Abstract
By the 1950s, eugenics had lost its scientific status; it now belonged to the context rather than to the content of science. Interest in the subject was also at low ebb. But that situation would soon change dramatically. Indeed, in an essay-review published in 1993, Philip Pauly commented that a “eugenics industry” had come to rival the “Darwin industry” in importance, although the former seemed less integrated than the latter. Since then, the pace of publication on eugenics, including American eugenics, has only accelerated, while the field has become even more fractured, moving in multiple and even contradictory directions. This essay explores the trajectory of work on the history of American eugenics since interest in the subject revived in the 1960s, noting trends and also fractures. The latter are seen to result partly from the fact that professional historians no longer own the subject, which has attracted the interest of scholars in several other disciplines as well as scientists, political activists, and journalists, and also from the fact that the history of eugenics has almost always been policy-oriented. Historians’ desire to be policy-relevant and at the same time attentive to context, complexity, and contingency has generated tensions at several levels: within individuals, among historians, and between professional historians and others who also engage with the history of eugenics. That these tensions are resolved differently by different authors and even by the same authors at different times helps explain why the fragmentation that Pauly noted is not likely to be overcome anytime soon.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Allen, Garland E. 1970. “Science and Society in the Eugenic Thought of H.J. Muller.” BioScience 20(6): 346–353.
Allen, Garland E. 1975a. Life Science in the Twentieth Century. New York: Wiley.
Allen, Garland E. 1975b. “Genetics, Eugenics, and Class Struggle.” Genetics 79(Suppl): 29–45.
Allen, Garland E. 1976. “Genetics, Eugenics and Society: Internalists and Externalists in Contemporary History of Science.” Social Studies of Science 6: 105–122.
Allen, Garland E. 1991. “Old Wine in New Bottles: From Eugenics to Population Control in the Work of Raymond Pearl.” Keith R. Benson, Jane Maienschein, and Ronald Rainger (eds.), The Expansion of American Biology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pp. 231–256.
Allen, Garland E. 2013. “Culling the Herd: Eugenics and the Conservation Movement in the United States, 1900–1940.” Journal of the History of Biology 46(1): 31–72.
Bajema, Carl J. (ed.). 1976. Eugenics Then and Now. Stroudsburg, PA: Dowden, Hutchinson and Ross.
Bashford, Alison. 2010. “Epilogue: Where Did Eugenics Go?” Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 539–558.
Bashford, Alison and Levine, Philippa (eds.). 2010. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bix, Amy Sue. 1997. “Experiences and Voices of Eugenics Field-Workers: ‘Women’s Work’ in Biology.” Social Studies of Science 27(4): 625–668.
Black, Edwin. 2003a. The War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows.
Black, Edwin. 2003b. Eugenics and the Nazis – The California Connection. SFGate. http:// www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Eugenics-and-the-Nazis-the-California-2549771.php.
Brandt, Allan M. 2004. “From Analysis to Advocacy: Crossing Boundaries as a Historian of Health Policy.” Frank Huisman and John Harley (eds.), Locating Medical History: The Stories and their Meanings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 460–484.
Braslow, Joel T. 1996. “In the name of therapeutics: the practice of sterilization in a California state hospital.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 51: 29–51.
Brechin, Gray. 1996. “Conserving the Race: Natural Aristocracies, Eugenics and the U.S. Conservation Movement.” Antipode 28: 229–245.
Briggs, Laura. 2003. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science and US Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Bruinius, Harry. 2006. Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Carey, Jane. 2012. “The Racial Imperatives of Sex: Birth Control and Eugenics in Britain, the United States and Australia in the Interwar Years.” Women’s History Review 21(5): 731–752.
Carlson, Elof Axel. 2001. The Unfit: The History of a Bad Idea. New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.
Chase, Allan. 1977. The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism. New York: Knopf.
Coates, Patricia Walsh. 2008. Margaret Sanger and the Origin of the Birth Control Movement, 1910-1930: The Concept of Female Sexual Autonomy. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press.
Cogdell, Christina. 2004. America by Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Cohen, Adam. 2016. Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck. New York: Penguin Press.
Comfort, Nathaniel. 2013. The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Cooke, Kathy J. 1998. “The Limits of Heredity: Nature and Nurture in American Eugenics Before 1915.” Journal of the History of Biology 31(2): 263–278.
Cravens, Hamilton. 1978. The Triumph of Evolution: American Scientists and the Heredity-Environment Controversy, 1900–1941. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Currell, Susan and Cogdell, Christina (eds.). 2006. Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Dorey, Annette K. Vance. 1999. Better Baby Contests: The Scientific Quest for Perfect Childhood Health in the Early Twentieth Century. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co.
Dorr, Gregory Michael. 2008. Segregation’s Science: Eugenics and Society in Virginia. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.
Dorr, Gregory Michael and Logan, Angela. 2011. “Quality, not mere Quantity, Counts: Black Eugenics and the NAACP Baby Contests.” Paul A. Lombardo (ed.), A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 68–92.
Dowbiggin, Ian. 1997. Keeping American Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880–1940. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Dowbiggin, Ian. 2002. “A Rational Coalition: Euthanasia, Eugenics, and Birth Control in America, 1940–1970.” Journal of Policy History 14(3): 223–260.
Dowbiggin, Ian. 2014. The Search for Domestic Bliss: Marriage and Family Counseling in 20th-century America. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press.
Dyck, Erica. 2013. Facing Eugenics: Reproduction, Sterilization, and the Politics of Choice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
English, Daylanne K. 2004. Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Engs, Ruth Clifford. 2014. “Eugenics, Immigration Restriction, and the Birth Control Movements.” Katherine A.S. Sibley (ed.), A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover. Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 313–337.
Farmer, Ann. 2008. By their Fruits: Eugenics, Population Control, and the Abortion Campaign. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
Franks, Angela. 2005. Margaret Sanger’s Eugenic Legacy: The Control of Female Fertility. Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co.
Gausemier, Bernd, Müller-Wille, Staffan, and Ramsden, Edmunc (eds.). 2013. Human Heredity in the Twentieth Century. London: Pickering and Chatto.
Goddard, Henry H. 1912. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness. New York: Macmillan.
Gordon, Linda. 1974. “The Politics of Population: Birth Control and the Eugenics Movement.” Radical America 8(4): 61–98.
Gould, Stephen Jay. 1974. “Essay Review: On Biological and Social Determinism: Genetics and American Society.” History of Science 12(3): 212–220.
Graves, Joseph L. 2003. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Haller, Mark H. 1984 [1963]. Eugenics: Hereditarian Ideas in American Thought. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hart, Bradley W. 2012. “Watching the ‘Eugenic Experiment’ Unfold: The Mixed Views of British Eugenicists Toward Nazi Germany in the Early 1930s.” Journal of the History of Biology 45: 33–63.
Hansen, Randall and King, Desmond. 2013. Sterilized by the State: Eugenics, Race, and the Population Scare in Twentieth-Century North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hasian, Marouf Arif. 1996. The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.
Herrnstein, Richard J. 1971. “I.Q.” Atlantic 228(3): 43–64.
Herrnstein, Richard J. 1973. I.Q. in the Meritocracy. Boston: Little Brown.
Higham, John. 1955. Strangers in the Land. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Hofstadter, Richard. 1944. Social Darwinism in American Thought. Boston: Beacon Press.
Jensen, Arthur. 1969. “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?’ Harvard Educational Review 39(1): 1–123.
Kevles, Daniel J. 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kline, Wendy. 2001. Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kline, Wendy. 2010. “Eugenics in the United States.” Alison Bashford and Philippa Levine (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics. Oxford:Oxford University Press, pp. 511–522.
Kluchin, Rebecca M. 2009. Fit to be Tied: Sterilization and Reproductive Rights in America, 1950–1980. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 1997. “Saving Babies and Sterilizing Mothers: Eugenics and Welfare Politics in the Interwar United States.” Social Politics 4(1): 136–153.
Ladd-Taylor, Molly. 2001. “Eugenics, Sterilisation and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe.” Gender & History 13: 298–327.
Largent, Mark A. 2008. Breeding Contempt: The History of Coerced Sterilization in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Largent, Mark A. 2014. “On Daniel J. Kevles’s In the Name of Eugenics.” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 44(5): 514–520.
Larson, Edward J. 1995. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Leon, Sharon M. 2013. An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lombardo, Paul A. 2008. Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v Bell. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Lombardo, Paul A. (ed.). 2011. A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Lombardo, Paul A. and Dorr, Gregory M. 2006. “Eugenics, Medical Education, and the Public Health Service: Another Perspective on the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 80(2): 291–316.
Lovett, Laura L. 2007. Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Ludmerer, Kenneth M. 1969. “American geneticists and the eugenics movement: 1905–1935.” Journal of the History of Biology 2(2): 337–362.
Ludmerer, Kenneth M. 1972. Genetics and American Society: A Historical Appraisal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
MacKenzie, Donald A. 1976. “Eugenics in Britain.” Social Studies of Science 6(3/4): 499–532.
MacKenzie, Donald A. 1978. “Statistical Theory and Social Interests: A Case Study.” Social Studies of Science 8(1): 35–83.
MacKenzie, Donald A. 1981. Statistics in Britain, 1865–1930: The Social Construction of a Scientific Debate. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press.
Magnello, M. Eileen. 2009. “Karl Pearson and the Establishment of Mathematical Statistics.” International Statistical Review 77: 3–29.
Mazumdar, Pauline M.H. 1991. Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources, and Its Critics in Britain. London and New York: Routledge.
Mazumdar, Pauline M.H. 1996. “Two Models for Human Genetics: Blood Grouping and Psychiatry in Germany between the World Wars.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 70(4): 609–657.
Mitchell, Michelle. 2004. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny after Reconstruction. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Morton, Newton E. 1999. “Genetic Aspects of Population Policy.” Clinical Genetics 56: 105–109.
Nourse, Victoria F. 2008. In Reckless Hands: Skinner v. Oklahoma and the Near-Triumph of American Eugenics. New York: W.W. Norton.
Ordover, Nancy. 2003. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Osborn, Frederick. 1973. “The Emergence of a Valid Eugenics.” American Scientist 61: 425–429.
Osborn, Frederick. 1974. “History of the American Eugenics Society.” Social Biology 21(2): 115–126.
Paul, Diane B. 1995. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. New York: Humanity.
Paul, Diane B. 1997. “From Eugenics to Medical Genetics.” Journal of Policy History 9: 96–116. Reprinted in Paul, Diane B. 1998. The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature–Nurture Debate. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 133–156.
Paul, Diane B. 2002. “From Reproductive Responsibility to Reproductive Autonomy.” Lisa S. Parker and Rachel A. Ankeny (eds.), Mutating Concepts, Evolving Disciplines: Genetics, Medicine, and Society. Dordrecht: Kluwer, pp. 87–105.
Paul, Diane B. 2014. “What was Wrong with Eugenics? Conflicting Narratives and Disputed Interpretations.” Science & Education 23: 259–271.
Paul, Diane B. and Spencer, Hamish G. 2001. “Did Eugenics Rest on an Elementary Mistake?’ Rama S. Singh, et al. (eds.), Thinking About Evolution: Historical, Philosophical, and Political Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 103–118.
Pauly, Philip J. 1993. “The Eugenics Industry: Growth or Restructuring?’ Journal of the History of Biology 25(1): 131–145.
Pernick, Martin S. 1996. The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pernick, Martin S. 1997. “Eugenics and Public Health in American History.” American Journal of Public Health 87(11): 1767–1772.
Pickens, Donald K. 1968. Eugenics and the Progressives. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press.
Porter, Theodore M. 2004. Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Publishers Weekly. 2005. http://publishersweekly.com/978-0-375-41371-1. Reviewed 28 November. Accessed 17 August 2015.
Ramsden, Edmund. 2003. “Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States.” Population and Development Review 29: 547–593.
Reilly, Philip R. 1991. The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Robertson, Thomas. 2012. The Malthusian Moment: Global Population Growth and the Birth of American Environmentalism. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Rome, Adam. 2008. “Nature Wars, Culture Wars: Immigration and Environmental Reform in the Progressive Era.” Environmental History 13(3): 432–453.
Rosen, Christine. 2004. Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1974. “The Bitter Fruit: Heredity, Disease and Social Thought in Nineteenth-Century America.” Perspectives in American History 8: 189–235.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 1976. “Charles Benedict Davenport and the Irony of American Eugenics.” No Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,, pp. 89–97.
Rosenberg, Charles E. 2007. “Anticipated Consequences: Historians, History, and Health Policy.” Our Present Complaint: American Medicine, Then and Now. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 185–205.
Schrag, Peter. 2010. Not Fit for Our Society: Nativism and Immigration. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Schoen, Johanna. 2005. Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
Schoen, Johanna. 2011. “Reassessing Eugenic Sterilization: The Case of North Carolina.” Paul A. Lombardo (ed.), A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, pp. 141–160.
Selden, Steven. 1999. Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. New York: Teachers College Press.
Shapiro, Adam R. 2015. “Review of Sharon M. Leon, An Image of God (2013).” Journal of the History of Medicine 70: 229–231.
Spencer, Hamish G. and Paul, Diane B. 1998. “The Failure of a Scientific Critique: David Heron, Karl Pearson and Mendelian Eugenics.” British Journal for the History of Science 31: 441–452.
Spiro, Jonathan P. 2009. Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant. Burlington, VT: University of Vermont Press.
Stanton, William Ragan. 1960. The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2002. “Making better babies: Public health and race betterment in Indiana, 1920–1935.” American Journal of Public Health 92(5): 742–752.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2005a. Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2005b. “Sterilized in the Name of Public Health: Race, Immigration, and Reproductive Control in California.” American Journal of Public Health 95(7): 1128–1138.
Stern, Alexandra Minna. 2012. Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tennis, Joseph T. 2012. “The Strange Case of Eugenics: A Subject’s Ontogeny in a Long-Lived Classification Scheme␣and the Question of Collocative Integrity.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(7): 1350–1359.
WGBH. 1998. A Scientific Odyssey – People and Discoveries: Discoveries. 1923. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/databank/entries/dh23eu.html. Accessed 17 August 2015.
Wellerstein, Alex. 2011. “States of Eugenics: Institutions and the Practices of Compulsory Sterilization in California.” Sheila Jasanoff (ed.), Reframing Rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the Genetic Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 29–58.
Wexler, Alice. 2008. The Woman who Walked into the Sea: Huntington’s and the Making of a Genetic Disease. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Wilson, Philip K. 2006. “Confronting ‘Hereditary’ Disease: Eugenic Attempts to Eliminate Tuberculosis in Progressive Era America.” Journal of Medical Humanities 27(1): 19–37.
Wolff, Tamsen. 2009. Mendel’s Theatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth-Century American Drama. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Paul, D.B. Reflections on the Historiography of American Eugenics: Trends, Fractures, Tensions. J Hist Biol 49, 641–658 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-016-9442-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10739-016-9442-y