Eugenic Nation

by Stern, Alexandra Minna

  Eager to sever any association with state coercion, eugenicists in the postwar period shifted their scope in two directions. In the first direction, they began to place greater emphasis on individual choice and private decision making, often under the emergent rubric of medical genetics. This was the case with genetic counseling, which was launched at a handful of heredity clinics and university-based human genetics departments in the 1940s. Using family pedigree charts and armed with fledgling knowledge of the biochemistry of a variety of genetic diseases, genetic counselors advised couples on the probability that their offspring would carry deleterious or lethal traits.13 They publicly disdained earlier eugenicists’ fixation on race and instead believed that the universal gene pool could be improved through judicious mating and a personal reluctance to propagate defects.14 The individual was also the focus for practitioners of constitutional medicine and biotypology, specialties that mixed physiology, psychology, and anthropometry in a quest to identify omnipresent human types that corresponded not to racial classifications, but to binaries such as hyperkinetic and hypokinetic, introvert and extrovert, endomorph and ectomorph.15

  If genetic counselors and biotypologists headed in the first direction, population experts headed in the second. After World War II, as the United States became a global superpower, a core group of eugenicists merged their interest in salvaging and retooling eugenics with the export of Western-led modernization to the Third World. This resulted in organizations such as the neo-Malthusian International Planned Parenthood Foundation and the Population Council, founded in 1948 and 1952, respectively, which pursued family planning and birth control abroad.16 Wary of totalitarianism, most postwar eugenicists distanced themselves from arguments about the need to capitulate individual rights to the national collectivity and moved simultaneously into the domains of marriage, the family, and the geopolitics of international development.17

  Thus, efforts to encourage better breeding continued in the United States, primarily through family planning, population control, and genetic and marital counseling. At the same time, a few organizations, such as the Pioneer Fund, formed in 1937, forged ahead undaunted with studies aimed at furnishing a scientific basis for racial discrimination.18 In addition, as content analyses of the most widely assigned biology textbooks demonstrate, eugenic explanations of social behavior were heartily endorsed in classrooms around the country into the 1960s.19 During the 1940s and 1950s, there were heated debates about “good” versus “bad” eugenics—the latter usually equated with “pseudoscience”—but the term itself did not fall into general disrepute until the 1970s.20 Indeed, the American Eugenics Society (AES) did not feel compelled to change its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology until 1973 (although its directors clarified that this did “not coincide with any change of its interests and policies”).21 Lastly, the stringent immigration and sterilization laws passed decades earlier remained in force, affecting the ethnic and demographic composition of the United States and the lives of thousands of patients and inmates in state institutions.22

  The second reason to challenge the prevailing historical understanding of eugenics is that until recently, the eugenics historiography, like much of the history of medicine, has been quite East Coast–centric. For the most part, scholars have explored eugenics from the vantage point of organizations such as the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) and the AES, and individuals, such as Charles B. Davenport and Madison Grant, all based on the Atlantic seaboard. For the first generation of historians delving into eugenics, archival repositories such as the American Philosophical Society Library—which houses the papers of the ERO and Davenport—were the logical place to start, and the books and articles resulting from this research produced an exceedingly rich foundation.23 With New York, Washington, D.C., and Boston as epicenters, most students of eugenics developed a narrative that tacitly enshrined the East Coast as the geographical reference point and then projected that interpretation across the rest of the country, often with only remote interest in regional variations. Certain seminal events, such as the creation of the ERO in 1910 and its closing in 1940, or the sparsely attended Third International Eugenics Congress, held in New York in 1932, crystallized into salient signposts. However, if we turn to the South, Midwest, and West, these temporal markers chafe against alternative chronologies. For example, it was in the cereal capital of Battle Creek, Michigan, that John Harvey Kellogg incorporated the first sizable eugenics organization, the Race Betterment Foundation, in 1906.24 One year later, the hardtack state of Indiana stood at the vanguard, ushering in the country’s first sterilization law. We also see that, in the 1930s, as the ERO was coming under fire, several Southern states passed sterilization laws for the first time, the number of sterilizations performed nationwide increased markedly, and several groups on the West Coast, such as the California Division of the AES and the American Institute of Family Relations (AIFR), amplified their activities.25

  Over the past decade, studies focused on Vermont, Virginia, North Carolina, Minnesota, Indiana, and Oregon have underscored the multidimensional presence of eugenics from coast to coast.26 They have demonstrated the longevity of hereditarianism across the arc of the twentieth century and detailed the range of alliances that eugenicists forged with socialists, free-love advocates, feminists, horticulturists, pediatricians, obstetricians, public health advocates, philanthropists, industrialists, and a motley cast of politicians and legislators. At the same time, it is now impossible to disregard the global reach of eugenics, which thrived in places as diverse as Norway, Japan, China, Argentina, and Canada.27 Eugenics was a worldwide phenomenon; what its heterogeneous adherents shared was faith in the application of biology and medicine to the perceived problems of modern society. And in many countries, such as Mexico, Chile, and France, eugenics grew in popularity not in the 1910s and 1920s, but from the 1930s to 1950s, inspiring socialist education campaigns, the professionalization of social work, and the construction of planned housing communities for fecund working-class families.28 Once situated in this multiregional and transnational panorama, the timetable and topography of eugenics in the United States appears more elongated and striated than previously imagined.

  In particular, by turning our gaze thousands of miles west, away from the headquarters of the ERO, we encounter a history that was both paradigmatic of large-scale national trends and particular to the region. It is surprising that the American West has been largely overlooked, given that California performed twenty thousand sterilizations, one-third of the total performed in the country, that Oregon created a State Eugenics Board in 1917, and that the impact of restrictive immigration laws designed to shield America from polluting “germ plasm” reverberated with great intensity along the Mexican border. In addition, the “West” spawned metaphors and myths for the initial generation of American eugenicists, who updated the Manifest Destiny doctrines of the 1840s with a twentieth-century medical and scientific vocabulary to expound on the noble westward march of Anglo-Saxons and Nordics.29

  From the perspective of the American West, conventions tear at the seams; in their wake materialize novel subjects and avenues of inquiry. For example, the Second National Conference on Race Betterment (SNCRB), held at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (PPIE) in 1915, needs to be understood not just as part of an ascendant eugenics movement that had one foot on the West Coast, but also in terms of the circulation of tropical medicine from the Panama Canal and Philippines to San Francisco. A closer look at the implementation of medical inspections and immigration regulations along the Mexican border illustrates the eugenic dimensions of the Border Patrol, which was formed in 1924 to help enforce the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act and regulate Mexican immigration. The affinity between eugenic and environmentalist ideas about the purity and preservation of nature can be captured by reviewing the origins of the interpretative parks movement and the Save-the-Redwoods League, both of which were generously supported by Charles M. Goethe, the Sacramento business
man who launched the Eugenics Society of Northern California (ESNC).30 Last but certainly not least, the AIFR, founded in 1930 by Paul Popenoe, an ardent sterilization proponent, not only points to the concerns of eugenicists in the rapidly expanding city of Los Angeles before and after World War II but also illuminates the eugenic designs behind the personality, marital compatibility, and sexual function tests that were formulated during the Cold War era.

  A third reason to challenge the prevailing historical understanding of eugenics is that, as feminist scholars have shown, placing gender and sexuality at the center of the analysis reconfigures the history of eugenics, demanding substantial temporal and thematic revisions, and delineating a story that is at once more ordinary and more complex.31 For example, when the reproductive and erotic body is highlighted, an uninterrupted line can be drawn from the sterilization laws passed by state legislatures in the 1910s that targeted “morons” and the “feebleminded” to the sexual surgeries performed by federal agencies on poor female welfare recipients during the 1960s.32 As the twentieth century progressed, and following the simplification and routinization of the salpingectomy (removal of one or both fallopian tubes, which still entailed greater risks and longer convalescence than the vasectomy) in the 1930s, more operations began to be performed on women than men.33 This transition indicates that the forced sterilization of women in the United States was interwoven with the enlargement of the welfare state, the denigration of dependent and single mothers, and the perceived burden of “illegitimate” children.34 This was certainly the case in North Carolina, where sterilizations of African American women deemed “unfit” and incapable of proper parenting rose in the 1950s and 1960s.35 For more than fifty years, involuntary sterilizations were motivated by a shifting mix of anxieties about sexual deviance and the promiscuity of teenage girls, fears of biological deterioration, and a discourse of institutional cost saving.

  In addition to urging a reevaluation of sterilization practices, foregrounding sexuality and gender complicates many of the conceptual retaining walls that have circumscribed eugenics and other social and cultural phenomena. For example, the records of North Carolina’s Eugenics Board show that while black women were being disproportionately sterilized in the 1950s and 1960s, some of them, intent on obtaining birth control, actually filed applications for the operation.36 Although only about 6 percent (468) of the eight thousand total sterilizations in North Carolina were requested, the insistence of a vocal minority to obtain approval for the procedure reveals the extent to which the battle for reproductive control was framed by eugenic categories and priorities. Feminist scholars have recognized this symbiotic relationship for quite some time and have shown how male physicians gradually took over birth control, eugenicists appropriated the agenda of family planning, and the women’s movement struggled to reverse these trends in the 1960s and 1970s.37 All too often, however, these issues are distilled into a thumbnail sketch of the hot-button figure of Margaret Sanger, who has been alternately described as a die-hard eugenicist with virulent race and class prejudices or as a true if misguided feminist who cultivated strategic alliances with eugenicists but did not fully accept the implications of their ideas.38

  A tendency to depict eugenics in black and white has elided uncomfortable nuances. For instance, according to one scholar, the majority of women in Puerto Rico (mostly middle- or working-class) who underwent sterilization had a positive or neutral assessment of the procedure, which was their preferred contraceptive option.39 Yet it is common for scholarship on twentieth-century Puerto Rico to ignore this feminist attitude toward sterilization as well as the vibrancy of the early feminist movement, which fought for reproductive autonomy, and instead echo condemnations of the scientific experts who pushed “la operación” as a “remedy” for a purported overpopulation problem. Although the experiences of Puerto Ricans who underwent surgery in New York City hospitals may have more in common with those of African American and Native American women who spoke out against forced tubal ligations in the 1960s and 1970s, much of the history of sterilization needs to be considered a fractious interplay between diverse feminist groups, those sterilized, physicians, the welfare bureaucracy, and eugenicists.

  Finally, if attention to gender and sexuality has illustrated some of the gray areas of reproductive politics, it also sheds light on how everyday eugenics played out, above all, among white middle-class Americans.40 After World War II, as eugenicists turned toward genetic and marital counseling, their target populations changed.41 Instead of tallying the “undesirable” and “feebleminded,” they began to devote greater attention to married heterosexual couples, who they hoped would amply procreate. Although some historians juxtapose these two approaches as “positive” (fostering the reproduction of the “fit”) and “negative” (impeding the reproduction of, and even euthanizing, the “unfit”), such a distinction implies that they can be fairly easily entangled. In California, however, the most strident champions of “positive” eugenics, Popenoe and Goethe, who used that term to explain their interests and the organizations they founded, were also the most heavily invested in “negative” campaigns such as compulsory sterilization and unyielding immigration restriction. Rather than accepting such descriptors transparently, it is crucial to historicize their rhetorical function and be cognizant of their explanatory limitations. Scholars have also relied on the terminology of “mainline” and “reform” to characterize, respectively, the racist eugenicists of the 1920s, such as Harry H. Laughlin, and their more moderate successors, such as Frederick Osborn, the longtime president of the AES who foregrounded population planning and demography.42 Yet, once gender is factored into the equation, these lines too become blurred.

  Beneath the surface of the distinction between “mainline” and “reform” lay a significant continuity in twentieth-century hereditarianism. In the 1940s and 1950s, many eugenicists traded in their previous interest in determining the biological differences between discrete racial groups for a fascination with the male-female dichotomy, which was envisioned as stretching along a continuum of overlapping gradations of personality, temperament, and compatibility. The disarticulation and transposition of “race” onto gender and sexuality was an integral component of the midcentury “shift from the categorical to the scalar” and was central to the perpetuation of a hereditarian and evolutionist vision of civilization and its discontents in the United States.43 This reconfiguration helped to spur national alarm over homosexuality (manly women and effeminate men), frigid wives, and sexual dysfunction, and contributed to the pronatalist zeal of the “baby boom.”44 The racial panics of the 1920s reemerged as the sexual conformity of the 1950s, even as institutional racism and the racialized baggage of social Darwinism perdured, the latter often embedded in population and family planning or psychotherapeutic constructs of gender and sex.

  Through these temporal, spatial, and topical lenses, the systematic affront to eugenics occurred not in the 1930s and 1940s, but during the civil rights era, when its two principal pillars, sterilization laws and national origins immigration quotas, were dismantled through a combination of grassroots mobilization and legislative action. By the 1960s and 1970s, there was increasing uneasiness and anger, in streets and assembly halls, about the lingering and persistent ramifications of hereditarianism on specific groups, such as poor African American women who were being unwittingly sterilized, Mexican American youths whose life options were restricted by the results of intelligence testing and vocational tracking, and middle-class white women who were eager to finally wrest birth control out of the hands of male family planners.45 Furthermore, the patriarchal culture, gender imbalances, and racial prejudices of the medical establishment were coming under attack from many sides.46 A sea change was underway, as evidenced by the media and congressional uproar over revelations that the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) had conducted unethical and harmful syphilis experiments on poor rural blacks in Macon County, Alabama, for more than forty years.47 The 1973 he
arings on the now notorious Tuskegee experiments catalyzed the formulation of informed consent protocols, which nations had been urged to adopt after the Nuremberg Trials, and bolstered the claim that racial minorities had been pawns, not beneficiaries, in the advancement of American medicine and science. The protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s—ranging from desegregation, black power, Chicano nationalism, and second-wave feminism to gay liberation—arose in part as an assault on the decades-long effects of eugenics-based policies and rationales. Certainly, the 1960s should not be reduced to a revolt against eugenics, but this tumultuous era cannot be comprehended outside of the troubled history of hereditarianism in the United States.

  Eugenics is an elusive word. It has had divergent connotations and has galvanized disparate projects across the world.48 As the preceding pages suggest, the transformation of eugenics over time makes it imperative to define it in contextual, not absolute, terms. However, this does not imply a lack of precision. When Sir Francis Galton, the British statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term in 1883, he combined the Greek eu (good or well) with the root of genesis (to come into being, be born) and added the modifying suffix ics.49 After trying out various formulations, in Essays in Eugenics, published in 1909, Galton wrote that eugenics was “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.”50 If “science” encompasses both theory and practice, knowledge and skill, and “race” comprises the human species, interpretations that correspond to Galton’s description of eugenics as a kind of interventionist religion and his emphasis on the betterment of all human “specimens” and “stock,” then eugenics can simply be defined as better breeding. Indeed, in 1911 Davenport reiterated this definition of eugenics as “the science of the improvement of the human race by better breeding.”51 Of course, the operative word is better, the significance of which was, and continues to be, the source of the intense politicization of eugenics. Who decides what potential progenitor or offspring is “better” and has the leverage to enforce such preferences? What is the rationale for selection and who, ostensibly, in the short and long term, will benefit or suffer? What if members of a given society disagree on who and what is superior and inferior, normal and abnormal? What roles should the state and the individual be allowed or encouraged to play in the development and enforcement of eugenic programs? What restrictions, if any, should be placed on commercial access to genetic technologies and information, particularly those that enable certain people and groups potentially to buy eugenic enhancement while others are left behind? Nestled in Galton’s foundational definition are the perplexing questions that have haunted attempts at better breeding for more than a century.