The American People, Volume 1 by Larry Kramer

Author:Larry Kramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2016-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

GOOD BREEDING?

In the richly appointed living room of Mrs. E. H. (Mary) Harriman, widow of the exceedingly wealthy railroad tycoon and early supporter of all things eugenic, a group of people sit sipping tea and discussing what to do about the approximately 300,000 “defectives” of all sorts who had already been tabulated by New York State at the request of Mrs. Harriman, a woman of great energy, conviction, power, and of course wealth. Her husband owned most of the railroads in America. She is also the daughter of a rich man. And she controls a fortune of between $70 million and $100 million. She is sixty-three years old and will live until 1932 at 1 East Sixty-ninth Street. She is a direct woman and minces no words. It is April 8, 1914.

She opens the gathering by welcoming everyone and reminding them, with a touch of pride in her voice, “My late husband’s fortune has paid for many local charities, as you know. I cite the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration, which seeks out Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants to our crowded cities in order to deport them or at the least confine them, should they be candidates, which unfortunately so many of them are, for forced sterilization.”

She pauses to modestly acknowledge the polite applause, before proceeding. “The agenda of the meeting today concerns the topic ‘What can be done to prevent the continuing occurrence of sexual perversities, including homosexuality, also known as sodomy?’ A representative from the Tally Office, Mr. Eagen Odemptor, is present to help direct our discussion.”

Edwin Black’s monumentally important work, War Against the Weak, to which we owe much of our information on the hideous history of the eugenics movement, unfortunately does not deal with the movement’s additional interest in ridding the world of homosexuals. This subject, just beginning to interest gay scholars, and just as slowly beginning to appear out of the very wormy woodwork of the groves of academe, is addressed in Proof Positive: The American Government’s Active Role in the Extermination of Homosexuals, by Waldo Strummer and Mellissa Evinrude, to which much is owed.

“They are mentally deficient, at the very least,” Odemptor explains patiently to the group, which is not terribly familiar with homosexuals but has a nodding acquaintance with sodomites, a word several admit to knowing, “but only from church and of course the Bible.” But once enunciated out loud, homosexuality is nervously added to the list of unpleasant items to attend to. Has not the former president Theodore Roosevelt himself written just last year that “society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind”? “I’ll know one when I see one,” Roosevelt is quoted in The Washington Monument as saying to the Temperance First and Last Society at the Willard Hotel for its annual Founders Tea on May 1, 1914. “And so will all of you. Just as we have all come to recognize a drunk.” Never one to put down that big stick, Teddy Roosevelt goes even

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