The Jersey City Independent "

Jersey City filmmaker Justin Strawhand explores eugenics in America in his latest film, War Against the Weak. Strawhand directed the film, which outlines the connection between the United States’ push to create a master race by eliminating the “unfit” and the Holocaust.

We caught up with Strawhand in advance of the film’s Thursday night screening at New Jersey City University, his alma mater.

Could you give us a quick primer on eugenics in America — how it started and how it ultimately ended?

The American eugenics movement really starts at the beginning of the 20th century on Long Island, in Cold Spring Harbor. It’s funded by some of the wealthiest families in the country, Rockefeller and Carnegie, and it really takes off like wildfire. Eugenics becomes taught in schools, it’s legislated all over the country, and the Supreme Court decides that eugenics sterilization is okay in 1927.

There’s really two things that kill American eugenics. One is that as the atrocities in Germany [are uncovered] — and more specifically, as America goes to war with Germany — eugenics gets a really bad name. Secondly, the very people that eugenicists were so terrified of, which were the waves of immigrants who were coming in from all over the place, but specifically from Eastern Europe, become a very powerful voting bloc, and so the politicians who had supported eugenics really run scared from it. That isn’t to say the ideas of eugenics don’t transform after the war because I think that they do, but they change names and they change tactics.

How did you become interested in this topic?

I had become aware of eugenics as a historical concept in 2001 or 2002. It just struck me, the idea that people in America were trying to breed a master race … how it seemed so similar to what was happening in Germany. I began doing research with a friend of mine and then a few years later I read Edwin Black’s book War Against the Weak.

When I read that book — it was so in-depth, it had so much research behind it, and it made the connection that German eugenics and American eugenics were really part of the same movement. German eugenics had its roots, its foundation, in the United States. That was a revelation. I said, I’ve got to make this movie. I ended up optioning the book from Edwin, and found a great producer, Peter Demas, and a couple years later, here we are.

What were some of the things that shocked you the most while you were making the film?

There’s so much. There was an institution in South Jersey called the Vineland Training School. People who were epileptic or had any other mental condition, migraine headaches — didn’t really matter, anything that was different from what was considered the norm — would be sent to these colonies. Around that area there was this kind of made-up family called the Kallikaks that was seen as this degenerate family that had been breeding and breeding for years in the Pine Barrens and it was thought that the offspring of this family were degenerates. A lot of the offspring ended up in this facility. And this was used in the United States to prove that basically inferiority would pass on through the blood.

When I was in Germany, I was watching all of these German propaganda films, and all of a sudden in German I hear somebody say, ‘Die, Kallikak family!’ They repeat this American myth, because it was really a myth, almost verbatim. All of a sudden it’s being used in Germany in their total destruction of everybody with disabilities. It was just this amazing connection where all of a sudden this American fable… in Germany was now being used for outright murder. That literally made me drop out of my chair in the screening room in the archives in Berlin.

Has anyone shared a personal story about the movement, something that happened to them a family member?

I showed the film recently in San Francisco and a woman stood up who was an Auschwitz survivor. She had contact with Joseph Mengele and she gave this really incredible testimonial that was highly complimentary for the film. We’ve had friends who’ve found out that their grandparents had been sterilized and they realized their mother or father had been adopted. When we were filming, I remember a woman came up who had a disability and we told her what we were doing and she started crying and said thank you for making this movie. Nobody is really concerned with these issues, nobody’s concerned with issues of the disabled. Perhaps the best audience we had was with a group of disability activists in New York at NYU who were just on fire, wanted to tell everybody that they wanted to promote the film, wanted everybody to see it. That’s the general reaction.

I would say 99 percent of the people who watch this movie say that A, I didn’t know about this, and B, everybody in world should see this movie, I want everyone to know about this. And that’s the point of the movie, we felt like this was a story that really hadn’t been told, and it can happen again anytime.

Is there anything you see happening today that seems along these same lines?

When you work and are immersed for this long in a subject like this you become hypersensitive to ways it may be reappearing. So I would say I’m not the best person to talk about that. What I hope is that people watch the film and are able to apply the facts of history and see that as a tool set they can apply to analyze contemporary events. So when you look at things like biotechnology and bioethics and reproductive technology and legislation that may be anti-immigrant or seems to be compassionate on a top level but then when you really think about it, is not compassionate … our film ends right after World War II, and I haven’t been able to do the research to be able to speak authoritatively on contemporary events, but I know that my judgment is so much richer because I’ve spent this time learning about this thing in history.

Do you have anything in your background that specifically connects you to this movement?

This is what becomes so interesting about it. The fact that I wear eyeglasses connects me to this. The fact that I get migraine headaches connects me to this. The fact that my wife and I are different races and that we have an interracial child connects me to this. This is not just about being part of a certain ethnic group. It was such a big movement, it affected so many people, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone in the audience that wouldn’t have been, in a very real way, terminated, that wouldn’t have been, in a very real way, denied the right to reproduce or to have a family. That’s how extensive eugenics was. It saw its ultimate climax in the world in the Holocaust, but that could have just been the beginning.

What kind of research does a project like this take, and what were some of the challenges you faced?

We had a team of researchers and I spent who knows how many weeks in archives in the United States and Germany collecting material. We ended up with dozens and dozens of books, journals and then primary source documents in the thousands. And a lot of that was me retracing Edwin’s steps, but he was more concerned with finding facts and information. I had to do a secondary search which was also a visual search. Where he needed thousands of facts, I needed thousands of pictures to support those facts.

It was just an enormous amount of organization and weeding out information and putting more in. I had a partner who came in, Richard Belfiore, who helped me take an about 140 page script down to 50 pages. But that was almost the easy part, because then we had to figure out, well how do we get all these images into the film as well? How do we tell a story with just images when really, there’s no video, there’s not much archival film from that time period? We had to make a film out of photographs and documents, thoughts and ideas, letters and charts.

War Against the Weak is your second film. What was the first?

8 Bit was my first film. That was a film about video games and artists that reappropriate old video games and make new art out of them. They make basically fine art out of pop art or commercial art, which was where video games originated. It premiered at MOMA in 2006 and has really played around the world. I got an email from Estonia the other day that said, ‘Can we show 8 Bit?’ People keep asking for it.

How did that project come about?

I graduated from NJCU in 2001 and started a production company, which was very much supported by the vice president of finance at the time, Howard Buxbaum. He was very into the idea of students or former students starting up businesses that would be affiliated with the university and utilize student help … and having a sort of symbiotic relationship between young entrepreneurs and the university. So we started in a converted bathroom at NJCU doing commercial video stuff for a few years, saved up a little bit of money and were able to produce our first film with a former professor of mine, Marcin Ramocki, who still teaches at NJCU. We started making this little short film about these musicians that played music with Nintendo Game Boy and that grew and grew and grew into a feature film.

After this screening, where else can people see War Against the Weak?

The best way to find it and to follow it is at watwmovie.com. We’re still hunting for distribution but we hope to release it in the spring on a limited theatrical basis and then it would be distributed to educational institutions shortly after that.

THE DETAILS

War Against the Weak screening; Thursday, November 18 at 7:30 pm; at NJCU’s Margaret Williams Theatre (Hepburn Hall), 2039 John F. Kennedy Blvd. A pre-screening reception will be held at 7 p.m. and a Q+A with Strawhand will follow the screening. Admission is free.

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