While traveling, I heard a lot about the 60th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe. I think it is good and right to celebrate the destruction of an empire that harmed and warped so many. I do wonder though how clean our own hands were at the time. As Eddie Izzard joked:
Stalin killed 20 million of his own people, died in his bed. Hitler killed people next door. Stupid man. After a few years, we wont stand for that!
We certainly were OK with isolationism and neutrality until the war became personal. I keep wondering how much moral outrage there was actually in the United States at the time about the Nazi eugenics program, and how much of the wartime sentiment boiled down to fear of a hegemonic Germany.
The source of my interest in this subject comes from a place pretty close to home. As I mentioned yesterday, I was traveling to where I grew up, Lynchburg, VA. Several years ago there was a documentary called the Lynchburg Story which tells the story of the The Lynchburg Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded. This was a state-sponsored eugenics program where 8,000 poor or illegitimate children were labeled as defective, then involuntarily sterilized and kept locked away from society. The children were frequently not permitted to be educated and were put to work doing jobs to bring in money for the institution (while being told that their work was their education).
Eugenics was a fad at the time that swept most of the country. It was apparently common-place to have fittest family competitions at the county fairs showing convoluted, meaningless pedigrees. Fitness in eugenics was a pseudo-science where everything was thought to be genetic. Having an unwed mother or unemployed parent was considered to be evidence of your own defects since such behaviors were considered hereditary. Things like family tendencies towards civic leadership were also considered inherited traits, but of course these made you more fit. Below is the pedigree for Carrie Buck, the Virginia Colonys first involuntary sterilization.
The reason this is relevant to a discussion of World War II is that the eugenics laws of the United States (upheld as constitutional by a 8-1 supreme court decision) were the model for the Nazi Sterilization laws that led to the Holocaust in Europe. According to the documentary, the facility near Lynchburg even received a personal letter of commendation from Adolph Hitler for their work in the field. This made me realize I had a significant gap in my knowledge about American foreign and domestic policy from the 30s. For instance, it occurs to me that we still had diplomatic relations with Germany during this time. Were there really Nazi flags flying in the United States from Germanys consulates and embassy for seven years??
Like all such things, it is comforting to obscure these events behind the veil of history, and highlight the benefits that came from war after the fact. Was the US Civil War about taxation, slavery, or heritage? I dont know, but my history classes certainly suggested that slavery was not the prime motivation. I suppose to each person of the time the reasons were their own. I would have to imagine the same holds true for WWII. Some must have been in favor of eugenics, and others (and I hope many) found it repugnant.
Regardless, it is important to note that the US was instrumental in ending the Holocaust. However, it is equally important to remember what happened at home. Anyone have a guess as to when the sterilization program in Virginia was canceled? 1950? nope. Surely by the sixties during the civil rights movement? Uh-uh. Sterilization continued until 1972. Involuntary sterilization laws continued on the books until 1979. Across the United States, it is estimated that 40,000-60,000 people were sterilized against their will.
While celebration for the end of pain is good, to learn the most from our history it is equally important to keep our own atrocities in the forefront of our minds. Growing up miles from the colonys site, I had never heard of it. This is simply not part of Lynchburgs history anymore. When even intelligent people like Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. can be caught in this fervor, we must not hide our shame, but instead places like the colony must become beacons reminding us of the dangers of valuing some life more than others, and of perverting science to the whims of politics and social bigotry.
I wont hold my Breath though. 