Harry Hamilton Laughlin, a son of George Hamilton and Deborah Jane Laughlin, was born at Oskaloosa, Iowa, on March 11, 1880, and spent his youth in Kirksville.

Laughlin attended the schools in Kirksville and was graduated from the First District Normal School in 1900 and served the Kirksville High School first as a teacher and later as principal. Laughlin was married to Pansy Laughlin in 1902

In 1903 he went to Centerville, Iowa, as the high school principal. Laughlin returned to Kirksville in 1905 to assume the superintendency of the Kirksville schools. He taught agriculture at the First District Normal School from 1907 until 1910. After establishing the Eugenics Record Office, underwritten by Mary (Mrs. E. H.) Harriman, Davenport ask...more

Dr. Laughlin received a D.Sc. from Princeton in 1917 for a thesis on cytology and an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg in Germany in 1936.

In June 1920, Laughlin testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in the United States Congress in Washington, D.C. He published Eugenical Sterilization in the United States in 1922. It featured Laughlin's Model Eugenical Sterilization Law. He argued that the integration of inferior races of people in America was dimini...more

After the D.C. testimony, committee chairman Albert Johnson appointed Laughlin to be the committee's Expert Eugenics Agent. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924 soon followed, which restricted total immigration into the US to about twenty percent of previous levels. Laughlin's arguments in Eugenical Sterilization in the United States influenced...more

1933 Sterilization Laws of Germany took shape following Laughlin's foundational theories explicated in Eugenical Sterilization in the United States.

After retiring from the ERO, Laughlin and his wife moved back to Kirksville where he died at the age of 62.