Eugenic Theory Research Articles

‘Making lovely nonsense out of everything’: individuated receptions of eugenic theories of cognitive disability

This project examines the rhetorical strategies that parents of children with cognitive disabilities use in appeals to medical authority. A close reading of four sets of letters from the Henry Herbert Goddard Papers reveals that parents were often sophisticated rhetorical agents who internalized, critiqued, and reappropriated eugenic theories and ideas. This archival project explores sites of eugenic thought’s reception, which are often overshadowed by scholarly attention to sites of production and dissemination. In an effort to increase attention to sites of reception, I outline a framework that invites future research to consider how recipients of theories of cognitive disability position themselves within professional networks of expertise in order to make claims from what might appear to be a subordinate position.

Ernst Rüdin and the State of Science

Ernst Rüdin and the State of Science

Being Cellular

Taking suggestion from the case of Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cells, this essay is profoundly interested in the possibilities for new, and alternative, forms of life and being. What forms of sociality and the communal are available for us if we estrange ourselves from the life of our species? And how might these practices of estrangement—queering—actually allow for a new ethical landscape? The essay explores the politics of science in relation to race and sex in historical context. Fantasies about the plasticity of life in speculative thought must consider the histories of social and scientific racism and eugenics. The essay considers two scientific speculators, H. G. Wells and Julian Huxley, whose works demonstrate risks that we must be mindful of in embracing an ontology of life. There are ramifications of self-directed scientific modification of the biological, as Wells's and Huxley's ideas include advanced ideas of the plasticity of life but also the theory and practice of eugenics. The essay still argues for the importance of the utopian, of dreams that reach to new paradigms, that search out the ineffable moments of life that confound us.

The Cult of Quality: White Eugenics and Black Responses in the United States, 1900-1934

This paper focuses on the theory of eugenics and how it was adopted and subverted by black intellectual figures when institutionalized sterilizations were based upon class. The cornerstone of the eugenics theory was based in biological determinism and assumptions of genetic heritability. For black leaders, W.E.B. Du Bois in particular, the early plight for racial legitimacy rested on eugenics and, while morally questionable, strengthening the black community was an attempt to counteract white assumptions. Thus,‘black eugenics’ should not immediately be condemned as an outright failure but should be regarded as an earnest attempt for civil rights. As such, it should not be forgotten and should be recognized as part of the broader framework for African American liberation.

Petre Tomescu and His Early Studies in Catatonic Schizophrenia

Petre Tomescu (born 1890, died 1972) was a professor of Psychiatry, and Dean of the Faculty of Medicine from Bucharest. He was one of the first psychiatrists in Romania to be highly influenced by the hereditary theories of mental pathology and eugenics, proposing a different interpretation and treatment of mental disorders compared to his predecessors. His scientific work included studies in the areas of epilepsy, physiopathology of adrenergic substances, psychotechnic examinations, excretion and metabolism of alcohols, and so on. One of the main areas of study was however the catatonic syndrome. For example, in an article from 1929, Tomescu continued the researchers conducted by Bourgignon and de Jong regarding catatonia induced by Bulbocapnine on animals, by testing it on cats, dogs, chickens, and rabbits. In another study, conducted together with his mentor Al. Obregia, he described a series of particular cases of periodic catatonia, either as an evolutive stage of periodic psychosis, or alternating with manic syndrome. One of his most interesting, however practically unknown results, was proving a positive response in patients with schizophrenic catatonia to Harmine, a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. The purpose of this presentation is to present these forgotten studies, and to emphasise the role Tomescu had in the development of Romanian psychiatry in the Interwar period. Acknowledgment: This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNDI– UEFISCDI, PN-II-RU-TE-2012-3-44

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

"The game is the double game": medical discourse in Tennessee Williams's the Loss of a Teardrop Diamond.

The Loss of a Teardrop Diamond (1957) functions as a searing retort against the American medical model which, for decades, demonized drug and alcohol users by labeling them as “disabled”; medicalized social “deviants”; pathologized sexual preference; and attempted to eradicate physical, psychological, and sexual non-normativity through eugenics. By depicting characters grappling with issues such as substance addiction, homosexuality, and euthanasia, Tennessee Williams not only exposes and challenges the flawed logic of eugenic theory and the fallacies of such medical discourse, but also, in the process, reveals that the provincialism, rigid social norms, and narrow-mindedness of the South—a society of “double games”—in effect paralleled such ideologies and facilitated the construction of non-conformity and non-normativity as medical “pathologies.”

L’experience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture par Serge Zenkine

Reviews 241 production. In three chapters and a coda, she attempts to rehabilitate his reputation as an author of bad books“in both senses of the term”(1). She aims at demonstrating his contributions to modern knowledge of sexology as well as to the place of human sexuality in psychiatry. She shows how fiction influenced science and psychiatric medicine in the late nineteenth century and beyond and how scientific ideas, prompted through Enlightenment thought and perhaps pure genius, found their way into novels. In chapter 1, Wyngaard examines the difficulty in defining the term pornography, literally meaning writing about prostitutes. Censors were even confounded as to what was considered pornographic/obscene and what was not. Interestingly, one of Rétif’s earliest works, Le pornographe (1769) is not pornographic but constructively addresses the regulation of prostitution. She further details how he doggedly tested censorship boundaries with Le paysan perverti (1775) and eventually La paysanne pervertie (1784), its “semiauthorized soft porn” complement (7). Chapter 2 juxtaposes Le pornographe with Rétif’s single truly pornographic work, L’anti-Justine (1798), a response to the literary excesses of his rival, the Marquis de Sade. Modern pornography owes its invention to these two works. Chapter 3 treats the concept of fetishism, another contribution of Rétif, this time to the catalog of deviant sexual behaviors. Rétif had a special predilection for shoes and tiny feet. The final section concerns La découverte australe (1781), a work of science fiction that foretells sexual behavior through theories of eugenics. From a feminine perspective, Rétif’s major achievements were to make vicarious sex available through the framework of the sentimental novel and to demonstrate that women were capable of enjoying sexual pleasure as much as men. They were not portrayed as victims of Sadean brutality or male privilege. Rétif’s illustrator, Louis Binet, attested to this in several of his images displayed throughout the book, including the one on the cover. Thus, Rétif made pornography available to women and helped prepare the way for the twentieth-century “feminist antipornography movement” (66) as well as its counterpart, the advocacy of porn for women as beneficial for their sexual well-being. Wyngaard draws attention to Rétif’s far-sighted view of female sexuality, though, like Sade, he incorporated incest into the pleasure equation. Independent Scholar Ivy Dyckman Zenkine, Serge. L’expérience du relatif: le romantisme français et l’idée de culture. Paris: Garnier, 2011. ISBN 978-2-8124-0256-2. Pp. 244. 37 a. This intriguing book argues that the notion of one’s culture as a contingent construct, one among others of equal or at least comparable status, first emerged in France during the Romantic period. This idea“est intimement liée à une transformation et une redistribution du sacré,” which the author summarizes in the following way: “L’unité substantielle du sacré s’affaiblit pour céder la place à la pluralité des formes; la destruction sacrificielle est refoulée [...] au profit des objets fabriqués, des artefacts matériels s’opposant aux textes abstraits et spirituels”(50). One might think that the Enlightenment had already fulfilled much of this program, but the author argues that the key step toward cultural relativism or pluralism (terms he employs interchangeably, but are they really synonymous?) is not the critique of religion as such. Rather, it is a radicalization of the sacred, which puts it beyond any definitive instantiation or interpretation, thereby allowing its existence to be affirmed on a different basis: “La littérature romantique relativise des institutions et des pratiques traditionnelles qui semblent servir normalement à affirmer le Même, et les remet en perspective de l’Autre absolu” (113). There are echoes here of Paul Bénichou’s work, and the choice of exemplary authors is similar to his: the Saint-Simonians, Nerval, Gautier, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, though with the interesting addition of a chapter on “Politesse et traduction,” which argues that the understanding of civility and of the dynamic of translation in Germaine de Staël and other early Romantic writers prepared the way for the acceptance of cultural relativism. There are some excellent examples of critical insight here, in...

As funções de um cérebro darwinista: Guedes Cabral e o evolucionismo de Funções do cérebro (1876)

The book Funções do cérebro (Workings of the brain), by physician Domingos Guedes Cabral, is recognized as one of the first Brazilian works to defend Darwinist theories. In light of the need for more studies on the reception of evolutionism in Brazil, the article investigates this book in an effort to reveal how Guedes Cabral used evolutionism in his argumentation and to reveal the purpose of his arguments within a historical context. Findings indicate that Guedes Cabral relied on evolutionism as part of both an ideological project and an incipient eugenic theory, later developed in the early twentieth century.

Ingegneria sociale e salute razziale. Le teorie eugenetiche della Progressive Era statunitense

The success of eugenics in the Usa, a nation that prides itself on its tradition ofindividualism and personal freedom, requires an adequate explanation. The aim ofthis article is to show how eugenic theories that flourishedin the late nineteenth andearly twentieth century derived from the technocratic political culture of theProgressive Era. Eugenics, in other words, was part of the projects of socialengineering and social planning that many American progressives consideredessential for the management and betterment of modern industrial society. In thisperspective, leading progressive intellectuals saw eugenics as a genuine branch ofsocial science and eugenic policies as an indispensable tool in the quest for socialcontrol.

ASPHER’s Values, Vision, Mission and Aims: A Working Paper

PREFACEPublic health challenges develop over time and vary across countries. Society changes as do population health threats, and public health systems accordingly attempt to adapt to change. As reflected in ASPHER's activities, public health training programmes must reflect these continuously developing changes in a dynamic way. From time to time all organisations need to revise their mission statements and the ethical context for their activities as part of the process of adaptation to change.Theodore Tulchinsky, together with Christopher Birt, Ramune Kalediene and Andre Meijer, members of the ASPHER Executive Board, prepared this Working Paper. They take a wide perspective and context for ASPHER's mission, addressing the ethics, values, vision and aims of the organisation, including some early targets for its activities.The Executive Board approved this Working Paper, under development for more than a year, as a basis for continuing discussion, so enabling the possibility for members to agree formally upon ASPHER's values, vision, mission and aims. The first opportunity for such discussion will offer itself at the Annual Conference in Valencia at the end of October this year.Suresnes, 2 October 2007Anders FoldspangPresident - ASPHERPREAMBLEThe peoples of Europe have benefited greatly from the startling successes of modern public health of the 19th and 20th centuries, which has brought sanitation, environmental and occupational health, vaccination, control of infectious diseases, safer and healthier foods, healthier mothers and babies, family planning, declining mortality from coronary heart disease and stroke, as well as from motor-vehicle crashes, and recognition of tobacco use as a major health hazard. The result is increased longevity, with improved health standards and quality of life for the peoples of the industrialized countries. But this improvement is far from uniform for all population groups and countries across Europe, with many countries in post-Soviet transition and other poor and developing countries still suffering from low health standards; in many such countries the New Public Health remains a novel and challenging concept.Public health developed on the basis of, and continues to rely upon, a wide spectrum of available social, legislative as well as biomedical and environmental interventions. Health promotion is incorporated within this increasing scope of public health, and it addresses complex public health problems that are largely influenced by social conditions as well as by individual and group knowledge, attitudes, practices, and behaviours. This complex of causation and of intervention approaches applies in prevention and control of HIV, cardiovascular diseases, motor vehicle injury, mental health, threatened pandemics, and terrorism, as well as in communicable diseases and in many other health problems facing individuals, groups and communities. European schools of Public Health, and ASPHER as their association, have a continuing role in promoting new public health policies as dictated by changing epidemiology and as enabled by new technologies.The ethical base of public health in Europe developed in the context of the 19th and early 20th century successes, and was codified following lessons learned from the corruption by dark forces, using eugenics theories to justify the killing hundreds of thousands of helpless individuals, genocide and the Holocaust, with the killing of millions in efficient systems of mass murder. The threats of genocide, ethnic cleansing and terrorism have departed from neither the European nor the world stages, and the utmost degree of vigilance is required to prevent their recurrence. As in the case of war, these constitute grave threats to public health and international human rights. The lessons learned from the 20th century tragedies help us today to address increasingly complex ethical issues in public health, by balancing the rights of the individual with those of the community. …

Domesticating Socialism and the Senses in Jane Hume Clapperton'sMargaret Dunmore: Or, A Socialist Home

Domesticating Socialism and the Senses in Jane Hume Clapperton's Margaret Dunmore: Or, A Socialist HomeClapperton's utopian novel, Margaret Dunmore: Or, A Socialist Home (1888), provides a good example of the way in which matters of everyday life – food, childcare, the home – were increasingly implicated in agendas for social transformation in the fin-de-siècle period, and seen as problems that could be solved by modernity. The varying programmes for change offered by socialists and feminists in this period, however, could reflect sharply divergent views of the pleasures and politics of everyday life, and Clapperton's novel assumes a disparity between ‘social happiness’ and the sensory experience of the individual that warrants examination. Beginning with an overview of Clapperton's theory of ‘conscious’ evolution which takes the home as the locus of social transformation, this essay will focus on the place of the senses and emotions in Margaret Dunmore, written to exemplify Clapperton's political philosophy of ‘Scientific Meliorism’ which combined socialism and feminism with evolutionary and eugenic theory. In this novel, the individual's sensory experience poses a threat to the well-being of the ideal community. Unlike emotions, which Clapperton depicts as amenable to conscious adaptation through a combination of social correction and self-scrutiny, sensory experience is inherently anti-social, immune to the claims of service to others which was crucial to Clapperton's understanding of socialism. From childcare to cooking, forms of sensory deprivation are heralded as the key to efficiently resolving the disorder or conflict caused by over-stimulation or self-indulgence. As a result, despite Clapperton's emphasis on the ‘evolution of happiness’, the value placed on rationality, technology, and self-control over convivial pleasures means that the constrictions and inequities of bourgeois domesticity are merely reconfigured rather than abolished.

The causes of epilepsy: Changing concepts of etiology of epilepsy over the past 150 years

This paper provides a survey of the changing concepts of the etiology of epilepsy from 1860 to 2010, focusing on the first two 50-year periods and outlining more briefly major developments in the past 50 years. Among the concepts reviewed in the first 100 years are: the division between predisposing and exciting causes, idiopathic and genuine epilepsy, organic epilepsy, the concept of "cause" being equivalent to "causal mechanism," Russell Reynolds etiological classification, the neurological taint and theories of degeneration, the self-perpetuating nature of seizures, reflex theories of etiology, autointoxication, heredity and eugenics, epilepsy due to brain disorders, the role of EEG and of hippocampal sclerosis, psychological theories of causation, and the multifactorial view of epilepsy etiology. In the past 50 years, the major advances in studying causation in epilepsy have been: clinical biochemistry, neuroimaging, molecular genetics, studies of mechanisms of epilepsy, better statistical methodologies and classification. A number of general observations can be made: the identification of "cause" is not as simple as it might at first appear; progress in the study of causation has been often erratic and travelled up many cul-de-sacs; theories of causation are heavily influenced by societal influences and fashion, and is also heavily dependent on applied methodologies; the recently explored possibility that the underlying inherited mechanisms of epilepsy are shared with other neuropsychiatric conditions is in effect a reinvention of the concept of the neurological trait, and this has ethical and social implications. Considering and classifying cause in terms of causal mechanism, as was suggested by Hughlings Jackson, is an ultimate goal.

Commentary: What might have been: Sullivan may have impacted modern prenatal alcohol research under different circumstances

often cited as a precursor to modern fetal alcohol re-search, was published at a time when alcoholism wasa topic of great interest in Europe and North America.Emerging theories of heredity, eugenics and temper-ance movements drove alcoholism research from 1860to 1910. In addition to an upsurge of medical litera-ture on alcoholism, a number of journals devoted tothe topic were formed (e.g. Journal of Inebriety).

Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France (review)

Reviewed by: Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France Raymond Watkins Dances with Darwin, 1875–1910: Vernacular Modernity in France. Rae Beth Gordon. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiv + 311. $89.95 (cloth). Rae Beth Gordon’s book fully lives up to its goal of being what Clifford Geertz calls a “thick description,” focusing on Parisian life between 1875 and 1910 and using “journalistic firsthand accounts and the iconography of gesture and movement in drawings, posters, lithographs, and photographs in the music-hall and in film representations” (2). Gordon is a vigilant urban anthropologist, mining an impressive number of the era’s newspapers and journals to provide a ground-level account of la vie quotidienne as experienced in the music halls, cabarets and café-concerts, and reflected by prominent journalists and cultural critics of the fin de siècle. She concentrates on three fields: late nineteenth-century psychological pathology, Darwinian concepts of evolution and fears of animal regression, and colonial views of African and African-American dance hall performers, all to show the way these separate practices create “an amalgam in the popular imagination” (4). Gordon is at her best in teasing out the complex interrelations between these practices, so that her study increasingly feels like a “palimpsest” (130) of cultural influence. One underlying argument, fully developed in Gordon’s previous book, is that the French are particularly drawn to convulsive movement and gesture, witnessed equally in the hysteric at the Salpêtrière as in the epileptic contortions of the café-club performer (19–34).1 In this way, Dances with Darwin trades on spectacular displays of the body in movement, whether through hysteria (chapter 1), degeneration and evolutionary conceptions of “the ugly” (chapter 2), epileptic singers (chapters 1 and 5), or African and African-American dance (chapter 4). Such displays are brought to life through a remarkable collection of illustrations around which particular chapters are structured, including reproductions of period photographs, posters, cartoons, lithographs, and sketches. These images are fascinating by themselves, but also provide evidentiary support for many of the key points of the book. Chapter 4, “Natural Rhythm: Africans and Black Americans in Paris,” is especially [End Page 437] provocative as the figures provide their own narrative progression to show the imbrication of black/white hybridity, minstrelsy, and fears of evolutionary regression. Although the book’s ostensible focus is the influence of Darwin’s thought on the Parisian café-concert and music hall, I found Gordon’s comments on Darwin and evolution less revealing than the emphasis on race and medical pathology in understanding the mechanisms of the café-concert. Perhaps this is partly because Darwin himself was reluctant to separate human kind into distinct races or classifications (65); perhaps it is due to the ambiguity of Darwin’s beliefs in contrast to some views that grew out of his work, including theories of degeneration, social Darwinism, eugenics, and scientific racism (the latter of which Gordon strongly distinguishes from Darwin). Dances with Darwin might therefore be better titled Dances with Darwinism, since Gordon’s multivalent approach to culture seems weakened by focusing on one man, rather than on the constellation of institutions, movements, and thinkers that contributed to the cultural tapestry called “Darwinism,” including ideas cited in the study by Spencer, Haeckel, Nordau, and Lombroso. Dances with Darwin is a rich contribution to studies of the “primitive,” and Gordon’s archival work serves as a useful extension of Sieglinde Lemke’s Primitivist Modernism by showing that the “angularity and fragmentation” (272) that Lemke claims for twentieth century cubism in fact has a much less auspicious start in music hall performance of the nineteenth century.2 In “Natural Rhythm” (chapter 4), Gordon traces the meteoric popularity of the Cake-Walk in Parisian café-concerts, frequently performed by whites who increasingly exaggerated the Afro- American form. What Gordon shows is the extent to which the Cake-Walk’s popularity was tied to the belief that it was initially performed by “primitives”; Parisians were ignorant of the fact that the Cake-Walk “originated on antebellum southern plantations as a parody of the master’s dances” (173). In other words, the Cake-Walk was a satire...

Population Policy and Eugenic Theory: Implications of China's Ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

The Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) is the first new human rights treaty of the 21st century. China was an early supporter of the CRPD and became East Asia's first State Party in 2008. This article discusses how the CRPD protects the rights of persons with disabilities to life, marriage and procreation, and analyses China's population policy, which continues to reflect eugenic theories. As China did not file any reservations, it is now obligated to reform laws and policies that conflict with the CRPD.

Population Policy and Eugenic Theory: Implications of China's Ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Population Policy and Eugenic Theory: Implications of China's Ratification of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities

Medicine, Madness and Writing in La vorágine

This essay explores the ways in which medical discourse regarding mental illness and racial degeneration shapes the portrayal of madness and the act of literary creation in Jose Eustasio Rivera's La voragine (1924). The medical lexicon of neur- asthenia and eugenic theory that is used to depict the protagonist Arturo Cova's mental unravelling also reveals Rivera's concern for his own health and, meta- phorically, for that of the Colombian nation. While insanity leads to Cova's demise in the depths of the jungle and raises doubts about the well-being of the Colombian body politic, it simultaneously serves as a catalyst for literary creation: the lyrical power of the untamed Latin American wilderness can only be evoked by the simi- larly unruly ramblings of a madman. This piece examines Rivera's personal famil- iarity with medical ailments at the turn of the twentieth century and the ways in which he appropriates medical discourse to forge a new way of writing about Latin America. Resumen

La frontera que vino del norte (review)

2009Book Reviews12g Lafrontera que vino del norte. By Carlos González Herrera. (Mexico City: Editorial Taurus/El Colegio de Chihuahua, 2008. Pp. 295, notes, bibliography, index. ISBN 9789705804885, 179 pesos, paper.) The title of Carlos González Herrera's book can be translated as The Frontier that Camefrom the North. His overarching thesis can be summed up as the U.S.Mexico border served as a way for the United States, which was in the process of becoming a nation-empire at the end of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, to define itself, culturally, racially, and hygienically against the Mexican "other." The first chapter examines the historiography of both the frontier and the border in American history, particularly dealing with Frederick Jackson Turner. The second chapter, "the slow construction of the border," examines how the U.S. attitude toward the border developed at the turn of the century, and how this project was aimed first not at Mexicans but at other "undesirable" ethnicities who used Mexico as an entry point into the United States. Other chapters describe the use of the theories of eugenics, the concept of public health, and the construction of a legal apparatus along the border, all with the end of defining the cultural and social boundary of the United States as well as its physical border. The fifth chapter, "the indispensable enemy," details the duality of U.S. immigration policy, alternating between "big economic interests (railroad companies , mines, agribusiness) [and] big ideological-cultural projects (nativist, racist, eugenist)" (120). The last two chapters are particularly noteworthy. Chapter seven, "an Anglo society on the border," analyzes a process what the author calls "the racialization of El Paso" (202). By the beginning of the twentieth century, "the Anglo population in El Paso ceased being a white enclave in the area and became a majority, not only demographically, but also as the masters, almost absolute, of the means of obtaining wealth" (167). Chapter eight examines the impact of the Mexican Revolution on both the Mexican population in El Paso and of the treatment of Mexicans there. Returning to the theme of the medicalization of the border, it makes good use of oral history sources to describe die humiliation of being subjected to "sanitation" while crossing the border. This chapter deals with nationalism born out of the tragic explosion of March 6, 1 9 1 6, at an El Paso jail. As the mainly Mexican inmates were being deloused with gasoline, somebody lit a match and at least two dozen people, mainly Mexican inmates, burned alive. Three days later, Pancho Villa's forces invaded Columbus, New Mexico. Residents of El Paso "saw a cause and effect relationship between the explosion and the attack" that was "read in nationalist terms by both groups" (243). Despite the author's pleas for the centrality of the Mexican border in the construction of U.S. imperial-national identity, the book often depicts El Paso as much more marginal. For example, the reader is informed that "the political establishment in Washington continued to conceive immigration as a phenomenon taking place in the ports of San Francisco and New York," while the Southwest "remained a marginal region peripheral to political and cultural center of the nation" (148). The medicalization and ethnic discrimination aimed at 1 30Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJuly Mexicans, though real, were also directed against various other immigrant groups. And much of the reforms of the Progressive Era were arguably directed against these other ethnic groups. González Herrera does not deny this, but he does not connect the discrimination against Mexican immigrants to the broader trends in the United States as a whole. Overall, this book is interesting and useful, especially considering that it has aimed to tell a particular story (of Mexicans in El Paso) to a particular audience (in Mexico) with the implicit goal of shedding light on the current issues of Mexican migration and the treatment of Mexicans in the United States. At the same time, it is weaker in addressing issues in United States, as well as Mexican, history and historiography. City College ofNew YorkJ. A. Zumoff Growing Up Jim Crow: How Black and White Southern Children Learned Race. By...

Chris Woodhead: a new champion of eugenic theories

Chris Woodhead: a new champion of eugenic theories