On November 16th, 1915, Harry Haiselden, a physician at German-American Hospital in Chicago, called a press conference to announce that he would not perform corrective surgery on a newborn boy with a fatal birth defect. Aside from the fatal missing anal canal, the “Bollinger” child had no right ear, no neck, a deformed rib cage that led to a caved chest, dead nerves on the right side of its body, and a deformed shoulder, among other abnormalities. Haiselden had justified his decision on both humanitarian and what was and is called eugenic grounds: not only would the child face a miserable life in an indifferent institution, but it would be a burden– even a threat– to its family and to society.1 While many today might condemn Haiselden, as many did when he made the announcement, his statements would be echoed by many through the 1920s, and represented a mix of two significant movements in the early twentieth century United States: progressivism and eugenics. As I hope to show, these two movements were inextricably tied to the thinking of euthanasia proponents into the 1930s. I will argue, in fact, that despite detractors who feared that legalized euthanasia would lead to abuse, proponents of euthanasia into the 1930s held an unflinching faith in the power of directed heredity to address the social ills of the early twentieth century United States.
The progressive movement was a response to significant social changes occurring in the first decades of the twentieth century. Massive immigration into the U.S. included southern and eastern Europeans, immigrants who were both less united than previous German and Irish groups and more foreign to Americans. Rural-to-urban migration– including rural blacks– also occurred within the country, due to an economic depression in agriculture, and the use of the combustion engine in machinery led to the growth of large-scale industry. These swift and radical changes fomented labor and racial conflicts: while several were killed in labor battles between 1912 and 1914, racial pressure grew with legalized discrimination against blacks and Asians.2
A variety of mostly middle-class Americans responded to these changes with social and political campaigns ranging from forest conservation to women’s suffrage. Improvements in medicine led to treatment of diseases and physical deformities, and associations were formed to annihilate tuberculosis, cancer, and other maladies. These associations included the American Social Hygiene Association, whose goal was to wipe out sexual disease and who felt that science could eradicate “social” diseases. Though progressives could come from different political parties, all shared a common belief that science could be used to solve social problems; and while some believed scientific methods could lead to greater personal autonomy, others wanted the state to force people to comply with policies meant to benefit the general public.3
Occurring simultaneously was a movement that had its source in social Darwinism, known as eugenics. Men like the nineteenth-century Darwinist Herbert Spencer believed medicine and charity had unnaturally protected the unfit of society, implying– and in the case of William Graham Sumner, arguing– that we should allow nature to take its course and root out the weak. Going a step further, eugenicists asserted that it was necessary to assist nature in this task. The aim of eugenics advocates was to improve human heredity through social measures, and was therefore a mix of utilitarian and evolutionary principles. The result in the United States was, among other things, forced sterilization laws for the handicapped, the insane, and criminals, as well as marriage restriction and anti-immigration laws.4 Given the substantial changes taking place in progressive America, then, along with the promotion of eugenic ideas, it should not be surprising to find that a movement to prevent suicide could coexist with efforts to legalize the killing of “idiots,” criminals, and other defectives.5
Interest in involuntary euthanasia, in fact, grew after 1900, and the rhetoric used in discussions of this topic was decidedly eugenic. Men like William Duncan McKim believed, for example, that it was possible to save civilization if we killed criminals, drunkards, and those with disabilities, while others advocated killing – or not operating on– infants who would be useless to society. McKim included alcoholics, burglars, epileptics, and the retarded among those who should be mercifully killed, and psychologist G. Stanley Hall rejected efforts to save criminals and defectives, as well as the sick, because these efforts would hinder natural selection. Similarly, the surgeon G. Frank Lydston justified involuntary euthanasia on eugenic grounds, asserting that those who were incurable, a threat to society, and useless to themselves should be killed “in strict justice to society;” and advocated both the gassing of “imbeciles” and sterilization.6
Ideas like these were represented in state legislatures as well, especially in the Midwest. In 1903, Michigan representative Link Rogers introduced a bill that would electrocute mentally retarded infants, and three years later, euthanasia bills were proposed in Iowa and Ohio. During the ensuing discussions, a forensic psychiatrist named Walter Kempster argued that a potential law should include the mentally defective, and Dr. R.H. Gregory suggested the idea that anaesthetics should be used to kill deformed or mentally retarded children.7
Efforts to make the debate more conspicuous included an article in the 1913 Medical Review of Reviews. The editor, Victor Robinson, polled several of the country’s most prominent experts with the question, “Shall the state allow science to end painlessly the lives of incurables?” Among the euthanasia proponents were those who spoke in eugenic terms. Columbia University professor R. Burton Opitz, for example, claimed that just as the state reserves the right to imprison or execute the criminal, so it holds the “moral” right to destroy the incurable, and particularly “those who, quite capable of reproducing their like, would finally endanger the existence of the State.”8 Others in the article reflected the notion, grounded in eugenic thinking, that some lives were worth living, while others were not. These included the socialist Eugene V. Debs, who believed it was necessary to give ourselves the same mercy we give to “other orders of animate creation,” and argued that life is only valuable under certain conditions: “Human life is sacred,” he says,
“but only to the extent that it contributes to the joy and happiness of the one possessing it, and to those about him, and it ought to be the privilege of every human being to cross the River Styx in the boat of his own choosing, when further human agony cannot be justified by the hope of future health and happiness.”9
The progressive William J. Robinson likewise maintained that there were situations when life was no longer worth living, contending that “life is sacred when it is pleasant, when it is wanted, when it is bearable. But a life of pain, agony and anguish is not sacred, no more than is a life of crime, shame, disgrace and humiliation.” It is our ability to control our fate, he concludes, that distinguished us from the animals 10
While men like Robinson spoke in terms of the individual, others alluded to the burden of “defectives” on society, an argument that could be seen in the thinking of both progressive and eugenic thinkers. Often, the allusion to this “burden to society” specifically meant a burden on children. One of the most important progressive efforts in the early twentieth century had, in fact, involved child welfare. This included efforts to control child labor, and to promote compulsory education, milk inspection, medical care and health education at school, child courts, home economics, and other endeavors aimed at improving the lives of children.11 Euthanasia advocates reflected these efforts in their justifications of mercy killing and involuntary euthanasia. Among them was Harry Haiselden. Haiselden, who believed that his decision to let the Bollinger baby die would save it from a life of suffering, also argued that the child would hinder its parents from caring for their three other healthy children, and felt letting it die would free resources needed to educate, clothe, and feed other children.12
Similar pronouncements were made in a 1916 silent movie, Are You Fit to Marry?, with Haiselden starring as the protagonist. The movie begins with Jack Gaynor, who after proposing to his sweetheart Alice, goes to her father to ask for his permission to marry. Concerned about the man’s hereditary health, the father takes Jack to see a horse of “thoroughbred stock,” then brings him to a psychiatric hospital to see the residents, whom he calls “unfortunates.” There “by no fault of their own,” the father claims that these residents are the result of bad inheritance, which itself is to blame for “much crime, poverty, and misery.” These people, then, represented a burden on society generally, and children specifically: while “millions are spent in caring for these defectives,” children suffer in crowded quarters. What is needed, he concludes, are eugenic laws: “For the salvation of the race and the health and happiness of every individual we must stop at its source the pollution of the blood stream of the nation by passing sane eugenic laws that would prevent marriages among the unfit.”13
Later in the movie, these eugenic and progressive references would be tied directly to euthanasia. In a flashback to a past couple, the movie shows a doctor exposing Anne (who wants to marry a man of bad inheritance) to several children with mental or physical deformities. One of these is a boy, a “hopeless cripple.” Although an operation would give him two more years of life, these two years would be a “dreadful sentence of a life” better not lived. The better, more scientific alternative would be to let him die. The doctor explains by stating that “the cause of science [is to] save children from disease, deformity, unhappiness and crime,” and concludes by saying that he and others are completely justified in their decision not to lengthen “absolutely useless subnormal lives.”14
There were, of course, progressives who opposed euthanasia, and even those people who endorsed it were aware of the possibility that the practice could lead to abuse. Aside from men like Eugene Debs and George Gordon Battle, who supported euthanasia under the condition that a system be in place to prevent abuse, this was perhaps most conspicuous in the arguments of Charles Francis Potter, president of the Euthanasia Society of America (ESA).15 Potter himself reflected eugenic and progressive ideals. Not only could euthanasia stop defectives from having children, Potter argued, but it would also save money and benefit children.16 Specifically, he believed that “incurable imbeciles” should be killed by the lethal chamber, in part because New York state alone spent $30 million annually to keep them alive, money that could be used instead to benefit the state’s children.17 Although these “imbeciles” were not subject to safeguards, those suffering extreme pain were. Here, according to Potter, a legal proceeding could be created, wherein the suffering person could petition a court to die. After this petition, both sides of the case could be heard, including testimony from medical and psychopathic specialists, and the court could then determine whether the request should be granted.18 For Potter, the potential for abuse was not nearly as important as the possible benefit that legalized euthanasia could accord society.19
Still, euthanasia advocates were obliged to address the abuse concern. For this, a physician named Inez Philbrick helped to introduce a bill in the Nebraska state legislature that would have allowed a person with an incurable and terminal illness to apply to a district judge for euthanasia. Philbrick, too, reflected both progressive and eugenic beliefs, promoting sterilization, birth control, women’s suffrage, and the prohibition of child labor. According to the 1937 bill which she helped advance, when the judge received the petitioner’s application, he would then pass it on to a panel of two doctors and a lawyer. If the panel and judge agreed, and if other requirements were fulfilled, the patient’s doctor could provide the necessary poison. The bill also included stipulations that family could apply in place of terminal “minors” or “mental incompetents.”20
Concerns over abuse would not, then, hinder efforts to advocate mercy killing, whether it was intended for the terminally ill or the socially undesirable. Despite objections from the Catholic Church, doctors, lawyers, and others, euthanasia advocates would continue to promote mercy killing, and would do so with clear eugenic ties. It was in 1938, the year after the Nebraska bill was introduced, that the ESA was founded, many of whose members subscribed to eugenics.21 It was in that same year, too, that the author of an article titled “Human Rubbish” compared criminals, the mentally and physically ill, and others to a “wilderness of weeds,” lamenting the fact that the country had failed to enforce eugenics, birth control, and sterilization laws. The author of this latter article goes on to consider the need for euthanasia: “The time may come,” he declares, “when it will be necessary to resort to euthanasia for those who are mentally and physically beyond scientific restoration to some degree of physical and mental health and happiness.”22 As World War II began, in fact, prominent ESA members like Ann Mitchell continued to maintain the value of euthanasia using eugenic language. Believing the war to be an opportunity for the United States and Britain to rid itself of the biologically unfit, she argued for the use of euthanasia as a war order, and felt that the war represented a struggle for biological dominance, to be won by that nation most open to practicing eugenics and euthanasia.23
Interesting to note in this euthanasia narrative is the presence of a cultural shift toward secularization that included in it a growing belief in eugenics and euthanasia.24 This shift could be rooted in Darwinist teaching, as Ian Dowbiggin and Stephen Kuepper argue, a teaching which showed many Americans that science needed to replace Christianity as the authority for judging what is ethical; and it could have involved more specifically changing attitudes toward dying and the role of the physician, as Shai Joshua Lavi claims.25 Whether interpreted broadly or narrowly, however, a common theme in this shift is the presence of progressive or eugenic goals (and often both) as justification for euthanasia. This may help to explain why men like Harry Haiselden could display sincere compassion for a child he thought should die; because they believed their decisions were based on the methods of objective science. It was in fact this belief that, to a number of prominent Americans in the early twentieth century, made euthanasia so attractive.26
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Funkhouser, W.L.1938. “Human Rubbish.” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 26: 197-199.
Robinson, Victor, ed. 1913. “A Symposium on Euthanasia.” Medical Review of Reviews 19: 134-55.
Strafford, W.H. and Jack Lait. Are You Fit to Marry? Newfoundland, PN: John E. Allen, Inc., 1927.
Zucker, Marjorie B., ed. The Right to Die Debate: A Documentary History. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1999.
“Dr. Potter Backs ‘Mercy Killings,’” New York Times, 3 February 1936, 13.
Secondary Sources
Dowbiggin, Ian. A Concise History of Euthanasia: Life, Death, God, and Medicine. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2005.
Dowbiggin, Ian. A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Kuepper, Stephen L. “Euthanasia in America, 1890-1960: The Controversy, the Movement, and the Law.” PhD diss., Rutgers University, 1981.
Larson, Edward J. and Darrel W. Amundsen. A Different Death: Euthanasia and the Christian Tradition. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998.
Lavi, Shai Joshua. “The Modern Art of Dying: The History of Euthanasia in the United States.” PhD diss., Berkeley, CA: University of California, Berkeley, 2001.
Pernick, Martin S. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Roberts, Carolyn and Martha Gorman. Euthanasia: A Reference Handbook. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 1996.
Urofsky, Melvin I. Lethal Judgments: Assisted Suicide and American Law. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.
Weikart, Richard. “Social Darwinism,” lecture. Turlock, CA: C.S.U. Stanisluas, April 19, 2010.
Weikart, Richard. From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
End Notes
1Stephen L.Kuepper, “Euthanasia in America, 1890-1960: The Controversy, the Movement, and the Law,” PhD diss., (New Jersey: Rutgers: 1981), 69-70.
2Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 25; Ian Dowbiggin, A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 18.
3Pernick, The Black Stork, 25-28.
4Pernick, 22; Dowbiggin, A Merciful End, 14-15; Kuepper, “Euthanasia in America,” 62; and Richard Weikart, “Social Darwinism” (lecture, C.S.U. Stanislaus: Turlock, CA, April 19, 2010) for William Graham Sumner.
5Kuepper, 27 (suicide prevention movement, 1905); Pernick, 24 (legalized killings, 1906).
6Dowbiggin, 17-18; Pernick, 23; and Kuepper, 64-65 (Lydston’s eugenic support for involuntary euthanasia).
7Pernick, 24. At the same time, Victor Robinson showed that popular sentiment was still antagonistic to euthanasia. This could be seen in, among other acts, a New York counter-bill stating that any person promoting euthanasia in word of mouth or in writing would be guilty of a felony.
8Victor Robinson, ed, “A Symposium on Euthanasia,” Medical Review of Reviews 19 (1913), 152.
9Robinson, “A Symposium on Euthanasia,” 151-152.
10Robinson, 154; and Dowbiggin, 20. For the relationship between eugenics and the value of life, Richard Weikart, From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).
11Kuepper, 70 (Haiselden’s reference to a “burden to society”); and Pernick, 27-28 (progressivism and child welfare).
12Kuepper, 70 and 89 (note 43).
13W.H. Stafford and Jack Lait. Are You Fit to Marry? (Newfoundland, PN: John E. Allen, Inc., 1927).
14Ibid.
15Robinson, 151-153 (Debs and Battle).
16Dowbiggin, 45.
17“Dr. Potter Backs ‘Mercy Killings,’” New York Times, 3 February 1936, 13.
18Ibid., 13.
19Dowbiggin, 44. Importantly, Potter also believed legalizing euthanasia would prevent the abuse already occurring underground. Legalizing it, to him, would not only prevent nonphysicians from performing unsafe or unprofessional jobs, but it could also defend against possible abuses from uncaring relatives or doctors.
20Dowbiggin, 47-48.
21Dowbiggin, 54, cites a statistic claiming that 73% of ESA members supported eugenics, a number originally produced by Valery Garrett, who compared board members of the National Society for the Legalization of Euthanasia (the original name for the ESA) to members of eugenics organizations, and to authors who wrote eugenics essays.
22W.L. Funkhouser, “Human Rubbish,” Journal of the Medical Association of Georgia 26 (1938): 197-199. Importantly, the author also showed signs of the same progressive empathy for children that Haiselden and Potter had shown earlier.
23Dowbiggin, 55.
24Kuepper, ii.
25Dowbiggin, 8-9; Kupper, ii; Shai Joshua Lavi, The Modern Art of Dying: The History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press, 2005), 70-78.
26Kuepper, 69-70 (Haiselden’s compassion for the Bollinger baby); and Pernick, 15 (“objective method” of science).
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