Jewish American Heritage Month

Posted By richards on August 11, 2013

People generally have two reactions when they hear about American eugenics programs for the first time: the first is shock, and the second is distancing. How could those people have done that to them?

Most have heard of the program in Nazi Germany, in which more than 400,000 people considered unworthy of life those with hereditary illnesses, but also the dissident, the idle, the homosexual, and the weak were targeted for forced sterilization beginning in the 1930s. Few realize that the some of the inspiration for Germanys eugenics program, and even the language for the Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, which among other restrictions banned sexual intercourse between Jewish and non-Jewish Germans, came from eugenicists who had been practicing for years in the United States. Some 60,000 American citizens were sterilized, often under coercion or without consent.

Returning from my first visit with Willis Lynch, I met my in-laws, in town from Northern Virginia, for dinner in Durham, N.C. Lynch was sterilized at age 14 on the recommendation of North Carolinas Eugenics Board, which determined that he was unfit to father children. When I told them about all he had been through, they were outraged. They had never heard of forced sterilizations taking place in the United States, but blamed their ignorance on where they grew up. Im from the North, said my mother-in-law, who had assumed that Lynch, now 80, is black (he is white). We didnt have things like that there.

I went home and looked it up. Pennsylvania, her home state, never passed a eugenics law, but managed to sterilize 270 people anyway, and also to perform the first known eugenics-motivated castration, in 1889. The first state to enact a eugenics-based sterilization law was Indiana, in 1907; it was followed two years later by Washington and California. Eventually 32 states would pass such legislation. Internationally, the list of countries with a history of forced sterilization includes Canada, Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic, Denmark, Japan, Iceland, India, Finland, Estonia, China, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, and Uzbekistan.

Though North Carolina did not sterilize the greatest number of people (that distinction belongs to California, where 20,000 were sterilized), the states Eugenics Board was notorious for its aggressiveness. While many states confined their sterilization programs to institutions, North Carolina allowed social workers to make recommendations based on observations of unwholesome home environments or poor school performance. The states program was also one of the longest lasting, increasing its number of sterilizations while others were winding down. Between 1929 and 1974, more than 7,600 North Carolinians were sterilized. Like Willis Lynch, many of the victims were children, and consent was provided by relatives or guardians who feared the loss of welfare benefits or other consequences if they refused.

Over more than a decade, sterilization victims waited for North Carolina to make things right. Lynch, for his part, testified at state hearings, gave interviews to newspapers and magazines, and talked regularly by phone with other victims. For years, not much materialized: an apology from Democratic Gov. Mike Easley, expressions of regret and sympathy from his successor, Beverly Perdue, also a Democrat.

Then in 2012, something remarkable happened: A Perdue-appointed task force that had been listening to testimonies from Lynch and others like him for almost two years recommended a package of compensation for the victims of eugenics, and the states Republican-led and oft-divided House of Representatives supported the measure in a bipartisan effort. The plan included equal monetary payments to victims, access to mental health resources, and a program of public recognition and education that would ensure that no one would ever forget what happened to them. It began to look like North Carolina would be the first in the nation to address the legacy of eugenics, and victims imagined what they might do with the restitution: pay bills, fix up their homes, visit distant relatives.

The members of the task force were united in their recommendation, but the journey to a proposal that satisfied the victims had not been easy. Theyd listened to many hours of painful testimony from sterilized men and women and their families, and had reviewed thousands of pages of supporting documents: medical records, reports from the Eugenics Board, propaganda in favor of eugenics-based sterilization. Theyd looked at the faulty science behind eugenics, as well as North Carolinas unequal targeting of poor, vulnerable, and minority citizens. Theyd considered actuarial data to estimate the number of living victims, and calculated the potential total cost of compensation. Though they acknowledged that no amount of money can pay for the harm done by compulsory sterilization, they did, in fact, put a number on the line: $50,000 for each living victim, $50 million total.

But some wondered: Can you put a price on reproductive ability? And is it appropriate, in a time of austerity, to make such large monetary payments, especially when it wont right the wrongs? Should todays taxpayers be responsible for something that happened decades ago? Though the effort to include the task forces recommendations in the House budget had been bipartisan, the measure faced more dissent from the G.O.P.-controlled Senate: The state cant afford to pay for something that wont fix any problems, and it was a long time ago, anyway. It wasnt us.

It is human nature to distance oneself from what now seems cruel, violent, reprehensible. We tell ourselves that we would not have done that, that our country is better than that now. But that same distance I am not like that, I am better is what motivated the first eugenicists and their followers.

Excerpt from:
North Carolina’s shocking history of sterilization

Category: Jewish American Heritage Month
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