H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.: Eugenics Anthology, #2

By A.E. Samaan

     H.H. Laughlin was crucial for the Nazi's crusade to breed a "master race." This American positioned himself to have a significant effect on the world's population. During his career Laughlin:

• Wrote the "Model Eugenical Law" copied by the Nazis to draft the Nuremberg racial decrees.
• Appointed as an "expert" witness for the U.S. Congress when the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act was passed. The 1924 Act would prevent Jewish refugees from reaching the safety of U.S. shores during The Holocaust.
• Provided the "scientific" basis for the 1927 Supreme Court case of Buck v. Bell that made "eugenic sterilization" legal in the United States. Over 80,000 Americans were sterilized against their will as a consequence.
• Defended Hitler's Nuremberg decrees as "scientifically" sound in the American press in order to dispel the criticism of Nazi eugenics.
• Created the political organization that ensured that "scientific racialism" would survive the negative taint of The Holocaust and be instrumental in the Jim Crow era of American legislative racism.

     H.H. Laughlin was given an honorary degree from Heidelberg University by Hitler's government, specifically for these accomplishments. Yet, no one has ever written a book on Laughlin. Despite the vast number of books about The Holocaust, Laughlin is mostly unknown outside of academic circles.

 

     H.H. Laughlin was funded by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. This author was given permission to survey Laughlin's archived correspondence at the institution. These documents had not been seen for decades. They are the backbone of this book as they evidence Laughlin's collaboration with Hitler's henchmen. The story told by these long-forgotten documents intensifies at the juncture when the Carnegie leadership came to the horrible realization that one of its most recognized scientists was supporting Hitler's regime.

 

AUTHOR'S NOTE: 
     A preliminary version of this book was circulated amongst academic circles and other interested parties as an Advanced Readers Copy (A.R.C.) in 2015. This version is a part the Eugenics Anthology seven-book series that is currently being completed by A.E. Samaan. 

 

ONGOING ORIGINAL RESEARCH:

• Truman State University, MO - Pickler Memorial Library – Special Collections – Harry Hamilton Laughlin.
• American Philosophical Society, PA – Genetics and Eugenics Collection. 
• California Institute of Technology, CA –  Register of the E. S. Gosney Papers.
• Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library, Cold Spring Harbor, NY.
• Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C. - Eugenics Records Office Files.
• Columbia University, NY – Rare Book & Manuscripts, Butler Library -Telford Taylor Papers.
• United States National Archives, Washington D.C. – Records About the Holocaust and War Crimes.
• University of Iowa  - Charles F. Wennerstrum Papers.
• United States Library of Congress, Washington D.C. – Robert H. Jackson Papers.
• The Margaret Sanger Papers Project.
• Chicago Tribune Archives.
• New York Times Article Archive.

PERSONAL CONVERSATIONS AS PRIMARY SOURCES:

• Ken Gemes, Birkbeck University of London
• Garland Allen, Washington University of St. Louis - Foreword Author.
• Professor Jonathan Marks, University of North Carolina
• Paul Lombardo, Georgia State University.
• Stefan Kühl, University of Bielefeld. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Library Without Walls, LLC
• Release date: Nov 16, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393995401

A.E. Samaan

A.E. Samaan is a CMATH Champion at the Center for Medicine After The Holocaust. He has spent nearly two decades scouring the archives that hold the papers of prominent Americans and Britons that sympathized or outright collaborated with the Nazis. The Eugenics Anthology book series is the culmination of this work.

Book preview

H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

Eugenics Anthology, Volume 2

A.E. Samaan

Published by Library Without Walls, LLC, 2020.

While every precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher assumes no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein.

H.H. LAUGHLIN: AMERICAN SCIENTIST. AMERICAN PROGRESSIVE. NAZI COLLABORATOR.

First edition. November 16, 2020.

Copyright © 2020 A.E. Samaan.

ISBN: 978-1393995401

Written by A.E. Samaan.

For my mother. Who left this world too young. And whose guiding hand I perceive to this day. A.E. Samaan

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DEDICATION

For my mother,

Who left this world too young,

And whose guiding hand I perceive to this day.

~~

www.AESamaan.com

H.H. LAUGHLIN: American Scientist. American Progressive. Nazi Collaborator.

Eugenics Anthology - Vol. #2

Copyright© A.E. Samaan, 2020.

Published Through: Library Without Walls, LLC.

Cover concept by A.E. Samaan with Mariana Garcia Pizá.

Title typography design by A.E. Samaan.

Horse swastika design by A.E. Samaan in conjunction with Mike Rodrigues.

Interior graphics, design, and images by A.E. Samaan.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-0-9964163-8-2 (Library Without Walls, LLC.)

ISBN-10: 0-9964163-8-2

ISBN (Kindle): 978-0-9964163-6-8

ISBN (EPUB): 978-0-9964163-5-1

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020935020

A.E. SAMAAN*, SAN DIEGO, CA

Samaan, A.E., 1968 –

~~~~~~

First circulated within academic circles and other interested parties as an Advanced Readers Copy (A.R.C.) in 2015 ISBN: 978-9964163-0-6

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1. Eugenics - The Holocaust - History - World War II 2. Law - Political and social views. 3. Nazi Germany - History - 20th century.  4. Ethics, Evolutionary.  5. National Socialism - philosophy. 6. United States - History - jurisprudence - race laws - anti-miscegenation - segregation. 7. American Civil Rights - History - civil rights legislation. 8. Darwin, Charles, 1809-1882 - Evolutionary theory - Political and social views.

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For more information, visit www.HHLaughlin.com

For more information on the author, visit www.AESamaan.com

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H.H. LAUGHLIN

***

American Progressive.

American Scientist.

Nazi Collaborator.

Vol. II

Eugenics Anthology

www.EugenicsAnthology.com

CENTER FOR MEDICINE AFTER THE HOLOCAUST:

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Although German violations of basic medical ethics are well documented, they are virtually unknown by today’s students in the health sciences. It’s rarely discussed that American eugenicists played a critical role in the development of German racial hygiene policies. Although healthcare in Western democracies is arguably the best in the world today, we should pause and reflect upon the similarities to German medicine ethics in the 1930s. There is a resurgence of interest in eugenics and biological determinism following the success of the Human Genome Project, violating medical ethics. Controversy persists regarding abortion, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, embryonic stem cell research, assisted suicide, and euthanasia. The original Hippocratic Oath is in disrepute. Healthcare ethics is being formulated at a centralized, national level.

A close up of a logo Description automatically generated The mission of the Center for Medicine after the Holocaust (CMATH) is to challenge doctors, nurses, and bioscientists to personally confront the medical ethics of the Holocaust and apply that knowledge to contemporary practice and research, being mindful of the Hippocratic Oath with every step. CMATH is concerned that healthcare personnel, like all human beings, have the capacity to believe they are doing good when they are actually doing harm.

By studying the past, we hope to provide knowledge for today that will prevent the repetition of previous errors and lead to wisdom in future doctors, nurses, bioscientists, and healthcare policy makers. If the best physicians, nurses, and scientists of the early 20th century could sacrifice their patients for utopian goals, can we be certain that we will not do the same.

EVOLUTION OF THE COVER ART - WHY THE HORSE SWASTIKA?

      I am also a photographer and artist in addition to an investigative historian.  Having a cover design that is consistent throughout the series was important to me. The design and layout of this cover is an extrapolation of the cover for the first book of the series, From a ‘Race of Masters’ to a ‘Master Race’: 1948 to 1848. 

    Most importantly, the horse-swastika conveys an important theme about the International eugenics movement and particularly Dr. Laughlin. Most, if not all eugenicists believed human beings to be nothing more than animals. Eugenics was a way of perfecting humanity, and in Laughlin’s case, a way of breeding human thoroughbreds.  Adolf Hitler called his thoroughbreds a master race, and every other eugenic-minded zealot had a variation on the theme. Laughlin himself started as an obscure animal breeder in rural Midwest and would have remained that way if not for his political contacts.

A.E. Samaan is a CMATH Champion.

For more information, visit AESamaan.com

"No consistent eugenist can be a ‘Laisser Faire’

unless he throws up the game in despair.

He must interfere, interfere, interfere!"

~Sydney Webb~

As quoted on page 117 of:The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought, Marouf A. Hasain, Jr., 1996.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS:

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This book is the culmination of many years of original research, either by scouring through the various archives or by hunting down old and forgotten books and publications. It would not have been possible without the help and support from the archivists at the following institutions that have preserved the documentation of the eugenics movement. Archives at San Diego State University, University of Southern California, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, American Philosophical Society, and our National Archives were of greater use than I initially imagined. However, the following institutions and archivists were truly indispensable:

Truman University – Amanda Langendoerfer

Cal. Tech University – Charlotte (Shelley) Erwin

Certainly, this book would not have been possible without the help and generosity of John Strom. Mr. Strom is the archivist at the Carnegie Institution in Washington D.C. who hunted down the institution’s files on the Eugenics Record Office and Harry H. Laughlin. Mr. Strom informed me that these files had not been sourced for decades. They had been misplaced and Mr. Strom was kind enough to take the time to hunt them down. More importantly, he also took the time to digitize them and pull them out of obscurity.

Of course, no work of history is possible without the help and guidance of those that came before you. The famous bioethicist, Professor Paul Lombardo generously gave his time to answer my questions. This author is particularly thankful to Professor Garland Allen, who is now retired, but which himself scoured through previously unorganized and forgotten files of the Eugenics Records Office and the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory both at Truman University and the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. Professor Allen provided much-valued encouragement and guidance throughout the writing of the 2015 A.R.C. version of this book and through this formalized 2020 version.

A.E. Samaan

Dec. 2020

THE EUGENICS ANTHOLOGY:

The puzzle pieces are still being shuffled. I finished the A.R.C. version of From a ‘Race of Masters’ to a ‘Master Race’: 1948 to 1848, knowing that there remained a lot of critically important history still hiding in the archives of the eugenics movement. Pivotal figureheads are yet unknown to anyone that is not an expert in the movement. There is enough of this material to write an entire book series on the subject, and yet, remain in uncharted history. This Eugenics Anthology seeks to uncover forgotten facts and place them into context. Historians conducting original research do not have the luxury to anticipate the contents as we are not privy to all the puzzle pieces when we embark upon original research. I have therefore employed an unusual approach. I have started with the paperback, and I won't be publishing formal first editions until the series is complete, when all the puzzle pieces are uncovered and in place.

This peculiar approach can be attributed to my experience in the paper manufacturing and publishing industry. I am part of a generation that was born into age-old publishing technology, which had improved in efficiency, but not substantially changed since the Industrial Revolution. I had the opportunity of working with old Heidelberg letterpresses and binding machinery. I had the pleasure of typesetting pages letter by letter, a process that I did not sufficiently appreciate at the time. I learned how to publish a tome with physical printing plates and the annoyance of printing inks. Needless to say, the process I was taught for the printing of a book was an expensive and tedious process, and in many ways, more than a skill and probably closer to an art. Naturally, I was that much more astonished to see the first direct-to-press printing press and delighted when on-demand digital publishing first emerged.

Technology has upended an entire industry. Today, the only thing standing between an author’s manuscript and a bound tome is a click of a mouse. The author can easily create all the graphics, cover design, and text formatting, a process that used to span several industries and professions. Paperback books are now very easy to make. What used to be a ceremonious event is now not any more ceremonious than ordering underpants from an online service. As such, it seems to me that the traditional publishing process needs to be reversed. For the above reasons, the paperback versions of this Eugenics Anthology will go first, and the hardbound book after, once the Anthology is complete. The hardbound will be ceremoniously reserved for the final edition, perfected for all posterity.

In 20/20 hindsight, this approach accomplished its purpose. I published the 2015 A.R.C. version of this book for the purpose of circulating it amongst interested parties and reaching out to fellow researchers. Much to my pleasant surprise, the initial printing garnered the attention of several figures in academia, namely Professor Ken Gemes of Birkbeck University of London, Garland Allen of Washington University of St. Louis, and Sheldon Rubenfeld, M.D. of Medicine After the Holocaust. I am eternally thankful for their support and encouragement. It is primarily because of them that I find the motivation to persist upon the path of completing this series, groping for the puzzle pieces without the benefit of the final image within sight. Printing a temporary paperback as each milestone is reached, provides a much-needed sense of accomplishment along the path of this decades-long project, as well as allowing me to share the findings with colleagues as I go along.

I am not part of academia, and many of my accomplishments are a result of questioning prevailing wisdom and standards. The methodology described here is but one aspect of how this affects my writing. Technology has also radically changed academic research just as drastically as it changed the paper and publishing industry. This is another concept that is difficult to explain to the younger generations. What was once scarcely accessible to the general public through the archives and journals, is now available to everyone. The clear majority of people that will come across this book will do so through search engines, not libraries, journals, or even a physical copy of the book itself. More often than not, the researcher of the 21st Century will see only the page that results from a Google Books query, and not have ready or even manageable access to the index or citation pages at the end of a physical copy of the book. It is for this reason that I have documented sources in-line or in footnotes on the same page whenever possible; for the ease of the online researcher and casual internet query. I have endeavored to be careful not to disrupt continuity and readability, if at all possible while employing this method of source documentation.

A.E. Samaan, San Diego, CA. – November 30th, 2019

Table of Contents

Foreword

Introduction

A Primer on Eugenics:

Chapter 1:  The Formative Years

A SHORT BIO OF H.H. LAUGHLIN

ONE-WORLD EUGENIC UTOPIA

1898 - TIMING IS EVERYTHING

1903 - AMERICAN BREEDERS’ ASSOCIATION

1910 - THE STATION FOR EXPERIMENTAL EVOLUTION

Chapter 2:  Conceiving a Eugenic Eden

1914 - LEGAL ASPECTS OF STERILIZATION

1919 - STATISTICAL DIRECTORY OF STATE INSTITUTIONS

1920 - BIOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF IMMIGRATION

1922 - MODEL EUGENICAL LAW

1923 - ANALYSIS OF AMERICA’S MODERN MELTING POT

1923 - ERECTING THE GATES ABROAD

Chapter 3:  Erecting the Foundations of a Eugenic Eden

1924 - IMMIGRATION RESTRICTION ACT

1924 - RACIAL INTEGRITY ACT

1925 - INTL. FEDERATION OF EUGENIC ORGANIZATIONS

1927 - BUCK v. BELL

1928 - STERILIZING THE GREATEST GENERATION.

1928 - EUGENICAL ASPECTS OF DEPORTATION

Chapter 4:  In the Regime’s Shadow

1933 - A CENTURY OF PROGRESS

1933 - EUGENICAL NEWS

1933 - TOURING HITLER’S EUGENIC UTOPIA

1934 - PAN AMERICAN CONGRESS

1935 - POPULATION CONGRESS IN BERLIN

1935 - CARNEGIE’S FIRST ADVISORY COMMITTEE

1935 - A REORIENTATION OF THE PROBLEM

1936 - CONNECTICUT STUDY

1936 - HEIDELBERG DEGREE

1937 - ERBKRANK

1938 - THOROUGHBRED STUDY

Chapter 5:  The Proximate Consequences of Utopian Aspirations

1938 - CONQUEST BY IMMIGRATION

1939 - CARNEGIE’S PATIENCE RUNS OUT

1944 -IN PARI DELICTO

1950-1970 - THE PIONEER FUND AND ITS ENDURING LEGACY

1970-PRESENT - FORGETTING OR FOREBODING . . . ?

Bibliography & Notes:

Foreword

Eugenics was an international movement during the first four decades of the twentieth century, aimed at improving the hereditary make-up of the human population by restricting the reproductive rights of those individuals deemed to be biologically unfit. The term eugenics (meaning well or truly" born) originated with Francis Galton (1822-1911), an English geographer and statistician, and cousin of naturalist and evolutionary theorist, Charles Darwin (1809-1882). Galton claimed that modern society had counteracted the effects of natural selection, which, if unhampered, eliminated degenerate and disabled individuals. Modern medicine and humanitarian mores, he pointed out, as technically advanced and noble as they might be, were creating a major problem since they allowed the biologically unfit to survive and even out-reproduce the fit that created a financial and social burden on present and future generations. The scientific, social, and political movement based around eugenics that was to develop in the early twentieth century gained considerable support and prestige from the concurrent rise of the new Mendelian genetics, and thus could lay claim to be based on a new, cutting-edge science.

As a self-proclaimed scientific and social movement, eugenics was international in scope, encompassing all the major western, industrialized countries, including the United States, Britain, France, Scandinavia, and Germany. While the outcome of eugenics practices is associated in most people’s minds with Germany, especially after the rise of power of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP, or Nazis) in 1933, less well-known is that it was in the United States that eugenics got one of its earliest starts and achieved its greatest legislative successes prior to the Nazis. Instrumental in this success was American-born advocate, Harry Hamilton Laughlin (1880-1943), initially an agricultural instructor at Northeast Missouri State Normal School (Kirksville, MO) and later appointed by Charles B. Davenport (1866-1944), one of the most well-known biologists in the United States, as Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. In that position, Laughlin came to play a central role in the promotion of eugenics in the United States and abroad. Yet, surprisingly, few people outside of academic historians of the eugenics movement have heard of him. It is thus highly significant, and important for our understanding of this movement, and particularly the United States’ critical role in promoting it around the world, that A. E. Samaan has undertaken this highly detailed and comprehensive study of Laughlin’s life and work. Through Samaan’s portrayal, we get a more complete understanding of the great breadth of the movement, its many scientific pretensions, and its socio-political ideologies, as well as its international acceptance and practical application. Laughlin was a microcosm of the international eugenics movement as a whole, and as Samaan illustrates so well, it is through this window that we can come to see the many facets of the movement that might otherwise appear disconnected and marginal.

In the generation following World War II, the historical development of eugenics, and its association with the Holocaust in Germany, was shoved under the rug by both the scientific community and historians. Although many German biologists and medical scientists were involved in developing eugenics both before, but especially after, the Nazis seized power in 1933, the topic got little attention even in the famous Nüremberg  Doctors Trials in 1945-1946. Clearly, collective guilt and the desire to present a more purified, apolitical picture of science fed into the long period of silence about the eugenics movement and the participation of a large number of scientists in its promotion in the first four decades of the twentieth century. The term itself was purged from the titles of journals, books, institutions, and professional societies that had been its strongest outlets and public face prior to the war. Scientists, particularly geneticists, as well as historians (of Germany and of the history of science), if they mentioned eugenics at all, relegated it to a minor, bizarre corner of twentieth-century history, the product of twisted minds and perverse misapplication of science. Despite his importance in promoting eugenics, Harry Laughlin received scant attention even among historians of American science.

However, in the era starting with the early 1960s, eugenics began to come under closer scrutiny and emerged, albeit somewhat slowly, from its shadowy past. The first book devoted to the history of eugenics was published by historian Mark Haller: Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1963). And while Haller noted the connection between eugenics in the United States and Nazi Germany, the details of the relationship, especially how the American movement, through the work of Laughlin, served as a model for its Nazi counterpart, went largely unexplored. Over the past half-century since Haller’s work, the history of eugenics, in both the United States and on the international scene, has been the focus of a mushrooming scholarly enterprise, some even referring to it as an academic industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, a variety of studies, both as articles in historically-oriented journals and as academic books, began to appear and reveal the depths to which the scientific community – specifically biologists and geneticists – had come to expand and promote eugenics. Books on eugenics in specific countries, starting with Kenneth Ludmerer’s Genetics and American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), Angus McLaren’s Our Own Master Race: Eugenics in Canada, 1885-1945 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1990) or William Schneider’s Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-Century France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1990), began to explore the technical as well as the political side of eugenics in specific cultural and political contexts. Comparative studies such as Daniel Kevels’ In the Name of Eugenics (Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985) focusing on the American and British movements, Mark B. Adams’ edited volume, The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), Gunnar Broberg and Nils Roll-Hansen’s Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 1996) and more recently Diane Paul, John Stenhouse and Hamish Spencer’s edited collection, Eugenics at the Edges of Empire: New Zealand, Australia, Canada and South Africa (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), all show the common core as well as the sometimes significant national variations in eugenic ideology and practice.

It is not surprising that the German eugenics movement, especially with its direct connection to the Holocaust, was even more shunned by historians and biologists, especially in Germany itself, in the decades following World War II. That the forefront of biological science under the Nazis had been intricately involved in justifying mass sterilization and murder was more than an embarrassment, it was a subliminal realization of direct culpability, and academics shied away from investigating the topic in Germany until well into the 1980s. One of the first to tackle the issue head-on was Robert Proctor’s Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), which exposed the degree to which the German medical community had joined in and cooperated with the Nazi’s promotion of eugenics as an aspect of public health and cleansing the germplasm of inferior individuals and racial groups, such as Jews and Slavs. In a similar vein, British historian Paul Weindling offered a major investigation of the development of eugenic thought in Germany: Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), providing a stunning exposé of the tradition of eugenic thinking in Germany, starting a generation before the rediscovery of Mendel in 1900. The work of other historians and biologists inside Germany, such as geneticist-turned-historian Benno Müller-Hill’s Murderous Science (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), and outside, American historian of science Kristie Macrackis in her book, Surviving the Swastika: Scientific Research in Nazi Germany (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), showed how biologists compromised their work to fit into the Nazi research (and funding) agenda. The ethical issues in medicine were explored in the volume edited by historians Frank Nicosia and Jonathan Heuener, Medicine and Medical Ethics in Nazi Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2002). Sheila Weiss’ Race, Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987), emphasized how the German citizenry was persuaded to follow eugenic solutions – sterilization and euthanasia – because of its inherent logic in solving social problems at their origin, that is, prevention of defective and undesirables from being born in the first place.

Most tellingly, the connection between United States and German eugenics was fully exposed by German historian Stefan Kühl in his revealing The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Kühl shows clearly how German eugenicists (also called racial hygienists) looked toward, and admired the research and successful legislative programs put into place by Harry Laughlin and other eugenicists in the United States. Around the same time, to finally bring into focus the full extent to which the most prestigious German scientific establishment had cooperated fully with the Nazi regime’s eugenics programs, the Max-Planck Institute (the new name for the pre-World War II Kaiser-Wilhelm Institute) opened its archives and organized a series of conferences, resulting in a wide variety of publications that acknowledged the role of this powerful and prestigious organization in promoting eugenics and human research projects on twins and other concentration camp populations. As disturbing as it was for the German (and American) conscience for all this to come to the surface, by the turn of the millennium, much of the infrastructure of eugenics as it had developed in the twentieth century was exposed to the public, as well as the academic community, to view and begin to grasp how such developments could have begun and expanded to an ultimately violent and inhumane conclusion.

The above list of works on eugenics is not meant to be definitive, as numerous other books, articles, documentaries, an exhibit on eugenics in the National Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., and on-line sources (the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, for example, has an on-line eugenics archive) are all now readily available. The point here is to show that despite the long silence about eugenics following World War II, the world has become more aware of eugenics as a historical movement that had dire consequences. An important part of this reawakening is, as A.E. Samaan has indicated, to make sure it does not happen again.

Given the long silence after World War II, we may wonder why scholars and others (including journalists) suddenly seemed to develop an interest in the history of eugenics from the 1960s onward. Interestingly, this renewal occurred concurrently with the rise of the civil rights, anti-war, and liberation movements in the United States and around the world. These movements began to sensitize the academic community as well as the general public to racial inequalities and oppression that still persisted from the American civil war to the liberation of colonial countries like South Africa from imperialist and racist control (as in the overt racist policy of Apartheid). At the same time, in reaction to the civil rights’ and liberation movements’ agitation for equality, a new generation of genetic theories supporting a scientific basis for racial and ethnic inequalities began to appear. The most outlandish and controversial proposal appeared in 1969 in educational psychologist Arthur Jensen’s article, How Much Can We Boost I.Q. and Scholastic Achievement? in the prestigious Harvard Educational Review. The answer was that, despite the introduction of supplementary and compensatory education programs in the United States during the preceding decade, no significant change had been achieved. According to Jensen’s analysis, the differences between white and black students’ performance on standard I.Q. tests (one standard deviation, or approximately 15 I.Q. points) had persisted for generations and was thus most likely due to genetic differences between the racial groups. Such claims sounded so similar to the older eugenic arguments that historians, sociologists, and a number of geneticists saw the re-emergence of eugenic type thinking, dressed this time in slightly different scientific garb. By the 1970s, then, the academic community had become sensitized to the consequences of remaining silent in the face of a resurgence of scientific arguments for inequality, that is, what came to be called scientific racism.  They began to use the lessons of history to challenge the resurgence of scientific racism as methodologically and conceptually flawed and highly dangerous to human dignity and freedom.

While most of the histories of eugenics appearing from the 1970s and 1980s on, dealt to one degree or another with Harry Laughlin as a visible player, surprisingly, no one other than a single unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (by Frances Hassencahl at Case Western Reserve University, 1970) has focused on him as a central figure in organizing and spreading the word about eugenics as a rational and scientific solution to social and economic problems. This is the important task that A. E. Samaan has taken up. Consulting all the relevant published, unpublished, and archival sources, Samaan has exposed more clearly than anyone else the wide variety of eugenics activities in which Laughlin engaged throughout his career. Influenced early on by the utopianism of H.G. Wells (1866-1946) and other Fabian Socialists in Britain, he was enamored by the concept of a One-World Government, central planning, and scientific breeding in the rapid expansion of industrial agriculture in the early twentieth century. In his eugenic work, he directed scientific research into human heredity, especially of degenerative physical and mental conditions, wrote and lobbied for legislation on compulsory sterilization, immigration restriction, and anti-miscegenation laws, supported genetic theories of racial categorization, testified as a scientific expert in legal cases such as the infamous Buck v Bell case in the United States (1925), testing the constitutionality of forced sterilization; he organized and participated in international eugenic meetings, designed exhibits for such public spaces as the American Museum of Natural History (in New York), founded several eugenics societies and a research organization in the United States, wrote analyses of thoroughbred horse breeding (which he compared to methods that should be applied to humans), and supported the Nazi eugenics movement as a part of Adolf Hitler’s racial state. For his work on eugenic sterilization and immigration restriction, the Nazi government awarded him an honorary M.D. degree from the University of Heidelberg on the occasion of its 550th anniversary in 1936.

In addition to a biographical treatment of Laughlin’s career, Samaan has also placed him and the eugenics movement in their broad economic and social context, namely in what is known in the United States as the Progressive Era or elsewhere (Britain and Germany) as  Industrial Efficiency. He presents the historical background (roughly 1880s-1940s) when industrialization was developing rapidly, and when the prevailing ideology of laissez-faire capitalism was being replaced by various forms of central planning and governmental regulation: monetary policy, production methods, imports and exports (or interstate commerce), banking operations, and standardization of everything from railroad gauges to intelligence tests. Behind it all was the guiding principle of efficiency, that is, streamlining policies to achieve the most effective output from the least amount of input. Laughlin and the eugenicists argued that to allow defective and degenerate individuals to reproduce, or enter the country through unrestricted immigration, and then have to deal with the social and economic problems they created, was the epitome of inefficiency. Preventing their birth or entry into the country in the first place would solve the problem at its source. It would save society millions and thus represent a rational, and efficient approach to managing society. This was the application of the Progressive ideology of industrial management to society at large. No one represented this mind-set more clearly than Harry Laughlin.

In addition to providing us with a convenient window through which to view eugenics a whole, Samaan’s portrait of Laughlin has illuminated not only new dimensions to his influence on the movement in the interwar and early post-war years, but also how it has extended in various forms down to the present. One of the most influential, and virulent, outcomes of Laughlin’s work was the formation of the Pioneer Fund in 1936, bankrolled by New York millionaire Wycliffe Draper (1891-1972), with Laughlin as its first President. The Pioneer fund, which still exists today, is dedicated to funding research into racial differences in intelligence, creativity, and other social factors that will help maintain the traditional racial hierarchy (whites at the top, blacks at the bottom). Since its founding, the pioneer Fund has supported the work of a variety of scientific racists, including Arthur Jensen, along with a crowd of white supremacists who fought school integration and busing in the United States in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. It also supported a group of European Aryan supremacists known as the Northern League and their journal, Mankind Quarterly, which continues to publish to this day articles on racial differences and inequalities. It is in tracing out all these various interconnections that Samaan’s book has offered such a rich, kaleidoscopic picture of the eugenics movement. This perspective helps us understand the wide appeal of eugenics in its hey-day: from ultra-conservatives to radical socialists and even communists.  It is a unique portrait of both a man and a widespread social movement.

Garland E. Allen

Washington University in St. Louis

March 8th, 2020

Introduction

"All this my friend, is offered without presuming to anticipate

what you alone are qualified to decide for yourself."

~ Thomas Jefferson

Lack of clarity is a direct cause of Holocaust denial. The seeds of Holocaust denial take root and prosper with misinformation. An incomplete history leaves a void. Every question that goes unanswered, every doubt that is left unaddressed, every discrepancy that is not provided an explanation is an opportunity for those that revel in the perversion of history. Clarity and transparency are, therefore, imperative, as they leave no room for denial theories that would deprive the victims of justice or rob the living of the truth.

Yet, there are critical portions of Holocaust history that remain unaddressed.  It seems that the missing pieces of history are typically where that history is politically inconvenient. We rightfully point to the debauchery of the Hitler regime but have been quite lethargic, or intentionally inactive, in pointing to the aid and support provided by prominent Britons and Americans. The first book of this series, From a ‘Race of Masters’ to a ‘Master Race’: 1948 to 1848, began to piece together the vast amount of support provided to Hitler’s henchmen by American and British scientists. However, there is one American scientist that was particularly important in fulfilling Hitler’s perverse aspirations, which seems to have been forgotten. In the silence of decades following The Holocaust. Harry H. Laughlin’s contributions to world history are listed here in order to demonstrate just how improbable it is for Laughlin’s story to have fallen by the wayside. Laughlin utilized his influence to:

The history of The Holocaust simply cannot be told with any thoroughness or accuracy without including Harry H. Laughlin, yet that is precisely what has happened. While lesser figures from Holocaust history have several books devoted to them, Laughlin has remained an obscure side topic. The unpublished dissertation by Frances Janet Hassencahl was written in 1970 for her Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University.¹ She wrote it primarily as an analysis of Laughlin’s effectiveness as a public speaker, but despite its limited scope, it has otherwise served to date as the authoritative work devoted to this pivotal figure. Other than that single dissertation, the most thorough academic paper on Laughlin was written by Garland Allen and Randall D. Bird.²

Dr. Laughlin should share in the infamy and disrepute of Dr. Mengele, the Nazi scientist known for conducting experiments on concentration camp inmates. Dr. Mengele was in truth following Dr. Laughlin’s lead. Mengele was the subordinate of Alfred Ploetz, Ernst Rüdin, and Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer in the Nazi hierarchy, and in turn, these German eugenicists were very much indebted to Leonard Darwin, Charles B. Davenport, Karl Pearson, and Laughlin. That no books are dedicated to the history of Laughlin or his influential associates, such as Charles B. Davenport, Leonard Darwin, Karl Pearson, Alfred Ploetz, Ernst Rüdin, and Otmar von Verschuer, while countless volumes are written about Dr. Mengele, illustrates just how incomplete Holocaust history truly is.

Dr. Laughlin’s history goes a long way to explain important questions about The Holocaust, namely how Hitler was able to draft so many laws in such a short period of time, and how Hitler was able to mostly manage international scrutiny of his racial policies in the pivotal decade between 1933 and 1943. In addition, Laughlin’s efforts significantly impacted both sides of the Atlantic. A full accounting of Laughlin’s influence on the American side of the equation begins to answer questions about US policy during The Holocaust, especially for those of the Jewish faith, who should be privy to the whole truth of why their ancestors were denied safe harbor.

Equity demands a full accounting, as it is only just to expose non-German collaborators. Leading up to The Holocaust, it was quite common to hear American and British eugenicists publicly call for racial purification and the systematic sterilization, segregation, or euthanasia of unwanted members of society. Eugenics was in the news frequently. The German, American, and British eugenicists vociferously celebrated the implementation of eugenic legislation (i.e. the infamous Nuremberg Laws) by National Socialist Germany, and these accomplishments were broadly documented by the mainline journalism of the time.

More to the point, the newspaper and magazine clippings prior to 1942 would indicate that Laughlin should have been remembered as an indispensable part of Holocaust history, and by extension, equally reviled as Hitler’s henchmen. Clearly, this is not what happened. The systematic and intentional distancing of American science from eugenics seems to begin when Hitler’s henchmen demonstrated what eugenic utopianism would truly look like in practice. The world winced in disgust, and the politically astute and politically connected eugenicists stopped advertising the parallels and commonalities between themselves and their German associates. Tracing the history from the Nuremberg Trials onwards demonstrates a pattern of evasion, a systematic and seemingly intentional side-stepping of the evidence of the very close relationships between prominent German scientists and their American and British counterparts.

These men were the product of academia, and much of their story remains within the walls of academia. Academia has done an inordinate amount of hand-wringing for their complicity in creating the atom bomb. Thus, their systematic distancing from eugenics rings uncomfortably hollow, especially in academia’s attempt to relegate eugenics to the status of pseudo-science after the fact. The full history of a figure central to eugenics such as Laughlin will reveal just how entrenched and accepted the science truly was.   

COLLAGE 1: Section of Hunter’s Civic Biology textbook written by Charles B. Davenport. Civic Biology was the textbook at the center of the Scopes’ Monkey Trial. Note the white-supremacist language of this section.

A Primer on Eugenics:

"At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries,

the civilised races of man will almost certainly exterminate,

and replace, the savage races throughout the world.

At the same time the anthropomorphous apes . . .

will no doubt be exterminated.

The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider,

for it will intervene between man in a more civilised state,

as we may hope, even than the Caucasian, and some ape as low as a baboon,

instead of as now between the negro or Australian and the gorilla."

- Charles Darwin - The Descent of Man (1871), Chap. VI, Pgs. 200-201

So what is eugenics? Even those well-versed in WWII history still misunderstand the ideology that was the impetus behind the crimes against humanity. Those contemporary to Hitler knew precisely what eugenics was and how central the science was to his regime. Yet, eugenics was an Anglo-American export to Germany, and not the other way around as is commonly depicted by popular accounts of The Holocaust. The general confusion about the science behind the murders began as American and British academic elites deliberately distanced the eugenics they practiced from the eugenics implemented by the Third Reich. The relationship was further blurred by the Nuremberg Trials. The prosecution at the Nuremberg Trials deliberately described the crimes as part of a military conspiracy, and not as the consequence of an ideology, a world-view, or creed that permeated all aspects of Hitler’s Third Reich. The Nuremberg Trials were, after all, military tribunals and were limited to presiding over crimes of a military nature. Thus, the prosecution at Nuremberg focused disproportionately on those cold water and high-altitude experiments conducted at the concentration camps, as they had been conducted for military research by the likes of Dr. Mengele. Yet, neither the high altitude nor the cold water experiments had anything to do with Hitler’s perverse fascination with breeding a master race. Despite the horrid nature of these experiments, they were a small handful of incidents compared to the mechanized and industrial scope of eugenic policy in Nazi Germany. To make matters worse, the military tribunal had no jurisdiction to sit in judgment on the German domestic policy that existed prior to the declaration of war, nor did the American military have the jurisdiction to sit in judgment over crimes that occurred in nations where the United States was not actively engaged in the war. This became a distinctly limiting factor after the coalition of nations that presided over the first Nuremberg Trial fell apart, and the German territories were divided between East and West along the footprint of what would later be the Berlin Wall. This demarcation is of some significance. The peak of Hitler’s genocidal campaign came after 1942 or 1943, yet the relevant policies and laws were put in place as soon as the regime came to power a decade earlier in 1933. This is a crucial point to make about the timeline and its relation to the jurisdictional limitations of the Nuremberg Trial. The ethnic cleansing campaign to breed a master race began as soon as the National Socialists amassed power in 1933. Thus, much of the early crimes against humanity fell outside of the jurisdiction allowed to the military tribunal. 

More to the point, one cannot understand The Holocaust without understanding the intentions, ideology, and mechanisms that were put in place in 1933. The eugenics movement may have come to a catastrophic crescendo with the Hitler regime, but the political movement, the world-view, the ideology, and the science that aspired to breed humans like prized horses began almost 100 years earlier. More poignantly, the ideology and those legal and governmental mechanisms of a eugenic world-view inevitably lead back to the British and American counterparts that Hitler’s scientists collaborated with.  Posterity must gain an understanding of the players that made eugenics a respectable scientific and political movement, as Hitler’s regime was able to evade wholesale condemnation in those critical years between 1933 and 1943 precisely because eugenics had gained international acceptance. As this book will evidence, Hitler’s infamous 1933 laws mimicked those already in place in the United States, Britain, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Canada. 

So what is this scientific and political movement that for 100 years aspired to breed humans like dogs or horses?  Eugenics is quite literally, as defined by its principal proponents, an attempt at directing evolution by controlling any aspect of human existence that affects human heredity. From its onset, Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin and the man credited with the creation of the science of eugenics, knew that the eugenic cause had to be observed with religious fervor and dedication. As the quote on the opening pages of this book illustrates, a eugenicist must intrude, intrude, intrude.  A vigilant control over anything and everything that affects the gene pool is essential to eugenics. Eugenic policies cannot allow for the individual to enjoy self-government or self-determination any more than a horse breeder can allow the animals to determine whom to breed with. One simply cannot breed humans like horses without imbuing the state with the level of control a farmer has over its livestock, not only controlling procreation, but also the diet, access to medical services, and living conditions. Garland Allen and Randall D. Bird explain how interest in animal breeding turned into an interest in breeding humans like animals:

Like many eugenicist, Laughlin was fascinated by animal breeding, and for a serious reason. He believed, through analogy, that the eugenicist was to humans what the agricultural breeder was to animals; a scientist using experimental procedures to perfect the species along desired ends. (The Papers of Harry Hamilton Laughlin, Garland Allen & Randall D. Bird, Annals of the History of Biology, Vol. 14, No. 2)

Popular culture has rightfully associated eugenics with ethnic cleansing and dystopian aspirations. However, at one point, it was accepted by the majority of the scientific community as Galton’s eugenics had emerged in conjunction with Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. It was not until after the horrid revelations of the death camps that eugenics was exposed as a vile belief system leading. Leading up to WWII, eugenics was regarded as the logical conclusion derived from Darwin’s theory of how sexual selection affected human evolution. Eugenics now seems to share infamy with other erroneous doctrines such as phrenology, but the general public is yet to understand exactly how pervasive eugenics truly was or how deeply it influenced not just the Third Reich, but comparatively benign governments in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada, England, and the United States.

More to the point of this book, it is important to quickly summarize what the eugenic cause entailed for those that preached its doctrines. Laughlin certainly understood eugenics to imply a nation-wide effort that necessitated the enforcement by an all-powerful state obsessed with the purity of its population. Laughlin and his fellow eugenicists understood how radical this concept truly was and declared war on not just traditional morality that prescribed treating humans like animals, but the founding notions of any government that based its laws on the belief that all men are created equal. The derision directed at the Declaration of Independence and Judeo-Christian values is prominent throughout their work, and their claims are herein juxtaposed against the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution and the Christian church as this was the arena the eugenicists chose to wage war upon.

A proper primer on eugenics necessitates an understanding of how eugenicists defined their science. The Laughlin files held at Truman University’s archives hold a two-page compendium of the definition of the science of eugenics by several of its key proponents. Much of it was taken from a paper by a Prof. Dr. Günther Just entitled "Bevölkerungspolitische Richtlinien" which was presented to the International Congress for Population Study that was held in Hitler’s Germany in 1935. The first definition is from Otto von Verschuer, the man whom the infamous Dr. Mengele answered to in the Nazi hierarchy:

O. von Verschuer: "The aim of eugenics (Rassenhygiene) is the cultivation of good hereditary qualities, and therefore, the preservation of hereditary soundness in the nation." (BOX: D-2-4:14, Laughlin Papers, Truman Univ. Archives, Special Collections)

Note that Otto von Verschuer’s definition is devoid of the overt anti-Semitism Hitler’s National Socialist regime is known for. This is what made the movement so dangerous, as it appealed to an otherwise educated group of intellectuals. These were scientists embarking on a project of directed evolution. Anti-Semitism dovetailed with eugenics because those that wanted to direct evolution believed in a racial hierarchy with respect to evolution, and these scientists regarded the Jewish population as being of a lower evolutionary value. Alfred Ploetz, one of the fathers of eugenics in Germany as well as one of the architects of the Third Reich’s eugenic legislation, is the next definition Laughlin quotes:

Alfred Ploetz: Eugenics (Rassenhygiene) is the endeavor to keep the species healthy and to develop its inborn qualities. (BOX: D-2-4:14, Laughlin Papers, Truman Univ. Archives, Special Collections)

Again, these are the seemingly benign words of a true-believer intent on redirecting human evolution, through the cold and dispassionate calculations of science, and should not be confused with the drunken bigotry of a lynch mob. Laughlin’s compendium also includes definitions from well-known American and British eugenicists like Havelock Ellis and C.W. Saleeby. Laughlin also provides four different definitions of the science of eugenics from Herman Lundborg. Lundborg was one of the premiere eugenicists from Sweden. In 1922, Lundborg was appointed as the head of Sweden’s eugenic governmental agency, the State Institute of Racial Biology. Some of his definitions are telling as to the nature of a society dedicated to breeding humans like horses, and willing to reorganize society towards this end:

H. Lundborg: Its (Racehygiene) aim and endeavor is to prevent the emergence and spreading of hereditary degeneracy and to organize social conditions so that future generations can best be equipped for their struggle for existence. This can best be achieved by a good mate-selection. (BOX: D-2-4:14, Laughlin Papers, Truman Univ. Archives, Special Collections)

This eugenics primer must also clarify that some of Galton’s devoted followers spoke of positive and negative eugenics in sporadic fashion, and that historians of the movement have since tried to split the movement and its proponents down these demarcation lines. Laughlin quotes C.W. Saleeby, who was an associate of Margaret Sanger and an early ideological head of her Birth Control movement. Saleeby provides an interesting dissection of eugenics and is quoted as having Galton’s approval to extend the concept of National Eugenics under three heads:

The last point is instrumental in revealing that eugenics was far more than just a human breeding project. Saleeby’s last point is important as it reveals why Hitler’s domestic policy went to the lengths it did to protect its prized gene pool. The Third Reich would implement some of the world’s first anti-smoking, anti-alcohol, and the most extensive campaign to stamp out known carcinogens such as food colorants. Controlling human heredity in order to direct evolution meant vigilantly guarding against anything and everything that would negatively affect the gene pool. Eugenics, as such, is not just a tool of totalitarianism. Eugenics, as it was conceived, could not be anything but totalitarian as it desired to control all aspects of society. German eugenicists reveled in Hitler coming to power as they knew his National Socialist (Nationalsozialist) form of government was willing to put the full force of government to coerce compulsory or preventive eugenic health initiatives.

This is also what makes the intentions of these scientists relevant today, as the motivation to legislate and micro-manage the lives of the population can hardly be said to be a thing of the past. Many of these compulsory health measures remain part of mainstream collectivist thought. Yet, they are the very mechanisms by which a ‘totalitarian’ form of government enacts its strangling control over a populace. Dystopias come in the guise of good intentions and are always the inevitable outcome of utopian aspirations. Case in point, before the term totalitarian was ever uttered, the young Adolf Hitler was dreaming up an Ideal State where everything would be planned for and provided for.³ These utopian sentiments later informed the expansive domestic policy of a hyper nationalized and socialized Germany under Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party. (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei)

Thus, Hitler’s National Socialism was a centrally-planned society by necessity, as one cannot breed a master race without total control over all aspects of society. A eugenic society by necessity is a centrally-planned society, and in many ways, centrally-planned economies tempt the necessity for eugenics. The centrally-planned societies of the Fordism and Taylorism era were focused on creating an efficiently orchestrated society with a collectivist focus on the