It was the rage of the age

Was Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a private research facility in Suffolk County, pivotal to the spread of eugenics through the United States and world?

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

The book, by Mark A. Torres, an attorney as well as an author, will be released by The History Press on Jan. 21. Torres also wrote the 2021 book “Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood,” an examination of the plight of migrant farmworkers on Long Island, published, too, by The History Press. 

Torres is general counsel of Teamsters Local 810, a union that covers Long Island, and as an attorney has long specialized in labor and employment law in federal and state courts. He is also a professor at Hofstra University. 

As an author, he excels at in-depth research. Earlier this year the Association of Public Historians of New York awarded Torres its Joseph F. Meany Award (named for former New York State Historian Joseph F. Meany, Jr.) for his book on migrant farmworker camps on Long Island.

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

I’ve received an advance copy of Torres’ book. It begins with an “Author’s Note” in which Torres explains: “True to my roots as an author of Long Island history, I have always strived to present topics from the oft-neglected local perspective. Thus, this book is not intended to merely serve as a broad retelling of the history of eugenics. Instead, it 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 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 writes. “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.”

Then the book 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,” and other doctors were put on trial in the aftermath of World War II for crimes against humanity, he relates, in connection with 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,” says 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.”

“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.”

“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 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—including 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.” 

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.”

On its website, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in a section labeled its “History” has an n 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.”

“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 leading in 1923 the Beer Hall Putsch, an attempted coup in Munich involving 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…The law also established approximately two hundred genetic courts and managed anyone suspected of having a genetic defect to be reported to the authorities.” A publication put out by the Eugenics Record Office, Eugenical News, featured the law “proudly.” 

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 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.”

“Over time, the world began to learn of the Nazis’ atrocities,” writes Torres. “In 1936, the Rockefeller Foundation finally became reluctant to fund any further eugenics-based programs, and nearly all funding ended when the fighting erupted in 1939. Unfortunately, Nazi eugenics programs had already benefited from the foundation’s funding, and the fully developed program continued throughout the war.”

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.”

In the U.S., laws were passed 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. “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 Eugenics Record Office activities also included research close to home, “in local communities on Long Island and throughout New York State.” It got involved with psychiatric institutions on Long Island including Kings Park Psychiatric Center, Central Islip State Hospital and Pilgrim State Hospital in Brentwood. 

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, both on Long Island. He tells of how Dr. John Strong, the author of numerous books on Native Americans and long a professor of history at Southampton College on Long Island, 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.”

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. He writes: “At Boston University, eugenics was taught to students at the School of Theology.” New York University, Columbia and Barnard “each offered a eugenics-based course….Other New York colleges that taught eugenics” that are listed include Adelphi, Cornell, Colgate, Farmingdale, Fordham, Syracuse University and Vassar. 

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 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.” 

To learn more about the origin and development of eugenics, visit the National Human Genome Research Institute.

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