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NY Times, Oct. 14 2014
When Racism Was a Science
'Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office' Recreates a Dark Time in a
Laboratory's Past
By JOSHUA A. KRISCH
An old stucco house stands atop a grassy hill overlooking the Long
Island Sound. Less than a mile down the road, the renowned Cold Spring
Harbor Laboratory bustles with more than 600 researchers and
technicians, regularly producing breakthroughs in genetics, cancer and
neuroscience.
But that old house, now a private residence on the outskirts of town,
once held a facility whose very name evokes dark memories: the Eugenics
Record Office.
In its heyday, the office was the premier scientific enterprise at Cold
Spring Harbor. There, bigoted scientists applied rudimentary genetics to
singling out supposedly superior races and degrading minorities. By the
mid-1920s, the office had become the center of the eugenics movement in
America.
Today, all that remains of it are files and photographs — reams of
discredited research that once shaped anti-immigration laws, spurred
forced-sterilization campaigns and barred refugees from entering Ellis
Island. Now, historians and artists at New York University are bringing
the eugenics office back into the public eye.
“Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office,” a new exhibit at the
university’s Asian/Pacific/American Institute, transports visitors to
1924, the height of the eugenics movement in the United States. Inside a
dimly lit room, the sounds of an old typewriter click and clack, a
teakettle whistles and papers shuffle. The office’s original file
cabinets loom over reproduced desks and period knickknacks. Creaky
cabinets slide open, and visitors are encouraged to thumb through copies
of pseudoscientific papers.
“There’s a haunted quality, that’s the nature of the files,” said John
Kuo Wei Tchen, a historian at N.Y.U. and co-curator of the exhibit.
(This reporter is a student at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism
Institute, a separate branch of the university.) “We hoped we could
evoke a visceral feeling of what it was like to be in a detention
center, where people were presumed to be ineligible unless proven
otherwise.”
When the Eugenics Record Office opened its doors in 1910, the founding
scientists were considered progressives, intent on applying classic
genetics to breeding better citizens. Funding poured in from the
Rockefeller family and the Carnegie Institution. Charles Davenport, a
prolific Harvard biologist, and his colleague, Harry H. Laughlin, led
the charge.
“There were many prominent New Yorkers involved in eugenics,” Dr. Tchen
said. “It was initially about how to become more efficient as a modern
society.”
Researchers sought out “unfit” families in the Manhattan slums and the
Pine Barrens of New Jersey. They cataloged disabilities and undesirable
traits, scribbling the exact dimensions of heads and arms.
Psychiatric institutes sent crates of case files to the office, where
the chief characteristics of “the feebleminded” were collated into
pedigree charts. Davenport himself devised a sophisticated apparatus to
quantify skin color.
“The Eugenics Record Office was built around very systematized ideas
that still might be seen as legitimate today,” said Noah Fuller, an
artist and co-curator of the exhibit. “At the time, this was widely
accepted as legitimate science.”
By the 1920s, the office had begun to influence the United States
government. Laughlin testified before Congress, advocating forced
sterilization and anti-immigration laws. Congress complied. The
Immigration Act of 1924 effectively barred Eastern Europeans, Jews,
Arabs and East Asians from entering the country. And thousands of people
who were deemed unfit were sterilized.
The University of Heidelberg in Nazi Germany later awarded Laughlin an
honorary degree for his work in the “science of racial cleansing.” He
accepted the award, and his research on Long Island continued to
influence Nazi ideology throughout World War II and the Holocaust.
When war broke out in Europe, widespread discomfort with eugenics and
Nazism turned public sentiment against the office. In the late 1930s, an
independent review by the Carnegie Institution found the office unfit to
conduct human scientific research, citing biases and heavy reliance on
anecdotal evidence, and it was closed in 1939.
“The Eugenics Record Office was flawed in terms of methodology, taking
hearsay evidence, and in terms of bias, accepting evidence that
resonated with social prejudices,” said Daniel Kevles, a science
historian at Yale University who is not involved in the N.Y.U. exhibit.
As Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory turned its genetic focus to breeding
better plants and animals, the eugenics office was all but forgotten —
until David Micklos, executive director of the laboratory’s DNA Learning
Center, applied for a government grant to scan files from the office and
display them in an online archive, which opened in 2000.
“It was a hidden part of American scientific history — people didn’t
like to talk about it,” said Mr. Micklos, who added that he was inspired
by ethical concerns surrounding the Human Genome Project.
The Eugenics Archive, which offers period photographs and facsimiles of
the original case files, is now open to the public on the Cold Spring
Harbor website.
The curators at N.Y.U. relied heavily on Mr. Micklos’s online archive as
they began to reconstruct the Eugenics Record Office last year. In their
research, they followed one lead all the way to a garage in Bar Harbor,
Me., where they found a cache of previously undiscovered eugenics files
inside original file cabinets from the office.
The cabinets are on display as part of the exhibit. “Very few physical
objects remain from the eugenics era,” Mr. Fuller said. “These file
cabinets are an important physical link.” Visiting the exhibit last
month, Mr. Micklos sat in a wooden chair and thumbed through a few of
the files. “This is pretty much exactly what it would’ve looked like,”
he said.
He shook his head and added, “Think of all the people whose lives were
completely out of their own control.”
At the N.Y.U. exhibit, the ethical line between genetics and eugenics is
blurred in every cabinet; legitimate science and blatant racism vie for
space on every page. The reconstructed eugenics office can force viewers
to think about the ethical implications of today’s genetic research.
But Mr. Micklos points out that the bigotry that gave rise to eugenics
was never really about the science.
“It doesn’t take any fancy scientific theory for people to hate one
another,” he said.
“There is relatively little difference between any two human beings on a
genetic level. An awful lot that we learn from modern genetics is that
people are very much the same.”
“Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office” is open on weekdays from 11
a.m. to 5 p.m. until March 13, 2015, at 8 Washington Mews in Manhattan.
Information: apa.nyu.edu.
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