CHAPTER 19: American Legacy
America'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 turn 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 turn of the century. As one lifelong friend remembered, Davenport 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 stern 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. [8]
***
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 [The ERA was affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (fittingly through Section F: "The Zoological Sciences") and had two seats on the Council of the AAAS.] 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, spearheaded by archaeologist A.V. [Alfred Vincent] 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." [18]
On Sunday, June 16 and Monday, June 17, 1935, the advisory committee led by Kidder visited Cold Spring Harbor, touring both the ERO and the adjacent Carnegie Station for Experimental Evolution. Laughlin's residence, provided by the Carnegie Institution, was one of the buildings in the compound, and Mrs. Laughlin graciously prepared Sunday lunch and Monday dinner for the delegation. The men found her hospitality delightful, and Laughlin's presentations exhaustive. But after a thorough examination, the advisory committee concluded that the Eugenics Record Office was a worthless endeavor from top to bottom, yielding no real data, and that eugenics itself was not science but rather a social propaganda campaign with no discernible value to the science of either genetics or human heredity. [19]
Almost a million ERO records assembled on individuals and families were "unsatisfactory for the scientific study of human genetics," the advisory committee explained, "because so large a percentage of the questions concern ... traits, such as 'self-respect,' 'holding a grudge,' 'loyalty,' [and] 'sense of humor,' which can seldom truly be known to anyone outside an individual's close associates; and which will hardly ever be honestly recorded, even were they measurable, by an associate or by the individual concerned." [20]
While much ERO attention was devoted to meaningless personality traits, key physical traits were being recorded so sloppily by "untrained persons" and "casually interested individuals" that the advisory committee concluded this data was also "relatively worthless for genetic study." The bottom line: a million index cards, some 35,000 files, and innumerable other records merely occupied "a great amount of the small space available ... and, worst of all, they do not appear to us really to permit satisfactory use of the data." [21]
The advisory committee recommended that all genealogical and eugenic tracking activities cease, and that the cards be placed in storage until whatever bits of legitimate heredity data they contained could be properly extracted and analyzed using an IBM punch card system. A million index cards had accumulated during some two decades, but because of the project's starting date in 1910 and Laughlin's unscientific methodology, the data had never been analyzed by IBM's data processing system. This fact only solidified the advisory committee's conclusion that the Eugenics Record Office was engaged in mere biological gossip backed up by reams of worthless documents. The advisory committee doubted that the demographic muddle would "ever be of value," and added its hope that "never again ... should records be allowed to bank up to such an extent that they cannot be kept currently analyzed."[22]
The advisory committee vigorously urged that "The Eugenics Record Office should engage in no new undertaking; and that all current activities should be discontinued save for Dr. Laughlin's work in preparation of his final report upon the Race Horse investigation." Moreover, the advisory committee emphasized, "The Eugenics Record Office should devote its entire energies to pure research divorced from all forms of propaganda and the urging or sponsoring of programs for social reform or race betterment such as sterilization, birth-control, inculcation of race or national consciousness, restriction of immigration, etc. Hence it might be well for the personnel of the Office to discontinue connection with the Eugenical News." Committee members concluded, [b]"Eugenics is by generally accepted definition and understanding not a science." They insisted that any further involvement with Cold Spring Harbor be devoid of the word eugenics and instead gravitate to the word genetics. [23][/b]
Geneticist L. C. Dunn, a member of the advisory committee traveling in Europe at the time, added his opinion in a July 3, 1935, letter, openly copied to Laughlin. Dunn was part of a growing school of geneticists demanding a clean break between eugenics and genetics. "With genetics," advised Dunn, "its relations have always been close, although there have been distinct signs of cleavage in recent years, chiefly due to the feeling on the part of many geneticists that eugenical research was not always activated by purely disinterested scientific motives, but was influenced by social and political considerations tending to bring about too rapid application of incompletely proved theses. In the United States its [the eugenics movement's] relations with medicine have never been close, the applications having more often been made through sociology than through medicine, although the basic problems involved are biological and medical ones." [24]
Dunn wondered if it wasn't time to shut down Cold Spring Harbor altogether and move the operation to a university where such an operation could collaborate with other disciplines. "There would seem to me to be no peculiar advantages in the Cold Spring Harbor location." As it stood, '''Eugenics' has come to mean an effort to foster a program of social improvement rather than an effort to discover facts." In that regard, Dunn made a clear comparison to Nazi excesses. "I have just observed in Germany," he wrote, "some of the consequences of reversing the order as between program and discovery. The incomplete knowledge of today, much of it based on a theory of the state, which has been influenced by the racial, class and religious prejudices of the group in power, has been embalmed in law, and the avenues to improvement in the techniques of improving the population have been completely closed." [25]
Dunn's July 3 letter continued with even more pointed comparisons to Nazi Germany. "The genealogical record offices have become powerful agencies of the [German] state," he wrote, "and medical judgments even when possible, appear to be subservient to political purposes. Apart from the injustices in individual cases, and the loss of personal liberty, the solution of the whole eugenic problem by fiat eliminates any rational solution by free competition of ideas and evidence. Scientific progress in general seems to have a very dark future. Although much of this is due to the dictatorship, it seems to illustrate the dangers which all programs run which are not continually responsive to new knowledge, and should certainly strengthen the resolve which we generally have in the U.S. to keep all agencies which contribute to such questions as free as possible from commitment to fixed programs." [26]
Carnegie's advisory committee could not have been more clear: eugenics was a dangerous sham, the ERO was a worthless and expensive undertaking devoid of scientific value, and Laughlin was purely political. But as Hitler rose and the situation of the Jews in Europe worsened, and the plight of refugees seeking entry into the United States became ever more desperate, the Carnegie Institution elected to ignore its own findings about Cold Spring Harbor and continue its economic and political support for Laughlin and his enterprises. Shortly after Merriam reviewed the advisory committee's conclusions, the Reich passed the Nuremberg Laws in September of 1935. Those of Jewish ancestry were stripped of their civil rights. Laughlin, Eugenical News and the Cold Spring Harbor eugenics establishment propagandized that the laws were merely sound science. Eugenical News even gave senior Nazi leaders a platform to justify their decrees. The Carnegie Institution still took no action against its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise.
In 1936, the brutal Nazi concentration camps multiplied. Systematic Jewish pauperization accelerated. Jews continued fleeing Germany in terror, seeking entry anywhere. But American consulates refused them visas. In the face of the humanitarian crisis, Laughlin continued to advise the State Department and Congress to enforce stiff eugenic immigration barriers against Jews and other desperate refugees. The Carnegie Institution still took no action against its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise. [27]
In 1937, Nazi street violence escalated and Germany increasingly vowed to extend its master race to all of Europe -- and to completely cleanse the continent of Jews. Laughlin, Eugenical News and the eugenics establishment continued to agitate in support of the Reich's goals and methods, and even distributed the anti-Semitic Nazi film, Erbkrank. The Carnegie Institution still took no action against its Cold Spring Harbor enterprise. [28]
One of hard propaganda Nazi films produced by the Office of Racial Policy in the National Socialist Racial and Political Office meant to warn the greater public about the dangers and costs posed by mentally ill and mentally retarded people.
"Erbkrank” [The Hereditary Defective] was directed by Herbert Gerdes. It was one of six propagandistic movies produced by the NSDAP, Reichsleitung, Rassenpolitisches Amt or the Office of Racial Policy, from 1935 to 1937 to demonize people in Nazi Germany diagnosed with mental illness and mental retardation.
The goal was to gain public support for the T4 Euthanasia Program then in the works. This film, as the others, was made with actual footage of patients in Nazi German psychiatric institutions.
Adolf Hitler reportedly liked the film so much that he encouraged the production of the full-length film "Opfer der Vergangenheit: Die Sünde wider Blut und Rasse” (English: Victims of the Past: The Sin against Blood and Race). In 1937, Erbkrank was reportedly showing in nearly all Berlin film theaters.
-- Erbkrank (1936), by Tiergartenstrasse 4 Association
In 1938, as hundreds of thousands of new refugees appeared, an emergency intergovernmental conference was convened at Evian, France. It was fruitless. Germany then decreed that all Jewish property was to be registered, a prelude to comprehensive liquidation and seizure. In November, Kristallnacht shocked the world. Nazi agitation was now spreading into every country in Europe. Austria had been absorbed into the Reich. Hitler threatened to devour other neighboring countries as well. Laughlin, Eugenical News and the eugenics establishment still applauded the Hitler campaign. By the end of 1938, however, the Carnegie Institution realized it could not delay action much longer. [29]
On January 4, 1939, newly installed Carnegie president Vannevar Bush put Laughlin on notice that while his salary for the year was assured, Bush was not sure how much funding the ERO would receive -- if any. At the same time, Jews from across Europe continued to flee the Continent, many begging to enter America because no other nation would take them. In March of 1939, the Senate Immigration Committee asked Bush if Laughlin could appear for another round of testimony to support restrictive "remedial legislation." Bush permitted Laughlin to appear, and only asked him to limit his unsupportable scientific assertions. But Laughlin was not prohibited from again promoting eugenic and racial barriers as the best basis for immigration policy. Indeed, the Carnegie president reminded him, "One has to express opinions when he appears in this sort of inquiry, and I believe that yours will be found to be a conservative and well-founded estimate of the situation facing the Committee." Bush added that he had personally reviewed Laughlin's prior testimony and felt it was "certainly well handled and valuable." [30]
After testifying, Laughlin received a postcard at the Carnegie Institution in Washington from an irate citizen in Los Angeles. "As an American descendant of Americans for over 300 years, I'd like to learn what prompted you to supply [the Senate Immigration Committee] ... with so much material straight from Hitler's original edition of Mein Kampf." [31]
At about this time, Laughlin was also permitted to testify before the Special Committee on Immigration and Naturalization of the New York State Chamber of Commerce. In May of 1939, Laughlin's report, Immigration and Conquest, was published under the imprimatur of the New York State Chamber of Commerce and "Harry H. Laughlin, Carnegie Institution of Washington." The 267-page document, filled with raceological tenets, claimed that America would soon suffer "conquest by settlement and reproduction" through an infestation of defective immigrants. As a prime illustration, Laughlin offered "The Parallel Case of the House Rat," in which he traced rodent infestation from Europe to the rats' ability "to travel in sailing ships." [32]
Laughlin then explained, in a section entitled "The Jew as an Immigrant Into the United States," that Jews were being afforded too large a quota altogether because they were being improperly considered by their nationality instead of as a distinct racial type. By Laughlin's calculations, no more than six thousand Jews per year ought to be able to enter the United States under the existing national quota system -- the system he helped organize a half-decade earlier -- but many more were coming in because they were classified as German or Russian or Polish instead of Jewish. [b]He asked that Jews in the United States "assimilate" properly and prove their "loyalty to the American institutions" was "greater than their loyalty to Jews scattered through other nations." Immigration and Conquest's precepts were in many ways identical to Nazi principles. Laughlin and the ERO proudly sent a copy to Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, as well as to other leading Nazis, including Verschuer, Lenz, Ploetz and even Rudin at a special address care of a university in occupied Czechoslovakia. [33]
In late 1938, the Carnegie Institution finally disengaged from Eugenical News. The publication became a quarterly completely under the aegis of the American Eugenics Society, published out of AES offices in Manhattan, with a new editorial committee that did not include Laughlin or any other Carnegie scientist. The first issue of the reorganized publication was circulated in March of 1939. Shortly thereafter, the Carnegie Institution formalized Laughlin's retirement, effective at the end of the year. On September 1, 1939, the Nazis invaded Poland, igniting World War II. Highly publicized atrocities against Polish Jews began at once, shocking the world.[/b] Efforts by Laughlin in the final months of 1939 to find a new sponsor for the ERO were unsuccessful. On December 31, 1939, Laughlin officially retired. The Eugenics Record Office was permanently closed the same day. [34]
Laughlin and his wife immediately moved back to Kirksville, Missouri. The last years of his life were uneventful, and he died in Kirksville on January 26, 1943. Davenport eulogized him in Eugenical News as a great man whose views were opposed by those of "a different social philosophy which is founded more on sentiment and less on a thorough analysis of the facts." Davenport saluted his protege, predicting that within a generation Laughlin's work would be "widely appreciated" for what it really was: "preservation ... from the clash of opposing ideals and instincts found in the more diverse racial or geographical groups." [35]
Strangely enough, Laughlin, the staunch defender of strong germ plasm and warrior against the feebleminded and the hereditarily defective, left no children. The family kept it a secret, but the rumor was that Laughlin himself suffered from an inherited disease that made him subject to uncontrollable seizures. These seizures had occasionally occurred in front of his colleagues at the ERO. Laughlin's condition had been discovered in the 1920s upon his return from Europe. During one episode, Laughlin reportedly drove off the road near Cold Spring Harbor and almost ran into the water. An obstruction stopped his vehicle. Laughlin nearly died that night, and his wife reportedly never allowed him to drive a car again. [36]
Among his many crusades, Laughlin may best be remembered for his antagonism toward epileptics. He claimed that epilepsy was synonymous with feeblemindedness, and that people with epilepsy did not belong in society. He fought to keep such people out of America and demanded their sterilization and even their imprisonment in segregated camps. No wonder the family kept his condition a secret. Childless and frustrated, Harry Hamilton Laughlin reportedly suffered his genetic disease in silence and died under its grip. The disease: epilepsy. [37]
***
Once Laughlin retired on December 31, 1939, Carnegie began the immediate and systematic dismantling of the ERO, abandoning three decades of support for racial eugenics. Mail addressed to the ERO, and even letters specifically addressed to Laughlin or Davenport, were not forwarded to either man. Instead, a series of standard responses were typed up for clerical staff to utilize in replying to all correspondents. The message: work at the office had been suddenly discontinued and no questions could be answered. [38]
Personal correspondents were told to contact Laughlin or Davenport directly at their home addresses. But if a letter involved even the slightest reference to eugenics or the Cold Spring Harbor installation, it was answered with a vague customized form letter. For example, on February 19, 1940, the widow of Lucien Howe sent a handwritten personal note to Davenport lamenting the news that the ERO had been discontinued. An officer of the Carnegie Institution replied for him, writing back to the aging Mrs. Howe, "Your letter of the 19th to Dr. Davenport has been turned over to me for reply" and so on. [39]
When eugenic enthusiasts earnestly mailed in their family trees or genealogical trait records, or requested copies of their files or pertinent information from them, they were deftly answered with noncommittal form letters. When a Texas man offered family information, he received a curt note, "Doctor Laughlin has resigned, and for the time being at least, the Genetics Record Office is not in a position to file and index family records." The same type of reply was mailed out time and time again. The ERO had operated under the name "Eugenics Record Office" until 1939, when Carnegie officials insisted on a cosmetic name change to "Genetics Record Office." From 1939 on, Carnegie Officials consistently referred to the ERO as the "Genetics Record Office" or sometimes simply the "Record Office," avoiding any use of the word eugenics. [40]
Letters came in for years. Carnegie officials generally acted as though they had no access to Laughlin's files and therefore could not answer specific questions. But in fact Carnegie administrators kept the files close at hand and quietly checked them in some cases. For example, when Jane Betts in Wichita asked about record #51323 on February 29, 1944, a Carnegie official quickly plucked her record out of a million files and replied about its status. With few exceptions, however, questions addressed to the Eugenics Record Office were generally answered with no real information except that the office was closed and no data was available. [41]
After World War II, when the magnitude of Hitler's eugenicide became apparent, the Carnegie Institution decided to get rid of its records. It sold the ERO building at Cold Spring Harbor but retained the rest of the facilities. Officials destroyed many of Laughlin's years-old unpublished worksheets on horse racing and breeding (an adjunct to his investigations in human heredity), but finding recipients for the rest of the ERO's enormous and controversial collection was not easy. In May of 1947, a leading heredity clinic at the University of Michigan was offered the files but wondered whether Carnegie would provide a stipend to house the materials. Carnegie would not. So Carnegie kept searching for someone to take the files. [42]
In September of 1947, a Carnegie administrator overseeing the dismantled Cold Spring Harbor operation wrote to the Dight Institute, an independent eugenic research organization at the University of Minnesota. "If any institution is interested in the records of the Genetics Record Office, I am confident that arrangements could be made ... to transfer them." But, the note added, "there is very little chance that those funds [formerly used to run the ERO] would be transferred with the records." [43]
Dight director Sheldon Reed, an ardent eugenicist, replied, "It seems a great pity to me that the work must be abandoned." As for transferring the voluminous files to Dight, Reed posed a number of questions about the size and breadth of the collection and the cost of the transfer. Dight did not want to pay any of the moving expenses. As Dight officials pondered the usefulness of a collection they termed "colossal," Reed was frank with the Carnegie Institution. "I am sorry to take up your time with this business [the many logistical questions]," he wrote, "but it may be that you are even more interested in getting rid of records than I am in obtaining them." [44]
Eventually, Carnegie officials decided the best idea was to disperse the ERO records. In January of 1948, the Dight Institute agreed to house the ERO's extensive individual trait and family documents if Carnegie would defray the expected $1,000 shipping costs. Some six months later the Minnesota Historical Society agreed to take a half-ton of biographical jubilee books, family genealogical volumes and related materials. At the same time, the New York Public Library received a thousand ERO volumes of family genealogical books and local histories. Horse racing and stud breeding publications were handed over to the family that had originally sponsored the research. Carnegie donated Davenport's voluminous papers and Laughlin's ERO operational papers to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, while maintaining some documents at a Cold Spring Harbor archive and retaining some others in Washington. When the Dight Institute closed its doors in the 1990s, its ERO papers were also sent to the American Philosophical Society, which now holds the largest consolidated eugenic collection anywhere. [45]
The dispersal of the records of the Cold Spring Harbor enterprise did not end the flow of letters to the ERO. For decades, people continued to send requests for eugenic information, updates of their pedigrees, and proof of their family's biological worth. In 1952, a dozen years after the ERO's closure, Clifford Frazier, an attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote offering to "bring my family data heretofore furnished up to date." In 1953, James Brunn, a realtor in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote requesting information to help trace his lineage back to the Revolutionary War. In 1959, Minnie Williams of Harrison, Ohio, wrote to say that she had finally assembled as much information as she could about her family pedigree; she had been working at it for years. In 1966, Elsie Van Guilder addressed a letter to "American Breeders Association, Eugenics Section, Cold Spring Harbor" seeking to trace her family. In 1976, E. Taylor Campbell of St. Joseph, Missouri, explained that he had been working on his family tree for fifty-one years, and he still needed nine more forms. [46]
Indeed, eugenic enthusiasts continued remitting family traits and proffering inquiries for decades. Letters continued into the 1980s, forty years after the ERO was dismantled. They probably never stopped. In February of 2003, a North Carolina attorney told this reporter than he had just discovered old ERO forms from his father's day; the attorney said his daughter was working with them to advance the family genealogy. Laughlin's work was that en grained in America. It persevered -- not only in the mindsets of generations of Americans, but also in America's laws. [47]
Although the ERO stopped functioning in 1939, America's eugenic laws did not. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized and legally prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws. During the 1940s, some 15,000 Americans were coercively sterilized, almost a third of them in California. In the fifties, about ten thousand were sterilized. In the sixties, thousands more were sterilized. All told, an estimated 70,000 were eugenically sterilized in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; the majority were women. California consistently outdistanced every other state. [48]
Victims, especially those who only discovered their sterilizations years after the fact, eventually began to initiate litigation. One such victim was Joseph Juhan, a Tennessee war veteran with little formal education but with a pointed message for the Carnegie Institution. In late 1976, he penned a letter filled with poorly formed characters and numerous misspellings, randomly employing parentheses for emphasis, that nevertheless poignantly asserted his legal rights. The letter was addressed to "Dr. Charles Davenport, Dept of Experimental Evolution" at Cold Spring Harbor.