“If Hitler succeeds in his wholesale sterilization, it will be a demonstration that will carry eugenics farther than a hundred Eugenics Societies could. If he makes a fiasco of it, it will set the movement back where a hundred eugenic societies can never resurrect it.”
— Henry Goddard to Dr. Henry Perkins (1934)
The development of eugenics
Across the world, and as seen in both Vermont and Nazi Germany, similar patterns can be found when eugenics develops. As often found in the lead up to ethnic violence, a social panic typically followed a significant economic crisis—and the panic was as important as the crisis itself.
Eugenicists seized upon social upheaval and socioeconomic tensions to promise a bright new future. They created localized social constructs of a master race. This pattern also points to a major issue in defining eugenics as a science: If multiple races are the master race, how can it have a genetic basis?
Inter-country dialogue
Prior to the outbreak of World War II, American and Nazi eugenicists heavily influenced each other. While American states were more successful in implementing eugenical programs, German eugenicists such as Eugen Fischer produced authoritative works on the subject. Both Adolf Hitler and Charles Davenport—Henry Perkins’ mentor—looked to Fischer as an inspiration, and Davenport would later direct Perkins towards the German’s work. Meanwhile, Nazis turned to American eugenicists such as Madison Grant and Leon Whitney.
While Vermont itself never inspired Nazi Germany, it did engage in national eugenics dialogue with these leading eugenicists who were in correspondence with Nazis.
American awareness
To what extent were Americans aware? Journalists spread word of Hitler and Nazi Germany’s atrocities from the very beginning. But eugenicists got there first: Thanks to national leaders of the movement, in 1924 the U.S. passed the Johnson-Reed Act. It was the most restrictive immigration bill ever signed into law in America, and led to Jews being turned away in the 1930s and 1940s.
“Germany’s 700,000 Jews have been tortured physically, robbed of homes and properties, denied a chance to earn a living, chased off the streets. Now they are being held for “ransom,” a gangster trick through the ages. But not only Jews have suffered. Out of Germany has come a steady, ever-swelling stream of refugees, Jews and Gentiles, liberals and conservatives, Catholics as well as Protestants, who could stand Nazism no longer.”
TIME, January 2, 1939
In the immediate post-war period, American journalists compared the horrors of the mental asylum to the concentration camps.
“Through public neglect and legislative penny-pinching, state after state has allowed its institutions for the care and cure of the mentally sick to degenerate into little more than concentration camps on the Belsen pattern. Court and grand-jury records document scores of deaths of patients following beatings by attendants. Hundreds of instances of abuse, falling just short of manslaughter, are similarly documented. And reliable evidence, from hospital after hospital, indicates that these are but a tiny fraction of the beatings that occur, day after day, only to be covered up by a tacit conspiracy of mutually protective silence and a code that ostracizes employees who sing too loud.”
Albert Q. Maisel
“Bedlam 1946,” Life Magazine (May 1946)