Harry Hamilton Laughlin (11 March 1880 – 26 January 1943) was an American educator, eugenicist, and sociologist. He served as Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from 1910 to its closing in 1939, and he was influential in the implementation of compulsory sterilization.
Biography[]
Harry Hamilton Laughlin was born in Oskaloosa, Iowa in 1880, and he worked as a high school teacher and principal before becoming interested in eugenics. He and Charles Davenport shared an interest in chicken breeding, and, in 1910, Davenport asked Laughlin to move to Long Island to serve as Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office. In this position, he played an influential role in US politics, supporting an anti-immigration act in 1924 due to his belief that there was excessive insanity among immigrants from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe. He also supported compulsory sterilization laws to remove people with undesirable traits such as "feeble-mindedness" from the gene pool. Nazi Germany gave him an award for his "racial cleansing", and he was infamous for being among the most racist and anti-Semitic of the early-20th century eugenicists. He died in Missouri in 1943 at the age of 62.