War Against the Weak Read online

  Osborn, a like-minded eugenicist, wrote back with encouragement, reporting that Carnegie’s committee had considered the general topic before. British eugenicists had already approached Andrew Carnegie directly. But Osborn assured, “I know of no one better qualified to do this work than you. “61

  Shoring up his knowledge and enlisting wider consensus, Davenport traveled to Europe for four months, where he briefly visited with Galton. The founding eugenicist warned Davenport that any such effort must be a serious scientific enterprise, not just “any attempt at showy work, for the sake of mere show.” Untroubled, Davenport traveled to several European marine life research centers gathering academic accord for his project.62

  Fresh from his European travels, and fortified with the latest international views on eugenics, Davenport dispatched to the Carnegie Institution a more detailed letter plus a lengthy report on the state of human evolution studies to date. The documents made clear that far-reaching American race policy could not be directed without supportive scientific data based on breeding experiments with lower species. The results of those experiments would be applied in broad strokes to humans. “Improvement of the human race can probably be effected only by understanding and applying these methods,” he argued. “How appalling is our ignorance, for example, concerning the effect of a mixture of races as contrasted with pure breeding; a matter of infinite importance in a country like ours containing numerous races and subspecies of men.”63

  Davenport hoped to craft a super race of Nordics. “Can we build a wall high enough around this country,” he asked his colleagues, “so as to keep out these cheaper races, or will it be a feeble dam… leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to the blacks, browns and yellows and seek and an asylum in New Zealand.”64

  Man was still evolving, he reasoned, and that evolution could and should be to a higher plane. Carnegie funds could accelerate and direct that process. “But what are these processes by which man has evolved,” posited Davenport, “and which we should know… in hastening his further evolution.” He disputed the value of improved conditions for those considered genetically inferior. He readily admitted that with schooling, training and social benefits, “a person born in the slums can be made a useful man.” But that usefulness was limited in the evolutionary scheme of things. No amount of book learning, “finer mental stuff” or “intellectual accumulation” would transfer to the next generation, he insisted, adding that “permanent improvement of the race can only be brought about by breeding the best.”65

  Drawing on his belief in raceology, Davenport offered the Carnegie trustees an example he knew would resonate: “We have in this country the grave problem of the negro,” he wrote, “a race whose mental development is, on the average, far below the average of the Caucasian. Is there a prospect that we may through the education of the individual produce an improved race so that we may hope at last that the negro mind shall be as teachable, as elastic, as original, and as fruitful as the Caucasian’s? Or must future generations, indefinitely, start from the same low plane and yield the same meager results? We do not know; we have no data. Prevailing ‘opinion’ says we must face the latter alternative. If this were so, it would be best to export the black race at once.”66

  Proof was needed to fuel the social plans the eugenicists and their allies championed. Davenport was sure he could deliver the proof. “As to a person to carry out the proposed work,” he wrote Carnegie, “I am ready at the present moment to abandon all other plans for this.” To dispel any doubt of his devotion, Davenport told the institution, “I propose to give the rest of my life unreservedly to this work. “67

  The men of Carnegie were impressed. They said yes.

  * * *

  During 1903, while the esteemed men of the Carnegie Institution were readying their adventure into eugenics, Davenport worked to broaden support for the perception of American eugenics as a genuine science. Since the great men of medicine were, for the most part, devoted to improving individual health, not stunting it, few of them wanted to be affiliated with the nascent movement. So Davenport instead turned to the great men of the stable, the field and the barnyard.

  He found a willing ear at the newly established American Breeders Association. The ABA was created in 1903 by the Association of Agricultural Colleges and Experimental Stations, after four years of preparatory effort spurred by a request from the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture. The American government urged animal breeders and seed experts to “join hands.” The idea of bringing the two groups together was first suggested to Washington in 1899 by the Hybridizer’s Conference in London meeting under the auspices of the Royal Horticultural Society. In light of Mendel’s discoveries about peapods, the American government pushed the plan.68

  Many breeders were convinced that their emerging Mendelian knowledge about corn and cattle was equally applicable to the inner quality of human beings. A typical declaration came from one New York State breeder: “Every race-horse, every straight-backed bull, every premium pig tells us what we can do and what we must do for man…. The results of suppressing the poorest and breeding from the best would be the same for them as for cattle and sheep.”69

  At the ABA’s first annual meeting in St. Louis during the chilly final days of December 1903, Davenport was well received and elected to the permanent five-man oversight committee. Two organizational sections were established: Plants and Animals. But Davenport prevailed upon the ABA to add a third group, a so-called Eugenics Committee. The establishing resolution declared the committee should “devise methods of recording the values of the blood of individuals, families, people and races.” The resolution specified that the goal was to “emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood.”70

  Eventually, Davenport bluntly confessed to an ABA audience: “Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life, so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm.” A report to the committee called for broad public awareness through “popular magazine articles, in public lectures… in circular letters to physicians, teachers, the clergy and legislators.” The report decried “such mongrelization as is proceeding on a vast scale in this country…. Shall we not rather take the steps… to dry up the springs that feed the torrent of defective and degenerate protoplasm?” In the process, the report claimed, the United States would curtail the $100 million in annual expenditures for the destitute, insane, feebleminded, defective and criminal elements-a group comprised of at least two million people. How? The report, circulated to the entire ABA membership and the federal government, was explicit: “By segregation during the reproductive period or even by sterilization.”71

  Once defectives were eliminated in America, the same methods could be employed worldwide. ABA president Willet Hays, who also served as assistant secretary of agriculture, authored an article entitled “Constructive Eugenics” for American Breeders Magazine, in which he proposed a global solution to all unwanted races. “Eugenic problems are much the same throughout as the problems of plant breeding and animal improvement,” wrote Hays, adding, “May we not hope to… lop off the defective classes below, and also increase the number of the efficient at the top?” His suggestion? A massive international numbering convention, assigning descriptive eleven-digit “number names” to every man, woman and child on earth using census bureaus. By creating a series of nearly 100 billion numbers, for an estimated world population of only 1.5 billion, Hays hoped to enroll “every person now living, any person of whom there is any history, and any person who might be born in the next thousand years…. No two persons would have the same number.” These eleven-digit “number names” would not only identify the individual, they would trace his lineage and assign a genetic rating, expressed as a percentage. Methodically, one nation after another would identify its population and eliminate the unwanted strains. “Who, except the prudish, would object if public agencies gave to every person a lin
eage number and genetic percentage ratings, that the eugenic value of every family and of every person might be available to all who have need of the truth as to the probable efficiency of the offspring.”72

  On January 19, 1904, the Carnegie Institution formally inaugurated what it called the Station for Experimental Evolution of the Carnegie Institution at bucolic Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport’s annual salary was fixed at $3,500 plus travel expenses. It was a significant compensation package for its day. For example, in 1906, the president of the University of Florida received only $2,500 per year, and Northwestern University’s librarian earned only $1,200.73

  A new building for the experimental station costing $20,000 was approved. Everything would be first class, as it should be, endowed by Andrew Carnegie’s fortune. The undertaking was not merely funded by Carnegie, it was an integral part of the Carnegie Institution itself. Letterhead prominently made it clear at the top that the station was wholly part of the Carnegie Institution. Moreover, the purse strings would be tightly held with the smallest activity being considered in advance and authorized after approval. “The sum of$300 [shall] be paid to Prof. Davenport to enable him to procure certain animals for the proposed laboratory,” instructed Carnegie’s chairman,John Billings, “…provided that he shall furnish properly acceptable vouchers for the expenditure of this money.”74

  Billings was fastidious about record keeping and supervision. He was one of America’s most distinguished citizens. Some would eventually call him “the father of medical and vital statistics” in the United States. He ensured that medical statistics were included in the United States Census of 1880, and he took a leadership role in drawing up the nation’s vital statistics for the censuses of 1890 and 1900. During Billings’s tenure in the Surgeon General’s Office, he was considered America’s foremost expert on hygiene.75

  Billings and the Carnegie Institution would now mobilize their prestige and the fortune they controlled to help Davenport usher America into an age of a new form of hygiene: racial hygiene. The goal was clear: to eliminate the inadequate and unfit. Now it was time to search the nation, from its busiest metropolises to its most remote regions, methodically identifying exactly which families were qualified to continue and which were not.

  CHAPTER 4

  Hunting the Unfit

  The Carnegie Institution’s Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor opened for business in 1904. But in the beginning, little happened. The experimental station’s first years were devoted to preparatory work, mostly because Davenport was fundamentally unsure of just how he would go about reshaping mankind in his image. “I have little notion of just what we shall do,” Davenport confided in a note. “We shall reconnoiter the first year.”1

  So Davenport focused on the basics. Lab animals were purchased: a tailless Manx cat, long-tailed fowl, canaries and finches for breeding experiments. Hundreds of seeds were acquired for Mendelian exercises. A staff was hired, including an animal keeper from Chicago, several research associates, an expert in botany and entomology, plus a gardener and a librarian. The librarian assembled shelf after shelf of the leading English, German and French biology publications: 2,000 books, 1,500 pamphlets, and complete sets of twenty-three leading journals, including American Journal of Physiology, Canadian Entomologist, Der Zoologische Garten and L’Annee Biologique. Associates were recruited from the scholarly ranks of Harvard, the University of Chicago, Columbia University and other respected institutions to actively research and consult. Corresponding scientists were attracted from Cambridge, Zurich, Vienna, Leipzig and Washington, D.C. to share their latest discoveries from the fields of entomology, zoology and biology.2

  Davenport was so busy getting organized that the Carnegie Institution did not issue its official announcement about the experimental station until more than a year later, in March of 1905.3

  Indeed, only after Davenport had recruited enough scholars and amassed enough academic resources to create an aura of eugenic preeminence, did he dispatch a letter to Galton, in late October of 1905, inviting him to become a so-called “correspondent.” Clearly, Davenport wanted Galton’s name for its marquee value. “Acceptance of this invitation,” Davenport wrote, “ [is] implying only [a] mutual intention to exchange publications and occasionally ideas by letter.” But Galton was reluctant. “You do me honor in asking,” Galton scribbled back, “…but I could only accept in the understanding that it is an wholly honorary office, involving no duties whatever, for I have already more on my head than I can properly manage.” That said, Galton asked Davenport to “exercise your own judgment” before using his name “under such bald restriction.”4

  During the next two years, Davenport’s new experimental station confined its breeding data to the lower life forms, such as mice, canaries and chickens, and he contributed occasional journal articles, such as one on hereditary factors in human eye color.5

  But how could Davenport translate his eugenic beliefs into social action?

  Talk and theories gave way to social intervention at the December 1909 American Breeders Association meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. Subcommittees had already been formed for different human defects, such as insanity, feeblemindedness, criminality, hereditary pauperism and race mongrelization. Davenport encouraged the ABA to escalate decisively from pure hereditary research into specific ethnic and racial investigation, propaganda and lobbying for legislation. He convinced his fellow breeders to expand the small Eugenics Committee to a full-fledged organizational section. ABA members voted yes to Davenport’s ideas by a resounding 499 to 5. Among his leading supporters was Alexander Graham Bell, famous for inventing the telephone and researching deafness, but also a dedicated sheep breeder and ardent eugenicist.6

  Now the real work began. Davenport and Bell had already devised a so-called “Family Record” questionnaire. Bell agreed to use his influence and circulate the forms to high schools and colleges. The ABA also agreed to distribute five thousand copies. Davenport’s eugenic form asked pointed questions about eye defects, deafness and feeblemindedness in any of a suspect family’s ancestry. Bell wondered why Davenport would not also trace the excellence in a suspect family, as well as its defects.7

  But Davenport was only interested in documenting human defects in other races and ethnic groups, not their achievements. He believed that inferiority was an inescapable dominant Mendelian trait. Even if a favorable environment produced a superior individual, if that individual derived from inferior ethnic or racial stock, his progeny would still constitute a biological “menace.”8

  Davenport’s scientific conclusion was already set in his mind; now he craved the justifying data. Even with the data, making eugenics a practical and governing doctrine would not be easy. American demographics were rapidly transforming. Political realities were shifting. Davenport well understood that as more immigrants filed into America’s overcrowded political arena, they would vote and wield power. Race politics would grow harder and harder to legislate. It mattered not. Davenport was determined to prevail against the majority-a majority he neither trusted nor respected.

  The inspiration to persevere against a changing world of ethnic diversity would come weeks later, during a visit to Kent, England. Davenport called the experience “one of the most memorable days of my life.” That morning, the weather was beautiful and Davenport could not help but walk several miles through the bracing English countryside. He found himself at Downe House, Darwin’s longtime residence. For an hour, the American eugenicist pondered Darwin’s secluded walking paths and gardens. “It is a wonderful place,” Davenport wrote, “and seems to me to give the clue to Darwin’s strength-solitary thinking out of doors in the midst of nature. I would give a good deal for such a walk.… Then I would build a brick wall around it…. I know you will laugh at this,” he continued, “but it means success in my work as opposed to failure. I must have a convenient, isolated place for continuous reflection.”9

  Davenport returned to America and began constru
cting his scientific bastion, impervious to outside interference. The first step would be to establish the so-called Eugenics Record Office to quietly register the genetic backgrounds of all Americans, separating the defective strains from the desired lineages. Borrowing nomenclature and charting procedures from the world of animal breeding, these family trees would be called pedigrees. Where would the ERO obtain the family details? “They lie hidden,” Davenport told his ABA colleagues, “in records of our numerous charity organizations, our 42 institutions for the feebleminded, our 115 schools and homes for the deaf and blind, our 350 hospitals for the insane, our 1,200 refuge homes, our 1,300 prisons, our 1,500 hospitals and our 2,500 almshouses. Our great insurance companies and our college gymnasiums have tens of thousands of records of the characters of human bloodlines. These records should be studied, their hereditary data sifted out and properly recorded on cards, and [then] the cards sent to a central bureau for study… [of] the great strains of human protoplasm that are coursing through the country.”10

  At the same time, Davenport wanted to collect pedigrees on eminent, racially acceptable families, that is, the ones worth preserving.11

  The planned ERO would also agitate among public officials to accept eugenic principles even in the absence of scientific support. Legislation was to be pressed to enable the forced prevention of unwanted progeny, as well as the proliferation by financial incentives of acceptable families. Whereas the experimental station would concentrate on quotable genetic research, the ERO would transduce that research into governing policy in American society.