War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  The ERO’s sweeping anti-blindness measure did not succeed in 1921.25 But Howe refused to give up. OnJanuary 12,1922, Howe reminded Laughlin that the intent was to target a broad spectrum of defectives, but beginning with known medical diseases was still the best idea. “We tried to legislate against too many hereditary defects,” Howe recounted, “It would be better to limit the legislation to hereditary blindness, insanity, epilepsy and possibly hereditary syphilis.” Crafting such legislation required care. Howe conceded, “The phraseology as concocted by doctors and scientists is quite different from that which Constitutional lawyers would have recommended.”26

  Howe was relentless in keeping the idea alive. Lawyers associated with Columbia University were called upon to refine the text to pass Constitutional muster. In one reminder letter, Howe asked Laughlin, “Have you heard anything from our friends connected with the Law Department of Columbia, as to what progress they have made in their attempt to formulate that law for the prevention of hereditary blindness?… When members of a committee are supposedly resting, that is the time to get work out of them.”27

  On July 22, 1922, Howe wrote to Laughlin from his New York estate, aptly named “Mendel Farm.” Howe expressed his undying devotion to the Mendelian cause and his still-burning determination to “hunt” those with vision problems and subject them to eugenic countermeasures. “As today is… the centenary of the birth of our ‘Saint’ Gregor,” wrote Howe with some gaiety, “I feel like sending a word to you, to Drs. Davenport, Little-indeed to every one of the earnest workers at Cold Spring Harbor…. If our good old Father Mendel is still counting peas grown in the celestial garden, he probably takes time on this anniversary, to lean over the golden bars, and as he rubs his glasses to look down on what is being done at Cold Spring Harbor and several other institutions like it, his mouth must stretch into a very broad grin when he thinks how little attention was paid to him on earth and what a big man he is now.”28

  Returning to the idea of hunting down the families of the visually impaired, Howe wrote, “Can you suggest any appeal which could be made to the State Board of Health so as to induce them to set one or two of their field workers to hunting up other defective members of certain families whose names appear so frequently among the pupils of schools for the blind?… With remembrances to Mrs. Laughlin and best wishes always.”29

  Laughlin replied that he too wanted to “hunt” for those with imperfect vision. “A state survey hunting hereditary eye defects and other degeneracy, but laying principal emphasis on eye disorders, would constitute a splendid piece of work.” Howe responded with a letter, eager as ever, declaring that the schools could easily provide the family trees. “Probably the director of almost every school of the blind can remember two or three pupils from branches of the same family who are there because of albinism, cataract, optic atrophy or some similar condition…. But,” he cautioned, “superintendents have not been trained as field workers [to trace the extended families).”30

  Therefore, Howe again pushed for the New York State Board of Health to undertake such a statewide hunt. Fortunately, New York State Commissioner of Public Health Hermann M. Biggs was already a member of Howe’s advisory committee to prevent hereditary blindness. “I will ask one or two doctors in New York or elsewhere to send letters to you for Dr. Biggs advocating such an investigation,” wrote Howe. He also offered to personally train the state’s field workers.31

  An official New York State hunt for the visually impaired never occurred. But Howe continued his pursuit of the names. In 1922, twenty of forty-two state institutions for the blind filled out forms on a total of 2,388 individuals in their care, constituting approximately half of America’s institutionalized total. The numbers only further infuriated Howe. By his calculations, institutionalized blind people cost taxpayers $28 to $39 per inmate per month, higher than the feebleminded at $15.21 per month and prison inmates at $18.93 per month. No wonder that on February 10, 1923, Howe sent a letter jointly addressed to Davenport and Laughlin suggesting that any blindness-prevention law include a provision to imprison the visually impaired. In a list, Howe’s second point read: “If the hereditary blind whose intended marriage has been adjudged to be dangerous, prefer to go to prison at the expense of the taxpayer that would probably be cheapest for the community and kindest to possible children… and a better protection against future defectives.” Howe repeated the idea twice more in that letter.32

  In the same long February 10 letter, Howe promised to send a report to the secretary of the AMA’s Section on Ophthalmology. But he was waiting for additional names of blind people to come in so he could forward the latest tally. Howe also assured that he was working closely with Columbia University law professor J. P. Chamberlain to revise the hoped-for legislation.33

  Several months later, in July of 1923, Professor Chamberlain wrote an article for the American Bar Association Journal advocating what he called “repressive legislation” to restrict marriages. “The effect of the modern doctrine of eugenics is being felt in state legislative halls,” Chamberlain began. “There is a growing tendency to segregate them [defective persons] in colonies for their own well being and to protect society… and along with this repressive legislation is another trend… legislation limiting the rights of certain classes of persons to marry and requiring preliminary evidence of the fitness of the parties to the ceremony.” Professor Chamberlain assured the nation’s attorneys that protecting future generations was sound public policy and within any state’s police powers. Once a proper “standard of deficiency” could be written into the statutes, marriage restriction could be enforced against the defective as well. “The past record makes it appear probable that the law will not lag behind medical science.”34

  Howe floated another attempt at legislation to prevent hereditary blindness when on February 1, 1926, Bill #605 was introduced to the New York State Assembly. This time, the proposal required a sworn statement from any marriage applicants averring, “Neither myself nor, to the best of my knowledge and belief, any of my blood relatives within the second degree have been affected with blindness…. “ No definition of blindness was offered. Once again, the bill empowered the town clerk to prohibit the marriage, and even made initial consultation with experts optional. Ironically, even Howe could not craft a definition for blindness. In a letter to another ophthalmologist, he confessed that in a conversation with a federal official, Howe had been called upon to define the condition; both had been at a loss for words. “He was as much in doubt as I,” wrote Howe, adding, “Please tell me what better measure you can suggest.” Bill #605 was never enacted.35

  But Howe continued his crusade. Even as he was pushing his anti-blindness legislation, Howe was also orchestrating a second marriage restriction against not just the visually impaired, but anyone judged unfit. His idea was to require a large cash bond from any marriage applicant suspected of being “unfit.” Again, no definitions or standards were set. The couple applying for a marriage license would be required to post a significant cash bond against the possibility that their defective children might be a cost to the state. Howe suggested bonds of as much as $14,000, equivalent to over $130,000 today.36 In other words, marriage by those declared eugenically inferior would be made economically impossible by state law.

  Howe had come up with his idea for a general marriage bond as early as 1921. At the time, Laughlin had praised Howe’s concept. “Your plan for offering bond is, I believe, a practical one,” Laughlin wrote Howe on March 30, 1921. He continued, “For one thing, it presents in very clear and clean cut manner to the average tax-payer the problem of paying for social inadequates from the purse of the tax payer. There is nothing like touching the purse of the tax payer in order to arouse his interest…. “ Laughlin was pleased with the larger implications because Howe’s idea represented a “feature in future eugenical control, not only of hereditary blindness but of hereditary defects of all sorts.” Howe’s bonding plan, wrote Laughlin, would “place the res
ponsibility for the reproduction of defectives upon the possible parents of such.” Moreover, Laughlin wrote, cash bonding would be most useful in “border-line” cases where no one could be sure.37

  Within a year, Howe was asking Columbia University’s Professor Chamberlain to draft legislative language to enforce bonding. In May of 1922, Laughlin sent yet another letter of encouragement to Howe, asserting that should any law to “bond parents against the production of defective children” withstand court challenge, “a great practical eugenical principle will have been established.”38

  In late December of 1922, in a letter inviting Mr. and Mrs. Howe to join the Laughlins for lunch at Cold Spring Harbor, Laughlin could not hide his continuing enthusiasm. “The bonding principle,” wrote Laughlin, “…securing the state against the production of defectives has, I think, great possibilities. Perhaps the greatest single amendment which can be made to the present marriage laws for the prevention of the production of degenerates. If you can develop the principle and secure its adoption, you will have deserved the honor of the eugenical world.”39

  Eventually, the marriage bond proposal was introduced to the New York State Assembly as a part of Bill #605, Howe’s amended anti-blindness effort. Under the proposal, any town clerk, depending on the severity of the suspected defectiveness, could set the bond, up to $14,000. The amount of $14,000 represented Howe’s estimate for supporting and educating a blind child. The bond could be released once the wife turned forty-five years of age. Eugenicists were hopeful and even published the entire text of Bill #605 in Eugenical News. Marriage bonding legislation, however, died in New York when Bill #605 was voted down.40

  Even still, the Eugenics Record Office wove the notion into the model eugenics legislation it distributed to the various states. In a memo, Laughlin asserted that the principle should be viewed “in reference not only to the blind, but also to all other types of social inadequacy (and this is the goal sought).” He added, “If this principle were firmly established it would doubtless become the most powerful force directed against the production of defectives and inadequates.”41

  During the 1920s, while Howe was trying to establish marriage prevention and marriage bonding, he and Laughlin were also working on a third concept. It was known by several names and was ultimately called “interstate deportation.” Under this scheme, once a family was identified as unfit, family members could be uprooted and deponed back to the state or town of their origin-presumably at the expense of the original locale. This would create a financial liability for any town or state, forcing them to view any suspected defective citizens as an intolerable expense. The plan held open the possibility of mass interstate deportations to jurisdictions that would simply refuse the deportees, leading to holding pens of a sort. Some eugenicists called for “colonies.” Margaret Sanger advocated “wide open spaces” for the unfit. After all, the United States government had already set the precedent by creating a system of reservations for Native Americans.

  It was Howe’s initiative for marriage prevention and bonding that opened the door. In a review of Howe’s marriage restrictions, Laughlin wrote in the spring of 1921, “It is easy for the eugenicist to plan a step further and to urge further development of our deportation services which means only that the community which produces a non-supporting defective must maintain him… it means more inter-state deportation and finally, within the state, deportation to counties in which defectives are born or have citizenship or long residence.”42

  By late 1922, Howe and other sympathetic ophthalmologic colleagues, along with Laughlin and the Carnegie Institution, were formulating deportation specifics. Howe was developing a eugenic “debit and credit” system to rank individuals. Towns, counties and states would then be charged when their defectives moved elsewhere in the nation. “Of course our national deportation system is based upon this theory,” Laughlin acknowledged to Howe in a December 5, 1922, letter. A few weeks later, Laughlin again lauded a system of bonding “each state, community and family… for its own degenerates.” He adding that “the matter of deportation… [is] only one other phase in the application of this greater principle.”43

  Once more, bonding marriages against hereditary blindness was to be the precedent for national deportation. “You have done a splendid service,” Laughlin wrote Howe in March of 1925, “in directing the work of the Committee on Prevention of Hereditary Blindness. The whole thing appeals so strongly to me because I believe it is a step in the direction of working out… the matter of placing responsibility for the production of hereditary inadequates upon families, towns, states and nations which produce them.”44

  Eventually, the eugenics movement developed a constellation of bonding, financial responsibility and deportation principles which it tried to implement based on precedents set by Howe’s hereditary blindness countermeasures. The program’s goal was to create enclaves of eugenically preferred citizens, which would be achieved when the unfit were systematically expelled from an area. It was defective cleansing. An outline of the measure was published as a lead essay in Eugenical News. The section headlined “Interstate Deportation” declared, “There is now, however, a substantial and growing movement for the inter-state and inter-town return of charity cases and ne’er-do-wells from the host communities to the communities which produced them.”45

  Setting up an argument for property confiscation, the Eugenical News outline explained that the cost of relocation and maintenance would be borne first by the community the family had come from, but then ultimately by the defective family itself. “In many communities the town or the county or the state has a legal claim upon any property of the producing family, particularly the parents…. “46 The government would have the power to turn any family deemed unfit into a family of paupers.

  The Eugenical News essay also challenged the concept of free movement within the United States. “It remains to be seen whether an individual inadequate can simply move in on a community and claim legal residence.” Eugenical News asked, “Is there a legal recourse, for example, in the case of ‘dumping’ the undesirables of one community on another, of ‘exiling’ or ‘driving out of town’ undesirable persons? Perhaps the time will come when there will be no place where such undesirables can go, in which case the logical place for them is the community and family where they were produced.” But in the end, after describing a thorough program of dislocation and deportation, the article made the final result clear: “Compulsory segregation or sterilization of potential parents of certain inadequates.”47

  Throughout the essay outlining the new set of eugenic responsibilities and countermeasures, Howe was credited for his tireless efforts. One article declared, “He threw the weight of his professional experience, as an ophthalmologist, into this particular field…. “48

  But most of Howe’s most radical plans never took root, in large part because the famed ophthalmologist died before he could complete his work. He died on December 17, 1928, at age eighty, in his Belmont, Massachusetts, home. The next month Eugenical News eulogized the man who had served as president of the Eugenics Research Association until shortly before his death. “Lucien Howe was a true gentleman, a broad scholar, and he loved his fellow men.” This statement echoed the tribute of the American Ophthalmological Society, which adopted the following resolution: “A student of quality, an author of distinction, a scholar in the house of scientific interpretation and original research, Dr. Howe, a former president of this Society, has added to its reputation and has maintained its tradition.” For eight decades, the American Ophthalmological Society has awarded the Lucien Howe Medal for service to the profession and mankind.49

  CHAPTER 9

  Mongrelization

  The u.s. Census Bureau would not cooperate with eugenics. No agency collected and compiled more information on individuals than the bureau. Its mission was clear: to count Americans and create a demographic portrait for policymakers. A fundamental principle of census taking is the confidentiality and
sanctity of individual records. In the early twentieth century, American eugenics coveted this information.

  For years, eugenic leaders tried-with little result-to convince the Census Bureau to change its ways. They targeted the 1920 census. In 1916, Alexander Graham Bell, representing the Eugenics Record Office, was among the first to formally suggest that the bureau add the father’s name and the mother’s maiden name to the data gathered on each individual.1 The Census Bureau declined to make the addition.

  But shortly after Bell’s first entreaty, Laughlin proposed a survey of all those in state custodial and charitable facilities, as well as jails. The Census Bureau agreed, and soon thereafter its director of statistical research, Joseph A. Hill, granted Laughlin the assignment. Laughlin was credentialed as a “special agent of the Bureau of the Census.”2 This first joint program, however, would not lead to an alliance with the Census Bureau, but to a bureaucratic war.

  Since the 1880s, the Census Bureau had compiled statistics on what it called “the defective, dependent and delinquent” population, referring to the insane as defective, the elderly and infirm as dependent, and prisoners as delinquent. Laughlin insisted on changing the Census Bureau’s terminology to “the socially inadequate” and adding to its rolls large, stratified contingents of the unfit, especially along racial lines. Laughlin’s concept of social inadequacy would encompass those who “entail a drag upon those members of the community who have sufficient insight, initiative, competence, physical strength and social instincts to enable them to live effective lives…. “3

  The Census Bureau refused. It stubbornly claimed that Laughlin’s newly concocted term, socially inadequate, if used publicly, would surely “call forth criticism and protest.” Nor would it accept any of Laughlin’s substitute categories, such as “submerged tenth” or “the sub-social classes.” To adhere to the legal descriptions of the project-and follow the most conservative line-the Census Bureau insisted on its traditional appellations, “defective, dependent and delinquent.”4