Suffolk Closeup — A horrendous history

In the northwest corner of Suffolk County is the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Its outrageous history is detailed in a forthcoming book, “Long Island and the Legacy of Eugenics: Station of Intolerance.”

The book, by Mark A. Torres, an attorney as well as an author, will be released by The History Press on Jan. 21. Torres also wrote the 2021 book, “Long Island Migrant Labor Camps: Dust for Blood,” an examination of the plight of migrant farmworkers in Suffolk, also published by The History Press. It’s the best work I’ve ever read on this subject.

Torres is general counsel of Teamsters Local 810, a union that covers Suffolk, and as an attorney has long specialized in labor and employment law in federal and state courts. He is also a professor at Hofstra University and teaches a course titled “Migrant Labor in New York.”

As an author, he excels at in-depth research. Earlier this year the Association of Public Historians of New York awarded Torres its Joseph F. Meany Award (named for former New York State Historian Joseph F. Meany Jr.) for his book on migrant farmworker camps. 

Most Suffolk County residents know little about the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, although it’s off Route 25A on 110 acres in Huntington and currently employs more than 1,000 people. 

And what a history it has!

As to eugenics, I’ve known just a small amount — a basic understanding that it involves a theory that some human beings are inferior to others. 

I’ve received an advance copy of Torres’ book. It begins with an “Author’s Note” in which Torres explains: “True to my roots as an author of Long Island history, I have always strived to present topics from the oft-neglected local perspective. Thus, this book is not intended to merely serve as a broad retelling of the history of eugenics. Instead, it focuses on investigating the local origins, characters and stratagems employed by the Eugenics Records Office in Cold Spring Harbor which, for nearly three decades, served as the global headquarters of the eugenics movement.”

He relates how his investigative “journey led me to study the archival records at numerous facilities, including the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Archives … the Rockefeller Archive in Sleepy Hollow, New York; the American Philosophical Institute in Philadelphia; Truman State University in Kirksville, Missouri; and the National Museum of Health and Medicine in Silver Springs, Maryland …”

“The information I amassed from these meticulously preserved archives provided sharp insight into the origins, inspiration and machinations of the American eugenics movement, while never losing focus on the fact that it all emanated from a small hamlet on Long Island.”

“Through it all, I came to understand how eugenics became such an accepted and normalized part of society in the United States and throughout the world during the 20th century,” writes Torres.

He goes on how the book includes “the downfall of the Eugenics Record Office” [part of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory between 1910 and 1939] “and the ultimate discrediting of eugenics as a scientific field. The final section also explores the enduring and cruel legacy of eugenics.”

Not too incidentally, in an interview Torres told me officials at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory were “more than accommodating” in allowing him to view its historical records.

“The quest to perfect our species was not a new one,” Torres goes on. “However, the problem with such aspirations: Who decides the standards of perfection? And, more importantly, what is to be done with those who fall below the arbitrarily created standards?”

Then the book starts with the 1946 trial in Nuremberg, Germany: United States of America v. Karl Brandt, et al. Brandt and other doctors were put on trial in the aftermath of World War II for crimes against humanity, he relates, in connection with the Nazi “euthanasia program.”

“Brandt and six others were convicted, sentenced to death and executed. Astonishingly, the information that Brandt and his cohorts so desperately relied on for their defense “was not derived from Nazi propaganda,” says Torres. “Instead, their sources came directly from a report published in 1914 by the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York.”

“What connection,” asks Torres, “did an administrative office 4,000 miles away in a small town on Long Island have with the Nazi regime that plotted and carried out the systematic torture and murder of millions of human beings based on race and disability?”

“The connection was eugenics: the pseudoscience that dominated much of the 20th century and was premised on the racist, classist and misguided belief that mental, physical and behavioral traits of human beings were all inheritable and must be eliminated to save the human race.”

“Although it was promoted as cutting-edge science, eugenics was a social philosophy that aimed to develop a master race of human beings with the purest blood and the most desirable hereditary traits,” the book continues.

A “component” of eugenics was “’negative eugenics,’ which aimed to discourage or outright prevent the reproduction of people who were declared genetically unfit. Negative genetics was driven by the premise that society would dramatically improve if the millions of Americans who were deemed mentally, physically or morally undesirable were ‘eliminated from the human stock’ by means of segregation, sterilization and even euthanasia. This included the ‘feebleminded,’ paupers, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the deformed, the congenitally weak, the blind and the deaf. While human heredity would not begin to be understood by scientists until the 1960s, the social prejudice and practice of eugenics dominated scientific objectivity for more than half a century.”

“The legacy of eugenics is undeniably cruel and enduring,” writes Torres. “In the United States alone, more than 60,000 forced sterilizations were carried out in more than half the states … A multitude of people throughout the country were classified as undesirable and confined to psychiatric centers during their childbearing years. A bevy of marriage restriction and eugenic sterilization laws were enacted for the purpose of preventing the procreation of the unfit. Eugenically driven immigration laws barring the entry of immigrants from many countries into the United States endured for years. Globally, eugenics thrived in countries like Argentina, Canada, China, Japan and Norway, and Nazi Germany used it to commit unimaginable atrocities. In some ways, the ideals of eugenics persist today.”

“Despite its global appeal,” Torres goes on, “eugenics was truly made in America, and the epicenter of the movement was not found in some laboratory or government facility. Instead, the science was developed at the Eugenics Record Office … in Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island.”

More next week on the book out next month about the Eugenics Record Office at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and how from Suffolk County eugenics “spread throughout the world.”