SUFFOLK CLOSEUP Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory's Legacy Of Eugenics

SUFFOLK CLOSEUP

By Karl Grossman

 The Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private research facility in Suffolk County, was pivotal to the spread of eugenics through the United States and world as detailed in a forthcoming book by Mark A. Torres, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.”

Ultimately discredited as a pseudoscience, eugenics “aimed to develop a master race of human beings,” notes Torres. 

The Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory operated from 1910 to 1939—and pushed eugenics throughout the U.S. and the world. 

On its website, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in a section labeled its “History” has an essay on a “historical perspective on genetics” headlined: “Good genes, bad science.”  It begins relating how in the early 1900s “the bogus concept of hereditary criminality and a made-up disease known as feeblemindedness became part of some scientists’ so-called studies of genetics. Ideas such as these were the core of the American eugenics movement….in which science got mixed up with racial dogma.”

“Many of Hitler’s beliefs were directly inspired by the eugenics books he read while he was in prison,” writes Torres. (Hitler was jailed for the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, an attempted coup in Munich led by members of his Nazi Party. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to five years in jail and served nine months.) Hitler “admired,” Torres says, “the policies of the American eugenics program, including the efforts that led to the passage of strict immigration laws in the United States.” 

In 1933, Hitler “seized power,” and “eugenics presented Hitler with a…globally accepted science to support his sinister plans. In July 1933, Germany enacted the ‘Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny,’ the first eugenic sterilization law in the country.” A publication put out by the Eugenics Record Office, Eugenical News, featured the law “proudly,” says Torres.

Soon “German eugenicists began to formulate definitions of Jewishness. Hitler insisted that Jews of all degrees to be identified, including those with at least one drop of Jewish blood.” The “methodology was fully inspired by the family pedigree system created at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory more than two decades before,” writes Torres. 

With the massive sending of Jews and others to death camps, Hitler “directed…doctors at different concentration camps to conduct a wide range of eugenics-based research.”

The book includes a chapter on the impact of eugenic advocates on U.S. immigration law, titled “’Scientific Racism’ and the Anti-Immigration Movement.” Torres writes about how Harry Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from its inception to closure, sent a report to the U.S. Congress in 1922 labeling certain immigrants “human waste.” Writes Torres: “Page after page, the report was rife with racial and ethnic slurs and detailed statistics regarding feeblemindedness, insanity, crime, various forms of illness and deformity and ‘all types of social inadequacy.’”

Laughlin testified before Congress in 1922 asserting: “These degeneracies and hereditary handicaps are inherent in the blood.” 

Before Congress again, in 1924, “elaborate charts” were displayed by Laughlin “promoting the link between the so-called inferior races and immoral conduct.” 

“As a direct result of Laughlin’s tireless efforts, which were driven by his eugenic ideals coupled with lawmakers’ growing racial animus against immigrants, the House and Senate passed the Immigration Act of 1924,” writes Torres. “The law imposed even stricter quotas on immigrants from all non-Nordic nations. For example, the quota on immigration from Italy was dramatically reduced from forty-two thousand per year to just four thousand.”

The Eugenics Record Office was also busy “in local communities on Long Island and throughout New York State. In August 1921, a group of neighboring families on Babylon Road in Commack were subjected to eugenic studies.” It got involved in psychiatric hospitals in Suffolk: Kings Park Psychiatric Center, Central Islip State and Pilgrim State in Brentwood.  

Laws were passed in the U.S. to mandate sterilization based on the claims of eugenics.  Torres focuses on a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court 8-to-1 decision upholding a “request by the State of Virginia to forcefully sterilize nineteen-year-old Carrie Buck based on a eugenics diagnosis.” She was determined to be “feebleminded.” The ruling, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. “has never been reversed,” writes Torres, himself an attorney. “It is an enduring legacy left by the Eugenics Record Office and a direct byproduct of the ERO’s work. In the wake of the decision, the number of sterilizations across the country began to grow exponentially.” 

The decision, says Torres, “was so impactful that, in November 1946, the Nazi doctors who were on trial in Nuremberg cited it in defense of the atrocities they had committed during the Second World War.” Among the doctors convicted and executed for crimes against humanity for the Nazi “euthanasia program” was Karl Brandt who was also “the personal physician of Adolph Hitler.”

Torres’ book will be out on June 21 and is being published by The History Press.

In an interview, Torres emphasized how eugenics “was not a fringe movement. It was the rage of the age. It was widely embraced.”

Regarding education, his book cites a 1916 ERO report stating that 254 colleges taught courses on eugenics. He writes: “At Boston University, eugenics was taught to students at the School of Theology.” NYU, Columbia and Barnard “each offered a eugenics-based course….Other New York colleges that taught eugenics” listed include Adelphi, Cornell, Colgate, Farmingdale, Fordham, Syracuse University and Vassar. 

Also, “eugenics was a regularly offered course in the biology department at San Francisco State University from 1916 to 1951.”

The year 1951 was decades after the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory was shut down. In recent years, what eugenics is about has continued as an issue. 

In 2007, Dr. James Watson, chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and a Nobel Prize winner, was “relieved” of his post after saying in an interview with the London Times that there was an intelligence gap between Blacks and whites and this accounted for many of the problems in Africa. In 2019, the laboratory stripped Watson of titles he still held including chancellor emeritus after he appeared on a PBS documentary “American Masters: Decoding Watson,” and asked if he changed his views, he said: “No. Not at all….there’s a difference on the average between Blacks and whites on I.Q tests. I would say the difference is…genetic.”

Last month, Laura Helmuth, editor-in-chief of Scientific American, resigned after complaints about comments she made including, online, that “Trump’s racist rants are straight-up eugenics.” An article in the magazine in October scored Trump’s statements about immigrants, its headline saying they were in the “Language of Eugenics.” Helmuth from 2016 to 2018 was president of the National Association of Science Writers.

And this month, New York magazine featured an article headed: “A Rift in the Family, My in-laws gave me a book by a eugenicist. Our relationship is over.” 

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.

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.