Support for the killing of the unfit began to slowly spead in the U.S. after 1911
Nazi Germany was inspired by U.S. eugenicists to begin killing the unfit. Over the next two decades after 1911, when Charles Davenport first supported the killing of the unfit, 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.”
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.” 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?”
Carrell 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.” Then, In 1940, Nazi Germany had began using gas chambers to kill the unfit after being advised to do so by U.S. eugenicists.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 103). New York, NY: Basic Books.