CHAPTER 9: Mongrelization

The u.s. Census Bureau would not cooperate with eugenics. No agency
collected and compiled more information on individuals than the
bureau. Its mission was clear: to count Americans and create a demographic
portrait for policymakers. A fundamental principle of census taking is the
confidentiality and sanctity of individual records. In the early twentieth
century, American eugenics coveted this information.

For years, eugenic leaders tried-with little result-to convince the
Census Bureau to change its ways. They targeted the 1920 census. In 1916,
Alexander Graham Bell, representing the Eugenics Record Office, was
among the first to formally suggest that the bureau add the father's name
and the mother's maiden name to the data gathered on each individual.'
The Census Bureau declined to make the addition.

But shortly after Bell's first entreaty, Laughlin proposed a survey of all
those in state custodial and charitable facilities, as well as jails. The Census
Bureau agreed, and soon thereafter its director of statistical research,
Joseph A. Hill, granted Laughlin the assignment. Laughlin was credentialed
as a "special agent of the Bureau of the Census."2 This first joint program,
however, would not lead to an alliance with the Census Bureau, but
to a bureaucratic war.

Since the 1880s, the Census Bureau had compiled statistics on what it
called "the defective, dependent and delinquent" population, referring to
the insane as defective, the elderly and infirm as dependent, and prisoners as
delinquent. Laughlin insisted on changing the Census Bureau's terminology
to "the socially inadequate" and adding to its rolls large, stratified contingents
of the unfit, especially along racial lines. Laughlin's concept of social
inadequacy would encompass those who "entail a drag upon those members
of the community who have sufficient insight, initiative, competence,
physical strength and social instincts to enable them to live effective
lives .... "3

The Census Bureau refused. It stubbornly claimed that Laughlin's
newly concocted term, socially inadequate, if used publicly, would surely
"call forth criticism and protest." Nor would it accept any of Laughlin's
substitute categories, such as "submerged tenth" or "the sub-social classes."
To adhere to the legal descriptions of the project-and follow the most
conservative line-the Census Bureau insisted on its traditional appellations,
"defective, dependent and delinquent."4

A war of nomenclature erupted, one Laughlin described as a "tempest
in a teapot." It raged for more than two years. First, the Census Bureau
polled its own stable of social science experts, who reacted with "caustic
criticism." Unwilling to back down, Laughlin consulted his own bevy of
experts, and then, disregarding any direction from the Census Bureau,
employed the term socially inadequate anyway when he requested information
from 576 state and federal institutions. To rub his point in the Census
Bureau's face, Laughlin asked the institutions not only for data, but also
for their opinions about his choice of terminology. All but three of the
institutions endorsed his new term, and he eventually swayed those three
as well, achieving unanimity. Laughlin saw this as more than vindication
for his position.5

The Census Bureau did not. Although the outbreak of World War I
interrupted the project, in May of 1919 the bureau finalized and then published
Laughlin's work under the title it chose, Statistical Directory of State
Institutions for the Defective, Dependent and Delinquent Classes.Determined to
have the last word, Laughlin published a vituperative article in the Journal
of Sociology, recounting the quarrel in detail. Quoting page after page of
support for his position from prominent sociologists and officials he had
worked with, Laughlin publicly castigated the Census Bureau for lack of
leadership and scientific timidity.6

Following the irksome, years-long experience, the Census Bureau
refused all but cosmetic cooperation with eugenicists. Laughlin, in his
capacity as secretary of the Eugenics Research Association, wrote to
Samuel Rogers, director of the census, in 1918, asking if the bureau
planned to identify nine classes of "socially inadequate." Rogers formally
replied that no such data would be gathered, except the names and
addresses of the deaf and blind, as previously collected.7

At a 1919 conference, the ERA Executive Committee decided to try to
convince the Census Bureau to conduct "an experimental genealogical survey
of a selected community." Three days later, the ERA formally petitioned
Census Bureau Director Rogers to add two additional columns
titled Ancestry to the paper questionnaires or enumeration sheets. "In the
interest of race betterment," the two new columns, to be situated between
the existing columns eleven and twelve, would identify the mother, by
maiden name, and the father. "Family ties would be established," explained
the ERA request, "and thus all census enumeration records would become
available for genealogical and family pedigree-studies." The ERA predicted
that these records would "constitute the greatest and most valuable
genealogical source in the world." Writing in the Journal of Heredity,
Laughlin advocated the two additional columns so that any "individual
could be located from census to census and generation to generation ....
Such investigations would be of the greatest social and political value."8

The proposals became more and more grandiose as the government's
capacity for data retrieval and analysis increased. But any cooperation
between the Census Bureau and American eugenics was for all practical
purposes destroyed by Laughlin's dogmatic insistence on employing
charged terminology more pejorative than the Census Bureau was willing
to adopt.9

Despite a year-to-year cascade of petitions, letters, scientific articles
and eugenic rationales urging the agency to create a massive registry of
American citizens that could be marked as fit or unfit, the Census Bureau
stands out as one federal organization that simply refused to join the
movement. 10

Rebuffed by the Census Bureau, Laughlin turned his attention to other
government agencies, using his official bureau contacts with hundreds of
state and federal institutions. His goal was to create further classifications
that other bureaus and agencies of the federal government could adopt. An
official 1922 booklet distributed by the U.S. House of Representatives to
administrators of state institutions was entitled "Classification Standards to
be Followed in Preparing Data for the Schedule 'Racial and Diagnostic
Records of Inmates of State Institutions', prepared by Harry Laughlin." It
listed sixty-five racial classifications. Classification #15 was German Jew,
#16 was Polish Jew, #17 was Russian Jew, #25 was North Italian, #26 was
South Italian, #30 was Polish ("Polack"), #61 was Mountain White, #62
was American Yankee, #63 was American Southerner and #64 was Middle
West American.l 1 If the Census Bureau would not adopt his eugenic classifications,
Laughlin hoped the states would.

Virginia was eager, thanks to its registrar of vital statistics, Walter
Ashby Plecker. Plecker considered himself a product of the Civil War, even
though he was born in Virginia in 1861, just as the conflict began.
Memories of his youth in Augusta County, Virginia, during the turbulent
Reconstruction years, were influenced greatly by a beloved Negro family
servant called Delia. In many ways, Delia represented the emotional
strength of the whole family. As was common, she essentially raised Plecker
as a young boy, exercising "extensive control" over his activities and earning
his lasting gratitude. Plecker's sister sobbed at Delia's wedding at the
thought of losing the connection, and Delia broke down as well. When
Plecker's mother fell ill for the last time, she sent for Delia to nurse her
back to health if possible. In his mother's final hour, it was Delia who comforted
her at her deathbed, and when the moment came, it was Delia who
tenderly placed her fingers on the woman's eyelids and shut them for the
last time. 0 wonder Delia was remembered in the mother's will. No wonder
that Plecker, as executor of his mother's estate, warmly wrote the first
bequest check to Delia. From Plecker's point of view, Delia was family. 12

Fond memories of Delia did not prevent Walter A. Plecker from
becoming a fervent raceologist and eugenicist, however. He detested the
notion of racial and social mixing in any form. His obsession with white
racial purity would turn him into America's preeminent demographic
hunter of Blacks, American Indians and other people of color. In the
process, Plecker fortified Virginia as the nation's bastion of eugenic racial
salvation. Plecker's fanaticism propelled him into a lifelong crusade to codify
the existence of just two races: white and everything else.

Plecker began his career in medicine, receiving a degree from the
University of Maryland at Baltimore, and then continuing in obstetrics at
the New York Polyclinic. He opened a practice in Virginia and quickly
became involved with family records, at one point serving as a pension
examiner. Plecker moved his practice to Birmingham, Alabama, for several
years, but soon returned to his beloved Virginia. He settled in Elizabeth
City County, one of the eight original Virginia shires created in 1634.
Elizabeth City County was intensely proud of its genealogical heritage.
The historic county's citizens included many so-called First Families of
Virginia, that is, Colonial settlers. Meticulous family records had been
kept, but were in large part destroyed during the numerous battles and
town burnings of the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil
War. After the Civil War, Elizabeth City County meticulously restored and
reorganized its population records. 13

In 1900, Elizabeth City County created a health department, along with
a section of vital statistics to document births and death. A few years later,
Plecker was hired as a county health officer, where he fastidiously recorded
life cycle events. One triracial Hampton, Virginia, family that he first
encountered in 1905 made quite an impact on him. After delivering their
baby boy, Plecker at bedside registered the mother as "Indian and colored,"
and the husband as "Indian and white." Later, the woman's daughter ran off
with a white man, marrying in another state. The young couple then
returned to Hampton as a second-generation racially mixed marriage.14
Plecker was appalled by the racial permissiveness of Virginia's system.

Later, when Plecker observed a local Negro death rate twice that of
whites, he began to investigate, pursuing a goal of "near 100% registration
of births and deaths." Population statistics and registration became more
than a fascination; they became his mission. His proficiency at registering
citizens made Plecker a natural pick in 1912 to help draft the state's new law
creating the Bureau of Vital Statistics. At age fifty-one, Plecker was invited
to head the new agency as registrar and to set his own salary. He was so
dedicated to population registration that he magnanimously asked "for little
more than subsistence." Virginia's 1912 statute established registration
of the state's citizens by race-without clear definitions. Yet for three hundred
years Virginia had produced racially mixed citizens by virtue of the
state's original Colonial settlement, its indigenous Indian population, a
thriving slave system, and waves of European immigration. IS

But a desire for general population registration was not what drove
Plecker. He was hardly devoted to the statistical sciences or demographics.
He was simply a racist. Plecker's passion was for keeping the white race
pure from any possible mixture with Black, American Indian or Asian
blood. The only real goal of bureaucratic registration was to prevent
racially mixed marriages and social mixing-to biologically barricade the
white race in Virginia.

In an official Virginia State Health Bureau pamphlet, Plecker declared:
"The white race in this land, is the foundation upon which rests its civilization,
and is responsible for the leading position which we occupy amongst
the nations of the world. Is it not, therefore, just and right that this race
decide for itself what its composition shall be, and attempt, as Virginia has,
to maintain its purity?" 16

Plecker was no authority on eugenics, however. He was a proud member
of the American Eugenics Society, but that required no real scientific
expertise for membership. Nor did Plecker really comprehend the tenets
of Mendelian genetics or heredity. Years after he became a leading exponent
of eugenic raceology, Plecker wrote to Laughlin for advice on race
mixing formulas, and confided, "I am not satisfied with the accuracy of my
own knowledge as to the result of racial intermixture with repeated white
crossings." He added that he just didn't understand Davenport's complex
protoplasmic discussion of skin color, explaining, "I have never felt justified
in believing that ... children of mulattoes are really white under
Mendel's Law."I?

Although he cloaked his crusade under the mantle of eugenic science,
Plecker did not mind confessing his real motive to Laughlin. "While we are
interested in the eugenical records of our citizens," Plecker wrote the
ERa, "we are attempting to list only the mixed breeds who are endeavoring
to pass into the white race."18 In other words, Plecker could not be distracted
with complex formulas and eugenic charts tracing a spectrum of
racial and subraciallineages. In Virginia, you were either ancestrally white
or you weren't.

Plecker introduced new techniques in registering births and deaths. In
July of 1921, for instance, the Bureau of Vital Statistics mailed a special
warning to each of Virginia's 2,500 undertakers. Plecker reminded them
that under the law, death certificates could not simply be mailed, but must
be delivered in person for verity's sake. Nor could a body be removed or
buried without a proper burial permit. An extra permit was needed to ship a
body. Moreover, Plecker demanded that coffin dealers provide monthly
reports of "all sales of which there is any doubt, giving the address of purchaser,
or head of the family, and name of deceased with place and date."19
Under Plecker's rule, no one was permitted to die in Virginia without leaving
a long racial paper trail.

Plecker would enforce similar regimens with midwives and obstetricians,
town clerks and church clerics-anyone who could attest to the racial
makeup of those who lived and died in Virginia. Over the next several
years, he created a cross-indexed system that recorded more than a million
Virginia births and deaths since 1912. He also catalogued thousands of
annual marriages, each filed under both husband's and wife's name. The
data quickly became too voluminous for index cards. Plecker created a
complicated but unique system to store the massive troves of information.
Clerks would type all the names "on to sheets of the best linen paper, using
unfading carbon ribbons," Plecker once explained in a flourish of braggadocio,
adding, "We make these in triplicate and bind them in books.
These [names] can be quickly referred to as easily as you can find a word in
the dictionary." Eventually, Plecker hoped to secure state funding to reconstruct
as many records as possible going back to 1630 and then "indexing
these by our system. "20

Plecker planned to add the names of all epileptics, insane, feebleminded
and criminals, which would be gathered from the state's hospitals, prisons,
city bureaus and county clerks, bestowing on Virginia a massive eugenical
database that would reach back to the first white footfalls on Virginia soil.
"The purpose will be to list degenerates and criminals," he assured.2\ Of
course the ERO was also assembling hundreds of thousands of names, but
its extensive rolls only amounted to a patchwork of lineages from counties
speckled around the country. Plecker's vision would deliver America's first
statewide eugenic registry-a real one.

It is important to understand that while carrying the banner of eugenics,
Plecker's true passion never varied. It was always about preserving the purity
of the white race. Millions of inscribed linen pages and thousands of leatherbound
volumes could be filled, but Plecker would never achieve his real goal
without dramatic legislative changes. Existing state laws outlawing mixedrace
marriages, including Virginia's, were simply too permissive. In the first
place, most states varied on what exactly constituted a Negro or colored person.
At least six states forbade whites from marrying half-Negroes or mulattoes.
Nearly a dozen states prohibited whites from marrying those of
one-quarter or even one-eighth egro ancestry. Others were simply vague.
Virginia's own blurred statutes had allowed extensive intermarriage through
the generations: between whites and light-skinned Negroes, White-Indian-
Negro triracials, mulattoes, and others. Plecker and the ERO called this
process the "mongrelization" of Virginia's white race.22

To halt mongrelization, a coalition of Virginia's most powerful whites
organized a campaign to create the nation's stiffest marriage restriction law.
It would ban marriage between a certified white person and anyone with
even "one drop" of non-Caucasian blood. The key would be mandatory
statewide registration of all persons, under Plecker's purview as registrar of
the Bureau of Vital Statistics. Leading the charge for the new legislation
were Plecker and two friends, the musician John Powell and the journalist
Earnest S. Cox.23

Powell was one of Virginia's most esteemed composers and concert
pianists. Ironically, he built his musical reputation on performing his
Rhapsodie Negre, which wove Negro themes and spirituals into a popular
sonata form. Later, as Powell became more race conscious, he claimed that
Negroes had stolen their music from the "compositions of white men."
Powell decried the American melting pot as a "witch's cauldron."24

Cox led the White America Society, and authored the popular racist
tome, White America (192 3), which warned of the mongrelization of the
nation. "[The] real problems when dealing with colored races," trumpeted
Cox, "[is] the sub-normal whites who transgress the color line in practice
and the super-normal whites who [only] oppose the color line in theory."
Eugenical News effusively reviewed Cox's book, stating, "America is still
worth saving for the white race and it can be done. If Mr. E. S. Cox can
bring it about, he will be a greater savior of his country than George
Washington. We wish him, his book and his 'White America Society' godspeed."
Plecker, Cox and Powell created a small but potent white supremacist
league known as the Anglo-Saxon Clubs, which would become pivotal
in the registration crusade.25

Despite their virulent racism, the Anglo-Saxon Clubs claimed they harbored
no ill will toward Negroes. Why? Because now it was just scienceeugenic
science. The Anglo-Saxon Clubs could boast, "'One drop of negro
blood makes the negro' is no longer a theory based on race pride or color
prejudice, but a logically induced, scientific fact." As such, even the group's
constitution proclaimed its desire "for the supremacy of the white race in
the United States of America, without racial prejudice or hatred."26 This
was the powerful redefining nature of eugenics-in action.

The Anglo-Saxon Clubs and their loose confederation oflocal branches
successfully petitioned the Virginia General Assembly and quickly brought
about Senate Bill #219 and House Bill #311, each captioned "An Act to
Preserve Racial Integrity." The legislation would require all Virginians to
register their race and defined whites as those with "no trace whatsoever of
any blood other than Caucasian." As one Norfolk editorialist described the
proposal, "Each person, not already booked in the Vital Statistics Bureau
will be required to take out a sort of passport correctly setting forth his
racial composition .... " This passport or certificate would be required
before any marriage license could be granted. Pure whites could only
marry pure whites. All other race combinations would be allowed to intermarry
freely. 27

The Anglo-Saxon Clubs found a powerful ally in their campaign. The
state's leading newspaper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, allowed its pages to
become a megaphone for the legislation. In July of 1923, for example, Cox
and Powell published side-by-side articles entitled "Is White America to
Become a Negroid Nation?" The men claimed their proposed legislation
was based on sound Mendelian eugenics that now conclusively proved that
when two human varieties mixed, "the more primitive ... always dominates
in the hybrid offspring." The Richmond Times-Dispatch supported the idea
in an editorial.28

On February 12,1924, Powell enthralled a packed Virginia House of
Delegates with his call to stop egro blood from further mongrelizing the
state's white population. "POWELL ASKS LAW GUARDING RACIAL
PURITY" proclaimed the Richmond Times-Dispatch's page one headline.
Subheads read "Rigid Registration System is Needed" and "Bill Would
Cut Short Marriage of Whites with Non-Whites." The newspaper's lead
paragraph called the address "historic." Leaving little to doubt, the article
made clear that a "rigid system of registration" would halt the race mixing
and mongrelization arising from centuries of procreation by whites with
Negro slaves and their descendants. Such preeminent eugenic raceologists
as Madison Grant were quoted extensively to reaffirm the scientific necessity
underpinning the legislative effort. Lothrop Stoddard, a member of
Margaret Sanger's board of advisors, was also quoted, declaring, "I consider
such legislation ... to be of the highest value and greatest necessity in order
that the purity of the white race be safeguarded from possibility of contamination
with nonwhite blood .... This is a matter of both national and racial
life and death."29

Virginia's legislature, in Richmond, was soon scheduled to debate what
was now dubbed the "Racial Integrity Act." It was the same 1924 session of
the legislature that had enacted the law for mandatory sterilization of mental
defectives that was successfully applied to Carrie Buck. On February 18,
1924, with the forthcoming debate in mind, the Richmond Times-Dispatch
published a rousing editorial page endorsement that legislators were sure
to read. Employing eugenic catchphrases, the newspaper reminded readers
that when "amalgamation" between races occurred, "one race will absorb
the other. And history shows that the more highly developed strain always
is the one to go. America is headed toward mongrelism; only ... measures
to retain racial integrity can stop the country from becoming negroid in
population .... Thousands of men and women who pass for white persons
in this state have in their veins negro blood ... it will sound the death knell
of the white man. Once a drop of inferior blood gets in his veins, he
descends lower and lower in the mongrel scale."30

Despite the bill's popular appeal, legislators were unwilling to ratify the
measure without two adjustments. First, the notion of mandatory registration
was considered an "insult to the white people of the state," as one irritated
senator phrased it. Plecker confided to a minister, "The legislature
was about to vote the whole measure down when we offered it making registration
optional." Mandatory registration was deleted from the bill.
Second, a racial loophole was permitted (over Plecker's objection), this to
accommodate the oldest and most revered Virginia families who proudly
boasted of descending from pre-Colonial Indians, including Pocahontas.
Plecker's original proposal only allowed those with one-sixty-fourth Indian
blood or less to be registered as white. This was broadened by the senators
to one-sixteenth Indian blood, with the understanding that many of
Virginia's finest lineages included eighteenth- and nineteenth-century
Indian ancestors.31

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act was ratified on March 8, 1924, and
became effective on June 15. Falsely registering one's race was defined as a
felony, punishable by a year in prison.32

As soon as the law was enacted, Plecker began circulating special bulletins.
The first went out in March of 1924, even before the effective date
of the law. Under the insignia of the Virginia Department of Health, a special
"Health Bulletin," labeled "Extra #1" and entitled "To Preserve Racial
Integrity," laid out strict instructions to all local registrars and other government
officials throughout the state. "As color is the most important feature
of this form of registration," the instructions read, "the local registrar
must be sure that there is no trace of colored blood in anyone offering to
register as a white person. The penalty for willfully making a false claim as
to color is one year in the penitentiary .... The Clerk must also decide the
question of color before he can issue a marriage license .... You should
warn any person of mixed or doubtful color as to the risk of making a claim
as to his color, if it is afterwards found to be false." Health Bulletin Extra #1
defined various levels of white-Negro mixtures, such as mulatto, quadroon,
octoroon, colored and mixed. Along with the bulletin, Plecker distributed
the first 65,000 copies of State Form 59, printed on March 17,
"Registration of Birth and Color-Virginia."33

Health Bulletin #2 was mailed several days later and warned, "It is estimated
that there are in the state from 10,000 to 20,000, possibly more, near
white people, who are known to possess an intermixture of colored blood,
in some cases to a slight extent, it is true, but still enough to prevent them
from being white. In the past, it has been possible for these people to
declare themselves as white .... Then they have demanded the admittance
of their children into the white schools, and in not a few cases have intermarried
with white people .... Our Bureau has kept a watchful eye upon the
situation." Bulletin #2 reminded everyone that a year of jail time awaited
anyone who violated the act.34

Plecker quickly began using his office, letterhead and the public's
uncertainty about the implications of the new law to his advantage. His let
ters and bulletins informed and sometimes hounded new parents, newlyweds,
rnidwives, physicians, funeral directors, ministers, and anyone else
the Bureau of Vital Statistics suspected of being or abetting the unwhite.35

April 30, 1924
Mrs. Robert H. Cheatham
Lynchburg, Virginia

We have a report of the birth of your child, July 30th, 1923, signed by Mary
Gildon, midwife. She says that you are white and that the father of the child
is white. We have a correction to this certificate sent to us from the City
Health Department at Lynchburg, in which they say that the father of this
child is a negro. This is to give you warning that this is a mulatto child and
you cannot pass it off as white. A new law passed by the last legislature says
that if a child has one drop of negro blood in it, it cannot be counted as
white. You will have to do something about this matter and see that this
child is not allowed to mix with white children. It cannot go to white
schools and can never marry a white person in Virginia.

It is an awful thing.

Yours very truly,
WA. Plecker
STATE REGISTRAR36

Plecker followed this with a short note to the midwife, Mary Gildon.

This is to notify you that it is a penitentiary offense to willfully state that a
child is white when it is colored. You have made yourself liable to very serious
trouble by doing this thing. What have you got to say about it?

Yours very truly,
WA. Plecker
STATE REGISTRAR37

Plecker's friend Powell of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs was copied on both
letters. A small handwritten notation at the top left read, "Dear Mr. Powell:
This is a specimen of our daily troubles and how we are handling them."38

Plecker acted on rumor, consulted arcane tax and real estate documents,
and of course whatever records were available from various eugenic
sources. On July 29,1924, Plecker wrote to W H. Clark, who lived atIrish
Creek in Rockbridge County. "I do not know you personally and have no
positive assurance as to your racial standing, but I do know that an investigation
made some time ago by the Carnegie Foundation of the people of
mixed descent in Amherst County found the Clark family one of those
known to be thus mixed. We learned also that members of this family and
of other mixed families have crossed over from Amherst County and are
now living on Irish Creek." After informing Clark that his ancestors
included "three Indians who mixed with white and negro people," Plecker
asserted that the man was now one of five hundred individuals who would
be removed from the list of white people.39

Adding a threat of prosecution, Plecker warned, "We do not expect to
be easy upon anyone who makes a misstatement and we expect soon to be
in possession of facts which we can take into court if necessary." Plecker
seemed to enjoy taunting the racially suspect. He sardonically added that
he looked forward to tarring even more of Clark's extended family. "I will
be glad to hear what you have to say," quipped Plecker, "and particularly to
have the dates and places of the births and marriages of yourself, your parents
and grandparents."40

Plecker was equally ruthless with his own registrars. One was Pal S.
Beverly, a registrar in Pera, Virginia. Beverly had bitterly complained that
registration of his own family as white had been overruled by Plecker.
Records unearthed by Plecker showed Beverly to be a so-called "Free Issue"
egro, that is, a class of freed slave. "Because of your constant agitation,"
Plecker wrote him on October 12, 1929, "of the question that you are a
white man and not a member of the 'Free Issue' group of Amherst, as you
and your ancestors have been rated, we wrote to you recently asking for the
names of your father and of his father and your grandfather's mother."41

Plecker had probed Beverly's family tree for generations. The registrar
laid it out for him in stunning and damning detail. "The certificate of death
of your mother Leeanna (or Leander) Francis Beverly, Nov. 5, 1923, states
that she was the wife of Adolphus Beverly," informed Plecker. "This certificate
was signed by you when you were our local registrar." Plecker then
checked Adolphus Beverly's 1881 marriage license and discovered that
Beverly's father was listed as colored. Plecker then investigated Adolphus
Beverly's father, Frederick. In the Personal Property Tax Book for the years
1846 through 1851, Frederick was listed as a freed slave. Frederick was
born in 1805 and was recorded in the census along with his older brother,
Samuel-and on and on.42

"I am notifying you finally," Plecker informed Beverly, "that you can
have no other rating in our office under the Act of 1924 than that of a
mulatto or colored man, regardless of your personal appearance, voting
list, or statements which any persons may make to petitions in your
behalf .... I want to notify you further that any effort that you make to register
yourself or your family in our office as white is, under the Racial
Integrity Act of 1924, a felony making you liable to a penalty of one year in
the penitentiary." For extra measure, he added that the bureau had identified
numerous other mixed-race individuals in the county named Beverly.43

As promised, Plecker began decertifying the extended family members
of Pal Beverly. Among them was Mascott Hamilton of Glasgow, in
Rockbridge County, Virginia. Mter Plecker's ruling, Hamilton's children
were thrown out of the white school they attended. When Hamilton
threatened to sue, Plecker gleefully replied, "I am glad to learn from you
the fact that your children are kept out of the white schools .... " He presented
the point-by-point documentation: "You and your wife belong to
the group of people known as 'free issues' who are classed in Amherst
County where they started as of free Negro stock, the name they were
called by before the War Between the States to distinguish them from slave
Negroes .... Your wife's mother married Price Beverly, a grandson of
Frederick Beverly, who was a son of Bettie Buck or (Beverly) who was a
slave and set free and sent to Amherst by her owner Peter Rose of
Buckingham County, together with her sons Frederick and Samuel. Your
wife's grandmother, Aurora Wood married Richard, a son of the freed
negro, Frederick Beverly."44

The litany continued. "The children which you refer to were probably
your wife's by her divorced husband Sam Roberts, who is shown to be an
illegitimate son of] ennie Roberts. You did not marry Dora till 192 5. The
Roberts family is also of true 'free issue' stock. Your wife gave birth to one
child two months after she was married to Sam Roberts. Does she say that
the father was a white man and not her husband? What a mess-trying to
be white!!"45

Plecker scoffed, "Your wife's history shows a complete line of illegitimacy
and she claims this as the ground upon which she hopes to be classified
as white. It would be difficult to find a white family except of
feebleminded people in the state with such a record." Ending with his standard
threat, Plecker warned, "It is a penitentiary offense to try to register as
white a child with any ascertainable trace of negro blood, and that when
you go into court you will have this charge to face."46

Similarly denigrating correspondence was mailed across the state. In
May of 1930, Plecker notified the wife of Frank C. Clark, of rural Alleghany
County, that her protestations of a white appearance and years of living as
white were meaningless. "The question of whether or not there is any trace
of negro blood present is determined by the record of ancestors and not by
the appearance of an individual at the present day after securing crossings of
white blood. either does the securing of marriage licenses, and registering
children falsely as white establish the racial origin." Her father-in-law's colored
marriage license, and the state's pre-Civil War tax records, "establishes
the colored ancestry of your husband Frank C. Clark."47

Plecker then enumerated the genealogical details of Mrs. Clark's
mother, Elena, her grandmother, Ella, and even her great-great-grandmother,
Creasy, "who was said to have been 'a little brown-skinned egro
who lived to be nearly one hundred years old.''' In closing, Plecker admonished,
"All descendants of the people referred to above are colored and will
be so considered in our office. They cannot legally marry into the white
race nor attend white schools. Anyone who registers the births of descendants
of the above as white ... makes himself or herself liable to one year in
the penitentiary."48

In one case, four mulattoes from one family married white spouses, two
in Washington, D.C., one in a distant Virginia town, and one in an undetermined
location. When they returned to their hometown, Plecker tracked
them all down and called the police. The couples "fled before the warrants
issued for their arrest were served," Plecker recounted to a friend.49

In another case, Plecker investigated a Grayson County couple married
five years earlier. The couple had just given birth to a son. After a review of
the birth certificate and other records, the man was found to be white, but
Plecker determined his wife to be of Negro descent. Plecker essentially
unmarried the couple. He ruled, "They were married illegally and under
the laws of Virginia, they are not legally married. Both are liable to the
State Penitentiary." That ruling and any attendant information was forwarded
to the Commonwealth Attorney for prosecution. 50

Plecker's relentless crusade continued for years. His typical workday
began at 8:30 in the morning and ended at 5:00, and he usually put in a
half-day on Saturdays. Two assistants, Miss Marks and Miss Kelly, helped
him manage his constant correspondence as he probed for clues about individuals'
racial composition and then consummated his investigations with
elaborate, combative missives.51

More than just prohibiting marriage and school admittance, he also
tried to keep everyone but certified whites from riding in the white railroad
coaches. He even pressured white cemeteries. When Riverview Cemetery
in Charlottesville tried to bury someone of suspected egro bloodline,
Plecker protested, "This man is of negro ancestry .... To the white owner of
a lot, it might prove embarrassing to meet with negroes visiting at one of
their graves on the adjoining lot."52

When he didn't possess actual documentation, the registrar was more
than willing to fake it. In 1940, fifteen citizens in Pittsylvania County had
petitioned Plecker to bar the five children of the King Family from attending
white school "on account of being of negroid mixture." Plecker contacted
the chairman of the Pittsylvania County school board seeking information
on the five students admitting "we have no information in regard
to them ... [and] no way of proving facts from the record." Plecker
explained, "We are particularly desirous of knowing whether a negro man
is the reputed father of these children, and if possible, his name." Until
that time, Plecker assured the school official, "We will preserve [the petitions
of the fifteen people] in our files as evidence ... and upon that information
we will designate any of these children found in our records as colored-
regardless. "53

In one episode, the Bedford County clerk, Mr. ichols, contacted
Plecker to confirm the racial status of a young man seeking to marry a
white girl. The young man's complexion was one of mixed parentage.
Plecker wrote back, "We do not know whether we can establish his racial
descent until we have had further information as to his family .... [But] if
this young man has the appearance of being mulatto and cannot prove the
contrary, I would suggest that no license be granted to him." Two days
later, the young couple went to the next county, Roanoke County, and successfully
secured their marriage license. Plecker discovered it after the fact,
haranguing the issuing clerk, "We have no positive information as to the
man's pedigree, we can only surmise it from Mr. Nichols' observation as to
his appearance. [But] shall this man ... be turned loose upon the community
to raise more mulatto children?"54

Plecker proselytized and chastised anyone who would listen. His
Bureau of Vital Statistics regularly published radical racist and eugenic literature,
which was distributed to thousands of doctors, ministers, teachers,
morticians and racial integrity advocates. One series of official tracts, entitled
the "New Family Series," was aimed at youngsters to heighten their
awareness of "dangers threatening the integrity and supremacy of the white
race." The bureau's 1925 annual report to the governor was itself widely
disseminated as a special health bulletin. In that report, Plecker lamented,
" ot a few white women are giving birth to mulatto children. These
women are usually feebleminded, but in some cases they are simply
depraved. The segregation or sterilization of feebleminded females is the
only solution to the problem.""

The 1924 state publication, Eugenics and the New Family, insisted, "The
variation in races is not simply a matter of color of skin, eyes, and hair and
facial and bodily contour, but goes through every cell of the body. The
mental and moral characteristics of a black man cannot even under the best
environments and educational advantages become the same as those of a
white man. But even if the negro's attainments should be considerable,
these could not be transmitted to his offspring since personally acquired
qualities are not inheritable. Neither can the descendents of the union of
the two races ifleft to their own resources, be expected to develop or maintain
the highest type of civilization. "56

When Virginia's Racial Integrity Act was passed in 1924, Plecker
became an immediate hero among raceologists and eugenicists across
America. He addressed major eugenic conferences and authored special
articles on the topic for Eugenical News, the American Eugenics Society's
Eugenics, and various eugenic research anthologies. Laughlin was so
impressed that he cited Plecker's work in the 1929 edition of the American
:YearBook "for leadership in establishing new racial integrity laws in the
American states."5?

Plecker's audience expanded beyond eugenic circles. The American
Public Health Association invited him to read a paper before its fifty-third
Annual Meeting in October of 1924, in Detroit. At the event, Plecker
preached to the nation's most important public health officials that whites
and nonwhites could not "live in close contact without injury to the higher
[whites], amounting in many cases to absolute ruin. The lower [nonwhites]
never has been and never can be raised to the level of the higher." The association
was so taken with Plecker's advocacy that it reprinted much of his
speech in the American Journal of Public Health. The journal praised
Virginia's law as "the most perfect expression of the white ideal, and the
most important eugenical effort that has been made in the past 4,000
years." Such platforms only served to legitimize Plecker's views.58

Soon Plecker was pushing for similar "one drop" racial integrity laws in
other states. Exporting such legislation was essential to his strategy since
Virginians of any complexion could easily cross state lines to marry. In one article
Plecker complained, "White and coloreds ... quietly move to Washington
or northern States and become legally married. In some instances, they even
return to their home State and live in marriage relations .... "59

To help make Virginia's race law a national standard, Virginia Governor
E. Lee Trinkle proudly distributed copies of the Racial Integrity Act to
every governor in America, with a personal letter requesting that they propose
similar legislation in their own states. John Powell reported to one
interested Midwestern legislator, "He [Trinkle] received thirty-one replies.
Nineteen of these, most of them from southern governors, were noncommittal;
eleven, the majority from the north and west, strongly approved;
the only disapproval came from the governor ofMinnesota."6o

Powell added, "Of course, laws against intermarriage cannot solve the
negro problem in any of its aspects-industrial, economic, political, social,
biological or eugenical. They can, however, delay the evil day and give time
for the evolvement of an effective solution ... a real and fmal solution."61

Even if some governors were hesitant, legislators and activists across
the nation were eager to replicate the law. Ohio senator Harry Davis
requested more information, which Plecker provided along with a detailed
briefing on the difficulties of lobbying such a bill. A Maryland lawmaker,
John R. Blake, asked for a copy of the law plus a recommendation for a
speaker to address the legislature. When the race-minded Reverend Wendell
White of South Carolina wrote for more information on such a law,
Plecker gladly sent it, bemoaning the vague response of that state's governor.
Plecker encouraged the clergyman, "If such men as you and others will
get behind him [the governor of South Carolina] and the legislature, you
can get this or a better law across. "62

To help, Plecker's Bureau of Vital Statistics mailed literature to legislators
in "all of the States, appealing to them to join Virginia in a united
move to preserve America as a White Nation." The first two states to
emulate Virginia's statute were Alabama and Georgia. Wisconsin attempted
to follow suit. Other states were slow to approve "one drop" measures,
in part because of increasing civil rights activism. With methodical lobbying,
however, the eugenics movement hoped to spur more such laws. To
that end, Laughlin asked Plecker to compile a special chart for Eugenical
News entitled "Amount of Negro Blood Allowed in Various States for
Marriage to Whites."63

Plecker's bureaucratic ire did not confine itself to white and Negro
unions. Asians were also barred from marrying whites. For instance, on
February 28, 1940, Spotsylvania Circuit Court Clerk A. H. Crismond
issued a marriage license to a local couple, Philip N. Saure and Elsie M.
Thomas. Upon checking, Plecker discovered that the groom was a native
of the Philippines and the bride an Italian-American born in Pittsburgh.
Assuming the woman was white, Plecker chided, "You as Clerk were not
authorized to issue a marriage license to a person of any of the colored
races, including Filipinos." He lectured the clerk parenthetically in typical
eugenic prose, "The Italians from the Island of Sicily are badly mixed with
former negro slaves, and if this woman is from there, it is ... [possible] she
herself would have a trace of negro blood."64

At about the same time, Plecker informed a California researcher that
Virginia was also disallowing marriages between whites and Hindus because
they were "of the colored races ... who are considered either Mongolian or
Malay, I am not sure which." He told a South Boston, Virginia, contact that
Portuguese were admixed with Negroes, and equally disqualified. His
eugenic tracts bemoaned the presence of 500,000 to 750,000 Mexicans in
Texas and called for their expulsion south of the border.65

But Plecker harbored a special animus toward one ethnic group. He
despised Native Americans. Because he believed that American Indian
tribes had intermixed for generations with whites and some Negroes,
Plecker was satisfied that pure Indians no longer existed. To him, they were
all mongrels. Worse, because Virginia's Racial Integrity Act contained a
historic loophole for those with no more than one-sixteenth Indian ancestry,
Plecker saw the exemption as a demographic escape tunnel for those of
mixed Negro lineage. From the outset, Plecker embarked upon a furious
campaign to eradicate American Indian identity.

Virginia's fabled history of settlement began with Indians. Years before
any European landed in America, the Algonquin ruled the wooded lands
which later became known as Virginia. Dashing Stream and his wife, Scent
Flower, gave birth to Powhatan, who rose to become a noble chief ruling a
federation of Algonquin tribes. Powhatan's daughter was the beautiful
Pocahontas, who in legend and perhaps in fact saved Captain John Smith
by persuading her father to spare Smith's life when he was Powhatan's captive.
Ultimately, in a well-documented saga, she married John Rolfe and
sailed for England, where in 1617 she died of smallpox at the age of twentytwo.
Their Virginia descendants included the Randolphs, the Bollingses,
the Rolfes, the Pendletons, the Smiths, the Wynnes, the Yateses, and many
others who helped build Virginia during the earliest Colonial times and
eventually constituted Virginia's aristocracy.66

But three hundred years of population admixture, genocide and oppressive
living conditions for those who remained had reduced the continent's
many once proud tribes to a decimated remnant. The U.S. Census Bureau
counted Indians in varying ways at various times, employing an array of
definitions, all subject to local discretion, throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. Partially as a result of these inconsistencies,
Indian demographic statistics ebbed and flowed in American population
records, and their legal status was complex and troubled. But on June 2,
1924, Congress finally granted citizenship to all Indians not already naturalized
under its Indian Citizenship Act. This law was ratified less than two
weeks before the effective date of Virginia's own Racial Integrity Act. The
new federal Indian law, together with Virginia's one-sixteenth Indian
exemption, outraged Plecker.67

He embarked on a systematic effort to identify the lower class descendants
of American Indians who had intermarried with whites and egroes,
and to reclassify them from Indian or white to mongrel. Among his main
targets were the Monacan Indians, mainly of Amherst County, who
descended from the Monacan Confederacy and dated back to Pocahontas's
day. Others he pursued included the Rappahannock, Chickahominy and
Pamunkey tribes. These Indian communities were small and often cloistered.
Some two hundred dwelled in Rockbridge County. In King William
County there were probably fewer than 250. In another county, there were
just forty individuals who called themselves Indians but whom Plecker
claimed derived instead from the illegitimate daughter of a Negro and a
white.68 All were targets for the registrar.

American Indians throughout the state vigorously objected when the
Bureau of Vital Statistics attempted to reclassify them as egro, or mongrel,
or even nonwhite. "We had considerable trouble," Plecker admitted
in a correspondence, "in establishing the position of the American Indian,
and admitted those with one-sixteenth or less of Indian blood, to accommodate
our Pocahontas descendants and one or two other cases known to
us in the State. That clause, however, has given us much trouble, as a number
of groups who have but a trace of Indian blood, the rest being negro
and white, are claiming exemption under that clause. In at least one county,
some who are descendent of antebellum 'free negroes' with a considerable
admixture of illegitimate white blood, are claiming themselves Indians and
seem to have been meeting with success."69

Most of Virginia's Indians were rural poor, living in modest cabins
near mission churches. It was easy to marginalize them as unfit.
Physically, most of them bore only the strong, classically handsome features
of American Indians, including high cheekbones, thick black hair
and their traditional complexion. Some, however, did possess blond hair,
reflecting clear Anglo-Saxon parentage. A few, presumably descended
from intermarriages with free Negroes in the prior century, possessed
darker skin.70

Virginia's registrar, however, only allowed for two classifications, white
and nonwhite. All 1,300 of Virginia's local registrars were under orders to
watch for Indians with any trace of Negro ancestry registering as white. In
at least one case, the local registrar consulted a hair comb hanging inside a
Monacan church. "If it passes through the hair of an applicant," explained
Plecker, "he is an Indian. If not, he is a negro." In a private letter, Plecker
described the hair comb as being "about as reliable as some of their [the
Indians'] other tests." In Eugenical News, he bragged that his "systematic
effort to combat" what he called "near-whites" included utilizing "living
informants" as well as the state's oldest tax and registration records.7I If he
couldn't get them one way he would get them another way.

Plecker employed his usual pejorative tactics in erasing "Indian" as a
racial category from the state's records. He sarcastically accused one Indian
family in Rockbridge County of having a bloodline that included several
Indians who had intermarried with some whites and Negroes. He
instructed local registrar Aileen Goodman to change their classification to
"colored" and brashly notified the accused individual that, "In the future,
no clerk in Virginia is permitted to issue a marriage license ... [to] persons
of mixed descent with white people and our Bureau expects to make it very
plain to clerks that this law must be absolutely enforced." The Rockbridge
family members were no longer Indians.72

Even when no Negro bloodline was apparent, Plecker was adamant. He
identified one man in Lexington, Virginia, as "one-fourth Indian, threefourths
white, who cannot be distinguished from a white man. He attended
one of the colleges of Virginia, studied law, and married into a good family
in Rockbridge County. There are several similar cases in Southwest
Virginia where Indians ... have married white women and their children
are passing as white." He informed the local registrar, "You see [to it] that
the mixed people of your territory are registered either as colored or 'free
issue.''' Disallowing even the category "mixed Indian," Plecker instructed,
"the term 'mixed' without the word 'Indian' after it might be acceptable but
we would prefer one of the other terms." The Lexington, Virginia, family
members were no longer IndiansJ3

At one point Plecker visited an Indian church following its Sunday service,
and after two hours sternly informed the assembled that no matter how
they protested, they would be registered as "colored and would continue to
be so and that none of them would be considered anything else." Some
years later, when the clerk of Charles City tried to issue a marriage license
to a member of the church, Reable Adkins, and even included the birth certificate
attesting to the man's white lineage, Plecker simply changed the
records. "We received this certificate for this birth with both parents given
as white," he acknowledged. "Of course we will not accept the certificate in
that way.... All of the Adkins group and others associated with them under
their Chickahominy Charter are classed in our office as colored and never
as white or Indian. In reply to your inquiry as to whether a marriage license
should be issued to them other than colored, when they present birth certificates
stating that they are Indian, I wish to state emphatically that this
should not be done .... They are negroes and should always be classed as
negroes, regardless of any birth certificate they present .... When the certificates
come in to us we index and classify them as negroes." A special
form was usually attached to the back of the certificate nullifying the category.
Adkins family members were no longer Indians.74

Plecker's interference even extended beyond Virginia. For example,
Plecker wrote to William Bradby of Detroit, Michigan, advising that his
birth certificate claiming to be of "half-breed Indian" parentage would be
disallowed. Leaving no room for argument, Plecker declared simply, "We
do not recognize any native-born Indian as of pure Indian descent unmixed
with negro blood." Bradby's family members were no longer Indians. 75

To bolster his assertion that Indians simply no longer existed, only
mongrel mixtures, Plecker turned for scientific support to the Carnegie
Institution and its Eugenics Record Office. For years prior to the passage
of Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, the ERO had focused on the Indians of
Virginia as examples of the unfit. In 1926, the Carnegie Institution
financed and published the results of extensive fieldwork by two of its
Virginia researchers who had examined some five hundred tribal members
in one area. The Carnegie Institution's book, printed under its own
imprimatur with Davenport's close supervision, was entitled Mongrel
Virginians.76

Mongrel Virginians was heralded for its academic completeness. It
asserted that all living descendants of the several hundred Indians in
question "have been visited time and again by one or both of the authors.
In addition every known white, colored or Indian person in the county,
state or nation who could furnish information concerning the deceased or
living has been consulted and asked to give any material of value to the
investigation." The Carnegie report lumped all of these Indians into one
new group, which they called the "Win Tribe." Indeed, the subtitle of
Mong;rel Virginians was The Win Tribe. No one had ever heard of a Win
Tribe prior to this volume. The book explained "Win" stood for "White-
Indian-Negro."77

"The Wins themselves claim to be of Indian descent," the book
asserted. "They are described variously as 'low down' yellow negroes, as
Indians, [and] as 'mixed.' No one, however, speaks of them as white. The
Wins themselves in general claim the Indian descent although most of
them realize they are 'mixed,' preferring to speak of the 'Indian' rather than
of a possibility of a negro mixture in them."78

The Carnegie report assessed their usefulness to society as follows: "It
is evident from this study that the intellectual levels of the negro and the
Indian race as now found is below the average for the white race. In the
Wins, the early white stock was probably at least of normal ability, i.e. for
the white .... [Today, however,] the whole Win tribe is below the average,
mentally and socially. They are lacking in academic ability, industrious to a
very limited degree and capable of taking little training. Some of them do
rather well the few things they know, such as raising tobacco or corn-a
few as carpenters or bricklayers, but this has been the result of years of persistent
supervision by the white landlords. Less than a dozen men work
even reasonably well without a foreman .... Very few could tell the value of
either twenty-five or seventy-five cents."79

Nor did the Carnegie report find redeeming qualities in the Indian culture
it described. "There is practically no music among them," the study
reported, "and they have no sense of rhythm even in the lighter mulatto
mixtures. As is well known, the negro is 'full' of music. Some of them [the
mulattoes] have been given special training in music, but no Win has ever
shown any semblance of ability in this line."80 No mention was made of the
Indians' legendary rhythmic dances or songs and their many drums and
other musical instruments.

Mong;rel Virginians was accorded credibility because of its prestigious
authorship, and its touted academic rigor. "Amidst the furor of newspaper
and pamphlet publicity on miscegenation which has appeared since the
passage of the Virginia Racial Integrity Law of 1924," the report assured,
"this study is presented not as a theory or as representing a prejudiced
point of view, but as a careful summary of the facts of history. "81

Plecker seized on Mongrel Virginians to prove his point and help him
reclassify Indians. He helped popularize the book around the state with his
own enthusiastic reviews. Eugenical News extolled the study to the movement
at large.82

Despite Mongrel Virginians, Indians and others fought back. Several
sued Plecker from the beginning and made substantial progress in the
courts. Plaintiffs' attorneys were often unyielding in their objections. One
such attorney, J. R. Tucker, demanded that Plecker stop interfering with a
birth certificate and threatened, "I find nowhere in the law any provision
which authorizes the Registrar to constitute himself judge and jury for the
purpose of determining the race of a child born and authorizing him to
alter the record .... I desire and demand a correct copy of the
record ... without comment from you and without additions or subtractions,
and I hereby notify you that unless I obtain a prompt compliance ... I
shall apply to a proper court for a mandamus to compel you."83

In a candid note, Plecker admitted to his cohort Powell that his bureau's
strategy was based in no small way on simple intimidation. Tucker's ultimatum
had rattled Plecker. "In reality," he conceded, "I have been doing a
good deal of bluffing, knowing all the while that it could not be legally sustained.
This is the first time my hand has absolutely been called."84

As early as November of 1924, one judge by the name of Henry Holt
ruled against Plecker, setting the stage for a test case. "In twenty-five generations,"
wrote the judge in an incisive opinion, "one has thirty-two millions
of grandfathers, not to speak of grandmothers, assuming there is no intermarriage.
Half of the men who fought at Hastings were my grandfathers.
Some of them were probably hanged, and some knighted. Who can tell?
Certainly in some instances there was an alien strain. Beyond peradventure,
I cannot prove that there was not." Nor could the judge find any two ethnologic
authorities who could agree on the definition of pure Caucasian.85

Powell and Plecker worried about the judge's ruling. The commonwealth
attorney was willing to pursue an appeal as a test case, but he also
warned that the entire Racial Integrity Act might be struck down. They
decided not to pursue the appeal. Plecker in turn assisted efforts to get the
legislature to reduce the Pocahontas exemption, causing raucous debate
within the state house and in the newspapers ofVirginia.86

Plecker continued his crusade even after retiring in 1946 at the age of
eighty-four. To the last day he was publishing racist pamphlets decrying
mongrelization, defending the purity of the white race, decreeing demographic
status family-by-family in a state and in an era when demographic
status defined one's existence. In a final flourish, Plecker submitted his resignation
with the declaration, "I am laying down this, my chief life work,
with mingled feeling of pleasure and regret." He hoped to be dubbed
"Registrar Emeritus."87

During his tenure, Walter A. Plecker dictated the nature of existence
for millions of Americans, the living, the dead and the never born. His verdicts,
often just his suspicions, in many ways defined the lives of an entire
generation of Virginians-who could live where, who could attend what
school and obtain what education, who could marry whom, and even who
could rest in peace in what graveyard. It was not achieved with an army of
soldiers, but rather with a legion of registrars and millions of registration
forms. He was able to succeed because his campaign was not about racism,
nor mere prejudice, nor even white supremacy. It was about science.

Now that science was ready to spread across the seas.

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