Personal Heroes: Inky Clark

Having written lately about Yale’s prominent role in eugenics, I’d like to make a paradoxical-seeming statement of gratitude to a character who was, at least superficially, built on the eugenicist’s model of the ideal man.

Russell Inslee “Inky” Clark Jr. is one of my personal heroes.  He was a graduate of the Yale Class of 1957 and a member of Skull and Bones, the secret society known for its plutocratic membership, including George H.W. Bush, Averell Harriman, and also the prominent eugenicist Irving Fisher.  Clark would go on to spend much of his career as headmaster of a prep school, Horace Mann in New York City.  But before that,  in 1965, he became director of undergraduate admissions at Yale, and he proceeded to re-make the university on a meritocratic model.

Instead of getting into Yale because you came from the right sort of family, or went to the right schools, or simply because you were entitled, old boy, you could now get in because you somehow seem to have earned it.   You could get in just because you were smart enough or because you showed the dim beginnings of a talent.

It didn’t matter, at least not as much, that you were a Jew, or a public school graduate, or in my case an Irish-Italian Catholic from a big and not so bright parochial high school in Newark, NJ.  Thanks to Clark and the president of Yale at that time, Kingman Brewster, it soon ceased to matter that you were not a white male.

Here’s how the Yale Alumni Magazine described what Clark achieved, in an article published around the time of his death in 1999 (my italics added).

But there was nothing inevitable about Yale’s move towards greater meritocracy and diversity, or the institution’s leadership among selective universities on these issues during the 1960s. These outcomes were a result of Kingman Brewster’s personal leadership, and his willingness to endure the opposition that came as a price for his idealism. Clark remembered that in the first year of his deanship, he was hauled before the [Yale] Corporation to report directly on his changes in admissions policy. One of the Corporation members who had “hemmed and hawed” throughout Clark’s presentation finally said, “Let me get down to basics. You’re admitting an entirely different class than we’re used to. You’re admitting them for a different purpose than training leaders.” Clark responded that in a changing America, leaders might come from nontraditional sources, including public high school graduates, Jews, minorities, and even women. His interlocutor shot back, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table”—this was at a time when the Yale Corporation included some of America’s most powerful and influential men. “These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”

Those days are of course now long gone, and our universities and the country are infinitely better places for it.

My own life has also been better than I had any reason to expect, and every so often I think about Inky Clark and thank him for it.  Once at a dinner party, I mentioned to a friend that Inky Clark was the reason I got into Yale.  And the friend, whose close relative A. Whitney Griswold had been president of Yale in the 1950s, immediately replied, with a smile, “And he’s the reason I didn’t.”

I think it worked out o.k. for both of us.

What Inky Clark wrought also worked out well for a great many other people, of all types, as I am reminded by this joyous, poignant note written  by a new Yale graduate who died this past weekend.

The Earth Moved

This is a story I wrote for the June issue of Smithsonian Magazine.  The editors there asked me to write a different lead, to make it seem more timely.  You can read that version here.  But I think the historical account stands on its own.  Feel free to disagree in the comments:

Alfred Wegener

On November 1, 1930, his fiftieth birthday, a German meteorologist named Alfred Wegener set out with a colleague on  a desperate 250-mile return trip from the middle of the Greenland ice pack back to the coast.  The weather was appalling, often below minus-60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Food was scarce.   They had two sleds with 17 dogs fanned out ahead of them, and the plan was to butcher the ones that died first for meat to keep the others going.

Less than halfway to the coast, down to seven dogs, they harnessed up a single sled and pushed on, with Wegener on skis working to keep up.   He was an old hand at arctic exploration.  This was his fourth expedition to study how winter weather there affected the climate in Europe.  Now he longed to be back home, where his wife Else and their three daughters awaited him.  He dreamed of “vacation trips with no mountain climbing or other semi-polar adventures” and of the day when “the obligation to be a hero ends, too.”   But he was also deeply committed to his work.  In a notebook, he kept a quotation reminding him that no one ever accomplished anything worthwhile “except under one condition:  I will accomplish it or die.”

That work included a geological theory, first published a century ago this year, that sent the world woozily sliding sideways and also outraged fellow scientists.  We like to imagine that science advances unencumbered by messy human emotions.  But Wegener’s brash intuition threatened to demolish the entire history of the Earth as it had been built up step by step by generations of careful thinkers.  The response from fellow scientists was a firestorm of moral outrage, followed by half a century of stony silence.

Wegener’s revolutionary idea was that the continents had started out massed together in a single supercontinent and then gradually drifted apart.   He was of course right.  Continental drift, and the more recent science of plate tectonics, are now the bedrock of modern geology, helping to answer life-or-death questions like where earthquakes may hit next, and how to keep San Francisco standing.   But in Wegener’s day, drift was heresy.  Geological thinking stood firmly on solid earth, continents and oceans were permanent features, and the present-day landscape was a perfect window into the past.

The idea that smashed this orthodoxy got its start at Christmas 1910, as Wegener (the W is pronounced like a V) was browsing through “the magnificent maps” in a friend’s new atlas.

When Alabama Stood Up for Freedom

Alabama is on the brink of passing a highly punitive law against immigrants, and it reminds me of an item from my eugenics story that ended up on the cutting room floor.   In the 1930s, when eugenicists at Yale and other leading intellectual institutions were still defending forced sterilization, Alabama stood up for freedom and the fundamental concepts of American life.

Here’s what I wrote:

Even as late as 1940, when the Germans had sterilized 400,000 people, Yale professor Ellsworth Huntington could applaud “the way sterilization is being gradually accepted as a necessary measure for preserving the health of the community.”  This was five  years after the governor of Alabama, a state not ordinarily known for its progressive thinking, rejected a proposed sterilization law*, declaring that “the country people of Alabama do not want this law; they do not want Alabama, as they term it, Hitlerized.”

Maybe it’s time now for Alabama to remember its own best impulses.  Here’s an excerpt from an editorial about the proposed immigration law in today’s New York Times:

The Supreme Court recently heard oral arguments on the constitutionality of Arizona’s immigration law, whose noxious spirit and letter Alabama has copied. A ruling in that case is expected in June, and could unleash more Arizona-style damage in other states. Meanwhile, the two Republican architects of Alabama’s immigration law, Micky Hammon in the House and Scott Beason in the Senate, are pressing on. And The Associated Press reported this month that Alabama farmers are planting less and shifting to mechanized crops as the reality of an immigrant labor shortage — the high price of xenophobia — sinks in.

* Kline, W., Building a Better Race, p. 80

Adolph Gave Good Blurbs (Postscript)

Whitney (with “Fitter Family” promoters)

The most appalling moment in the literary history of Yale occurred in Madison Grant’s Wall Street law office during the thick of the Depression.  The secretary of the American Eugenics Society then was a New Haven veterinarian named Leon F. Whitney, author of The Complete Book of Dog Care and other pet titles; he later worked as a pathology instructor at Yale Medical School, until his retirement in 1964, and his collection of champion dogs ended up at the Peabody Museum, where they are still among the most actively studied specimens.

In 1934, Whitney published a book called The Case for Sterilization, which was not about neutering the family dog.   To the question how many Americans “ought to be sterilized,” he added up “all the various types of less useful social elements,” noting that they tended to occur disproportionately in blacks and immigrants.  Then he concluded that “we should probably be disposing of the lowest fourth of our population”—or roughly 30 million people.  He quickly added that he was not “suggesting that all these be sterilized wholesale, but merely that we make voluntary sterilization available to them.”

One of Hitler’s staff wrote to New Haven requesting a copy of the book, and Hitler himself later followed up with a personal letter of thanks.  Soon after, Whitney went down to New York to meet with his fellow eugenicist Madison Grant, and proudly showed him the letter.  In  the 1994 book The Nazi Connection, historian Stefan Kühl writes:   “Grant only smiled, reached for a folder on his desk,” and gave Whitney his own letter, in which Hitler thanked Grant for writing The Passing of the Great Race and called it his “Bible.”

From Polemics to Murder (God & White Men–Conclusion)

By then, Fisher himself had stopped campaigning publicly for eugenics, and no longer tried to work the notion of the nation’s racial stock into economics discussions. His old ally Madison Grant died in 1937, and Fisher seemed to recognize the alarming effects of their earlier efforts together. In 1938, he joined three other economists in attacking the radio personality Father Charles Coughlin, a notorious anti-Semite, for adding “fuel to the already blazing flames of intolerance and bigotry.” A year later, he was one of the signatories to a public letter issued by Christian and Jewish institutions, cautioning Americans “against propaganda, oral or written” that sought to turn classes, races, or religious groups against one another. The letter warned, poignantly: “The fires of prejudice burn quickly and disastrously. What may begin as polemics against a class or group may end with persecution, murder, pillage, and dispossession of that group.”

Fisher survived World War II, dying in 1947 at the age of 80. His major causes by then were warding off deflation and requiring banks to hold larger reserves against their deposits, proposals that remain relevant in the post–Lehman Brothers era. We do not know how Fisher, Yerkes, Huntington, or other eugenicists responded to the discovery of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and other centers of racial hygiene. No doubt they were horrified.

Karl Brandt

Grant’s Passing of the Great Race would turn up once more after the war, at Nuremberg. Hitler’s personal physician Karl Brandt had been charged with brutal medical experiments and murder in the concentration camps. His lawyers introduced Grant’s book into evidence in his defense, arguing that the Nazis had merely done what prominent American scholars had advocated. Brandt was found guilty and sentenced to death.

We know better now, of course. And yet eugenic ideas still linger just beneath the skin, in what seem to be more innocent forms. We tend to think, for instance, that if we went to Yale, or better yet, went to Yale and married another Yalie, our children will be smart enough to go to Yale, too. The concept of regression toward the mean—invented, ironically, by Francis Galton, the original eugenicist—says, basically: don’t count on it. But outsiders still sometimes share our eugenic delusions. Would-be parents routinely place ads in college newspapers and online offering to pay top dollar to gamete donors who are slender, attractive, of the desired ethnic group, with killer SAT scores—and an Ivy League education.

Irving Fisher and the other Yale eugenicists would no doubt rejoice that the university’s germ plasm is still so highly valued—at up to ten times the price for other colleges. But if they looked more carefully at the evidence, they would discover that these highly desirable donors are now often the grandsons and granddaughters of the very immigrants they once worked so hard to eliminate.

Born to be a burden (Eugenics in the US)

Born to be a burden (eugenics Germany)

Into the Lion’s Maw (God & White Men–part 4)

Entirely apart from his reputation as an economist, Irving Fisher enjoyed an idyllic American existence. He lived with his wife Margaret and their three children in a big house on the crest of Prospect Street, with a music room, a library, and “a 40-foot living room with a large, sunny bay window,” as their son Irving recalled in his memoir, My Father Irving Fisher. A health enthusiast at home as well as in public, Fisher disdained cane sugar, tea, coffee, alcohol, tobacco, and bleached white flour. He often jogged in shorts around the neighborhood and liked to ride a bicycle to his classes on the Yale campus. One of his books was titled How to Live.

His various crusades required a platoon of busy assistants. So Fisher built out from the basement of the family home onto the sloping ground in back, eventually creating ten work rooms and, young Irving recalled, a “hidden beehive of activity below decks.” The office equipment included one of Fisher’s own inventions, an index card filing system that made the first line of each card visible at a glance. With his wife’s money, he turned it into a thriving business. When the company was bought out—it would become part of the Sperry Rand corporation—Fisher capitalized on his new wealth by buying stock on margin. By the late 1920s, he and Margaret had a fortune of $10 million.

Fisher was the son of a Congregational minister, and his driving impulse was to proselytize. Thus eugenics seemed a natural outgrowth not just of his work as an economist, but of his family heritage. It needed “to be a popular movement with a certain amount of religious flavor in it,” he thought. His role as a leading apostle also seemed like a way for him to make a real mark on the world—as if his economics alone were not enough: “I do want before I die,” he wrote to his wife, “to leave behind me something more than a book on Index Numbers.”

But his eugenic enthusiasms drew him

Kind Words for Despicable Men (God and White Men–part 3)

For readers today, it is almost impossible to browse through the eugenics literature from before World War II without hearing intimations of Auschwitz in every line. It takes a continual effort to keep in mind that they did not know about the Holocaust then. When one early enthusiast declared that eugenics “is going to be a purifying conflagration some day,” no one understood how horrifically prophetic those words would later sound.

Reading about Irving Fisher, Ellsworth Huntington, and the rest, I felt a predictable sense of loathing: these were despicable men. But in other parts of their lives, even the worst of them was at times admirable, and I felt a queasy sense of liking. This was illogical on a personal level. Their writing was laced with animosity toward the wave of immigrants into the United States after 1890—southern and eastern Europeans (mainly Italians and Jews, respectively), yellow-peril Asians, and the drunken, misbegotten Irish. It was an era when a Harvard anthropologist could lament “the flooding of this country with alien scum.” Fisher spoke of “defectives, delinquents, and dependents.”

Under the pretext of science, the eugenicists were proposing to preserve “Nordic” hegemony by breeding out my own Irish and Italian stock, among others. So why liking? Partly, it’s because the idea of the white Anglo-Saxon gentry prattling about their own superiority has become a stock joke (“Too damned funny, old bean”). Ellsworth Huntington sounds about as dangerous as Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady when he declares: “An Englishman likes to work things out for himself, and is glad when an emergency throws him on his own resources. The Mediterranean and Alpine people, on the contrary, are much more docile, more willing to be led.”

And partly it’s because, having grown up Irish and Italian, I am aware that my people also entertain notions of our magnificence. Other ethnic groups do the same, though they are generally not so foolish, or so accustomed to power, as to issue scientific pronouncements on the topic to the less fortunate. The truth is that all humans favor in-groups, starting with the family, and we disparage those we perceive as outsiders. Treating this as only the outlaw impulse of eugenicists and Nazis is a convenient way of overlooking a hateful tendency in us all.

Madison Grant

These eugenicists also felt disturbingly familiar in other ways. They weren’t sinister characters out of some darkly lighted noir film about Nazi sympathizers, but environmentalists, peace activists, fitness buffs, healthy-living enthusiasts, inventors, and family men. If Madison Grant had not been such an ardent racist and so closely tied to Nazi genocide, he might be remembered today as one of America’s greatest conservationists. “Among his many accomplishments,” writes Jonathan P. Spiro in his recent biography, Defending the Master Race, “Grant preserved the California redwoods, saved the American bison from extinction, founded the Bronx Zoo, fought for strict gun-control laws, built the Bronx River Parkway,” and helped create Glacier, Denali, and Everglades National Parks.  (To be continued.)

Blue Ribbons for Human Stock (God and White Men, part 2)

In the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics “fell squarely in the mainstream of scientific and popular culture,” according to Yale history professor Daniel Kevles, author of the 1985 book In the Name of Eugenics.Theodore Roosevelt popularized the term “race suicide,” for what he saw as the dwindling of the old Anglo-American stock, and the young Winston Churchill advocated sterilization and labor camps for “mental defectives.” Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger decried the proliferation of “human weeds,” while progressive reformer Havelock Ellis thought that getting the reproductive choices right would require the sexual liberation of women.

Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined the word “eugenics” in 1883 from the Greek for “of good birth.” But it really gained currency after 1900, with the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s work describing how different traits are inherited in pea plants—and particularly after researchers demonstrated in 1907 that Mendelian inheritance plays a role in eye color in humans, too.

Eugenicists inferred—incorrectly, as we now know—that single genes, or “unit characters,” could determine feeblemindedness, insanity, alcoholism, and even broad swaths of behavior like criminality. They also believed that society could now use this knowledge to dramatically improve the species. Huntington, the Yale geographer, described this as the fifth “most momentous” discovery in human history, after tools, speech, fire, and writing. For Fisher, likewise, it was the coming of an epoch: “We could make a new human in a hundred years.”

By the late 1920s,

God and White Men at Yale (Part 1)

Irving Fisher

This is a piece I wrote for the Yale Alumni Magazine, about the remarkable role that university played in the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.

On a sweltering Friday in June 1921, a 54-year-old Yale economics professor named Irving Fisher delivered a major speech at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. The pain of the recent war in Europe was still fresh, and Fisher was troubled by the quality of those who had died, and the damage to “the potential fatherhood of the race” by the loss of so many young men “medically selected for fighting but thereby prevented from breeding.”

In light of these losses, the issue, it seemed to Fisher, was that graduates of leading universities were failing to do their reproductive duty: the families “of American men of science” averaged just 2.22 children, versus a national average of 4.66. (Or as he put it, perhaps too lucidly, “The average Harvard graduate is the father of three-fourths of a son and the average Vassar graduate the mother of one-half of a daughter.”) This “race suicide” among “the well-to-do classes means that their places will speedily be taken by the unintelligent, uneducated, and inefficient.”

To prevent that, immigration from certain regions needed to be sharply curtailed, and birth control “extended from the white race to the colored” and to other “undesirable” ethnic and economic groups, ideally under the control of a eugenics committee established to “breed out the unfit and breed in the fit.” Otherwise, “the Nordic race … will vanish or lose its dominance.”

It was strong stuff, and from a seemingly impeccable source.

New Hope and More Hard Work (A Bitter Pill–Conclusion)

So where does all this leave drug research from the natural world?  Miller, Vederas, and a few small drug companies remain surprisingly optimistic.   That’s partly because the resource, though rapidly dwindling, is still out there waiting to be studied.  Miller estimates that medical researchers have tested only about 60,000 of the 400,000 or so plant species on Earth, and most of those against only a handful of diseases.  Extrapolating from the past success rate, he estimates that the plant species still waiting to be studied may contain upwards of 500 new botanical drugs.

Moreover, new technologies are making it easier to find them, according to Vederas.  Automated fractionation can now rapidly break down botanical specimens, thinning out the natural complexity to just three compounds per test well for high throughput screening.  Better methods also make it easier to synthesize these compounds, leading this past November to approval of a new breast cancer drug, Halaven, derived from a sponge found on the coast of Japan.  Researchers are also learning how to clone and work with individual genes in a plant.  At the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, Jay Keasling’s laboratory has recently overcome obstacles to transferring plant genes into bacteria and fungi, for synthetic production of the highly effective anti-malarial artemisinin, from the sweet wormwood plant.  He says commercial production will begin this Autumn.

At the same time, many of the remarkable biochemical functions attributed to plants and animals are turning out to come not from the organism itself, but from the bacteria and other microbes around it.  Instead of having to plant fields or cut down forests to get medicinal compounds, drug companies may soon be able to have these microbes brew them for us in fermentation vats.  Such improvements could lead to what Miller calls a “second renaissance” in natural products drug development.  Ethnobotanist Mark Plotkin, an early proponent of bioprospecting, adds, “Just because capitalism doesn’t get something right, doesn’t mean it’s not there.  We know that well these days.  You need to look everywhere, but I think the sweet spot lies somewhere between the medicine man and the microchip.”

This is not to say that blockbuster $1 billion-a-year drugs are ever going to produce a steady flow of cash for habitat preservation.