War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (38 page)

Minutes later, Merriam went to the unusual extreme of dictating a letter to Davenport explicitly reiterating his concerns. “In order that there may be no misunderstanding … regarding Dr. Laughlin’s work,” Merriam wrote, “I wish to be frank and say that I have heard a number of quite different criticisms”-he scratched out the word
different
and penned in the word
frank-
“ … quite frank criticisms of Dr. Laughlin’s conclusions drawn from his recent studies…. Because the genetics and eugenics work is so important it is necessary that we be exceedingly guarded, lest conclusions go beyond the limits warranted by the facts and therefore ultimately diminish the effectiveness of our scientific work.” Merriam closed with a warning, “I am sure that neither you nor Dr. Laughlin will underestimate my interest in this problem or my recognition of its very great importance.”
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Davenport in turn spoke to Laughlin, advising him that Secretary Davis had invited Laughlin to join him in sailing to Europe. Davenport also verbalized Merriam’s concerns about Laughlin. When Merriam’s letter arrived in Cold Spring Harbor a few days later, Davenport issued a pointed memorandum to Laughlin driving home Merriam’s censure by quoting verbatim: “In order that there may be no misunderstanding … regarding Dr. Laughlin’s work I wish to be frank and say that I have heard a number of quite frank criticisms of Dr. Laughlin’s conclusions drawn from his recent studies…. Because the genetics and eugenics work is so important, it is necessary that we be exceedingly guarded lest conclusions go beyond the limits warranted by the facts and therefore ultimately diminish the effectiveness of our scientific work…. I am sure that neither you nor Dr. Laughlin will underestimate my interest in this problem or my recognition of its very great importance.”
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The next Monday, Davis appointed Laughlin “Special Immigration Agent to Europe,” making it official with a certificate. Laughlin had a penchant for titles that used the word
agent.
First he was retained as a “Special Agent of the Bureau of the Census.” Then Johnson dubbed him the House’s “Expert Eugenics Agent.”
³³
Now in his latest agent capacity he would tour Europe for six months, quietly investigating the family trees of aspiring immigrant families.

If he could establish the scientific numbers necessary to pronounce certain ethnic and racial groups as either eugenically superior or inferior, America’s whole system of immigration could change. Laughlin wanted all potential immigrants to be ranked in one of three classes. “Class 1: Not sexually fertile, now or potentially, and not debarred on account of cacogenesis [genetic dysfunction]. Class 2: Sexually fertile, now or potentially, and not debarred on account of cacogenesis. Class 3: Sexually fertile, now or potentially, and debarred on account of cacogenesis.”
³⁴
Laughlin now found himself the syndic of America’s genetic future.

Despite the urgings of the Carnegie Institution, Laughlin was unwilling to sail with Davis in July. He needed more time. Instead, he and his wife departed aboard the
5.5. Belgoland
about a month later, in time to attend an international eugenics meeting in Lund, Sweden. For the next six months, Laughlin would travel throughout Europe, setting up shop at American consulates and rallying logistical support from like-minded European eugenics groupS.
³⁵

Scandinavia was first. In Sweden, he contacted the American embassy in Stockholm, as well as consular officials in Uppsala and Goteborg. In Denmark, he visited the consulate in Copenhagen. Laughlin concluded that Sweden was actually hoarding its superior strains by discouraging emigration through such groups as the Society for the Prevention of Emigration and an investigation undertaken by the government’s Emigration Commission. Working with Sweden’s official State Institute of Race-Biology, Laughlin launched ancestral verifications of four immigrant candidates, all young men, one from Kalmartan, one from Valhallavagen, and two from Stockholm. The American consul was to provide a social worker to undertake the field work along the lines of an earlier Laughlin study that was being translated into Swedish.
³⁶

He was sure his work in Sweden would yield scientific proof that Nordics were superior human beings. Writing from Europe, he expressed his elation to Judge Harry Olson of Chicago. “It seems that the Swedish stock has been selected for generations by a very hard set of national conditions-severe climate, relatively poor soil. The strenuous struggle for existence seems to have eliminated the weaklings…. Of course, the original Nordic stock was sound, else it would have died out entirely … [and] could not have made a good stock.” Indeed, Laughlin thought that Swedish emigrants “must be considered her finest product in international commerce.”
³⁷

His optimism faded as he traveled south. In Belgium, Laughlin contacted the American consul in Brussels to initiate investigations of four applicants whose visas had not yet been approved-two men and a woman from Brabant, and a woman from Brussels. His fellow eugenic activist Dr. Albert Govaerts, who had studied the previous year in Cold Spring Harbor, helped Laughlin get organized and performed the physical examinations. The Solvay Institute, with the consent ofVrije University, provided desk space.
³⁸

In Italy, he liaised with that country’s Commissioner General of Emigration who agreed to help prepare field studies of four Italians seeking to emigrate to the U.S. Laughlin was convinced Italy had “an excess of population” and that the Italian government was “desirous of finding an outlet for their ‘unemployed.’” With this in mind, he began investigating the four Italians.
³⁹

In England, an office was set up for Laughlin in the Eugenics Education Society headquarters outside London. Four Britons who had applied to emigrate were selected for familial examination. They included two Middlesex Jews (a teenage man named Morris and a woman in her twenties), plus a young woman from Devonshire and a young man from Hampshire. U.S. Public Health Service officers stationed in England were to perform the medical examinations.
⁴⁰

Laughlin reported back to Davenport that the various investigations “were made by a field worker … in much the same fashion as similar individual and family histories are made by eugenical field workers in the United States.” The help of U.S. consuls was indispensable to “securing the most intimate individual and family histories of would-be emigrants to America … awaiting visas.” Indeed, the individuals themselves were actually selected by the consuls, “who are giving their full cooperation in the work,” Laughlin added. He hoped consular officials would go further and glean confidential family character information from local priests. If immigrant candidates felt the questions were too intrusive or offensive, Laughlin explained, field workers would “simply withdraw to the American Consulate, and announce that if the would-be immigrant desires to have his passport vised [issued a visa], he must provide the information concerning his own ‘case history’ and ‘family pedigree.’” Laughlin boasted that the consuls would “smooth the way for perfecting these field studies.”
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Mental tests to identify feeblemindedness were of course part of the investigation, although Laughlin did not indicate what language was being used in the various non-English-speaking countries. Where U.S. Public Health staff was not available for medical examinations, Laughlin proposed contract nurses or physicians. Secretaries and stenographers stationed around the Continent would be employed to type up the results
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The purpose of Laughlin’s family probes was not to help the United States properly ascertain the intellectual, economic, political or social caliber of individual immigrants, which fell well within any government’s prerogative, but rather to determine how much tainted blood an applicant had received from his forebears. Ancestral blood, not individual worth, would be Laughlin’s sole determinant.

He was receiving excellent cooperation until he arrived in Paris in late November of 1923. There he set up a mailing account at the local American Express office at 11 Rue Scribe, and was then ready to begin work. But when he contacted American Consul General A. M. Thackera to begin his local probes, the embassy balked. Someone at the embassy checked Regulation 124, dating back to 1896. It was against regulations for American consuls to correspond with officials of other American departments. Laughlin, as Special Immigration Agent to Europe, was officially a representative of the Department of Labor. Obviously, the rule would not allow them to collaborate with Laughlin.
⁴³

To resolve the problem, a conference was held in Paris on Sunday, December 2, 1923, attended not only by Consul General Thackera, but also by his British counterpart, Consul General Robert Skinner, as well as Consul General-at-Large Robert Frazer. They could find no way around the regulations. So they cabled Washington for instructions. By the end of the week, the State Department sent notice that the rule had been waived, so long as the diplomats “confined themselves to facts and did not render opinion or try to outline policy,” as Laughlin reported it. The project proceeded unimpeded, mainly because the consuls were eager to cooperate.
⁴⁴

Before he was done, Laughlin had visited twenty-five U.S. consular offices in ten countries: Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Italy, Holland, Germany, Switzerland, England, Spain and France, as well as the French colony of Algiers. Not only did Laughlin proudly establish eugenic testing procedures and precedents wherever he went, he created a network of friendly American consuls throughout the Continent, a feat he bragged about to the ERO. In fact, going beyond on-site work with the twenty-five consulates, Laughlin also mass-mailed every American consulate in Europe and the Near East-128 consulates in all-advising them of his project and seeking detailed local demographic data. Within months, two consulates had already provided partial reports directly to Laughlin, and more than two dozen others had sent the requested information to the State Department to be forwarded to Laughlin, who was still traveling. Eventually eighty-seven consulates supplied the requested population and ethnic information directly to Laughlin. Only eleven did not respond.
⁴⁵

During his whirlwind tour, Laughlin found little time for sightseeing. Moreover, as he traveled from city to city and incurred mounting expenses for stenographers, field investigators, report printing and other general living expenses, he was advancing his own money. He was still collecting a salary as ERO assistant director, but he complained more than once, “I am bearing my own expense.” He was uncertain if he would ever be reimbursed. In late 1923, Laughlin petitioned Davenport, “If these studies prove profitable, and I am permitted to continue them beyond the first of January [1924], I respectfully request that provision be made for my expenses.”
⁴⁶

Assistant Secretary of Labor Henning had promised a $500 stipend, and Laughlin had applied to receive it, but Henning’s secretary then notified Laughlin that the department had “no means of sending you cash in advance…. “ Laughlin confided to Davenport, “I am a little uneasy about the 500 Dollars. The Department of Labor promised, but did not deliver.”
⁴⁷

Carnegie and the ERO were not helpful, still apprehensive about Laughlin’s growing reputation for outlandish race science. Even the prestigious scientific journal
Nature
had publicly castigated Laughlin in a review of his 1922 study on eugenic sterilization. For Laughlin, the tension with his own organization was palpable. To counter the bad reviews, he began sending a disenchanted Merriam as many complimentary European reviews of his work as he could. He also dispatched frequent optimistic reports back home justifying his investment of time, but noted that, in return, “I have not heard very many times from Cold Spring Harbor.”
⁴⁸

At one point in late November of 1923, an almost desperate Laughlin admitted that the British and Belgian family case studies had already exhausted the anticipated $500 Labor Department reimbursement, and “the Swedish and Italian studies will need additional funds.” He asked for financial assistance from the Carnegie Institution, and also mentioned this request to Davenport, so formally as to almost be provocative. “I … do not feel like going into the matter any further without authorization for expenses from the director of the Eugenics Record Office,” Laughlin wrote to Davenport, who was, of course, the director of the ERa. He added, “I should also like the assurance that in case the Department of Labor does not supply the money which I have actually spent for field assistance, I should be reimbursed [by the ERO].”
⁴⁹

Finally, on December 21, the Carnegie Institution decided to be more forthcoming with support for Laughlin’s European endeavors. Davenport dispatched a letter to Laughlin in Belgium assuring him that the Department of Labor would reimburse all legitimate expenses. At the end of the letter he casually appended exactly what he knew Laughlin most wanted to hear: “Did I tell you that $300 has been appropriated for your traveling expenses in the budget of this Department [at Carnegie], and a check will be made out to you for it January first?”
⁵⁰

In mid-February of 1924, Laughlin sailed into New York Harbor after an exhausting six-month eugenic mission to Europe. Now it was time for the special immigration agent to compile his ideas and data into a scientific report to Congress. His government allies were more than ready. Several weeks before Laughlin sailed home, the seven-man
ad hoc
Committee on Selective Immigration published a detailed endorsement of his conclusions and proposed legislation, including overseas eugenic screening. Signing on to that report was House Immigration Committee Chairman Johnson, acting in his alter ego as member of the seven-man committee. The published report noted that although Laughlin was still in Europe, they knew he would agree with its contents.
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