By MARTY LEVINE
Pitt’s star eugenics professor Roswell H. Johnson was hired with some fanfare in September 1912. He was hardly alone in his academic pursuit of reasons why “superior” people should be encouraged more than others to breed, but his 1918 co-authored textbook, Applied Eugenics, helped spread the pseudo-science to universities coast-to-coast. He never seems to have encountered doubt or disdain in any organized manner during his 21-year career here.
Johnson was hired as a double threat. Already an acclaimed advisor to gas and oil men looking for new wells and how to exploit them, he was appointed instructor in biology and geology. The newspapers noted that he had also “spent two years in special study of experimental evolution under (Charles) Davenport at Cold Springs Harbor,” New York, in 1907, where Johnson studied insect breeding in a facility dedicated to better animal breeding — and the lessons this might teach us.
Johnson was a hit in Pittsburgh right away, speaking to the First Unitarian Church men’s club on “The Ethics of Evolution,” the Homewood Woman’s Club (in a “stereopticon lecture” using a twin-lensed slide projector to create 3D effects) on “Man of the Future,” and at a local department store on “‘Our’ Product: The Next Generation.”
By 1914, he was presenting his current research — on marriage and birth rates among female graduates of a Washington, Pa., seminary, as “proving” that women's colleges hurt the chances of a “eugenically superior” class of women to win mates and produce babies.
The next year he was part of a Pitt-led public discussion on “The Right of the State to Prohibit the Reproduction of Defectives,” in which he took “the biological perspective.” Later that year he was in Washington, D.C., at a YMCA program, pushing the idea that “the failure of college women to marry and have children is killing off some of our best racial stock in this country,” according to the Pittsburgh Daily Post.
“Encouraging late marriages in the false hope of getting more intelligent offspring will hasten a danger toward which this country is already drifting at an alarming rate,” he pronounced. “The best aids to eugenics among young folks are dances, theater-going, card parties and other social functions.”
“To improve the chance of proper mating,” the paper’s report concluded, “Prof. Johnson recommended a combining of the European idea of ‘arranged marriages’ with the American idea of ‘romantic love.’”
“Co-Education Urged To Prevent Race Suicide” trumpeted another headline that year following a Johnson appearance. This time he was pushing a survey that showed, Johnson contended, that, “Separate colleges for women in the United States should be abolished,” the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times reported. He had undertaken a survey of Wellesley student marriage and birth rates, which showed “that 20 years after graduation less than one-half of the girls have married. These have borne only one and one-half children each. … And the honor scholars, who from the eugenic point of view are assumed to be the pick of the lot, do only about one third as well as this. … From this point of view (Johnson and colleagues) believe that colleges are hastening extinction of the old American stock.”
Johnson was teaching two eugenics courses and a eugenics lab at Pitt by 1918, as a course catalog shows. The classes focused on the “agencies under social control that may improve or impair the social qualities of future generations, either physically or mentally” as well as the “range of characteristics of such a nature as to require restricted reproduction, various methods of control, possible improvement of the action of sexual selection; the production of an increased birth rate from the superior.” The lab looked at “variation and heredity of human characteristics” and involved a “comparative study of significant vital statistics.”
By the early 1930s, he had become secretary-treasurer of the American Eugenics Association. He continued to lecture locally to groups like the Rodef Shalom Sisterhood child study class on “The Family Unit”; to the College Club on “Eugenic Aspects of Southern Russia,” where he had spent the previous three summers in “intensive study,” the papers gushed; and to the Congress of Clubs on “Needed Legislation.”
Even one of the Mellons wanted to collaborate with Johnson. Unfortunately, it was a Mellon of the more dissolute variety, his very existence among the genetic Mellon stock seeming to disprove all of Johnson’s work: Living in a “dingy tenement home hid away in the heart of the (Golden) triangle” in Downtown Pittsburgh, reported the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in October, 1934, he was the first cousin of banker Andrew W. Mellon.
William Andrew Mellon “insists on living in his … century-old brick building … garbed in clothes that bore fully a score of patches … in danger of starvation … his only entrances are through a cellar of 212 Fourth Avenue, and a coffee store at 217 Third Avenue.” There, he took a reporter aside and “outlined his plans for a eugenic cult,” for which he hoped to get the support of Roswell H. Johnson. This Mellon suggested that boxing champions and the first woman to swim the English Channel should breed for the best results. Eugenics, he believed, “is going to help Andy and all the Mellons, because I will lay before them the need of eugenics and how it has been neglected in our own family, as well as in almost every other family in the world.’”
But it was too late. Johnson was leaving Pitt for the University of Hawaii, where he intended to organize a “social hygiene movement.”
Eugenics, of course, had already had a very influential decade, and done some of its major damage. The work of Johnson’s most influential teacher, Charles Davenport of the experimental evolution station at Cold Springs Harbor, and his ilk had already inspired the U.S. to enact new restrictions against eastern and southern European immigrants in 1924 that would keep a generation of Jews and southern Italians at home to suffer and die through World War II and the Holocaust. And one of Davenport’s biggest German disciples would soon author the Nazis’ sterilization laws, while another would declare, as rector of the University of Berlin, that eugenics “has destroyed the theory of the equality of man,’” according to Daniel Okrent in “The Guarded Gate.”
Okrent notes that Johnson and his co-author of “Applied Eugenics” contributed to the anti-immigrant sentiment that created the 1924 law by printing, in their textbook, that eastern and southern European peoples “taken as a whole (were) fecund stocks” — beset “by illiteracy, squalor and tuberculosis, their high death-rates, their economic straits” and were thus not desirable “eugenic material.”
He also found that, in an article in Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review in 1922, Johnson had written that laws should be enacted to “prevent the outbreeding of superiors by inferiors.”
Thanks to University Times reader Charles E. Jones, Department of Geology and Environmental Science, for alerting us to the reproduced Pitt eugenics course catalog entries online.
Marty Levine is a staff writer for the University Times. Reach him at martyl@pitt.edu or 412-758-4859.
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