Free War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition by Edwin Black Page B

blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race was not Hitler’s. The idea was created in the United States and largely cultivated in Connecticut, two to three decades before Hitler came to power. The State of Connecticut played an important, largely unknown, role in America’s campaign of ethnic cleansing. What’s more, Connecticut was a pivotal engine in this country’s eugenic nexus with Nazi Germany.
    In 1909, Connecticut became the fourth state to adopt eugenic laws such as forced sterilization, building on the state’s 1895 marriage-restriction law and the 1907 Indiana sterilization statute. Connecticut’s sterilization-enabling law, short on text, was vague enough to allow ordinary staffers at two state hospitals for the insane, one at Middletown and one at Norwich, to just scrutinize a patient’s family tree in deciding whether the patient would be sterilized. The number of those actually sterilized was small, just about three per one hundred thousand citizens. But, the state’s impact on policy far exceeded its numbers. Indeed, in 1919, as mass-sterilization programs were contemplated for Connecticut residents, the surgical authority was expanded from the two designated sterilizing institutions to include the Mansfield State Training School and Hospital at Mansfield Depot. The 350-acre Mansfield facility was established to be a great processing center—but it never implemented some of its darker designs.
    Eugenics coercively sterilized some sixty thousand Americans, barred the marriage of untold thousands, forcibly segregated many tens of thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted vast numbers of Americans in ways the world is still learning. In Connecticut, only 550–600 persons were forcibly sterilized, but hundreds of thousands more were slated for the coercive surgery before the plan was abandoned.
    Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for massive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad estate. They were in league with America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians faked and twisted data to serve the racist aims of American eugenics. They considered Connecticut both an early epicenter for eugenic propaganda and a later test case for full-scale ethnic cleansing.
    The Carnegie Institution literally invented the American movement by establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. This complex stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans of color, ethnicity, and economic disadvantage. The movement’s purpose: carefully plot the removal of entire families, full bloodlines, and indeed whole peoples.
    Devotion to eugenics swelled with special fervor in Connecticut. Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American movement came from the American Eugenics Society (AES), based in New Haven, and its affiliate the Eugenics Research Association, based in Long Island. These organizations, which functioned as part of a closely-knit network, published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis. While the AES was at all times a national eugenic organization, it was commonly dominated by Connecticut eugenicists. So, the state’s role was magnified.
    In the late nineteenth century, prestigious local physicians, such as Dr. Henry M. Knight, his son Dr. George Knight, and other Knight family members in the medical profession, laid the foundation for the twentieth-century eugenics movement that would emerge. In 1858, the elder Henry Knight had helped found the Connecticut School for Imbeciles, arguing against wasting time and money educating the “students.” The Knights were among the earliest proponents of confinement colonies to forcibly incarcerate the so-called