Entomology as Public Policy

Why Walter Ashby Plecker's Tyranny of Taxonomy Matters Today

Walter Ashby Plecker (1861-1947). Founding Registrar, Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics (1912-1946). Sketch by Robert F. Graboyes.

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The gentlemen who crafted Virginia’s 1902 Constitution set out to construct an orderly, well-managed society. Virginia would not be governed by hooligans in repurposed bedsheets, as were the benighted regions farther south. No siree, the high-minded solons who crafted the new constitution were filled with the spirit of Progressivism, armed with statistics, guided by experts, and informed by the indisputable facts of the new science of eugenics. Six years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson had made “separate, but equal” the law of the land, and the political Machine that ran Virginia spent the next two-thirds of a century defining, documenting, and separating the races. (The Machine focused much more on “separate” than it did on “equal.”)

From 1912 to 1946, the Machine made Walter Ashby Plecker, MD, their chief social engineer. They established a Bureau of Vital Statistics and made him its registrar. Plecker’s bureaucracy made genealogical research a central mission of state government. As the population swelled from 2 to 3 million, Plecker devoted his life to constructing a taxonomy of races, determining each race’s place in society, slotting each and every Virginian in one of his categories, meting out privileges and penalties on the basis of one’s race, and harnessing the police powers of the Commonwealth to sustain the whole enterprise—as he, the Machine, and God had intended. (Plecker thought God had destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah because they engaged in racial mixing).

For 34 years, the Machine empowered Plecker to organize Virginians as an entomologist organizes bugs and beetles. He classified and reclassified Virginians, moving them from one display case to another by dint of data, anecdotes, whims, and (likely) fabrications. At his urging, the General Assembly crafted and passed the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which bifurcated Virginia’s population into just two legal categories—“white” and colored.” The law was signed by Governor E. Lee Trinkle, a moderate Progressive who championed prohibition, women’s suffrage and, later on, the New Deal. (Virginia soon became the first state to criminalize lynching, not so much for the benefit of African Americans, but rather because lynching was disorderly and bad for business.)

Plecker’s ambition soared when he read The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History, by Madison Grant (1916). Grant, a friend of Theodore Roosevelt, co-founded the Bronx Zoo and originated the field of wildlife management. Economic historian Thomas C. Leonard wrote:

“Grant was a cofounder of the American environmental movement, a crusading conservationist who preserved the California redwoods; saved the American bison from extinction; fought for stricter gun control laws; helped create Glacier and Denali national parks; and worked to preserve whales, bald eagles, and pronghorn antelopes.”

Today, Grant is best remembered for The Passing of the Great Race, which posited a racial hierarchy of mankind, with “Nordics” at its pinnacle. Grant mentored Plecker to make Virginia a eugenic laboratory. Grant also became an inspiration beyond America’s shores. The Passing of the Great Race was the first non-German book published by the Nazis after taking power, and, in a letter to Grant, Adolf Hitler wrote, "The book is my Bible."

Born ten days before the firing on Fort Sumter in 1861, Plecker bragged in 1943 that, “Hitler's genealogical study of the Jews is [probably] not more complete” than his own files on Virginians. His designation of “white” or “colored” on your birth certificate determined where you could live, study, eat, receive medical care, read, drink water, relieve your bowels, and lie in your grave. Until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia (1967), Plecker’s law determined whom you could or couldn’t marry—and it was a criminal offense to travel to another state to marry one you couldn’t marry in Virginia.

There were other Virginia/Nazi Germany cross-currents. Eugenicist Harry Laughlin was instrumental in crafting both the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 and in its defense before the U.S. Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell (1927). In 1934, Laughlin visited Nazi Germany to accept an honorary doctorate from the University of Heidelberg for his contributions to the “science of racial cleansing.” According to historian Jonathan Peter Spiro, Laughlin told Madison Grant that:

“he was thrilled that the speeches of Nazi leaders such as Wilhelm Frick ‘sound exactly as though spoken by a perfectly good American eugenist,’ but he admitted that he was jealous that he and Grant were only humble researchers, whereas Frick was ‘a powerful Reichsminister in a dictatorial government’ that was ‘getting things done.’”

In 1939, Dr. Edward DeJarnette, a Virginia eugenicist and state hospital administrator, was jealous of the Nazis’ widespread sterilization program, and proclaimed, “The Germans are beating us at our own game!” At the postwar Nuremberg Trials, Nazi officials defended their eugenic policies by citing Madison Grant, U.S. sterilization laws, and Buck v. Bell.

Plecker’s Display Cases

The racial categories of Plecker and his contemporaries were arbitrary, malleable, and incoherent. Under the Racial Integrity Act:

• Some people previously regarded as white became “Negro” and, therefore “colored.”

• Plecker stripped Native Americans of their identities by declaring that were really “Negro,” hence, “colored,” by dint of intermarriage between the two groups. But the legislature carved out one exception, described below, that Plecker hated and routinely ignored.

• Asians were classified as “colored,” but upper-class Asians were sometimes treated as “honorary whites.”

• Plecker warned one woman than Sicilians likely had black blood.

• Jews were regarded as white—though Plecker’s allies disagreed.

This last point intrigues me especially. Like me, my mother was Jewish. Her 1922 birth certificate (with fragments shown below) declares her “a white female,” and the signature below that declaration reads, “W. A. Plecker.” I have wondered whether Plecker wished to banish Jews, as well, from his vision of “whiteness” and whether pragmatism forced him to relent. His mentor, Madison Grant, clearly considered us nonwhite, and in 1916, a Plecker-like North Carolina scholar asserted that Jews were “Negro” by the same logic that Plecker had used on Native Americans.

When Whites Became Black

In Colonial Virginia, a “white,” had to be of at least 3/4 European lineage—later raised to 7/8 and then 15/16. But Madison Grant thought “white” should be limited to those with absolutely zero discernible nonwhite ancestry—and that marriage or sex between whites and nonwhites should be a criminal offense. Grant recruited Earnest Sevier Cox—preacher, activist, and white supremacist—to manage the drive for a “one-drop rule” in Virginia. Cox recruited John Powell, an internationally celebrated concert pianist, composer, spokesman for Steinway Pianos, and co-founder of the Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America. Cox also recruited Plecker. Spiro wrote:

“When Plecker read The Passing of the Great Race, he was greatly pleased to discover that his popular racism could be rationalized by ‘indisputable scientific fact.’ He immediately converted to eugenics, and took it upon himself to spread the gospel that American society could save itself from ruin only by ‘turning a deaf ear to those who would interpret Christian brotherhood to mean racial equality.’ […] Grant introduced Cox, Plecker, and Powell to his disciples Lothrop Stoddard and Harry H. Laughlin, and they all became quite friendly. Just as Margaret Sanger had cozied up to the eugenicists to achieve respectability, so the southern segregationists used the eugenicists to gain scientific credibility. For years to come, the three northern scientific racists (Grant, Stoddard, and Laughlin) provided advice and acted as mentors to the three southern popular racists (Cox, Plecker, and Powell).”

The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 gave Plecker what he wanted—eugenic authority and police powers to enforce his taxonomy of whites versus everyone else. The Act introduced the one-drop rule—a single African American ancestor classified one as African American and subjected one to the full brunt of Jim Crow. Plecker developed a vast database of Virginians and weaponized those data. The “Registration of Birth and Color” card shown below) states:

“A white person is one with no trace whatever of blood of another race, except that one with one-sixteenth of the blood of American Indian, unmixed with other race, may be classed as white.”

and

“I hereby affirm that I believe the statements as to color of parents on the other side of this card are correct and that I am signing this with the knowledge that the penalty for making a false statement as to color is one year in the penitentiary.”

Plecker now had the power to shift people from “white” to “colored.” In my hometown, the city library limited African Americans to the basement and denied them access to the stacks. Plecker would mail icy letters informing families that his bureau had discovered an African American ancestor in their backgrounds. With that, their children were expelled from white schools, marriages were banned, the ignominies of Jim Crow were laid upon them—all backed up by the threat of a felony and a year in the penitentiary

Native Americans as African Americans

Plecker reserved a special animus for Native Americans and was determined to erase their very existence. A National Park Service website quoted Plecker:

“‘some of these mongrels, finding that they have been able to sneak in their birth certificates unchallenged as Indians are now making a rush to register as white’ … … ‘one hundred and fifty thousand other mulattoes in Virginia are watching eagerly the attempt of their pseudo-Indian brethren, ready to follow in a rush when the first have made a break in the dike.’ … … ‘there are no native born Virginia Indians free from negro intermixture.’”

Plecker asked the General Assembly to classify Virginia’s Native American tribes as “colored.” But here, there was a political problem. Many legislators and aristocrats claimed Pocahantas as an ancestor. As drafted, the law would redefine all of them as “colored.” So Plecker’s “indisputable scientific facts” bowed to the sensitivities of Virginia’s gentry. The Racial Integrity Act specified that one could claim 1/16 Native American ancestry and remain legally white. Though Plecker clearly disliked the Pocahantas Excpetion, he said it was motivated by:

“the desire of all to recognize as an integral and honored part of the white race the descendants of John Rolfe and Pocahontas.”

The state’s tribes were thus stripped of their legal recognition, thus depriving them of rights and privileges enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Their official status was restored only in 2018, when President Trump signed bipartisan legislation.

Asians as “Honorary Whites”

The status of East and South Asians in this era could be puzzling. They were explicitly “colored” under the Racial Integrity Act, which stated:

“the State Registrar of Vital Statistics may as soon as practicable after the taking effect of this act, prepare a form whereon the racial composition of any individual, as Caucasian, negro, Mongolian, American Indian, Asiatic Indian, Malay, or any mixture thereof, or any other non-Caucasic strains.”

What puzzles me is that in my segregated elementary school (1960-1967), we had a few students whose families came from India, Japan, and elsewhere in Asia. The parents were often highly educated professionals—doctors, for example. But under the laws of that time, they were legally “colored” in schools that did not welcome anyone other than whites. Some lived in my otherwise all-white neighborhood. How could this have been?

I suspect the answer lies in an article from the University of Virginia, where I studied and later taught. Apparently, the first Chinese graduate of UVa, W. W. Yen received his degree in 1900. (Yen served multiple times as premier of China in the early 20^th century.) UVa was rigidly segregated throughout the first half of the 20^th century. How did Yen slip in?:

“without a large influx of Asian immigrants, Asians were mostly an afterthought in the racist laws of the era, and were barely mentioned in the implementation of the Virginia Racial Integrity Laws and Sterilization Laws of the 1920s. Based on his social class, education and relative assimilation, Yen had little in common with the Chinese laborers being derided at the time as ‘coolies,’ ‘strike breakers’ and even replacements for slaves. To borrow a term from contemporary sociologists, Yen may have even been seen as an ‘honorary white.’”

Even more surprising, some of those students in my school came from mixed marriages (often a white father and a World War II-era bride from Japan, China, or the Philippines. Under Virginia law, such marriages were clearly prohibited—until the Supreme Court struck down those bans in Loving v. Virginia during my final week in elementary school (June 1967). I wondered how these marriages could have existed and how their children—to my delight—were in school with us. I asked Paul Lombardo, one of America’s top experts on eugenics and on Plecker:

“Before the federal decision in Loving, those marriages were certainly not sanctioned by Virginia law. But of course, the law is rarely self-enforcing. If the couples had married out of state, and no action was taken by local (or school) officials, there would have been little beyond the sentiment of other neighbors to prevent enrollment in public school. By ’67 Plecker had been dead for twenty years, the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been passed, raising questions about the validity of some discriminatory state laws. I suspect that many in Virginia were not interested in refighting those battles—particularly in cases that involved someone who was Asian rather than Black.”  

Jews as Whites

Again, Plecker’s signature appears on my mother’s 1922 birth certificate, which declares her a “white female.” But his mentor, Madison Grant, certainly didn’t see things that way. He wrote:

“the result of the mixture of two races, in the long run, gives us a race reverting to the more ancient, generalized and lower type. The cross between a white man and an Indian is an Indian; the cross between a white man and a Negro is a Negro; the cross between a white man and a Hindu is a Hindu; and the cross between any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew.”

In North Carolina, in 1910, Arthur Talmage Abernethy—historian, scientist, theologian, politician, and poet laureate of North Carolina—wrote, The Jew a Negro: Being a Study of the Jewish Ancestry from an Impartial Standpoint. This book declared on the basis of speculative historical intermarriage that Jews were really African-American in his book—exactly what Plecker had conjectured about Virginia’s Native Americans.

Legally, Jews had been considered white since colonial times. However, as historian Leonard Rogoff notes, under eugenics, “Jews were accepted as white, but their precise racial place was not fixed;” they were “a racial tabula rasa upon which anything could be written.”

My guess is that Plecker placed Jews in the “white” out of pragmatism. Virginia’s gentry claimed descent from Pocahantas, but enough generations separated her from Plecker’s contemporaries that a 1/16 rule safely put them on the white side of the wall. The same wouldn’t have been true with Jews. Prominent Virginia Jews had intermarried with prominent Christians in the 1700s and 1800s—too recently for a 1/16 rule to protect them. I mentioned this ambiguous position of Jews to Paul Lombardo, who told me:

“In writing to a woman who was concerned about a girl her son was courting, [Plecker] wrote, ‘The Italians from the island of Sicily are badly mixed with former Negro Slaves … (she might have) … a trace of Negro blood.’ My father’s family was from Sicily, so Plecker’s letter struck a note with me as well.”

Why Plecker Matters Today

Plecker and his ilk aren’t merely historical curiosities; they are unsettling object lessons for public policy discussions in 2023. Today’s academic journals and legislative proceedings are filled with proposals bearing a creepy resemblance to those proffered a century ago by Plecker and friends. Those doing the proffering today argue that their motives are far loftier and nobler than those of the Plecker—that they are merely seeking to reverse the wrongs of a century ago. I’m absolutely certain that in many cases, that’s true.

However, my having grown up under the tyranny of taxonomy, provides a powerful warning against entrusting a government with the power to define my ancestry and ethnicity, or yours, and dole out privileges and penalties, based on that ancestry. Once again, politicians and bureaucrats are asked to subdivide Americans by race, slot every American in display cases, use immutable characteristics to evaluate their worth and guilt, determine a scheme of privileges and penalties for each group, and harness the police powers of the state (or quasi-statal private organizations) to enforce the whole thing. Examples:  

• In 2021, the California State Board of Education adopted an “Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum” asking, “When and how have Jews experienced conditional whiteness?” and “Which Jews have experienced conditional whiteness?” Others have explained violence against Jews as resulting from their being “hyperwhite.”

• Some define Asian-Americans as “white-adjacent” and “privileged,” thus ignoring the history of discrimination—the Chinese Exclusion Act, Japanese internment camps, etc.

• In 2021, the American Medical Association and Association of American Medical Schools issued Advancing Health Equity, a 54-page speech code, laden with accusatory concerns over “whiteness,” “white fragility,” “white privilege,” and “white supremacy” and denigrating the idea of “seeking to treat everyone the ‘same.’”

• In 2021, physicians Bram Wispelway and Michelle Morse, suggested race-based hospital admissions as part of an “antiracist agenda for medicine.”

• Brookings scholar Shadi Hamid, worried that hospitals in various states have instituted racial preferences in distributing scarce treatments for COVID-19.

• Brookings scholars Rashawn Ray and Alexandra Gibbons argue that, “we cannot employ colorblind ideology in a society that is far from colorblind.”

• Present-day elementary school children have in some places been segregated by race and required declare themselves as “oppressed” and “oppressors.”

• Antiracism guru Ibram X. Kendi famously wrote: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Kendi proposed a profoundly authoritarian “antiracist constitutional amendment” under which bureaucrats could issue racial edicts with no legal course of appeal.

Advocating such mechanisms today requires one to assume that those given Plecker’s powers will use them more ethically than he did—now and evermore. I was 17 years old when Virginia’s Constitution of 1902 was finally relegated to the trash bin, and many of my earliest memories revolve around its ugly results. No one should ever be trusted to wield such fearsome powers.

LAGNIAPPE

Jacob’s Ladder

Walter Ashby Plecker co-opted a story from Genesis to justify his racist vision. In “Jacob’s Ladder,” those held in slavery repurposed another Genesis story to craft an uplifting vision of freedom.

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Robert F. Graboyes publishes Bastiat’s Window, a Substack journal of economics, science, and culture—with an emphasis on healthcare. He is a health economist, journalist, and musician in Alexandria, Virginia, and holds five degrees, including a PhD in economics from Columbia University. In 2014, he received the Reason Foundation’s Bastiat Prize for Journalism. His music compositions are at YouTube.com/@RFGraboyes/videos.