Abstract
In a letter to the secretary of the American Eugenics Society dated September 22, 1927, the distinguished economist Edward A. Ross argued that “interest in eugenics is almost a perfect index of one’s breadth of outlook and unselfish concern for the future of our race. There is no doubt that a truly angelic society could be built up on earth with a people as gifted and well-dispositioned as the best five per cent among us. Of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.”1 Edward A Ross was neither solitary nor extravagant in his unconditional endorsement of eugenics in the 1920s and in the praise he accorded to the new science of human betterment. His comment was rather typical of the time and captures the enthusiasm of numerous American intellectuals who fell under the sway of eugenics prior to World War II. From the end of the nineteenth century through the first four decades of the twentieth century, eugenics managed to attract outstanding men of American science, politics and culture. The list of followers of eugenics is long and includes top academics engaged in cutting-edge research: biologists, zoologists, economists, physicians and sociologists. Eugenics also sparked the imagination of influential politicians, such as President Theodore Roosevelt, Congressman Albert Johnson, Senator David Reed and governor of Pennsylvania Gifford Pinchot as well as prominent lawyers such as Madison Grant.
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Notes
E. A. Ross (1936) Seventy Years of It: An Autobiography (New York: Appleton-Century), 233.
M. A. Hasian, Jr. (1996) The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens: The University of Georgia Press), 5.
See for example D. J. Kevles (1995) In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press);
D. K. Pickens (1968), Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press);
E. Black (2003), War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press);
S. Currell and C. Codgell (ed.) (2006), Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s (Athens: Ohio University Press);
M. S. Pernick (1996), The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of “Defective” Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 (Oxford: Oxford University Press);
A. M. Stern (2005), Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press);
H. Bruins (2006), Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America’s Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Alfred A. Knopf);
P. A. Lombardo (ed.) (2011), From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).
F. Galton cited in M. F. Guyer (1916) Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company), 293.
F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope and Aims,” Paper read before the Sociological Society at a Meeting in the School of Economics and Political Science (London University), on May 16, 1904, in F. Galton (2004), Essays in Eugenics (Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific Honolulu), 35.
M. Grant (1918) The Passing of the Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s Sons), xx.
L. Stoddard (1922) The Revolt against Civilization: The Menace of the Under Man (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 30.
A. E. Wiggam (1923) The New Decalogue of Science (Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company), 36.
C. B. Davenport (1912), “The Geography of Man in Relation to Eugenics,” in W. E. Castle and J. M. Coulter (eds.), Heredity and Eugenics: A Course of Lectures (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press), 309.
C. B. Davenport (1912), “The Inheritance of Physical and Mental Traits of Man and Their Application to Eugenics,” in Castle and Coulter, Heredity and Eugenics, 269.
C. B. Davenport (1912) “The Family-History Book” Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, 7 (Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Eugenics Record Office).
Cited in H. H. Newman (1921) Readings in Evolution, Genetics, and Eugenics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press), 475.
R. L. Dugdale (1877) The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease and Heredity (New York: Putnam’s Sons).
A. H. Estabrook (1916) The Jukes in 1915 (Washington DC: Carnegie Institution).
H. H. Goddard (1913) The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of FeebleMindedness (New York: Macmillan).
H. F. Osborn (1926) Evolution and Religion: Polemics of the Fundamentalist Controversy of 1922 to 1926 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons).
R. Pearl (1919), “Sterilization of Degenerates and Criminals,” Eugenical Review, XI (April), 1–6. At this point, one should note Pearl’s restraint when sketching his list of undesirables, despite the impression to the contrary. When contrasted with a similar list composed by the British proponent of eugenics Reid Rentoul, Pearl’s list in the preface to his highly influential Race Culture; or, Race Suicide is rather modest. R. Rentoul (1906) Race Culture; or, Race Suicide (A Plea for the Unborn) (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: The Walter Scott Publishing Co.), vi.
Black War against the Weak, 78. On Goddard’s IQ testing, see also L. Zenderland (1998), Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
E. Huntington and L. B. Whitney (1927), The Builders of America (New York: William Morrow and Company), 3. Huntington and Whitney were using Goddard’s terminology developed in his book The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness (1877). Black, War against the Weak, 78.
Goddard’s lead article in the Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, “Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness,” for example, gives a lengthy explanation of the research into feeblemindedness in children, totally disregarding explanation of the terminology used. H. H. Goddard (1910), “Heredity of Feeble-Mindedness,” Eugenics Record Office Bulletin, I, 3, 1–14.
See Black War against the Weak, 80; and A. H. Estabrook (1916), “National Conference of Charities and Corrections,” Eugenical News, 1, 42–43.
E. G. Conklin (1922) Glossary to Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
D. Haraway (1989) Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge), 26.
A. E. Wiggam (1926) The Fruit of the Family Tree (New York: Blue Ribbon Books), 82.
M. Grant (1918) The Passing of a Great Race or the Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner’s Sons), 87.
The first Fittest Family Contest was held at the Kansas Free Fair in Topeka. See L. Lovett (2007), Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890–1938 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press); A. M. Stern (2002), “Making Better Babies: Public Health and Race Betterment in Indiana, 1920–1935,” American Journal of Public Health (May), 748;
F. B. Sherbon (1929), “Popular Education,” Eugenics, II, 2 (February), 31–33.
Ross (1914) The Old World and the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: The Century Co)., 286.
E. Huntington (1928), “The Next Revolution,” Eugenics, I, 1 (October), 6.
For a discussion of the shift from Social Darwinism to the new ethics, see R. Weikart (2004), From Darwin to Hitler: Evolutionary Ethics, Eugenics, and Racism in Germany (New York: Palgrave Macmillan).
P. Popenoe and E. S. Gosney (1929), Sterilization for Human Betterment (New York: Macmillan), 98.
L. F. Whitney (1929), “Is Eugenics Racial Snobbery,” Eugenics, II, 2 (February), 20.
L. F. Whitney (1929) “Immigration from Another Angle,” Eugenics, II, 3 (March), 15.
W. E. Kellicott (1911) The Social Direction of Human Evolution: An Outline of the Science of Eugenics (New York: D. Appleton and Company), 120–130.
H. H. Goddard (1929), “Hereditary Mental Aptitudes in Man,” Eugenics, II, 4 (April), 2.
T. N. Carver (1929), “The Economic Test of Fitness,” Eugenics, II, 7 (July), 3.
For an excellent insight into the connection between eugenics and American organized religion, see C. Rosen (2004), Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
B. Regal (2002) Henry Fairfield Osborn: Race and the Search for the Origins of Man (Aldershot: Ashgate), 160.
H. F. Osborn (1926) Evolution and Religion: Polemics of the Fundamentalist Controversy of 1922 to 1926 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), 2.
P. E. Osgood (1928), “The Refiner’s Fire,” Eugenics, I, 3 (December), 10.
H. Arendt (1998) The Human Condition (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press), 7.
C. G. Campbell (1936) “The German Policy” Eugenical News: Current Record of Race Hygiene, XXI, 2 (March–April), 25. See also “Eugenical Sterilization in Germany,” Eugenical News, XVII, 5 (September–October 1933), 89–90; “Race Culture in Germany,” Eugenical News, XVII, 5 (September–October 1933), 91; C. M. Goethe, “Patriotism and Racial Standards,” Paper delivered at the 24th Annual Meeting of the Eugenics Research Association, American Museum of Natural History, June 6, 1936, Frederick Osborn Papers, The American Philosophical Society. For a historical insight,
see Stefan Kühl (1994), The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Luczak, E.B. (2015). “A Truly Angelic Society”: Eugenic Humanity without Humans. In: Breeding and Eugenics in the American Literary Imagination. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137545794_2
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