Authors: Edwin Black
In September of 1923, Laughlin kicked off his first European immigration tour by attending the Permanent International Commission meeting in Lund, Sweden. Preparations for this meeting prevented Laughlin from sailing to Europe in July with Secretary of Labor James Davis. At the Lund meeting, Laughlin advanced most of the motions that the commission adopted.
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The 1923 meeting proved a watershed event for the movement. The group ratified the four-point “Ultimate Program” devised by the American Eugenics Society, calling for each nation to undertake research, education, administrative measures and “conservative legislation” within its borders. And although it welcomed news of their efforts, the commission stopped short of extending membership to Japan and India.
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To keep the eugenic directorate truly elite, commission rules permitted no more than three representatives of each cooperating country to be empanelled. Davenport and Laughlin sat at the apex of this group. All commission members were dedicated to the American-espoused belief in Nordic supremacy, a sentiment which was also growing in Germany. Yet Germany was still not a full participant on the commission. Although Germany was willing to rejoin the group, German race scientists told commissioners that Germany still “could not cooperate with representatives of certain nations.” In personal correspondence, German eugenicists specified whom they meant: the French.
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Commission leaders said they would wait.
During the next two years, with Germany still in the periphery, Davenport and Laughlin were able to extend U.S. domination of the commission’s scope, science, and political agenda. Resolutions were binding on the dozen or so members, committing them to pursue the agreed-upon legislative and scientific strategies. Because of this, policy developed on Long Island leapt across the ocean directly into the capitals of other nations.
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For example, in 1925 Davenport introduced a resolution based on Laughlin’s strategy of investigating immigrant families and screening them for eugenical fitness. Likening human beings to farm animals, Davenport’s resolution read: “Whereas every nation has a right to select those who shall be included in its body politic, and whereas some knowledge of both family history and past personal performance are as essential a part of the information about a human immigrant and potential parent, as about an imported horse or cow, therefore [be it] resolved that each immigrant-receiving country may properly enquire into the family and personal history of each immigrant.”
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Commission members, working through scientific and intellectual societies back home, then pressured for changes in immigration regulations along these lines.
Worldwide uniformity was important to Davenport. To push usage of the ERO’s standard family pedigree form in all countries, Davenport issued a message: “Members are reminded that a standardized form of pedigree was worked out by the Federation and has been widely published in most countries.” He also asked all cooperating national societies to lobby for national registration and census schemes similar to models already developed by his colleagues in Norway and Holland. Davenport tempered his worldwide eugenic mandates by assuring he would “avoid anything which might savour of interference in national affairs,” adding, “nevertheless, it is clear that in certain directions, such work might be usefully undertaken.”
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By 1925, the commission was comprised not just of individuals, but also of constituent eugenic societies and institutions. Hence it was time to adopt another new name, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations (lFEO). The new name was meant to further extend the organization’s scope, and also reflected Davenport and Laughlin’s desire to energize and standardize the movements in many countries. Ultimately, uniformity of eugenic action was written into IFEO membership rules. As president of the IFEO, Davenport issued a memorandum to member societies restating the federation’s goals: “To endeavor to secure some measure of uniformity in the methods of research, and also sufficient uniformity in the form of presentation of results to make international work of worldwide use. To endeavor to promote measures tending to eugenic progress, whether international or national, on comparable lines.”
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Even though Davenport was an influential steering force, federation members were independent thinkers. They advanced their own substantial legislative and scientific contributions for consideration by the federation. The Nordic countries of Scandinavia were especially active in this regard. Indeed, Europe’s northwestern nations were the most receptive to eugenics. Predominantly Catholic countries were the most resistant. Whether resistant or receptive, however, each country’s eugenics movement developed its own literature in its own language, its own racial and genetic societies, its own raceological personalities and its own homegrown agenda. Nonetheless, the movement’s fundamental principles were American and shepherded by Americans. Many foreign eugenicists traveled to America for training at Cold Spring Harbor and to attend meetings, congresses and conferences. As the epicenter of eugenics, and by virtue of its domination of the IFEO, American eugenic imperialism was able to take root throughout Europe and indeed the world.
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Belgium’s Societe Belge d’Eugenique was organized in 1919. The Belgian Eugenics Society announced in
Eugenical News
that it was “fully awake to the needs of the time in connection with preservation of the race. Its leaders realize that the safeguarding of public health through hygienic measures is not sufficient, but that due attention must be paid to the prevention of the transmission of hereditary traits that would be injurious to the race.” The new society’s nine sections included ones for social hygiene, documentation and legislation. Within two years, the Belgian Eugenics Society launched its own journal, which the ERO at Cold Spring Harbor quickly declared to be of “high order.”
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Dr. Albert Govaerts led the Belgian movement. He was allied with Laughlin from the beginning. After the second international congress in New York in 1921, Govaerts stayed on and traveled to Cold Spring Harbor for a term of study, which was funded by a fellowship from America’s post-war Commission for Relief in Belgium Educational Foundation.
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Govaerts’s work at the ERO concentrated on hereditary tuberculosis studies, and his research was published in the
American Review of Tuberculosis
in 1922. After Govaerts returned to Belgium, his original tables and calculations remained on file at the ERO. By early 1922, Govaerts’s Belgian Eugenics Society had installed eugenic lectures and courses at the University of Brussels. They also succeeded in garnering recognition of the budding science from the Belgian government. Later in 1922, a government-supported National Office of Eugenics opened in Brussels at the distinguished Solvay Institute. The National Office of Eugenics trained eugenic field workers and operated as a Belgian version of the ERO.
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Laughlin and Govaerts often worked as a team. Laughlin used Govaerts’s office as a headquarters during his 1923 sojourn throughout Europe as a Congressional immigration agent, and he even stayed in his home when visiting Brussels. Eugenicists never secured sterilization laws in Belgium, but Govaerts boasted of his lobbying efforts for a “eugenical prenuptial examination” to be required of all marriage applicants.
Eugenical News
reported that Govaerts “very graciously states that Belgian eugenicists are deeply indebted to the Eugenics Record Office for the service rendered in aiding the Belgian society to establish its new office.”
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In Canada, eugenic passions became inflamed over many issues, including the birth rate of French Canadians. But perhaps no debate was more heated than the one prompted by problems associated with immigrant groups. Hard-working Asian and European immigrants flowed into Canada throughout the 1890s as the country’s infrastructure expanded. In 1905, Ontario carried out its first census of the feebleminded. Shortly after Indiana passed its 1907 sterilization law, Ontario’s Provincial Inspector of Hospitals and Public Charities argued that Rentoul’s concepts could end the hereditary production of tramps, prostitutes and other immoral characters. Another Canadian physician pointed to the example of a Chicago doctor who advocated asexualization.
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By 1910, Canada’s British-American Medical Association was studying the sterilization laws in California and Indiana. Similar legislation proposed in Ontario and Manitoba did not succeed. But the movement for human breeding and sterilization of the unfit continued. The first Canadian sterilization law was passed by Alberta’s legislature in 1928. Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act targeted mental defectives who “risk … multiplication of [their] evil by transmission of [their] disability to progeny.” Alberta’s Eugenics Board authorized the sterilization of four hundred people in its first nine years. In 1937, certain safeguards were eliminated by the new Social Credit government, and the door was opened to forced sterilization. Until the law was repealed in 1972, of some 4,700 applications, 2,822 surgeries were actually authorized. The majority of Alberta’s sterilized were young women under the age of twenty-five, many under the age of sixteen. Following the example of America’s hunt for mongrels, Alberta disproportionately sterilized French-Canadian Catholics, Indians and Metis (individuals of mixed French-Canadian and Indian descent). Indians and Metis constituted just 2.5 percent of Canada’s population, but in later years represented 25 percent of Alberta’s sterilized.
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British Columbia passed its own law in 1933, creating a three-person Eugenics Board comprised of a judge, a psychiatrist and a social worker. Because records were lost or destroyed, no one will ever know exactly how many were sterilized in British Columbia, although one study discussed the fates of over fifty women who had undergone the operation.
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In Switzerland, the eminent psychiatrist and sexologist Dr. Auguste Forel was a leading disciple of eugenics beginning in 1910. He was also a proponent of U.S.-style sterilization laws. The wealthy industrialist Julius Klaus was another early advocate, endorsing eugenic registers to identify Switzerland’s unfit. When he died in 1920, Klaus bequeathed more than a million Swiss francs, or about $4.4 million in modern money, to establish a fund for Swiss eugenic investigations and related advocacy. Klaus’s will specifically forbade using the fund for charitable works to “ameliorate the condition of physical and mental defectives.”
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Swiss eugenic scientists were suddenly endowed. The anthropologist Otto Schlaginhaufen became director of the Zurich-based Julius Klaus Foundation for Heredity Research, Social Anthropology and Racial Hygiene as well as the Institution for Race Biology. These organizations were dedicated to “the promotion of all scientifically based efforts, whose ultimate goal is … to improve the white race.” In 1923, Schlaginhaufen and Forel, now fully funded, ascended to the Permanent International Eugenics Commission.
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Swiss eugenics focused on the exclusion of certain ethnic groups, as well as Forel’s notion of sexology, that is, the study of sexual behavior, especially as it related to women. Forel believed women wished to be and should be “conquered, mastered and subjugated” to fulfill their national reproductive duty. In 1928, Switzerland’s first sterilization law was passed in Canton Vaud, where Forel practiced. It targeted a vaguely-defined “unfit.” Only Vaud passed such a law, but physicians across the country performed sterilizations for both medical and eugenical reasons. Although the extent of Swiss sterilizations remains unknown, one scholar ascertained that some 90 percent of the operations were conducted on women.
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In Denmark, eugenics was organized by two of Davenport’s earliest confederates, August Wimmer and Soren Hansen. Wimmer was a psychiatrist at the University of Copenhagen, and Hansen was president of the Danish Anthropological Committee. As Nordic raceologists seeking to stamp out defective strains within an already eugenically elite country, their affiliation with Davenport was natural. One Danish physician even traveled to the Vineland Training School in New Jersey to study under H. H. Goddard, whose texts on the Kallikaks and revision of the Binet-Simon test became standard in Danish eugenical publications. Although resistant at first, in 1912 the government launched a massive eugenical registration of deaf-mutes, the feebleminded and other defectives. It was not until a decade later that the first eugenic marriage restriction law was adopted. So-called “therapeutic sterilization” was common, but compulsory sterilization would not be legalized until 1929.
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A government commission reexamined the sterilization issue in 1926, looking to America for guidance. In November of 1927, Laughlin arranged for his lengthy legislative guide on sterilization to be sent by Chicago judge Harry Olson directly to a member of the Danish sterilization commission. In 1929, Hansen proudly reported to
Eugenical News
that his country had finally adopted what he termed, “the first ‘modern’ eugenical sterilization law to be enacted in Europe.”
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Shortly after the passage of Denmark’s legislation, the Rockefeller Foundation began supporting eugenic research in that country. Denmark’s leading eugenic scientist, Dr. Tage Kemp, received much of the financial support. The first grants were awarded in 1930 for blood group research. The next year Kemp received a special Rockefeller fellowship to continue his research. In 1932, Kemp traveled to Cold Spring Harbor for further study. He wanted eugenic and genetic research to achieve greater scientific and medical exactitude. “I was notably impressed by the importance of the careful execution of the several observations,” he wrote Rockefeller officials, adding, “these ought as far as possible to be carried out and reexamined (after-examined) by an investigator with medical education.” Rockefeller officials agreed, granting Kemp a second fellowship in 1934. They would continue to fund race biology and human genetics in Denmark throughout the 1930s.
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