Whether today or at the height of the Cold War or in the late 1800s, both supporters and detractors have linked eugenics to anxieties about biological deterioration and hopes for genetic optimization. Over time, these oscillating concerns have continuously, albeit unevenly, affected our understandings of race, sexuality, reproduction, and nature. For example, in the 1980s, some scholars expressed worry that the development of genetic tests for diseases such as Tay-Sachs and sickle-cell anemia had the potential to revive the associations between particular racial groups and biological defects that had been so popular in the 1920s and 1930s. One sociologist suggested that instead of overtly guiding medical and public policies, these stereotypes were now being insidiously and sometimes inadvertently furthered by genetic screening programs that allowed eugenics to enter surreptitiously through the back door.52 Several decades earlier, Hermann J. Muller, a Nobel Prize–winning geneticist with socialist leanings, proposed artificial insemination and the establishment of sperm banks stocked with superior “germinal material” as the ideal route to genetic perfectibility. He was confident that his plan was compatible with the values of a democratic society, since the donations from “persons of unusual moral courage, progressive spirit, and eagerness to serve mankind” would be voluntary.53 Although Muller asserted that his scheme of artificial insemination was a far cry from the controlled procreation of a Hitler or Mussolini, his assumption that women would happily serve as the wombs of such superlative progeny was offensive to many Americans, especially feminists struggling to win greater reproductive freedom.
These two examples illustrate how medical or social programs designed to encourage the breeding of some people and not others have incited anticipation, trepidation, and controversy in the United States. It is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to discuss the motivations for and implications of genetic testing and “genius” sperm banks without grappling with bioethical dilemmas and revisiting the legacy of eugenics. Over the past decade, with the launching of the Human Genome Project and the prospective ramifications of the decoding of the human genome for genetics and reproduction, these issues have become more salient than ever before. One of the greatest ironies of our contemporary era is that sensitivity to the discrimination and abuse promoted by eugenics, understood mainly in terms of state coercion and violative bodily intrusion, has made many scientists and legislators wary of regulation, a position that has only boosted the commercialization of reproductive and clinical genetics. Even with the bioethical concepts of autonomy, choice, consent, and beneficence codified into medical practice and research, American society is characterized by wide discrepancies in genetic health access and literacy that can easily turn one person’s perfection into another person’s defectiveness. One biologist has suggested that, if driven solely by market demand, Americans’ tendency to choose the “best” for their children could eventually translate into two branches of Homo sapiens: a wealthy genetic elite that replicates itself through designer babies and a medically underserved genetic underclass.54 Although such futuristic specters of the survival of the richest and fittest may be overblown, the ubiquity of such scenarios in books and on television underscores the value of exploring how eugenics has been and continues to be conceived in modern historical memory. Eugenics has left discernible imprints on race relations, the immigrant experience, marriage patterns, sexual expression, contraceptive use, standardized testing, and even parks and recreation systems. A fruitful way to begin to track the broad social reach and the continuities and shifts in better breeding is by returning to the context in which eugenics emerged more than one hundred years ago.
In the late 1800s, far-reaching processes of industrialization, urbanization, immigration, imperialism, and secularization were remaking national, cultural, and economic landscapes across the globe. It was a period of technological innovations, from the railroad to the telegraph; of medical discoveries, from X-rays to microbes; and of the birth of new interpretive human sciences, such as sociology and psychology. But the underbelly of Progress (with a capital P) was riddled with perceived social ills such as sprawling urban tenements, malnourished children, disease outbreaks, environmental degradation, class conflict, and racial strife. As assorted elites in various countries sought to make sense of a world in flux, they increasingly turned not to religion but to science, which offered authority, rationality, and incisive explanatory power. Evolutionism, physical anthropology, and bacteriology could help diagnose, ameliorate, and perhaps even perfect society.
If there was one word to which reformers gravitated to express their predicament, it was degeneration, a term imbued with both scientific and moral meaning.55 A concern with degeneration was sparked in part by Darwinism and the ascendance of monogenesis, which posited that humans were much closer to animals, specifically primates, than suggested by polygenesis.56 Not only was reversion to a more primitive state possible, according to the hierarchies formulated by physical anthropologists, it was already embodied by types further down on the evolutionary ladder. The turn of the twentieth century was the heyday of racial taxonomies that placed whites and Europeans at the apex of civilization, blacks and Africans on the bottom rungs, and nearly everyone else in the suboptimal middle position of hybridity and mongrelization.57 In the United States, the solidification of these racial hierarchies was integral to the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation after Reconstruction and the rise of Sinophobia and anti-Asian discrimination, and it helped to rationalize colonial ventures in Latin America and the Pacific. Furthermore, doctrines of racial decline coincided with the advent of modern contraception and fertility drops in parts of Western Europe and the United States, each of which prompted some reformers to worry that the flagging birthrate of the “fit” was being outpaced by the rampant propagation of the “unfit.” In the United States, degenerationism translated into alarm about immigrant invasions and miscegenation, and admonitions against “race suicide,” which President Theodore Roosevelt, for one, was convinced was jeopardizing America’s vitality and global stature.58
Eugenics was sown in the soil of degenerationism. From the outset, it had strong affinities with contemporaneous notions of racial decadence and spoke much the same language as the burgeoning disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and sexology. However, the coalescence of organized eugenics movements required the convergence of the competing and complementary hypotheses in plant and animal biology that gave rise to modern genetics. One of the initial catalysts was the neo-Lamarckian theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, which posited that environmental forces, both favorable and unfavorable, could alter human heredity and be transmitted down the familial line. Formulated by the French naturalist Jean Baptiste de Lamarck in the early nineteenth century, this version of natural selection stressed the role of external stimuli in either improving or damaging hereditary material. On the one hand, neo-Lamarckism promoted optimism in reformers who hoped that cleaning up urban decay and instituting public and personal hygiene could produce more vigorous “stock.” On the other hand, it also made reformers skeptical about their ability to impede the likely and natural regression of humans back down the evolutionary scale. Neo-Lamarckism provided the basis for eugenics movements in “Latin” countries such as France, Romania, Argentina, and Mexico. Following neo-Lamarckism, for example, Mexican and Brazilian eugenicists supported public health measures and prohibition campaigns that they believed would offset the permanent destruction inflicted on the national “race” by overwork, alcoholism, tuberculosis, and syphilis.59
At the same time that neo-Lamarckism was alternately fueling hope and dismay, another concept of heredity was on the horizon. Linked to the studies of Galton, the German cytologist August Weismann, and the rediscovery of the hybridization experiments of the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, this theory claimed that hereditary material was transmitted from generation to generation with absolutely no modification. As this doctrine of strict hereditarianism was being formulated, Galton embarked o
n the inquiries into the biographies of famous men that would convince him that musical, intellectual, and other traits were not learned but innate.60 Emboldened by his conclusions, Galton began to espouse eugenics, organized projects to stimulate breeding among the upper classes, and calibrated anthropometric and biometric techniques to measure and correlate the physique, psychology, and physiology of a cross section of British families. While Galton gathered biometric data on “hereditary geniuses,” Weismann refuted neo-Lamarckism from the perspective of cell biology. Weismann contended that the human body contained two completely distinct kinds of cells—germ and somatic. In the 1880s, he had first asserted that germ cells were located in the gonads and produced sperm and eggs and that all other bodily tissues were composed of somatic cells. Moreover, he claimed that hereditary material was fixed in the germ cells, which determined the arrangement and expression of the somatic cells but were never reciprocally affected by them. By disputing the theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics, Weismann challenged the environmental reform impulse of neo-Lamarckism and infused hereditarianism with a heavy dose of fatalism.61
Despite Weismann’s principles, however, it was not until 1900, when scientists rediscovered the results of Mendel’s experiments, that neo-Lamarckism gradually lost its tenacious hold.62 Working with pea plants in an Austrian monastery in the 1860s, Mendel had painstakingly elucidated the patterns underlying the transmission of hereditary material from parent to offspring.63 Most important, he had postulated that to be expressed in the next generation, some hereditary factors needed to be passed on by both parents whereas others required only one progenitor. He had labeled these traits, respectively, recessive and dominant and then had calculated his well-known 3:1 ratio, which he had replicated in thousands of garden experiments with smooth, wrinkled, long, and short peas.64 Along with these postulates, Mendel’s laws of segregation and independent assortment—which stated that during the formation of gametes, the germ cells disaggregated and then recombined independently, producing different variations—rapidly gained currency among scientists.65
After 1900, Mendelianism became the basis of modern genetics. In subsequent decades, Weismann’s germ and somatic cells were renamed genotype and phenotype by the Danish geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen; chromosomes were identified as the locus of the gene; the workings of sexual selection were determined; and certain diseases caused by dominant genes, such as Huntington’s disease, and by recessive genes, such as phenylketonuria (PKU) were identified.66 In 1953, James Watson and Francis Crick proposed that genetic material was contained in DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid), structured as a double helix consisting of paired combinations of four nucleic acids held together by hydrogen bonds. By this time, the field of genetics had expanded beyond Mendel’s original formulas into highly involved and technical laboratory experiments crossbreeding mice, flies, and worms and a complicated universe of acronyms and cryptic scientific notations. Geneticists were mapping the metabolic pathways of dozens of genetic diseases and discovering masking effects (epistasis) and patterns of incomplete dominance and codominance. Moreover, the intersection of genetics with new-fangled medical imaging (such as X-ray crystallography) and the techniques of molecular biology and biochemistry (such as karyotype analysis and eventually electrophoresis) was generating voluminous information about plant and animal genomes.67
In the United States, eugenics was informed principally by Mendelianism. Although neo-Lamarckism held some sway in the first decade of the century, especially among idealist Progressives, by the onset of World War I the emphasis was on strict hereditarianism.68 This was evident in the family pedigree studies, which relied on Mendelian ratios to delineate the transmission of bad “unit characters” or genes that might cause criminality, alcoholism, or feeblemindedness from generation to generation. These studies often profiled poor rural white families through morality tales in which irresponsible and degenerate offspring recklessly reproduced more of their kind. In rare exceptions, a family member chose the respectable path of childlessness or, when fortunate enough to have been born with a majority of good genes, sought out vigorous mates.69 During the 1920s, it was the application of Mendelianism to humans, and above all the corollary that specific racial and degenerate types had distinct “unit characters,” that propelled eugenic campaigns for sterilization, interracial marriage bans, and immigration restriction. If surgical operations and marriage laws would protect the nation from the feebleminded and defective from within, then tight immigration laws would do the same from without.
Eugenics achieved its greatest national visibility in the 1920s when it was virtually synonymous with biological racism and modern degenerationism. Furthermore, it was during this decade that eugenicists achieved two critical victories: Buck v. Bell, the U.S. Supreme Court case that upheld the constitutionality of Virginia’s sterilization law (1927), and the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924), which set a quota of 2 percent on all immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe based on the 1890 census and closed the gates to practically all newcomers from Asia. Instead of constituting a decrescendo, however, these triumphs worked to naturalize eugenics into the body politic and into state, federal, and county institutions and laws. Thus, ultimately eugenics had a broader reach in the 1930s and 1940s because the precepts of its initial generation of adherents—in defective “unit characters”—had been codified into law. Notably, spurred by Buck v. Bell and the economic pressures of the Depression, sterilizations peaked in the United States from 1935 to 1945, even as many eugenicists admitted that sexual surgeries could do little, in the short or long run, to curtail the spread of deleterious recessive genes, which were transmitted heterozygously and often remained unexpressed.70
Historical definitions of American eugenics are grounded in the conflation of hereditarianism and biological racism that solidified in the 1920s, an association that melded further in the 1940s as the brutal extremes of Nazi racial hygiene and extermination campaigns were recognized. For the most part, our understanding of eugenics remains trapped in the vortex of the interwar period, even though revamped eugenic projects prospered into the 1960s. After World War II, many eugenicists embarked on the task of redefinition. Osborn, who led the charge of “reform” eugenics, blamed postwar discomfort with “eugenics” on Hitler, who had “prostituted” the term and was responsible for the American public’s eagerness to “drop the word from its vocabulary.”71 In order to renew hereditarianism and demonstrate its applicability, Osborn returned to Galton. In his book The Future of Human Heredity, Osborn invoked Galton’s vision of eugenics and reiterated the British statistician’s call for a systematic plan of study and education. Echoing Galton, Osborn wrote, “the improvement of the race should be man’s highest aspiration toward which all men should work.”72 In the postwar period this would entail initiating policies to reduce “defects and abnormalities that have a genetic origin,” modifying familial and environmental factors to ensure that children’s natural abilities would flourish, and encouraging couples to visit heredity clinics to make genetically informed and rational decisions about reproduction. Even as Osborn promoted genetic counseling, the optimization of intelligence, and medical genetics—all in the name of enhancing the gene pool—he and his contemporaries, especially in population planning, did not condemn, and often quietly endorsed, sterilization, which they viewed as an integral, if sometimes mismanaged, facet of a comprehensive eugenics program.73 From the perspective of its postwar crusaders, eugenics could emerge unscathed from the horrors of the Final Solution if the original intent of Galton’s definition were honored and made to conform to principles of democracy and individualism.
Eugenic Nation foregrounds Galton’s definition of eugenics because of its historical provenance, staying power, and flexibility. It can serve as a compass to explore changes and continuities in American eugenics over the twentieth century. As recently as 1994, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, authors of The Bell Curve, justified their arguments about
race and intelligence by emphasizing the validity of Galtonian biometrics and eugenics.74 Over and over again, Galton was (and is) the point of departure for eugenicists who sought to redefine their science, for scholars narrating the past, and for philosophers delving into bioethics. Guided by this definition, Eugenic Nation approaches eugenics in the United States as a multifaceted set of programs aimed at better breeding that straddled many social, spatial, and temporal divides. At times I use hereditarianism interchangeably with eugenics, both for the purposes of word variation and to describe ideas and practices based on the primacy of heredity over cultural or behavioral explanations. Eugenic Nation seeks to push the bounds of what has been considered eugenics, not to vilify but to raise questions about the extent to which medicine, biology, and the hereditarian impulse have shaped modern society.
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