American Eugenics Movement Research Articles

Sheldon Rubenfeld (ed.), Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. xxii + 233, £25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-230-62192-3.

Sheldon Rubenfeld (ed.), Medicine After the Holocaust: From the Master Race to the Human Genome and Beyond (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), pp. xxii + 233, £25.00, paperback, ISBN: 978-0-230-62192-3. - Volume 56 Issue 1

The American Investment in Marriage

The American Investment in Marriage Kristin Celello (bio) Rebecca L. Davis . More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010. 336 pp. Notes and index. $29.95. That Americans are more attached to the institution of marriage than many of their counterparts elsewhere in the world is evident both statistically and anecdotally, if the number of magazine articles, memoirs, and advice books published about the subject each year is any indication. The irony, of course, is that men and women living in the United States have consistently demonstrated a faith in marriage and its purported personal and economic rewards at the same time that they have divorced at what experts and government officials have identified as alarming rates. In her compelling new book, More Perfect Unions: The American Search for Marital Bliss, Rebecca L. Davis seeks to uncover how twentieth-century Americans developed and maintained their attachment to marriage, while also seeking to strengthen this seemingly fragile institution. What is not evident from the book's title is that it is, at its heart, a history of marriage counseling in the United States. A number of historians have made forays into this area of study over the past decade, establishing the pivotal role that Paul Popenoe (a founder and public face of the profession through mid-century) played in the propagation of the American eugenics movement and in marriage counseling's more general ties to the development of a national therapeutic culture. 1 What Davis offers, however, is a systematic look at the profession from its origins—which are more complex than accounts focused primarily on Popenoe would lead one to believe—to its current iterations in both secular and religious contexts. She ably demonstrates that an investment in marriage was not only a personal decision but also one with far greater consequences for the well-being of the nation. Her contribution is all the more impressive given the paucity of easily accessible sources on the topic. For instance, the papers of marriage counseling's first professional organization, the American Association of Marriage Counselors (later the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy) were lost in a fire in the early 1980s. Left only with the personal papers of individual counselors (secular and religious), social work agencies, and other marital advice givers, Davis [End Page 517] nevertheless constructs an authoritative account of the profession's development, reach, and appeal. The book's organization is primarily chronological, although it does retrace its steps on occasion in the more thematically based closing chapters. Opening her analysis in the early twentieth century, Davis convincingly establishes the "tension between personal satisfaction and communal obligations" as resting at the "heart of the modern marriage dilemma" (p. 21). In other words, while many young Americans in the 1920s embraced Judge Ben B. Lindsey's call for companionate marriage—defined by relatively easy access to birth control and to divorce—others continued to hold that marriage was too important to the community and the nation to exist exclusively as a site for personal gratification. Marriage and marital roles were nevertheless in the process of a fundamental transformation in the 1920s, especially for women. But anxiety—not only about changing gender roles but also about the dangers of "race suicide," immigration, and other social problems and how they might negatively affect the institution of marriage—inevitably followed. Rather than turning to family, neighbors, or religious leaders for help in solving the marital "puzzle," husbands and wives began to look to the growing ranks of sociologists, psychoanalysts, and social workers instead. Davis argues that it was no coincidence that the marriage counseling profession originated in the tumultuous years of the Great Depression. The growing number of married women entering the paid labor force, especially as their husbands struggled to find work, led to fears about declining male authority in the home. Galvanized by the troubled times, noted eugenicist Paul Popenoe opened the American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in 1930. Popenoe soon became the public face of the marriage counseling profession, broadly selling his particular interpretation of marital woes, downplaying the strains that mass unemployment placed on relationships, and focusing on the...

Paul A Lombardo: A Century of Eugenics in America. From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era

The year 2007 saw the centenary of America’s, and the world’s, first compulsory sterilisation law, enacted in Indiana and followed later by similar laws in over 30 other American states. A symposium was held to mark the anniversary, together with a public meeting and other events, and this book contains a number of the principal contributions. The book’s title is actually somewhat misleading; the emphasis is almost entirely on the topic of compulsory sterilisation in America, with eugenics itself featuring very little except as a background. The issues discussed revolve mainly around how American society and the establishment treated, and mistreated, its poor, its socially inadequate and its racial minorities. The book’s contributors come almost entirely from a social science and law background, with a single final chapter involving a medical geneticist. So, does it contain anything which the human geneticist, whether scientist or clinician, can learn from? While initially sceptical, my final conclusion is yes, though the parts of value are somewhat scattered among other chapters mainly of interest to historians and social scientists. The editor, Paul Lombardo, has contributed both a thoughtful introduction and a specific chapter. He highlights the shifting meanings of the term ‘Eugenics’, rightly noting that it has changed from being one that a century ago was uncritically regarded as good, whereas today it has, equally uncritically, become a term of abuse; neither situation is helpful to any objective analysis. Lombardo also notes the shifting nature of the ‘problems’ that eugenicists and others claimed to have identified, leading to political pressure to enact laws permitting and promoting compulsory sterilisation, the main hallmark of the American eugenics movement. As Lombardo emphasises here, and as others have before, this produced ‘strange bedfellows’ promoting eugenics, with some supporters being radical and progressive (in the European sense of these terms!) in other areas of policy, co-existing somewhat uneasily with the majority whose views were based largely on bigotry and racism. For many, eugenics seems to have provided a ‘secular religion’. Of the series of individual chapters, only that of Elof Carlson relates the topic of compulsory sterilisation to the wider history of American eugenics, and the role of those scientists involved in this, such as Davenport, East, Loughlin and Popenoe, receives virtually no mention. Yet it was the support and involvement of respected and established American geneticists that was crucial in persuading the various American states to pass the laws, just as their counterparts and contemporaries underpinned eugenics in Nazi Germany. A series of chapters traces the development of compulsory sterilisation laws in a range of American States, notably Indiana (the first) and California (the state that actually performed most). A major factor was the introduction of vasectomy by Indiana surgeon Harry Clay Sharp. Although somewhat repetitive and at times parochial (Europe receives barely a mention despite the close interactions of American and European eugenicists and the strongly international nature of the eugenics movement), some interesting facts emerge from these chapters. Particularly significant perhaps is that most compulsory sterilisations were performed primarily for social reasons, not on eugenic grounds; the reasons were principally poverty and social deprivation, as well as perceived ‘feeble P. S. Harper (&) Institute of Medical Genetics, Cardiff University, Heath Park, Cardiff CF14 4XN, UK e-mail: HarperPS@Cardiff.ac.uk

Advertising eugenics: Charles M. Goethe's campaign to improve the race

Over the last several decades historians have shown that the eugenics movement appealed to an extraordinarily wide constituency. Far from being the brainchild of the members of any one particular political ideology, eugenics made sense to a diverse range of Americans and was promoted by professionals ranging from geneticists and physicians to politicians and economists.(1) Seduced by promises of permanent fixes to national problems, and attracted to the idea of a scientifically legitimate form of social activism, eugenics quickly grew in popularity during the first decades of the twentieth century. Charles M. Goethe, the land developer, entrepreneur, conservationist and skilled advertiser who founded the Eugenics Society of Northern California, exemplifies the broad appeal of the eugenics movement. Goethe played an active role within the American eugenics movement at its peak in the 1920s. The last president of the Eugenics Research Association,(2) he also campaigned hard against Mexican immigration to the US and he continued open support for the Nazi regime's eugenic practices into the later 1930s.(3) This article examines Goethe's eugenic vision and, drawing on his correspondence with the leading geneticist Charles Davenport, explores the relationship between academic and non-academic advocates of eugenics in America.

Reaching Beyond the "Moron": Eugenic Control of Secondary Disability Groups

While much has been published about the American eugenics movement, few authors have considered the relative status of various disability populations as targets of eugenic control. While many writers focus on persons diagnosed as feeble-minded as the central focus of control, little has been written regarding the status of additional disability groups. This is important since, as described here, a central component of coming to understand past social injustices against marginalized groups and the contemporary relevance of such injustices is gaining an awareness of why specific populations were accepted by control authorities as appropriate or viable targets for control measures.

The Real "Toll" of A. G. Bell: Lessons about Eugenics

Historian Brian Greenwald offers a revisionist interpretation of Bell. He reviews Bell's role and influence within the American eugenics movement and shows that Bell had the respect of the most prominent American eugenicists. His intimate knowledge of deafness, from personal experience with his mother and wife and from his studies of deaf people on Martha's Vineyard, caused American eugenicists to defer to him on matters related to the deaf population. Greenwald argues, therefore, that Bell could have been extremely destructive to deaf people's right to marry and reproduce as they wished. The opportunity was available for Bell to advocate invasive government eugenic measures against the American deaf population, but he did not do so. Greenwald believes that several factors explain Bell's behavior, but he concludes that Bell's personal contact with deaf people throughout his life "humanized and personalized" his approach.

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement by Christine Rosen

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement by Christine Rosen

Weeding Out the Recessive Gene: Representations of the Evolving Eugenics Movement in Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre

Weeding Out the Recessive Gene:Representations of the Evolving Eugenics Movement in Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre Ashley Craig Lancaster Because of the sense of desperation and the peculiar family antics in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre, these two novels have often been critiqued as versions of the same story. In a 1933 review of God's Little Acre, Bennett A. Cerf actually criticized Caldwell for the "striking parallels" and "unescapable duplications" between the novels (34). Critics such as Kenneth Burke, John Miller Maclachlan, and Jay Watson have written about the novels as if the characters in each blend together into a stock Caldwellian poor-white characterization.1 Despite these critics' assessments of the novels, however, Caldwell actually creates two separate family studies with the Lesters of Tobacco Road and the Waldens of God's Little Acre, and each presents a distinctly different representation of poor-white life. Even though both the Lesters and the Waldens exhibit the "uninhibited" behavioral ideology that these critics have associated with poor-whites, the Waldens do not face the economic degradation that the Lesters do (Maclachlan 133). In fact, the Waldens live in a modestly successful economic environment that should rank them just above this poor-white category. Therefore, when Caldwell places the Waldens with the Lesters in this category, he blurs the definition of "poor-white," making it no longer defined by economics. [End Page 78] Expanding the category of poor-white to include the Waldens allows Caldwell to focus not just on the physical degradation of poverty, as he does in Tobacco Road, but also on the process of economic and social decline that eventually situates a family firmly in this category. This shift by Caldwell to identify families that have the potential to become like the Lesters parallels the shift that also occurred in the American eugenics movement from the late 1920s to the 1930s. Karen E. Keely and Sarah C. Holmes have recently linked Tobacco Road to the early American eugenics movement by focusing on the poverty of the Lesters, the physical deformities of Ellie May and Sister Bessie, and the obvious connections between Tobacco Road and "The Bunglers" articles written by Caldwell's father, Ira, in 1929.2 In contrast, the Walden family of God's Little Acre appears neither economically nor physically deprived; in fact, the Waldens have both economic and physical privileges that make them seem far better off than the Lesters. Eugenicists in the 1920s and 1930s, however, no longer worried about identifying the "genuinely lame, insane, and deformed," genetically "inferior" people such as the Lesters, who could be recognized physically (Black 53). They worried about genetic "inferiors" who looked just as "normal" as genetically "superior" people did and who could possibly remain undiscovered for as many as three generations (East 44). With increased emphasis put on uncovering hidden defectives, eugenicists turned to environmental and familial factors that could expose inferiority and open up a chance to create a "superior" race in America. In God's Little Acre, Caldwell borrows the rhetoric of this new eugenics movement as he conducts a second fictional eugenic family study that forces attention not on the economic circumstances and outer appearance of his subjects, as he did in Tobacco Road, but on the inherited behavioral patterns of the Waldens that raise questions both about the possibility of their genetic inferiority and about how America should handle these possible threats to future progress. While early American eugenicists aimed many of their race betterment endeavors at African Americans and immigrants, they also focused a great deal of energy on rural poor-whites who refused to accept their role in the new industrial society driving the American economy from the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century (Rafter 17).3 Elizabeth Yukins has argued that economic failure by poor-whites spurred the eugenics movement because "[d]ominant whiteness was threatened by the spectre of inadequacy and fallibility within its own racial borders" (167). By focusing on "individual genetic weakness rather than racial inferiority", eugenicists would be able to "maintain the ideology of white superiority" [End Page 79] and to pinpoint "'degenerate' whites" who "threatened the...

Back to the Future: Eugenics—A Bibliographic Essay

The following essay is a review of the literature about the American eugenics movement produced by scholars over the last fifty years. The essay provides an explanation for today's renewed interest in the subject and for why the science of eugenics remains relevant to contemporary society. The essay examines the catalyst to re-examine the eugenics movement, the influence of Darwinian thought upon its development, the political and institutional support for its growth, the relationship between eugenics, sterilization, and sex, and how the twentieth-century promises of the science of better breeding was a precursor to the twenty-first-century promise of genetic engineering.

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (review)

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, by Christine Rosen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. 286 pp. $37.50. In her very interesting book, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement, Christine Rosen has written an important, detailed, and rather frightening account of how the American religious community of the early 20th century came to support the movement. She specifically documents how Protestant, Jewish, and a limited number of Catholic religious leaders contributed to making American the foremost movement in the world by the 1920s and sought the creation of a good society in America by means of those methods that the movement advocated: sterilization, immigration restriction, incarceration, intelligence testing, and statistical analysis applied to the racial/ethnic/genetic backgrounds of families. Underlying the assumptions on which American rested were racism, bigotry, pseudo-science masquerading as science, the assumption that many immigrants and lower socio-economic level Americans could not be assimilated into U.S. society, and a quasi-religious zeal to inflict on the people of the United States and, thereby, create a master race in America. The American movement became the model used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, who turned their zealousness for as the means of preserving the health of the nation into, first, the murder of the disabled, and, subsequently, the brutalization and murder of millions of innocent men, women, and children in the final solution. Rosen's book is very much a part of a significant recent interest by the scholarly community in the study of the American movement, its influence in the United States, and its world-wide (or European) influence. In the United States, religious leaders, politicians, businessmen, scientists, philanthropic foundations, corporate sponsors, and others supported the effort to create a master race in the United States. All of this is well documented in such accounts as Edwin Black's The War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (2003). Rosen's book adds much to the Black book and other accounts by describing in detail religious support of eugenics, a matter to which Black gives much less attention. As strong advocates of the importance of ethical behavior, according to Rosen, liberal religious leaders were significantly influenced by the growing importance of the concept of charity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and by the development of the movement. Committed to religious charity, they participated in many social reform and progressive activities in this period. Many were also troubled by foreign immigrants flooding to U.S. shores and raising fears and deep concerns on the part of America's political, cultural, economic, and religious leaders. As supporters of modernity, seeking to make their respective religions relevant to the twentieth century, liberal clergymen also became advocates of science and believed that science, including evolutionary biology, could help in bringing human progress and perfectibility. The Reverend Oscar Carleton McCullough (1843-1891), for example, minister to the Plymouth Congregational Church of Indianapolis, Indiana, produced one of the first eugenic family studies in the United States and sought the merger of Protestant Social Gospel theology and eugenics (p. 27). Moreover, there was a tendency for advocates of and its related branches to seek biblical support for their particular reform. Almost from the outset of the movement in America, there had been an easy association between religion and eugenics. In 1907, in an attempt to effect God's will while resolving major social problems, the Stare of Indiana passed the first sterilization law in the United States. …

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. By Christine Rosen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii + 286 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. By Christine Rosen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. viii + 286 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

:Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

:Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement

Preaching eugenics: religious leaders and the American eugenics movement

With our success in mapping the human genome, the possibility of altering our genetic futures has given rise to difficult ethical questions. Although opponents of genetic manipulation frequently raise the specter of eugenics, our contemporary debates about bioethics often take place in a historical vacuum. In fact, American religious leaders raised similarly challenging ethical questions in the first half of the twentieth century. Preaching Eugenics tells how Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish leaders confronted and, in many cases, enthusiastically embraced eugenics-a movement that embodied progressive attitudes about modern science at the time. Christine Rosen argues that religious leaders pursued eugenics precisely when they moved away from traditional religious tenets. The liberals and modernists-those who challenged their churches to embrace modernity-became the eugenics movement's most enthusiastic supporters. Their participation played an important part in the success of the American eugenics movement. In the early twentieth century, leaders of churches and synagogues were forced to defend their faiths on many fronts. They faced new challenges from scientists and intellectuals; they struggled to adapt to the dramatic social changes wrought by immigration and urbanization; and they were often internally divided by doctrinal controversies among modernists, liberals, and fundamentalists. Rosen draws on previously unexplored archival material from the records of the American Eugenics Society, religious and scientific books and periodicals of the day, and the personal papers of religious leaders such as Rev. John Haynes Holmes, Rev. Harry Emerson Fosdick, Rev. John M. Cooper, Rev. John A. Ryan, and biologists Charles Davenport and Ellsworth Huntington, to produce an intellectual history of these figures that is both lively and illuminating. The story of how religious leaders confronted one of the era's newest sciences, eugenics, sheds important new light on a time much like our own, when religion and science are engaged in critical and sometimes bitter dialogue.

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics archive: image archive on the American eugenics movement

Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe

This article uses the fifty‐year career of Paul Popenoe as a lens through which to examine the North American eugenics movement. Popenoe, a leading advocate of compulsory sterilisation in the 1930s, became a celebrated marriage counsellor in the 1950s, famous for the Ladies' Home Journal feature ‘Can This Marriage Be Saved?’ The ease with which Popenoe metamorphosed from a champion of sterilisation to an expert on marriage was made possible by, and helps to reveal, deep ideological affinities and organisational connections between eugenics and marriage counselling in the United States.

In Defense of Eugenics

The best of either sex should be united with the best as often, and the inferior with the inferior as seldom, as possible. Plato: The Republic, c. B.C.370 Eugenics: A Reassessment Richard Lynn Westport, CF: Praeger, 2001 366pp., $85 US As a scientific field the legacy of eugenics is a peculiar one. For several decades, its image in terms of an intellectual movement has been shaped by falsehoods and distortions. The conventional view reflects not just a degree of bias from historical accounts but scathing exaggerations, which portray a once thriving discipline as morally and scientifically discredited. But is this an accurate assessment of a discipline that once attracted preeminent scholars, appealed to distinguished individuals of accomplishment - university presidents, medical professionals, scientific innovators, and philanthropists alike - and received considerable support from various quarters of society? If not, then how did it acquire such an odious reputation and why? Richard Lynn's recent book reconsiders the credibility of eugenics as a valid scientific endeavor. Unlike other contemporary accounts, Lynn's thorough study provides a comprehensive second look by scrutinizing a number of antieugenic arguments that over the years have called into question its credibility. In sober and dispassionate terms, Lynn's careful analysis of various eugenic policies - including the societal implications that are likely to follow a eugenic renewal - is long overdue, and for its meticulous tour de force probe, his account offers an unrivaled assessment of this vastly maligned subject. In other words, don't expect to find it on Oprah's book club listl As thorough and objective as Lynn's book is, it remains engulfed by a biased literature that generates a continuous stream of anti-eugenic works. Unfortunately, the high price ($85) and limited availability of Lynn's excellent and timely book will unlikely provide an adequate level of balance against a tide of negative sentiments. The scholarship that spans the history of this once thriving field is saturated with hysterical screeds such as Stefan Kuhl's The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism and Nicole Hahn Rafter's Creating Born Criminals. Historical accounts, typical of Garland Allen and Daniel Kevles, depict leading eugenicists as malevolent misanthropes. Even the Dolan DNA Learning Center of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, which contains an archive for the American Eugenics Movement, claims on their web site, is important to remind yourself that the vast majority of eugenics work has been completely discredited. In the final analysis, the eugenic description of human life reflected and social rather than scientific facts [see http://vector.cshl.org/eugenics/]. Yet how valid is this claim? Is this merely a baseless charge quite typical of contemporary egalitarian political and social prejudices, which continues to fuel the current negative climate of opposition toward eugenics? As behavior genetic research continues to discover year after year how genes influence physical and behavioral traits, the nonscientific academic literature continues to produce antieugenic monographs, which further compound a dense fog of distortions and enduring fables. The paradoxical aspect about modern advances in genetic and bio-medical research is that as the scientific process refines and improves upon recent discoveries in cloning and biotechnology, which moves society that much closer to confronting eugenic-oriented policies, opponents of eugenics continue to proclaim the implausibility of applied eugenic programs. It is like insisting that the earth is really flat despite all the evidence to the contrary from improved navigational and space exploration. Although one could find examples of eugenic ideas from ancient history to modern times, the Victorian scientist and explorer Sir Francis Galton is credited for originating the modern concept of eugenics. …