One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

In the 1930s, Laughlin sowed the seeds of his downfall as he began to establish warm relationships with Germany’s newly emergent Nazis, some of whom came to Cold Spring Harbor to study American methods and findings. In 1936, the University of Heidelberg awarded Laughlin an honorary degree for his commitment to race purification. The following year Laughlin and Cold Spring Harbor became U.S. distributors of a Nazi documentary called The Hereditarily Diseased, which argued that it was foolishly sentimental to keep retarded people alive. This was more than many people could countenance. At a convention of the American Jewish Congress in New York, the keynote speaker, Bernard S. Deutsch, attacked Laughlin in the bitterest terms. “Dr. Laughlin’s ‘purification of race’ theory is as dangerous and as spurious as the purified Aryan race theories advanced by the Nazis, to which it bears suspicious resemblance,” Deutsch said.