Eugenics — “It was the rage of the age”

The Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private research laboratory, is located on Long Island, New York. Its outrageous history is detailed in a forthcoming book, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.”

Jews have been a major target of eugenics. Hitler was an avid believer in it.

Indeed, the book by Mark A. Torres, an attorney as well as an author, starts with the 1946 trial in Nuremberg, Germany: United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al.

Brandt, who was “the personal physician of Adolph Hitler,” he relates, and other doctors were put on trial in the aftermath of World War II for crimes against humanity for the Nazi “euthanasia program.”

“Brandt and six others were convicted, sentenced to death and executed. Astonishingly, the information that Brandt and his cohorts so desperately relied on for their defense was not derived from Nazi propaganda,” writes Torres. “Instead, their sources came directly from a report published in 1914 by the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.”

“What connection,” asks Torres, “did an administrative office four thousand miles away in a small town on Long Island have with the Nazi regime that plotted and carried out the systematic torture and murder of millions of human beings based on race and disability?”

“The connection was eugenics: the pseudoscience that dominated much of the twentieth century and was premised on the racist, classist and misguided belief that mental, physical and behavioral traits of human beings were all inheritable and must be eliminated to save the human race.”

“Many of Hitler’s beliefs were directly inspired by the eugenics books he read while he was in prison,” says Torres. (Hitler was jailed for leading in 1923 the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup by members of his Nazi Party. Convicted of treason, he was sentenced to five years in jail and served nine months.) Hitler “admired,” Torres continues, “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, he “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.”

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

Most Long Island residents know little about the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, although it is off a main east-west highway, Route 25A, on 110 acres, and currently employs more than a thousand people.

I’ve received an advance copy of Torres’ book—which will be out on January 21. Its publisher is The History Press.

It begins with an “Author’s Note” in which Torres explains that his book “focuses on investigating the local origins, characters and stratagems employed by the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor which, for nearly three decades, served as the global headquarters of the eugenics movement.”

He relates how his investigative “journey led me to study the archival records at numerous facilities, including the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Archives…the Rockefeller Archive in Sleepy Hollow, New York; the American Philosophical Institute in Philadelphia; Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri; and the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland…”

“The information I amassed from these meticulously preserved archives provided sharp insight into the origins, inspiration and machinations of the American eugenics movement, while never losing focus on the fact that it all emanated from a small hamlet on Long Island.”

“Through it all, I came to understand how eugenics became such an accepted and normalized part of society in the United States and throughout the world during the twentieth century,” writes Torres.

He goes on about how the book includes “the downfall of the Eugenics Record Office” (part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory between 1910 and 1939) “and the ultimate discrediting of eugenics as a scientific field. The final section also explores the enduring and cruel legacy of eugenics.”

“The quest to perfect our species was not a new one,” Torres goes on. “However, the problem with such aspirations: Who decides the standards of perfection? And, more importantly, what is to be done with those who fall below the arbitrarily created standards.”

“Although it was promoted as cutting-edge science, eugenics was a social philosophy that aimed to develop a master race of human beings with the purest blood and the most desirable hereditary traits,” the book continues.

A “component” of eugenics was “’negative eugenics’ which aimed to discourage or outright prevent the reproduction of people who were declared genetically unfit. Negative genetics was driven by the premise that society would dramatically improve if the millions of Americans who were deemed mentally, physically or morally undesirable were ‘eliminated from the human stock’ by means of segregation, sterilization and even euthanasia. This included the ‘feebleminded,’ paupers, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the deformed, the congenitally weak, the blind and the deaf. While human heredity would not begin to be understood by scientists until the 1960s, the social prejudice and practice of eugenics dominated scientific objectivity for more than half a century.”

“The legacy of eugenics is undeniably cruel and enduring,” writes Torres. “In the United States alone, more than sixty thousand forced sterilizations were carried out in more than half the states….A multitude of people throughout the country were classified as undesirable and confined to psychiatric centers during their childbearing years. A bevy of marriage restriction and eugenic sterilization laws were enacted for the purpose of preventing the procreation of the unfit. Eugenically driven immigration laws barring the entry of immigrants from many countries into the United States endured for years. Globally, eugenics thrived in countries like Argentina, Canada, China, Japan and Norway, and Nazi Germany used it to commit unimaginable atrocities. In some ways, the ideals of eugenics persist today.”

“Despite its global appeal,” Torres goes on, “eugenics was truly made in America, and the epicenter of the movement was not found in some laboratory or government facility. Instead, the science was developed at the Eugenics Record Office…in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.”

Before the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory became “the global center of the eugenics movement,” eugenics had roots in England, relates Torres.

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 Record Office, part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “Davenport also led the movement that would ultimately springboard eugenics into a global phenomenon.”

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.”

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.”

And only in 2023 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 horrors committed in the name of eugenics—and how an institution on Long Island was the base for it.

He names the names—prominent names—of those in government and business in the U.S. 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.”

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. Among the results was the destruction of thousands of people’s ability to pass on their ‘defective’ genes through forces sterilization programs.”

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.”

Laughlin’s “staunch efforts as a liaison between eugenics and U.S. immigration policy,” Torres continues, “adversely affected the lives the lives of millions of immigrants seeking entry into the United States. This included many Jews who were denied entry to the country and were left to suffer at the hands of the Nazi regime.”

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

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.” He cites a 1916 ERO report stating that 254 colleges taught courses about eugenics.

Also, he notes, “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 Records 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 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, 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 Donald Trump’s statements about immigrants, its headline “Trump’s Racist Rants against Immigrants Hide under 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 headlined: “A Rift in the Family, My in-laws gave me a book by a eugenicist. Our relationship is over.”