by Edwin Black
In 1909, Connecticut became the fourth state to adopt eugenic laws such as forced sterilization, building on the state’s 1895 marriage-restriction law and the 1907 Indiana sterilization statute. Connecticut’s sterilization-enabling law, short on text, was vague enough to allow ordinary staffers at two state hospitals for the insane, one at Middletown and one at Norwich, to just scrutinize a patient’s family tree in deciding whether the patient would be sterilized. The number of those actually sterilized was small, just about three per one hundred thousand citizens. But, the state’s impact on policy far exceeded its numbers. Indeed, in 1919, as mass-sterilization programs were contemplated for Connecticut residents, the surgical authority was expanded from the two designated sterilizing institutions to include the Mansfield State Training School and Hospital at Mansfield Depot. The 350-acre Mansfield facility was established to be a great processing center—but it never implemented some of its darker designs.
Eugenics coercively sterilized some sixty thousand Americans, barred the marriage of untold thousands, forcibly segregated many tens of thousands in “colonies,” and persecuted vast numbers of Americans in ways the world is still learning. In Connecticut, only 550–600 persons were forcibly sterilized, but hundreds of thousands more were slated for the coercive surgery before the plan was abandoned.
Eugenics would have been so much bizarre parlor talk had it not been for massive financing by corporate philanthropies, specifically the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad estate. They were in league with America’s most respected scientists hailing from such prestigious universities as Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. These academicians faked and twisted data to serve the racist aims of American eugenics. They considered Connecticut both an early epicenter for eugenic propaganda and a later test case for full-scale ethnic cleansing.
The Carnegie Institution literally invented the American movement by establishing a laboratory complex at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. This complex stockpiled millions of index cards on ordinary Americans of color, ethnicity, and economic disadvantage. The movement’s purpose: carefully plot the removal of entire families, full bloodlines, and indeed whole peoples.
Devotion to eugenics swelled with special fervor in Connecticut. Much of the spiritual guidance and political agitation for the American movement came from the American Eugenics Society (AES), based in New Haven, and its affiliate the Eugenics Research Association, based in Long Island. These organizations, which functioned as part of a closely-knit network, published racist eugenic newsletters and pseudoscientific journals, such as Eugenical News and Eugenics, and propagandized for the Nazis. While the AES was at all times a national eugenic organization, it was commonly dominated by Connecticut eugenicists. So, the state’s role was magnified.
In the late nineteenth century, prestigious local physicians, such as Dr. Henry M. Knight, his son Dr. George Knight, and other Knight family members in the medical profession, laid the foundation for the twentieth-century eugenics movement that would emerge. In 1858, the elder Henry Knight had helped found the Connecticut School for Imbeciles, arguing against wasting time and money educating the “students.” The Knights were among the earliest proponents of confinement colonies to forcibly incarcerate the so-called “feebleminded,” a never-defined, supposed mental class. They led the way in establishing the state’s epileptic asylum and then lobbied energetically to pass “An Act Concerning Crimes and Punishments,” which criminalized marriage for people with various disabilities. Through the efforts of such medical advocates as the Knight family, Connecticut passed its sterilization law in 1909, not in the name of bias but in the name of science.
Eugenic rallying calls were heard everywhere in Connecticut’s social worker elite. In 1910, Edwin A. Down, in his capacity as president of the Connecticut State Board of Charities, announced at the first annual state Conference of Charities and Corrections that the kindest “act of charity” society could show to an economically disadvantaged or “degenerate” person was to sterilize the individual. In 1934, Connecticut Congregationalist Pastor George Reid Andrews walked away from his pulpit to assume the AES presidency, averring he could save more people through eugenics, which had become his de facto religion. Pioneer German eugenicist Alfred Ploetz, the man who literally founded the concept of rassenhygeine, that is, Nazi eugenics, first studied racial genealogy in Meridian, Connecticut, before bringing his rabid ideology back to Germany and the Nazi Party.
Charles Davenport, the father of organized American eugenics and the movement’s scientific guru, was a Connecticut native. Davenport developed his earliest notions in the state’s intellectual and medical circles, constantly churning with eugenic fascination. Davenport went on to organize the triad of raceology agencies at Cold Spring Harbor sponsored by the Carnegie Institution. The three entities included the Station for Experimental Biology, the Eugenics Research Association, and the Eugenics Record Office. At Cold Spring Harbor, Davenport mentored his henchman Harry Laughlin, who functioned as superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, the nerve center crammed with dark brown floor-to-ceiling card files. Within those long drawers were collected endless personal records, from family trees to idle gossip. It was all assembled in a delusional attempt to create authentic family pedigrees that could be judged worthy or unworthy of continued existence on earth.
Congress had christened Laughlin a “federal eugenics agent” during immigration control hearings that helped establish the 1924 National Origins Act. As a consequence, Laughlin designed the ethnic and genetic formulas that eventually evolved into the Third Reich’s 1935 Nuremberg Race Laws. In 1937, he received an honorary Nazi degree from the University of Heidelberg for his contribution to Hitler’s war against the Jews. It was this man, haloed as a Carnegie Institution researcher, who almost single-handedly transformed Connecticut into a mini-Nazi eugenic state. Laughlin’s program came complete with concentration camps, de-citizenship laws, and a mass killing program designed to ethnically cleanse vast numbers of Americans.
The state’s walk toward Nazism began in late 1936, when Connecticut governor Wilbur Cross commissioned Laughlin as a Carnegie expert to undertake a “Survey of the Human Resources of Connecticut.” The purpose of the survey was to bring Nazi-style ethnic cleansing to Connecticut in an organized scientific fashion but devoid of the type of Brownshirt violence that so typified Nazi Germany. Obviously, Laughlin was the perfect choice. He was editor of Eugenical News, a leader of the AES, and America’s most accomplished authority on preparing government-backed elimination of unfit families.
Connecticut’s official report called upon the state’s 2,400 physicians to assume personal responsibility for “selection of an individual for sterilization under the state’s statutes, which govern this means of preventing future degeneracy… Thus when in social medicine the physician works for the elimination of human defect, he performs an invaluable service.” These ideas were incorporated into a formal public address that was presented to the Yale Medical School by the eugenic commission’s chairman, former Connecticut senator Frederick C. Walcott.
Connecticut officials placed much of their hopes on “physicians who specialize in diseases of the eye, the ear, on nervous or mental disorders, on the heart, the lungs, the digestive system, and upon crippled bodies.” The plan was to eliminate the family bloodlines of anyone who was sick. Indeed, special emphasis was placed on those with even the slightest vision problems. In that regard, the nation’s organized ophthalmologists had long promoted legislation to identify all those related to anyone with a vision problem so they could be rounded up, placed in camps, and their marriages prohibited or annulled. Ultimately, had the ophthalmologists been successful, anyone related to anyone with a vision problem would have been forcibly sterilized.
Connecticut’s survey of humans was to parallel similar biological surveys of “useful plant and animal life,” as its preamble makes clear. “Human weeds,” a term popularized by eugenicist Margar
et Sanger, were to be eradicated as diligently as garden weeds. Indeed, because eugenicists saw themselves as breeders and were encouraged by the US Department of Agriculture, they considered the human species as one to be pruned and cultivated, like any herd of cattle or field of corn. Eugenicists believed that crime, poverty, immorality, unchaste behavior, and other undesired traits were genetic and could not be stamped out unless the entire family was prevented from reproducing or otherwise eliminated from nature.
Laughlin was a stickler for minute details, which he generally organized with excruciating specificity. His ethnic cleansing program for Connecticut was not a mere outline, but rather a robustly sequenced point-by-point roadmap exhaustively enumerated in a massive five-volume report spanning hundreds of pages. It was all based on years of prior research that the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenic Record Office had quietly compiled on hundreds of Connecticut families and other Americans.
By the fall of 1938, the first facets of implementation had been rushed into effect by Connecticut officials.
Connecticut established twenty-one human cross-classifications to qualify its residents for normal life or eugenic treatment. Age, for example, was cross-classified by “Race Descent,” “Nativity and Citizenship,” and “Kin in Institutions.” Just being related to someone in an institution was a mark against your reproductive record. The same racial and family linkages were measured for intelligence, honesty, “decency,” and any criminal record. Even before the survey was undertaken, Laughlin’s proposal made clear that the targets were Negroes, Orientals, Mexicans, and others who had found their way into the United States.
In the period leading up to the October 1938 report, Laughlin had discreetly surveyed 160 towns in 8 counties, 46 town farms, 10 jails, 18 institutions, and many other population and residential dynamics. He also investigated 8 complete Connecticut families, generation by generation, as prime examples of undesirable bloodlines. Based on Laughlin’s first assessment, the state was spending 24.2 percent of its budget on “the care, maintenance, and treatment of its socially inadequate classes.”
The first 11,962 citizens selected to be sterilized were residents of penal institutions, unqualified for work, disabled, morally unacceptable, or otherwise “socially inadequate.” About two-thirds of those targeted were males. All were prioritized for eugenic action with one of three labels: Urgent, Less Urgent, or Undetermined. The grand total amounted to roughly 10 percent of the state’s populace, an approach in keeping with the classic eugenic drive to eliminate the “bottom tenth.” Color-coded cards—white, red, and blue—were readied for each citizen.
Laughlin’s goal was to sterilize approximately 175,000 Connecticut residents—or, once again, about 10 percent of the state’s population. The state’s eugenical laws did not require a court order, so eugenicists had a free hand. The Connecticut program emulated Hitler’s eugenical regime whereby doctors were required to denounce those citizens considered racially or medically “unfit.”
The plan’s most startling feature involved external and internal deportation. To save expense, large numbers of candidates would not be sterilized but simply thrown out of the state. Immigrants would be deported to their native countries. “Unfit” American citizens would be declared “aliens” in their own country. They would then be expelled to their family’s original ancestral locale. For example, an American adjudged an “unfit alien” might be traced generations back to Indiana, Virginia, Kentucky, Massachusetts, or North Carolina. That person and his entire family, under the guidelines, would be rounded up and deposited into the so-called “originating state.” The legal and biological justification for this action was set forth in report volume 1, on page 53, in section 12, entitled “The Intertown and Interstate Deportation of Socially Inadequate and Handicapped Person.”
In other words, the joint Carnegie Institution-Connecticut plan was to create domestic refugees or displaced persons in a fashion identical to that employed by the Nazis at that very moment in refugee-torn Europe. Just as in Germany, based upon the same ideals and principles, the unwanted would be stripped of their citizenship, and then declared “aliens” to be deported—somewhere. Legal precedents, according to Laughlin in the report, were based on Sec. 1690 of the 1930 Connecticut Revised Statutes, a section entitled “Deportation,” which called for paupers and other undesirables to be exiled from the state to their previous or ancestral locale.
Ultimately, so many people would be dumped into ancestral towns and states, creating so vast a social displacement problem, that concentration camps would be needed to handle the uprooted population. Property was to be seized to pay for the economic drain on the state. Once again, the process was a mirror image of the genocidal Nazi program implemented against Jews.
Page 56 of the report states, “If exile, or ‘encouraged emigration,’ or ‘dumping’ were no longer possible” due to the masses to be internally deported, American states that “now permit the production of certain types of human defectives and inadequates would be compelled to consider more seriously a practical means for the reduction of their supply.”
The next page itemized five special remedies for “population control.” These included segregation in camps, forced exile, sterilization, and marriage prohibition. Item 5 was entitled “Euthanasia.” Laughlin explained, “In some communities ‘mercy death’ has been advocated in certain extreme cases… but the modern American state has not yet worked out ‘due process of law’ nor has it yet decided on who should sit in judgment.” He went on to suggest, “The legality and protection finally found in the eugenical sterilization laws after twenty years of experimental legislation give some hope that a similarly sound basis for euthanasia might be worked out… for states or communities which desire it.” Inevitably, the concentration camps for deportees to be set up in North Carolina, Kentucky, Indiana, and other states of “defective” human origination were to be converted into eugenicide mills—that is, death camps. Whether these death camps were to be operated in Connecticut or the state receiving the expelled aliens was a detail to be worked out by “interstate treaties.” These “treaties” would be engineered by like-minded eugenic advocates in the legislatures of Connecticut and recipient states, such as North Carolina and Virginia, using the robust interstate cooperation model perfected during the quest to achieve mass sterilization. To that end, on page 66 in a section headed “Needed Researches,” project 8 “Euthanasia—Mercy Death,” the task was set forth: “compile and analyze all past and existing statues of all nations which bear upon the subject.”
During these same days, the Third Reich was considering a program, which was ultimately launched the next year, 1939, under the codename “T-4.” Under T-4, Nazi doctors gassed tens of thousands of so-called “defectives.” One of the nations Laughlin was always willing to proffer as a shining example in his deliberations and suggestions was Nazi Germany.
As Laughlin’s report to Connecticut’s governor trumpeted, “The elimination or reduction of members of degenerate human stocks” was the social imperative. Since the first years of the twentieth century, euthanasia had always been the official holy grail of the American eugenics movement. Gas was the preferred method. In 1906, the first eugenicide legislation was proposed in the Ohio legislature. Iowa also tried to pass such legistlation. In 1912, the Carnegie Institution, at the First International Eugenics Congress, held in London, established euthanasia as official doctrine within the movement. Creating the legal underpinnings for systematic extermination was a constant struggle for advocates.
Until euthanasia could be legalized, sterilization, segregation, and/or deportation would have to suffice. Connecticut officials wasted no time.
One Connecticut town, Rocky Hill, was selected as a model for biological surveillance. Nearly all of the town’s 2,190 citizens were registered and almost half fingerprinted. A proposed racial registration card for IBM technology was part of the state’s study. IBM had established a record as expert in deadly population co
ntrol, designing and executing Hitler’s efforts to identify Jews, find their assets, and deport them. Ironically, IBM’s Nazi technology was actually first tested by the company in a pilot program in Jamaica in 1928, five years before the Hitler regime. The Carnegie Institution’s 1928 Jamaica Race-Crossing Project introduced the race classification card that evolved into the SS card that IBM used in Germany. The Jamaica Race-Crossing Project was the first step in a plan to wipe out all black people on earth. Indeed, the American eugenics movement was less successful precisely because it lacked the punch-card technology that IBM so carefully developed for the Nazi eugenic and extermination campaigns.
Connecticut’s project was never implemented on the scope desired, not much beyond the first surveillance steps taken in Rocky Hill. Governor Cross lost his 1938 re-election bid. With Cross out of office, Connecticut cast aside Laughlin’s project. Just a few copies of the full secret report were ever circulated. State officials hoped no one would ever discover their plans.
North Carolina Confronts Its Genocide
Of the more than thirty American states that violated one of the most basic rights of their citizens—the right to procreate—few were as pernicious as North Carolina. Yet the nature of North Carolina’s history also illustrates the challenge of obtaining modern-day justice, even when the most energetic efforts are undertaken. The state has been on a decades-long collision course with its own campaign to eliminate the existence of a significant portion of its population. Most importantly, the crimes committed by the state in conjunction with the leading academic, scientific, judicial, legal, and medical authorities were never about just improving perceived conditions in North Carolina. Rather, it was always about the state doing its fair share to achieve international race purification. This meant close coordination, cooperation, and synchrony with the most virulent eugenic leaders around the world, from California to Connecticut to Nazi Germany. What North Carolina did was never a local transgression; it was part of a global aggression in pursuit of a master race.
