The Genius Factory (11 page)

Shockley was searching for a cause, and, in 1963, he found it. Ever since a wartime trip to India, Shockley had worried about overpopulation and vigorously supported birth control and abortion rights. In March 1963, Shockley saw a
San Francisco Chronicle
story entitled “Weird Attack Maims Shopkeeper.” A hoodlum named Rudy “The Brute” Hoskins had burst into a San Francisco deli and tossed lye into the face of the owner, Harry Goldman, blinding him in one eye. It turned out that an ex-boyfriend of Goldman’s girlfriend had promised Hoskins $400 to toss the acid (though paid him only $2). Shockley was mesmerized by the details of Hoskins’s life: Hoskins was black. His “mentally dull” mother had an IQ of only 65. She had seventeen children but could remember the names of only nine of them. Shockley, rather than blaming the obvious villain—the creep ex-boyfriend who had paid for the attack—suddenly saw the world anew.

The problem was not that there were too many people on the planet, Shockley concluded. The problem was that there were too many of the
wrong
people on the planet (like Rudy Hoskins and his mom), and they were breeding too fast. With his systematic brain, Shockley immediately outlined the problem, named it “The Problem of Human Quality,” and set about solving it. Shockley reached much the same conclusion that Robert Graham was reaching a few hundred miles south. The planet was being destroyed by “dysgenics.” In better, bygone days, genetic failures like Rudy Hoskins’s mother would have died before childbearing age. Now, thanks to what Shockley liked to call “humanitarianism gone berserk,” society not only kept these imbeciles alive but paid them through wel-fare programs to have more children. Like Graham, Shockley discounted the fact that Americans were richer, healthier, and better educated than ever before.

It was no accident that Shockley developed his eugenic fixation at the same time as Graham. They were men cut from the same starched cloth. Like Graham, Shockley had been a giant in the 1950s, a scientific businessman in an age when there was no cooler job. Like Graham, Shockley had been fawned over as a wise man. And like Graham, Shockley started to fear the genetic decline of the U.S. population at the moment that Americans decided to stop listening to men like him.

Through the mid-1960s, Shockley laid out his dysgenic fears in articles and university lectures. In
U.S. News & World Report,
he wondered, “Is the Quality of the U.S. Population Declining?” Year after year, he petitioned the National Academy of Sciences to commission a study on American genetic decline.

Because he was a Nobel laureate, Shockley’s theories about “human quality” were respectfully tolerated, but without great interest. He craved more attention, and he pushed until he found a way to make America really listen. He started talking more about race. Shockley had originally framed America’s “quality” problems in generic terms: anyone could have a low IQ. But by the late 1960s, Shockley had narrowed his focus to the intellectual inadequacy of blacks. Shockley coined a phrase, “The Tragedy for the American Negro,” that he repeated, mantralike, approximately every ten minutes. Black Americans, Shockley said, had an average IQ 12 points lower than whites’. As a result, few blacks could perform demanding jobs, and too many blacks were imbeciles. Social welfare programs and better education could not correct this problem; it was genetic. Blacks, Shockley said, were “genetically enslaved” to their poor DNA, condemned to lives of misery, poverty, and crime. These ideas about black intelligence didn’t originate with Shockley; he built on the work of controversial social scientists—notably Arthur Jensen and Richard Herrnstein—who had been combing intelligence test data. Shockley viewed himself as a popularizer of their ideas. In fact, he was more of an unpopularizer. Their arid journal articles mostly escaped notice, but Shockley’s inflammatory rhetoric, catchy phrases, and provocations enraged Americans.

Between 1960 and 1970, Shockley accomplished a remarkable reversal of reputation. At the start of the decade, Shockley was revered as a symbol of American greatness, one of the world’s greatest scientific minds, a daring businessman, a hero. By decade’s end, he was a national disgrace.

Shockley himself didn’t seem like much of a provocateur. He discussed incendiary topics in a bizarre manner—exactly as if he were summarizing the latest advances in semiconductor research. He was the iceman. He didn’t exude hatred for blacks—he didn’t have any. He didn’t exude sorrow—he didn’t have any of that, either. Shockley’s critics assumed that his racial anxiety stemmed from some personal experience, some deep trauma, but it probably didn’t. He had no particular feelings for blacks one way or another. He hardly knew any blacks. To him, his racial conclusions were simply the logical outcome of a train of thought. As far as he was concerned, once he started to address human quality, he would follow its logic wherever it took him. In his mind, his conclusions had nothing to do with any actual black person; he was simply making an irrefutable point.

Shockley was at once a brilliant debater and a terrible one. Every point was backed up by a statistic, every sentence a model of logic, clarity, and chill. I listened to lots of tapes of him debating other experts, and he demolished his opponent every time. Yet his snooty, meticulous manner was exactly calibrated to infuriate anyone who disagreed with him.

Because Shockley was such a pure rationalist, he assumed that all problems were equally susceptible to his single kind of scrutiny. It never occurred to him that the “science” itself might be built on shaky premises. He believed religiously in the accuracy of IQ tests, that they measured intelligence in an absolute and total fashion. He never questioned whether an IQ test was a fitting tool of social policy. And he assumed that the “genetically enslaved” blacks led the lives of misery he ascribed to them, but he never actually talked to any of them.

Shockley chose precisely the wrong moment to share his conclusions with America. The late 1960s had arrived, with the full flower of the civil rights movement, the rise of black power, and the student revolts. Shockley was a comically delightful villain: the scientific racist. Tiny in stature, narrow-faced, mild of manner, he made a grand foil for blacks’ anger and students’ rage. He played along, touring campuses with the enthusiasm of a hot indie rock band. He would accept any invitation. He was shouted down by black students at Dartmouth; barred from Harvard and Yale; silenced, then whisked into a police car, at the University of Kansas. His supporters were attacked at California State University, Sacramento. His face was emblazoned on “Wanted: Dead or Alive” posters. When
Roots
aired, five universities canceled Shockley engagements.

William Shockley, the notorious Nobelist.
Courtesy of Stanford University Archives

At Stanford, where Shockley was a professor in the Engineering Department, students regularly demonstrated against him. They shouted “Off Pig Shockley,” pinned a list of demands to the university president’s door with a hunting knife, and burned Shockley in effigy. Shockley was unperturbed—and not-so-secretly delighted—by the rage he generated. Black protestors dressed in white Klan robes mau-maued his classroom. When his classroom was invaded, Shockley serenely interviewed the disrupters to discern their complaints, carefully chalked their demands on his blackboard, and tried to debate each one point by point. He kept asking the protestors “to formulate clearly defined questions.” When a microphone at a protest outside his office malfunctioned, Shockley cheerfully went outside and fixed it so that the anti-Shockley imprecations could continue. It surely satisfied him enormously to have all those transistors at work against him.

Shockley found ever more inciting ways to goad his enemies. He praised Hitler’s eugenic policies: “I would think that it would be quite likely that there was some significant amount of elimination of genetic diseases [in Nazi Germany]. Just as the autobahns were a good thing, maybe there were some other good things about Hitler.”

Shockley thought he could prove to blacks that whiteness led to intelligence. Shockley proposed to do this by measuring the percentage of “white” genes in blacks: he would show that the “whiter” the black person, the smarter he was. (Not that he had any real idea of how to test for “white” genes.) He asked NAACP leader Roger Wilkins to help him collect blood samples from members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other celebrated blacks, on the grounds that these accomplished people would surely prove to be significantly white. When Wilkins rejected him furiously, Shockley suggested that Stanford blood-test its five hundred black students. You can imagine how well that went over on campus.

In the late 1960s, Shockley floated his “Voluntary Sterilization Bonus Plan.” The government, he said, should pay anyone with an IQ of less than 100 to be permanently sterilized—$1,000 for every IQ point under 100. (The cash would go into a trust, because such morons could not, of course, take care of the money themselves.) There would also be bonuses for bounty hunters who recruited willing candidates. At first Shockley called his sterilization plan an “intellectual exercise,” but eventually he agitated to conduct a pilot program in California.

Naturally, Shockley beguiled Robert Graham. Shockley was not merely a Nobelist but one preaching what Graham himself believed. Graham contacted Shockley after his first controversial speech in 1965 and struck up a friendly correspondence with him. Graham sucked up to Shockley—he couldn’t help it, Graham sucked up to all men he admired—donating generously to Shockley’s Foundation for Research and Education on Eugenics and Dysgenics (FREED) and sending Shockley flattering “Dear Bill” notes.

So when Graham decided to start collecting his supersperm, Shockley topped his list. Shockley gave Graham his first Nobel sperm, supplying a sample during a 1977 visit to southern California. Shockley donated again in 1978. Soon after, Graham wrote a letter to Shockley telling him to expect more visits as soon as women started getting pregnant. “We will resume collecting donations as soon as we have begun to utilize a good proportion of our present library. We don’t want such a superb asset to go long unutilized,” Graham wrote. He signed off the note to Shockley, “I will keep you informed if you become a father again.”

But Graham never used Shockley’s “superb asset” again. Shockley, in fact, proved no asset at all, but Graham’s biggest liability. When the
Los Angeles Times
announced the Nobel bank, scientists pelted the Repository with criticism. Geneticists objected that intelligence was not purely DNA-linked and hence Nobel sperm might not make kids smarter. Andrologists observed that Nobelists were too old to be effective sperm donors. Statisticians said Graham was duping customers who thought they were getting a guaranteed genius. But these slights didn’t stick, since Graham’s idea seemed harmless, at worst. If DNA did help intelligence, then these children could get a boost from a Nobelist dad. And if DNA didn’t help intelligence, what harm was done?

The scientific criticisms didn’t stick, but the criticism of Shockley did. The initial
Times
piece didn’t make anything of Shockley’s involvement. He was described only as a 1956 Nobelist in physics; his contentious second career as a racial scientist went unmentioned. But after a couple of days of favorable coverage for the Repository—or at least gape-mouthed coverage—newspapers around the country pounced on the Shockley link. Shockley turned the Nobel sperm bank from a curiosity into a menace and then into a joke. If Shockley was involved, the bank couldn’t possibly be as innocent as Graham claimed. On his own, Graham seemed a little odd—an eccentric millionaire, yes, but well meaning and perhaps even visionary. Manacled to Shockley, Graham suddenly seemed sinister. Editorial pages in practically every major city denounced Shockley as a racist and wondered if the bank was a neo-Nazi plot. The
New York
Post
headline was typical: “Master Race Experiment.”

A few days after Shockley’s involvement was publicized, the widow of bank cofounder Hermann Muller wrote a letter to Graham demanding that he remove Muller from the bank’s official name, the Hermann Muller Repository for Germinal Choice. Shockley’s donation proved that the bank was a racist mistake, she said.
Time
and
Newsweek
mentioned the seventy-year-old Shockley’s contribution to point out that sperm from older men was much more likely to produce a Down syndrome child.

Columnists reveled in the Shockley connection. San Francisco’s Herb Caen said it was “proof that masturbation makes you crazy.” Ellen Goodman mocked Shockley as the “Father of the Year.” Every would-be comic from Art Buchwald on down riffed on the Nobel sperm bank: there were proposals for Academy Award sperm banks, media sperm banks, elite animal sperm banks, even sperm banks that were really banks.
The Boston Globe
fast-forwarded to 2003, when newspaper classifieds would advertise pedigrees and stud fees: “Nuclear physicist, age 22, fee $750,000.” Roald Dahl quickly pounded out a comic novel inspired by Graham.
My Uncle Oswald,
set in 1919, told the story of a temptress who seduced the world’s greatest men—Renoir, Picasso, Freud, Einstein, Conrad, Shaw . . . —collected their sperm, and sold it to eager women. (Later, a Swedish novelist inspired by the Repository would imagine a similar sperm-collecting scheme at the Nobel Prize ceremonies in Stockholm.)