Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  For sheer poignancy—mixed with a strong dose of alarm—few articles could rival “The Village of a Thousand Souls,” published in the American Magazine in 1913. Arnold Gesell, who was then a junior professor at Yale, returned to his all-American hometown of Alma, Wisconsin. Gesell claimed to have found that about a quarter of the residents showed signs of feeblemindedness or insanity, and he called for eugenic measures, including isolating the feebleminded, to uplift his beleaguered hometown.

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  Eugenics and the mania over feeblemindedness arrived at a time when America was particularly receptive. The start of the twentieth century was an era of fast-paced, disruptive change. As rural residents fled farms and small towns, the United States was transforming from a predominantly rural nation to an urban, industrial one, and in the process community and family ties were breaking down. At the same time, immigrants were arriving in record numbers, dramatically altering the country’s religious, cultural, and racial makeup.

  These roiling changes caused considerable social anxiety and ushered in what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the Age of Reform.” Native-born, white, middle-class, Protestant Americans mobilized to put their own imprint on a nation in transition by uniting behind an array of causes. They fought corrupt urban political machines. They agitated for safer factories and against child labor. They campaigned for improved public education and for women’s rights. These reform campaigns were, one history of the period explained, a “response” to the “crisis” caused by the great changes the nation was undergoing—“a counter to these movements that threatened to transform American society in more fundamental ways.”

  If the age of reform was about the native-born, white, Protestant middle class trying to build a nation in its own image, eugenics fit right into the ethos of the era. The reformers believed in using intellectual tools, including science, to uplift—and purify—society, and this was just the sort of promise eugenics was holding out. The old-stock reformers could not prevent the country from urbanizing or spawning teeming immigrant neighborhoods, and they could not prevent the nation’s cultural and religious composition from changing. They could, however, do battle with what they were being told was an alarming rise in “the diseased, the deficient, and the demented.”

  The eugenicists matched the demographic profile of the reformers of the era. Both the leaders of the eugenics movement and the rank and file were largely middle-class, well educated, white, and Protestant. Hofstadter observed that professionals and intellectuals were in the forefront of the reform movements of the era: they were the sort, he noted, who “see the drift of events” and then “throw their weight on the side of what they feel is progress and reform.” So it was with eugenics—it appealed, in particular, to academics and professionals, including lawyers, doctors, social workers, and journalists.

  In the legal profession, support for eugenics came from the very top. When Connecticut enacted the nation’s first eugenic law in 1895—a ban on certain marriages—the American Bar Association’s president praised it as a necessary “practical deterrent.” James C. Carter used his president’s address that year to declare that government must “prevent unhealthy progeny” to protect “future generations from the evil operation of the laws of heredity.”

  The highest echelons of the medical profession also largely supported the eugenics movement. At the American Academy of Medicine’s first meeting of the twentieth century, in June 1900, its president called for laws to prevent, as the title of his address put it, “Crime, Pauperism, and Mental Deficiency.” Dr. G. Hudson Makuen argued that medicine as it was currently practiced was counterproductive. “We prolong the lives of weaklings,” he said, “and make it possible for them to transmit their characteristics to future generations.”

  Many religious leaders actively promoted eugenics to their flocks and to the nation. The Very Reverend Walter Taylor Sumner, dean of Chicago’s Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, announced in 1912 that he would only marry couples with a “certificate of health” from a reputable physician. A few months later, the New York Times reported that two hundred Chicago clergy adopted a resolution “urging pastors to direct their energies toward creating public opinion indorsing Dean Sumner’s plan.” Other religious leaders offered their houses of worship. New York’s West End Presbyterian Church was an organizing center, with the Reverend Dr. A. E. Keigwin convening his fellow Protestant clergy to “push a eugenics campaign.”

  Women were active in all of the movements during the age of reform and were well represented in the ranks of the eugenicists. Many influential feminists supported the cause, including the writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman and the birth control crusader Margaret Sanger. Sanger lectured to a Vassar College audience on the importance of reducing “the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable.”

  Women were particularly influential at the grassroots level. In the early twentieth century, women were largely excluded from politics and public policy—they could not vote until the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920. Many legislators, however, considered eugenics, with its focus on reproductive issues, a proper realm for female guidance. Women were among the most active lobbyists for eugenic laws of all kinds. The historian Edward J. Larson, in his study of southern eugenics, concluded that in every state in the Deep South federated women’s clubs played a decisive role in establishing eugenically segregated institutions for the mentally retarded.

  Eugenics found support across the ideological spectrum. In addition to the feminists, some of the era’s most outspoken progressives endorsed some manner of eugenics. Theodore Roosevelt, the most famous progressive of all, was characteristically unreserved in his beliefs. A few years after leaving the White House, he wrote a magazine article declaring, “I wish very much that the wrong people could be prevented entirely from breeding.” He insisted that “feeble-minded persons” should be “forbidden to leave offspring behind them.”

  At the same time, eugenics exerted a strong appeal to conservatives. Many were drawn to its insistence that there was a natural elite, and that differences among people could not be eradicated simply by improving their environment. Eugenics offered what purported to be a scientific answer to the progressive argument that the disadvantaged could be saved if only they were provided with the right government programs. Conservatives could point to the writings of thinkers like Galton and Goddard, who believed that helping the genetically disadvantaged would only increase the number of criminals and welfare cases.

  There was almost always a strong current of racism and anti-Semitism to the eugenics movement, and bigots of all kinds were drawn to it. Many of the most prominent eugenicists were openly white supremacist and saw racism as central to their beliefs. In Hereditary Genius, Galton flatly asserted that whites were superior to the “African negro,” a race that he asserted contained a particularly large number of “half-witted men,” and he claimed that Jews were “specialized for a parasitic existence.” Paul Popenoe, one of the American movement’s leading theoreticians, wrote in his 1918 book Applied Eugenics that if races can be judged by their original contributions to the world’s civilizations “the Negro race must be placed very near zero on the scale.”

  Although eugenics was popular with many southern racists, who saw in it a scientific rationale for the Jim Crow system, eugenicists in the South generally focused their attention on whites. Their primary interest was in “preserving” the white race from decline. Southern eugenicists were particularly concerned with the lowest economic class, people often disparagingly referred to as “poor white trash,” who were seen as repositories of the worst of the white race’s germplasm. One Louisiana doctor spoke for many white elites when he asked, in 1917, “What language can express the humiliation we should feel at seeing [our] race, physically, mentally and morally, slowly going to decay?” Whites were, he feared, “a race, proud of its lineage, boastful of its achieveme
nt, . . . and withal rotting at its roots!”

  Blacks were victims of eugenics, and they were sterilized—in some cases in the worst way, by prison or hospital doctors operating without legal authority. But southern eugenicists in the early twentieth century were more concerned about keeping blacks as far as possible from whites. On the same day Virginia enacted its eugenic sterilization law, it adopted the Racial Integrity Act of 1924. Like other southern states, Virginia already prohibited sexual relations between races, but the new law was stricter. It defined every person in Virginia as either “white” or “colored” according to the “one drop” rule, which held that any nonwhite ancestry made someone nonwhite. Southern eugenicists believed that if they strictly policed the race line, any hereditary defects of blacks would remain with them—and not corrupt the white race.

  Eugenics reached into every corner of the nation, and became a popular subject in the mass media—often intermixed with strong strands of “scientific” racism. Mass-market books spread the message to a vast reading audience, none more so than Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race, which argued in 1916 that the “Nordic” race was superior to other races—and responsible for all progress—but also in peril. “We Americans must realize that the altruistic ideals which have controlled our social development during the past century, and the maudlin sentimentalism that has made America ‘an asylum for the oppressed,’ are sweeping the nation toward a racial abyss.” In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard published The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, which painted a portrait of the impending collapse of the superior white civilization in the face of the global rise of people of color. Stoddard invoked “the vision of a ‘Pan-Colored’ alliance for the overthrow of white hegemony at a single stroke—a dream which would turn into a nightmare of race-war beside which the late struggle in Europe would seem . . . child’s play.” He warned: “We stand at a crisis—the supreme crisis of the ages.”

  Grant’s and Stoddard’s racist eugenic arguments resonated strongly. In a 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, President Warren G. Harding praised Stoddard’s book, which had fourteen printings in its first three years. “Whoever will take the time to read and ponder Mr. Lothrop Stoddard’s book on The Rising Tide of Color,” the president declared, “must realize that our race problem here in the United States is only a phase of a race issue the whole world confronts.” In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, the wealthy and brutish Tom Buchanan, husband of Daisy, holds forth on how “civilization’s going to pieces” and cites “‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard.” The reference is to The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy, and critics have noted that the name “Goddard” is an amalgam of the names “Grant” and “Stoddard,” as well as being the name of a prominent real-life eugenicist.

  National magazines carried the eugenic message to a broader public and patiently explained the science of hereditary defects to a lay audience. A 1915 Atlantic Monthly article that ran under the headline “Some Misconceptions of Eugenics” instructed that by promoting the “most desirable” strains and “eliminating the inferior breeds,” eugenics had the prospect of producing “untold benefits to society.” In the early days of eugenics, such articles were ubiquitous: according to one survey, from 1910 to 1914, general-interest magazines ran more articles on eugenics than on three of the era’s biggest social problems—slums, tenements, and living standards—combined.

  Major newspapers covered eugenics no less extensively, on both their news and editorial pages. The New York Times gave respectful coverage to the eugenicists’ agenda. “Courses in Eugenics Increase in Colleges of This Country,” the paper reported, citing figures from the American Eugenics Society, an organization it described as having “for its aim the betterment of racial standards throughout the country.” At times, newspapers were more expressly supportive. When Louisiana’s legislature was considering a major eugenic law, the New Orleans Times-Picayune gave its endorsement. In several editorials, it insisted the bill was not a “wild eugenic scheme” or a violation of human rights. It was, the editorial board insisted, “simply a step to protect the community and the human race against the . . . unfit.”

  Religious leaders spread the word in articles for religious journals and through sermons from the pulpit, including ones they entered in the American Eugenics Society’s popular Eugenics Sermon Contest. The Reverend Harry F. Ward, a founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service and a professor of Christian Ethics at Union Theological Seminary, wrote in the magazine Eugenics that Christians and eugenicists were fighting a common battle because both were concerned with the “challenge of removing the causes that produce the weak.”

  The Reverend Phillips Endecott Osgood, the rector of St. Mark’s Church in Minneapolis, used metallurgical imagery to urge people of faith to purge “the “dross” of humanity. “The Refiner’s Fire” won the 1926 Eugenics Sermon Contest and was reprinted in the Homiletic Review. Many years later, the United Methodist Church would formally apologize for the prominent role its churches and pastors played in the eugenics movement. “As the Eugenics Movement came to the United States,” it said regretfully, “the churches, especially the Methodists, the Presbyterians, and the Episcopalians, embraced it.”

  There were high-profile eugenics conferences, such as the Second International Eugenics Congress, which convened in 1921 at New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The museum was a welcoming site for the gathering—its president, Henry Fairfield Osborn, was a cofounder, along with Madison Grant, of the eugenic Galton Society. On the opening day, Osborn instructed a standing-room-only crowd that “the selection, preservation, and multiplication of the best heredity is a patriotic duty of the first importance.” The Museum of Natural History installed special eugenic exhibitions, including ones on race, which taught that “humanity is composed of many races differing widely in physical, mental and moral qualities.”

  There were eugenic presentations at less lofty gatherings as well, including state and county fairs. The Kansas Free Fair of 1920 had a contest that judged human families in the same way as animals, and soon the American Eugenics Society was sponsoring “fitter family” competitions at fairs across the country. A volunteer who helped organize the contests said that when fairgoers wondered about the word “Eugenics” over the entrance to a building on the fairgrounds, “we say, ‘While the stock judges are testing the Holsteins, Jerseys, and Whitefaces in the stock pavilion, we are judging the Joneses, Smiths, and the Johnsons.’” Families who entered these competitions had to submit to medical and psychiatric examinations and take intelligence tests. Like the livestock, the winning families were awarded prizes. The “fitter family” contests were enormously popular and gave the movement a boost. “All the newspapers were glad to cooperate,” a leader of the American Eugenics Society later recalled. “No activities of the society got so much publicity.”

  Eugenics even found its way into the nation’s movie houses in the form of a feature-length horror film. In 1917 William Randolph Hearst’s media company produced The Black Stork, a fictionalized version of the story of Chicago obstetrician Harry Haiselden. Haiselden became famous for allowing a baby with serious birth defects to die without treatment. In the film, in which the real Haiselden starred, a doctor saves the life of a “defective” baby, who grows up to be a disabled adult and returns to kill the doctor who “condemned” him to “this life of torture and shame.” Fortunately, the baby’s grim adulthood is only a vision from God, and the mother is able to allow her defective newborn to die before he grows up to be a threat to society.

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  While eugenics gained strength across the United States, a fundamental problem remained: it was not clear how the movement would achieve its goals. Galton and other eugenics pioneers talked about preventing the “unfit” from reproducing, but they were vague on the details. Early eugenicists in the United States were equally unclear ab
out how to proceed—an imprecision that was driven in large part by the lack of good options.

  The first tactic that eugenicists tried was one that struck many as barbaric: forced castration. In 1855 Gideon Lincecum, a Texas physician, drafted a bill to castrate criminals. Lincecum had no reservations about the procedure. “Did you never see [a] eunuch?” he wrote to a friend. Lincecum said he had known five, including one that he castrated himself, a “degraded drunken sot.” Lincecum said that he performed the operation “in a kind of youthful frolic,” but castration “cured him.” The legislature did not take the matter so lightly. The bill “occasioned a smart amount of angry discussion,” Lincecum later recalled, and was referred to the committee that supervised cattle issues, where it died.

  In 1897 the Michigan legislature considered a bill authorizing “asexualization,” as it called castration, of inmates of the Michigan Home for the Feeble Minded and Epileptic and certain classes of criminals. The bill’s sponsors had great hopes, but castration struck too many members of the general public as unseemly and cruel. Dr. W. R. Edgar, a Michigan state representative who sponsored the bill, blamed the state’s “sentimentalists” for its defeat.

  In the absence of laws, some doctors at state institutions started to perform castrations on their own authority. In the 1890s Dr. F. Hoyt Pilcher, head of the Kansas State Asylum for Idiotic and Imbecile Youth, castrated forty-four boys and men and performed hysterectomies on fourteen girls and women. Dr. Pilcher’s methods drew opposition, including from a local paper that reported his activities under the headline “Mutilation by the Wholesale Practiced at the Asylum.” In the end, public opposition forced Dr. Pilcher to stop.