96 eugenics not only combatants but against the civilian population The Italians also bombed Red Cross stations, hospitals, ambulances, and civilian targets In a way, the air attacks on the Abyssinians prefigured not only Guernica but later Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London On the continental scale, the war accelerated the political decisions and rivalries in Europe It destroyed the good will that had existed between Britain and Mussolini’s Fascist government The crisis surrounding the war highlighted and increased the mutual suspicion between France and Britain That impression was reinforced at Munich in 1938, leading Adolf Hitler and Mussolini into assumptions that would lead them to war in 1939 and 1940 The alienation of Italy from its former allies and Europe at large brought it closer to Hitler’s Germany At the same time it deepened the contempt that Hitler and Mussolini had for the western powers, in large part because of their inability to anything constructive Finally, it signaled the effective end of the League of Nations as a body capable of protecting small nations from aggression and preventing aggressive war There had been defections from the league at least as far back as the 1920s based on smaller nations stating that the league was useless in protecting them The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and the invasion of Abyssinia only demonstrated and reinforced the perceived weaknesses of the league While the league could point to accomplishments in areas such as improving health of people in poorer nations, it could not stop a war Further reading: Andall, Jacqueline, and Derek Duncan, eds Italian Colonialism: Legacy and Memory Oxford: Peter Lang, 2005; Ben-Ghiat, Ruth, and Mia Fuller, eds Italian Colonialism New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005; Lamb, Richard Mussolini as Diplomat: Il Duce’s Italy on the World Stage New York: Fromm International, 1999; Larebo, Haile M The Building of an Empire: Italian Land Policy and Practice in Ethiopia, 1935-1941 New York: Oxford University Press, 1994; Mockler, Anthony Haile Selassie’s War New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003; Sbacchi, Alberto Legacy of Bitterness: Ethiopia and Fascist Italy, 1935-1941 Lawrenceville, NJ: Red Sea Press, 1997 Robert Stacy eugenics Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term and concept of eugenics in 1883 Eugenics, often defined as “well-born,” was an effort to apply Darwinian evolution and Gregor Mendel’s recently recognized genetic discoveries to the physical, mental, and moral improvement of human beings Eugenics gained many supporters in the progressive-era United States, Canada, and much of Europe But the concept was riddled with class and racial biases that inflicted harm on thousands of supposedly “inferior” humans When the excesses of Adolf Hitler’s World War II eugenics programs became known, this effort at human engineering fell into disrepute Galton was a respected scientist and statistician, but his eugenics notions were based less on evolution than on Social Darwinism, a philosophy that conveniently justified growing inequities in industrializing societies Nations could no longer wait for evolution to weed out the weak and stupid; rather, experts would facilitate the process of improving the race, by which most eugenicists meant white northern Europeans Positive eugenics tried to encourage “superior” men and women to produce superior offspring (The Galtons were childless.) Negative eugenics went much further It proposed to discourage “defective” humans from reproducing at all Soon, eugenics agencies and research facilities were springing up A eugenics laboratory, later named in Galton’s honor, was founded at London’s University College in 1904 In the United States Charles Davenport created a Eugenics Record Office on Long Island U.S president Theodore Roosevelt, fearing “race suicide,” heartily approved of this burgeoning movement to weed out the “unfit.” The state of Indiana in 1907 was the first to pass a eugenics sterilization law Buck v Bell, a eugenics sterilization case from Virginia, came before the U.S Supreme Court in 1927 Speaking for eight of the nine justices, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., ruled in favor of the state Carrie Buck, he noted, “is a feeble-minded white woman the daughter of a feeble-minded mother and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child,” adding, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By 1933 28 states had sterilized more than 16,000 unconsenting women, men, and children In Canada interest in eugenics peaked among English speakers during the Great Depression, when the poor and sick seemed an impossible burden The Soviet Union and many European nations also promoted fitter families while trying to minimize the “unfit.” Everywhere the poor and uneducated, racial and ethnic minorities, and criminals were overwhelmingly beneficiaries of “genetic cleansing.” But none took eugenics as far as Nazi