No One Cares About Crazy People Page 12
Galton did not live to see eugenics applied to justify the mass extermination of Jews and the smaller-scale attempts to wipe out the mentally ill in the Holocaust. Common supposition has it that the practice died out with the defeat of the Third Reich in 1945, yet Galton’s spawn did no such thing. Eugenics flourished in the postwar years, in subtler forms than attempted genocide, sterilization of reproductive organs, lobotomy, castration, and murder by neglect. Eugenics would constitute the preeminent indignity directed at the insane and the presumed insane for most of the ensuing hundred years after Galton’s treatise. As mentioned, it is practiced today and, in some cases, practiced in the name of useful medical research. Now, for the first time in history, man was not an unquestioned creature of God but could be seen as an exponent of blind deterministic forces. And those same forces, confronted with shortages of food and water, could make part of humanity “surplus.” And once mankind had internalized that utilitarian formulation…
“I think that stern compulsion ought to be exerted to prevent the free propagation of the stock of those who are seriously afflicted by lunacy, feeble-mindedness, habitual criminality, and pauperism,” Galton wrote in his 1908 autobiography.11 He was knighted in 1909.
The list of European and American public figures who joined the eugenics crusade under Galton’s banner is stunning.
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche saw in it a validation of his argument that man was not a creation of the divine, but an organism like all others, without moral purpose, part of the universal chaos. Short decades later, the Nazis would read Nietszche’s thoughts as a literal call for the restoration of the master race. They appropriated, in effect, Francis Galton’s ideal social class, added some myth, and claimed it as their own as they sought to propagate a fantasy population: blond blue-eyed Aryans who, in folk belief, had disappeared with the lost continent of Atlantis. The former president Theodore Roosevelt thought eugenics was a damned good means of getting rid of all those damned degenerates who were just interested in reproducing more degenerates. “Society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding,” grumbled the architect of the Square Deal for the common man in a 1913 letter to the eugenics pioneer Charles Benedict Davenport.12 Roosevelt was drawn to eugenics via his manly friendship with one of the most incandescent hero-villains of the early twentieth century.
Madison Grant, nearly forgotten today, was a titan in his time, an enduring icon of American conservation and, at the same time, as intelligent and cold-blooded an avatar of scientific racism as anyone on the western side of the Atlantic.
Grant was born into the Long Island upper class in 1865. Photographs of him in his fifties show a lean, imperious aristocrat with a silvery wide-swept mustache. His skull and clean-shaven jaw were long, in the approved Nordic fashion. His passion for the natural world grew from his boyhood ramblings among the exotic trees and flowers on his grandfather’s estate. As for animals, “I began by collecting turtles as a boy and have never recovered from this predilection.”13
A well-tutored young international traveler even before he entered Yale in 1884, Grant emerged in the late nineteenth century as a fierce champion of the natural world. His profession was the law; his avocation was saving nature. He led successful drives to prevent the destruction of California’s redwood trees and the depletion of the bison. He founded the Bronx Zoo and designed the scenic Bronx River Parkway, and his visionary efforts guided the creation of Glacier (Montana) and Denali (Alaska) National Parks. A hunter himself, he pressed for stronger gun laws and for limits on a hunter’s bounty. He became an expert in wildlife management, perceiving, à la Malthus, that the oversupply of stocks—their “surplus”—guaranteed their descent from perfection and nudged them toward extinction.
It was exactly within Grant’s visionary genius that malignity festered like a deformed gene. The same mastery of biological process that enabled him to anticipate threats to natural perfection activated his abhorrence of “inferior” human strains—and his wish to get rid of them. He loathed not only Negroes and Jews, but any specimen of the sweating, reeking, and jostling immigrant nationalities that were invading his pristine Anglo-Saxon precincts on the immigration tide. They deserved the same fate as all surplus livestock.
Madison Grant did not bring eugenics to the United States, but Davenport, his best friend, did. And then the two of them worked for years to make eugenics theory as American as apple pie. For a time, they succeeded.
Davenport, the recipient of Roosevelt’s harrumphing fan letter, was another in the unending supply of patricians/outdoorsmen/naturalists/intellectuals and future eugenicists such as Grant, and about the same age. Davenport met Francis Galton in London in 1902 and found himself transformed. A few years later, he described the encounter to Grant, whom he knew from an interlocking circle of clubs. Grant was just then expanding his interests from protecting the natural world to protecting human purity. Davenport lacked the zealotry of his friend, but Grant had more than enough for both of them. He pounced on Galton’s ideas and devoured them like so many plump gazelles at a watering hole. Then he went to work.
Abetted by Davenport, Grant raced to institutionalize the eugenics movement in America. He founded the American chapter of the Galton Society in 1918 and was among the founders of the American Eugenics Society in 1926. These organizations gained funding and support on the ballast of Madison’s incendiary 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race. Like eugenics itself, this manifesto profited from the nativist hysteria inflamed by a new swell of emigration from eastern European countries, compounded by the steady northward flow of Negroes from the agrarian South who were looking for industrial jobs that white workers had considered their birthright.
Because of these incursions into America’s economic and social sanctuaries, not to mention the steely absolutism of the book’s tone, The Passing of the Great Race proved as consequential in its way as Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Grant declared, in a foundational paragraph:
Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. 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.14
And just in case anyone missed that subtle point:
A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit—in other words social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums [my emphasis]… This is a practical, merciful, and inevitable solution of the whole problem, and can be applied to an ever widening circle of social discards, beginning always with the criminal, the diseased, and the insane.15
It was passages such as these that led Grant’s indefatigable* biographer, Jonathan Peter Spiro, to sum up his subject’s imprint on history in one damning sentence: “Madison Grant’s major contribution to eugenics… was to advance it from a skirmish against individuals who were socially unfit into a war against groups who were racially unfit.”16
The spark was a bonfire now. Its flames soared higher on the fuels added to it by the captains of American philanthropy, the very sorts that Francis Galton had denounced as standing in the way of evolutionary progress. Now the benefactors had switched sides. Their enthusiasm was not based on ethnic genocide. It was the “unfit” of the world, most prominently those same “degenerates,” “imbeciles,” and “morons” Galton had denounced—the mentally ill—that had these titans spoiling for a cleansing.
Spurred by Madison Grant’s evangelizing, some of the country’s most esteemed people and institutions came up with fistfuls of dollars, mill
ions in today’s money, which they flung into genetics research. Those contributors included the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Institution, and Mary Harriman, daughter of the massively wealthy railroad baron E.H. and sister of the American statesman Averill. Soon great universities such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Stanford, and eventually many others, were folding eugenics studies into their scientific curricula, overt racial assumptions and all.
The next and most catastrophic stage in the spread of eugenics was probably inevitable from the moment of its first Malthusian spark. The Passing of the Great Race saw its first German publication in 1925, the same year that Hitler’s Mein Kampf appeared. It could not have happened at a worse time—or, as Grant and his publisher Charles Scribner were concerned, at a better time. Scribner was a Princeton man and one of the three sons of Charles Scribner’s Sons. Charles was as racially benighted as most educated men of his time. As Jonathan Spiro reveals, Scribner took pride in having brought out The Passing of the Great Race because it had elevated “the race question to the fore.”17 Charles Scribner hadn’t seen anything yet.
Weimar Germany seethed. Its young men and its economy vitiated in the Great War, its prideful populace humiliated, its stature among nations laid low by the ruinous Treaty of Versailles, the nation thirsted to reclaim its ancient mythic greatness. The blueprint came from a bespectacled and sickly reservist in the Great War, a weak-chinned social wallflower with a lifelong stomachache, an agronomist by education, a virulent anti-Semite by temperament, whose name was Heinrich Himmler. Himmler joined the Nazi Party in 1923 and within two years was commanding the spectral SS, bodyguards to Hitler and eventual overseers of the death camps.
Himmler was a member of the Thule Society, a shadowy group that fetishized the myth of ancient Teutonic supremacy—the “Aryans.” Tall, muscular, with blue eyes and pale skin, the Aryans were thought by some to be a race stronger than God. They were the “Übermenschen.” In myth, their forebears had emerged from the lost undersea continent of Atlantis (itself a version of Eden) to enter history and consummate an earthly paradise that would last through eternity. They sounded distinctly like Francis Galton’s own idealized perfect Brits.
In the German version, the Übermenschen genetic line had thinned over the millennia as its carriers mated with inferior races. (Though why an Übermenschen would want to mate with anyone except another Übermenschen is an interesting question.) At any rate, as Germany’s mortification in the Great War’s aftermath stoked fantasies of epic vengeance in the shattered Fatherland, Heinrich Himmler was on hand to show how it could happen. And he had Hitler’s ear. In 1925 Hitler was released from a year in prison and began rebuilding the dormant Nazi Party into a national movement, championing Aryan racial supremacy and the credo “Might makes right.” The führer became aware of Madison Grant’s book-length polemic and wrote a letter to Grant exclaiming that “the book is my Bible.”18
Adolf Hitler’s rise over a few short years is part of world folklore. He gained the German chancellorship in January 1933. Immediately his Third Reich legalized involuntary sterilization of “congenital mental deficiency,” schizophrenia, manic-depressive “insanity,” epilepsy, and a list of hereditary physical deformities. More than 62,000 people were relieved of reproductive capacity in that first year; and 360,000 through 1939, when more efficient and deadly measures replaced sterilization.
Hitler’s euthanasia program coincided with his invasion of Poland in September 1939, the move that touched off World War II. Its first targets were children: disabled, diseased, mentally incapacitated children: “lives unworthy of life,” as a Nazi phrase had it, whose existence cost the Reich good money. Agents posing as social workers coaxed families of such excess baggage to give them over to one of seven newly established “pediatric clinics,” where they were gassed, shot, or simply allowed to starve to death—ammunition, after all, did not grow on trees.
The next victims were to be the mentally ill in toto.
In the autumn of 1939, Nazi soldiers overran a psychiatric hospital at Poznan, in freshly occupied Poland. They ordered some thousand patients out of their quarters, placed them on the flatbeds of transport trucks, drove them to a nearby forest, and killed them with carbon monoxide gas. The Nazis called these murders and the thousands that followed them “disinfection.”
Hitler maintained a policy of never signing orders that decreed murder. The single known time that he broke this policy involved mental patients. Doctors enlisted to expand “disinfection” activities feared that they might someday be held to account by authorities who did not consider “disinfection” a legal defense for murder. In August 1940, Hitler signed a life-taking “authorization” for physicians “so that patients who, on the basis of human judgment, are considered incurable, can be granted mercy death after a discerning diagnosis.” Even Hitler must have choked briefly on the word mercy.
By this time, at least some American foundations were starting to comprehend the macabre applications of their generosity. The Carnegie Institution withdrew its funding of Nazi eugenics research in 1939. By then, the Third Reich knew all it needed to know.
Four hundred mental patients were rounded up and shot at Chelm, in eastern Poland, in January 1940. Then the killing of the mad went industrial-scale. At Hartheim Castle, near Linz in Austria, 18,269 “disinfections” were carried out between January 1940 and August 1941. By the time Hitler ended the program in 1941, it had “granted mercy” to nearly one hundred thousand people. He halted it because some impossibly brave German Catholic clergymen had begun to denounce it. Somehow, they had not been fooled by the führer’s name for the murder apparatus: the Charitable Foundation for Curative and Institutional Care. At any rate, by this time Hitler had turned his attention toward exterminating Jews and invading the Soviet Union.19
Historians have estimated that the Nazis sterilized up to 375,000 people in all—many of them homosexual, most of them insane. This is a small number when compared to the estimated 5,933,900 Jews exterminated in the name of Aryan purity.20 Yet it is a pathetic marker of how far, “moral treatment” aside, the world had progressed in its care for “crazy people” between medieval Bedlam and the twentieth century.
Europe was not alone in its murderousness and abuse of the mentally ill. In America, sterilization and more invasive measures flourished before and after the war. Indiana enacted the country’s first compulsory sterilization law for the mentally ill in 1909. Washington and California quickly followed. California’s sunshine and sparkling beaches were drawing many newcomers to the state, and “race scientists” were just as keen as Britons and Germans to keep their paradise pristine. The Golden State became the national leader in the practice, neutering twenty thousand mental patients between the onset and 1979. It was not until September 2014 that the practice was prohibited in a bill signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown, following revelations that the state cleansed the ovaries of 148 women between 2006 and 2010. California claimed half of all coercive sterilizations before the war; unaccountably, this percentage dipped to only a third afterward.
By 1931, sterilization laws had been enacted in twenty-seven states.
One may summon persuasive and well-intentioned arguments in support of abortion, such as preserving the health and bodily autonomy of a pregnant woman. Yet the stubborn fact remains that Margaret Sanger, still revered as the enlightened pioneer crusader for abortion and founder of the group that became Planned Parenthood, unapologetically declared her wish to head off “objectionable” babies even before they were conceived. In 1932, she proclaimed in a public speech: “[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.”21 She could be even more blunt. On August 5, 1926, she told an audience at Vassar College: “The American public is taxed, heavily taxed, to maintain an increasing race of morons.”22 Also in 1932, just a year before Adolf Hitle
r established himself as chancellor of the Third Reich, she proclaimed: “Knowledge of birth control is essentially moral. Its general, though prudent practice must lead to a higher individually and ultimately to a cleaner race.”23
Among the groups obstructing that “cleaner race,” Sanger listed “morons, mental defectives, epileptics.”24
Of all the estimated sixty thousand sterilizations carried out in America before the twentieth century ended, one case in particular testifies how the specter of the Other—meaning, in most instances, the mad—is a primal menace that strips the membrane of reason from even the most enlightened men and women.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. stood above the great family legacies of his generation, above even the Cabots and the Lodges, as a descendant of American secular sainthood. His namesake father was a central figure among the New England transcendentalists, the small core of Harvard-centered men and women who had epitomized learning and moral rigor in the fragile early years of the Republic. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table,” was a fixture at the Saturday Club at the Parker House in Boston, the monthly gatherings of these eminences. It was he who nicknamed Boston the “Hub City”—“hub” signifying the center of the universe.
Oliver Jr. proved a noble steward of his father’s ideals. A lean Yankee patrician, Harvard man, legal scholar, abolitionist, thrice-wounded officer for the Union side in a cause that rejected the right of white people to use “inferior” Africans as chattel, appointed to the Supreme Court by Theodore Roosevelt, Holmes was practically an incarnation of the Declaration of Independence. And yet here is part of what Oliver Wendell Holmes had to say in 1927 regarding involuntary sterilization as a tool of eugenics: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes… Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”