants and societal misfits were genetically inferior, and soon he was confidently writing that people could inherit genes for “nomadism,” “shiftlessness,” and “insincerity.” Immigrants from Italy, Greece, Hungary, and other Southeastern European countries had germ plasm that made them “more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.” Jews inherited genes for “thieving” and “prostitution.”13

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13 Charles Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (Henry Holt, 1911), 216-219.

Davenport saw a pressing need for America to act on his findings. He calculated that supporting the insane and other misfits cost taxpayers more than $100 million a year, money that was wasted because social programs had little hope of doing any good. Modern society, he complained, had “forgotten the fundamental fact that all men are created bound by their protoplasmic makeup.”14 The mentally ill and other misfits, he suggested, should not just be sterilized, but castrated. This, he said, made “the patient docile, tractable, and without sex desire.”15

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14 Ibid., iv.

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15 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 53.

In 1910, Davenport obtained funding from Mary Harriman to establish a Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor—an initiative that was designed to transform eugenic research findings into societal laws. Harriman, who had inherited $70 mi ll i o n w h e nh er h u s ban dd i e d in 1909, d o na t e d$ 500,000 to the Eugenics Record Office over the next eight years. John D. Rockefeller Jr. kicked in another $22,000. Davenport used the money to gather censuslike data on the “cacogenic” in America. From 1911 to 1924, the office trained 258 field-workers, who went into mental hospitals, poorhouses, and prisons to document the family histories of the “defectives” housed there and to determine what percentage were foreign born. The field-workers also surveyed small communities, intent on identifying the percentage of misfits not yet confined by asylum walls. As a 1917 textbook, Science of Eugenics, approvingly explained, the Eugenics Record Office was quantifying “the burden which the unfit place upon their fellow-men.”16

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16 Charles Robinson, ed., The Science of Eugenics (W. R. Vansant, 1917), 97.

Increasingly, academics at top schools were conducting eugenic studies as well. Many of their articles were published in the Journal of Heredity, the house organ for the American Genetics Association. Their research typically focused on showing that the unfit were that way because of inferior genes, that they were multiplying rapidly, and that it was extremely expensive for “normals” to provide care to such “defectives.” In one Journal of Heredity article, immigrants were likened to a “bacterial invasion.” Another writer, in an article titled “The Menace of the Half Man,” calculated that if the country could get rid of its defectives, then “human misery, in a well-ordered country like America, will be more than cut in half.” At the same time, scholars wrung their hands over the poor job that the rich and well-born were doing at spreading their superior genes. A number of studies found that the scions of alumni of Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools were a dying breed, their low birthrate a type of “race suicide.” Mayflower descendants were reported, with breathless alarm, to be on their way to “extinction.” And WASP women who attended elite liberal arts colleges like Wellesley were particularly deficient at having large families, leading one Ivy League academic, John Phillips, to lament that “the birth rate of college women is quite the most pathetic spectacle of all.”17

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17 Prescott Hall, “Immigration Restriction and Eugenics,” Journal of Heredity 10 (1919):126; Seth Humphrey, “The Menace of the Half Man,” Journal of Heredity 11 (1920):231; Robert Sprague, “Education and Race Suicide,” Journal of Heredity 6 (1915):158; and Paul Popenoe, “Harvard and Yale Birth Rates,” Journal of Heredity 7 (1916):569. Popenoe quotes Phillips in his Journal of Heredity article.

The stream of articles signaled eugenics’ arrival as an academic discipline. By 1914, forty-four colleges in America had introduced eugenics into their curriculums, with the subject taught as a science, much like engineering or mathematics, at such schools as MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown. By 1924, more than 9,000 papers on eugenics had been published, and in 1928, Eugenical News—a monthly newsletter published by the Eugenics Record Office—could count 1,322 eugenics papers that it had reviewed over the previous twelve months. The Eugenics Research Association boasted in 1924 that 119 of its 383 members were fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s most prestigious scientific group.18 Even the august Encylopaedia Britannica confidently predicted that future progress would include “the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.”19

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18 Harry Laughlin, “The Progress of American Eugenics,” Eugenics 2 (February 1929):3-16. Also Eugenical News 9 (December 1924):104.

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19 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 63.

As early as 1914, Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office had announced a platform for achieving that brighter future. One of the office’s advisory groups, “The Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population,” calculated that 10 percent of the American population was defective and should be sterilized. 20 It was an agenda that pleased former president Theodore Roosevelt. “At present,” he wrote the committee, “there is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal.”21 During a national eugenics conference that year funded by John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the flaked cereal, the scope of the needed enterprise was further defined: Over the next forty years, the country needed to sterilize 5.76 million Americans in order to reduce the percentage of defectives in the population to an acceptable level.22

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20 Eugenics Record Office, Bulletin No. 10 B, “The Legal, Legislative, and Administrative Aspects of Sterilization,” February 1914.

Mendelian Madness

The scientific justification for the compulsory sterilization of the severely mentally ill rested on two premises: that “insanity” was an inherited disease and that the severely mentally ill were proficient at the mating game and thus were passing on their tainted genes to a large number of offspring. If either of these facts weren’t true, then the eugenicists’ argument that the mentally ill were a threat to the country’s “germ plasm” would be seriously undermined.

Proving that insanity was an inherited disease fell to Aaron Rosanoff, a doctor at Kings Park State Hospital in New York. Working under Davenport’s tutelage, he charted the family histories of seventy-two insane patients. His initial results were not what he expected. Among the 1,097 relatives of the seventy-two patients, only forty-three had ever been hospitalized for a mental illness—a number far too low to show a causal genetic link. Rosanoff calculated that according to Mendelian laws, 359 of the relatives should have been mentally ill. His study seemed to disprove the notion he’d set out to prove. Where had he gone wrong? The answer, he concluded, was that he had defined mental illness too narrowly. Plenty of mentally ill people were never hospitalized. “Neuropathy,” he explained, manifested itself in many ways. Relatives of patients with manic-depressive insanity should be considered mentally ill if they were “high-strung, excitable, dictatorial, abnormally selfish,” or if they had an “awful temper, drank periodically, [or] had severe blue spells.” In a similar vein, relatives of patients hospitalized for schizophrenia should be classified as neuropathic if they were “cranky, stubborn, nervous, queer, [or] restless,” if they were “suspicious of friends and relatives,” if they “worried over nothing,” or acted like “religious cranks.” And with that neatly expanded definition of mental illness at work, Rosanoff determined that the seventy-two hospitalized patients had 351 neuropathic relatives—almost an exact match to the number needed to support his hypothesis. “The hereditary transmission of the neuropathic constitution as a recessive trait, in accordance with the Mendelian theory, may be regarded as definitely established,” he happily concluded.23

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21 As cited by Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 15.

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22 Race Betterment Foundation, Proceedings of the First National Conference on Race Betterment, Battle Creek, MI, January 8-12, 1914, 479.

23 A. J. Rosanoff, Eugenics Record Office, Bulletin No. 5, “A Study of Heredity of Insanity in the Light of the Mendelian Theory,” October 1911.

There was—if Rosanoff’s study was to be believed—a clear line separating “neuropathics” from “normals.” However, Rosanoff’s findings had unsettling ramifications for normals as well. Because the “neuropathy” gene was recessive, a normal person might still be a carrier of insanity, capable of passing it on. Rosanoff calculated that 30 percent of the American population was so tainted. Meanwhile, a mating between two mentally ill people, both of whom lacked the “normalcy” gene, was obviously hopeless: “Both parents being neuropathic, all children will be neuropathic.”

Twenty-five years later, Boston psychiatrist Abraham Myerson pointed out how laughably bad this science was. “Whole diversities of things are artificially united. Thus, if a father has a sick headache and his descendant has dementia praecox, the two conditions are linked together in a hereditary chain.”24 Yet in the wake of Ro - sanoff’s 1911 study, mental illness as a Mendelian disorder became the scientific paradigm presented to the public. The Science of Eugenics, a popular book published in 1917, told readers that “when both parents are normal but belong to insane stock, about one-fourth of their children will become insane.”25 The 1920 Manual on Psychiatry, a medical text edited by Rosanoff, declared, “Most of the inherited mental disorders are, like the trait of blue eyes, transmitted in the manner of Mendelian recessives.”26 Biologist Paul Popenoe, editor of the Journal of Heredity, explained that when an “insane” person “mates with a normal individual, in whose family no taint is found, the offspring (generally speaking) will all be mentally sound, even though one parent is affected. On the other hand, if two people from tainted stocks marry, although neither one may be personally defective, part of their offspring will be affected.” 27 With such scientific dogma in mind, the New York Times editorialized in 1923 that “it is certain that the marriage of two mental defectives ought to be prohibited.”28

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24 Abraham Myerson, “A Critique of Proposed ‘Ideal’ Sterilization Legislation,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 33 (March 1935):453-463.

25 Robinson, The Science of Eugenics, 12.

26 Aaron Rosanoff, ed., Manual of Psychiatry (John Wiley and Sons, 1920). The quotation is from a review of the book in Journal of Heredity 12 (1921):300.

27 Paul Popenoe, “Heredity and the Mind,” Journal of Heredity 7 (1916):456-462.

28 “His Trust in Eugenics Is Excessive,” New York Times editorial, June 19, 1923.

But if proving that insanity was inherited was difficult, eugenicists had an even harder time supporting the notion that the mentally ill were prolific breeders. Even on the face of it, this seemed a dubious proposition. Schizophrenics, almost by definition, are socially withdrawn, which is just what researchers found time and again. A 1921 study determined that nearly two-thirds of males diagnosed as schizophrenic had never even had sex with a woman. Other studies found that the “insane” were less likely to be married than the general population and had mortality rates five to fifteen times those of the normal population. Even Popenoe reluctantly concluded that the insane didn’t marry in great numbers and that they had so few children they didn’t reproduce their own numbers. They were worse breeders, in fact, than Harvard graduates and Mayflower descendants.29

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29 Charles Gibbs, “Sex Development and Behavior in Male Patients with Dementia Praecox,” Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry 9 (1923):73-87; Paul Popenoe, “Marriage Rates of the Psychotic,” Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease 68 (1928):17-27; Paul Popenoe, “Fecundity of the Insane,” Journal of Heredity 19 (1928):73-82; Sewall Wright, “Heredity and Mental Disease,” Journal of Heredity 16 (1925):461-462; and Abraham Myerson, ed., Eugenical Sterilization: A Reorientation of the Problem (Macmillan, 1936).

However, such findings didn’t temper eugenicists’ call for sterilizing the mentally ill. Eugenicists simply lumped them together with a larger group of misfits—the poor, criminals, and mentally handicapped—said to be siring offspring at great rates. Popenoe argued that while the mentally ill in asylums—whose lives had been the subject of the research studies—may not have been good at breeding, those in the community were making up for their shortcomings. “Mentally diseased persons who do not get into state institutions and who have not been legally labeled insane seem to have families quite as large as the average, if not larger,” he said. “They are spreading defective germ plasm continually through the sound part of the community, and many of them can be pointed out with probable accuracy through a study of their ancestry.”30

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30 Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson, Applied Eugenics (Macmillan, 1933), 134; and E. S. Gosney and Paul Popenoe, Sterilization for Human Betterment (Macmillan, 1929),

The Selling of Eugenics

During World War I, America’s interest in eugenics briefly cooled as the country turned its attention to the more pressing matters of war. But the carnage of that conflict, in which the United States and European countries sent their young men to fight and die, heightened the belief, here and abroad, that societies were racially degenerating. If a society’s most fit young men died in battle while the weak left at home survived to procreate, what would that do to a society’s makeup in the future? With that question hanging in the air, the need for countries to adopt eugenic policies suddenly seemed more pressing.

The selling of eugenics in America began in earnest in 1921, when the American Museum of Natural History hosted the Second International Congress on Eugenics, a meeting financed in large part by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. Museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn—a nephew of J. P. Morgan—opened the session by declaring that it was time for science to “enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society.” Over the next few days, speakers from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, and NYU, as well as other top universities, tried to do just that. They presented papers on the financial costs societies incurred by caring for defectives, the inheritability of insanity and other disorders, and the low birth rates of the elite in America. They gave talks on “The Jewish Problem,” the dangers of “Negro-White Intermixture,” and the “Pedigrees of Pauper Stocks.” After the conference, many of the scientists’ charts and exhibits were put on display in the U.S. Capitol, where they remained for three months.31

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31 See Barry Mehler, A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921-1940, Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988, 36-60, for a description of the Second International Congress of Eugenics; also Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 277-284.

The meeting stirred the New York Times to editorialize that life, indeed, was becoming ever more unfair for the well-to-do.

Civilization, as now organized, does not leave Nature as fresh as she has been in the past to procure the survival of the fit. Modern philanthropy, working hand in hand with modern medical science, is preserving many strains which in all preceding ages would have been inexorably eliminated… . While life has become easier in the lower ranges, it has become more difficult for the well born and the educated, who pay for modern philanthropy in an ever lessening ability to afford children of their own. There is a very serious question whether the twentieth century will be able to maintain and pass onward the infinitely intricate and specialized structure of civilization created by the nineteenth century.32

At the close of the international meeting, Davenport, Osborn, and other prominent eugenicists formed a committee to establish a national eugenics society. As a first step, they recruited a ninety-nine-member scientific advisory council, reaching out to candidates with a letter that warned of “racial deterioration” and the need for societal leaders to resist the “complete destruction” of the “white race.” In a eugenic society, the letter said, “our burden of taxes can be reduced by decreasing the number of degenerates, delinquents, and defectives supported in public institutions.”33

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32 “Eugenics as Romance,” New York Times editorial, September 25, 1921.

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33 As cited by Mehler, History of the American Eugenics Society, 61.

The advisory council, in place by 1923, was an elite group, and it remained so for the next decade. From 1923 to 1935, more than half of its members were graduates of Ivy League universities, with nearly 40 percent educated at Harvard, Yale, or Columbia. Harvard’s president emeritus Charles Eliot and eight other college presidents served on the council. Professional biologists, zoologists, and geneticists made up one-third of the group. About 10 percent were psychologists. Five presidents of the American Psychological Association (past or present) were members, as were a similar number of presidents of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Adolf Meyer, who was the leading figure in American psychiatry at that time, joined the council. So did Charles Burr, a past president of the American Neurological Association. Floyd Haviland, president of the American Psychiatric Association (APA), offered his advice as a council member. The council, which was expected to review all of the society’s educational materials, represented many of the best and brightest in America—its top doctors and scientists, educated at its best universities.34

The American Eugenics Society (AES) was incorporated in 1926. John D. Rockefeller Jr. contributed $10, 000 t o h e lpl a u n c hi t . G eor g e E a s t man, o f E a s t man Ko d ak f am e, g a v e$ 20,000. Yale professor Irving Fisher, the best-known economist of his time, served as the first president. In a short period, it grew into a truly national organization, with chapters in twenty-eight states.

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34 Ibid, 129-179.

The society focused on promoting eugenics to the American public—getting textbooks and pamphlets into schools and conducting informational campaigns to build support for sterilization laws. One of its popular traveling exhibits, consisting of a board with blinking lights, was titled “Some People Are Born to Be a Burden on the Rest.” Every fifteen seconds a light flashed to warn onlookers that American taxpayers had just spent another $100 caring for defectives. Every thirty seconds, a light flashed to signal that another defective had been born. At intervals of fifty seconds, a flashing light told of another criminal being carted off to prison, with the audience informed that “very few normal persons ever go to jail.” Finally, after seven and one-half long minutes, a light blinked to announce that a “high grade person,” at long last, had been born.35

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35 Eugenical News 10 (July 1925):131.

36 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 62.

State fairs proved to be particularly good forums for educating the public. In addition to its flashing-light exhibit, the society set up charts explaining Mendelian laws of inheritance and how they determined human types. “Unfit human traits,” the AES advised the American public, “run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs.”36 To further its point, the AES organized “Fitter Families” contests, with entrants submitting family histories, undergoing psychiatric exams, and taking IQ tests, all in the hope that they would be deemed Grade-A humans. Winning families joined other best-of-show livestock—pigs, goats, cows—in end-of-fair parades, the humans riding in automobiles decorated with banners proclaiming them the state’s “best crop.”37

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37 Eugenical News 10 (March 1925):27.

To get the country’s clergy involved, the AES sponsored annual contests with cash awards, up to $500, f or mini s t ers an d p r i es t s w h o d e l i v ere d t h e b es t e ug e ni csser m o n . I n 1928, R e v ere n d Wi ll iam M a t so n o f t h e M e t h o d i s tEp i sco p a lC h u rc h w o n t h e t o pp r i zeo f$ 500 by telling his congregation that “modern science” had proven “all men are created unequal.” With such a disparity in genetic makeup, trying to lift up the unfit with education and social programs was “like attempting to grow better alfalfa with dandelion seed.” Said Matson: “We may raise a pig in the parlor but he remains a pig.” Other ministers won cash prizes for telling their members that God was waiting for the human race to become “purified silver,” cleansed of its “impurities of dross and alloy” and that “if marriage is entered into by those notoriously unfit to give a righteous biologic entail, the state has a right to insist on sterilization.”38

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38 Eugenics 2 (August 1929):3-19; also see Mehler, History of the American Eugenics Society, 90.

Meanwhile, in a 137-page booklet called “Tomorrow’s Children,” designed to serve as the society’s “catechism,” schoolchildren and other readers were encouraged to think of the AES as a “Society for the Control of Social Cancer.” The mentally ill and other defectives were an “insidious disease,” and each time they had children, they created “new cancers in the body politic.” In a modern society, cancer needed to be treated with a “surgeon’s knife.” At the moment, though, American society was failing to respond to this threat: “Crime and dependency keep on increasing because new defectives are born, just as new cancer cells remorselessly penetrate into sound tissue.”39

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39 As cited by Mehler, History of the American Eugenics Society, 246.

90❗️

In the 1930s, the invective from eugenicists became, in many instances, even shriller. Franz Kallmann, chief of research at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, said that all people, even lovers of “individual liberty,” had to agree “mankind would be much happier” if societies could get rid of their schizophrenics, who were not “biologically satisfactory individuals.”40 Charles Stockard, president of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, worried that the human species faced “ultimate extermination” unless propagation of “low grade and defective stocks” could be “absolutely prevented.”41 Meanwhile, Earnest Hooton—Harvard professor of anthropology and AES council member—in his 1937 book Apes, Men, and Morons, compared the insane to “malignant biological growths” whose germ plasm should be considered “poisonous slime.” America, he argued, “must stop trying to cure malignant biological growths with patent sociological nostrums. The emergency demands a surgical operation.”42

Note: the insula reacting to Thems

432

40 Franz Kallmann, “Heredity, Reproduction, and Eugenic Procedure in the Field of Schizophrenia,” Eugenical News 23 (November-December 1938):105.

41 As cited by Mehler, History of the American Eugenics Society, 244.

42 Earnest Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons (G. Putnam’s and Sons, 1937), 269, 295.

All of this was a far cry from the sentiments that had governed moral treatment a century earlier. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the American public regularly heard the insane likened to “viruses,” “social wastage,” and “melancholy waste products.” They were a plague on civilization, one that in nature would have been quickly eliminated. Scorn toward the severely mentally ill had become the popular attitude of the day, and that attitude was the foundation for laws that curbed their right to pursue, as the Declaration of Independence had once promised, life, liberty, and happiness.

The Killing Fields

America’s embrace of eugenic sterilization as a progressive health measure had consequences for the mentally ill in other countries as well. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court deemed it constitutional, Denmark passed a sterilization law, and over the next few years, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland did too. America’s influence on Nazi Germany was particularly pronounced, and it was in that country, of course, that eugenics ran its full course.

Prior to World War I, eugenics was not nearly as popular in Germany as it was in the United States. Germany’s parliament defeated a sterilization bill in 1914, and the country didn’t pass any law prohibiting the mentally ill from marrying. However, after the war, eugenics gained a new appeal for the German population. Germany’s economy lay in ruins after the war, and more than 1.75 million of its ablest young men had died in the conflict. How could the impoverished country afford the cost of caring for “defectives” in asylums? Should the unfit be allowed to pass on their tainted genes while so many of its healthy young men had died before having a chance to become fathers? In 1925, Adolf Hitler, in Mein Kampf, hailed eugenics as the science that would rebuild the nation. The state, he wrote, must “avail itself of modern medical discoveries” and sterilize those people who are “unfit for procreation.”

100

Much as U.S. geneticists had, German eugenicists sought to develop scientific evidence that mental illnesses were inherited and that such genetic disease was spreading through its population. American money helped fund this effort. In 1925, the Rockefeller Foundation gave $2.5 million to the Psychiatric Institute in Munich, which quickly became Germany’s leading center for eugenics research. In addition, it gave money to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Genetics and Eugenics in Berlin, which was used to pay for a national survey of “degenerative traits” in the German population.59

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43 Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics, 186.

100

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Germany passed a comprehensive sterilization bill. The German eugenicists who drew up that legislation had gone to school on the U.S. experience, which American eugenicists noted with some pride. “The leaders in the German sterilization movement state repeatedly that their legislation was formulated only after careful study of the California experiments,” wrote Margaret Smyth, superintendent of Stockton State Hospital, after touring Germany in 1935. “It would have been impossible they say, to undertake such a venture involving 1 million people without drawing heavily upon previous experience elsewhere.”60

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60 Margaret Smyth, “Psychiatric History and Development in California,” American Journal of Psychiatry 94 (1938):1223-1236.

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59 See Paul Weindling’s essay, “The Rockefeller Foundation and German Biomedical Sciences, 1920-1940,” in Science, Politics, and the Public Good, ed. Nicolaas Rupke (MacMillan Press, 1988), 119-140.

101

Many in Germany and in the United States also saw the Nazi bill as morally superior to any U.S. state law, as it had elaborate safeguards to ensure due process. German physicians were required to report “unfit” persons to Hereditary Health Courts, which then reviewed and approved patients for sterilization. There were even provisions for appeal. This was an example of how one country could learn from another and push modern medicine forward. Germany, the New England Journal of Medicine editorialized, had become “perhaps the most progressive nation in restricting fecundity among the unfit.” The American Public Health Association praised Germany in similar terms and at its annual meeting in 1934 mounted an exhibit on Germany’s sterilization program as an example of a modern health program. The New York Times, meanwhile, specifically sought to “dispel fears” that Hitler, with his new sterilization law, was pursuing “a discredited racial idea.” Germany, it wrote, was simply following in the path of other “civilized” countries, most notably the United States, where “some 15,000 unfortunates have been harmlessly and humanely operated upon to prevent them from propagating their own kind.”61

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61 “Sterilization and Its Possible Accomplishments,” New England Journal of Medicine 211 (1934):379-380; New York Times editorial, “Purifying the German Race,” August 8, 1933; William Peter, “Germany’s Sterilization Program,” American Journal of Public Health 24 (March 1934):187-191; Andre Sofair, “Eugenic Sterilization and a Qualified Nazi Analogy: The United States and Germany, 1930-1945,” Annals of Internal Medicine 132 (2000):312-319.

101

Over the next six years, Germany sterilized 375,000 of its citizens. The pace of eugenic sterilization during this period picked up in the United States as well, and the Scandinavian countries also sterilized a number of their “defectives.” A eugenic treatment born in the United States had spread into a half dozen European countries. However, Germany was employing it with a fervor missing in the United States, which led some American eugenicists to fret that Hitler was now “beating us at our own game.” While America was “pussy-footing around” with the procedure, complained Leon Whitney, field secretary for the American Eugenics Society, Germany was making “herself a stronger nation.”62

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62 As cited by Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 116; and Sofair, “Eugenical Sterilization and a Qualified Nazi Analogy.”

101

And then Nazi Germany took eugenic treatment of the mentally ill to its ultimate end.

Eugenic attitudes toward the mentally ill—that they were a drain on society and a threat to its “germ plasm”—inevitably raised the possibility of a more extreme measure. Should a state simply kill its insane? This question was first raised in the United States in 1911, when Charles Davenport published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Although he generally argued against killing the unfit, he wrote that if a society had to choose between allowing “mental defectives” to procreate and killing them, the latter would be the preferable alternative. “Though capital punishment is a crude method of grappling with the difficulty [of defectives],” he concluded, “it is infinitely superior to that of training the feebleminded and criminalistic and then letting them loose upon society and permitting them to perpetuate in their offspring these animal traits.”63 Five years later, Madison Grant, a wealthy New York lawyer and a founder of the American Eugenics Society, pushed this notion a step further in his book The Passing of the Great Race. “The Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race,” he argued. “A great injury is done to the community by the perpetuation of worthless types.”64

The idea that the mentally ill, and other misfits, were “useless eaters” was now alive and loose in the Western world. Grant’s best-selling book went through four editions and was translated into French, Norwegian, and German. Hitler, according to German historian Stefan Kühl, later wrote Grant a fan letter, telling him “the book was his Bible.”65

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63 Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, 263.

64 Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 45.

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65 Stefan Kühl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism (Oxford University Press, 1994), 85.

103

Over the next two decades, the notion that state killing of the mentally ill might be acceptable popped up in various forums in the United States. In 1921, Connecticut legislators, having toured the State Hospital for the Insane in Norwich, where they observed a fifty-year-old man manacled to an iron bed, contemplated passing a law “that would provide that persons found to be hopelessly insane after observation and examination of experts should be put to death as mercifully as possible, preferably by poison.” The New York Times headline proclaimed that the man had been “Exhibited as Case for Merciful Extinction.”66 The hateful rhetoric of American eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s, which characterized the mentally ill as “social wastage,” “malignant biological growths,” and “poisonous slime,” also implicitly suggested that perhaps society should find a way to get rid of them. The insane, explained Harvard’s Earnest Hooton, were “specimens of humanity who really ought to be exterminated.”67 Finally, in 1935, Alexis Carrel, a Nobel Prize-winning physician at Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research in New York City, made the point explicit. In his book Man the Unknown, he wrote:

Gigantic sums are now required to maintain prisons and insane asylums and protect the public against gangsters and lunatics. Why do we preserve these useless and harmful beings? The abnormal prevent the development of the normal. This fact must be squarely faced. Why should society not dispose of the criminals and insane in a more economical manner? … The community must be protected against troublesome and dangerous elements. How can this be done?

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66 “Exhibited as Case for Merciful Extinction,” New York Times, February 7, 1921.

67 Hooton, Apes, Men, and Morons, 236, 294-295.

103

Carrel answered his own question. The insane, or at least those who committed any sort of crime, “should be humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasic institutions supplied with proper gases.”68

103

Nazi Germany began killing its mentally ill with “proper gases” in January 1940. It did so based on a simple eugenics rationale: Four months earlier, it had invaded Poland, and killing the mentally ill promised to free up hospital beds for the wounded, and also spare the state the expense of feeding them. Over the course of eighteen months, the Nazis gassed more than 70,000 mental patients. Program administrators even calculated the resultant financial benefits, carefully itemizing the food—bread, margarine, sugar, sausage, and so on—no longer being consumed by those who had been killed. Hitler called a halt to this systematic killing of the mentally ill on August 24, 1941; the gas chambers were dismantled and sent to concentration camps in the East, where they were reassembled for the killing of Jews and others “devoid of value.” A path that had begun seventy-five years earlier with Galton’s study of the superior traits of the ruling English elite, and had then wound its way through the corridors of American science and society, had finally arrived at Auschwitz.

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68 Carrel, Man the Unknown, 318-319.

🔮 The Cosmos

Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED

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