The Genius Factory

by David Plotz

  It was a cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, who transformed these anxious theories into a new “science” of eugenics. Galton, an eccentric and adventurer, was obsessed with measuring anything that could be measured. He amassed weather data and composed Britain’s first weather maps. He pioneered the use of fingerprinting. And in the 1860s, he set out to measure human achievement. Galton’s 1869 book, Hereditary Genius, counted and classified Britain’s most accomplished men and showed that they were very often related to one another. Successful fathers had successful sons. This, Galton claimed, proved that God-given abilities were passed from one generation to the next. (It did not concern Galton that in Victorian England, advantages of birth, wealth, and education might have given the sons of famous men a career boost.)

  Galton named his new science “eugenics,” an invented word based on the Greek for “well born.” For Galton, the goal of eugenics was to increase genius. The best people must be prodded to reproduce, because their children’s natural gifts would improve Britain. Galton’s acolytes, however, immediately focused on the dark reverse of his theory: If the rich are rich because they are endowed with natural abilities, the poor must be poor because they are endowed with natural inabilities. Why were there so many poor criminals, imbeciles, drunks, epileptics, and morons? Why were the poor so shiftless? Why were the poor so . . . poor? Because they were naturally weak. “The taint is in the blood.”

  The British talked plenty about eugenics, but it was can-do Americans who converted Galton’s theory into dismal practice. Americans adopted eugenics with a convert’s zeal. In the United States, eugenics quickly merged with racial anxiety: blacks and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—that is, Negroes, Jews, Papists—were threatening to overwhelm America’s white, Protestant, northern European elite.

  Eugenics was a way to fight back. With vigorous American entrepreneurship, eugenicists took Galton’s philosophy, spiced it up with a dollop of Mendelian genetics, and turned it into an aggressive, impolite, and wildly successful national crusade to preserve the American “germ plasm.” In 1910, Charles Davenport opened the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman—the richest families in America supplied the funds for it. Davenport and his assistants scoured America in search of the “unfit.” They hunted for albinos, the Amish, epileptics, mental patients, and criminals and cataloged their supposed genetic weaknesses on note cards. (Eventually, the ERO would collect 750,000 of the cards.) Anthropologists wrote case studies of depraved families. The Jukeses of New York were the subject of not one but two books detailing the family’s array of criminals, lunatics, and imbeciles. Eugenicists gave new, allegedly scientific intelligence tests to immigrants at Ellis Island and discovered that 80 percent of them qualified as “feeble-minded.”

  Americans—that is, white upper- and middle-class Americans—took to eugenics like a cult. University presidents, academics, congressmen, businessmen, and good society everywhere embraced the creed. Eugenics was proselytized by everyone from Ivy League professors to the KKK. By the late 1920s, 20,000 college students a year were taking eugenics courses. Eugenics assumed the trappings of a religion: Eugenicists proposed a “Decalogue of Science”—a revised, eugenic Ten Commandments. The American Eugenics Society sponsored eugenics sermon contests and issued a Eugenics Catechism:

  Q: What is the most precious thing in the world?

  A: The human germ plasm.

  American eugenics leaders weren’t satisfied with merely identifying the unfit. Neutralizing them was the goal. The eugenicists persuaded legislatures to write laws preventing “mental defectives” from marrying. They won passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which choked off the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The eugenicists flirted with euthanasia: in 1915, Chicago doctor Harry Haiselden was lionized when he refused to operate on a “defective” newborn, who quickly died. The Black Stork, a movie about (and starring) Haiselden, became a national sensation, playing for a decade.

  The American eugenicists’ most important cause was sterilization. How they longed to cut! They thought practically everyone should get the knife: the “feebleminded,” alcoholics, epileptics, paupers, criminals, the insane, the weak, the deformed, the blind, the deaf, and the mute—and their extended families. Of course, most of the purportedly genetic ailments developed by eugenicists were not, in fact, genetic in origin. And even if they had been genetic, sterilization would have been a hopelessly bad cure for them. It would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic diseases. But eugenicists didn’t stop to do the math.

  Once surgical vasectomy was perfected at the turn of the twentieth century, the sterilizers got to work. In 1907, Indiana passed the first law allowing the forced sterilization of the feebleminded. By 1917, fifteen states had legalized eugenic sterilization. By the 1930s, a majority of states mandated the sterilization of the unfit. Daniel Kevles’s superb history In the Name of Eugenics quotes Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker, the rare public official who opposed a sterilization law. When a political crowd got rowdy on him, Pennypacker retorted, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”

  Despite state laws, sterilization remained constitutionally murky. But to its opponents, it was a cruel and unusual punishment. To supporters it was an essential public health measure. In 1927, eugenicists finally pushed a case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Buck v. Bell concerned eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck, who had been committed to Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. The state, having declared her an imbecile, was proposing to sterilize her. Under Virginia law, three generations of a family had to be feebleminded before sterilization was permitted. Carrie’s mother, Emma, also held at the colony, was classified as feebleminded. Carrie made two defective generations. The state then set out to prove that Carrie’s seven-month-old daughter was also a moron, thus establishing a third generation. A Red Cross worker testified that the infant had “a look” that was “not quite normal” about her. That was enough for the Court, which voted 8–1 to sterilize Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision, which likened sterilization to castration. Holmes’s words still sting: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

  After Buck v. Bell, sterilization became common. Virginia, one of the most enthusiastic states, made raids into Appalachia, rounded up families of “misfit” hillbillies and dragged them down to the asylum operating room. By the end of the 1930s, more than 35,000 Americans had been forced under the knife. Another 25,000 were sterilized before the practice finally petered out in the 1960s. The most unfortunate victims of the mills were children who “voluntarily” submitted to sterilization. In War Against the Weak, Edwin Black quotes a transcript of one such child’s “consent”:

  DOCTOR: Do you like movies?

  PATIENT: Yes, sir.

  DOCTOR: Do you like cartoons?

  PATIENT: Yes, sir.

  DOCTOR: You don’t mind being operated on, do you?

  PATIENT: No, sir.

  DOCTOR: Then you can go ahead.

  Americans cheerfully exported their bloody-minded eugenic ideas to the world. German eugenicists were particularly captivated by the American notion of Nordic supremacy. Germans published textbooks based on American ideas, and Adolf Hitler read them. He wrote fan letters to leading American eugenicists, telling Madison Grant, for example, that his book The Passing of the Great Race was his “bible.”

  The purported science of American eugenics helped Hitler medicalize and sanitize his hatred, making it palatable for a mass audience. When Hitler took power, he imposed draconian sterilization laws of the sort that his American
teachers had only dreamed of. In only three years, the Nazis sterilized 225,000 Germans. When the war arrived, sterilization degenerated into “mercy killing”—the outright murder of tens of thousands of asylum residents. The eugenic murders were the prelude to, and inspiration for, the Holocaust. Nazi eugenic enthusiasm flourished even in the death camps, as Josef Mengele and his ilk conducted barbaric experiments on twins and other unfortunates in the name of gene science.

  The Great Depression had fostered a skepticism about eugenics in the United States. Those Carnegies and Rockefellers who ruined the nation—we’re supposed to believe they’re our genetic superiors? Hitler’s crimes sealed the case against eugenics. Disgraced by the war, the sterilizers and race theorists shrank from public attention.

  Even as America had been sterilizing its citizens, it had also been flirting with a more innocuous, almost goofy, form of eugenics. Since Galton, eugenics had followed two tracks. “Negative” eugenics—with all the grimness the name suggested—stopped marriages and compelled sterilization to stop the “unfit” from breeding. Negative eugenics was state-sponsored and brutal. But “positive” eugenics took a milder approach. Like Galton himself, the positive eugenicists didn’t worry much about punishing the unfit; instead they sought to increase the number of outstanding people. Philosophically, positive and negative eugenics were identical: both embraced the fiction that white Protestants were genetically superior to everyone else; both were founded on a terror of immigrants and blacks; both held that the eugenics crisis was man’s greatest challenge. And many eugenicists believed in both positive and negative tactics. But when it came to action, positive eugenics was essentially harmless.

  While negative eugenics was goose-stepping toward the gas chamber, the positive eugenicists were embarking on more innocent projects. Popular textbooks instructed young women in their obligation to marry eugenically fit men. Bright young things were warned against the trendy new practice of contraception, because America needed more good, healthy babies. Teddy Roosevelt, an enthusiast for positive eugenics, declared that “the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the good citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.” Six children, TR averred, was the right number for preventing “race suicide,” four the bare minimum.

  In classic American style, the positive eugenicists turned the crusade into a competition. In 1920, the Kansas Free Fair hosted the first “Fitter Family Contest.” Twenty families entered, and trained eugenicists gave them psychiatric evaluations and intelligence tests. The winning family was paraded around the grounds like prize cattle. Soon the American Eugenics Society was sponsoring “human stock” competitions at fairs all around the country. Winners were awarded a medal on which was inscribed: “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”

  The most durable idea in positive eugenics was the dream of turning outstanding men into reproductive machines. The roots of this idea were ancient. In her excellent book Quest for Perfection: The Drive to Breed Better Human Beings, Gina Maranto writes that in fifth-century B.C. Sparta, a husband could dragoon one of the city’s finest young men to impregnate his wife in order to produce “well-born children.” Socrates advised in The Republic that the state should breed its citizens like horses, assigning the best men and women to reproduce.

  When eugenics took hold in Europe in the 1880s, Maranto notes, the notion of putting the finest men out to stud was revived. Count Georges Vacher de Lapouge proposed that “a very small number of males of absolute perfection” be used to father all children. Lapouge and other eugencists were mesmerized by the male reproductive capacity. A woman could bear only one child in a year, but a man might father hundreds every day. It was enough to make eugenicists giddy: Why not a whole nation of Pasteurs or Franklins? This mathematical conception of male fertility combined with a mechanical conception of female fertility: women were “receptacles” for children. The product was a potent, if rather icy, vision of the future: the genius factory.

  The modern paradigm of the genius factory was laid out by J.B.S. Haldane in a weird little tract entitled Daedalus. Haldane, a Brit and Marxist, was one of the twentieth century’s great scientists; he forged the connection between Mendelian genetics and evolution. Daedalus, published in 1923, was a scientific prophecy that looked back from the year 2073. Haldane predicted that 1923’s primitive eugenics would develop into sophisticated “ectogenesis”: eventually, children would be bred in test tubes using sperm and eggs selected from only the best men and women of the age. Sexual love would wither, but at what benefit! Men would be raised to gods.

  (Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World as a rebuke to Daedalus. In Huxley’s dystopia, factory breeding didn’t liberate mankind; it chilled emotion and calcified class divisions.)

  For a young American scientist named Hermann Muller, Daedalus was a revelation. Muller would be the bridge between the negative eugenics and airy Daedalus-style philosophizing of the 1920s and the practical schemes of Robert Graham in the 1980s. Melancholic, attention-seeking, and brilliant, Muller was one of America’s first outstanding geneticists. As a junior researcher at the University of Texas in the 1920s, Muller proved that X-rays caused genetic mutations in fruit flies, a discovery that would win him the 1946 Nobel Prize in Medicine. In 1933, the socialist Muller moved to Leningrad to live out his ideals. In the USSR, he drafted a Daedalus-inspired eugenic manifesto, Out of the Night: A Biologist’s View of the Future.

  In Out of the Night, Muller said that after America’s socialist revolution, real eugenics could remake the nation. In a postrevolutionary society, Muller argued, Americans would surely be willing to subordinate their selfish reproductive desires to the common good. A cadre of the best men would be enlisted to be fathers of all mankind. These men would possess the two most valuable human traits: intelligence and “comradeliness”—Muller’s catchall term for cooperativeness, good nature, and altruism.

  In the current capitalist society, Muller conceded, attempting to breed with the best men would flop. Thanks to distorted American values, women would pick the wrong guys—don’t they always?—producing “a population tomorrow composed of the maximum number of Billy Sundays, Valentinos, Jack Dempseys, Babe Ruths, and even Al Capones.” But in a socialist utopia, women would go for Mr. Right (or, rather, Mr. Left). “It would be possible for the majority of the population to become of the innate quality of such men as Lenin, Newton, Leonardo, Pasteur, Beethoven, Omar Khayyam, Pushkin, Sun Yat Sen, Marx.” In a few generations, Muller claimed, eugenic sperm banks would enable the number of great men and women to multiply a hundredfold.

  Certainly, Muller acknowledged, some people might hesitate at this fundamental change in marriage, but in the end, “how many women, in an enlightened community devoid of superstitious taboos and of sex slavery, would be eager and proud to bear and rear a child of Lenin or Darwin!”

  To modern eyes, Out of the Night reads almost like a parody in its invocation of Lenin as the ideal sperm donor, its misplaced hope in socialist revolution, its preposterous underestimation of the male ego, and its view of science as a benevolent God, one that can reverse evolution with a flick of its hand. Yet it was when reading Out of the Night that I finally began to understand the Nobel sperm bank as something other than a lark. To Muller and his acolyte Robert Graham, this genius factory was nothing less than the most important project of mankind, because it was the only possible salvation of a genetically doomed world. Out of the Night was the scaffolding of the Nobel Prize sperm bank, its scientific logic, its animating zeal.

  It didn’t impress Muller’s Soviet sponsors, however. He sent it with a flattering note to Stalin, who loathed it. For that and other reasons, life in the Soviet Union became impossible for Muller, and he fled back to the West lest he be purged. Eventually he settled into a professorship at the University of Indiana.

  Despite the disgrace of eugenics by Nazism, the idea of the genius factory continued to entice Muller. With the 1949 discovery of how to freeze and thaw sperm,
eugenic sperm banks finally seemed practical. Discarding the socialist idealism of Out of the Night, Muller concocted a new justification for the genius factory—a sales pitch for a nuclear age. Muller, whose Nobel-winning experiments had made him the world authority on radiation and mutation, argued that a buildup of atmospheric radiation was altering human DNA at an alarming rate, a rate much faster than evolution could adjust to. Humanity was dooming itself to slow genetic decline as we slowly accumulated bad mutations. The remedy: to freeze the seed of the world’s best men in lead-shielded tanks, and use their healthy DNA, instead of our radiation-weakened strands, to breed the next generation.

  Muller outlined his scheme for what he called “germinal choice” in a 1961 Science magazine article. This proposed a different kind of eugenics than he had preached in Out of the Night. No longer was he calling for the state to squirt Lenin seed into women at government filling stations. Now eugenics would be private and voluntary. Families would decide for themselves whether to have mediocre children of their own or glorious ones from the genius bank.

  Muller’s “germinal repositories” restored some credibility to eugenics. George Bernard Shaw sent a couple hundred dollars in support. Even Aldous Huxley liked the notion, because there was no Brave New World problem of state compulsion. Then, in spring 1963, Muller received a manuscript and a note from a man he had never heard of, Robert Graham. Graham asked Muller to write an introduction to his book, The Future of Man. Muller read the manuscript and didn’t much like it: Graham seemed to care only that sperm donors be brilliant and was indifferent to Muller’s belief that they should also be altruistic. Still, Muller suggested some changes to Graham, who took the edits graciously. More important, Muller recognized that Graham was a valuable ally. This was not merely because Graham shared Muller’s ideas about impending genetic disaster. It was because Graham shared Muller’s ideas and was rich. Muller had been talking about a genius sperm bank for a generation. In Graham, Muller found the man who could make it happen.