Cold Spring Harbor's Eugenics Record Office, 1910–1939: the model sterilization law and Virginia's Carrie Buck (Long Island, NY)

SUMMARYCold Spring Harbor's Eugenics Record Office, 1910–1939: the model sterilization law and Virginia's Carrie Buck (Long Island, NY) [Connections: Genetics (honest), Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDThe National Park Service: "In 1910, SEE established a new office on the campus, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO)," funded by grants from the Carnegie Institution of Washington and by Mary Williamson Harriman. Charles Davenport hired Harry Laughlin as deputy. "Laughlin drafted a model law for states to implement forced sterilization"; "Eighteen states adopted and used it." The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924 used "Laughlin's work as its foundation." Carrie Buck was "sterilized under the new law in Virginia," upheld in Buck v. Bell (1927). "The Eugenics Record Office closed in 1939."

PATTERNthe same campus that leads American genetics today once wrote the race-and-heredity rules that state governments applied, Virginia included. Hostile witness: a federal agency describing a national landmark

LENS (WW9)the house that measured "blood" for the state is the house whose descendants now build the panels; that is why Rule 14 exists

OPENneeds deep research: direct ERO links to Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 and registrar Walter Plecker (the reclassification of Virginia's Native people as "colored"); the NPS page does not mention either

SOURCENPS, "Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and the Place of Science in U.S. History".