Harry Laughlin
From its inception in 1910 to its closing in 1939, the Eugenics Records Office operated under the direction of Harry Laughlin, a former high school principal. The Eugenics Record Office was initially funded in part by John Harvey Kellogg, remembered today chiefly for his contributions to the breakfast table. Kellogg was, in addition to being one of the inventors of corn flakes, a leading authority and practitioner of healthy living, a proponent of vegetarianism, and the director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, an early health spa and resort.
Laughlin provided testimony in the original lawsuit court hearings in the case of Carrie Buck in the form of a written deposition, in which he derided the family from which Buck had descended despite never having met them. Laughlin based his opinion on the demographics of the family rather than an independent observation of its circumstances and character. It was the same manner of thinking which he used to operate the Eugenics Records Office during his tenure. Laughlin was primarily concerned with the elimination of defectives from the human race, through the control of the reproductive process.
Although several states had already passed compulsory sterilization laws when he assumed his role at the Eugenics Record Office, few enforced them. Laughlin was of the opinion that the reason for lax enforcement was the vague manner in which the laws were written, and he composed a model law which eliminated any ambiguity. Laughlin’s model identified as defectives those who were feebleminded, those found to be insane, criminals of all types, alcoholics and drug addicts or users, the blind, the deaf, vagrants, and those suffering from a deformity. Eighteen states used Laughlin’s model as the basis for their laws, including Virginia in 1924.
So did the German Reichstag when it passed the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933. The grateful Nazis awarded Laughlin an honorary doctorate for his work. But it was the German adoption of his model which led to its ultimate downfall. Aggressive sterilization in Germany became widely associated with the evils of the Nazi party, and with the exception of California, Virginia, and North Carolina its practice in the United States began to fall into disrepute. By 1935 the leading provider of funds for the Eugenics Research Office was the Carnegie Institution, and it began to cast doubt on the scientific values of the services the office provided.
The genealogical records and research which the Eugenics Records Office developed purported to plot means by which selective breeding would lead to the elimination of defectives among humanity, creating in essence perfect races. As adopted by the Germans it was meant to create a single perfect race, the American version allowed for diversity, although Laughlin argued that immigration by some Europeans, such as Slavs, introduced a higher rate of insanity into the American population. Laughlin’s work was discredited by the Carnegie Institution when it discontinued funding it, but his records remain and many are accessible online.