Growing
up in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the early 1900s, young Carrie Buck
impressed those she met as serious and self-possessed, someone whose
quiet demeanor hinted at a life filled with challenges. Of humble
origins—her widowed mother had given her up to foster care as a
child—the stocky, darkhaired girl didn’t let her difficulties get her
down. She enjoyed reading the newspaper, liked to fiddle with crossword
puzzles, and always made herself useful around the house. She was a bit
awkward in social situations, but otherwise she was a thoroughly average
teenager. No one had any reason to think differently of her. Then
something terrible occurred that changed Carrie’s life forever.
In
1923, when she was seventeen, Carrie Buck was raped by a nephew of her
foster parents. The girl became pregnant, and her foster parents—perhaps
embarrassed by what their nephew had done—decided to hide the girl away
by committing her to the Virginia Colony for the Epileptic and
Feebleminded, a mental facility in the town of Lynchburg. Carrie’s birth
mother had previously been committed to the same institution, accused
of being mentally deficient and promiscuous. The same reasons were given
for Carrie’s incarceration. It was a classic case of punishing the
victim.
Carrie had her baby in the spring of 1924, the same year
that Virginia passed a law permitting the involuntary sterilization of
those judged to be mentally impaired. The statute grew out of the early
twentieth century’s widely influential eugenics movement, a now
discredited cousin of genetics that attempted to improve American
society by “breeding out” a long list of undesirable traits ascribed to
minorities, the poor, and certain immigrant populations. At the same
time, eugenicists hoped to foster the increase of good breeding traits
by encouraging “high-grade” citizens to go forth and multiply (the word
eugenics means “well born”).
It’s no surprise that complacently
comfortable white folks conceived and promoted this scheme of biological
discrimination. According to eugenicists, if you weren’t of Nordic or
Anglo-Saxon heritage, your genes were second rate. Even if you were
white, if you happened to be epileptic, mentally ill, illegitimate,
unemployed, homeless, a sexually active single woman, an alcoholic, a
convicted criminal, or a prostitute—all signs of “feeblemindedness” or
“hereditary degeneracy”—you were a threat to the purity of the nation’s
gene pool. Eugenicists advocated three ways of dealing with the
perceived problem of bad genes: immigration restrictions, the prevention
of “unfit” marriages, and involuntary sterilization of “defective”
individuals in state care, chiefly mental patients and prison inmates.
Carrie
Buck had the misfortune of being the first Virginia resident chosen for
compulsory sterilization. Her case became a test of the
constitutionality of the state’s new law, a challenge that went all the
way to the U.S. Supreme Court. With little justification beyond a family
history of poverty and illegitimacy, Carrie and her birth mother were
both portrayed as sexually deviant simpletons. Even Carrie’s baby girl
was said to be “not quite normal.” Years later, researchers determined
that all three family members were of average intelligence, and that the
arguments for Carrie’s sterilization were based on faulty, biased
testimony. “These people belong to the shiftless, ignorant and worthless
class of anti-social whites of the South,” one so-called expert
declared—without ever having met Carrie Buck or her mother.
Despite
the flimsy testimony presented in the case, the Supreme Court upheld
the Virginia law in 1927 by an eight-to-one margin, with justice Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr. issuing this shocking pronouncement: “It is better
for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring
for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can
prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . .
Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Shortly afterward, Carrie
Buck, a perfectly normal citizen of the United States, was sterilized
against her will. It was an outrage destined to be repeated many times
over—mostly against poor, uneducated women—as the dark age of eugenics
spread across the land in the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s.
Thousands of
activists had a hand in creating the conditions that permitted the abuse
of Carrie Buck and others like her, but few bear a greater measure of
responsibility than biologist Charles Davenport, a man who spent more
than three decades leading the campaign for racial purity in the United
States. In essence, Davenport and his fellow eugenicists sought to
create a master race of white Protestant Yankees, with all the
frightening ramifications that implies. (Imagine the banality of an
entire nation of Ward and June Cleavers.) Aside from being morally
repulsive, their goal amounted to second-rate science, since biological
strength lies in genetic diversity, not sameness.
Davenport’s
offenses went beyond the harm he caused here at home. His lengthy
collaboration with eugenicists in Nazi Germany contributed to that
country’s brutal racial policies. Today, we rightly reject what
Davenport and others like him stood for as white supremacy gone berserk.
In his own time, though, Davenport was hailed as a trailblazer, an
honorable scientist who studied and taught at our nation’s most
prestigious institutions of higher learning. Davenport’s chilling story
demonstrates that when prejudice and public policy mix, the result can
be a humanitarian nightmare.
A lanky, goatee-sporting man who
favored all-white suits, Charles Benedict Davenport was the product of a
puritanical upbringing. He was born in 1866 on his family’s farm near
Stamford, Connecticut. In his childhood and early teens, he spent the
spring and summer months working on the farm. The rest of the year, he
lived in Brooklyn, where his domineering father ran a successful real
estate and insurance business. Davenport attended Brooklyn Polytechnic
Institute, earning a bachelor of science in civil engineering in 1886.
In 1889, he received a bachelor’s degree from Harvard University,
followed by a doctorate in zoology in 1892.
Even as a student,
Davenport wrote prolifically, which he continued to do after being hired
as an instructor at Harvard in 1893. A primary area of interest for the
young scholar was the study of heredity and selective breeding in
animals, a topic his years on the farm gave him practical insight into.
His writing earned him a favorable reputation, and in 1899 the
University of Chicago offered him an assistant professorship. In 1904,
Davenport left Chicago to become the director of the new Station for
Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, a genetics
research center funded by the Carnegie Institution. It was the perfect
place for Davenport to cultivate his interests in evolution, heredity,
and eugenics.
In 1910, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record
Office at Cold Spring Harbor, a facility that became the epicenter of
the American eugenics movement. By compiling detailed “pedigrees” on
thousands of families, the office sought to document how desirable or
undesirable traits are passed from one generation to the next. In
addition to physical characteristics, Davenport and his staff considered
a wide range of behavioral and cultural traits to be genetic in origin,
including personality quirks such as a love of the sea, a fondness for
songbirds, and a preference for city life.
As wacky as that
sounds, many of the country’s brightest leaders in education, politics,
and business thought it was true. Moreover, those same people were
convinced that some character traits are more prevalent in certain
ethnic and socioeconomic groups than others. Specifically, they believed
that good traits—intelligence, honesty, industriousness—are predominant
in middle and upper-class WASPs, and that bad traits—criminality,
immorality, shiftlessness—tend to be found in just about everyone else,
especially the poor and the disadvantaged.
Englishman Francis
Galton—a cousin of Charles Darwin—started this whole spurious exercise
in 1883 when he came up with the concept of eugenics. It was Galton who
first suggested that society could be improved by encouraging
intelligent, successful couples to marry and have children in order to
perpetuate their superior qualities. Researchers in Britain and the
United States quickly drew a link between Galton’s idea and the genetic
mechanisms of heredity outlined twenty years earlier by Augustinian monk
Gregor Mendel. Suddenly, the advancement of society through science
seemed possible.
Actually, Galton’s concept of pairing individuals
who might pass on desirable traits is practiced every day in cultures
around the world. Whenever two bright, successful people get married, we
look upon it as a “good match.” Many early eugenicists emphasized this
simple, positive goal. Where Charles Davenport and his cohorts went
astray was to focus on the negative side of eugenics: attempting to
eliminate “bad matches” by determining who, in their opinion, should not
have children and doing all they could to prevent that from happening.
The
negative approach to eugenics flourished in the United States thanks to
the financial support of major philanthropic organizations such as the
Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution, as well as a pool
of wealthy backers that included breakfast cereal tycoon John Kellogg
and railroad fortune heiress Mary Harriman. Respected public figures the
likes of Teddy Roosevelt and Alexander Graham Bell supported the aims
of the American eugenics movement, and courses in the subject were
taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and other top
universities. (Many colleges adopted Charles Davenport’s 1911 textbook
“Heredity in Relation to Eugenics,” a book filled with inaccurate,
oddball opinions about inherited traits within families.)
What’s
indisputable about the eugenics movement in this country is that it was
driven by racial and class prejudice. At the dawn of the twentieth
century, white Protestant Americans feared being overrun by immigrants
from southern and eastern Europe, people who traditionally had large
families. Groups such as the Race Betterment Foundation and the American
Eugenics Society stoked those fears by suggesting that the superior
traits of industrious Anglo-Saxons were being undermined by the lazy,
degenerate masses showing up on their shores. Charles Davenport
articulated the goal of encouraging white Americans to have more
children and stemming the invasion of undesirables in his “eugenics
creed”:
I believe in striving to raise the human race
to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of
effective endeavor.
I believe that I am the trustee of the germ
plasm that I carry; that this has been passed on to me through thousands
of generations before me; and that I betray the trust if (that germ
plasm being good) I so act as to jeopardize it, with its excellent
possibilities, or, from motives of personal convenience, to unduly limit
offspring.
I believe that, having made our choice in marriage
carefully, we, the married pair, should seek to have 4 to 6 children in
order that our carefully selected germ plasm shall be reproduced in
adequate degree and that this preferred stock shall not be swamped by
that less carefully selected.
I believe in such a selection of immigrants as shall not tend to adulterate our national germ plasm with socially unfit traits.
I believe in repressing my instincts when to follow them would injure the next generation.
Davenport’s
creepy doctrine was worthy of Jack D. Ripper, the mad general in Dr.
Strangelove who raved about a communist conspiracy to pollute “our
precious bodily fluids.” From today’s perspective, the call for racial
purity and selective breeding smacks of Big Brotherism, but large
numbers of Americans embraced it, a fact demonstrated in legislatures
across the country. In 1907, the state of Indiana passed the nation’s
first eugenic sterilization law. By 1935, some thirty states had similar
laws on the books, and around twenty thousand involuntary
sterilizations had been performed, the majority of those in California
and Virginia.
By the time eugenic sterilizations were phased out
(most of the laws had either been repealed or were no longer being
enforced by the 1970s), between forty thousand and seventy thousand
Americans had been sterilized against their will. Roughly 40 percent of
those sterilizations took place in California, where the eugenics
movement had a cadre of rabid supporters, among them the first president
of Stanford University and members of the University of California
Board of Regents and the State Board of Charities and Corrections.
In
addition to lobbying for forced sterilizations and strict immigration
laws (such as the highly prejudicial Immigration Act of 1924), the
eugenics movement advocated legal restrictions on interracial marriages.
“Race mixing” was a perceived threat to the genetic purity of white
America. True to form, Charles Davenport did all he could to convince
the world that mixed marriages produced inferior offspring. In 1929, he
published a book called “Race Crossing in Jamaica,” a study of racial
mixing and its supposedly negative effects. Now cited as a classic
example of scientific racism—the attempt to prove racial superiority
through pseudoscientific methods—the book drew numerous unfounded
conclusions.
Like some minstrel show jokester, Davenport reported
that black people excelled at music but trailed whites in complex mental
activities. “Browns,” as he called his subjects of mixed parentage,
represented “an exceptionally large befuddled class,” a group with many
members who “seem not to be able to utilize their native endowment.”
Davenport loftily asserted that “the Blacks seemed inferior to the
Whites in ability to criticize absurd statements.” (Obviously those
blacks hadn’t read Davenport’s book or they’d have found plenty to
criticize.) In the end, eugenicists’ objections to interracial marriage
produced the desired effect: new antimiscegenation laws were passed and
old ones rewritten according to eugenic precepts.
As repugnant as
their record was in the United States, American eugenicists hit absolute
bottom through their support of Nazi Germany’s infamous “racial
hygiene” program. By touting the superiority of Northern European
bloodlines, American eugenicists fed Adolf Hitler’s delusion that
Germans are members of a master race. Without a doubt, it was madness
that drove Hitler to slaughter millions of Jews, Slavs, gypsies,
homosexuals, and the mentally impaired, but the pseudoscientific
claptrap of negative eugenics gave Hitler’s quest for racial purity a
veneer of scientific legitimacy, especially in the beginning, when the
Nazis sterilized over a quarter of a million German citizens—the first
step on the road to the Holocaust.
German scientists repeatedly
looked to US race policies for inspiration. In fact, the Nazis based
their 1933 law authorizing eugenic sterilizations on a model statute
issued by the Eugenics Record Office. At the outset of Germany’s massive
sterilization effort, American eugenicists bubbled over with praise,
citing the “success” of the program as proof that the smaller numbers of
eugenic sterilizations in the United States were inadequate.
Adolf
Hitler himself had followed the eugenics movement in this country for
years. In 1916, American attorney, conservationist, and arch-bigot
Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial
Basis of European History, a landmark work of scientific racism that
exalted people of Nordic ancestry. Hitler called the book his “Bible,”
and he wrote Grant to tell him so. Hitler was also aware of the 1927
Supreme Court ruling that gave legal sanction to eugenic sterilizations
(a ruling, by the way, that’s never been overturned). Nazi leaders would
later cite the Court’s decision in their own defense at the Nuremberg
war crimes tribunals.
Charles Davenport’s complicity with German
eugenicists stretched throughout his tenure at the Eugenics Record
Office. His affinity for biological fascism was coldly laid out in
Heredity in Relation to Eugenics—a shocking set of principles not
uncommon in America at the time: “The commonwealth is greater than any
individual in it,” Davenport wrote. “Hence the rights of society over
the life, the reproduction, the behavior and the traits of the
individuals that compose it are . . . limitless, and society may take
life, may sterilize, may segregate so as to prevent marriage, may
restrict liberty in a hundred ways.” Hitler couldn’t have said it any
better.
Davenport’s Cold Spring Harbor facility functioned as the
hub of international eugenics activities, and its influential journal
Eugenical News enthusiastically endorsed the German movement at every
opportunity. As president of the International Federation of Eugenics
Organizations, Davenport worked with leading German eugenicists such as
Ernst Rüdin, director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Psychiatry and
a major architect of Hitler’s heinous racial policies. Following his
retirement from the Eugenics Record Office in 1934, Davenport continued
to support German eugenicists—even as the Nazis began the systematic
annihilation of millions of “inferior” Europeans, the darkest blot on
Davenport’s career.
By the time the United States entered World
War II, in 1941, most American eugenicists had finally distanced
themselves from their German counterparts, but a growing number of
scientists and members of the public were already turning against
eugenics. The Eugenics Record Office had closed its doors in December
1939 in the face of criticism about its aims and methods. By the end of
the war, as the Nazi concentration camps were liberated, every American
was made sickeningly aware of the horror that had been wrought in the
name of racial purity—a fatal blow to the eugenics movement in this
country. The ugly spectacle of negative eugenics was finally recognized
for what it truly is: racial and class prejudice, pure and simple.
Some
outrageous scientific claims were made during the heyday of the
eugenics movement. One of the notions the American Eugenics Society
tried to plant in the public mind was the idea that “what you really are
was all settled when your parents were born”—as if genetics alone
determines our essential character. The truth, of course, is that we’re
each molded through a complex interplay of inherited traits and
environmental influences—the long-debated nature versus nurture
equation. We also have the power to help shape ourselves through our own
conscious efforts. The great promise of life is that any person of any
background has the potential to succeed or fail, to soar intellectually
or to remain a prisoner of ignorance. As Iowa-born politician and future
US vice president Henry Wallace said when he spoke out against eugenics
in 1939: “Superior ability is not the exclusive possession of any one
race or any one class. It may arise anywhere, provided men are given the
right opportunities.”
Charles Davenport died before the end of
World War II (he passed away in February 1944), so he didn’t live to see
the final dismantling of his dream, as the discriminatory laws he’d
supported were rolled back starting in the 1950s. In all honesty, the
eugenics leader was a pitiable man. Nervous and completely lacking in
empathy, he was so sensitive to criticism that he retreated into a shell
of moody silence when anyone attacked his work. His habit of dressing
in white as a symbol of racial purity was a disturbing characteristic.
But the saddest thing about Charles Davenport is that such an
intelligent human being would turn his mind to such an ignoble purpose.
If Davenport hadn’t become embroiled in the lunacy of eugenics, he would
be remembered for his legitimate academic accomplishments. As it is,
any good he did has been interred with his bones.
Today, the
old-fashioned expression of positive eugenics—matchmaking—still
flourishes, although now it’s moved online. Meanwhile, more complicated
issues regarding genetics—genetic engineering, cloning, biotechnology,
gene therapy—have replaced eugenics as topics of public interest. And
while we can celebrate the fact that the bigoted, immoral pseudoscience
of eugenics has been consigned to history’s junk heap, regrettably the
white supremacist attitude that shaped much of Charles Davenport’s
career lives on in the beliefs of diehard social Darwinists—an outlook
as persistent as a noxious weed, a kudzu of the mind.
Excerpted from “Villains, Scoundrels, and Rogue: Incredible True Tales of Mischief and Mayhem” by Paul Martin. Reprinted with the permission of Prometheus Books. Copyright @ 2014. All rights reserved.
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