Eugenics In America Research Articles

Privatizing procreative liberty in the shadow of eugenics.

The late John Robertson is renowned for the theory of ‘procreative liberty’ that he expounded in his pioneering book, Children of Choice. Procreative liberty captures the ‘freedom to reproduce without sex’ above and beyond the ‘freedom to have sex without reproduction’ that are recognized by constitutional rights to abortion and birth control. Most controversial among Robertson's work on procreative liberty was its application to prenatal selection. Unless the state had very good reasons, he argued, people should be free to access reproductive medicine or technology to have a child who or would be born with particular traits. Prospective parents in the USA today face no official limits in using sperm banks, egg vendors, IVF clinics, or surrogacy agencies with an eye toward choosing for certain characteristics. But should they be protected, this essay asks, when mix-ups or misdiagnoses thwart the selection of offspring traits? The best answer to this question extends the theory of procreative liberty from government restrictions to professional negligence. It also demands sensitivity to genetic uncertainty, the limits of private law, and the history of eugenics in America. Or so I argue in this tribute to the inimitable John Robertson.

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

Nothing Natural: Social Darwinism, scientific racism and eugenics in America

Nothing Natural: Social Darwinism, scientific racism and eugenics in America

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

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

A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (review)

A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (review)

A Century of eugenics in America: from the Indiana Experiment to the human genome era

Contents Preface and Acknowledgments Introduction: Looking Back at Eugenics / Paul A. Lombardo Part 1. The Indiana Origins of Eugenic Sterilization 1. The Hoosier Connection: Compulsory Sterilization as Moral Hygiene / Elof Axel Carlson 2. The Indiana Way of Eugenics: Sterilization Laws, 1907-74 / Jason S. Lantzer Part 2. Eugenics and Popular Culture 3. From Better Babies to the Bunglers: Eugenics on Tobacco Road / Paul A. Lombardo 4. Quality, Not Mere Quantity, Counts: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests / Gregory Michael Dorr and Angela Logan Part 3. State Studies of Eugenic Sterilization 5. From Legislation to Lived Experience: Eugenic Sterilization in California and Indiana, 1907-79 / Alexandra Minna Stern 6. Eugenics and Social Welfare in New Deal Minnesota / Molly Ladd-Taylor 7. Reassessing Eugenic Sterilization: The Case of North Carolina / Johanna Schoen 8. Protection or Control? Women's Health, Sterilization Abuse, and Relf v. Weinberger / Gregory Michael Dorr Part 4. Eugenics in the Human Genome Era 9. Are We Entering a Perfect Storm for a Resurgence of Eugenics? Science, Medicine, and Their Social Context / Linda L. McCabe and Edward R. B. McCabe 10. Modern Eugenics and the Law / Maxwell J. Mehlman List of Contributors Index

Paul A. Lombardo , editor. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era . (Bioethics and the Humanities.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2011. Pp. xi, 251. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95.

Journal Article Paul A. Lombardo, editor. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. (Bioethics and the Humanities.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2011. Pp. xi, 251. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95 Get access Paul A. Lombardo, editor. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. (Bioethics and the Humanities.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 2011. Pp. xi, 251. Cloth $70.00, paper $24.95. The American Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 3, June 2011, Page 918, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr.116.3.918 Published: 01 June 2011

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.

“Six Blacks from Home”: Childhood, Motherhood, and Eugenics in America

In August 1919, a settlement house worker in Columbus, Ohio, filed a complaint in juvenile court against a seven-year-old girl whom I will call “Marie.” The complaint read, “Marie runs the streets continually. She is very irregular in her attendance at school, and is as dirty as a pig. She has been found in a lumber yard with a negro, and it was alleged by her associates that he raped her there. She goes into stores and begs.” According to the surviving records, Marie's “truancies from home” alerted settlement workers to the case. As a young child she reportedly began staying out late at night and loitering in the company of men and boys, and was threatened with being put out of the house when she was found alone with the African American man. By 1928, after Marie became an unwed mother at the age of sixteen, and had spent nine years in and out of child welfare institutions, a summary report contained the interesting typographical error that Marie's young life had strayed a distance of “six blacks from home.” As incidental as slipping “blocks” into “blacks” may have been in one sense, it captured a powerful truth. Marie violated key boundaries of sexual, gender, and racial purity that made a woman a candidate for respectable motherhood, and she paid dearly for these transgressions.

Eugenics and Historical Memory in America

How is the history of eugenics in America remembered, and forgotten? In this article, I explore the recent gubernatorial apologies for forced sterilizations, which were carried out under the authority of state eugenics laws from 1907 until the 1970s. I situate the apologies in the global context of movements for reparations and restitution, examine the discursive architecture of apologies that seek to address the contravention of medical ethics and trust, and suggest that the apologies have the potential to elide important aspects of the history of eugenics in America.

Building a better race: gender, sexuality, and eugenics from the turn of the century to the baby boom

List of Illustrations Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Motherhood, Morality, and the Moron: The Emergence of Eugenics in America 2. From Segregation to Sterilization: Changing Approaches to the Problem of Female Sexuality 3. without Unsexing: Eugenics and the Politics of Reproduction 4. A New Deal for the Child: Ann Cooper Hewitt and Sterilization in the 1930s 5. Marriage Is Not Complete without Children: Positive Eugenics, 1930-1960 Epilogue: Building a Better Family Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Breeding Better Vermonters: The Eugenics Project in the Green Mountain State.

Eugenics -- the study of human racial progress through selective breeding -- frequently invokes images of social engineering, virulent racism, immigrant persecution, and Nazi genocide, but Vermont's little known adventure in eugenics shows the inherent adaptability of eugenics theory and methods to parochial social justice. Beginning with genealogies of Vermont's rural poor in the 1920s, and concluding in the 1930s with an expose of ethnic prejudice in Vermont's largest city, this story of the Eugenics Survey of Vermont explores the scope, limits, and changing interpretations of eugenics in America and offers a new approach to the history of progressive politics and social reform in New England. Inspired and directed by Zoology Professor Henry F. Perkins, the survey, through social research, political agitation, and education campaigns, infused eugenic agendas into progressive programs for child welfare, mental health, and rural community development. Breeding Better Vermonters examines social, ethnic, and religious tensions and reveals how population studies, theories of human heredity, and a rhetoric of altruism became subtle, yet powerful tools of social control and exclusion in a state whose motto was freedom and unity.

Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South

The visibility of contemporary research in genetics has revived interest in the history of the eugenics movement. Edward J. Larson, inSex, Race, and Science, focuses on eugenics in America's Deep South. The eugenic reforms during the early part of the century followed advances in biology indicating that human heredity could be manipulated through selected breeding. But reforms were mainly driven by social forces: concerns about purifying the Caucasian race and restricting the propagation of those deemed eugenically unfit and responsible for social problems. The movement, championed by a professional elite and based on the authority of science, advocated reforms through eugenic marriage restrictions and compulsory sterilization. control of human reproduction as a solution to pressing economic and social problems and a means of controlling the future. Analyzing eugenic reforms in the context of state policies, Larson's detailed and interesting study suggests that the movement did not necessarily follow the

The Social Adjustment of the Feeble-minded. A Group-Thesis Study of 898 Feeble-Minded Individuals Known to Cleveland Social Agencies, Made by Students in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Western Reserve University.Helen M. Walker , Mary C. Schauffler

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsThe Social Adjustment of the Feeble-minded. A Group-Thesis Study of 898 Feeble-Minded Individuals Known to Cleveland Social Agencies, Made by Students in the School of Applied Social Sciences, Western Reserve University. Helen M. Walker , Mary C. Schauffler PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 36, Number 4Jan., 1931 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/215528 Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Patrick J. Ryan “Six Blacks from Home”: Childhood, Motherhood, and Eugenics in America, Journal of Policy History 19, no.33 (Apr 2009): 253–281.https://doi.org/10.1353/jph.2007.0017