One Summer: America, 1927

leading New York physician, spoke for a vociferous minority when he declared that people of an inferior nature ‘have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind’. W. Duncan McKim, also a physician and author of Heredity and Human Progress , proposed that ‘the surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death’.
    The problem, as most saw it, was twofold. America was producing far too many defectives through careless and unrestricted breeding, while at the same time introducing almost limitless volumes of additional inferiority through unrestricted immigration from backward nations.
    Nearly everyone had an especially dreaded race. The writer Madison Grant disdained Jews because of their ‘dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest’. Frank J. Loesch, a member of a presidential commission on crime reform, thought the problem was Jews and Italians together, ‘withthe Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn’. Charles B. Davenport, one of the most eminent scientists of his day, was more expansively dubious and listed Poles, Irish, Italians, Serbians, Greeks and ‘Hebrews’ as less intelligent and reliable, more susceptible to depravity and crimes of violence, than people of sound Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic stock. These were not people, in Davenport’s view, who could be lifted out of their bad habits, but were immutably condemned by their genes to be troublesome, destructive and dull. They were creating an America that was ‘darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality’. Madison Grant called it ‘race suicide’.
    All these views were bundled together into the smart new science of eugenics, which may be simply defined as the scientific cultivation of superior beings. In most of the world, eugenics was an innocuous goal – a well-intentioned wish to produce healthier, stronger, smarter people – but in America eugenics took on a harsher cast. It led to the sinister belief that procreation should somehow be regulated and directed. As an official of the American Eugenics Society observed: ‘Americans take more care over the breeding of cattle and horses than of their own children.’ Eugenics was used to justify the introduction of restrictive covenants on where people could live, enforced deportations, the suspension of civil liberties, and the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of innocent people. It resulted in the severe curtailment of immigration and its virtual elimination from certain parts of the world. It even led eventually, but more or less directly, to the downfall of Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who once could do no wrong.
     
    The bible of negative eugenics, as they became known in America, was the fearsome and popular Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant, a New York lawyer (by training, though he never practised) and naturalist (by practice, but without training), which was first published in 1916. Grant took it as read that the only really goodgroup of humans was what he called the ‘Nordic race’, by which he meant essentially all northern Europeans except the Irish. Europe divided into three tiers of being – Nordic, Alpine and Mediterranean – which grew progressively more degenerate as one moved south.
    One obvious problem with Grant’s theory was that he had to explain how such wretched people had managed to produce the Athens of Plato and Socrates, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance and so many other marvels of antiquity. Grant’s explanation was that in ancient Greece and Rome the ruling class was composed of Nordic Achaeans, who weren’t really Mediterranean at all, but were northern Europeans who had drifted south. All the great Renaissance artists, Grant maintained, were ‘of Nordic type … largely of Gothic and Lombard blood’. All others – the real Italians – were dull, stunted and shifty, and were genetically condemned to remain forever so.
    Grant believed that any degenerate genes introduced into the general population would not be diluted and made safe, but would permanently taint the whole. ‘The cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,’ he grimly explained.
    Although none of this was compatible with