American Eugenics Society Research Articles

A substituição nua: o apoio de geneticistas e biotecnólogos à eugenia da Segunda Guerra Mundial ao Projeto Genoma Humano

ABSTRACT Using a combination of archival and secondary sources, this article argues that scientists and bioethicists after the Second World War advocated a wide variety of eugenic practices and strongly supported the development of eugenics, strengthened by advances in medicine, human genetics, and population genetics. I detail extensive research in both the Curt Stern and the American Eugenics Society Papers (American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia), uncovering novel defenses of eugenics and its integration in sciences after the Second World War by key figures such as Curt Stern and Theodosius Dobzhansky. Moreover, I relate to Richard Lewontin’s participation in a Princeton conference sponsored by the American Eugenics Society in 1965. This article is also the first to not only describe geneticists’ defense and development of eugenic ideas but also details bioethicists’ defense of this inhumane and unscientific ideology until the dawn of the Human Genome Project in the late 1980s.

Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion by Melissa J. Wilde

Reviewed by: Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion by Melissa J. Wilde Lauren Macivor Thompson Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion. By Melissa J. Wilde. Oakland: University of California Press, 2020. 304 pp. $29.95. The early twentieth-century battle to legalize birth control in the United States is an area ripe for continued scholarly attention. Melissa J. Wilde’s new book, Birth Control Battles: How Race and Class Divided American Religion is a good addition to the fold, and aims to expand our knowledge of how various American religious groups approached the idea of birth control access in the early twentieth century. She argues that this particular battle represented one of the first schisms over the politics of sex and gender that still divide religious groups in our own time. Wilde finds a “watershed moment” between 1929 and 1931, as nine of the most prominent religious groups in the country proclaimed birth control to be a duty and not a sin (2). This support, she finds, was founded not in a concern for privacy or women’s rights, but rather because of these groups’ beliefs in eugenics, the threat of race suicide, and white supremacy. The liberalization of some religious groups’ promotion of birth control is rooted, as Wilde argues, in a term she phrases as “complex religion.” Her definition of complex religion emphasizes that religion is not set apart from but instead is twinned with racial, ethnic, [End Page 107] class, and gender inequality. In other words, “one cannot explain early birth control reform within the American religious field without understanding how race was seen at the time” (5). A work of “comparative-historical sociology,” Birth Control Battles draws its evidence from a sample of thirty-one religious denominations beginning in the year 1926, the year of the last government census of religious organizations. Ninety percent of Americans who claimed membership in a religious group in the 1926 census were members of these denominations and many had more than 400,000 members at the time (12). Using the periodicals published by these religious groups (many on a weekly basis), Wilde treats them as representative of the general beliefs and opinions of each denomination,” although she “do[es] not claim nor assume that every member who was reading these periodicals agreed with the views expressed in them (or indeed, with the official stances of the denomination)” (19). She then divides the denominations into “early liberalizers” (those who supported birth control and promoted legalization), “unofficial supporters” (groups who did not make an official statement but published at least one supportive article per year), “critics” (those groups who officially condemned contraception or publicly criticized it), and “silent” (those who said nothing on the subject between 1929 and 1932). In analyzing this data, Wilde divides her study into three parts, examining religious responses to historical precursors to the birth control movement in Part I, the responses of religious groups to the emerging birth control movement itself in Part II, and the legacy of these responses in Part III, as the birth control pill was developed. Birth Control Battles is deeply researched and presents a new and much-needed religious component of our historical understanding of the birth control movement’s wide impact on American society. The book has several key issues, however, that detract from its full impact. There is a distracting amount of passive voice throughout. Further, the author uses large block quotes of text from the primary sources, sometimes three to four to a page, with little to no analysis in between. A stronger interpretive voice would have made these findings more meaningful and improved the flow and readability of the text, especially for nonspecialists and the public. Wilde aptly illustrates that religious denominations who came to support birth control were mobilized by the American Eugenics Society, which deliberately collaborated with religious groups to bring “legitimacy and visibility” to the eugenics movement (66). Yet the book gives little overview of the complexities of eugenics in this period, and while it differentiates between “positive” and “negative” eugenics, it casts the religious support for birth control between the 1930s and [End Page 108] 1960s...

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

A Digital History of Anglophone Demography and Global Population Control, 1915–1984

An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon (review)

Reviewed by: An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon Bernadette McCauley An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. By Sharon M. Leon. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 226 pp. $45.00. In An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, Sharon Leon explains how and why Catholics took an aggressive stance against the eugenically motivated movement to sterilize individuals [End Page 64] deemed unfit to reproduce. The book reveals that Catholics were among the first to address the dubious science of the eugenics movement as they fought the kind of legislation upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision, all before the Vatican denunciation of sterilization that came with the encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930. The development and controversy of Catholic thought on eugenics has been examined well elsewhere, notably in R. Scott Appleby’s discussion in Ronald L. Numbers and John Stenhouse’s Disseminating Darwinism: The Role of Place, Race, Religion and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 1999), but this study is fresh in that it examines specific Catholic activism and lay involvement. The lone dissenter in the Buck case was the Roman Catholic justice on the Supreme Court, Pierce Butler. Butler did not leave any written record of his objection to sterilization but other Catholics were constructing an argument to be presented publicly and, moreover, addressed the movement politically. Successful efforts against sterilization legislation in Ohio clearly rested on Catholic voting strength but Leon concludes Catholics were also influential in Alabama with significantly fewer Catholics because they articulated a persuasive argument for other opponents of the proposed law. Leon reminds readers of the tremendous support for eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s and that, unlike the early birth control movement (which was initially opposed by most eugenicists), American eugenics was mainstream, sharing similar rhetoric and goals with other popular reforms. This slippery reform slope allowed for strange bedfellows, which was why Catholic reformers John A. Ryan and John Montgomery Cooper, who both opposed sterilization measures, agreed to serve on the American Eugenics Society Board of Directors thoughtout the 1920s. An Image of God reveals, not incidentally, that Catholic civic engagement with reproductive issues in the early twentieth century extended beyond birth control, which is probably the more historically well-known component of Casti Connubii; readers who are not [End Page 65] familiar with Leslie Woodcock Tentler’s Catholics and Contraception: An American Story (Cornell University Press, 2004) might want to read it along with this book. Leon emphasizes that the Catholic campaign against sterilization was very much an effort of lay people as well as priests and bishops, which she contextualizes within the emergent Catholic educated professional class. In these efforts, lay Catholics were carving out a role for themselves as politically active Catholics. Women’s leadership was noteworthy and the history of their involvement contributes to our growing understanding of the uniquely Catholic gendered approach to the modern world articulated so well by Kathleen Sprows Cummings in New Women of the Old Faith: Gender and Catholicism in the Progressive Era (University of North Carolina Press, 2009). An Image of God is arguably just as important as a book about the place of religion in American civil discourse in this period as it is about science and religion. It also offers resounding evidence that recent calls for the need to integrate the American Catholic experience into our understanding of major issues of twentieth century U.S. history are right on the mark. Bernadette McCauley Hunter College, The City University of New York Copyright © 2015 American Catholic Historical Society

Christianity and Eugenics: The Place of Religion in the British Eugenics Education Society and the American Eugenics Society, c.1907-1940

Historians have regularly acknowledged the significance of religious faith to the eugenics movement in Britain and the USA. However, much of this scholarship suggests a polarised relationship of either conflict or consensus. Where Christian believers participated in the eugenics movement this has been represented as an abandonment of ‘orthodox’ theology, and the impression has been created that eugenics was a secularising force. In contrast, this article explores the impact of religious values on two eugenics organisations: the British Eugenics Education Society, and the American Eugenics Society. It is demonstrated that concerns over religion resulted in both these organisations modifying and tempering the public work that they undertook. This act of concealing and minimising the visibly controversial aspects of eugenics is offered as an addition to the debate over ‘mainline’ versus ‘reform’ eugenics.

An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon (review)

Reviewed by: An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon Paul A. Lombardo An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. By Sharon M. Leon. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Pp. ix, 226. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-0388-8.) When Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930, he specifically addressed “some who are over solicitous for the cause of eugenics” and seek to employ “medical action” in the form of surgical sterilization. Historians reference the encyclical as the most authoritative Roman Catholic opposition to eugenic sterilization laws passed in the first third of the twentieth century. But relatively little historical attention has been paid to how American Catholics engaged the eugenics movement before Rome spoke. Thanks to Sharon Leon’s An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, we now have a much more nuanced picture of when Catholic opposition to sterilization took shape, and the motives and arguments that gave it form. Leon’s book opens three new doors in the history of eugenics. First, she provides a detailed roadmap to politics among the faithful, noting how during the early years of the American eugenics movement, the pro-natalist thrust of so-called “positive eugenics” echoed traditional church thinking that Pius would summarize in Casti Connubii as “salutary counsel for more certainly procuring the strength and health of the future child.” This feature of the growing eugenics movement provided an attraction to some important American Catholic thinkers. Second, Leon explains that Catholic critics of eugenic sterilization went beyond doctrinal arguments to focus strategically—and as history would later conclude, accurately—on the scientific weakness of eugenic theory. Third, both before and after Buck v. Bell, the watershed Supreme Court case that validated the constitutionality of state laws mandating eugenic sterilization, Catholic critics of the practice highlighted individual human dignity and the moral significance of bodily integrity as counterweights that trumped statist assertions about the common good. The strength of Leon’s study lies in the painstaking research she conducted, not only in the well-known records of the American Eugenics Society and other eugenic advocacy groups, but also in the records of organizations such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the National Council of Catholic Men (NCCM). She found evidence that the men’s group first inadvertently overlooked the pending litigation in Buck v. Bell. Then, aware of the danger of awakening all too common 1920s anti-Catholic sentiments, NCCM quietly orchestrated the filing of a petition for rehearing after the decision in the case had been announced. Although its efforts to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision were ultimately unsuccessful, the petition contained the best and most thorough arguments made against the sterilization law. Despite decades of research on the Buck case by other scholars, Leon was first to discover the provenance of this final chapter of the litigation. Leon dedicates a full chapter to address one of the persistent questions in American sterilization history—although two thirds of the states had sterilization laws, why did similar legislation fail in the remainder of the states? Leon focuses on Ohio, telling the story of Catholic opposition to sterilization proposals there in the early 1930s. Her fine-grained analysis of behind-the-scenes lobbying by a prominent [End Page 179] Catholic bishop, Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland, in opposition to a sterilization bill is a masterful exercise in political and legislative history. Popular commentary on the history of eugenics in America often operates at the level of cartoon, with anti-Darwinian religionists of many stripes posed against the forces of scientific materialism. Leon’s book provides an antidote to that kind of ahistorical polemic by showing in textured detail how the Catholic hierarchy as well as the laity struggled with the many-faceted seductions of eugenics. Paul A. Lombardo Georgia State University Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

Ethical Issues in Cardiovascular Research Involving Humans

This component of the series “Careers in Cardiovascular Research: A Primer for New Investigators” will address ethical conduct of research involving humans. The dramatic decline in cardiovascular mortality (Figure) provides testimony to the societal benefits of research leading to new therapies and systems of care.1 In concert with these rapid developments, changing expectations have resulted in the emergence of ethical issues with highly publicized examples of concern over conduct of research in humans.2–5 Whereas professional ethics should, and for most physicians do, “regulate” conduct of biomedical research, “self-regulation” does not always meet societal expectations. Dr Barry Coller6 has pointed out that science lacks intrinsic morality. Thus, the laudable goals of improving patient care, understanding mechanisms of disease, or protecting society from perceived external threats do not justify ignoring fundamental human rights that guide (and regulate) the conduct of research. Figure. Death rates for cardiovascular disease in the United States, 1900 to 2005 (not adjusted for age). At the same time it is important to reflect on the importance of physicians participating in research and providing the opportunity for their patients to do so. Although some have argued this compromises the basic physician responsibility to a patient,7 we believe the best interest of the patient can and must be protected in the research setting. Two brief examples demonstrate the fundamental changes in understanding that may arise from direct involvement of physicians in research. As late as the 1970s, the prevailing wisdom to explain the presence of intracoronary thrombus on postmortem examination of patients after myocardial infarction was simply wrong; pathologists studying hearts in this setting found evidence to “suggest that coronary thrombi are consequences rather than causes of acute myocardial infarction”8 and “consideration is given to the possibility that some thrombi may follow rather than precede …

Pumpkins, Pigs, and People

Fat pigs. Speedy horses. Large pumpkins. If plants and animals could be improved by proper breeding techniques, then why wouldn't the same hold true for humans? In 1927, governor of Kansas Arthur Capper explained to the press, is as important for Kansas to grow fine men and women as it is to grow fine cattle and hogs. 1 and Contests that took place at state fairs across early 20th-century America were designed to judge stock to select the most eugenically fit family. While Americans were already exposed to eugenic messages through proeuthanasia films like The Black Stork, newspapers, magazines, and biology textbooks, these contests played a pivotal role in popularizing eugenics throughout the 1920s and became increasingly commonplace at international, national, and local fairs. 2 Specifically, eugenics exhibits at the state fairs helped to garner public support for the social reforms such as immigration restriction, marriage restriction, euthanasia, segregation, and compulsory institutionalization and sterilization of those deemed degenerates or defectives. The Fitter Family Contests actually began as Better Baby Contests that were organized as part of the U.S. Children's Bureau campaign against infant mortality. The Better Baby Contests were originally designed to decrease infant mortality rates, but they changed from this rather benign focus on improving children's health to eugenically oriented Fitter Family competitions with a strong commitment to controlled human breeding. 3 By the mid-1920s, the categorizations used in Better Baby Contests to identify healthy babies and educate mothers about child rearing became a front for the eugenics movement to discourage poor immigrants, Blacks, and the mentally or physically disabled from reproducing. When Mary Watts and Florence Sherborn, respectively president and vice-president of the Iowa Baby Betterment Association, joined the American Eugenics Society (AES) Committee on Popular Education, 4 they likely saw themselves as saving infant lives and promoting eugenics as a scientific endeavor to improve the mental and physical quality of the human race. 5 As a result of their partnership with the eugenics movement, the Better Baby Contests eventually became Families for Future Firesides competitions. The AES used the contests to disseminate practical and scientific information on genetic health, draw attention to eugenics, and promote eugenics research. These contests, along with sermon contests and traveling exhibits, became powerful tools for eugenicists to promote reforms involving the family and reproduction and provided an opportunity to collect detailed family information that could be used for research. At most contests, competitors submitted an Abridged Record of Family Traits that was scanned for patterns of presumed inheritance. 6 Favorable capabilities included [being] generous, self-sacrificing, having strong family ties, and being a successful parent. Negative traits, or temperamental stigmata as they were called, included being selfish, jealous, suspicious, high tempered, and cruel. Also, a team of medical doctors performed time-consuming evaluations of social, educational, occupational, dental, psychological, psychiatric, racial, and medical histories. Each family member was given an overall letter grade of eugenic health, and the family with the highest grade average was awarded a silver trophy. Trophies were typically awarded in three family categories: small (1 child), medium (2-4 children), and large (5 or more children). Childless couples were eligible for prizes in contests held in some states. 7 All contestants with a B+ or better received bronze medals bearing the inscription, Yea, I have a goodly heritage, 8 and most winners were White with Western and Northern European heritage. APS Images of the Eugenics Health Exhibits The American Philosophical Society (APS) has a collection of scrapbooks maintained by the American Eugenics Society that contains 83 images of the Eugenic Health Exhibits at the 1925 Kansas, Michigan, Texas, and Pennsylvania State Fairs. …

Eugenics from the New Deal to the Great Society: genetics, demography and population quality

The relationship between biological and social scientists as regards the study of human traits and behavior has often been perceived in terms of mutual distrust, even antipathy. In the interwar period, population study seemed an area that might allow for closer relations between them—united as they were by a concern to improve the eugenic quality of populations. Yet these relations were in tension: by the early post-war era, social demographers were denigrating the contributions of biologists to the study of population problems as embodying the elitist ideology of eugenics. In response to this loss of credibility, the eugenics movement pursued a simultaneous program of withdrawal and expansion: its leaders helped focus concern with biological quality onto the developing field of medical genetics, while at the same moment, extended their scope to improving the social quality of populations through birth control policies, guided by demography. While this approach maintained boundaries between the social and the biological, in the 1960s, a revitalized American Eugenics Society helped reunite leading demographers and geneticists. This paper will assess the reasons for this period of influence for eugenics, and explore its implications for the social and biological study of human populations.

Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom (review)

Reviewed by: Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom Garland E. Allen Wendy Kline . Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001. xv + 218 pp. Ill. $35.00, £24.95 (0-520-22502-3). Wendy Kline has added an important perspective to the growing literature on eugenics, especially in the United States. Building a Better Race addresses the issues of race and gender in the eugenics movement of the period 1910-50, and that movement's influence on the postwar generations up through the turn of the millennium. Kline portrays the development of genetics in terms of the new sexuality and morality of the early decades of the twentieth century, and ties these changes into the larger perspective of the perceived "degeneration" of society. Eugenics, as she sees it, gained its popularity by addressing both the problem of race (in its broad sense, as "human race") and the change in women's position within society, especially with regard to their role as reproductive agents and mothers. The solution to the prospect of improper motherhood was sterilization, so Kline concentrates her study on California, where the largest percentages of eugenical sterilizations in the United States took place (over half by 1935). She raises a number of interesting questions, and provides new information about institutions such as the Sonoma State Hospital and Paul Popenoe and Roswell Johnson's Human Betterment Foundation. The first chapter, "Motherhood, Morality, and the Moron," charts the development of corporate capitalism, progressivism, the sexual revolution of the immediate pre- and post-World War I era (the "roaring twenties"), and the growing concern over "race suicide" (E. A. Ross's term popularized by Theodore Roosevelt) stemming from the unwillingness of many educated young women to take on the traditional roles of housewife and mother. Eugenics stood to correct these issues by identifying the "girl problem"—that is, women who, because of the shift in moral standards, were unfit to be good mothers and should be sterilized. This [End Page 153] early emphasis on negative eugenics was seen as fulfilling the American Eugenics Society's dictum that "Eugenics stands against the forces which work for racial deterioration" (p. 30). Sterilization was promoted by avoiding its older negative connotations of invasive surgery that "unsexed" the individual. Unearthing the testimonies of many families and patients who had actually sought sterilization for themselves or relatives, Kline poignantly illustrates the degree to which many women had internalized their own sense of defect and lack of ability to bring forth a "normal" child, or in many cases to care for it properly even if the child itself were not disabled. She helps to show that sterilization was not viewed as a universal instrument of oppression, as is so often stated, or at least implied, in existing histories of eugenical sterilization (including some of my own writing). A later chapter deals with the effect of the depression of 1929-33 on the incidence of sterilization and on the eugenics movement as a whole. Kline points out that even though historians have claimed that the eugenics movement was on the decline by the early 1930s, the sterilization rate in California more than tripled in the period 1931-39, compared to 1920-29. She argues, however, that by the 1930s eugenics was taking a different approach, emphasizing "euthenics" (improvement of the environment) and placing more of its focus on individual rather than on group (racial or class) differences (what other historians have called "reform eugenics"). The shift also included an increased concern about the ability of certain women to be good mothers, whether or not they were "genetically" defective. As Kline shows, eugenics was becoming much more pluralistic by the 1930s, and sterilization could be promoted for a variety of social ends that did not require a genetic basis. In an epilogue, the author discusses the continuation of the pluralistic 1930s eugenic outlook reflected in the current work of David Popenoe (son of Paul Popenoe of the Human Betterment Foundation) and his conservative Council on Families in America...

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.

"Hopelessly entangled in Nordic pre-suppositions": Catholic participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s.

While American Catholics stand out as some of the few voices of cultural opposition to the eugenics movement in the United States, Catholics and eugenicists actively engaged in conversational exchanges during the late 1920s. In association with the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen of the American Eugenics Society, John A. Ryan and John Montgomery Cooper engaged in a process that Sander Gilman and Nancy Leys Stepan call "recontextualization," whereby they challenged the social and scientific basis for eugenics policy initiatives while constantly urging American eugenicists to rid their movement of racial and class prejudice. In the process, they participated in a revealing debate on immigration restriction, charity, racial hierarchies, feminism, birth control, and sterilization that points to both the instances of convergence and divergence of Catholic and eugenic visions for the national community.

"Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Pre-suppositions": Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s

"Hopelessly Entangled in Nordic Pre-suppositions": Catholic Participation in the American Eugenics Society in the 1920s

Disease, Deformity, and Defiance: Writing the Language of Immigration Law and the Eugenics Movement on the Immigrant Body

[T]he following classes shall be excluded from admission to the United States ... All idiots, insane persons, epileptics, and persons who have been insane within five years previously; paupers; persons likely to become a public charge; professional beggars; persons afflicted with a loathsome or with a dangerous contagious disease; persons who have been convicted of a felony or other crime or misdemeanor involving moral turpitude. --32 Stat. 1214, sec. 2 of 1903 US Statutes at Large Immigration should first of all be considered a long-time investment in family stocks. --American Eugenics Society (quoted in Kevles 95) The process of migration, acculturation, and naturalization for immigrants to the United States is, under the best of circumstances, traumatic. Their bodies, as repositories of their cultures, serve as microcosms of the homelands they have left behind. As they change and Americanize, they are in a sense destroying these homelands. Although immigrant aid societies, immigrant churches, and ethnic communities have traditionally done their part in smoothing immigrants' transition to the US, their efforts have often been undermined by the attitudes of the country's dominant group and by the tenor of its immigration laws. The restrictive language of US immigration law has from its first appearance been surprisingly vivid, often bearing close structural and rhetorical resemblance to the nativist utterances of contemporaneous American writers and thinkers. Both sources bristle with emotionally loaded catalogues of negative attributes describing the immigrant body. It seems likely, therefore, that the language and the sentiment of the immigration statutes were fed by nativist rhetoric, and that these statutes, in turn, helped legitimate and perpetuate such prejudices. Immigrant authors, in response, have written in both their fiction and their memoirs about how this language has affected the ways that they have imagined themselves as embodied individuals. The interplay between laws and nativism, and the literary responses triggered by both, is complex and wide-ranging, manifest in many immigrant groups over more than a hundred years of US history. I will limit my inquiry here to the immigration statutes enacted between 1891 and 1924 and to the role that the burgeoning eugenics movement in the United States played in the production of those laws. The stories written by Anzia Yezierska and Mary Gordon that take place during this same period will provide examples of literary responses. Although Yezierska is an immigrant and Gordon a third-generation American writing about her grandmother's generation, both appear preoccupied with the effects of nativist sentiment on the immigrant body. In this article I argue that the regulation and repression of immigrants' behavior in their new land and their discomfort with their embodied selves is an important strain in their literature, one that is closely linked to the official language of the law and the unofficial language of the dominant group. Anxiety over American immigration during the second half of the nineteenth century was triggered less by the oddness of those who were entering the country than by their number. The Jews and the Irish--the two groups whose literature I am using as examples--were in evidence in the country from its earliest days, but as long as their numbers were few, they did not seem menacing. Indeed, between 1769 and 1875 the country had an open-door immigration policy. There were no restriction clauses in US immigration laws until 1875 because of the country's desperate need for settlers and workers. As the Jews and the Irish, as well as many other immigrant groups, became more noticeable, however, the country's dominant group, Protestants whose ancestors came from northern Europe, began to seek reasons for exclusion. They found fertile ground in the pseudo-science of eugenics. Both the term eugenics, from the Greek meaning well born, and the movement itself began in England in 1883 with Francis Galton, a statistician and cousin of Charles Darwin. …

Eugenics in Ireland: the Belfast Eugenics Society, 1911–15

In 1927 a classic textbook of human genetics made the following remark: We are coming to recognise more and more clearly that racial factors and especially hereditary mental factors, although they work (it cannot be too often repeated) in conjunction with other factors, are among the most influential in determining the course of a nation’s history . . . What historians regard as degeneration, sickness and ageing of a nation, what they look on as the decline of a nation are the outcome of the racial constituents of the people concerned.This view was typical of a large constituency of opinion-formers, policy-makers and scientists in the period from the late nineteenth until the middle of the twentieth century. Anxiety about the social effects of bad heredity led to the formation of eugenics societies in a considerable number of countries. These included the Eugenics Education Society of London in 1907, the German Society for Race Hygiene in 1905, the American Eugenics Society in 1912, and, in the same year, the French Eugenics Society. By the 1920s eugenics societies could be found in the Soviet Union (a legacy from Tsarist times), Mexico, Scandinavia, Brazil, Japan, and many other countries.

History of the American Eugenics Society.

History of the American Eugenics Society.

A new name society for the study of social biology (Formerly the American eugenics society)

A new name society for the study of social biology (Formerly the American eugenics society)

Annual Business Meeting of the American Eugenics Society

Annual Business Meeting of the American Eugenics Society

Annual Meeting of the American Eugenics Society

Annual Meeting of the American Eugenics Society

Minutes of the 1967 annual meeting of the American eugenics society

Minutes of the 1967 annual meeting of the American eugenics society