The Eugenics Record Office
The Eugenics Record Office was established in Cold Spring Harbor in 1910 by Charles Davenport, who asked Harry Laughlin to serve as its director. It became the epicenter for the eugenics movement in the United States. The ERO provided information which it collected and analyzed to lobby legislatures in several states to broaden the eugenics movement across the country. Much if not all of the information it provided legislators either in writing or verbal testimony was skewed in favor of the movement, it cannot be said to have been impartial or scientifically collected and analyzed.
It was funded primarily by the Carnegie Institution of Washington’s Station for Experimental Evolution. Its primary purpose was to gather information regarding the population of the United States. Originally the ERO received financial support from private sources including the Rockefeller family. Charles Davenport solicited the funding by claiming the ERO would collect valuable information in the developing field of genetic research, drawing the attention of the Carnegie Institution, which supported it for the next 25 years.
The ERO established field workers to collect the information which they accomplished through the use of questionnaires. Some of the questionnaires were presented to people under the guise of allowing them to learn more about their family history. Some were sent through the mail and others were collected by field workers who collected them door to door. Most of the field workers were women, who were less likely to appear threatening when approaching someone in their home with questions about their family history.
The questionnaires were prepared by several different committees which operated out of the ERO in Cold Harbor. The committees included several notable scientists, doctors, psychologists, and philosophers. Alexander Graham Bell served on one, the Committee on Heredity of Deafmutism. Other committees included one responsible for the study of hereditary feeblemindedness and another which looked at inherited mental traits, to name just two. The committees prepared the questionnaires and studied the results.
The ERO published some of its findings in a newsletter which it called Eugenical News. It also produced pamphlets and what it called scientific charts which supported the idea of selective breeding, along with the results of its findings regarding racial and ethnic trends. In 1935 the Carnegie Institution performed a review of all of the work of the ERO and in the wake of the review it ordered its director, Harry Laughlin, to cease all work. Four years later the institution forced Laughlin to retire when it withdrew all funding. Since then the work of the ERO has been completely discredited as having any scientific basis, but much of the information it collected still survives and can easily be reviewed online.