One Summer: America, 1927

by Bill Bryson

For a time, the principles of negative

eugenics, as they became known in America, were practically inescapable. At the Sesquicentennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1926, the American Eugenics Society had a stand with a mechanical counter showing that a person of inferior nature was born somewhere in the United States every forty-eight seconds, while “high-grade” persons came along only once every seven and a half minutes. The relative rates at which the counters revolved showed all too dramatically how swiftly the nation was being overwhelmed with inferiority. It was one of the most popular displays at the exhibition.

Laughlin’s credo was simple: “To purify the breeding stock of the race at all costs.” As journalist Edwin Black notes in his 2003 book, War Against the Weak, Laughlin’s plan of attack was threefold: “sterilization, mass incarceration and sweeping immigration restrictions.”

Congress could not resist the authority of the committee or Laughlin’s horrifying

propaganda, and it quickly pushed through the 1921 Dillingham Immigration Restriction Act followed by the 1924 National Origins Act. Together these ended America’s open-door immigration policy. By 1927, more people were being deported from Ellis Island than were coming in through

Nonetheless, when given the new Stanford version of the Binet-Simon test, which eventually became the modern IQ test (and it is interesting to reflect that the IQ test was invented not to determine how smart people are, but how stupid),

Thanks to this ruling, states now had the right to perform surgery on healthy citizens against their will—a liberty never before extended in any advanced country. Yet the case attracted almost no attention. The New York Times gave it a small mention on page 19. The News Leader of Richmond, Virginia, where the matter was a local story, didn’t report it at all.

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.

The Carnegie Institution, the Eugenics Record Office’s chief source of funding, appointed Herbert Spencer Jennings, a respected geneticist from Johns Hopkins University, to review Laughlin’s work. Jennings found that Laughlin had falsified data, manipulated findings to support racist conclusions, and generally perpetrated scientific fraud for over a quarter of a century. Laughlin was forced to step down from the ERO, which was effectively closed in 1938. Laughlin retired to Missouri, but a huge amount of damage had been done.

Farnsworth,

Thompson, his work done, retired as mayor in 1923, but his admirers, fearful of the kinds of things Emory Buckner was doing in New York—padlockings and so on—persuaded Thompson to run again in 1927, just to be on the safe side. By Chicago standards the election was peaceful: there were just two bombings, two shootings, two election officials beaten and kidnapped, and twelve declared cases of intimidation of voters. Al Capone donated $260,000 to Thompson’s campaign. He or someone in his camp is often credited with coining the droll slogan “Vote early and vote often.” (In fact the phrase was decades old in 1927.) According to the official tally, slightly more than one million votes were cast in a city with almost exactly that number of registered voters.

Chicago in the twenties may have been corrupt, but it was not really as violent as reputation has it. With an annual rate of 13.3 murders per every 100,000 people, it was indubitably more homicidal than New York, with 6.1, Los Angeles, with 4.7, or Boston, with just 3.9—but it was less dangerous than

Detroit, at 16.8, or almost any city in the South. New Orleans had a murder rate of 25.9 per 100,000, while Little Rock had a rate of 37.9, Miami 40, Atlanta 43.4, and Charlotte 55.5. Memphis was miles ahead of all other cities, with a truly whopping rate of 69.3. The average in America today, you may be surprised and comforted to hear, is 6 murders per 100,000 people.

Fire from a tommy gun was all but randomly distributed, which made it ideal for hoodlums—and made hoodlums very scary people once they started pulling the trigger. Illinois imposed no restrictions on the sale of tommy guns, so they were available to the general public in hardware stores, sporting goods stores, and even drugstores. The wonder is that the death tolls in Chicago weren’t higher.

Prohibition may be the greatest gift any government ever gave its citizens. A barrel of beer cost $4 to make and sold for $55. A case of spirituous liquor cost $20 to produce and earned $90—and all this without taxes. By 1927, Capone’s organization—which, interestingly, had no name—had estimated receipts of $105 million. The scale of his operations unquestionably makes him one of the most successful businessmen in American history.

Tunney promoted himself as an intellectual and a gentleman. He didn’t drink or swear and refused to advertise cigarettes, but he made a lot of money endorsing other things—cars, hats, shoes, pajamas, and walking sticks, among much else. He had an unfortunate tendency to pomposity. He liked to carry around a book with him. When asked what it was, he would reply casually, “Oh, just a copy of the Rubaiyat that I am never without.” This was largely why most people couldn’t stand

him. The typical fight fan, as Paul Gallico of the Daily News put it, “wanted to see the book-reading snob socked back to Shakespeare.”

In the 1990s, many baseball players suddenly became immensely strong—some evolved whole new body shapes—and began to smack home runs in quantities that made a mockery of Ruth’s and Maris’s numbers. It turned out that a great many of this new generation of ballplayers—something in the region of 5 to 7 percent, according to random drug tests introduced, very belatedly, in 2003—were taking anabolic steroids. The use of drugs as an aid to hitting is far beyond the scope of this book, so let us just note in passing that even with the benefit of steroids most modern players still couldn’t hit as many home runs as Babe Ruth hit on hot

Roosevelt’s broadcast and moved to a lectern at center stage. In a voice often described as reedy, Lindbergh declared that three specific forces—the British, the Jews, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt—were leading America to war by willfully distorting the truth. “I am speaking here only of war agitators, not of those sincere but misguided men and women who, confused by misinformation and frightened by

propaganda, follow the lead of the war agitators,” he said.