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.
Read more at :
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/philanthropys-original-sin
