War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (13 page)

Laughlin returned to Kirksville at his first chance. Initially, he hired on as principal of the local high school in 1900. However, he soon advanced to the Department of Agriculture, Botany and Nature at his college alma mater, the Nonnal School. His wife Pansy had also graduated from there. Hence, it was where Laughlin felt most comfortable. Indeed, despite the wide travels and illustrious circles he ultimately attained, Laughlin always considered simple Kirksville his true home and refuge.
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Still, Laughlin was convinced his days at Normal were temporary. A political dreamer, Laughlin had already drafted the first of numerous outlines for a one-world government comprised of six continental jurisdictions, complete with an international parliament apportioning seats in favor of the hereditarily superior nations. In Laughlin’s world scheme, the best stocks would rule. Laughlin submitted his detailed plans to heads of state and opinion makers, but to no avail. No one paid attention.
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Highfalutin proposals for a personally crafted world order were only the outward manifestations of a man who desperately sought to make a mark, and not just any mark, but an incandescent mark visible to all. In pursuit of this, Laughlin spent a lifetime submitting his writings on everything from politics to thoroughbred horseracing to world leaders and influential personalities, seeking favorable comments, approval and recognition. And if none of that was possible, just a simple “thank you” would do.

It was not unusual for Laughlin to mail an obscure journal article or scientific paper to dozens of perfect strangers in high places, soliciting any measure of written approbation. These reply letters typed on important letterheads were then filed and cherished. Many were little more than polite but depthless two-sentence acknowledgments written by well-placed people who scarcely understood why they had been contacted. For example, Laughlin sent one immigration study to dozens of embassies, newspaper editors, business tycoons and private foundation leaders seeking comment. The Columbian Ambassador to Washington formally wrote back: “I take pleasure in acknowledging receipt of … the books … which I will be glad to look over.” The editor of
Foreilfll Affairs
magazine issued a curt two-sentence thank you, indicating, “It will be useful in our reference files.” An assistant in Henry Ford’s office dashed off a two-sentence proforma note, “We … wish to take this opportunity of thanking you on behalf of Mr. Ford for the copy of your work…. “
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Self-promotion was a way of life for Laughlin.
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But no matter how high his station, it was never high enough. “If I can’t be great,” Laughlin once confessed to his mother, at least “I can certainly do much good.”
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Laughlin’s desperate quest for greatness turned a historic corner on May 17, 1907, when he wrote to Davenport asking to attend one of Cold Spring Harbor’s continuing summer biology courses. His application was immediately approved.
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The relationship between Davenport and Laughlin finally ignited in January of 1909 when both men attended the American Breeders Association meeting in Columbia, Missouri.
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The next year, after Mrs. Harriman approved the ERO, Laughlin was Davenport’s number one choice.

Within Davenport’s grandiose ideas about reshaping mankind, Laughlin could both find a niche and secure personal gratification. Working in the eugenics movement, with his notions of a one-world government, Laughlin might achieve a destiny he could barely imagine in any other endeavor.

Davenport understood Laughlin’s deeply personal needs. As such, he structured Laughlin’s employment to be more than just a career. The Eugenics Record Office would become Laughlin’s life-from morning to night and into the next morning. Laughlin found such rigor comforting; it represented a personal acceptance he’d never known. Davenport had certainly chosen the right man.

Stressing to Mrs. Harriman that the ERO’s task was a long-term project, Davenport proposed that Laughlin be hired for at least ten years. Laughlin’s residence would actually be on the grounds of the Eugenics Record Office, and his title would be “superintendent.” Davenport understood human nature. The very title “superintendent” was reminiscent of railroad station managers, the kind who had catered to Mrs. Harriman’s late husband’s steel-tracked empire. “Do you wish first to see Mr. Laughlin,” Davenport asked Mrs. Harriman with apparent deference, but quickly added, “or do you authorize me to offer Mr. Laughlin $2,400 for the first year?”
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Mrs. Harriman approved. Davenport notified Laughlin. The campaign to create a superior race would soon be launched.

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By late 1910 the Laughlins had arrived at Cold Spring Harbor to open the facility. They lived on the second floor of the ERO’s main building, where they enjoyed four large rooms and a fifth smaller one. Laughlin would have continuous access to the library, dining room and kitchen adjacent to the main business area on the first floor. He would eat and sleep eugenics. Working fastidiously on the smallest details of the ERO’s establishment, it was not uncommon to find him in the office seven days a week including most holidays.
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The Eugenics Record Office went into high gear even before the doors opened in October of 1910. Its first mission was to identify the most defective and undesirable Americans, estimated to be at least 10 percent of the population. This 10 percent was sometimes nicknamed the “submerged tenth” or the lower tenth. At the time, this amounted to millions of Americans. When found, they would be subjected to appropriate eugenic remedies to terminate their bloodlines. Various remedies were debated, but the leading solutions were compulsory segregation and forced sterilization.
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No time was wasted. During the ERO’s preparatory summer months, a dozen field workers, mainly women, were recruited to canvass prisons and mental institutions, establishing good working relationships with their directors. The first junket on July 15, 1910, proved to be typical. First, field workers visited the notorious prison at Ossining, New York, known as Sing Sing, where they were granted a complete tour of the “hereditary criminals” they would be studying. After Sing Sing, the group traveled to the State Asylum at Matteawan, New York, where Superintendent Lamb promised to open all patient records to help “demonstrate at once the hereditary basis of criminal insanity.” An albino family was then examined in nearby Millerton, New York. The eugenic investigators ended their outing at a school for the feebleminded in Lakeville, Connecticut. In Lake-ville, once again, “the records were turned over to us,” Davenport reported to Mrs. Harriman, enabling the “plotting on a map of Connecticut the distribution of birth-places of inmates.” None of the institutions hesitated to tum over their confidential records to the private ERO-even before the agency opened its doors.
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After a few weeks of training in eugenic characteristics and principles, Laughlin’s enthusiastic ERO field investigators swept across the eastern seaboard. Their mission was to identify those perceived as genetically inferior, as well as their extended families and their geographic concentrations. By pegging hotspot origins of defectives, eugenic cleansing priorities could be established. By no means was this a campaign directed solely against racial groups, but rather against any individual or group-white or black-considered physically, medically, morally, culturally or socially inadequate in the eyes of Davenport and Laughlin. Often there was no racial or cultural consistency to the list of those targeted. The genuinely lame, insane and deformed were lumped in with the troubled, the unfortunate, the disadvantaged and those who were simply “different,” thus creating a giant eugenic underclass simply labeled “the unfit.”

The hunt began.

ERO researcher A. H. Estabrook traveled to western Massachusetts and Connecticut to collect family trees on albino families. He was then “attached” to the State Asylum at Matteawan to research criminal insanity. Thereafter, Laughlin assigned him to search for “degenerates in the isolated valleys around the upper Hudson [River].” Estabrook developed 35 pages of pedigrees and 168 pages of personal descriptions in his first forays, but Laughlin became most interested in one “large family with much inter-marriage that promises to be as interesting as theJuke or Zero family.”
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Mary Drange-Graebe was assigned to Chicago where she worked with the Juvenile Psychopathic Institute under Dr. William Healy. After four months in Chicago, she was reassigned to track down the so-called Ishmael clan of nomadic criminals and vagabonds in and around Indianapolis. The tribe of racially mixed white gypsies, Islamic blacks and American Indians had been described years earlier in the study
The Tribe of Ishmael: a Study in Social Degeneration,
as a prime example of genetic criminality. This book had become a fundamental text for all eugenics. Now the ERO considered the book, written a generation earlier, as “too advanced for the times.” So Drange-Graebe would resume tracing the family lineages of the infamous Ishmaelites. Within months, she had assembled 77 pages of family pedigrees and 873 pages of individual descriptions.
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Criminal behavior was hardly a prerequisite for the ERO’s scrutiny. Field worker Amey Eaton was assigned to Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to report on the Amish. Buggy-riding Amish folk, the most conservative wing of Mennonite Christians, were among the most law-abiding, courteous and God-fearing people in America. But they were also known for their unshakable pacifism, their peculiar refusal to adopt industrial technology and their immutable clannishness. This made them different. “In this small sect,” Laughlin reported, “considerable intermarriage has occurred. These people kindly cooperated in our efforts to learn whether … these consanguineous [family-linked] marriages had resulted in defective offspring.”
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The ERO’s sights were broad, so their workers continued fanning out. Helen Reeves sought records of so-called feebleminded patients in various New Jersey institutions. Another researcher was sent to trawl the files of the special genealogy collection of the New York Public Library, looking for family ties to unfit individuals. Various hospitals around the country were scoured, yielding records on eighty immigrant families with Huntington’s chorea, a devastating disease of the central nervous system. Even when Davenport vacationed in Maine, he used the occasion to visit the area’s islands and peninsulas to record the deleterious effects of inter-marriage in groups considered unfit. Idyllic Washington and Hancock counties in Maine were of particular interest.
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Epileptics were a high-priority target for Laughlin and the ERO. Field worker Florence Danielson was dispatched to collect the family trees of epileptics at Monson State Hospital for Epileptics in Massachusetts. Monson had previously been an almshouse or poorhouse. In line with eugenic thought, Monson’s administrators believed that epilepsy and poverty were genetically linked.
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Laughlin dispatched a second ERO investigator, Sadie Deavitt, to the New Jersey State Village for Epileptics at Skillman to chart individual pedigrees. At Skillman, Deavitt deftly interviewed patients and their families about the supposed traits of their relatives and ancestors. The ERO’s scientific regimen involved ascribing various qualities and characteristics to epileptic patient family members, living or dead. These qualities included medical characteristics such as “deaf’ or “blind,” as well as strictly social factors such as “wanderer, tramp, confirmed runaway” and “criminal.”
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The definition of “criminal” was never delineated; it included a range of infractions from vagrancy to serious felony.

Miss Deavitt employed warmth and congeniality to extract family and acquaintance descriptions from unsuspecting patients, family members and friends. A New Jersey State instructive report explained, “The investigator visits the patients in their cottages. She does this in the way of a friendly visit and leads the patient on to tell all he can about his friends and relatives, especially as to addresses. Often they bring her their letters to read and from these she gleans considerable information. Then comes the visit to the [family’s] home. It is the visitor’s recent and personal knowledge of the patient that often assures her of a cordial welcome.” By deftly gaining the confidence of one family member and friend after another, Miss Deavitt was able to map family trees with various social and medical qualities penned in with special codes. “Sx” meant “sexual pervert”; “im” stood for “immoral.”
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None of the hundreds of people interviewed knew they were being added to a list of candidates for sterilization or segregation in special camps or farms.

Laughlin and the ERO focused heavily on the epileptic menace because they believed epilepsy and “feeblemindedness” were inextricably linked in human nature. Indeed, they often merged statistics on epileptic patients with those of the feebleminded to create larger combined numbers. The term “feeblemindedness” was never quite defined; its meaning varied from place to place, and even situation to situation. The eugenically damning classification certainly included genuine cases of severely retarded individuals who could not care for themselves, but it also swept up those who were simply shy, stuttering, poor at English, or otherwise generally nonverbal, regardless of their true intellect or talent.
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Feeblemindedness was truly in the eye of the beholder and frequently depended upon the dimness or brightness of a particular moment.

But there was little room for gray in Laughlin’s world. To accelerate the campaign against epileptics, Laughlin distributed to hospital and institutional directors a special thirty-page bulletin, filled with dense scientific documentation, number-filled columns, family charts and impressive Mendelian principles warning about the true nature of epilepsy. The bulletin, entitled “A First Study of Inheritance of Epilepsy,” and first published in the
Journal of Nervous and Mental Diseases,
was authored by Davenport and a doctor employed by New Jersey’s epileptic village. The treatise asserted conclusively that epilepsy and feeblemindedness were manifestations of a common defect, due to “the absence of a protoplasmic factor that determines complete nervous development.” The bulletin emphasized that the genetic menace extended far beyond the family into the so-called genetic “fraternity,” or the lineages of everyone related to every person who was considered epileptic. The more such “tainted” defectives were allowed to reproduce, the more numerous their epileptic and feebleminded descendants would become. In one example, the research declared that “in 28 families of normal parents of epileptic children every one shows evidence of mental weakness. “
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