Of Fear and Strangers, page 15
Having found a safe harbor at Duke University in North Carolina, Lemkin immediately sought to call attention to the mass atrocities that he had studied and then been nearly swept up by. Published in 1944, Axis Rule of Occupied Europe hardly seemed like a cri de coeur. Rather, it was a technical, dry analysis of laws and decrees that Germany, Italy, and their allies had imposed on occupied peoples. It drilled down into the ways that minorities were stripped of their rights, dehumanized, and brutalized. For this process, there simply was no single word. Bland concepts like “Germanization” revealed nothing of the stunning crimes being committed. “Denationalization” did not “connote the destruction of the biological structure,” as Lemkin put it. “New conceptions require new terms,” he concluded, and so Raphael Lemkin proposed the combining of genos, the Greek for “race or tribe,” with cide, for killing.
“Genocide” was more than barbarism or mass murder. It represented an intent to annihilate a human identity, a collective, whether it was a national, racial, or religious group. It commenced with the destruction of “the national pattern of the oppressed group,” and ended with the imposition of the oppressor’s “pattern.” To prevent genocide, Lemkin argued, there must be a radical shift in morality, so that even victors in battle considered such behavior beyond imagination. International law must codify such morality and override claims of national sovereignty. In this appeal, Lemkin placed himself in a lineage that prominently featured Bartolomé de Las Casas near its beginnings. Together, these moralists formed a chain, an “awakening of humanitarian feelings.”
Skeptics scoffed. What would a word do to stop such slaughters? Nevertheless, Lemkin worked tirelessly to do more than get his word adopted by dictionaries; he traveled to Nuremberg to petition those writing up charges at the Nazi war crimes trials to use this term. In October of 1945, the Nuremberg indictments accused all twenty-four defendants of systematic genocide.
During his return to Europe, Raphael reunited with his brother only to learn that his parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins—49 members of his extended family in all—had been murdered. His determination became fevered. He stalked legislators, diplomats, and dignitaries, and after much behind-the-scenes lobbying, on December 9, 1948, the newly created United Nations passed the Genocide Convention. This human rights treaty was not just a reaction to the recent war, the document declared, but also the sacking of Carthage and Jerusalem, the routing of the French Albigensians, the victims of Christian and Islamic holy wars, and the Spanish Conquest. Genocide was an international crime against humanity, and it had just led to the death of six million European Jews. Lemkin’s word became part of international law, naming a form of extreme identity-based violence, framing it ethically and politically, and linking it to some of the worst atrocities in history.
Lemkin’s relief, however, was short-lived. As he pushed for ratification of the UN proposal, he found resistance coming from his new homeland. The United States refused to accept the Genocide Convention; some senators worried the rules might be retroactively applied to their own treatment of Native Americans or African Americans. This embarrassment, perhaps a tacit confession, lasted for half a century. During those years, Lemkin’s law did not put an end to genocide, but neither did it prove empty. It helped spread a new consciousness of ways that the politics of division could devolve into a depraved desire to kill off an entire people.
WORDS ARE NOT just part of lexical maps or pragmatic tools. They may be incantations, invitations to imagine and remember. By 1945, xenophobia had become all of those. It started out as a name for psychological illness and extreme nationalism, then moved to notions of racial and cultural primitivity, before it settled as an animus against immigrants and minorities. After Auschwitz, xenophobia now also possessed a sickening, nightmarish resonance. Its very mention could unleash searing images of pencil-thin bodies in striped work clothes. It carried the stench of flesh turned into smoke, crushing images of children behind barbed wire, histories of immense sadism and cruelty. In the postwar years, the definition of xenophobia stabilized; it became part of that broader discourse deployed to stir the dead and warn the living.
Among other incantations, xenophobia still retained its difference. It pointed away from the “Jewish question,” directly at the perpetrators. What was the source of their malicious desires? In the postwar era that cause, that need to be xenophobic desperately required explanation. Where did such inhumane hate come from? Why here not there, now and not then? Those questions were articulated by the American sociologist Nathan Reich. If anti-Jewish vitriol in Germany came from a “deep-seated, irrationally motivated state of xenophobia,” he asked, why “may [it] remain latent and relatively innocuous in periods of well-being and social tranquility but can, under the guise of any rational façade, easily assume forms of active discrimination and hostility in times of strain and stress?”
Five years after the Axis powers were defeated, international migration had rebounded. Once again, ships filled with immigrants who disembarked in foreign lands. Airplanes, highway systems, automobiles, telephones, film, radio, and television ushered in ever more interchange between strangers. There was a foreigner at the gas station, on the playground, in the baker’s shop, and by the schoolroom. Globalization threw more tribes together. So it was fair to ask: when and where would it start again? Xenophobia lurked in the cracks of history. Invisible for a while, it periodically rushed forth and loosed decimation, only to then disappear. Despite its countless victims, the nature of this beast remained elusive. It was clear only that, if the past was any guide, it would surely strike again.
To make matters worse, if xenophobia recurred, it would be accompanied by an additional terror. In a desperate race with the Germans, the United States had pulled together some of its best scientific minds for the Manhattan Project. On August 6, 1945, their achievement, the first atomic bomb, was dropped on Hiroshima. It unleashed a mushroom inferno, the greatest explosion in history. Soon thereafter, a second nuclear fireball consumed Nagasaki and led to the Japanese surrender. In two swift strokes, some 200,000 Japanese lives had vanished, and the Atomic Age had commenced.
After the joy of Allied victory, a slow, rising panic ensued. “What if” scenarios were articulated by the very physicists who had ushered in this new age. Given the genocide that had just occurred in Europe, the idea that a hateful despot might gain access to these weapons was unthinkable. In 1947, atomic scientists created the Doomsday Clock to measure how close we had inched toward the end of life on Earth. What would need to change to stop this countdown? What stood between all of us and apocalypse? A great many survivors concluded that what was required was another Manhattan Project, but one of a very different sort.
PART II
INSIDE THE XENOPHOBIC MIND
These were the modes of a people, small in number, beset by dangers and in terror. They dared not think. If frightened … they shook and committed horrid atrocities in the name of their creed, the cost of emptiness.
—WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS, In the American Grain
That invisibility to which I refer occurs because of a peculiar disposition of the eyes of those with whom I come into contact. A matter of the construction of their inner eyes.…
—RALPH ELLISON, Invisible Man
CHAPTER 9
Little Albert and the Wages of Fear
THE BIRTH AND early life of that political and moral peril called xenophobia commenced in the shadows. Coined simultaneously by an unknown doctor as well as anonymous enemies of ultranationalism and then reminted for colonial use by Jean Martin de Saintours, this term spread far and wide, floating about among foreign journalists and diplomats, imperialists, racists, liberals, and socialists, its meaning stabilized at times by one author and one context, only to be flipped around and reconceptualized by the next. After the Nazi Holocaust, the word’s implications became more set. However, xenophobia had not yet found its theoretician, someone who could answer the critical question: why? No one had yet established what lay under the iceberg’s tip. No one provided explanations that might make sense of this trouble’s origins and menacing power.
In 1936 a League of Nations expert noted that the seemingly political problem of xenophobia was “in reality essentially psychologic.” Intense hostility toward strangers had no single pattern, he wrote, but must be explained by a deeper understanding of the inner workings of those who were carried away by such hatred. By then, this claim was not novel. Philosophers, psychologists, sociologists, behavioral physiologists, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts had already begun to promote differing psychic and behavioral explanations for stranger hatred. After Auschwitz, these experts—unlike the forgotten consuls and journalists who first deployed the term—became revered figures, even celebrities, who increasingly were seen as crucial to the survival of humankind. The man who unleashed the atomic bomb, President Harry Truman, addressed the American Psychiatric Association in 1948, and rather stunningly declared that world peace lay in his audience’s hands. Such desperate hyperbole said much about the fear and the burden, the mystery too, that made experts of the psyche move to the foreground.
By then careful students could have recognized that xenophobia was three-headed, like the hound that guarded the gates of the underworld. This Cerberus was made up of knotty questions regarding human identity, its relation to emotions like fear and aggression, and, lastly, the nature of groups. If postwar thinkers were hoping to slay this monster, each of those heads needed to be lopped off, dissected, and better understood. Otherwise, in a continually globalizing world armed with nuclear weaponry, the same intolerance that haunted prior periods of history might make for mass murder on a scale never before seen.
These three interrelated questions were rarely taken up together; mostly, they were divided from each other. Different intellectual communities focused on what was most amenable to their methods. Some asked who was this xénos, this stranger? What made him or her different? What linked me to you, but not her? Others zoomed in on the misperception of threat that seemed to lead to either a phobic retreat or a violent reaction. What made the normal regulation of emotion, which routinely managed everyday dangers and forms of novelty, go berserk? Lastly, some noted that from the Chinese Boxers to the British Brothers’ League, from the KKK to the Hitler Youth, xenophobia took up residence in many at once. It possessed certain qualities that emerged only in groups.
During the second half of the twentieth century, varied experts went to work on what seemed to be a catastrophe waiting to happen. Their efforts led to a series of powerful, if never fully integrated, models, defined by new terms, new explanatory concepts, some empirical research, and a slew of therapeutic applications. All this in an effort to make good on the promise, “Never Again.”
WHAT MAKES A man phobic of strangers? In the 1880s, when xenophobia first appeared in a clinic, the doctors who observed this fear had little to offer by way of explanation. For most of them, heredity provided a one-stop solution. To explain phobias, models of inheritance could be deployed, including Herbert Spencer’s model of Social Darwinism, in which human life was geared for the survival of the fittest; the French biologist Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s view that learned experiences could be inherited; and Ernst Haeckel’s contention that the life of the individual recapitulated the life of the species. Mix and match these speculative theories and almost anything could be given a supposed reality, a biological cause, and an essence that required no further explanation.
Degeneration theory was such an intoxicating mix. It explained numerous problems—psychiatric, neurologic, rheumatic, addictive, and others—as the result of an unspecified hereditary decay. Family trees would be marked by this damage, which could even be tied to thinly veiled Christian sins like boozing and whoring. Through Lamarckian mechanisms, the punishment for these venal excesses, it was said, would be visited on the children. Evolution thus went into reverse. In Dreyfusard France, degeneration and its ills were found—surprise!—among “foreign races” like the Jews.
Alongside degenerative heredity, another proposed cause of morbid fear was trauma. A prophet of that peril was the American neurologist Dr. George Beard. Having cured himself of lethargy through self-administered electrical shocks, Beard proposed that many urban dwellers were short-circuiting. In the whirring metropolis with its ceaseless competition, the strain was much too much. Humans had only so much nervous force, and as one’s batteries ran down, the capacity for emotional self-regulation diminished. “Neurasthenia” ensued, marked by unceasing fatigue, jittery states, and odd fears. Beard’s 1881 book, American Nervousness, was taken up by the popular press. Early self-help books followed with titles like Don’t Worry (Worry: The Disease of the Age) and Why Worry?
However, as the new century arrived, degeneration theory and neurasthenia both began to lose scientific support. If phobias were due to degeneration, one Harvard doctor quipped, we all must be degenerates. A third suspect now stepped forward: was there some disruption in childhood development? In this search for phobias stemming from the playground, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall played a pivotal role.
After graduating from Williams College, Hall considered the priesthood but then went to Harvard to study with William James. There he received the first American doctorate in psychology, before traveling to Germany to train in their state-of-the-art labs. Upon his return, Hall became a professor at Johns Hopkins and promptly turned his sights toward morbid fears. Fear was the expectation of pain, he reasoned, and it led humans to consider “whether to fly or fight,” his anticipation of the famous “fight or flight” reaction, demonstrated by the landmark physiological research of Walter B. Cannon a dozen years later. Acutely frightened individuals faced a stark choice: escape or lunge into defensive violence. Phobics were not just people who shied away from their fears; they were also those who leapt irrationally into battle.
G. Stanley Hall
Armed with this basic understanding, Hall sought to map out the fears of childhood. Unlike his meticulous, lab-based German colleagues, his method was simple, sloppy, and, like America itself, gargantuan. Hall sent out thousands of questionnaires across the nation to youngsters of all ages. Recipients sent back a landslide of replies to his rather vague queries. By 1897, Hall had collected more than seventeen hundred reports from infants to young adults. He reported on 6456 kinds of fear. Reptiles and thunder were the most common source of terror, but coming in third, acknowledged by over a quarter of his respondents, was a fear of strangers.
If Hall’s data could be trusted, stranger fear was extremely common among American youth. But who were these bogeymen?
Children’s fears of persons are often at first directed to black, lame, ugly, or especially deformed people, to gypsies, rag men, Chinamen, policemen, coal men, tramps, tinkers, doctors, teachers, peddlers, and often extend to almost all strangers.
Hall hurried on from this list, never bothering to ask why the foremost stranger was “black”? What made the “lame” or “rag men” or “Chinamen” frightening? Instead, he offered a deeper explanation. Once upon a time, humankind believed “all strangers were dangerous.” Now such fear existed only in sparsely populated areas, where the stranger incited unnecessary trepidation and awe. Such worry was atavistic, irrational, part of a lost world. “Serpents are no longer among our most fatal foes,” Dr. Hall wrote, and “strangers are not usually dangerous.” The transformation of strangers from enemies to others we simply do not know was not unlike the conquering of a superstition. As children became adolescents, they mostly made this transition; the older adolescent didn’t dash away from a Chinese boy. Knowledge and maturity tempered such reactions.
Hall’s conclusions aligned with the beliefs of American progressives, who placed their faith in reason and education. However, he yearned for a deeper revelation. An unsure theoretician whose piles of data never added up to very much, Hall one day awoke from his discontent to an epiphany. Embracing Lamarck and Haeckel, he concluded that phobias were inherited. Great-granddad’s dog bite was long forgotten, but little Billy, three generations later, on his first sight of a mutt, would recoil as if he had been mauled. Ancient traumas led children to instinctively distrust strangers. Once bitten, many generations shy.
In 1904, Hall compiled his masses of data and published Adolescence: Its Psychology and Its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion, and Education. It was a fourteen-hundred-page tome that had the effect, by sheer heft, of making that stage of life an object of study. Near the end of his encyclopedic work, Hall confessed a desire to broaden his purview to include the “nearly one third of the human race” that lived in “136 colonies and dependencies” under “a few civilized nations.” How did this relate to adolescence? Thanks to Social Darwinism, eugenics, and ethnic psychology, Hall soon made that clear.
Natives across the globe were “adolescents of adult size.” Virtuous, confiding, and affectionate, they—like children in Hall’s survey—saw strangers as enemies. Diversities that Westerners accepted, they found intolerable. Education could lift up these childish minds, but in the same way that obstinate children refused to grow up, some primitives rejected civilizing. If so, an unavoidable fate awaited them. Like the “great auk” or the “Southern buffalo,” these groups would be driven to death. Never before, Hall marveled, had so many “lower races” been plucked like “weeds in the human garden.” He listed these killed-off tribes—Beothuks, Aztecs, Tasmanians, Huichols, Maori, Burra, and Adelaide … he innocently went on and on. When the Nazis prepared their Final Solution, the ground had been prepared by progressive do-gooders like G. Stanley Hall. All that was left was to define the Jews as recalcitrant children.
