Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, by Randall Hansen and Desmond King

Abstract

Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America, by Randall Hansen and Desmond King. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2013, viii, 303 pp. $30.95 US (paper). Hansen and King combine their strengths in political history and policy studies to produce a careful study of eugenics side-by-side with a history of rights-based discourse. In doing so, they convincingly demonstrate how eugenics, particularly in the United States and to a lesser degree in Canada, altered its language to appease rights-based critics as it continued to advocate for coercive sterilizations in the post-World War Two period. In this way, they show the endurance of eugenics and indeed its intensification as it embraced new tactics for appealing to society as a progressive solution to fears about population control in the first half of the century then population growth in the second half. The book is divided into three parts. Part A includes seven chapters that provide the intellectual background, including its start in Britain and its adaptation in the United States. This section covers some well-trod ground for readers familiar with eugenics scholarship, notably Daniel Kevles' In the Name of Eugenics. Where Hansen and King diverge, however, is in their careful analysis of the interplay between American and German eugenicists and the extension of that analysis beyond the war. These chapters describe the main players or leaders in the eugenics movement, drawn primarily from Britain and the United States. They explain the origins of key institutions, including the research station at Cold Spring Harbor, the Eugenics Research Office, and the rising rates of institutionalization for people deemed feebleminded. While concentrating on the early applications of eugenics in the United States they lay the framework for the policy, legal, scientific, and intellectual framework leading up to the Second World War. Part B is only three chapters but introduces a significant part of their main argument. It begins by exploring the German experience, but instead of highlighting it as a critical turning point, as several historians have done (including Kevles), they show how Germany was in many ways an aberration. Here Hansen and King effectively draw on the secondary literature and bring their considerable talents to bear. They clearly show how German intellectuals and scientists were not, in fact, masterminds behind the eugenics programs, but rather that a perfect storm emerged that placed German race hygienists in unprecedented positions of power due to an ideological commitment to killing, manufactured by a strong and unopposed government. The success of the many killing programs, of which eugenics was merely a small part, had much less to do with science and much more to do with politics and timing. What is more, the authors then demonstrate the close relationship between American reformers (and philanthropists) and Gennan eugenicists. In spite of the spectre of Anti-Semitism that coursed through the German program, they argue that Americans applauded the program and looked seriously into replicating it in the United States. …