War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (48 page)

William Robinson, a New York urologist, published widely on the topic of birth control and eugenics. In Robinson’s book,
Eugenics, Marriage and Birth Control (practical Eugenics),
he advocated gassing the children of the unfit. In plain words, Robinson insisted: “The best thing would be to gently chloroform these children or to give them a dose of potassium cyanide.” Margaret Sanger was well aware that her fellow birth control advocates were promoting lethal chambers, but she herself rejected the idea completely. “Nor do we believe,” wrote Sanger in
Pivot of Civilization,
“that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.”
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Still, American eugenicists never relinquished the notion that America could bring itself to mass murder. At the First National Conference on Race Betterment, University of Wisconsin eugenicist Leon J. Cole lectured on the dysgenic effects of charity and medicine on eugenic progress. He made a clear distinction between Darwin’s concept of natural selection and the newer idea of simple “selection.” The difference, Cole explained, “is that instead of being
natural
selection it is now
conscious
selection on the part of the breeder…. Death is the normal process of elimination in the social organism, and we might carry the figure a step further and say that in prolonging the lives of defectives we are tampering with the functioning of the social kidneys!”
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Paul Popenoe, leader of California’s eugenics movement and coauthor of the widely-used textbook
Applied Eugenics,
agreed that the easiest way to counteract feeblemindedness was simple execution. “From an historical point of view,” he wrote, “the first method which presents itself is execution…. Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.”
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Madison Grant, who functioned as president of the Eugenics Research Association and the American Eugenics Society, made the point clear in
The Passing of the Great Race.
“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.”
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On November 12, 1915, the issue of eugenic euthanasia sprang out of the shadows and into the national headlines. It began as an unrelated medical decision on Chicago’s Near North Side. At 4 A.M. that day, a woman named Anna Bollinger gave birth at German-American Hospital. 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.
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Catherine Walsh, probably a friend of Anna 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. He was naked and appeared to have been lying in one position unattended. Walsh urgently called for Haiselden, “to beg that the child be taken to its mother,” and dramatically recalled, “It was condemned to death, and I knew its mother would be its most merciful judge. “
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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. She kissed his forehead. “I knew,” she recalled, “if its mother got her eyes on it she would love it and never permit it to be left to die.” 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 and save it?”
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Haiselden laughed at Walsh, retorting, “I’m afraid it might get well.” He was a skilled and experienced surgeon, trained by the best doctors in Chicago, and now chief of the hospital’s medical staff. He was also an ardent eugenicist.
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Chicago’s health commissioner, Dr. John Dill Robertson, learned of the deliberate euthanasia. He went to the hospital and told Haiselden he did not agree that “the child would grow up a mental defective.” He later recollected, “I thought the child was in a dying condition, and I had doubts that an operation then would save it. Yet I believed it had one chance in 100,000, and I advised Dr. Haiselden to give it this one chance.” But Haiselden refused.
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Quiet euthanasia of newborns was not uncommon in Chicago. Haiselden, however, publicly defended his decision to withhold treatment as a kind of eugenic expedient, throwing the city and the nation into moral turmoil amid blaring newspaper headlines. An inquest was convened a few days later. Some of Haiselden’s most trusted colleagues were impaneled on the coroner’s jury. Health Commissioner Robertson testified, “I think it very wrong not to save life, let that life be what it may. That is the function of a physician. I believe this baby might have grown up to be an average man…. I would have operated and saved this baby’s life….”
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At one point Haiselden angrily interrupted the health commissioner’s testimony to question why he was being singled out when doctors throughout Chicago were routinely killing, on average, one baby every day, under similar circumstances. Haiselden defiantly declared, “I should have been guilty of a graver crime if I had saved this child’s life. My crime would have been keeping in existence one of nature’s cruelest blunders.” A juror shot back, ““What do you mean by that?” Haiselden responded, “Exactly that. I do not
think
this child would have grown up to be a mental defective. I know it.”
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After tempestuous proceedings, the inquest ruled, “We believe that a prompt operation would have prolonged and perhaps saved the life of the child. We find no evidence from the physical defects that the child would have become mentally or morally defective.” The doctor jurors concluded that the child had at least a one-in-three chance-some thought an “even chance”-of surviving. But they also decided that Haiselden was within his professional rights to decline treatment. No law compelled him to operate on the child. The doctor was released unpunished, and efforts by the Illinois attorney general to indict him for murder were blocked by the local prosecutor.
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The medical establishment in Chicago and throughout the nation was rocked. The
Chicago Tribune
ran a giant banner headline across the width of its front page: “Baby Dies; Physician Upheld.” One reader in Washington, D.C., wrote a letter to the editor asking, “Is it not strange that the whole country should be so shaken, almost hysterical, over the death of a babe never consciously alive … ?” But the nation was momentarily transfixed.
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Haiselden considered his legal vindication a powerful victory for eugenics. “Eugenics? Of course it’s eugenics,” he told one reporter. On another occasion he remarked, “Which do you prefer-six days of Baby Bollinger or seventy years of Jukes?”
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Emboldened, Haiselden proudly revealed that he had euthanized other such newborns in the past. He began granting high-profile media interviews to advertise his determination to continue passively euthanizing infants. WIthin two weeks, he had ordered his staff to withhold treatment from several more deformed or birth-defected infants. Haiselden would sometimes send instructions via cross-country telegraph while on the lecture tour that arose from his eugenic celebrity. Other times he would handle it personally, like the time he left a newly delivered infant’s umbilical cord untied and let it bleed to death. Sometimes he took a more direct approach and simply injected newborns with opiates.
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The euthanasia of Allan Bollinger may have begun as one doctor’s controversial professional decision, but it immediately swirled into a national eugenic spectacle. Days after the inquest ruling,
The Independent,
a Hearst weekly devoted to pressing issues of the day, ran an editorial asking “Was the Doctor Right?”
The Independent
invited readers to sound off. In a special section,
The Independent
published supportive letters from prominent eugenicists, including Davenport himself. “If the progress of surgery,” wrote Davenport, “is to be used to the detriment of the race … it may conceivably destroy the race. Shortsighted they who would unduly restrict the operation of what is one of Nature’s greatest racial blessings-death.”
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Haiselden continued to rally for eugenic euthanasia with a six-week series in the
Chicago American.
He justified his killings by claiming that public institutions for the feebleminded, epileptic and tubercular were functioning as lethal chambers of a sort. After clandestinely visiting the Illinois Institution for the Feebleminded at Lincoln, Illinois, Haiselden claimed that windows were deliberately left open and unscreened, allowing drafts and infecting flies to swarm over patients. He charged that Lincoln consciously permitted “flies from the toilets, garbage and from the eruptions of patients suffering from acute and chronic troubles to go at will over the entire institution. Worse still,” he proclaimed, “I found that inmates were fed with the milk from a herd of cattle reeking with tuberculosis.”
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At the time, milk from cattle with tuberculosis was a well-known cause of infection and death from the disease.
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H Lincoln maintained its own herd of seventy-two cows, which produced about 50,000 gallons of milk a year for its own consumption. Ten diseased cows had died within the previous two years. State officials admitted that their own examinations had determined that as many as half of the cows were tubercular, but there was no way to know which ones were infected because “a tubercular cow may be the fattest cow in the herd.” Lincoln officials claimed that their normal pasteurization “by an experienced employee” killed the tuberculosis bacteria. They were silent on the continuous handling of the milk by infected residents.
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Medical watchdogs had often speculated that institutions for the feeble-minded were really nothing more than slow-acting lethal chambers. But Haiselden never resorted to the term
lethal chamber.
He called such institutions “slaughterhouses.”
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In tuberculosis colonies, residents continuously infected and reinfected each other, often receiving minimal or no treatment. At Lincoln, the recently established tuberculosis unit housed just forty beds for an estimated tubercular population of hundreds. Lincoln officials asserted that only the most severely infected children were placed in that ward. They stressed that other institutions for the feebleminded recorded much higher mortality rates, some as high as 40 percent.
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Eugenicists believed that when tuberculosis was fatal, the real culprit was not bacteria, but defective genes. The ERO kept special files on mortality rates resulting from hereditary tuberculosis, compiled by the Belgian eugenicist Govaerts and others.
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Tuberculosis was an omnipresent topic in textbooks on eugenics. Typical was a chapter in Davenport’s
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics
(1911)
.
He claimed that only the submerged tenth was vulnerable. “The germs are ubiquitous…. Why do only 10 percent die from the attacks of this parasite? … It seems perfectly plain that death from tuberculosis is the result of infection added to natural and acquired non-resistance. It is then highly undesirable that two persons with weak resistance should marry…. “ Popenoe and Johnson’s textbook,
Applied Eugenics,
devoted a chapter to “Lethal Selection,” which operated “through the destruction of the individual by some adverse feature of the environment, such as excessive cold, or bacteria, or by bodily deficiency.”
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Some years earlier, the president of the National Conference on Charities and Correction had told his institutional superintendents caring for the feebleminded, “We wish the parasitic strain … to die out.” Even an article in
Institution Quarterly,
Illinois’s own journal, admitted, “it would be an act of kindness to them, and a protection to the state, if they could be killed.”
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No wonder that at one international conference on eugenics, Daven-port proclaimed without explanation from the podium, “One may even view with satisfaction the high death rate in an institution for low grade feeble-minded, while one regards as a national disaster the loss of … the infant child of exceptional parents.”
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Haiselden himself quipped, “Death is the Great and Lasting Disinfectant.”
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Haiselden’s accusations of deliberate passive euthanasia by neglect and abuse could neither be verified nor dismissed. Lincoln’s understaffed, overcrowded and decrepit facility consistently reported staggering death rates, often as high as 12 percent per year. In 1904, for example, 109 of its epileptic children died, constituting at least 10 percent and probably far more of its youth population; cause of death was usually listed as “exhaustion due to epileptic seizures.” Between 1914 and 1915, a bout of dysentery claimed eight patients; “heat exhaustion” was listed as the cause. During the same period, four individuals died shortly after admission before any preliminary examination at all; their deaths were categorized as “undetermined. “
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