One Summer: America, 1927

even the small amounts of genetics that were understood at the time, it appears that Grant was saying exactly what a lot of people wanted to hear. His book was praised by the American Historical Review , Yale Review and Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science . Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the Natural History Museum in New York and the country’s leading anthropologist, wrote the introduction.
    Among others supporting Grant’s views, in whole or in part, were the Yale economist Irving Fisher, the Harvard neuropathologist E. E. Southard, A. Lawrence Lowell of Harvard – the man whose committee condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death – the birth control activist Margaret Sanger, and Herbert Hoover, who had a lifelong antipathy to people with brown skin. In 1909, in a report forhis employers, Hoover declared that black and Asian labourers should be avoided because they suffered from ‘a low mental order’ and a pathological ‘lack of coordination and inability to take initiative’. Stressing his own first-hand experience, Hoover concluded that ‘one white man equals from two to three of the colored races, even in the simplest forms of mine work such as shoveling or tramming’. If Hoover modified these views in later years, he gave no evidence of it. In 1921, he was patron of a eugenics conference hosted by the Natural History Museum in New York and inspired by The Passing of the Great Race .
    For a time, the principles of negative eugenics were practically inescapable. At the Sesquicentennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1926, the American Eugenics Society had a stand with a mechanical counter showing that a person of inferior nature was born somewhere in the United States every forty-eight seconds, while ‘high-grade’ persons came along only once every seven and a half minutes. The relative rates at which the counters revolved showed all too dramatically how swiftly the nation was being overwhelmed with inferiority. It was one of the most popular displays at the exhibition.
    The spiritual headquarters for the eugenics movement in America was the Eugenics Record Office, opened in 1909 in Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island’s North Shore, and largely funded by the sort of wealthy people who wanted more innately superior beings like themselves and fewer of any other kind. (The property abutted the estate of the Tiffany family of jewellery renown.) The first director was Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist. Davenport believed eugenic explanations could be found for every aspect of the human condition – obesity, criminality, propensity to lie or cheat, even love of the sea. Under Davenport, the ERO also made several studies of the deleterious effects of racial interbreeding. As he explained: ‘One often finds in mulattoes ambition and drive combined with low intelligence, so that the hybrid is unhappy, dissatisfied with his fate and rebellious … A hybridized people are a badly put together people and a dissatisfied, restless, ineffectivepeople.’ Davenport argued not just for the sterilization of the inferior and faulty, but for their castration, in order to remove desire as well as reproductive ability, just to be on the safe side.
    Davenport, however, was the soul of enlightened compassion compared with his young protégé Harry H. Laughlin, who may have been the most lamentable person to achieve scientific respectability in America in the twentieth century. Born in 1880 in Oskaloosa, Iowa, Laughlin trained at the North Missouri State Normal School, and worked as a teacher and school administrator after college, but developed an interest in breeding and enrolled at Princeton to study biology. In 1910 he met Davenport, who was so taken with Laughlin’s zeal and devotion to eugenic purification that he made him superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office.
    Laughlin’s credo was simple: ‘To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.’ As Edwin Black notes in War Against the Weak , Laughlin’s plan of attack was threefold: ‘sterilization, mass incarceration and sweeping immigration restrictions’. In furtherance of these goals, Laughlin created the imposingly named, ferociously vengeful Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ Plasm in the American Population, which had the self-assigned task of eradicating reproductive inferiority from America once and for all. Laughlin’s committee was chaired by