by Adam Cohen
Kellogg promoted many eccentric health regimens and causes, and his newest one was eugenics. It was, for him, a matter of urgency. He made this clear in his own paper for the conference, which he titled “Needed—A New Human Race.” In it, Kellogg declared that “all serious-minded men and women should join in making known to every human being in every corner of the globe the fact that the human race is dying, and to discover and apply the remedies necessary for salvation from this dismal fate.”
The Race Betterment conference was the largest eugenics conference ever held in the United States. More than four hundred delegates and thousands of members of the general public descended on the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Attendance at the first session “so far exceeded the expectations of the organizers,” the official proceedings reported, “that some two hundred people were unable to enter the auditorium.”
There were exhibits on subjects ranging from “Open-Air Sleeping” to home cleanliness, the latter including an unmade bed with dirty clothes on it and a squalid kitchen with moldy pickles on display. There were also “Mental and Physical Perfection Contests,” in which schoolchildren and babies were given extensive tests and evaluations. The winners were awarded gold medals stamped with the official insignia of the First National Conference on Race Betterment.
The heart of the conference was the sessions on eugenic theory and practice, with addresses from leaders in the field. In Laughlin’s presentation, “Calculations on the Working Out of a Proposed Program of Sterilization,” he spoke about the same subject he had been working on so intently for the Breeders’ Association. He came to Battle Creek with a powerful message: to save the nation from the threat posed by “defective” people, there would need to be millions of sterilizations.
Laughlin put a precise percentage on how much of the nation was genetically unworthy. The “lowest ten percent of the human stock are so meagerly endowed by Nature that their perpetuation would constitute a social menace,” he told the conference. Laughlin brought charts that provided examples of the sort of people he was talking about. One chart showed the “Poorhouse Type of Source of Defectives” and was illustrated with a feebleminded woman living in an almshouse, whose children were feebleminded and, in one case, an “epileptic imbecile.” Another showed the “Hovel Type of Source of Defectives,” in this case a family beset by feeblemindedness, alcoholism, epilepsy, sex offenses, and criminality.
In his speech to the conference, Laughlin laid down a marker on how many eugenic sterilizations would be needed. To rid the nation of what he called the “lowest one-tenth” of the population would require fifteen million people to be sterilized over the next two generations. There had so far been fewer than one thousand eugenic sterilizations, he said, and that was not nearly enough. Current sterilization regimens were little more than a “slight palliative,” he said, and “[a] halfway measure will never strike deeply at the roots of the evil.”
Laughlin called for a new, more methodical approach to sterilization. He argued for identifying “defective” people and sending them to institutions, sterilizing them, and then quickly releasing them. “The shorter the periods of commitment,” he explained, the more rapidly the whole population of “individuals possessing hereditary potentialities for defective parenthood” could be rendered sterile.
The costs of such a sweeping program would be considerable, Laughlin conceded, but he urged states not to be discouraged. He argued that the increased expenditures could be made up for by forcing the people who were institutionalized to work in the fields or in factories. In any case, the expense was well worth it, he insisted, because “the germ-plasm of a nation is always its greatest asset, and . . . the expense of such measures would be paying investments—not only in dollars and cents, but in the inborn qualities of future generations.”
In February, not long after his return from Battle Creek, Laughlin’s American Breeders’ Association report was released. It was published as Eugenics Record Office Bulletin No. 10 under the title Report of the Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population. Writing on behalf of the committee, Laughlin expanded on many of the themes he had discussed at the Race Betterment conference. The report was the most thorough argument to date for using eugenic sterilization to save the nation from a tide of mental and physical defects.
Laughlin examined the problem of “defective germ-plasm” from a variety of scientific perspectives, including medicine, biology, anthropology, and thremmatology (the science of animal and plant breeding). With his usual precision, Laughlin set out ten problems and ten solutions. The problems were ten defective classes that were the source of the defective germplasm of the report’s title. These included the feebleminded, the pauper, the inebriate, the deformed, and the criminalistic. He then considered ten “suggested remedies,” ranging from “laissez-faire,” doing nothing, to what he called “euthanasia,” which he defined as killing off people with undesirable traits.
In evaluating the options, Laughlin rejected killing those with defective germplasm. Any eugenic advantages it would bring about, he said, would come at too high a moral price. Laissez-faire, on the other hand, posed too great a threat to the hereditary stock of the nation, because people with defective germplasm were increasing as a percentage of the population. “There must be selection not only for progress, but even for maintaining the present standard,” he insisted.
The report put the rate of “great anti-social human varieties” at about 10 percent of the population, the same number as Laughlin used in Battle Creek. It offered two main recommendations: “life segregation” and sterilization. Unlike Laughlin’s presentation in Battle Creek, the report put greater emphasis on segregation. It called for greatly increasing the number of “defectives” held in state institutions, starting as early as possible in their reproductive years. “Life segregation” of this kind should, the committee urged, “be the principal agent used by society in cutting off its supply of defectives.”
Sterilization was also an option, the report said, but it noted that “there is a wide range of opinion as to the extremity to which society itself should go in applying” it. The report called for using sterilization primarily as a backup to institutionalization, to be used only when “life segregation” failed to “function eugenically.” It stated that “society must, at all hazards, protect its breeding stock,” but it argued that segregation was “equally effective eugenically, and more effective socially.”
Although Laughlin was the author, the report was far more skeptical about sterilization than he had been, just a month earlier, in Battle Creek. The critical difference was that in the report Laughlin was bound to reflect not only his own opinion, but the views of the whole American Breeders’ Association committee. Evidently, they did not share his enthusiasm for mass sterilization, and believed that the eugenic goals that they all shared could be achieved in less intrusive ways.
The report included a second part, titled “The Legal, Legislative and Administrative Aspects of Sterilization,” also written by Laughlin. It included a model eugenic sterilization law that the committee “respectfully commended[ed]” to the states as a “probably efficacious” way of addressing their “practical eugenical problems.” The model law called for eugenics commissions to be established at the state level that would examine institutionalized people and members of the general public and determine which ones should be sterilized.
In its list of categories of “defective” people who should be sterilized, the law did not include all ten of the “problem” categories that appeared in the first part of the report. It recommended sterilization for the “feeble-minded, insane, epileptic, inebriate, criminalistic and other degenerate persons.” It exempted other groups, however—the “crippled, the blind, the deaf, and the tubercular.” The committee believed that these groups could be educated “voluntarily, from a sense of social duty, t
o refrain from having offspring in the interest of national welfare and vigor.” As a result, it said, “eugenical training rather than enforced sterilization, should apply to them.”
If Laughlin had to be more restrained than he would have liked in some of the report’s policy recommendations, he had no such limitations on the use of soaring rhetoric to describe the problem—and he took full advantage of this freedom. “If America is to escape the doom of nations generally, it must breed good Americans,” the report warned. “The fall of every nation in history has been due to many causes, but always chiefest among these causes has been the decline of the national stock.”
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For all of his new prominence in the eugenics movement, Laughlin lacked the graduate training in science that Davenport and the academic members of the American Breeders’ Association had. Laughlin’s formal education had ended years earlier, with his undergraduate degree from the First District Normal School. With the research he was now conducting, and the highly credentialed circles he was traveling in, that was becoming a handicap. At Davenport’s suggestion, Laughlin took a leave of absence to pursue a doctorate in biology at Princeton.
Laughlin moved through the doctoral program rapidly, earning a master’s degree in 1916 and a doctor of science in 1918. He studied with Edwin G. Conklin, a prominent biology professor with a strong interest in eugenics, who encouraged his students to fill out family records that could be ued for eugenic research. Laughlin focused on science, not polemics, however, in his doctoral thesis, “Determining the Relative Duration of the Several Mitotic Stages.”
On his return to Cold Spring Harbor, Laughlin added a new role to his duties: editor. The Eugenics Record Office launched a new journal that Davenport and Laughlin jointly ran. The Eugenical News quickly became the house organ of the American eugenics movement. It published research on popular eugenics subjects, such as the rising tide of feeblemindedness and the dangers of race mixing. In keeping with the views of the editors, the articles were often xenophobic and racist, and when the Nazis began their rise in Germany, the Eugenical News would report on German eugenic and racial policies with considerable sympathy.
The years after his return from Princeton were among the most productive of Laughlin’s career. He conducted his research with a single-minded intensity, rarely stopping for weekends, holidays, or vacations. Laughlin had long been trying to gain access to U.S. Census Bureau records of institutionalized Americans, but he was told the information was confidential. He finally succeeded in persuading the bureau to designate him as a “special agent of the Bureau of the Census” and let him conduct his own study of the populations of all of the nation’s custodial institutions.
Laughlin used his access to create a database on the national origins and racial backgrounds of prisoners and institutionalized mentally ill people across the country. His work was slowed by World War I, but in 1919 he wrote the Statistical Directory of State Institutions for the Defective, Dependent, and Delinquent Classes. Laughlin would go on to use the data, in testimony before Congress and elsewhere, to argue that certain nationalities had higher levels of mental and physical defects than others.
Laughlin was increasingly building alliances with leading eugenicists. He became close friends with Madison Grant, the author of The Passing of the Great Race. Grant was an upper-class New York lawyer and writer, whose family had roots in pre–Revolutionary War America. A big-game hunter and an environmental activist, Grant helped to preserve the California redwoods, played a major role in creating the Denali and Glacier National Parks, and drew up the legislation that created the Bronx Zoo.
Grant was also a leader of the emerging eugenics establishment. He was a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society and of the Galton Society, a New York–based eugenics organization that emphasized scientific racism and espoused the superiority of Northern Europeans. Grant served as treasurer of the Second International Eugenics Congress, which was held in New York City. Like Laughlin, Grant believed that the nation was under siege by defective people, and that the answer lay in a system of “negative eugenics.” The two men even agreed on the percentage of the population that was unworthy: in a letter to Davenport, Grant said that it was necessary to eliminate “the submerged tenth” of the population.
Grant was particularly focused on what he saw as the threat posed by “inferior races.” He was contemptuous toward “the negroes,” on whom, he complained in a letter to Davenport, “so much sentimentalism has been wasted.” Grant was also fixated on Polish Jews, “whose dwarf stature, peculiar mentality, and ruthless concentration on self-interest,” he said, were “being engrafted upon the stock of the nation.”
In his book The Passing of the Great Race, Grant had argued that a white, northern European “native American aristocracy” supplied “the leaders in thought,” and controlled capital, education, and “the religious ideals and altruistic” inclinations of the community. This hereditary elite rested, he said, upon “layer after layer of immigrants of lower races.”
Grant introduced a disturbing typology of the world’s races. He divided the people of Europe into Nordic, Alpine, and Mediterranean races, and he warned that Nordics, the most exalted in his view, was in peril. Grant’s vision of the Nordic race in many ways anticipated the Nazis’ idealization of the Aryans. Grant extolled the Nordic race, which “in its purity has an absolutely fair skin,” as “the white man par excellence.” In a chapter on the Nordic Fatherland, he warned of the danger race mixing posed to Nordic people. “Races must be kept apart by artificial devices,” he wrote, “or they ultimately amalgamate and in the offspring the more generalized or lower type prevails.”
Grant’s proposed responses to these issues also anticipated Nazism. Readers might fear there was “little hope for humanity,” he wrote, “but the remedy has been found, and can be quickly and mercifully applied.” He advocated a “rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit.” With an aggressive program of forced sterilization, society could do away with “an ever widening circle of social discards,” starting with “the criminal, the diseased and the insane” and gradually extending to “weaklings” and “perhaps ultimately to worthless race types.”
Grant’s theories about racial superiority and the need for dealing firmly with the weak and defective greatly influenced the Nazis, who translated his writings into German. Parts of Mein Kampf, and of the racial policies Germany put in place, appeared to borrow directly from The Passing of the Great Race. The book would later be discovered in Adolf Hitler’s personal library, and Hitler is said to have written Grant a fan letter, in which he said “the book is my Bible.”
Laughlin and Grant corresponded frequently and enthusiastically. In their letters, the two men freely exchanged opinions about eugenics—and racist and anti-Semitic views. Laughlin had to be circumspect in public, because the Eugenics Record Office relied on financing from organizations and individuals who might not want to be associated with virulent racism and anti-Semitism. He also served on committees with Jews and others who might find such views offensive. Laughlin had already been the subject of at least one complaint, from a trainee who had reported to a Eugenics Record Office funder in 1914 that Laughlin had discriminated against him because he was Jewish.
In his private correspondence with Grant, however, Laughlin could express himself more freely. In one letter, written shortly before the Nazis took power in Germany—but well after their agenda was known—Laughlin cautioned that America faced a “Jewish problem” of its own. “The Jew is doubtless here to stay and the Nordics’ job is to prevent more of them from coming,” he wrote. Laughlin’s disdain extended to a wide range of groups. In another letter, he betrayed both his support for racial segregation and where he ranked Hindus and blacks on his personal racial hierarchy. It was good, he told Grant, that so few Hindus had immigrated to the United States. “The Hindu, although a colored man,” i
s “more intelligent than the Negro, and claim[s] ‘Aryan descent,’” he wrote. As a result, Hindus in America “would be more insistent in . . . trying to destroy the barriers to mixture between the white and colored races than would any other non-white race which has come to our shores.”
Laughlin and Grant collaborated on their eugenics work. The wealthy Grant helped fund the Eugenics Record Office. Laughlin, for his part, helped Grant with his writing. He reviewed a prepublication manuscript of Grant’s next major book about race, The Conquest of a Continent, and provided not only technical and stylistic advice, but help in identifying the most offensive parts. In one letter to Grant, Laughlin flagged a passage that he said had “a tinge of ‘Damn Jew’ about it.”
When The Conquest of a Continent was released, Laughlin wrote to the publisher, Charles Scribner’s Sons, urging that the book be sent to high school and college history departments. He also wrote letters to prominent people urging them to read it. “The wide and continuous distribution” of The Conquest of a Continent was, he insisted, “important.”
Laughlin remained close to Grant throughout the older man’s life. Shortly before Grant died, Laughlin conducted an unsuccessful letter-writing campaign to members of the Yale Committee on Honorary Degrees, urging them to award Grant a doctorate of law. Laughlin was effusive in his praise. “No Yale graduate more definitely than Madison Grant is an exemplar of American ideals,” he wrote. “As a painstaking student in American history . . . Grant has thrown great honor upon Yale University.”
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In the years after World War I, Laughlin increasingly turned his attention to immigration. War-weary Americans were in an isolationist mood, and popular opinion was turning against the new arrivals who were flooding into the nation’s cities. In 1900 the foreign-born were nearly 14 percent of the population, and immigrant families, including American-born children, were more than one-third. In the years since, immigration had continued at record and near-record levels, with as many as one million new immigrants arriving each year.