on Eugenics opened at the Cecil Hotel in London. The location was symbolic. With nearly eight hundred rooms and a vast, monolithic façade overlooking the Thames, the Cecil was Europe’s largest, if not grandest, hotel—a site typically reserved for diplomatic or national events. Luminaries from twelve countries and diverse disciplines descended on the hotel to attend the conference: Winston Churchill; Lord Balfour; the lord mayor of London; the chief justice; Alexander Graham Bell; Charles Eliot, the president of Harvard University; William Osler, professor of medicine at Oxford; August Weismann, the embryologist. Darwin’s son Leonard Darwin presided over the meeting; Karl Pearson worked closely with Darwin on the program. Visitors—having walked through the domed, marble-hemmed entrance lobby, where a framed picture of Galton’s pedigree was prominently displayed—were treated to talks on genetic manipulations to increase the average height of children, on the inheritance of epilepsy, on the mating patterns of alcoholics, and on the genetic nature of criminality.
Two presentations, among all, stood out in their particularly chilling fervor. The first was an enthusiastic and precise exhibit by the Germans endorsing “race hygiene”—a grim premonition of times to come. Alfred Ploetz, a physician, scientist, and ardent proponent of the race-hygiene theory, gave an impassioned talk about launching a racial-cleansing effort in Germany. The second presentation—even larger in its scope and ambition—was presented by the American contingent. If eugenics was becoming a cottage industry in Germany, it was already a full-fledged national operation in America. The father of the American movement was the patrician Harvard-trained zoologist Charles Davenport, who had founded a eugenics-focused research center and laboratory—the Eugenics Record Office—in 1910. Davenport’s 1911 book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, was the movement’s bible; it was also widely assigned as a textbook of genetics in colleges across the nation.
Davenport did not attend the 1912 meeting, but his protégé Bleecker Van Wagenen, the young president of the American Breeders’ Association, gave a rousing presentation. Unlike the Europeans, still mired in theory and speculation, Van Wagenen’s talk was all Yankee practicality. He spoke glowingly about the operational efforts to eliminate “defective strains” in America. Confinement centers—“colonies”—for the genetically unfit were already planned. Committees had already been formed to consider the sterilization of unfit men and women—epileptics, criminals, deaf-mutes, the feebleminded, those with eye defects, bone deformities, dwarfism, schizophrenia, manic depression, or insanity.
“Nearly ten percent of the total population . . . are of inferior blood,” Van Wagenen suggested, and “they are totally unfitted to become the parents of useful citizens. . . . In eight of the states of the Union, there are laws authorizing or requiring sterilization.” In “Pennsylvania, Kansas, Idaho, Virginia . . . there have been sterilized a considerable number of individuals. . . . Many thousands of sterilization operations have been performed by surgeons in both private and institutional practice. As a rule, these operations have been for purely pathological reasons, and it has been found difficult to obtain authentic records of the more remote effects of these operations.”
“We endeavor to keep track of those who are discharged and receive reports from time to time,” the general superintendent for the California State hospital concluded cheerfully in 1912. “We have found no ill effects.”
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I. Indeed, the mean height of the sons of exceptionally tall fathers tended to be slightly lower than the father’s height—and closer to the population’s average—as if an invisible force were always dragging extreme features toward the center. This discovery—called regression to the mean—would have a powerful effect on the science of measurement and the concept of variance. It would be Galton’s most important contribution to statistics.
“Three Generations of Imbeciles Is Enough”
If we enable the weak and the deformed to live and to propagate their kind, we face the prospect of a genetic twilight. But if we let them die or suffer when we can save or help them, we face the certainty of a moral twilight.
—Theodosius Grigorievich Dobzhansky, Heredity and the Nature of Man
And from deformed [parents] deformed [offspring] come to be, just as lame come to be from lame and blind from blind, and in general they resemble often the features that are against nature, and have inborn signs such as growths and scars. Some of such features have even been transmitted through three [generations].
—Aristotle, History of Animals
In the spring of 1920, Emmett Adaline Buck—Emma for short—was brought to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia. Her husband, Frank Buck, a tin worker, had either bolted from home or died in an