One Summer: America, 1927 (52 page)

Grant believed that any degenerate genes introduced into the general
population would not be diluted and made safe, but would permanently taint the whole. “The cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew,” Grant grimly explained.

Although none of this was compatible with even the small amounts of genetics that were understood at the time, it appears that Grant was saying exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear. His book was praised by the
American Historical Review
, the
Yale Review
, and
Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
. Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the country’s leading anthropologist, wrote the introduction.

Among others supporting Grant’s views, in whole or in part, were the Yale economist Irving Fisher, the Harvard neuropathologist E. E. Southard, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard—the man whose committee condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death—the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, and Herbert Hoover, who had a lifelong antipathy to people with brown skin. In 1909, in a report for his employers, Hoover declared that black and Asian laborers should be avoided because they suffered from “a low mental order” and a pathological “lack of coordination and inability to take initiative.” Stressing his own firsthand experience, Hoover concluded that “one white man equals from two to three of the colored races, even in the simplest forms of mine work such as shoveling or tramming.” If Hoover modified these views in later years, he gave no evidence of it. In 1921, he was patron of a eugenics conference hosted by the American Museum of Natural History itself and inspired by
The Passing of the Great Race
.

For a time, the principles of negative eugenics, as they became known in America, were practically inescapable. At the Sesquicentennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1926, the American Eugenics Society had a stand with a mechanical counter showing that a person of inferior nature was born somewhere in the United States every forty-eight seconds, while “high-grade” persons came along only once every seven and a half minutes. The relative rates at which the counters revolved showed all too dramatically how swiftly the nation was being overwhelmed with inferiority. It was one of the most popular displays at the exhibition.

The spiritual headquarters for the eugenics movement in America was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO), opened in 1909 in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s North Shore, and largely funded by the sort of wealthy people who wanted more innately superior beings like themselves and fewer of any other kind. (The property abutted the estate of the Tiffany family of jewelry renown.) The first director was Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist. Davenport believed eugenic explanations could be found for every aspect of the human condition—obesity, criminality, propensity to lie or cheat, even love of the sea. Under Davenport, the ERO also made several studies of the deleterious effects of racial interbreeding. As Davenport explained: “One often finds in mulattoes ambition and drive combined with low intelligence, so that the hybrid is unhappy, dissatisfied with his fate and rebellious.… A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffective people.” Davenport argued not just for the sterilization of the inferior and faulty, but for their castration, in order to remove desire as well as reproductive ability, just to be on the safe side.

Davenport, however, was the soul of enlightened compassion compared with his young protégé Harry H. Laughlin, who may have been the most lamentable person to achieve scientific respectability in America in the twentieth century. Born in 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Laughlin trained at the North Missouri State Normal School and worked as a teacher and school administrator after college, but then developed an interest in breeding and enrolled at Princeton to study biology. In 1910 he met Davenport, who was so taken with Laughlin’s zeal and devotion to eugenic purification that he made him superintendent of the ERO.

Laughlin’s credo was simple: “To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.” As journalist Edwin Black notes in his 2003 book,
War Against the Weak
, Laughlin’s plan of attack was threefold: “sterilization, mass incarceration and sweeping immigration restrictions.” In furtherance of these goals, Laughlin created the imposingly named, ferociously vengeful Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasm in the American Population, which had the self-assigned task of eradicating reproductive inferiority
from America once and for all. Laughlin’s committee was chaired by David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford, and included scientists and academics from many of America’s best universities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Chicago, among others.

The committee also included a brilliant but eccentric French surgeon, Alexis Carrel, from the Rockefeller Institute in New York. Carrel’s extreme views on eugenics—which were in some respects little short of mad—would contribute significantly, even dangerously, to Charles Lindbergh’s opinions, but mercifully that was still some way off.

Laughlin, meanwhile, was tireless in his efforts to root out and limit human inferiority wherever it arose. The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization appointed him its expert adviser and assigned him the task of determining the comparative degeneracy of various ethnic groups. To persuade the members of how urgently reforms were needed, Laughlin filled the committee chamber with photographs of drooling mental defectives, all identified as recent immigrants, beneath a banner reading: “Carriers of the Germ Plasm of the Future American Population.”

Congress could not resist the authority of the committee or Laughlin’s horrifying propaganda, and it quickly pushed through the 1921 Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act followed by the 1924 National Origins Act. Together these ended America’s open-door immigration policy. By 1927, more people were being deported from Ellis Island than were coming in through it.

That more or less settled the problem of imported inferiority, but it left the issue of home-produced backwardness, of which there was a separate abundance.

Laughlin and his supporters turned their attention to that challenge with, if anything, even more enthusiasm. They conducted tests on large blocks of people and repeatedly produced unnerving results. They reported that up to 80 percent of all prisoners and half of servicemen were feebleminded. New York alone was calculated to contain as many as two hundred thousand mentally subnormal people. Altogether, it was believed, about one-third of the American population was dangerously backward.

The solution, in Laughlin’s view, was sterilization on a massive scale. He believed in sterilizing not merely the insane and mentally deficient but also orphans, tramps, paupers, the hard of hearing, and the blind—“the most worthless one-tenth of our present population,” as he put it with a certain conspicuous absence of compassion.

In 1927, the question of how freely the state could exercise the power of sterilization came to a head in a legal case known as
Buck v. Bell
. The case focused on a seventeen-year-old girl in Virginia named Carrie Buck, who was deemed to be of low intelligence and had recently given birth to an illegitimate child, in consequence of which she was now confined in the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded at Lynchburg. Her mother was already an inmate there. In 1924, Carrie Buck was selected for sterilization by the colony’s superintendent, Dr. John H. Bell (hence
Buck v. Bell
).

The chief contention was that not only was Carrie Buck mentally incompetent, but so were her mother and daughter—three straight generations of defectives. The family, it was argued, was clearly incapable of producing other than mental defectives and ought to be sterilized for its own good and the good of society. The evidence against the family was hardly overwhelming. Laughlin, the state’s chief witness, pronounced against the Bucks without ever having met or examined any of them. He declared that Carrie Buck came from a “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class” of southerner and should be rendered incapable of producing more of her kind on grounds of class alone.

The charge of simplemindedness against Vivian Buck, Carrie’s daughter, was made purely on the word of a social worker who examined the child once and thought there was something “not quite normal” about her, but she freely added: “I should say that perhaps my knowledge of the mother may prejudice me in that regard.” The child was just six months old at the time; no tests then existed for determining the mental capabilities of such a young person. In fact, Vivian was later shown to have normal, possibly even above-average, intelligence. She died of an intestinal disorder at just eight years old, but her performance at school to that point was entirely capable, and once she even made the honor roll. Carrie Buck herself was clearly not retarded in any meaningful
sense, if at all. She read newspapers every day and enjoyed the new craze for crossword puzzles. An academic who later interviewed Buck described her as “not a sophisticated woman [but] neither mentally ill nor retarded.”

Nonetheless, when given the new Stanford version of the Binet-Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test (and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid), Carrie Buck was determined to have a mental age of nine while her mother didn’t quite make it to eight. Officially, they both fell into the classification of “moron.”

The case came before the U.S. Supreme Court in the spring of 1927. The court ruled by a vote of 8 to 1 that Buck should be sterilized. The majority opinion was written by eighty-six-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.—a man of such long life that he had fought as an infantryman in the Civil War.

Holmes summarized the situation concisely: “Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child.” He agreed with Laughlin that sterilization was necessary in society “to prevent our being swamped with incompetence.” Then he gave his solution: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.”

Then came the ringing conclusion that has been quoted ever since: “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Only one justice, Pierce Butler, dissented from the majority view, and he did not offer a written opinion to explain his dissent. Holmes was supported by all the other justices, who included the chief justice and former U.S. president, William Howard Taft, and the liberal Louis D. Brandeis.

Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended
in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention. The
New York Times
gave it a small mention on page 19. The
News Leader
of Richmond, Virginia, where the matter was a local story, didn’t report it at all.

Slowly sentiment began to turn against negative eugenics. Many serious geneticists, like Thomas Hunt Morgan of Columbia University, would have nothing to do with it, and in the summer of 1927 Harvard quietly declined a gift to endow the university with a chair in negative eugenics.

Harry H. Laughlin, however, seemed unstoppable. He became increasingly—and in retrospect very oddly—hostile to epileptics, insisting that they must be either sterilized or by some means confined during their reproductive years. The oddity in this is that it is now known that Laughlin was secretly an epileptic himself. He sometimes had seizures at Cold Spring Harbor, which his colleagues overlooked or covered up even as they were condemning sufferers elsewhere.

In the 1930s, Laughlin sowed the seeds of his downfall as he began to establish warm relationships with Germany’s newly emergent Nazis, some of whom came to Cold Spring Harbor to study American methods and findings. In 1936, the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his commitment to race purification. The following year Laughlin and Cold Spring Harbor became U.S. distributors of a Nazi documentary called
The Hereditarily Diseased
, which argued that it was foolishly sentimental to keep retarded people alive.

This was more than many people could countenance. At a convention of the American Jewish Congress in New York, the keynote speaker, Bernard S. Deutsch, attacked Laughlin in the bitterest terms. “Dr. Laughlin’s ‘purification of race’ theory is as dangerous and as spurious as the purified Aryan race theories advanced by the Nazis, to which it bears suspicious resemblance,” Deutsch said. The Carnegie Institution, the Eugenics Record Office’s chief source of funding, appointed Herbert Spencer Jennings, a respected geneticist from Johns Hopkins University, to review Laughlin’s work. Spencer found that Laughlin had falsified data, manipulated findings to support racist conclusions, and generally
perpetrated scientific fraud for over a quarter of a century. Laughlin was forced to step down from the ERO, which was effectively closed in 1938. Laughlin retired to Missouri, but a huge amount of damage had been done.

Altogether at least sixty thousand people were sterilized because of Laughlin’s efforts. At the peak of the movement in the 1930s, some thirty states had sterilization laws, though only Virginia and California made wide use of them. It is perhaps worth noting that sterilization laws remain on the books in twenty states today.

In late September 1927, Carrie Buck, her legal options exhausted, was scheduled for sterilization and the procedure was carried out the following month. Her sister was sterilized as well, but without knowing what was happening. She was told she was being treated for appendicitis.