War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  Powell and Plecker worried about the judge’s ruling. The commonwealth attorney was willing to pursue an appeal as a test case, but he also warned that the entire Racial Integrity Act might be struck down. They decided not to pursue the appeal. Plecker in turn assisted efforts to get the legislature to reduce the Pocahontas exemption, causing raucous debate within the state house and in the newspapers of Virginia.86

  Plecker continued his crusade even after retiring in 1946 at the age of eighty-four. To the last day he was publishing racist pamphlets decrying mongrelization, defending the purity of the white race, decreeing demographic status family-by-family in a state and in an era when demographic status defined one’s existence. In a final flourish, Plecker submitted his resignation with the declaration, “I am laying down this, my chief life work, with mingled feeling of pleasure and regret.” He hoped to be dubbed “Registrar Emeritus.”87

  During his tenure, Walter A. Plecker dictated the nature of existence for millions of Americans, the living, the dead and the never born. His verdicts, often just his suspicions, in many ways defined the lives of an entire generation of Virginians-who could live where, who could attend what school and obtain what education, who could marry whom, and even who could rest in peace in what graveyard. It was not achieved with an army of soldiers, but rather with a legion of registrars and millions of registration forms. He was able to succeed because his campaign was not about racism, nor mere prejudice, nor even white supremacy. It was about science.

  Now that science was ready to spread across the seas.

  PART TWO

  Eugenicide

  CHAPTER 10

  Origins

  One morning in June of 1923, John C. Merriam, the Carnegie Institution’s newly installed president, telephoned Charles Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor. Anticipation was in the air. A long-awaited eugenic countermeasure, loosely called “the plan,” finally seemed within reach. “The plan” would create an American eugenic presence throughout the world even as inferior strains were eliminated in the United States. It was now important to be politically careful. Merriam, however, was worried about the behavior of Harry H. Laughlin.1

  Merriam’s hopeful phone call to Davenport had been years in the making. American eugenics had always sought a global solution. From the beginning, ERO leaders understood all too well that America was a nation of immigrants. But American eugenicists considered most of the immigrants arriving after 1890 to be genetically undesirable. This was because the 1890s witnessed the onset of the great Eastern and Southern European exodus to the United States, with throngs of non-English-speaking families crowding into the festering slums of New York and other Atlantic seaboard cities.2

  Eugenicists viewed continued immigration as an unending source of debasement of America’s biological quality. Sterilizing thousands of the nation’s socially inadequate was seen as a mere exercise, that is, fighting “against a rising tide,” unless eugenicists could also erect an international barrier to stop continuing waves of the unfit. Therefore the campaign to keep defective immigrants out of the country was considered equally important to the crusade to cleanse America of its genetic undesirables. This meant injecting eugenic principles into the immigration process itself-both in the U.S. and abroad.

  Immigration had always been a complex, emotionally-charged concept in the United States. A thousand valid arguments encompassing economics, health conditions, overcrowding, demographics and humanitarianism perpetually fed competing passions to either increase or decrease immigration. Moreover, the public and political mood twisted and turned as conditions in the country changed. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million immigrants had flooded into the United States, mainly fleeing Europe’s upheaval. More than eight million of that number arrived between 1900 and 1909.3

  America’s turn-of-the-century welcome was once poetically immortalized with the injunction: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”4 But after World War I, American society was in ethnic, economic and demographic turmoil. Now-curtailed war industries laid off millions. Returning “dough boys” needed work as well, only adding to widespread joblessness. Inflation ate into wages. African-Americans who had gone to war now expected employment as well; they had fought for their country, and now they wanted their sliver of the American dream. Dislocation bred discontent. Massive labor strikes paralyzed much of America during 1919, with some 22 percent of the workforce joining a job action at some point during that year.5

  Moreover, demographic upheaval was reweaving the very fabric of American social structure. Boy soldiers raised on the farm suddenly turned into hardened men during trench warfare; upon returning they often moved to cities, ready for a new life. Postwar immigration boomed-again, concentrated in the urban centers. The 1920 census revealed that for the first time in American history, the population majority had shifted from rural to urban areas. America was becoming urbanized, and mainly by immigrants. The 1920 census meant wrenching Congressional reapportionment, that is, a redrawing of district lines for seats in the House of Representatives. Eleven rural states were set to lose seats to more urbanized states. The House had expanded its available seats to 435 to preserve as much district status quo as possible.6 But immigration remained the focal point of a political maelstrom.

  To further inflame the day, race riots and ethnic strife ripped through the cities. Mrican-Americans, back from soldiering, were tired of racism; they wanted a semblance of rights. At the same time, the Ku Klux Klan rose to never before seen prominence. The threat of Bolshevism worried the government and the average man. The Red Scare in the summer of 1919 pitted one ism against another. Marxism, communism, Bolshevism, and socialism sprang into the American consciousness, contending with capitalism. Race riots against African-Americans and mob violence against anarchistic Italians and perceived political rabble-rousers ignited throughout the nation. A man named J. Edgar Hoover was installed to investigate subversives, mainly foreign-born.7

  As the twenties roared, they also growled and groaned about immigration. Along with the most recent huddled masses came widespread vexation about the future of American society. Legitimate social fears, ethnic combat and economic turmoil stimulated a plethora of restrictive reforms, some sensible, some extreme.

  The best and worst of the nation’s feelings about immigration were exploited by the eugenicists. They capitalized on the country’s immigration stresses, as well as America’s entrenched racism and pervasive postwar racial anxiety. Seizing the moment, the men of the Carnegie Institution injected a biological means test into the very center of the immigration morass, dragging yet another field of social policy into the sphere of eugenics.

  As early as 1912, the eugenics movement’s chief immigration strategist, Harvard professor Robert DeCourcy Ward, advocated eugenic screening of immigrant candidates before they even reached U.S. shores. Davenport enthusiastically wrote a colleague, “I thoroughly approve of the plan which Ward urges of inspection of immigrants on the other side.”8 Bolstered by other eugenic immigration activists, such as ophthalmologist Lucien Howe, Laughlin became the point man in the movement’s efforts. Their goals were to rewrite immigration laws to turn on eugenic terminology, and to install an overseas genetic surveillance network.

  Key to any success was Albert Johnson. Johnson was an ambitious small-town personage who would eventually acquire international potency. Born in 1869 in Springfield, Illinois, on the northern edge of the Mason-Dixon Line, Johnson grew up during the tempestuous Reconstruction years. His high school days were spent in provincial Kansas communities, including the newly created village of Hiawatha, and later Atchison, the state’s river and railroad center. But Johnson was an urban newspaperman at heart, working first as a reporter on the Herald in St. Joseph, Missouri, and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Within a few years he had joined the ranks of east coast journalists, becoming managing editor of Connecticut’s New Haven Register
in 1896, and two years later serving as a news editor of the Washington Post. After his stint with the Post, Johnson moved to Tacoma, Washington, where he worked as editor of the Tacoma News. Johnson then returned to his small-town roots as editor and publisher of the local newspaper in Hoquiam, Washington. In 1912, while publisher, he successfully ran for Congress. Johnson chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization for twelve years, beginning in 1919. In that pivotal position, Johnson would shape American immigration policy for decades to come.9 During his tenure, Johnson acted not only as a legislator, but also as a fanatic raceologist and eugenicist.

  Even before Johnson rose to chair the Immigration Committee, Congress had enacted numerous immigration restrictions that were reactive, not eugenic, in nature, even if the legislation employed much of the same terminology. For example, a 1917 statute barred immigration for “all idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded persons, epileptics, insane persons… [and] persons of constitutional psychopathic inferiority.” Laughlin and his colleagues wanted to rewrite these classifications along strictly biological and racial lines. His idea? New legislation to create a corps of eugenic “immigration attaches” stationed at American consulates across Europe and eventually the entire world. These consuls would exclude “all persons sexually fertile… who cannot… demonstrate their eugenical fitness… mental, physical and moral.” Laughlin’s proposed law was of paramount importance to eugenic stalwarts. As a leading immigration activist told Davenport in an October 1, 1920, letter, any new system would need to “heavily favor the Nordics” and ensure that “Asiatics, Alpines and Meds… [are] diminished.”10

  The Journal of Heredity, formerly the American Breeders Magazine, trumpeted one of the movement’s rationales for overseas screening in an article entitled “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics.” The article declared, “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat… [which will] as with all organisms, eventually limit… its influence.”11

  Premier racial theorist Madison Grant, president of the Eugenics Research Association and vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, was a close ally and confidant of Johnson’s. Grant’s influence with Congress on immigration was a recognized asset for the eugenics movement, and was well utilized. Davenport would periodically send him materials, including confidential reports done by social workers on individual New York immigrants deemed defective, “which you may be able to use with Congress.” As far as Johnson was concerned, any immigration was too much immigration. In fact, Johnson had already introduced without success an emergency measure to suspend all immigration for two years.12

  It wasn’t long before Laughlin became the designated eugenic authority for Johnson’s committee. Laughlin began in 1920 by offering Johnson the same definition of the “socially inadequate” previously rejected by the Census Bureau, together with the same flawed data. Unlike the Census Bureau, however, Johnson readily accepted these notions. He invited Laughlin to testify before a full House committee to formally espouse his raceology and lobby for the new legislation.13

  Laughlin enthusiastically testified for two mornings, on April 16 and 17, 1920, invoking a gamut of eugenic arguments, from the history of the Jukes to the Tribe of Ishmael to the high cost of institutionalizing defective stock. At one point, when Laughlin was explaining one of his new terms for mental incompetence, a committee member interrupted and asked him how to spell it. Laughlin replied: “M-O-R-O-N. It is a Greek word meaning a foolish person.14

  To stem the supply of morons and stymie further degeneracy, Laughlin asked Johnson to allow him to enable “testing the worth of immigrants… in their home towns, because that is the only place where one can get eugenical facts…. For example, whether he comes from an industrious or shiftless family.” But just as the terms feeblemindedness and blindness were vague and fundamentally undefined, the exact nature of shiftlessness was also unclear. Laughlin assured Johnson that this could be remedied. “General shiftlessness could easily be made into a technical term,” he explained, “by a little definition in the law. It could be made a technical term by describing it by a 50-word paragraph…. “15

  Laughlin emphasized that the quality and character of the individual candidate for immigration were not as important as his ancestral pedigree. “If the prospective immigrant is a potential parent, that is, a sexually fertile person,” testified Laughlin, “then his or her admission should be dependent not merely upon present literacy, social qualifications and economic status, but also upon the possession in the prospective immigrant and in his family stock of such physical, mental, and moral qualities as the American people desire…. The lesson,” he emphasized, “is that… the family stock should be investigated, lest we admit more degenerate ‘blood.’”16

  Johnson, a proud champion of immigration quotas, was greatly impressed with Laughlin’s expertise and saw its usefulness in drafting any restrictive legislation. The chairman promised to invite Laughlin back as an expert to help the committee deliberate on his proposal for eugenic attaches. Laughlin’s two-day testimony and proposed law were published by the House under the title “The Biological Aspects of Immigration.”17

  When Laughlin came back to consult, an encouraged Johnson created a new title for him: “Expert Eugenics Agent.” Laughlin was now empowered to conduct wide-ranging racial and immigration studies, and to present them as reliable Congressional data. His new authority included the power to print and circulate official committee correspondence and questionnaires, and mail them en masse at House expense. The first of these was a survey entitled “Racial and Diagnostic Record of State Institutions.” It was printed on official House letterhead, with the committee members’ names routinely listed at the top, but now with Laughlin’s name added as “Expert Eugenics Agent.” The form asked 370 state institutions-hospitals, prisons, asylums-in the forty-eight states to report the nationalities, races and problematic natures of their residents. Perhaps intentionally, private institutions were not queried, limiting the survey and its resulting data to the most needy and troubled within immigrant groups.18

  Laughlin’s target for the survey data was the 1924 legislative session. This was when temporary immigration quotas, enacted under Johnson’s baton in 1921, were scheduled to be revised. Those restrictive quotas had calculated the percentages of the foreign born nation-by-nation, as enumerated by the 1910 census, and then limited each nation’s new annual immigration to only 3 percent of that number. This had the effect of turning America’s demographic clock back to 1910. But to eugenicists, this restrictive quota was not restrictive enough. Laughlin and his colleagues wanted to tum the clock back to 1890, before mass influxes from Eastern and Southern Europe had begun. Laughlin’s study of “Racial and Diagnostic Records of State Institutions” would statistically prove that certain racial and national types were criminalistic and amoral by genetic nature.19

  But the hundreds of state hospitals, prisons and other institutions spread across the United States all saw their residents’ ancestries through different eyes using different terminology. To guide institutions in standardizing their responses, Laughlin circulated a supplemental Congressional publication entitled “Classification Standards to be Followed in Preparing Data for the Schedule ‘Racial and Diagnostic Records of Inmates of State Institutions.’” His title, “Expert Eugenics Agent,” was printed on the cover. The booklet listed sixty-five racial classifications to be employed. Classification #15 was German Jew, #16 was Polish Jew, #17 was Russian Jew, #18 was Spanish-American (Indian), #19 was Spanish-American (White), #25 was North Italian, #26 was South Italian, #29 was Russian, #30 was Polish (Polack), #61 was Mountain White, #62 was American Yankee, #63 was American Southerner, and #64 was Middle West American. Crimes to be classified for genetic purposes included several dozen categories ranging from homicide and arson to driving reck-lessly, disorderly conduct, and cond
ucting business under an assumed name. The data collected would all go into one mammoth Mendelian database to help set race-based immigration quotas.20

  The Carnegie Institution was no bystander to Laughlin’s operation. Laughlin regularly kept Carnegie president John Merriam briefed on the special Congressional privileges and testing regimens placed at the disposal of the eugenics movement. Merriam authorized Carnegie statistician J. Arthur Harris to validate the reliability of the data Laughlin would offer Congress. However, Laughlin’s derogatory raceological assertions were now becoming more public, and Merriam feared that his views would not be popular with America’s vocal minorities.21

  In November of 1922, Laughlin’s statistics-filled presentation to Congress was published as “Analysis of America’s Modern Melting Pot.” It contained copious racial and ethnic denigrations. Johnson declared that the entire session would be published officially with the pejorative subtitle “Analysis of the Metal and Dross in America’s Modern Melting Pot.” The dross was the human waste in American society. Laughlin’s testimony insisted, “Particularly in the field of insanity, the statistics indicate that America, during the last few years, has been a dumping ground for the mentally unstable inhabitants of other countries.”22

  During his testimony about the melting pot, Laughlin told the House, “The logical conclusion is that the differences in institutional ratios, by races and nativity groups… represents real differences in social values, which represent, in turn, real differences in the inborn values of the family stocks from which the particular inmates have sprung. These degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood.” Laughlin asked for authority to conduct additional racial studies of “Japanese and Chinese… Indians… [and] Negroes.” He appended a special statistical qualification for Jews, explaining, “The Jews are not treated as a separate nation, but are accredited to their respective countries of birth.” As such, he urged a separate “study of the Jew as immigrant with special reference to numbers and assimilation. “23