Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Davenport had traveled to England years earlier and met Francis Galton, emerging from the audience as a disciple. Davenport pursued his interest in eugenics at the American Breeders’ Association. The organization, which would be the setting of his historic meeting with Harry Laughlin, had an unusual mission and unconventional membership. It sought to bring together academic genetics scholars like Davenport with “practical breeders” who had developed their insights “at the feeding trough, at the meat, butter, and wool scale, on the race track, and at the prize ring.”

  The Breeders’ Association’s members believed they were on the brink of achieving something great. “Science is taking hold of the forces of heredity as it has hold of the forces of mechanics,” an editorial in American Breeders Magazine declared, “and the Twentieth Century bids fair to be the century of breeding.” The organization’s interest, like that of so many people working in the field, was rapidly moving toward the genetics—and breeding—of humans.

  The American Breeders’ Association became one of the first prominent American organizations to study eugenics. It formed a Committee on Eugenics with a distinguished membership. The committee chairman was David Starr Jordan, Stanford University’s first president, and its members included the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who was conducting research on hereditary deafness. Davenport served as secretary, and in that capacity he organized a subcommittee on the heredity of feeblemindedness.

  Increasingly, Davenport was leaving animal breeding and shifting his focus to eugenics research and advocacy. At a Breeders’ Association meeting in Omaha in 1909, he delivered a speech arguing for government policies to improve the nation’s genetic stock. Rational, scientific measures were needed, he insisted, “to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm.” Davenport persuaded the Breeders’ Association to elevate the Committee on Eugenics to a “section,” putting it on an equal footing with the Animal and Plant Sections.

  In that same year, Davenport published his first major book on eugenics. In Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, he contended that “three or four percent of our population is a fearful drag on our civilization.” Once again, he called for strong government action. “Society must protect itself,” he wrote. “As it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.”

  Davenport ended his short book with a “Plan for Further Work,” which included a plea to the nation’s philanthropists to fund increased research. “Vastly more effective than ten million dollars to ‘charity’ would be ten millions to Eugenics,” he insisted. Any wealthy person who contributed his money to “redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and suffering,” he wrote, “would be the world’s wisest philanthropist.”

  Davenport’s appeal was strategically timed. He was in the process of trying to raise money to create a center for eugenics, and he was looking for what he regarded as wise philanthropists. Davenport approached Mrs. E. H. Harriman, the widow of the railroad magnate, who had inherited a sizable fortune. Davenport had a connection to the family: Harriman’s daughter Mary, a Barnard undergraduate, had spent part of a summer at the Cold Spring Harbor Biological Laboratory. As it turned out, Harriman was herself a strong believer in the eugenic cause, as she would show with her financial contributions and her own supportive words. “What is the matter with the American people?” Harriman would later exclaim at a public meeting. “Fifteen million must be sterilized!” When Davenport left a meeting with Harriman at which she had pledged significant financial support, he could barely contain his excitement. In his diary, he declared it to be nothing less than “a red-letter day for humanity.” Harriman became the main patron of Davenport’s new project, an offshoot of the Station for Experimental Evolution that would be known as the Eugenics Record Office. Over the next five years, she would donate more than $500,000, a white frame house, and about seventy-five acres of land.

  Davenport recruited a prestigious Board of Scientific Directors. Alexander Graham Bell, his colleague from the Breeders’ Association Eugenics Section, agreed to serve as chairman. Bell, who was the son of one deaf woman and the husband of another, was studying eugenic solutions to the problem of deafness. In a paper presented to the National Academy of Sciences, “Upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race,” he expressed his fear that if the deaf reproduced unchecked they would produce a “defective race of human beings” that would be a “great calamity to the world.”

  Davenport recruited other scientists from leading universities. William Welch, the dean of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, agreed to be vice chairman, and E. E. Southard, a Harvard psychiatrist, signed on as a board member. Irving Fisher of Yale, perhaps the most prominent economist of his time, also joined the board. Fisher’s main intellectual interest, aside from economics, was eugenics. In 1909 he wrote A Report on National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conservation, anticipating a proliferation of eugenic laws. “Humanity will probably submit in the future to communal restriction of the right to multiply with as good grace as it has given up the right to rob and to rape,” he predicted.

  Davenport also persuaded John D. Rockefeller Jr., the world’s richest man, to underwrite fellowships at the Eugenics Record Office. Rockefeller, who was troubled by the human defects he saw all around him, was creating his own organization, the Bureau of Social Hygiene, to end prostitution, venereal disease, and other societal ills. An organization affiliated with the bureau, the Criminalistic Institute, conducted eugenic investigations of women criminal defendants.

  Davenport intended for the Eugenics Record Office to do more than conduct research and collect records. He wanted it to explore practical ways of addressing the threats that people with hereditary defects posed. Davenport wrote to Galton to inform him of the office’s founding. It would, he said, promote both positive and negative eugenic measures in pursuit of Galton’s vision: “weeding out” humanity’s worst traits.

  Davenport knew whom he wanted to head up his new organization. He had been impressed with Laughlin from their first correspondence about poultry, and since then their professional relationship had developed into a strong meeting of the minds. They shared undeniable common ground, as one history of the Eugenics Record Office observed: both men were “highly energetic and serious about their work, utterly humorless and rigid in their approach to life, and totally dedicated to the cause of social reform through eugenics.”

  Davenport offered to make Laughlin the first superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, and Laughlin accepted without hesitation. “As rapidly as we can, we are settling our business affairs,” Laughlin wrote to Davenport on September 2, 1910. “Mrs. Laughlin also anticipates with pleasure the making of a new home.” Davenport responded a few days later to say that he had ordered filing cases, a typewriter, and office furniture, and there would be letterhead on hand when Laughlin arrived.

  The Laughlins arrived in Cold Spring Harbor in mid-September. They moved into the large house Harriman had donated, sharing the ground floor with office space. On October 1, 1910, the Eugenics Record Office formally opened, and it was on its way to becoming—as one history would call it—a “center for research in human genetics and for propaganda in eugenics.”

  While his new creation took shape, Davenport published another book. Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, which was released in 1911, quickly became one of the most authoritative texts of the eugenics movement. It was assigned reading in many of the eugenics courses that were springing up at colleges and universities across the country, and it was cited by more than one-third of the high school biology textbooks of that era. In his new book, Davenport explored the way in which various human traits were inherited. He argued that qualities like “criminality,” “narcotism,” and “pauperism” were genetically determined. With pauperism, Davenport conceded the environment was important, but he still insisted
it was largely hereditary. “When both parents are shiftless in some degree,” he wrote, only about 15 percent of their children would be “industrious.”

  In keeping with the bigotry that was rarely far from the surface of American eugenics, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics offered Davenport’s views about the hereditary deficits of various racial and ethnic groups. America’s earliest immigrants had been “men of courage, independence, and love of liberty; and many of them were scholars or social leaders,” he wrote. The newer immigrants, he insisted, fell short.

  Jews had positive attributes, Davenport allowed, including literacy and earning capacity, but “the hordes of Jews” who were “now coming” were inferior to the English and Scandinavians, “with their ideals of community life in the open country, advancement by the sweat of the brow, and the uprearing of families in the fear of God and the love of country.” On personal care, he wrote, the “recent Hebrew immigrants occupy a position intermediate between the slovenly Servians and Greeks and the tidy Swedes, Germans and Bohemians.”

  Heredity in Relation to Eugenics was equally opinionated about Italians. Davenport began by noting that Italians in America came mainly from southern Italy and were darker than northern Italians, “doubtless” having “derived part of their blood from Greece and Northern Africa.” He credited Italian immigrants with “thrift,” “careful attention to details,” and capacity for hard work, particularly monotonous labor, but he was troubled by their lack of initiative and “tendency to crimes of personal violence.”

  Davenport credited the Irish with “sympathy, chastity and leadership of men.” He cautioned, however, that they brought “alcoholism, considerable mental defectiveness and a tendency to tuberculosis.” The Irish also tended to “aggregate in cities and soon control their governments, frequently exercising favoritism and often graft,” he said. Davenport had an even lower opinion of the black Portuguese who were coming to New England as agricultural workers. He pronounced them “illiterate and neither resourceful nor intelligent.”

  Heredity in Relation to Eugenics concluded that the nation’s demographic changes were a genetic crisis. Northern European stock was steadily being replaced by people of lesser genetic worth. The “great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe” was likely, Davenport warned, to rapidly turn the nation “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality.” In addition, he said, “the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase.”

  For Davenport, it all came down to regulating “germplasm,” the eugenicists’ term for the genetic inheritance individuals carried. Nations also had germplasm—the sum total of the germplasm of all of their citizens—and this national store varied considerably based on the racial, ethnic, and other characteristics of the population. It was this national stock of germplasm—its quality, and its likelihood of preserving and enhancing America’s greatness—that was at stake, Davenport believed, in the eugenics movement.

  The views that Davenport and other American eugenicists were expressing were ones that, in a couple of decades, would be associated with German racial theorists. In the 1910s, with the founding of the Eugenics Record Office, and the publication of books like Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, the United States was on a parallel track with Germany. Decades before the Nazis, German “racial hygienists” were already in the forefront of the eugenics movement. The Germans established the world’s first eugenics journal, the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie (Archive for Racial and Social Biology), in 1904, and, the following year, the world’s first eugenics professional organization, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (German Society for Racial Hygiene). Germany was also a leader in international eugenics. In 1907 the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene became a global organization, and four years later Germany hosted its first international meeting of eugenicists, in Dresden.

  For all of their early success, German eugenicists were becoming worried that their American counterparts were surpassing them. The German Society for Racial Hygiene circulated a flyer noting “the dedication with which Americans sponsor research in the field of racial hygiene and with which they translate theoretical knowledge into practice.” It pointed, in particular, to Harriman’s generous donations to the Eugenics Record Office. The society asked, with evident envy, “Can we have any doubts that the Americans will reach their aim—the stabilization and improvement of the strength of the people?”

  • • •

  Under Laughlin’s leadership, the Eugenics Record Office became a vital arm of the American eugenics movement. One of its central functions was the training of eugenics field-workers to help establish the standards and protocols for what the eugenicists hoped would become a new science of human evaluation and improvement. The trainees attended classes taught by Laughlin, Davenport, and an array of guest lecturers with special expertise in areas like hereditary science and the social structure of rural communities.

  The Eugenics Record Office emphasized the collection of eugenic information, a focus that was in keeping with the times. Jane Addams, the founder of Hull House in Chicago, noted that when new workers arrived at settlement houses like hers in the 1890s, they said, “We must do something about social disorder.” After 1900, they said, “We want to investigate something.” The Eugenics Record Office instructed its staff and students in investigation, imparting what it maintained were the scientific methods of eugenic fieldwork.

  Eugenics Record Office trainees were taught how to conduct eugenic investigations of communities, families, and individuals. They learned how to interview a subject’s neighbors, and to discern “community reactions” by asking if a subject was law breaking, inclined to the overconsumption of alcohol, or simply “silly.” Depending on the answers, individuals and families could be labeled “feebleminded” without any intelligence testing or educational records. The researchers were also taught practical skills, such as measuring brain size by assessing cranial capacity.

  The trainees, who were overwhelmingly young women—in the first few years, 131 out of 156 trainees were female—were deployed to mental hospitals, poorhouses, and other institutions across the country. They were also sent to Ellis Island, where they were instructed on how to identify feebleminded people trying to enter the country. The data that the researchers collected, which was stored in fireproof cabinets and intricately indexed, became the basis for studies of the heritability of various traits.

  As part of its “clearinghouse” function, the Eugenics Record Office staff produced manuals to help other organizations and individuals conduct their own eugenic fieldwork. The Family-History Book advised researchers on how to map out family trees and trace hereditary connections between generations. The Trait Book assigned numerical codes to a wide array of human qualities, from beauty to criminality. The codes allowed researchers to systematically track these traits when they appeared in family lines.

  The Eugenics Record Office also provided more individualized information. An admiring profile that appeared in the New York Times in 1913 under the headline “Social Problems Have Proven Basis of Heredity” called attention to a service the Times’ readers could take advantage of. The Eugenics Record Office staff was available to help members of the public with “advice as to the suitability of marriages.” In a report released that year, Laughlin said the Eugenics Record Office was getting a steady stream of requests from couples considering marrying but uncertain of the eugenic implications.

  The subject matter at the Eugenics Record Office was serious, and the workload heavy, but there were also more carefree times to be had on the rustic Cold Spring Harbor campus. A drama club produced plays performed by the field-workers, which were put on in the surrounding community, for entertainment and edification—though as with much of the organization’s work, the lessons were often unsettling. Pansy Laughl
in wrote “Acquired or Inherited? A Eugenical Comedy in Four Acts,” a lighthearted romp in which various characters, including a eugenics field-worker and a wealthy merchant, pursue their attractions for one another. By the play’s end, the young women have learned, among other things, that Felix Rosenfeld, a money-hungry Jewish peddler, is not an appropriate eugenic choice.

  Laughlin’s position at the Eugenics Record Office immediately elevated him to the highest ranks of the eugenics movement. He continued to conduct his own research on the subjects he cared about most, especially eugenic sterilization and the threat posed by immigrants with hereditary defects. He also investigated some of the scientific issues eugenicists were most focused on, such as “differential fecundity,” the claim that certain groups like the feebleminded reproduced at a higher rate than “normal” people.

  Laughlin was also becoming a larger presence in national eugenics organizations. When the American Breeders’ Association established a high-profile committee with an unwieldy name to recommend eugenic policies, Laughlin was at the center of it. The Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population was chaired by the Breeders’ Association president, Bleecker Van Wagenen. Laughlin was named secretary, which meant that when the committee decided to prepare a major report on eugenic sterilization, he was designated its main author.

  In January 1914, while Laughlin was hard at work on the Breeders’ Association’s eugenic sterilization report, he was invited to address the First National Conference on Race Betterment, another high-profile platform. The conference, which was being held at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, was organized by Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, the director of the sanitarium and the brother of W. K. Kellogg, the inventor of cornflakes and founder of the Kellogg Company.