War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (12 page)

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.
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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.”
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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.”
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Davenport returned to America and began constructing 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.”
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At the same time, Davenport wanted to collect pedigrees on eminent, racially acceptable families, that is, the ones worth preserving.
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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.

In early 1910, just after the impetus for the new eugenics section of the American Breeders Association, Davenport swiftly began making his Eugenics Record Office a reality. Once more, the undertaking would require a large infusion of money. So once again he turned to great wealth. Reviewing the names in Long Island’s
Who’s Who,
Davenport searched for likely local millionaires. Going down the list, he stopped at one name: “Harriman.”
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E. H. Harriman was legendary. America’s almost mythic railroad mag-nate controlled the Union Pacific, Wells Fargo, numerous financial institutions and one of the nation’s greatest personal fortunes. Davenport knew that Harriman craved more than just power and wealth; he fancied himself a scientist and a naturalist. The railroad man had financed a famous Darwin-style expedition to explore Alaskan glaciers. The so-called “Harriman Expedition” was organized by famous botanist and ornithologist C. Hart Merriam, a strong friend of eugenics. In 1907, Merriam had single-handedly arranged a private meeting between Davenport’s circle of eugenicists and President Theodore Roosevelt at the president’s Long Island retreat.
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Harriman died in 1909, leaving a fabulous estate to his wife, Mary.
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Everything connected in Davenport’s mind. He remembered that three years earlier, Harriman’s daughter, also named Mary, had enrolled in one of Cold Spring Harbor’s summer biology courses. She was so enthusiastic about eugenics, her classmates at Barnard College had nicknamed her “Eugenia.” Mrs. Harriman was the perfect candidate to endow the Eugenics Record Office to carry on her husband’s sense of biological exploration, and cleanse the nation of racial and ethnic impurity.
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Quickly, Davenport began cultivating a relationship with the newly widowed Mrs. E. H. Harriman. Her very name invoked the image of wealth and power wielded by her late husband, but identified her as now possessing the power over that purse. Even though the railroad giant’s wife was now being plagued by philanthropic overtures at every tum, Davenport knew just how to tug the strings. Skilled in the process, it only took about a month.
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In early 1910, just days after the ABA elected to launch the Eugenics Record Office, Davenport reconnected with his former student about saving the social and biologic fabric of the United States. Days later, on January 13, Davenport visited Mary to advance the cause. On February 1, Davenport logged an entry in his diary: “Spent the evening on a scheme for Miss Harriman. Probably time lost.” Two days later, the diary read: “Sent off letter to Miss Harriman.” By February 12, Davenport had received an encouraging letter from the daughter regarding a luncheon to discuss eugenics. On February 16, Davenport’s diary entry recorded: “To Mrs. Harriman’s to lunch” and then several hours later, the final celebratory notation: “All agreed on the desirability of a larger scheme. A Red Letter Day for humanity!”
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Mrs. E. H. Harriman had joined the eugenic crusade. She agreed to create the Eugenics Record Office, purchasing eighty acres of land for its use about a half mile from the Carnegie Institution’s experimental station at Cold Spring Harbor. She also donated $15,000 per year for operations and would eventually provide more than a half million dollars in cash and securities.
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Clearly, the ERO seemed like an adjunct to the Carnegie Institution’s existing facility. But in fact it would function independently, as a joint project of Mrs. Harriman and the American Breeders Association’s eugenic section. “As the aims of the [ABA’s] Committee are strongly involved,” Davenport wrote Mrs. Harriman on May 23, 1910, “it is but natural that, on behalf of the Committee, I should express its gratitude at the confidence you repose in it.”
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Indeed, all of Davenport’s numerous and highly detailed reports to Mrs. Harriman were written on American Breeders Association eugenic section letterhead. Moreover, the ABA’s eugenics committee letterhead itself conveyed the impression of a semiofficial U.S. government agency. Prominently featured at the top of the stationery were the names of ABA president James Wilson, who was also secretary of the Department of Agriculture, and ABA secretary W. M. Hays, assistant secretary of the Department of Agriculture. In fact, the words “U.S. Department of Agriculture, Washington D.C.” appeared next to Hays’s name, as a credential.
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The project must have seemed like a virtual partnership between Mrs. Harriman and the federal government itself.
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Although the establishment of the Eugenics Record Office created a second eugenics agency independent of the Carnegie Institution, the two facilities together with the American Breeders Association’s eugenic section in essence formed an interlocking eugenic directorate headquartered at Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport ruled all three entities. Just as he scrupulously reported to Carnegie trustees in Washington about the experimental station, and ABA executives about its eugenic section, Davenport continuously deferred to Mrs. Harriman as the money behind his new ERO. Endless operational details, in-depth explanations regarding the use of cows to generate milk for sale at five cents per quart to defray the cost of a caretaker, plans to plant small plots of hay and com, and requests to spend $10 on hardware and $50 on painting-they were all faithfully reported to Mrs. Harriman for her approval.
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It gave her the sense that she was not only funding a eugenic institution, but micromanaging the control center for the future of humanity.

While the trivialities of hay and hardware consumed report after report to Mrs. Harriman, the real purpose of the facility was never out of anyone’s mind. For example, in his May 23, 1910 report to Mrs. Harriman, Davenport again recited the ERO’s mission: “The furtherance of your and its [ the ABA’s] ideal to develop to the utmost the work of the physical and social regeneration of our beloved country [through] the application … of ascertained biological principles.” Among the first objectives, Davenport added, was “the segregation of imbeciles during the reproductive period.” No definition of “imbeciles” was offered. In addition, he informed Mrs. Harriman, “This office has addressed to the Secretary of State of each State a request for a list of officials charged with the care of imbeciles, insane, criminals, and paupers, so as to be in a position to move at once … as soon as funds for a campaign are available. I feel sure that many states can be induced to contribute funds for the study of the blood lines that furnish their defective and delinquent classes if only the matter can be properly brought to their attention.”
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Referring to the increase in “defective and delinquent classes” that worried so many of America’s wealthy, Davenport ended his May 23 report by declaring, “The tide is rising rapidly; I only regret that I can do so little.”
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Davenport could not do it alone. Fundamentally, he was a scientist who preferred to remain in the rarefied background, not a ground-level activist who could systemize the continuous, around-the-clock, county-by-county and state-by-state excavation of human data desired. He could not prod the legislatures and regulatory agencies into proliferating the eugenic laws envisioned. The eugenics movement needed a lieutenant to work the trenches-someone with ceaseless energy, a driven man who would never be satisfied. Davenport had the perfect candidate in mind.

“I am quite convinced,” Davenport wrote Mrs. Harriman, “that Mr. Laughlin is our man.”
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Fifty-five miles west of where northeast Missouri meets the Mississippi River, rolling foothills and hickory woodlands veined with lush streams finally yield to the undulating prairie that seats the town of Kirksville. In colonial times, mound-building Indians and French trappers prowled this region’s vast forests hunting beaver, bear and muskrat pelts. After the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, only the sturdiest pioneers settled what became known as the state of Missouri. Kirksville was a small rural town in its northeast quadrant, serving as the intellectual and medical center of its surrounding agricultural community.
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In 1891, the Laughlin clan was among the tough middle-class pioneer families that settled in Kirksville, hoping to make a life. George Laughlin, a deeply religious college professor, migrated from Kansas to become pastor at Kirksville’s Christian Church. The next year, the classically trained Laughlin was hired as chairman of the English Department of the Normal School, the area’s main college.
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Quickly, the Laughlins became a leading family of Kirksville.

In a modest home on East Harrison Street, the elder Laughlin raised ten children including five sons, one of whom was Harry Hamilton Laughlin. Young Harry was expected to behave like a “preacher’s kid,” even though his father was a college professor and no longer a clergyman. Preacher’s kid or not, Harry was prone to youthful pranks and was endearingly nicknamed “Hi Yi” by his siblings. Once, on a sibling dare, Harry swung an axe at his younger brother Earl’s hand, which was poised atop a chopping block. One of Earl’s fingers was nearly severed, but was later reattached.
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Ancestry and social progress were both important in the Laughlin household. Reverend Laughlin could trace his lineage back to England and Germany, and it included U.S. President James Madison. His mother, Deborah, a Temperance League activist, acknowledged that her great-grandfather was a soldier in the English Light Dragoons during colonial times.
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When a well-educated Harry Laughlin graduated from college, he saw himself destined for greater things. Unfortunately, opportunity did not approach. So Laughlin became a teacher at a desolate one-room schoolhouse in nearby Livonia, Missouri. Life in Livonia was an unhappy one for Laughlin. He had to walk through a small stream just to reach the front door of the schoolhouse. Laughlin referred to his ramshackle school as being “20 miles from any civilized animal.” Sneering at the locals, he wrote, “People here are 75 years behind the times.” Laughlin denigrated his students as “very dull” and admitted to “a forced smile” when he wasn’t grumbling.
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