War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (32 page)

Throughout the essay outlining the new set of eugenic responsibilities and countermeasures, Howe was credited for his tireless efforts. One article declared, “He threw the weight of his professional experience, as an ophthalmologist, into this particular field…. “
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But most of Howe’s most radical plans never took root, in large part because the famed ophthalmologist died before he could complete his work. He died on December 17, 1928, at age eighty, in his Belmont, Massachusetts, home. The next month
Eugenical News
eulogized the man who had served as president of the Eugenics Research Association until shortly before his death. “Lucien Howe was a true gentleman, a broad scholar, and he loved his fellow men.” This statement echoed the tribute of the American Ophthalmological Society, which adopted the following resolution: “A student of quality, an author of distinction, a scholar in the house of scientific interpretation and original research, Dr. Howe, a former president of this Society, has added to its reputation and has maintained its tradition.” For eight decades, the American Ophthalmological Society has awarded the Lucien Howe Medal for service to the profession and mankind.
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T
he u.s. Census Bureau would not cooperate with eugenics. No agency collected and compiled more information on individuals than the bureau. Its mission was clear: to count Americans and create a demographic portrait for policymakers. A fundamental principle of census taking is the confidentiality and sanctity of individual records. In the early twentieth century, American eugenics coveted this information.

For years, eugenic leaders tried-with little result-to convince the Census Bureau to change its ways. They targeted the 1920 census. In 1916, Alexander Graham Bell, representing the Eugenics Record Office, was among the first to formally suggest that the bureau add the father’s name and the mother’s maiden name to the data gathered on each individual.
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The Census Bureau declined to make the addition.

But shortly after Bell’s first entreaty, Laughlin proposed a survey of all those in state custodial and charitable facilities, as well as jails. The Census Bureau agreed, and soon thereafter its director of statistical research, Joseph A. Hill, granted Laughlin the assignment. Laughlin was credentialed as a “special agent of the Bureau of the Census.”
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This first joint program, however, would not lead to an alliance with the Census Bureau, but to a bureaucratic war.

Since the 1880s, the Census Bureau had compiled statistics on what it called “the defective, dependent and delinquent” population, referring to the insane as
defective,
the elderly and infirm as
dependent,
and prisoners as
delinquent.
Laughlin insisted on changing the Census Bureau’s terminology to “the socially inadequate” and adding to its rolls large, stratified contingents of the unfit, especially along racial lines. Laughlin’s concept of social inadequacy would encompass those who “entail a drag upon those members of the community who have sufficient insight, initiative, competence, physical strength and social instincts to enable them to live effective lives…. “
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The Census Bureau refused. It stubbornly claimed that Laughlin’s newly concocted term,
socially inadequate,
if used publicly, would surely “call forth criticism and protest.” Nor would it accept any of Laughlin’s substitute categories, such as “submerged tenth” or “the sub-social classes.” To adhere to the legal descriptions of the project-and follow the most conservative line-the Census Bureau insisted on its traditional appellations, “defective, dependent and delinquent.”
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A war of nomenclature erupted, one Laughlin described as a “tempest in a teapot.” It raged for more than two years. First, the Census Bureau polled its own stable of social science experts, who reacted with “caustic criticism.” Unwilling to back down, Laughlin consulted his own bevy of experts, and then, disregarding any direction from the Census Bureau, employed the term
socially inadequate
anyway when he requested information from 576 state and federal institutions. To rub his point in the Census Bureau’s face, Laughlin asked the institutions not only for data, but also for their opinions about his choice of terminology. All but three of the institutions endorsed his new term, and he eventually swayed those three as well, achieving unanimity. Laughlin saw this as more than vindication for his position.
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The Census Bureau did not. Although the outbreak of World War I interrupted the project, in May of 1919 the bureau finalized and then published Laughlin’s work under the title it chose,
Statistical Directory of State Institutions for the Defective, Dependent and Delinquent Classes.
Determined to have the last word, Laughlin published a vituperative article in the
Journal of Sociology,
recounting the quarrel in detail. Quoting page after page of support for his position from prominent sociologists and officials he had worked with, Laughlin publicly castigated the Census Bureau for lack of leadership and scientific timidity.
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Following the irksome, years-long experience, the Census Bureau refused all but cosmetic cooperation with eugenicists. Laughlin, in his capacity as secretary of the Eugenics Research Association, wrote to Samuel Rogers, director of the census, in 1918, asking if the bureau planned to identify nine classes of “socially inadequate.” Rogers formally replied that no such data would be gathered, except the names and addresses of the deaf and blind, as previously collected.
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At a 1919 conference, the ERA Executive Committee decided to try to convince the Census Bureau to conduct “an experimental genealogical survey of a selected community.” Three days later, the ERA formally petitioned Census Bureau Director Rogers to add two additional columns titled
Ancestry
to the paper questionnaires or enumeration sheets. “In the interest of race betterment,” the two new columns, to be situated between the existing columns eleven and twelve,. vould identify the mother, by maiden name, and the father. “Family ties would be established,” explained the ERA request, “and thus all census enumeration records would become available for genealogical and family pedigree-studies.” The ERA predicted that these records would “constitute the greatest and most valuable genealogical source in the world.” Writing in the
Journal of Heredity,
Laughlin advocated the two additional columns so that any “individual could be located from census to census and generation to generation…. Such investigations would be of the greatest social and political value.”
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The proposals became more and more grandiose as the government’s capacity for data retrieval and analysis increased. But any cooperation between the Census Bureau and American eugenics was for all practical purposes destroyed by Laughlin’s dogmatic insistence on employing charged terminology more pejorative than the Census Bureau was willing to adopt.
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Despite a year-to-year cascade of petitions, letters, scientific articles and eugenic rationales urging the agency to create a massive registry of American citizens that could be marked as fit or unfit, the Census Bureau stands out as one federal organization that simply refused to join the movement.
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Rebuffed by the Census Bureau, Laughlin turned his attention to other government agencies, using his official bureau contacts with hundreds of state and federal institutions. His goal was to create further classifications that other bureaus and agencies of the federal government could adopt. An official 1922 booklet distributed by the U.S. House of Representatives to administrators of state institutions was entitled “Classification Standards to be Followed in Preparing Data for the Schedule ‘Racial and Diagnostic Records of Inmates of State Institutions’, prepared by Harry Laughlin.” It listed sixty-five racial classifications. Classification #15 was German Jew, #16 was Polish Jew, #17 was Russian Jew, #25 was North Italian, #26 was South Italian, #30 was Polish (“Polack”), #61 was Mountain White, #62 was American Yankee, #63 was American Southerner and #64 was Middle West American.
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If the Census Bureau would not adopt his eugenic classifications, Laughlin hoped the states would.

Virginia was eager, thanks to its registrar of vital statistics, Walter Ashby Plecker. Plecker considered himself a product of the Civil War, even though he was born in Virginia in 1861, just as the conflict began. Memories of his youth in Augusta County, Virginia, during the turbulent Reconstruction years, were influenced greatly by a beloved Negro family servant called Delia.
In
many ways, Delia represented the emotional strength of the whole family. As was common, she essentially raised Plecker as a young boy, exercising “extensive control” over his activities and earning his lasting gratitude. Plecker’s sister sobbed at Delia’s wedding at the thought of losing the connection, and Delia broke down as well. When Plecker’s mother fell ill for the last time, she sent for Delia to nurse her back to health if possible.
In
his mother’s final hour, it was Delia who comforted her at her deathbed, and when the moment came, it was Delia who tenderly placed her fingers on the woman’s eyelids and shut them for the last time. No wonder Delia was remembered in the mother’s will. No wonder that Plecker, as executor of his mother’s estate, warmly wrote the first bequest check to Delia. From Plecker’s point of view, Delia was family.
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Fond memories of Delia did not prevent Walter A. Plecker from becoming a fervent raceologist and eugenicist, however. He detested the notion of racial and social mixing in any form. His obsession with white racial purity would turn him into America’s preeminent demographic hunter of Blacks, American Indians and other people of color.
In
the process, Plecker fortified Virginia as the nation’s bastion of eugenic racial salvation. Plecker’s fanaticism propelled him into a lifelong crusade to codify the existence of just two races: white and everything else.

Plecker began his career in medicine, receiving a degree from the University of Maryland at Baltimore, and then continuing in obstetrics at the New York Polyclinic. He opened a practice in Virginia and quickly became involved with family records, at one point serving as a pension examiner. Plecker moved his practice to Birmingham, Alabama, for several years, but soon returned to his beloved Virginia. He settled in Elizabeth City County, one of the eight original Virginia shires created in 1634. Elizabeth City County was intensely proud of its genealogical heritage. The historic county’s citizens included many so-called First Families of Virginia, that is, Colonial settlers. Meticulous family records had been kept, but were in large part destroyed during the numerous battles and town burnings of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War. After the Civil War, Elizabeth City County meticulously restored and reorganized its population records.
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In 1900, Elizabeth City County created a health department, along with a section of vital statistics to document births and death. A few years later, Plecker was hired as a county health officer, where he fastidiously recorded life cycle events. One triracial Hampton, Virginia, family that he first encountered in 1905 made quite an impact on him. After delivering their baby boy, Plecker at bedside registered the mother as “Indian and colored,” and the husband as “Indian and white.” Later, the woman’s daughter ran off with a white man, marrying in another state. The young couple then returned to Hampton as a second-generation racially mixed marriage.
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Plecker was appalled by the racial permissiveness of Virginia’s system.

Later, when Plecker observed a local Negro death rate twice that of whites, he began to investigate, pursuing a goal of “near 100% registration of births and deaths.” Population statistics and registration became more than a fascination; they became his mission. His proficiency at registering citizens made Plecker a natural pick in 1912 to help draft the state’s new law creating the Bureau of Vital Statistics. At age fifty-one, Plecker was invited to head the new agency as registrar and to set his own salary. He was so dedicated to population registration that he magnanimously asked “for little more than subsistence.” Virginia’s 1912 statute established registration of the state’s citizens by race-without clear definitions. Yet for three hundred years Virginia had produced racially mixed citizens by virtue of the state’s original Colonial settlement, its indigenous Indian population, a thriving slave system, and waves of European immigration.
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But a desire for general population registration was not what drove Plecker. He was hardly devoted to the statistical sciences or demographics. He was simply a racist. Plecker’s passion was for keeping the white race pure from any possible mixture with Black, American Indian or Asian blood. The only real goal of bureaucratic registration was to prevent racially mixed marriages and social mixing-to biologically barricade the white race in Virginia.

In an official Virginia State Health Bureau pamphlet, Plecker declared: “The white race in this land, is the foundation upon which rests its civilization, and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst the nations of the world. Is it not, therefore, just and right that this race decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has, to maintain its purity?”
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Plecker was no authority on eugenics, however. He was a proud member of the American Eugenics Society, but that required no real scientific expertise for membership. Nor did Plecker really comprehend the tenets of Mendelian genetics or heredity. Years after he became a leading exponent of eugenic raceology, Plecker wrote to Laughlin for advice on race mixing formulas, and confided, “I am not satisfied with the accuracy of my own knowledge as to the result of racial intermixture with repeated white crossings.” He added that he just didn’t understand Davenport’s complex protoplasmic discussion of skin color, explaining, “I have never felt justified in believing that … children of mulattoes are really white under Mendel’s Law.”
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