THE DARWIN PAPERS

VOLUME 1                                                                              NUMBER 13

PART II (1)

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The Darwin Papers © 2000 James M. Foard
© 2004 James Foard

What was the historical connection between Darwin and Hitler, and where do we go to find the "missing link" that most historians have overlooked when analyzing the causes of the holocaust? Where did these ideas originally spring from? How did Darwin develop his ideas, and how did they make their way into Nazi Germany? Let us examine the history of evolutionary and eugenic ideas to find the answer.

To investigate in detail that thread between evolutionary theory and the holocaust, we must take a further look at eugenics, the term used by the Nazis for their overall "improvement" of the breeding stock of the human race. Although Malthus was considered the founding father of eugenics, the term was first coined by Francis Galton (1822-1911), cousin to Charles Darwin, in his ``Human Faculty'' in 1884. According to eugenicist Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, eugenics "was subsequently developed into a science and into an educational effort."

Darwin makes reference in his Descent on numerous occasions to his cousin, Mr. Galton, who developed the concept that through controlled breeding we could improve the stock of the human race. Galton's ideal was the rational breeding of human beings. The aim of Eugenics, as defined by its founder, is "to bring as many influences as can be reasonably employed, to cause the useful classes of the community to contribute MORE than their proportion to the next generation." (2)

Galton's father was a former Quaker turned Anglican, and he was brought up in a strict religious household, but he abandoned his faith after reading Darwin's Origin of Species.

Galton wrote: "The publication in 1859 of the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin made a marked epoch in my own mental development, as it did in that of human thought generally. Its effect was to demolish a multitude of dogmatic barriers by a single stroke, and to arouse a spirit of rebellion against all ancient authorities whose positive and unauthenticated statements were contradicted by modern science." (Galton, Memories of My Life, p. 287.)

He wrote to his cousin Charles, "Your book drove away the constraint of my old superstition, as if it had been a nightmare."

Indeed, Galton saw evolution in religious terms, as a new faith for mankind, to be exercised through the practice of eugenics: "The chief result of these Inquiries has been to elicit the religious significance of the doctrine of evolution. It suggests an alteration in our mental attitude, and imposes a new moral duty. The new mental attitude is one of a greater sense of moral freedom, responsibility, and opportunity; the new duty which is supposed to be exercised concurrently with, and not in opposition to the old ones upon which the social fabric depends, is an endeavor to further evolution, especially that of the human race." (3)

Galton hoped that eugenics would speed up the process of evolution, thereby breeding out the less desirables among humans. Chase wrote: "What Galton was talking about here was the power to breed people as we breed pigs."(4)

Galton hoped that this new religion would foster voluntary eugenic marriages after failing to see it regulated by the state. (5) Kevles notes: "To Galton's mind, the scientific (sic) doctrine of evolution destroyed the religious doctrine of the fall from grace." (6)

Galton saw that farmers and flower growers selected certain strains to breed desired characteristics, so he made it his goal to have a similar planned process for mankind. He wished for man to take charge of his own evolution, to give "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable" and he pondered, "could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" (7)

The problem here is who will decide whom the desirables and undesirables would be.

From Galton's research came the Galton Laboratory of National Eugenics in Great Britain, which, among other things, compiled "detailed statistics concerning the practice and results of uncontrolled breeding." (8)Galton saw it as his mission to "improve the breeding stock" of humanity. By implication then there are less useful members of society who should be discouraged from propagating their kind, just as Darwin believed.

Galton sought to integrate the developing science of statistics with the study of human inheritance, yet he was not a trained mathematician nor a particularly meticulous scientist. (Kevles, pp. 17) Galton himself never graduated from medical school. Allan Chase noted that Galton's "ignorance of socioeconomics was matched only by his painful ignorance of human biology-an ignorance made all the more appalling because Galton was in his fourth year of medical school when he came into his inheritance and promptly quit school."(9)

Firmly convinced of the validity of his racist ideas, Galton pressed on, yet in his second major work, Natural Inheritance, Galton, like his cousin Charles, "failed to shed any real light on the heritability of talent or intelligence-a problem he never solved." Kevles wrote that much of Galton's data on heredity was erroneous, unsupported and faulty. (Kevles, pp. 17-18)

Galton eventually reached the conclusion that it was "impossible that the natural qualities of a race may be permanently changed through the action of selection upon mere variations" and that selection individuals of the highest eugenic value "cannot even produce any great degree of artificial and temporary improvement."(10)

Thus eugenics was practically useless, for even if certain extreme variations were chosen for reproduction, for instance, the smarter or taller people, after a few generations the population would revert to the same proportion as the average population was initially. Only by selecting those with certain qualities from each generation could certain natural qualities be kept predominant. This was the same conclusion reached years later in the Hardy-Weinberg law, which pretty much states that human populations have a tendency to reach certain limits in variability, and then have a tendency to revert towards a condition of stasis.

Allan Chase wrote that Galton's ideas were thoroughly bankrupt and unsupported by any valid historical data. For proof, Chase noted that there was a total lack of any lineal ancestors or descendants who had attained to notable artistic and scientific success of such famous people like Shakespear, Goethe, Beethoven, Aristophanes, Aristotle, Mozart, Shelley, Rembrandt, Cervantes, Harvey, Malpighia, Newton, Galileo, Lavoisier, Faraday, Priestley, Leewenhoek, and other famous men, while on the other hand among the Kings, royalty, scions of family banks and landed gentry there were wastrels, psychotics, half-wits and incompetents aplenty. (11)

Nevertheless, undeterred by logic and evidence, Galton coldly and methodologically continued to maintain his Malthusian ideas up until the end of his life.

In 1873, preceding the Nazis by fifty years, Galton wrote his terrible sentence for those less fit members of society who do not quite make the elitist cultural grade to be deemed worthy of procreation:

"I do not see why any insolence of caste should prevent the gifted class, when they had the power, from treating their [lower caste] compatriots with all kindness, as long as they maintained celibacy. But if these continued to procreate children, inferior in moral, intellectual, and physical qualities, it is easy to believe that the time may come when such persons would be considered as enemies to the State, and to have forfeited all claims to kindness.(12)

Galton was the caricature of the mad scientist, unconcerned for the weak and helpless of humanity. He began to view many of the laws in effect to protect the poor from the rich, the weak from the strong, and the innocent from predatory members of society as subversive to the process of evolution, or natural selection. He even felt that bad sanitary conditions among the poor were useful for selecting those who were less evolved but more able to survive infectious diseases, lack of food, and malnutrition for procreation of the lower classes (In other words, among the "lower classes" evolution would act in a retrograde manner as a check on their advancement, thus keeping them in their proper place as less valuable and hence less privileged members of society).

Chase wrote scathingly of Galton:

"Even in terms of available nineteenth-century knowledge of natural selection and social medicine, this was an extraordinary exhibition of intellectual and moral bankruptcy. Only a cruel and thoroughly prejudiced ignoramus in British medical history could have, as late as 1873, written that in the new urban slums Nature selects only the least fit to survive the infectious and other deficiency diseases of poverty." (13)

Indeed, during this time that Galton was proposing his horrendous ideas to the public, England was leading the world in prevention of contagious diseases and other inequities consequent on the new industrial environment.

Galton's barbaric ideas on race improvement were supported by another of Darwin's disciples, Herbert Spencer, the founder of Social Darwinism. English Philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) became the father of modern sociology and psychology with his evolutionary ideas. According to Alastair M. Taylor, Professor of History at the University of California and T. Walter Wallbank of the University of Edinburgh in their classic volume Civilization Past and Present, Spencer was opposed to "all state aid to the poor, whom he regarded as unable to compete successfully in the struggle for survival and consequently better eliminated." (14)

Allan Chase wrote: "What had been just plain larceny and slumlordism, before Spencer's Social Darwinism sanctified greed and aggression as merely the 'survival of the fittest,'now became the inevitable and biologically ordained fulfillment of evolutionary destinies. Spencer held it to be contrary to the 'general truths' of biology [meaning evolution] for any society to enact laws mandating safety standards for human housing, clean-water systems, effective sewage systems, mine and factory safety regulations, and minimum-wage and working-hours regulations." (15)

Spencer felt that such regulations acted against the Darwinian laws of natural selection.

Darwin makes frequent references to Spencer throughout his entire work. Taylor and Wallbank wrote of the German Philosopher Friedreich Nietzsche's (1844-1900) views on Christianity, and where this precursor of Hitler got his ideas from:

" Nietzsche viewed Christianity with contempt because he regarded gentleness as weakness and humanitarianism as protection of the unfit and spineless. Likewise, he ridiculed democracy and socialism for protecting the worthless and weak and hindering the strong. Social Darwinism and the antidemocratic cult of naked power, as preached by advocates like Nietzsche,were laying the foundations of fascism, which would one day plunge the world into the most terrible convulsion in its history." (16)

The authors further wrote: "The pseudo-scientific application of a biological theory to politics, whereby a nation is regarded as an organism, constituted possibly the most perverted form of social Darwinism in the period under review. It led to racism and anti-Semitism and was used to show that only "superior" nationalities and races were fit to survive. . .Social Darwinism was also employed to justify the use of military power to ensure that the 'fittest' state would survive. In Prussia the ultra nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschlke (1834-1896), at once bitterly anti-English, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic, regarded war as 'the one remedy for an ailing nation.' He asserted,'The grandeur of war lies in the utter annihilation of puny man in the great conception of the State . . . In war the chaff is winnowed from the wheat.'" (17)

Chase wrote: "What had been ill-mannered and even immoral and un-Christian bigotry before the coming of Galton's eugenics now became race hygiene and the preservation of 'the race' against the awesome specter of what was known in the nineteenth century as 'racial degeneration' and is better known today as 'genetic enslavement."

One of the disciples of Francis Galton was a man by the name of Karl Pearson (1857-1936). When Francis Galton died in 1911 he left the main portion of his estate to University College of London for a Chair in Eugenics. Pearson, a radical socialist, was chosen by Galton before his death to be the first Galton Professor of Eugenics at the college, which post he held for many years.

Pearson did not believe that everyone had the right to have children:

"The right to live does not connote the right of each man to reproduce his kind ... As we lessen the stringency of natural selection, and more and more of the weaklings and the unfit survive, we must increase the standard, mental and physical, of parentage." Darwinism, Medical Progress and Parentage (London 1912).

Pearson was an advocate of social imperialism, the evolutionary concept that so-called superior races and countries should produce more of their share of offspring than those considered to be less developed, in order to maintain their political and social supremacy. He sought to integrate the new science of statistics with evolutionary theory, calling it Biometrics. Kevles noted that oftentimes Pearson's theories went against solid biological science, but Pearson turned a deaf ear to criticism of his work by other scientists.(18)

Charles P. Davenport was another disciple of Galton's. Davenport (1866-1944) grew up in Brooklyn Heights New York with ten brothers and sisters. In 1890, the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences founded a Biological Laboratory at Cold Springs Harbor. Scientists documented the diversity of the natural world and attempted to reconcile it with Darwin's principles of natural selection and evolution. In 1898 Davenport became its summer director, then became an assistant professor (1899) and then professor (1901) at the University of Chicago. He met Karl Pearson and Francis Galton in London in 1902, and consequent on this meeting he became obsessed with setting up his own laboratory for the study of evolution. In 1904 he persuaded the Carnegie Institute to donate ten million dollars, an enormous sum for that day, to establish a "Station for Experimental Evolution" at the Cold Springs Harbor lab.

Like most eugenicists, Davenport was a racist, and felt that Jews were "'intermediate between the slovenly Servians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans and Bohemians.'" He further felt that the great migration to American during the early part of the 20th Century of people from Southeastern Europe would make the country's population "'darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial . . .more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.'"(19)

Davenport defended the Nazi pledge to exterminate the Jews, and endorsed the "'infinitely superior' weapon of capital punishment against Nordic and non-Nordic race polluters whose inferior genes threatened the purity of the Aryan racial gene pools of the Third Reich." (20)

Mary Harriman, the mother of future U.S. Ambassador to Russia and United Nations representative W. Averell Harriman, was an undergraduate at Cold Springs Harbor in the summer of 1905. Her family bred racehorses, and she thought that the laws of heredity used in breeding horses might be used in breeding men as well. In 1910 she was instrumental in raising money to establish a Eugenics Record Office next to Cold Springs Harbor Laboratory, which became incorporated with it in 1918.

Davenport used the office to ferret out records of people in "prisons, hospitals, almshouses, and institutions for the mentally deficient, the deaf, the blind, and the insane." He labeled these people as "defectives" Davenport was so pleased with the success of the Eugenics Records Office that he wrote to Mrs. Harriman: "What a fire you have kindled! It is going to be a purifying conflagration some day!" (21)

In his major work, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, published in 1911, he advocated compulsory sterilization for those deemed to be unfit for procreation, and was against mine and factory safety laws, charitable institutions, safety standards and sewage regulations, since these would only keep those alive who in evolutionary terms should be candidates for extinction by the Darwinian law of "survival of the fittest." He also advocated capital punishment for the crime of being born of inferior blood. (22)

Davenport had a thoroughly evolutionary concept of man as merely an evolved animal, just like Darwin, and we can see how this affected his concept of the worth of human existence, for he wrote in his book: "Man is an organism-an animal; and the laws of improvement of corn and of race horses hold true for him also. Unless people accept this simple truth and let it influence marriage selection human progress will cease."

In 1916 he sought to establish Eugenics as a religion during an address at the Battle Creek Michigan Sanitarium, titled "Eugenics as a Religion." In this address he spelled out his eugenics creed, amounting to a declaration of war against those deemed unfit to procreate, where he stated, among other things that only a "selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits" should be allowed to reproduce, and furthermore he stated his reasoning for this: "I believe in doing it for the race." Not the entire human race, mind you, but only those "carefully selected" for procreation. (23)

As we have seen, Francis Galton's theory, based on Charles Darwin's ideas, was largely responsible for many of the brutal pseudo-scientific experiments conducted by Germany during the period of Nazi domination. (24) One of Darwin's sons, Leonard, was an economist and a eugenicist, though I could consider this an anti-distinction, not an honor.

We find out that before Darwin's horrible concepts of racial superiority and extermination were actually carried out in Nazi Germany, they were first put to the test here in the United States and Great Britain. Galton advocated extermination of those deemed "unfit" for survival through forced sterilization, and his ideas were put to practice in the United States, where from 1905-1972 more than 70,000 of the poor, the uneducated, and the infirm were sterilized in this country to prevent them from having children. Of this number 50 percent were sterilized against their will for being classified as feebleminded, or retarded. (25)Galton's writings are frightening to read today, yet these abominable theories were part and parcel of Darwin's ideas.

Even this number is far below the actual amount of sterilizations that occurred in the United States. In 1974 Judge Gerhard Gesell stated in a suite brought by poor persons who were subject to forced sterilization by federally funded family-planning programs in hospitals and clinics that "Over the past few years an estimated 100,000 to 150,000 low-income persons have been sterilized annually under federally funded programs." (26)

This equals the rate at which poor people were sterilized in Nazi Germany during the twelve years of the Third Reich. In fact, the Nazis based much of their sterilization policies on what they learned from their eugenist colleagues in Britain and the United States, who were years ahead of the Nazis in passing sterilization laws for certain unwanted members of the population.

The superintendent of Davenport's Eugenics Records Office was Harry H Laughlin. He was also the co-editor of Eugenical News. In 1914 he drafted the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law. This law called for compulsory sterilization of the following classes of people:

• Feeble-minded
• Insane (and psychopathic)
• Criminalistic, delinquent and wayward
• Epileptic
• Inebriates and drug users
• Diseased persons, those with tuberculosis, syphilitic, leprosy, infectious diseases, and chronic illnesses
• Blind people and those with seriously impaired vision
• Deaf people and those with impaired hearing
• Deformed and crippled people
• Orphans, state dependants, homeless, tramps, ne'er-do-wells, and paupers (27)

The German Sterilization Act of 1933, cited at the beginning of this chapter, was based on Laughlin's Model Eugenic Sterilization Law. Kuhl reports that two primary constituents for the formation of the German sterilization law were the California sterilization law based on Laughlin's 1922 Model Sterilization Law, and a study conducted by Paul Popenie and Eugene S. Gosney, president of the eugenic association in California called the Human Betterment Foundation, called Sterilization for Human Betterment, which was published in a German edition in 1930. (28)

By the time the Model Sterilization Law was written, twelve states had enacted sterilization laws, the first being Indiana in 1907 (29). Dr. Harry Sharp first began sterilizing delinquent boys in that state to reduce "sexual overexitation." (30)

Approximately 3,000 people had been involuntarily sterilized in the name of evolutionary eugenics in America by 1924; most of them (2,500) in California. In 1924 Dr. Laughlin pushed for passage of the Model Sterilization Law, which would legislate "compulsory sterilization of the blind, criminals, epileptic, paupers, homeless, and runaway young teenagers." That year Virginia passed a Eugenical Sterilization Act based on Laughlin's Model Law.

In 1927 Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes authorized this into law in the infamous Buck Vs. Bell case. Carrie Buck was an unmarried seventeen year old mother. Her mother was a patient at the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and Feebleminded. Carrie was unjustly accused by the Colony Superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, of "immorality, prostitution, untruthfulness and [having] syphilis" Priddy accused Carrie and her family of having congenital defects, and said that "These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South." (31) The Eugenics Record Office sent sociologist Arthur Estabrook and a Red Cross Nurse to examine Carrie's baby. They concluded that she was "not quite normal" and "below average".

Carrie was sentenced to be sterilized. A court appointed guardian appealed the sentence in a suit on Carrie's behalf. Priddy had died in the meantime and been replaced by John H. Bell as the superintendent of the colony, thus the name of the case, "Buck Vs. Bell."

Harry Laughlin never met Carrie, but he sent a written statement affirming Carrie's moral delinquency and "feeblemindedness." The case reached the Supreme Court, where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, an avid student of Darwinian evolution (32) and a eugenics enthusiast himself, ruled in favor of Carrie's sterilization. Holmes wrote in his ruling opinion that "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes . . .Three generations of imbeciles are enough." (33)

Holmes ordered Carrie to be kept in confinement until the time of her sterilization.

In this ruling, Holmes assumed that Carrie's "degenerate offspring" would necessarily become criminals and commit crimes serious enough that they would be executed. He stated that Carrie was "the daughter of a feeble minded mother, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble minded girl."

However it was later learned that Carrie was probably not disabled, (34) and that her child was not born from promiscuity, but from a rape, and furthermore the child, far from being feeble minded or "defective" was a solid "B" student in first grade, and that she had an "A" in conduct and made the honor role.(35)

After the sterilization of Carrie Buck, Holmes wrote to his friend Lewis Einstein that "establishing the constitutionality of a law permitting the sterilization of imbeciles . . .gave me pleasure." (36)

Eventually at the Lynchburg Colony in Virginia alone more than 8,000 poor were sterilized, many of them simply illiterate. Sterilization of males was preformed every Tuesday and sterilization of females was preformed every Thursday.

A former member of the Montgomery County Virginia Board of Supervisors, Howard Hale, remembered when entire families of "misfit" mountaineers on welfare were raided by state sterilization authorities in the nineteen-thirties and brought down to Western State Hospital for sterilization.(37)

In America eugenicist E.G. Conklin solemnly wrote of "the religion of evolution," (38)while Sidney Cazort chimed in with our "duty of upbuilding the human race." In the Proceedings of the Third Race Betterment Conference at Battle Creek Michigan sponsored by The Race Betterment Foundation in 1928, C.E. Rugh spoke of "the moral implication in the doctrine of evolution." (39)

Faith in eugenics took on the form of a moral crusade, where "individual desires are less important than the biological and moral imperative of improving the human race; they permitted [Darwinian] biology to assume religion's traditional function of defining permissible conduct." (40)According to Ludmerer, "Social Darwinism was based on the principle of evolution as universal law. According to this doctrine, evolution applies not only to life but to the physical cosmos and human societies as well." (41)

We see here the development of a creed for evolutionists, where it takes on the dogmatic affirmation of a religious faith, expressing itself in the pseudo-science of eugenics.

California led the nation in sterilizations, and by 1929 had sterilized 6,255 human beings. (42)

In 1912 the first International Congress for Eugenics was held in London in 1912. This was primarily an outgrowth of a meeting of racial hygienists organized the previous year in Dresden by the International Society for Racial Hygiene, a mostly German organization devoted to eugenic ideals.

The sponsor of the 1912 Eugenics Congress was the British Eugenics Education Society, headed by Leonard Darwin, the son of Charles Darwin.. Other notable individuals who served in the capacity of vice-presidents and representatives of their countries were Charles Davenport; Alexander Graham Bell, one of the original founders of the National Geographic Society; Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University; Winston Churchill, secretary of state for Home Affairs from Great Britain; and a long list of evolutionists representing various universities and museums from the United States, Europe and around the world. (43)

The Congress was divided into four groups to discuss:

1. The Physical Aspects of Heredity: specifically the effects of inter-racial marriages and unions.

2. Historical and sociological effects of eugenics.

3. Legislative and social implications of eugenics.

4. How to prevent procreation of the "unfit" by segregation and sterilization (negative eugenics) and how to aid in the breeding of the "fit" (positive eugenics).

The goal of the Congress was stated as follows: "To make more widely known the results of the investigations of those factors which are making for racial improvement or decay; to discuss to what extent existing knowledge warrants legislative action; and to organize the cooperation of existing societies and workers by the formation of an International Committee or otherwise." (44)

The second International Congress of Eugenics was held in 1921 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The president of the museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, presided over the Congress. Leonard Darwin was present again as a vice-president. Also present were future United States President Herbert Hoover; future governor of Pennsylvania Gifford Pinchot; Robert M. Yerkes, the United States Army Chief Psychologist; Madison Grant; Mrs. E. H. Harriman, and many other notables in science and politics.

In typical racist fashion, foreshadowing the developments in Nazi Germany, Osborn, who was also the co-founder of the Galton Society, described the purpose of the Fourth Section of the Congress:

"The right of the state to safeguard the character and integrity of the race or races on which its future depends is, to my mind, as incontestable as the right of the state to safeguard the health and morals of its people. As science has enlightened government in the prevention and spread of disease, it must also enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society, the spread of feeblemindedness, of idiocy, and of all moral and intellectual as well as physical diseases." (45)

According to Stefan Kuhl, Geza von Hoffman, the Austrian Vice-consulate in California, spent several years sending information to his eugenist colleagues in Germany on the eugenics movement in the United States. In 1913 he published a book that was to become a major influence in the eugenics movement in Germany, Racial Hygiene in the United States of North America.

Hoffman stated that Galton's hope for eugenics becoming the "religion of the future" (Kuhl, p. 16) was becoming a reality in the United States, and that American social and scientific thought was thoroughly saturated with the ideas of Darwin and Galton. He concluded his book with an investigation of United States immigration laws, stating that "Homo Europaeus", the "Nordic" type should be the most favored in immigrant status.

President Theodore Roosevelt had talked about the menace of the "yellow peril" concerning the oriental races, and warned against "race suicide." Hoffman reported to his German colleagues on the federal and state agencies involved in eugenics legislation and research. He stated that by 1913 Indiana, California, Connecticut, Nevada, Iowa, New Jersey, New York, Kansas, Michigan, North Dakota and Oregon has passed sterilization laws.

In 1934 the secretary of the American Eugenics Society wrote enthusiastically of the German sterilization law: "Many far-sighted men and women in both England and America have long been working earnestly toward something very like what Hitler has now made compulsory." (46)

This was just part of the consequence of applying Darwin's ideas to the world in biological, political and social terms.

These racist views were common fodder for many of the intellectual and social elite during the latter part of the nineteenth and the first few decades of the twentieth century.

We have read where many of the religious clergy of Darwin's day actively embraced his theory of evolution. Josiah Strong was a noted Congregational Minister powerfully influenced by Darwin's theory. Note the racial undertones and frightening implications in his manifesto, America's Destiny, written in 1885: "The noblest races have always been lovers of liberty. That love has always ran strong in early German blood. . . It was no accident that the great reformation of the sixteenth century originated among a Teutonic, rather than a Latin people...Speaking roughly, the peoples of Europe...where the Teutonic race are purest, there Protestantism spread with the greatest rapidity...most of the spiritual Christianity in the world is found among Anglo-Saxons...Without controversy, these are the forces which, in the past, have contributed most to the elevation of the human race...There can be no reasonable doubt that North America is to be the great home of the Anglo-Saxon, the principal seat of his power...America is to have the great preponderance of numbers and wealth, and by the logic of events will follow the scepter of controlling influence...Our national genius is Anglo-Saxon...the mean weight of the white native of the United States were found to be superior to Englishmen not only in height, but also in chest-measurement and weight . . . Mr. Darwin is not only disposed to see, in the superior vigor of our people, an illustration of his favorite theory of natural selection, but even intimates that the world's history thus far has been simply preparatory for our future, and tributary to it. He (Darwin) says: 'There is apparently much truth in the belief that the wonderful progress of the United States, as well as the character of the people, are the results of natural selection...'".

Strong further wrote: "There is abundant reason to believe that the Anglo-Saxon race is to be, is, indeed, already becoming, more effective here than in the mother country. The marked superiority of this race is due, in large measure, to its highly mixed origin..." He then quotes Rawlingson, "'Even the Jews, who are so often cited as an example of a race at once pure and strong, may, with more reason, be adduced on the opposite side of the argument.'"

One could not find more racist statements coming from the very worst of Nazi propaganda during the reign of the Third Reich. When Strong wrote of the healthiness of the Anglo-Saxon race being attributed to "it's highly mixed origin" he was not referring to other ethnic races, such as Black or Jewish people, for he wrote: "Mr. Green's studies show that Mr. Tennyson's poetic line, 'Saxon and Norman and Dane are we,' must be supplemented with Celt and Gaul, Welshman and Irishman, Frisian and Flamand, French Huguenot and German Palatine."

Strong then quotes Herbert Spencer, one of the fathers of so-called modern sociology, and an ardent Darwinist, who wrote: "'From biological truths it is to be inferred that the eventual mixture of the allied varieties of the Aryan race, forming the population, will produce a more powerful type of man than has hitherto existed, and a type of man more plastic, more adaptable, more capable of undergoing the modifications needful for complete social life."

Strong carries on with this theme, quoting Darwin again: "'At the present day,' says Mr. Darwin, 'civilized nations are everywhere supplanting barbarous nations, excepting, where the climate opposes a deadly barrier; and they succeed mainly, though exclusively, through their arts, which are the products of the intellect.'" He continues: "Whether the extinction of inferior races before the advancing Anglo-Saxon seems to the reader sad or otherwise, it certainly appears probable...Is there room for reasonable doubt that this race, unless devitalized by alcohol and tobacco, is destined to dispossess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder, until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized mankind?" (47)

What a frightening consequence of applying Darwin's theory to social policy. This is classic Jingoism in its ugliest form.

When social Darwinism has been implemented in the American and British economy, the theory of "survival of the fittest" has led to many work related abuses in laissez-faire capitalism, which has been just as merciless as totalitarian regimes can be when Darwinism is used to justify the exploitation of working people in the labor market when the profit motive in economics is applied at the expense of the value of human life and dignity.

Among those who took up the mantle of Social Darwinism to justify the exploitation of the working poor were the railroad tycoon James Hill, who championed the mercilessness of the railroad companies by writing "the fortunes of railroad companies are determined by the law of the survival of the fittest." John D. Rockefeller, Sr. told a Sunday school class "the growth of a large business is merely a survival of the fittest . . .merely the working-out of a law of nature and a law of God." Andrew Carnegie wrote that he had "found the truth of evolution" in Spencer's writings." (48)

Five American Presidents, Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, were all enthralled with eugenics. Roosevelt wrote that "it is obvious that if in the future racial qualities are to be improved, the improving must be wrought mainly by favoring the fecundity [fertility] of the worthy types . . .At present, we do just the reverse. There is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal . . ." (49)

Eugenics organizations in the United States and Germany were richly supported by wealthy American capitalists such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation. University professors and leading research institutes contributed to the eugenics movement. Supposed inequalities between races were explained away as the result of some races being unable to adapt as efficiently in the Darwinian struggle for existence.

In 1928 Harry Laughlin gave a talk at a meeting of the International Federation of Eugenics Organizations in Munich Germany and later wrote an article based on it in the German journal of the International Society for Racial Hygiene (ARGB). The Commission of the American Genetic Association, headed by Laughlin, proposed that the lowest 10 percent of American society be sterilized so that the "inferior" members of society be "eradicated." (50)

Also in 1928 the Rockefeller Foundation donated $325,000 for the construction of a new building of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Eugenics, and Human Heredity in Germany. (51)

Kuhl reports that the Rockefeller Institute kept the International Organization of Eugenics Organizations (IFEO) afloat during the depression, and continued to support German eugenics organizations even after the Nazis gained power and control over German eugenics research. (52)

Thus the Darwinian principle of survival of the fittest, with a struggle for survival, was taken seriously enough by eugenicists to be framed into law, and these laws eventually made their way into Nazi Germany after being developed in the United States and Britain.

A common element among eugenics advocates was the idea of the superiority of the Nordic race and the inferiority of Jewish, black, and southern and eastern European races. H.G. Wells, among other followers of Darwin, supported the idea of planned racial "improvement", and eugenics became a household word.

Margaret Sanger, the Founder of Planned Parenthood, advocated eugenics, describing it as a way to eliminate "human waste" from society. (53)

Sanger was an open admirer of Adolph Hitler's eugenic measures in Nazi Germany. In 1939 she wrote "The Negro Problem" where she encouraged abortion as one means to reduce the surplus population of blacks. She encouraged abortions and sterilization among minority racial groups and the poor because, as she wrote:

"Everywhere we see poverty and large families going hand in hand. Those least fit to carry on the race are increasing most rapidly. People who cannot support their own offspring are encouraged by Church and State to produce large families. Many of the children thus begotten are diseased or feeble-minded; many become criminals. The burden of supporting these unwanted types has to be bourne by the healthy elements of the nation. Funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to the maintenance of those who should never have been born," (54)

She further stated her position that there must be drastic measures to curtail the reproduction of those unfit to breed, reflecting Darwinian and eugenic beliefs:
"The lack of balance between the birth-rate of the ``unfit'' and the ``fit,'' admittedly the greatest present menace to the civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. The example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken, should not be held up for emulation to the mentally and physically fit, and therefore less fertile, parents of the educated and well-to-do classes. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective. Possibly drastic and Spartan methods may be forced upon American society if it continues complacently to encourage the chance and chaotic breeding that has resulted from our stupid, cruel sentimentalism." (55)

One of the catastrophic consequences again of Darwin's odious theory has been the holocaust of abortion, which Sanger encouraged among the poor and minorities as a way to improve, in her words, the breeding stock of humanity.

Madison Grant, one of the co-founders along with Sanger of The American Birth Control League, which eventually became Planned Parenthood, wrote:

"Where altruism, philanthropy or sentimentalism intervenes with the noblest purpose and forbid nature to penalize the unfortunate victims of reckless breeding, the multiplication of inferior types is encouraged and fostered. Indiscriminate efforts to preserve babies among the lower classes often results in serious injury to the race . . . Mistaken regard for what are believed to be divine laws and sentimental belief in the sanctity of human life tend to prevent both the elimination of defective infants [infanticide] and the sterilization of such adults as are themselves of no value to the community. The laws of nature require the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when it is of use to the community or race. (56)

Darwin's theory was immensely popular among the newsmen who covered the Scopes "Monkey Trial"in Dayton Tennessee in 1925. One of the famous journalists at the trial was H. L. Mencken, a prominent newspaper editor who was known for his rabid anti-religious views.

"Inherit the Wind" was a semi-fictional play loosely based on the trial, often presented to the public and to impressionable school students as an accurate rendering of the events. Nothing could be further from the truth, the entire script was a piece of revisionist propaganda that entirely distorted the events of the Scopes trial, yet it is still warmly heralded by liberals and evolutionists as an example of the victory of the forces of truth and justice over so-called ignorant, narrow minded Christian bigots. The reporter in the play, E.K. Hornbeck, is meant to represent Mencken.

Mencken's spent much of his time drunk during the trial, yet his articles about it were read all over the country, where he viciously lampooned William Jennings Brian and all Christian's in general. We get some idea of his view of religion from one of his many quotes: "Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.... A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill."
(For an objective analysis of Inherit the Wind and the Scopes Trial, exposing the historical bias of the play and the movie , see Inherit the Wind: The True Story.

Mencken further said of religion: "I believe that religion, generally speaking, has been a curse to mankind - that its modest and greatly overestimated services on the ethical side have been more than overcome by the damage it has done to clear and honest thinking.."(Living Philosophies, 1931, Will Durant).

Mencken was a confirmed evolutionist: "Well, then, what virtues do I demand in the man who claims enrollment in the highest cast? .... the chief of these qualities is a sort of restless impatience with things as they are - a sort of insatiable desire to help along the evolutionary process. .... By his life and labors, the human race, or some part of it, makes some measurable progress, however small, upward from the ape." (Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist [1910], p.29-30)

Mencken revealed his Machiavellian attitude towards human society when he stated: "If you point out that human progress, as I have defined it, involves the practical enslavement of two-thirds of the human race, my answer is that I can't help it. If you point out that a slave always runs the risk of being oppressed by a particularly cruel master, I answer that a master always runs the risk of having his brains knocked out by a particularly enterprising slave." (ibid)

Since Mencken's diaries were made public in 1991 it has proven to be a major embarrassment to his followers. They clearly show that he was a vicious racist, and held many ideas in common with the Nazis on racial purity and the superiority of the white races. In one piece of correspondence he revealed his evolutionists conception of the black races: "I admit freely enough that, by careful breeding, supervision of environment and education, extending over many generations, it might be possible to make an appreciable improvement in the stock of the American negro, for example, but I must maintain that this enterprise would be a ridiculous waste of energy, for there is a high-caste white stock ready at hand, and it is inconceivable that the negro stock, however carefully it might be nurtured, could ever even remotely approach it. The educated negro of today is a failure, not because he meets insuperable difficulties in life, but because he is a negro. He is, in brief, a low-caste man, to the manner born, and he will remain inert and inefficient until fifty generations of him have lived in civilization. And even then, the superior white race will be fifty generations ahead of him." (Men versus the Man: A Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist, and H.L. Mencken, Individualist [1910], p.29-30)

This should not surprise us, since Mencken was a follower of Nietzsche, as was Adolf Hitler, and it was Mencken who translated Nietzsche's The Antichrist into the English language.

Mencken glorified the evolutionary values of Nietzsche and Hitler, particularly the right of the strong to rule over the weak members of society, and it was the weak, whom we have seen, that Darwin wished to breed out of existence.

I believe America has a good chance to repent, to renounce the false teaching of evolution and to turn from the godlessness that evolutionary teaching engenders; to allow the truth to be taught in her schools and universities. I believe that this great nation, founded on the teachings of Christ, can and will turn to her God and embrace His Law, otherwise, if she hardens her heart as Pharoah did when confronted by God's word through the prophet Moses in ancient Egypt, and if Christians still continue to lose their rights and freedoms in this country, if the truth is suppressed in the public forum and the freedom to preach the gospel is hindered, then I am writing this for a posterity when America will be remembered after she is gone as a once great and proud nation who forgot the God that her founders believed in, and who turned her back on her religious heritage and paid the ultimate price.
Perhaps what I am writing may be read by someone many centuries after the demise of the American Republic, and hopefully they may learn something from this and not be led to make the same tragic mistakes that America in her pride has done. I have mixed feelings regarding the future of this nation now, since the events that have transpired over the summer of the year 2003, when America legitimized sodomy and outlawed the Ten Commandments.
On June 26, 2003 the Supreme Court of the United States of America legalized sodomy in our land while Americans did nothing to protest it and our government leaders sat by. On August 21, 2003, because Christians failed to do their duty, and because we did not have courageous leadership in the White House to stand for God's Word, the Ten Commandments were outlawed in the state of Alabama by the courts of this land while Americans did nothing to protest it and our government leaders sat by.
While there were a few brave souls who came to stand by Judge Moore, by and large the Christian response was too little, too late. If Christians will do nothing to stand up for their freedom, then they do not deserve to keep it. While this disaster occured in Alabama and a brave and virtuous man stood alone against the forces of tyranny, the Christian church in America barely blinked an eye as she uttered a collective burp of acquiescence while sitting back at her feeding trough.
When the Ten Commandments were in danger of being taken away from public view in Alabama, the President of the United States should have sent down Federal troops to prevent this from happening, and he should have addressed the nation and reaffirmed our Christian heritage and told us of the necessity of honoring God in our public institutions.

There is still hope for this great nation, however I must confess that my hopes were diminished by the events in Alabama concerning Judge Moore. I still nourished a hope that there might have been enough Christian men with the backbone to come together and stand up for their liberty and freedom who would have resisted the tyranny being exercised by the liberal establishment, the ACLU and the other ungodly forces who have hijacked this once great land. This may yet happen.

If there will be brave and virtuous men, and if there is a true religious revival instead of the emotionalism that passes for genuine devotion, if there will be true Christians and those of our Jewish brethren in political office who have the courage to speak out against what was going on in our land, if we will remember justice and mercy, "strengthen the weak hands and confirm the feeble knees", plead for the poor, the fatherless, the widow and the infirm, as the Lord has said

"If my people who are called by My name will humble themselves, and pray and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and forgive their sin, and heal their land" (2 Chronicles 7:14)

This may yet take place; in America's darkest hour there can still be hope: "The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light";  I do see that one possibility for this nation, that one beacon of hope for America, and that beacon of light is Christ.

We should remember though, as the Scripture has said, that in the true sense we are strangers and pilgrims on this earth, that ultimately we are citizens of the kingdom of heaven. The rallying cry of the early colonists was "We have no King but Jesus". I am first of all a Christian, my American citizenship comes second to my devotion to Christ, and so the rallying cry should be "We have no Lord but Jesus; and no government that denies the rights of individuals to pray and respect the 10 Commandments is a legitimate government, and we are absolved of any allegiance to those courts who would attempt to muzzle free religious speech and freedom of worship"; thus if there might be a peaceful, non-violent civil movement to restore justice and righteousness in the land, this could lead, in due time, to a movement to restore the Union and form a Christian nation. We need a change in our political landscape; we need a New Foundation to be established; just as God took the people of Israel out of Egypt and formed a new nation from within their midst, so God can take the Christians from within America and form a new nation out of them, if they will be obedient to Him.

America should have officially proclaimed herself a Christian nation, and this should have been done long ago, and been put into law; in fact, this was the fatal flaw in the Constitution of the United States, and the secularists have exploited this crack in our founding document and used it to the destruction of this once great country.
To cry out that this is what has happened in Islamic countries, the union of church and state, is a mistake of the gravest proportion, since this would be to equate the ravings of the "Prophet" with the inspired Word of God in the Holy Bible. This is not such a terrible concept, after all, Switzerland has had a union of various churches with the state for centuries and not suffered terribly for it. Great Britain has a union of church and state, and we do not see terrible penalties inflicted on those who do not belong to the Church of England for their beliefs, nor do we see some kind of British Taliban in place inflicting repressive measures on those of other beliefs either. Even in Czarist Russia there was much greater freedom of belief in an officially Orthodox country than most western historians have led us to believe was the case.
Surely there could be no more serious abuses coming from a Christian government, no more henious abominations such as the sodomite parades in our public streets, no more terrible atrocities than partial birth abortion, no more arbitrary hijacking of justice than the removal of the Ten Commandments that have occurred under our present day secular government than could happen under a Christian government were it to rule in our land. I regret that there were not enough clear headed Christian men with the intestinal fortitude to take the steps necessary to prevent these atrocities from happening.
And America should have proclaimed Jesus Christ as Lord to the nations of the world. This was her purpose, this was her destiny, this was the reason that God had established her and raised her up.

Three articles from The Instrument of Government, a landmark document in the establishment of constitutional law, instituted in 1653 in England under Cromwell when he assumed the position of Lord Protector over the realm, would do much to insure religious liberty in this land, and in fact I believe that they should be added to a revised version of our Constitution to insure the religious rights of Christians, with the added provision that these liberties would be ensured for Catholics as well. These three articles read:

XXXV. That the Christian religion, as contained in the Scriptures [no extra biblical cults are meant to be included], be held forth and recommended as the public profession of these nations [England, Ireland and Scotland]; and that, as soon as may be, a provision, less subject to scruple and contention, and more certain than the present, be made for the encouragement and maintenance of able and painful teachers, for the instructing[of] the people, and for discovery and confutation of error * (see note) , hereby, and whatever is contrary to sound doctrine; and until such provision be made, the present maintenance shall not be taken away or impeached.
XXXVI. That to the public profession held forth none shall be compelled by penalties or otherwise; but that endeavours be used to win them by sound doctrine and the example of a good conversation.
XXXVII. That such as profess faith in God by Jesus Christ (though differing in judgment from the doctrine, worship or discipline publicly held forth) shall not be restrained from, but shall be protected in, the profession of the faith and exercise of their religion; so as they abuse not this liberty to the civil injury of others and to the actual disturbance of the public peace on their parts: provided this liberty be not extended to ["Popery or Prelacy, etc . . ."; this part relating to the Papacy would not be included, Catholics would enjoy the full rights as other Orthodox Christians; this was inserted after a century of Protestant/Catholic wars that tore the Empire apart] nor to such as, under the profession of Christ, hold forth and practice licentiousness.