Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,470

This is the grave of Raymond Pearl.

Born in 1879 in Farmington, New Hampshire, Pearl grew up pretty wealthy and had a very good education. Although his parents wanted him to go into a humanities-based subject (imagine that today….), Pearl was more interested in science and so when he went to Dartmouth for college, he majored in biology. He was also a superb musician and was known for his proficiency with almost all the wind instruments. So this was a talented person. Unfortunately, he would use his talents to promote some very bad, no good, awful ideas.

Before this though, he went to the University of Michigan for his PhD in zoology, working on a form of flatworms. He also was a fish expert. He married in 1903 and spent the next few years traveling and studying at some of Europe’s most elite universities. By this time, he was already really interested in ideas of eugenics. While in Europe, he decided to move toward pushing these ideas generally.

It’s again worth stating that eugenics is not a “pseudoscience,” or if it is, the word has no meaning. Too often, this word gets used as “any scientific inquiry of the past that I don’t like.” This simply takes science completely out of context. It sees science as TRUTH and that’s simply not what science is or does. Science is a profoundly human endeavor, where the biases and ideas of the investigator exist throughout the process, from asking questions to observation to interpreting findings. This is how you get whole fields of medical science that ignore Black pain or you get facial recognition technology that simply doesn’t recognize Black faces. To call eugenics a pseudoscience would make no sense to someone like Pearl or to anyone else during this era. It was a completely legitimate form of scientific study. Sure it was complete bullshit, but again, all of science is defined by the biases of the involved humans.

Well, Pearl went back to Michigan to teach for a year, then it was on to Penn, then Maine, and finally Johns Hopkins. He was recruited by the Wilson administration in World War I to run the statistical division of the United States Food Administration. Enemies got in the way of his desire to come to Harvard; some of it was personal and some of it was that Pearl’s research seems to have had some very real problems. It’s not too surprising because Pearl was obsessed with demonstrating hereditary predisposition of disease, which might make sense if it wasn’t all about race for him. His findings were highly prejudiced, which again is hardly uncommon even today, but he was so open about it that it made even those who were open to eugenic ideas uncomfortable.

On the other hand….Pearl was a weirdo in that he criticized people for doing the same thing he did. He was a big eugenics guy of course. But by the late 20s, he started openly criticizing eugenicists for being too focused on race even though his own research was the same way. The best I can figure without going into a deeper dive for a post like this than I realistically have time for is this–Pearl was a political liberal. He believed, like a lot of these people, that eugenics was a Progressive thing and that you could manage the health of humans like you could manage the labor market or cities or sexuality or any of the other things Progressives thought you could bring expertise to. So the use of eugenics to promote far-right agendas really disgusted him. He thought eugenics was great but he also thought that bad scientists were using these ideas the wrong way. His 1927 article The Biology of Superiority is considered the first meaningful attack on eugenics from inside the movement. On the other hand, Pearl was pretty anti-Semitic through all this, though this by no means meant he wasn’t a political liberal given the widespread nature of anti-Semitism in American elites during this period.

So now that he was a kinda sorta critic of eugenics, Pearl moved into the eugenics-adjacent population control movement. He believed that World War I was caused by too many people in Europe and he strongly believed that the rise in global population was going to push against the planet’s resources quickly. About this latter point he wasn’t exactly wrong, but the problem with the whole population control movement is that it ignores consumption, which is the real driver of problems and which of course implicates the global elite, so they don’t like to talk about that, then or now. Pearl was a big birth control guy and while this put him in the same world as Margaret Sanger, who as we now know had her own set of eugenic beliefs, Pearl came to these questions with a deep contempt for the poor and a very strong suspicion of female sexuality (normal for Progressives across the political spectrum and whether they were men or women) and so they were very not close.

Oh, and Pearl also argued that siblings could have sex and produce children without medical issues any more than the regular population. I think this was not driven out of any particular personal weirdness so much as it was an intellectual argument.

Pearl was a reformer in all sorts of ways. He was a vegetarian at a time when this was really an experimental lifestyle, although I am not sure how committed he was to never eating meat so much as he found it interesting to explore and write about. He also wrote a book in 1926 called Alcohol and Longevity that argued that drinking had no negative impacts on health. Let’s just say that Pearl had a personal interest in this topic as he was a massive, no apologies alcoholic. He was known for throwing epic parties and Prohibition didn’t impact his relationship to booze at all, except maybe he paid more for it. He was close to people such as H.L. Mencken; they loved partying together as members of the Saturday Night Club, a group of elite partiers. He also was a big food guy, despite his vegetarianism, which at this time usually meant you thought flavor was bad and sinful. Somewhat amusingly, he published another piece that suggested tobacco did have negative health impacts and this was incredibly controversial because basically the entire medical establishment were tobacco addicts and they didn’t want to hear this any more than he would on drinking.

Before we think that Pearl was just some crank, we need to understand he was an incredibly influential scientist, whose findings on issues such as population density of insects, as well as aging, were central to the fields for a half-century after his death. You can’t separate the eugenics from the other scientific findings. They are all science. Just because something isn’t acceptable today doesn’t mean it isn’t science. The future is just as likely to see lots of the findings of scientists today as morally reprehensible and that doesn’t mean that what we can’t see as such now is not science.

In 1940, Pearl decided to visit the Baltimore Zoo. While walking around, and thinking god knows what while watching the animals, he had a massive heart attack and dropped dead. He was 61 years old.

Raymond Pearl is buried in Pine Grove Cemetery, Farmington, New Hampshire.

If you would like this series to visit other American eugenicists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Osborn is in Garrison, New York and Aaron Rosanoff is in Glendale, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.