In my previous post, I talked about some of the cultural influences building up to the eugenics movements, a nightmare of Darwinian theory misapplied to humanity and infused with good old fashioned white bigotry.

While eugenics founder Francis Galton was based in England, his contemporaries in the United States, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, were far more terrifying. With financial backing from the Carnegie Institution, Davenport set up a eugenics research center in Cold Spring Harbor, NY that would eventually become the Eugenics Record Office (ERO). Davenport’s main agenda was filtering the immigrants who came into America and eliminating “undesirables” (i.e. anyone with a family history of crime, mental illness, dark skin tone, or what the eugenicists called “feeblemindedness”). Davenport’s chief targets were the Jews trying to enter America in the first quarter of the 20th Century, but he also utilized a huge number of field researchers to compile family trees of Americans and look for undesirable traits. While I find Davenport monstrous, writing about Harry Laughlin actually makes me physically ill, so I’m going to try to get through this next part quickly.

Laughlin led the crusade for forced sterilizations of people with disabilities. As superintendent of the ERO, Laughlin served repeatedly as an expert witness and even drafted sterilization laws, contributing to the forced sterilizations of 64,000 Americans across 28 states. He is perhaps most known for his involvement in the forced sterilization of Carrie Buck, a woman Laughlin declared to be hereditarily feebleminded. As a publicity tool, influential eugenicists arranged for Buck to have an appeal, and the resulting court case, Buck v. Bell, went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1927. The Court ruled 8-to-1 that Buck should be forcibly sterilized, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. making the infamous statement, “Three generations of imbeciles is enough.”

I hope this makes it clear: eugenics was not just some fringe ideology. This was a widely accepted political stance that was backed by “science.” Even President Calvin Coolidge was a eugenics enthusiast who believed in preserving European bloodlines. He once stated, “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves successfully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides. Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.” This was the same speech where he said “America must be kept American.” (Kind of sounds like another president, doesn’t it?)

Due to a combination of factors, the eugenics movement started to lose steam in the late 1930s. Scientists who had been fearful of retaliation finally began speaking out against the eugenicists’ theories. As it turns out, genetic variation leads to better health, not the “impurity” the eugenicists were concerned about. Furthermore, geneticists pointed out that, even if feeblemindedness were genetic (it’s not), breeding it out of the population would take millennia because of the nature of recessive genes. Laughlin’s research was deeply flawed, and after a thorough investigation of the ERO, the Carnegie Foundation pulled their funding.

Of course, by this point, Laughlin and his team at the ERO had found new inspiration from some colleagues working across the Atlantic Ocean. A populist politician named Adolf Hitler had come to power in Germany, and his sweeping eugenic policies dovetailed perfectly with Laughlin’s work. In fact, because of Laughlin’s contributions to eugenics, the University of Heidelberg presented him with an honorary M.D. in 1936. Laughlin used Nazi propaganda films on ethnic purity in his campaigns for sterilization and selective breeding, and he praised the Germans’ ethnic segregation even after the horrors of Kristallnacht. Laughlin and the Nazis were a match made in… well, they were made somewhere.

The atrocities committed by the Nazis caused the eugenics movement to fall out of favor in the United States for the most part, but sadly, those ideas are still out there even today. The ERO may have closed its doors in 1939, but there are still groups and individuals pushing for sterilization, controlled breeding, and rigid racial separation. While we’ve been able to dismiss many of them as fringe groups and bigots, the rise of a white nationalist “alt-right” should make us all wary.

But what does all this have to do with over-use of the word “Nazi”? We’ll wrap up this topic in the next post.