The Good, the Bad and the Ugly Sperm = eugenics ????

The eugenics movement coincided with one of the greatest eras in U.S. immigration. During the first two decades of the 20th century, 600,000-1,250,000 immigrants per year entered the country through Ellis Island (except during World War I). Unlike earlier waves of immigrants who came primarily from northern Europe, the 20th century brought an influx from southern and eastern Europe. Eugenicists, most of whom were of northern and western European heritage, worried that the new immigrants weakened America biologically, and lobbied for federal legislation to selectively restrict immigration from "undesirable" countries.

The eugenics movement provided a scientific rationale for growing anti-immigration sentiments in American society. The earlier wave of Irish immigrants joined "established" Americans of northern and western European extraction in their disregard of "new" immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. Labor organizations fed on fears that working class Americans would be displaced from their jobs by an oversupply of cheap immigrant labor, and anti-communist factions stirred up fears of the "red tide" entering the U.S. from Russia and eastern Europe.

Eugenics Record Office Superintendent Harry Laughlin became the anti-immigration movement's most persuasive lobbyist. Between 1920 and 1924 he testified three times before the House of Representatives Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. He first testified that a disproportionate number of inmates in mental institutions were from southern and eastern Europe — even though his own data clearly showed a high proportion were German and Irish. On the strength of this testimony, Committee Chairman Albert Johnson appointed Laughlin as an "expert eugenics agent." In subsequent testimonies, Laughlin used flawed data to show that new immigrants had high levels of "all types of social inadequacy," including feeblemindedness, insanity, criminality, and dependency.

The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, sponsored by Johnson, did everything eugenicists had hoped for. First, it limited total immigration to 165,000 — about 15-20% of peak years. More important, it restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe countries to only 9% of the total. Northern and western European countries got 86% of the quota, even though they made up the minority of immigrants in 1923. This change in the complexion of immigration was accomplished by a cunning use of statistics. The Johnson Act limited immigrants from each country according to their proportion in the U.S. population in 1890 — a time prior to the major waves of southern and eastern European immigration when the U.S. was decidedly more Anglo-Nordic in composition.

U.S. immigration did not reach pre-Johnson Act levels again until the late 1980s. Less than 10% of the 660,477 legal immigrants to the U.S. in 1998 were from northern and western European countries.

Harry H. Laughlin

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In February 1907, Laughlin's interest in breeding experiments led him to write Charles Benedict Davenport, the director of the Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Dr. Davenport was one of the first scientists to introduce the concepts of Mendelian genetics into the United States. After establishing the Eugenics Record Office, underwritten by Mary (Mrs. E. H.) Harriman, Davenport asked Laughlin to be the superintendent. In October 1910, Laughlin and his wife Pansy moved to Cold Spring Harbor, New York where they stayed for the next 29 years.

Dr. Laughlin received a D.Sc. from Princeton in 1917 for a thesis on cytology and an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 1936.

He was superintendent in charge of the Eugenics Record Office of the Department of Genetics of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, D. C., from its origin in 1910 until 1921 and director from 1921 until 1940. Dr Laughlin served as the eugenics expert for the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, U. S. House of Representatives from 1921 to 1931; the Eugenics Associate to the Municipal Court at Chicago, 1921 to 1930; the U. S. immigration agent to Europe for the Department of Labor from 1923 to 1924; and was a member of the permanent Immigration Commission of the International Labor Office of the League of Nations in 1925.

He also was a member of the Galton Society, the Eugenics Research Association, the American Society of International Law, the American Statistical Associate, president of the American Eugenics Society 1927-28, associate editor of the Eugenical News from 1916 to 1939, secretary of the Third International Congress of Eugenics in 1932, and president of the Pioneer Fund, Incorporated, from its origin until 1941.

Dr. Laughlin was a prolific writer, publishing numerous articles and books on eugenics, eugenical sterilization, immigration, genetics, and various phases of inheritance including racing capacity in thoroughbred horses. It is his work on eugenical sterilization and immigration restriction for which he is best known. Laughlin's Eugenical Sterilization in the United States established him as an expert on the topic. His model sterilization laws were used by many of the more than 30 states that passed sterilization laws. Germany's 1933 sterilization laws were also modeled after Laughlin's. Laughlin's immigration studies, which seemed to support the idea that recent immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe had a higher percentage of "socially inadequate" persons than other immigrants, led to the highly restrictive immigration quota system of 1924 which favored immigrants from Northern Europe. As is evident in the Laughlin Collection, Dr. Laughlin also devoted considerable time and effort developing his ideas for a common world government.