Abstract
By investigating the practices and beliefs of Gilded Agetrotting horse breeders, this article demonstrates therelationship between industrial economic development and thegrowth of genetic reasoning in the United States. As mosthistorians of biology already know, E.H. Harriman, LelandStanford, and John D. Rockefeller not only transformed Americanbusiness practice, they donated heavily to institutions thatpromoted eugenic research programs. What is not widely known, however, is that these sameindustrialists were accomplished trotting horsebreeders with well-developed theories ofinheritance. The article that follows usesthese theories to place the rise of eugenic andgenetic research into the context of the rapiddevelopment of industry in post Civil WarAmerica. Specifically, the study identifieshow functional utility as defined through thenarrow concerns of industrial practices wereprivileged over form and pedigree in Americanhorse breeding. Even more importantly, thisarticle suggests that the continuityestablished between the practices of theindustrial philanthropists and the scientificresearch institutions that they establishedoccurred at two levels: through the valuesprivileged by the development of the dynamicsof a mass society and through the tools used toprocess the large amounts of informationnecessary to understand breeding patterns inslow breeding organisms.
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Manuscripts
David Starr Jordan Papers. Deposited at Special Collections Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Leland Stanford Papers. Deposited at Special Collections Stanford University, Stanford, CA.
Robert Bonner Papers. Deposited at the New York Public Library, New York, New York.
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Thurtle, P. Harnessing Heredity in Gilded Age America: Middle Class Mores and Industrial Breeding in a Cultural Context. Journal of the History of Biology 35, 43–78 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014519404949
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1014519404949