Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity by Bruinius Harry

Author:Bruinius, Harry [Bruinius, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2007-12-18T05:00:00+00:00

using big, block script for the words, so the three-year-old could read them. The tenderness he showed was very different from what Amzi had shown him. Once, just after Charles Junior’s third birthday, when Gertrude had taken him to Kansas to visit her mother, Davenport wrote: “My dear son, Take good care of mother. Help Grandma all you can. Write me a little note now and then to tell me how you are. Have you begun on ‘The Boy’? Will you not get one out every week? Good bye, dear son. Your loving father, Chas. B. Davenport.” 3

This spirit of “happier homes and healthier children” at Cold Spring Harbor sometimes soothed Harry’s melancholy. Even though the Laughlins themselves did not have children after more than ten years of marriage, Harry and Pansy found that the rhythms of the sprawling campus suited them well, and they became eager participants in this small community, suffused with a particular ethos of American family life. They started a Eugenics Record Office Drama Club, and produced public plays for the neighboring Long Island towns. The purpose of the Drama Club, however, was not simply to entertain but to spread the gospel of eugenics. Pansy wrote a play called Acquired or Inherited? A Eugenical Comedy in Four Acts. It was about a hilarious web of infatuations, featuring the characters David Reed, a bachelor interested in eugenics; Hannah Perkins, his flirtatious, feebleminded housekeeper; Jean Reed, his niece; and a butler named Sam. When a group of guests come to their house for dinner, the air is charged with people falling in love. These include a happy-go-lucky and greedy highchair peddler named Felix Rosenfeld; a eugenics fieldworker named Eugenia Traveler; a bachelor maid of forty-five, Sophronia Burton; an indolent but wealthy merchant, Jerry Dunbridge; and finally an ambitious electrician, Lester Gordon. Like a lesson from the book of Proverbs, this morality tale warned of the wiles of a wanton woman and the dangers of bad breeding. The denouement was a message on proper eugenic coupling. With its undisguised anti-Semitism (the greedy Jewish peddler was not a healthy match, it turned out), the play became quite popular in the community, and it played for a number of years.4

Yet, for all the laughter and familial love at Cold Spring Harbor, the real obsession was science. Its buildings were abuzz with the work to produce the types of family “memoirs” President Roosevelt had found so ominous. Last year, at the First International Congress of Eugenics in London, Major Darwin had predicted that the most important goal of eugenicists would be to stamp out the perpetuation of feebleminded citizens, and Davenport and Laughlin were now bringing to this goal their own type of religious zeal. The same sentimental, romantic longings that had infused their writings were now defining their research. And their first objective—in addition to training a vast army of social workers—was to locate those citizens of the wrong type, whom they believed, along with Roosevelt, society had no business with perpetuating.

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