War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (57 page)

A letter went to sociologist Raymond Bellamy at the Florida State College for Women; Bellamy replied, “I am glad to do anything I can to help,” and specified Negroes and Seminole Indians in South Florida, and Cubans in Tampa. A copy went to W. E. Bryan, a plant breeder at the University of Arizona in Tucson; Bryan reported race-mixing between American Indians and Mexicans, and suggested using a field worker who could speak Spanish. A letter went to J. S. Blitch, superintendent of the Florida State Reformatory; Blitch responded that of his 1,640 prisoners, fewer than a third were white, the rest being “plain negro stock.” UCLA official Bennet Allen replied that Los Angeles was home to many ethnic groups, including Japanese, Mexican, Italian, and Portuguese. He also reported that the Mexicans and the Japanese rarely married outside their respective groups. Henry Bolley of the North Dakota Agricultural College’s Botany Department reported “half-breeds among our North Dakota Indians, but I think largely of French origin,” as well as farmers of Russian and possibly Polish heritage.
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On February 29, 1929, Davenport went global. He mass mailed letters to eugenic contacts and official sources in countries on every continent, signing them as president of the IFEO’s Committee on Race Crossing. The letters all declared:

In Norway, Dr. Halfdan Bryn focused on “the northern parts of the country,” where, over the centuries, Laplanders and Alpines had mixed with pure Nordics; Bryn added that his forthcoming book, to be published by Lehmann in Munich, would include plenty of pictures of “Norwegian hybrids.” In Moscow, Professor Bunak, director of the Institute of Anthropology, explained that the Eastern European plains, the Caucasus, Siberia and Turkistan all featured “numerous tribes, [such] as North European, Baltic, Mediterranean, Armenoid, Uralian (Ougrofinnic), Mongolic, Turck and others” who had intermingled during the past twenty to thirty centuries; more recently, Yakoutian-Russians and other “race-hybrids” had proliferated through the regions. In colonial Rhodesia, a museum zoologist acknowledged some Bantu and Asiatic mixtures, but he assured Davenport that “miscegenation is regarded by decent persons as severely as it probably is in the Southern States of the USA.” Reports came from Brazil, China, Holland, France, Fiji, Chile and many more countries.
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In locations with no known eugenic contacts, Davenport resorted to Laughlin’s network of American consuls. In the Azores, Vice-Consul Prescott Childs demonstrated an excellent knowledge of eugenic principles and reported that due to the islands’ remoteness, very few of Breton or Flemish blood had mixed with pure Portuguese; Childs added that his real “eugenic concern” was too much intermarriage, which he believed led to increased insanity. In Harbin, American Consul C. C. Hansen pointed out that a number of Russians had migrated into North Manchuria resulting in “intermingling of Chinese men with Russian women”; Hansen reported the villages along various rivers where “half-caste children … of the first generation” could be located. In Nairobi, American Consul Charles Albrecht outlined the geographic districts of Kenya and attached a list of photographers “who might be able to furnish you with photographs of race hybrids.” In Estonia, Tahiti and other remote locations, American consuls pledged their assistance.
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At 6:15 P.M. on Friday, September 27, 1929, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations met in Rome to consider the preliminary report of the Committee on Race Crossing. From their perspective, identification and eugenic countermeasures of all sorts were more than pressing-the world was in crisis, and they were in a race against time. Mussolini, a dictator, was not hampered by the checks and balances of democracy. The IFEO wanted to enlist him to help impose stern eugenic measures in Italy. Since the summer, Fischer and Davenport had been working on a special appeal to
II Duce.
Now, in the Piazza Venezia, they and their colleagues would have an audience with Mussolini.
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Fischer stepped forward to read the long appeal. It was not lost on the delegation that they were in Rome, seat of the Catholic Church, which strenuously opposed all forms of eugenics. “It seems natural and desirable,” Fischer read, “when considering eugenic problems, that some expression of our hopes and wishes should be addressed to the great statesman who … shows more than any other leader today … how much he has the eugenic problems of his people at heart.” Fischer went on to label the effects of race mixing “catastrophes,” and urged immediate measures to “[set] a model to the world by showing that energetic administration can make good the damage.” In an emotional crescendo to his appeal, Fischer declared, “The urgency brooks no delay; the danger is imminent.”
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Two hours later, the men retreated to the elegant library of the Central Statistical Institute where they huddled over maps, reports, tables and surveys as they plotted the course of their global eugenic action. Virginia, the Java Islands, Norway, Germany, all of Europe, all of the United States, all of the British Empire. The world. With trained field workers and Hollerith data processing equipment, the unfit could be quickly and methodically identified, quantified, qualified and prioritized for countermeasures-whether they resided in big cities, the hinterlands or island villages. Every delegate was instructed to lobby his government for cooperation.
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Davenport was encouraged. Fascism was on the rise in Europe, and he realized it was time to relinquish the reins. On December 2, 1929, Davenport wrote to Fischer asking him to assume chairmanship of the Committee on Race Crossing. Rüdin would soon replace Davenport as IFEO president as well. The Germans were the future. Davenport wrote Ploetz in Munich, “Personally, I am very glad that the Federation is now under the
Leitung
[leadership] of a German.”
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Fischer was willing to assume leadership of the Committee on Race Crossing, but who would pay the postage and printing costs? Davenport replied that the IFEO treasury would, since “it is more important to spend our money that way than almost any other.” Davenport and Fischer coauthored a questionnaire to be sent worldwide “to the persons living and working in foreign regions, physicians, missionaries, merchants, farmers and travelers,” asking them to “send as detailed and significant data as possible.” The questionnaires would be produced in English, Spanish and German. Davenport and Fischer reported in a joint memo that the data would eventually identify not only race-crossed individuals, “but entirely foreign people, that is the so-called colored ones.”
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As the thirties opened, many key players in the American eugenics movement continued to support German raceology. In December of 1929, the Rockefeller Foundation began a five-year subsidy of Fischer’s German national “anthropological survey” with a donation totaling $125,000. Although the study was labeled “anthropological,” it was in fact racial, eugenic and, in part, directed at German Jewry. German officials who supported the proposal for the study made this clear in a letter to the foundation. They would not survey a single large sample of people “of an ancient type”; instead, they would select multiple smaller cross-sections of the general population, which would “be examined in its genealogical and historical relationships with the help of church records, place and family histories.” The Germans specified, “In this way it is hoped to find new solutions about the appearance of certain signs of degeneration, especially the distribution of hereditary pathological attributes.”
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The letter continued, “From the eugenic standpoint, questions will be submitted on the biological conditions of families, the number of births and abortions, succession and rate of births, and finally questions on the decline of births and birth registration in the region being investigated …. A determination of blood groups will also be undertaken…. There is also planned an investigation of the Westphalian aristocracy, of the old-establishedJewish population of Frankfurt, and the so-called old lineage of some other towns.… For certain eugenic discussions it seemed of the greatest importance to obtain useful support for the question of … pathological lines of heredity among the population.”
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Rockefeller executives quickly approved the idea, channeling the money through the Emergency Fund for German Science. Rockefeller trustees authorized the grant in the midst of the devastating worldwide depression ignited by the stock market crash of 1929. As breadlines stretched across American cities, the economic crisis also crippled the German economy.
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German eugenicists needed all the financial assistance they could get.

In August of 1930, Germany’s
Archiv for Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie
ran a tribute to Ploetz on his seventieth birthday. Among those extending kudos were Davenport and Popenoe on behalf of the United States. In October of 1930,
Eugenical News
called the edition “a worthy tribute of esteem and affection for the genial and high-minded scholar whom it honors.” In the same issue of
Eugenical News,
an article entitled “Jews in West Africa” reviewed a book claiming “evidence of Jewish infiltration” among the Masai tribes of Africa as a result of a “trek ofJews from Jerusalem to the Niger.” The book was deemed “a good example of the deductive method … so great as to make the book a very valuable contribution.” The next news item congratulated J. F. Lehmann, now openly Nazi, for being Germany’s leading eugenic publisher. At about that time, the IFEO created a Committee on Racial Psychiatry under Rüdin’s chairmanship.
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In December of 1930,
Eugenical News
reprinted Rüdin’s long paper, “Hereditary Transmission of Mental Diseases.” In it Rüdin declared, “Humanity demands that we take care of all that are diseased-of the hereditarily diseased too-according to our best knowledge and power; it demands that we try to cure them from their personal illnesses. But there is no cure for the hereditary dispositions themselves. In its own interest, consequently, and with due respect to the laws of nature, humanity must not go so far as to permit a human being to transmit his diseased hereditary dispositions to his offspring. In other words: Humanity itself calls out an energetic halt to the propagation of the bearer of diseased hereditary dispositions.”
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Rüdin advocated sterilization of all members of an unfit individual’s extended family. “It becomes clear,” he argued, “that, in these cases, propagation ought to be renounced … for other degrees of relationship, e.g., for the nephews and nieces, grandchildren…. We must make the eugenic ideal a sacred tradition. It must be rooted so deeply in man, and at the right time, that the respect he owes it becomes a matter of course with him, and that he will find love without trespassing on the laws of eugenics.”
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In 1931, Rockefeller approved an additional ten-year grant totaling $89,000 to Rüdin’s Institute for Psychiatry. This grant funded research by two doctors into the links between blood, neurology and mental illness. It reflected a growing trend among some philanthropic foundations to avoid funding scientific organizations focused on eugenics, which in recent years had come under fire for being too political and too scientifically shoddy.
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Genetics, psychiatry, brain research, anthropology and sociology were all preferable destinations for American biologic research dollars. One Rockefeller memo observed, “Race biology today suffers immensely from its mixture with political dogmas and drives”; in that instance, the foundation had granted $90,000 to a eugenic geneticist who had studied at Cold Spring Harbor, because they felt the recipient was worthy. Moreover, eugenicists were constantly seeking the “carriers”-the normal people who transmitted defective genes that might crop up once in several generations. Because of the bad publicity surrounding this idea, and the growing belief that eugenics was more racism than science, the new breed of eugenicists began looking for blood identifiers that seemed ethnically neutral. Even still, the searches remained race-specific.
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Whether under the banner of psychiatry, anthropology, genetics or race hygiene, American funding was still consciously promoting eugenic research. For example, in 1931, the Carnegie Institution contributed $5,000 for an international genetics congress and the separate Carnegie Endowment added $3,500. Davenport also contacted the Rockefeller Foundation to enlist their support for this event.
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Also in 1931, the famous Baur-Fischer-Lenz volume,
Foundation of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene (Grundriss der menschlichen Erblichkeitslehre und Rassenhygiene),
was translated into English. One chapter was entitled “Racial Psychology” and cited a study demonstrating that “the racial endowment of the Jews finds expression in the nature of the offences they commit.” Another passage asserted that “fraud and the use of insulting language really are commoner among Jews,” adding, “It is said thatJews are especially responsible for the circulation of obscene books and pictures, and for carrying on the White Slave Trade. Most of the White Slave traders are said to be Ashkenazic Jews.” Another passage insisted, “The Jews could not get along without the Teutons.” The term
Jewish Question (Judenfrage),
which was used throughout the book, required no explanation.
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