SUFFOLK CLOSEUP "LI And The Legacy Of Eugenics:Station Of Intolerance"

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

 Before the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Suffolk County became “the global center of the eugenics movement,” eugenics had roots in England, relates Mark A. Torres in his forthcoming book, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.”

He notes how in 1851 in England, Herbert Spencer penned a book “Social Statics” that “first publicized the phrase survival of the fittest.” And “less than a decade later, Charles Darwin popularized the phrase survival of the fittest in his seminal work “The Origin of the Species.” Yet another Englishman, Francis Galton, a cousin of Darwin, then authored a book “Hereditary Genus” in which he “suggested that the breeding of the best people would evolve mankind into a super species…”

“The founding fathers of eugenics in England,” writes Torres, “had formulated the theoretical concepts of human hereditary research. It was only a matter of time before it caught on in the United States, and of the many individuals and groups who helped establish eugenics from theory to practice, none was more influential than an American biologist Charles Davenport who was directly responsible for the establishment and operation of the Eugenics Records Office, which for more than three decades would serve as the eugenics capital of the world.”

From the Eugenics Records Office, part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in Suffolk County, “Davenport also led the movement that would ultimately springboard eugenics into a global phenomenon.”

“In 1902, the Carnegie Institute of Washington was founded, and Davenport immediately began to lobby the group to invest in the establishment of a center for genetics at Cold Spring Harbor,” Torres continues. And “the forces were beginning to align for the formation of the American eugenics movement, and Charles Davenport would be at the center of it all.”

Davenport “developed a plan to collect hereditary information from a multitude of families in order to prove that evolution worked in human beings the way it worked in animals and plants.”

In the end, eugenics was thoroughly discredited, as Torres relates in the last chapter of his book, titled “A Reckoning.”

“The rise of eugenics was not a random phenomenon,” the chapter begins. “Eugenics presented as a cutting-edge science driven by utopian ideals for the betterment of humanity. It was buoyed by a continuous flow of financial support from wealthy and progressive-minded donors and fully embraced by the leading thinkers of the time before settling into the very fabric of the United States and societies throughout the world. Ultimately, eugenics was discredited as a science and exposed as nothing more than a social philosophy used as a slogan for intolerance, racism, bigotry and classism. It was essentially a means for the wealthy to assert their dominance over the poor, which has been an unfortunate and recurring theme throughout all of human history.”

“It took many years for the scientific and corporate communities to accept responsibility for their part in eugenics,” says Torres.

Indeed, it was only in 2020 that the president of the Carnegie Institution for Science “issued a formal apology for the group’s support for eugenics.” The statement: “There is no excuse, then or now, for our institution’s previous willingness to empower researchers who sought to pervert scientific inquiry to justify their own racist and ableist prejudices. Our support of eugenics made us complicit in driving decades of brutal and unconscionable actions by the governments in the United States and around the world.”

Only last year did the American Society of Human Genetics issue a statement declaring that it “seeks to reckon with, and sincerely apologizes for, its involvement in and silence of the misuse of human genetics to justify and contribute to injustice in all forms,” he continues.

Torres closes his book by stating: “In the nearly three decades of its operation, the Eugenics Record Office served as the ultimate vessel to fortify and amplify the pseudoscience called eugenics and transformed it into a global phenomenon. Everything that emanated from this facility served to dominate the poor, the weak and the sick, who were deemed the defectives of society and subject them to mass levels of institutionalization, sterilization, immigration restrictions and even euthanasia. Later, in the hands of the Nazi regime, eugenics was openly used as a scientific excuse to torture and murder a multitude of innocent human beings.”

“The Eugenics Record Office and those who directly operated, controlled and funded it are fully deserving of the blame for the entire eugenics movement and the dire atrocities committed under the banner of this false science,” he says. “While we must continue to honor the seemingly countless victims, we must also provide public discourse and educational programs on the subject, for if we fail to do so, we may be in danger of repeating this dark history.”

Between the start and end of his book, Torres documents the atrocities committed in the name of eugenics—and how an institution in Suffolk County was the base for it.

He names the names—prominent names—of those in government and business who  pushed eugenics. “All movements require the support and participation of people with strong public influence” and “there were few greater endorsements than that of president of the United States of America. In fact,” he notes, “every president” of the U.S. from Theodore Roosevelt to Herbert Hoover “was a member of a eugenics organization, publicly endorsed eugenic laws, or signed eugenic legislation without voicing opposition.” As for Roosevelt, whose ”summer White House” at Sagamore Hill was a “mere six miles from the ERO facility in Cold Spring Harbor,” Roosevelt wrote a letter to Davenport asserting: “Someday we will realize that the prime duty of the good citizen of the right type [is] to leave his blood behind him in the world; that that we have no business to perpetuate citizens of the wrong type.” 

He tells of John Harvey Kellogg, a doctor who with his brother founded the Kellogg company that developed corn flakes becoming a “staunch ally of Charles Davenport and a full-fledged eugenicist….In 1914, he organized the First Race Betterment Foundation Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, with the stated purpose of establishing the foundations for the creation of a super race.”

Torres writes of how eugenics was embraced by academia in the U.S. “During much of the early to mid-twentieth century, eugenics was taught….at the most prestigious academic institutions in the country, including Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Yale.”

And the book includes how “Native American reservations on Long Island were targeted” by Davenport and his followers including what is now the Shinnecock Indian Nation and the Unkechaug Reservation in Mastic. He tells of how Dr. John Strong, the author of numerous books on Native Americans and long a professor of history at Southampton College, said “the eugenically biased data derived from these studies was used by the [U.S.] Bureau of Indian Affairs…to the detriment of the Native American population.”

More next week on this must-read book—which will be out on January 21.

Karl Grossman is a veteran investigative reporter and columnist, the winner of numerous awards for his work and a member of the L.I. Journalism Hall of Fame. He is a professor of journalism at SUNY at Old Westbury and the author of six books.