Boston Brahmins traced their families back to the Mayflower. New York’s upper crust was dubbed by Edith Wharton as the “tribe”. They were fabulously wealthy trust fund babies who attended Harvard, Yale or Princeton. They set a glittering path between their vast country estates, their townhomes, academic appointments and government service.
Yet in the early 1900’s these trust fund babies were deeply worried. Their cozy world was being invaded by immigrants who didn’t look like them or speak American English. Between 1890 and 1910, over 11 million European immigrants arrived, an average of 550,000 per year. (By comparison, about 1.3 million immigrants arrived in the European Union in 2015 before the door slammed shut.)
The new arrivals came from Italy, Eastern Europe and Russia with different religious practices, clothing and food. The trust fund babies obsessed on the notion that America would be destroyed before the new immigrants were assimilated. They searched for a solution to protect white Protestant America.
Science had the answer. It started with Gregor Mendel, a monk who spent seven years studying pea plants. Mendel realized that he could predict the flower color of offspring based on the flower color of the parent plants. Around the same time, Charles Darwin theorized about evolution. Voila! Genetic studies were born.
As the Boston Brahmins and their New York cousins lounged around their gilded homes fretting about their endangered good life, they began thinking about how to make better people. What if people could be screened to eliminate undesirable traits like diseases, mental defects, epilepsy or physical ugliness? And so was born the science of eugenics.
The Americans drew inspiration from Francis Galton, an English researcher whose family was like Downton Abbey minus the aristocratic title. Galton used his Victorian upper crust social values to create scientific traits that could be used to determine who should be allowed to have babies. Two American devotees expanded on his research.
Charles Davenport was a bona fide scientist who trained a generation of American biologists, botanists and geneticists. Unfortunately, he was also a racist. Henry Laughlin was an opportunistic wanna-be academic who summarized eugenic research into lengthy numerical charts. His charts provided the scientific proof for Congress in 1921 and 1924 when it voted to severely limit immigration to ensure America’s racial purity.
Davenport and Laughlin created The Trait Book which eventually had 3,500 attributes (hair and eye color) and defects (history of disease, harelip, speech impediment). Each trait was assigned a number which was then aggregated to assign a final score for each individual. The final score determined whether a person was desirable or undesirable. Tall blonds had the most desirable traits while short, dark-haired Italians, Eastern Europeans and Jews had the least desirable traits.
The eugenicists argued that only people with desirable traits should be allowed to have children. By controlling who could reproduce, all the undesirable traits would eventually be bred out of American society leaving it with a pure (white) race.
Eugenics was a social and political crowd pleaser before fading into disrepute and disgrace. The virulent racism of many leaders of the movement repelled Americans, particularly those who weren’t tall and blond. Nazi Germany adopted eugenics in their quest for a racially pure society. As the truth leaked out of Berlin, American eugenicists became an embarrassment and lost their research funding.
Eugenics is an example of how research can be twisted into bad science by morally questionable behavior. Eugenics may be gone but it raised ethical questions that are still with us.
Today science has mapped the entire human genome, allowing us to correct inheritable diseases. What if a new batch of obsessed racists misuses that research to create designer babies who can become a master race? Every medical ethicist loses sleep on that question.
To learn more about this fascinating social and political movement, see The Guarded Gate, by Daniel Okrent (2019). The book is not the easiest to read due to the subject matter, the cast of characters and the author’s propensity for flitting between story lines.
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