War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (56 page)

Davenport’s efforts to bring the Germans back into the international movement were more than successful. In 1928, the International Federation of Eugenic Organizations met in Munich. Rüdin functioned as the gracious host when IFEO members, including the impressed American delegation, were treated to a guided tour of Rüdin’s department at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry. The next year, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry was selected for IFEO membership. In 1932, Davenport consented to relinquish the presidency of the IFEO, and Rüdin was elected to succeed him. Laughlin was proud to offer the nomination. The vote was unanimous.
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German race hygiene was now primed to seize the reins of the international movement and become senior in its partnership with the American branch.

In 1927, the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes added another eugenic establishment, the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics
(Kaiser Wilhelm Institut for Anthropologie, menschliche Erblehre und Eugenik),
located in Berlin-Dahlem. The name itself symbolized the affinity between the American and German movements. Earlier,
Eugenical News
had adopted a subtitle in homage to the German term
race hygiene;
now the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes reciprocated by including the term
eugenics
in tribute to the American movement.
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The first director of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics was Eugen Fischer, a longtime Carnegie Institution associate and Davenport collaborator. This new institute was not funded by American capital, but rather by an assortment of German government agencies-local, Prussian and federal-to whom eugenics and race science were becoming increasingly important. The Ministry of the Interior provided the largest single donation: 500,000 marks. The Prussian Ministry of Science donated some 400,000 marks, including the land itself. Small amounts were also contributed by the provinces of Upper Silesia, the Rhine, Westphalia and the municipality of Essen. Funds from industrialists, such as the Thyssen brothers, comprised just token monies.
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While the institute’s initial funding was German, it enjoyed both the envy and unqualified support of the American eugenics establishment.

The grand opening of the Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics took place in September of 1927 as an official function of the Fifth International Congress on Genetics in Berlin. Davenport was chairman of the human eugenics program and an honorary president of the congress. Baur was chairman of the local German eugenics committee. The congress was the first major international scientific event to be held in Germany since the Great War.
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The congress began on September 11, 1927, with approximately one thousand delegates from all over the world gathered in a gala Berlin setting. Registrants were first greeted with a Sunday dinner at the zoo, then a barrage of sumptuous banquets staged by the Berlin Municipality and formal dinner events enlivened by
divertimenti,
followed by the finest liquors and cigars. Museum tours were scheduled for the ladies, and everyone was invited to a special performance at the Opera House.
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Germany was unfurling the red carpet to celebrate its regained scientific leadership.

Welcoming grandiloquence by both government officials and local academics eventually gave way to the real business of the conference: genetics. A procession of several dozen research papers and exhibits reported the latest developments in a spectrum of related disciplines, from genuine scientific revelations about the genetics of plants and animals, to the most recent advances in cytology, to the newest slogans and Mendelian math of traditional racial eugenics. A large Carnegie contingent was on hand to contribute its own research, proffering papers and delivering lectures.
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On the afternoon of September 27, Davenport and his colleagues traveled to Berlin-Dahlem for the much-anticipated grand opening of the new Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics. Davenport had been eager to congratulate his friend Fischer in person from the moment he had learned about his appointment almost a year earlier. Situated on about an acre of land, with a museum in the basement and a complex of lecture rooms, measurement labs and libraries on most other floors, the institute was the new centerpiece of eugenic research in Germany. As the leader of American eugenics, Davenport proudly delivered one of the commemorating addresses at the grand opening. The next year, the IFEO added the new institute to its roster. Davenport was so impressed with Fischer’s institute that he felt obliged to provide a brief history of eugenic progress in America to the institute’s administration.
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The third Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany’s eugenic complex was the Institute for Brain Research. Like other Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, this one grew out of a research operation created years earlier by the family of psychiatrist Oskar Vogt, which merged into the KWI in 1915. In those days the Institute for Brain Research was housed in a modest neurological laboratory also run by Vogt. Everything changed when the Rockefeller money arrived in 1929. A grant of $317,000 allowed the institute to construct a major building and take center stage in German race biology. Rockefeller funders were especially interested in the Institute’s Department of Experimental Genetics, headed by Russian geneticist Nikolai Timofeeff-Ressovsky. The Institute for Brain Research received additional grants from the Rockefeller Foundation during the next several years.
³⁴

By the late twenties, Davenport and other Americans had created a whirlwind of joint projects and entanglements with German eugenics. No longer content to direct purely domestic efforts, the two schools now eyed the rest of the world. They graduated from discussion and philosophy to concrete plans and actions. Among the most ambitious of these was a project to identify and subject to eugenic measures every individual of mixed race, everywhere. The approach would be along the lines created in the United States. Identification was the first step. In 1927, Davenport proposed a systematic survey of mixed-race populations in every region of the world. It would cover all Africans, Europeans, Asians, Mexicans, indigenous peoples and others who had mixed during centuries of modern civilization.

The global search for hybrids originated around February of 1926. Davenport had made the acquaintance of wealthy raceologist Wickliffe Draper, who shared Davenport’s anxiety about human hybridization. The plan was to conduct field surveys using questionnaires, just as eugenicists had done in various counties and remote areas around the United States. But this time they would cover not just a state, not just a nation, but eventually every populated region on earth.
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They needed a demonstration project. Davenport’s first impulse was to survey New York City, but he thought mixed-race individuals would be easier to identify in foreign countries or colonies. “I am suggesting Jamaica,” Davenport wrote Draper on February 23, 1926, “…because I take it that there is a larger proportion of mulattoes.” Within three weeks, Draper wrote a check to the Eugenics Research Association for $10,000 to defray the costs of a two-year study of “pure-blooded negroes, as found in the western hemisphere … and of white, as found in the same places with especial reference to inheritance of the differential traits in mulatto offspring.”
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Over the next two years, Davenport’s investigators deftly researched the family backgrounds of 370 individuals, taken from the local penitentiary and from the city center of Kingston. The American Consul in Jamaica interceded with the British Colonial Office to provide special access to the island’s jails, schools and doctors. Some eight thousand sheets of information were generated by field workers and archived in the Eugenics Record Office.
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But the Jamaica project featured something totally new. For the first time, personal information and eugenic traits were punched into IBM’s Hollerith data processing machines. International Business Machines would be a perfect match for eugenics. People tracking was the company’s business. IBM’s technology involved hundreds of thousands of custom-designed punch cards processed through punching, tabulating and sorting machines. Hollerith punch cards could store an almost unlimited amount of information on people, places and processes by virtue of the holes strategically punched into their columns and rows. Hollerith processors then read these holes and tabulated the results. Hollerith cards were originally developed for the U.S. Census, and IBM enjoyed a global monopoly on data processing. More than just counting machines, Hollerith systems could cross-tabulate all information on individuals and then match or cross-reference the data to their plain paper or already-punched street addresses or other geographic identifiers. Hence, people identified with certain traits could be easily located for additional eugenic action.
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For example, these high-speed tabulators could quickly identify a specific class of eugenic subjects, say, all first-generation morons of Mexican extraction with vision problems. All relatives across extended family trees could be connected to the selected individuals. Or the machines could identify all eugenically inferior residents in a single village, plus their descendants living elsewhere. At the rate of 25,000 cards per hour, IBM machines could rapidly search out the holes, stack the cards and provide seemingly miraculous results. Continuous refinements in high-speed Hollerith technology would soon permit alphabetizing and printouts. As massive numbers of individuals passed from identification to segregation to sterilization and beyond, even the workflow could be managed by IBM technology, using card designs, punching patterns and equipment arrays, each custom configured to a specific use. Mass eugenics required efficient systems.
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IBM was willing.

IBM managers desired the lucrative ERO account, but the process of punching in the hundreds of thousands of existing index cards at Cold Spring Harbor was simply too massive and expensive an undertaking. But if brought into a project at the outset, IBM could cost-effectively tabulate all names, racial information, medical characteristics and other eugenic data. This required IBM engineers to confer with Davenport’s eugenic investigators to jointly plan the program, ensuring that data was collected in a fashion that could be systematically coded and punched into Hollerith machines for later retrieval and management. To design the system correctly, the IBM engineers needed to know both the eugenic information that Carnegie researchers wanted to input as well as how they wanted the results retrieved. IBM always needed to know the end result in order to design the system. In a report on the Jamaica project, Davenport confirmed, “The test records were scored as received chiefly by Miss Bertha Jacobson. Codes for each of the traits to be tabulated were worked out, adapted to the Hollerith punch cards. Ratios were computed.”
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IBM custom-designed the layout for at least forty-five variables to be punched in on the Jamaica project for later retrieval by eugenicists. Sex and race were to be punched into column 1. Age in column 2. Height in columns 3 and 4. Cranial capacity in column 18. Foot length in column 24. Army Alpha intelligence testing in column 33, and Beta testing in column 32. Information on fingerprints was punched into columns 44 and 45. At one point, Davenport considered securing data from banks about how much money was in each individual’s account and cross-referencing this information against eugenic standards.
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The 1927-1928 Jamaica race-crossing investigation was the first time IBM devised a system to track and report racial characteristics. Five years later, IBM, under the leadership of its president, Thomas J. Watson, would adapt the same technology to automate the race warfare and Jewish persecution in Hitler’s Reich. IBM custom-designed the indispensable systems that located European Jews and other undesirables, and then provided a multiplicity of custom-tailored punch card programs to help the Nazis trace family trees, index bank accounts and other property, organize eugenic campaigns and even manage extermination in death camps. Indeed, a decade later, the SS Race Office employed a punch card with physical attributes specified colurnn-by-colurnn in a fashion almost identical to those first worked out for the Jamaica study.
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The pilot investigation in Jamaica went well, so well that the Carnegie Institution proudly published a major research volume on the project. Even as the program was underway, in February of 1927, Davenport was confident enough to contact Fischer in Germany and discuss ideas with him. “No one has greater experience in the field than you,” wrote Davenport, “and we shall of course want to get the benefit of that experience.” A few days later, he notified the IFEO secretary in London that a race-crossing committee would be needed “in view of … the international nature of the problem.”
In
short order, Fischer was invited to join the committee. Davenport would chair the panel.
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The campaign to identify mixed-race people of all varieties across America began on November 14, 1928, with one of the ERO’s well-honed, massive letter-writing efforts. Beginning that day, scores of letters were mailed by Davenport to eugenic contacts at universities, prisons, agricultural colleges, as well as to members of the American Breeders Association and other interested parties in every state from California to Florida and even the Alaska territory. It was the first step in searching out the racially unacceptable. Davenport’s letters were all variations on a few forms: