Authors: Edwin Black
Blacks might not have been able to decipher the reading, writing and arithmetic denied to them by a discriminatory educational system intent on keeping them illiterate. They may not have been able to comprehend the first thing about tennis nets, bowling lanes or incandescent bulbs. But the descendants of men and women ripped from Africa had cultivated a rich oral storytelling tradition, an intense, almost enraptured scripture-quoting religion, and as a group they would originate the revolutionary music that would dominate the twentieth century. Perhaps most remarkably, they were smart enough to stay alive in a world where an uppity black man with too much on the ball, or too much spring in his step, could be lynched for looking in the wrong direction or asking too many questions.
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Brigham’s book would be circulated to all the state legislatures, congressional committees and throughout the marble halls of Washington as proof positive that the inferior were not just poor or uneducated, but genetically defective. This notion was welcome news to many. Now the pages of polished scholarship could be held up as justification for the draconian measures the movement advocated.
But dissident schools of psychologists and social works emerged. Common sense rejected the numbers. Resistance grew.
The U.S. Army never acted on Yerkes’s voluminous findings, declining to classify its inductees according to his data. Indeed, three independent investigations of the project were launched, one by the army’s general staff, one by the surgeon general and one by the secretary of war. The general staff’s investigation derisively concluded, “No theorist may … ride it [the test scores] as a hobby [horse] for the purpose of obtaining data for research work and the future benefit of the human race.” Nor would military planners utilize the information in the next war.
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Vituperative attacks upon the objectivity and credibility of the Alpha and Beta tests were widespread and highly publicized. Typical were the public denunciations of syndicated journalist Walter Lippmann in the
New
Republic.
“The danger of the intelligence tests,” warned Lippmann, “is that in a wholesale system of education, the less sophisticated or the more prejudiced will stop when they have classified and forget that their duty is to educate. They will grade the retarded child instead of fighting the causes of his backwardness. For the whole drift of the propaganda based on intelligence testing is to treat people with low intelligence quotients as congenitally and hopelessly inferior.” Terman’s answer to Lippmann was simply, “Some members of the species are much stupider than others.” But Lippmann summed it up for many when he declared that the Stanford-Binet and other IQ tests were “a new chance for quackery in a field where quacks breed like rabbits, and … doped evidence to the exponents of the New Snobbery.”
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Eventually, even some of the architects of the IQ, SAT and kindred intelligence tests could no longer defend their creations from the growing rejection in their own professions. In 1928, Goddard grudgingly retreated from his hereditarian stance. “This may surprise you, but frankly when I see what has been made out of the moron by a system of education, which as a rule is only half right, I have no difficulty in concluding that when we get an education that is entirely right there will be no morons who cannot manage themselves and their affairs and compete in the struggle for existence. If we could hope to add to this a social order that would literally give every man a chance, I should be perfectly sure of the result.”
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As for the compulsion to sterilize, Goddard eventually abandoned the eugenic creed entirely, at least publicly. “It may still be objected that moron parents are likely to have imbecile or idiot children. [But] there is not much evidence that this is the case. The danger is probably negligible.” Aware he had recanted his whole life’s work, Goddard confessed in exasperation, “As for myself, I think I have gone over to the enemy.”
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In 1929, Brigham finally rejected those scholarly publications that asserted a racial basis for intelligence-including his own. Whether out of shame or embarrassment, the Princeton scholar submitted, “Comparative studies of various national and racial groups may not be made with existing tests … one the most pretentious of these comparative racial studies-the writer’s own-was without foundation.”
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Meaningful as they were to the history of science, the several quiet recantations were published in obscure medical and scholarly journals. Academia could relish the debate and savor the progress. But the system hewed in stone by the eugenics movement’s intelligence warriors has stubbornly remained in place to this day. By the time some scientists saw the folly of their fiction, the politicians, legislators, educators and social workers who had adopted eugenic intelligence notions as firm science had enacted laws, procedures, systems and policies to enforce their tenets. Quiet apologies carne too late for thousands of Americans who would be chased down by the quotients, scales and derisive labels eugenics had branded upon them.
No longer constrained by newness or lack of scientific proof, the eugenic crusade blitzed across America. The weak, the socially maligned, the defenseless and the scientifically indefensible of America’s lowest biological caste would now be sterilized by the thousands, and in some cases euthanized.
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t didn’t matter that the majority of the American people opposed sterilization and the eugenics movement’s other draconian solutions. It didn’t matter that the underlying science was a fiction, that the intelligence measurements were fallacious, that the Constitutionality was tenuous, or that the whole idea was roundly condemned by so many. None of that mattered because Davenport, Laughlin and their eugenic constellation were not interested in furthering a democracy-they were creating a supremacy.
Of course, American eugenicists did not seek the approbation of the masses whose defective germ plasm they sought to wipe away. Instead, they relied upon the powerful, the wealthy and the influential to make their war against the weak a conflict fought not in public, but in the administrative and bureaucratic foxholes of America. A phalanx of shock troops sallied forth from obscure state agencies and special committees-everyone from the elite of the academic world to sympathetic legislators who sought to shroud their racist beliefs under the protective canopy of science. In tandem, they would hunt, identify, label and take control of those deemed unfit to populate the earth.
During the years bracketing World War I, a potent, if unsound, intelligence classification system was taking root. A patchwork of largely inert state sterilization laws awaited greater validation. The elite thinkers of American medicine, science and higher education were busy expanding the body of eugenic knowledge and evangelizing its tenets. However, the moment had still not arrived for eugenic rhetoric to massively impact the country. During these percolating years, Davenport and Laughlin continued to prepare the groundwork. They knew humanity could not be recreated overnight. They were patient men.
During the war years, eugenic organizations proliferated in America. Like-minded citizens found ethnic solace and even self-vindication in the idea of biological superiority. The Race Betterment Foundation was among the leading eugenic organizations that sprouted around the country to augment the work at Cold Spring Harbor. The society was founded by yet another wealthy American, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek, Michigan. Dr. Kellogg was a member of the state board of health and operated a health sanitarium renowned for its alternative and fanciful food regimens. He had developed for his patients a natural product, a cereal made of wheat flakes. In 1898, Dr. Kellogg’s brother, Will, created the corn flake, and in 1906 he began selling it commercially through a company that would ultimately become the cereal giant known as Kellogg Company. In that same year, Dr. Kellogg founded the Race Betterment Foundation to help stop the propagation of defectives.
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The Race Betterment Foundation attracted some of the most radical elements of the eugenics community. The organization wanted to compile its own eugenic registry, listing the backgrounds of as many Americans as possible, this to augment the one being developed by the Eugenics Record Office. In 1914, Dr. Kellogg organized the First Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan. The conference’s purpose was to lay the foundations for the creation of a super race, amid an atmosphere of lavish banquets, stirring calls to biological action, and scientific grandiloquence. “We have wonderful new races of horses, cows, and pigs,” argued Dr. Kellogg. “Why should we not have a new and improved race of men?” He wanted the “white races of Europe … to establish a Race of Human Thoroughbreds. “
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Davenport told the Battle Creek conferees that this could be accomplished by working quietly with the heads of state institutions. “The superintendents of state institutions,” he explained, “were very desirous of assistance. We were able to give it to them, and they to us.” Davenport relied upon institutional figures to authenticate his findings. “We have found that a large proportion of the feeble-minded, the great majority of them, are such because they belong to defective stock.”
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Whatever restraint Laughlin used in his formal writings was absent from his speeches to the eugenic vanguard. Laughlin boldly put the Battle Creek gathering on notice: “To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs is the slogan of eugenics.” His three-pronged program was based on sterilization, mass incarceration, and sweeping immigration restrictions. “The compulsory sterilization of certain degenerates,” affirmed Laughlin, “is therefore designed as a eugenical agency complementary to the segregation of the socially unfit classes, and to the control of the immigration of those who carry defective germ-plasm.”
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The mothers of unfit children should be relegated to “a place comparable to that of the females of mongrel strains of domestic animals,” said Laughlin. He complained that although twelve states had enacted laws, only a thousand people had been sterilized. “A halfway measure will never strike deeply at the roots of evil,” he railed.
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At the Second Race Betterment Conference held the next year, ERO Scientific Director Irving Fisher, a Yale University economist, was equally blunt. “Gentlemen and ladies,” Fisher sermonized, “you have not any idea unless you have studied this subject mathematically, how rapidly we could exterminate this contamination if we really got at it, or how rapidly the contamination goes on if we do not get at it.”
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Eugenic extremism enjoyed layer upon layer of scientific veneer not only because eminent scholars enunciated its doctrine and advocated its solutions, but also by virtue of its numerous respected “research bodies.” The Eugenics Record Office had inaugurated a Board of Scientific Directors in December of 1912. The board was initially comprised of Davenport, plus eminent Harvard neuropathologist E. E. Southard, Alexander Graham Bell and renowned Johns Hopkins University patholo-gist William Welch. Welch enjoyed impeccable qualifications; he had served as both the first scientific director of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research and as a trustee of the Carnegie Institution. Moreover, before and during his term on the ERO’s scientific board, Welch was also elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the American Medical Association and the National Academy of Science. Understandably, Laughlin and Davenport felt it only fitting that he should serve as chairman of the ERO’s Board of Scientific Directors.
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Among the biological issues the board identified as vital were “the consequences of marriages between distinct races-miscegenation,” “the study of America’s most effective bloodlines,” as well as “restricting the strains that require state care.” The board also sought to examine the ancestral caliber of immigrants being allowed into the country. As usual, feeblemindedness took the spotlight. Several key regions of the East Coast were targeted for investigation.
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Among the directors, only Bell became uncomfortable with the ERO’s direction. He immediately voiced consternation over eugenics’ constant focus on inferior traits. “Why not vary a little from this program and investigate the inheritance of some desirable characteristics,” Bell wrote Davenport on December 27, 1912, just days after the board’s first meeting. For emphasis, Bell reiterated over and over in his letter that the ERO’s sub-stantial funding might be better “devoted to the study of …
desirable
characteristics rather than undesirable. The whole subject of eugenics has been too much associated in the public mind with fantastical and impractical schemes for restricting marriage and preventing the propagation of undesirable characteristics, so that the very name ‘Eugenics’ suggests, to the average mind … an attempt to interfere with the liberty of the individual in his pursuit of happiness in marriage.”
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Perhaps the most militant of the eugenic research bodies was the Eugenics Research Association, created in June of 1913 at Cold Spring Harbor. Like many other eugenic groups, this association was also dominated by Davenport and Laughlin. But unlike the other eugenic bodies, the Eugenics Research Association was determined to go far beyond family investigations and position papers. The body was determined to escalate its “research” into legislative and administrative action, and public propaganda for the causes of eugenics, raceology and Nordic race supremacy. As such, the Eugenics Research Association brought together America’s most esteemed eugenic medical practitioners, the field’s most respected university professors, the movement’s most intellectual theorists and the nation’s most rabid eugenic racists.
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Only fifty-one charter members created the ERA, and its ranks did not exceed five hundred in later years. Those fifty-one charter members included men and women from the senior echelons of psychology, such as Yerkes and Adolf Meyer; later, Goddard, Brigham, Terman and other intelligence measurement authorities would join up. Professors from the medical schools and life science departments of Harvard, Columbia, Yale, Emory, Brown and Johns Hopkins were counted among the ranks.
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