[NARRATOR:] On August 18th, 1934,
Twenty-year-old Ann Cooper Hewitt,
Heiress to one of the largest fortunes in the United States,
Was admitted to a San Francisco hospital
For an emergency appendectomy.
She later learned
The surgeons not only had removed her appendix,
But also a length of her fallopian tubes
Rendering her incapable of ever becoming pregnant.
The story of the "sterilized heiress"
Hit the papers just after the New Year in 1936
When Ann filed a half-million dollar damage claim
Against the surgeons and her own mother
for sterilizing her without her knowledge or consent.
Ann's mother denied any wrongdoing.
She'd done what she'd done for "society's sake," she insisted,
Because her daughter was "feebleminded."
It was the sort of bizarre, high-society scandal
That would have captured the national imagination
Under any circumstances.
But that one word, "feebleminded," struck a familiar chord for Americans––
And linked Ann's plight to a decades-old campaign
To control human reproduction,
Known as "eugenics."
[ARCHIVAL:] What is the bearing of the laws of heredity upon human affairs?
Eugenics provides the answers.
[LOMBARDO:] Eugenics was proposed as the scientific solution for social problems.
It was a combination of hope and aspiration on one side
And on the other side it was about fear
And in some cases about hate.
[ARCHIVAL:] They are identified early,
Categorized feebleminded,
Imbecile,
Idiot.
It would have been better by far if they had never been born.
(shouting)
[KEVLES:] People tend to think
That eugenics was a doctrine that originated with the Nazis,
That it was grounded in wild claims
That were far outside the scientific mainstream.
Both of those impressions are fundamentally not true.
[COHEN:] It was almost a mania
That sort of swept through the country.
And there was that kind of naïve, optimistic vision of eugenics
Like, “Hey, let’s all get together and make better people."
[STERN:] The Eugenics Movement was about having healthy children,
About having a stronger society.
There’s nothing wrong with that.
You have to look at the underbelly
Of what was implemented in the name of eugenics
To see what was so problematic about it.
(steamboat whistle blows)
(clatter of horses)
(whistle blows)
[NARRATOR:] In the fall of 1902,
An American biologist named Charles Benedict Davenport
Arrived in London on a sort of pilgrimage.
He was thirty-six, Harvard-educated,
And like many biologists of his generation,
Absorbed with the study of evolution.
He'd been traveling in Europe with his wife,
Collecting seashells for research on species variation,
But this was to be the highlight of the trip:
A meeting with the world-renowned gentleman scientist,
Sir Francis Galton.
A pioneering statistician,
Galton had lived his eighty years by a single motto:
"Whenever you can, count."
His obsession with measurements and patterns
Had led him to create the world's first weather maps,
Established fingerprinting as a means of identification,
And set data-backed parameters for the perfect cup of tea.
Charles Davenport had come to discuss another matter:
Galton's work on heredity.
[MUKHERJEE:] Francis Galton was a great quantifier.
He liked to quantify height,
Hair color.
You know, what is the chest size of an average man?
What is the thigh length of an average man?
Even things like intelligence.
[SPIRO:] Galton had a theory
That talent, as he called it
—what we would call intelligence—
seemed to run in families.
And so it quickly occurred to him,
“If we can get people with high talent to mate with each other,"
"Prevent people with low talent from mating with each other,"
"We will, within a few generations,"
"Create this race of super men.”
[COMFORT:] Francis Galton was borrowing ideas
And kind of riffing off of
The work of his half-cousin Charles Darwin.
[WAILOO:] Darwin believed that evolution was this natural process
That was inevitably leading towards what they called
The “survival of the fittest.”
Galton really turns that idea on its head and says,
“You know, natural selection isn’t working very well."
"We need to do a form of selection."
"We need to intervene.”
[NARRATOR:] To name the effort,
Galton had coined the term "eugenics"
A hybrid derived from two Greek words
Meaning "well" and "born."
Charles Davenport believed, as Galton did,
That selective breeding could transform the human race.
What was needed was a scientific understanding
Of how heredity actually worked
And over dinner at Galton's home,
Davenport declared his intention to get to the bottom of it.
[COMFORT:] Davenport said
"I’m gonna create a new kind of institution,"
"A station for experimental evolution,"
"Not Darwinian natural selection that you just go out and observe,
"But can we figure out how inheritance works?"
"Can we do experiments and find the patterns of heredity?"
(whistle sounds)
[NARRATOR:] When Davenport sailed for home in December 1902,
He carried with him not only a letter of recommendation signed by Galton,
But also, he later wrote,
"A renewed courage for the...study of evolution."
[LEONARD:] Davenport and Galton really did imagine
That the idea of improving human heredity
Was of almost religious significance,
Of profound moral importance.
They also believed they were qualified to breed a better race
Because they believed that they were the best and the brightest.
(chickens clucking)
[NARRATOR:] Scarcely more than a year later,
With funding from the Carnegie Institution,
Davenport opened his research station on the north shore of Long Island,
At Cold Spring Harbor.
Situated on ten acres along Oyster Bay,
The place had been purpose-built
For the breeding and analyzing of plants and animals
Complete with sprawling garden plots,
An aviary,
And a half-dozen tidy enclosures
Housing chickens, goats, and sheep.
By mating organisms with unusual characteristics––
A tailless Manx cat, or a rooster with a black comb––
And then studying their offspring, generation after generation,
Davenport hoped to unlock the mystery of evolution.