The Great Confinement

Fascism was always here.

Unsplash

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross.” Most of us have heard that quip before. It’s traced back to Sinclair Lewis, the satirical novelist who wrote It Can’t Happen Here, a dystopian novel about the rise of the Nazis in America. There’s some debate about whether he said those exact words, but that’s what he was getting at. There’s just one problem:

Fascism didn’t have to come to America.

It was already here.

American race laws, westward expansion, and eugenics movements inspired Hitler. He knew about them. He studied them. He admired them. He emulated them. For evidence up front, you can read Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, Edwin Black’s War Against The Weak, Carroll Kakel’s The American West and the Nazi East, Claudio Saunt’s Unworthy Republic, and James Whitman’s Hitler’s American Model. Everything Hitler did, everything you read about now, America did first, all the way back in the 1830s. Americans invented modern genocide.

It was an export.

As political scientist David Carroll Cochran writes, Hitler studied British extermination policies against the Irish and American extermination policies against the Native Americans. He used them as a blueprint for his own plans to expand Germany. When Sinclair Lewis was somewhat naively warning Americans that fascism could happen in America, Hitler was engaging in regular correspondence with American eugenicists and learning from founding fathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who built the U.S. as we know it on the explicit extermination of Native Americans.

These same colonists made more rapid westward expansion a primary justification for the Revolutionary War against Britain, citing it specifically in the Declaration of Independence. Indeed, one of the largest military actions of the war was the Continental Army’s attack on the Iroquois Confederation. After George Washington ordered the “total destruction and devastation of their settlements” so they would be “driven” out by “terror,” the American military established its pattern for the next century by expelling Native people from their homeland through a campaign of brutally indiscriminate violence.

After the U.S. won independence, Thomas Jefferson directly threatened to exterminate all Native Americans who didn’t leave voluntarily from areas they wished to settle. He called them “the doomed red race.”

Carroll goes on:

Their methods included mass shootings, rape, burned villages, destroyed food supplies and forced marches. The result was rapid depopulation by murder, starvation, disease, exposure and expulsion… Aside from Native peoples themselves, this process enjoyed wide public support.

Hitler grew up reading western novels. He recommended them to his generals. He praised the American West in Mein Kampf. He even used terms like “Redskins,” the “Wild East,” and “Indians” to refer to the Eastern Europeans he planned to colonize and displace. In his own words, “Here in the east a similar process will repeat itself for the second time as in the conquest of America…”

“Our Mississippi must be the Volga.”

Yes, those were Hitler’s words.

When the German geographer Friedrich Ratzel developed the term Lebensraum, he explicitly drew on Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” the notion of white Americans civilizing the American West. Hitler and his government saw the Native American Reservations for what they were.

They were concentration camps.

Hitler refined his thinking about genocide with American ideas, including eugenics. In 1916, a prominent American lawyer and anthropologist named Madison Grant published The Passing of The Great Race, a book that announced the racial superiority of Nordic cultures. Grant promoted an early version of Replacement Theory, warning that “catering to weaklings” would bring about the downfall of civilization. (He also wanted to put African tribes on display at the Bronx Zoo.) Hitler wrote a fawning letter to Grant about The Passing of The Great Race.

Hitler said, “The book is my Bible.”

Madison Grant wasn’t exactly a pariah. He served on the boards of scientific societies and museums across the country. His ideas also reached Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, both of whom became card-carrying eugenicists. Alexander Graham Bell also joined the eugenics movement. Around that time, a school principal and amateur biologist named Henry Goddard published The Kalikak Family, a book which advocated for mass sterilization and incarceration of “the feebleminded.” By the 1920s, the U.S. was running large-scale eugenics programs that not only sought their sterilization but also their incarceration.

Even the Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed eugenics in their coverage of The International Eugenics Congress in 1912, bemoaning how "The unfit among men were no longer killed by hunger and disease but were cherished and enabled to reproduce their kind."

Most Americans don't understand how much support the eugenics movement gained here and how deep it went. As Johns Hopkins biologist Steven Farber writes, "these ideas were not fringe but widely held and taught in universities." Major organizations, including the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, funded and organized research in eugenics.

In 1910, John Harvey Kellogg (yeah, the cereal guy) helped found the Eugenics Record Office, working with Stanford President David Starr Jordan. That work led to the establishment of the Eugenics Research Association and the American Eugenics Society. Both organizations operated "with the expressed support of the mainstream scientific establishment," including the American Association of the Advancement of Science, which published the journal Science.

Historian Edwin Black published two books on America’s eugenics movement and complicity in German concentration camps, War Against the Weak and IBM and the Holocaust. While American corporations helped the Nazis design computer systems to facilitate genocide, American political leaders were building their own concentration infrastructure. Institutions like the Eugenics Research Association and American Eugenics Society wanted to sterilize up to a tenth of the population. These eugenics programs ultimately identified 10 classes of "unfit" people who should be "sterilized" if not "eliminated." Here were their criteria:

1. The feebleminded

2. The poor

3. Alcoholics

4. All criminals

5. Epileptics

6. The "insane"

7. The "weak"

8. The "deformed"

9. The deaf and blind

10. The chronically ill

Sometimes, the definitions were so broad they included anyone who had outstanding fines or couldn't pay their bills on time. As Black writes, the eugenics dragnet became "so sweeping that it covered not only people plagued by seizures, but also those suffering from migraine headaches and even brief fainting spells due to exhaustion, heat stroke or other causes."

Everyone from newspaper columnists to radio hosts in the U.S. knew what Hitler was doing. They expressed admiration, even envy. As Black explains, American eugenicists in the 1930s began to complain very publicly, "The Germans are beating us at our own game." They wanted to do more, faster.

It wasn't a big leap from mass sterilization to mass incarceration of those considered “weak” or “feebleminded.” In fact, eugenicist publications in the U.S. frequently wondered what they would do with "a group of people who are free to gratify their instincts without fear of consequences in the form of children." In other words, they were scared that their own sterilization programs would create a burden on the government, so they started building work camps and colonies for these 10 classes of undesirables and removing them from society.

At one point, you could report your own neighbors if you suspected they were feebleminded. Your local eugenics office would send out a consultant to give them an IQ test and determine their “feeblemindedness.”

The eugenics movement presided over a vast network of institutions like asylums and colonies, where outcasts performed hard labor, and sometimes they were even “rented out” for janitorial services, at 25 cents an hour.

There’s a long, deep obsession in western culture with removing the unfit and concentrating them in one area.

It predates the U.S.

During the Middle Ages, towns and villages in Europe built an entire ecosystem of lazar houses (hospitals) and police forces for isolating and quarantining lepers, who suffered from a disease that often made them permanent outcasts. According to Michel Foucault, thousands of “leprosariums” or “cities of the damned” existed throughout Europe by the year 1226. In Scotland, hundreds of these slums kept nearly 1.5 million lepers separated from the rest of society.

At the time, nobody understood how leprosy spread. The physical symptoms reinforced its perception as a moral or spiritual illness. The church convinced most of the public that it was a punishment from God. Foucault discovered that churches went one extra mile, framing exile and death as the only path to a leper’s salvation: “Have patience in thy malady… as was the leper who died before the gate of the rich man and was carried straight to paradise.”

In their view, you saved people by letting them die.

As living conditions improved, leprosy became less common and nearly vanished by the end of the 17th century. Yet the infrastructure and cultural practice of quarantine continued, and it started looking for new targets to sustain itself. As Foucault says poetically, authorities sought “a new incarnation of disease, another grimace of terror, renewed rites of purification and exclusion.”

He goes on:

What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle… Often, in the same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangeily similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and “deranged minds” would take the part played by the leper… salvation was expected from this exclusion.

Salvation through exclusion…

To put things more bluntly, once western societies started locking people up for looking or acting different, they didn’t know what to do with all those empty cities of the damned and the resources they spent on maintaining them. Instead of shutting them down, they found new populations to fill them with. They turned the exact same slums and hospitals into rehabilitation centers for criminals, runaways, and stray people who didn’t fit anywhere else.

In the 18th century, hospitals weren’t really places for treatment. Foucault describes them as “semi-judicial, administrative entities” where the elite exercised power. In this sense, hospitals “had nothing to do with any medical concept.” They were an “instance of order, of the monarchical and bourgeois order being organized.” These early hospitals even had dungeons. Institutions started applying the contagion principle from disease to socially undesirable behaviors.

They believed mental illness was contagious.

Often, European cities didn’t even house their inmates. They simply threw them on boats and had them shipped off wherever the captain was going. Captains could collect a fortune in fees this way. The captains just dropped them off at the next port, and sometimes they even threw them overboard.

Basically, these cities deported their mentally ill.

Foucault calls this period of history “the great confinement.” Governments made their citizens afraid of madness and filled their heads with all kinds of horror stories about what happened to anyone who strayed from society’s path. It’s not a coincidence that this same era also saw a proliferation of witch hunts.

The ordinary person developed a perception of madness as a disease like leprosy, and they were terrified of thinking forbidden thoughts. They regarded it as a form of demonic possession. When someone started expressing ideas or emotions that scared them, they accused them of madness and locked them up.

What counted as madness in the 18th century?

Anything that made you unpleasant to be around. Anything that made you economically unproductive.

Foucault’s work also unearthed the panopticon, an idea originally developed by British humanitarian Jeremy Bentham for prisons and even schools. In the panopticon, all the cells in a prison faced inward toward a single guard tower. The idea was constant surveillance. In Bentham’s theory, you could use this constant surveillance to foster self-policing. Eventually, the inmates wouldn’t need cells anymore. You could even get rid of the guard tower. The inmates would continue to act as if they were being watched all the time.

For Bentham, it was a good thing.

History teaches us that fascism didn’t arrive here from Germany. The ideas that inform today’s understanding of fascism go back hundreds of years, and they lie at the roots of American and European history.

For centuries, western cultures have celebrated the punishment, exclusion, and extermination of groups that didn’t conform to society’s dominant standards. They even justified it by talking about death and exile as forms of salvation for those they deemed undesirable, whether it was “savages” on the frontier or the “feebleminded” in their cities. They exiled them to cities of the damned. They deported them. When they ran out of one group, they found another.

It never really stopped.

These ideas go into hiding. They creep out into pop culture and mainstream media. Left unchecked, they only get louder. Then they get written into public policy. One day, Americans look up from our lattes and see concentration camps in the Everglades and wonder how they got there.

This is how they got there.

When we look at what’s going on now, here and abroad, we understand that it’s not an aberration of history. It’s a norm. If we ever hope to stop any of this, we have to recognize the patterns and how they fit together.

That’s called education.

This is why fascist governments erase history from their classrooms. It’s why they ban books. They don’t want us to know that European leper colonies and jail designs inspired American westward expansion, that American westward expansion inspired the Holocaust, and the Holocaust feeds back into the executive orders to jail the homeless and build concentration camps for immigrants, or war crimes and forced starvation halfway around the world. We’re ten years into all this, and our mainstream media still argues over terminology.

Throughout modern history, western cultures have engaged in great confinements, locking up their unwanted in asylums, reservations, and concentration camps, either exterminating them or watching them die.

It was never an accident. The lessons were never learned. Fascism didn’t have to arrive here wrapped in a flag or carrying a cross. It sailed here in the 1600s. We exported it around the world, but it never left home.

You can’t fight what you don’t understand.

A lot of you already understand all this.

If you didn’t already understand…

Now you do.