Opinion
Email
Print
New film offers a chilling view of forced sterilization
ADVERTISEMENT
Published: March 29, 2009
War Against the Weak, which will be shown at a Durham film festival Thursday, shows how frighteningly easy it is for misguided scientists to fan flames of prejudice, enlist the powerful against the weak and land on the wrong side of history.
The film deals with the junk science of eugenics, and how it led to the forced sterilization of about 65,000 Americans in the 20th century, including more than 7,600 men, women and children in North Carolina. The lead editorial on the opposite page tackles our state's fledgling effort to right the wrongs of its sterilization program, which ran from 1929 through 1974.
War Against the Weak, based on a book by Edwin Black, is produced by Peter Demas and directed by Justin Strawhand. It supplies a national context for the eugenics story. It chills you, from its opening interview with an elderly survivor of sterilization in Hitler's Germany.
And before you can say, "It can't happen here," the film's fast-moving shots sweeps you back to the dawn of the 20th century in America. As the first cars were hitting the road and the first planes were taking to the skies, "eugenicists" who considered themselves progressive were mapping ways to take control of Darwin's "Natural Selection" and create their own master race, one that sterilization would rid of the "the Submerged Tenth," which included the feebleminded, the blind, the deaf and the epileptic.
The movement swept the country, spawning best-selling books and its own newspaper. When the Supreme Court upheld sterilization in a Virginia case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
The relatively few critics of the eugenics movement had a hard time being heard.
Good intentions degenerated to bullying the weak into sterilization. In limited cases, none of which have been reported as having occurred in North Carolina, the movement included euthanasia of babies.
Among those who embraced the American eugenics movement was Adolf Hitler.
Germans studied eugenics in America. American scientists financed by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation backed the work of the Germans, according to the film. American eugenicists visited programs in Germany, praising them even as the rest of the world began to realize just what a madman Hitler was. The film makes a strong argument that the German eugenics movement led to the Holocaust and all its crimes, including Josef Mengele and his atrocious "medical" experiments on concentration camp prisoners.
After World War II, when the horrors of Hitler's Germany were revealed, most American states backed off their eugenics programs. But North Carolina accelerated its program. In Winston-Salem, prominent families helped to form a Human Betterment League. Some doctors at the Bowman Gray School of Medicine participated in the eugenics movement. The Wake Forest University School of Medicine apologized for the involvement of those doctors after it was revealed in a Journal investigative series in 2002.
There were occasional articles about the program and editorials in support of it in the Journal and other papers at the time. But for the most part, it operated under the radar and without controversy. The eugenics board, sitting in Raleigh, approved most of the petitions for sterilization for people they'd never seen. The reasons included "feeblemindedness," a description that was often based on faulty intelligence testing. Some victims were sterilized just because they were promiscuous.
By the 1960s, the state program was targeting poor black women. Just as the national eugenics movement took hold during a time of major scientific advances, North Carolina's backward movement continued through a time when many thought the state was progressive.
As we enter a world where there's a fine line between gene therapy and gene enhancement, it's useful to remember how easy it is get on the wrong side of history.
(War Against the Weak will be shown Thursday at 10:30 a.m. at Full Frame Documentary Film Festival in Durham. For more information, click on fullframefest.org)
■ John Railey writes local editorials for the Journal. He can be reached at 727-7357 or at jrailey@wsjournal.com.
Email
Print
