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God and White Men at Yale
In the 1920s, leading thinkers—including the greatest
economist America ever produced—focused their efforts on eugenics,
preserving the Nordic stock, and the problem of “race suicide.”
May/June 2012
by Richard Conniff ’73
Richard Conniff ’73, a National Magazine Award winner, is the author, most recently, of The Species Seekers: Heroes, Fools, and the Mad Pursuit of Life on Earth.
On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major
speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in
Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had
died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of
so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from
breeding.”
In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to
Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their
reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22
children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too
lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son
and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This
“race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will
speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”
To prevent that, immigration from certain regions
needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race
to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally
under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit
and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose
its dominance.”
It was strong stuff, and from a seemingly impeccable
source. Irving Fisher ’88, ’91PhD, a dapper, balding
figure, with a white van dyke beard and rimless eyeglasses, was one of
America’s best-known scholars. The New York Times ran long,
flattering profiles about his work, and for years the Wall
Street Journal published “Fisher’s Weekly Index,” for tracking
market prices. The rich and powerful, including congressmen and presidents,
sought his advice.
And with good reason: even today, Fisher is widely
regarded as the greatest economist America has produced. He devised many of the
basic concepts for analyzing the modern financial system and explained them so
clearly that, at his death in 1947, the Harvard economics faculty en masse
would sign a letter saying, “No American has contributed more to the
advancement of his chosen subject.”
But Fisher was also a leading voice of the eugenics
movement, which aimed to improve human populations through carefully controlled
breeding. The aim, more precisely, was to build up the white northern European
population, and discourage all others. This agenda, as it found its way into
state laws, would mean evicting other Americans from their homes, depriving
them of the ability to have children, and locking them away in institutions.
Fisher didn’t merely lend his reputation to bigotry. He
made eugenics a major focus of his life and regarded it as a natural outgrowth
of his economics: “national vitality” depended on a productive citizenry, and
it was clear to him that healthy living and careful breeding were the best ways
to make the citizenry become more productive. To that end, he helped found the
Race Betterment Society; was an active member of the Eugenics Research
Association, a group of scholars in the field; and served as founding president
of the American Eugenics Society, which organized research, lobbying, and
propaganda for the movement.
Yale figured prominently in this work. The early
meetings of the AES took place in the Manhattan home of an influential friend
of Fisher’s from his college years, Madison Grant, Class of 1887. Other
university administrators, faculty, and alumni also played an active part, among
them the conservationist Gifford Pinchot ’89 and the explorer and geography
professor Ellsworth Huntington ’09PhD. The AES later
established its headquarters in offices overlooking the New Haven Green, at Elm
and Church Streets. In the years leading up to World War II, when it was
carefully downplaying the anti-Semitic character of the eugenics program in
Nazi Germany, the AES was housed on the Yale campus. The seminal text of the
movement was Madison Grant’s 1916 book, The Passing of the Great Race, which influenced Adolf Hitler himself.
In the early decades of the
twentieth century, eugenics “fell squarely in the mainstream of scientific and
popular culture,” according to Yale history professor Daniel Kevles, author of the 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics. Theodore Roosevelt popularized the term “race suicide,” for what he saw as the
dwindling of the old Anglo-American stock, and the young Winston Churchill
advocated sterilization and labor camps for “mental defectives.” Planned
Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger decried the proliferation of “human
weeds,” while progressive reformer
Havelock Ellis thought that getting the reproductive choices right would
require the sexual liberation of women.
Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined
the word “eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek for “of good birth.” But it
really
gained currency after 1900, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work
describing how different traits are inherited in pea plants—and
particularly after researchers demonstrated in 1907 that Mendelian
inheritance plays a role in eye color in humans, too.
Eugenicists inferred—incorrectly, as we now know—that
single genes, or “unit characters,” could determine feeblemindedness, insanity,
alcoholism, and even broad swaths of behavior like criminality. They also
believed that society could now use this knowledge to dramatically improve the
species. Huntington, the Yale geographer, described this as the fifth “most
momentous” discovery in human history, after tools, speech, fire, and writing.
For Fisher, likewise, it was the coming of an epoch: “We could make a new human
in a hundred years.”
By the late 1920s, 376
American colleges were offering courses in eugenics. The army of enthusiasts
included, at various times, the presidents of Yale, Harvard, Stanford, the
American Museum of Natural History, and the universities of Michigan,
Wisconsin, and California. State fairs also embraced the eugenic cause. Known
for celebrating grand champion sows and other masterworks of animal husbandry,
they now added a “human stock” section, where competitors vied for the blue
ribbon in the “Fitter Families” contest. A traveling display warned, “Some
people are born to be a burden on the rest,” above a light that flashed every
15 seconds to indicate that another “$100 of your money” had just gone “for the
care of a person with bad heredity.”
To help make their case, the eugenicists developed
elaborate genealogies showing how certain “unfit” families had spread
their
defective “germ plasm”—that is, their genes—through
the generations, at terrible cost to society. The true identities of
these
families were hidden behind fake names. But the genealogies were often
fake,
too, and the harsh-sounding pseudonyms like Jukes and Kallikak served as
an onomatopoeic way of getting people to feel, as Fisher did, “what
awful contamination can be saved the race by a wise application of
eugenics.”
Genealogies of
prominent Yale and Harvard men often served as a bracing and instructive
contrast. Fisher looked at the 1,394 descendants of Jonathan Edwards,
Class of
1720, and reported that “something like half have been public men or men
of
great distinction and good influence in the world.” This biologizing of
social superiority provoked one skeptic to publish a detailed account in
an
academic journal of how manic-depressive insanity ran through the
families of
Boston’s Brahmins.
Yale was “not luminously worse” than others in
perpetuating this “farrago of flawed science,” according to Kevles.
But it was bad enough. Proponents of eugenics included Yale president James R.
Angell, celebrated football coach Walter Camp ’80, primatologist Robert Yerkes,
and Yale medical school dean Milton Winternitz.
Stewart Paton, who pioneered mental health services for college students during
a two-year stint at Yale in the 1920s, was a
eugenicist. So was Rabbi Louis L. Mann, a lecturer at Yale, who told an
audience at a 1923 birth control conference that, even in ancient times, the
wise men of Israel had realized the necessity of checking the multiplication of
the unfit.
But though many scholars and statesmen embraced
eugenics, none, writes historian Annie L. Cot, “could rival Fisher, whose
struggles in the ranks of the eugenic movement were lifelong.”
For readers today, it is almost
impossible to browse through the eugenics literature from before World War II
without hearing intimations of Auschwitz in every line. It takes a continual
effort to keep in mind that they did not know about the Holocaust then. When
one early enthusiast declared that eugenics “is going to be a purifying conflagration some day,” no one understood how horrifically prophetic those words would later
sound.
Reading about Fisher, Huntington, and the rest, I felt
a predictable sense of loathing: these were despicable men. But in other parts
of their lives, even the worst of them was at times admirable, and I felt a
queasy sense of liking. This was illogical on a personal level. Their writing
was laced with animosity toward the wave of immigrants into the United States
after 1890—southern and eastern Europeans (mainly Italians and Jews, respectively),
yellow-peril Asians, and the drunken, misbegotten Irish. It was an era when a
Harvard anthropologist could lament “the flooding of this country with alien
scum.” Fisher spoke of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”
Under the pretext of science, the eugenicists were
proposing to preserve “Nordic” hegemony by breeding out my own Irish and
Italian stock, among others. So why liking? Partly, it’s because the idea of
the white Anglo-Saxon gentry prattling about their own superiority has become a
stock joke (“Too damned funny, old bean”). Ellsworth Huntington sounds about as
dangerous as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady when he
declares: “An Englishman likes to work things out for himself, and is glad when
an emergency throws him on his own resources. The Mediterranean and Alpine
people, on the contrary, are much more docile, more willing to be led.”
And partly it’s because, having grown up Irish and
Italian, I am aware that my people also entertain notions of our magnificence.
Other ethnic groups do the same, though they are generally not so foolish, or
so accustomed to power, as to issue scientific pronouncements on the topic to
the less fortunate. The truth is that all humans favor in-groups, starting with
the family, and we disparage those we perceive as outsiders. Treating this as
only the outlaw impulse of eugenicists and Nazis is a convenient way of
overlooking a hateful tendency in us all.
These eugenicists also felt disturbingly familiar in
other ways. They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir
film about Nazi sympathizers, but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness
buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors, and family men. If Madison Grant
had not been such an ardent racist and so closely tied to Nazi genocide, he
might be remembered today as one of America’s greatest conservationists. “Among
his many accomplishments,” writes Jonathan P. Spiro in his recent biography, Defending
the Master Race, “Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the
American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, fought for strict
gun-control laws, built the Bronx River Parkway,” and helped create Glacier,
Denali, and Everglades National Parks.
Entirely apart from his reputation as an economist,
Fisher enjoyed an idyllic American existence. He lived with his wife Margaret
and their three children in a big house on the crest of Prospect Street, with a
music room, a library, and “a 40-foot living room with a large, sunny bay
window,” as their son Irving recalled in his memoir, My Father Irving
Fisher. A health enthusiast at home as well as in public, Fisher
disdained cane sugar, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, and bleached white flour.
He often jogged in shorts around the neighborhood and liked to ride a bicycle
to his classes on the Yale campus. One of his books was titled How
to Live.
His various crusades re-quired a platoon of busy assistants. So Fisher built out from the basement of the
family home onto the sloping ground in back, eventually creating ten work rooms
and, young Irving recalled, a “hidden beehive of activity below decks.” The
office equipment included one of Fisher’s own inventions, an index card filing
system that made the first line of each card visible at a glance. With his
wife’s money, he turned it into a thriving business. When the company was
bought out—it would become part of the Sperry Rand corporation—Fisher
capitalized on his new wealth by buying stock on margin. By the late 1920s, he and Margaret had a fortune of $10 million.
Fisher was the son of a Congregational minister, and
his driving impulse was to proselytize. Thus eugenics seemed a natural
outgrowth not just of his work as an economist, but of his family heritage. It
needed “to be a popular movement with a certain amount of religious flavor in
it,” he thought. His role as a leading apostle also seemed like a way for him
to make a real mark on the world—as if his economics alone were not enough: “I
do want before I die,” he wrote to his wife, “to leave behind me something more
than a book on Index Numbers.”
But his eugenic enthusiasms drew him away from the arc
of his true genius. His book The Theory of Interest was
“an almost complete theory of the capitalist process as a whole,” according to
Harvard economist Joseph Schumpeter. But Fisher never found time to pull his
ideas together into one grand synthesis, nor did he develop a school of
disciples to carry on his work. His books are thus “pillars and arches of a
temple that was never built,” Schumpeter wrote. “They belong to an imposing
structure that the architect never presented as a tectonic unit.”
“Unfortunately,” Yale economist Ray B. Westerfield agreed, “his eagerness to promote his cause
sometimes had a bad influence on his scientific attitude. It distorted his
judgment.” This was never more nakedly obvious than in October 1929, when
Fisher’s enthusiasm for stocks as a long-term investment led him to pronounce
that the market had arrived at “a permanently high plateau.” The great Wall Street
crash hit shortly after, and it turned America’s greatest economist into a
national laughingstock, incidentally leaving the family fortune in ruins.
But the far grosser distortion of judgment, and of his
better self, was in Fisher’s campaigning as a eugenicist. His interest in
health had arisen largely from his own encounter in 1898 with tuberculosis, the
disease that killed his father. It took Fisher three years of fresh air, proper
diet, and close medical attention in sanatoriums around the country to regain
his health. Having managed to get his own head out of the lion’s mouth, he said
in 1903, he wanted to prevent “other people from getting their heads into the
same predicament.” His initial approach was to lobby the government to reduce
urban pollution, protect the health of mothers and children, and establish
school health programs, “so that American vitality may reach its maximum
development.”
But his almost religious conversion to eugenics, not
long after, turned all that upside down. Two decades after his own recovery,
Fisher was denouncing “hygiene to help the less fit” as “misapplied hygiene” and “distinctly dysgenic. … Schools for tubercular children give
them better air and care than normal school children receive.” He seemed to
have forgotten that he was once among those who, by his own harsh standard,
deserved to have their heads held fast in the lion’s mouth.
Other Yale eugenicists also
allowed their work to be distorted by the cause. Robert Yerkes is remembered
today as a primatologist and the founder of the Yerkes National Primate
Research Center at Emory University. But when he came to Yale in 1924, as a
professor in the new field of psychobiology, he was better known for developing
the first national program of intelligence testing—a program that provided an
ostensibly scientific basis for the fight against immigration in the early 1920s.
Yerkes and a team of like-minded scholars had designed
the test at the start of World War I, as a means “for the classification of men
in order that they may be properly placed in the military service.” By war’s
end, the US military had administered it to 1.7 million recruits. According to
the test, the average native-born white American male had a mental age of 13.
But his foreign-born counterparts were morons (a label coined by the
eugenicists, from the Greek for “foolish”), with an average mental age barely
over 11.
Yerkes wrote to key congressmen during the immigration
debate to remind them of what Army testing had said about the inferiority of
southern and eastern Europeans. Fisher chimed in. “The facts are known,” he
declared. “It is high time for the American people to put a stop to such degradation
of American citizenship, and such a wrecking of the future American race.”
In truth, the facts were badly flawed, and Fisher had
reason to know it. Yerkes’s test, which supposedly gauged innate intelligence,
was mainly a measure of how long a person had been in the United States and
perhaps also how well he might fit in at the local country club. Among the
questions asked: “Seven-up is played with A. rackets, B. cards, C. pins, D.
dice.” “Garnets are usually A. yellow, B. blue, C. green, D. red.” “An
air-cooled engine is used in the A. Buick, B. Packard, C. Franklin, D. Ford.”
Fisher received a sharp upbraiding from a member of his
organization’s own immigration committee over “the shakiness of the evidence”
used in its lobbying. Herbert S. Jennings, a geneticist at Johns Hopkins
University, resigned from the AES in 1924, citing its “clearly illegitimate”
arguments. Privately, he advised Fisher that a eugenics society was no place
for serious researchers, whose work depends on freedom “from prejudice and
propaganda.”
Fisher had been lobbying the federal government for
eugenicist policies since at least 1909, when his final report for Theodore
Roosevelt’s presidential commission on Americans’ health and longevity devoted
a chapter to the “question of race improvement through heredity.” He had been
fighting to limit immigration since 1914, when he coauthored a report to the
American Genetic Association. It declared that “steamship agents and brokers
all over Europe, and even in Asia and Africa, are today deciding for us the
character of the American race of the future.”
Fisher’s friend, Madison Grant, likewise wrote about
“being literally driven off the streets of New York City by the swarms of
Polish Jews.” Grant became the leading advocate for state laws mandating
involuntary sterilization of the “unfit” and banning interracial marriage. He
also persuaded Virginia to discard its practice of granting the privileges of a
white person to anyone with 15 white great-grandparents; state officials were
soon sniffing out and harassing anyone with even “one drop” of non-white blood.
Fisher, Grant, and the AES wanted to restrict both the
number of immigrants and their nationalities. They argued that each foreign
country’s annual quota should be proportional to its representation in the
United States as of the 1890 census—that is, before the flood of new immigrants
had entered the country. Using an outdated census was a way to discriminate
against southern and eastern Europeans and thereby to ensure, as Fisher put it
in the New
York Times, “a preponderance of immigration of the stock which
originally settled this country.”
The Immigration Act of 1924—with quotas based on the
1890 census—became law that May. Congress had been “hoodwinked” by the eugenicists,
Representative Emanuel Celler complained, with the
result that total immigration was cut in half, and immigration from targeted
countries like Italy by as much as 90 percent. The law would later become a
factor in preventing Jewish refugees from escaping Nazi persecution.
In Germany, an imprisoned political extremist viewed
these developments with satisfaction. Writing Mein Kampf in his cell, Adolf Hitler complained that naturalization in Germany was not all
that different from “being admitted to membership of an automobile club,” and
that “the child of any Jew, Pole, African, or Asian may automatically become a
German citizen.” Now, though, “by excluding certain races” from the right to
become American citizens, the United States had held up a shining example to
the world. It was the sort of reform, Hitler wrote, “on which we wish to ground
the People’s State.”
Nazi Germany would soon become
the dark apotheosis of eugenics. When compulsory sterilization began there in
1933, the Nazi physician in charge of training declared he was following “the
American pathfinders Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard” (author of The
Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy). Eugen Fischer, the leading Nazi eugenicist, would thank
Grant and his racial theories for inspiring Germans to work toward “a better
future for our Volk.”
As early as 1933, the New York Times was noting
that if you changed Madison Grant’s “Nordic” to “Aryan,” his arguments sounded
much like “recent pronouncements and proceedings in Germany.” Even so,
eugenicists put Grant’s name forward four times in those years for an honorary
doctorate from Yale. University officials gave his backers the polite
brush-off.
Other eugenicists also backed away. When Ellsworth
Huntington became president of the AES in 1934, membership was
shrinking. He
was obliged to lay off staff and move the operation into his university
office,
in a mansion at 4 Hillhouse Avenue (since
demolished). The harsh, coercive measures with which eugenics had made
its name
were likely to raise hackles in the shifting politics of the 1930s, says
Brendan Matz ’11PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in history at the Chemical
Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. So Huntington began to promote a
milder
brand of reform eugenics. Nevertheless, when he was organizing a
conference in
1936, Huntington asked a researcher who had recently returned from
Germany to
report on the Nazi sterilization program. “In the face of the present
psychological situation, it is not wise to laud Germany,” Huntington
advised,
“but it is perfectly legitimate to say that in spite of certain mistakes
Germany is also doing things which are desirable.”
By then, Fisher himself had stopped campaigning
publicly for eugenics, and no longer tried to work the notion of the nation’s
racial stock into economics discussions. His old ally Madison Grant died in
1937, and Fisher seemed to recognize the alarming effects of their earlier
efforts together. In 1938, he joined three other economists in attacking the
radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semite, for adding
“fuel to the already blazing flames of intolerance and bigotry.” A year later,
he was one of the signatories to a public letter issued by Christian and Jewish
institutions, cautioning Americans “against propaganda, oral or written”
that sought to turn classes, races, or religious groups against one another.
The letter warned, poignantly: “The fires of prejudice burn quickly and
disastrously. What may begin as polemics against a class or group may end with
persecution, murder, pillage, and dispossession of that group.”
Fisher survived World War II, dying in 1947 at the age
of 80. His major causes by then were warding off deflation and requiring banks
to hold larger reserves against their deposits, proposals that remain relevant
in the post–Lehman Brothers era. We do not know how Fisher, Yerkes, Huntington,
or other eugenicists responded to the discovery of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and
other centers of racial hygiene. No doubt they were horrified.
Grant’s Passing of the Great Race would turn up once more after the war, at Nuremberg. Hitler’s personal
physician Karl Brandt had been charged with brutal medical experiments and
murder in the concentration camps. His lawyers introduced Grant’s book into
evidence in his defense, arguing that the Nazis had merely done what prominent
American scholars had advocated. Brandt was found guilty and sentenced to
death.
We know better now, of course.
And yet eugenic ideas still linger just beneath the skin, in what seem to be
more innocent forms. We tend to think, for instance, that if we went to Yale,
or better yet, went to Yale and married another Yalie,
our children will be smart enough to go to Yale, too. The concept of regression
toward the mean—invented, ironically, by Francis Galton, the original
eugenicist—says, basically: don’t count on it. But outsiders still sometimes
share our eugenic delusions. Would-be parents routinely place ads in college
newspapers and online offering to pay top dollar to gamete donors who are
slender, attractive, of the desired ethnic group, with killer SAT scores—and an
Ivy League education.
Irving Fisher and the other Yale eugenicists would no
doubt rejoice that the university’s germ plasm is
still so highly valued—at up to ten times the price for other colleges. But if
they looked more carefully at the evidence, they would discover that these
highly desirable donors are now often the grandsons and granddaughters of the
very immigrants they once worked so hard to eliminate.  |
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