Eugenics Record Office

Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 The Eugenics Record Office (ERO), located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States, was a research institute that gathered biological and social information about the American population, serving as a center for eugenics and human heredity research from 1910 to 1939.

It was established by the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Station for Experimental Evolution, and subsequently administered by its Department of Genetics.

[1] Both its founder, Charles Benedict Davenport, and its director, Harry H. Laughlin, were major contributors to the field of eugenics in the United States.

Its mission was to collect substantial information on the ancestry of the American population, to produce propaganda that was made to fuel the eugenics movement, and to promote the idea of race-betterment.

[3] Gertrude Davenport was an embryologist and a geneticist who wrote papers with her husband supporting the idea that Mendelian genetics theories applied to humans.

Supported by the argument that the eugenics office would collect information for human genetics research, Davenport convinced the Carnegie Institute to establish the ERO.

In 1939 the Carnegie Institution's new president, Vannevar Bush, forced Laughlin's retirement and withdrew funding for the ERO entirely, leading to its closure at the end of that year.

In 1944, its records were transferred to the Charles Fremont Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics at the University of Minnesota.

Many of these questionnaires were collected by field workers, usually educated women (who had few other jobs open to them), who would go door-to-door asking people to fill out this information.

These included a journal called Eugenical News, posters with propaganda full messages about intelligent breeding, and pamphlets with information on the movement.

[11] Eugenics was and continues to be a controversial issue due to the pressure radical eugenicists put on the government to pass legislation that would restrict the liberties of the people who had traits that could be considered undesirable.

[1] Specifically, the ERO dedicated its resources to the restriction of immigrants and the forced sterilization of individuals deemed to have undesirable characteristics.

Herbert Spencer Jennings from Johns Hopkins University criticized Laughlin's data which was used to justify restrictions on immigration.

Furthermore, a major critic of eugenics, A. M. Carr-Saunders of Britain, mentioned eugenicists were incapable of providing a distinction between biological heredity and the environment.

For instance, Harry H. Laughlin asserted that various forms of "degeneracy" were innate to certain racial groups of recent immigrants by looking at populations in asylums and homes for the disabled.

[20]Although the ERO and eugenics movement was prominent in the early to mid twentieth century, many of the initial philosophies remained.

Beginning in the 1990s, some Chinese government officials sought to eliminate those with opposing moral values which tend to be influenced by the Buddhist and Taoist religions.