A Genealogy of American Theatre

Abstract

In their explorations of the theatrical value of eugenic ideas, Eugene O’Neill and Susan Glaspell both place a white woman’s reproductive body at the center of the stories they tell. Circumscribed narratives of reproductive white women were among the primary narratives of eugenics, whether those women were criminally dysgenic and feebleminded, or models of eugenic maternity. While eugenic iconography reduced the issue of gender to specific types of women, race in eugenics discourse was less clearly or consistently represented. On the one hand, eugenics, in Charles Davenport’s definition, aimed to “improve the blood of the race by better breeding.”² That race was central to the eugenics movement is plain. On the other hand, what race or whose blood was often left undefined. Most eugenicists neglected to specify whether “race” meant the human race, the Anglo-Saxon race, or any other racially defined group. This vagueness implied a benefit to the largest possible population, while not identifying which individual populations might be the targets of eugenic investigation. In America, eugenicists directed their attention at “defective,” “poor whites” proliferating within the country, and at “inferior” immigrants arriving in great numbers from abroad. As Albert Wiggam described it, a two-part challenge faced the eugenics movement: “race-suicide” (meaning the end of the Anglo-Saxon race, as the phrase was popularized by Theodore Roosevelt), but also, significantly, “always class-suicide.

Finally, then, we see, actually and literally, that from dogs to kings, from rats to college presidents, blood always tells.

Albert Wiggam, The Fruit of the Family Tree

Blood will tell, but we do not know just what it tells, nor which blood it is which speaks.

Livingston Farrand, National Negro Congress,1909’¹