Eugenics and the Clergy in the Early Twentieth‐Century United States

Abstract

Introduction When I tell people that I spent a considerable amount of time doing work in disciplines of both religion and biology, they almost always ask, do you think of evolution? They are, of course, referring to controversy that emerged in late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between disciples of Darwinian evolution and those advocating Biblical literalism (Marsden 184-95). Yet during roughly this same period, an analogous (if less well remembered) encounter took place between liberal churches of day and of evolutionary biology. This was encounter of liberal Christianity and eugenics. In this article, I examine following questions: How did American churchmen and eugenicists view each other? What role, if any, did clergy play in American movement? Finally, what caused eventual termination of this relationship? Some background is called for first. The word eugenics was coined by English scientist Francis Galton in 1883. Galton defined term as of improving racial stock through giving the more races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over less suitable (Kevles ix). However, eugenic notions had existed in America even before Galton's definition; as early as 1863, Horace Bushnell had made hereditarian references in his bestselling Christian Nurture (Bushnell 195-96, 202-03). Eugenic theory and practice also occurred in John' Humphrey Noyes's perfectionist Oneida commune. As early as 1848, Noyes had written that amativeness should have its proper gratification without drawing after it procreation as a necessary consequence; he further argued that men and women should be able to control their fertility until science takes charge of business. Noyes later read both Darwin and Galton; finally, between 1869 and 1880, he presided over a eugenic breeding program that he called stirpiculture (Oneida Community 52; Parker 254-55). By turn of century, began moving out of avant-garde reform circles and into realm of both professional and popular science. In 1903, for example, American Breeders Association formed for professional breeders and university biologists. By 1906, group had a committee, with membership including such notables as biologist and Stanford University Chancellor David Stair Jordan, inventor and audiologist Alexander Graham Bell, University of Chicago sociologist Charles R. Henderson, plant breeder Luther Burbank, eugenicist Roswell Johnson, Stanford biologist Vernon Kellogg, and zoologist and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. Popular articles on also began appearing in magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Popular Science Monthly. Books aimed at popular audiences bore titles such as The Task of Social Hygiene (1913), The Right to Be Well Born (1917), and Racial Hygiene (1929).1 What one may ask, what was goal of eugenics? What was it about that caught attention of Americans during this period? If we examine literature produced during period from roughly 1910 to 1930, we find that movement was concerned with more than simply breeding better physical specimens of humanity. Instead, provided a worldview in which value of anything-be it a physical object, a social structure, a philosophy, or an individual-could be determined according to degree to which it furthered cause of race, primarily through enhancement of society's gene pool. Eugenics thus served as a catch-all philosophy for many different social reforms, both conservative and liberal. Most sympathizers appear to favored immigration restriction on grounds that it diluted good puritan racial stock, or that it made America a dumping ground for dysgenic (that is, eugenically unfit) rejects from other countries (Popenoe and Johnson 298-317; Geothe 6-9). …