Harry H. Laughlin

DSc, Princeton University

Credit where credit is due: Harry Laughlin did not invent the idea of sterilizing “undesirables” to improve the human gene pool. He just provided an authoritative pseudoscientific framework for it, then labored strenuously to see sterilization laws enacted across the country and around the world. No, he didn’t invent it, but you had to admit it: sterilization was his shtick.

He was a latecomer to eugenics. Born and educated in the Iowa boonies, he became a schoolteacher, then a principal, then a school-superintendent-cum-teacher-of-future-farmers. An interest in breeding animals evolved, naturally enough, into an interest in breeding human beings, which led him, in 1907, at the somewhat advanced age of twenty-seven, to contact leading human-breeding theorist Charles Davenport, founder of the Station for Experimental Evolution, and its devil-spawn, the Eugenics Records Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. Laughlin must have been a hell of a letter writer, at least when it came to letters about eugenics: Davenport invited him to come east and run the Records Office.

Eugenics remained Laughlin’s calling for the rest of his life. Somehow he found the time to pick up a DSc—equivalent to a PhD of today—from Princeton in cytology, or cell biology, when he was thirty-seven. This conferred a measure of magisterial authority on his “findings.” And it surely helped pave the way toward the honorary degree the University of Heidelberg bestowed upon him in 1936. Hmm. That place and time rings a bell. What was going on in Germany in 1936?

But we’re jumping ahead of ourselves. Twelve American states had compulsory sterilization laws on the books before Laughlin came along, but few states had the stomach to enforce them. Laughlin wanted to fix this. His work involved, among other things, producing a prodigious amount of writing on eugenics, sterilization, immigration, and the promotion of eugenics through the sterilization of immigrants. His chef d’oeuvre, the snappily titled Eugenical Sterilization in the United States (Psychopathic Laboratory of the Municipal Court of Chicago,* 1922), established him as a star in his field. By producing what passed for statistical proof that certain groups of people were simply “unfit” to reproduce—and by crafting an example of a law for compulsory sterilization^*—he empowered another twelve states to pass enforceable sterilization laws.

Virginia passed a eugenics law in 1924 and cracked down posthaste. The first person up for sterilization—a woman characterized by the state as the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring”^*—naturally sued. Colleagues of Laughlin testified against her, and Laughlin himself, who never met her, presented a deposition asserting that she belonged to “the shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.” The state won, the case went to the Supreme Court, the court went with Laughlin, and the woman was sterilized. She was one of more than 60,000 citizens of the US who were rendered incapable of reproducing over the course of the sterilization craze, which lasted into the 1970s. The 1970s!

Dr. Laughlin, we should add, also had a hand in the criminalization of miscegenation. And in restricting the flow of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe (because they were considered far more likely to be “socially inadequate” than the fine people of northern and western Europe). And we’d be shirking our responsibility if we didn’t mention that he wrote “a eugenical comedy in four acts” for the entertainment of his coworkers. And that his sterilization laws attracted a worldwide audience.

Which brings us back to Germany.

In 1933 the Nazi party, in one of its first legislative actions, passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring.* It was based on Laughlin’s pioneering legal model, imported from the US along with the racist fake science of William Z. Ripley and Madison Grant. The Nazis sterilized more than 350,000 people over the twelve years of their reign, which must have made Laughlin’s heart-cockles feel nice and toasty. And that honorary University of Heidelberg degree for his epic work on the “science of racial cleansing”: icing on the sachertorte.

But as details of Nazi lunacy filtered into the American media mainstream, it became apparent that improving the gene pool, racial cleansing, racial hygiene, sterilization, whatever you call it, was not as well loved by the American public as it was by the nation’s small cadre of highly placed racists. Support for this branch of putative scientific research plummeted, and by 1939 funding had dried up and the Eugenics Records Office was no more.

One last note. In his spare time, Harry Laughlin devoted considerable energy to thinking about, writing about, and agitating for the establishment of a world government. The primary goal: to prevent the intermixing of the races. Naturally, in his vision he and like-minded Ivy-bred technocrats were to be in charge of the world.