6 “New Fashioned with Respect to the Human Race” American Eugenics in the Media at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Celeste Tường Vy Sharpe

Tendencies fostered by the modern social organism are injuring the race. . . . War itself, once a valuable selective agency, exposes the strongest and the fleetest to the bomb and the bullet, to the diseases and temptations of military service, to irregular habits, delayed marriage, and diminished families. The confinements of the industrial organization kill off the biologically fitter. The institution of property replaces “natural mating” with mating of the less fit to perpetuate the race. Celibacy, the custom of later marriage, and the restriction of families cut down the ranks of the fittest. Even the development of medicine, hygiene, and dietetics rears to maturity fathers of weakly families who might have fallen early beneath the scythe of natural selection. Excessive humanitarianism fosters parasitic and pauper growths, propping ill-favored individuals at the expense of the social group.

—Albert Galloway Keller, New York Times, 1908

During the second half of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, rapid industrialization and the related large-scale transatlantic patterns of migration to urban centres lay at the centre of Progressive Era concerns, which echoed earlier and parallel European developments (as chapters 7 and 8 also argue with respect to coerced experimentation and sterilization, or the application of eugenics ideology in the psychiatric and mental health field). In the United States, the period from the 1890s to the 1920s was characterized by profound social discourses and medical reform movements, which were likewise motivated by political attempts to eliminate the ills caused by urbanization, industrial labour conditions, immigration challenges, and corruption in the federal government. The “modern social organism,” as Yale sociologist Albert Galloway Keller (1874–1956) described so vividly,¹ caused grave concern in that it seemingly altered the existing mechanisms for ensuring that the physically strongest and mentally fittest people continued “the race.” Fear of the fertility of newly arrived immigrants to American cities almost sparked a panic about “race suicide,” the belief that the reckless breeding of the lower classes and “unfit” would eventually overwhelm the approved reproduction of the white middle and upper classes and also hurt the level of culture and social behaviour of the nation as a whole.² These changing times, according to eugenicists, needed dedicated, thoughtful, and far-reaching responses and solutions to preserve the “best stock” and eventually produce “a race of superior beings,” including their mental functions and social capabilities.³

Eugenics gained traction in the United States around the turn of the twentieth century as a response to the perceived imminent degeneration of society, with psychiatrists and physicians often at the forefront of this new scientific and social movement. Eugenics—defined by Francis Galton (1822–1911) in 1882 as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage”—appealed to many in the Progressive Era as a new science-based approach to the pressures of modernization on human development.⁴ Varying incarnations of this popular and medico-scientific ideology permeated North American and European policy and society during the early twentieth century, resulting in the establishment of numerous laws and organizations advocating for and designed around eugenic principles (see, for example, Mikkel Dack’s chapter on the social and legal context of the 1937 Amendment to the Sexual Sterilization Act in the province of Alberta).

This chapter primarily examines the discourse in American print media on eugenics and its relation to mental and public health from 1900 to 1915, with attention to how this rhetoric introduced eugenics to the public and laid a foundation for its later popularity during the interwar period. While historical studies using media as their main content source face frequent methodological difficulties in measuring the effects of media content, messages, and formats, this approach is here triangulated between the strengths and weaknesses of newspapers as historical sources, scientific and political publications from the time period, and secondary literature accounts. The emergent media discourse on eugenics and public mental health successfully blended established nineteenth-century preoccupations with racial taxonomies and reproductive control with Progressive Era ideas of behavioural control and social collectivism, thus situating eugenics as a response to old and new problems alike. The American eugenics community’s self-perceived status from 1900 to 1915 as a latecomer to eugenic policy and study provides deeper context for the sharp rise in support by scientists, administrators, and public health workers for eugenic organizations, forced sterilization laws (for a comparison, see chapter 8 and 9), and the eugenic movement as a whole between World War I and World War II. Eugenic policies and regulations thereby emerged in many North American jurisdictions, including in more than thirty American states and Canadian provinces; Canada saw the introduction of Alberta’s Sexual Sterilization Act in 1928 and a derivative act in British Columbia in 1933. In recent years, historians and other researchers and community activists have drawn attention to the broader reach of the eugenics movement across the globe.

While eugenics infused a range of topics in public conversation, in this chapter I will focus on two of the most prevalent themes: the science of heredity and eugenicists as vehicles for progress; and the ramifications of eugenics for the social institution of marriage, childbirth, and family health. These two thematic areas are significant in that they suffused conversations on eugenics in the early years of the movement. While I am analyzing them separately, it is important to acknowledge that newspaper articles on eugenics often employed combinations of the themes to better support the eugenicists’ particular positions. Another significant feature of the discourse is that beyond frequent references to Galton and Charles Darwin (1809–82), the newspaper articles indicated that American eugenicists, psychiatrists, and neurologists were attuned to the conversations and scientific studies being conducted in Europe, particularly in England, during the period of analysis. Taken together, the two thematic areas laid a foundation that the eugenics movement would build on and adapt in the years to come.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

The scholarship on eugenics and psychiatry in the United States⁵ has typically focused on the most renowned figures and institutions of the movement, such as Charles Davenport (1866–1944) and the Eugenics Record Office (ERO)—located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York—although the scholarly research has diversified considerably in the last two decades.⁶ Key points in the more traditional narratives include the establishment of a few East Coast–based eugenics and mental institutions, the support of various eugenic policies and programs by wealthy corporations, and the charisma of the movement’s male leaders in advocating for eugenic-based legislation at the state and national level. A common periodization of eugenics history on the international level, one that is still often used, begins with World War I and ends with the eugenics community’s retreat in light of the horror of, and public revulsion to, German eugenic and euthanasia programs during World War II. Studies of this kind include, for example, historian of biology Garland E. Allen’s The Ideology of Elimination: American and German Eugenics, 1900–1945 and Edwin Black’s War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.⁷ While Allen and Black acknowledge the diffuse nature of eugenics organizations and figures in the United States, their studies still focus largely on the most prominent—typically East Coast—psychiatric and research institutions, along with male eugenicists who were also scientists. This focus, while vital to understanding the larger narrative of the eugenics movement, overemphasizes the efforts of these few institutions and individuals and obscures the diversity of perspectives and approaches of eugenics advocates across time and space.

More recent scholarship has shifted the study of eugenics away from the stricter chronological and limited geographic focus to deepen and enrich understanding of eugenics in American history by demonstrating how eugenics policy and rhetoric developed at different rates and in different ways across the country. Historian Alexandra Minna Stern, for instance, emphasizes the importance of place to the development of eugenics in the United States and, in relation to the movement in the western states, argues that “by turning our gaze thousands of miles west, away from the headquarters of the ERO, we encounter a history that was both paradigmatic of large-scale national trends and particular to the region.”⁸ Historian Nathaniel Deutsch discusses the development of eugenics programs and attitudes in Indiana, the first state to successfully pass sterilization legislation, in 1907, informed by specific neurological and psychiatric medical concerns. His work on the “Tribe of Ishmael,” a pejorative phrase for the poorest white class, examines eugenics from the perspective of a group targeted by the eugenics proponents and the government for sterilization.⁹ Eugenics legal scholar Edward J. Larson’s study of the shape of eugenics in the Deep South highlights the different mechanisms and ways in which eugenics was used by (predominantly) white southerners to maintain economic, political, and social control.¹⁰ Taken together, these scholars largely argue that the form taken by eugenics policies and rhetoric was often shaped more by the particular views of individual local and state societies than by the agendas put forward by the big northeastern institutions. Following the work of these researchers, this study likewise seeks to shift attention away from the northeast part of the United States to the articles and conversations that took place in newspapers across the country.

Scholarly interest in eugenics rhetoric is perhaps best exemplified by Marouf Arif Hasian’s monograph The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought. He applies an ideographic approach to show how the “rise and (temporary fall) in the popularity of eugenic explanations of individual and social behaviour reflects the changes that were taking place in the public vocabulary.” His analysis of eugenics rhetoric seeks to get at the “instantiated particular views of the relationship between citizens and the government.”¹¹ Hasian’s arguments are framed largely in response to a concern that public and health discourses around genetics in the 1980s and 1990s misrepresented eugenics as a temporary aberration in history before World War II driven by mistaken, unscientific individuals. He also places considerable weight on the frequency of keywords he identified, such as “necessity,” in tracing the warp and weft of eugenics rhetoric. My own study diverges from Hasian’s in that I am placing more emphasis on the historical context of the Progressive Era, and specifically on how newspaper articles on eugenics and the emerging movement functioned as a space for various individuals and expert groups across the country to express their visions of the future. By focusing on the earlier years of the movement, this chapter also argues for more scholarly attention to the overlap between the eugenics movement and transatlantic progressivism.

The scholarship on Progressive Era reform provides the backdrop for this study. Daniel Rodgers’s monograph Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age in particular provides several starting points for this project. Although Rodgers does not delve into the growing discourse around eugenics specifically in his book, his work on city planning, social insurance, wartime collectivism, and cooperative farming resonates in that it shows an America that sought and contributed to these transatlantic discussions, although often with different results than European states. He argues that America’s laggard position on these issues actually had some advantage by opening opportunities to “leapfrog over their competitors,” namely, to see how experimental work had played out and avoid costly mistakes.¹² This view can also be applied to the arc of the American eugenics movement, which is commonly considered to have started slowly in Britain, where the movement was founded but did not develop as much as in America and Germany (in terms of laws, social programs, mental institutions, and forms of psychiatric diagnostics and control). This was truly an international movement that reached well beyond the “big three” eugenics countries and had its peak in the interwar period with an emphasis on so-called negative eugenics, in line with its implementation and practice in Germany. Timing and precedent, then, as Rodgers demonstrates, are as significant as ideology in shaping public sentiment and policy decisions.¹³ The sentiments expressed in the earlier years of the eugenics movement provided precedents upon which later eugenicists could build.

Critical scholarly interest in eugenics has provided a rich body of work. In examining newspaper items on eugenics published across the country, this study seeks to highlight how the eugenicists working in the early years of the movement carved out a vital space in the public conversation for their particular plans for society. Early eugenicists—mindful that the United States was slightly behind its European peers on eugenics policies and studies—built a discursive foundation for the movement that drew expressly on interest in breeding science, racial taxonomies, psychiatric nosologies, and systematic responses to mass industrialization, urbanization, and immigration.

EUGENIC SCIENCE AND BREEDING

The language of breeding—namely, discussions on animal- and plant-breeding principles as a springboard for human eugenics—was strongest during the first decades of the twentieth century. Connections with agricultural breeding provided common references and explanations with which to educate a broader public on the expertise of the eugenicists and the rationale of applying eugenic principles to questions of human reproduction. Such advocates argued that while America had long struggled with demographic pressures, developments in science and breeding meant a conceivable end to mental health concerns about drunkenness, epilepsy, social deviance, race, and other undesirable aspects of human difference plaguing the nation. The process of identifying problem groups, adapting animal- and plant-breeding techniques for humans, and outlining legal and social mechanisms to enact eugenic programs would, according to the early eugenics discourse, propel the chosen American and European races to greatness.¹⁴

Yet what identified an ideal eugenic person? Typically, people from the middle class were identified as the best breeding stock, with special emphasis on intellectuals, artists, and scientists—reflecting the kinds of people who were the strongest advocates in the movement. A combination of German, Nordic, and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant characteristics was thought to be the best.¹⁵ Amory C. Stevens of New York described the ideal type of man as one “who will combine the large frame and strength of the ideal Anglo-Saxon or Scandinavian, the practical intelligence of the American, the intellect of the high German, the art-loving qualities and sunny temperament of the Latin, and so forth.”¹⁶ In predominantly white areas of the country, the definition of “race” shifted to include more attention to class and social factors in addition to ethnic differences. Eugenicists created all sorts of social boundaries and categories among whites, as Stern points out, by “dividing northerner from southerner, employed from unemployed, . . . schooled from unschooled, sound from unsound and ordered from disordered.”¹⁷ The complex characterizations and distinctions created to delineate the ideal from the degenerate highlighted the white middle- to upper-class core of the movement and further demonstrated the ways that eugenicists wove together their own notions of race, class, and ability in categorizing people as eugenically healthy or not. These notions visibly informed the early eugenics discourse, particularly the conversations on how to extrapolate from agricultural breeding to human breeding and on how to overcome existing social norms that might impede the progressive eugenics programs.

Printed in newspapers across the United States, triumphant reports from prominent scientists on the formation of new scholarly societies and on their latest findings sought to impress upon the public the cutting-edge relevance of eugenics. Turn-of-the-century articles and some editorials reinforced this view by describing eugenics as the natural extension of breeding programs for animals and plants that yielded stronger, faster-growing specimens. Eugenics advocates claimed that American horticulturalist Luther Burbank’s (1849–1926) well-documented successes in creating new varieties of plants, for example, paved the way for applications of breeding science to human beings. A 1906 Blue Grass Blade article on Burbank cheerfully declared that his “achievements with the fruits, the flora and the trees coupled with his own practical human and aspiring intelligence have come opportunely to help our species further onward and upward.”¹⁸ The discoveries he made with plants were portrayed largely as a model of the possibilities of heredity and breeding science, and eugenics advocates depicted Burbank himself as an exemplar of human achievement, ingenious intellect, and progressive scientific thought.

Early attempts to educate the public on the potential of eugenics widely acknowledged that human nature and individuality will presented significant obstacles to any direct translation of agricultural breeding to humans. Belief in the goals of eugenic science, however, provided hope that eugenicists would create new knowledge about human heredity. As German historian Peter Weingart argues, “Given the concern about degenerative development, traditional demography seemed inferior because it focused only on the quantitative aspects of the population, whereas eugenics could deal with the quality.”¹⁹ Assistant secretary of agriculture Willet M. Hays (1879–1954) released a cautiously optimistic statement highlighting the potential of eugenics: “The subject of investigating the heredity of man is comparatively much more difficult than in the case of plants and animals. It is so important that science and religion should join in an investigation at once conservative, careful, and possibly constructive.”²⁰ Eugenicists educated in a range of fields, but primarily from the sciences, medicine, and psychiatry, promoted a belief that their work was a natural extension of agricultural breeding, “improving the human species in much the same ways as a breeder improves a flock or herd,” albeit with greater consequences for the future.²¹ Eugenic science, then, held the key to eliminating degenerate groups identified as “injuring the race.”²²

In 1906, the Department of Agriculture held a series of high-profile meetings of eugenicists in the United States. Statements and reports from the meetings, published in newspapers across the country, outlined the objectives of eugenics and how these principles should be applied in practice for the good of society, especially in America. The meeting delegation was made up of prominent eugenicists chosen by Assistant Secretary Hays: Alexander Graham Bell (1844–1929) as chair, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan (1851–1931), University of Chicago professor Charles R. Henderson (1848-1915), Dr. Charles Woodruff (1846–1927), C. W. Ward (1867–1931?), and Reverend J. E. Gilbert (1886–1963?). Hays described the committee’s four areas of activity: “to investigate and report on heredity in the human race; to devise methods of recording the values of the blood of individuals, families, peoples, and races; to emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood, and to suggest methods of improving the heredity of the family, the people, or the race.”²³ Hays’s own background as a founder of the American Breeder’s Association, and an avid animal and plant breeder, is apparent in the men he selected for the committee and its initial stated goals.

As framed by eugenics articles, social progress and selective breeding measures went hand in hand—though the language allowed considerable room for various interpretations of what improvement to the human race might look like. As a tangible first step, while those investigations into translating principles of animal and plant breeding were conducted, the committee agreed that the “immediate object of the committee . . . is to spread information in regard to the ill effects of the marriage of defective persons, including imbeciles, idiots and feeble-minded.” Insane persons, confirmed drunkards and moral degenerates were to be “restrained in colonies and kept from marrying.”²⁴ Starting with those groups, the Department of Agriculture’s committee could use public education in eugenic rhetoric to lay the foundation for broader legislative, mental health, and social actions. As these ill-defined groups had long been blamed as morally and genetically bereft and targeted by nineteenth-century reformers of all stripes, eugenicists needed only to put a bit of their own gloss on how best to “solve” the contemporary societal problems of poverty, addiction, decreasing social coherence, and immigration rather than devise an entirely new position. The vagueness of eugenics generally, and the 1906 committee’s reports specifically, opened a discursive space for differing groups to describe and promote a wide range of actions and policies to further eugenic aims.

The shift from Galton’s more benign definition of eugenics to the more active selection process and set of tactics outlined in the 1906 reports and articles established eugenics as a science and a social program. Early eugenic discourse aimed high: to produce scientific knowledge about optimal partnering and reproduction, to prove its utility in American society through demonstrated results, and to align with American notions of progress. Sweeping statements became increasingly common, such as Garrett P. Serviss’s (1851–1929) bold declaration on page 1 of the Blue Grass Blade that “the new men and women raised up by the new science of ‘eugenics’ will have, by the mere effect of their improved physique, a richer, fuller, more agreeable life than their predecessors have enjoyed.”²⁵ The idea of an American eugenic utopia emerged from statements like this and became a point of reference for later proponents. Over time, as eugenics permeated the personal behaviour and systems of government, society could then reach its potential.

How eugenicists envisioned the specific mechanisms for eugenic breeding and progress to occur varied significantly. In contrast to more benign and generalized language about eugenic utopias, an aggressive form of eugenics advocacy pushed for the forced quarantine, examination, sterilization, and/or elimination of those deemed unfit. Dr. Eugene Davenport (1856–1941) of the University of Illinois was one such proponent. He argued bluntly “that all the ‘culls’ or ‘scalawags’ of the human race should be taken before the courts, scientifically investigated, and if found unworthy, colonized and permitted to die off.”²⁶ Extreme measures seemed appropriate to those especially panicked about America’s acute problem with race suicide and its laggard status with regard to eugenic knowledge and policies overall. Although scientists varied in their fervour for eugenics and the specifics of implementing eugenic principles, their rhetoric in newspaper discussions consistently emphasized that eugenics presented a scientifically based set of corrections to problem groups in American society, such as the vast patient populations of the mental asylums, the white working-class populations of the mining and heavy industry cities, the hill colonies of Virginia with their alleged problems of mental retardation and physical disability rates, and the African American populations of the Deep South, among others.

The tension between notions of American exceptionalism and connection with transatlantic communities and social processes is apparent. In these early years of the eugenics movement, articles noted similarities in the effects of industrialization and urbanization on Europeans and Americans but also gestured to the ways that these same effects were perceived as heightened or worse in America. Writing for the Evening Star in Washington, DC, in 1906, John Elfreth Watkins (1852–1903) from the prominent Smithsonian Institution and Museums stressed that “blond immigrants and their descendants”—despite being perceived as the most prized immigrants in the United States—“cannot thrive in this country, save in the cloudy regions of the extreme northwestern corner.” More generally, “every now and then we learn of some great man collapsing of nervous breakdown before forty-five under loads which Europeans seem to bear safely until sixty or sixty-five.” And perhaps most damning, “Suicides, which are nearly always due to mental or nervous diseases, are increasing in the United States.”²⁷ That large areas of the United States proved unhealthy for European immigrants and detrimental to those Americans expected to be both physically and mentally robust indicated the need for the measured and wide-reaching application of eugenics, and the movement’s supporters had a ready supply of anecdotal evidence to support these assertions.

American eugenicists also participated in the transatlantic conversations throughout this period by contributing their own insights abroad. The middle-class norm among eugenicists also cut the other way, and the affluent upper class received a fair amount of scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic. The primary accusation held that the wealthy—assumed in articles on eugenics to be men only—used their money and privilege to achieve marriages that may not have occurred if the only considerations for such unions were attractiveness, health, and love. Eugenicists were quick to point out that their principles did not preclude love or forming loving attachments. Freeing partnering from “the influences that do violence to love”—especially “the still more fatal influence of wealth and position and worldly convenience, which give a factitious value to persons who would never appear attractive partners in life were love and eugenic ideals left to go hand in hand”—was a particular concern for American and British eugenicists deeply concerned with the power and privilege of wealth.²⁸ The middle class served as the fulcrum for eugenic norms in the United States and Europe, with those classes above and below suspect by virtue of their social status.

Reverend Dr. Samuel George Smith (b. 1851?) of Minneapolis spoke at the 1912 Eugenics Congress in London, calling for attention to the ways that the wealthy and upper class could circumvent ideal eugenic practices. He speculated that “we may say they will not permit poor to breed, but how can we deal with those who defy society by wealth, social position, and power,” and stated that excellence of the mind should be sought in the same way as—and even in cases of a lack of—physical excellence.²⁹ Smith’s class critique likely played well to his European audience, but it also calls attention to a broader transatlantic concern with the growth and consolidation of wealth among a few that accompanied industrialization around the turn of the century. Also speaking to the relation between eugenics and class, John C. Hudson (1919–96), superintendent to the education committee of the borough of Hornsey, England, praised what he saw as the increased possibility for social mobility in American society, and in the city of Chicago’s education system specifically: “As, for example, every boy who goes to the public school in the states has the possibility of becoming president someday. The greatest ambition of a boy in the older countries of Europe can only rise to the height of following some occupation like that of his father, uncle, or of some relative.”³⁰

The potential for improvement and belief in progress underpinned many early accounts and discussions of eugenics in American newspapers. The convergence of innovations in animal and plant science with medical and neuropsychiatric diagnostics and treatment concerns, a decline in the birth rate in many areas of Europe and the United States, increased immigration, and changing social relationships linked to mass industrialization and urbanization in the Progressive Era opened space for the eugenics movement to assert itself. In cobbling together a set of approaches and principles based in part on contemporary scientific research on heredity, early eugenicists presented a vision, albeit still vague, of a progressive science and related social program. As Stern describes, “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.”³¹ While scientists worked to solve the puzzle of human heredity, eugenicists speculated on how to apply eugenic principles to the general public. As will be discussed in the next section, education and regulation of marriage—and, to a lesser extent, parenting—seemed the optimal place for eugenicists to implement their notion of social change.

MARRIAGE, LEGISLATION, AND PUBLIC MENTAL HEALTH EDUCATION

American eugenicists, and among them many psychiatrists and mental health administrators, diverged greatly in their opinions on the optimal combination of formal and informal guidance to ensure public compliance with eugenic principles. While individual states passed marriage regulations and forced sterilization laws with the support of eugenics advocates, education programs and tests were devised as bottom-up methods for spreading eugenics knowledge and changing social norms. Keenly motivated to demonstrate the efficacy of the movement to their Northern Atlantic peers (see also chapter 2), American eugenicists pursued a wide range of approaches for shaping ideal couples and marriages. A key implication in much of the discourse was that the drunkards, the feeble-minded, and other undesirable people were by and large men. It could be that degeneracy in men was seen as more debilitating to society than degeneracy in women and so sparked more discussion of how to decrease the prevalence of these unfit groups. Many eugenicists argued that a primary way to ensure that degenerate men did not reproduce was to educate women in choosing better husbands. This sense of choice, as I will later discuss, was greatly limited by women’s lack of financial and political power, but it is interesting to note that the early discourse on eugenics did not explicitly describe women as prone to the moral and physical degeneration or deficiencies so often noted in men. The recurring fear expressed in the media was that women would marry degenerate men, which would then increase the chances for below-average offspring and further regress the race.

Rhetoric on marriage, and the increasing discussions of the role of eugenics in this social institution, particularly resonated with the public because of long-standing concern over who should marry and which pairings would be most beneficial to society. Fear of undesirable pairings caused by young people’s misplaced affections and lack of education on “proper” matches quickly found a platform in turn-of-the-century eugenics discourse. Specifically, proponents claimed that human nature and emotions deterred and harmed the selection process at the individual level. At the same time, eugenicists were trained to evaluate and identify appropriate matches based on observable physical and behavioural traits and therefore had a duty to communicate to the public the benefits of and need for eugenic-based couplings to ameliorate the risk of poor matches. An article in the New York Times emphasized how a “eugenicist only puts more care and more intelligence in the selection of his life mate,” because of the eugenicist’s greater knowledge in the desirable traits for a mate. Eugenic societies, as Weingart argues, sought to “take decisions about reproduction out of the hands of individuals, with their irrational considerations under the influence of passion, and leave only the satisfaction of their sexual needs to themselves.”³² Eugenicists, informed by their keen insights into human heredity, saw themselves as experts in recognizing optimal couples.

Jurisdiction over who was to wield the power to influence and regulate marriage was a tricky subject. The emergent position of eugenics meant that its proponents had to avoid alienating large constituencies of Americans and institutions that could be useful in the future. As Thomas Leonard argues, “Progressive Era eugenics opposed laissez-faire values, by substituting an objective, expert determination of the social good for a subjective, individual determination of the social good. Individuals could not be relied upon to promote the social good of better heredity, but experts could.”³³ Beyond this, however, is the fact that eugenicists themselves varied widely in their visions of how eugenic principles could best be applied to American society. Eugenicists carefully positioned themselves in relation to other groups with vested interest in the institution of marriage. Dr. H. W. Anderson (b. 1901?), president of the California State Eugenics Association, adamantly argued that “legitimate eugenics has no quarrel with the church, with marriage. . . . Its mission is to take society as it finds it and improve upon it, and, in every legitimate way, labor to produce a better race of human beings.”³⁴ Statements like this demonstrated some eugenicists’ apprehension about appearing too socially radical and thereby limiting the appeal of the movement. The institution of marriage demanded wary respect from a number of eugenicists, who were generally careful about framing their rhetoric to accommodate traditional views.

Eugenics rhetoric placed a significant burden on women as the arbiters of good marriages that would lead to “quality” children but foresaw the intervention in marriages of poorer stock and guidance of the eugenics movement along the way. In several articles, eugenicists argued that greater social freedom for women, achieved in large part as a result of women’s suffrage, to choose healthy and loving marriages (hopefully with eugenic principles in mind). La Reine Helen Baker (b. 1882) was one of those who agreed with the sentiment that women would achieve greater control over their lives through suffrage—and that it had implications for the eugenics movement. An outspoken attendee of the 1910 National Woman Suffrage Association convention, Baker declared that “it is quality we want in children, not quantity. Woman suffrage will produce better children, for it will produce better thinking.”³⁵ Baker’s statement interpreted declining birth rates from a different perspective: her position focused on a broader definition of female autonomy than that of the previously discussed group of eugenicists, which, according to Baker, linked women’s suffrage to women’s education to high quality eugenic marriages to a small number of “better” children. Her response to race suicide emphasized increasing the quality of women’s and children’s lives rather than increasing family size. Women, to Baker’s mind, should hold the power to enact eugenic principles—they merely needed additional knowledge to do so correctly. Baker thus joined a circle of very ardent women supporters of eugenics in the United States.

Writing for the San Francisco Call in 1913, Dr. Edward C. Spitzka (1852–1914) claimed, “The more that women are emancipated the fewer marriages there will be for financial reasons, women being today the greater offenders in this respect. The universal establishment of the real love marriage would be a boon to the human race.”³⁶ Spitzka’s words connected female autonomy, love, and marriage into a surprisingly feminist and altogether eugenic vision of society. His inclusion of “financial reasons” hints at the common distrust of money as a primary motivator for marriage. While it was not uncommon for wealthy women to be pursued for their dowry and money, eugenics discourse emphasized a seeming problem of weak wealthy men obtaining good marriages and having children based on their social position alone.³⁷ The significance of “real love” bonds, in relation to scientific hereditary knowledge, varied from contemporary eugenicist to eugenicist, yet overall it opened a place in the discourse for women’s action and choice as integral to visions of a eugenic society.

Despite uncertainty over who should be invested with the power to form couples for marriage, there was general agreement that marriage and reproduction should be regulated in three main ways: through strict legislation, with public education, and by social pressure. Of the three approaches typically described, legal regulation of marriage was seen by eugenicists as a more immediate and practical solution than the other two. This piecemeal approach did little for the kind of broad societal change eugenicists wished to see, but it did present evidence to European peers that the United States was making serious efforts to reform society with eugenics. Further, as Benjamin Witt (b. 1860) wrote in 1915, progressive reformers wanted to “bring the United States abreast of Germany and other European countries in the matter of remedial legislation,” largely connecting with similar “progressivist” tendencies in Germany and central Europe at the time (see chapter 7 on the historical case of Kurt Goldstein).³⁸ Eugenics-based laws, then, served as a measure to inhibit race suicide while bringing the United States closer in line with its transatlantic peers.

Forms of marriage legislation varied greatly. Dr. G. Frank Lydston (1858–1923), a criminal anthropologist and psychologist, argued that all degenerates—the “criminal, epileptic, insane and drunken”—should be prevented from marrying unless they first submitted to sterilization.³⁹ He believed that barring degenerates from marriage took precedence over broader marriage legislation, because of the perceived immediate danger posed by those groups. Indiana’s sterilization law (1907), Michigan’s neurologically inspired prohibition of marriage for epileptics (1913), and Nebraska’s prohibition of marriage for first cousins (1915) exemplified this mindset. Fear of how undesirable social behaviours, psychological traits, and illnesses could be passed from generation to generation helped push such laws into force.

Some eugenicists saw legal regulations of marriage as stepping stones in eugenic progress. Dr. Henry Maudsley (1835–1918), a British eugenicist, expressed doubt in the efficacy of doctors and laws in actually shaping and restricting marriage to the most ideal couples. Reviewing the approaches taken by several northern US states, he was of the opinion that “the legal restrictions upon marriage proposed by the homeopathic physicians to the Legislatures of Nebraska, Colorado, and Michigan would be negligible even should they be fixed in the statute books.”⁴⁰ While perhaps overlooking the extent to which marriage laws could be interpreted and implemented at the local level, Maudsley’s views do emphasize the ways that laws regulating marriage were structurally contained to small geographic areas and lacked any sense of systematic consistency. Archibald Primrose (1847–1927), Earl of Rosebery and former British prime minister, stated in a 1908 speech to the Society for Comparative Legislation in London that the most fortunate states were those that “achieved development by the individual efforts of its citizens as little as possible supported or guided by legislation.”⁴¹ He mentioned the Michigan and Nebraska laws specifically, noting that while “people might be inclined to smile” at them, they could be the start of a long-term social change in the country. European observers were likely those who would “smile” at the American laws, as Primrose implied. The newspaper article that mentioned his speech the recently passed laws in Michigan and Nebraska as indicative of growing support for eugenics in the United States and mused that “time might show that the Michigan enactment was of great value.”⁴² These comments only suggested the potential merit of such legislation, and in the context of the article, the opinions on eugenics were relegated to a small paragraph at the end of the article.

Keller likewise saw legal regulations as only the beginning for eugenics. More crucially, the Yale professor said,

The conviction that such and such unions are evil must be brought home to the masses, if at all, not by the microscope or the statistical table, but by actual, tangible misfortune, and on the large scale. This alone will cause them to distrust their accepted “ways,” and to tolerate the thought of other ways. There must at least be personal suffering to be compared with the weal of others; or, since this is a social matter, there must at least be a comparison of the destinies of societies practicing, respectively, good and bad systems of man-breeding.⁴³

This idea of changing the public’s mind socially through education, peer pressure, competition, and negative experiences, in addition to formal legislation, struck a balance between those who advocated for strict top-down regulation and those who argued for education and gradual adoption of eugenic principles on an individual level.

A society-based, education-driven effort to reform and regulate marriage garnered the most support. Alexander Graham Bell (1847–1922), inventor of the telephone, was highly regarded in the American eugenics community and among those opposed to legislative measures for marriage. Instead, he appealed to the idea that American society wished to produce the finest progeny and that this desire alone would shape marriage and breeding practice for the nation. He also believed that through public education, and a clear explanation of the dangers of the combination of certain groups in marriage, “mere dissemination of that knowledge would of itself tend to promote desirable and prevent undesirable unions of the sexes.”⁴⁴ Bell’s language reflects both the progressive desire to reform society and an uncertainty toward the appropriate measures needed to achieve finer offspring.

Suggestion and education, rather than law, was put forward as the appropriate way to affect marriage choices and ensure proper breeding. Optional medical tests and certificates of eugenic health were also proposed as indicators of individual adherence to eugenic principles, to signal that a person was of ideal health and reproductive ability. “Such certificates,” explained biological psychologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939), “would imply an inquiry and examination into the hereditary influences dominating or conditioning the constitution, health, intelligence and character of the individual. . . . The possession of such a certificate would involve a superiority to the average in all these respects. No one would be compelled to offer himself for such examination, just as no one is compelled to seek a university degree.” These “patents of natural nobility” would, to Ellis’s mind, serve to validate people who may not have the backing of wealth or privileged social status in many areas of their lives, including marriage, jobs, or any situation that would involve personal evaluation.⁴⁵ This evaluative approach accompanied by some kind of award or certification suffused events like the better-baby contests or psychological IQ tests prevalent after World War I, which offered people validation of their supposed fitness in relation to their peer groups and society at large. As demonstrated by the examples above, while the shape and scope of eugenics-oriented legislation was still heavily contested among eugenicists in the media, it was largely agreed that even if such laws were enacted, public education and changes to social norms would result in the greatest long-term success in infusing eugenic principles into the behaviours and minds of Americans.

The American context for eugenics discourse prior to World War I is acutely apparent in an example from a 1913 edition of the Day Book, a Chicago publication. The feature element of page 4 was a large photograph of Eugenette Bolce (1913–1938), the “first baby born in England in accordance to the laws of eugenics.” Her parentage points to the transatlantic reach of the eugenic movement: her father was “of Austrian descent, born in California” and her mother was English. The only other information about Eugenette included in the short article accompanying her picture was that “for a seven-month-old youngster Baby Bolce is displaying remarkable intelligence and already has a pronounced sense of humor. Since her birth she has been reared under the healthiest conditions.”⁴⁶ The juxtaposition of Eugenette’s photograph and story, which together take up over 80 percent of the entire page, with the only other article on page 4, titled “Negress Would Marry White,” points to the particular social issues facing American eugenicists. The terse latter article reports that Blanche Shoemaker had begun legal proceedings to compel the local county clerk to issue her a marriage licence so she could marry a white man. County clerks’ denial of marriage licences to interracial couples is a well-documented occurrence over the twentieth century as a de facto form of miscegenation law.⁴⁷ The contrast in this instance with the image of a “perfectly” conceived white marriage and child starkly highlights the limits implicit in eugenic rhetoric to the kinds of choices available to women related to marriage and childbirth.

Early eugenics discourse often focused on marriage as the key site for social change and implementation of eugenics knowledge and principles. While tension between formal legal regulations and socially based education continued, from 1900 to 1915 the emerging sense was that a combination of the two was needed to move toward an ideal society. Implementation is where the United States differentiated itself from Europe, primarily with the wide-ranging forms of marriage bans passed across the country. The diffuse nature of the eugenics movement and its efforts, coupled with the varied beliefs of the eugenicists and the sense that practical measures needed to be put in place quickly, resulted in a hodgepodge of regulations and ideas for education on eugenics and also its application in the field of public mental health across the country.

CONCLUSION

The earliest discussions of eugenics framed it within popular notions and established ideologies to make it acceptable to a general public. This discourse cast eugenics as a progressive, scientific solution to social issues, and scientists such as Burbank, Bell, and David Starr Jordan who advocated for various eugenic policies were portrayed as a vanguard in the fight against race suicide and the degeneration of the American people. Trading on well-established racialized views of social stratification, the pseudo-science of eugenics seemingly presented new evidence to reinforce systemic racism. Concerns over “proper” couplings opened space for eugenicists to argue for the precise selection, by eugenics experts, of the most desirable combinations of people to marry and have children along with a general (and often contradictory) set of parameters for ideal marriages and parenting environments.

The American eugenics community had the “acute hunger of the era’s social reformers for international information.”⁴⁸ Like other Progressive Era movements, the American eugenics movement found itself a latecomer to develop specific eugenic policy and stimulate scientific research when compared with the eugenics developments across the Atlantic. From 1900 to 1915, American eugenicists looked primarily to Britain, in part because of long-standing historical connections and also because it was the home of Galton and of the first concerted eugenics programs of study. After World War I, German eugenic science aligned more with the American community’s goals, and both countries moved strongly toward more of a negative eugenic bent. Newspaper coverage of early eugenicists reveals a sense of urgency behind the rhetoric. The changes to the health of the race wrought by the “modern social organism”—namely, “the rapid intensification of market relations, the swelling great city populations, and the rising working class resentments from below”—caused considerable concern and calls for immediate action.⁴⁹ American progressives and eugenicists, taking up the metaphor of lagging behind in the race of progress with European states along with concerns about degeneracy and the deterioration of the public health situation, pushed for a wide range of eugenic solutions, both immediate (e.g., marriage bans) and long-term (e.g., public education of women on eugenic marriages).⁵⁰

Newspapers as the main historical source for this study have enabled analysis of the early eugenics movement through the words of eugenicists, mental health–care physicians, and social reformers. Newspapers played an early and vital role in disseminating eugenic principles to the public and served to inform and reassure the public that eugenics was in line with both traditional belief systems and the new progressive movements. While the peak of eugenics in America can most easily be seen in the 1920s and 1930s, the fervour and support for such ideas in that period was not new. In fact, these early years of eugenic discourse laid a strong foundation in establishing the US eugenics movement as, simultaneously, part of a transatlantic conversation on ordering and regulating industrialized nation-states (see also chapters 2, 3, and 7) and a more localized response to the particular shape of American society during the Progressive Era. The numerous instances of forced sterilization legislation, the organization of eugenic institutions and associations nationwide, and the attention given eugenics in general after 1915 drew heavily upon the groundwork set by this early public discourse around mental and public health.