The Genius Factory (4 page)

Shay was Graham’s chief inspiration, but not his only one. All around him, Graham glumly observed the triumph of dullards over brains. Graham sold contact lenses to pro football players, and he was repulsed at how women flung themselves at the mountainous morons. Graham would sometimes eat lunch in the cafeteria of his Pasadena factory—sometimes, but not often, because his employees irritated Graham too much. He thought they didn’t want to improve themselves or work harder. All they cared about was milking the government for more benefits. These indistinct resentments clarified themselves in Graham’s mind. He had no religion, but he found a faith in eugenics. He became fixated on the idea that the world needed more intelligent people because the idiots were multiplying too fast.

It was not surprising that Graham grew fascinated with genetic degradation when he did, as the 1950s turned the corner into the ’60s. The late 1950s had marked the zenith of men like Graham. In the Sputnik-era scientific-industrial complex, technical businessmen were kings. White men just like Graham—intelligent, arrogant, scientific, and self-assured—dominated 1950s America. (Their rationalist ethos didn’t merely pervade business and government, it also spilled over into other, less obviously scientific aspects of human life. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies, for example, helped popularize the notion of sex as a mechanical act, separable from human emotion. Very little separated Kinsey’s scientific sex from Graham’s scientific breeding.) As a titan of industry and prize inventor, Graham felt he had the right, even the obligation, to impose his eugenic ideas on the idiotic masses. Graham’s genetic dread also reflected his fear of the societal change that he sensed was coming. Graham began worrying about the intellectual decline of Americans at the very instant Americans started to decide they didn’t want to listen to men like Graham. The civil rights and women’s movements were overthrowing the white male order. The demand for Wise Men was withering.

So at this nervous moment, with the Wise Men still clinging to power, Graham wrote a book to sound the alarm. Part pseudoanthropology, part evolutionary biology, all polemic, Graham’s
The Future of Man
throbbed with panic: Act now or humanity will die! The thrust of
The Future of Man
was that prosperity had ruined mankind, because it had reversed human evolution. Graham, undeterred by the fact that more people were living longer, healthier, and richer lives than at any point in history, concluded that man had peaked 15,000 years ago, in the good old days of the Cro-Magnons. These “scourging gods,” as Graham called them lustfully, had been brilliant and mighty because nature was so ruthless. Only the greatest Cro-Magnons had survived to pass on their glorious genes. But then, the tragedy of civilization! The agricultural revolution had softened man and allowed weaker specimens to breed. Since intelligence was 50 to 90 percent inherited, according to Graham, mankind got stupider as these lesser men multiplied. Natural selection waned. After thousands of years of such regression, half the human population was “what might be described as dull.” Graham believed that the spread of half-wits explained the rise of communism, a political ideology that squashed brilliance and rewarded mediocrity.

Graham anguished that the few smart people who remained were cooperating in their own extinction by using birth control, an “almost wholly pernicious” invention. The refusal to reproduce was “nature’s unforgivable sin,” Graham wrote.

The disappearance of genes for high intelligence is a defeat for the uniqueness of man, an erosion of the essence of the human condition. The childlessness of an Isaac Newton or a George Washington, the extinction of the Lincoln family, the spinsterhood of the brightest girl in the class, are great biological tragedies. As a result, mankind is deprived of some of that essential quality which separates him from the apes.

But a remedy was at hand. Just a few more smart people, and we could fend off the idiotic hordes. “Ten men of high intelligence can be more effective than 1000 morons.” Mankind, Graham proclaimed, could seize control of evolution through “intelligent selection.”

Ever practical, Graham ended
The Future of Man
with a how-to guide for saving humanity. Most of his proposals were mundane—government support for married graduate students, housing projects designed for large families, corporate sponsorship of employees with children.

But Graham saved his one big idea for last: “germinal repositories”—or, as they would be come to be known, sperm banks. Women would be artificially inseminated with sperm collected from the world’s smartest men: “Consider what it would mean to scientific progress if another 20 or more children of Lord Rutherford or Louis Pasteur could have been brought into the world. . . . Consider the gains to society if this new technique had been available to engender additional sons of Thomas Edison.” The number of geniuses in the population, Graham declared, would “increase exponentially.”

Graham was a man out of time. He didn’t realize that he had arrived at his views seventy-five years late. His ideas were so old they were new again.

CHAPTER 2

MANUFACTURING GENIUS

Fitter Family contest winner, Eastern States Exposition, 1925.
Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society

W
hen I tell someone I’m writing a book about a Nobel Prize sperm bank, this is the usual response: First a quizzical “It’s a novel?” Second—after I shake my head “no”—a laughing double-take. “You’re kidding. That’s a joke, right?” At a distance of twenty years, Robert Graham’s sperm bank does seem like nothing but a giggle. Yet there was a time when it could be taken not merely seriously but as the most serious thing in the world. There was a time when celebrated men would risk their reputations on such an idea.

Robert Graham had come late to the eugenics craze that had gripped the United States and Britain for fifty years from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s. Eugenics was the confluence of three rivers of Anglo-American thought: late-eighteenth-century theories about overpopulation, late-nineteenth-century Darwinism, and early-twentieth-century racial paranoia. The gloomy eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Malthus outlined the first key ideas of what would become eugenics. Fearing overpopulation, Malthus concluded that the poor’s misery must be ordained by Mother Nature. Their suffering and early death were good, Malthus said, because it prevented them from spreading their innate weakness. Any effort to ease their lot, with, say, a minimum wage, would increase misery in the long run. A century later, Social Darwinism gave a scientific framework to Malthus’s instincts. If Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ruled birds, surely it ruled mankind, too. Mother Nature intended to cull the worst humans before they could breed, while the best of us were obliged to go forth and multiply.

It was a cousin of Charles Darwin, Francis Galton, who transformed these anxious theories into a new “science” of eugenics. Galton, an eccentric and adventurer, was obsessed with measuring anything that could be measured. He amassed weather data and composed Britain’s first weather maps. He pioneered the use of fingerprinting. And in the 1860s, he set out to measure human achievement. Galton’s 1869 book,
Hereditary Genius,
counted and classified Britain’s most accomplished men and showed that they were very often related to one another. Successful fathers had successful sons. This, Galton claimed, proved that God-given abilities were passed from one generation to the next. (It did not concern Galton that in Victorian England, advantages of birth, wealth, and education might have given the sons of famous men a career boost.)

Galton named his new science “eugenics,” an invented word based on the Greek for “well born.” For Galton, the goal of eugenics was to increase genius. The best people must be prodded to reproduce, because their children’s natural gifts would improve Britain. Galton’s acolytes, however, immediately focused on the dark reverse of his theory: If the rich are rich because they are endowed with natural abilities, the poor must be poor because they are endowed with natural inabilities. Why were there so many poor criminals, imbeciles, drunks, epileptics, and morons? Why were the poor so shiftless? Why were the poor so . . . poor? Because they were
naturally
weak. “The taint is in the blood.”

The British talked plenty about eugenics, but it was can-do Americans who converted Galton’s theory into dismal practice. Americans adopted eugenics with a convert’s zeal. In the United States, eugenics quickly merged with racial anxiety: blacks and immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—that is, Negroes, Jews, Papists—were threatening to overwhelm America’s white, Protestant, northern European elite.

Eugenics was a way to fight back. With vigorous American entrepreneurship, eugenicists took Galton’s philosophy, spiced it up with a dollop of Mendelian genetics, and turned it into an aggressive, impolite, and wildly successful national crusade to preserve the American “germ plasm.” In 1910, Charles Davenport opened the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Harriman—the richest families in America supplied the funds for it. Davenport and his assistants scoured America in search of the “unfit.” They hunted for albinos, the Amish, epileptics, mental patients, and criminals and cataloged their supposed genetic weaknesses on note cards. (Eventually, the ERO would collect 750,000 of the cards.) Anthropologists wrote case studies of depraved families. The Jukeses of New York were the subject of not one but two books detailing the family’s array of criminals, lunatics, and imbeciles. Eugenicists gave new, allegedly scientific intelligence tests to immigrants at Ellis Island and discovered that 80 percent of them qualified as “feeble-minded.”

Americans—that is, white upper- and middle-class Americans—took to eugenics like a cult. University presidents, academics, congressmen, businessmen, and good society everywhere embraced the creed. Eugenics was proselytized by everyone from Ivy League professors to the KKK. By the late 1920s, 20,000 college students a year were taking eugenics courses. Eugenics assumed the trappings of a religion: Eugenicists proposed a “Decalogue of Science”—a revised, eugenic Ten Commandments. The American Eugenics Society sponsored eugenics sermon contests and issued a Eugenics Catechism:

Q
: What is the most precious thing in the world?

A
: The human germ plasm.

American eugenics leaders weren’t satisfied with merely identifying the unfit.
Neutralizing
them was the goal. The eugenicists persuaded legislatures to write laws preventing “mental defectives” from marrying. They won passage of the 1924 Immigration Act, which choked off the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. The eugenicists flirted with euthanasia: in 1915, Chicago doctor Harry Haiselden was lionized when he refused to operate on a “defective” newborn, who quickly died.
The Black Stork,
a movie about (and starring) Haiselden, became a national sensation, playing for a decade.

The American eugenicists’ most important cause was sterilization. How they longed to cut! They thought practically everyone should get the knife: the “feebleminded,” alcoholics, epileptics, paupers, criminals, the insane, the weak, the deformed, the blind, the deaf, and the mute—and their extended families. Of course, most of the purportedly genetic ailments developed by eugenicists were not, in fact, genetic in origin. And even if they had been genetic, sterilization would have been a hopelessly bad cure for them. It would have taken literally thousands of generations of mass sterilization to significantly reduce the incidence of genetic diseases. But eugenicists didn’t stop to do the math.

Once surgical vasectomy was perfected at the turn of the twentieth century, the sterilizers got to work. In 1907, Indiana passed the first law allowing the forced sterilization of the feebleminded. By 1917, fifteen states had legalized eugenic sterilization. By the 1930s, a majority of states mandated the sterilization of the unfit. Daniel Kevles’s superb history
In the Name of Eugenics
quotes Pennsylvania governor Samuel Pennypacker, the rare public official who opposed a sterilization law. When a political crowd got rowdy on him, Pennypacker retorted, “Gentlemen, gentlemen! You forget you owe me a vote of thanks. Didn’t I veto the bill for the castration of idiots?”

Despite state laws, sterilization remained constitutionally murky. But to its opponents, it was a cruel and unusual punishment. To supporters it was an essential public health measure. In 1927, eugenicists finally pushed a case to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Buck v. Bell
concerned eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck, who had been committed to Virginia’s Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded. The state, having declared her an imbecile, was proposing to sterilize her. Under Virginia law, three generations of a family had to be feebleminded before sterilization was permitted. Carrie’s mother, Emma, also held at the colony, was classified as feebleminded. Carrie made two defective generations. The state then set out to prove that Carrie’s
seven-month-old
daughter was also a moron, thus establishing a third generation. A Red Cross worker testified that the infant had “a look” that was “not quite normal” about her. That was enough for the Court, which voted 8–1 to sterilize Carrie Buck. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority decision, which likened sterilization to castration. Holmes’s words still sting: “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.”

After
Buck v. Bell,
sterilization became common. Virginia, one of the most enthusiastic states, made raids into Appalachia, rounded up families of “misfit” hillbillies and dragged them down to the asylum operating room. By the end of the 1930s, more than 35,000 Americans had been forced under the knife. Another 25,000 were sterilized before the practice finally petered out in the 1960s. The most unfortunate victims of the mills were children who “voluntarily” submitted to sterilization. In
War Against the Weak,
Edwin Black quotes a transcript of one such child’s “consent”:

DOCTOR:
Do you like movies?

PATIENT:
Yes, sir.

DOCTOR:
Do you like cartoons?

PATIENT:
Yes, sir.

DOCTOR:
You don’t mind being operated on, do you?

PATIENT:
No, sir.

DOCTOR:
Then you can go ahead.

Americans cheerfully exported their bloody-minded eugenic ideas to the world. German eugenicists were particularly captivated by the American notion of Nordic supremacy. Germans published textbooks based on American ideas, and Adolf Hitler read them. He wrote fan letters to leading American eugenicists, telling Madison Grant, for example, that his book
The Passing of the Great Race
was his “bible.”

The purported science of American eugenics helped Hitler medicalize and sanitize his hatred, making it palatable for a mass audience. When Hitler took power, he imposed draconian sterilization laws of the sort that his American teachers had only dreamed of. In only three years, the Nazis sterilized 225,000 Germans. When the war arrived, sterilization degenerated into “mercy killing”—the outright murder of tens of thousands of asylum residents. The eugenic murders were the prelude to, and inspiration for, the Holocaust. Nazi eugenic enthusiasm flourished even in the death camps, as Josef Mengele and his ilk conducted barbaric experiments on twins and other unfortunates in the name of gene science.

The Great Depression had fostered a skepticism about eugenics in the United States.
Those Carnegies and Rockefellers who ruined the nation—we’re supposed to believe they’re our genetic superiors?
Hitler’s crimes sealed the case against eugenics. Disgraced by the war, the sterilizers and race theorists shrank from public attention.

Even as America had been sterilizing its citizens, it had also been flirting with a more innocuous, almost goofy, form of eugenics. Since Galton, eugenics had followed two tracks. “Negative” eugenics—with all the grimness the name suggested—stopped marriages and compelled sterilization to stop the “unfit” from breeding. Negative eugenics was state-sponsored and brutal. But “positive” eugenics took a milder approach. Like Galton himself, the positive eugenicists didn’t worry much about punishing the unfit; instead they sought to increase the number of outstanding people. Philosophically, positive and negative eugenics were identical: both embraced the fiction that white Protestants were genetically superior to everyone else; both were founded on a terror of immigrants and blacks; both held that the eugenics crisis was man’s greatest challenge. And many eugenicists believed in both positive and negative tactics. But when it came to action, positive eugenics was essentially harmless.

While negative eugenics was goose-stepping toward the gas chamber, the positive eugenicists were embarking on more innocent projects. Popular textbooks instructed young women in their obligation to marry eugenically fit men. Bright young things were warned against the trendy new practice of contraception, because America needed more good, healthy babies. Teddy Roosevelt, an enthusiast for positive eugenics, declared that “the prime duty, the inescapable duty, of the
good
citizen of the right type is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world.” Six children, TR averred, was the right number for preventing “race suicide,” four the bare minimum.

In classic American style, the positive eugenicists turned the crusade into a competition. In 1920, the Kansas Free Fair hosted the first “Fitter Family Contest.” Twenty families entered, and trained eugenicists gave them psychiatric evaluations and intelligence tests. The winning family was paraded around the grounds like prize cattle. Soon the American Eugenics Society was sponsoring “human stock” competitions at fairs all around the country. Winners were awarded a medal on which was inscribed: “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”