by Edwin Black
Long-skulled, with bushy eyebrows, a thin mustache and a semicircular receding hairline topped by a very high brow, Katzen-Ellenbogen’s head seemed almost too large for his body. As one who had worked with epileptics, disturbed children and the insane, Katzen-Ellenbogen had become accustomed to tinkering with the extremes of human frailty and the limits of will. He was attracted to the mysteries of the mind, but was convinced that the field of psychology was still in its infancy as it probed those mysteries. “Psychology is a discipline of undue hopes and uncritical skepticism,” he wrote, adding, “It has been a hard battle, which in forty years time has elevated psychology from a cinderella science domiciled in one room at the Leipzig University to palace-like institutions, such as for instance the Harvard Psychological Institute…. “17
In 1915, two years after he joined the Eugenics Research Association, Katzen-Ellenbogen sailed again to Europe. He would never return to America. He traveled first to Russia, but ended up in Germany. By then, Europe was embroiled in a bloody World War. But Katzen-Ellenbogen remained an “active member” of the organization even while abroad. Then America entered the war against Germany, and on March 21,1918, the association’s executive committee dropped Katzen-Ellenbogen from its rolls.18
Katzen-Ellenbogen studied troubled minds but was also familiar with intense personal pain and the fire of his own considerable mental anguish. In 1920, his only son, still in America, fell from a roof garden and was killed. The boy’s death destroyed Katzen-Ellenbogen’s sense of personal existence. There would be no male heir to carry on his bloodline, which contradicted the central aspiration of eugenics. But beyond any tenet of science, the untimely death would haunt Katzen-Ellenbogen for the rest of his life. He was in Europe when it occurred, yet he did not return for the funeral. The doctor’s wife slid into profound depression. Katzen-Ellenbogen never forgave himself for staying away. Suicidal impulses would grip him for years.19
Bitter but also philosophical, purely scientific yet overwhelmingly ambitious, Katzen-Ellenbogen wandered from mental place to mental place. He emerged with the disconnected sense of a man with nothing to lose. Abortionist, drug peddler, informer, medical theorist, murderer-Katzen-Ellenbogen eventually drifted into all of these realms.20 This American eugenicist would disappear from America, but his biological vision of humanity would eventually shock the world. Nor would he be alone in his crimes.
* * *
Eugenics found allies not just among the nation’s learned men, but also among the affluent and influential. In 1912, shortly before the Eugenics Record Office installed its board of scientific directors, the New York State legislature had created the Rockefeller Foundation, which boasted fabulous assets. John D. Rockefeller donated $35 million the first year, and $65 million more the next year.21 Davenport was keen to funnel Rockefeller’s money into eugenics. As he had done with Mrs. Harriman, Davenport cultivated a personal connection with Rockefeller’s son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. The younger Rockefeller controlled the foundation’s millions.22
Shy and intensely private, the oil heir seemed to enjoy corresponding with Davenport about sundry eugenic topics. On January 27, 1912, using his personal 26 Broadway stationery, the young Rockefeller wrote Davenport a letter about a plan to incarcerate feebleminded criminal women for an extra length of time, so they “would… be kept from perpetuating [their] kind… until after the period of child bearing had been passed.” Two months later, Rockefeller Jr. sent Davenport a copy of a Good Housekeeping article referencing Pearson and British eugenicists. Rockefeller asked, “Will you be good enough to return the article with your reply, which I shall greatly appreciate.” On April 2, Rockefeller sent Davenport a formal thank you for answering a letter just received. About a month later, Rockefeller sent another note of personal thanks, this time for answering questions about the Good Housekeeping article.23
At its first meeting, the ERO’s board of scientific directors “voted to recommend to Mr. John D. Rockefeller the support of the following investigations.” The ERO’s board, chaired by William Welch (who doubled as Rockefeller’s own scientific director), compiled a short list: first, “an analysis of feeblemindedness”; second, “a study of a center of heavy incidence of insanity in Worcester County, Massachusetts”; third, a well-financed “preliminary study of the sources of the better and the poorer strains of immigrants” to be conducted overseas. They also petitioned Rockefeller to fund a statistician who would compile the data.24
Welch found his work with the ERO satisfying, and did not mind becoming vice-chairman when Alexander Graham Bell was appointed to the top post. Two years after Welch joined the board of scientific directors, Davenport used the connection to secure additional Rockefeller financial support. On March 1, 1915, Davenport told Welch, “It seems to me a favorable time to approach the Rockefeller Foundation on the subject of giving a fund for investment to the Eugenics Record Office.” Davenport skillfully played Mrs. Harriman’s wealth against Rockefeller’s vastly superior fortune. To date, Rockefeller’s foundation had “given us $6,000 a year, whereas Mrs. Harriman has given us $25,000” as well as funds for construction and other general expenses. Davenport’s new plan called for an annual investment fund, as well as money to establish a better indexing operation to link surnames, traits and geographic locales. After adding up the columns, itemizing the projects and totaling the results, Davenport wrote Welch, “I would suggest that we should ask for $600,000 [$10.1 million in modem money] from the Rockefeller Foundation.”25
If Rockefeller agreed to the $600,000 subvention, Davenport planned to go back to Mrs. Harriman and ask her to go one better. “We should then ask Mrs. Harriman to consider an endowment of $800,000 to $1 million.” That would almost double her annual tithe.26
As expected, Davenport lunched with Mrs. Harriman just days later. Their discussion was fruitful. “She is, I understand, ready to tum over some property to [the Eugenics Record Office],” Davenport happily reported to Bell. Mrs. Harriman’s financial support would ultimately grow to hundreds of thousands of dollars27
Big money made all the difference for eugenics. Indeed, biological supremacy, raceology and coercive eugenic battle plans were all just talk until those ideas married into American affluence. With that affluence came the means and the connections to make eugenic theory an administrative reality.
Providing her opulent 1 East Sixty-ninth Street home as a meeting place, Mrs. Harriman bestowed her prestige as well as her wealth on the eugenic crusade. At one meeting in her home on April 8, 1914, more than a dozen experts gathered to plan action against those considered feebleminded. Most offered short presentations. Goddard, fresh from his intelligence-testing accomplishments, began the meeting with a proposed definition of “feebleminded.” Another outlined ideas on “segregation of the feebleminded.” A third offered “new and needed legislation in re: the feebleminded.” Laughlin presented a fifteen-minute talk on “sterilization of the feebleminded. “ Davenport spoke on county surveys of the feebleminded.28
Mrs. Harriman wielded great power. Vhen she made a request of New York State officials, it was difficult for them to say no. Davenport’s proposed county surveys in search of the unfit, for example, were implemented by state officials. Eugenic agencies were established, often bearing innocuous names. Robert Hebberd, secretary of the New York State Board of Charities, reported to Mrs. Harriman that “our Eugenics Bureau is known officially as the Bureau of Analysis and Investigation.” In describing the agency’s work, Hebberd’s letter reflected the usual eugenic parlance, “The study of groups of defective individuals is so closely related to the welfare of future generations that the lessons drawn from the histories of abnormal families… [can] prevent the continuance of conditions which foster social evils.” He added that to this end, the records of some 300,000 people had already been tabulated in twenty-four of New York State’s counties. Hebberd promised to coordinate his agency’s work with privately financed eugenic field surveys “in Rockland County, under your di
rection.” He deferentially added, “Permit me to say that it is gratifying to know of your deep interest in this branch of the work of the State Board of Charities.”29
Rockefeller also financed private county surveys. His foundation would cover the $10,000 cost of a hunt for the unfit in New York’s Nassau County. Davenport and several Nassau County appointees formed an impromptu “Committee on the Enumeration of Mental Defectives,” which worked closely with local school authorities in search of inferior students. Eight field workers would assist the search.30
Some ordinary New York State agencies changed their focuses from benign to eugenic. One such agency operated under the innocuous-sounding name of the Bureau of Industries and Immigration. Originally established to protect disadvantaged immigrants, the bureau began employing investigators to identify “defectives,” the feebleminded and the insane. One typical report on fifteen feebleminded newcomers began with Case #258, which focused on Teresa Owen, a forty-year-old woman from Ireland who was classified as insane. The case note on Owen read, “Has been released to her husband and is cohabiting with him, with what disastrous results to posterity… no one can foretell. She is a menace… [and] should be removed and segregated pending removal.” Case #430 treated Eva Stypanovitz, an eighteen-year-old Russian Jew who was classified as feebleminded. The file on Stypanovitz noted, “Case diagnosed by relatives. Is of marriageable age, and a menace to the community.” Case #918 dealt with Vittorio Castellino, a thirty-five-year-old from Italy, and recorded, “Such a case cannot be too extravagantly condemned from a eugenic and economic point ofview.”31
Another such agency was the organization that became known as the National Committee on Prison and Prison Labor, first organized in 1910 by the New York State Department of Labor to investigate the exploitation of convict-manufactured goods. Four years later, the body changed its name amid a “widening of its activities.” Judge Olson, the stalwart eugenic activist who also directed the Municipal Court of Chicago Psychopathic Laboratory, steered his colleagues on the prison committee to create similar municipal psychopathic labs to document hereditary criminality in their cities. The New York City Police Department did indeed establish a psychopathic laboratory for eugenic investigations, utilizing Eugenics Record Office field workers supplied by Mrs. Harriman. Davenport himself headed up the prison group’s special committee on eugenics, which was established “to get at the… heredity factors in anti-social behavior… with the aid of a careful family history.” Prisoners at Sing Sing were the first to be examined by Davenport’s researchers under a year-long joint project with the Eugenics Record Office.32
In 1916, New York’s Senate Commission to Investigate Provision for the Mentally Deficient held hearings and published a 628-page special report, including a 109-page bibliography of eugenic books and articles. The commission’s purview included imposed sterilization. Among its cited resources were eugenic county surveys in Westchester County supervised by Dr. Gertrude Hall, one of the eugenic experts in Mrs. Harriman’s circle and the director of the Bureau of Analysis and Investigation.33
Many officials were easily swayed by the stacks of scientific documentation eugenicists could amass. New York’s State Hospital Commission-comprised of a coterie of leading physicians-emerged from meetings with Davenport at the Eugenics Record Office in July of 1917 expressing a new determination to concentrate on the feebleminded-even though there was not yet a definition for feeblemindedness. After the meeting, the commission announced it would recommend that the state legislature allocate $10 to $20 million during the next decade to eugenically address the insane and feebleminded. The ERO pledged its assistance in the effort.34
New York State was hardly alone. Indiana’s legislature appropriated $10,000 for a Committee on Mental Defectives in 1917. Initial research was completed by ERO field workers Clara Pond (in Jasper, Wabash and Elkhart counties) and Edith Atwood (in Shelby, Vanderburgh and Warrick counties). A commission to investigate the feebleminded was empanelled in Utah. Arkansas did the same. One ERO field worker, Ethel Thayer, traveled some 10,000 miles during six months in 1917, interviewing 472 individuals to produce what the ERO termed “more or less complete histories of 84 [families].”35
There was no way for the public to know if a seemingly unrelated government agency was actively pursuing a eugenic agenda. The United States Department of Agriculture maintained an active role in America’s eugenics movement by virtue of its quasi-official domination of the American Breeders Association. Various Department of Agriculture officials either sponsored or officially encouraged eugenic research. Agricultural department meetings went beyond the bounds of simple agronomy; they often encompassed human breeding as well. On November 14, 1912, Professor C. L. Goodrich, at the Washington office of the Department of Agriculture, was asked by a colleague in the USDA’s Columbia, South Carolina, office whether two Negro siblings, both with six fingers on each hand, should be brought to an ABA meeting at the National Corn Exposition for eugenic evaluation. Professor Goodrich, who controlled the presentations of the ABA’s Eugenic Section, replied a few days later, “Have the children brought…. I will put you on the program for a paper before the Eugenics section….”36
On November 26, 1912, the USDA’s Office of Farm Management wrote to Davenport on official government letterhead suggesting that the ERO assign “a eugenic worker on the case and develop the facts in relation to the negro’s family by the time of the meeting of the Breeder’s Association in Columbia [South Carolina] in February.” Receptive to the idea, Davenport replied three days later, “Perhaps he can present one or more of the polydactyls to the eugenics section.”37
On January 3, 1913, Davenport wrote to George W. Knorr at the USDA in Washington asking, “If not too late, please add two titles to the eugenics program.” One of these would be Davenport’s own last-minute entry, “A Biologist’s View of the Southern Negro Problem.” Knorr wrote back asking for a lecturer on eugenic immigration issues. On January 8, Davenport referred Knorr to a Harvard eugenicist specializing in immigration, and reminded the department to make sure “the meeting of the eugenics section [was all arranged] at the Insane Asylum.” That same day, Davenport wrote his colleague at Harvard, asking him to contact the USDA to get on the program. On January 10, Davenport asked Knorr to approve yet another eugenics paper entitled “Heredity ofLeft-handedness.”38
Secretary of Agriculture James Wilson doubled as president of the ABA. At the group’s 1913 convention, he rallied the forces. In his presidential address, Wilson declared, “You have developed in your eugenics section a great experiment station and institution of research, with a splendid building called the Eugenics Record Office.… Your laboratory material is the heredity that runs through the veins of the good, bad, and indifferent families of our great country… assembling the genetic data of thousands of families… making records of the very souls of our people, of the very life essence of our racial blood…. Those families which have in them degenerate blood will have new reason for more slowly increasing their kind. Those families in whose veins runs the blood of royal efficiency, will have added reason for that pride which will induce them to multiply their kind.” Wilson also encouraged the ERO to seek even greater funding. “I observe that you are publicly asking for a foundation of half a million dollars,” he said. “Twenty times that sum, or ten millions, would come nearer the mark. “39
The speeches presented at obscure agricultural meetings in South Carolina, the eugenic surveys in small Indiana counties or by major New York State agencies, the eugenics courses taught in small colleges or in prestigious universities-none of this eugenic activity remained a local phenomenon. It quickly accumulated and became national news for a movement hungry for the smallest advance in its crusade. Therefore in January of 1916, the ERO launched a new publication, Eugenical News, which was edited by Laughlin and reported endless details of the movement’s vicissitudes. Approximately 1,000 copies of each issue were distributed to activists. From the most important
research to the most obscure minutia, an eager audience of committed eugenic devotees would read about it in Eugenical News. Almost every administrative proposal, every legislative measure, every academic course, every speech and organizational development was reported in this publication.40
When field worker Clara Pond began her eugenic duties at the New York Police Department on January 15, 1917, it was reported in the February issue. When the ERO received records of 128 family charts from Morgan County, Indiana, it was reported. When the Village for Epileptics at Skillman, New Jersey, contributed 798 pages of data on its patients, it was reported. When Laughlin spoke before the Illinois Corn Growers Convention at the University of Illinois, it was reported. When Dr. Walter Swift of the Speech Disorder Clinic wrote on inherited speech problems in the Review of Neurology and Psychiatry, his article was reviewed in depth. When Yerkes paid a courtesy visit to the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, it was reported. When Congress overrode President Wilson’s veto of an immigration bill, the vote tallies were reported. When the state of Delaware appropriated $10,000 for an institution for the feeble-minded, it was reported. When eugenic field worker Elizabeth Moore took up gardening at her home in North Anson, Maine, this too was reported.41
No legislative development was too small, nor was any locale too obscure for coverage. Indeed, the more obscure the eugenic development, the more enthusiastic the reportage seemed. The more significant the research or legislative effort, the more readers looked to Eugenical News for information and guidance. In effect, Eugenical News offered the movement organizational, scientific, legislative and theoretical cohesion.
