by Bryson, Bill
His tour, however, was having a much greater effect than he probably realized. Papers everywhere lovingly recorded his flying times between cities: Grand Rapids to Chicago, 2 hours 15 minutes; Madison to Minneapolis, 4 hours; St. Louis to Kansas City, 3 hours 45 minutes. For anyone who had ever traveled between any such pairs of places, these were magical times. Moreover, Lindbergh repeated these feats day after day, safely, punctually, routinely, without fuss or sweat, as if dropping in by air were the most natural and sensible way in the world to arrive at a place. The cumulative effect on people’s perceptions was profound. By the end of the summer, America was a nation ready to fly—quite a turnaround from four months earlier, when aviation for most people simply meant barnstormers at county fairs and the like, and the United States seemed unlikely ever to catch up with Europe. Whether Lindbergh knew it or not, his tour of America did far more to transform the future of aviation than his daring dash to Paris ever could.
The great irony is that by the time America was ready to take to the air properly, Charles Lindbergh would no longer be anybody’s hero.
• SEPTEMBER •
SUMMER’S END
A few Jews add strength and character to a country. Too many create chaos. And we are getting too many.
—CHARLES LINDBERGH
26
Of all the labels that were applied to the 1920s—the Jazz Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Age of Ballyhoo, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense—one that wasn’t used but perhaps should have been was the Age of Loathing. There may never have been another time in the nation’s history when more people disliked more other people from more directions and for less reason.
Bigotry was casual, reflexive, and well nigh universal. At The New Yorker, Harold Ross forbade the use of the term toilet paper on grounds of taste (it made him queasy), but he had nothing at all against nigger or darkie. In the week before Lindbergh’s flight to Paris, The New Yorker ran a cartoon with the immortally dismal line “Niggers all look alike to me.”
George S. Kaufman as a young man lost his job on a newspaper in Washington when the owner came in one night and said, “What’s that Jew doing in my city room?” Bert Williams, a black comedian who was described by W. C. Fields as “the funniest man I ever saw,” was beloved by millions and rich enough to rent a deluxe apartment in Manhattan, but was allowed to live there only if he agreed to confine himself to the service entrance and freight elevator when coming and going. At the Supreme Court, Justice James C. McReynolds was so prejudiced against Jews that he refused to speak or otherwise acknowledge fellow justice Louis Brandeis and made a point of studying papers or even reading a newspaper when Brandeis was addressing the court. He was similarly rude to President Harding’s assistant attorney general, Mabel Walker Willebrandt, because of her sex.
Nothing better captured the expansive spirit of detestation in the period than the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan. Until recently moribund, the Klan burst onto the national stage in the 1920s with a vigor and breadth of appeal that it had never had in its antebellum heyday. The Klan hated everybody, but it did so in ways strategically contrived to reflect regional biases, so that it focused on Catholics and Jews in the Midwest, Orientals and Catholics in the Far West, Jews and southern Europeans in the East, and blacks everywhere. At its peak, the Klan had five million members (some sources say eight million), and seventy-five members of Congress either belonged to or were openly associated with it. Several cities elected Klan mayors. Oklahoma and Oregon had Klan governors. In Oregon the Klan nearly succeeded in getting Catholic schools outlawed, and in many places Catholics were forbidden membership on school or hospital boards, and Catholic-owned businesses were boycotted.
For many, the Klan became almost as much a social organization as a political one. In Detroit, thousands of happy citizens attended a Christmas rally outside city hall, where a Santa Claus dressed in Klan regalia distributed presents to children by the light of a burning cross. In Indiana, a Klan picnic rally—or Klonklave, as they were numbingly known—featured a jousting tournament with men in Klan robes, and a tightrope walker, also in full regalia, carrying a cross in one hand and an American flag in the other, while doing stunts on a high wire.
Under the leadership of a flabby junior high school dropout named David C. Stephenson, the Klan especially thrived in Indiana. The state boasted 350,000 members; in some communities up to half the white men were fee-paying Klansmen. Fired up by Stephenson and his minions, Hoosiers became peculiarly receptive to wild anti-Catholic rumors. Many in the state believed that Catholics had poisoned President Harding and that priests at Notre Dame University in South Bend were stockpiling armaments in preparation for a Catholic uprising. In 1923 the most surreally improbable rumor of all emerged—that the pope planned to move his base of operations from the Vatican City to Indiana. According to several accounts, when residents of the town of North Manchester heard that the pope was on a particular train, 1,500 of them boarded it with a view to seizing the pontiff and breaking up his conspiracy. Finding no one recognizably papal, the mob turned its attentions to a traveling corset salesman, who was nearly dragged off to an unhappy fate until he managed to convince his tormentors that it was unlikely that he would try to stage a coup armed with nothing but a case of reinforced undergarments.
The Klan’s downfall was unexpectedly sudden, and it was the plump and unlovely Stephenson who brought it about. In March 1925, he took out on a date a young woman of good character named Madge Oberholtzer. To the extreme distress of her parents, Madge didn’t come home that night or the following night. When eventually Stephenson returned her, the young woman was in a dreadful condition. She had been beaten and savagely abused. Skin had been torn from her breasts and genitals. Her doctor and family learned that Stephenson had grown drunk and violent after collecting her, had forced her to go to a hotel, and there brutally and repeatedly raped her. In shame and desperation, Oberholtzer had swallowed a fatal dose of mercuric chloride. By the time she reached home doctors could do nothing for her. She took two weeks to die.
Stephenson was confident that his position as Klan head in Indiana would protect him from prosecution, and was astonished when he was convicted of kidnap, rape, and second-degree murder, and sentenced to life in prison. In revenge he released documents that exposed corruption at the highest levels in Indiana. The mayor of Indianapolis and the head of the Republican Party in the state were both jailed for taking payoffs. The governor should have been but escaped on a technicality. The entire Indianapolis City Council was dismissed and fined, and a prominent judge was impeached. The whole affair was so squalid and disgusting that Klan membership everywhere collapsed, and the Klan retreated into the shadows of American life. It was never a national force again.
Remarkably, the Ku Klux Klan was not the most dangerous outpost of bigotry in America in the period. That distinction belonged, extraordinary though it is to state, to a coalition of academics and scientists. Since early in the century, a large number of prominent and learned Americans had been preoccupied, often to the point of obsessiveness, with the belief that the country was filling up with dangerously inferior people and that something urgent must be done about it.
Dr. William Robinson, a leading New York physician, spoke for a vociferous minority when he declared that people of an inferior nature “have no right in the first instance to be born, but having been born, they have no right to propagate their kind.” W. Duncan McKim, also a physician and author of a book titled Heredity and Human Progress, proposed that “the surest, the simplest, the kindest, and most humane means for preventing reproduction among those whom we deem unworthy of the high privilege, is a gentle, painless death.”
The problem, as most saw it, was twofold. America was producing far too many defectives through careless and unrestricted breeding, while at the same time introducing almost limitless volumes of additional inferiority through unrestricted immigration from backward nations.
Nearly everyone had an especially dreaded r
ace. The writer Madison Grant disdained Jews because of their “dwarf stature, peculiar mentality and ruthless concentration on self-interest.” Frank J. Loesch, a member of a presidential commission on crime reform, thought the problem was Jews and Italians together, “with the Jews furnishing the brains and the Italians the brawn.” Charles B. Davenport, one of the most eminent scientists of his day, was more expansively dubious and listed Poles, Irish, Italians, Serbians, Greeks, and “Hebrews” as less intelligent and reliable, and more susceptible to depravity and crimes of violence, than people of sound Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic stock. These were not people, in Davenport’s view, who could be lifted out of their bad habits but were immutably condemned by their genes to be troublesome, destructive, and dull. They were creating an America that was “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex immorality.” Madison Grant forthrightly described what was happening to America as “race suicide.”
All these views were bundled together into the smart new science of eugenics, which may be simply defined as the scientific cultivation of superior beings. In most of the world, eugenics was an innocuous goal—a well-intentioned wish to produce healthier, stronger, smarter people—but in America eugenics took on a harsher cast. It led to the sinister belief that procreation should somehow be regulated and directed. As an official of the American Eugenics Society observed: “Americans take more care over the breeding of cattle and horses than of their own children.” Eugenics was used to justify enforced deportations, the introduction of restrictive covenants on where people could live, the suspension of civil liberties, and the involuntary sterilization of tens of thousands of innocent people. It resulted in the severe curtailment of immigration and its virtual elimination from certain parts of the world. It even led eventually, but more or less directly, to the downfall of Charles Lindbergh, the pilot who once could do no wrong.
The bible of negative eugenics was the fearsome and popular The Passing of the Great Race, by Madison Grant, a New York lawyer (by training, though he never practiced) and naturalist (by practice, but without training), which was first published in 1916. Grant took it as read that the only really good group of humans was what he called the “Nordic race,” by which he meant essentially all northern Europeans except the Irish. Europe divided into three tiers of being—Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean—which grew progressively degenerate as one moved south.
One obvious problem with Grant’s theory was that he had to explain how such wretched people had managed to produce the Athens of Plato and Socrates, the Roman Empire, the Renaissance, and so many other marvels of antiquity. Grant’s explanation was that in ancient Greece and Rome the ruling class was composed of Nordic Achaeans, who weren’t really Mediterranean at all, but were northern Europeans who had drifted south. All the great Renaissance artists, Grant maintained, were “of Nordic type … largely of Gothic and Lombard blood.” All others—the real Italians—were dull, stunted, and shifty, and were genetically condemned to remain forever so.
Grant believed that any degenerate genes introduced into the general population would not be diluted and made safe, but would permanently taint the whole. “The cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,” Grant grimly explained.
Although none of this was compatible with even the small amounts of genetics that were understood at the time, it appears that Grant was saying exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear. His book was praised by the American Historical Review, the Yale Review, and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the country’s leading anthropologist, wrote the introduction.
Among others supporting Grant’s views, in whole or in part, were the Yale economist Irving Fisher, the Harvard neuropathologist E. E. Southard, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard—the man whose committee condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death—the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, and Herbert Hoover, who had a lifelong antipathy to people with brown skin. In 1909, in a report for his employers, Hoover declared that black and Asian laborers should be avoided because they suffered from “a low mental order” and a pathological “lack of coordination and inability to take initiative.” Stressing his own firsthand experience, Hoover concluded that “one white man equals from two to three of the colored races, even in the simplest forms of mine work such as shoveling or tramming.” If Hoover modified these views in later years, he gave no evidence of it. In 1921, he was patron of a eugenics conference hosted by the American Museum of Natural History itself and inspired by The Passing of the Great Race.
For a time, the principles of negative eugenics, as they became known in America, were practically inescapable. At the Sesquicentennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1926, the American Eugenics Society had a stand with a mechanical counter showing that a person of inferior nature was born somewhere in the United States every forty-eight seconds, while “high-grade” persons came along only once every seven and a half minutes. The relative rates at which the counters revolved showed all too dramatically how swiftly the nation was being overwhelmed with inferiority. It was one of the most popular displays at the exhibition.
The spiritual headquarters for the eugenics movement in America was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), opened in 1909 in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s North Shore, and largely funded by the sort of wealthy people who wanted more innately superior beings like themselves and fewer of any other kind. (The property abutted the estate of the Tiffany family of jewelry renown.) The first director was Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist. Davenport believed eugenic explanations could be found for every aspect of the human condition—obesity, criminality, propensity to lie or cheat, even love of the sea. Under Davenport, the ERO also made several studies of the deleterious effects of racial interbreeding. As Davenport explained: “One often finds in mulattoes ambition and drive combined with low intelligence, so that the hybrid is unhappy, dissatisfied with his fate and rebellious.… A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people.” Davenport argued not just for the sterilization of the inferior and faulty, but for their castration, in order to remove desire as well as reproductive ability, just to be on the safe side.
Davenport, however, was the soul of enlightened compassion compared with his young protégé Harry H. Laughlin, who may have been the most lamentable person to achieve scientific respectability in America in the twentieth century. Born in 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Laughlin trained at the North Missouri State Normal School and worked as a teacher and school administrator after college, but then developed an interest in breeding and enrolled at Princeton to study biology. In 1910 he met Davenport, who was so taken with Laughlin’s zeal and devotion to eugenic purification that he made him superintendent of the ERO.
Laughlin’s credo was simple: “To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.” As journalist Edwin Black notes in his 2003 book, War Against the Weak, Laughlin’s plan of attack was threefold: “sterilization, mass incarceration and sweeping immigration restrictions.” In furtherance of these goals, Laughlin created the imposingly named, ferociously vengeful Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasm in the American Population, which had the self-assigned task of eradicating reproductive inferiority from America once and for all. Laughlin’s committee was chaired by David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, and included scientists and academics from many of America’s best universities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Chicago, among others.
The committee also included a brilliant but eccentric French surgeon, Alexis Carrel, from the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel’s extreme views on eugenics—which were in some respects little short of mad—would contribute significantly, even dangerously, to Charles Lindbergh’s opinions, but mercifully that was still some way off.
Laughlin, meanwhile, was tireless in his efforts to root out and limit human inferiority wherever it arose. The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization appointed him its expert adviser and assigned him the task of determining the comparative degeneracy of various ethnic groups. To persuade the members of how urgently reforms were needed, Laughlin filled the committee chamber with photographs of drooling mental defectives, all identified as recent immigrants, beneath a banner reading: “Carriers of the Germ Plasm of the Future American Population.”
Congress could not resist the authority of the committee or Laughlin’s horrifying propaganda, and it quickly pushed through the 1921 Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act followed by the 1924 National Origins Act. Together these ended America’s open-door immigration policy. By 1927, more people were being deported from Ellis Island than were coming in through it.
That more or less settled the problem of imported inferiority, but it left the issue of home-produced backwardness, of which there was a separate abundance.
Laughlin and his supporters turned their attention to that challenge with, if anything, even more enthusiasm. They conducted tests on large blocks of people and repeatedly produced unnerving results. They reported that up to 80 percent of all prisoners and half of servicemen were feebleminded. New York alone was calculated to contain as many as two hundred thousand mentally subnormal people. Altogether, it was believed, about one-third of the American population was dangerously backward.
The solution, in Laughlin’s view, was sterilization on a massive scale. He believed in sterilizing not merely the insane and mentally deficient but also orphans, tramps, paupers, the hard of hearing, and the blind—“the most worthless one-tenth of our present population,” as he put it with a certain conspicuous absence of compassion.