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Cited at Nuremberg: the American Eugenics Movement, Its Influence Abroad, the Buck V Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History Volume 4 Issue 1 Article 1 February 2021 Cited at Nuremberg: The American Eugenics Movement, its Influence Abroad, the Buck v. Bell Decision, and the Subsequent Bioethical Implications of the Holocaust Bessie Blackburn Liberty University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh Part of the Bioethics and Medical Ethics Commons, European History Commons, Holocaust and Genocide Studies Commons, Social History Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Blackburn, Bessie (2021) "Cited at Nuremberg: The American Eugenics Movement, its Influence Abroad, the Buck v. Bell Decision, and the Subsequent Bioethical Implications of the Holocaust," Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History: Vol. 4 : Iss. 1 , Article 1. Available at: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh/vol4/iss1/1 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Crossing. It has been accepted for inclusion in Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History by an authorized editor of Scholars Crossing. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Cited at Nuremberg: The American Eugenics Movement, its Influence Abroad, the Buck v. Bell Decision, and the Subsequent Bioethical Implications of the Holocaust Abstract Eugenics was a bioethical movement that captivated many Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century and even into the Progressive era. No event in American history better encapsulates the American eugenics movement than the trial of Carrie Buck and her later forced sterilization. This trial is monumental not only to understanding American eugenic policy, but also international reactions and Nazi Germany’s chilling use of this pseudoscience in the Holocaust. In order to best understand the trial of Carrie Buck, one must look first look at the origins of eugenics, second, the context of the eugenics movement in America and internationally from 1850 onward, and third, at the Buck trial itself. Furthermore, an examination of Nazi use of these ideas from this ideology must be explored in light of these American influences. This article is available in Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History: https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh/vol4/ iss1/1 Blackburn: Cited at Nuremberg Cited at Nuremberg: The American Eugenics Movement, its Influence Abroad, the Buck v. Bell Decision, and the Subsequent Bioethical Implications of the Holocaust Bess Blackburn Dr. Snead HIST 597 December 2, 2019 Published by Scholars Crossing, 2021 1 Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History, Vol. 4, Iss. 1 [2021], Art. 1 Blackburn 1 The black gallows stood as an international symbol of justice and righteous anger that June 2, at 10:10 in the morning as chilling rain fell.1 The Americans had designed these gallows with thirteen ominous steps and a noose that had thirteen knots.2 Indeed, the world watched with righteous indignation, and rightfully so, as justice was served, and these members of the Third Reich received their due. The American newspaper Stars and Stripes demonstrated this sentiment by reporting that these Nazis had “paid an eye for 10,000 eyes, and a tooth for 10,000 teeth…All were found criminally responsible for horrible medical experiments conducted on helpless concentration camp inmates under the guise of scientific research.”3 Confidently, the first to be hanged after being condemned to death in the Doctors’ Trial made his way up to the gallows: his name was Karl Brandt. Brandt was Adolf Hitler’s personal doctor throughout the reign of the Reich, a believer in the progress of the human race, and the architect behind the famed Nazi T-4 euthanasia program.4 As he stood on the gallows and refused religious aid moments before his death, he issued his own indictment against the very nation that was killing him: How can the nation which holds the lead in human experimentation in any conceivable form, how can that nation dare to accuse and punish other nations which only copied their experimental procedures? And even euthanasia! Only look at Germany, and the way her misery has been manipulated and artificially prolonged. It is, of course, not surprising that the nation which in the face of the history of humanity will forever have to bear the guilt for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that this nation attempts to hide itself behind moral superlatives. She does not bend the law: Justice has never been there! Neither in the whole nor in the particular. What dictates is power. And this power wants victims. We are such victims. I am such a victim.5 1 Ulf Schmidt, Karl Brandt, the Nazi Doctor: Medicine and Power in the Third Reich (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007), 396, 398. 2 Ibid., 398. 3 Ibid. 4 Ibid., 56. 5 Ibid., 396. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh/vol4/iss1/1 2 Blackburn: Cited at Nuremberg Blackburn 2 Brandt was hanged after his speech, and the world little remembered nor cared about what he had claimed. However, in his death, he left more questions than answers concerning where his sickening ideas of health and human progress had originated. It is this speech that demands consideration of this one idea: perhaps eugenics and the pseudoscience that ended in genocide were not strictly a Nazi phenomenon, but an international, and further, an American one. While often hidden under the guise of race betterment in both a scientific and even moral sense, eugenics was a bioethical movement that captivated many Americans at the turn of the nineteenth century and even into the Progressive era. This was seen through many events, including international eugenics congresses (of which many were led by American thinkers or hosted in America), American legislation, and American eugenic research facilities. However, no event in American history better encapsulates the American eugenics movement than the trial of Carrie Buck and her later forced sterilization. This trial is monumental not only to understanding American eugenic policy, but also international reactions and Nazi Germany’s chilling use of this pseudoscience in the Holocaust. In order to best understand the trial of Carrie Buck, one must look first look at the origins of eugenics, second, the context of the eugenics movement in America and internationally from 1850 onward, and third, at the trial of Carrie Buck. Furthermore, an examination of Nazi use of these ideas from this ideology must be explored in light of these American influences. The origins of eugenic ideology begin with the idea of personhood. Indeed, the idea of a “good human” in the biological sense is not a new phenomenon. Obviously, for generations of mankind, there have been slaves and those looked down upon because of their supposedly inferior race or gender or nationality. Indeed, this has been in effect since the days of Aristotle, and his work, The History of Animals, which outlines how life physically works and the Published by Scholars Crossing, 2021 3 Bound Away: The Liberty Journal of History, Vol. 4, Iss. 1 [2021], Art. 1 Blackburn 3 subsequent purpose of that life.6 In it, he discusses how life works—biologically, parts of living things are homogeneous (such as skin, eyes, etc.).7 However, figuratively, what gives substance to life is the heterogenous mixture of these homogenous elements (a good eye or a good ear by itself does not necessitate seeing or hearing).8 Thus, Aristotle promoted this holistic view of life that culminated in its τέλος, or ultimate purpose for living; therefore, the ultimate reason for existence (not only for Aristotle, but also Plato, Plotinus, Augustine, and others) was in itself a purpose—the final end of man was in “contemplation and love of the truth.”9 Later it was philosophers such as Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon who advocated for a different form of life, one that was a reduction of complexity. Purpose was not found within life itself; but in the usefulness of those systems that had once been viewed in a more Greek and even Christian context as wholly purposeful.10 It is this reductionist understanding of life that dominated the modern era. This explanation of life was seen in a Texas Memorial bill written by physician and naturalist Gideon Lincecum in the 1850s.11 In the bill, which at the time was not passed, Lincecum called for criminal punishment to not only be limited to the death penalty, but also suggested substituting castration as the punishment for certain crimes.12 Originally, then, the idea of mass sterilization in America was aimed at cutting down crime as it circulated well into the 1890s (along with the establishment of the American Breeders Association, a eugenic society, 6 Etienne Gilson, From Aristotle to Darwin and Back Again: A Journey in Final Causality, Species, and Evolution, trans. John Lyon (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 1. 7 Ibid, 2. 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid., 2-3, 7, 18. 10 Ibid., 5, 18. 11 Mark A. Largent, Breeding Contempt: The History Of Coerced Sterilization In The United States (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 11-2. 12 Ibid. https://digitalcommons.liberty.edu/ljh/vol4/iss1/1 4 Blackburn: Cited at Nuremberg Blackburn 4 ten years later).13 As soon as 1901, for example, further legislation was introduced on the Colorado Senate floor, calling for forced castration of certain criminals.14 But these ideas were not limited to the criminal justice sector for long.15 This idea of cutting down social ills such as crime or later, feeblemindedness, served as moral justification for eugenic practice well after the ideology’s inception in the 1850s. It was after Charles Darwin, the famed English scientist, wrote in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (published in 1859) that this theory of mechanism applied to life began to take a significant hold in the scientific community.
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