Search Results

This chapter focuses on the Catholic members of the American Eugenics Society (AES). As part of the effort to win converts to their cause, and to soothe the fears of those opposed to eugenics, the AES established the Committee on Cooperation with Clergymen (CCC), which included two Catholic members, the Reverend John A. Ryan and the Reverend John Montgomery Cooper. While the Catholic members tended to concur with the pronatalist elements of positive eugenics, they disagreed on negative eugenics policies, such as the dissemination of birth control for the poor, immigration restriction based on national origin, and sterilization of the “unfit,” that forcibly discouraged the reproduction of certain groups.

This chapter considers the international success of the eugenics movement. The eugenics movement encompassed an international community made up of scientists rather than believers in a common faith. The science of eugenics had its start in Great Britain in the late nineteenth century, but quickly drew followers and spawned movements in several European countries as well as in a handful of South and Central American nations. The international success of the eugenics movement raised fundamental questions about where the ultimate authority for eugenics policy should be placed—with the work of scientists or with the pronouncements of religious figures. While Catholics welcomed the clarity that an authoritative teaching from the Vatican could offer for their interactions with eugenicists, the magisterium's claim to offer guidance for all persons, Catholic or not, revived long-standing concerns about the Catholic perspective on the proper relationship between church and state.

This chapter examines the past eugenics movement in order to evaluate the motivations, patterns, strategies, and language that drew in so many. Searching the parameters of a movement that targeted natural reproduction for lessons about modern methods of assisted conception is both highly logical and utterly counterintuitive. One might insist that eugenics cares about individual reproduction only as it impacts the population, whereas ART cares about the population only as it assists in individual reproduction. However, both eugenics and ART are logically tied by their mutual focus on controlling reproduction. In reviewing and summarizing the detailed accounts of the lives, the lures, and the losses that define the eugenics movement, the chapter focuses on the themes that emerge from the analysis—science, language, tradition, and economics.

This chapter considers the early clashes between Catholics and the eugenics movement in the years prior to World War I. The discussions include the impact of a March 1910 article by Father Stephen M. Donovan, published in the American Ecclesiastical Review, which questioned the increasing number of vasectomies ordered by states for institutionalized persons; the establishment of institutions that helped crystallize eugenics as a distinct movement in the United States; Catholic writers' questioning of the larger claims and goals of the eugenics movement; and Catholics' attempt to forge their own version of “positive eugenics”.

This chapter discusses the reception of Kenyan racial theories in Britain, uncovering the political complexity of ‘native mentality’ and examines how it came about that the leaders of the British Eugenics Society, who were at that time attempting to reform the organisation along more moderate lines, wrote letters and so actively supported Kenyan research. The relationship between Kenyan racial theories and British eugenics is analysed and contextualised. The study reveals the aftermath of the publicity given to Kenyan racial theories. There was fierce debate on the issue of race and intelligence in relation to the Kenyan research. Kenyan eugenicists sparked a fascinating metropolitan debate on race and science. The chapter also analyses the reaction within the colonial office and the British government to the Kenyan eugenics movement.

This chapter discusses the eugenics movement's attempts to redefine its public face. It backed off from its earlier position on forced sterilization, and repackaged eugenics philosophy to embrace environmental reforms, encourage high birthrates, eschew past racism, and to become less strident in its call for compulsory sterilization. The chapter also describes how Catholic conversations about eugenics and eugenics policy initiatives shifted in response to these changes. By the mid-1940s, Catholic family advocates and eugenicists found some accord in their pronatalism, particularly with the emergence of the “baby boom.” But they continued to find themselves on opposite sides of important questions about the role of the state in regulating and restricting marriage.

This chapter examines the factors that led to the reemergence of the figure of Elizabeth Tuttle and the conflicting images of her that had formed during the eugenics movement. It considers a number of publications about Jonathan Edwards, including biographies written by Samuel Hopkins in 1765, Sereno Edwards Dwight in 1829, and Henry Bamford Parkes in 1930. Whereas Dwight pictured Elizabeth Tuttle as an innocuous grandmother, Parkes suggested that she was a menacing crazy grandmother. According to Parkes, the claim that the Tuttles contributed a streak of hereditary deviance to the Edwards family tree originally developed during the eugenics movement. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, Charles Davenport offered a detailed construction of the figure of Elizabeth Tuttle and elevated her to the exalted position of matriarch of America's first family of genetic aristocrats. This book has attempted to free Elizabeth Tuttle from the gender stereotypes that have informed her identity, challenging the notion that she was a disobedient wife who destroyed her marriage by stubbornly refusing to submit to her husband, Richard Edwards.

This chapter examines the Soviet government's attempts to control reproduction by outlawing abortion and offering financial rewards to women with seven or more children, along with other measures such as childraising programs. The chapter first discusses how Soviet officials sought to address declining birthrates in the country by discouraging contraception, banning abortion, regulating sexuality and reproductive health, promoting motherhood and family, and opposing the eugenics movement. It then places these reproductive policies in comparative context by analyzing how the shift toward state interventionism assumed a particular form. It shows that Soviet pronatalist policies undermined parental authority and gave rise to extrafamilial youth organizations.

This introductory chapter discusses growth of the eugenics movement in the half-century before World War II and its opposition led by American Catholics. It explains the rationale behind the eugenics movement's plan of social control. It describes the responses of Catholic thinkers, writers, and activists to eugenics ideas and policies, which offer a revealing look at both the evolution of Catholicism and of American society at large.

This chapter explores the emergence of the eugenics movement in California from 1900 to the 1940s, during which time an influential web of individuals and groups endorsed, financed, and directed eugenic projects. These included physicians, businessmen, and biologists—all of whom infused hereditarianism into state, city, and country concerns and policies. Eugenics also reinforced doctrines of white supremacy and Manifest Destiny that dated back to the 1840s, providing new and seemingly modern grounds for racial segregation and stereotypes. Indeed, California was home to an interwoven tripartite system in which the sterilization program, antialien deportation policies, and psychometric research aimed mainly at children and adolescents worked in concert to create one of the most activist eugenics movements in the country and even the world.

This chapter examines genealogy as a motif from early in William Faulkner’s career and its link to the mainstream eugenics movement in the United States. It looks at Faulkner’s construction of lineages for the Snopes, Sartoris, Compson, Bundren, and Goodwin clans that were for the most part studies in aberrant forms of whiteness. The chapter suggests that Faulkner’s preoccupation with white deviance, dysfunction, and decline is consistent with that of the eugenics movement. It considers a number of Faulkner’s novels in which he tackles socially undesirable white behavior, from Father Abraham (1926) to Sanctuary (1931). The chapter also discusses the eugenics movement’s turn to the South in the 1920s, and considers the Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell (1927), which tested the constitutionality of Virginia’s new eugenic sterilization act. Finally, it argues that Faulkner brings to his family studies an emphasis on and respect for the interiority of his subjects that was often absent in eugenics discourse.

What Alexander Graham Bell considered his most important, if least known, invention, the ear phonautograph, was designed to “bring the deaf to speech.” This chapter links Derrida’s suggestion that invention has become production to Marx’s blurring of reproduction-production and to Bell’s eugenics initiatives designed to eliminate reproduction between deaf mutes who, like foreigners, suffered from “broken speech.”

This chapter constructs a historical narrative of genetics that draws on already published histories as well as original research, beginning with the eugenics movement of the progressive era, in which scientistic thinking enabled the belief that biology offered salvation from a range of social ills. It examines posteugenics research, especially that which explicitly distanced itself from politics by engaging in laboratory experimentation with insects and other nonhuman life forms and also adopted an atomistic, molecular view of biology. Nevertheless, the molecularization of biology introduced a worldview that was no less political, no less invested in particular social and economic arrangements. Heredity became a fixture of public discourse, a triumph of nature over nurture—the hereditarian thinking of the postwar era represented a commitment to the status quo precisely at a time when it was most vulnerable to the challenges of rising social movements.

The history of the gas chamber is a story of the twentieth century. But an earlier event that would subsequently figure into its evolution occurred one day in 1846, when a French physiologist, Claude Bernard, was in his laboratory studying the properties of carbon monoxide, a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas suspected of somehow being responsible for many accidental deaths. Bernard and the Swedish chemist and pharmacist Carl Wilhelm Scheele had focused their attention on the effect of gases on the blood—work that later would become central to understanding the lethal power of the gas chamber. As Bernard was conducting his initial experiments with carbon monoxide, others were discovering the properties of carbon dioxide. One significant development in the discussion that would turn into the eugenics movement was set in motion in July 1874, when Richard Louis Dugdale conducted a study of the Jukes clan. Eugenics dovetailed readily with other already established American notions such as manifest destiny, racial segregation, and a reliance on capital punishment.

This chapter describes the fate of the eugenics movement and Catholic opposition after World War II. In the 1950s, Catholics managed to integrate successfully with the larger American population while maintaining their religious traditions and community. The eugenics movement had withered away, and by 1960 there was a Catholic in the White House. For most of the nation, forced sterilization did not arise again as an issue until the 1960s and 1970s, when poor people of color were targeted for the operation. By the mid-1970s, the public face of Catholic teaching with regard to reproductive issues focused on the controversy over contraception and a vociferous response to the legalization of abortion in the Roe v. Wade decision.

This chapter focuses on the eugenics of Charles Davenport who, through his speeches, writings, and advocacy on behalf of eugenic ideology, established himself as the expert of the American eugenics movement. Davenport is most notably known for attempting to quantify the heritability of social and mental traits within group variations, and for relating questions of heredity with the challenges of immigration. Upon the adoption of the Johnson-Reed Act, the decrease of European immigrants in the 1920s forced black–white racial issues to the forefront, and therefore caused Davenport to devote his studies to the black–white racial binary. He examined the nature of black–white differences, particularly in the context of children between blacks and whites, as well as between those he refered to as mulattoes.

This book has discussed social welfare policies under Joseph Stalin's leadership and their connection to warfare. It has explained how social medicine enabled the state to launch a variety of public health initiatives, as well as adopt an environmentalist approach to maintaining the bodily well-being of the citizenry. It has examined Soviet reproductive policies that included the rejection of the eugenics movement and the construction of an essentialist gender order that nonetheless upheld women's place in the workforce. It has also considered the Soviet government's extensive use of surveillance and propaganda so as to monitor and influence people's thinking, along with state violence in an attempt to effect social transformation and ensure state security. The book argues that such state interventionist practices were intended to fashion a rational social order.