The Orphans of Davenport

by Marilyn Brookwood

  A naturalist who yearned to establish a zoological research center, Davenport had explored possible sites where he might organize a program for the study of animal evolution, including at Cold Spring Harbor, on Long Island. In 1902, he proposed such a laboratory to the newly established Carnegie Institution, in Washington DC, and two years later, Carnegie funded a Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution and named Davenport as director. There, Davenport continued his earlier work in quantitative methods in biology, the use of exact statistical measurement as also employed in physics and chemistry. According to a Davenport biographer, American geneticist Carlton MacDowell (1887–1973), his work had “unquestionable importance.”68

  Yet, MacDowell also reported that Davenport’s research program was poorly defined, lacked a methodical approach, and had limited focus, which caused him to jump from investigation to investigation. Despite these failings, with support from the Rockefellers and other wealthy families, each summer Davenport’s station attracted outstanding American geneticists to its labs.69

  During his first years at the experimental station, Davenport expressed doubt about Mendelian genetics; but by 1909, he accepted that Mendel’s findings had far-reaching implications for eugenic investigations of human populations. To mount a more comprehensive research attack, he hunted for money to expand, and in 1910, with financial support of over half a million dollars (today about $14 million) from Mary Williamson Harriman, the wealthy widow of a railroad baron, Davenport created a second Cold Spring Harbor enterprise, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). It would research trait inheritance, preach eugenic gospel, and become consequential in national policy.

  To assist him, Davenport hired an unknown Iowan, Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943), an expert in breeding thoroughbred horses and an instructor at the First District State Normal School in Kirksville, Missouri, as ERO superintendent. Together, they would investigate the laws of human heredity, especially those that defined social behaviors. To advance their agenda, in 1912, shortly after Davenport was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, he published Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, in which he argued that “poverty means . . . mental inferiority,”70 and warned of the threat posed by certain inherited traits:

  Imbecility and “criminalistics” . . . can be traced back to the darkness of remote generations in a way that forces us to conclude that these traits have come to us directly from our animal ancestry and have never been got rid of. . . . If we are to build up in America a society worthy of the species man then we must take such steps as will prevent the increase or even the perpetuation of animalistic strains.71

  At the ERO, Davenport and Laughlin launched ambitious research in which they collected data about individual traits found in members of families. Their methodology took the form of a detailed questionnaire, the Record of Family Traits, distributed by the ERO’s trained fieldworkers or that families requested. Working nationwide, fieldworkers especially interviewed inmates in asylums and institutions, patients in hospitals, and residents in poor houses about themselves, their close relatives, and their relatives as far back as they could remember. Their reports included subjective descriptions that could not be verified and that workers labeled “community reactions” (actually, local gossip).

  These conscientious workers painstakingly recorded information into the ERO’s Trait Book, its catalog of every human behavioral feature—physical and mental. Chess-playing, as one example, “is number 4598, where 4 signifies a mental trait; 5, general mental ability; 9, special game-playing ability; and 8, the specific game, chess.”72 Altogether, the ERO systematized five trait categories: physical traits, including height, weight, eye color, hair color, and deformities; deficiencies, such as color blindness and diabetes; mental traits related to intelligence and insanity; personality characteristics, such as rebelliousness, irritability, and radicalness; and social traits, such as criminality, scholarship, alcoholism, and traitorousness. All these data, including hundreds of subcategories, were entered on thousands, eventually about a million, 3-by-5 index cards.73

  To promote awareness of biodeterminism, Laughlin established The Eugenical News, a monthly newspaper for “the dissemination of eugenical truths.”74 From 1916 to 1939, the newspaper published articles on the menace of the feebleminded, differential fertility, the evils of race crossing, among many other eugenic concerns.75 Headlines in one edition included “Eugenical Ideas in Tennessee,” “Quality, Not Quantity of Population,” and “Prenuptial Examinations in Belgium, Luxemburg, Germany.”76 Under Davenport and Laughlin, the ERO became the beating heart of American eugenics, “a clearinghouse for eugenics information and propaganda, a platform from which popular eugenic campaigns could be launched, and a home for several eugenical publications. . . . [It] was the only major eugenics institution with a building, research facilities, and a paid staff.”77

  So that Laughlin’s academic credentials would measure up to the authority of his position, in 1916 Davenport arranged for him to attend Princeton University, where in two years he earned his master’s and doctorate degrees.78 In 1920 and again in 1922, Laughlin testified before the US House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization about the dangers of immigrants flooding the United States. Specifically, he spoke against the immigration of Italians and Jews, who from 1900 to 1920 comprised 9 percent of those entering the United States. The committee named Laughlin its Expert Eugenics Agent, and he played a key role in the 1924 passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act, the law that limited immigration from any country to 2 percent of that nation’s population.79 The Head of the Carnegie Institution called Laughlin’s influence “monumental.”80

  With ERO enthusiasm for perfecting the human race charting the way, through the 1920s the educated public absorbed a blizzard of eugenics-focused radio coverage, newspaper and magazine articles, public lectures, conferences, YMCA programs, museum installations, and even community celebrations, such as church picnics that featured eugenicist speakers. Eventually, there would be hundreds of college courses—including at Harvard, Columbia, and Princeton—in which eugenic science was taught to thousands of students. At state fairs, families submitted to physical and psychiatric exams, as well as intelligence tests, as they participated in highly popular Better Baby and Fitter Family competitions.81

  The ERO’s message accelerated further in 1922 when Albert E. Wiggam, America’s foremost journalist-promoter of eugenics, published his treatise, The New Decalogue of Science. A hyperbolic sermon in support of eugenic sterilization, Wiggam’s book broadcast his devotion to eugenics’ creed, a crusade for “the highest truth man will ever know,” along with eugenics’ “Ten Commandments of Science.”82 Also in 1922, the New York Times reported Lewis Terman’s belief that the intelligence of the white race was declining. Terman advised, “If the seed of unusual success is not in the original germ cell, there is no chance for the developed man or woman to become intellectually ‘unusual.’” He said his fears reflected statistics showing that the intellectually superior were slower to reproduce and therefore had fewer children than the “socially incompetent.”83

  Meanwhile, despite secretly suffering from epilepsy,84 a condition thought related to mental illness and reason to institutionalize and sterilize those afflicted, Laughlin committed himself to the extension of laws for involuntary sterilization of the degenerate. His strident 1922 tract, Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, included a model sterilization law, and as he intended, many states used his suggested text to win passage of sterilization legislation. But the Eugenics Record Office did not lift the heavy burden of saving the nation from the menace of inherited degeneracy alone. It received significant assistance from the talented and well-connected New York City aristocrat Madison Grant (1865–1937).

  One of America’s most celebrated eugenics leaders, Grant was an environmentalist without portfolio. Despite his lack of scientific training, the Columbia Law School graduate headed the Bronx Zoo and New York Aqua
rium, served as a trustee of the American Bison Society and the American Museum of Natural History, and created the Bronx River Parkway and Glacier National Park.85 But in a feat every bit as remarkable, his ideas managed to shift eugenics’ focus from “a skirmish against individuals who were socially unfit to a war against groups who were racially unfit.”86 Historian of eugenics Mark Haller, of Temple University, described Grant as “the nation’s most influential racist.”87

  The Passing of the Great Race, or the Racial Basis of European History, Grant’s milestone eugenics treatise published in 1916 by Charles Scribner’s Sons, went to four editions and seven printings. Here Grant explicated a biologically determined racial caste system in which blond, blue-eyed “Nordics” were ascendant.88 In close to 500 pages, he described nonexistent pathways that racial groups traveled as they crossed Europe; humanity’s progress related to race; race-based summaries of European civilizations; and—scattershot—excoriations of degenerate races. Through this lens, for example, Grant interpreted the racial qualities that made Rome a dominant civilization: “its love of organization, of law and military efficiency, as well as its ideals of family life, loyalty, and truth, obviously point to a Nordic rather than to a Mediterranean origin.”89 He also assailed ideas that drove the French Enlightenment and American Revolution:

  There exits to-day a widespread and fatuous belief in the power of environment, as well as of education and opportunity to alter heredity, which arises from the dogma of the brotherhood of man, derived in its turn from the loose thinkers of the French Revolution and their American mimics.90

  Grant’s book found favorable academic reception and popular success. One supporter, John C. Merriam, a member of the National Research Council’s Committee on Scientific Problems of Human Migration, passed the book on to several colleagues. In 1920, Merriam, a paleontologist, had become president of the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC, the institution that provided significant financial support to the ERO. Another supporter was Robert M. Yerkes, coauthor of the intelligence tests given to World War I army recruits.91 Adolf Hitler wrote Grant to say that the book was his bible,92 while later, Nazi war criminals cited Grant in their Nuremburg trial defenses.93 And ERO head Charles Davenport asked Grant: “Can we build a wall high enough around this country, so as to keep out these cheaper races?”94

  Although America’s eugenic cause—some called it a mania—appeared to be thriving, voices skeptical of its doctrine were emerging. In 1913, two physicians reported to the National Academy of Medicine that after examining 1,000 incarcerated young recidivists, they could find “no proof of the existence of hereditary criminal traits.”95 Further, in the pages of the New Republic, in 1922, journalist and public intellectual Walter Lippmann, who had advised President Woodrow Wilson and later won two Pulitzer Prizes, challenged Lewis Terman’s insistence that IQ tests measured

  innate, hereditary, predetermined intelligence. . . . This dogma could not but lead to an intellectual caste system in which the task of education had given way to the doctrine of predestination and infant damnation. . . . The claim that we have learned how to measure hereditary intelligence has no scientific foundation. We cannot measure intelligence when we have never defined it . . . we cannot speak of its hereditary basis after it has been fused with a thousand . . . environmental influences.96

  In 1926, attorney Clarence Darrow (1857–1938), who had defended a Tennessee teacher’s challenge of a law against teaching evolution, published a biting essay, The Eugenics Cult, in which he attacked “semi-cultured citizens [who] read eugenist books . . . then shudder with horror at the . . . rising tide of undesirables.” Darrow summed up arguments that “inevitably, the superior stocks will be submerged. . . . The only wonder is that with the persistent and senseless breeding of the unfit this hasn’t happened long ago.” Darrow also raised a skeptical eyebrow at Albert Wiggam’s declaration that with eugenics “we already have enough science at hand to bring the world into an earthly paradise” and at another eugenicist’s claim that it would take “less than four generations [to] eliminate nine-tenths of the crime, insanity, and sickness . . . in our land.” Darrow asked, “Amazingly simple, isn’t it?”97 According to British statistician R. C. Punnett, inventor of the Punnett square for computing the appearance of dominant and recessive traits, it would take “250 generations—roughly 8000 years—of selective breeding before feeblemindedness could be eliminated from the United States.”98

  However, the most knowledgeable, if least heeded, of eugenics’ critics were geneticists and biologists. In 1909, biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan questioned the Mendelian concept of “an adult character somehow residing in a particle within a cell.”99 Although Morgan and Charles Davenport were close friends, by 1924 Morgan noted the false logic of eugenic claims of unit trait inheritance when he recognized that trait expression is influenced by environmental conditions.100 At about that time, because of its “reckless statements and unreliability,” Morgan resigned from the American Breeders Association, a eugenics organization that supported Davenport’s work.101

  By the mid-1920s, nearly all geneticists “felt compelled to speak up” and reject eugenic theories. According to historian Garland Allen, they recognized that “the arguments of eugenicists were totally out of touch with advances in the field.”102 However, in the 1930s, when young Rockefeller Institute cell biologist Alfred Mirsky asked Morgan why he had not challenged Davenport’s eugenic ideas, Morgan replied, “It would hurt too many old friends.”103 Another scientific voice opposed to eugenics was that of anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), of Columbia University. Boas, who in 1887 had immigrated to the United States from Germany, termed eugenics “racism disguised as science.”104

  Before geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings (1868–1947) ever got to Harvard or even attended college, he had been hired to teach zoology at Texas A&M. A born scientist, Jennings eventually earned an undergraduate degree at Harvard, where he studied under Charles Davenport. In 1924, as a Johns Hopkins geneticist, Jennings wrote a paper in which he described the “linear arrangement of genes in the chromosomes,”105 noting “the double serial arrangement, like a pair of strings of beads.”106 Here Jennings anticipated by three decades DNA’s double helix, captured in 1952 in an image by crystallographer Rosalind Franklin and described by Francis Crick and James Watson in their 1953 Nobel Prize–winning work. But Jennings’s paper was notable for another reason: it rebuked the United States for passage of the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act because Congress had used the work of Mendel to claim that immigrants had inferior traits that were genetically based. Jennings wrote:

  Mendelism has become grotesquely inadequate and misleading. . . . There is indeed no such thing as a “unit character” and it would be a step in advance if that expression should disappear. . . . Nothing can be more certain . . . than that hundreds of genes are required to make a mind—even a feeble mind. . . . Development, it turns out is a continual process of adjustment to environment. . . . All characteristics are hereditary, and all are environmental.107

  In 1927, sterilization received the nation’s highest judicial endorsement and became the law of the land when the Supreme Court decided the case of marginalized Virginia citizen Carrie Buck. Placed at age 3 with a foster family after her mother’s incarceration for drug use and sexual promiscuity, when she was a teenager Carrie’s foster parents removed her from school, where she had been an average student with no behavior problems and made her their servant.108 After she was raped and became pregnant by a foster family relative, the family advised the state that she was feebleminded and epileptic and should be institutionalized and sterilized. A credulous state agent agreed.

  In a plan to win Supreme Court approval for the state’s newly crafted sterilization law, Virginia officials colluded to challenge Carrie’s sterilization and assigned complicit legal counsel to defend her. When the case reached the Supreme Court, false testimony and a deposition by ERO leader Harry Laughlin sealed her fate. Laughlin,
who never met Carrie, included in his deposition the invented claim that her baby was feebleminded. He also quoted from his own well-regarded book on sterilization, which promoted “the right of the state to limit human reproduction in the interests of race betterment.” Laughlin’s deposition painted Carrie’s family as a “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the south” whose “feeblemindedness is caused by the inheritance of degenerate qualities”; he said that Carrie was the “potential parent of social inadequate or defective offspring.”109

  With a single dissent from a Catholic justice who objected on religious grounds, the Supreme Court supported Virginia’s claim, and in a five-paragraph decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes upheld the state’s right to forcibly sterilize Carrie. Regarded as one of the most infamous verdicts in American jurisprudence, Holmes wrote, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”110 On June 4, 1927, a social worker returned Carrie to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, where the Supreme Court’s verdict was accomplished.

  Following the court’s decision, every state legalized involuntary sterilization, although some rarely used the statute. The decision still stands, and some state laws remain in place. From about 1920 until today, a total of 65,000 to 70,000 Americans have been sterilized, most of them low-status women.111 Reports about Carrie’s later life tell of her love of crossword puzzles, her avid reading of newspapers. Her daughter, who died at age 8, was also of normal intelligence. Borrowing Thomas Chatterton William’s phrase, Carrie Buck’s was a “crime of being.”112