Roosevelt, a patrician, had little choice but to joust with his redneck foes. In 1905, during his southern tour, he rebuked Arkansas governor Jeff Davis for defending the lynch mob. One newspaper joked that the president’s entourage was wise to travel through Mississippi at night, so that Vardaman wouldn’t have to shoot him. Roosevelt also ruffled the feathers of the proud white women of the South when he had dared to class Jefferson Davis (the Confederate president) with Benedict Arnold. When he did that, one incensed Georgia woman declared that the president had dishonored his mother’s blood.42
Blood was thicker than water for Roosevelt, but not in the way the testy Georgia woman would have viewed the matter. His understanding of race and class remained rooted in evolutionary thinking, and he believed that blacks were naturally subordinate to the Anglo-Saxon. But he also felt progress was possible, which was why he backed Booker T. Washington’s program for industrial education at Tuskegee Institute. If blacks proved themselves capable of economic self-sufficiency, then they could qualify for greater political rights. But the Harvard-educated president never abandoned the premise that racial traits were carried in the blood, conditioned by the experiences of one’s ancestors. As an ardent exponent of “American exceptionalism,” Roosevelt argued that the nineteenth-century frontier experience had transformed white Americans into superior stock.43
Roosevelt’s motto can be summed up in three words: “work-fight-breed.” There is clear evidence that he was influenced by the mountaineers’ myth, by which good Saxon stock was separated from the debased southern poor white. History was written in blood, sweat, and “germ protoplasm”—the turn-of-the-century term for what we now refer to as genes. Roosevelt believed that every middle-class American male had to stay in touch with his inner squatter; he must never lose the masculine traits that attached to the “strenuous life.” Too much domestic peace, luxury, and willful sterility, as TR put it, made Americans weak, lethargic, and prone to self-indulgence.44
The ills attending modernity could be corrected in three ways. A man could return to the wilderness, as Roosevelt did when he hunted big game in Africa and made a harrowing trip down the Amazon River at the age of fifty-five. War—the raw fight for survival—was a second means of bringing forth ancestral Saxon traits. Breeding, however, remained the most primitive of instincts. In Roosevelt’s mind, childbirth was nature’s boot camp for women, a life-or-death struggle that strengthened the entire race.45
As for war, it did not just build character; it literally reinvigorated the best qualities of the American stock. After spending several years in the Dakotas as a rancher, Roosevelt published his voluminous Winning of the West (1886–96), part American history and part treatise on evolution. The author returned to New York, took up politics, and discovered a new aggressive outlet in imperialist crusading. He rallied behind the Spanish–American War in 1898 and formed his own regiment, the Rough Riders, which he filled with cowboys and mountaineers from the West, plus men like himself, athletes, who had come from Ivy League universities. He even included a number of Indians (in a separate company), a few Irish and Hispanics, one Jewish recruit, and one Italian, all in an attempt to recreate what he thought was the right mix of ethnic stocks for the new American frontier in Cuba. It is important to note that he did not include any black men, nor genuine southern crackers, in his muscular version of Darwin’s Galápagos Islands experiment.46
Roosevelt’s famed ride up San Juan Hill (actually Kettle Hill) was vividly captured by the equally famed artist Frederic Remington. Before he headed to Cuba, Remington had taken a magazine assignment in Florida. There he found the “Cracker cowboy,” who was the antithesis of the pure-blooded American westerner he had earlier known. The men he encountered in Florida wore a “bedraggled appearance”; their unwashed hair, tobacco-stained beards, and sloppy dress reminded him of Spanish moss dripping off oaks in the swamps. Remington saw their lack of “fierceness” (relative to the frontiersman) and compared it to the difference between a “fox-terrier” and a “yellow cur.” Pursuing the animal kingdom analogy further, he said they had no better sense of the law than “gray apes.” These curlike, apish would-be conquerors stole cattle, and then showed surprise when indicted for their crime. Their ignorance was so astounding that they could not even find Texas on the map. Roosevelt would have agreed: the distinct culture of the West did not translate to the South.47
That said, Roosevelt did not try to resolve all the contradictions in his approach to the South. He may have defended racial purity and opposed miscegenation, but he also confessed to Owen Wister, author of The Virginian, that he believed that southern white men, despite their outrage over race mixing, were the first to leer at mulatto women and take black mistresses. Unimpressed by southern whites, and valuing hardworking black men, he did nothing to protect the latter’s right to vote. Washington, Lincoln, and Grant were his heroes, men who lived active, virtuous lives, rejecting comfort and complacency. They weren’t political tricksters, like “Br’er Vardaman,” as one clever journalist called the rabid Mississippian. They weren’t the aristocrats of the antebellum South either, who drank, dueled, and made “perverse” speeches. As he told Wister, white southerners had taken a wrong turn on the evolutionary ladder, using empty bombast to conceal “unhealthy traits.” In the final analysis, the president opined, the Confederate generation and their heirs had contributed “very, very little toward anything of which Americans are now proud.” For him, the Vardamans might be a nuisance, but their days were numbered.48
He could be confident in this future because Roosevelt was an unabashed eugenicist. He used the bully pulpit of his office to insist that women had a critical civic duty to breed a generation of healthy and disciplined children. He first endorsed eugenics in 1903, and two years later he laid out his beliefs in speech before the Congress of Mothers. Worried about “race suicide,” as he put it, he recommended that women of Anglo-American stock have four to six children, “enough so the race shall increase and not decrease.” Women’s duty to suffer “birth pangs,” and even face death, made the fertile female the equivalent of the professional soldier. Women who shirked their procreative duty were worse than deserters. So he pushed for passage of a constitutional amendment in 1906 that would place marriage and divorce under the control of federal law.49
Taking marriage and divorce laws out of the arbitrary control of the states served a larger eugenic purpose. Every die-hard eugenicist believed that citizens did not have an individual right to marry or to reproduce. As a leading eugenic organization reported in 1914, “Society must look upon germ-plasm as belonging to society and not merely to the individual who carries it.” Because children produced by unfit parents could cost taxpayers if they became criminals, society had the right to protect itself. Far more dangerous was the cost to the nation’s human stock if degenerates were allowed to breed. In 1913, Roosevelt wrote supportively to the leading eugenicist Charles Davenport that it was the patriotic duty of every good citizen of superior stock to leave his or her “blood behind.” Degenerates, he warned, must not be permitted to “reproduce their kind.”50
It was during the eugenic craze that reformers called for government incentives to ensure better breeding. This was when the idea of tax exemptions for children emerged. Theodore Roosevelt criticized the new income tax law for allowing exemptions for only two children, discouraging parents from having a third or fourth. He wanted monetary rewards for breeding, akin to the baby bonuses established in Australia in 1912. He also promoted mothers’ pensions for widows—an idea that caught on. As one defender of pensions claimed in 1918, the widowed mother was “as much a servant of the State as a judge or general.” Her child-rearing duties were no less a public service than if she had toiled on the battlefield. Like Selective Service, which weeded out inferior soldiers, the pensions were allotted exclusively to “a fit mother.”51
Roosevelt was far from alone. Academics, scientists, doctors, journalist
s, and legislators all joined the “eugenic mania,” as one California doctor termed the movement. Advocates believed that the way to encourage procreation of the fit was to educate the middle class on proper marriage selection. Eugenic thinking found expression in a flood of books and popular public lectures, as well as “better baby” and “fitter family” competitions at state fairs. Eugenics courses were added to college curricula. Such efforts resulted in the passage of laws imposing marriage restrictions, institutional sexual segregation of defectives, and, most dramatically, state-enforced sterilization of those designated “unfit.”52
• • •
Charles Davenport established a research facility at Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor in 1904. His facility grew into the Eugenics Record Office. A Harvard-trained biologist and professor, Davenport, along with his team, collected inheritance data. Not surprisingly, he was also an influential member of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, a group of agricultural breeders and biologists. This group included many prominent figures, including the famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Davenport’s second in command, Harry H. Laughlin, became the eugenics expert for the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, and played a crucial role in shaping the 1924 Immigration Act, one of the most sweeping and restrictive pieces of legislation in American history.53
When eugenicists thought of degenerates, they automatically focused on the South. To make his point, Davenport said outright that if a federal policy regulating immigration was not put in place, New York would turn into Mississippi. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), he identified two breeding grounds for diseased and degenerate Americans: the hovel and the poorhouse. The hovel was familiar, whether one identified it with the cracker’s cabin, the low-downer’s shebang, or the poor white pigsty. Echoing James Gilmore’s Down in Tennessee (1864), Davenport’s work expressed a grave concern over indiscriminate mating that occurred in isolated shacks. Brothers slept with sisters, fathers with daughters, and the fear of an inbred stock seemed very real. His attack on the poorhouse also pointed south. Mississippi did not provide separate facilities for men and women in their asylums until 1928. Poorhouses allowed criminals and prostitutes to produce all manner of weak-minded delinquents and bastards, he believed. Finally, Davenport’s antirural bias was especially potent. The survival-of-the-fittest model he subscribed to emphasized migration from the countryside to the city; as the fitter people moved, the weaker strains remained behind.54
Almost all eugenicists analogized human and animal breeding. Davenport described the best female breeders as women with large hips, using the same thinking that animal breeders had employed for centuries to describe cows. The biggest donor to the Eugenics Record Office was Mrs. Mary Harriman, widow of the railroad magnate Averell Harriman; she came from a family of avid horse breeders. Alexander Graham Bell imagined rearing “human thoroughbreds,” saying four generations of superior parents would produce one thoroughbred. A wealthy New York horse breeder, William Stokes, published a eugenics book in 1917, and went so far as to contend that Americans could be bred to class, guaranteeing that intellectual capacity matched one’s station. He popularly argued the “right of the unborn” to be born healthy. Why should one generation be punished for the bad breeding choices of the parents?55
Three solutions arose in the effort to “cull” American bloodlines. As in animal breeding, advocates pushed for legislation that allowed doctors and other professionals to segregate and quarantine the unfit from the general population, or they called for the castration of criminals and the sterilization of diseased and degenerate classes. If that seems a gross violation of human rights in any age, a Michigan legislator went a step further in 1903 when he proposed that the state should simply kill off the unfit. Another eugenics advocate came up with a particularly ludicrous plan to deal with a convicted murderer: execute his grandfather. Such proposals were not merely fringe ideas. By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books, along with an unwieldy thirty-four categories delineating the kinds of people who might be subject to the surgical procedure. Eugenicists used a broad brush to create an underclass of the unfit, calling for the unemployable to be “stamped out,” as Harvard professor Frank William Taussig wrote in Principles of Economics (1921). If society refused to subject hereditary misfits (“irretrievable criminals and tramps”) to “chloroform once and for all,” then, the professor fumed, they could at least be prevented from “propagating their kind.”56
Eugenicists were divided over the role women should play in the national campaign. Some insisted that they remain guardians of the hearth. This ideal coincided with the traditional southern ethos that asserted planter and middle-class women possessed a “natural aversion” to associating with black men. The New York horse breeder Stokes called on women to scrutinize potential suitors, demanding family pedigrees and subjecting the man to a physical examination. (It is easy to see how he borrowed from the horse breeder’s demand for pedigree papers, not to mention the proverbial “gift horse” mouth inspection.) It became popular for young women to pledge to a eugenic marriage, accepting no man who did not meet her high scientific standards. In 1908, a concerned female teacher in Louisiana started “better baby” contests, in which mothers allowed their offspring to be examined and graded. This program expanded into “fitter family” competitions at state fairs. The contests were held in the stock grounds, and families were judged in the manner of cattle. The winners received medals, not unlike prize bulls.57
Educated women were the gatekeepers, the guardians of eugenic marriages, though fecund poor women continued to outbreed their female betters. So-called experts contended that those who overindulged in sexual activity and lacked intellectual restraint were more likely to have feeble children. (Here they were imagining poor whites fornicating in the bushes.) Once experts like Davenport identified harlotry and poverty as inherited traits, sexually aggressive women of the lower classes were viewed as the carriers of degenerate germ protoplasm. In 1910, Henry Goddard, who ran a testing laboratory at the school for feeble-minded boys and girls in Vineland, New Jersey, invented a new eugenic classification: the moron. More intelligent than idiots and imbeciles, morons were especially troublesome because they could pass as normal. Female morons could enter polite homes as servants and seduce young men or be seduced by them. It was thought to be a real problem.58
This 1929 chart from a Kansas fair states unequivocally that heredity determines every person’s destiny. Its message is clear: unfitness must be “bred out” of the national stock.
Scrapbook, American Eugenic Society Papers, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
The fear of promiscuous poor women led eugenics reformers to push for the construction of additional asylums to house feebleminded white women. In this effort, they deployed the term “segregation,” the same as was used by southerners to enforce white-black separation. The “passing” female was not a new trope either: it borrowed from the other southern fear of the passing mulatto, who might marry into a prominent family. Passing also conjured the old English fears of the class interloper and unregulated social mobility—the house servant seducing the lord of the manor.59
Even with such racial overtones, the major target of eugenicists was the poor white woman. Goddard’s description of the female moron as one lacking forethought, vitality, or any sense of shame perfectly replicated Reconstruction writers’ portrayal of white trash. Davenport felt the best policy was to quarantine dangerous women during their fertile years. How this policy prescription led to sterilization is rather more calculated: interested politicians and eager reformers concluded that it was cheaper to operate on women than to house them in asylums for decades. Southern eugenicists in particular argued that sterilization helped the economy by sending poor women back into the population safely neutered but still able to work at menial jobs.60
World War I fueled the euge
nics campaign. First of all, the army refused to issue soldiers prophylactics. The top brass insisted that sexual control required a degree of internal discipline, which no army program would effectively inculcate. The army, along with local antivice groups, rounded up some thirty thousand prostitutes and placed as many as possible in detention centers and jails where they were kept out of the reach of soldiers. Thus the federal government backed a policy of sexual segregation of tainted women. At the same time, advocates for the draft argued that a volunteer force would be both unfair and uneugenic. Senator John Sharp of Mississippi insisted that without a draft only the “best blood” would go to the front, leaving behind those of an “inferior mold” to “beget the next race.”61
The war advanced the importance of intelligence testing. Goddard had created the “moron” classification by using the Binet-Simon test, which was succeeded by the IQ (intelligence quotient) scale promoted by Stanford professor Lewis Terman and then used by the U.S. Army. The army’s findings only served to confirm a long-held, unpropitious view of the South, since both poor white and black recruits from southern states had the lowest IQ scores. Overall, the study found that the mean intelligence of the soldier registered at the moron level—the equivalent of a “normal” thirteen-year-old boy. Given the results, observers wondered if poor white men were dragging down the rest of the nation.62
The lack of public education funding in the South made the army’s intelligence test results inevitable. The gap in education levels matched what had existed between the North and South before the Civil War. Many of the men who took the test had never used a pencil before. Southern white men exhibited stunted bodies—army medical examiners found them to be smaller, weaker, and less physically fit. National campaigns to fight hookworm and pellagra (both associated with clay-eating and identified as white trash diseases) only reinforced this portrait. Beginning in 1909, the New York–based Rockefeller Institute poured massive amounts of money into a philanthropic program aimed at eliminating hookworm, while the U.S. Public Health Service tackled pellagra. The Rockefeller Foundation published shocking pictures of actual hookworm subjects, some pairing boys the same age, one normal and the other literally dwarfed and disfigured by the disease. It didn’t help the South’s image that hookworm was spread by the lack of sanitation. Outhouses were rare among the southern poor, let alone toilets.63
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