Cold Spring Harbor: The Long Island Lab that Brought Eugenics to America

In 1910, the renowned biologist Charles B. Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a biomedical research and education center on Long Island, New York. His plan? The creation of a more “perfect” human race through breeding strategies, as well as the elimination of 15 million people he considered inferior—about 10 percent of the U.S. population at the time.

1. What Is Eugenics?
2. Misapplying Mendel
3. Not a Fringe Movement
4. The Case of Carrie Buck
5. Eugenics at War
6. ERO’s Echoes

What Is Eugenics?

Davenport was one of the leading American proponents of eugenics, the racist pseudoscience that suggested selective breeding can improve the human gene pool. Eugenicists not only encouraged people with “desirable” traits (e.g., white, Protestant, and affluent) to reproduce, but also discouraged those they considered “undesirable”—people with mental illnesses or disabilities, people of color, immigrants, Indigenous people—from reproducing, sometimes by force. Eugenicists supported racial segregation, bans on interracial marriage, and anti-immigration legislation. They also convinced lawmakers to allow legal, involuntary sterilization of women they saw as unfit to be mothers. The most extreme eugenicists even advocated euthanasia for “undesirable” individuals.

“It never was a science, it was a social philosophy,” Mark Torres, author of Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance, tells Mental Floss. 

Torres, an attorney and historian, says Davenport was largely responsible for turning eugenics from a theoretical idea developed in Europe into an actual practice by setting the groundwork for the movement, organizing funding, and establishing key partnerships in the U.S. “He believed that high incidences of certain characteristics within family pedigree charts conclusively proved that those characteristics were inheritable—and that some of them needed to be eliminated from society,” he writes. 

The early seeds of the eugenics movement were planted in England, but the movement’s foundation and practice, including sterilizations and anti-immigration laws, emerged from Davenport’s institution in the small hamlet of Cold Spring Harbor, New York.

Misapplying Mendel

In the 19th century, Austrian monk and scientist Gregor Johann Mendel investigated how pea plants exhibited certain traits from generation to generation and discovered the basics of inheritance. He became known as the father of genetics, and his work formed a fundamental basis of biology. 

Around the same time, Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, gave eugenics its name. Many of the leading thinkers at the time embraced “social darwinism,” which champions the idea that human society is ruled by the “survival of the fittest.” Social darwinists believe that natural selection takes out those who are unfit, which improves civilization. Eugenicists, including Davenport, had an incorrect understanding of Mendel’s work: They believed that abstract human qualities—like intellect, probable income status, likelihood to commit crimes, and other social characteristics—are passed down genetically.

Davenport had a prestigious background teaching at places like Harvard and University of Chicago, and many other prominent academics at the time also promoted eugenics; Harvard’s Edward M. East, for example, argued the white race was being tainted by mixing with Black, Asian, Jewish, and Italian individuals. With an endorsement from Galton, as well as investments from wealthy philanthropists like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, Davenport and his colleagues gained access to study many American families’ records and collect data to support eugenic theories. 

“This was an age that predated the HIPAA privacy laws,” Torres explains. “Thus, there were little legal privacy protections. Moreover, Charles Davenport and his program were not only fully revered; most of the administrators at the state-run facilities openly advocated for eugenics. They were more than happy and willing to assist and share information upon request.” 

The researchers received records from patients in psychiatric hospitals, people in prisons, circus performers at Coney Island, and even children through their contacts with leaders at schools for developmentally disabled students. They also deployed numerous field agents, mainly female college graduates, across the country to conduct interviews. Ultimately, the efforts gave the ERO the necessary data to study and amplify eugenics.

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Not a Fringe Movement

Some may think that the ERO’s questionable racial theories would make it a scientific pariah, but Davenport and ERO superintendent Harry Laughlin were lauded in the community for taking a progressive approach to handling social issues. And they were not alone in embodying both enlightened and racist ideologies. 

It wasn’t too difficult for ERO leaders to form relationships with prominent figures like the notorious white supremacist Madison Grant, who was also a leading environmentalist. Davenport wrote to him in 1920, asking, “Can we build a wall high enough around this country to keep out these cheaper races?” Even Helen Keller, a famous disability rights advocate, espoused a eugenicist view when she published a letter in The New Republic in response to a notorious medical case [PDF]. “Our puny sentimentalism has caused us to forget that a human life is sacred only when it may be of use to itself and the world,” she wrote.

“The knee-jerk reaction is to assume that eugenics was kind of a fringe movement, a marginalized movement,” Torres says. In fact, “ it was taught in over 300 universities in around America, including all the big Ivy League schools. Most doctors and scientists espouse it. It was openly championed by every president from Roosevelt to Hoover … they even had religious sermon contests for best eugenics sermon.” Midwestern families had competitions to be crowned the “fittest” family. “People would dress up in [their] best outfits to take measurements,” he says.

The Case of Carrie Buck

It wasn’t just a cultural and academic movement, but a legal one. Torres writes that Laughlin created a “model sterilization law” that individual states could use as a foundation. One of those states was Virginia, which passed legislation based on Laughlin’s model in 1924 to allow forced sterilization of people perceived to be mentally disabled. State senator and lawyer Aubrey Strode, who drafted the legislation, had Laughlin provide a sworn statement and assist him with his argument.

Eighteen-year-old Carrie Buck would be the first person to whom the law was applied. She had been placed in a state institution for intellectually disabled people based on her alleged family history of promiscuity and because she had given birth to a daughter following a rape. The institute’s superintendent sued to forcibly sterilize Buck. A series of legal hearings and appeals brought her case, Buck v. Bell, before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. The ERO sent a field officer to testify as an expert witness, though he presented himself only as an employee of the Carnegie Institute, and avoided mentioning eugenics.

The justices ruled that the Virginia law did not violate Buck’s right to due process, meaning the sterilization could go forward. The decision, which has yet to be formally overturned, led to a significant increase of sterilizations across the country—and far beyond.

Eugenics at War

The work done at the ERO expanded well outside of the U.S. American sterilization laws were replicated in places like Canada, Norway, Denmark, Switzerland, and Sweden. Yet, no regime carried out the ERO’s eugenic mission like Nazi Germany.

“One of the largest misconceptions was that Nazi Germany kind of led this to [the U.S.]—it's completely opposite,” says Torres, whose book describes how the ideas conceived on Long Island inspired eugenic experiments later committed by the Nazis during the Holocaust.  

During the height of the regime, high-ranking Nazi officials corresponded with the ERO, sending postage marked with swastikas across the Atlantic to Cold Spring Harbor. Psychiatrist Carl Schneider was a lead researcher of Aktion T4, a Nazi program that murdered more than 70,000 children and adults perceived as physically or intellectually disabled. Schneider praised the ERO as “important pioneers in the field of racial hygiene.”

Biologist Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer “was the parallel to Charles Davenport here in America,” Torres says. Verschuer encouraged his student, SS physician Josef Mengele, to apply for his eventual role at Auschwitz concentration camp, where he would perform gruesome experiments on children and adults in the name of eugenics. During the Nuremberg trials, the defendants relied on the ERO’s work to support their own actions. What, they asked, did the Nazi Party do that was so different from what the ERO promoted decades earlier in the U.S.? Some defendants even cited the legal precedent set in Buck vs. Bell.

ERO’s Echoes

The ERO and its philosophy stood tall for nearly three decades, but it collapsed in the U.S. and Europe as the atrocities of the Third Reich came to light. By then, more than 60,000 (documented) forced sterilizations had taken place in over half of U.S. states, and countless more in other countries. The organization had created registries of certain groups, like lists of blind people, “to find [and] sterilize them—or worse,” Torres says.

Though decades have passed, Torres sees many similarities between the eugenic movement of the 1900s and the current sociopolitical climate. “ A lot of that dangerous rhetoric still prevails,” Torres says. “It's more troubling that it’s on a national scale, at the top administration levels.”

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