Imbeciles

by Adam Cohen

  Dr. Bell’s career as an evangelist for eugenic sterilization was short-lived. On September 11, 1933, he took a leave of absence due to poor health and moved to Asheville, North Carolina. Shortly thereafter, he resigned. On December 9, 1934, he died of heart failure at the age of fifty-one, after serving as colony superintendent for just under ten years.

  While Dr. Bell carried the sterilization banner to the end of his life, Strode largely remained silent. In 1934 he ended a three-decade career as a trial lawyer to become a judge on Lynchburg’s corporation court, as the municipal court was then known. In all of his years as a lawyer and judge after the ruling in Buck v. Bell, only one instance has come to light of Strode speaking publicly about eugenic sterilization, and, not surprisingly perhaps, it was anything but a call to arms.

  Strode’s reference to sterilization came nearly a decade after his Supreme Court victory, in a 1936 address to the Virginia Social Science Association. In “The Utility and Futility of Punishment for Crime in Virginia,” Strode had more to say about the role of environment than heredity in producing criminals. In discussing convict labor laws, he observed that while the state took advantage of prisoners’ labor, their children were often condemned to grow up in poverty. If those children ended up “in the struggle for existence” driven to steal, he said, people mistakenly then argued “that their children are criminal because their father was a criminal.” Strode disagreed with this “hereditarian” analysis, focusing instead on the environmental factors that would have led the children astray. He went on to advocate a long list of progressive measures that could be used to reduce crime, including full employment programs and doing away with slums. Strode included on his list “carefully guarded measures for the sterilization of” the “unfit,” but it was the last factor he raised—and it was undercut by everything he had said up until then. At best, the speech offered a very ambivalent and weak endorsement of the Buck v. Bell advocacy that had made him famous.

  If Strode had been trying to quietly moderate the drive for sterilization in Virginia, it did not hurt his standing with the state’s eugenicists, who remained grateful for his work. At a 1939 celebration of Dr. DeJarnette’s fiftieth anniversary at Western State Hospital, the guest of honor had warm words for Dr. Priddy—and for his former lawyer. “I knew him as a boy and I thought he was the handsomest young man I had ever seen,” Dr. DeJarnette recalled of Strode. He was a “wonderful lawyer,” who had written a “law for sterilization of the unfit that has stood the test of the Courts.”

  Strode’s health declined in the 1940s, when he suffered several strokes. He remained on the bench until a friend in the legislature could rewrite the state law to give full pensions to judges who retired because of physical disabilities. On May 17, 1946, four years into his retirement, Strode died at Kenmore. A brief New York Times obituary said he was “known for his interest in social legislation,” a description that would doubtless have pleased him. But there was no avoiding the reason the Times was reporting his death, the achievement he would forever be remembered for: Strode had, the obituary said, drafted “the Virginia Sterilization Act, which became a model for other states.”

  • • •

  After the ruling in Buck v. Bell, Harry Laughlin had no shortage of new projects, including writing an analysis of the court’s decision. Laughlin’s study was published in 1930 under the title The Legal Status of Eugenical Sterilization: History and Analysis of Litigation Under the Virginia Sterilization Statute, Which Led to a Decision of the Supreme Court of the United States Upholding the Statute. In his introduction, Chief Justice Harry Olson of the Municipal Court of Chicago said Laughlin “is entitled to the thanks of the American people” for his success in promoting eugenic sterilization.

  Laughlin ended his study by presenting the path forward for sterilization. He included more model sterilization laws, along with an appeal for his own work. The “next task,” Laughlin said, was “building up a body of knowledge and of legal practice for evaluating evidence of hereditary degeneracy.” Among the organizations doing this work, he noted, was the Eugenics Record Office.

  Laughlin continued his interest in immigration. After his success with the exclusionary Immigration Act of 1924, he turned to a new tactic: deportation. It was, he believed, the only way to undo the damage of decades of immigration from the wrong countries. On February 21, 1928, Laughlin testified on the eugenic aspects of deportation to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Deportation was, he said, the “last line of defense against contamination of American family stocks by alien hereditary degeneracy.”

  Laughlin helped Madison Grant with his follow-up to The Passing of the Great Race, the book Hitler reportedly called “my Bible.” Grant was finishing up The Conquest of a Continent, a book of which a New York Times reviewer would write: “Substitute Aryan for Nordic, and a good deal of Mr. Grant’s argument would lend itself without much difficulty to the support of some recent pronouncements in Germany.” Laughlin gave Grant editorial suggestions on the manuscript, and when it came out he helped promote it. He wrote to the publisher to urge “wide and continuous distribution.” Laughlin suggested it be sent to high school and college American history departments across the country and in Canada.

  In 1937, Laughlin made his last great effort for his friend. He embarked on his unsuccessful lobbying campaign to persuade Yale to award him an honorary degree. In his energetic letter writing to the degree committee, Laughlin described Grant as an “exemplar of American ideals”—and so he was for Laughlin. Decades later, a leading historian of the American eugenics movement would offer up another description of Grant: America’s “most influential racist.”

  Laughlin’s dreams for the American eugenics movement continued to grow. His attention was increasingly turning from the states, which had been the drivers of eugenic policies, to the federal government. He wanted Congress to create an official Bureau of Eugenics, which would administer its own federal eugenics statute, and in 1929 he drew up a blueprint for it. Laughlin also tried, without success, to persuade the U.S. Census Bureau to use the 1930 census to collect eugenics data on the American population. His aim was to turn the census into “a permanent and complete pedigree record of the American people as individuals”—information that could be used for future eugenic purposes.

  While Laughlin’s ambitions for the movement were growing, the tide was turning against eugenics. In the early years scientists had generally kept silent, but they were becoming more openly critical. In the fall of 1927, Raymond Pearl, a Johns Hopkins biologist, became the most prominent scientist to come out strongly against eugenics. Because Pearl had once been an active eugenicist, even addressing the First International Eugenics Congress in London, his stand carried particular weight. In an article in H. L. Mencken’s American Mercury magazine, titled “The Biology of Superiority,” Pearl lambasted eugenicists for the deficiency of their science. The eugenics literature, he insisted, had “largely become a mingled mess of ill-grounded and uncritical sociology, economics, anthropology, and politics, full of emotional appeals to class and race prejudices, solemnly put forth as science, and unfortunately accepted as such by the general public.”

  While criticism was growing, the eugenics movement was also weakening from within. With the Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression, the nation suddenly had new and more important things to worry about than defective germplasm. In 1931, after the Democrats won a majority in Congress, Albert Johnson was replaced as chairman of the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization by Samuel Dickstein, a New York Democrat who was a Jewish immigrant from Russia. Laughlin’s career as a congressional Expert Eugenics Agent was over.

  Laughlin’s position at the Eugenics Record Office was also increasingly precarious. John Merriam, the president of the Carnegie Institution, was uncomfortable with how politicized the office had become under Laughlin, and he raised his concerns with Charles Davenport. Merriam also rep
rimanded Laughlin for using the office’s stationery to lobby Congress. The Carnegie Institution had long been hearing from critics who objected to the Eugenics Record Office’s scientific methods, and Merriam decided to appoint a committee to review its work. The committee concluded that the office’s records were deficient and its research protocols unduly subjective.

  As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, Laughlin was a strong supporter of their eugenics programs. He corresponded regularly with leading Nazi scientists, including one who praised Hitler for being the first politician to recognize that “the central mission of all politics is race hygiene.” Laughlin ran regular reports in the Eugenical News on the Nazis’ progress, and he published his own work in the Society for Racial Hygiene’s journal, Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschafts-Biologie.

  Laughlin was an admirer of Germany’s infamous Sterilization Act of 1933. The law called for forced sterilization of anyone, institutionalized or not, who suffered from a wide array of purported defects. Feeblemindedness, drug and alcohol addiction, blindness, and physical deformity were all grounds for sterilization. Laughlin published the new law as the lead article in the September–October 1933 issue of Eugenical News, and he shared the special pride he felt in it. “To one versed in the history of eugenical sterilization in America,” he wrote, “the text of the German statute reads almost like the ‘American model sterilization law.’”

  Laughlin followed developments in Germany closely. An inveterate newspaper clipper, he collected articles on German eugenic and race policies, including one from the August 16, 1933, New York Times with the headline: “Hindenburg Asked to Save Reich Jews: 500,000 Are Facing ‘Certain Extermination,’ American Congress Declares.” None of the grim news out of Germany caused Laughlin to temper his enthusiasm. In December 1934—after laws were enacted expelling Jews from the civil service, and removing many Jewish children from school—the Eugenical News published an essay on the Germany’s Sterilization Act of 1933 that appeared to endorse the broader Nazi agenda. “In the new Germany,” it said, “laws are made for the benefit of posterity, regardless of the approval or disapproval of present generations.”

  Laughlin’s lack of outrage over Nazi racial policies had a simple explanation: his own views were not so different. In a November 19, 1932, letter to Madison Grant, Laughlin indicated that he would like to make the United States judenrein—“cleansed of Jews,” in Nazi terminology—if it were possible. In a passage he carefully marked “not for publication,” Laughlin wrote: “Whether we like it or not, a Jew must be assimilated or deported. The deportation of four million Jews would be many more times more difficult than the repatriation of three times as many Negroes.” All they could do, Laughlin said, was work to keep the nation’s Jewish population from growing any larger.

  Preventing more Jews from coming to the United States was Laughlin’s response to the gathering storm in Europe. With the disturbing reports coming out of Germany—and the threat, as the New York Times headline noted, of “certain extermination”—there were growing calls to loosen, at least temporarily, the immigration quotas Laughlin himself had helped put in place. The New York Chamber of Commerce commissioned Laughlin to investigate the subject, and in May 1934 he authored a report recommending that no special efforts be made to admit Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. In his report, which received prominent press coverage, Laughlin insisted the nation should adhere to a policy of admitting immigrants because they are “desirable human seed-stock of future American citizens” and “not because of persecution.”

  Laughlin’s political stands and Nazi sympathies attracted criticism, some of it directed to his funders at the Carnegie Institution. Hyman Achinstein, a Brooklyn resident who said he had known Andrew Carnegie well, wrote to object to Laughlin’s report urging no exceptional admissions for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and to say it was a “disgrace” that the Carnegie Institution kept him on staff. If Carnegie were to “arise of his restful abode and see for himself what spirit pervades his institutions,” Achinstein said, “he would say Halt.”

  Charles Davenport consistently stood by Laughlin when his critics attacked, but in 1934 Davenport retired, leaving Laughlin vulnerable. John Merriam appointed a new visiting committee the following year to review Laughlin and the Eugenics Record Office. Its members were less favorable than the first committee toward eugenics, and less likely to support Laughlin.

  The new committee’s report, which was released in June 1935, was a broad indictment of the Eugenics Record Office for engaging in worthless research and undertaking inappropriate political crusades. The chairman of the committee attacked Laughlin personally for having “a messiah attitude toward eugenics” that was “out of place” in a “scientific institution.” The committee called for the office to cease its politics and propaganda and focus on “pure research.”

  Laughlin resented the inference, and he refused to rein in his politically charged activities. In August 1935 he and Clarence Campbell, an associate from the Eugenics Record Office, served as vice presidents of the International Congress for Population Science in Berlin—a conference that has been singled out for being “the apex of international support of Nazi race policies.” Laughlin did not attend, but contributed a paper on eugenic sterilization in the United States. Campbell gave his own remarks praising Nazi racial policies. At the end of the conference, Campbell gave a toast “To that great leader, Adolf Hitler!”

  In May 1936 Laughlin was informed that he was to be recognized the following month with an honorary doctorate of medicine from the University of Heidelberg in recognition of his work on the “science of racial cleansing.” The university was marking its 550th year, and it had decided to celebrate not on the actual anniversary in October, but on June 30, the two-year anniversary of Germany’s “blood purge” of Jewish university faculty. With German universities entirely under Nazi control, the award was effectively an honor from the Third Reich itself, and one of the anniversaries it was marking was an odious one.

  Laughlin was delighted by the recognition, and not put off by the Nazis’ actions, including, the previous September, adopting the infamous Nuremberg laws, which made marriage or sexual relations between Jews and non-Jewish Germans illegal and stripped Jews and other “non-Aryans” of German citizenship. Laughlin did not attend in person, but he wrote to the university to express his “deep gratitude” for “this high honor.” Laughlin particularly appreciated it, he said, because it came “from a nation which for many centuries nurtured the human seed-stock which later founded my own country and thus gave basic character to our present lives and institutions.”

  Laughlin continued the political activism and propaganda that the Carnegie visiting committee had directed him to stop. In 1937 he and a wealthy friend, Wickliffe Draper, founded the Pioneer Fund. One of the organization’s main purposes, it declared at its founding, was to aid in the education of children of parents who were “deemed to have such qualities and traits of character as to make such parents of unusual value as citizens.” The Pioneer Fund charter gave priority to “children who are deemed to be descended predominantly from white persons who settled in the original thirteen states prior to the adoption of the Constitution of the United States and/or from related stocks.”

  Another factor working against Laughlin, besides the decline of eugenics and mounting criticism of him and the Eugenics Record Office, was his health. The man who had lobbied for laws that described epileptics as “defective” and authorized their sterilization was showing increased symptoms of his own epilepsy. Laughlin was having seizures in public, and in 1937 had one while driving in downtown Cold Spring Harbor. He would have driven directly into the ocean if he had not crashed into a retainer wall. The Carnegie Institution’s board of directors expressed concerns about Laughlin’s health, and Merriam ordered him to get a full medical checkup.

  At the end of 1938, Merriam retired as president of the Carnegie Institution and was replaced by V
annevar Bush. A respected scientist and inventor, Bush was even more opposed to Laughlin’s work than Merriam had been. Four days after he took office on January 1, 1939, Bush told Laughlin there would be a new review of his work. In June Bush asked for Laughlin’s resignation, based on concerns about his research and his health. Laughlin resisted at first, but he agreed when the Carnegie Institution offered him a lifetime pension.

  In December, which was to be his final month, Laughlin had a change of heart. He wanted to stay, and he had Senator Robert Reynolds of North Carolina—the leading Nazi sympathizer in Congress—lobby members of the Carnegie board. Bush, however, stood his ground, and Laughlin agreed to leave. On December 31, the Eugenics Record Office was effectively shut down. At Bush’s direction, it was renamed the Genetics Record Office, and its budget was slashed.

  The Eugenical News was also freed from Laughlin’s influence. In new editorial hands—and once the United States formally entered the war against Germany—the publication abandoned the Nazi sympathies it had exhibited during the Laughlin era. In June 1943, after recounting German atrocities, it declared: “These almost unbelievable facts bring to our hearts a rush of pity for those victims of sadism, brutality and planned race extinction.” The Eugenical News was no longer the propaganda organ for Nazi racial policies it once was.

  Because American eugenics was effectively over as anything but a fringe cause, Laughlin’s career was at an end. His work lived on in limited form: sterilization laws remained on the books, and sterilizations were still being performed. There would be no new legislative victories, however, no federal eugenics agency, and no more cooperative work with Nazi eugenicists. An internal memo prepared to help Carnegie Institution staff answer questions about Laughlin’s departure noted tersely that the Eugenics Record Office was no longer in a “position to furnish information regarding genealogy, marriage advice, nor to assist students in preparation of themes on eugenics.”