CHAPTER 1

THE GENETIC PASSION OF ROBERT GRAHAM

February 29, 1980: The Los Angeles Times photograph that introduced Robert Graham and his Nobel Prize sperm bank to the world. Robert Lachman/Los Angeles Times

The Los Angeles Times headline beckoned like a bulletin from the future: “Sperm Bank Donors All Nobel Winners: Plan Seeks to Enrich Human Gene Pool.” It was February 29, 1980, Leap Day—that strange quasi-day seemed right for such an otherworldly story. The article began by describing the sperm bank as “the world’s most exclusive men’s club,” then piled on the weirdness: a reclusive zillionaire . . . a secret cadre of Nobel geniuses . . . the women of Mensa . . . a mysterious, ultramodern fertility technology . . . a sinister experiment to improve the human race. It sounded like something out of a James Bond movie.

The article introduced America to Robert K. Graham—a most unlikely sperm banker. The seventy-four-year-old optometrist, who had made $100 million by inventing shatterproof plastic eyeglasses, was on a mission to collect sperm from Nobel laureates. He was storing the prize seed in an underground bunker on his Escondido, California, estate, and he was distributing it only to women smart enough to qualify for the high-IQ society Mensa. Graham had given his sperm bank a name that had the thud of second-rate science fiction: “The Repository for Germinal Choice.”

Graham told Times reporter Edwin Chen he had already enlisted three Nobel prize–winning scientists to “deliver” their sperm, and eventually he intended to canvass all the world’s Nobel laureates. So far, Graham said, two dozen Mensa women had contacted him—he had told the Mensa Bulletin about the bank a few months earlier—and he had shipped frozen Nobel sperm to three of them.

The sperm bank was not a prank, Graham insisted to Chen, and not a rich man’s folly. Graham said he was trying to save mankind from genetic catastrophe. In modern America, the millionaire complained, cradle-to-grave social welfare programs paid incompetents and imbeciles to reproduce. As a result, “retrograde humans” were swamping the intelligent minority. This “dysgenic” crisis would soon cause the evolutionary regression of mankind, as well as global communism. How could we save ourselves? Graham had the answer. Our best specimens—and “specimens” is just the kind of word Graham would use to describe people—must have more children. His Nobel Prize sperm bank would father a cadre of leaders, scientists, and politicians who would help reverse the genetic decline. Graham was not charging his customers or paying his donors. He and his Nobelists were making a gift of the genius genes, a lifesaving present to a dying world. Graham promised to study the children of his supersperm, tracking their development, achievements, and IQ. He would publish his findings in scientific journals, vindicating his extraordinary semen and his experiment.

Graham outlined his ideas to Chen with an unapologetic bluntness. “The principles of this may not be popular, but they are sound,” he said. “So far, we’ve refused to apply to humans what we already know and apply to animals and plants.”

Graham gave Chen a tour of the bank, such as it was. Graham owned ten beautiful acres in Escondido, a thriving town half an hour northeast of San Diego. In Graham’s prizewinning garden, in the shadow of the American flag that Graham flew over his property, sat a concrete bunker the size of a modest bathroom. The bunker was a few feet underground and slightly dank. It had once been a pump house; Graham had converted it into a small laboratory. Its prize equipment was a lead-sheathed, waist-high vat of liquid nitrogen. Graham opened the vat and showed Chen what he claimed was the Nobel sperm, a few dozen ampules frozen at 196 degrees below zero centigrade.

Graham wouldn’t disclose the names of his three Nobel donors, so Chen wasn’t sure if Graham was an honest eccentric or a con artist. After all, Nobel laureates’ sperm looked like anyone else’s; Graham’s vials could just as well have contained seed from his gardener. Chen called every Nobelist he could find in California and asked if he had made a sperm deposit. One after another said no. A dozen had never heard of Graham’s project. Another ten admitted that Graham had contacted them but said they had turned him down. Most were scornful. “It’s pretty silly,” Medicine Laureate Max Delbrück told Chen. Chemistry and Peace Laureate Linus Pauling said he had nixed Graham: “The old-fashioned way is still best.” Medicine Nobelist Renato Dulbecco, who hadn’t been contacted, burst out laughing at the idea, “Oh come, come. This is fantastic. . . . It’s too late for me. I was vasectomized long ago.”

Finally Chen reached Stanford’s William Shockley, whose invention of the transistor had won him the 1956 Physics Nobel. Chen asked his question. After a long, long pause, Shockley said, “Yes, I’m one of them. This is a remarkable attempt, and I am thoroughly in sympathy with this sort of an approach. Everyone talks about it, but by God, Graham is doing something about it.” Chen had his story. The Nobel sperm bank was for real.

A remarkable photo of Graham illustrated the Times article. At first glance, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It showed a handsome elderly man with perfect posture and a formal bearing. Graham wore a camel’s-hair blazer and a perfectly knotted polka-dot tie. His crown of thick gray hair was Brylcreemed to a high shine. It looked like a photograph from a midcentury corporate annual report: Our CEO at work. But then you noticed Graham’s eyebrows were jauntily cocked. And his hands were sheathed in weird, massively thick oversized mitts. And he was standing in a laboratory, not a boardroom, with a microscope perched on a shelf behind him and a huge metal drum at his feet. The caption read: “Robert K. Graham in his underground chamber. At lower left, the sperm repository, made of thick lead to shield it from radiation.” The picture was a mesmerizing conflation of future and past, the 1950s businessman and his twenty-first-century project. All at the same time it exuded optimism, pragmatism, malevolence, and goofiness.

Chen’s Los Angeles Times article provoked an international sensation. Chen has been a journalist for more than thirty years on some of the most important beats in the world (he now covers the White House for the Times), and he says he has never experienced anything like the frenzy of February 29. Journalists called him by the dozen; so did desperate women hoping to score genius sperm. Graham, too, was inundated with media requests. Reporters from all over the country wanted to see his magic vials and quiz him about his intentions. Graham’s subterranean chamber became the ground zero of the future. The press immediately gave the “Repository” a much flashier nickname: the “Nobel Prize Sperm Bank.” The nickname pleased Graham, who started using it himself.

On March 2, Graham held a press conference in his backyard. He spent most of the session rebutting accusations of sexism, racism, elitism, white supremacism, and Nazism. Yes, Graham conceded, all his donors were white, and it was true that he gave sperm only to married women, not lesbians or single women. But he was no Nazi. “I don’t know much about Hitler and his vision. I don’t see a parallel. We aren’t thinking of a super-race. We are thinking in terms of a few more creative, intelligent people who otherwise might not be born.”

But in giddier moments, Graham was dreaming bigger than just “a few more creative, intelligent people.” His little Repository was a “pilot project,” he said. Soon it would seed similar banks around the world. Every city would have its own genius sperm bank. There wouldn’t be just a few superkids, but thousands of them. Given enough time, Graham mused, genius sperm banks might help “stimulate [man’s] ascent toward a new level of being, of which his present organic status may be only the crude beginning.” His Repository, Graham hoped, might one day give birth to mankind’s “secular savior.”

Other people could have conceived the idea of a Nobel sperm bank, but no one except Robert Graham could have conceived it and made it a reality. Graham had the right-wing politics of a self-made millionaire, the relentless inquisitiveness of an inventor, the can-do spirit of an entrepreneur, and the moxie of a salesman. Together, these qualities made him confident that his sperm bank was the right idea, rich enough to fund it, and certain that he could market it to a skeptical public. It was also no accident that Graham was in southern California, the ground zero of American libertarianism. In 1980, California culture was a clash between freethinking futurism (new-ager Jerry Brown, “Governor Moonbeam,” was in the middle of his second term) and hard-right political conservatism (former governor Ronald Reagan had swept the New Hampshire primary just three days before the Times article). In Robert Graham—and perhaps only in Robert Graham—these alien theologies intersected. His sperm bank sought to harness scientific libertarianism and dreamy futurism, and put them in the service of rigid social control.

Here’s my favorite Robert Graham story.

In the early 1970s, when he had tired of running his eyeglasses company but wasn’t yet collecting Nobel sperm, Robert Graham tried to start a country. He thought an island would be best. Graham instructed George Michel, a vice president at his firm, Armorlite, to locate an island that Graham could buy and flag as a sovereign—or at least semisovereign—nation. Graham instructed Michel that the island should be at least five miles wide and fifteen miles long.

Michel hired several Los Angeles real estate agents, and they eventually located four or five promising candidates, mostly small islands in the Atlantic Ocean that Great Britain might surrender for the right price. Graham was thrilled. Next, he assigned Michel and several Armorlite colleagues to design the island’s living and working quarters. Graham decreed that the island had to be completely self-sufficient and that no cars would be permitted on it. Michel drew blueprints for prefabricated living saucers that could be stacked on land or in the sea. He designed a futuristic sewage system, greenhouses, and food factories. His masterpiece, Michel recalls fondly, was a vacuum-tube-driven transportation system, in which gyroscopically balanced pods would zip passengers from one part of the island to another.

Graham’s island wasn’t the usual kind of millionaire’s ego trip. Graham didn’t aspire to rule his kingdom. He lived to play handmaiden to great men—men he thought were better than he was. Graham intended to create an elite research colony. Graham would invite the world’s best practical scientists to the island, offer them lavish living conditions and the fanciest laboratories money could buy, and let them start inventing. Grahamland would support itself: when scientists produced something valuable, they and the colony would share the royalties. The inventors would get rich, and Grahamland would prosper. Graham was convinced that scientists would flock to his island, because he was sure they wanted what he wanted: an escape from the morons, weaklings, and imbeciles who increasingly dominated the rest of the world. Science would be Grahamland’s god and its law. It would be a rational empire, Graham’s own private Atlas Shrugged.

Grahamland never progressed beyond the planning stages. Michel quit Armorlite in a stock dispute. Graham got distracted and never managed to buy the island. But the private nation was pure, distilled essence of Robert Graham: the entrepreneurial vigor; the cockamamie grandeur; the unshakable faith in practical science; the contempt for the pig-ignorant, lazy masses; and the infatuation with finding—and claiming—the world’s best men.

Robert Graham was born on June 9, 1906, in Harbor Springs, Michigan. When he was a rich old man, Graham liked to tell stories that made it sound as if he’d grown up on the frontier—kerosene lanterns instead of electricity, hauling water up the road for the Saturday-night bath. This was bogus nostalgia. Though Harbor Springs was small (only 1,500 residents) and rural, there was no pioneer hardship. Harbor Springs was a resort, the summer playground of midwestern royalty, and it was enjoying its heyday as Robert was growing up in the 1910s and ’20s. The town sat on Little Traverse Bay, a gorgeous inlet of Lake Michigan at the northern tip of the state. Harbor Springs famously had the cleanest air in America: the west winds racing over the lake stripped the air of pollen and dust. Hay fever sufferers made Harbor Springs a summer refuge in the late nineteenth century. Thanks to railroads and a ferry, the rich soon followed for the beautiful harbor and the long summer nights. The Harbor Springs summer census was a who’s who of American business: Cincinnati’s Gambles (Procter & Gamble), Louisville’s Reynoldses (aluminum), Illinois’ Pullmans (trains), Michigan’s Upjohns (pharmaceuticals), and many other names from the fronts of supermarket packages and the backs of automobiles. They built “cottages”—Newport-like mansions—along the town’s glorious beaches. And they got together to establish Michigan’s most exclusive country clubs, purchasing huge tracts of land, fencing them off, and laying out the first golf courses in the state.

Robert Graham was born into the local gentry—the respectable year-rounders who were acknowledged by the summer folk but not of them. His father, Frank Graham, was the local dentist and prospered by treating both locals and tourists. Frank had graduated first in his class at the University of Michigan dental school, married Fern Klark, and settled in Harbor Springs in 1903. He built himself a fine shingled Victorian house on East Bluff Drive, the street where the richest townies lived. Fern Graham was a gracious, gentle woman, but Frank was chilly and formal. When he took a walk on the town beach, he wore a coat and tie. Frank was a clever man, however, an inveterate tinkerer. He invented a new carburetor for boat engines and designed a collapsible keel for sailboats. After the Titanic sank, Frank spent years trying to build a better lifeboat.

The oldest of four children, Robert inherited his mother’s grace and his father’s inventiveness and formality. But he may have inherited even more from Harbor Springs. Growing up in the resort town instilled in Robert Graham a lifelong obsession with the rich and the great. (This is a man who titled the longest chapter in his autobiography “Princes and Princesses I Have Known.”) In summer, Graham caddied at Harbor Springs’ two private golf courses, Harbor Point and Wequetonsing. Graham caddied to earn pocket money—75 cents for eighteen holes—but also to spend time around powerful men. The respectful adulation he would perfect as a genius sperm banker—he learned that on the golf courses of Harbor Springs. Some eighty years later, Graham wrote about caddying in his memoir: “I know of no other situation in which a boy can be in the company of leading and outstanding individuals, hours at a time. He can learn some of their ways of thinking and talking, their matters of concern and some of their foibles.” (Graham carried the bags of famed baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, among others.) Caddying prodded Graham’s ambition in another way: it made him greedy. The Graham family was plenty prosperous, but he was a townie, a second-class citizen, practically a ragamuffin compared to Harbor Springs’ majestic summer migrants. Like many middle-class kids who spend their lives around the rich, Graham smelled money and developed an appetite for it. “I saw these wealthy summer people enjoying themselves at leisure and concluded that wealthy was the way to be.”

Harbor Springs is also where young Robert learned his first, unfortunate lessons about race. Graham’s ancestors were fairly recent arrivals in America—there were Welshmen and Czechs in the near past—but they were very white and very Protestant. These traits were virtually requirements for living in Harbor Springs, a town that was as prejudiced as you’d expect for Michigan in the 1920s. This, after all, was when Henry Ford was at the height of his influence and his anti-Semitism. Jews and blacks were excluded from Harbor Springs’ clubs, of course—not that there were any around, except for the black servants of some summer folk. The many Indians who lived around Harbor Springs were second-class citizens, mostly confined to jobs in manual labor. In Harbor Springs, Graham developed the discomfort with nonwhites that he would never lose.

By the time he graduated from Harbor Springs High School in 1924, Graham had acquired a distinctive bantam charm that he would carry till his death. He was not a tall man—five feet, eight inches on a good day—but he carried himself like one. He had the posture of a Prussian Army colonel, and his head was huge for his body. Graham was vain, and he had much to be vain about: His chest was broad from swimming, his legs strong from running. He had jug ears, eyebrows so bushy they looked fake, and a vast chin—but these aggressive features combined in a fortunate way. His hair, thick and brown with a widow’s peak, was slicked back in the fashion of the day. Many girls thought him gorgeous, and he knew it. His classmates voted him the best-looking boy in the class of 1924. They liked him, too. Next to his picture in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, it said, “Here good sense and good nature are never separated.”

Robert Graham in the Harbor Springs High School yearbook, 1924. Courtesy of the Harbor Springs Library

At eighteen, Graham headed off to the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, intent on shedding his bourgeois roots. Frank Graham had urged his eldest son to follow him into dentistry, but Robert loathed the idea of “fooling around in people’s mouths.” He wanted to do something more ambitious. He set out to become the next Enrico Caruso. His voice had dazzled audiences in Harbor Springs, and he believed he could be a star. He spent eight years studying music at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. He sang leads in student operas and twice soloed at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House during university tours.

In 1932, at the pit of the Great Depression, he graduated and moved to New York City to be discovered. He wasn’t. He blew an audition at Radio City Music Hall. With the brutal rationality that would eventually make him a good businessman, he recognized that no amount of teaching would ever make him a Caruso: his voice was too erratic. He returned abjectly home to Michigan. Very quickly, he blotted his musical career from his memory. It had been, he said, a “waste.” When he wrote his memoir sixty years later, he scarcely mentioned it and left out entirely the fact that he had married another singer and had children with her. All that Graham let himself remember from his singing years was what he always remembered: his brushes with famous men. How his uncle, the celebrated architect Ernest Graham (the Wrigley Building, Equitable Building, Flatiron Building), had paid for his New York music lessons. How he had befriended Arnold Gingrich, later the founding editor of Esquire.* ¹ How he had spent a weekend at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, where he had been awed to see Wright so engaged in “exalted discourse” that the architect didn’t notice he was drooling egg yolk all over his shirt and tie. In a poor man, Graham would have considered dripping egg yolk the sign of a slovenly mind. But in Wright, it meant genius.

Graham remained determined to get rich, but he needed a new path. He was blessed with a clear-eyed view of himself. “[I] have no great gifts, but no great weaknesses, either.” He knew he was disciplined: He never drank alcohol or coffee, never smoked, never gambled. He solved problems quickly, and his hands were as agile as his mind. He loved hard work and believed in its moral virtue. With all this in mind, Graham settled on a second career: optometry. It was an odd but inspired choice. Though deeply unglamorous, optometry was a profession of gadgets—not very good gadgets. Graham relished the challenge of trying to improve eyeglasses and the tools that made them. He earned an optical degree from Ohio State in a mere eighteen months—inventing a new kind of lens along the way—and landed a coveted job at Bausch & Lomb immediately after graduation. When America entered the Second World War, Graham was a father in his mid-thirties. He spent the war figuring out how to use the optical technology in captured German equipment to improve American artillery scopes and binoculars.

When the war ended, Graham was working for the optical giant Univis. It was a drag. Graham was a salesman, and he was good at it—gracious, elegant, smart—but his heart wasn’t in it: he lacked the salesman’s profligate bonhomie; he didn’t have the patience to explain things to people he thought were stupid. Graham liked the tinkering of optometry, not the salesmanship. So Graham threw himself at the profession’s number one problem: Why were eyeglasses so bad? Lenses were still made of glass, which meant they were fragile and dangerous. Thousands of Americans suffered eye injuries every year when their spectacles shattered.

Graham saw the future, and it was . . . plastics. Despite decades of attempts, no one had been able to manufacture a plastic lens that was as reliable and scratch resistant as glass. Graham thought he could. In 1947, when Univis refused to dedicate itself to plastic lens research, Graham quit, recruited a partner, and poured all his money into starting a new company, which they called Armorlite. Graham moved to southern California, the red-hot center of the postwar industrial economy, and tried to make plastic eyeglasses. He failed and failed and failed. After a fiasco using Plexiglas, Graham began to experiment with a little-known plastic called CR-39. It had been used to make B-17 fuel tanks during the war.

CR-39 was a disaster, too. It shattered the lens molds, and it shrank too much as it dried. But Graham persisted with it and perfected CR-39 lenses at the end of 1947. Armorlite’s lenses revolutionized the optical business. In the 1950s, Armorlite thrived but still served a niche market. Then fashion came to Graham’s aid. Large lenses were the vogue of the 1960s, and they could be made only of lightweight plastic. Armorlite boomed. Graham employed five hundred workers at his Pasadena factory. He marketed his product aggressively and was a great showman: When he gave a speech, he would yank off his Armorlite spectacles, fling them into the air, let them fall as the audience gasped, and then pick them up, unscathed. Graham kept on tinkering—he helped perfect contact lenses, developed the first antireflective coating for plastic lenses, and manufactured the first UV-protective lenses, among other inventions. He was a hero in his small corner of American business. Optical societies rained medals down on him. The National Eye Research Foundation dubbed him “The Man Who Made It Safe to Wear Glasses.” He also became incredibly rich. During Armorlite’s lean years, Graham took his salary in stock; by the time Armorlite struck gold, he controlled nearly the entire company. Graham risked all on Armorlite and made it back thousands of times over.

But Graham was dissatisfied. His personal life was messy. Graham had divorced his first wife after she had borne him three children, then played the field with a sportsman’s relish. He was an incorrigible flirt, and his sharp good looks, dapper dress, and impeccable manners helped his cause. He remarried, unhappily, to a woman his brother Tom described as an “alcoholic showgirl.” That miserable union produced two more children, but it was headed toward divorce when his wife swallowed an overdose of sleeping pills and died. He wiped this second wife from his history books, too. (Graham possessed the great American gift of amnesia. He forgot nasty parts of his past as if he were erasing a chalkboard.) With a lack of awareness that would be funny if it weren’t sad, he described the second marriage in his memoir with a single sentence: “I had recently concluded an embittering marriage and swore never to put my neck into that noose again.” He fathered another child—out of wedlock, according to his brother—and then found wife number three in 1960. Marta Ve Everton, an ophthalmologist twenty-one years his junior, was whip smart, elegant, religious, and altruistic. She was the great love of Graham’s life. She bore him two children, bringing his total to eight.

Graham had an ambivalent relationship with his brood. He liked the idea of family in theory but bungled it in practice. Like his own father, he was emotionally distant with his kids. His three daughters thrived, especially Marta Ve’s two girls. But three of his boys found serious trouble. One apparently killed himself. Another suffered a traumatic head injury as a boy, never quite recovered, and died in middle age after a difficult life. A third moved to the Pacific Northwest and cut his ties with the family. Graham seemed ashamed of some of his sons; he would sometimes avoid introducing them to his friends.

Graham’s success in a too-narrow field, his huge, almost-but-not-quite-happy family, his fascination with the rich and famous: in the late 1950s, all these helped inspire the passion that would define the rest of his life. Graham came to believe—more strongly than he believed anything—that society was doomed unless smart people had more children. He vowed to help them do it.

Graham’s obsession began with a mistake. Graham’s childhood idol had been an inventor named Ephraim Shay. Shay had designed the “Shay locomotive”—a powerfully geared steam train that could climb steep hills. Mining and logging firms bought Shay trains by the hundreds. He made a fortune and retired to Harbor Springs in the late nineteenth century. He was the town’s most celebrated resident, famed for his fertile mind and generous heart. He engineered Harbor Springs’ water supply. He built experimental boats that he docked in the town harbor. In winter, he hammered together hundreds of sleds for the town’s children, including young Robert Graham. When Shay died in 1916, it hit ten-year-old Robert hard. He believed that Shay had died childless. The inventor’s barrenness lodged in Graham’s head and eventually goaded him to act. As an adult, Graham would write, “God had planted some of His best seed in our town, but it had died out. They still name streets and schools for Ephraim Shay. The great bronze tablet which recounts his accomplishments still stands. But the genes which determined his extraordinary nature have died out. Ever since, the extinction of exceptionally valuable human genes has been a concern of mine.”

In fact, Graham was wrong about Shay. The inventor’s “seed” was alive and well and spreading all over America. Shay had fathered a son before moving to Harbor Springs. In 2000, three years after Graham’s death, about 160 of Shay’s descendents, all carrying his “exceptionally valuable” genes, celebrated their ancestor at a reunion in Harbor Springs.

Shay was Graham’s chief inspiration, but not his only one. All around him, Graham glumly observed the triumph of dullards over brains. Graham sold contact lenses to pro football players, and he was repulsed at how women flung themselves at the mountainous morons. Graham would sometimes eat lunch in the cafeteria of his Pasadena factory—sometimes, but not often, because his employees irritated Graham too much. He thought they didn’t want to improve themselves or work harder. All they cared about was milking the government for more benefits. These indistinct resentments clarified themselves in Graham’s mind. He had no religion, but he found a faith in eugenics. He became fixated on the idea that the world needed more intelligent people because the idiots were multiplying too fast.

It was not surprising that Graham grew fascinated with genetic degradation when he did, as the 1950s turned the corner into the ’60s. The late 1950s had marked the zenith of men like Graham. In the Sputnik-era scientific-industrial complex, technical businessmen were kings. White men just like Graham—intelligent, arrogant, scientific, and self-assured—dominated 1950s America. (Their rationalist ethos didn’t merely pervade business and government, it also spilled over into other, less obviously scientific aspects of human life. Alfred Kinsey’s pioneering studies, for example, helped popularize the notion of sex as a mechanical act, separable from human emotion. Very little separated Kinsey’s scientific sex from Graham’s scientific breeding.) As a titan of industry and prize inventor, Graham felt he had the right, even the obligation, to impose his eugenic ideas on the idiotic masses. Graham’s genetic dread also reflected his fear of the societal change that he sensed was coming. Graham began worrying about the intellectual decline of Americans at the very instant Americans started to decide they didn’t want to listen to men like Graham. The civil rights and women’s movements were overthrowing the white male order. The demand for Wise Men was withering.

So at this nervous moment, with the Wise Men still clinging to power, Graham wrote a book to sound the alarm. Part pseudoanthropology, part evolutionary biology, all polemic, Graham’s The Future of Man throbbed with panic: Act now or humanity will die! The thrust of The Future of Man was that prosperity had ruined mankind, because it had reversed human evolution. Graham, undeterred by the fact that more people were living longer, healthier, and richer lives than at any point in history, concluded that man had peaked 15,000 years ago, in the good old days of the Cro-Magnons. These “scourging gods,” as Graham called them lustfully, had been brilliant and mighty because nature was so ruthless. Only the greatest Cro-Magnons had survived to pass on their glorious genes. But then, the tragedy of civilization! The agricultural revolution had softened man and allowed weaker specimens to breed. Since intelligence was 50 to 90 percent inherited, according to Graham, mankind got stupider as these lesser men multiplied. Natural selection waned. After thousands of years of such regression, half the human population was “what might be described as dull.” Graham believed that the spread of half-wits explained the rise of communism, a political ideology that squashed brilliance and rewarded mediocrity.

Graham anguished that the few smart people who remained were cooperating in their own extinction by using birth control, an “almost wholly pernicious” invention. The refusal to reproduce was “nature’s unforgivable sin,” Graham wrote.

The disappearance of genes for high intelligence is a defeat for the uniqueness of man, an erosion of the essence of the human condition. The childlessness of an Isaac Newton or a George Washington, the extinction of the Lincoln family, the spinsterhood of the brightest girl in the class, are great biological tragedies. As a result, mankind is deprived of some of that essential quality which separates him from the apes.

But a remedy was at hand. Just a few more smart people, and we could fend off the idiotic hordes. “Ten men of high intelligence can be more effective than 1000 morons.” Mankind, Graham proclaimed, could seize control of evolution through “intelligent selection.”

Ever practical, Graham ended The Future of Man with a how-to guide for saving humanity. Most of his proposals were mundane—government support for married graduate students, housing projects designed for large families, corporate sponsorship of employees with children.

But Graham saved his one big idea for last: “germinal repositories”—or, as they would be come to be known, sperm banks. Women would be artificially inseminated with sperm collected from the world’s smartest men: “Consider what it would mean to scientific progress if another 20 or more children of Lord Rutherford or Louis Pasteur could have been brought into the world. . . . Consider the gains to society if this new technique had been available to engender additional sons of Thomas Edison.” The number of geniuses in the population, Graham declared, would “increase exponentially.”

Graham was a man out of time. He didn’t realize that he had arrived at his views seventy-five years late. His ideas were so old they were new again.