Post by Okwes on Sept 24, 2007 9:08:43 GMT -5
"The mother of a 16-year-old housed in a Lynchburg asylum pleaded
with Virginia's governor shortly before Christmas 1929 to intervene
and prevent her daughter's sterilization by the state.
'I am a poor broken hearted mother asking you for a favor of my
daughter' the Pocahontas, Va., woman wrote in pencil to Gov. Harry F.
Byrd. 'They claim they have to sterlyize her before she can come home
my daughter is to young.'
The mother had little chance. Virginia was in the forefront of
efforts, based on a movement called eugenics, to engineer a better
society by using such tools as forced sterilization of 'unfit' people
and the prohibition of marriage between whites and non-whites.
Virginia's ardor for eugenics might be spotlighted for the world when
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington launches an
exhibit in 2004 on racial science in Nazi Germany. Eugenics, often
called the 'science' of breeding better people, was embraced by the
Nazis.
The Library of Virginia received a request in June to help the
Holocaust Museum find documents or pictures about sterilizations at
the old Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in
Lynchburg and the landmark sterilization case there of Carrie Buck.
In the 1927 Buck case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's
sterilization law.
From 1927 to 1979, about 8,300 Virginians were sterilized
involuntarily -- rendered unable to have children -- as eugenics
adherents applied theory mixed with social prejudice to alter human
lives. Creation of the Holocaust Museum exhibit comes as scholars
have located troves of information about Virginia's study, teaching
and application of eugenics. It largely has been discredited as
science in intervening years.
Historians at the University of Virginia have traced webs linking
educators, advocates in Richmond of racial purity and of
Sterilization law, national eugenicists and in some cases, Nazis.
There was admiring correspondence by Earnest S. Cox of Richmond, an
influential white supremacist, to the Nazi secretary of interior in
1938, and Cox was in contact with former Nazi officials after World
War II. Cox was a major force behind Virginia's 1924 law against
racial intermarriage, the Racial Integrity Act.
There was quiet support from top educators at the University of
Virginia for the work of Dr. Walter A. Plecker, head of the state
Bureau of Vital Statistics, in zealously enforcing that race-purity
law.
There was an unsuccessful proposal for a benefactor to endow a
national center on eugenics education at U.Va. The idea was floated
by a national eugenicist who wrote and edited a journal that gushed
with positive publicity about the Nazi eugenics program.
The new scholarship provides a fuller and broader perspective of
Virginia's eugenics movement, which affected state policy and
discourse for almost two-thirds of a century and created a lasting
legacy.
Virginia Indian tribes, for example, still are trying to reckon with
the crushing impact of Plecker's campaign, The Times-Dispatch
reported in March. Plecker waged a paper war against Virginia's
Indians by classifying them as blacks, to block them from 'passing'
as white people,
Until this summer, Virginia's newspaper industry held in honor a
former newspaper editor and eugenics adherent who crusaded in the
1920s for state law to separate the races in all places of public
entertainment.
The industry's most prestigious award was named for the Newport News
editor. After The Times-Dispatch detailed his crusade, his name was
removed from the award.
The precise scope of the Holocaust Museum exhibit, meanwhile, is
undecided, according to a museum spokesman. The context for the
exhibit will be 'the eugenics movement that had adherents all the way
around the world,' he said.
Museum researchers have traveled to Virginia to scour for records and
to visit the old Virginia 'Colony' in Lynchburg. From there, Carrie
Buck's sterilization echoed worldwide.
* * *
Germany was marching toward the Holocaust when a student of eugenics
at the University of Virginia wrote in 1934, 'In Germany Hitler has
decreed that about 400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great
step in eliminating the racial deficients.'
Another student wrote in 1935 that 'amalgamation' of the black and
white races clearly threatened to injure or destrip 'the most
specialized qualities of the white race...the only hope, therefore,
of slowing up the process of amalgamation is to prevent racial
intermarriage.'
These term papers and others reflected the extent to which U.Va.
taught eugenics as a basis for social policy, historian Gregory M.
Dorr contended in his Ph.D. disseration at the school this year.
His 'Segregation's Science: The American Eugenics Movement and
Virginia, 1900-1980' was a source for much of this article. Another
source was Dr. Paul A. Lombardo, director of the Program in Law and
Medicine at U.Va.'s Center for Biomedical Ethics and an expert on
eugenics history.
The eugenics movement, born in England in the late 19th century,
gained broad acceptance in America in the early 1900s. Congress
endorsed eugenics thinking in 1924 by adopting the Immigration
Restriction Act, which led to sharply reduced immigration quotas for
southern and eastern Europeans.
In the same year, Virginia's legislature adopted its sterilization
law and its Racial Integrity Act. By 1928, 376 colleges nationwide
were teaching eugenics, including a number of them in Virginia.
At the heart of the eugenics movement were beliefs that human stock
could be improved by selective breeding -- encouraging reproduction
among the 'best' people and reducing it among 'defective'
or 'socially inadequate' people by such steps as compulsory
sterilization or institutionalization. Branding a
person 'feebleminded' could mean he was mentally ill or retarded,
immoral or alcoholic.
U.Va., perceived by many Southerners as the region's flagship
university, became a hotbed of eugenics teaching.
It traditionally was an academy for Virginia's aristocracy, whose
interest in family lineage went hand in hand with this 'science' of
improving the human stock. The university was much smaller then; in
1935 it had 2,360 students, compared with 18,000 today.
Key educators were highly respected and enthusiastic supporters of
eugenics. These white men and other key Virginia advocates embraced
theories about genetic inheritance of most human traits, including
racial superiority, that also fit their cultural views.
The university became 'an epicenter of eugenical thought,' Dorr
writes, 'closely linked with the national movement, the Virginia anti-
miscegenation movement and tied to the state mental health
professionals who promoted eugenic sterilization.'
One of U.Va.'s leading eugenicists was Dr. Harvey E. Jordan, hired in
1907 and promoted in 1939 to dean of medicine.
Jordan was connected to many national eugenics groups and leaders. In
Virginia, he joined the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a Richmond-
based group set up to preserve 'the supremacy of the white race in
the United States of America without racial prejudice or hatred.' The
clubs pushed for Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.
Sharing like views was Dr. Ivey F. Lewis, a biology professor hired
in 1915. He taught eugenics and became dean of the university in 1933.
Lewis deplored 'the drag of the negro on our civilization' in a
letter to Earnest Cox, author of a book urging repatriation of blacks
to Africa. He invited Cox to lecture to his class and corresponded
with him over three decades.
In addition to white supremacy there was significant anti-Semitism in
the United States. At Va., there was surveillance of Jewish students,
segregation in housing, efforts to limit their enrollment and
official wariness, clearly shared by Lewis.
Weighing a request to use an auditorium for a rally for Europe's
oppressed, Lewis demurred in 1938 and added, 'It seems to me quite
likely that the pro-Jew meeting of protest would bring forth a
reaction that would not be to the interests of the University of
Virginia.... A great many people believe that the growing number of
Jews in the United States is a menace to the American way of life.'
The university's reputation led Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, a prominent
national eugenicist, to propose Charlottesville to benefactor
Wickliffe Draper as home for a national center for eugenics education.
Laughlin knew Virginia. Author of a 1914 model sterilization law for
states, he also had corresponded extensively with Plecker about
Virginia's race-purity campaign. He had given testimony in the Carrie
Buck legal case and helped to win passage of the Racial Integrity Act.
Laughlin lavished favorable publicity on the Nazi eugenics program in
the Eugenical New journal he edited, according to Lombardo, who has
traced ties of some American adherents with Germany.
In 1935, Laughlin's affinity with Nazi thinking was shown further
when he sent a paper on American sterilization law to be read by a
like-minded collague at a World Population Congress in Berlin. The
colleague applauded Nazi racial princicples and ended his speech
with 'To that great leader, Adolf Hitler.'
Draper, the benefactor, was keenly interested in eugenics and
attended the same Berlin conference. He also visited Charlottesville,
but Laughlin's 1936 proposal for a national center on eugenics
education was not adopted. Scholars aren't certain why.
In the same year that Laughlin floated the U.Va. idea, he received
from Nazi-controlled Heidelberg University an honorary degree for his
achievements in the 'science of racial cleansing.'
Laughlin wrote back, according to Lombardo, that he found the degree
a personal honor and 'also evidence of a common understanding of
German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics.'
* * *
Walter Plecker, born before the Civil War and head of the Bureau of
Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, was one of Virginia's most
inflammatory eugenics supporters.
After helping win passage of the Racial Integrity Act, Plecker used
it to wage a vigorous campaign to prevent what he
considered 'destruction of the white or higher civilization.'
Lewis of U.Va. expressed admiration when Plecker contacted him in
1926 seeking more information about intermarriage issues in Albemarle
County.
'I feel that Virginia of all the Southern states is most to be
congratulated for having in charge of this work a man like yourself
who sees this situation as it is,' Lewis answered, 'and who tries so
effectively to do what can be done.'
There was agreement with Plecker at least on principle from Jordan of
U.Va.
'I have followed Dr. Plecker's work and am in entire sympathy with
it,' be wrote in 1927. Jordan was not pleased, however, about the
idea of appointing Plecker to a Virginia committee of the American
Eugenics Society, thinking that would be too incendiary.
Plecker was invited to describe Virginia's experience to national
audiences. He addressed the American Public Health Association in
1924 on 'Virginia's Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem' and a major
New York conference on eugenics in 1932.
Wrote Harry Laughlin, 'Doubtless the best headquarters in the world
[for studying racial integrity] would be Dr. Plecker's office in
Richmond, Va.'
* * *
Tennessee-born Earnest S. Cox, a real estate agent and self-described
ethnologist, found a hospitable home in Richmond for his supremacist
and eugenic ideas.
He moved there and published in 1923 the book 'White America,'
warning against destruction of the white civilization from racial
intermarriage.
As co-founder with Plecker of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, Cox
provided much of the ideological firepower behind the Racial
Integrity Act.
Cox also teamed up with racist Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator from
Mississippi between 1935 and 1947, to promote bills for returning
blacks to Africa. His book became a textbook for many university
professors and was distributed, with funding from Wickliffe Draper,
to members of Congress.
The Virginian enjoyed suppport in high ranks of the national eugenics
movement and was invited to address the Eugenics Research
Association, a mainline group, in New York in 1936. Plecker went
along. They visited the homes of national leaders including Draper
and Laughlin.
Later Cox made contact with two Nazi racial theorists. One was
Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi secretary of the interior, to whom he mailed
a copy of 'White America.'
In a 1938 letter to Frick, Cox spoke of the 'common Teutonic
heritage' of Southern whites and Germans, and added, 'Personally, I
hold a high admiration for your country and an affection for your
people.'
For Prick's activities as a Nazi administrator during the Holocaust,
he was convicted during the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946.
Years after World War II, Cox wrote 'Teutonic Unity,' a book about
muting people of Germanic descent.
Cox corresponded with former Nazi officials. He was advised by one of
them, who was living in Argentina, of his 'surprise that more or less
all what was the central idea of our thinking and indoctrination I
find again in the book of an American writer.'
Cox died in a Richmond area hospital in 1966. A retired Army officer,
he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
* * *
Of some 30 states with similar laws, Virginia lagged behind only
California in the nation for sterilizations; more than 20,000 people
were sterilized in California and more than 60,000 nationwide.
Germany, which was influenced by Harry Laughlin's model sterilization
law, sterilized between 360,000 and 3.5 million victims from 1933 to
1945, according to Lombardo.
The U.S. rate didn't seem to satisfy Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, director
of Western State Hospital in Virginia, when he drew this comparison
in 1938:
'Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while
the United States with approximately twice the population has only
sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938, in the past 20 years....
'The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the United States
should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the
maximum.'
Another eugenics adherent, a superintendent of the Virginia 'Colony'
theorized about global acceptance of sterilization.
Dr. J. H. Bell wrote in an annual report on the asylum for fiscal
1933:
'The fact that a great state like the German Republic, which for many
centuries has helped furnish the best that science has bred, has in
its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act
providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons
seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this
idea."
Decades hence, long after Americans recoiled at the horrors of the
Holocaust and the United States entered the civil rights era, that
kind of thinking has been relegated to the museum.
Dr. Dorr, now teaching at the University of Alabama, looked closely
in his research at the interplay of culture and science that fueled
adoption of eugenics: and its influence upon social policy
The history of forced sterilizations and race-purity law in Virginia
offers important lessons for modem times, he and Lombardo believe.
Dorr concluded, 'Understanding the relationship between Virginia
eugenicists their science, teaching and the segregated culture in
which they lived helps clarify our own valuation of science today,
and hopefully, the role it plays in determining liberating rather
than oppressive, public policy.
* * *
When the despairing mother from Pocahontas made her plea to Gov.
Harry Byrd, she enclosed a lucid, handwritten letter by her teenage
daughter to 'prove' the girl wasn't at all 'feeble-minded.'
'Moma, I declare I do wish I could home come.
'I do hate to be sterilized but it is the only way to come home. I
absulitily would be willing for them to cut my head off if I could
only come home.'
She dreamed of going home for Chrustmas, of presents and siblings and
the parents whom she missed.
There was a frightened side to her letter.
'If I don't see you any more in this world I hope to meet you all in
another one hope God will help all of you and be with us.'
After writing seven Xs for kisses, the girl added this postscript:
'Locks and keys may parts us, and we are far apart but your name in
golden letters still linger around my HEART" (Peter Hardin, Richmond
Times Dispatch, November 26, 2000).
Contact Peter Hardin at (202) 662-7669 or phardin@media-general.com.
----------------------------------------------------------
----------
Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.
with Virginia's governor shortly before Christmas 1929 to intervene
and prevent her daughter's sterilization by the state.
'I am a poor broken hearted mother asking you for a favor of my
daughter' the Pocahontas, Va., woman wrote in pencil to Gov. Harry F.
Byrd. 'They claim they have to sterlyize her before she can come home
my daughter is to young.'
The mother had little chance. Virginia was in the forefront of
efforts, based on a movement called eugenics, to engineer a better
society by using such tools as forced sterilization of 'unfit' people
and the prohibition of marriage between whites and non-whites.
Virginia's ardor for eugenics might be spotlighted for the world when
the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington launches an
exhibit in 2004 on racial science in Nazi Germany. Eugenics, often
called the 'science' of breeding better people, was embraced by the
Nazis.
The Library of Virginia received a request in June to help the
Holocaust Museum find documents or pictures about sterilizations at
the old Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded in
Lynchburg and the landmark sterilization case there of Carrie Buck.
In the 1927 Buck case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Virginia's
sterilization law.
From 1927 to 1979, about 8,300 Virginians were sterilized
involuntarily -- rendered unable to have children -- as eugenics
adherents applied theory mixed with social prejudice to alter human
lives. Creation of the Holocaust Museum exhibit comes as scholars
have located troves of information about Virginia's study, teaching
and application of eugenics. It largely has been discredited as
science in intervening years.
Historians at the University of Virginia have traced webs linking
educators, advocates in Richmond of racial purity and of
Sterilization law, national eugenicists and in some cases, Nazis.
There was admiring correspondence by Earnest S. Cox of Richmond, an
influential white supremacist, to the Nazi secretary of interior in
1938, and Cox was in contact with former Nazi officials after World
War II. Cox was a major force behind Virginia's 1924 law against
racial intermarriage, the Racial Integrity Act.
There was quiet support from top educators at the University of
Virginia for the work of Dr. Walter A. Plecker, head of the state
Bureau of Vital Statistics, in zealously enforcing that race-purity
law.
There was an unsuccessful proposal for a benefactor to endow a
national center on eugenics education at U.Va. The idea was floated
by a national eugenicist who wrote and edited a journal that gushed
with positive publicity about the Nazi eugenics program.
The new scholarship provides a fuller and broader perspective of
Virginia's eugenics movement, which affected state policy and
discourse for almost two-thirds of a century and created a lasting
legacy.
Virginia Indian tribes, for example, still are trying to reckon with
the crushing impact of Plecker's campaign, The Times-Dispatch
reported in March. Plecker waged a paper war against Virginia's
Indians by classifying them as blacks, to block them from 'passing'
as white people,
Until this summer, Virginia's newspaper industry held in honor a
former newspaper editor and eugenics adherent who crusaded in the
1920s for state law to separate the races in all places of public
entertainment.
The industry's most prestigious award was named for the Newport News
editor. After The Times-Dispatch detailed his crusade, his name was
removed from the award.
The precise scope of the Holocaust Museum exhibit, meanwhile, is
undecided, according to a museum spokesman. The context for the
exhibit will be 'the eugenics movement that had adherents all the way
around the world,' he said.
Museum researchers have traveled to Virginia to scour for records and
to visit the old Virginia 'Colony' in Lynchburg. From there, Carrie
Buck's sterilization echoed worldwide.
* * *
Germany was marching toward the Holocaust when a student of eugenics
at the University of Virginia wrote in 1934, 'In Germany Hitler has
decreed that about 400,000 persons be sterilized. This is a great
step in eliminating the racial deficients.'
Another student wrote in 1935 that 'amalgamation' of the black and
white races clearly threatened to injure or destrip 'the most
specialized qualities of the white race...the only hope, therefore,
of slowing up the process of amalgamation is to prevent racial
intermarriage.'
These term papers and others reflected the extent to which U.Va.
taught eugenics as a basis for social policy, historian Gregory M.
Dorr contended in his Ph.D. disseration at the school this year.
His 'Segregation's Science: The American Eugenics Movement and
Virginia, 1900-1980' was a source for much of this article. Another
source was Dr. Paul A. Lombardo, director of the Program in Law and
Medicine at U.Va.'s Center for Biomedical Ethics and an expert on
eugenics history.
The eugenics movement, born in England in the late 19th century,
gained broad acceptance in America in the early 1900s. Congress
endorsed eugenics thinking in 1924 by adopting the Immigration
Restriction Act, which led to sharply reduced immigration quotas for
southern and eastern Europeans.
In the same year, Virginia's legislature adopted its sterilization
law and its Racial Integrity Act. By 1928, 376 colleges nationwide
were teaching eugenics, including a number of them in Virginia.
At the heart of the eugenics movement were beliefs that human stock
could be improved by selective breeding -- encouraging reproduction
among the 'best' people and reducing it among 'defective'
or 'socially inadequate' people by such steps as compulsory
sterilization or institutionalization. Branding a
person 'feebleminded' could mean he was mentally ill or retarded,
immoral or alcoholic.
U.Va., perceived by many Southerners as the region's flagship
university, became a hotbed of eugenics teaching.
It traditionally was an academy for Virginia's aristocracy, whose
interest in family lineage went hand in hand with this 'science' of
improving the human stock. The university was much smaller then; in
1935 it had 2,360 students, compared with 18,000 today.
Key educators were highly respected and enthusiastic supporters of
eugenics. These white men and other key Virginia advocates embraced
theories about genetic inheritance of most human traits, including
racial superiority, that also fit their cultural views.
The university became 'an epicenter of eugenical thought,' Dorr
writes, 'closely linked with the national movement, the Virginia anti-
miscegenation movement and tied to the state mental health
professionals who promoted eugenic sterilization.'
One of U.Va.'s leading eugenicists was Dr. Harvey E. Jordan, hired in
1907 and promoted in 1939 to dean of medicine.
Jordan was connected to many national eugenics groups and leaders. In
Virginia, he joined the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, a Richmond-
based group set up to preserve 'the supremacy of the white race in
the United States of America without racial prejudice or hatred.' The
clubs pushed for Virginia's Racial Integrity Act.
Sharing like views was Dr. Ivey F. Lewis, a biology professor hired
in 1915. He taught eugenics and became dean of the university in 1933.
Lewis deplored 'the drag of the negro on our civilization' in a
letter to Earnest Cox, author of a book urging repatriation of blacks
to Africa. He invited Cox to lecture to his class and corresponded
with him over three decades.
In addition to white supremacy there was significant anti-Semitism in
the United States. At Va., there was surveillance of Jewish students,
segregation in housing, efforts to limit their enrollment and
official wariness, clearly shared by Lewis.
Weighing a request to use an auditorium for a rally for Europe's
oppressed, Lewis demurred in 1938 and added, 'It seems to me quite
likely that the pro-Jew meeting of protest would bring forth a
reaction that would not be to the interests of the University of
Virginia.... A great many people believe that the growing number of
Jews in the United States is a menace to the American way of life.'
The university's reputation led Dr. Harry H. Laughlin, a prominent
national eugenicist, to propose Charlottesville to benefactor
Wickliffe Draper as home for a national center for eugenics education.
Laughlin knew Virginia. Author of a 1914 model sterilization law for
states, he also had corresponded extensively with Plecker about
Virginia's race-purity campaign. He had given testimony in the Carrie
Buck legal case and helped to win passage of the Racial Integrity Act.
Laughlin lavished favorable publicity on the Nazi eugenics program in
the Eugenical New journal he edited, according to Lombardo, who has
traced ties of some American adherents with Germany.
In 1935, Laughlin's affinity with Nazi thinking was shown further
when he sent a paper on American sterilization law to be read by a
like-minded collague at a World Population Congress in Berlin. The
colleague applauded Nazi racial princicples and ended his speech
with 'To that great leader, Adolf Hitler.'
Draper, the benefactor, was keenly interested in eugenics and
attended the same Berlin conference. He also visited Charlottesville,
but Laughlin's 1936 proposal for a national center on eugenics
education was not adopted. Scholars aren't certain why.
In the same year that Laughlin floated the U.Va. idea, he received
from Nazi-controlled Heidelberg University an honorary degree for his
achievements in the 'science of racial cleansing.'
Laughlin wrote back, according to Lombardo, that he found the degree
a personal honor and 'also evidence of a common understanding of
German and American scientists of the nature of eugenics.'
* * *
Walter Plecker, born before the Civil War and head of the Bureau of
Vital Statistics from 1912 to 1946, was one of Virginia's most
inflammatory eugenics supporters.
After helping win passage of the Racial Integrity Act, Plecker used
it to wage a vigorous campaign to prevent what he
considered 'destruction of the white or higher civilization.'
Lewis of U.Va. expressed admiration when Plecker contacted him in
1926 seeking more information about intermarriage issues in Albemarle
County.
'I feel that Virginia of all the Southern states is most to be
congratulated for having in charge of this work a man like yourself
who sees this situation as it is,' Lewis answered, 'and who tries so
effectively to do what can be done.'
There was agreement with Plecker at least on principle from Jordan of
U.Va.
'I have followed Dr. Plecker's work and am in entire sympathy with
it,' be wrote in 1927. Jordan was not pleased, however, about the
idea of appointing Plecker to a Virginia committee of the American
Eugenics Society, thinking that would be too incendiary.
Plecker was invited to describe Virginia's experience to national
audiences. He addressed the American Public Health Association in
1924 on 'Virginia's Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem' and a major
New York conference on eugenics in 1932.
Wrote Harry Laughlin, 'Doubtless the best headquarters in the world
[for studying racial integrity] would be Dr. Plecker's office in
Richmond, Va.'
* * *
Tennessee-born Earnest S. Cox, a real estate agent and self-described
ethnologist, found a hospitable home in Richmond for his supremacist
and eugenic ideas.
He moved there and published in 1923 the book 'White America,'
warning against destruction of the white civilization from racial
intermarriage.
As co-founder with Plecker of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America, Cox
provided much of the ideological firepower behind the Racial
Integrity Act.
Cox also teamed up with racist Theodore Bilbo, a U.S. senator from
Mississippi between 1935 and 1947, to promote bills for returning
blacks to Africa. His book became a textbook for many university
professors and was distributed, with funding from Wickliffe Draper,
to members of Congress.
The Virginian enjoyed suppport in high ranks of the national eugenics
movement and was invited to address the Eugenics Research
Association, a mainline group, in New York in 1936. Plecker went
along. They visited the homes of national leaders including Draper
and Laughlin.
Later Cox made contact with two Nazi racial theorists. One was
Wilhelm Frick, the Nazi secretary of the interior, to whom he mailed
a copy of 'White America.'
In a 1938 letter to Frick, Cox spoke of the 'common Teutonic
heritage' of Southern whites and Germans, and added, 'Personally, I
hold a high admiration for your country and an affection for your
people.'
For Prick's activities as a Nazi administrator during the Holocaust,
he was convicted during the Nuremberg trials and executed in 1946.
Years after World War II, Cox wrote 'Teutonic Unity,' a book about
muting people of Germanic descent.
Cox corresponded with former Nazi officials. He was advised by one of
them, who was living in Argentina, of his 'surprise that more or less
all what was the central idea of our thinking and indoctrination I
find again in the book of an American writer.'
Cox died in a Richmond area hospital in 1966. A retired Army officer,
he is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
* * *
Of some 30 states with similar laws, Virginia lagged behind only
California in the nation for sterilizations; more than 20,000 people
were sterilized in California and more than 60,000 nationwide.
Germany, which was influenced by Harry Laughlin's model sterilization
law, sterilized between 360,000 and 3.5 million victims from 1933 to
1945, according to Lombardo.
The U.S. rate didn't seem to satisfy Dr. Joseph DeJarnette, director
of Western State Hospital in Virginia, when he drew this comparison
in 1938:
'Germany in six years has sterilized about 80,000 of her unfit while
the United States with approximately twice the population has only
sterilized about 27,869 to January 1, 1938, in the past 20 years....
'The fact that there are 12,000,000 defectives in the United States
should arouse our best endeavors to push this procedure to the
maximum.'
Another eugenics adherent, a superintendent of the Virginia 'Colony'
theorized about global acceptance of sterilization.
Dr. J. H. Bell wrote in an annual report on the asylum for fiscal
1933:
'The fact that a great state like the German Republic, which for many
centuries has helped furnish the best that science has bred, has in
its wisdom seen fit to enact a national eugenic legislative act
providing for the sterilization of hereditarily defective persons
seems to point the way for an eventual worldwide adoption of this
idea."
Decades hence, long after Americans recoiled at the horrors of the
Holocaust and the United States entered the civil rights era, that
kind of thinking has been relegated to the museum.
Dr. Dorr, now teaching at the University of Alabama, looked closely
in his research at the interplay of culture and science that fueled
adoption of eugenics: and its influence upon social policy
The history of forced sterilizations and race-purity law in Virginia
offers important lessons for modem times, he and Lombardo believe.
Dorr concluded, 'Understanding the relationship between Virginia
eugenicists their science, teaching and the segregated culture in
which they lived helps clarify our own valuation of science today,
and hopefully, the role it plays in determining liberating rather
than oppressive, public policy.
* * *
When the despairing mother from Pocahontas made her plea to Gov.
Harry Byrd, she enclosed a lucid, handwritten letter by her teenage
daughter to 'prove' the girl wasn't at all 'feeble-minded.'
'Moma, I declare I do wish I could home come.
'I do hate to be sterilized but it is the only way to come home. I
absulitily would be willing for them to cut my head off if I could
only come home.'
She dreamed of going home for Chrustmas, of presents and siblings and
the parents whom she missed.
There was a frightened side to her letter.
'If I don't see you any more in this world I hope to meet you all in
another one hope God will help all of you and be with us.'
After writing seven Xs for kisses, the girl added this postscript:
'Locks and keys may parts us, and we are far apart but your name in
golden letters still linger around my HEART" (Peter Hardin, Richmond
Times Dispatch, November 26, 2000).
Contact Peter Hardin at (202) 662-7669 or phardin@media-general.com.
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Comments? Questions? Write me at george@loper.org.