CHAPTER 19

Eugenics and the “Sole Possible Economic Order”

Part I

Wisdom comes by disillusionment.

—George Santayana

Most people, excluding the neo-Nazis, accept that there was a holocaust in Germany, but how many know that disabled people were the first to be systematically exterminated by physicians?

Disabled people know that quality-of-life judgments made about us by non-disabled people can prove not only inaccurate but deadly. To combat oppression, we must understand its historical roots, particularly the institutional support that makes it possible.

“Lives Not Worth Living” and “Useless Eaters”

The phrase “lives not worth living” came from the title of a book published in 1920, Release and Destruction of Lives Not Worth Living, by two German Social Darwinists, Alfred Hoche, a professor of medicine, and Rudolf Binding, a professor of law. The book defended the right to suicide, and called for the killing of not only incurably sick people but also the mentally ill, the feeble-minded, the intellectually disabled, and deformed children. Arguing that such people led “ballast lives” and were only “empty human husks,” these professors medicalized the concept of killing disabled people by making it seem therapeutic; they upheld that it would be “healing work” and humane to destroy such lives which, in their view, were “not worthy of life.”¹ These were not uniquely German ideas; support for eugenics also existed in the United States and in England, where euthanasia was viewed as a way to “economize” into a more “efficient” society.

Not long after the publication of this book, hundreds of thousands of disabled people were systematically killed in German gas chambers set up in the very institutions where people went for treatment. How can a society be maneuvered into a regimen of murder? The answer is found in the ideas that led to a “science” of eugenics, the economics that made the practice attractive, and the history of the agents applying euthanasia.

The Roots: Racism, Physicalism, and Classism

With the publication of Origin of Species, Charles Darwin introduced his theory that man evolved by way of a gradual adaptation of varied life-forms to the environment by the process of “natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life,” (italics mine). “Favoured races,” translated, meant his race, the Caucasians.

The English philosopher Herbert Spencer substituted the phrase “survival of the fittest” for “natural selection” and is credited with the development of Social Darwinism, the application of Darwin’s ideas to sociology.²

In 1871, with The Descent of Man, Darwin clarified his thoughts on artificial selection:

We civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost to save the life of everyone to the last moment…. Thus the weak members of society propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man.³

If this undesired situation were to be “corrected,” then selective breeding of humans would follow as the next logical step, to rid civilization of disabled, sick, and poor people and to limit the propagation of unfavored races.

In 1883 a cousin of Darwin’s, biologist/geneticist Francis Galton, coined the term “eugenics,” furthering the march towards selective breeding. Drawn from Darwin’s ideas, eugenics upheld that biological groups could be strengthened (cleansed) by eliminating the “unfit” through genetic and hereditary screening. Sickness, indigence, dependence, immorality, and race were factors in the determination of fitness.⁴ Darwin himself suggested that people ought to refrain from marriage if they “are in any marked degree inferior in body and mind.”⁵ Galton’s solution was widely accepted in scientific circles all over the world.

Spencer, a staunch supporter of the eugenics movement, became a guru in the US on the subject, presenting seminars and lectures on the benefits of eliminating the “unfit,” largely those in need of public services.

The pre-Nazi “scientific” theory of racial hygiene (originally coined in 1903), in keeping with the work of Darwin, Spencer, and Galton, held that the German race could and must be kept pure and not allowed to “degenerate.” Social Darwinists such as Alfred Ploetz feared that the misfits and the poor were multiplying at a faster rate than the fit (bourgeoisie) and that elimination was necessary to preserve the German plasm. They professed that those “weak” who were surviving with the assistance of medicine were interfering with the natural selection process and should die in order to keep the German gene strain strong. Racism, physicalism, and classism formed a cultural triad that permitted eugenic theory to turn into a full-blown societal frenzy of murder.

The Nazi/American Physician Connection

The Nazi Party relied on scientists and physicians to give eugenics and racial hygiene scientific credibility and to win the support of the German people.

In 1933 the Nazi government passed the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, or the Sterilization Law, as it came to be known. It designated people for sterilization who “suffered” from “genetic illness,” including feeble-mindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive insanity, genetic epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, genetic blindness or deafness, or severe alcoholism. Physicians became the genetic police, with genetic courts to back up their findings.

An influential manual of Rudolf Ramm of the medical faculty of the University of Berlin proposed that each doctor was to be no longer merely a caretaker of the sick but was to become a “cultivator of the genes,” a “physician to the Volk,” and a “biological soldier.” To carry out these programs properly, the individual physician must become a “genetics doctor” (Erbarzt). He could then become a “caretaker of the race” and a “politician of population.”⁶

The eugenic purge was widespread. Targeted for sterilization were 200,000 congenitally feebleminded; 80,000 schizophrenics; 20,000 manic-depressives; 60,000 epileptics; 600 people with Huntington’s chorea; 4,000 blind; 16,000 deaf; 20,000 gravely bodily deformed; and 10,000 alcoholics. Reich interior minister Wilhelm Frick, forming the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy, estimated the number of genetic “defectives” in Germany to be 500,000, noting that “some experts consider the true figure to be as high as 20 percent of the German population.”⁷

Sterilization practices eventually expanded to encompass race, especially to control what became known as the “black scourge,” and were widely and cruelly practiced on Jewish people in the death camps.

In the US, eugenics policy focused on the incarcerated population, developing into an entire “science” of criminal anthropology. Physical characteristics were linked to criminal behavior and disabled people were said to be predisposed to commit crimes. A 1911 textbook on treating disabled people stated, “A failure in the moral training of a cripple means the evolution of an individual detestable in character, a menace and burden to the community, who is only too apt to graduate into the mendicant and criminal classes.” American physicians were performing vasectomies on the penal population as early as the turn of the century. By 1920, sterilization was compulsory for criminals considered genetically inferior in twenty-five states. And by 1950, according to the Human Betterment Foundation, 50,707 Americans had been sterilized, many against their will.⁸

Eugenic propaganda institutions existed in England and the US such as the one at Cold Spring Harbor in New York led by Charles B. Davenport and funded by the Carnegie Institution and Mary Harriman. The Rockefeller Foundation funded the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics which was headed by Ernst Rüdin, who also headed the Racial Hygiene Society under the Nazis. Fritz Lenz, the physician-geneticist and propagator of racial hygiene theory in Germany, complained that the Germans were being held back, in comparison to their US counterparts, by the socialist Weimar Constitution (which prohibited alterations of a person’s body).⁹

German sterilization did not stop until the end of the war. Even so, the physicians performing sterilization were immune from prosecution because “allied authorities were unable to classify the sterilizations as war crimes, because similar laws had only recently been upheld in the United States.”¹⁰

Due to mounting evidence that not enough was known about heredity to draw the conclusion that sterilization did in fact eliminate the “defectives” from the gene pool, eugenic practices were eventually quelled. In the US and England, continual legal pressure was applied to halt sterilization, under the banner of individual rights (interestingly now an argument for physician-assisted suicide). “Rational” science proved not to be immune from physicalist and racist tendencies that resulted in the unnecessary destruction of the reproductive rights of thousands of innocent people.

Useless Eaters and Economics

What happened to disabled people in Germany must be understood in the context of the broader socio-economic issues. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had proclaimed that “the sick person is a parasite of society.”¹¹ The phrase “useless eaters” became popular descriptive speech during the deep recession after World War I. Such ideas served to turn the German people into supporters of the euthanasia program, by branding disabled people as deplorable consumers of state funds at a time when the German people were experiencing economic hardships. It became openly shameful to be disabled. No longer just an “aberration” of nature, the “disabled parasite” was a social cost not to be tolerated.

But the social funds “saved” by eliminating the useless eaters were to be devoted to beefing up the Reich’s military for an attempt at Aryan world domination. Since “defectives” were unproductive to the war effort (not soldier material), even seen as taking away from it by consuming social funds, we became highly disposable.

In 1930s Germany, biomedical scientists combined eugenics with Social Darwinism to produce a biological ideology that not only called for man-made selection but began the mechanisms to socially engineer it. The German state took these actions:

In 1933, the first year of Nazi government, expenditures for the handicapped and invalid were drastically cut. In 1933 German medical insurance companies paid 41.5 million RM for invalids—ten million less than in 1932, in the depths of the recession…. For the Nazi medical philosopher, support for the mentally ill was simply not worth the cost.¹²

Reich propagandists took every opportunity to inculcate resentment toward “defective” Germans. Schoolchildren were a primary propaganda target. Adolf Domer’s 1935–36 high school mathematics textbook included the following problems:

Problem 94

In one region of the German Reich there are 4,400 mentally ill in state institutions, 4,500 receiving state support, 1,600 in local hospitals, 200 in homes for the epileptic, and 1,500 in welfare homes. The state pays a minimum of 10 million RM/year for these institutions.

I. What is the average cost to the state per inhabitant per year?

II. Using the result calculated from I, how much does it cost the state if:

A. 868 patients stay longer than ten years?

B. 260 patients stay longer than twenty years?

C. 112 patients stay longer than twenty-five years?

Problem 95

The construction of an insane asylum requires 6 million RM. How many housing units at 15,000 RM could be built for the amount spent on insane asylums?¹³

So, it is not surprising that 1939 was designated by Hitler as the year of “the duty to be healthy.” The state shifted the public focus away from social welfare onto the “culprits” using all the public resources. Those who could not be “cured” must be killed.

The Needle Belongs in the Hand of the Doctor

Physicians were among the most numerous and strongest supporters of state-sanctioned killing. When Hitler ascended to power he congealed racial hygiene into a political biology which became the mold for Nazi social policy. Large numbers of German physicians joined the Nazi Party. Robert Proctor, author of Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis writes:

In 1937 doctors were represented in the SS seven times more often than was the average for the employed male population. Membership records for the Nazi Physicians’ League indicate that nearly forty thousand physicians joined the league in 1942; Georg Lilienthal has discovered archival evidence that by the beginning of 1943, some forty-six thousand physicians had joined. If ninety thousand physicians were active from 1931 to 1945, then roughly half of all physicians joined the Nazi Party.¹⁴

The German physicians were charged with the duty to determine who was worth health care costs and who was not. They became the gatekeepers marshaling the “health” of the state. There were four categories for extermination:

1. Patients suffering from specified diseases who are not employable or those with schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile diseases, therapy-resistant paralysis and other syphilitic sequelae, feeblemindedness from any cause, encephalitis, Huntington’s chorea and other neurological conditions of a terminal nature.

2. Patients who have been continually institutionalized for at least five years.

3. Patients who are in custody as criminally insane.

4. Patients who are not German citizens, or are not of German or kindred blood, giving race and nationality.¹⁵

Disability was the primary qualifier for death in the eyes of the physician and the state. It is most important to understand that disability persecution was all-encompassing. If one was of pure Aryan blood and disabled, one was slated for extermination for contaminating the race. If one had a job but was disabled, one could still be determined as genetically “unfit” based on the disability and murdered. And euthanasia was not limited to “sick” people, it was imposed upon intellectually disabled people even though they were “healthy.” Without question, all disabled people were considered to be not worthy of life and all were given the unsubstantiated diagnosis of “terminal” illness with one exception: Nazi Germany did not euthanize its disabled veterans.

Disabled children became the first victims of the euthanasia program. Baby Knauer was the first official victim. Born blind, without part of one arm and a leg, Baby Knauer, according to Dr. Karl Brandt, a leading physician in the euthanasia program, “seemed to be an idiot” (italics mine). Her father, a full-blooded German, asked Hitler to grant a “mercy” death. Hitler granted the request for death; from this point on physicians were guaranteed immunity from prosecution for infanticide by proclamation. The results were monstrous.

Soon thereafter, the Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness required that all children born with congenital deformities be registered with the health authorities. These included “idiocy or Mongolism (especially if associated with blindness of deafness); microcephaly or hydrocephaly of a severe or progressive nature; deformities of any kind, especially missing limbs, malformation of the head, or spina bifida; or crippling deformities such as spastics [Littleschen Erkrankung].”¹⁶ The list was expanded to include epilepsy, paralysis, and any disfigurement of the body.

Officials estimated that by 1945 some five thousand children of all ages had been systematically killed by their physicians. The physicians’ choice of methods included lethal injection, starvation, withholding of treatment, exposure to the elements, and the use of cyanide gas or other chemical warfare weapons. Some twenty-eight institutions were fitted with extermination facilities, “including some of Germany’s oldest and most highly respected hospitals (Eglfing-Haar; Brandenburg-Gorden; Hamburg Rotherburg and Uchtspringe; Meseria-Obrawalde, among others).”¹⁷

The adult phase began in 1939, with a plan to exterminate all of Germany’s mental patients. The operation was given the code name T-4, shortened from Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address of the nonprofit Patient Transport Corporation that rounded up the economically unfeasible culprits slated for disposal and took them to the nursing homes, mental institutions, and hospitals which housed the killing chambers. In fact, the prototype for the gas chambers that exterminated the Jews in Poland was created in a hospital in Brandenburg to kill the disabled. It was a shower-like room with benches around the walls, equipped with small holes from which the carbon monoxide gas would be piped into the chamber:

The first gassing was administered personally by Dr. Widmann. He operated the controls and regulated the flow of gas. He also instructed the hospital physicians Dr. Eberl and Dr. Baumhardt, who later took over the exterminations in Grafeneck and Hadamar … At this first gassing, approximately eighteen to twenty people were led into the “showers” by the nursing staff. These people were required to undress in another room until they were completely naked. The doors were closed behind them. They entered the room quietly and showed no signs of anxiety. Dr. Widmann operated the gassing apparatus; I could observe through the peephole that, after a minute, the people either fell down or lay on the benches. There was no great disturbance or commotion. After another five minutes, the room was cleared of gas. SS men specially designated for this purpose placed the dead onto stretchers and brought them to the ovens … At the end of the experiment Viktor Brack (who was of course also present and whom I’d previously forgotten), addressed those in attendance. He appeared satisfied by the results of the experiment, and repeated once again that this operation should be carried out only by physicians, according to the motto: “The needle belongs in the hand of the doctor.” Karl Brandt spoke after Brack, and stressed again that gassings should only be done by physicians. That is how things began in Brandenburg.¹⁸

The word got out that killing was taking place, so disabled people often had to be dragged onto the T-4 buses forcefully. Those who resisted were beaten into submission. Entire wards of epileptics were killed and the families told that they died of flu, inflammation of the lungs, or apoplexy. Some living in institutions knew beforehand that they were scheduled for disposal and would write their parents that their death was imminent. Elderly people feared they were next and refused to go into institutions for the aged.¹⁹

It is estimated that two hundred and seventy-five thousand (one estimate puts it at over one million) disabled people were exterminated before the church, which had the power to stop it all along, belatedly brought an end to the official euthanasia program in 1941. A small group of pastors and some incensed citizens motivated Bishop von Galen of the Roman Catholic Church to stand up to Hitler and these physicians in a sermon, in which he said:

Broadly speaking, there is near certainty that none of the unexpected deaths of these mental cases have been due to natural causes, but were artificially induced, in accordance with the “unworthy lives” and, consequently, the killing of innocent people, if their existence is no longer held to be productive for the nation or for the state. It is a frightful concept that seeks to justify the murder of innocents and allows the killing of invalids incapable of work or the infirm, or incurable, and of old men and women afflicted by senility. Confronted with this doctrine the German bishops declare: No man has the right to kill an innocent person, no matter what the reason, except in case of war or in legitimate self-defense.²⁰

Hitler called off the T-4 euthanasia program in August 1941. He recognized that killing the Bishop would be political suicide and he was deeply involved in the Russian front fighting, which was not going well. The gas chambers were dismantled and moved to Poland, where extermination was horrifically escalated.

But the official end to the euthanasia program did not stop the killing of disabled people. Physicians were encouraged to continue with methods of killing that were less noticeable and that fit better into normal hospital routine. They switched from “active” to “passive” killing of disabled children by simply withholding treatment or food. The children died slowly and in agonizing pain. The killing of “defective” adults continued, too, but it was contrived in a less visible manner, performed quietly by doctors who gave their “patients” lethal injections or doses of medication, withheld treatment, or starved them within their own tightly controlled institutions.

Off the Hook at Nuremberg

At the Nuremberg trial Dr. Brandt defended his actions, saying that euthanasia was “out of pity for the victim and out of a desire to free the family and loved ones from a lifetime of needless sacrifice.” He emphasized that Hitler’s proclamation was not an “order to kill” children but gave physicians the right to do so if the patient was “incurably sick.”²¹

Baby Knauer was not “incurably sick.” She had multiple disabilities; with prosthetic devices and training in Braille, her ability to function in the world would only have been limited by what the world would allow. Disabled people who were employed and thus no “burden” to their families were also indiscriminately slaughtered.

The Nuremberg court avoided the euthanasia of the disabled by shifting the debate. The court said, “The evidence is conclusive that almost at the outset of the program non-German nationals were selected for euthanasia and extermination … We find that Karl Brandt was responsible for, aided and abetted, took a consenting part in, and was connected with plans and enterprises … in the course of which murders, brutalities, cruelties, tortures and other inhumane acts were committed [against non-German nationals]. To the extent that these criminal acts did not constitute war crimes they constituted crimes against humanity”²² (italics mine).

The original victims of Nazi cleansing were not non-German individuals but the German disabled. Some interpret the killings of disabled people as the beginning of the Jewish holocaust, but the murders of thousands of disabled people represented a holocaust of its own. The logic for killing disabled people was distinct from the rationale for killing other identity groups.

The Nuremberg court did not view disabled people as equal citizens against whom it would be illegal to commit a crime. The treatment of disabled people by the court was discriminatory; no reparations were ever made to the families of those killed, no one was punished for their murders.

Social Darwinism marked the beginning of the need for the disabled to justify our very existence. If medicine could be viewed as an inhibitor to biological cleansing, even seen as reversing some “natural selection” process where the disabled and sick should die, then who would be safe? Disabled people’s struggle for survival took on a new dimension. It was not Darwin’s “natural” world that we would be pitted against; it was man’s “civilized” world of dominant physicalist notions and the growing culture of wealth accumulation that would become our biggest adversary.

Part II

There has never existed a truly free and democratic nation in the world.... I have entered the fight... against the economic system under which I live.

—Helen Keller, socialist, addressing the Woman’s Peace Party
and the Labor Forum in New York City, 1916

The American Heritage Dictionary defines capitalism as “an economic system characterized by freedom of the market with increasing concentration of private and corporate ownership of production and distribution means, proportionate to increasing accumulation and reinvestment of profits.” If democracy is the practice of promoting social equality where more people participate in governance, then capitalism with its economic tendency to concentrate wealth works against that equality, because wealth and ownership reside in fewer and fewer hands. This glaring contradiction is at the heart of modern-day inequities, and this is what Helen Keller meant above when she addressed the Woman’s Peace Party and the Labor Forum at Carnegie Hall. There can be no democracy without economic democracy.

The godfather of capitalism, Adam Smith, in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, recognized that class-based policy was not beneficial to the democratic masses. He pointed out two centuries ago that “the vile maxim of the masters” was, “all for ourselves and nothing for other people.” In Smith’s day the “masters” were the rich mercantile class who manipulated government and public policy to their advantage. In Nazi Germany, the “masters” were the Aryan militarists and entrepreneurial class that dismantled the democratic Weimar Republic health care system, the most respected and comprehensive social services program in the world, to shift public funds to the fascist goal of world domination.

Smith advocated for a capitalism that would advance economic equality— something that has never materialized. And he opposed the concentration of wealth—something the US government defends by protecting the rich against the poor. Since Smith’s day, capitalism has worked its will upon the people to produce an enormous gap between rich and poor. Author Michael Parenti explains:

Income and wealth disparities are greater today than at any time since such information was first collected in 1947. As one economist put it: “If we made an income pyramid out of a child’s blocks, with each layer portraying $1,000 of income the peak would be far higher than the Eiffel Tower, but almost all of us would be within a yard of the ground.”²³

Today we have the “masters” of the market—the corporations, speculators, banks, and global capitalists—maintaining the inequality and widening the income disparity.

The Social Darwinists were masters at keeping societal resources in the hands of the wealthy by marginalizing lives perceived to be of no use to the economic order, but, as this chapter will explore, capitalism’s production dynamics adversely affected disabled people’s ability to participate in the sole economic order.

The Sole Economic Order

It is an obscure fact that industrialization and entrepreneurialism were prominent in both the US and the Nazi National Socialist government of Germany. Although the Nazis called themselves National Socialists, Nazis were pro-profiteering industrialists like the Rockefellers, Du Ponts, and Mellons. Hitler made this clear when he wrote, “We stand for the maintenance of private property…. We shall protect free enterprise as the most expedient, or rather the sole possible economic order.”²⁴

Walter Russell Mead writes that “major US corporations collaborated with Hitler throughout the ’30s and into WWII.” For example, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil was partnered with the German corporation IG Farben, which patented and made gasoline from coal with the help of concentration camp slave labor. Mead points out that Hitler had repeatedly offered to send the Jews to the US instead of to death camps, but the US refused to take them. Historian Howard Zinn explains that the US did not get involved in the war over the persecution of the Jews, nor over Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Czechoslovakia, or Austria, nor over Italy’s attack on Ethiopia; rather it “was the Japanese attack on a link in the American Pacific Empire that did it;’’ it was the attack on US business interests that determined our “vital” interest in World War II.²⁵ This is to say that economic interests rose above democratic and humane principles; even delayed our involvement in World War II because businesses in the US and Nazi Germany had a common hatred of egalitarian economic ideals. The US saw fascists like Hitler (and Mussolini) as infinitely preferable to communism because he fostered the sole economic order, capitalism.

Body Politics and Capitalist Disadvantages

Capitalism is characterized by certain disadvantages. One byproduct is that large numbers of people remain unemployed and in poverty. While capitalism held the promise of expanding the base of people benefiting from it, it is inherently exclusionary. Some segments would fall harder to the bottom of the market-driven society, like the disabled and the elderly. […]

While the accumulation of wealth remained of paramount import, the fact that large segments of the population were excluded from benefiting from the sole economic order did not rate concern. The expendable were squeezed out while the Social Darwinists who were profiting from the status quo justified this state of affairs as the “natural” order of things.

Nazi Germany viewed disabled people as a burden on the state and a drag on the economy, and exterminated us. The desire to solve the “defect” problem in America was inextricably mixed with matters of money; masters of efficiency in the US were bean-counting like their Nazi counterparts. Economics factored into the widespread support for eugenics and euthanasia. In 1935 Dr. J. N. Baker, a health officer in Alabama, stated, “With bated breath, the entire civilized world is watching the bold experiment in mass sterilization recently launched by Germany. It is estimated that some 400,000 of the population will come within the scope of this law, the larger portion of whom fall into that group classed as inborn feeblemindedness.... It is estimated that, after several decades, hundreds of millions of marks will be saved each year as a result of the diminution of expenditures for patients with hereditary diseases.” Dr. Baker included as targets for compulsory medical intervention any “sexual pervert … or any prisoner who has been twice convicted of rape” or imprisoned three times for any offense, as well as those “habitually and constantly dependent on public relief or support by charity.”²⁶

Other Americans followed suit:

Many American advocates also argued that euthanasia might be a good way to save on medical costs. Dr. W. A. Gould, for example, in the Journal of the American Institute of Homeopathy, defended euthanasia as one way of resolving economic difficulties; he asked his reader to recall in this context the “elimination of the unfit” in ancient Sparta. Some offered more radical suggestions: in 1935 the French-American Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrel (inventor of the iron lung) suggested in his book Man the Unknown that the criminal and insane should be “humanely and economically disposed of in small euthanasia institutions supplied with proper gases.” W. G. Lennox, in a 1938 speech to Harvard’s Phi Beta Kappa chapter, claimed that saving lives “adds a load to the back of society”; he wanted physicians to recognize “the privilege of death for the congenitally mindless and for the incurable sick who wish to die; the boon of not being born for the unfit.”²⁷

The “unfit” unquestionably meant those of no use to the market economy, the non-working members of the society. The connection between eugenics, euthanasia, and the economic order is clear; those of no use to the economic order were marginalized. What was not clear was that the development of the market economy itself—the sole economic order—was to construct barriers that precluded segments of society from reaping any reward from it. It directly affected disabled people’s ability to be productive members of the community.

The Vile Maxim and the Social Darwinists

Philosopher Herbert Spencer’s proclamation—that capitalism’s “natural selection” process of individualism and competition weeded out the “unfit” by leaving the inferior in poverty to die—fit in perfectly with laissez-faire capitalism, which from the very start would never be economically egalitarian and needed some credible public justification to explain why some prospered and larger numbers of “others” did not. If society viewed non-prosperity as the fault of the individual’s shortcomings and not inherent in the design of capitalism, then capitalists were off the hook from admitting that class differences were a result of capitalism’s economic structure and inherently exploitative nature.

Robert Proctor explains that:

When phrases such as “the struggle for existence” and “the survival of the fittest” became catchwords for the new Social Darwinism, this reflected the broader social and economic structure of the times: this is what is meant when we hear that Darwin’s theory cannot be understood apart from the Manchester economics of Ricardo and Smith and the dog-eat-dog world of mid-nineteenth-century British capitalism.²⁸

Social Darwinists used the science of biology to support their undemocratic politics by upholding that heredity—race and genes—prevailed over the class and economic issues raised by Karl Marx. Just as the “inferior” were not meant to survive in nature, nor were they meant to economically survive in society.

The Social Darwinists elevated individual competition to the status of a “natural law.” If the entrepreneurial business process, as explained by John D. Rockefeller, was “merely the working out of a law of nature and a law of God,” then the rich capitalists were free to accumulate vast hordes of wealth and claim they were the “fittest.” Free enterprise magnate Andrew Carnegie, a follower of Spencerian philosophy, expressed a sigh of relief when he said, “All is well since all grows better,” getting off the moral hook with capitalism’s “natural” law.²⁹

While Hitler dismantled the democratic socialist Weimar Republic, the American Social Darwinists did their best to prevent the formation of any social contract that would compensate for the injuries, occupational illnesses, high unemployment, and deaths propagated by industrial capitalism. Refusing to redistribute societal wealth and meet the pre-Nazi German democratic standard, the industrial class sought to prevail over the greater public’s interests by using science as a political weapon. Laissez-faire sociologists and anthropologists used biological determinism to argue against implementing reforms that would better the living conditions of the poor, claiming that biology conferred a non-correctable individual condition that could not be solved by social reform. By erecting these “logical” barriers against humane social policy, Social Darwinists could make the case for a bare-bones government, and use futility as a reason to curtail the role of government in society, to oppose socialized medicine, and to make public expenditures unpopular.

The elite Social Darwinist’s solution was to weed out the “unfit”: the non-Caucasian races (particularly immigrants), the poor, the deaf, and the disabled. But clearly class rose above Spencerian “natural laws”; disabled offspring of the “fittest” (prosperous) class inherited the means to survive and did not starve to death, making it clear that “natural law” had little to do with survival, but man-made selection had everything to do with it.

Dissenters of the Spencerian view, such as sociologist Lester Frank Ward, spoke out against the Social Darwinists’ invocations by branding Social Darwinist doctrine as:

the most complete example of the oligocentric world view which is coming to prevail in the higher classes of society and would center the entire attention of the whole world upon an almost infinitesimal fraction of the human race and ignore the rest … I want a field that shall be broad enough to embrace the whole human race [not a select class], and I would take no interest in sociology if I did not regard it as constituting such a field.³⁰

In the Social Darwinist tradition, Charles Murray, coauthor of The Bell Curve, made the class link when he wrote, “Some people are better than others. They deserve more of society’s rewards.”³¹ It is the “fit” bourgeoisie busily concentrating their wealth and control over the means of production who deserve and get capitalism’s rewards. The privileged who “deserve” more do get more under government policies (subsidies) that amount to a socialism for the rich, while the underprivileged struggle on Darwin’s terms—capitalism for the poor.

Social Darwinism proved to be a convenient self-serving veneer for the masters of Smith’s vile maxim—the Rothschilds, the Carnegies, the Harrimans— who benefitted from the sole possible economic order and did not want to see a more equitable system evolve. Social Darwinism provided the business class who controlled the means of production with the justification to leave the surplus population in poverty to die, rather than design an economic system that would accommodate all of society.

Missing the Link: Blur in the Eugenic Political Lines

It must be noted that the “defect question” did not fall neatly into “left” or “right” camps of political thought either in the US or in Germany. Alarmingly, elements on both sides supported euthanasia and eugenics. For instance, in the US, turn of the century Progressive reformists viewed eugenics and euthanasia as positive social change:

Eugenicists were an integral part of the progressive movement in the United States. Their policies were jumbled in with such other progressive issues of the day as electoral reform, government regulation of commerce, international disarmament, women’s rights and suffrage, prohibition and birth control.³²

The democratic movement saw eugenics as a secular, rational means to control what it perceived as meandering nature that interfered with the march of progress. It entirely missed the link to market capitalism, which de-valued disabled people’s non-exploitable bodies. It missed the link to Social Darwinism, where the “unproductive,” of no use to building more wealth, were disposable.

Unwittingly, the labor movement contributed to the ethics that propelled anti-humanistic eugenics. If work defines human worth and work is the central criterion for human validation, then the worker has their pride and the capitalist has their labor to exploit, two sides of the same paradigm. If work was to be the end-all of existence, then disabled people (who could not work) inevitably would be marginalized, and relegated to a corner of society.

In Germany, eugenics was seen as progressive in socialist circles:

Many socialists identified eugenics with state planning and the rationalization of the means of production; many thus found the idea of a “planned genetic future” an attractive one…. Alfred Grotjahn, for example, today considered the father of German social medicine and one of the leading architects of Weimar Germany’s progressive health reforms, saw racial hygiene as a legitimate concern of medicine. He was one of those who defended the use of the term eugenics (rather than racial hygiene) in order to avoid confusion with racist notions of the political-anthropological variety.³³

The vast majority of German physicians were not critical of euthanasia practices other than out of their concern not to do something illegal. A small group of doctors who were treating disabling diseases caused by economic, industrial, or environmental conditions heroically opposed the increasing power that Nazi biology and the insurance companies were exercising in the health care fields. The Marxist physicians, concerned that the poor, disabled, and unhealthy were getting the short end of the stick, stuck to humane principles that put care above profit and life above economizing and efficiency. Holding that capitalism was the greatest malady afflicting industrial society, Dr. Ernst Simmel said that capitalism forces wage earners “to squander and waste the only thing they possess—their labor power and their health.”³⁴ Forced into exile when the Nazi revolution took full root, their organization, the Association of Socialist Physicians, continued criticism from afar:

The association marveled at the willingness of Nazi physicians to dismantle public medical services—services that had taken decades to construct, and for which Germany was world renowned. It ridiculed suggestions that such measures were designed to serve “the whole, rather than the individual” and deplored the Nazi contempt for the handicapped and the elderly—individuals who, in Nazi medical jargon, were nothing but useless “ballast lives,” lives not worth living.³⁵

But the majoritarian political spectrum simply missed the fact that social power relations control the nature of work and by having political power oppress those perceived to be of little use to their ends.

Beyond “Adapt or Perish”

“To aid the bad in multiplying is, in effect,” wrote Herbert Spencer in The Study of Sociology, “the same as maliciously providing for our descendants a multitude of enemies.” Allowing society to “foster good for nothings,” Spencer claimed, is “injurious,” for that “puts a stop to that natural process of elimination by which society continually purifies itself.”³⁶

Spencer held capitalism in regard for providing such a service, but one has only to look at Roy Cohn or J. Edgar Hoover, Michael Milken or Charles Keating, to see how individualism and competition have failed at weeding out “the bad.”³⁷ One could even say it has produced an unprecedented opportunity for the most “injurious” to prosper, through adaptation to obsessive capital accumulation. Take Robert Allen, CEO of AT&T, for instance, who became the poster boy for corporate greed by firing forty thousand workers and getting an accumulative $16 million in perks and bonuses for his dastardly deeds.³⁸

Feudalism was toppled by capitalism, yet, as under feudalism, the world’s billionaires—all 358 of them—own more assets than the annual combined incomes of 45 percent or 2.5 billion of the world’s people.³⁹ The sole economic order, set upon increasing the concentration of wealth and ownership of production, has done just that; the billionaires are the new feudal lords, the new masters keeping the hierarchy of wealth in place.

Adam Smith’s “vile maxim” is the mantra of the twentieth century business class. Our society is plagued with stock and securities fraud, medical billing fraud, telemarketing fraud, racketeering, price fixing, and unlawful labor practices. Political bribery is commonplace. Corporations like Nike, Disney, Wal-Mart, Reebok, and Kathi Lee Gifford Clothing take their manufacturing to Indonesia, Honduras, and Haiti where they can pay subhuman wages to young girls who work a grueling ten-to twelve-hour day for 28 or 40 cents an hour. The market society that glorifies efficiency and profit above principles of cooperation and equality has brought our “civilization” to an inhumane abyss.

Most dangerously, Social Darwinist conditioning has paved the way for decision-making classes to successfully put the spin on welfare that it is the failure of the individual—not the economic system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. The critical link is that the capitalist market economy produces a negative social outcome: by fixating on the accumulation of money it produces social casualties.

In 1940, economist Karl Polanyi warned of the dangers when markets dominate the affairs of society. He wrote:

[C]ontrol of the economic system by the market is of overwhelming consequence to the whole organization of society: it means no less than the running of society as an adjunct to the market. Instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system. The vital importance of the economic factor to the existence of society precludes any other result. For once the economic system is organized in separate institutions, based on specific motives and conferring a special status, society must be shaped in such a manner as to allow that system to function according to its own laws.⁴⁰

Its own laws would produce a “market society” where human concerns and social orders get subsumed by a kind of economic tyranny; the inversion of what Polanyi believed was needed to foster a cooperative and healthy society. […]

The basic law of evolution is not about adaptation, it is about self-transcending creativity. Moving beyond “Adapt or Perish,” that is, beyond simply accepting one’s environment as permanent and then adapting to it, is to move into a realm where one seeks to transform the inequalities. Our freedom lies in the fact that we are not at the mercy of some “natural law” but are part of a social order which is by no means fixed, but needs democratizing to offer a counterforce to the dominant market “society.”