The American Eugenics Society had its first headquarters in a building on the site of what is now City Hall.
At the first gathering, in 1921, Charles Darwin’s son Leonard “advocated for ‘elimination of the unfit.’ ”
Local social studies teacher and New Haven Museum educator Eva Galanis unpacked that history in a sobering 30-minute illustrated lecture, based on her 2024 Trinity College master’s degree research, in the latest installment of the New Haven Museum’s lunch-and-learn online webinars.
Although discredited after World War II, eugenics was the study of genetics to identify desirable and undesirable traits and then to use that (mis)information to inform public policy, she said.
“But it’s not history. It’s embedded in modern institutions as a vehicle for categorizing haves and have-nots, and justifying dehumanization, so it behooves us to understand,” she said.
Referencing the recent jean/gene advertising campaign brouhaha, Galanis said that such seemingly silly issues in insidious ways reflect the temperature of the times, and point to how the discredited ideas of racial superiority/inferiority and other aspect of eugenics persist in insinuating themselves into our language and even our minds.
Galanis argued that what’s going on today in standardized testing, in gene editing, in targeting immigrant communities, and in controlling women’s reproduction is evidence that “the eugenics movement never died, it reproduced itself.”
If Galanis’s presentation had one eye on dispelling myths, she had another on underlining how close to home, specifically the Elm City and to Yale University, eugenics’ origins lie.
Established in 1921, the American Eugenics Society had its first headquarters at 185 Church St. The society had many notable personages as its most august founders and supporters, including Yale professors — Irving Fisher, Roert Yerkes, Ellsworth Huntington, and Madison Grant.
Shortly after the founding, the organization moved to the Yale campus itself from which it pumped out studies, information, organized events on the “happy side” of eugenics, like how to measure your IQ, and in general served as the intellectual ballast propelling racist, anti-immigrant, anti-disabled people proposals for generations to come, she averred.
In 1909 Connecticut was the second state (after Indiana) to pass a sterilization law, she said, and it is still technically on the books.
But the most striking thing Galanis said she found in her research, “was a headline [in a newspaper article] after a visit [by eugenics proponents] to the Norwich State Hospital for the Insane in 1921” where the grievous conditions of the patients/inmates were described.
That headline read “Should the Hopelessly Insane Be Put to Death?”
“That didn’t go anywhere, but it planted a seed, and a decade later we see what went on in Nazi Germany. The Passing of the Great Race [an influential book by Yale’s Madison Grant] was referred to as a source by those on trial at Nuremberg,” she added.
Connecticut’s governor Wilbur Cross also doesn’t come out of this history of woe smelling of the proverbial roses. In 1935, Galanis reports, he commissioned Harry Laughlin, an original member of the American Eugenics Society — a major proponent of compulsory sterilization and anti-immigrant legislation — to conduct a survey of all Connecticut residents with disabilities.
The results argued for mass deportation and sterilizations, but nothing came of it, largely because Cross did not win the election here, and the Nazis did over there. The silver lining at least, Galanis added, “was that the state of Connecticut established a department of mental health, as we know it today.”
Galanis was at pains to find other positive light and that was largely, of course, that there were at all points courageous people who called out the eugenicists for who they were. She cited among many others W.E.B. Dubois “who was always pushing back against, for example, critiques of Black intelligence.”
Then there was Canon Clinton Jones, an Episcopal priest and early gay activist who, with colleagues at Trinity College. also set up what was to become one of the country’s pioneering transgender clinics in the early 1970s.
“He [Jones] argued,” Galanis said as she brought her lecture to a close, “that it isn’t enough to ‘allow’ homosexuals to exist, you also have to want them to be a part of the community. And I believe this still reverberates in Connecticut’s social fabric today,” illustrated by the profusion of Pride festivals.
Her future work, Galanis said, is going to focus on the role of Planned Parenthood — both for and against eugenics — and also the local Black Panther Party and the Hill Parents Association.
Click here for an abstract of the presentation.
