War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (75 page)

Among his many crusades, Laughlin may best be remembered for his antagonism toward epileptics. He claimed that epilepsy was synonymous with feeblemindedness, and that people with epilepsy did not belong in society. He fought to keep such people out of America and demanded their sterilization and even their imprisonment in segregated camps. No wonder the family kept his condition a secret. Childless and frustrated, Harry Hamilton Laughlin reportedly suffered his genetic disease in silence and died under its grip. The disease: epilepsy.
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Once Laughlin retired on December 31,1939, Carnegie began the immediate and systematic dismantling of the ERO, abandoning three decades of support for racial eugenics. Mail addressed to the ERO, and even letters specifically addressed to Laughlin or Davenport, were not forwarded to either man. Instead, a series of standard responses were typed up for clerical staff to utilize in replying to all correspondents. The message: work at the office had been suddenly discontinued and no questions could be answered.
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Personal correspondents were told to contact Laughlin or Davenport directly at their home addresses. But if a letter involved even the slightest reference to eugenics or the Cold Spring Harbor installation, it was answered with a vague customized form letter. For example, on February 19, 1940, the widow of Lucien Howe sent a handwritten personal note to Davenport lamenting the news that the ERO had been discontinued. An officer of the Carnegie Institution replied for him, writing back to the aging Mrs. Howe, “Your letter of the 19th to Dr. Davenport has been turned over to me for reply” and so on.
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When eugenic enthusiasts earnestly mailed in their family trees or genealogical trait records, or requested copies of their files or pertinent information from them, they were deftly answered with noncommittal form letters. When a Texas man offered family information, he received a curt note, “Doctor Laughlin has resigned, and for the time being at least, the Genetics Record Office is not in a position to file and index family records.” The same type of reply was mailed out time and time again. The ERO had operated under the name “Eugenics Record Office” until 1939, when Carnegie officials insisted on a cosmetic name change to “Genetics Record Office.” From 1939 on, Carnegie Officials consistently referred to the ERO as the “Genetics Record Office” or sometimes simply the “Record Office,” avoiding any use of the word
eugenics
.
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Letters came in for years. Carnegie officials generally acted as though they had no access to Laughlin’s files and therefore could not answer specific questions. But in fact Carnegie administrators kept the files close at hand and quietly checked them in some cases. For example, when Jane Betts in Wichita asked about record #51323 on February 29, 1944, a Carnegie official quickly plucked her record out of a million files and replied about its status. With few exceptions, however, questions addressed to the Eugenics Record Office were generally answered with no real information except that the office was closed and no data was available.
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After World War II, when the magnitude of Hitler’s eugenicide became apparent, the Carnegie Institution decided to get rid of its records. It sold the ERO building at Cold Spring Harbor but retained the rest of the facilities. Officials destroyed many of Laughlin’s years-old unpublished worksheets on horse racing and breeding (an adjunct to his investigations in human heredity), but finding recipients for the rest of the ERO’s enormous and controversial collection was not easy. In May of 1947, a leading heredity clinic at the University of Michigan was offered the files but wondered whether Carnegie would provide a stipend to house the materials. Carnegie would not. So Carnegie kept searching for someone to take the files.
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In September of 1947, a Carnegie administrator overseeing the dismantled Cold Spring Harbor operation wrote to the Dight Institute, an independent eugenic research organization at the University of Minnesota. “If any institution is interested in the records of the Genetics Record Office, I am confident that arrangements could be made … to transfer them.” But, the note added, “there is very little chance that those funds [formerly used to run the ERO] would be transferred with the records.”
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Dight director Sheldon Reed, an ardent eugenicist, replied, “It seems a great pity to me that the work must be abandoned.” As for transferring the voluminous files to Dight, Reed posed a number of questions about the size and breadth of the collection and the cost of the transfer. Dight did not want to pay any of the moving expenses. As Dight officials pondered the usefulness of a collection they termed “colossal,” Reed was frank with the Carnegie Institution. “I am sorry to take up your time with this business [the many logistical questions],” he wrote, “but it may be that you are even more interested in getting rid of records than I am in obtaining them.”
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Eventually, Carnegie officials decided the best idea was to disperse the ERO records. In January of 1948, the Dight Institute agreed to house the ERO’s extensive individual trait and family documents if Carnegie would defray the expected $1,000 shipping costs. Some six months later the Minnesota Historical Society agreed to take a half-ton of biographical jubilee books, family genealogical volumes and related materials. At the same time, the New York Public Library received a thousand ERO volumes of family genealogical books and local histories. Horse racing and stud breeding publications were handed over to the family that had originally sponsored the research. Carnegie donated Davenport’s voluminous papers and Laughlin’s ERO operational papers to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, while maintaining some documents at a Cold Spring Harbor archive and retaining some others in Washington. When the Dight Institute closed its doors in the 1990s, its ERO papers were also sent to the American Philosophical Society, which now holds the largest consolidated eugenic collection anywhere.
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The dispersal of the records of the Cold Spring Harbor enterprise did not end the flow of letters to the ERO. For decades, people continued to send requests for eugenic information, updates of their pedigrees, and proof of their family’s biological worth. In 1952, a dozen years after the ERO’s closure, Clifford Frazier, an attorney in Greensboro, North Carolina, wrote offering to “bring my family data heretofore furnished up to date.” In 1953, James Brunn, a realtor in Kansas City, Missouri, wrote requesting information to help trace his lineage back to the Revolutionary War. In 1959, Minnie Williams of Harrison, Ohio, wrote to say that she had finally assembled as much information as she could about her family pedigree; she had been working at it for years. In 1966, Elsie Van Guilder addressed a letter to “American Breeders Association, Eugenics Section, Cold Spring Harbor” seeking to trace her family. In 1976, E. Taylor Campbell of St. Joseph, Missouri, explained that he had been working on his family tree for fifty-one years, and he still needed nine more forms.
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Indeed, eugenic enthusiasts continued remitting family traits and proffering inquiries for decades. Letters continued into the 1980s, forty years after the ERO was dismantled. They probably never stopped. In February of 2003, a North Carolina attorney told this reporter than he had just discovered old ERO forms from his father’s day; the attorney said his daughter was working with them to advance the family genealogy. Laughlin’s work was that engrained in America. It persevered-not only in the mind-sets of generations of Americans, but also in America’s laws.
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Although the ERO stopped functioning in 1939, America’s eugenic laws did not. Tens of thousands of Americans continued to be forcibly sterilized, institutionalized and legally prevented from marriage on the basis of racial and eugenic laws. During the 1940s, some 15,000 Americans were coercively sterilized, almost a third of them in California. In the fifties, about ten thousand were sterilized. In the sixties, thousands more were sterilized. All told, an estimated 70,000 were eugenically sterilized in the first seven decades of the twentieth century; the majority were women. California consistently outdistanced every other state.
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Victims, especially those who only discovered their sterilizations years after the fact, eventually began to initiate litigation. One such victim was Joseph Juhan, a Tennessee war veteran with little formal education but with a pointed message for the Carnegie Institution. In late 1976, he penned a letter filled with poorly formed characters and numerous misspellings, randomly employing parentheses for emphasis, that nevertheless poignantly asserted his legal rights. The letter was addressed to “Dr. Charles Davenport, Dept of Experimental Evolution” at Cold Spring Harbor.

A response came from Agnes Fisher, the Record Office’s secretary.

The American Civil Liberties Union never filed a sterilization suit in Georgia. But a few years later, in 1980, the ACLU in Richmond did file a historic suit against the state of Virginia on behalf of the victims of the Lynchburg Training School where Carrie Buck was sterilized. The ACLU ultimately forced Virginia to confront its history. In May of 2002, the governor of Virginia formally apologized to victims living and dead for decades of eugenic sterilizations. The governors of California, Oregon, North Carolina and South Carolina have followed suit.
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Nonetheless many of the laws are still on the books. For example, North Carolina’s eugenic sterilization law, although not used for years, remains in force and was even updated in 1973 and 1981. Chapter 35, Article 7 still allows for court ordered sterilization for moral as well as medical improvement. While most states stopped enforcing sterilization statutes in the sixties and seventies, the practice did not stop everywhere. Across the country, additional thousands of poor urban dwellers, Puerto Rican women and Native Americans on reservations continued to be sterilized-not under state laws, but under special federal provisions.
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In the seventies, for example, a group of Indian Health Service physicians implemented an aggressive program of Native American sterilization. According to a U.S. General Accounting Office study, hospitals in just four cities sterilized 3,406 women and 142 men between 1972 and 1976. The women widely reported being threatened with the loss of welfare benefits or custody of their children unless they submitted to sterilization. A federal court ordered that all future Indian Health Service sterilizations employ the proper safeguards of legitimate therapeutic procedures, and that “individuals seeking sterilization be orally informed at the outset that no Federal benefits can be withdrawn because of failure to accept sterilization.” During the same four-year period, one Oklahoma hospital alone sterilized nearly 8 percent of its fertile female patients. No one will ever know the full scope of Indian sterilization in the postwar period because medical records were either not kept or were incomplete.
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Eugenics left behind more than sterilization laws. Marriage prohibitions remained in force. For example, Walter Plecker’s Racial Integrity Act and numerous similar state statutes endured long after the ERO and Plecker disappeared. These laws potentially affected millions in ways that society can never measure. In 1958, two Virginians, a black woman named Mildred Jeter and a white man named Richard Loving, were married in Washington, D.C., to avoid violating Plecker’s law. Upon their return to Virginia, they were arrested and indicted by the Caroline County grand jury. The trial judge suspended their one-year jail sentence on the condition that they leave Virginia and not return together for twenty-five years.
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From their new residence across the river in Washington, D.C., the Lovings appealed the infringement of their civil rights. Appellate courts, one after another, affirmed Virginia’s law and the couple’s conviction. Finally, almost nine years later in 1967, the United States Supreme Court considered the case.
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