by David Plotz
Harbor Springs is also where young Robert learned his first, unfortunate lessons about race. Graham’s ancestors were fairly recent arrivals in America—there were Welshmen and Czechs in the near past—but they were very white and very Protestant. These traits were virtually requirements for living in Harbor Springs, a town that was as prejudiced as you’d expect for Michigan in the 1920s. This, after all, was when Henry Ford was at the height of his influence and his anti-Semitism. Jews and blacks were excluded from Harbor Springs’ clubs, of course—not that there were any around, except for the black servants of some summer folk. The many Indians who lived around Harbor Springs were second-class citizens, mostly confined to jobs in manual labor. In Harbor Springs, Graham developed the discomfort with nonwhites that he would never lose.
By the time he graduated from Harbor Springs High School in 1924, Graham had acquired a distinctive bantam charm that he would carry till his death. He was not a tall man—five feet, eight inches on a good day—but he carried himself like one. He had the posture of a Prussian Army colonel, and his head was huge for his body. Graham was vain, and he had much to be vain about: His chest was broad from swimming, his legs strong from running. He had jug ears, eyebrows so bushy they looked fake, and a vast chin—but these aggressive features combined in a fortunate way. His hair, thick and brown with a widow’s peak, was slicked back in the fashion of the day. Many girls thought him gorgeous, and he knew it. His classmates voted him the best-looking boy in the class of 1924. They liked him, too. Next to his picture in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, it said, “Here good sense and good nature are never separated.”
Robert Graham in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, 1924. Courtesy of the Harbor Springs Library
At eighteen, Graham headed off to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intent on shedding his bourgeois roots. Frank Graham had urged his eldest son to follow him into dentistry, but Robert loathed the idea of “fooling around in people’s mouths.” He wanted to do something more ambitious. He set out to become the next Enrico Caruso. His voice had dazzled audiences in Harbor Springs, and he believed he could be a star. He spent eight years studying music at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. He sang leads in student operas and twice soloed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House during university tours.
In 1932, at the pit of the Great Depression, he graduated and moved to New York City to be discovered. He wasn’t. He blew an audition at Radio City Music Hall. With the brutal rationality that would eventually make him a good businessman, he recognized that no amount of teaching would ever make him a Caruso: his voice was too erratic. He returned abjectly home to Michigan. Very quickly, he blotted his musical career from his memory. It had been, he said, a “waste.” When he wrote his memoir sixty years later, he scarcely mentioned it and left out entirely the fact that he had married another singer and had children with her. All that Graham let himself remember from his singing years was what he always remembered: his brushes with famous men. How his uncle, the celebrated architect Ernest Graham (the Wrigley Building, Equitable Building, Flatiron Building), had paid for his New York music lessons. How he had befriended Arnold Gingrich, later the founding editor of Esquire.* 1 How he had spent a weekend at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, where he had been awed to see Wright so engaged in “exalted discourse” that the architect didn’t notice he was drooling egg yolk all over his shirt and tie. In a poor man, Graham would have considered dripping egg yolk the sign of a slovenly mind. But in Wright, it meant genius.
Graham remained determined to get rich, but he needed a new path. He was blessed with a clear-eyed view of himself. “[I] have no great gifts, but no great weaknesses, either.” He knew he was disciplined: He never drank alcohol or coffee, never smoked, never gambled. He solved problems quickly, and his hands were as agile as his mind. He loved hard work and believed in its moral virtue. With all this in mind, Graham settled on a second career: optometry. It was an odd but inspired choice. Though deeply unglamorous, optometry was a profession of gadgets—not very good gadgets. Graham relished the challenge of trying to improve eyeglasses and the tools that made them. He earned an optical degree from Ohio State in a mere eighteen months—inventing a new kind of lens along the way—and landed a coveted job at Bausch & Lomb immediately after graduation. When America entered the Second World War, Graham was a father in his mid-thirties. He spent the war figuring out how to use the optical technology in captured German equipment to improve American artillery scopes and binoculars.
When the war ended, Graham was working for the optical giant Univis. It was a drag. Graham was a salesman, and he was good at it—gracious, elegant, smart—but his heart wasn’t in it: he lacked the salesman’s profligate bonhomie; he didn’t have the patience to explain things to people he thought were stupid. Graham liked the tinkering of optometry, not the salesmanship. So Graham threw himself at the profession’s number one problem: Why were eyeglasses so bad? Lenses were still made of glass, which meant they were fragile and dangerous. Thousands of Americans suffered eye injuries every year when their spectacles shattered.
Graham saw the future, and it was . . . plastics. Despite decades of attempts, no one had been able to manufacture a plastic lens that was as reliable and scratch resistant as glass. Graham thought he could. In 1947, when Univis refused to dedicate itself to plastic lens research, Graham quit, recruited a partner, and poured all his money into starting a new company, which they called Armorlite. Graham moved to southern California, the red-hot center of the postwar industrial economy, and tried to make plastic eyeglasses. He failed and failed and failed. After a fiasco using Plexiglas, Graham began to experiment with a little-known plastic called CR-39. It had been used to make B-17 fuel tanks during the war.
CR-39 was a disaster, too. It shattered the lens molds, and it shrank too much as it dried. But Graham persisted with it and perfected CR-39 lenses at the end of 1947. Armorlite’s lenses revolutionized the optical business. In the 1950s, Armorlite thrived but still served a niche market. Then fashion came to Graham’s aid. Large lenses were the vogue of the 1960s, and they could be made only of lightweight plastic. Armorlite boomed. Graham employed five hundred workers at his Pasadena factory. He marketed his product aggressively and was a great showman: When he gave a speech, he would yank off his Armorlite spectacles, fling them into the air, let them fall as the audience gasped, and then pick them up, unscathed. Graham kept on tinkering—he helped perfect contact lenses, developed the first antireflective coating for plastic lenses, and manufactured the first UV-protective lenses, among other inventions. He was a hero in his small corner of American business. Optical societies rained medals down on him. The National Eye Research Foundation dubbed him “The Man Who Made It Safe to Wear Glasses.” He also became incredibly rich. During Armorlite’s lean years, Graham took his salary in stock; by the time Armorlite struck gold, he controlled nearly the entire company. Graham risked all on Armorlite and made it back thousands of times over.
But Graham was dissatisfied. His personal life was messy. Graham had divorced his first wife after she had borne him three children, then played the field with a sportsman’s relish. He was an incorrigible flirt, and his sharp good looks, dapper dress, and impeccable manners helped his cause. He remarried, unhappily, to a woman his brother Tom described as an “alcoholic showgirl.” That miserable union produced two more children, but it was headed toward divorce when his wife swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and died. He wiped this second wife from his history books, too. (Graham possessed the great American gift of amnesia. He forgot nasty parts of his past as if he were erasing a chalkboard.) With a lack of awareness that would be funny if it weren’t sad, he described the second marriage in his memoir with a single sentence: “I had recently concluded an embittering marriage and swore never to put my neck into that noose again.” He fathered another child—out of wedlock, according to his brother—and then found wife number three in 1960. Marta Ve Everton, an oph
thalmologist twenty-one years his junior, was whip smart, elegant, religious, and altruistic. She was the great love of Graham’s life. She bore him two children, bringing his total to eight.
Graham had an ambivalent relationship with his brood. He liked the idea of family in theory but bungled it in practice. Like his own father, he was emotionally distant with his kids. His three daughters thrived, especially Marta Ve’s two girls. But three of his boys found serious trouble. One apparently killed himself. Another suffered a traumatic head injury as a boy, never quite recovered, and died in middle age after a difficult life. A third moved to the Pacific Northwest and cut his ties with the family. Graham seemed ashamed of some of his sons; he would sometimes avoid introducing them to his friends.
Graham’s success in a too-narrow field, his huge, almost-but-not-quite-happy family, his fascination with the rich and famous: in the late 1950s, all these helped inspire the passion that would define the rest of his life. Graham came to believe—more strongly than he believed anything—that society was doomed unless smart people had more children. He vowed to help them do it.
Graham’s obsession began with a mistake. Graham’s childhood idol had been an inventor named Ephraim Shay. Shay had designed the “Shay locomotive”—a powerfully geared steam train that could climb steep hills. Mining and logging firms bought Shay trains by the hundreds. He made a fortune and retired to Harbor Springs in the late nineteenth century. He was the town’s most celebrated resident, famed for his fertile mind and generous heart. He engineered Harbor Springs’ water supply. He built experimental boats that he docked in the town harbor. In winter, he hammered together hundreds of sleds for the town’s children, including young Robert Graham. When Shay died in 1916, it hit ten-year-old Robert hard. He believed that Shay had died childless. The inventor’s barrenness lodged in Graham’s head and eventually goaded him to act. As an adult, Graham would write, “God had planted some of His best seed in our town, but it had died out. They still name streets and schools for Ephraim Shay. The great bronze tablet which recounts his accomplishments still stands. But the genes which determined his extraordinary nature have died out. Ever since, the extinction of exceptionally valuable human genes has been a concern of mine.”
In fact, Graham was wrong about Shay. The inventor’s “seed” was alive and well and spreading all over America. Shay had fathered a son before moving to Harbor Springs. In 2000, three years after Graham’s death, about 160 of Shay’s descendents, all carrying his “exceptionally valuable” genes, celebrated their ancestor at a reunion in Harbor Springs.
Shay was Graham’s chief inspiration, but not his only one. All around him, Graham glumly observed the triumph of dullards over brains. Graham sold contact lenses to pro football players, and he was repulsed at how women flung themselves at the mountainous morons. Graham would sometimes eat lunch in the cafeteria of his Pasadena factory—sometimes, but not often, because his employees irritated Graham too much. He thought they didn’t want to improve themselves or work harder. All they cared about was milking the government for more benefits. These indistinct resentments clarified themselves in Graham’s mind. He had no religion, but he found a faith in eugenics. He became fixated on the idea that the world needed more intelligent people because the idiots were multiplying too fast.
It was not surprising that Graham grew fascinated with genetic degradation when he did, as the 1950s turned the corner into the ’60s. The late 1950s had marked the zenith of men like Graham. In the Sputnik-era scientific-industrial complex, technical businessmen were kings. White men just like Graham—intelligent, arrogant, scientific, and self-assured—dominated 1950s America. (Their rationalist ethos didn’t merely pervade business and government, it also spilled over into other, less obviously scientific aspects of human life. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies, for example, helped popularize the notion of sex as a mechanical act, separable from human emotion. Very little separated Kinsey’s scientific sex from Graham’s scientific breeding.) As a titan of industry and prize inventor, Graham felt he had the right, even the obligation, to impose his eugenic ideas on the idiotic masses. Graham’s genetic dread also reflected his fear of the societal change that he sensed was coming. Graham began worrying about the intellectual decline of Americans at the very instant Americans started to decide they didn’t want to listen to men like Graham. The civil rights and women’s movements were overthrowing the white male order. The demand for Wise Men was withering.
So at this nervous moment, with the Wise Men still clinging to power, Graham wrote a book to sound the alarm. Part pseudoanthropology, part evolutionary biology, all polemic, Graham’s The Future of Man throbbed with panic: Act now or humanity will die! The thrust of The Future of Man was that prosperity had ruined mankind, because it had reversed human evolution. Graham, undeterred by the fact that more people were living longer, healthier, and richer lives than at any point in history, concluded that man had peaked 15,000 years ago, in the good old days of the Cro-Magnons. These “scourging gods,” as Graham called them lustfully, had been brilliant and mighty because nature was so ruthless. Only the greatest Cro-Magnons had survived to pass on their glorious genes. But then, the tragedy of civilization! The agricultural revolution had softened man and allowed weaker specimens to breed. Since intelligence was 50 to 90 percent inherited, according to Graham, mankind got stupider as these lesser men multiplied. Natural selection waned. After thousands of years of such regression, half the human population was “what might be described as dull.” Graham believed that the spread of half-wits explained the rise of communism, a political ideology that squashed brilliance and rewarded mediocrity.
Graham anguished that the few smart people who remained were cooperating in their own extinction by using birth control, an “almost wholly pernicious” invention. The refusal to reproduce was “nature’s unforgivable sin,” Graham wrote.
The disappearance of genes for high intelligence is a defeat for the uniqueness of man, an erosion of the essence of the human condition. The childlessness of an Isaac Newton or a George Washington, the extinction of the Lincoln family, the spinsterhood of the brightest girl in the class, are great biological tragedies. As a result, mankind is deprived of some of that essential quality which separates him from the apes.
But a remedy was at hand. Just a few more smart people, and we could fend off the idiotic hordes. “Ten men of high intelligence can be more effective than 1000 morons.” Mankind, Graham proclaimed, could seize control of evolution through “intelligent selection.”
Ever practical, Graham ended The Future of Man with a how-to guide for saving humanity. Most of his proposals were mundane—government support for married graduate students, housing projects designed for large families, corporate sponsorship of employees with children.
But Graham saved his one big idea for last: “germinal repositories”—or, as they would be come to be known, sperm banks. Women would be artificially inseminated with sperm collected from the world’s smartest men: “Consider what it would mean to scientific progress if another 20 or more children of Lord Rutherford or Louis Pasteur could have been brought into the world. . . . Consider the gains to society if this new technique had been available to engender additional sons of Thomas Edison.” The number of geniuses in the population, Graham declared, would “increase exponentially.”
Graham was a man out of time. He didn’t realize that he had arrived at his views seventy-five years late. His ideas were so old they were new again.
CHAPTER 2
MANUFACTURING GENIUS
Fitter Family contest winner, Eastern States Exposition, 1925. Courtesy of the American Philosophical Society
When I tell someone I’m writing a book about a Nobel Prize sperm bank, this is the usual response: First a quizzical “It’s a novel?” Second—after I shake my head “no”—a laughing double-take. “You’re kidding. That’s a joke, right?” At a distance of twenty years, Robert Graham’s sperm bank does seem like nothing but a gig
gle. Yet there was a time when it could be taken not merely seriously but as the most serious thing in the world. There was a time when celebrated men would risk their reputations on such an idea.
Robert Graham had come late to the eugenics craze that had gripped the United States and Britain for fifty years from the late nineteenth century until the 1930s. Eugenics was the confluence of three rivers of Anglo-American thought: late-eighteenth-century theories about overpopulation, late-nineteenth-century Darwinism, and early-twentieth-century racial paranoia. The gloomy eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Malthus outlined the first key ideas of what would become eugenics. Fearing overpopulation, Malthus concluded that the poor’s misery must be ordained by Mother Nature. Their suffering and early death were good, Malthus said, because it prevented them from spreading their innate weakness. Any effort to ease their lot, with, say, a minimum wage, would increase misery in the long run. A century later, Social Darwinism gave a scientific framework to Malthus’s instincts. If Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” ruled birds, surely it ruled mankind, too. Mother Nature intended to cull the worst humans before they could breed, while the best of us were obliged to go forth and multiply.
