A REMINDER OF THE BAD OLD DAYS FROM AN UNLIKELY SOURCE

I recently read John Maynard Keynes paper "The End of Laissez-Faire" (1926) and came across this line:

"The time may arrive a little later when the community as a whole must pay attention to the innate quality as well as to the mere numbers of its future members."

I immediately thought that Keynes believed in the main tenet of the eugenics movement and I thought that if a mind as powerful as his were vulnerable to this claptrap, there must have been many others. This snippet from the Encyclopedia Brittanica entry on "Eugenics" gives some indication of how widespread eugenics became:

In the United States, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was opened at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, N.Y., in 1910 with financial support from the legacy of railroad magnate Edward Henry Harriman. Whereas ERO efforts were officially overseen by Charles B. Davenport, director of the Station for Experimental Study of Evolution (one of the biology research stations at Cold Spring Harbor), ERO activities were directly superintended by Harry H. Laughlin, a professor from Kirksville, Mo. The ERO was organized around a series of missions. These missions included serving as the national repository and clearinghouse for eugenics information, compiling an index of traits in American families, training field-workers to gather data throughout the United States, supporting investigations into the inheritance patterns of particular human traits and diseases, advising on the eugenic fitness of proposed marriages, and communicating all eugenic findings through a series of publications. To accomplish these goals, further funding was secured from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., the Battle Creek Race Betterment Foundation, and the Human Betterment Foundation.

Prior to the founding of the ERO, eugenics work in the United States was overseen by a standing committee of the American Breeder’s Association (eugenics section established in 1906), chaired by ichthyologist and Stanford University president David Starr Jordan.