The Torch Magazine

Eugenics in America

by Anne Legge

     In his wonderfully written book The Gene: An Intimate History, Pulitzer prize-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee characterizes eugenics as a flirtation with the perfectibility of man (12). An ingredient of the Progressive Movement in the United States from 1890 to 1930, eugenics was a response to the stresses of the time including industrialization, immigration, and urbanization. Eugenics came in two varieties: positive eugenics encouraged breeding of desirable stock, and negative eugenics prevented reproduction of the unfit (Cohen 47). The problem is who decides who is fit, and by what criteria. By its very nature, eugenics was elitist and paternalistic.

     The father of eugenics was the British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin and contemporary of Charles Darwin. Galton coined the word eugenics from the Greek words for good and genes, as well as originating the phrase nature versus nurture (Mukherjee 65-67). The intention of eugenicists was to use the newly re-discovered Mendelian laws of heredity to improve the human race. The movement became part of the zeitgeist of the day, the elite of science, politics, and education being proponents, including Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Alexander Graham Bell, and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Not himself a hard-core eugenicist, Charles Darwin acknowledged the need for altruism and aid for our weaker brothers and sisters, but hard-core geneticists embraced the thinking of Social Darwinism, questioning even vaccination and philanthropy as factors that enable the weaker to survive.

     Eugenics was inherently racist, based on a belief in the superiority of Nordic stock and on preserving the purity of the germ-plasm, the eugenicists' term for the inheritance package carried by individuals. The national stock of germ-plasm was the eugenicists' primary concern. Seeing the unhealthy and unfit as a burden on society, eugenicists argued that improvements to the environment—housing, nutrition, education, medical care—would not solve society's problems but only foster the survival of the unfit.

     Although eugenics claimed to be science-based, it could more accurately be called science-exploiting. In the classic debate of nature versus nurture, opinion in the first part of the 20th century favored the hereditary nature of all disorders, physical defects, and problem behaviors, including eye defects, physical deformities, dwarfism, deafness, epilepsy, feeble-mindedness (a favorite catch-all category), schizophrenia, manic depression, insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, even vagrancy, pauperism, criminality, and immorality. One serious problem with the eugenicists' conclusions was that the science of the day was woefully inadequate in understanding mental illness, epilepsy, intelligence testing, and the principles of inheritance. Another problem was that few traits are purely hereditary. Mukherjee explains, Most genes react with other triggers--environment, chance, behaviors, or even parental and prenatal exposures—to determine an organism's form and function (454). The eugenicists had a kind of hubristic confidence that they knew exactly how to master nature. Galton stated, What nature does blindly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly (qtd. In Mukherjee 72).

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     The eugenics movement advocated three courses of action: education, segregation and sterilization, and immigration reform. Eugenicists published articles and books, created college and high school texts and courses, and held international conferences attended by scientists, physicians, and such notables as Winston Churchill, Harvard President Charles Eliot, and eminent physician William Osler, as well as a delegation from Germany, who gave a presentation on what they termed Racial Hygiene. American eugenicists even took their agenda to state fairs; the Kansas Free Fair of 1929 included educational exhibits and contests for Better Babies and Fitter Families alongside cattle, pig, and sheep judging, with ribbons and cash prizes awarded to the winners. A staff of examiners screened the contestants covering hereditary, social, and educational attainments and mental and physical status (Cohen 61). Between 1890 and 1930, almost everyone who was anyone was a eugenicist in sympathy if not in practice. There were few dissenting voices except for the Catholic Church (Cohen 67).

     One of the founding fathers of American eugenics was Charles Davenport, a Harvard-educated biologist interested in scientific breeding of livestock and dogs with an organization called the American Breeders Association, which soon extended its focus to human breeding. In 1904 Davenport founded the Station for the Experimental Study of Evolution in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Davenport recruited eugenicist Harry Laughlin, and the Cold Spring Harbor facility became the Eugenics Record Office. Funded by Andrew Carnegie and other wealthy patrons, it collected histories and pedigrees, developed manuals, and trained field workers to do eugenic research. Other adherents were Edwin Alderman, president of the University of Virginia; Harvey Jordan, dean of the UVA medical school; and Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia.

     At the First National Conference on Race Betterment, held in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1914, Laughlin quantified the problem: To rid the nation of what he [Laughlin] called the 'lowest one-tenth' of the population would require fifteen million people to be sterilized over the next two generations. There had so far been fewer than one thousand eugenic sterilizations, he said, and that was not nearly enough (Cohen 118-19). The policy Laughlin recommended might be irreverently called catch and release: identify defectives, institutionalize them, sterilize them, and release them to return to normal life. He continued, If America is to escape the doom of nations generally, it must breed good Americans. The fall of every nation in history has been due to many causes, but always chiefest among these causes has been the decline of the national stock (qtd. in Cohen 121).

     The drive to enact sterilization laws began in Indiana in 1907, quickly spreading throughout the nation. By 1931, 28 of the 48 states had legalized eugenic sterilization (Cohen 306). An important center of eugenic activity was the Virginia Colony for Feeble-Minded and Epileptics in Amherst County, Virginia, superintended by Dr. Alfred Priddy, and characterized by Mukherjee as the Hotel California of mental illness: patients who checked in rarely ever left (79). Patients at such institutions were routinely sterilized by salpingectomy (surgical removal of a fallopian tube) for women or vasectomy for men, often without the patient's knowledge or consent. The paperwork recorded that the procedures were necessary because of appendicitis or pelvic disease.

     While the threat to racial purity from within was addressed by segregating and sterilizing the unfit and by miscegenation laws in Virginia and other states, the external threat was addressed by immigration reform in response to a surge of ten million white immigrants from 1890 to 1924. Mainly Jewish, Italian, Irish, and Polish, this population was said to be carrying defective germ-plasm (Mukherjee 82), while the stock deemed desirable was Nordic from such countries as Germany, Scandinavia, Scotland, and England.

     Harry Laughlin testified to Congress, Careful studies have shown that the frequency of Insanity [sic] in our foreign population is 2.9 times greater than in those of native birth (qtd. in Cohen 130). In addition to Laughlin's supposedly scientific evidence, the eugenicists took their propaganda campaign to the popular press. In a 1929 article in Good Housekeeping, Calvin Coolidge asserted less than lucidly, Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides (qtd. in Cohen 134). In 1923, a Saturday Evening Post editorial endorsed Laughlin's testimony: If America doesn't keep out the queer, alien, mongrelized people of Southern and Eastern Europe, her crop of citizens will eventually be dwarfed and mongrelized in turn (Cohen 134).

     Congress responded by passing the extremely stringent Immigration Act of 1924. Subsequent immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe fell dramatically, especially that of European Jews, for whom the timing was catastrophic. In 1941, from the Netherlands, Otto Frank wrote desperate letters to U.S. Government officials appealing unsuccessfully for American visas for his wife Edith and his daughters Margot and Anne Frank (Cohen 135).

     After the Nazis seized power in 1933, their sterilization laws were modeled after American precedents but went further, targeting not only those with hereditary disorders but also political dissidents, journalists, and ultimately certain ethnic groups. It was a steep and slippery slope from sterilization to occasional euthanasia to extermination of six million Jews in the Holocaust.

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     In 1929, Harry Laughlin showed Congress a chart of nationalities ranked by intelligence, a chart based on data from U.S. Army testing. The verbal skills testing was administered at Ellis Island to immigrants who had just endured a trans-Atlantic voyage in steerage, had limited English literacy, and may have never before held a pencil. Needless to say, most of them tested very badly. The history of intelligence testing is bound up with the eugenics movement because IQ tests were the tools for identifying the incompetents among the native stock as well as among immigrants. To pursue this fascinating subject, you cannot do better than Stephen Jay Gould's The Mismeasure of Man (1981, revised and expanded in 1996.)

     Intelligence testing began in France with Alfred Binet, director of the Sorbonne psychology lab, who devised a battery of tests designed to identify school children in need of remedial help. After Binet, the dominant American psychologists involved in intelligence testing were Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, and Robert Yerkes. Their thinking postulated a single factor, which they called general intelligence, which resided in the brain and was innate and immutable. It could be measured, supposedly, with IQ tests, which were used to classify and rank people (Gould 20). As used by the eugenicists, this testing was said to prove that oppressed and disadvantaged people—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status (Gould 27).

Goddard concluded that feeble-mindedness obeyed Mendelian rules of inheritance, and he created a taxonomy of mental defectives. Idiots, the lowest, had a mental age of three and could not develop speech. Imbeciles, with a mental age of three to seven, could not master written language. The highest category, which Goddard called morons, had a mental age of eight to twelve and could be taught to function in society. It should be noted that these categories were often employed imprecisely and that eugenicists saw a strong link between feeble-mindedness and immorality (Gould 193-194).

     Lewis Terman of Stanford revised the Binet tests, creating the grandfather of all of today's ubiquitous mental tests. However, intelligence testing really took off with Robert Yerkes' testing of 1.75 million World War I Army recruits. Literate Army recruits took the Alpha test of verbal skills while illiterate recruits and those who failed the Alpha test took the pictorial Beta test. The shocking result of the Army tests showed that the average mental age of white American adults stood just above the moron threshold, age thirteen. Actually, the tests measured literacy and knowledge of American culture, not intelligence, and their administration was a shambles. Tests were administered in unsuitable venues, with inadequately trained testers, and with strictly enforced timing under circumstances guaranteed to cause confusion and anxiety. The recruits were not told why they were tested and what use would be made of the tests. Nevertheless, the conclusion that 47.3 per cent--almost half--of the white draft were morons was considered sound science (Gould 253). (1)

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     In 1924, the same year the Immigration Act was passed, the eugenics movement also set in motion what became the landmark case of Buck v. Bell in Amherst County, Virginia.

     Carrie Buck, a tomboyish sixteen, the daughter of Frank and Emma Buck, a young woman socially, politically, and literally from the wrong side of the Charlottesville, Virginia tracks, had become pregnant. At the time she was a foster child in the home of Alice and John Dobbs, where she helped with housework and was sometimes hired out to neighbors. Carrie said that the father of her child was Clarence Garland, the visiting nephew of Alice Dobbs, and that he seduced her with a promise of marriage but took her by force (Lombardo 139-140).

     The Dobbses petitioned the Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court in Charlottesville to send Carrie to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Amherst County, where two doctors judged her to be feeble-minded. The Dobbses stated that she had a temper, was dishonest, and was guilty of moral delinquency, having become pregnant out of wedlock. Carrie's daughter Vivian, born March 28, 1924, was placed with the Dobbses.

     When Carrie entered the Colony, the mental examiner who tested her wrote inaccurately that she had attended school for nine years, had repeated one grade, and had an IQ of 56. In actuality, she had completed fifth grade, been promoted to sixth, and had never repeated a grade—these being some of many inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the court record (Lombardo 105).

     Carrie's mother, Emma Buck, age 48, had been committed to the colony four years earlier. The record notes that she suffered from pneumonia, rheumatism, and syphilis. She had been arrested for prostitution and had given birth to illegitimate children. Her IQ was listed as 50, diagnosis Mental Deficiency, Familial Moron (Lombardo 106).

     Dr. Albert Priddy, Superintendent of the Virginia Colony, was a fervent eugenicist who had performed illegal sterilizations of inmates for years until he was sued by the husband of Willie Mallory, a woman institutionalized for feeble-mindedness, whom Priddy had sterilized and whose children he intended to sterilize for pelvic disease. When the Mallory suit came to trial, the jury refused to award Mallory damages, but the lawsuit made the Virginia superintendents wary and all sterilizations stopped. Priddy was determined to take a test case to the U.S Supreme Court in order to legalize sterilization of the feeble-minded and socially unfit. In the three generations of Emma, Carrie, and Vivian Buck, he believed he had his case.

     The first trial, Buck v. Priddy, Amherst County Court, 1924, was a travesty of justice. Priddy was represented by a competent lawyer, Aubrey Strode. The major premise of the case was that Carrie's genealogy represented hereditary deficiencies (Lombardo 136). Drs. Albert Priddy and Joseph DeJarnette testified, and Dr. Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office was deposed. Laughlin had written a model law for eugenic sterilization and a popular book entitled Eugenic Sterilization in the United States. Laughlin also dispatched a colleague, a zealous fieldworker, Dr. Harry Estabrook, to examine the principals and testify in the trial.

     The Colony Board appointed legal representation for Carrie, Irving Whitehead, confidant of Priddy, boyhood friend to Aubrey Strode, former Colony director, and sterilization advocate (Lombardo 107). Teachers, neighbors, and social workers gave testimony that was often rumor or hearsay. The charge that Emma, the mother, and Carrie, her daughter, were feeble-minded was not consistent with the fact that both had completed fifth grade and been promoted to sixth. No one challenged whether feeble-minded was a scientifically meaningful term or the validity of mental testing of the seven-month-old infant Vivian, even though [t]he circumstances of Carrie's commitment and the contradictions in the testimony of her foster parents should have alerted any conscientious attorney to probe further (Lombardo 139). Procedures in place to protect Carrie were formalities only, and she did not appear to understand what was at stake.

     Joseph DeJarnette, superintendent of Western State Hospital in Staunton, Virginia, had been a specialist in care of the mentally ill for thirty-six years. In court he demonstrated only a simplistic understanding of Mendel's laws and stated that feeble-mindedness runs in families (Lombardo 123-124).

     The trial ended in less than five hours (Lombardo 135). Less than two months after the Buck v. Priddy trial, Albert Priddy died of Hodgkin's disease, and Dr. John Bell succeeded him as superintendent of the Lynchburg Colony and defendant in the lawsuit, now Buck v. Bell, which proceeded in 1925 to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals.

     In 1927 Carrie's case was argued before the U.S Supreme Court, and it took hardly any time for the court to render its 8-1 verdict on May 12, 1927, just before Carrie's twenty-first birthday. Pierce Butler, the only Roman Catholic on the court, was the sole dissenter, and he never explained his dissent. Chief Justice William Howard Taft assigned Oliver Wendell Holmes to write the majority opinion. In part, it reads, It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. Three generations of imbeciles are enough (qtd. in Mukherjee 83-84).

     Carrie's salpingectomy was performed on October 19, 1927, by Dr. John Bell. She wanted to return to the Dobbs household to be with her daughter, but Alice Dobbs refused, and Carrie was placed in another home. Ultimately, Carrie married twice and died in 1983.

     It is estimated that between 1907 and 1983 sixty to seventy thousand Americans were sterilized, mainly in Virginia and California (Cohen 319). However, the American eugenics movement was moribund by the end of World War II. Various factors contributed to its demise: preoccupation with the challenges of the Great Depression; revulsion at revelations of Nazi ethnic cleansing; changes in care of the mentally ill which countered their segregation in large institutions; introduction of new therapies such as insulin, drug, and electric shock and lobotomy; new antipsychotic drugs which enabled treatment of the mentally ill at home; and advances in the knowledge of epilepsy and mental illness, along with improvements in intelligence testing.

     Mukherjee points out that eugenics is not actually dead but reincarnated, more politely, in the last half of the twentieth century—no longer your Nazi grandfather's eugenics (272) but eugenics in its benign avatar. Its champions call it neo-genics or newgenics (273). Newgenics is based on sound science and individual choice. It brings us a myriad of amazing possibilities and controversial issues, including legalization of abortion, mapping the human genome, genetic diagnosis and analysis, cloning, genius sperm banks, designer babies, gene replacement therapy, and stem cell therapy—a brave new world indeed! Newgenics brings new moral and ethical challenges. We were once warned to beware the military-industrial complex. Now Mukherjee cautions us to beware the genetic-commercial complex (272). But that is surely another Torch paper.

Footnote

(1) 1994 saw an example of the heritage of the eugenic view when Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray published The Bell Curve, a heavily documented tome proving the innate group differences in IQ between whites and blacks in America, a work thoroughly demolished by Gould in the revised edition of The Mismeasure of Man (367-378).

Works Cited

Cohen, Adam. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. New York: Penguin, 2006.

Gould, Stephen Jay. The Mismeasure of Man. New York: Norton, 1996, 1981.

Lombardo, Paul A. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2008

Mukherjee, Siddhartha. The Gene: An Intimate History. New York: Scribners, 2016.

Author's Biography

   The late Anne Legge was a retired associate professor of English from Lord Fairfax Community College, Middletown, Virginia.

   She graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the College of William and Mary, where she was student body president. She also earned a graduate degree from the University of Virginia.

   A member of the Winchester Torch Club since 1983, she served as club president (1986-87) and received the Silver Torch Award in 2001. She was a two-time recipient of the Charles Greeb Best Paper Award.

   Eugenics in America was originally presented to the Winchester club on March 1, 2017.