Exposing the Haunted History of American Eugenics
The interior is painstakingly decorated to mimic the Eugenics Record Office that was once located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The walls are lined with aged metal filing cabinets. Desks placed in the middle of the room are covered in documents with titles such as “The Universal Marriage Law” and “Why a Baby Can’t be Darker Than the Sum of the Blackness of its Father and Mother.” Speakers hidden in high corners give the space false life as they play recordings of typing and chairs scraping across wooden floors. A chalkboard inscribed with the words, “Means proposed for cutting off the supply of human defectives and degeneratives” hangs on the wall.
The staged setting functions as the backdrop for an exhibition called “The Haunted Files: The Eugenics Record Office.” The exhibit replicates a research facility once funded by the Carnegie Institute, that specialized in the study of eugenics which, as defined by Associate Curator, Mark Tseng Putterman, was “the idea that humans could breed the human race to better itself… to make sure that the desired traits were propagated from generation to generation.”
However, what traits were considered “desirable” by eugenicists were heavily influenced by their own biases, which excluded anyone who was not a white man or woman from Northern or Western Europe, and those who possessed any sort of mental or behavioral weakness, such as a low IQ or promiscuity. These “traits” were believed to be heritable, like eye color, at the time. The research accumulated by the Eugenics Record Office, which “proved” that anyone but a healthy person of Nordic descent was fit to be an American, permeated society. Mental institutions and state governments used the “data” to justify the institutionalization, and even sterilization, of people deemed “unfit”.
In 1924, the federal government called the head of the Office, Charles Davenport, to testify before Congress on the dangers of allowing Eastern Europeans and Asians to infiltrate the American population. His testimony provided the foundation for the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act, which cut off all immigration from Asia, and most from Eastern Europe.
“At the time, it was a respected scientific institution,” Putterman explained, “but today we understand that their methods were very much tainted by their biases. Nonetheless, they were very influential in shaping ideas of racial hierarchies, intellectual hierarchies, and cultural hierarchies.”
The Eugenics Record Office lost that respect on the eve of World War II when Americans saw eugenics at play in the Hitler’s horrible treatment of Jewish people in Germany. The falsity of their research was also confirmed when the Office was given a bad review by a panel of unaffiliated scientists in 1936. It closed permanently in 1938.
The “Haunted Files” exhibit puts a dark period of American history that was saturated with fears of race diversity, disease, and disability, coupled with a desire of race betterment, on display at 8 Washington Mews five days per week, until next March.
“Who ‘belongs’ in American society and who doesn’t, who is an ‘ideal’ American and who isn’t, and the various policies that grew out of those ideas continue to influence conversations today,” Putterman explained, “Whether it’s about race, welfare, or immigration, in some ways, I think we’re almost in parallel moment to eugenics in terms of these larger demographic changes.”
The “Haunted Files” exhibit encourages visitors to look through the more than 4,000 replicated files on display.This is history that is meant to be felt, examined, and remembered.
