American Experience (1988) s31e03 Episode Script

1
♪♪♪♪
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
On August 18, 1934,
20-year-old Ann Cooper Hewitt,
heiress to one
of the largest fortunes
in the United States,
was admitted
to a San Francisco hospital
for an emergency appendectomy.
She later learned
the surgeons not only
had removed her appendix,
but also a length
of her fallopian tubes-
rendering her incapable
of ever becoming pregnant.
The story
of the "sterilized heiress"
hit the papers just after
the New Year in 1936,
when Ann filed a half-
million-dollar damage claim
against the surgeons
and her own mother
for sterilizing her
without her knowledge
or consent.
Ann's mother denied
any wrongdoing.
She'd done what she'd done
for "society's sake,"
she insisted,
because her daughter was
"feebleminded."
It was the sort of bizarre,
high-society scandal
that would have captured
the national imagination
under any circumstances.
But that one word,
"feebleminded,"
struck a familiar chord
for Americans
and linked Ann's plight
to a decades-old campaign
to control human reproduction,
known as eugenics.
MAN (on newsreel):
What is the bearing
of the laws of heredity
upon human affairs?
Eugenics provides the answer.
PAUL LOMBARDO:
Eugenics was proposed
as the scientific solution
for social problems.
It was a combination of hope
and aspiration on one side
and on the other side,
it was about fear
and in some cases about hate.
MAN 2 (on newsreel):
They are identified early,
categorized feebleminded,
imbecile, idiot.
MAN (on newsreel):
It would have been better by far
if they had never been born.
(crowd pledging in German)
DANIEL KEVLES:
People tend to think
that eugenics was a doctrine
that originated with the Nazis,
that it was grounded
in wild claims
that were far outside
the scientific mainstream.
Both of those impressions are
fundamentally not true.
ADAM COHEN:
It was almost a mania
that sort of swept
through the country.
And there was
that kind of naïve,
optimistic vision of eugenics,
like,
"Hey, let's all get together
and make better people."
ALEXANDRA STERN:
The eugenics movement was about
having healthy children,
about having a stronger society.
There's nothing wrong with that.
You have to look
at the underbelly
of what was implemented
in the name of eugenics
to see what was so problematic
about it.
(ship horn blaring)
♪♪♪♪
(horses whinnying,
hooves clomping)
(ship horn blaring)
NARRATOR:
In the fall of 1902,
an American biologist named
Charles Benedict Davenport
arrived in London
on a sort of pilgrimage.
He was 36, Harvard-educated,
and like many biologists
of his generation,
absorbed with the study
of evolution.
He'd been traveling in Europe
with his wife,
collecting seashells for
research on species variation,
but this was to be the highlight
of the trip:
a meeting with the world-
renowned gentleman scientist,
Sir Francis Galton.
A pioneering statistician,
Galton had lived his 80 years
by a single motto:
"Whenever you can, count."
His obsession with measurements
and patterns
had led him to create
the world's first weather maps,
establish fingerprinting
as a means of identification,
and set data-backed parameters
for the perfect cup of tea.
Charles Davenport had come
to discuss another matter:
Galton's work on heredity.
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE:
Francis Galton was
a great quantifier.
He liked to quantify height,
hair color.
You know, what is the chest size
of an average man?
What is the thigh length
of an average man?
Even things like intelligence.
JONATHAN SPIRO:
Galton had a theory that talent,
as he called it
What we would call
intelligence
Seemed to run in families.
And so it quickly occurred
to him,
"If we can get people
with high talent
"to mate with each other,
"prevent people with low talent
from mating with each other,
"we will,
within a few generations,
create this race of super men."
NATHANIEL COMFORT:
Francis Galton
was borrowing ideas
and kind of riffing off
of the work
of his half-cousin,
Charles Darwin.
KEITH WAILOO:
Darwin believed that evolution
was this natural process
that was inevitably leading
towards what they called
the "survival of the fittest."
Galton really tums that idea
on its head
and says,
"You know, natural selection
isn't working very well.
"We need to do a form
of selection.
We need to intervene."
NARRATOR:
To name the effort,
Galton had coined the term
"eugenics"-
a hybrid derived
from two Greek words
meaning "well" and "born."
Charles Davenport believed,
as Galton did,
that selective breeding
could transform the human race.
What was needed was
a scientific understanding
of how heredity
actually worked
And over dinner
at Galton's home,
Davenport declared his intention
to get to the bottom of it.
COMFORT:
Davenport said,
"I'm going to create
a new kind of institution,
"a station
for experimental evolution,
"not Darwinian natural selection
"that you just go out
and observe,
"but can we figure out
how inheritance works,
"can we do experiments
and find the patterns
of heredity?"
(ship horn blaring)
NARRATOR:
When Davenport sailed for home
in December 1902,
he carried with him not only
a letter of recommendation
signed by Galton,
but also, he later wrote,
"a renewed courage
for the study of evolution."
THOMAS LEONARD:
Davenport and Galton
really did imagine
that the idea
of improving human heredity
was of
almost religious significance,
of profound moral importance.
They also believed
they were qualified
to breed a better race,
because they believed
that they were the best
and the brightest.
(clucking)
NARRATOR:
Scarcely more than a year later,
with funding
from the Carnegie Institution,
Davenport opened
his research station
on the north shore
of Long Island,
at Cold Spring Harbor.
Situated on ten acres
along Oyster Bay,
the place had been purpose-built
for the breeding and analyzing
of plants and animals
Complete
with sprawling garden plots,
an aviary,
and a half-dozen tidy enclosures
housing chickens, goats,
and sheep.
By mating organisms
with unusual characteristics
A tailless Manx cat
or a rooster with a black comb
And then studying
their offspring,
generation after generation,
Davenport hoped to unlock
the mystery of evolution.
COMFORT:
Davenport wasn't yet
thinking much about humans.
He was just absorbing all these
different theories of heredity
and trying to figure out
which ones applied when
and under what conditions.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
After scores of experiments,
one theory seemed to stand out
from the rest:
the recently discovered work
of an Austrian monk
named Gregor Mendel,
who'd spent a decade
in the mid-19th century
experimenting with peas.
LOMBARDO:
Mendel learned
that there was a pattern
to how pea plants
passed down certain traits.
And you could come up
with certain ratios
to predict how likely it was
that a pea plant would look
one way or another.
SPIRO:
Davenport took that
and ran with it.
He goes about breeding all kinds
of animals,
looking for the Mendelian ratio,
and in trait after trait,
he seems to find
the Mendelian ratio.
COHEN:
Suddenly,
they're beginning to see
a mathematical,
scientific explanation
for things that had been
merely conjectural before.
It's becoming obvious
that in fact
there are these things
called genes.
These units are being
transmitted
from parents to their offspring,
and they're giving rise
to physical traits.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
By 1906, the work
at Cold Spring Harbor
had caught the attention
of the press
And established
Charles Davenport
as a rising star
in the new science of genetics.
Thanks to Mendel's laws
of heredity,
Davenport told one reporter,
agricultural breeders
could now precisely select
for desirable traits
To develop a strain
of protein-rich wheat
or a chicken
that laid more eggs.
The same methods would one day
lead, he predicted,
to a "rapid
and thoroughgoing improvement
of the human race."
KEVLES:
Davenport was tantalized
by the possibility
that you could take charge
of human evolution.
And then along comes
Mendelian genetics,
which seems to offer
a very powerful tool.
So extrapolating from the work
that the breeders were doing
in animals
to the breeding
of better human beings
was a natural step.
NARRATOR:
In 1909,
Davenport informed his funder,
the Carnegie Institution,
that he'd shifted his focus
from the breeding of cats
and roosters
to an investigation
of human traits.
Having already found
the Mendelian ratio
in early studies of eye color
and hair color
And convinced he was
on the right track
He now began to collect data
on a wide range
of other human characteristics.
He sent out
a family history questionnaire
to hundreds of individuals
and solicited prisons,
hospitals,
and educational institutions
for their records.
SPIRO:
You can't really do
breeding experiments
with human beings.
Aside from the ethics,
you just can't live long enough
to see generations
and generations.
So it was Davenport's genius
to realize
if he could collect
family pedigrees,
he could trace
family inheritances
and try to prove that
evolution works for human beings
the way it works for animals.
NARRATOR:
Davenport's plan was to analyze
the pedigree charts
for Mendelian patterns
And to identify
the desirable traits
human beings might encourage
through careful breeding
And the undesirable ones
they could breed out.
♪♪♪♪
(horse whinnying)
LOMBARDO:
"Wouldn't it be a better world
"if we could wipe out poverty?
"Wouldn't it be a better world
if we didn't have criminals?
"Wouldn't it be a better world
"if everyone behaved themselves?
"And if the reason
we have poverty and crime
"is something that's determined
by our genes,
"if we can change that
and make it
"so that the people
who have those bad traits
"don't pass them down,
wouldn't that be
a better world?"
(whistle blowing)
(machinery clanking)
NARRATOR:
Among Americans
of Charles Davenport's class
and generation,
there was perhaps no word
that had more currency
at the turn of the century
than improvement.
They had come of age
in the midst of a revolution
A seismic shift that had made
the United States
the most prosperous
and powerful nation on earth
And, in the eyes of many,
had simultaneously plunged it
into chaos.
SPIRO:
It's the beginning
of the 20th century,
and we have
rampant urbanization,
rampant industrialization,
rampant immigration.
The old order is passing,
and wherever you look,
society seems to be
deteriorating.
NARRATOR:
More and more farms
were giving way to factories,
and the cities were overrun
with newcomers,
many from the countryside,
many hundreds of thousands more
from abroad.
COMFORT:
There was impure water,
and the schools were awful,
and the disease was rampant,
and immigrants were pouring in.
KEVLES:
People were apprehensive
about rapid change,
about the kinds of people
you saw on the streets
Slums, crime, alcoholism,
prostitution.
Native white Protestants felt
that they were losing control
of American society.
NARRATOR:
Determined not only
to meet the new challenges,
but to master them,
a veritable army of educated,
middle- and upper-middle-class
Americans
had launched a crusade
to remake society
To eliminate corruption,
stamp out disease and vice,
assimilate the immigrant,
and uplift the poor
All in the name of progress.
LEONARD:
The world had never
seen invention
as powerful and remarkable
and as influential
as the last three decades
of the 19th century.
This fueled an already existing
American optimism
about what can be improved
and it directed it
into a particular track,
which was
scientific improvement.
COMFORT:
There was a great belief
in science.
There was a great belief
in government,
in bureaucracy as a tool
for solving social problems,
and also a belief
in collectivism,
that the population needs
to work together
to improve society.
CHRISTINE ROSEN:
The progressive movement said,
"We can use state power
and expert advice and knowledge
"to solve things like poverty,
to solve things
like alcoholism."
So that was an incredibly
hopeful and optimistic idea.
Eugenics was part of that.
(birds crowing)
NARRATOR:
When the letter from Charles
Davenport arrived in 1909
at New Jersey's
Vineland Training School
for the Feebleminded,
the staff hadn't known
quite what to make of it
A mere two-line note requesting
hereditary information,
one of hundreds Davenport
had sent.
COMFORT:
Davenport investigated
any and all traits
Eye color, weight, mood, habit,
temperament, diseases, anything.
And then he finds this
psychologist in New Jersey,
and he begins to zero in
on low intelligence,
something known
as feeblemindedness.
NARRATOR:
Psychologist Henry Goddard,
Vineland's director of research,
had no family histories
to share.
But what he lacked in data,
he more than made up for
with enthusiasm.
Not only was Goddard interested
in the new science of heredity,
he asked Davenport to guide him
in making his own study
of feeblemindedness.
LOMBARDO:
Like lots of people
who are working in institutions,
doctors or social workers,
Henry Goddard was interested
in identifying the kinds
of conditions
that were passed down
in heredity
and preventing them.
NARRATOR:
Henry Goddard was 42
and a one-time teacher
in Quaker schools.
It was, in part,
an interest in education
that had brought him to Vineland
in 1906.
He'd spent the three years since
trying to parse the many
varieties of feeblemindedness,
an all-too-common
mental deficiency
associated
with anti-social behavior.
Some of Vineland's 300 inmates
were violent or deranged,
others unruly,
still others merely slow.
Hoping to improve their
individual care and training,
Goddard had pioneered the use
of an "intelligence test,"
which purported to measure
a person's mental abilities
in relation to that
of so-called "normal" people
of the same age.
The scores enabled him
to sort his charges
into categories.
To the existing classifications
of "idiot" and "imbecile,"
which long had been used
to describe debilitating
mental impairment,
Goddard had added a third-
a higher-functioning group
he called "morons."
WENDY KLINE:
That was actually
a diagnostic term
and not just an insult.
Henry Goddard argued
the high-grade moron
is high functioning enough
to act normal,
but they're kind of stuck
in this evolutionary phase,
and they don't emerge
as true adults.
What's missing
is moral judgment.
So Goddard constructs that term,
"moron,"
and "mental deficiency"
and "immorality"
become basically
interchangeable.
NARRATOR:
Now, with Davenport's tutoring,
Goddard began to survey
the family histories
of 35 of his students
at Vineland.
What he found made him
an instant believer in eugenics.
Not only did morons seem clearly
to pass on
their feeblemindedness
to their offspring,
their family trees
often were rife
with alcoholics, prostitutes,
criminals, and paupers.
As Goddard put it to
the New Jersey State Conference
of Charities and Corrections
in 1910,
"Feeblemindedness is at the root
"of probably two-thirds
of the problems
that you have before you."
The cause was
"defective ancestry."
COMFORT:
Henry Goddard puts forward
this idea
that if you got rid
of feeblemindedness,
you would get rid
of all of these problems,
or at least greatly reduce them.
And we love explanations
like that.
It's so simple.
"Oh, it's just feeblemindedness
so let's, you know,
that's the fix."
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Goddard reasoned that
if the test he'd devised
to better care
for the feebleminded
instead were used
to identify them,
the contagion could be halted
And future generations
spared the scourges
of mental deficiency.
ROSEN:
Henry Goddard said,
"You know, it takes an expert
"to identify the true menace
of feeblemindedness.
"So someone
you're sitting next to
"at a restaurant or in a theater
"could look perfectly normal
to you,
"and it only takes
one feebleminded person
"marrying another one,
"even someone
who's not feebleminded,
to create generations
of feeblemindedness."
What it did is up the stakes
of feeblemindedness
by claiming
that it was a hidden menace
that was more difficult
to pinpoint
than people might think.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
By early 1910,
Charles Davenport was convinced
that certain human traits
were passed down
in a predictable way
and that American society
could be dramatically improved
if only reproduction
were controlled.
Anxious to spread the word,
he began to lay plans
for a new institution
dedicated to eugenic research
and education.
(din or a crowded city street)
In February,
in search of a patron,
Davenport traveled to New York
to lunch
with Mrs. E.H. Harriman,
widow of a recently deceased
railroad magnate.
ROSEN:
Davenport's pitch
to Mrs. Harriman
was to say,
"Right now you give your money
"to all kinds
of good organizations.
"They feed the poor,
they clothe the poor.
"They do many wonderful things,
but it's never-ending.
"With eugenics,
"we eventually won't need
your philanthropy and charity,
"because we'll solve
the problems
that right now
you're just throwing money at."
He persuaded Mrs. Harriman
that the future of the country
was at stake
and that only a eugenic project
could save it.
SPIRO:
Charles Davenport says,
"All you people who think that
if we just educate the poor,
"if we just give them charity,
"if we just reform
their environment,
"even the poor can rise
to our level,
"forget about it.
"That's just
sentimental hogwash.
"It's not the environment
that makes you what you are.
"It's your genetic inheritance
from your parents.
"So now, yes, let's regulate
the matings of human beings,
"eliminate the bad genes
from the population,
and keep the fittest genes
in the gene pool."
WAILOO:
By limiting the birth of people
who were deemed to be unfit,
you were by definition enhancing
the stock of human society.
And so there was
this social mission
of really fighting dependency,
fighting crime,
through eugenics.
The idea was
that eugenics would solve
all of these
broader social problems
if enacted in a robust way.
NARRATOR:
Mrs. Harriman was
a great believer
in the importance
of proper matings.
She credited
her late husband's interest
in horse-breeding for that,
and she enthusiastically pledged
to finance Davenport's
eugenic enterprise.
It was, Davenport later wrote
in his journal,
"a red letter day for humanity."
♪♪♪♪
MUKHERJEE:
The impulse to perfect humanity
is an ancient aspiration.
The idea that,
somehow or the other,
that you can get the best humans
by selectively breeding
the best, most fit,
hardiest, most beautiful
It's an ancient desire.
You find it in Sanskrit texts.
You find it in Greek texts.
The trouble is that only
some human beings can dictate
or decide what those
what the correct features
might be.
Who decides?
SPIRO:
Charles Davenport thought,
"By breeding a superior race
of people,
we can bring about the
millennial kingdom on earth."
COMFORT:
The problem with utopias is that
they set a set of aspirations
that then blind you
to a certain set
of consequences.
And that can be dangerous.
(birds chirping)
NARRATOR:
In October 1910,
on a 80-acre plot adjacent
to the Cold Spring Harbor
campus,
Charles Davenport
opened the doors
of his new institute.
It was a modest structure built
for a grand purpose:
to house hereditary information
on American families
and use it to guide
the reproductive choices
of the nation.
He called it
the Eugenics Record Office.
COMFORT:
Eugenic ideas
were very much floating around
as early as 1880.
But Davenport
gave eugenics teeth.
He was institutionalizing
eugenics.
He was marshaling people
around a research program.
NARRATOR:
Davenport already had assembled
a prestigious Board
of Scientific Directors,
among them prominent scientists,
physicians,
and famed inventor
Alexander Graham Bell.
Day-to-day operations,
meanwhile,
would be overseen
by Harry Laughlin,
a high school superintendent
from the Midwest
with a lifelong passion
for poultry breeding.
ROSEN:
Laughlin was
a very zealous proponent
of eugenics,
and in that sense,
he got along well
with Davenport.
They both believed
in the mission,
they believed in the cause.
COHEN:
For Davenport,
a lot of it was about
what you could do
in the laboratory
and how you can analyze
the data.
For Laughlin,
a lot of it was about,
"Well, how are we going
to get out there in the world
and change the direction
of history?"
NARRATOR:
To gather new disciples
to the cause
And to aid
in the collection of data
Laughlin and Davenport launched
an academic program,
which offered training
in eugenic field-research
techniques.
♪♪♪♪
Over the course
of six weeks each summer,
recent college graduates
From Vassar, Harvard, Oberlin
Were taught how to investigate
family histories;
how to conduct interviews
and make eugenically useful
measurements;
and how to chart
family pedigrees
and analyze them.
Then, at a salary
of $75 a month,
came a year's work in the field.
Armed with the official
Trait Book,
which assigned numerical codes
to a broad spectrum
of human characteristics,
the newly minted researchers
fanned out:
to study delinquents
in the Juvenile Psychopathic
Institute of Chicago;
the insane
at the New Jersey State Hospital
at Matawan;
albinos in Massachusetts;
circus families at Coney Island;
the Amish in Pennsylvania.
COHEN:
They would go
into some holler in Virginia
and find some family
that seemed to have a lot
of alcoholics and criminals,
and, you know,
other ne'er-do-wells,
and they would go, "Aha.
We've found a family
with terrible genes."
And they'd interview someone,
and they'd say,
"Oh, yeah, you know,
"John seems a little slow,
but I knew his uncle,
and his uncle was a big drunk."
And they'd write that down,
"Uncle a big drunk."
So they would come back
with all this evidence
of the way in which human traits
were inherited.
KEVLES:
Of course the reliability
of the data
was not questioned,
even though it was based
on interpretation, impression,
recollection
by the living members
of the family
with whom they spoke.
No checking.
NARRATOR:
Year by year
As trainees rotated out
of the summer program
and into positions
at universities, hospitals,
and mental institutions
Davenport's assumptions
and methods of fieldwork
gained currency
all across the country.
And year by year,
the data accumulated.
Stored in fireproof cabinets
and intricately indexed,
it comprised,
as Scientific American noted,
"A sort of inventory
of the blood of the community"
and supplied grist
for a multitude
of books, pamphlets, lectures,
and press releases
regarding the danger of
so-called "inferior germ-plasm."
SPIRO:
They're using the family records
that are stored
in the fireproof vault
to prove that all these traits,
not just physical
but mental traits, moral traits,
are caused by genes.
There's nothing you can do
about it.
This is cold, hard,
pure science.
NARRATOR:
"Just as we have strains
of scholars, of military men,"
Davenport told
The New York Times,
"we have strains of paupers,
of sex offenders
"strains with strong tendencies
toward larceny,
"assault, lying, running away
The cost to society
of these strains is enormous."
WAILOO:
Davenport took this basic idea,
applied it far more widely
than it had ever been before,
and really promoted
this probabilistic idea
as if it were
a deterministic one.
That is to say,
it's not just likelihoods,
but in some ways,
we're dealing with certainties.
And that idea really sold.
NARRATOR:
By the time
the Eugenics Record Office
issued its first official report
in 1913,
many Americans had begun
to see the wisdom in eugenics.
"I agree with you
that society has no business
to permit degenerates
to reproduce their kind,"
former president
Theodore Roosevelt
wrote Davenport that year.
"It is really extraordinary
that our people refuse
"to apply to human beings
such knowledge
"as every successful farmer
is obliged to apply
to his own stock breeding."
♪♪♪♪
LEONARD:
If you're going to be
in the business of breeding,
you're going to have to convince
thought leaders and politicians,
most especially the government,
to begin
a kind of unprecedented program.
So they understood
from the beginning
that they needed
to persuade those
who were in a position
to do something about it
that it was possible,
indeed, desirable.
COMFORT:
The eugenicists thought
that people's base interests
are just self-serving,
selfish, right?
And if you just leave them
to themselves,
they're going to evolve
in all these random,
dumb directions.
NARRATOR:
The Eugenics Record Office
recommended
both widespread
eugenic education
and aggressive government
intervention:
laws that would keep defectives
out of the country,
prohibit them from marrying,
and prevent them
from becoming parents
by segregating them in asylums
throughout
their reproductive years.
Also recommended was a new
and somewhat controversial
surgical procedure
known as sterilization.
By cutting and sealing
organs involved in reproduction,
both men and women
could be made infertile.
So far, the technique had been
used primarily on criminals
Particularly sex offenders
And it was thought to have
a curative effect.
Harry Laughlin envisioned
a broader application:
as a eugenic tool that would
eliminate defective germ-plasm
once and for all.
COHEN:
Harry Laughlin really has
this political vision
of what we can do with eugenics.
And he said,
"In order
for eugenic sterilization
to really do
what had to be done,
15 million Americans would have
to go under the knife.
♪♪♪♪
The idea was that eugenics was
for the common good
and by implementing
the science of heredity,
they could protect America
and strengthen America.
KEVLES:
They thought of it as
the beginning of a revolution,
of a religious movement.
You have to start
with a few converts,
and then you try to grow it
into a bigger movement.
All that seemed exciting
and full of possibility,
and they were going to create
a new world.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
The eugenics movement
that Charles Davenport
had launched
rested on Mendel's laws
of inheritance,
which assumed each trait
was governed by one gene
and was passed down
in predictable patterns.
But for all of Davenport's
certainty about the gene,
there remained open questions
About the gene's
physical properties
and its location
within the cell,
and the means by which
it accomplished its function.
All over the world,
scientists looked
to fast-breeding organisms
in search of clues.
Some focused their experiments
on the sea urchin,
which turned out
a new generation each year;
others on the even speedier
meal worm,
with its larvae-to-larvae cycle
of four months.
For zoologist
Thomas Hunt Morgan,
the organism of choice was
the fruit fly,
which was capable of reproducing
in just ten days.
MUKHERJEE:
The organism breeds so quickly
that Morgan is able
to see things
that the eugenicists cannot,
because he's watching
mutations move
across multiple generations.
NARRATOR:
By 1913,
Morgan had been studying
fruit flies for so long
that his laboratory
at Columbia University
was known simply as
"the Fly Room,"
and his assistants
"the Fly Boys."
For nearly a decade,
they'd been holed up there,
on the sixth floor
of Schermerhom Hall,
breeding flies
in half-pint milk bottles
pilfered
from the campus cafeteria.
Thousands upon thousands
of mutants were crossed
and the results meticulously
recorded:
white-eyed, bristled,
red-eyed, short-winged.
When the data was collated,
Morgan made
a startling discovery:
the mechanism of heredity
in flies
was far more complex
than in Mendel's peas.
MUKHERJEE:
Gregor Mendel thought
that every gene
was its own unique,
discrete entity.
Morgan showed that, in fact,
that's not the case.
That, in fact, genes live,
genes have a physical entity.
They live in chromosomes.
Because they live
in chromosomes,
often they travel in packs.
Morgan's work complicates
the idea of simple eugenics,
because you don't just pick
one thing out of one drawer,
a second thing out
of another drawer,
until you get your ideal child.
It's not so easy to pick
and choose
what your next generation
might be.
♪♪♪♪
ALONDRA NELSON:
It makes sense in pea plants,
it makes sense in cattle,
it should make sense in humans,
but there were no experiments
that really could support
Davenport's theory.
NARRATOR:
Thomas Hunt Morgan
was a believer
in the transformative power
of eugenics.
He had served on the board
at the Eugenics Record Office
since it opened.
But based on the lessons
he'd learned in the Fly Room,
it seemed clear that
eugenic science, such as it was,
had no business informing
American laws.
"If the eugenicists want to do
this sort of thing,
well and good,"
Morgan wrote a friend,
"but I think it is just as well
"for some of us to set
a better standard
and not appear as participators
in the show."
LOMBARDO:
Morgan writes a letter saying,
"I'm going to ask to be
taken off this letterhead.
"I study fruit flies,
"and I can't figure out
how their eyes work.
"I can't figure out
which one's going
"to inherit certain kinds
of wings,
"and you seem to be saying
you can understand
"who's going to inherit
something as vague
as criminality or pauperism."
So he backed away but privately.
NARRATOR:
Morgan's withdrawal from the
Record Office was regrettable;
but Davenport was undeterred.
At this point,
the eugenics movement
would not be stalled
by the minutiae of science.
MUKHERJEE:
What genes are
is a great biological
and biochemical question.
But there's kind of
a Yankee practicality
about eugenics,
"Let's get this job done."
And so they move right along.
(marching band playing,
crowd cheering)
NARRATOR:
When the Panama-Pacific
International Exposition
opened in San Francisco
on the morning
of February 20, 1915,
100,000 people streamed
through its turnstiles.
Over the next nine months,
the number would reach
more than 18 million.
Billed as "an encyclopedia
of modern achievement,"
the fair offered
a dizzying array
of diversions and curiosities:
a 23-minute ride
over a functioning replica
of the recently completed
Panama Canal;
an assembly line that turned out
18 Model Ts a day;
a 57-tier tower built entirely
of Heinz condiment products.
STERN:
The Panama-Pacific Expo
was a celebration of science,
efficiency, engineering.
It was an opportunity
for the United States
to demonstrate the power
of science and technology,
and also a utopian vision
looking towards the future.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Nowhere did the future
look brighter
than from
the Race Betterment Exhibit.
Housed in the Palace
of Education,
the display featured
imposing plaster casts
of Atlas, Venus, and Apollo;
a collection
of medical instruments
used to gauge
human biological capacity;
and a welter of charts, graphs,
and lists
that outlined the way eugenics
would better the human race.
All of it was the work
of Dr. John Harvey Kellogg,
a fierce proponent of what
he called, "biologic living."
COMFORT:
John Harvey Kellogg was
an incredibly energetic man.
He was a health reformer,
and a physician,
and an amazing entrepreneur.
And he developed
all these regimens
and invented different
medical instruments,
had a whole dietary plan.
SPIRO:
He was obsessed
with cleanliness, with purity,
and he believed that the key
to reforming society
is to cleanse our bowels
on a regular basis.
He invents something
called Corn Flakes
to help cleanse your bowels.
And he had a spa
in Battle Creek, Michigan.
Lots of eugenicists came
to the Battle Creek Sanatorium
to have their bowels cleansed
and to talk about eugenics.
ROSEN:
For Kellogg,
eugenics made perfect sense.
It was about health.
He linked these views
about heredity,
which were difficult to change,
with these ideas
about what human beings can do
to improve themselves.
LEONARD:
John Harvey Kellogg believed
that the environment
can affect the gene,
that consuming alcohol
or consuming meat could lead
to genetic inferiority
in offspring.
So there was more than one way
to improve heredity.
NARRATOR:
At the Expo,
Kellogg sought to usher
his brand of eugenics
onto the national stage.
With assistance
from Charles Davenport
Who had supplied him
with both data and contacts
Kellogg had organized not only
the Race Betterment exhibit,
but also a major
eugenics conference at the fair.
(murmuring)
The turnout exceeded
expectation,
drawing reform-minded
medical professionals,
university presidents,
conservationists,
and business leaders
from all over the country
and across
the political spectrum.
LOMBARDO:
Eugenics had a little bit
of something for everyone.
So if you're a social hygienist,
you're interested
in wiping out prostitution,
eugenics is interested
in that too.
If you're a prohibitionist,
and you want to get rid
of alcohol,
because alcohol
breaks up families,
it makes men unemployable
Eugenics wants to get rid
of all those things too.
So it manages to match up
with the concerns
of many other different kinds
of reforms.
WAILOO:
What led people to get
behind the eugenics campaign
wasn't just their ardent belief
in the science or in heredity.
It was a fundamentally broad
and sweeping
social and political agenda
to try to recreate society,
one might say,
in their own image.
KEVLES:
They're almost all white,
they're almost all Protestant,
middle-to-upper-middle class,
and they tended
to equate human worth
with the qualities
that they themselves possessed.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Over five days in August,
the 60-odd conference delegates
delivered talks
on everything
from proper tooth brushing
to eugenic sterilization.
"Unless we weed out
the weaklings,"
one speaker warned,
"we will reach a point
"where many of those born
and helped to survive
will be a burden to the race."
All told,
the Race Betterment Conference
drew an estimated 10,000 people
and generated more than
a million lines of press.
"Your efforts
on behalf of eugenics
are certainly beginning
to bear fruit,"
Kellogg told Charles Davenport.
"The public is beginning
to understand better
and appreciate more."
The Panama-Pacific Expo
was really a defining moment
for the American
eugenics movement.
The eugenics movement
was coalescing.
It was solidifying.
COHEN:
These elites are all saying,
"Yes, you know,
we believe in progress,
and this is progress."
Eugenics gave them a way
to view the world
and to say, "Okay, you know,
"all these vague anxieties
I have about the present
and particularly the future,
this is what the problem is.
Well, let's get to work
on solving that."
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
In May 1917, as new converts
spread the eugenic creed
in cities and towns
across America,
a half-dozen psychologists
gathered
at the Vineland Training School
for the Feebleminded
to meet with Henry Goddard,
by now considered
the nation's leading expert
on mental deficiency.
His groundbreaking 1912 study,
The Kallikak Family,
had awakened the public to
the menace of the feebleminded,
with its true-life tale
of an old-stock American,
a feebleminded tavern girl,
and a fateful tryst
that over several generations
had spawned more than
a hundred mental defectives,
among them one of Goddard's
own patients at Vineland,
a girl he'd diagnosed
as a moron.
SPIRO:
The Kallikak Family
was a huge best seller
for many, many years.
References to the Kallikaks were
in the speeches of politicians,
books, scholarly journals,
popular magazines.
Everyone knew
what the Kallikaks meant.
"You have to watch out
who you mate with
"or your descendants
could turn out
to be feebleminded, criminals,
alcoholics, and so forth."
NARRATOR:
Goddard was eager
to demonstrate the value
of intelligence testing
as a diagnostic tool
And he'd spent the years since
his book's publication
administering tests to scores
of institutional inmates,
immigrants, school children.
Now, with his colleagues,
he designed a program
to carry out
intelligence testing
on a mass scale.
Just seven weeks earlier,
the United States had plunged
into the First World War
And the draft ultimately
would swell the army's ranks
by nearly three million men.
The aim of the testing program
was to classify them for service
and to identify
the mental defectives
lurking among them.
They began
in late September 1917
at Camp Lee and Camp Taylor,
Camp Devens, and Camp Dix.
First, new recruits were sorted
according to their level
of literacy
and then administered
one of two tests.
KEVLES:
They had one test called
the Alpha Test
for draftees who were literate
in English
and another called the Beta Test
for draftees
who were not literate in English
or illiterate completely.
One of the questions
on the Alpha Test was,
"The Knight engine is used
in the Ford, the Pierce-Arrow,
or the Lozier car?"
Now, tell me,
is that known to you?
NARRATOR:
While the literate testers
puzzled
over multiple-choice questions,
the others attempted
to draw their way out of mazes
and sketch in the missing bits
of simple pictures.
One Sicilian recruit,
a Catholic,
considered an image of a house
and drew a crucifix
where a chimney might be.
He was marked wrong.
"It was touching
to see the intense effort put
into answering the questions,"
an Army examiner later recalled,
"often by men who never before
had held a pencil
in their hands."
KEVLES:
The tests were
by no means measures
of intelligence,
whatever that may mean.
How well you did on them
depended upon your degree
of education,
how many years
you'd been in school,
and also how attuned you were
with middle-class culture.
NARRATOR:
Administered to 1.7 million
Army personnel
over the course of the conflict
Officers and enlisted men,
black soldiers
as well as white
The tests led
to a shocking conclusion.
Roughly half of the draftees
were considered to be morons.
LOMBARDO:
The Army's experience
became a headline,
"America is degenerating.
We have to somehow interrupt
this swamp of defect."
♪♪♪♪
COHEN:
There was a movement
to institutionalize more people
at this time,
driven by eugenics.
You can see how an IQ test
can really grease the wheels.
If you're going to start
moving people into institutions,
if you're going to start
sterilizing them and all that,
you need some numbers,
and the IQ test provided that.
NARRATOR:
By 1919, intelligence testing
was a full-fledged craze.
An adapted version
of the Army test,
the National Intelligence Test,
sold half a million copies
in one year.
Businesses administered
mental tests
to prospective employees;
schools and universities
evaluated their students;
and ever more paupers,
prostitutes, drunkards,
and delinquents found themselves
suddenly
with pencil in hand.
COHEN:
Feeblemindedness was a big fear
in that era.
There was a thought
that there were a lot
of these people out there
who were deficient,
who were morons,
and they were not only
out there,
they were reproducing much
more rapidly than other people.
MUKHERJEE:
The trouble is that in practice
the word "moron" could be anyone
who was not part
of the, you know,
the so-called social norm.
So the word "moron" begins
as a scientific attempt
to classify intelligence
but very soon becomes usable
as a means of social control.
NARRATOR:
By 1920,
the vast majority
of those committed
to institutions
for the feebleminded
were classified as morons.
♪♪♪♪
COHEN:
To some extent,
humanity's always been
about othering
and about, you know,
"There's us,
and there's the other."
The eugenics movement
really gave
this scientific, you know,
punch to this idea that,
"There are us,
and there are the others,
"and we're the right people.
"We're the people
that it's important
"not only to favor now,
but we're the people
who have to own the future."
Suddenly eugenics comes along
and gives them
a scientific basis
for believing that.
LEONARD:
Eugenics is easy to accept,
because it preserves
existing hierarchies.
It doesn't seek
to overturn them.
What it did was lend new weight
to established hierarchies.
LOMBARDO:
I don't think
there has ever been a time
when people didn't think
that some people simply better
than others.
The eugenics movement,
like a chameleon,
took on the colors
of those attitudes
which existed before the word
"eugenics" was coined
and certainly exist today.
(whistle blowing)
NARRATOR:
They'd been swarming
the ports of entry since 1890
As many as a million of them
a year,
in flight from poverty
and oppression,
lured by the promise
of equality and opportunity.
The Great War
had staunched the flow;
but with the armistice,
the tap had been opened
once more.
By 1920,
some 75,000 new immigrants
were landing at Ellis Island
each month.
That May, at Cold Spring Harbor,
Charles Davenport penned
a letter to a friend:
"Can we build a wall high
enough around this country,"
he wondered,
"so as to keep out
these cheaper races?"
COHEN:
Charles Davenport was born
into a very fancy,
old-stock family.
So he was someone brought up
to believe that family mattered
and that, you know,
good qualities ran
in good families like his.
ROSEN:
Charles Davenport
was very focused
on wanting to maintain
the traditional American stock.
And he wasn't alone in that.
There was this fear that
the right sort of American
wasn't having enough children.
And the race as it existed
was being diluted and polluted
by incoming waves of immigrants.
SPIRO:
Most immigrants used to come
from northern
and western Europe,
from the British Isles,
from Germany.
And then all of a sudden
in the 1890s,
immigrants started coming here
from eastern Europe,
from southern Europe.
These are Catholics,
these are Jews,
these are peasants.
And Davenport feels correctly
that his race is losing
the demographic game.
NARRATOR:
On the receiving end
of Davenport's letter
was Madison Grant,
a zealous convert
to the eugenics cause
with a sterling
American pedigree
and an abiding preoccupation
with endangered species.
SPIRO:
Madison Grant was
a very wealthy lawyer.
His ancestors are traced back
to the original Puritan founders
of the United States.
Some of his ancestors signed
the Declaration of Independence.
He was a committed
conservationist.
He saved the redwoods
from extinction.
At some point he realized,
"I'm spending all my time
and effort
"trying to save
our nation's flora and fauna
while my own race is dying out."
When Madison Grant walks out
the door
of his Wall Street law office,
he is accosted by thousands
of foreign-speaking peasants.
They don't know
and they don't care
that Madison Grant's ancestors
signed the Declaration
of Independence,
and he is offended.
NARRATOR:
Grant had sounded the alarm
for old-stock Americans in 1916
with
The Passing of the Great Race,
a 476-page elegy
for what he called
"The white man par excellence."
STERN:
His vision is one
of America as a country wrought
by great men
who ventured from Europe,
and an America
that is facing an onslaught
from the undesirable hoards
from most
of the rest of the world.
SPIRO:
He invents this race
called the Nordics,
this tall, blond-haired,
blue-eyed race.
According to Grant,
the Nordics are
the most recently evolved
of all the races.
That means their genetic traits
are still fragile.
They're not fully formed.
And so if a blond-haired,
blue-eyed Nordic
mates
with a more primitive race
A Mediterranean, a Jew,
certainly a Negro
or an Asiatic
The more primitive genes
of the inferior race
will actually overwhelm
the superior
but not yet stable genes
of the Nordics.
COHEN:
So this is a threat,
and a threat not just, you know,
"Hey, I look around the city,
and it looks
a little different."
This is a genetic invasion.
NARRATOR:
As Grant saw it,
the threat from the Negro race
was mostly neutralized
bylaws already on the books
in many states,
that forbid marriage
between blacks and whites.
The threat posed
by the foreign-born, however,
was at once more insidious
and more pressing.
"We Americans must realize
"that the altruistic ideals
and the maudlin sentimentalism
"that has made America
'an asylum for the oppressed'
are sweeping the nation
toward a racial abyss,"
Grant declared.
"This generation
must completely repudiate
"the proud boast of our fathers
"that they acknowledged
no distinction
"in 'race, creed, or color, '
"or else turn the page
of history
and write, 'Finis Americae."
SPIRO:
Madison Grant takes eugenics,
which had hitherto
been concerned
only with survival
of the fittest individual,
and he says,
"We need to be concerned
"with the survival
of the fittest race.
We need to preserve
the Nordic race."
NARRATOR:
Grant's mission in 1920 was
to rally his fellow eugenicists
and convince
the federal government
to drastically
reduce immigration.
He began
with a charm offensive directed
at Congressman Albert Johnson,
the chairman
of the House Committee
on Immigration
and Naturalization,
inviting Johnson to New York,
plying him
with whiskey and cigars,
and gradually persuading him
of the urgent need for eugenics.
Once Johnson was in the fold,
Grant suggested
he bring Harry Laughlin,
the superintendent
of the Eugenics Record Office,
to Washington D.C.,
to testify on the so-called
"biological aspects
of immigration."
Johnson was so impressed
with the presentation,
he named Laughlin
"Expert Eugenics Agent"
and commissioned him to make
a study of the foreign-born.
In the meantime
Amid a rising
anti-immigrant clamor
from labor unions, social
workers, conservationists
Congress curbed the influx
with the Emergency Quota Act
of 1921.
SPIRO:
This was supposedly
a one-year temporary measure.
But in 1922, the bill is renewed
for another two years,
and that gave Madison Grant
and the eugenicists time
to launch a massive
propaganda campaign
convincing Americans
that immigration restriction
must be permanent.
NARRATOR:
In September 1921,
at New York's American Museum
of Natural History,
Grant convened an
international eugenics congress
to whip up support
for the cause.
Organized in tandem
with Charles Davenport,
the week-long event
drew some 300 delegates
from 28 foreign countries.
Numerous members of the Senate
and House immigration committees
were in attendance,
as was actress Lillian Russell
Who now informed her legions
of fans
that the American melting pot
was a catastrophe.
"If we don't put up the bars
and make them higher
and stronger," she warned,
"there no longer will be
an America for Americans."
SPIRO:
There are all kinds of exhibits
at the Congress
showing that Negro fetuses
have smaller skulls,
Italians have a higher level
of criminality
than other people.
And at the end of the Congress,
the exhibits are packed up
and shipped to Washington, D.C.,
where they are prominently
displayed
in the committee rooms
so that congressmen
could not help
but, consciously or not,
imbibe all the latest
scientific findings of eugenics.
NARRATOR:
But it was Harry Laughlin's
return to Capitol Hill
And the reports on his study
That convinced many
on the House Committee
of the perils
of unchecked immigration.
COHEN:
He had numbers
that purported to show
that rates of insanity
were different
among immigrants
from different countries,
that certain nationalities
were much more likely
to have their immigrants
become prison inmates.
And he also argued
that just biologically,
because we were largely
a Nordic,
northern European country,
it was harder
to assimilate immigrants
from other parts of the world.
NARRATOR:
Citing data from
the Army intelligence tests,
Laughlin claimed
that foreign-born whites
And in particular Jews
Were intellectually inferior
to native-born Americans
and therefore likely, over time,
to diminish the intelligence
of the nation.
SPIRO:
The Jews on the
Immigration Committee object.
They claim correctly
that the eugenicists have
first come up with their theory
that Jews are inferior
and then found the data
to back it up.
But Congress is converted
to the cause of eugenics.
The Congressional Record
is filled
with Congressmen
reading excerpts
from The Passing
of the Great Race,
Madison Grant's book,
on the floor of Congress.
And so the restrictionists
win the day,
and Congress passes immigration
restriction legislation.
NARRATOR:
On May 26, 1924,
President Calvin Coolidge signed
the restriction act into law.
Madison Grant hailed it
as "one of the greatest steps
forward
in the history of this country."
LEONARD:
They shut the door
and reduced immigration
to the United States by 97%.
The door was shut,
and it didn't open again
for 40 years.
And in a very real sense,
this was a political,
policy victory for eugenics.
NARRATOR:
The new policy would help
the nation to remain,
as one congressman said
on the House floor,
"The home of a great people:
"English-speaking,
a white race with great ideals,
"the Christian religion.
One race, one country,
one destiny."
STERN:
It was really a reversal
of, you know,
"Give us your tired
and your huddled masses,"
and it sends a message that
the open arms of Ellis Island
are now closed.
NARRATOR:
For many of those
across the Atlantic
who would pin their hopes
on America in the years to come,
the consequences would be dire.
COHEN:
Congress passed this law
and closed the door
on Jews
in eastern Europe and Germany
who were trying to flee
the Nazis.
Otto Frank wrote
to the U.S. State Department,
trying to get visas
for his family.
And he wrote repeatedly,
and he had connections,
and he was turned down,
because of this law.
We think about Anne Frank dying
in a concentration camp
because the Germans thought the
Jews were genetically inferior,
but to some extent,
Anne Frank died
in a concentration camp
because the U.S. Congress
believed that as well.
We believe that married people
who have transmissible diseases
should not have children.
No couple who has the disease
of feeblemindedness
or insanity or epilepsy
should have children.
Babies should not be brought
into the world
when the father's income
is obviously inadequate
to provide for its food,
clothing, or shelter.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
On August 5, 1926,
a crowd gathered
at Vassar College
to hear a lecture given
by Margaret Sanger,
the controversial founder
of the American
Birth Control League.
Sanger's reputation
preceded her.
In her dozen years as a crusader
for contraception
and family planning,
she'd been denounced, jeered,
and jailed repeatedly.
Now, she'd undertaken
a cross-country speaking tour
intended to bolster her cause
by linking it to eugenics.
LEONARD:
Margaret Sanger
was laser-beam focused
on promoting birth control,
which she saw
as a liberatory agent for women.
It was a hard push,
reproductive rights,
contraception.
Her embrace of the eugenicists
was a way of getting some
influential and powerful allies
behind her cause.
NARRATOR:
"The question
of race betterment,"
Sanger told the Vassar audience,
"is one of immediate concern.
"And I am glad to say
"that the government
has already taken certain steps
"to control the quality
of our population
"through the drastic
immigration laws.
"But while we close our gates
"to the so-called 'undesirables'
from other countries,
"we make no attempt
"to discourage or cut down
the rapid multiplication
of the unfit and undesirable
at home."
WAILOO:
Margaret Sanger is struggling
to open a conversation
at a time when
public discussion
of birth control,
let alone access
to birth control, was illegal.
But her views
are fairly persistent
with regard to issues
of biological inferiority.
You could argue
that they're strategic,
but the difference
is not that significant
from the standpoint
of those listening to her words.
KLINE:
Once birth control is packaged
as a way of improving
the human race,
it seems more manageable.
And there are a lot of people
that were on the fence
that she convinced
to embrace birth control,
because
of its eugenic potential.
It was being labeled
a birth-control activist
that was truly controversial.
Being a eugenicist was
far more acceptable.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Amid the many
American enthusiasms
of the 1920s
Skimpy dresses,
dance marathons, mahjong
Breeding a better human race
was perhaps the most unlikely.
But by the middle years
of the decade,
the notion was everywhere.
Included in the curriculum
at more than 350 American
colleges and universities
Among them Harvard,
Northwestern,
and the University of California
at Berkeley
Eugenics also was preached
from pulpits,
promoted on lecture circuits,
and appropriated
to sell everything
from newfangled
beauty treatments
to children's toys.
Disseminated
by a host of popularizers,
and at times diluted, distorted,
or both,
the eugenic creed filtered down
to the masses
through magazine articles,
advice manuals,
even a movie called
Are You Fit to Marry?
COHEN:
This was really something
that permeated the culture.
It was really a craze.
It was something people
were excited about.
ROSEN:
Eugenics starts to trickle
into mainstream popular culture
in the 1920s.
And it says
to individual Americans,
"If you want your society
to improve,
"you have to marry
the right person.
"You have to have
healthy children.
"You have obligations
to the human race
and to your country."
NARRATOR:
As one newlywed confessed
in a letter
to his local eugenics society:
"My wife and I
are both extremely tall,
"and this worries us,
"as we do not wish to bring
abnormally tall children
into the world."
♪♪♪♪
(oinking)
At state and county fairs
across the country—
In Massachusetts,
Kansas, Georgia, Texas
A human stock contest known as
"Fitter Families
for Future Firesides"
drew throngs.
Sponsored by
the American Eugenics Society,
a propaganda organization run
by the movement's evangelists,
Harry Laughlin
and Madison Grant,
the competition offered a primer
on eugenics,
disguised as wholesome
family entertainment.
ROSEN:
What the American
Eugenics Society realized
is that if you're going
to spread a message
about eugenics,
you have to get people
involved in more
than just reading something
in a popular magazine.
SPIRO:
Eugenics is an
all-encompassing creed.
It's a faith, it's a religion.
Harry Laughlin
and Madison Grant understood,
"We need the people to be
converted of this religion,
"so that everyone
will understand,
"If I am eugenically superior
I cannot date
"and certainly cannot mate
with a eugenically
unfit person.'"
NARRATOR:
Fitter Families contestants came
from miles around,
often dressed
in their Sunday best,
and submitted themselves
to a rigorous
three-hour inspection.
Straight, healthy teeth
earned them high marks,
as did musical talent
or a family history
of longevity.
Disease or disability
Even a lame grandmother
or an epileptic uncle
Was a demerit.
"While the stock judges
are testing the Holsteins,
Jerseys, and Whitefaces
in the stock pavilion,"
one contest organizer said,
"we are judging the Joneses,
Smiths, and the Johnsons."
SPIRO:
Just as they would have
a contest
who had bred the best cows,
who had bred the best sheep,
who had bred the best children.
And at the end
of the state fair,
the eugenic winning family,
the fitter family,
would be driven down the midway
and wave to the people
and show off their ribbons.
LOMBARDO:
By the 1920s,
eugenics was a household word.
A generation of people grows up
thinking of this word
as a aspiration, healthy babies,
and as a warning.
They've read it in school,
they've heard it at church,
it has become part
of the consciousness
of the country.
NARRATOR:
So pervasive was the impulse
to human improvement,
even prominent African Americans
took up the theme.
W.E.B. Du Bois,
one of the founders
of the National Association
for the Advancement
of Colored People,
maintained that the "best"
of the black race
What he called
"the Talented Tenth"
Was the hope for the future.
"The Negro," Du Bois declared,
"must begin to breed for brains,
for efficiency, for beauty."
WAILOO:
Du Bois' ideas are fundamentally
about combating prejudice,
but at the same time,
he talked about
and embraced the notion
that not all blacks
were equally gifted
and equally talented,
and that the future
of African Americans
should hinge
on the future procreation
of the talented.
Those ideas really are resonant
with eugenic ideals of the time.
KLINE:
Eugenics became
a really powerful ideology,
because it made sense
to a lot of different groups
who were concerned
about disparate things.
Part of the draw is how science
can make us better human beings,
that we can engineer ourselves
into being even better
than we are.
And viewing that
as a source of progress.
NELSON:
The eugenics movement
of the early 20th century
got traction
because the slogans were simple,
things like, "Better babies
and happy families."
On the face of it,
you know, better babies,
healthier babies,
what's not to like?
It would have taken
considerable effort
to demonstrate to people
what that simple slogan
was actually hiding.
NARRATOR:
In September 1924,
at the Virginia Colony for
the Epileptic and Feebleminded,
the colony's board of directors
met to discuss the case
of patient 1692,
a 17-year-old named Carrie Buck.
She'd been admitted to the
colony several months before,
at the request
of her foster parents,
who claimed
that they could no longer
"control or care for her."
COHEN:
Carrie Buck had been raised
by a foster family,
not a nice family.
She is rented out to other
people in the community
to do house cleaning,
and she's pulled out of school
after fifth grade,
even though
she's doing very well
and is a perfectly good student.
Then, a nephew
of her foster mother rapes her,
and she gets pregnant,
and they want to get rid of her.
NARRATOR:
By the time her daughter
was born,
the state had labeled Buck
"morally delinquent"
for having given birth
out of wedlock,
diagnosed her
a "middle-grade moron,"
and confined her to the colony.
KLINE:
Sexual delinquent,
sexually immoral.
These terms are
intentionally vague.
Immoral tendency could be that a
woman had been sexually abused.
It could mean
she was going out late at night.
It could mean
she's a prostitute.
If you're morally deficient,
that's evidence
that you're mentally deficient
and vice versa.
So the state needs to intervene.
NARRATOR:
The question before the Colony's
board of directors now
was whether or not
to sterilize Carrie Buck.
COHEN:
She lands at the Colony
for Epileptics and Feebleminded
right when Virginia has passed
a eugenic sterilization law,
and the lawyer
for the state hospitals
really wants there to be a test
before sterilizations occur.
So the superintendent
of the Colony
basically needs an inmate
that he can say,
"I'm going to sterilize you,"
have that person
challenge the law,
and then hopefully prevail
against her.
So he's looking for someone,
and Carrie Buck checks
a lot of boxes.
NARRATOR:
From the board's perspective,
the menace posed
by Buck's own feeblemindedness
was doubled by her lineage.
Her mother, who was alleged
to have engaged in prostitution,
was likewise an inmate
at the Colony.
"By the laws of heredity,"
the board concluded,
"Carrie Buck is
the probable potential parent
of socially inadequate
offspring."
It was recommended
she be sterilized
for both her own welfare
and the good of society.
(gavel bangs)
Then Buck was assigned
an attorney,
friendly to the eugenic cause,
who would appeal
her sterilization
Ideally, all the way
to the Supreme Court
of the United States.
Across the country,
eugenicists would be watching
To see if the Virginia test case
could create
a national consensus
on sterilization.
LOMBARDO:
Sterilization was
a radical procedure.
Between 1915 and the mid-1920s,
you have a dozen or more states
that pass laws
that allowed
for mandatory sterilization
of people in institutions.
Some of them were used actively.
Many of them
were just on the books,
but nobody was being
operated on.
Some of them
had been struck down
by state courts.
So it wasn't at all clear
what was going to happen
to eugenic sterilization.
COHEN:
There was a hope
among eugenicists,
"If we could just get a case
"that goes up
to the Supreme Court,
"one ruling
from the Supreme Court,
"and suddenly we've got
a national legal standard
that eugenic sterilization
is acceptable."
So that became high
on the wish list
of the eugenics movement.
NARRATOR:
No one was more interested
in the Virginia test case
than Harry Laughlin,
who had spent much
of the previous decade
promoting sterilization
as a cheap, effective way
to rid the nation
of what he called
"the socially inadequate
classes."
COHEN:
Harry Laughlin believes
that to really move the needle
on the national genetic pool
and really improve things,
sterilization was the answer.
LOMBARDO:
Eugenical sterilization
was Laughlin's life work.
He published a book in 1922,
a compendium of every law
that had been passed,
of every case
that had been brought,
excruciating detail
about the history
of eugenical sterilization.
And it became the bible
for people who wanted
to pass sterilization laws.
NARRATOR:
It was only a matter of time
before Laughlin was asked
to serve as an expert witness
in the case
against Carrie Buck
And though he was unable
to appear in person,
he was more than happy to help.
LOMBARDO:
Laughlin never met Carrie Buck.
Laughlin never traveled
to Virginia to see her.
His testimony was read
into the record
of the Carrie Buck case
as a deposition.
NARRATOR:
The Buck family,
Laughlin argued,
was "mentally defective"
Members of what he described
as the "shiftless, ignorant,
and worthless class
of anti-social whites
of the South."
As such,
Carrie was certainly likely
to give birth
to defective children.
No doubt,
with her infant daughter Vivian,
she already had.
Laughlin's testimony
proved persuasive.
As the eugenicists hoped,
first the county judge,
then the state supreme court
upheld Virginia's
sterilization law.
(gavel banging)
The next and final ruling
would come
from the Supreme Court
of the United States.
COHEN:
Poor Carrie Buck,
there's no weaker person perhaps
who's ever come
before the Supreme Court.
She is poor, and she is alone,
and her mother is an inmate,
and she has a lawyer that's been
chosen by her enemies
to not represent her.
And she's asking the font
of justice in our society,
"Don't let them forcibly operate
on me
so I can't have children."
And they say,
"Go ahead, sterilize her."
NARRATOR:
In May 1927
the court's majority opinion
was rendered
by the venerable
Oliver Wendell Holmes,
who, at 86, was widely regarded
as America's
most brilliant legal mind.
"It is better
for all the world,"
Holmes wrote,
"if instead of waiting
"to execute degenerate offspring
for crime,
"or to let them starve
for their imbecility,
"society can prevent those
who are manifestly unfit
"from continuing their kind.
Three generations of imbeciles
are enough."
KEVLES:
Justice Holmes says,
"If she is allowed to reproduce,
"or if the Carrie Bucks
of the world in general
"are allowed to reproduce,
"this will be deleterious
to American society.
♪♪♪♪
"And so therefore the government
has the authority
"to step in and, in pursuit
of the greater public good,
to suppress her individual right
to reproduce."
NARRATOR:
Carrie Buck was sterilized
on October 19, 1927.
Less than a month afterward,
she was paroled from the Colony.
Thanks to Carrie Buck,
a jubilant Laughlin declared,
eugenical sterilization's
"experimental period,"
had come to an end.
Over the two decades that
preceded the Carrie Buck case,
only about 6,000 sterilizations
had been performed nationwide.
In the six years
that followed it,
as states across the country
rushed to enact
sterilization laws,
that number
would more than double.
LOMBARDO:
If you look back at all the
sterilization laws passed,
the easiest way to sum up
who their targets were is,
"Round up the usual suspects."
You are generally
going to be dealing
with poor people,
people who are part
of a disfavored minority,
people who were
on private charity
or public welfare,
people who had disabilities,
mental or physical,
and people
who were generally considered
somehow on the margins
of society.
♪♪♪♪
♪♪♪♪
WAILOO:
The conceit of eugenics
was that scientists understood
what traits were associated
with health and well-being
over the long term.
But hereditary science
in the early 20th century
was still emerging.
Eugenics led
the public discussion,
promoted the science
of human heredity
in a time when hereditarian
scientists
were themselves developing
their craft.
And I think for a period of time
they saw this
as a positive development,
society taking interest
in the kind of science
that they were doing.
And then I think by the '20s
there's a problem.
NARRATOR:
It was the fall of 1926,
and geneticist
Hermann J. Muller,
a former
Columbia University Fly Boy,
was looking for ways
to speed his experiment along.
♪♪♪♪
He was still working with flies,
though now on his own,
at the University of Texas
in Austin.
So far, he'd been using
the technique he'd learned
in the Fly Room
from Thomas Hunt Morgan:
hunt for naturally arising
mutations,
then track across them
across generations.
Breed a generation,
peer at its members one by one
through a jeweler's loupe,
repeat.
But at this point,
Muller had lost patience.
MUKHERJEE:
It took an enormous amount
of time
to generate these mutants.
You had to wait
until you basically found one.
It was a process of,
of discovery.
So Muller began to wonder
whether he could
actually create mutants
de novo, from scratch,
by doing something to the genes.
NARRATOR:
One night, on a whim,
Muller switched on
the x-ray machine
and began irradiating
male fruit flies.
Once they'd been exposed,
he slid them into glass bottles
with a roughly equal number
of female flies.
Then he waited.
When the larvae began to appear
on day five,
it was clear
the whim had worked.
MUKHERJEE:
Muller,
by using the exact right dosage
of x-rays,
finds that he can make dozens
of mutations,
mutations that would have
taken months or years to find.
He becomes a mutant maker.
He can't do it
in a predictable way.
But the principle
that human gene material
was malleable,
was changeable,
is an idea that Muller
understands and embraces.
NARRATOR:
If an insect's genes
could be altered
by a blast of radiation,
Muller realized,
human genes one day might be
manipulated as well
And heredity would no longer be
the prerogative, he said,
of "an unreachable god
playing pranks on us."
The idea of controlling
human heredity
had captivated Muller
since his earliest days
in Morgan's lab.
He'd been aware of the flaws
in so-called "eugenic science"
for nearly as long,
and his doubts about
the American eugenics movement
had been steadily mounting.
MUKHERJEE:
Muller began to think
that you couldn't have
a eugenics movement
without asking questions
about equality.
What was the criteria
for judging, you know,
a better human being
than a worse human being
and thereby sterilizing
the, the worst human being
or selectively breeding
the better human being?
Who would ensure
that the eugenics movement
was selecting the best features,
when the, when the best features
were dictated by the elites?
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Concerns about
the eugenics movement
had been raised before
But they'd come mainly
from lone voices,
shouting into the wind.
Now, increasingly,
hereditary scientists began
to speak as one.
LOMBARDO:
More and more,
scientists are realizing
that heredity's not something
that you can understand
simply like Mendel understood
his pea plants,
that some human traits are
really complex,
and you can't predict
whether they're going to appear,
or reappear,
that some conditions
that we think of as hereditary
are really about social issues.
Nobody really discards the idea
that heredity is important,
but there is growing chorus
of scientists
who are being more careful
in the way
that they talk about heredity.
NARRATOR:
Even the father
of the intelligence test,
Henry Goddard
Who had done so much
to stoke fears
of hereditary feeblemindedness
Disavowed
his earlier conclusions.
In particular, he regretted
having coined the term "moron."
With proper education,
he now believed,
such individuals
were perfectly capable
of managing their own affairs.
KEVLES:
Eugenic scientists were doing
what they understood to be
reliable science,
and it turned out that,
in many cases,
their science was mistaken.
Science is a process.
People make claims,
they advance evidence for it.
And then others come along
who have a more sophisticated
understanding
of the methodological problems.
And they say,
"Hey, prostitution may result
from a woman's having
no other choice economically,"
or, "Alcoholism may arise
from all sorts of stresses
in one's life."
You don't need genetics at all
to explain these things.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
As the 1920s came to a close,
and the Great Depression
radically rearranged
American society,
the dogma
of the eugenics movement
rang ever more hollow.
COHEN:
25% of the country's unemployed.
People's life savings
have been wiped out
by both the stock market crash
and the bank failures.
The person who's now
on the bread line
might have been a lawyer
who graduated from Harvard.
And this was a clear indication
that poverty was not biological.
(honking)
NARRATOR:
When, in 1932,
yet another eugenics congress
convened in New York,
most in the scientific community
declined to attend.
SPIRO:
They hold this conference
to propagate the idea
of eugenics.
All the same guys are there
Madison Grant,
Charles Benedict Davenport,
Harry Laughlin
Espousing the same ideas.
Their ideas have not changed
in 25 years,
and almost nobody comes.
Because among scientists,
eugenics is now viewed
as the purview
of a bunch of old, white cranks
whom science has passed by.
NARRATOR:
Improbably, Hermann Muller did
tum up at the congress,
though only to deliver
a scathing ten-minute speech.
"There is no scientific basis
for the conclusion
"that the socially lower classes
have genetically inferior
intellectual equipment,"
he insisted.
"Certain slum districts
of our cities
"are veritable factories
"for the production
of criminality
"among those who happen to be
born in them.
"Under these circumstances,
it is society,
"not the individual,
"which is the real criminal
and which stands to be judged."
WAILOO:
The problem of eugenic thinking
was an utter ignorance
of social causes
of social problems,
a tendency to over-biologize,
to think
through the biologicallens
about everything in society.
NARRATOR:
Eugenics might yet
perfect the human race,
Muller told the audience,
but only in a society
"consciously organized
for the common good."
(crowd chanting in German)
In July 1933, in Germany,
Adolf Hitler came to power
(Hitler speaking German)
NARRATOR:
and immediately enshrined
eugenics in state policy,
with a law that mandated
the sterilization
of men and women suffering
from any one
of nine presumably
heritable conditions.
It had been based on a model law
written by Harry Laughlin.
KEVLES:
Before Hitler, there was
a German eugenics movement.
But it did not have
a sterilization law.
The sterilization law was
ultimately enacted
with the inspiration of what
American states had been doing.
(man speaking in German)
COHEN:
Harry Laughlin is corresponding
with German scientists all along
and encouraging them.
He's proud of the fact
that when the Nazis adopt
a eugenic sterilization law,
it's strongly modeled
on his own law.
SPIRO:
The United States has
the reputation
of being on the forefront
of scientific endeavor.
When Adolf Hitler was in prison,
he read Madison Grant's
The Passing of the Great Race,
wrote Madison Grant a fan letter
saying, "This book is my bible,"
and when he wrote Mein Kampf,
his autobiography, he said,
"We Germans must emulate
what the Americans are doing."
NARRATOR:
Nazi officials estimated
no fewer than 400,000 Germans
would be sterilized
Roughly 25 times
the number sterilized
in the United States so far.
The more zealous
American eugenicists
applauded the Nazi law,
which applied to all people,
whether institutionalized
or not.
As one Virginia
sterilization advocate put it,
"The Germans are beating us
at our own game."
But for many Americans,
the news from Germany
was accompanied
by an uncomfortable revelation.
"Many interviewed
about the Hitler proposal
expressed shock,"
the Daily News reported.
"They were surprised to find out
"that 27
of our 48 American states
"have laws permitting the
performance of sterilization
upon the feebleminded."
COMFORT:
The 1930s was the peak
of eugenic sterilization.
And that was after geneticists
Professional,
scientific geneticists
Had largely abandoned
the eugenic program.
KEVLES:
There was this trend
that discredits the doctrine
on which eugenic sterilization
is based.
At the same time, paradoxically,
sterilization rates shot up
in the United States,
because of the Depression.
It costs money to keep people
in homes for the feebleminded.
So if you want to reduce
the cost of keeping people,
you sterilize them,
and that's what happened.
I'd like to know
just what sterilization is.
So would I.
Just how do they do it?
Well, I'll tell you.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
As public awareness
of eugenic sterilization spread,
a controversial Hollywood film
opened in theaters,
a cautionary tale
about good intentions
gone dangerously wrong.
And do you mean
they're going to stop me
from having children ever?
Exactly.
NARRATOR:
Released in 1934,
Tomorrow's Children
told the story
of 17-year-old Alice Mason,
the sole functional member
of an otherwise drunken,
crippled, feebleminded family,
who is slated for sterilization
along with her parents
and siblings
Three generations of unfit
are enough.
NARRATOR:
and saved from the scalpel
only by the revelation
that she'd been adopted.
Look at me.
Can't you see that I'm well
and strong?
And I'll be a good mother too,
judge,
honest I will.
LOMBARDO:
Tomorrow's Children
raises the question
of whether or not
you always get it right
when you sterilize someone.
How much can you really know
about someone's background?
Without getting into the details
of "How much do we understand
about genetics in 1934?"
it simply says,
"Sometimes people make mistakes
with these things,
and so maybe
we should be more careful."
NARRATOR:
Tomorrow's Children
was still playing
on screens across the country
when, in 1935,
a committee of scientists
turned up at Cold Spring Harbor.
They'd been sent
by the Carnegie Institution,
which had sponsored the Eugenics
Record Office since 1918
and had long been embarrassed
by its political activities.
Now, Carnegie's
board of directors
had ordered a review
of the work being done there.
The visiting committee's report
was decidedly unfavorable:
from a scientific vantage,
they concluded,
the thousands
of heredity records
stored
in the famed fireproof vault
were useless
for the study of human genetics.
COHEN:
They rightly saw
that this eugenics fieldwork
was largely ridiculous
and was not scientific.
But they also were troubled
by the degree to which
clearly Harry Laughlin
was acting not as a scientist
but as a evangelist
for eugenics.
And this was a clear indication
that the tide was really turning
against eugenics.
NARRATOR:
For the movement's faithful,
the message was plain:
if they were going to continue
to cull the unfit,
they would need
a new justification for it.
(car horns honking)
NEWSBOY:
Extra! Extra!
NARRATOR:
From the moment the case
of the "sterilized heiress"
first hit the news,
in January 1936,
Americans were enthralled by it.
First, there was the girl,
Ann Cooper Hewitt
A San Francisco socialite
who stood to inherit two-thirds
of her late father's
vast estate
And her shocking claim:
that her mother had
had her sterilized
to gain control
of that inheritance.
KLINE:
Ann Cooper Hewitt is sent
to the hospital
for an emergency appendectomy,
and she comes out sterilized.
And when she discovers it,
she is understandably horrified,
and she sues both her mother
and the two surgeons.
She claims
that her mother has done it
because her father's will
stipulates
that if Ann should die
childless,
the inheritance would go
to her mother.
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
Equally intriguing was the claim
of the mother, Maryon,
that her daughter
Ann was feebleminded
A diagnosis based
on an intelligence test
she'd been given just hours
before her sterilization.
KLINE:
Ann says that she's writhing
in pain,
and then a woman walks
in the room,
and the woman starts asking her
all these questions.
"What's the longest river
in the United States?"
And "How many years is
a presidential term?"
And Ann's reaction is,
"Why are you asking me
these asinine questions?
What does this have to do
with appendicitis?"
And she doesn't answer most
of the questions.
NARRATOR:
Although her score
identified the girl
as a high-grade moron,
a court-appointed psychiatrist
at a preliminary hearing
found her to be well-read,
fluent in French and Italian,
and "perfectly normal
in every respect."
LOMBARDO:
The Cooper Hewitt
sterilization case
was one of those cases
that people call
"the trial of the century."
Headlines all over the country.
And if you weren't
paying attention
to what sterilization was
by then,
you would have heard
in that story.
KLINE:
Ann Cooper Hewitt
is not emblematic
of the typical
sterilization patient.
And for that very reason,
she gets a lot more attention.
NARRATOR:
By eugenic standards,
Ann was the very definition
of well-born.
She was the scion
of the successful:
white, wealthy, seemingly sound
in both body and mind.
On what grounds, then,
those following the case
may well have wondered,
could her sterilization possibly
be justified?
Attorney I.M. Golden,
who represented
the surgeons named in the suit,
wondered much the same
And he decided to solicit
the opinion of an expert.
In May 1936,
he composed a letter
to one of California's
leading eugenicists,
Paul Popenoe,
and laid out for him
the details of the case
Among them, the reasons
Maryon Cooper Hewitt had given
for wanting
her daughter sterilized.
KLINE:
Maryon makes three charges
about her daughter's behavior
that she sees as indicative
of someone
who is mentally defective.
The first is
that she becomes infatuated
with a chauffeur.
The second is
that she is infatuated
with men in uniform.
And then finally
that she has plans
to run off with a Negro porter
on a train.
These are not people that
probably Maryon believed
her daughter should be
associating with.
Not somebody
she should have children with.
NARRATOR:
"In your opinion,"
Golden asked Popenoe,
"was it proper to sterilize her
as a matter of medical
and scientific procedure?"
Paul Popenoe long had been
a proponent
of eugenic sterilization.
But the argument that
an immoral, oversexed girl
would pass on those traits
genetically
could no longer
plausibly be made.
So Popenoe offered
another rationale,
one that had been recently
formulated
and recommended by
the American Eugenics Society.
Heredity, Popenoe told Golden,
is "not particularly the issue
in this case.
"But I suppose
we should all answer negatively
"the question whether a
young woman such as you describe
would be a desirable mother."
STERN:
In the '30s,
the eugenic rationale
for sterilization
begins to morph into a kind of
more generalized understanding
that this person isn't fit
to be a parent.
KLINE:
That tums the whole argument
about eugenics on its head,
because the determining question
was not, "Will she spread
her genetic defect?"
but "Will she make
a desirable mother?"
♪♪♪♪
(gavel bangs)
NARRATOR:
When the trial
of the two surgeons
got underway in San Francisco,
Ann's questionable capacity
to mother
was the centerpiece
of the defense.
The girl's sexual behavior
alone, Golden argued,
cast grave doubt on her ability
to provide good moral
and intellectual training
to her offspring.
In the end,
the argument had little effect
on the judge,
who, after six days
of listening to testimony,
abruptly called a halt
to the proceedings
and dismissed the case
on the grounds
that sterilization was legal
in California.
But in the public mind,
sterilization had been
effectively recast
as a preventative measure
against inept parenting.
LOMBARDO:
This not a story that happens
in an institution.
It's a story about a socialite.
Nevertheless, the same themes
of needing to sterilize people
for their own good
come up.
"Forget about heredity.
"These people will be unable
to take care of their children,
so the humane thing to do
is not to let them have any."
WAILOO:
Eugenics simply becomes
part of the machinery
of how these state institutions
function.
Hereditary defect is no longer
part of the conversation,
and it's simply a question
of a state attempting to use
all the tools available
to limit the number of people
who were seen to be
a social and economic burden.
NARRATOR:
By the close of the 1930s,
more than 30,000 Americans
had been sterilized nationwide.
♪♪♪♪
COHEN:
I think eugenics appeals
to some real strong elements
in the human psyche.
One part of that,
the positive part,
is that there is a desire
among people
to perfect things.
The negative side is,
we're also a species that is
very prone to tribalism.
We're very prone to believe
that, you know,
our people are the right people,
and other people are a threat.
♪♪♪♪
(cannon fire)
NARRATOR:
For a time, the enemies
within American society
were eclipsed by those without,
and the nation's attention
diverted
by a conflict that consumed
much of the world.
Then came the liberation
of Buchenwald and Dachau
and the chilling evidence
of eugenic policies carried
to a monstrous extreme.
MUKHERJEE:
By the mid-1940s
the full horror of what happens
in Nazi Germany
becomes apparent
The movement from sterilization
to extermination,
the killing of several millions
based on this kind of idea
of the betterment of human race.
And it creates
a vast embarrassment
for the American
eugenics movement.
KEVLES:
People were repelled
and began to turn away
from eugenics,
and "eugenics"
became a dirty word.
WAILOO:
The Holocaust, being tied to a
wide range of eugenic practices,
is a blemish
on humans as a species,
and it undercuts any notion that
eugenics was a positive force
in American society.
PROSECUTOR:
Surgical sterilization
was thought to be too slow
and too expensive to be used
on a mass scale.
COHEN:
After the war,
when the Allies put the Nazis
on trial at Nuremburg,
one of the charges
was eugenic sterilization,
and the lawyer
for the Nazi who was charged
said, you know,
"How can you charge my client
"with the crime
of eugenic sterilization
when your own U.S. Supreme Court
said this was okay?"
♪♪♪♪
NARRATOR:
By the end of the 1940s,
the eugenics movement had faded
from the mainstream
of American life.
But the laws
that had been passed
in the name of eugenics
would remain on the books
for decades
Barring some people
from entering the country
and others from marriage
and subjecting thousands
to forced sterilization
at the hands of the state.
By the time such practices
finally came to an end,
in the 1970s,
the total number
of sterilized Americans
would exceed 60,000.
And no matter the cost
or the casualties,
the scientific betterment
of humanity
would remain
an irresistible aspiration
Tempting generations to come
with the promise of perfection.
COMFORT:
We believe in science.
We want science
to solve social problems,
and we want to make
ourselves better.
I think everybody wants
to do that.
LEONARD:
There is this idea
that remains a kind of hope
that if we just
get the science right,
if only the right people
are put in charge,
that we can engineer our way
to a better world.
NELSON:
Some of the greatest
social changes
that have ever been accomplished
have occurred because
people were really willing
to imagine impossible things.
But the future that
American eugenicists imagined
was only a future for some.
KEVLES:
And so now the debate is,
"Are we going to use technology
"to try to fulfill
Galton's dream, if you will,
of taking charge
of our own evolution?"
Of course it was a pipe dream,
but nevertheless
it is a dream that persists.
We have reason to be
apprehensive about this,
and the test tube
bears watching.
♪♪♪♪
♪♪♪♪
♪♪♪♪