Authors: Edwin Black
In many cases, local officials, acting nearly a half-century after the fact, have elected to cremate the remains respectfully and bury them in memorial cemeteries. At one such burial service, conducted by Eberhard-Karls University in Tübingen, Professor Emeritus of Neuropathology Jürgen Peiffer spoke solemnly. “We must remember,” he eulogized, “that there is a dangerous possibility that we may bury our bad consciences together with these tissue remains, thereby avoiding the necessity of remembering the past…. I know that there are those who think we are acting out of faint-heartedness and anxiety; some ask whether ‘dust to dust’ really applies to glass slides and whether this act is the appropriate answer?” He answered his own question when he read aloud the inscription on the tablet.
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Displaced, oppressed, maltreated,
Victims of despotism or blind justice,
They first found their rest here.
Science, which did not respect
Their rights and dignity during life,
Sought even to use their bodies after death.
Be this stone a reminder to the living.
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A
merica’s retreat from eugenics was precipitated by the convergence of two forces: Hitler’s ascent in Germany and the climactic exit of the pseudoscience’s founding fathers from Cold Spring Harbor. But it was not a moment of truth that finally convinced the Carnegie Institution and the eugenic establishment to tum away from their quest for a superior Nordic race. Rather, the end was an inexorably slow process devoid of
mea culpas,
one that saw the major players withdraw only with great reluctance.
The real father of eugenics was of course Charles Benedict Davenport. Galton was merely the grandfather. It was Davenport who twisted Galton’s stillborn Victorian vision into self-righteous social-biological action. Eugenics always risked veering completely out of control. It did in Nazi Germany.
During the twelve-year Hitler regime, Davenport never wavered in his scientific solidarity with Nazi race hygiene. Nor did he modify his view that the racially robust were entitled to rule the earth. But Germany’s triumph in the thirties wielding his principles did not bring Davenport the personal fulfillment he craved. During all his years at the pinnacle of international eugenic science, Davenport remained the same sad, embittered, intellectually defensive man who had first embarked upon a biological crusade at the tum of the century. As one lifelong friend remembered, Daven-port remained “a lone man, living a life of his own in the midst of others, feeling out of place in almost any crowd.” Davenport could acquire international celebrity, but never personal happiness.
1
Correction. Davenport did find personal joy in one thing: his children, especially his son Charlie, born January 8, 1911. Little Charlie unlocked the affectionate quality guarded deep within men like Davenport. Proudly, Davenport would call out through the neighborhood for Charlie to come back for dinner after a day’s play. A family friend remembers the intense “pride and devotion” Davenport felt when it came to little Charlie.
2
The same year Charlie was born, Davenport published his cornerstone volume,
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,
which explained the biological basis of the superior family. Even as millions were devastated by crippling diseases, such as tuberculosis and polio, Davenport’s answer was to blame their ancestry, or more precisely, unsound protoplasm. “It is an incomplete statement,” asserted Davenport’s book, “that the
tubercle bacillus
is the cause of tuberculosis, or alcohol the cause of
delerium tremens
or syphilis the cause of
paresis.
Experience proves it….
In
general, the causes of disease as given in the pathologies are not the real causes. They are due to inciting conditions acting on susceptible protoplasm. The real cause of death of any person is his inability to cope with the disease germ or other untoward conditions.” Fatal epidemics did not kill, preached Davenport, only defective germ plasm.
3
On the evening of September 5, 1916, Davenport came face to face with his own dogma. That night, young Charlie was stricken by polio. Death entered the Davenport household quickly; within hours of showing symptoms, Charlie was dead. The next day the boy was interred in the family plot of a Brooklyn cemetery. Davenport never recovered from the loss. A close associate recounted a broken man, a man absolutely “prostrated.” After the funeral, both he and his wife retired to a sanitarium for several weeks. When he emerged, Davenport became even more cloistered and relentless in his work.
4
For years, Davenport uncompromisingly continued to seek out the imperfect, the inferior, the weak and the susceptible, demanding their elimination.
In
1934, at age sixty-eight, after a three-decade crusade, Davenport retired from the Carnegie Institution. Officials at the Washington office allocated a small room at the Eugenics Record Office to him, along with clerical help. On June 28, he delivered his final official address, “Reminiscences of Thirty Years.” The next day, Davenport began the remainder of his joyless life. The letter he dictated to his secretary almost stoically informed the Carnegie Institution: “I am now getting settled in a corner of the south room, second floor, of the Eugenics Record Office, and am looking forward to a chance of uninterrupted research.”
5
Davenport of course continued to be active as the elder statesman of eugenics into the 1940s, even as the Nazis assumed international leadership and swept Davenport’s principles into a brutal war. As late as 1943, Davenport was protesting, in
Eugenical News,
the widespread opposition to stem racial policies. But during his retirement years, Davenport mostly busied himself with continuous private investigations of mice, children, and other organisms.
6
In January of 1944, Davenport became fixated on a killer whale that had beached itself off Long Island. He was determined to have its skull to exhibit at his new whaling museum at Cold Spring Harbor. Night after night, in a steam-filled but uninsulated shed, Davenport boiled the whale’s head in a great cauldron. It was a slow process. The enormous orca was tough and resistant. Even as the weather became more and more brutal, Davenport would not give up. He fought the elements and the whale skull for two weeks, determined to beat them both. He became weaker and weaker.
7
Colleagues remembered that one night Davenport appeared at an ERO staff meeting reeking of blubber. He sat off by himself, seventy-eight years old and still unshakable. Shortly thereafter, Davenport came down with a severe case of pneumonia. On February 18, 1944, Davenport died, not of old age, but of germs.
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* * *
The Carnegie Institution continued to back eugenics long after its executives became convinced it was a worthless nonscience based on shabby data, and years after they concluded that Harry Hamilton Laughlin himself was a sham.
Laughlin and eugenics in general had become the butt of jokes and the object of reprehension as far back as 1912, when the world learned that its proponents planned to sterilize millions in America and millions more in other nations. Scientists from other disciplines ridiculed the movement as well. Despite the widespread derision, eugenics persevered as a science under siege, battling back for years, fortified by its influential patrons, the power of prejudice and the big money of Carnegie. But the Carnegie Institution’s patience began to erode as early as 1922, when Laughlin became a public font of racist ideology during the Congressional immigration restriction hearings.
9
Carnegie president John C. Merriam continued to be embarrassed by Laughlin’s immigration rantings throughout the 1920s. But he tolerated them for the greater agenda of the eugenics movement. However, Laughlin struck a particular nerve in the spring of 1928, while Merriam and a U.S. government official were touring Mexican archaeology sites. During the tour, Mexican newspapers splashed a story that Merriam’s Carnegie Institution was proposing that Congress severely limit immigration of Mexicans into the United States. It was Laughlin who prompted the story.
10
Merriam immediately instructed Davenport to muzzle Laughlin. “He [Merriam] feels especially that you ought not go further,” Davenport wrote Laughlin, “…helping the [House] committee on a definition of who may be acceptable as immigrants to the United States from Spanish America. The Spanish Americans are very sensitive on this matter…. It will not do for the Carnegie Institution of Washington, or its officers, to take sides in this political question.” Anticipating Laughlin’s predictable argument, Davenport continued, “I know you regard it properly as more than a political question and as a eugenical question-but it is in politics now, and that means that the institution has to preserve a neutrality.”
11
Yet Laughlin did nothing to restrict his vocal activities. By the end of 1928, Merriam convened an internal committee to review the value of the Eugenics Record Office.
In
early February of 1929, the committee inspected the Cold Spring Harbor facility and concluded that the accumulation of index cards, trait records and family trees amounted to little more than clutter. They “are of value only to the individual compiling them,” the committee wrote, and even then “in most cases they decrease in importance in direct proportion to their age.” Some of the files were almost two decades old, and all of them reflected nineteenth-century record-keeping habits now obsolete. The mass of records yielded much private information about individuals and their families, but little hard knowledge on heredity.
12
Nonetheless, with Davenport and Laughlin lobbying to continue their work, the panel rejected any “radical move, such as relegating them [the files] to dead storage.” Instead, Carnegie officials decided a closer affiliation with the Eugenics Research Association would help the ERO achieve some approximation of genuine science. Hence the Carnegie Institution would continue to operate the ERO under Carnegie’s Department of Genetics.
13
Genetics, however, was not the emphasis at Cold Spring Harbor. Laughlin and his ERO continued their race-based political agitation unabated. Moreover, once Hitler rose to power in 1933, Laughlin forged the ERO, the ERA and
Eugenical News
into a triumvirate of pro-Nazi agitation. But things changed when Davenport retired in June of 1934. Laughlin lost his greatest internal sponsor, and with Davenport out of power, Carnegie officials in Washington quickly began to move against Laughlin. They pointedly questioned his race science and indeed the whole concept of eugenics in a world where the genuine science of genetics was now emerging.
Carnegie officials first focused on
Eugenical News,
which had become a compendium of American raceology and Nazi propaganda. Although
Eugenical News
was published out of the Carnegie facilities at the ERO, by a Carnegie scientist, and functioned as the official voice of Carnegie’s eugenic operations, the Carnegie Institution did not legally own or control
Eugenical News.
It was Laughlin’s enterprise. Carnegie wanted an immediate change and made this clear to Laughlin.
14
Laughlin became very protective. He had always chosen what would and would not run in
Eugenical News,
and he even authored much of the text. In a September 11, 1934, letter to Davenport’s replacement, Albert F. Blakeslee, Laughlin rebuffed attempts to corral
Eugenical News,
defensively insisting, “In this formative period of making eugenics into a science, the ideals of the Eugenics Record Office, of the Eugenics Research Association, of the International Congresses and Exhibits of Eugenics, and of the
Eugenical News
are identical. I feel that the position of the
Eugenical News
as a scientific journal is quite unique, in that eugenics is a new science, and that the trend and rate of its development, and its ultimate character, will be influenced substantially by the
Eugenical News.”
15
Laughlin made clear to Carnegie officials that they simply could not control
Eugenical News,
because it was legally the property of the Eugenics Research Association-and Laughlin was the secretary of the ERA. To drive home his point, a Laughlin memo defiantly included typed-in excerpts from committee reports and letters to the printer, plus sample issues going back to 1916-all demonstrating the ERA’s legal authority over
Eugenical News.
“I feel that the Institution should go into the matter thoroughly,” insisted Laughlin, “and make a clean-cut and definite ruling concerning the relationship of the Carnegie Institution (represented by the Eugenics Record Office) to the
Eugenical News.”
16
By now, Carnegie felt it was again time to formally revisit the worth of Laughlin and eugenics. A new advisory committee was assembled, spear-headed by archaeologist A.V. Kidder. He began assembling information on Laughlin’s activities, and Laughlin was only too happy to cooperate, almost boastfully inundating Kidder with folder after folder of material. With Davenport in retirement, Laughlin undoubtedly felt he was heir to Cold Spring Harbor’s throne. He sent Washington a passel of demands about revamping Cold Spring Harbor’s administrative structure, renovations of its property and new budget requests for 1935.
17
Kidder was not encouraging. He wrote back, “I think I ought to tell you that I feel quite certain that the administrative and financial changes which you advocate are extremely unlikely, in my opinion, to be carried into effect in 1935.” Kidder was virtually besieged with Laughlin’s written and printed submissions to support his requests for a sweeping expansion of the ERO. On November
1,
1934, Kidder acknowledged, “I am at present reviewing all the correspondence and notes in my possession relative to the whole Cold Spring Harbor situation and in the course of a few days I shall prepare a memorandum for Dr. Merriam.” But within two days, Kidder conceded that he was overwhelmed. “I have read all the material you sent me with close attention,” he wrote Laughlin. “I have also read all the Year Book reports of the Eugenics Record Office…. I am now trying to correlate all this information in what passes for my brain.”
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