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At 4am on November 12 1915, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at the German-American Hospital in Chicago. The baby was somewhat deformed and suffered from extreme intestinal and rectal abnormalities, as well as other complications. The delivering physicians awakened Dr Harry Haiselden, the hospital's chief of staff. Haiselden came in at once. He consulted with colleagues. There was great disagreement over whether the child could be saved. But Haiselden decided the baby was too afflicted and fundamentally not worth saving. It would be killed. The method: denial of treatment.

Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Bollinger's, heard the news and sped to the hospital to help. She found the baby, who had been named Allan, alone in a bare room. Walsh pleaded with Haiselden not to kill the baby by withholding treatment. "It was not a monster - that child," Walsh later told an inquest. "It was a beautiful baby. I saw no deformities." Walsh had patted the infant lightly. Allan's eyes were open, and he waved his tiny fists at her. Begging the doctor once more, Walsh tried an appeal to his humanity. "If the poor little darling has one chance in a thousand," she pleaded, "won't you operate to save it?"

Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, "I'm afraid it might get well."
***

As America's eugenics movement gathered pace, it inspired a host of imitators. In France, Belgium, Sweden, England and elsewhere in Europe, cliques of eugenicists did their best to introduce eugenic principles into national life; they could always point to recent precedents established in the United States.

Germany was no exception. From the turn of the century, German eugenicists formed academic and personal relationships with the American eugenics establishment, in particular with Charles Davenport, the pioneering founder of the Eugenics Record Office on Long Island, New York, which was backed by the Harriman railway fortune. A number of other charitable American bodies generously funded German race biology with hundreds of thousands of dollars, even after the depression had taken hold.

Germany had certainly developed its own body of eugenic knowledge and library of publications. Yet German readers still closely followed American eugenic accomplishments as the model: biological courts, forced sterilisation, detention for the socially inadequate, debates on euthanasia. As America's elite were describing the socially worthless and the ancestrally unfit as "bacteria," "vermin," "mongrels" and "subhuman", a superior race of Nordics was increasingly seen as the answer to the globe's eugenic problems. US laws, eugenic investigations and ideology became blueprints for Germany's rising tide of race biologists and race-based hatemongers.

One such agitator was a disgruntled corporal in the German army. In 1924, he was serving time in prison for mob action. While there, he spent his time poring over eugenic textbooks, which extensively quoted Davenport, Popenoe and other American ethnological stalwarts. And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.

In The Passing of the Great Race, Grant wrote: "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 sterilisation 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."

One day in the early 1930s, Whitney visited Grant to show off a letter he had just received from Germany, written by the corporal, now out of prison and rising in the German political scene. Grant could only smile. He pulled out his own letter. It was from the same German, thanking Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race. The fan letter called Grant's book "his Bible". The man who sent those letters was Adolf Hitler.

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On January 30 1933, Hitler seized power. During the 12-year Reich, he never varied from the eugenic doctrines of identification, segregation, sterilisation, euthanasia, eugenic courts and eventually mass termination in lethal chambers. During the Reich's first 10 years, eugenicists across America welcomed Hitler's plans as the logical fulfilment of their own decades of research and effort. Indeed, they were envious as Hitler rapidly began sterilising hundreds of thousands and systematically eliminating non-Aryans from German society. This included the Jews. Ten years after Virginia passed its 1924 sterilisation act, Joseph Dejarnette, superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the Richmond Times-Dispatch: "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

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The American eugenics movement set the course. Extermination (referred to as "euthanasia") of the "unfit" was on the table. They were very successful in their promotion of segregation, since we still live with the conseqences of that advocacy today, in states like Illinois. And they were really frustrated that sterilization laws were applied to so few - 60 or 70,000. They wanted to sterilize millions.

Black also gets into the philanthropists who funded all this. It's a "who's who" of rich dogooders of the time. Or that's what they called themselves, anyway.
 

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Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
 
We really do need a vomit graemlin . . .

Thanks for the link, sndrake. The article looks very interesting.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 
Sure, rivka...

But you DO see the irony in getting thanked for posting something that elicited a comment regarding the need for a vomit graemlin?


 

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Posted by rivka (Member # 4859) on :
 
Yep, did when I posted.

But while the eugenics movement and associated history (and present) sickens me, I believe that it is essential to know as much as possible. Those who don't learn history, yada yada.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 
Funny you should bring that up. I played with that quote when writing about a modern organization that sanitizes its history out of all recognition in an article I wrote (it was originally a branch of the eugenics movement, but you wouldn't know it from the history on the website):

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George Santayana said "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

He didn't say anything about whitewashing or sugarcoating the past and what it might mean.

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a sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life

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So the bad guys are against this, right?
 

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Posted by Richard Berg (Member # 133) on :
 
That depends on whether you think I was kidding.
 

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Posted by Destineer (Member # 821) on :
 
Eugenics is obviously wrong, but what's the problem with the ambition to create a "master race," if all that means is that no one is ever born with a hereditary illness? The problem with eugenics is not the goal -- it's the gruesome method.

We just have to find a way to prevent deformities that doesn't require killing.
 

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Posted by sndrake (Member # 4941) on :
 
Des,

I think the most important issue in the article is the historical aspect - i.e. Hitler's policies, so reviled in hindsight, were a result of ideology (masquerading as science)that was promoted first and foremost in the U.S.

We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.
 

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Posted by Starla* (Member # 5835) on :
 
Eugenics is a warped view of evolutionary genetics.

In evolution--nature picks out who makes it or what genes make it. In eugenics, man decides to play nature and pick it.

I can see why that guy killed that baby, because he so firmly believed in his precious eugenics. But, was it right? Of course not.

As humans, we hold the sanctity of life. Or most of us, at least. Animals, in a way, are similar, in that they don't kill something unless they can eat it. Though, I have seen birds kill another bird that was sick or deformed, but I think that is more of a survival mechanism--kill the ill one, so the rest of us won't become ill ourselves.

Granted, again. Humans are not birds.
 

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Posted by quidscribis (Member # 5124) on :
 
Warning: This is an old thread I'm bumping, so some of the previous participants may or may not still be reading Hatrack and may or may not respond.


I didn't see this thread way back when - we didn't have internet at home. sndrake linked to it from the other thread.

I didn't know about the history behind eugenics, and I'm finding the article sndrake linked to in the OP is quite interesting and enlightening, although also quite frightening.

Canada has its own share of eugenics in its history. Inuit people from the north (North West Territories, Yukon, and now Nunavut) were flown to Edmonton when they needed surgery, whether it be tonsillectomies or anything else, and routinely sterilized at the same time without the knowledge or consent of the patient as a matter of policy. That happened up until the 1970s.
 

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Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 

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And they were really frustrated that sterilization laws were applied to so few - 60 or 70,000. They wanted to sterilize millions.

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Originally posted by Starla*:

As humans, we hold the sanctity of life. Or most of us, at least. Animals, in a way, are similar, in that they don't kill something unless they can eat it. Though, I have seen birds kill another bird that was sick or deformed, but I think that is more of a survival mechanism--kill the ill one, so the rest of us won't become ill ourselves.

Granted, again. Humans are not birds.

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Originally posted by sndrake:
Des,

I think the most important issue in the article is the historical aspect - i.e. Hitler's policies, so reviled in hindsight, were a result of ideology (masquerading as science)that was promoted first and foremost in the U.S.

We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.

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We clearly see it as ideology now, but it was packaged and sold as "science" back then.

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Originally posted by sndrake:
And he closely followed the writings of Leon Whitney, president of the American Eugenics Society, and Madison Grant, who extolled the Nordic race and bemoaned its "corruption" by Jews, Negroes, Slavs and others who did not possess blond hair and blue eyes. The young German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail.

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That should say "The young, short, dark haired, dark eyed German corporal even wrote one of them fan mail."
 

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Posted by pooka (Member # 5003) on :
 
Oh, I haven't posted one of these in a long time.

<-- King of Men

There, is that enough negative attention for you?
 

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Posted by King of Men (Member # 6684) on :
 
Eh? What did I say?
 

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Posted by Kwea (Member # 2199) on :
 
You were channeling Data.
 

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Posted by Mucus (Member # 9735) on :
 
?
I'm pretty lost.
 

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