Chapter Twenty-Three:
Brush, Part 2: Eugenics
"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.
"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down the pen again.
"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge. "Are they still in operation?"
"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish I could say they were not."
"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour, then?" said Scrooge.
"Both very busy, sir."
"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first, that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to hear it."
"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude," returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink, and means of warmth. We choose this time, because it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt, and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down for?"
"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.
"You wish to be anonymous?"
"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer. I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't afford to make idle people merry. I help to support the establishments I have mentioned—they cost enough; and those who are badly off must go there."
"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."
"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population."
—Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 1843
"Civilization's going to pieces," broke out Tom violently. "I've gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read The Rise of the Colored Empires by this man Goddard?"
"Why, no," I answered, rather surprised by his tone.
"Well, its a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don't look out the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved."
"Tom's getting very profound," said Daisy with an expression of unthoughtful sadness. "He reads deep books with long words in them. What was that word we—"
"Well, these books are all scientific," insisted Tom, glancing at her impatiently. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It's up to us who are the dominant race to watch out or these other races will have control of things."
"We've got to beat them down," whispered Daisy, winking ferociously toward the fervent sun.
"You ought to live in California—" began Miss Baker, but Tom interrupted her by shifting heavily in his chair.
"This idea is that were Nordics. I am, and you are, and you are, and—" After an infinitesimal hesitation he included Daisy with a slight nod, and she winked at me again."—And we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?"
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby, 1925
*
On the afternoon of Wednesday, June 20, 1928, the office staff of Charles F. Brush summoned reporters from the Cleveland Press and the Cleveland Plain Dealer to his "carpeted office in the Arcade," promising news. There they found the venerated inventor, along with his attorney, Jerome Fisher, from the Cleveland firm of Thompson, Hine & Flory, and while Brush looked on Fisher read to the journalists from the text of a legal document.
Charles Brush "...leaned back in his chair and tucked his thumbs in his vest pockets as Fisher read... Brush occasionally offered a comment, intended to clear up any ambiguity. He looked like a tired old gentleman who, after thinking a thing through to what seemed its logical conclusion, was prepared to go ahead with it."
The news was that Brush had placed half a million dollars worth of assets in a trust—which after his death, one year later almost to the day, would turn out to have been about one tenth of his life's accumulated fortune—to fund a charitable foundation which would bear his name.
"'What caused you to do this?' he was asked. 'General reading—and common sense,' he answered. 'These last few years this subject has received widespread attention. Ten or fifteen years ago this foundation would have been laughed at. Now it will be taken very very seriously, by people who take the trouble to think. '"
Fisher had read to the men from the legal trust indenture for the foundation, which Brush had signed two days earlier. The document is preserved in Charles Brush's papers at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.
Excerpts:
"WHEREAS, in my opinion the most urgent problem confronting the world today is the rapid increase of population which threatens to over-crowd the earth in the not distant future, with resultant shortage of food and lower standards of living, which must certainly lead to grave economic disturbances, famines and wars, and threaten civilization itself; and
"WHEREAS, beneficent scientific research has contributed toward the prolongation of life and the preservation of the weak and the unfit, who under former conditions could not have survived nor added descendants to the race; and
"WHEREAS, I believe that scientific knowledge cannot safely be used for these humane objects, unless it be used at the same time to improve the quality and reasonably limit the numbers of those who are born into the world;
"NOW THEREFORE, out of my belief that such restriction of the increase of population and the betterment of the human stock are fundamental to the well-being of humanity, I give to The Cleveland Trust Company, Trustee, for the benefit of mankind, and as a memorial to my beloved son, Charles Francis Brush, Jr., to be used for the purposes hereinafter described...
"The income shall be used by the board of managers to finance efforts contributing toward the betterment of the human stock, and toward the regulation of the increase of population, to the end that children shall be begotten only under conditions which make possible a heritage of mental and physical health, and a favorable environment. These purposes include the furtherance of scientific research in the field of eugenics and in regulation of the increase of population; the education of the people to the importance of the betterment of the stock, and to the economic and social evils which result from too great increase of population...
"It is my belief that the needs and purposes indicated herein are of such importance and magnitude as to merit the expenditure of far larger sums than those provided by this instrument. It is my hope that these needs and purposes will so appeal to many other persons as to inspire in them a desire to add to the principal of this fund..."
He named the first board of managers, appointed for life: T. Wingate Todd, Joel B. Hayden, Dorothy H. Brush, Edna B. Perkins, Roslyn Weir, and Jerome C. Fisher.
"IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my hand at Cleveland, Ohio, this 18[th] day of June, 1928."
He signed it in a small and trembling hand: "Charles F. Brush."
*
Eugenics began in England, at the crest of the British Empire.
Its first inklings came from Thomas Malthus, in 1798. Malthus was an economist, not a biologist, nevertheless his field gave him insight into how an ultimately limited food supply would eventually halt the growth of the human population. He advocated controlling the population to prevent poverty and starvation, but by reasonable men and women making rational choices in order to voluntarily limit their multiplication to prevent catastrophe. In the meantime, however, he felt that charity toward the poor was counterproductive as it delayed their eventual, inevitable extinction. These ideas were known to Charles Dickens, and found their way in 1843 into the mouth of his famously Christmas-skeptical and evidently Malthusian character, Ebenezer Scrooge.
English philosopher Herbert Spencer argued in his 1851 book Social Statics that in societies, both natural and human, members whom he described as the "fittest" would come to dominate all others, whom he labeled as the "unfit," who, Spencer said, were destined by the efficiency of natural competition to be eliminated, ultimately leading, Spencer said, to the perfection of those societies. Spencer's ideas seemed to be affirmed in 1859 when another English scientist, Charles Darwin, published his landmark On the Origin of Species, in which Darwin outlined his theory of evolution by means of natural selection, and though it is often attributed to Darwin, it was Spencer, in 1864, in another book, Principles of Biology, who coined the well-known phrase "survival of the fittest."
In the early 1860s a misanthropic Czech monk, Gregor Mendel, found peace from the humans who vexed him so in the solitude of his monastery garden, much preferring the company of his pea plants there. Cross-breeding his peas and observing the results he discovered he was able to predict how certain characteristics—smooth-skinned vs. wrinkled-skin peas, notably—would be expressed in the proceeding generations. Without understanding the mechanism—the discovery of DNA would wait until the 1950s and win a Nobel Prize for Watson and Crick—he had founded the science of genetics.
A cousin of Darwin, Francis Galton, is generally noted as the originator of the eugenics movement. Galton was a statistician and obsessive quantifier. He counted everything he could, looking for patterns in the data he collected, drawing conclusions from what he thought he saw in them. He was also an admirer of England's most accomplished and prominent families—artists, scholars, generals; his own Darwin clan certainly fit Galton's idea of accomplished and prominent—and he studied their genealogies. In 1869 he published Hereditary Genius, a book outlining his assertions that not only physical traits, but much more esoteric and subjective qualities, such as creativity and intelligence, were also heritable down family lines. More than a little self-congratulatory, where the statistical noise in the data might be made to suggest nearly anything the interpreter wished it to, and deeply subject to confirmation bias, Galton went looking for evidence of his own exceptionalness, and unsurprisingly found it. Then, harkening back to Spencer's notions of bred perfectibility, he recommended that the members of England's "best" families (like his own) marry only the most carefully chosen mates from among one another, and then, for the benefit of mankind, produce as many children as they possibly could. Galton coined the term for the movement, combining Greek roots for "well" and "born," creating the hybrid word "eugenic."
The idea soon spread to America.
In the early 1870s a State of New York prisons executive named Richard Dugdale interviewed hundreds of convicts incarcerated in Ulster County and traced their family trees. He claimed to have identified among them 42 families with heavier than usual proportions of social outcasts, imprisonment and poverty, and over 700 men descended from the same woman, whom he dubbed "the mother of criminals." He fictitiously named this extended family "Juke," and published his findings in an 1877 book called The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity. Dugdale asserted that in his experience antisocial behavior was caused by environment, however his caveat was generally ignored and his book held as evidence that it was bad breeding which made bad people.
Years later another book highly influential in the eugenics movement, The Kallikak Family: A Study in Heredity and Feeblemindedness, appeared in 1913, in which American psychologist Henry Goddard told a similar tale of a prevalence of antisocial traits seemingly passed down among a single family. Like "Juke," "Kallikak" was another invented name, and like "eugenic," it too was invented by combining Greek root words, these for "bad" and "beauty," i.e. "ugly."
The arrival of Germans in the Pennsylvania colony in the 18th century (see the Colemans later of Euclid, for just one instance) unsettled Benjamin Franklin, who feared they would not sufficiently assimilate into the emerging American society and culture. But the trickle of Germans in the 1700s was nothing compared to the wave of Irish, fleeing destitution caused by both natural and human-made disasters back home, which broke upon America's East Coast ports beginning in the 1840s. The Irish were overwhelmingly Catholic, which was shocking indeed, but for all that they were Christian, usually English-speaking, and from the British Isles; if they were alien they were a familiar kind of alien. In the American West, however, thousands upon thousands of Chinese had been admitted to labor on the railroads, and when the roads were finished the immigrants remained. The industrialization which exploded throughout the country at the end of the 19th century—at places like Standard Oil in the Cleveland Flats and the Brush Electric Company in Hough—brought an insatiable hunger for workers willing to accept, or at least unable to refuse, dangerous conditions, long hours, and low pay. Starting in the 1880s immigrants from southern and eastern Europe—Italians and Jews, significantly—seeking opportunity, looking to escape persecution, often both, flooded through New York's Ellis Island and other processing centers in numbers never before seen or likely even imagined. With an existing U.S. population in 1880 of 50 million, over 20 million new immigrants arrived in the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, with just less than half of that number coming in the first decade of the 20th century. The Jews were not Christians, of course, and in large part neither they nor the members of the other ethnic groups arriving alongside them spoke much or any English. They appeared to many to threaten to change what had been the very nature of the country.
In the 19-aughts, just as immigration into the United States was peaking, there arose another new idea: ostensibly objective, ostensibly scientific intelligence assessment. In 1905 the French government contracted psychologist Alfred Binet and physician Theodore Simon to devise a test to help assess the developmental levels of children with intellectual disabilities. Several formerly strictly clinical terms for describing determined levels of intelligence deficit originated at this time, and have since entered the common usage: idiot, imbecile, and moron. Early 20th century psychologists used the term "idiot" to describe "Those so defective that the mental development never exceeds that of a normal child of about two years." "Imbeciles" were said to be "Those whose development is higher than that of an idiot, but whose intelligence does not exceed that of a normal child of about seven years." Moron was a brand new word coined in the eugenics movement, again with their love of lofty-sounding terms derived from the venerable Greek, where "moros," means "foolish" or "stupid." (The "mor" of the "moron" is the same "mor" of the "wise fool," the college sophomore.) "Morons" were said to be "Those whose mental development is above that of an imbecile, but does not exceed that of a normal child of about twelve years."
The Binet-Simon Test was soon translated into English, and seized upon by American eugenicists, notably Henry Goddard, author of The Kallikak Family, who took the test over to Ellis Island and set about quizzing the newcomers. By Goddard's assessment—with no accounting for hunger, illness, exhaustion, disorientation, anxiety, illiteracy born of poverty, coming from another culture and not speaking the language—the immigrants indeed did quite poorly on his test. Later when the United States military mobilized for World War I they applied their own version of an intelligence test to the millions of rural farm boys and city slum-dwelling factory workers drafted into service. Again—and again with no accounting for the possibility that the recruits didn't read the same urbane magazines or attend the same fashionable theaters as the testers—the evaluators were appalled with the results.
What this pointed to, in the eugenicists' minds, was an alarming and growing epidemic of "feeblemindedness."
Feeblemindedness, or feeble-mindedness, was a broad term. It certainly covered all manner of developmental disability, and could also be applied to just about any kind of what today would be classified as neurological disorder or mental illness. These included schizophrenia, and particularly epilepsy, which was a fascination of the eugenics movement. What today is known as dyslexia looked like feeblemindedness, but so did never having learned to read, or just being a poor reader, or simply one who does not enjoy reading. It was addiction, particularly alcoholism. It was sexual promiscuity—that diagnosis heavily dependent on who was defining it and how it was being defined. These in turn led, in the eugenicists' model, to disease—particularly sexually transmitted ones like syphilis and gonorrhea, incurable before antibiotics, but also symptomatic of even more troubling moral disease abroad in the nation. And it all led to criminality, institutionalization, dependence. And the eugenicists were absolutely convinced this all was genetically heritable.
The newcomers arriving in the country at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries were, according to the eugenicists, not only lowering the nation's "intelligence quotient" ("I.Q." is another new term of this time) but they came with families often much larger than those of the older, established Americans'. Their non-northern European, non-Protestant Christian, non-English language backgrounds and traditions, coupled with their—assessed—lower intelligence, and high rate of reproduction, threatened, the eugenicists feared, to overwhelm the culture and, no less, to destroy the fabric of Western civilization, a looming catastrophe the eugenicists labeled "race suicide."
That term was coined by Edward Alsworth Ross, a sociologist at Stanford University in California, whose published views on Asian immigration to the West Coast brought him some attention in the early 20th century.
"I tried to show," Ross had said, "that owing to its high Malthusian birth rate the Orient is the land of 'cheap men,' and that the coolie, though he cannot outdo the American, can under live him. I took the ground that the high standard of living that restrains multiplication in America will be imperiled if Orientals are allowed to pour into this country in great numbers before they have raised their standards of living and lowered their birth rate."
He was fired from Stanford, over the objections of his faculty colleagues, at the behest of Jane Stanford herself, the widow of Leland, former first lady of California, and the only person whose opinion really mattered at the university bearing her late husband's name. The rub was more a personal clash than a disagreement over his racial ideas: Mrs. Stanford simply did not like Professor Ross. He later found a new home at the University of Wisconsin.
In 1904, with Carnegie steel and Harriman railroad money, Harvard biologist Charles Davenport established what he called the Station for Experimental Evolution on the north shore of Long Island in Cold Spring Harbor, just outside of New York City. There he would try to discover just how Darwinian evolution worked and, more importantly how it could be influenced, to breed better people. Within a few years Davenport had secured additional funding and made Cold Spring Harbor something of a summer school for budding and mid-career biologists, zoologists and sociologists, spreading the eugenic gospel among a generation of American scientists. By 1910 he had recruited the man who would become his most important lieutenant, an erstwhile English professor from Missouri named Harry Laughlin. Together the two men transformed the Station into a national repository of eugenical data, what became known as the Eugenics Record Office, which for 30 years would be the nerve center of the American eugenics movement.
Race suicide fears were further fanned in two other best selling books at that time, 1916's The Passing of the Great Race, or, The Racial Basis of European History, by zoologist and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Madison Grant, and 1920's The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy by Lothrop Stoddard, a Harvard Ph.D., and, according to historian David M. Chalmers, Exalted Cyclops of Provisional Ku Klux Klan No. 1 of Massachusetts.
What the eugenicists prescribed to counteract pervasive "race suicide" was a rigorous and aggressive program of "race hygiene." This, they envisioned, would increase "fitness" and improve the "human stock."
The "fitness" which so intrigued the eugenicists harkened back to Spencer. "Stock" is an animal breeder's term, as in livestock. (Indeed among the groups most enthusiastic in their support of the eugenics movement and its programs was the American Breeders Association, established by U.S. farmers at the request of the Department of Agriculture in 1903.) Stock refers to the animals which a breeder intends to allow, or to cause, to reproduce. More generally it refers to their individual and collective traits, both physical and performative: size, color, quality of coat, egg and milk production, speed, aggression, docility. The breeder will seek—either by facilitating or preventing their mating—to increase the number of animals with favored traits, and to decrease the number of those with disfavored ones. The eugenicists saw no reason these principles could not or should not be applied to humans.
Eugenic "race hygiene" efforts fell into two broad categories: "positive" and "negative." Proponents of positive eugenics would seek to encourage the propagation of human traits they deemed desirable, endeavoring to do what they could to encourage and facilitate those they found most worthy, the "fittest" in their view, to have more babies. Those would be people of the "eminent" sort whom Francis Galton so admired.
The converse, logically, was that those deemed unworthy, "unfit," must be prevented from introducing their traits into the gene pool, into the "stock," weakening it. This was negative eugenics.
Among the most effective negative eugenic measures enacted in the United States was shutting off the firehose of immigration. One point two million immigrants from Europe arrived in the United States in 1914, the last year before World War I disrupted the established immigration patterns. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, also known as the Immigration Restriction Act, passed among broad support of eugenics advocates and signed by President Coolidge, cut that number by 87 percent. The number of Russian Empire immigrants, which accounted for most of the Jews coming to the U.S., fell by 96 percent. Italians fell by 99 percent. The percentage of immigrants from northern and western Europe doubled.
Keeping the unfit out was a great start. But millions were already infesting the country. How would the unfit be prevented from further polluting the national stock?
Obviously, they must be prevented from having children.
How?
They could be segregated from the general society. Many, naturally, given what they were, had already found their ways into the nation's prisons. Many others had been relegated by courts and physicians to various "colonies" and "asylums." Perhaps there safely isolated from society at large the "unfit" could be educated and persuaded of the good that would be done by choosing to take the steps required to halt the spread of their "inferior" genes, their bad "protoplasm," as the eugenicists called it. But by the eugenicists' own definitions and assessments such people lacked the intelligence to understand the gravity of the responsibility they were being called upon to bear, much less the self-control and discipline needed to perform their part in the great task. So, those who would not or could not remove their "defective" genes from the "stock" voluntarily, those would have to be forced.
In the early 20th century the United States led the world in compulsory surgical sexual sterilization. In 1907 the State of Indiana decreed that "any confirmed criminal, idiot, rapist, or imbecile in a state institution whose condition had been determined to be 'unimprovable' by an appointed panel of physicians" would be forcibly sterilized. It was the first such state law. Dozens more would follow.
California proved the most enthusiastic, performing almost 70 percent of the state mandated surgical sterilizations in the U.S. by the 1920s. This is why F. Scott Fitzgerald's character Jordan Baker in his 1925 novella thought her Nordic friend Tom Buchanan ought to live there. The deep books Tom had been reading would have been the eugenic texts mentioned above, and his "this man Goddard" may have been a reference to Kallikak Family author Henry Goddard, or perhaps to Lothrop Stoddard, whose real-world Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy is certainly evocative of Fitzgerald's fictional Rise of the Colored Empires.
The long word Daisy couldn't quite remember may have been salpingectomy, the surgical severing of a woman's fallopian tubes. The man's counterpart is vasectomy, whereby his vas deferens are cut. Both procedures render their recipients permanently unable to parent children. Thousands of these procedures were performed by mandate of law or with dubious consent on Americans in state institutions across the country in the 20th century.
Out on Long Island at Cold Spring Harbor, the progress of state sterilization laws was closely tracked at the Eugenics Record Office. A number of such laws were challenged in court, and many struck down as violations of their subjects' Constitutional rights. Each legal defeat was a blow to Davenport and Laughlin's eugenic program, and they were convinced that, given the correct wording, eugenical legislation could successfully stand. Harry Laughlin took up the project of studying the applicable laws of all 48 states, and compiled a huge volume, entitled Eugenic Sterilization in the United States, published in 1922. It contained the text of a model sterilization law which the directors of the Eugenics Record Office believed would stand up to legal challenge all the way up to the Supreme Court. Its wording became just that, a model, which was employed by eugenics advocates nationwide to craft legislation which would compel those deemed unfit to undergo the sterilization surgery, whether or not they wanted it, or even understood what it was.
Through the 1920s, however, officials in Virginia remained the most cautious about it. With the help of Laughlin's model law, the commonwealth passed its own compulsory sterilization law in 1924, but some legal advisors were still anxious regarding the act's permissibility under the U.S. Constitution. State wardens were eager to institute the program, and felt they were on solid legal, and moral, ground, so they manufactured a test case.
Carrie Buck was the 18-year-old daughter of a homeless woman, Emma Buck, who was already an inmate of the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded in Lynchburg. From the age of four Carrie had been living as the foster child and, as she grew, increasingly, the live-in housekeeper of a local couple, John and Alice Dobbs. They halted her education after the sixth grade, and when Carrie became pregnant—she would claim the Dobbses' nephew had raped her; the charge was never investigated—the Dobbses wanted to put her out and send her away. Carrie's case was examined (the hearings were referred to as "inquisitions") and her satisfactory school record ruled out feeblemindedness, but the Dobbses' word that Carrie had exhibited signs of epilepsy was sufficient to remove her from their home and remand her to the state. Carrie's pregnancy delayed her processing, but she gave birth to her own daughter, Vivian, on March 28, 1924, and on June 4 she entered the same Virginia Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded which held her biological mother. She was issued a Binet-Simon test, which assessed her a "middle grade moron." Her mother's test years earlier had found Emma a moron as well.
The Virginia Colony superintendent, Dr. Albert Priddy, was an enthusiastic proponent of the commonwealth's new eugenic sterilization law, and was eager to put it into action. Within his institution he held Carrie Buck, a scientifically-determined moron, herself the child of another scientifically-determined moron, Emma. If Carrie's newborn daughter could be found to be likewise deficient that would clearly demonstrate the genetic menace which the Buck women's line represented to the commonwealth and provide an iron-clad justification for arresting it. Vivian Buck was examined for evidence of feeblemindedness. They couldn't very well interview a seven-month-old baby, nor assess her reading level, but they were able to find a social worker willing to say that, to her, the baby seemed "not quite normal," and with that vague and subjective diagnosis Dr. Priddy and his colleagues had what they needed. They petitioned for permission to surgically sterilize Carrie under Virginia's new law, then sued themselves in her name to test it. While Buck v Priddy was making its way through the lower courts, Dr. Priddy died of leukemia, and was succeeded as the Virginia Colony superintendent by Dr. John Bell, so when the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court Bell's name had replaced Priddy's on it as the defendant.
The Buck v Bell decision is famous among legal historians, but a hundred years later it is not commonly remembered by the American public. Writing for the majority—there was only one dissent—the legendary Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., likened involuntary surgical sterilization to any other measure required of an individual in order to ensure the public health.
*
"BUCK
v
BELL, Superintendent of State Colony Epileptics and Feeble Minded
No. 292
Argued April 22, 1927
Decided May 2, 1927
"Mr. Justice HOLMES delivered the opinion of the Court.
"This is a writ... to review a judgment of the Supreme Court of Appeals of the State of Virginia, affirming a judgment of the Circuit Court of Amherst County, by which the defendant... the superintendent of the State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble Minded, was ordered to perform the operation of salpingectomy upon Carrie Buck, the plaintiff... for the purpose of making her sterile... The case comes here upon the contention that the statute authorizing the judgment is void under the Fourteenth Amendment as denying to the plaintiff... due process of law and the equal protection of the laws.
"Carrie Buck is a feeble-minded white woman who was committed to the State Colony above mentioned in due form. She is the daughter of a feeble-minded mother in the same institution, and the mother of an illegitimate feeble-minded child. She was eighteen years old at the time of the trial of her case in the Circuit Court in the latter part of 1924. An Act of Virginia approved March 20, 1924... recites that the health of the patient and the welfare of society may be promoted in certain cases by the sterilization of mental defectives, under careful safeguard, etc. ; that the sterilization may be effected in males by vasectomy and in females by salpingectomy, without serious pain or substantial danger to life; that the Commonwealth is supporting in various institutions many defective persons who, if now discharged, would become a menace, but, if incapable of procreating, might be discharged with safety and become self-supporting, with benefit to themselves and to society; and that experience has shown that heredity plays an important part in the transmission of insanity, imbecility, etc. The statute then enacts that whenever the superintendent of certain institutions including the abovenamed State Colony shall be of opinion that it is for the best interest of the patients and of society that an inmate under his care should be sexually sterilized, he may have the operation performed upon any patient afflicted with hereditary forms of insanity, imbecility, etc...
"The judgment finds the facts that have been recited and that Carrie Buck 'is the probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually sterilized without detriment to her general health, and that her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization,' and thereupon makes the order... We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes... Three generations of imbeciles are enough."
*
All of this was intricately, inextricably intertwined with the movement for birth control.
The American birth control movement had one central, indispensable figure.
Margaret Higgins was born to Irish immigrants in Corning, New York, in 1879. Her mother was a devout Catholic, and Margaret was the sixth of 11 children. Her father, in contrast to his wife, had no use for the Church, and was something of a parlor radical in their home. From him is certainly where Margaret first developed her rebellious and radical streak. Despite admiration of her father's independent mind, Margaret was horrified by her mother's interminable pregnancies and frequent childbearing, and the constant responsibility of raising children, which Margaret attributed to exhausting her, and leading to her premature death at age 50. Margaret began studying nursing in 1900, but dropped out in 1902 to elope with a free-thinking Greenwich Village artist, painter William Sanger, by whose name she would become world famous.
Young Margaret Sanger and her husband associated with many of the most prominent counter-culture figures of their day, and she and their circle were all deeply impressed and influenced by the writings of English sex theorist Havelock Ellis. Ellis was among the first researchers to investigate and publish on human sexuality and sexual practices, work which predated that of Alfred Kinsey by 50 years, and of William Masters and Virginia Johnson by 60. A physician and psychologist, his books and articles challenged many Victorian taboos surrounding sex and were highly controversial in their time. Ellis noted that sex has not only physical but many psychological aspects as well. He asserted that women should take as much pleasure in sex as men, which was shocking indeed, and that it could and should be separated from the creation of children. Hence, he was a strong advocate of birth control.
Ellis was also an ardent eugenicist. He participated in debates alongside Francis Galton himself, and fretted over feeblemindedness, and the decline he saw of the stock of the race. Indeed many of his ideas regarding the emancipation of women were to permit them the freedom to choose more eugenically favorable mates. He advocated for the surgical sterilization of the unfit, and the coercion of the poor to acquiesce to the procedures by threatening to remove them from public relief if they tried to refuse.
In the early 19-teens the idealistic Sanger joined a visiting nurses association in New York City and worked to use her truncated medical training to try to help improve the lives of the inhabitants of the slums of Manhattan's Lower East Side. There she discovered levels of hardship she had not previously encountered in her middle class upbringing and intellectual Bohemian marriage. She also found immigrant women worn out by the rigors of childbearing and the responsibilities of mothering families of a dozen or more. Their plight, of course, reminded Sanger of her own mother's. She would later recount how the women frequently tried to employ ineffective and usually dangerous techniques learned by word of mouth to prevent conception or induce miscarriage, and often begged her to share what she knew about how wealthy women managed to keep their families small.
Sanger wanted to help them, but had to admit that her knowledge on the subject was in fact very limited. At the time information regarding birth control methods was regulated under the same laws which governed pornography, and where it was discovered it was seized and destroyed as such. Physicians, overwhelmingly male, either would not by moral inclination or could not according to law share information regarding birth control with their female patients.
The oft-told tale of the origin of Margaret Sanger's public career is that of Jake and Sadie Sachs. As the story goes, Sadie was pregnant for the fifth time, but this time in life-threatening danger as several months earlier she had injured herself seriously fumbling her way through a self-induced abortion. The only information regarding preventing another pregnancy their doctor would offer them was that Jake should "sleep on the roof." Terrified and frantic that evening they called their neighborhood nurse, Sanger. Sadie was in a coma when Sanger arrived and died just minutes later, leaving the family motherless and Jake shrieking in horror and grief. It was after pondering the disturbing experience, Margaret Sanger said, that she decided on her life's mission: first to spread information on, and then to provide access to the means of, birth control to all women.
In 1914 Sanger published the first issue of her newsletter The Woman Rebel. Militant and deliberately provocative, though it strongly advocated birth control, it contained very little substantive information regarding it. Nevertheless it was confiscated by postmasters under the 1873 Comstock Act, which forbade distribution of obscene materials through the U.S. mail. Within six months Margaret Sanger was brought up on criminal charges.
She fled the country, first to Canada, then to England (World War I had begun, but German U-boats were not yet menacing civilian ships as they later would), where she met her intellectual hero, Havelock Ellis. She then travelled to Amsterdam, where she saw the operation of the first birth control clinic in the world.
Around this time was when famous science fiction author H.G. Wells began following Margaret Sanger's career. He embraced many forward-looking ideas of his day, such as Ellis' and Sanger's, and like them also had an interest in eugenics. Like many did at the time Wells thought of eugenics as an emerging new field of science. Much of his work in sci-fi—which in the late 19th and early 20th centuries hadn't fully developed as a literary genre yet—he conceived of not as entertainments, but rather as thought experiments, exploring, in fictionalized form, extrapolations of the current currents of scientific and social thought. In The Time Machine he mused on what might become of British society were its class system to carry on far into the future. In The War of the Worlds he explored how England might itself fare were it to encounter a more technologically-advanced civilization inclined to treat it as it at that moment was treating other less technologically-advanced human societies right here on the planet Earth. They did not meet on this trip—they would in 1920—but Wells signed a petition to President Wilson protesting Sanger's prosecution for publishing The Woman Rebel, and would continue to take an interest in her work and progress for the rest of his life.
Unable to get to Sanger overseas, American authorities arrested her husband, William, on his own charges of distributing obscene materials in January 1915. This annoyed birth control advocates, who did not want a man to be either their test case or their martyr. William Sanger was found guilty and sentenced to 30 days in prison. Nevertheless, the case was widely covered and the publicity provided its own victory for birth control advocates, as it raised awareness of their cause and inspired the founding of several additional birth control organizations across the country.
Margaret Sanger returned to the United States in the fall of 1915, just as her husband was being released from prison. She was ready at last to face her own pending charges, and dreamed of founding a birth control clinic in the United States like the one she had seen in operation in Amsterdam. Two unforeseen events influenced the outcome of her case. Tragically, Sanger's five-year-old daughter, Peggy, died of pneumonia just weeks after her return, and that and the story from Chicago of the death of a newborn baby whom a doctor had refused to operate on in the womb which seemed related turned public opinion against the prosecutors and in early 1916 the charges against Sanger were dismissed. After all that, most people in America had herd of Margaret Sanger, and knew that she was about birth control.
On April 15, 1916, beginning in New Rochelle, New York, Sanger embarked on a nationwide speaking tour outlining her program for birth control and her plans to open the first birth control clinic in the United States. One of the first stops on the tour was Cleveland, where she spoke on April 23, Easter Sunday, and supporters marched down Euclid Avenue afterward handing out birth control literature in an act of civil disobedience. Sanger spoke in 20 cities from the East to the West Coasts over the next few months, and ended her tour on July 14 back in Cleveland, where a celebratory banquet was held in her honor.
The Plain Dealer's notice of the event:
"Cleveland club women, social workers, professional men and women and others included in the newly formed Birth Control League of Ohio attended a dinner at Hotel Statler Friday evening in honor of Mrs. Margaret Sanger, one of the leaders in the campaign for family limitation as a means of partially suppressing the flood of mental, moral and physical degenerates."
In Sanger's view, deeply influenced by Havelock Ellis, women taking control of their reproduction came part and parcel with improvement of the race.
When she returned to New York, she followed through on her plans to establish the country's first birth control clinic, which she did in October 1916 in the working-class immigrant neighborhood of Brownsville, in Brooklyn. They were open for ten days before she was arrested, but not before they had already seen over 500 women. Sanger was convicted of distributing obscenity and sentenced to her own 30 days in prison, which did nothing but make her and her movement better known and hence stronger than ever.
In 1917 she began publishing a new newsletter, Birth Control Review. Bolder and more enduring than The Woman Rebel, Sanger would remain its editor and publisher for eleven years. Activist women sold it on street corners in the face of abuse and sometimes physical attacks. In it, and in her public appearances and in the books she was about to start to write, Sanger advocated for birth control and women's rights. She also advocated strongly for the principles of eugenics.
Birth Control Review contained much talk on Thomas Malthus, and its contributors often referred to themselves as "neo-Malthusians." Sanger and her followers took many cues regarding charity from Malthus, and used the pages of the Review to speak in opposition to public assistance to the needy as interference in the natural processes working to eliminate the eugenically disfavored. Sanger's journal dedicated entire issues to sterilization, and featured illustrations depicting "human waste" people. E.A. Ross contributed articles on race suicide and railed against immigration, and pieces by Harry Laughlin ran in its pages as well. Most years during Sanger's tenure the February issue was given over to celebrating Havelock Ellis, commemorating the month of his birth, and Ellis himself was also an occasional contributor. The masthead of Birth Control Review listed Lothrop Stoddard as a member of the American Birth Control League's board of directors and on its national council.
In 1920 American women could vote in national elections for the first time, a heady moment for women who had been fighting for the right for decades. Late that year Margaret Sanger published her first book, Woman and the New Race, with Havelock Ellis providing the introduction. It was a massive bestseller, running through three editions in its first year.
*
No young woman was more inspired by the mission and saga of Margaret Sanger than Cleveland's Dorothy Adams Hamilton.
A privileged girl from a wealthy Euclid Avenue household, Dorothy graduated from Hathaway Brown in 1913, and that fall enrolled at Smith College in Massachusetts, just as Sanger was beginning her public career in New York. Before Dorothy finished her freshman year, Sanger published the first issue of The Woman Rebel. She fled to Europe as Dorothy started as a sophomore at Smith, and returned as she began as a junior. The charges against Sanger were dramatically dropped before the end of that academic year, and that spring she began her cross-country tour. Dorothy would have been home in Cleveland on her summer break in July 1916 when Sanger was celebrated with the banquet there. The two women would eventually become colleagues and friends, and Margaret Sanger said that she and Dorothy first met in 1916, and this likely would have been where and how and when. As Dorothy began her final year at Smith, Sanger opened the Brownsville clinic and went to prison. Birth Control Review began just as Dorothy was graduating. At Smith, with its emphasis on women's issues, Dorothy and her classmates would have closely followed all of this. It is no stretch to say that Margaret Sanger was Dorothy Hamilton's hero. Perhaps one should say heroine.
Back home in Cleveland, a few weeks after graduating Smith, Dorothy married a science nerd just done with a grad degree from MIT and about to go do his military service for the First World War. A Harvard undergrad and wealthy too, he was something of a Euclid Avenue neighbor, though from farther up the street, in the section where the really big houses were. It was July 28, 1917, and the bridegroom was Charles Francis Brush, Jr.
Junior served out World War I in Alabama, using his chemistry knowledge to make explosives for the Army, and when they were free they took a year-long deferred honeymoon across the Pacific. They lived one more year in Boston and their first child, daughter Jane, was born there. That was 1920, the year that Margaret Sanger published Woman and the New Race. The Hamilton-Brushes moved back to Cleveland and Junior started a business, Brush Laboratories, with an MIT classmate, Charles Baldwin Sawyer, and before long Dorothy started to figure out what it was she herself wanted to do.
A young wife of 26, and a new mother who had just given birth to her first child, upon returning to Cleveland Dorothy got involved with the Junior League, a women's civic organization founded in 1912 and still in operation today. She was joined by a Smith classmate from another wealthy Cleveland family, the former Hortense Lockwood Oliver. Just like Dorothy, Hortense had also graduated from Smith and married in the summer of 1917, she to Brooks Shepard, a University School classmate of Dorothy's husband who had gone on to Yale and recently begun a career as an executive at the Eberhard Manufacturing Company, an old maker of parts for carriages and wagons in Cleveland then transitioning to suppliers to the emerging auto industry. Hortense too was a new mother, to a son, Jack, born in 1918.
According to The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, "[Dorothy] Brush had been 'deeply influenced' by Sanger's 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, and began to follow Sanger's activism." Through the Junior League the two friends, inspired by Sanger and steeped in the dedication to women's causes of their Smith College, volunteered at the Maternity Dispensary of Lakeside Hospital, located on East 35th Street in Cleveland, at what today is the eastern edge of the Cuyahoga Community College Metro Campus. Significantly, the gynecological practice at Lakeside was founded around 1906 by Dr. William H. Weir, who was the husband of Charles F. Brush, Senior's grandniece, Roslyn, the granddaughter of Brush's sister Eliza.
The Sanger Papers Project goes on to say that "... starting in 1920, Dorothy Brush and fellow Junior League member Hortense Shepard began to provide birth control information to women at a prenatal clinic of a maternity hospital where they volunteered." This was the very same Maternity Dispensary of Lakeside Hospital, and what they were doing, disseminating information on birth control, was illegal, but they were emulating their role model Margaret Sanger's example, and, likewise, breaking the law in defiance of what they saw as injustice.
Much information regarding this period of Dorothy Brush's life is preserved in a typewritten manuscript history of the organization which she and Hortense Shepard would soon establish, located in the Western Reserve Historical Society archives in Cleveland. It recounts an origin story of Dorothy Brush's activist life reminiscent of Margaret Sanger's own tale about Jake and Sadie Sachs:
"The spark which ignited the Cleveland enterprise was an inconspicuous paragraph in the Plain Dealer one morning in the spring of 1920. A woman had walked off the East 9th Street Pier into the cold waters of Lake Erie, and had left behind her husband and nine children.
"This brief account was not an impersonal news item to two young women who read it. Mrs. Charles Brush and Mrs. Brooks Shepard, graduates of Smith College, had known Mrs. (Blank) [sic] as a 'repeat patient' at the 35th Street Pre-Natal Clinic of Maternity Hospital, where, as clinic aides, they had done Junior League volunteer service. Mrs. (Blank) [sic] had visited the Clinic just the week before, desperately fearful of another pregnancy, only to have her fears confirmed by the doctors. 'I mustn't have another baby,' she had cried. 'My husband is crippled and can't support the nine we have now! I still wash diapers for the last two! I am so tired!'
"For many months Mrs. Brush and Mrs. Shepard, both with a background of training in social case work, had been observing older women, ill and overburdened by child-bearing, being told by the doctor, 'Your health will be endangered by another pregnancy, but the law won't permit me to tell you how to prevent one. ' Almost more poignant, was an occasional young patient, coming in with her second, third or fourth pregnancy in rapid succession. She might be a girl with superior intelligence and education who had shared with her husband high hopes for their marriage and the future of their children. All these plans were fading fast, in a fog of discouragement and frustration. To the young clinic aides, the contrast between their own experience where a planned family was taken for granted, and these women whose married lives were one long series of pregnancies became so tragic as to haunt their days and nights.
"Mrs. Brush remembered that Mrs. Juliet Rublee, a niece of Mr. Charles F. Brush, Sr., was closely associated with Margaret Sanger, and wrote her to ask if there were any contraceptive methods practical for poor people in crowded tenements. Thereafter, when implored by the patients at the clinic, both clinic aides tried to advise about child spacing. They didn't know much, but they told what they knew. The doctor was sympathetic and often suggested instances where the advice was needed, but he said, 'Just don't let me know what you are doing. ' It is possible that the sentimental nurse who loved to talk about 'the patter of little feet,' was not so sympathetic.
"Presently, the Chairman of Volunteers at Maternity Hospital called on Mrs. Shepard. The Clinic might be seriously harmed by volunteers who gave contraceptive information. If the two ladies were to continue at the Clinic they must promise to give up this practice. Mrs. Brush, more idealistic, resigned, because she felt sure she could not keep any such promise. Mrs. Shepard, more practical, promised, because she believed the Clinic was a necessary service and her work there provided her with a valuable background of experience. After the ordeal of deciding, it really didn't matter, because Mrs. Shepard was tactfully 'separated' from her Clinic job shortly thereafter!"
Indeed, as noted above, another Brush family woman was already deeply embedded in the Sanger organization. Juliet Rublee was the daughter of Charles F. Brush, Senior's sister, and Dorothy's husband's cousin. She had her own money, independent of Uncle Charles, as her mother, Alice Delia Brush, had married Samuel E. Barrett, the founder of the Barrett Manufacturing Company in Chicago, a 19th century construction concern whose descendants, like Brush Electric's, still operate today. Juliet's husband was another Harvard man and a Wall Street lawyer who graduated to adviser first for the Theodore Roosevelt and then the Woodrow Wilson administrations.
Peter Engelman described her in his History of the Birth Control Movement in America:
"Juliet Barrett Rublee [was] a restless and adventurous heir to a Chicago roofing company fortune and wife of attorney and Washington insider George Rublee... Within a couple of years she became [Margaret] Sanger's best friend and most significant financial backer. In the days before Sanger's trial, Rublee went to Washington to lean on her connections in hopes of setting up a meeting between [birth control advocates] and President Wilson. A mercurial personality, Rublee was sometimes outlandish in her pursuits—she directed her own feature film in Mexico, a fiasco that drained her bank account, and she led an expedition to test a newly-invented deep-sea diving cylinder off the coast of Italy that resulted in her kidnapping. Hence she could not always be relied on in the movement."
Additional details come from the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU:
"Juliet Rublee lived an extravagant and exotic life in the 1920s and 1930s. She provided financial backing for a treasure hunt off the coast of Italy in 1926. When the expedition failed, Rublee was kidnapped by the Italian expedition crew and had to be ransomed by her husband. A few years later she wrote and produced a silent film on the 1910 socialist revolution in Mexico entitled Soul of Mexico, filmed on location from 1928-1932. Though critical success eluded her, Rublee's devotion to film, art, and dance was undimmed. Also fascinated by the spiritual world, she and Sanger often traded their dreams in letters."
The masthead of Sanger's Birth Control Review listed Juliet Rublee as vice president of the American Birth Control League for years, and she frequently served as the newsletter's co-editor. However impractical she was reputed to have been in certain realms of her life, Brush niece Juliet Rublee was a praetorian member of Margaret Sanger's inner circle, and the catalyst for an incident frequently referenced as formative by Dorothy Brush and the other Cleveland women involved in the early days of birth control in Ohio.
In November 1921, Rublee invited her cousin's wife, Dorothy, Dorothy's friend, Hortense Shepard, and their mothers, Jane Adams Hamilton and May Lockwood Oliver, to New York City to attend the First American Conference on Birth Control. The event was advertised in the pages of Birth Control Review for months leading up to it, and Lothrop Stoddard served on the conference committee and delivered a presentation. On the third and final day of the conference they were to hear Sanger give an address entitled "Birth Control—Is It Moral?" at New York Town Hall. When they arrived, however, the doors were barred, guarded by police. They opened a short time later, but not to welcome them in, but rather to escort Sanger out, under arrest. The Cleveland Brush family women, and a sizable crowd, followed the troop down Broadway to the station where Sanger was to be booked. There Juliett Rublee was also arrested, on a charge of disorderly conduct. Charges against both women were eventually dropped.
The November 1921 New York event was described by chronicler of birth control in Cleveland Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer in her 2004 book Any Friend of the Movement, who wrote, "The Cleveland women experienced firsthand the depth of hostility toward birth control and its use, as well as any public discussion of the topic. Although this encounter made them wary, it heightened rather than quenched their growing interest." According to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at NYU, "The Ohio women returned more informed, battle tested and inspired to bring together the necessary elements in Cleveland needed to form a birth control organization."
Back home, the women began building a network: family, society peers, and business associates, often people who were all three.
"'We quickly secured the enthusiasm of our young husbands,' Dorothy Brush remembered." They got Dorothy's husband, Charles Brush, Jr., as well as Hortense's, Brooks Shepard.
They got Junior's business partner and co-founder of Brush Laboratories, Charles Baldwin Sawyer.
They got Edna Brush Perkins, Junior's big sister, herself a veteran of the suffragist agitations which had just recently succeeded in securing women the vote in 1920. With her came her husband, Dr. Roger Griswold Perkins, public health physician and professor of medicine at Western Reserve University. They got Virginia Wing, a friend of the Brushes and a Millionaires' Row neighbor growing up who had been one of Edna's attendants at her debutante balls at Christmas 1900.
Cousin Juliet Rublee was already deep inside Margaret Sanger's national birth control organization. They had their mothers, Jane Adams Hamilton and May Lockwood Oliver. Cousin Roslyn Campbell Weir was on board too, and her husband, Dr. William, was the founder of the gynecological practice at Lakeside Hospital where Dorothy and Hortense had first begun their activism.
They got Julia McCune, another socially prominent and socially active Cleveland woman, who, among many other things, was a co-founder of the Cleveland Playhouse where Dorothy's sister Margaret Hamilton began the acting career which took her to Oz.
And they got Jerome Collett Fisher.
*
A 1928 newspaper article described Fisher as "[Charles F.] Brush [Senior]'s attorney, and a close friend of his son's." He was born in Kansas in 1889, and while he was but a newborn Fisher's parents moved the family to Conneaut, Ohio, in the Western Reserve lakeshore on the Pennsylvania line. In 1902 his father, Jerome Hopkins Fisher, died, leaving his mother, the former Effie Collett, a widow. The family hardly seems to have been left destitute, however, as Jerome attended Cleveland's University School and later Harvard, both alma maters of Charles Brush, Junior'. Fisher went on to graduate from Harvard Law School. His 1917 World War I draft card already listed him as an attorney and employed at the Cleveland firm of Thompson, Hine & Flory, and in June of that year he married Katherine Bingham, a Wellesley College grad. (Yet another summer 1917 wedding in this story. The U.S. was mobilizing for World War I that year, and though none of the young men who are part of this account came to harm in the war they all likely felt their futures at that moment somewhat uncertain.) Jerome served stateside in the Ohio National Guard during the war, and by 1920 the Bingham-Fishers were living down on Hessler Street by Western Reserve University.
The name Bingham warrants some comment here. Katherine was born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to Charles Wilson Bingham (1856-1942), and does not appear to have been a relation, at least a close one, to the Cleveland Millionaires' Row Binghams, or Charles F. Brush, Senior's first business partner, Charles William Bingham (1846-1929). Such a coincidence, if it be, is hard to ignore, however. The records available are far from comprehensive, and perhaps in the future new information will reveal family connections after all. Or perhaps it won't.
Back to Jerome.
The Thompson, Hine & Flory firm were Charles Brush, Senior's lawyers. Whether Fisher came to his job there a supporter of birth control and eugenics, or only later became persuaded, he was soon deeply involved, body and soul. His dedication to the movement is not in question, as will presently be made abundantly evident, but it certainly would have been a good career move regardless. Julia McCune of the Brush family birth control network was the wife of founding partner Walter L. Flory, and Amos Burt Thompson was the brother-in-law of Hortense Shepard's mother, May Oliver.
Jerome Fisher became Thompson, Hine & Flory's guy on birth control and eugenics, and the Cleveland movement's man on the legal end.
Fisher made himself an expert (the expert) on Ohio's laws governing birth control and if and how they conflicted with applicable federal laws and the laws of other U.S. states. Having studied the subject intensely, he composed in March 1922 a legal opinion, which was signed off on by his boss, A. B. Thompson.
Fisher wrote, and Thompson agreed, that, while indeed forbidden for pharmacists and laypeople, physicians in the State of Ohio could legally provide birth control information to their patients, for any reason, and could also provide preparations, so long as their ingredients were not mysterious or secret and were clearly listed on their containers, and absolutely nothing was sent through the U.S. mail. Significantly, it meant that to achieve the ends of the Ohio birth control advocates no new laws would need to be passed, and no existing laws would have to be changed or abolished. The opinion was circulated among other lawyers and legal experts, and they found it sound and concurred with its assertions.
Fisher presented the opinion later that year in Cincinnati as one of the featured speakers at the First Ohio State Conference on Birth Control, held in November. His presentation, "The Ohio State Laws Concerning Birth Control," was featured along with Juliet Rublee, speaking on "The Need of Birth Control in America." The Ohio State Medical Journal reported that "... the meeting was held in the ball room of the Hotel Gibson, attended by 500 men and women from high social circles..." "... [T]he list of patrons and patronesses..." of the conference, published in the December 1922 issue of Birth Control Review, included Mr. and Mrs. Charles F. Brush, Jr., Mr. and Mrs. Brooks Shepard, Mrs. William H. Weir, Mr. and Mrs. Baldwin Sawyer, Mr. and Mrs. Jerome C. Fisher, and Mr. and Mrs. Walter S. [sic] Flory.
Birth Control Review reported, "Mrs. Margaret Sanger was the principal speaker at the evening meeting. She... spoke of Birth Control as a world movement, which was about to usher in a new and better civilization." The text of Sanger's speech at the event was published in the pages of the January 1923 issue of The Ohio State Medical Journal.
Excerpts:
"Our critics say that birth control is in violation of the laws of nature. I answer by telling you that practically every thing we do violates the laws of nature. If we did not go against nature we still would be walking on four feet, and physicians, who violate nature's dictates more than any other group, would not be attempting to save the halt and the maimed that nature, if left to herself, would gather to her bosom.
"Nature was the first to originate birth control, and her methods were war, famine, disease, pestilence and flood. The ancients, getting beyond this stage, utilized infanticide and abandonment, both of which were advocated by Seneca, Aristotle and Plato.
"Even Rome, built on the strength of mighty armies, could not afford to care for children that were not fit. Each child was taken from its mother after birth and exposed to the elements. If it survived it was reared. Otherwise—well!
"Today, birth control is not alone an individual problem, it is not merely a national problem, it is a world problem, for, as H.G. Wells has said, the whole world is swarming with cramped, dreary, meaningless lives which amount to nothing, which represent only vain repetitions. All that they think has been thought before. All that they do has been done better before. They are born, but to use up the energies and resources of the world.
"Our charity to the unfit in reality is a crime against future generations, against the finest blossoming of the spirit of creative genius...
"We in the United States need a stringent program of right-about face if we are to survive among the nations. The light of democracy is flickering in this land. The increasing population among the morons, the feeble-minded, the insane and the lower types of our people, make this nation unsafe for the principles of democracy.
"We are fighting for the women and children of the present generation; we are fighting for the children, women and men of the next generation. We want a world freer, happier, cleaner. We want a race of thoroughbreds."
*
By the winter of 1923 the members of the Cleveland birth control group felt that their efforts had matured sufficiently to warrant the establishment of a more formal structure for their organization. They drafted a constitution, and elected officers, selecting Roslyn Weir as one of two co-vice presidents, and Katherine Bingham Fisher, as secretary. Dorothy Brush, Hortense Shepard, Hortense's mother May Oliver, and Julia McCune Flory were all among the founders.
They remained quite wary, however, of spooking potential supporters who might be put off by the birth control movement's controversial reputation. They left their organization unnamed for the time, but agreed that when they did choose a name it would avoid incorporating the term "birth control," and that they would not affiliate themselves with any of the established national birth control organizations. They would also make explicit their intentions, fortified with Jerome Fisher's legal scholarship, to operate within the law.
Before the end of the year they were engaged in concrete planning for how they would at last realize their goal of opening a birth control clinic in Cleveland. They wanted to establish it in an existing health care facility, which already would have all the necessary medical infrastructure in place. But what then followed was nearly five years of discussions and negotiations with the administrators of hospitals all over the city, all of whom ultimately felt that becoming associated with birth control would be too controversial, and thus detrimental to their institutions' core missions.
Charles Brush, Jr., died in the meantime, along with his and Dorothy's little daughter, Jane, in May 1927, and not long after Dorothy along with their son, young Charles Brush, III, moved from Cleveland to New York. Dorothy continued to be actively involved in the Cleveland birth control movement, though, and with her and the late Junior's wealth remained an important financial contributor. Dorothy remarried, to New York attorney Alexander C. Dick.
In February 1928, despite, or just as likely spurred by, these frustrations and setbacks, the Cleveland birth control group decided finally to move ahead and establish an independent clinic, unaffiliated with any existing city hospital, on their own. They found a space on the sixth floor of the Osborne Building, 1021 Prospect, in the triangular lot at the corner of Huron, right on the edge of what is today Playhouse Square, and at last gave their organization a name, the Maternal Health Association, or MHA.
Their first staff of six doctors included Roslyn Weir's husband, gynecologist Dr. William, and their first executive committee had Hortense Shepard as "Chairman," Dorothy Brush as 1st Vice "Chairman," and Katherine Bingham Fisher as Secretary. Roslyn Weir, May Oliver, and Julia McCune Flory were also on the committee, as well as Jerome Fisher, its only man. The board of trustees included Edna Brush Perkins, Charles Baldwin Sawyer, as well as Jerome Fisher's boss at the law firm, Walter Flory.
Interestingly, and deliberately, the MHA's first board also included a number of clergy. In Any Friend of the Movement, Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson Meyer said: "Due to the shady reputation of family limitation, the MHA recruited prominent religious leaders to add moral authority and an air of propriety to the cause... the clinic also required a firm moral foundation to counteract possible charges of acting against faith precepts or the laws of nature." So the MHA's board recruited Ferdinand Q. Blanchard from the Euclid Avenue Congregational Church, T. S. McWilliams, a professor of religious education at Western Reserve University and the former pastor of the Calvary Presbyterian Church, and Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver, leader of Temple-Tifereth Israel, at the time the largest Jewish congregation in Cleveland.
Also on the board was Rev. Joel Babcock Hayden, pastor of the Fairmount Presbyterian Church in Cleveland Heights.
*
Rev. Hayden's church at the corner of Fairmount and Coventry was—still is—just half a mile from Dorothy and Junior's suburban home on Tudor Drive. Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, he was a 1909 grad of Oberlin College, where he was a member of the cheerleading squad.
Joel Hayden's eugenics appears to have been rooted in anxieties over immigration and the newcomers' ability to assimilate in America. Quoting him, the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported in 1950 that, "His [Hayden's] interest in the sociological and industrial conditions of the foreign peasant class grew, he often explained, from his freshman year at college, when he spent the summer as a mechanic for the Pennsylvania Steel Co. at 10 cents an hour. 'In a gang of 20,' he would recall, 'there were representatives of seven nationalities, with not a high school education among them. Mine was a kid's reaction against the contrast, and I thought there was something rotten somewhere. The next year I decided to enter the Christian ministry, and decided that my life work should pass up the purely scholastic side and specialize in immigration and the study of its problems.'"
After Oberlin he got a second bachelor's, in divinity, from the Union Theological Seminary at Columbia University in New York. In 1912 he married an Oberlin classmate, Hazel Petty, and was ordained a Presbyterian minister. Young Rev. Hayden with his wife then spent 13 months in Poland as an "immigration fellow," under the auspices of the Board of Missions of the Presbyterian Church, studying to deepen his and his denomination's understanding of the Polish immigrants coming to the United States.
The Haydens returned to the U.S. in 1913, and Joel was appointed the pastor of the St. Paul's Presbyterian Church in Baltimore, Maryland, one described later by the Cleveland Plain Dealer as "a Polish mission." During his three-year tenure there he completed and published his report on his fellowship, Religious Work Among Poles in America.
Per his own book, Rev. Hayden was scandalized by his experience in Eastern Europe and his observations of Poles' relationship to their traditional church, both there and in America.
He wrote:
"In Poland the forms of superstition and ignorance connected with Catholicism are numerous and pitiful. The system is opposed to education, makes no effort to lift the people from poverty, perpetuates the class distinctions that have weakened the whole nation, appropriates the hard-earned money of the people in return for mystical benefits, and works hand in glove with the groups that exploit the material goods and the morals of the Poles. The Bishop of Galicia, according to Polish testimony, owns fourteen whiskey distilleries, and properly and effectually blesses them.
"This domination of the Poles by one church has led them to scorn and distrust all other forms of organized Christianity. There is no tolerance, no charity. The Lutheran, the Prussian Protestant, is the type of heretic who is the enemy of Rome and the Poles; the Russian is the menace to the Pole on the east, and he is faithful to the Orthodox leaders. So the Pole easily unites his national loyalty, his religious superstition, and his racial prejudices, and the result is dogmatic intolerance which expresses itself in the scorn which accompanied the words of a Polish carpenter in Wilmington, Delaware, with whom I spoke concerning another Pole in that city. I had asked him whether Mr. Z—— was not a Pole, and he quickly replied, 'No, he is not a Pole; he is a Presbyterian!'
"We must not be afraid to confront this fact in our Christian work among the Poles and other Slavs, that to the Roman Catholic Church there is no such thing as tolerance. Tolerance to her is heresy. There is no salvation outside that fold, and that puts an end to all genuine and sustained religious co-operation. We can, in the best spirit of a democratic country, tolerate other forms of Christian belief and worship, but she will never tolerate. Church and school fall under her tacit condemnation, sometimes not expressed, when that church and school do not conform to the thought of the Middle Ages, the ecclesiastical finality of Roman rule. When you confront the Pole, you are confronting the pupil and disciple of such a system of thought and discipline. In conversation with a Polish Catholic priest I was told that there was no salvation for us; that we were outcasts; that there never could be any quarter; that outside the Roman Church, all was atheism in reality, because we bowed before empty forms and insubstantial shadows. Back of such conversation, such kneeling to absolute and unquestioned authority, there is the definite resolve to bring all things into conformity to that system of thought and discipline. Whether democracy and the leadership of the Holy Spirit promised by Christ can live in such an atmosphere is the question which we are called upon to decide, as workers among those who have never escaped the shadow cast by dark clouds of fear."
American Enterprise Institute Fellow Christine Rosen has written about clergy members' support of the eugenics movement in the rapidly changing and increasingly technological late-19th and early-20th centuries in her book Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.
"Most ministers," Rosen wrote, "responded to the growing influence of science not with denunciations, but with well-intentioned efforts to incorporate scientific methods into their own belief systems... Many religious leaders arrived at eugenics through their own experiences with progressive-style reform. With secular progressives, they shared a fear of social unrest as well as optimism about people's ability to improve their circumstances. And although they came to reform with different traditions of social service, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews nonetheless confronted similar questions about society. They understood with progressives the challenge of assimilating thousands of immigrants and embraced many of the era's prejudices about these new arrivals to the United States."
Hayden came to Cleveland in 1917, when he was appointed pastor of the Woodland Avenue Presbyterian Church at East 46th Street. The neighborhood had been affluent in the 1870s, but by the time of Rev. Hayden's advent it had filled with Polish immigrants—Hayden's recent background no doubt being a factor in his selection for the post—and become what his Fairmount Church later described as a "slum." He told the Plain dealer in 1918, "'One of the chief duties of the church is to teach Americanism and a greater loyalty to God and country, especially in a foreign community, such as the one in which the Woodland avenue [sic] church is located,' said Rev. Mr. Hayden yesterday."
A 1919 publication of the City of Cleveland's Americanization Committee, Poles of Cleveland, lists Rev. Joel B. Hayden as a member of its General Committee, alongside Mrs. Roger G. Perkins, nee Edna Brush, which may be where and how and when Hayden first met and became involved with the Brush family and their projects. After his departure he would work toward the establishment of a settlement house for the neighborhood's Polish immigrant community, the Woodland Center Neighborhood House, in 1923. Among the main goals of the settlement house movement was facilitating immigrants learning English and adopting American cultural values and habits.
Pastor Elwood Erickson was set to retire from the Fairmount Church in 1922. Cleveland Heights had only just achieved city status the year before, and still had a population of barely 15,000 to fill its eight square miles, a commodious 1,650 square yards per person, most of whom were the affluent residents of its several exclusive planned housing developments and members of their associated golf clubs. Two of those were Charles F. Brush, Jr. and Dorothy Adams Hamilton Brush.
A history of the Fairmount Church published in the 1960s preserves this anecdote:
"Fairmount invited him [Hayden] to become its minister. When the call came before the Cleveland Presbytery there was objection to Joel's leaving the slums of Woodland Center for the 'Elysian Fields' of the Heights. Dr. Ferris presented the report to the Bills and Overtures Committee, and said that the Presbytery would stultify itself if it took the position that a man couldn't hope for a promotion within its bounds, and moved that the call be placed in Joel's hands. 'That isn't a church,' shouted one member of the Committee, 'it's a country club. ' 'Then I'll be the head caddy,' said Joel."
One of the first tasks he accomplished there was overseeing the completion of the church's new Sunday School.
"Because the Sunday School and young people's activities dominated the church life, the parish house was built first, in 1922, and completed in 1924 at a cost of $240,000.00. The church membership at the time was 399. The inscription at the entrance was 'Is it well with the child?' It expressed what has ever been Fairmount's primary concern."
One could read this as simply an apropos quotation from the Second Book of Kings, but given the eugenics movement's and later the Brush Foundation's emphasis on the so-called well-born child, it does raise an eyebrow that that was what Rev. Hayden chose to carve in stone above the Sunday School door.
"Dr. Hayden put Fairmount on the map... He attracted people including some who had not been inside a church for a long time... Both the church and Sunday School grew during his pastorate... He had been a cheer leader at Oberlin. He was a cheer leader always. He was an attractive speaker and had many invitations to speak. He had a flair for publicity and the knack of dramatizing himself and whatever he was doing. He was full of good humor, good will, and charm and was soon a well-known Cleveland personality... A colorful personality himself, he liked colorful personalities and drew them to him... He continued to be in demand as a speaker and this helped make Fairmount known..."
Advertisements can be found in the Cleveland Plain Dealer throughout the 1920s for nearly bi-weekly appearances by Rev. Hayden in various public forums speaking again and again simply on "current events." His opinions on matters were sought and known. In 1925 he was elected president of the City Club.
He continued his theological studies, and in 1928 he was awarded a doctor of divinity from Western Reserve University. That year he joined the board of directors of the Maternal Health Association, and within three months he was offered and accepted, along with his old Cleveland Americanization Committee colleague Edna Brush Perkins, one of the seats on the board of directors of the Brush Foundation.
*
Which brings things back to June 1928, and the little press conference in Brush's office in the Arcade.
How much of this eugenics business must be laid at Charles Brush's feet?
Enough.
When Brush and Jerome Fisher made the announcement of the Brush Foundation to the reporters in his office, Charles Brush had one year left to live, and about the last quarter of that he would spend suffering on his deathbed. So he didn't have much time to elaborate on his thoughts, beliefs and intentions. He had sufficient, however, to say a significant amount.
Two interviews in particular directly quote words Charles F. Brush said regarding his foundation and eugenics, or otherwise attribute sentiments directly to him. One appeared the following day, front page above the fold of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, "Brush Donates $500,000 for Eugenics Work." The other came later that summer, a full-page feature piece in the Sunday Magazine section of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, titled "A Fund For Breeding Better Human Beings: Why Charles Francis Brush, Cleveland Millionaire and Inventor, Has Set Aside A Half Million Dollars For Eugenic Purposes." A few other miscellaneous sources provide reliable information on Brush's thoughts on the subject as well.
The Post-Dispatch article related this story regarding the origin of the idea for the foundation:
"The Brush family for many years observed an interesting custom. Sunday night was always kept apart for the family. On that night they would all be together, sometimes with a few intimate friends, more often alone. These Sunday night gatherings gradually became a friendly forum for discussion of all manner of questions. Naturally, however, the debate often turned on some scientific problem. Not the least of these was the population problem. They all felt very keenly about it and had done considerable reading along sociological lines. Their views on this subject coincided more nearly than they did on any other."
And the typewritten manuscript history of the Maternal Health Association in the Western Reserve Historical Society archive adds further detail:
"Some of the first sympathetic listeners [to Dorothy Brush and Hortense Shepard's advocacy] were among their own families, Mrs. Brush's father-in-law, Charles F. Brush Sr., and his daughter and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Roger Perkins, his niece and her husband, Dr. and Mrs. Wm. Weir. Since Jerry [sic] Fisher was Mr. Brush's lawyer, Mr. Brush, therefore, received 'education' from at least two sources. This double pressure undoubtedly stimulated his thinking about problems of population and the well-born child, later resulting in concept [sic] of the Brush Foundation."
"What caused you to do this?" one of the reporters asked Brush at the press conference. "General reading," he replied.
He seems to have been reading Henry Goddard's The Kallikak Family, or something like it, or he remembered it imperfectly, as he had the fictional American Continental Army soldier Martin Kallikak's nationality confused, coupled with the breeding theories of Herbert Spencer.
Brush himself, per the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
"Four or five generations of paupers sprang from the same family in England, indicating that there is no end to this thing. A remedy cannot be effected all at once. A large part of this idea is to breed out the criminal and the feeble-minded."
And he seems to have been reading Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. At least it is suggested as much.
As reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"Brush believes that the world is rapidly becoming over populated to a danger point. He sees a rising tide of inferior humans, preserved through the new advances of medicine. And he has given the half-million dollars as one means of checking this rising tide before it is too late. The latter phrase is Brush's own."
He'd been reading the science fiction of H.G. Wells. In 1923 Wells published the novel Men Like Gods, in which his protagonist, Mr. Barnstable, is mysteriously borne away for a time to a society which had been practicing eugenic principles for millennia. The people he finds there are healthy and strong, both physically and mentally, not to mention very beautiful. They have eradicated disease, mosquitoes and literal weeds, as well as government and clothing, and along the way have developed telepathy. They are strict practitioners of population limitation, and any outlying baby who is born falling short of standards produces no offspring, as the inhabitants of the eugenic world do not love the weak and unproductive, and they have outgrown sentimental notions of compassion and pity. Mr. Barnstable and his companions are treated hospitably, fed pastries, Gruyere cheese and white wine, but are quarantined, and at their contemporary level of physical and mental development are considered by the inhabitants of the eugenic world as on the level of rats, a pestilence to be isolated and ultimately banished. Barnstable accepts his assessment—one which, as a reasonable man, he finds harsh but fair—and agrees to return to his own—our—world.
Said Brush, quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"Perhaps you've read H.G. Wells' 'Men Like Gods,'" he says. "Wells is a socialist, of course. Socialism won't work, and we wouldn't want it if it would. But the important thing in that book to me is the fact that in Wells' ideal world the population is kept down to 250,000,000 people, so that everyone could have plenty of everything."
And Brush had also been reading E.A. Ross, father of the term "race suicide." Having recovered from his sacking from Stanford and landed on his feet at the University of Wisconsin, Prof. Ross in 1927 published Standing Room Only?, a book laden with graphs, tables and statistics, plus the lyrics of a few Scottish folk songs. In it, Ross reviewed many of the theories of Thomas Malthus, and decried the victory of medical science, the rise of public health, and innovations in food production and preservation over disease and hunger, infant mortality, and general global death rates. Reiterating many old themes, Ross outlined a decline of Western birthrates, and increase in those of Asia and Africa, the eugenicists' classic race suicide rhetoric, and a warning about the dangers to American democracy posed by immigration.
The Plain Dealer reported, "Before announcing his action [the formation of the Brush Foundation], Dr. Brush spoke of 'Standing Room Only,' a book by Edward Alsworth Ross, which Dr. Brush said, 'had a very direct value in connection with the subject he was about to discuss. '" The St. Louis Post-Dispatch article went further, stating, "Many of his theories and beliefs Brush has derived from the book 'Standing Room Only,' by Prof. Edward Allsworth [sic] Ross of the University of Wisconsin. He buys copies in lots of a dozen and passes them out to his friends and acquaintances."
("It's all scientific stuff; it's been proved," Tom Buchanan said to Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. "This fellow has worked out the whole thing.")
It can be stated with confidence that Brush was thinking along these lines at least as early as March 1927, right after the publication of Standing Room Only?, two months before his son's unexpected death, and about the time the South Euclid-Lyndhurst School District was putting his name on their new high school. That same month, the Cleveland society magazine Topics ran a congratulatory notice of Brush's 78th birthday, which included this comment:
"It was with a satisfied expression that Mr. Brush declared, 'We are living more than any other people on earth, the average life of man having been increased from 40 to 60 years, while at the same time we have given back to civilization more than any other nation or people, the only danger ahead now being the increase in population and its relation to food supply in the not very distant future. '"
("'...we've produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?'")
He was reported to have been aware of and to have supported the May 1927 Buck v Bell Supreme Court decision and state-mandated eugenic sterilization.
Brush, quoted in the Cleveland Plain Dealer:
"'Sixteen states already have authorized sterilization of the unfit. Such procedure, when necessary, in the opinion of competent physicians, has been held constitutional by the United States Supreme Court. '"
And his words, in support of tenets of both "positive" and "negative" eugenics, reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
"This rational scientist would like to see birth control methods made scientifically exact and made so generally available that the families of the poor as well as the rich may be limited. He hopes that through a campaign of propaganda the wealthy can be persuaded to have larger families. And not only the wealthy but those of moderate incomes who can afford to rear well-educated children. He would also like to see sterilization of the feeble-minded made as effective in every state as it is in California and Virginia. He has no particular prejudice as between heredity and environment but holds that both are factors in the development of healthy and intelligent human beings. He points with pride to the opinion of Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court, upholding the Virginia sterilization law and containing the memorable sentence: 'Three generations of feeble-minded [sic] are enough. '"
And what about Helene? Brush's second daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia and lived like a ghost in the Millionaires' Row mansion from the time she was 15, around 1900. How frequently did her busy father see her in his huge house? Did she join the rest of the family for their customary Sunday evening dinners? How did she present and behave, and what impression did it make, on her father, but all their other relations and acquaintances involved with eugenics as well: her brother and her sister, and their spouses Dorothy and Roger; cousin Roslyn Weir; Jerome Fisher; Rev. Hayden? She would have met any eugenist's definition of "insane," and hers was precisely the kind of condition the eugenists were attempting to stamp out through their programs. How was Helene viewed by Brush, and other members of the family? Her diagnosis reportedly sent Brush into a depression. What role in his thinking and decision-making did his daughter Helene's situation play?
Charles F. Brush had resolved to create the foundation by the end of 1927, after the death of his son, evidenced by a handwritten note Dorothy sent him dated December 21 of that year, thanking him for a Christmas gift, and praising the plans he was making. The underlines are hers:
"Also I want to say that your possible work as outlined for eugenics and birth control is the most thrilling thing to me that has ever happened. I have been thinking of it constantly ever since you told me of it and I really know that nothing you could do in memory of Charles would have pleased him more—as it does me. We were entirely at one in our heartfelt interest along these lines. Charles even served on one committee when there was only one other man on it, and contributed money himself frequently. We both felt that of all the [illegible: many? worst?] evils discussed as causing misery to mankind, this was paramount. There is nothing I would not do to forward that work and I think your thought is perfectly thrilling!"
Further direct quotes from Charles F. Brush in the Post-Dispatch and Plain Dealer echo many of the themes espoused by Thomas Malthus, Margaret Sanger and E.A. Ross:
"'Isn't it better to get the public consciousness of this impending peril well established? If you had a house and someone should discover a fire in one of the wings wouldn't you prefer to be told of it before the roof came down?'"
"'Whereas, two or three generations ago it took six or eight babies to replace their parents in the world, it now takes rather less than three. Yet people are coming along as fast as ever. You can see what that must lead to.'"
"'We're going at breakneck speed toward the saturation point. We can double our population here, and still be prosperous. We can stand it longer than any other nation. But within 100 years, if the present increase goes on, some of us will starve to death.'"
"'War? Will war be the means of checking overpopulation? Why, I'm told that already the losses incurred in the late war [World War I] have been more than made up. War—even modern warfare—couldn't keep up with it.'"
"'We are drifting rapidly toward the condition of China and India, where the people struggle, not for clothes, not for education, but for something to eat. Why are we drifting so much more rapidly today than we were generations ago? Because in the last 20 or 30 years the enormous advances which have been made in medical science have so greatly decreased infant mortality.'"
"'In my own lifetime,' he says, 'the population of this country has increased five times. There are more than a million feeble-minded in this country today, to say nothing of the insane and the criminal population.'"
Other sentiments attributed to him reiterate some of the movement's most disquieting rhetoric:
"To Brush the problem is not one of the distant future but of the immediate present. He sees it as the greatest menace to our present civilization."
"He would like to see each race make the contribution of its superior, not inferior, stock."
"Brush holds no brief for any particular race of people, although he concedes that there may be superior races, just as there are superior breeds of cattle."
The text of the Brush Foundation trust indenture, bearing his signature, also carries the weight of Brush's own words.
There is in it a clear mandate for his foundation's managers to fund efforts to limit population, without ever using the then-controversial term "birth control." "...[I]n my opinion the most urgent problem confronting the world today is the rapid increase of population which threatens to over-crowd the earth in the not distant future, with resultant shortage of food and lower standards of living, which must certainly lead to grave economic disturbances, famines and wars, and threaten civilization itself..." And he warned of "... economic and social evils which result from too great increase of population..." He called on the managers to "limit the numbers of those who are born into the world," and to work to "regulate" and to "restrict" "the increase of population."
So far as eugenics was concerned, however, Brush in his indenture had no reservations about using the word, and several of the buzzwords of the movement."... beneficent scientific research has contributed toward the prolongation of life and the preservation of the weak and the unfit, who under former conditions could not have survived nor added descendants to the race..." He tasked the managers to work to "better" and to "improve the quality" of "the human stock," to support "scientific research in the field of eugenics" and to work toward the "education of the people to the importance of the betterment of the stock."
Brush personally chose the first board of managers—Dorothy, Roslyn, Edna, his own Thompson, Hine & Flory attorney Jerome Fisher, and Fairmount Presbyterian's pastor Joel Hayden—whose relationships to him and to each other, and with whose backgrounds and something of their agendas the reader will now be familiar, all save for the final figure, who would chair and lead the whole thing: T. Wingate Todd.
*
Doctor Thomas Wingate Todd was an English anatomist, born in 1885 in Sheffield, in Yorkshire, in the north of England, the son of a Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal minister. He was a star in school in Nottingham and Manchester, taking numerous scholarships, awards and honors in the course of earning his medical degrees in 1907. He served on the med school faculty at the University of Manchester beginning in 1908, lecturing in clinical and dental anatomy, and splitting his time as the House Surgeon at the Manchester Royal Infirmary.
In 1912 Dr. Carl August Hamann was promoted to Dean of the School of Medicine at the Western Reserve University, in the United States, in the Middle West, in Ohio, in Cleveland, and a replacement was sought to fill his vacated chair in the Department of Anatomy. Some American friends solicited the advice of Sir Arthur Keith, a legendary British anthropologist who also happened to have been Dr. Todd's mentor (plus one of Britain's most famous eugenicists). Dr. Hamman had begun a collection of skeletal remains for the Western Reserve medical school in the 1890s, which in twenty or so years had already become one of the most impressive comparative anatomy resources in the country. Familiar with Todd's perspicacity, and knowing the enthusiasm he shared with Hamman for the tales silent bones and teeth could be made to tell, Keith connected the young anatomist with the American university, with his persuasive endorsement. Thus Todd moved to Cleveland and became the Henry Wilson Payne Professor of Anatomy and Professor of Physical Anthropology in the Western Reserve University School of Medicine, where and how and when he met another member of the faculty there, the head of the Department of Hygiene and Bacteriology, Charles F. Brush's son-in-law, Dr. Roger Griswold Perkins,.
Cleveland was an industrial city, much like Manchester, and Dr. Todd found it entirely agreeable. He, Hamman and Roger got along wonderfully, but where the three men really came together was over Dr. Hamman's collection of bones. They worked hard and creatively to enlarge it, most notably persuading the Ohio Legislature to make the WRU anatomy lab the default destination for the unclaimed indigent bodies of Cuyahoga County, rather than burying them in the traditional potter's field as had previously been the practice. This change soon took what had been known as the Hamman Collection, but which increasingly came to be referred to as the Hamman-Todd Collection, from one of hundreds of skeletons to one of thousands. Todd also added specimens of apes and other non-human primates to the collection to increase its usefulness in the study of evolution. This extraordinary comparative anatomy resource attracted researchers from around the world.
However, due to the nature of how they had been acquired, and from what stratum of Cleveland society they had come, most of the skeletons in the collection were in one way or another damaged, not by the researchers but rather by the lives their donors had lived, by poor nutrition, disease, or violence, and quite often all three. Dr. Hamman's career was winding down—he would retire in 1928, and die in 1930—but Todd and Roger longed to study a broad sample of pristine specimens and from them to gain a new understanding of what was the normal growth and development of the human body, as Dr. Todd later put it, "Forward from the cradle, not backward from the morgue."
After studying thousands of life-ravaged skeletons, teeth and jaws, they thought they might find more to learn from healthy ones, and even more still from ones which were yet growing. Growing bodies of course belong to children, and living ones. Perhaps their teeth might be possible somewhat, but examining the growing bones of living children was, to say the least, a much greater challenge. Drs. Todd and Perkins believed it could be accomplished, however, using the then relatively new technology of X-ray imaging.
In 1925 Todd and Roger brought a proposal before the Cleveland Health Council and the Board of Education. They wanted to sponsor in a Cleveland grade school a healthy child contest, and the prize for the winners and their parents would be a trip to a fun summer camp. Hannah Buchanan was among a small coterie of "faithful advisors" to the Maternal Health Association, and she would aid Hortense Oliver Shepard and Katherine Bingham Fisher in selecting their first nurse for the clinic, Rosina Volk. She was also the head of the Children's Fresh Air Camp in Woodland Hills, now the Buckeye-Woodhill neighborhood of Cleveland, just south of University Circle beyond the gorge of Doan Brook, where Benedictine High School is located. They persuaded the school administrators, and starting in 1926 Todd and Roger were able to begin selecting students between ages six and 14 at the Stearns Road Grade School, just up the street from WRU.
Todd wrote:
"…in 1926 the Health Council, at Doctor Perkins' suggestion, sought the co-operation of the University and the Board of Education in a new intensive study of children's growth. This was no more new to Cleveland than to any large city. We had had surveys before. This was not to be a survey but a detailed study of a selected group large enough for practical purposes. Eight hundred children from Stearns Road School were carefully examined by all regular existing methods, but in addition the deeper structure of the developing child was brought into light by means of the X-ray. This cost money, and the Health Council cheerfully bore the cost."
The children selected during the school year and their parents considered it an honor to have been chosen, feeling it an acknowledgement of exemplary health and vigor which reflected well on their families and parenting. In the summer at the camp, between entertainments and outdoor recreation, the kids were met by a phalanx of WRU medical students, who took detailed histories of the children and quizzed their parents on their families' backgrounds and habits. These winners slash research subjects were then given detailed anthropometric exams, recording measurements of their bodies, and the process was capped with a series of six X-rays, or radiographs, of each child.
The planned three-year program ran its course through the school years and summers of 1926, 1927 and 1928, but marking how a child had grown from an initial measurement through the next two years of her or his life hardly furnished the kind of comprehensive developmental data which Todd and Roger were hoping to gather. They very much wanted to keep it going. And just as their funding was running out there was Roger's wife's rich dad with an interest in eugenics and half a million bucks.
According to writer James M. Wood, in an article on the Brush Foundation's early efforts which appeared in Cleveland Magazine in July 1983, "Brush consulted family members and friends about a director for the new foundation. His daughter, Edna Perkins, and her husband [Roger] reportedly urged that T. Wingate Todd be appointed."
Charles Brush, per the trust indenture of his foundation, wanted "to improve the quality... of those who are born into the world..." and to finance work toward "... the betterment of the human stock..." As Brush was establishing his foundation, his son-in-law Roger and Roger's renowned colleague Dr. Todd brought before the wealthy inventor a vastly expanded version of their expiring child growth study. (Todd and his successors would take it from 800 to around 5,000 subjects, adding to the Stearns Road kids students from the public Cleveland, East Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Shaker Heights, Lakewood and Euclid schools, and the private Western Reserve Academy, University School, Hawken, Hathaway Brown, Laurel and Park schools, as well as little kids from three local nursery schools before it was done.) This they couched for Brush as a eugenic quest to discover just what exactly a "well-born" child was.
By looking at many children, they posited, they could establish what constituted average and normal development, both physical and mental, as well as, much more importantly from a eugenical point of view, what was below the average, and what was above. With sufficiently detailed histories, a large enough sample set, and correct and rigorous testing, they might discover the things which pushed developing children toward the lower and the higher ends of the scale. They also added a comparative raciological aspect, recruiting for and noting four distinct racial and ethnic groups of Cleveland school kids, whom they classified as "Anglo-Saxon," "Teutonic," "Sicilian," and "Negro." According to Wood in Cleveland Magazine: "Todd hoped they would explain apparent racial differences and provide eugenicists with acceptable ways to improve racial stock."
Todd later said of the inquiry, "What we are all looking for of course is the superior child. We want to know the conditions of his birth and efficient development. We want to know how he behaves and what precisely are the indications of his superiority."
Wood reported that Brush "approved Todd's experiments," and with the inventor's blessing and financing the anatomist began a study of child growth and development which would last well over a decade.
They spent a year getting things ready, hooking up old Millionaires' Row friend Virginia Wing with a job, and setting up offices in the Western Reserve University Medical School. Charles F. Brush died in the meantime, and before his foundation opened for business its managers added two new important members to what they would have considered the scientific team.
Leo Dewey Anderson was a psychologist looking for the origins of personality traits. He would tell a Cleveland-area Parent Teacher Association meeting, "We are apt to look upon problems of race betterment and population limitation as of very recent development, but this is not true. The whole matter of eugenics and race betterment was discussed by Plato and has been a recurring topic since that time in all enlightened countries. Consciously, intelligently, and with full realizations of the wrongs we are committing toward our children's children, we must look into the future and devise methods for population control, by the elimination of the unfit through sterilization, rational education, or isolation."
Charles Elmer Gehlke was a Western Reserve and Columbia trained sociologist, specializing in criminals and the causes of criminality, subjects of keen interest to the eugenicists. In a 1931 speech in Cleveland he said, "We tinker at the police, at the courts, at the prisons... What is needed is a great public movement in this field which will strike at the roots of crime. Which is better, hospitals to care for hundreds of cases of typhoid fever, or a filtration system that has made typhoid a rare disease?" It's probably not accidental that he chose typhoid and its filtration as his metaphor, as by then he was working alongside Roger Perkins, and filtering typhoid out of Cleveland's water was Roger's first and perhaps greatest public health accomplishment.
*
"BRUSH EUGENIC BOARD IS READY TO TACKLE JOB
Staff Complete, Headquarters Opened; Study of Child to Be First Important Undertaking.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
September 26, 1929
Organization of the $500,000 Brush Foundation has been completed, headquarters have been set up, and the Foundation is now ready to tackle the problems for which it was set up a year ago by the late Charles Francis Brush. Its purpose is twofold—race improvement and population limitation.
The new headquarters have been established in the Medical School of Western Reserve University, Room 38, 2109 Adelbert Road S.E. Here magazines dealing with race betterment, eugenics and heredity can be consulted. A lending library of books bearing on the Foundation program is available for general use.
Study of the child is one of the jobs which must be undertaken. this research being planned to discover the traits and habit patterns which form the adult personality. This work. a study which never before has been conducted along the line contemplated by the Foundation, will be in direct charge of L. Dewey Anderson, Ph.D. of Columbia University.
Dr. Anderson, who comes from the Bureau of Education experiments in New York City to take the post of associate professor on the faculty of Western Reserve University Medical School and on the staff of the Brush Foundation, brings with him recent experiences in the study of human development. This study will be carried out by Dr. Anderson under direction of Dr. T. Wingate Todd, Chairman of the directors of the Brush Foundation and professor of anatomy at Western Reserve Medical School.
Race improvement, it has been pointed out, must include a program of population limitation. Children must be born at times when the best opportunities for health and happiness are present. It must also include reduction of the number of imbecile and others whose reproduction leads to race deterioration.
Search for the facts about that mysterious person, the human being, and information and education on these facts—these form the basis of the program.
The child research will be conducted jointly with Western Reserve University, and organizations cooperating throughout the city. Other parts of the program include:
Formation of study groups on the most recent deliberations relative to heredity and environment.
A broad educational program which will make possible discussions of all subjects relating to what it means to be well born, the effect of environment the individual understanding of character and physical development, and the education of boys and girls who are to be the parents of the next generation. This will be carried on in the state, in Cleveland, and outside, through conferences. talks, reading clubs and pamphlets.
The first year has not been wasted by the organization. Much study has been given to the setup and to lining up definite problems on which to work.
The first publication of the Brush Foundation, the article 'Growth—The Gypsy' [sic] by Dr. Todd, has been issued. This is the first of a series of publications which will cover growth. population, race improvement and other subjects which are asking the world for an answer. It presents results of an investigation which Dr. Todd has been carrying on for years with reference to the registration of development of children from 5 to 13 years of age, and may be secured at the Brush Foundation office.
Trustees of the Brush Foundation who have the sole control of the great endowment left by Dr. Brush and dedicated to race improvement and population limitation, represent social, civic and scientific interests.
Dr. Todd is a member of many learned societies and a scientist of international reputation. Since receiving his diploma from the Royal College of Surgeons in 1911 [sic] he has had a distinguished and stimulating career.
Mrs. Roger G. Perkins [Edna] has won notice for books written on her travels in the west and in the Orient. She worked during the formation of the women's suffrage party and later in connection with the Anti-Tuberculosis League and Associated Charities and the Women's City Club. She is at present, besides being the mother of three sons, an artist of repute.
Rev. Joel B. Hayden of Fairmount Presbyterian Church brings to the Foundation, its bulletin says, a 'religious enthusiasm, keen appreciation of the religious development of young men and women, and a fine civic spirit.'
Mrs. William H. Weir [Roslyn], niece [sic] of Dr. Brush, was active in the foundation of the Hawkins [sic] School, the Child Guidance Clinic, and is at present one of the organizers of the new Child Health Association.
Jerome C. Fisher, Foundation secretary, is a lawyer and has been interested for many years in eugenic questions. He brings to the Foundation legal experience, knowledge of eugenics programs and experience in the World War.
Mrs. Alexander Dick [Dorothy], daughter-in-law of Dr. Brush, has through her travels and experiences in various parts of the world acquired valuable knowledge of questions.
Brooks Shepard [Hortense's husband], besides his business ability, has been active in the research field.
Dr. C. E. Gehlke, professor of sociology at Western Reserve University, joins medical science with social science in his reputation.
The trustees yesterday announced the appointment of Miss Virginia Wing as executive secretary of the Brush Foundation. Miss Wing has been associated with the Health Council and the Anti-Tuberculosis League. Her experience in health and social work in Cleveland will serve to connect the educational program of the Foundation with those programs already under way in Cleveland. Her headquarters will be at the office of the Brush Foundation."
*
Both James Wood's 1983 article in Cleveland Magazine and one by Judith Bailey published in CWRU Magazine in February 1992 offered detailed descriptions about how the testing of what became known as the Brush Inquiry was carried out:
"The annual head-to-toe analysis of each child included a physical exam, a series of X-rays, and a dental exam and impressions, plus a battery of psychological tests, including the Rorschach inkblot tests. Sleep patterns, nutrition and other behaviors were tracked through a 588-item questionnaire filled out annually by the parents."
"For two full days, starting on their birthdays, children in paper slippers would shuffle from test to test in the anatomical laboratory. They were X-rayed and photographed (full-length nude). They made hand and footprints, gave tooth impressions for plaster casts and hair for tests, told researchers what they ate and what they thought, and were tested with Rorschach inkblots."
"Testing included physical examinations and X-rays of the head—frontal and side views—plus the hand-wrist, elbow, shoulder, chest, pelvis, knee and foot. Researchers also took dental impressions, assessed motor skills, and tracked diet, sleep patterns and other behavioral factors."
"Some subjects returned for retesting every three months until age one, every six months to age five and then every year—usually on their birthdays—through adolescence."
"At least a dozen radiographs were taken every three months at ages 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, then every six months until the child was five, then annually to age 18."
According to Bailey, the Rorschach tests originally employed in the Brush Inquiry were first developed to be used on "adults with psychiatric problems. The futility of applying this scoring to normal children soon became obvious to Brush Inquiry researchers, who subsequently spent over five years revising the Rorschach."
Dr. Todd said:
"…the Brush Foundation expects to build a synthetic study of physical and mental growth. By intensive investigation of normal children we expect to establish a record of progress from birth to adulthood punctuated by observations on the inception and maturation of those powers and qualifications which are of special significance in the greater progress of our civilization. Nay, further, it is our hope and plan to search not in the children's records only but in those of their parents, for the standards of excellence through which alone the child may have the fullest opportunity for a good start. We desire to recognize and foster the physical and mental equipment which bring in their train successively imagination and vision, the development of self-discipline, a rigorous sense of personal responsibility, the ability to utilize the experience alike of oneself and others, a realization of consequences and a constructive seriousness of purpose. Thus will democracy be made safe for the World and the millennium be at hand."
Not everyone on the board was excited about the initial focus of the Brush Foundation, notably the women, Dorothy and Roslyn—with the evident exception of Edna, who apparently supported her husband Roger's point of view—who had hoped for more support toward the cause of birth control.
David Weir was Roslyn and Dr. William's son, Charles F. Brush's great-grandnephew, and a lesser though not insubstantial heir in Brush's will. He himself became a physician and served on the Brush Foundation board in later years, and was interviewed for James Wood's 1983 Cleveland Magazine article. Perhaps not surprisingly in line with his mother's view, David Weir said that "'Todd's experiments in race betterment could be loosely justified as a project to find out what's normal in child growth and development... but it was a pretty tenuous use of foundation funds. '"
Wood continued:
"Foundation minutes show that Dorothy Hamilton Brush, Charles Junior's widow, and Roslyn Weir, pressured Todd to undertake contraceptive research. Mrs. Brush and a Brush niece, Juliet Rublee, were personal friends of Margaret Sanger. Mrs. Brush wanted to use foundation funds to support Sanger's clinics."
"According to notes in foundation files, Todd told the ladies 'over my dead body. ' Like many male physicians of the day he observed local laws which forbade giving birth control information to women. Todd was afraid contraceptive research would ruin the foundation's name and discredit his well-born children project. Because Charles Brush had personally selected Todd, and watched foundation affairs closely, the women went along with Todd's work."
And in the meantime Jerome Fisher was pursuing sterilization.
*
Attorney Fisher's side-gig from his side-gig on the board of the Brush Foundation was the Ohio Race Betterment Association. "The Association was organized in June, 1929, Jerome C. Fisher elected Chairman, and Dr. C. E. Gehlke, Secretary." That was according to a notice of the group penned by Virginia Wing and printed in the August 1931 issue of Eugenical News, the journal of Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin's Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The Ohio Race Betterment Association was "... composed of leading citizens from all sections of the state and from all walks of life who feel that the most practical means of stopping the steady multiplication of feeble-minded and epileptic persons is by sterilization." A September 1930 letter to Wing preserved in the Harry Laughlin Papers at Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri, from R. E. Miles, director of The Ohio Institute for social welfare in Columbus, offering advice on how to craft a sterilization bill for Ohio, locates the Association in the Brush Foundation offices in the WRU Med School at 2109 Adelbert Road. Wing, in Eugenical News, echoing the language of the Buck v Bell decision, went on: "Our purpose is, 'to aid in the education of the people as to the fundamental importance to human welfare of the inherited qualities of the race, and to assist by practical means in the care for and limitation of those whose inherited qualities render them socially inadequate.'"
T. Wingate Todd described it this way:
"Our first effort was to develop a fuller consciousness of the necessity and the practicability of betterment of the human stock. With this object the Ohio Race Betterment Association was established, an organization which, by mutual study, publicity and education strives to realize the social aspirations of our Founder. It keeps in close touch with the Institutional and Legislative work of the State, lending expert assistance where necessary in furthering social improvement. For it is realized that while much good will come of eugenics, that harvest will be slow, whereas education brings relatively quick returns."
Under the auspices of the Ohio Race Betterment Association, and in conjunction with the Brush Foundation, Fisher organized a gathering billed as the Symposium on Race Betterment, which convened in Dayton in October 1929.
Chaired by Antioch College president Arthur E. Morgan ("...I deem it a great honor to have been the chairman of the Race Betterment conference at which these papers were read, and I look forward with great hope to a world which will be a better and a saner place to live..."), the conference featured a number of eminent speakers from across the state.
Superintendent of the Ohio Hospital for Epileptics, G. G. Kineon, spoke on "Heredity Equals Destiny" (another recapitulation of the theories postulated by Dugdale and Goddard re: the Jukes and the Kallikaks), and Warren S. Thompson, the Director of the Scripps Foundation, on "The Principle of Population" (another recapitulation of the theories postulated by Malthus).
From the Brush Foundation itself Brooks Shepard explained the "Purpose of the Brush Foundation" ("...to discover, if we may, what constitutes a well-born child..."), and L. Dewey Anderson described Dr. Todd's growth study's developing "Yardsticks for Humanity" ("...the Brush Foundation expects to build a synthetic study of mental and physical growth. We hope to establish a record of progress from birth to adulthood by observations on the inception and maturation of the powers and qualifications which are of special significance in the greater progress of our civilization, and to gain knowledge which will aid in the formation of programs for race betterment.").
Permelia Shields from the Cleveland League of Women Voters and the Ohio Social Hygiene Committee talked about "The League of Women Voters, A Factor in Racial Betterment" ("...its interests are devoted to the study of those causes, great and small, which affect the welfare of human beings, and that, although it urges the assumption of obligations and restrictions necessary to social order, it does so that men and women together may enjoy a greater happiness and freedom, and leave to posterity a heritage of racial betterment..."), and Hamilton Shaffer, from the State Congress of Parents and Teachers, about "Environment and Heredity, Co-operators, not Rivals" ("Each individual is a mosaic of many characteristics, and whether the pattern becomes one of outstanding beauty, or deteriorates into a motley design with no particular merit, depends chiefly upon the effort of those in control of conditioning the child's development.").
The Director of the Central Clinic Council of Social Agencies in Cincinnati, Emerson A. North, explained his thoughts on "Psychiatry and Inheritance" ("...one of the duties of psychiatry is to assist in a better understanding of the feebleminded, with the purpose of preparing and fitting as many as possible into society. This can only be done when it becomes generally recognized that they are limited in the things they can do, and are capable only to a certain point..."), and the Superintendent of the Columbus State Hospital, William H. Pritchard, expressed his ideas regarding "What Shall We Do With Our Unfit?" ("...For defectives with psychotic or criminal histories, and especially those with homicidal or predatory or perverted sexual tendencies, and for all idiots and low grade imbeciles, continuous and permanent segregation, with useful and possibly profitable employment. The possibility of reproduction by sexual encounter in these classes should be precluded by the thoroughness with which this segregation is enforced. As public opinion in favor of the method is developed, the additional safeguard of sterilization of those so segregated might be provided...").
Remarks made at the conference specifically on behalf of the Brush Foundation were covered in depth and reported at the time:
"DEFENDS STUDIES TO IMPROVE RACE
Brush Foundation Director Tells Welfare Experts of Its Work Here.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
October 11, 1929
DAYTON, O., Oct. 10.—'If the health and happiness of the parent and his or her freedom from poverty and want are desirable, if children have the right to grow up in the environment which only such parents can give them, then it is inevitable that parents must have the right and means to decide when their children shall be born.'
That, in substance, was the declaration made by Brooks Shepard, [a] director of the Brush Foundation, Cleveland, today in stressing the importance of scientific study of racial conditions in the country, with the hope of ultimately improving the human race.
His remarks were made at a symposium of the Ohio Social Welfare conference, which leading social service workers from all over the country attended.
Vast sums are spent every year in this country in improving live stock, and more care and scientific attention must be devoted to improving human 'stock' if this country is to be saved from itself, he stated.
Present at the symposium, which was the highlight of the conference, were these leaders in their respective fields:
Dr. G. G. Kineon, superintendent of the Ohio Hospital for Epileptics at Gallipolis; Warren S. Thompson, director of the Scripps Foundation; Dr. L. William Prichard, superintendent of the Columbus State Hospital; Miss Permelia Shields, chairman of the Social Hygiene Committee of Ohio and of the Cleveland League of Women Voters; Dr. Emerson A. North, director of the Central Clinic of Social Agencies, Cincinnati; Dr. L. Dewey Anderson, director of psychological research, Brush Foundation.
In making the position of the Foundation clear, Shepard stated that his organization is not a new birth control organization.
That widespread misconception, he said, is the work of a leading news agency, which considers birth control the only one of the foundation's several interests which has any news value.
'The foundation is naturally interested in the movement to make parenthood a voluntary obligation,' he stated.
'Not from science but from the heart comes our conviction that the marriage of a man and a woman should not and must not be degraded to the level of cattle breeding.'
'We are not a branch of the American Eugenics Society and we are not at all sure that the claims of the eugenists are all well founded, although some of them certainly are.
'We are in agreement with the eugenists that certain types of unfitness are inherent in family strains and that the members of these families should be prevented as humanely as possible from passing them on to future generations.
'Whether the more humane way is to deprive them of their liberty and the opportunity to marry, or to deprive them of the possibility of offspring is a matter worthy of serious thought. This problem is one of the many being worked out by scientists, psychologists and physiologists attached to the foundation staff.
'What is unfitness? What qualities of parents are inheritable? What qualities are assets? What are liabilities?
'Obviously science alone cannot lay down rules for human selection and human conduct; but science can study and record the interplay and adjustment of human relationships, even though it does not attempt to evaluate them.'
Shepard cited the program of child study now being conducted by the foundation in collaboration with Western Reserve University, which will continue from infancy through adolescence.
This study embraces the normal child's physical, mental and emotional development; its home, its parents, and its ancestry.
Through this study the foundation hopes to trace the growth and maturing of the traits and behavior patterns which make it an individual, fit or unfit; to discover how far environment may supplement or may cancel its inherited qualities; to discover, if possible, what constitutes a well born child.
That epilepsy is hereditary and that one in every 500 in the United States has it, was the statement made at the forum by Dr. Kineon.
The symposium was the finale of a series of group conferences on social welfare work held during the day.
Addresses were made by Lawrence C. Cole, executive secretary, Children's Bureau; Miss Lottie Bialosky, Juvenile Court; Dr. O. B. Markey, Child Guidance Clinic, and John Eisenhauer, Boys' Farm, all of Cleveland."
Fisher once described his group's program at length to a civic lunch in Youngstown:
"URGES CHECK ON BIRTHS OF WEAK-MINDED
Ohio Race Betterment Association Head Explains Control Program
Youngstown Telegram
October 3, 1930
'The law of inheritance is as true with men as it is with race horses. No one expects to raise derby winners from scrubs.'
Jerome C. Fisher of Cleveland, president of the Ohio Race Betterment Association, thus explained birth control at a luncheon of the Kiwanis club here this noon. 'The People Our Children Live With' was the title of his talk.
The Ohio Race Betterment Association is formed 'to aid in education as to the care for and limitation of those whose inherited qualities render them socially inadequate.'
'Heredity knows no social distinctions,' Fisher said.
'In a democracy, every movement to raise moral standards, better political conditions, or secure economic justice, depends on the quality of the people.'
'Millions of dollars are being spent in an attempt to help the low grade and the unfit after they are born. Practically nothing has hitherto been done on the equally important question of the kind of people which are born,' he said.
'The real race suicide lies not only in the small families of good stock, but damagingly so in the 1,200 defective descendants of the Jukes girl.'
'We are breeding from the bottom, and flooding out the healthy stock with the bad, unsound stock. At the present birth rates, if we start with 200 college graduates and 200 of the low grade, unskilled type, the fifth generation will show 28 descendants of the college graduate class, and 472 descendants of the low grade group,' he continued.
'All who know the facts are deeply concerned by the alarming and steady increase in the number of feeble-minded. Conservative students agree that in 1920 there were at least 57,600 people in Ohio who had less than three-fourths of normal intelligence, and the public health committee of the Cleveland chamber of commerce said that a very conservative estimate of the 'definitely feeble-minded' in Ohio in 1920 was 34,500.
'Only about 3,500 can now be taken care of in the state institutions for this purpose, and even these involve a financial burden of about $2,000,000 a year upon taxpayers of the state,' he said.
'Science has found a means of sterilization, which in no way interferes with sex life, but does prevent the constant multiplication of feeble-minded children. Such treatment makes possible the release of many people from life-long imprisonment in asylums,' Fisher said.
'If one-tenth of our feeble-minded were selected for this treatment, our children's generation should be saved from more than 5,000 feeble-minded, and this means more than the saving of the three million [sic] dollars a year. It means kindness to those who would not wish to be born, and a better society in which our children will live,' he concluded."
The "education of the people to the importance of the betterment of the stock" was well within Fisher's mandate from Charles Brush as a member of his foundation's board, but as a juris doctor with a utopian vision for humanity's future, Jerome Fisher was not content with mere education. He wanted law. On the day of the announcement of the Brush Foundation he told the Cleveland Press: "One of the things which I hope this board will do is to encourage the movement for legislation in Ohio for sterilization of the feeble-minded. Such a bill has passed the legislature twice but been vetoed by the governor each time. I believe the race ought not to breed more from the unfit than the fit. That is happening now."
Harry Laughlin wrote to Charles Brush at his home on Millionaires' Row to congratulate him on behalf of the American Eugenics Society on the establishment of his Foundation, and to offer their cooperation. Laughlin's letter was answered by Jerome Fisher, on, he said, Brush's behest, and invited any advice on the matter which Laughlin might have. "I should be very glad, in due course," Fisher wrote, "to receive suggestions from you, especially as to the expenditures of the immediate fund, in the particular field of promoting the sterilization of the unfit, and the regulation of the increase of population. One question which concerns me is by what means States which have sterilization laws but make little use of them, can be aided in approaching the performance in California. Are you in touch with organizations or persons in various States working either for the passage of sterilization bills, or for an increased use of existing bills[?]" Fisher invited Laughlin to meet when he was in Cleveland, and he, Fisher, visited Cold Spring Harbor the following summer, and received a letter from Laughlin afterward thanking him for his visit.
Advocates of bringing Virginia- and California-style forced eugenic sterilization to Ohio persisted. In November 1930 a new sterilization bill was introduced in the Ohio legislature by State Senator Clande Van Everett David Emmons of Akron, and the Brush Foundation's Jerome Fisher and the other members of the Ohio Race Betterment Association made it their mission to secure its passage. They faced, as had the supporters of the previous two sterilization bills, strong opposition from Ohio Catholics, led by the bishop of Cleveland, Joseph Schrembs. Citing opposition to state imposition into matters concerning the family outlined in Pope Leo XIII's 1891 doctrinal letter Rerum Novarum, Shrembs and his allies were just as opposed to sterilization in Ohio as Fisher and his were for it. Ohio at the time was home to 1 million Catholics, the sixth largest state Catholic population in the country. In his opposition to sterilization Shrembs proved—surprisingly!—adept at the exercise of not just spiritual and moral but secular political power, organizing groups, circulating propaganda, writing editorials to newspapers. He also sent telegrams and paid in-person calls to lawmakers, reminding them of the number of Catholic voters who resided in their districts over whose votes Bishop Shrembs wielded significant influence. At times they were surprised and mildly chagrined to learn that the bishop knew of and would recommend to them specific legislative procedural obstacles which they could employ to mire and halt the bill. Fisher and the Ohio Race Betterment Association lobbied hard as well, also penning editorials, theirs listing the names of hundreds of doctors, hospital superintendents, judges, prison officials, academics, and (non-Catholic) clergy all in support of the bill, citing the endorsement of forced sterilization made by the recent United States Supreme Court in the Buck v Bell decision, then, as the Great Depression settled more heavily down upon the nation, more and more emphasizing the savings to Ohio taxpayers they maintained passage would entail.
Jerome Fisher exchanged many letters with Davenport and Laughlin at Cold Spring Harbor seeking advice on passing a sterilization bill in Ohio. In a September 18, 1930, letter to Laughlin, Fisher wrote "...we do not expect to wipe out feeble-mindedness but... if we can reasonably expect to reduce by a few thousands the number of feeble-minded in this state in the next two generations this is sufficient accomplishment to more than justify the sterilization bill." According to Phillip Reilly in his book The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States, Fisher consulted with Laughlin for advice on ways to counter arguments put forward by the opponents of Ohio's sterilization bill. It's not clear whether Laughlin's model sterilization law was used as the blueprint for Ohio's bill, but this was the standard practice in many states and it might have been more unusual if it wasn't than if it was. Nevertheless, the vote on the Emmons Bill was taken in March 1931, and once again the measure was defeated.
Fisher and his friends weren't done, though. They would try again.
*
"NEW ERA HUMAN TO RULE WORLD, SAYS SCIENTIST
Calumet City [Illinois] Times
November 15, 1929
CLEVELAND, NOV. 15.—A new era human will rule this old world in ages to come, and perhaps after all H.G. Wells' imaginary 'super man' will not be so imaginary, if there is any foundation to the goal toward which psychologists are working.
A $50,000 [sic] foundation—one set a year ago by Charles Francis Brush, inventor of the arc light [sic], for the betterment of the human race—is working toward this goal—one which will result in a new era child, if not a human of super qualities.
Dr. L. Dewey Anderson, associate professor of psychology at the graduate school of Western Reserve University and director of the psychological research of the foundation, points out some of the problems which the foundation hopes to solve. There are many and they are complex.
One of the primary discoveries which Dr. Anderson hopes to make is the definite determination of when the traits of pugnacity, timidity, perseverance, inquisitiveness, honesty and the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, make their appearance in the child's personality.
'If we can determine this,' according to Dr. Anderson, 'we will have proceeded immeasurably toward learning how parents may encourage the good behavioristic traits and discourage the bad.'
Another controversial point of psychology which the foundation hopes to bring light upon is that of whether a child's traits are environmental or inherited.
This has long been a bone of contention among psychologists.
'If we find that mental traits are inherited,' Dr. Anderson said, 'we will seek to learn what chance in life a child of a highly intelligent father and a commonplace mother would have.'
In other words, according to Dr. Anderson, it is the hope to find out if a child inherits the predominant traits from his father or his mother or if they are largely a chance proposition.
'Feeble-mindedness,' Dr. Anderson pointed out, 'is the only one of all the traits that we are certain is inherited.'
With knowledge as to the part that environment plays in a child's life, Dr. Anderson said that it would then be possible for psychologists to develop a program of education insuring [sic] a child the best possible training.
Probably one of the biggest problems facing the foundation is that of curtailing in future years the birth of unfits. Dr. Anderson admitted he is yet puzzled as to how to proceed in solving this problem. He mentioned sterilization of the insane and feeble-minded and the criminal class, but he said he frankly feels that the problem goes much further than that.
'We must throw light on the whole question by pointing out to the masses what results they may expect from children born under conditions that are not of the best.
'Also it may be brought out that children born at given intervals are liable to have the best chances in life, if our results show this. Then and then only can we obtain our object of race improvement through population limitation,' Dr. Anderson said."
*
Todd and the other members of the Brush Foundation board and their allies all looked constantly for new ways to expand their operations and, perhaps more to the point, locate new sources of funding, and very early on in their efforts they were able to join forces with some old Brush family neighbors and friends.
As far back as his earliest career in the north of England, teeth had always been an adjunct to Dr. Todd's work with bones, and he taught in the WRU dental school as well as from the department of anatomy. Birdsall Holly Broadbent had been a student of his shortly after Todd's arrival in Cleveland, and in 1924, Broadbent, as a newly minted orthodontist, joined Dr. Todd's lab at WRU as a research fellow. Not long afterwards, Todd and Roger first began X-raying the kids at summer camp, and young Dr. Broadbent came up with something useful for their efforts. Broadbent invented and had a prototype worked up of a device he called a roentgenographic cephalometer. The contraption held the head of a living subject very still, allowing a researcher to create wonderfully clear and standard X-rays of growing skulls and teeth and jaws.
Dr. Todd had some Brush family connections of his own. His professorship in the WRU Department of Anatomy was endowed by Henry Wilson Payne, whose niece, Frances Payne Bingham, happened to be the daughter of young Charles F. Brush's very first business partner, Charles Bingham. Frances had married the grandson of a former mayor of Cleveland, and a future Ohio state senator and U.S. congressman, Chester Castle Bolton, and in 1917 the Bingham-Boltons bought a 110-acre farm which they called Franchester ("Frances" + "Chester") in the brand new Village of Euclidville, in old Euclid Township. It was nestled comfortably against the Mayfield Country Club, on the west side of Richmond Road just north of Cedar, where Charles Brush was a member, and also neighbored the country home of Brush grandniece and the Brush Foundation and Maternal Health Association's Roslyn Weir and her husband, MHA gynecologist Dr. William. In 1920, as Euclidville became Lyndhurst, Frances' sister, Elizabeth, and Elizabeth's husband, Dudley Blossom, bought an adjacent 22-acre property and moved in next door, creating a cozy Brush family-associated enclave in the southeast corner of old Euclid Township, just about five miles due south down Richmond Road from Charles Brush's boyhood home at Walnut Hills farm.
The Boltons had three sons and a daughter. The youngest son, Charles Bingham Bolton, had been an orthodontic patient of Broadbent in his teens, and one of the first students of an innovative young tutor in Cleveland named James Hawken. So impressed and satisfied with Hawken's tutelage had the Boltons been that in 1922 Chester and Frances donated the land at the north end of their property for Mr. Hawken to open a country school, duly called the Hawken School, which operated on the spot on Richmond Road in Lyndhurst for the next 40 years. When Drs. Todd and Broadbent brought the young orthodontist's head holder out to the wealthy Brush friends in their country home in 1928, Charles Bolton, and his family along with him, had just suffered a terrible tragedy. An extraordinarily active youth, 18-year-old Charles had finished Hawken and was on his way to Harvard, and was working as a counselor at an outdoor camp near Boston in the summer of 1927, when he slipped in a swimming accident and broke his neck. He never attended Harvard, or any college, afterward, and a very long recovery would only be able to leave him paralyzed from the waist down, and confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
In an attempt to help her son's rehabilitation and to find some purpose in the new mode in which he, and all of the family along with him, would thenceforth be living, Mrs. Bolton agreed to Todd and Broadbent's funding request, if they named it for Charles, and found some role for him in the work of the study. The doctors readily agreed and the event was described by Dr. Broadbent's son, B. Holly, Jr., himself become a dentist, and a colleague, Dr. Rolf Behrents, in 1984:
"... encouraged by Dr. Broadbent and Dr. Todd, Frances Payne Bolton and her son established the Charles Bingham Bolton Fund in October of 1928. It was designed to subsidize a period of study covering five years as an independent but coordinated study in conjunction with the Brush Inquiry. The intent of the study was to determine what occurred in the facial skeleton and dental areas during growth and development. This major effort subsequently became known as the Bolton Study of the Development of the Face of the Growing Child."
The Bolton Study would end up being the most significant add-on to the work of the Brush Inquiry, but through the 1930s funding would be garnered for the larger project by introducing new layer upon new layer of supplemental research to the original growth study, investigating "tuberculosis in adolescent girls," "sick, needy and crippled children," "children's allergies and behavior," and "the developing mind through testing of intelligence."
*
T. Wingate Todd could be an intimidating figure. Just as intimidating could be his manifest indefatigability. He performed many of the dissections of the new cadavers coming into the Hamman-Todd collection through his and Roger's efforts personally, evidenced by his initials, "TWT," penciled on hundreds of their folios. The Brush Foundation produced nearly 50 papers on its work in the first decade following its inception, and Todd wrote all but three of them.
"During working hours at the medical school, Todd always wore a white lab coat cinched at the waist with a thick, braided rope, and it became a tradition in the anatomy department for the rest of the staff to wear similar rope 'belts,' although none could be as thick as Todd's. In descending gradations according to rank, seniority and age, the ropes they wore were thinner and thinner, and the youngest assistant always had to make do with a length of string."
According to his son, his first-born, named for Sir Arthur Keith:
"'My father's philosophy was that there was absolutely no reason for not being correct,' says Arthur Todd. 'The only grade he expected you to get was an 'A'; anything else was simply not a grade.'"
"'Everyone was busy, busy, busy in our house. As a matter of fact, I never knew anyone to sit down, unless they were so blessed tired that they just couldn't go on.'"
Other biographers took note of Dr. Todd's work ethic as well:
"Typically, Todd would rise at five a. m., spend a full day at the university, and bring work home with him at dinner time. He would go to bed at eight-thirty, wake up at eleven to work for a few hours, go back to sleep, then wake up at five and start the whole process over again.
"Sunday mornings usually found him working down at the medical school, where at noon his wife would pick him up and drive him home (Todd never bothered to learn to drive a car)."
"The Todds usually summered in a boarding house on Lake Muskoka in Ontario, Canada, although Dr. Todd himself almost always spent half of each day working indoors while the rest of the family romped outside."
Performing an especially engrossing dissection, prior to coming to the United States, he was late for his own wedding.
Three days after Christmas 1938 the tireless Dr. Todd's fragile, mortal body betrayed him, delivering unto him a massive heart attack at one o'clock in the morning, which killed him, at age 53.
T. Wingate Todd was mourned by the Western Reserve University community. Cleveland radio station WHK broadcast a tribute program for him the day following his death, with colleagues and former students offering their memories and admirations, and a musical one playing Gluck's "Melodie" and Bach's "Arioso" on the violin for his late teacher. Members of his family and figures from the affiliated Brush and Bolton Foundations held a private service for Dr. Todd in the WRU Anatomy Department on December 30.
After the holidays in the new working year the great and the good of the city whom Todd counted among his friends gathered to remember him in the Amasa Stone Chapel (built by the daughters of Euclid Township's railroad baron) on the Western Reserve campus. Rev. Joel B. Hayden presided, with the Honorable Harold Hitz Burton, mayor of Cleveland and future U.S. senator and associate justice of the Supreme Court, in attendance.
Roslyn Weir stepped in as acting chair of the Brush Foundation in January 1939, and Dr. Theodore Zuck moved in to Todd's leadership role in the anatomy department at WRU. In May, Zuck took over as chair of the Brush board, but left the job barely five months later with a new appreciation of his predecessor's stamina, having quickly become overwhelmed by the duties of the position combined with those of his private medical practice. In November, Zuck was replaced at the head of the board by Dr. William Greulich, an Ohio native who had been conducting growth research similar to the Brush Foundation's at Yale.
Dr. Todd's sudden and unexpected death indeed marked what, until then, was certainly the most significant change in the leadership profile of the Brush Foundation, but it was hardly the first.
The work of the organization hadn't even really begun when Charles Brush himself died just a year after establishing it, in June 1929. His daughter Edna died just a little over a year after that, in October 1930, and her husband and Todd's close collaborator, Dr. Roger Perkins, had died in 1936. T. Wingate Todd's death at the end of 1938 saw the passing of the last of the original members of the Brush Foundation's board most committed to the growth study.
Though he remained an original member of the Brush board, Rev. Hayden had left Fairmount Presbyterian Church to take a new position in Hudson, the move, evidently, not without a certain amount of drama. The 1966 history of the Fairmount church relates: "In the last year of his pastorate he [Hayden] had what we laymen call a nervous breakdown. The church sent him to Bermuda on a leave of absence. Soon after his return he was offered the headmastership of Western Reserve Academy." In January 1931, Rev. Hayden announced to his Fairmount Church congregation that he would be resigning effective April 1, to begin as headmaster at WRA in the fall with the start of the new school year.
Jerome Fisher hadn't gone anywhere; and he was still working on bringing sterilization to Ohio. Dorothy had moved to New York and remarried, but she still came back into town regularly for the Brush board meetings. And Roslyn Weir still lived up in Lyndhurst, among the Boltons and the Binghams and the Blossoms.
In 1936 provisions of the 1873 Comstock Act prohibiting distribution of birth control information through the mails were overturned by a federal court, and by that the restrictions on birth control education and services in the U.S. were dramatically decreased, a major victory for the proponents of the movement. Dorothy and Roslyn had always wanted the Brush Foundation to do more to support birth control, and those original board members remaining after Todd's death had prior to joining the Brush Foundation all been founding members of the Maternal Health Association. Dr. Todd had said the foundation would support birth control "over my dead body," and that's just about what happened. Not instantaneously, but decidedly, thereafter the direction of the efforts of the Brush Foundation would steadily turn more and more toward the birth control portion of the founder's mandate.
Joel Hayden continued to have problems. In the spring of 1939 his wife, Hazel, was the driver of an automobile involved in a crash on Chardon Road in Kirtland, in which her passenger, Marietta Hyde West, a teacher at East Technical High School and the widow of a federal judge, was killed. Two others were injured in the accident and Hazel's car caught fire, though Hazel was barely hurt at all. A witness to the event vouched to the Lake County sheriff that Mrs. Hayden was not at fault in the tragedy, and there were no further repercussions for her, save perhaps emotional and psychological.
At the beginning of 1941 Headmaster Rev. Hayden once again took another leave of absence from his job, this from WRA, for what was described only as ill health. He and Hazel embarked on another beach vacation, this one extended, in Florida, California and Mexico, finally visiting Hawaii, and missing being caught up in the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Japanese rampage across the Pacific by just a few months. His inclusion on the rosters of the managers of the Brush Foundation leaves off around 1942, and this period of incapacitation and rehabilitation is almost certainly implicated.
And, speaking of Pearl Harbor.
Just as it had arrested work on the park at Rockefeller's Forest Hill almost literally overnight, the abrupt entry of the United States into World War II had a similarly dramatic effect on the work of the Brush Inquiry.
Most of the national store of X-ray supplies and equipment, as well of physicians themselves, were commandeered for the war, and at home rationing and frequent shortages of nearly every kind of non-essential medical services ensued, and persisted through the duration of the conflict. In the face of these shortages, the Brush Inquiry, unofficially begun with the summer camp studies of the students from the Stearns School in 1926, was officially ended by vote of the members of the Brush Foundation board in June 1942.
Through the 1930s the Cleveland Maternal Health Association faced serious financial pressures brought about by the Great Depression, just like the rest of the world. At the same time they were busier than they had ever been, doubling their number of clients from 1931 to 1932, and staying at that elevated level for the rest of that troubled decade. They attributed the increased demand to couples facing hardship and wanting to delay child bearing until brighter times, which was squarely among their initial goals and which, despite the obstacles they were facing at the time, they must have viewed as a triumph. They held fundraisers and economized and scraped by, and in the meantime they worked on training female medical students from WRU, and developing birth control education programs in Ohio beyond Cuyahoga County.
During that same turbulent time Margaret Sanger became alienated from the very movement which she had started. A victim of her own success in some ways, Sanger had in 20 or so years brought birth control, if not completely, then certainly much further into the mainstream. But her movement had grown and evolved, and a new generation of educated, competent, confident leaders had risen within it, with their own ideas about how it should proceed. They shared Sanger's beliefs in the goals of birth control, but thought that they would have more success spreading knowledge of and access to it in the general society if more controversial elements of the movement's program were deemphasized. That meant the radical feminism, and that meant the veneration of Havelock Ellis, and that meant the utopian sci-fi eugenics. Sanger resigned from the American Birth Control League in 1928, but the move did not have the effect which she had imagined. Rather than prompting a loyal exodus away from the new leaders of the organization she found herself largely out in the cold. In 1937 she moved with her second husband, Noah Slee (the president of the 3-in-One Oil company) to Tucson, Arizona. She had no say in 1939 when her old American Birth Control League merged with the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau and rebranded as the Birth Control Federation of America, nor in 1942 when that Birth Control Federation changed its name once again to Planned Parenthood, and the Maternal Health Association of Cleveland affiliated with the new Planned Parenthood later that same year.
In the trust indenture establishing his foundation Charles Brush had said that, "It is my belief that the needs and purposes indicated herein are of such importance and magnitude as to merit the expenditure of far larger sums than those provided by this instrument. It is my hope that these needs and purposes will so appeal to many other persons as to inspire in them a desire to add to the principal of this fund..." It did, and someone did.
In May 1942 the Plain Dealer ran the story of an anonymous donor adding $250,000 to the original Brush Foundation endowment, a fully 50 percent increase to the original gift. The money turned out to be more of Charles Brush's own, in a sense. It was later revealed that the donor was Brush's grandson, Edna and Roger's son, Maurice Perkins, who had inherited from his grandfather $200,000 in his own right and presumably his share of the additional $600,000 left by Brush to his late parents, and who was now sending about half the money he could trace back to his grandfather into his grandfather's foundation.
After the death of Charles Brush, then Edna, then Roger, then Todd, then the collapse and departure of Joel Hayden, the war, the ending of the Brush Inquiry, Maurice Perkins' gift, and the MHA's affiliation with Planned Parenthood, 1942 became something of a second founding at the Brush Foundation, each piece moving it further and further away from eugenics, and increasing more and more its emphasis on supporting family planning and birth control.
Some other things happened in the 1930s and -40s to push it in that direction too.
*
Eugenic principles were not Nazi principles. Absolutely no one named thus far in this chapter was a Nazi. Neither were Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Helen Keller, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, John Harvey Kellogg of breakfast cereal fame, nor Charles Brush's fellow electrical pioneers Thomas Edison or Nicola Tesla, all enthusiastic supporters of the eugenics movement. Among millionaires from Euclid Township, Ohio, the Rockefeller philanthropies also supported eugenic research and causes. Brush's fan Henry Ford liked it too.
Eugenics was not an underground movement, or a secret conspiracy. It happened out in the open, and those who advocated it did so as publicly as possible, with pride; many of the contemporary news stories sourced in this chapter appeared on the front page of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Eugenic books were bestsellers, put out by the leading publishing houses, and the 1917 silent film The Black Stork, "a eugenic photoplay" depicting a doctor refusing to perform a life-saving surgery on an infant because doing so would weaken the race, ran in American cinemas for years. The National Socialist German Workers' Party wasn't even founded until 1920, 50 years after Francis Galton invented the word eugenics. No, eugenic principles were not Nazi principles. Nazi principles were eugenic principles. Those principles originated and were developed in Great Britain and the United States.
The U.S. state of Indiana was the first polity to pass a law to sterilize mentally handicapped persons, in 1907, and 30 out of 48 American states followed in the next 20 years. The 1915 World's Fair, the Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco, showcasing that city's recovery from its devastating 1906 earthquake, and celebrating the newly-opened Panama Canal, featured an extensive exhibit on eugenics in its Palace of Education and Social Economy, and 18 million visitors passed through the fair that year. In the 1920s, eugenicist intellectuals in the U.S. and Europe mourned that their eugenically fittest young men had been slaughtered on the battlefields of the First World War. During those same years at state fairs across America blue ribbons were handed out to families judged eugenically fittest, right alongside the prize hogs and heifers, and this not in any way coincidentally. German eugenicists lauded the 1924 U.S. Immigration Restriction Act, envying how it would "restrict the influx of Jews and eastern and southern Europeans." One was Adolph Hitler, and where he lauded it was in the pages of Mein Kampf.
The Nazis came to power in Germany in January 1933. One of the first things they did when they had it was to initiate their own program of race hygiene, Rassenhygiene. Nazi Germany's first eugenic law, the Law on Preventing Hereditarily Ill Progeny, an act based on U.S. state sterilization laws and Harry Laughlin's model, passed on July 14, 1933. It mandated that the feebleminded, and those with epilepsy, schizophrenia, manic depression, now more commonly called bipolar disorder, Huntington's chorea, a brain disorder which affects movement, hereditary body deformities, deafness, blindness, or alcoholism—over 400,000 Germans—submit to mandatory vasectomy or salpingectomy. The busy German surgeons performing them called the procedures Hitlerschnitte, "Hitler's cut." Later that year, the Law Against Dangerous Habitual Criminals required German prison inmates to be castrated, and the year following, the Law for the Protection of Heredity outlawed marriages in Germany to those branded by the Nazi state as mentally retarded. Eugenicists across the North Atlantic world cheered.
In 1934 Hitler took a moment from his Fuhrer stuff to write a fan letter to Madison Grant, thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race, Herr Hitler gushing to Mr. Grant that the book was his "Bible." Not long after, Deputy Fuhrer Rudolf Hess declared that, "National Socialism is nothing but applied biology," and Joseph Dejarnette, the superintendent of Virginia's Western State Hospital, complained in the pages of the Richmond Times-Dispatch that, seven years after Buck v Bell, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."
In 1935 the German Nazi government established the Aufklaruungsamt fur Bevolkerungspolitik und Rassenpflege, the Office for Education on Population Policy and Racial Welfare. The International Congress for Population Science convened that year in Berlin, and Harry Laughlin was named vice president of the conference and contributed a paper. Laughlin was later awarded an honorary MD from the dean of the University of Heidelberg, Carl Schneider, "who later served as a scientific advisor for the extermination of handicapped people in Nazi Germany." Schneider commended Laughlin as a "successful pioneer of practical eugenics and the farseeing representative of racial policy in America." A popular 1937 German film, "Erbkrank," "Hereditary Defective," juxtaposed shots of mentally handicapped people with those of hard working German farmers hoeing up weeds in their fields. The symbolism was lost on few, and Harry Laughlin raised money to show the film in U.S. high schools. Through the 1930s both Laughlin and Charles Davenport frequently praised the Nazi sterilization program in the pages of Eugenic News. Lothrop Stoddard spent four months in Germany in early 1940, and during his trip he met with SS head Heinrich Himmler, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, and finally Adolph Hitler himself.
Nazi Germany ran further and faster with the eugenic program than any other nation had previously, and American and European eugenists watched its "great eugenics experiment" with keen interest through the mid- and late-1930s. But their interest gradually turned to unease, then to disquiet, then to private alarm, as the fervent Nazi pursuit of eugenics led that most modern, most developed, most civilized of nations to places where those members of polite society who had previously supported eugenics, who had enjoyed crafting what they fancied as idealistic legislation in tasteful offices and making speeches at civil civic luncheons in its support, found themselves far, far less comfortable.
The Nazis were willing, indeed eager, to follow the logic of eugenics to places their forerunners hadn't been. First in their own Germany, then in foreign lands they were soon to conquer, they quickly moved beyond passive eugenic measures like marriage restrictions and the prevention of conception, to active ones like sterilization, then on from passively allowing those they deemed unfit to die, to actually, actively killing them.
What were originally called "lethal chambers," fueled by the vapors of heated carbolic acid, were first developed in Great Britain at the end of the 19th century as a means of disposing of stray dogs and cats. The U.S. state of Nevada performed the first-in-the-world execution by poison gas of a convicted murderer in 1921. When the Nazis lashed out across Europe, German armies deployed special units called Einsatzgruppen, simply—cryptically; euphemistically—"task forces," the task of which was to eliminate undesirables in the occupied territories. They first did so—expensively; inefficiently—with bullets, over trenches the victims had themselves dug, then in special vans with exhaust pipes modified to spew deadly gas into the load space: mobile, self-fueled gas chambers. Finally there were purpose built facilities. Places like Chelmno, Belzec and Treblinka, all in present-day Poland, were simply factories, to kill people—the unfit—to destroy their bodies, and to process the possessions they left. Auschwitz is the most famous. There were others. It would take many years before the sheer scale of this spasm of mass murder, the most infamous crime in human history, was fully grasped or widely known.
*
"PICTURE PROBLEM OF FEEBLE-MINDED
Health Museum Exhibits Open to Public Tomorrow
Cleveland Plain Dealer
March 21, 1944
An exhibition on 'Feeble-Mindedness in Ohio,' which starkly outlines an increasingly grave social, financial and health problem, will open for private preview at the Cleveland Health Museum tonight at 8 and to the public tomorrow.
The exhibition, in 20 graphic Chapters, is sponsored by the Brush Foundation of Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Dr. William W. Greulich, director. It was made in the museum's workshops and based chiefly on records of Ohio institutions for the feeble-minded.
That about 2 per cent of the population of the United States is mentally deficient, and that Greater Cleveland has 2,461 feeble-minded children in its schools, are the startling revelations of Chapter 1.
'Like Begets Like,' says another Chapter, a family history illustrating that feeble-mindedness, or the ability to transmit it, is passed on from generation to generation with increasing volume.
Silhouettes in another Chapter illustrate the fact that feeble-minded parents, on the average, have more children than normal parents. Thus the visitor will be led to consider the ultimate effect on the United States population of unrestricted reproduction of feeble-minded.
A suggestion that legislation limit the reproduction of persons with hereditary feeble-mindedness is made in a display on the 'Care of the Feeble-Minded.' Other suggestions are that medical treatment be given the comparatively few cases of nonhereditary types, that special education be given those who can profit from it, and that permanent institutional care be provided for those who need it.
The cause of hereditary feeble-mindedness lies not in the blood stream, as has been popularly believed, but in some defect transmitted by the germ cells, it is asserted.
Classification of individuals according to their intelligence is illustrated. Four manikins [sic] with the physical proportions of average 10-year-old children have within or without their outlines silhouettes expressing their mental ages, which are revealed by pressing buttons. It is explained that a 10-year-old child with a mental age of 10 has an I.Q. (intelligence quotient) of 100. A 10-year-old with a mental age of 7 has an I.Q. of 70. One with a mental age of 12 has an I.Q. of 120.
'Who is feeble-minded?' is asked, and answered by a diagram. Above 90 is normal. From 80 to 90 is dull normal. From 70 to 80 is border line. Individuals with I.Q. s of 69 or below are, by Ohio law, feeble-minded. Of the feeble-minded, the moron is the brightest, having an I.Q. between 49 and 69. An imbecile has an I.Q. between 49 and 19, and an idiot's rating is from 19 to zero.
The family histories of the exhibition were prepared by the following superintendents of institutions for feeble-minded: Dr. A. T. Hopwood, Apple Creek; Dr. F. L. Keiser, Columbus, and Dr. C. C. Kirk, Orient.
Dr. Raymond Walker Waggoner, professor of psychiatry, University of Michigan, will speak on 'Feeble-mindedness, Our Problem' at the preview. Dr. Waggoner is neuropsychiatric consultant to the director of selective service."
*
The Bolton portion of the growth study continued under the direction of B. Holly Broadbent, Sr. With the cessation of the Brush Inquiry in 1942 what persisted became primarily a study of dental development, and in 1948 administration of the ongoing Bolton Study was transferred out of the late Dr. Todd's anatomy lab and into the WRU School of Dentistry. The Bolton Study continued until 1959, when it too was discontinued.
Western Reserve University merged with the engineering-focused Case Institute of Technology in 1967 and the two together became Case Western Reserve University. The stored results of the Bolton and Brush studies were consolidated and merged in 1970 and housed at the CWRU Dental School. They remain there today in what is now known as the Bolton-Brush Growth Study Center, at the CWRU School of Dental Medicine, located at 2124 Cornell Road.
A recall of former test subjects of the Brush and Bolton studies was begun in 1978, and continued through 1982. Approximately 100 of the approximately 5,000 subjects were able to be located and were available and willing to take part in the follow-up, which was conducted by B. Holly Broadbent, Jr., Rolf Behrents, and Donald H. Enlow. The three dentists were very afraid they would find cancer.
Much more was understood about the dangers of radiation in the 1980s than was in the 1920s, particularly on growing tissues. A study involving repeatedly X-raying babies and children, and particularly their reproductive parts, would never be permitted today. Ironically Todd's Brush study trying to identify naturally occurring genetic anomalies so that they might be stamped out in later years seemed almost designed to cause them artificially. But, "Nature was very kind to us," Dr. Broadbent, Jr., told Cleveland Magazine in 1983. In the recalled subjects they did not find rates of cancer higher than those who did not participate in the study. His colleague Behrents concurred. "Frankly I expected more cancer," Behrents said, "and was surprised by the group's good health." But Dr. Broadbent, Jr. tempered their relief with a note of caution, saying, "Our recall studies, however, cannot guarantee there was no damage, or might not be some in the future. We are still looking."
The Hamman-Todd Osteological Collection now lives in the Physical Anthropology Lab of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, 1 Wade Oval.
It had no committed guardian during the lean years of the war after Dr. Todd's sudden death, and was almost lost to the Field Museum in Chicago, only saved by a technicality in the Ohio state law governing the disposition of human remains donated to medical schools. But it only didn't go because it couldn't, and for years its contents were neglected, even abused, stored wherever, in closets, attics, and coal bins, haphazard, unsearchable or cross-referenceable, and from a research point of view useless. This went on until 1951, when the bones began slowly to be transferred from the medical school, and collected in the basement of the Museum of Natural History, in an unorganized process which went on for more than 20 years.
In 1976 CMNH opened a new Laboratory of Physical Anthropology, which included provisions for the Hamman-Todd bones, which were then transferred into a modern, protective and organized home. Work in the Hamman-Todd Collection in the 1970s helped paleoanthropologist Donald Johanson identify a previously unknown hominid species discovered in Ethiopia dating back 3 million years dubbed Australopithecus afarensis, but which became internationally famous by the name of Lucy. In the 1990s the collection's paper records were digitized. The size of the collection, and its extraordinary level of detail in the documentation of its specimens today make Wade Oval in Cleveland a destination for anthropologists and evolutionary biologists worldwide.
One might think that Dr. Todd would have wanted his remains dissected, macerated, and his bones added to the massive Hamman-Todd collection which he helped create, and perhaps he did, but ultimately T. Wingate Todd's family had his body cremated and his ashes returned to the British Empire to be cast into Muskoka Lake in Ontario, Canada, where he and they vacationed.
Joel Hayden, still the nominal head of Western Reserve Academy, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in October 1945, from which he never recovered. He was replaced by the assistant dean of freshman at Harvard, a recent veteran of the naval war in the Pacific, Lieutenant Commander John W. Hallowell. At the Academy's June 1946 commencement, Hayden was honored by his close friend Lucien Price, a journalist and 1901 WRA grad. Price's speech honoring Hayden was bound and published by the Academy in 1950. In it Price related this curious anecdote:
"A year or so after he came here, one blossoming Maytime as we were driving together back to Hudson from Exeter, New Hampshire, he said, 'As a parson my job was to make people happy, even if it meant preserving the unfit. As a schoolmaster, times come when it is my bounden duty to eliminate the unfit, and I don't like it. For my boss I prefer Jesus Christ to Charles Darwin. '"
Joel Hayden retired to Vermont, to be cared for by the family of his daughter, whose husband was on the faculty at Middlebury College. He died there in January 1950, at age 61, and came back to Ohio to be buried at Oberlin College. Wife Hazel died in 1975 and is buried there beside him. His Fairmount Presbyterian Church remains at 2757 Fairmount Boulevard, at the corner of Coventry, in Cleveland Heights, and his Western Reserve Academy at 115 College Street in Hudson, where Hayden Hall, 88 College, houses the Music Department.
Jerome Fisher had a long and distinguished legal career, serving on several corporate boards, as well as continuing on the boards of the Maternal Health Association and the Brush Foundation. He became a senior partner at Thompson, Hine & Flory in 1952. While at a meeting in Downtown Cleveland in November 1954 he suffered a sudden and serious heart attack. He was rushed to the Hannah House of University Hospital, but died there that night. He was 65. Wife Katherine survived him 30 years; she died in 1984. Burial information on the Fishers is difficult to discover. It's possible they are in Conneaut, or perhaps in Pennsylvania where Jerome's parents lie.
Another sterilization bill came before the Ohio legislature in 1934. Like the others it was defeated. Ohio never passed a sterilization bill.
Fisher's boss Walter Flory served on the boards of Charles Brush Junior and C. Baldwin Sawyer's Brush Laboratories and Brush Development, and Charles Brush Senior's Medusa Portland Cement, as well as the MHA's Hannah Buchanan's Children's Fresh Air Camp, where Todd and Roger performed their first studies on the Children of Cleveland, and his wife's Cleveland Play House, among others. He died in 1951. Julia McCune Flory died 20 years later. . Both were born in Newark, Ohio, and the Flory family plot is in Cedar Hill Cemetery there.
Fisher's other boss and Flory's partner, Amos Burt Thompson, died at the age of 93 in 1965. His wife, Jeanne Lockwood Oliver, the sister of May and aunt of Hortense Shepard, had preceeded him in death a decade earlier. Their home at 11901 Carlton Road in Cleveland Heights is now the Phi Sigma Rho sorority house at Case Western Reserve University. They're both buried quite nearby, in Lake View Cemetery, in the southwest corner of old Euclid Township.
Thompson, Hine & Flory, the law firm these men helped make one of Cleveland's most successful and prominent, is still in operation, now from the 39th floor of the Key Tower on Public Square, and with offices in all of Ohio's largest cities, as well as Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, DC. Walter Flory was removed from the law firm's official name in 2001, making it simply Thompson Hine, although the firm said it was simply a branding and marketing move.
Hortense Shepard's mother, May Lockwood Oliver, was chair of the Cleveland Health Council and president of the Children's Fresh Air Camp. She too continued to grow the Maternal Health Association and supported her alma mater, the Lake Erie Seminary women's college, which later became Lake Erie College, in Painesville. She suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in August 1941, and died in her home on Magnolia Drive in University Circle. She's in Lake View.
May Oliver's friend, Dorothy's mother, Jane Adams Hamilton, had continued to work to help establish the Maternal Health Association, until she died relatively young at age 60, in July 1926. She's in Lake View.
Brooks Shepard left Eberhard Manufacturing and began a second career in 1931, following Joel Hayden down to Western Reserve Academy in Hudson to become an instructor of English and natural philosophy, taking extension courses through WRU and Harvard while there. He wrote articles for magazines, including Harper's and the Atlantic, eventually leaving WRA in 1944 due to poor health and retiring to Saxon's River, Vermont. He died in New York City in 1955. His wife, Cleveland MHA co-founder Hortense Lockwood Oliver, died in 1983. They are buried together in the Green Mount Cemetery in Montpelier, Vermont.
Charles Brush's daughter Edna Brush Perkins died from an embolism during surgery in Lakeside Hospital in Cleveland on October 11, 1930. She's in Lake View. Her husband, Dr. Roger Griswold Perkins, died from prostate complications, also in Cleveland, on March 28, 1936. He's in Rhode Island.
Charles Baldwin Sawyer, business partner and co-founder of Brush Laboratories with Charles Brush, Jr., and later president of Brush Beryllium, played a vital though still murky role in the Manhattan Project, and died on March 24, 1964. He's in Lake View.
Dr. Leo Dewey Anderson was the Brush Foundation's head of psychological research until at least 1942, after which mentions of him in the available sources become sparse. At some point he retired to Florida, and died in Alachua, near Gainesville, in 1990, at the age of 92. He is buried there with his wife, Dorothy Eisele Anderson, in the Newnansville Cemetery.
William Greulich left WRU for Stanford in 1944, and he was succeeded at the head of the Brush board by Roslyn Weir. From Stanford he, with Dr. Sarah Idell Pyle at WRU in Cleveland, compiled the Brush Inquiry data into a Radiographic Atlas of Skeletal Development of the Hand and Wrist, published in 1950, which they dedicated to T. Wingate Todd. Dr. Greulich died in Palo Alto, California, in October 1986.
Dedicated secretary of the Brush Foundation and the Ohio Race Betterment Association, Brush family childhood friend Virginia Remington Wing, served as executive secretary of the Foundation through the 1940s. She was active in several public health related commissions in Cleveland, with emphasis on fighting tuberculosis. She died of heart trouble in early 1951. Her funeral took place at the St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights, just across Coventry from Joel Hayden's Fairmount Presbyterian, where her pall bearers included Dr. William Weir and his and Rosyln's son Dr. David. She's in Lake View.
In the 1930s Charles Elmer Gehlke and his wife, the former Helen Jeffreys Hopkins, joined the Brush family-associated neighbors in Lyndhurst when they purchased a four-and-a-half-acre property across Richmond Road from William and Roslyn Weir. In May 1941 Helen was elected president of the Maternal Health Association. Dr. Charles retired from WRU in 1955, but continued to serve on the Brush board until 1964. He died at their home in Lyndhurst in 1968. Helen died ten years later. They're both in Lake View.
Brush's grandniece, Rosyln Weir, and the daughters of his early partner Charles Bingham, Elizabeth Beardsley Bingham Blossom and Frances Payne Bingham Bolton, and their husbands and families, lived out their lives in their outpost near the Mayfield Country Club in Lyndhurst, in the southeast corner of old Euclid Township.
Dr. William Weir retired from his gynecological practice in 1954, and he died in 1964. Roslyn helped organize the International Planned Parenthood Federation. She died in 1967. Both passed away at their home on Cedar Road in Lyndhurst, and they're both in Lake View.
Dudley Blossom died on their estate in Lyndhurst in 1938. Elizabeth Bingham Blossom survived him 32 years. Dudley was president of the Musical Arts Association, the parent organization of the Cleveland Orchestra, in the very final years of his life, up to his death. In the last years of Elizabeth's, with her patronage, Dudley's Orchestra acquired 800 acres in the Cuyahoga Valley for an outdoor summer venue, and the Musical Arts Association named it in his honor, Blossom Music Center. The clamshell-shaped amphitheater opened in 1968 and is still in operation for both the Orchestra and summer rock concerts on Steels Corners Road in Cuyahoga Falls. Both Dudley Stuart and Elizabeth Bingham Blossom are in Lake View.
After the accident which confined him to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, regarding Charles Bingham Bolton and the dental growth inquiry which bore his name, B. Holly Broadbent, Jr., told the CWRU Magazine in 1992, "Part of his recovery and resuming interest in other things had to do with his participation here in the early years." Much more than interested in the work of the Bolton Study, in fact Charles Bolton proved quite adept, and became not just its patron but a key research associate in the project. His major contribution was developing a method for animating the X-ray images they were making, creating a motion picture which showed the growth of a child's teeth and face over years. He was given awards by the American Society of Orthodontics, the American College of Dentists, and the National Advisory Dental Research Council of the National Institutes of Health, and made a member of the International Association of Dental Research. CWRU's dental school is named for him today.
Though forevermore wheelchair-bound, Charles Bolton nonetheless regained his life of vigor. He was first a trustee of his alma mater Hawken School, and later its president, and a professorship there was named for him. The school acquired more land in Chesterland in 1960 and Hawken located its upper school, grades 9 to 12, there in 1961, retaining the Lyndhurst campus for its lower and middle schools, which remain there today. Charles Bolton served for a time on the Lyndhurst Village Council, as well as at one time or another on the boards of just about every civic and cultural institution in Cleveland. His brother called him the "family saint."
Charles Bingham Bolton went down to his family's vacation home in Palm Beach, Florida, for Thanksgiving 1975, and remained there through the winter. In late March 1976 he had a stroke there. He was rushed home to Cleveland, but he died at the family's Franchester farm in Lyndhurst the next day. He's in Lake View.
His brother, father and mother all served in the U.S. House of Representatives, but his mother's story is one of that body's more interesting.
Chester Castle Bolton was elected to represent Ohio's 22nd congressional district in 1928, a Republican in an area which usually went Democratic, and he became a prominent critic of Franklyn Roosevelt's New Deal. He also served as a Lyndhurst Village Councilman from time to time. He had just been reelected for a fifth term in Congress when he entered Lakeside Hospital with heart problems and never left. He died there on October 30, 1939. His funeral was held at Charles Brush's Trinity Cathedral, and he was laid to rest in Lake View. So it goes.
What was extraordinary was that upon Congressman Bolton's death, his wife Frances Payne Bingham was enlisted to fill his seat for the remainder of his term. ("There was some speculation among politicians as to whether Mrs. Bolton might be interested in becoming a candidate to succeed her husband in the district," the Plain Dealer presciently reported at the time. She was.) When the term expired in 1940 the residents of Ohio's 22nd district elected Mrs. Bolton in her own right to a seat which she then held for the next 30 years. A champion of nursing, she helped create the Cadet Nurse Corps in World War II, and founded the nursing school at Western Reserve University. When she finally did lose an election for the first time she was in her eighties, and she retired and went home to Lyndhurst. She died at the Franchester Farm in 1977 at age 91, and is in Lake View.
Charles Davenport retired from the Eugenics Record Office in 1934. He was succeeded as its head by his protegee, Harry Laughlin. On the last day of the 1930s, Laughlin himself retired, and the sponsors of the ERO—already nervous about what they had wrought—began dismantling it. New inquiries to the office were answered with a form letter saying that it had ceased operations, and that future correspondences would receive no further reply. Laughlin died in 1943, Davenport in 1944. People kept writing to the defunct Eugenics Record Office, proudly submitting their own, what they considered to be exemplary, family trees to add to its database, for decades.
After the end of the Second World War such Nazi war criminals who had been captured alive were put on trial. Erhard Wetzel, the former head of the Nazi Race Political Office and consultant to the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories on so-called Jewish affairs, and Otto Hoffman, late head of the SS Race and Settlement Office, both cited the American Supreme Court Buck v Bell decision in their defense. Both were sentenced to prison. An amalgamation representing these men and their defense is depicted in the 1961 film Judgement at Nuremberg.
In 2002, at the 75th anniversary of Buck v Bell, Virginia governor Mark Warner publicly and officially apologized for his state's key role in the eugenics movement. Nevertheless, Buck v Bell has never been overturned; it remains law in the United States. Since it was handed down in 1927 approximately 70,000 Americans have been coercively sterilized by representatives of the state, slackening in the 1970s, but continuing well into the 21st century. California, always the nation's most enthusiastic sterilizer, was forcing female prison inmates to undergo salpingectomy as recently as 2010. In 2015 prosecutors in Tennessee were offering women on trial for crimes in that state plea deals if they would agree to submit to sterilization.
Both Juliet Rublee and Dorothy Brush followed Margaret Sanger out of the American Birth Control League in 1928, and continued to offer her friendship and to back her financially through her period of metaphorical exile.
Sanger had mostly retired from the movement by the Second World War. Dorothy maneuvered to get Smith College to grant her an honorary doctorate in 1949, and later to house her papers. Dorothy also lobbied for Sanger to be given the Nobel Peace Prize, without success. Margaret Sanger re-emerged into public life to help establish the International Planned Parenthood Federation in 1952, and she served as the organization's president until she was 80, in 1959. Dorothy travelled with Sanger during these years to help establish birth control clinics throughout the world, and to represent the cause at the new United Nations.
Brush's niece Juliet Rublee died at age 91 in Manhattan, in May 1966. Margaret Sanger died just a few months later, in Tucson, Arizona, age 86. Rublee is buried in Cornish, New Hampshire. Sanger is in the Fishkill Rural Cemetery in Dutchess County, New York.
Dorothy and Alexander Dick divorced in 1947. In 1962 she married for a third time, to Canadian professor Lewis Walmsley. Dorothy died on June 4, 1968, age 74, and her son, Charles F. Brush, III, scattered her ashes from a small plane into the Atlantic Ocean waters off the Hamptons.
Helene Brush died in Warrensville on July 4, 1935, age 51. She's in Lake View, with her family, in the Brush family plot.
*
Following World War II there began in the United States an unprecedented wave of marriage and childbearing, driven by the millions of American servicemen returning from the war wanting to marry and settle down, a social and demographic phenomenon now colloquially known as the Baby Boom. During those years Cleveland's Maternal Health Association offered fertility counseling to couples wanting to start families but experiencing difficulties conceiving, the first to do so in the American Midwest. Margaret Sanger returned to Cleveland in 1953 to speak at the MHA's 25th anniversary, joined by Dorothy, who introduced her. The MHA opened a new building on Cornell Road near the WRU campus in 1957, with a training and conference center named for Jerome Fisher. In 1965 they set up a mobile birth control unit, and by the late-1960s had five brick-and-mortar clinics operating in Cleveland. In 1966 the Maternal Health Association, affiliated with Planned Parenthood since 1942, was officially renamed Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland.
Yet more rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court had fundamental effects on the work of Planned Parenthood and the former Cleveland MHA. The 1965 Griswold v Connecticut decision ruled that married couples had the right to use contraception, and the 1972 Eisenstadt v Baird decision extended recognition of the right to all couples, married or not. Then the early 1970s saw the landmark Roe v Wade case, which made abortion legal throughout the United States, one of the most controversial decisions in the Court's history.
In line with the social trends which emptied out America's cities and filled up their hinterlands in the late 20th century, the 1980s saw a pull-back of the work of Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland in the city, but new clinics opened in the suburbs, and in the 1990s the organization worked to establish new facilities in Northeast Ohio beyond the Cleveland area. In 2012 Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland merged with two other Planned Parenthood affiliates in the state, forming Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio.
In 2022 the Supreme Court handed down Dobbs v Jackson, which overturned Roe v Wade. At this writing, per Dobbs, in the U.S., whether abortion can be provided is now up to the individual states. At this writing, abortion remains legal in Ohio, up to the twenty-second week of pregnancy.
The Cleveland center of Planned Parenthood of Greater Ohio operates today at 7997 Euclid Avenue, on the western edge of the Cleveland Clinic's main campus, offering birth control education and services, reproductive and sexual health treatments, and fertility counseling. Abortions are not performed at the Cleveland center, though the center will advise women on how to access those services. In 2024, according to their website, "Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Inc. (PPFA) works to protect and expand access to sexual and reproductive health care and education, and provides support to its member affiliates."
In 2020 Planned Parenthood of New York removed Margaret Sanger's name from the historic Brownsville clinic which she founded. The New York Times reported:
"Ms. Sanger, a public health nurse who opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in Brooklyn in 1916, has long been lauded as a feminist icon and reproductive-rights pioneer. But her legacy also includes supporting eugenics, a discredited belief in improving the human race through selective breeding, often targeted at poor people, those with disabilities, immigrants and people of color. 'The removal of Margaret Sanger's name from our building is both a necessary and overdue step to reckon with our legacy and acknowledge Planned Parenthood's contributions to historical reproductive harm within communities of color,' Karen Seltzer, the chair of the New York affiliate's board, said in a statement. The group is also talking to city leaders about replacing Ms. Sanger's name on a street sign that has hung near its offices on Bleecker Street for more than two decades."
Alexis McGill Johnson, the president and chief executive of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, went on to renounce Sanger in the New York Times in the spring of 2021, and the "Margaret Sanger Square" sign on Bleecker Street in Manhattan did indeed come down in December of that year.
*
The Brush Foundation still operates, headquartered today on Tiedeman Road in the West Side Cleveland suburb of Brooklyn, its assets managed by KeyBank. Charles Brush's $500,000, and his grandson Maurice Perkins' $250,000, have grown to nearly $8 million, and each year the Foundation makes grants to a dozen or more recipients totaling around $300,000.
Tax-exempt organizations in the United States are required to report their finances and identify their leadership via Form 990 filed annually with the IRS, and these filings are publicly searchable. The Brush Foundation also has a website.
In the 21st century, Brush Foundation grants have focused on supporting organizations involved in birth control education and services, and abortion rights advocacy and services. In 2004 they awarded $5,000 to the Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University, a valuable source of information used in this chapter. Other grants in the recent past have gone toward supporting the Cleveland Free Clinic, Case Western Reserve University, and scholarships for graduate students in public health at Columbia University in New York.
Their board usually contains at least one, and usually one or two more, direct descendants of Charles F. Brush. Their current president, the successor to T. Wingate Todd and Roslyn Weir, is Elizabeth Stites, Charles Brush's great great granddaughter, through Edna and the Perkins line, who holds a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of international affairs at Tufts University in Boston, where she is on the faculty.
This message from Dr. Stites could be found in late 2024 posted on the Brush Foundation website:
"Since our founding in 1928, the Brush Foundation has worked to advance reproductive health and rights through targeted philanthropy. Charles F. Brush, a noted Cleveland inventor and industrialist, began the Foundation with approximately $500,000. With additional contributions since its inception, the Foundation has made grants of more than eleven million dollars over nearly ninety years of grantmaking.
"The Brush Foundation's first grant of $5,000 was awarded in 1929 to establish a birth control clinic in Cleveland. Since 2008, public policy and advocacy have been the primary focus of the Brush Foundation's grantmaking. Currently the Foundation focuses its grantmaking on the state of Ohio with a goal of ensuring access to reproductive health care, supporting culture change to reduce abortion stigma, and advancing reproductive justice through an intersectional approach.
"Personal involvement and innovation by board members has been one of the continuing strengths of the Brush Foundation. The late Dorothy Brush, the daughter-in-law of the Founder, best exemplified this. She was one of the founders of the Cleveland Planned Parenthood clinic. She crusaded with Margaret Sanger and, with Mrs. Sanger and others, brought into being the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Today's board includes one Brush family member and leaders from the fields of reproductive health, rights, and justice and philanthropy.
"The Brush Foundation's leadership is proud of our longstanding commitment to these critical issues. In the current political climate, we are acutely aware that more work is needed across the globe to build a world where we all have the power to make decisions about our bodies, our families, and our future. Starting in the state of Ohio, we remain dedicated to ensuring that reproductive health care worldwide is acceptable, affordable, effective and safe."
*
Eugenics shows up in weird places. Perennial Christmas classics. High school required reading. 3-in-One oil. In 1977 the NBC television network aired the sitcom The Kallikaks, depicting a crude, unsophisticated family from Appalachia who move to California, ostensibly to run a gas station, but who spend most of their time scamming the government and their neighbors. Their single employee is a German immigrant named Oscar Heinz, who answers his boss, Mr. Kallikak, with "Jawohl." The show premiered on August 3, and was cancelled on August 31. The opening sequence of the 2006 comedy Idiocracy, written and directed by Mike Judge, creator of the popular animated duo Beavis and Butt-Head, which depicts the contrasting rate of reproduction between an intelligent and affluent though somewhat uptight couple, and a reckless and ignorant lower class family, meant to establish the movie's premise of how in the future the world has come to be dominated by dull incompetents, is pure eugenic race suicide theory. And the words idiot, imbecile, and moron are not going anywhere.
The Bolton heirs sold their family's Franchester Farm property in Lyndhurst to TRW in 1983, and on it Euclid's quintessential aerospace manufacturer built a new 480,000 square foot world headquarters. The company then bought up the adjacent old Blossom estate in 1992. In 2002, California's Northrop Grumman bought TRW, closed its Lyndhurst operations, and donated the land and the old headquarters building to the Cleveland Clinic. The Clinic ran its Wellness Institute from the site for 20 years, but closed that as well and tore down the TRW building in 2023. At this writing that property at the headwaters of Euclid Creek is being redeveloped.
What was the Gehlke estate in Lyndhurst is now the Three Village condominium development. The remaining Bolton, Blossom and Weir lands northwest of the corner of Richmond and Cedar Roads were purchased in 2000 by Lyndhurst's own First Interstate Properties, Ltd., which developed them into the Legacy Village shopping mall—sorry: "lifestyle center"—opening in time for the holiday season of 2003. Some of the small Tudor-style outbuildings from the old Blossom estate still stand around the periphery there.
Otherwise offering decently high-end dining, drink and retail, the most incongruous Legacy Village tenant may be a franchise of the Pittsburgh-based Giant Eagle supermarket chain, though the store itself is large, well-stocked, clean and bright. Like many suburban Midwestern supermarkets in the early 21st century, the Legacy Village Giant Eagle offers convenience products of pre-made meals for shoppers too busy, too tired, or simply not inclined to cook, along with complimentary plastic utensils and a little area styled a "CAFE," with a few small tables and some chairs and a microwave oven, where, if one wishes, one might heat the meals up and eat them right then and there.
On the wall above this comfortably informal enclave hangs a stylized, vector graphic portrait of a mustachioed Victorian gentleman, done in taupe, brown, lilac and lime, labeled:
CHARLES F. BRUSH
b. Euclid; engineer; developer, Brush electric dynamo
and Brush electric arc light.
It looks down on the checkout girls on their breaks tapping at their smart phones, and a guy writing something on a laptop computer, and you.
The information in Chapter Twenty-Three is drawn from the following sources:
Newspapers, Magazines and Journals:
"Social News of the Week." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 24, 1905.
"Reforms Show Work Of Clubs." Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 16, 1916.
"Teach Americanism He Urges Churches." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 16, 1918.
"Birth Control in Ohio." Birth Control Review, December 1922.
"Cincinnati Made Storm Center of Birth Control Pros and Cons by Holding of First Ohio Conference." The Ohio State Medical Journal, Vol. XIX, January 1923.
"News Notes." Birth Control Review, January 1923.
"Birthdays of Representative Clevelanders: Charles F. Brush." Cleveland Topics Magazine, March 19, 1927.
"Brush Donates $500,000 for Eugenics Work. Vision of Overcrowded World Inspires Fund for Race Study. Foundation Fund to Be Used to Limit World Population and Produce Better Offspring." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 21, 1928.
"Brush Fund on Birth Control Starts July 1." Cleveland Press, June 21, 1928.
"Clevelanders Give Opinions on Fund." Cleveland Press, June 21, 1928.
"A Fund For Breeding Better Human Beings. Why Charles Francis Brush, Cleveland Millionaire and Inventor, Has Set Aside A Half Million Dollars For Eugenic Purposes." St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday Magazine, August 19, 1928.
"The Brush Foundation." Eugenics. Vol. II, No. 2, February 1929.
"The Brush Inquiry, Western Reserve University." Eugenics. Vol. II, No. 11, November 1929.
"New Era Human to Rule World, Scientist Says." Calumet City (Illinois) Times, November 15, 1929.
"Tells of Race Betterment." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 21, 1929.
"Urges Check on Births of Weak-Minded." Youngstown Telegram, October 3, 1930.
"Western Reserve and Brush Foundation." The Villa, October 20, 1930.
"Ohio Race Betterment Association." Celina (Ohio) Daily Standard, January 16, 1931.
"Race Betterment." Dayton News, January 17, 1931.
"Hayden Resigns Pastorate to Head Hudson Academy." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 31, 1931.
"Urges Prevention for Crime Cure." Cleveland Plain Dealer, July 19, 1931.
"Ohio Race Betterment Association." Eugenical News, Vol XVI, No. 8, August 1931.
"Criticizes Police in Crime Prevalence." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 20, 1933.
"Legal Notices. Guardian's Insane. Etc." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 8, 1933.
"Denies Punishment is Crime Deterrent." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 1, 1936.
"Dr. T.W. Todd, Famed W.R.U. Scientist, Dies." Cleveland Press, December 28, 1938.
"Dr. Todd Loses Dare With Death." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 29, 1938.
"Honor Doctor Todd in Radio Memorial." Cleveland Plain Dealer, December 30 1938.
"Dr. Thomas Wingate Todd (1885–1938)." Angle Orthodontist, Vol. 9, January 1939.
"Todd Adolescent Study to Go On." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 17, 1939.
"Thomas Wingate Todd: January 15, 1885–December 28, 1938." Science, Vol. 89, No. 2303, February 17, 1939.
"Judge West's Widow Killed in Crash." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 16, 1939.
"Dr. Zuck to Head Brush Research." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 26, 1939.
"C.C. Bolton, Veteran in House, Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 30, 1939.
"Dr. Zuck Quits as Brush's Director." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 9, 1939.
"Yale Scientist to Guide Brush Work." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 15, 1939.
"Dr. Hayden to Return." Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 26, 1941.
"On the Beach at Waikiki." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 14, 1941.
"Heads Health Association." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 25, 1941.
"Mrs. J. G. Oliver, Civic Leader, Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 22, 1941.
"Brush Research is Given $250,000." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 24, 1942.
"16 Year Study of Children Finished." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 28, 1942.
"Professional Women's Groups Announce Topics of Meetings." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 14, 1943.
"Picture Problem of Feeble-Minded." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 21, 1944.
"Reveals Brush Foundation Head Leaving." Cleveland Press, May 19, 1944.
"Hayden 'Holding Own.'" Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 17, 1945.
"John W. Hallowell." Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 6, 1946.
"Dr. Joel B. Hayden Dies in East at 61." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 11, 1950.
"Brush Hand-Wrist Study is Presented to Dr. J. S. Millis." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 23, 1950.
"Virginia R. Wing Dies here at 69." Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 22, 1951.
"Walter L. Flory of Cleveland, 71." New York Times, July 5, 1951.
"Mrs. Amos B. Thompson Dies at 80." Cleveland Plain Dealer July 16, 1954
"Jerome Fisher, Civic Leader, Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 24, 1954.
"Jerome C. Fisher, Ex-Resident, Dies." Conneaut (Ohio) News Herald, January 15, 1955.
"Adelbert Alumni Fete Gehlke." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 2, 1955.
"Prof. Charles E. Gehlke to Retire from Reserve." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 4, 1955.
"Brooks Shepard." Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 17, 1955.
"Dr. William H. Weir Dies at 88; Prominent Cleveland Physician." Cleveland Plain Dealer, February 27, 1964.
"Founder of Beryllium Firm Dies." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 25, 1964.
"Thompson, 93, Dies; Attorney 50 Years." Cleveland Plain Dealer March 1, 1965
"Mrs. W. H. Weir Dies; Health Unit Founder." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 1, 1967.
"Mrs. D. B. Walmsley, Child Center Founder." East Hampton (New York) Star, June 27, 1968.
"Dr. C.E. Gehlke Dies; CWRU Sociologist." Cleveland Plain Dealer, November 5, 1968.
"Mrs. Walter Flory, Artist and Writer." New York Times, April 26, 1971.
"Charles B. Bolton Dies at 66; Member of Prominent Family." Cleveland Plain Dealer, March 29, 1976.
"Skeletons In The Closet: Who was Dr. T. Wingate Todd and What Was He Doing With All Those Bones?" Northern Ohio LIVE Magazine, February 1982.
"Cleveland Medicine's Incredible Ghosts." Cleveland Magazine, July 1983.
"The Long View of Health." CWRU Magazine, February 1992.
"Skeletons Out Of The Closet." The Cleveland Museum of Natural History Explorer Magazine, Spring 1996.
"Thompson Hine Sheds 'Flory.'" Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 28, 2001.
"Carrie Buck's Daughter." Natural History, July-August 2002.
"Havelock Ellis, Eugenicist." Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. 39 (2008).
"Discoveries of the Future: Herbert G. Wells and the Eugenic Utopia." Spatial Practices: An Interdisciplinary Series in Cultural History, Geography & Literature, Vol. 9, April 2009.
"Watch Your Words, Professor." Stanford Magazine, January/February 2015.
"From Blossom Estate to Shopping Mecca: How Legacy Village Came To Be." Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 11, 2015.
"Planned Parenthood in N.Y. Disavows Margaret Sanger Over Eugenics." New York Times, July 21, 2020.
"I'm the Head of Planned Parenthood. We're Done Making Excuses for Our Founder." New York Times, April 17, 2021.
Archival Collections:
Bolton-Brush Growth Study Center, Bolton Dental Building, Case Western Reserve University School of Dentistry, Cleveland, Ohio.
Brush Foundation Papers, Western Reserve Historical Society, Cleveland, Ohio.
Case Western Reserve University Archives, Cleveland, Ohio.
Charles Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Charles F. Brush Papers, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland, Ohio.
Dittrick Medical Museum, Allen Memorial Medical Library, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio.
Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd Papers, Dittrick Medical History Center, Allen Memorial Medical Library, Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine, Cleveland, Ohio.
Correspondence:
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, December 19, 1925. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Charles Davenport to T. Wingate Todd, December 21, 1925. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Dorothy Brush to Charles F. Brush, Sr., December 21, 1927. Charles F. Brush Papers, Kelvin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio:
Harry Laughlin to Charles F. Brush, Sr., June 30, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Jerome Fisher to Harry Laughlin, July 9, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Harry Laughlin to Jerome Fisher, September 11, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, September 27, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, October 20, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Charles Davenport to T. Wingate Todd, October 27, 1928. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Charles Davenport to T. Wingate Todd, March 20, 1929. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, March 27, 1929. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Harry Laughlin, April 8, 1929. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, August 29, 1930. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
R. E. Miles to Virginia Wing, September 12, 1930. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Jerome Fisher to Harry Laughlin, September 18, 1930. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, October 9, 1930. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
T. Wingate Todd to Charles Davenport, November 6, 1930. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Harry Laughlin to Jerome Fisher, January 8, 1931. Harry Laughlin Papers, Pickler Library, Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri.
Items from The Margaret Sanger Papers Project at New York University:
"Biographical Sketch."
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/aboutms/msbio.
"Documenting a Friendship."
Newsletter #3 (Fall 1992).
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/documenting_friendship.
"The Passionate Friends: H.G. Wells and Margaret Sanger."
Newsletter #12 (Spring 1996).
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/passionate_friends.
"The King and I: Sanger Remembers Havelock Ellis."
Newsletter #24 (Spring 2000).
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/king_and_i.
"Sanger Leagues: Cleveland-The First Wee Voice of Birth Control."
Newsletter #43 (Fall 2006).
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/cleveland.
"Travels With Margaret Sanger: Dorothy Brush's Portrait of Margaret Sanger."
Newsletter #63 (Spring 2013).
sanger.hosting.nyu.edu/articles/travelswithms.
Books:
Black, Edwin. War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003.
Brome, Vincent. H.G. Wells: A Biography. Greenwood Press, 1951.
Bruinius, Harry. Better For All The World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity. Alfred A. Knopf, 2006.
Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. Quadrangle Books, 1965.
Cohen, Adam. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. Penguin, 2016.
Coulter, Charles W. The Poles of Cleveland. Cleveland Americanization Committee, 1919.
Engelman, Peter C. A History of the Birth Control Movement in America. Praeger, 2011.
Fairmount Presbyterian Church. Fairmount Church 1916-1966. Fairmount Presbyterian Church, 1966.
Grosskurth, Phyllis. Havelock Ellis: A Biography. Alfred A Knopf, 1980.
Hansen, Randall and Desmond King. Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Hayden, Joel B. Religious Work Among Poles in America: A Study for the Immigrant Work Committee of the Home Missions Council. Missionary Education Movement of the United States and Canada, 1916.
Kuhl, Stefan. For the Betterment of the Race: The Rise and Fall of the International Movement for Eugenics and Racial Hygiene. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Kuhl, Stefan. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford University Press, 1994.
Leon, Sharon M. An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. The University of Chicago Press, 2013.
Loth, David. A Long Way Forward: The Biography of Congresswoman Frances P. Bolton. Longmans, Green and Co., 1957.
Meyer, Jimmy Elaine Wilkinson. Any Friend of the Movement: Networking for Birth Control 1920-1940. The Ohio State University Press, 2004.
Okrent, Daniel. The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics, and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America. Scribner, 2019.
Price, Lucien. Citation for Joel Babcock Hayden: Read at Commencement June 1946 on the Occasion of Dr. Hayden's Retirement after Fifteen Years as Headmaster of Western Reserve Academy. Western Reserve Academy, 1950.
Reilly, Philip R. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.
Rosen, Christine. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. Oxford University Press, 2004.
Ross, Edward Alsworth. Standing Room Only? The Century Co., 1927.
Suitters, Beryl. Be Brave and Angry: Chronicles of the International Planned Parenthood Federation. International Planned Parenthood Federation, 1973.
Weinberg, Julius. Edward Alsworth Ross and the Sociology of Progressivism. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1972.
Wells, H.G. Men Like Gods: A Novel. The Macmillan Company, 1923.
Brush Foundation Publications:
Todd, T. Wingate. "The Aim and Program of the Brush Inquiry." Undated pamphlet in the Archives of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, Cleveland, Ohio.
Hall, Theodore. Life in our Hands: The Story of the Brush Foundation. Brush Foundation, 1946.
Brush Foundation. The Brush Foundation, Cleveland, Ohio, 1928-1958. Brush Foundation, 1958.
Brush Foundation. The Brush Foundation, Cleveland, Ohio, 1928-1980. Brush Foundation, 1980.
Todd, T. Wingate. Growth-The Gipsy [sic]. Brush Foundation Publication No. 1. Brush Foundation, 1929.
Todd, T. Wingate. Family Building, An Inquiry into Human Development. Brush Foundation Publication No. 2. Brush Foundation, 1929.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Herald's Staff, An Account of the Brush Inquiry. Brush Foundation Publication No. 3. Brush Foundation, 1929.
Ohio Race Betterment Association. Race Betterment, A Symposium. Brush Foundation Publication No. 4. Brush Foundation, 1929.
Todd, T. Wingate. Frontier Life. Brush Foundation Publication No. 5. Brush Foundation, 1930.
Todd, T. Wingate. Practical Race Improvement. Brush Foundation Publication No. 6. Brush Foundation, 1930.
Gruenberg, Benjamin C. What We Know About Heredity and Environment. Brush Foundation Publication No. 7. Brush Foundation, 1930.
Todd, T. Wingate. An Anthropologist's Study of Negro Life. Brush Foundation Publication No. 8. Brush Foundation, 1930.
Todd, T. Wingate. Safeguarding Humanity. Brush Foundation Publication No. 9. Brush Foundation, 1930.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Registration of Life's Handicaps. Brush Foundation Publication No. 10. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Basis of Personality. Brush Foundation Publication No. 11. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Natural History of Human Growth. Brush Foundation Publication No. 12. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Life's Impact and Youth's Adjustment. Brush Foundation Publication No. 13. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Compensations in Life. Brush Foundation Publication No. 14. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Comings and Goings. Brush Foundation Publication No. 15. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Economic Outlook for the Children. Brush Foundation Publication No. 16. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Meeting the Hazards of Life. Brush Foundation Publication No. 17. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Measuring the Growth of Children. Brush Foundation Publication No. 18. Brush Foundation, 1931.
Todd, T. Wingate. Growth and Development. Brush Foundation Publication No. 19. Brush Foundation, 1932.
Todd, T. Wingate. Adolescent Skill-Hunger. Brush Foundation Publication No. 20. Brush Foundation, 1932.
Todd, T. Wingate. Human Bodies and Human Beings. Brush Foundation Publication No. 21. Sigma Xi Quarterly, Vol. 21, December 1933.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Menace of the Years. Brush Foundation Publication No. 22. Ohio Welfare Bulletin, October 5, 1933.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Claim of the Children. Brush Foundation Publication No. 23. n.p. (Northwestern University Boas Reprint Collection), n.d. (c. Dec. 1933.).
Todd, T. Wingate. The Growing-up Pattern. Brush Foundation Publication No. 25. Progressive Education, December 1934.
Todd, T. Wingate. An X-Ray Study of Nutritional Derivations. Brush Foundation Publication No. 24. Journal of Home Economics, Vol. 26, No. 10, December 1934.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Physiology of Youth. Brush Foundation Publication No. 26. The Journal of Medicine, February 1935.
Todd, T. Wingate. Anthropology and Growth. Brush Foundation Publication No. 27. Science, Vol. 81, No. 2098, March 15, 1935.
Todd, T. Wingate. An Objective Study of Constitution in the Child. Brush Foundation Publication No. 28. Dental Cosmos, Vol. 77, September 1935.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Bodily Expression of Human Growth and Welfare. Brush Foundation Publication No. 29. Science, Vol. 82, No. 2122, August 30, 1935.
Todd, T. Wingate. Physical Development from Eight to Fifteen Years. Brush Foundation Publication No. 30. Growth and Development, 1936.
Todd, T. Wingate. Food for Fitness. Brush Foundation Publication No. 31. Journal of the American Dietetic Association, Vol. XII, No. 2, July 1936.
Todd, T. Wingate. Problems of Normal Development. Brush Foundation Publication No. 33. Progressive Education, January 1937.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Stomach as an Organ of Social Adjustment. Brush Foundation Publication No. 34. The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 43, No. 4, October 1936.
Todd, T. Wingate. Orthodontic Implications of Physical Constitution in the Child. Brush Foundation Publication No. 35. International Journal of Orthodontia and Oral Surgery, Vol. 23, No. 8, August 1937.
Todd, T. Wingate. Physical Therapy and the Growing Child. Brush Foundation Publication No. 36. The Physiotherapy Review, Vol. 17, No. 4.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Constitution of the Normal Child. Brush Foundation Publication No. 37. The Angle Orthodontist, Vol. VII, No. 3.
Todd, T. Wingate. Objective Ratings of the Constitution of the Growing Child. Brush Foundation Publication No. 38. American Journal of Diseases of Children, Vol. 55, January 1938.
Todd, T. Wingate. Facial Growth and Pharyngeal Health. Brush Foundation Publication No. 39. Reprinted from the Journal of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, Vol. 1, No. 32.
Todd, T. Wingate. Facial Growth and Pharyngeal Health. Brush Foundation Publication No. 39. The Journal of the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery, Vol. 1, No. 2.
Todd, T. Wingate. Shadows in the Mirror of Health. Brush Foundation Publication No. 40. New York State Journal of Medicine, Vol. 37, No. 18, September 15, 1937.
Todd, T. Wingate. Certificates of Growing Up and Growing Old. Brush Foundation Publication No. 41. The Ohio Journal of Science, Vol. XXXVIII, No. 1, January 1938.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Significance of Developmental Growth Studies in Evaluation of Clinical Allergy. Brush Foundation Publication No. 42. The Journal of Allergy, Vol. 9, No. 3, March 1938.
Todd, T. Wingate. Aging versus Infirmity. Brush Foundation Publication No. 43. The Scientific Monthly, Vol. 46, No. 6, June 1938.
Krogman, Wilton Marion. The Skeleton Talks. Brush Foundation Publication No. 44. Scientific American, August 1938.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Record of Metabolism Imprinted on the Skeleton. Brush Foundation Publication No. 45. American Journal of Orthodontics and Oral Surgery, Vol. 24, No. 9, September 1938.
Todd, T. Wingate. The Cumulative Result of Structural Defect. Brush Foundation Publication No. 46. Journal of the American Dental Association Vol. 26, No. 3, March 1939.
Todd, T. Wingate. Facial Growth as an Objective Record of Child Health. Brush Foundation Publication No. 47. Angle Orthodontist, Vol. 9, No. 1, January 1939.
Misc. Items:
Trust Indenture, The Brush Foundation, June 1928. Charles F. Brush, Sr. Papers, Kelvin Smith Library-Digital Case. Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
"Statement of Governor Mark R. Warner on the 75th Anniversary of the Buck v. Bell Decision."
Georgia State University College of Law website
readingroom.law.gsu.edu/buckvbell/82.
"Hamann-Todd Human Osteological Collection."
Cleveland Museum of Natural History website
cmnh.org/phys-anthro/hamann-todd-collection.
"About Hawken."
Hawken School website
hawken.edu/about-hawken.
"Hayden Hall."
Hudson Heritage website
hudsonheritage.org/property/hayden-hall.
"BUCK v BELL, Superintendent of State Colony Epileptics and Feeble Minded."
Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School website
law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/274/200.
"About."
Junior League of Cleveland website
cleveland.jl.org/about.
"About."
Thompson Hine website
thompsonhine.com/about/overview.
"The Clinical History of 'Moron,' 'Idiot,' and 'Imbecile' The words have a less-than-savory past."
Merriam-Webster website
merriam-webster.com/wordplay/moron-idiot-imbecile-offensive-history.
"A Chronological Account of the Bolton-Brush Growth Studies: In Search of Truth for the Greater Good of Man."
Case Western Reserve University School of Dental Medicine website
case.edu/dental/sites/default/files/2018-04/Chronological_Account_BoltonBrush.pdf.
"Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland-HISTORY."
Planned Parenthood of Greater Cleveland website
plannedparenthood.org/pp2/clvld/aboutus/history.
"Cleveland Health Center of Cleveland, OH."
Planned Parenthood website
plannedparenthood.org/health-center/ohio/cleveland/44103/cleveland-health-center-3966-91230.
"Planned Parenthood"
Planned Parenthood website
plannedparenthood.org.
"Brush Foundation"
Brush Foundation website
brushfoundation.org.
"Elizabeth Stites"
Fletcher School of Tufts University website
fletcher.tufts.edu/people/faculty/elizabeth-stites.
"Elizabeth Stites"
Tufts University website
facultyprofiles.tufts.edu/elizabeth-stites.
Brush Foundation IRS Form 990s, 2001-2023
Candid website
app.candid.org/profile/7411506.
Jones-Kern, Kevin. "The Fall and Rise of the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection: The Effects of Individuals and Institutions." Class thesis, May 2, 1994.
"In Memoriam T. Wingate Todd 1885-1938."
Funeral Program
Dittrick Museum, Allen Library, CWRU.
"History."
The Cleveland Maternal Health Association.
MSS 4736. Cont. 3, Fold. 46.
Western Reserve Historical Society Archive, Cleveland, Ohio.
Atlases:
Hopkins, G.M. Plat Books of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. G.M. Hopkins Co., 1927.
Hopkins, G.M. Plat Books of Cuyahoga County, Ohio. G.M. Hopkins Co., 1942.
Encyclopedia of Cleveland History website:
case.edu/ech.
Genealogy websites:
ancestry.com.
findagrave.com.