Authors: Edwin Black
Kemp became a rising star at Rockefeller and was utilized as an advance man and confidential source for the foundation as it sought to create a eugenic infrastructure throughout Europe. On June 29, 1934, Daniel O’Brien, who ran Rockefeller’s Paris office, notified Kemp, “It is a pleasure to inform you that, at the last meeting of our Committee, a special fellowship was granted to you in order to permit you to spend three months on visits to various European institutes of genetics.” O’Brien’s letter continued, “I should like to have your comments on individuals who might be helped by means of a fellowship of approximately one year…. It would be particularly helpful to receive your personal impressions of the able men you come into contact with…. It would of course be understood that any information you may give would be considered strictly confidential.”
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Kemp’s itinerary included Holland, England, France, Austria, Switzerland, Russia, Germany and several other nations. His extensive report to Rockefeller included a significant section on Germany, which included summaries on the leading race hygienists and their institutions. For example, in Munich he met with Riidin and reported: “On the whole, I am finding the work going on there rather important and serious, and it is supported by enormous means.” Kemp then rated the leading scientists under Riidin, indicating which ones spoke English, and the nature of their projects. Bruno Schultz, for example, was “doing a great deal of statistical work concerning mental diseases of practical value for the sterilization law and the eugenical legislation in Germany.”
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In Berlin, Kemp toured the Institute for Brain Research, which Rockefeller had built. Kemp was impressed, writing back to Rockefeller officials, “I learned all concerning the anatomical, physiological and clinical work going on at this immense, remarkable and rather complicated institution.” He also spent time at the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics, “which I am finding one of the best centers in the world for the study of normal and morbid inheritance by human beings.” Kemp was also impressed with Verschuer, whom he described as “a keen National Socialist, completely honest, however, I feel, so one can rely upon his scientific results as being objective and real. He works especially with twin investigations and is doing this research very thoroughly and systematically. “
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In Munich, Kemp also met with Theodor Mollison, Mengele’s first advisor. He described Mollison as “a very fine and charming personality.” Kemp reported, “He is especially working on the specificity of the proteins of various human races.”
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Rockefeller continued granting Kemp funds for eugenic work, albeit always calling it “genetics.” Indeed, just after his report about European genetics, discussions were launched to build the institute in Copenhagen, which Kemp would lead. Previously, Kemp’s fledgling studies were confined to one or two small rooms at the University of Copenhagen. That would all change once the spacious new Institute of Human Genetics was erected.
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Although Kemp’s new institute was packaged as genetics, its eugenic nature was never in doubt. For example, within Denmark, directors of two existing centers for the feebleminded, as well as other local eugenicists, hoped Rockefeller’s new institute would bolster the “scientific foundation for eugenic sterilization.” Indeed, at times the project was described in Rockefeller memorandums as the institute for “Human Genetics and Eugenics.” Once plans became final, Rockefeller officials confirmed their plans had been developed “on the basis of his [Kemp’s] experiences gathered in studies in 1932 and 1934 partly at Eugenics Record Office and Department of Genetics in Cold Spring Harbor, USA,” as well as at leading eugenic centers in Uppsala, Austria and Munich.
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The University of Copenhagen and the local government planned to contribute land and financial support. But executives at the Rockefeller Foundation clearly understood, as their memos on the proposal reflected, “It will be impossible to have this plan realized at present without a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation.” The foundation committed $90,000, and the new Institute for Human Genetics opened to much fanfare in 1938. After the war, the Bureau of Human Heredity, another Danish eugenic agency, transferred its operations to the institute and the personal direction ofKemp.
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Thus Rockefeller inaugurated another eugenic outpost in Europe. It was not Germany; it was Denmark. It was not eugenics; it was genetics.
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While human genetics was becoming established in America, eugenics did not die out. It became quiet and careful. The American Eugenics Society inherited the residuum of the movement.
The AES assumed primacy in organized eugenics in the late thirties. It established a relationship with the Carnegie Institution just as the ERO was being dismantled. In 1939, Carnegie awarded the AES its first grant of $5,000 for genetic research. Additional grants in 1941 allowed the AES to help establish the Department of Medical Genetics at what became Wake Forest Medical School, the first such medical genetic chair in the United States. The Eugenics Research Association’s vice president, William Allan, was chosen to lead the new department. Allan had previously studied eugenic defects of people in the Appalachians, and now he would head the new $50,000 project funded by Carnegie. Writing in
Eugenical News,
Allan urged county-based “Family Record Offices” in North Carolina to assist in identifying the unfit and screening marriages. Such record offices would integrate marriage records and birth and death registries with family information going back more than a century. The undertaking could be implemented easily, he stated, because, “We already have a small army of men, our County Health Officers.” Allan himself was experienced in assembling family pedigrees.
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When Allan suddenly died two years later, fellow eugenicist C. Nash Herndon took over. Herndon advocated forced sterilization. Emulating the technique of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Herndon’s Department of Medical Genetics provided what he called the “genetic work-ups and medical affidavits” for the county to sterilize dozens of it citizens. Blacks were mainly targeted. He described the campaign in a 1943 university report: “This project consists of a gradual, but systematic effort to eliminate certain genetically unfit strains from the local population. About thirty operations for sterilization have been performed. “
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Writing in
Eugenical News
years after he joined the Wake Forest staff, Herndon also urged genetic counseling to encourage the fit to marry the fit. In addition, he called for educational efforts for the feebleminded to be reduced, declaring “It is of course an obvious waste of time to attempt to teach calculus to a moron.” Under Herndon, Wake Forest Medical School became one of America’s premier genetic research establishments. In late 2002, the
Winston-Salem Journal
published a five-part investigation of North Carolina’s eugenics program and the university’s involvement. The newspaper quoted the record of one woman who in 1945 pleaded with the eugenics board: “I don’t want it. I don’t approve of it, sir. I don’t want a sterilize operation…. Let me go horne, see if I get along all right. Have mercy on me and let me do that.” A shocked Wake Forest Medical School announced an internal investigation to discover the extent of the school’s connection to North Carolina’s eugenics program. In February of 2003, some two months after the articles ran, a spokesman told this reporter that the university still did not understand the historical facts or context of eugenics, but was determined to be thorough in its investigation.
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The AES was making some progress launching human genetic programs like the one at Wake Forest, but when America went to war, the nation’s priorities dramatically changed. By 1942, the AES had virtually disbanded. Its office closed, and its papers were shipped to the horne of
Eugenical News
editor Maurice Bigelow. The publication continued during the war years, but circulation dwindled to just three hundred.
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After the war, it took Frederick Osborn to salvage the organization. He became president of the AES in 1946. Osborn was a former president of the Eugenics Research Association and the nephew of eugenic raceologist Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was cofounder of the AES and president of the Second International Congress of Eugenics. The younger Osborn was determined to continue the eugenics movement, but under the name of “genetics.” Constantly introspective about eugenics’ calamitous past, Osborn wondered why “the other organizations set up in this country under eminent sponsorship have long since disappeared…. Was it because … some of the early eugenicists placed a false and distasteful emphasis on race and social class? … Was it because of the emotional reaction to Hitler’s excesses and his misuse of the word ‘eugenics’? Or did it go deeper.”
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He concluded that the public was not ready to cope with eugenic ideals, especially in the absence of irrefutable science.
In 1947 the remnant board of directors unanimously agreed, “The time was not right for aggressive eugenic propaganda.” Instead, the AES continued quietly soliciting financial grants from such organizations as the Dodge Foundation, the Rockefeller-funded Population Council, and the Draper Fund. The purpose: proliferate genetics as a legitimate study of human heredity.
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During the fifties, Osborn took extraordinary pains to never utter a provocative eugenic word. In a typical 1959 speech on genetics at Hunter College, Osborn was explicit, “We are not speaking here of any manipulation of the genes to produce a superior race. This would require a knowledge of human genetics we do not at present possess, and changes in our social mores which would be presently unacceptable.” He merely insisted, “Medical genetics has recently become an accepted field of study; the larger medical schools are developing departments of human genetics and setting up heredity counseling clinics.”
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At the same time, Osborn and his colleagues were searching for a new socially palatable definition of eugenics that would promote the same ideals under a new mantle. One Osborn cohort, Frank Lorimer, wrote Osborn, “Personally, I would redefine ‘eugenics’ to include concern with all conditions affecting the life prospects of new human beings at birth.” He added the caveat, “This is a matter of strategy rather than ideology.”
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The AES knew that reestablishing eugenics was an uphill battle. Osborn’s draft address for the 1959 board of directors meeting outlined an ambitious campaign of behind-the-scenes genetic counseling, birth control, and university-based medical genetic programs. At the same time, Osborn conceded that the movement’s history was too scurrilous to gain public support. “Lacking a scientific base,” wrote Osborn, “the eugenics movement was taken over successfully by various special interests. The upper social classes assumed that they were genetically superior and that eugenics justified their continuing position. People who thought they belonged to a superior race assumed that the purpose of eugenics was to further their interests…. The worst in all these movements found their climax under Hitler who combined them for political motives. It is no wonder that for a long time afterwards eugenics had few followers among thoughtful people.” But, he concluded, “With the close of World War II, genetics had made great advances and a real science of human genetics was coming into being…. Eugenics is at last taking a practical and effective form.”
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For Osborn, eugenics and genetics were still synonymous.
Osborn’s warnings notwithstanding, some AES members were eager to resume their former propaganda campaigns against the unfit. “The Society is torn,” one member wrote Osborn. “Is it to be a ‘scientific’ society or is it to be a ‘missionary’ or ‘educational’ society?”
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In 1961, geneticist Sheldon Reed wrote to an AES official, “It seems to me that there is considerable schizophrenic confusion as to whether eugenics exists or not.” He wondered if perhaps “the society should disband.” Reed added defiantly that the AES should cast off any guilt about the Holocaust. “My final point,” Reed declared, “is concerned with the allocation of guilt for the murder of the Jews. Was this crime really abetted by the eugenics ideal? One should remember that the Jews and other minorities have been murdered for thousands of years and I suspect that motives have been similar on all occasions, namely robbery with murder as the method of choice in disposing of the dispossessed individuals…. I do not wish to make Charles Davenport my scapegoat for this, as seems to be the fashion these days. As far as I can see, the motives behind the liquidation of the Jews were not eugenic, not genocide … but just plain homicidal robbery.”
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But Osborn felt, “We have to take into account that Europeans under Hitler suffered almost a traumatic experience.” He had already cautioned, “We must not put out anything that would upset the best of the scientists.” On another occasion, he warned, “This question of how to make selection an effective force is the crux of any eugenics program. It is completely irrelevant to get involved in red herrings regarding ‘breeding of supermen.’” To dampen his colleagues’ ardor, Osborn constantly reminded AES members, “The purpose of eugenics is not to breed some … superior being, but to provide conditions … for each succeeding generation to be genetically better qualified do deal with its environment.”
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Such remarks were made even as the AES continued to promote the gradual development of a superior race, albeit under the guise of genetic counseling and human genetics and with the full participation of hard science.
Eschewing high-profile agitation, Osborn insisted that only quiet work with scientists could accomplish the goal. In a candid 1965 letter, he wrote, “I started hopefully on this course thirty-five years ago and some day would be glad to tell you all of the steps we took-the work we did, the conferences we held, and the money we put into the then
Eugenical News-
about
$30,000 a year, to propagandize eugenics. It got us no where, probably because we did not have the backing of the scientific world.”
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