Philanthropy’s Original Sin

Philanthropic Support for Eugenics

By William A. Schambra

Philanthropy has many wonderful qualities — and never tires of proclaiming them, for one quality it sorely lacks is humility. It regularly thumps itself on the back, for instance, for devoting some $300 billion a year to good causes. And though philanthropic spending on social causes is dwarfed by that of the government, foundations proudly claim that dollar for dollar their spending is in fact more effective than the government’s. While government tends to stick with the safe and the routine, philanthropy regularly and energetically seeks out the next new thing; it claims it is at the cutting edge of social change, being innovative, scientific, and progressive. Philanthropy, as legendary Ford Foundation program officer Paul Ylvisaker once claimed, is society’s “passing gear.”

Indeed, philanthropy increasingly prides itself on its ability to shape and guide government spending, testing out potential solutions for social problems and then aggressively advocating for their replication by government. Any employee of a philanthropic organization can immediately tick off a list of major accomplishments of American foundations, all of which followed this pattern of bold experimentation leading to government adoption. For example, Andrew Carnegie’s library program pledged funding to construct the buildings, if the local municipalities would provide the sites and help pay for the libraries’ operation. The Rockefeller Foundation funded a moderately successful hookworm abatement program in the southern 
United States, which strongly involved local governments. The Ford Foundation’s “gray areas” project in the 1960s experimented with new approaches to urban poverty that then became the basis for the Great Society’s War on Poverty.

And yet, in all this deafening clamor of self-approbation, we rarely hear from these foundations about another undertaking that bears all the strategic hallmarks of American philanthropy’s much-touted successes, with far more significant results: that the first American foundations were deeply immersed in eugenics — the effort to promote the reproduction of the “fit” and to suppress the reproduction of the “unfit.”

Philanthropy vs. Charity

Although some of its animating ideas of course reach much further back into history, modern eugenics began with the mid-nineteenth-century work of Sir Francis Galton, the great English statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton proposed that talent and high social rank had hereditary origins, and that society could and should give monetary incentives for marriages of and progeny from eminent couples. By the turn of the twentieth century, eugenics was considered a cutting-edge scientific discipline backed up by a growing political and social movement — and therefore a particularly worthy candidate for philanthropists’ attention. It is no surprise, then, that the first major foundations devoted resources not only to the research behind the movement, but also to lobbying for government adoption of eugenic policies: at the federal level, restricting immigration of the “unfit”; at the state level, their mandatory institutionalization and sterilization.

Eugenics was American philanthropy’s first great global success. It inspired and cultivated programs around the world, but nowhere with more consequence than in the nation that sought most ferventlyto imitate America’s eugenic example, Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich.

How did American philanthropy become involved with so reactionary and misanthropic a venture as eugenics? As recent scholarship on eugenics has shown, the movement was not considered reactionary at the time. To the contrary, eugenics was very much an essential feature of the American progressive movement at the beginning of the twentieth century.

America’s first general-purpose philanthropic foundations — Russell Sage (founded 1907), Carnegie (1911), and Rockefeller (1913) — backed eugenics precisely because they considered themselves to be progressive. After all, eugenics had begun to point the way to a bold, hopeful human future through the application of the rapidly advancing natural sciences and the newly forming social sciences to human problems. By investing in the progress and application of these fields, foundations boasted that they could delve down to the very roots of social problems, rather than merely treating their symptoms. Just as tracking physiological diseases back to parasites and microbes had begun to eliminate the sources of many medical ailments, so tracking social pathology — crime, pauperism, dipsomania, and “feeblemindedness,” a catch-all term for intellectual disabilities — back to defective genes would allow us to attack it at its source. As John D. Rockefeller put it, “the best philanthropy is constantly in search of the finalities — a search for cause, an attempt to cure evils at their source.”

In their understanding of themselves, foundations’ determination to reach root causes efficiently and scientifically came to distinguish American philanthropy from mere charity. The old, discredited charitable approach had taken too seriously and had wasted its time addressing the immediate, partial, parochial problems of individuals and small groups. Charity lacked the steely, detached scientific resolve to see through the bewildering, distracting, superficial manifestations of social ailments down to their ultimate sources, which we now had the power to cure once and for all.

Consequently, the first large foundations poured resources into the development and deployment of the natural sciences, as well as promising new social sciences like economics, psychology, sociology, and public administration. Early philanthropists shaped the first major American research universities at Johns Hopkins and Chicago, as well as public policy research institutes like Brookings and the National Bureau of Economic Research, and academic coordinating bodies like the Social Science Research Council.

Alexis de Tocqueville’s idea that America was ennobled by everyday, charitable citizens stepping forward to solve their own problems became less attractive than a new view of social change: objective, nonpartisan professionals and experts could grasp and manage more efficiently and scientifically the complexities of modern industrial life than individuals ever could. Foundation grants would pave the way for this transfer of authority: as one Rockefeller report put it, the foundation’s funding was designed to “increase the body of knowledge which in the hands of competent technicians may be expected in time to result in substantial social control.” Centralized control in the hands of social technicians would require an effort to circumvent and diminish local ethnic, fraternal, and neighborhood groups and charities, which still took their bearings from benighted moral and religious orthodoxies rather than from the new sciences of society.

According to the perspective of philanthropic eugenics, the old practice of charity — that is, simply alleviating human suffering — was not only inefficient and unenlightened; it was downright harmful and immoral. It tended to interfere with the salutary operations of the biological laws of nature, which would weed out the unfit, if only charity, reflecting the antiquated notion of the God-given dignity of each individual, wouldn’t make such a fuss about attending to the “least of these.” Birth-control activist Margaret Sanger, a Rockefeller grantee, included a chapter called “The Cruelty of Charity” in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization, arguing that America’s charitable institutions are the “surest signs that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents.” Organizations that treat symptoms permit and even encourage social ills instead of curing them.

Charles B. Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist, spoke directly to philanthropy’s contempt for charity, along with the former’s yearning to solve problems at their roots. In a booklet published in 1910, Davenport bemoaned the fact that “tens of millions have been given to bolster up the weak and alleviate the suffering of the sick” while “no important means have been provided to enable us to learn how the stream of weak and susceptible protoplasm may be checked.” He insisted that “vastly more effective than ten million dollars to ‘charity’ would be ten millions to Eugenics. He who, by such a gift, should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and suffering would be the world’s wisest philanthropist.”

Philanthropic Support for Eugenics

Davenport found several wise philanthropists eager to take him up on his proposition to save humanity by funding eugenics. With the help of Mary Harriman, the wealthy widow of railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, Davenport was able to open the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) in 1910, adding it to the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor in New York, which had been launched earlier by the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution, in turn, added funds to the Eugenics Record Office.

The ERO became a remarkably aggressive and effective institution, skillfully deploying all the available scientific, cultural, and political tools at its disposal to promote its cause. As the top independently funded eugenics institution in the United States, its activities ranged from scientific and policy research, to public education and political advocacy, to training expert field workers whose job it was to track the “stream of weak and susceptible protoplasm” into every nook and cranny of the nation.

Davenport hired Harry H. Laughlin, at the time a teacher of agriculture with an interest in breeding, to manage the ERO. Laughlin became the world’s leading expert on and champion of sterilization. He compiled the authoritative study of its theory and practice; designed a model sterilization statute, variants of which came to be adopted by thirty states; and served as an expert eugenics witnesstestifying before the congressional committee determined to stem the rising tide of new and defective immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who were deemed biologically inferior to the earlier immigrants from the northern and western parts. In the notorious 1927 Supreme Court caseBuck v. Bell, which upheld the constitutionality of state sterilization laws, Laughlin even provided a deposition confirming Carrie Buck’s feeblemindedness without ever having laid eyes on her.

But philanthropy’s involvement in eugenics went far beyond the success of the ERO. The Rockefeller Foundation helped fund the research institutions in Germany behind the Nazi programs of sterilization and euthanasia. Rockefeller money also supported the work of French surgeon and biologist Alexis Carrel, whose discoveries in vascular suturing earned him the Nobel Prize in 1912. While working at the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research (today renamed Rockefeller University), Carrel wrote his bestseller Man, the Unknown (1935), which lent his prestige to eugenics, suggested the use of gas to euthanize lawbreakers, and in a later edition endorsed the German “suppression” of “the defective.” The Russell Sage Foundation for two decades employed Hastings H. Hart, a Congregationalist minister-turned-social worker, as a senior official and a consultant; while Hart didn’t support the sterilization of the feebleminded, he was an avid proponent of mandatorily sequestering them.

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