War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (8 page)

As the twentieth century opened for business, the eugenic spotlight would now swing across the ocean from England to the United States. In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers. Galton could not have envisioned that his social idealism would degenerate into a ruthless campaign to destroy all those deemed inadequate. But it would become nothing less than a worldwide eugenic crusade to abolish all human inferiority.

A
merica was ready for eugenics before eugenics was ready for America. What in England was the biology of class, in America became the biology of racial and ethnic groups. In America, class was, in large measure, racial and ethnic.

Everything Galtonian eugenics hoped to accomplish with good matrimonial choices, American eugenicists preferred to achieve with draconian preventive measures designed to delete millions of potential citizens deemed unfit. American eugenicists were convinced they could forcibly reshape humanity in their own image. Their outlook was only possible because American eugenicists believed the unfit were essentially subhuman, not worthy of developing as members of society. The unfit were diseased, something akin to a genetic infection. This infection was to be quarantined and then eliminated. Their method of choice was selective breeding-spaying and cutting away the undesirable, while carefully mating and grooming the prized stock.

Breeding was in America’s blood. America had been breeding humans even before the nation’s inception. Slavery thrived on human breeding. Only the heartiest Africans could endure the cruel middle passage to North America. Once offloaded, the surviving Africans were paraded atop auction stages for inspection of their physical traits.
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Notions of breeding society into betterment were never far from post-Civil War American thought. In 1865, two decades before Galton penned the word
eugenics,
the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York declared in its newspaper that, “Human breeding should be one of the foremost questions of the age…. “ A few years later, with freshly expounded Galtonian notions crossing the Atlantic, the Oneida commune began its first selective human breeding experiment with fifty-three female and thirty-eight male volunteers.
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Feminist author Victoria Woodhull expressed the growing belief that both positive and negative breeding were indispensable for social improvement. In her 1891 pamphlet,
The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit,
Woodhull insisted, “The best minds of today have accepted the fact that if superior people are desired, they must be bred; and if imbeciles, criminals, paupers and [the] otherwise unfit are undesirable citizens they must not be bred.”
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America was ready for eugenic breeding precisely because the most established echelons of American society were frightened by the demographic chaos sweeping the nation. England had certainly witnessed a mass influx of foreigners during the years leading up to Galton’s eugenic doctrine. But the scale in Britain was dwarfed by America’s experience. So were the emotions.

America’s romantic “melting pot” notion was a myth. It did not exist when turn-of-the-century British playwright Israel Zangwill optimistically coined the term.
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1n Zangwill’s day, America’s shores, as well as the three thousand miles in between, were actually a cauldron of undissolvable minorities, ethnicities, indigenous peoples and other tightly-knit groups-all constantly boiling over.

Eighteen million refugees and opportunity-seeking immigrants arrived between 1890 and 1920. German Lutherans, Irish Catholics, RussianJews, Slavic Orthodox-one huddled mass surged in after another.
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But they did not mix or melt; for the most part they remained insoluble.

But ethnic volatility during the late 1800s arose from more than the European influx. Race and group hatred crisscrossed the continent. Millions of Native Americans were being forced onto reservations. Mexican multitudes absorbed after the Mexican-American War, in which Mexico lost fully half its land to United States expansion, became a clash point in the enlarged American West and Southwest. Emancipated African slaves struggled to emerge across the country. But freed slaves and their next generation were not absorbed into greater society. Instead, a network of state and local Jim Crow laws enforced apartheid between African Americans and whites in much of the nation, especially in the South. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 temporarily halted the immigration through California of any further Chinese laborers, and blocked the naturalization of those already in the country; the measure was made permanent in 1902.
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“Race suicide” was an alarum commonly invoked to restrict European immigration, as 1880 Census Bureau Director Francis Walker did in his
1896 Atlantic Monthly
article, “Restriction of Immigration.” Walker lamented the statistical imbalance between America’s traditional Anglo-Saxon settlers and the new waves flowing in from southern Europe. Eminent sociologist E. A. Ross elevated the avoidance of “race suicide” to a patriotic admonishment, decrying “the beaten members of beaten breeds” from Croatia, Sicily and Armenia flooding in through Ellis Island. Ross warned that such groups “lack the ancestral foundations of American character, and even if they catch step with us they and their children will nevertheless impede our progress.”
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As the nineteenth century closed, women still could not vote, Native Americans who had survived governmental genocide programs were locked onto often-barren reservations, and Blacks, as well as despised “white trash,” were still commonly lynched from the nearest tree-from Minnesota to Mississippi. In fact, 3,224 Americans were lynched in the thirty-year period between 1889 and 1918-702 white and 2,522 black. Their crimes were as trivial as uttering offensive language, disobeying ferry regulations, “paying attention to [a] white girl,” and distilling illicit alcohol.
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The century ahead was advertised as an epoch for social progress. But the ushers of that progress would be men and women forged from the racial and cultural fires of prior decades. Many twentieth-century activists were repelled by the inequities and lasting scars of racial and social injustice; they were determined to transform America into an egalitarian republic. But others, especially American eugenicists, switched on the lights of the new century, looked around at the teeming, dissimilar masses and collectively declared they had unfinished business.

Crime analysis moved race and ethnic hatred into the realm of heredity. Throughout the latter 1800s, crime was increasingly viewed as a group phenomenon, and indeed an inherited family trait. Criminologists and social scientists widely believed in the recently identified “criminal type,” typified by “beady eyes” and certain phrenological shapes. The notion of a “born criminal” became popularized.
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Ironically, when robber barons stole and cheated their way into great wealth, they were lionized as noble leaders of the day, celebrated with namesake foundations, and honored by leather-bound genealogies often adorned with coats of arms. It was the petty criminals, not the gilded ones, whom polite society perceived as the great genetic menace.

Petty criminals and social outcasts were abundant in Ulster County, New York. Little did these seemingly inconsequential people know they were making history. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, this rustic Catskill Mountain region became a popular refuge for urban dropouts who preferred to live off the land in pastoral isolation. Fish and game were abundant. The lifestyle was lazy. Civilization was yonder. But as wealthy New Yorkers followed the Hudson River traffic north, planting opulent Victorian mansions and weekend pleasure centers along its banks, the very urbanization that Ulster’s upland recluses spurned caught up to them. Pushed from their traditional fishing shores and hillside hunting grounds, where they lived in shanties, the isolated, unkempt rural folk of Ulster now became “misfits.” Not a few of them ran afoul of property and behavior laws, which became increasingly important as the county’s population grew.
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Many found themselves jailed for the very lifestyle that had become a local tradition.

In
1874, Richard Dugdale, an executive of the New York Prison Association, conducted interviews with a number of Ulster County’s prisoners and discovered that many were blood relatives. Consulting genealogies, courthouse and poorhouse records, Dugdale documented the lineages of no fewer than forty-two families heavily comprised of criminals, beggars, vagrants and paupers. He claimed that one group of 709 individuals were all descendants of a single pauper woman, known as Margaret and crowned “mother of criminals.” Dugdale collectively dubbed these forty-two troubled families “the Jukes.” His 1877 book,
The Jukes, a Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity,
calculated the escalating annual cost to society for welfare, imprisonment and other social services for each family. The text immediately exerted a vast influence on social scientists across America and around the world.
¹¹

While Dugdale’s book spared no opportunity to disparage the human qualities of both the simple paupers and the accomplished criminals among the Jukes family, he blamed not their biology, but their circumstances. Rejecting notions of heredity, Dugdale instead zeroed in on the adverse conditions that created generation-to-generation pauperism and criminality. “The tendency of heredity is to produce an environment which perpetuates that heredity,” he wrote. He called for a change in social environment to correct the problem, and predicted that serious reform could effect a “great decrease in the number of commitments” within fifteen years. Dugdale cautioned against statistics that inspired false conclusions. He even reminded readers that not a few wealthy clans made their fortunes by cheating the masses-yet these scandalous people were considered among the nation’s finest families.
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But Dugdale’s cautions were ignored. His book was quickly hailed as proof of a hereditary defect that spawned excessive criminality and poverty-even though this was the opposite of what he wrote. For example, Robert Fletcher, president of the Anthropological Society of Washington, insisted in a major 1891 speech that germ plasm ruled, that one criminal bred another. “The taint is in the blood,” Fletcher staunchly told his audience, “and there is no royal touch which can expel it…. Quarantine the evil classes as you would the plague.”
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The Jukes
was the first such book, but not the last. Tribes of paupers, criminals and misfits were tracked and traced in similar books. The Smokey Pilgrims of Kansas, the Jackson “Whites of New Jersey, the Hill Folk of Massachusetts and the Nam family of upstate New York were all portrayed as clans of defective, worthless people, a burden to society and a hereditary scourge blocking American progress. Most convincing was a presentation made in 1888 to the Fifteenth National Conference of Charities and Correction by the social reformer Reverend Oscar McCulloch. McCulloch, a Congregationalist minister from Indianapolis, presented a paper entitled
Tribe of Ishmael: A Study of Social Degeneration.
The widely-reported speech described whole nomadic pauper families dwelling in Indianapolis, all related to a distant forefather from the 1790s.
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Ishmael’s descendants were in fact bands of roving petty thieves and con artists who had victimized town and countryside, giving McCulloch plenty of grist for his attack on their heredity. He compared the Ishmael people to the Sacculina parasites that feed off crustaceans. Paupers were inherently of no value to the world, he argued, and would only beget succeeding generations of paupers-and all “because some remote ancestor left its independent, self-helpful life, and began a parasitic, or pauper life.” His research, McCullouch assured, “resembles the study of Dr. Dugdale into the Jukes and was suggested by that.”
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Many leading social progressives devoted to charity and reform now saw crime and poverty as inherited defects that needed to be halted for society’s sake. “When this idea was combined with the widespread racism, class prejudice and ethnic hatred that already existed among the turn-of-the-century intelligentsia-and was then juxtaposed with the economic costs to society-it created a fertile reception for the infant field of eugenics. Reformers possessed an ingrained sense that “good Americans” could be bred like good racehorses.

Galton had first pronounced his theory of the well-born in 1883. For the next twenty years, eugenics bounced around America’s intellectual circles as a perfectly logical hereditary conclusion consistent with everyday observations. But it lacked specifics. Then, as one of the first sparks of the twentieth century, Gregor Mendel’s theory of heredity was rediscovered. True, between 1863 and 1868, various theories of heredity had been published by three men: Spencer, Darwin and Mendel. But while Darwin and Spencer presided with great fanfare in London’s epicenter of knowledge, Mendel was alone and overlooked by the world of science he aspired to.

The son of simple mountain peasants, Mendel was not socially adept. Combative exchanges with those in authority made him prefer solitude. “He who does not know how to be alone is not at peace with himself,” he wrote. Originally, he had hoped to devote himself to the natural sciences. But he failed at the university and retreated to an Augustinian monastery in Brno, Moravia. There, while tending the gardens, he continued the work of a long line of students of plant hybridization.
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Mendel preferred peas. Peering through flimsy wire-rim glasses into short tubular microscopes and scribbling copious notes, Mendel studied over ten thousand cross-fertilized pea plants. Key differences in their traits could be predicted, depending upon whether he bred tall plants with short plants, or plants yielding smooth pods with plants yielding wrinkled pods. Eventually, he identified certain governing inheritable traits, which he called “dominating” and “recessive.” These could be expressed in mathematical equations, or traced in a simple genealogical chart filled with line-linked
N's
and
B’s
. Among his many conclusions: when pea plants with wrinkled skins were crossed with plants yielding smooth skins, the trait for wrinkled skin dominated.
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In other words, the smooth pea pod skin was corrupted by wrinkled stock. Wrinkled peapods ultimately became a powerful image to those who found the human simile compelling.