Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America

"This is a wonderful book. There’s a lot of very, very good work on American eugenics but what I like about Stern’s book is the breadth of it. She is interested in some really unusual manifestations of eugenics beyond obvious things like sterilisation so she discusses people who were conservationists and eugenicists as well, who argued that conserving the Earth was the way to create an environment that is good for reproduction. She’s also very, very sensitive about gender issues. Who is it who gets to make the decisions about who can have babies? Most of the time, it is men who are making the decisions about the reproductive capacities of both men and women. So what I like about the book is the feminist analysis that sees the bigger, broader picture. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She also lays out what is going on in the United States and the relationship to its border with Mexico. She is very sensitive about that border as well, thinking about the racial aspect of American eugenics. One thing we know about American history is that race is a big question. And it isn’t just about African-Americans, it’s about that fear of the porosity of the Mexican border in places like California, Arizona, and to a lesser extent in Texas—there was never a eugenics law in Texas. In California in particular, there’s an enormous amount of the anti-Latino, anti-Hispanic stuff: ‘These people breed too much, we have to stop that because it is the wrong kind of breeding.’ ‘They breed like rabbits.’ All that kind of heavily racially inflected eugenics. They are doing things like intelligence testing which is part of eugenics, in which they are arguing that African-Americans and Latino people are less intelligent, and there’s this relationship between how much intelligence you have and how many babies you have. There’s this allegedly inverse proportion. So they are arguing that the stupider people, the people with lower IQs, are breeding more, and that has to be stopped. “There’s an allegedly inverse proportion between how much intelligence you have and how many babies you have” If you think this is not happening in England at the same moment, don’t be fooled. Some of the stuff that’s coming out in the 1920s is about the difference between Jewish children and Anglo children. Obviously, there is not a large black population to look at in this period, but there’s a lot of anti-semitic rhetoric. Oh, no, in this period eugenics is not a dirty word. It doesn’t really become a dirty word until the Nazis get involved, until the middle of the 1940s, I would say. No one was trying to cover it up, not at all. The people who were introducing things like IQ tests were proud members of the Eugenic Society. Winston Churchill was in favour of sterilisation. In the 1920s. And in the 1930s a government commission looked into the question of sterilisation and decided: ‘It’s okay if it is voluntary, but we are not going to go the compulsory route.’ That was too much invasion of the liberty of the subject. But there were quite a lot of people in Britain who would have liked a compulsory sterilisation programme, and Churchill was among them. All of these, but also those with heritable diseases. But then you have to ask the question: what is a heritable disease? Obviously it is things like Huntington’s Chorea, and things that really are passed on, but at the time it wasn’t just that. In this period, in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a notion that epilepsy, alcoholism, criminality, blindness, deafness, muteness, all of those things were heritable. It was a very broad umbrella of people who would be likely to be affected. How many families don’t have someone who drinks too much? “It isn’t just a question of stopping mad people from having kids. It just doesn’t work like that” In fact, statistically, it is absolute nonsense. In the 1930s, many geneticists who’d been big supporters of eugenics in the 1920s started to turn away from eugenics at the moment of what we call the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, when genetics became a more sophisticated discipline. Not all of them, by any means, but they started to be a little bit more uncomfortable, saying: ‘It’s not that simple. It isn’t just a question of stopping mad people from having kids. It just doesn’t work like that.’ And it doesn’t; we now understand the differences between dominant and recessive genes, which they were only beginning to understand in terms of human variation in the 1930s. I wouldn’t say so. The positive stuff is there in the earlier period. Again, it is such a broad movement that you’ve got all of this going on at all times. And, in the later period, I don’t think you’re necessarily looking at a more progressive version of eugenics. In fact we know that in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States, although compulsory sterilisation or involuntary sterilisation was no longer on the [law]books in most places, it was nonetheless happening. For instance, in the 1980s there was a big case that came to the California courts called Madrigal vs. Quilligan . At the county hospital, a hospital where they treated patients without health insurance, Latina women were coming in and being delivered of babies, and while they were in labour and often drugged up they were being given consent forms to sign that allowed the doctors to sterilise them. And in the Deep South amongst black women, a lot of the clinics were encouraging this. It was so common in the 1970s and the early 1980s that it was known as the ‘Mississippi appendectomy.’ So it doesn’t go away, no. I wish I could answer that. I think a lot of people didn’t know these things were going on. It usually came out because there was a lawsuit, or because some hotshot journalist found out about it. The kind of people who were being sterilised, particularly in these later periods, are people who often don’t have a vast amount of education, who don’t really necessarily know what their rights are, who are probably a little bit scared of the grand doctors. Are they going to make a fuss? Probably not. “The majority of people directly and adversely affected by eugenic practices were vulnerable people” We are talking about vulnerable people. One thing we know about eugenics is that the vast majority of people who were directly and adversely affected by eugenic practices were poorer people, often minority people. They weren’t necessarily women, although obviously women were affected, but they were on the whole the kind of people for whom it was difficult to fight back."

"Eugenic Nation examines the eugenics movement, the project of trying to create an ideal race in twentieth-century United States, with scientific attempts to engineer a strong, healthy, dominant, white race through breeding projects and sterilization—mostly of women of color, people who were mentally ill, or people who were deemed promiscuous. Forced sterilization stayed with us all the way into the 1970s. I teach with Eugenic Nation all the time; it’s very well-written. Stern outlines the surprising interface between eugenics and a whole bunch of things that outlived eugenics and are now seen as leftist causes, like environmentalism. For instance, the Sierra Club, she shows, comes from eugenicists, and at its origin shared the eugenicists’ goal of preserving space for the white race. She has an excellent chapter about how the completion of the Panama Canal fueled eugenicist thinking; through tropical medicine and immunization against yellow fever, white people were now able to survive even in tropical regions, and some thought this showed they were the master race. There’s also amazing evidence from ‘better babies’ exhibitions in the early twentieth century. The book shows all of the different ways that eugenicist thinking has intertwined with other elements in our social history. Eugenics was mainstream in the progressive moment: you can see this in the writing of people like Teddy Roosevelt. It was a popular position that only went out of vogue after World War II showed us what the apotheosis of eugenics looks like. Yet even after World War II , the movement persisted. It was now called ‘hereditarianism’, which was basically just eugenics under a different name. This continued to the 1970s. Stern’s work shows that these ideas persist and pop back up where people stop paying attention. Eugenic Nation focuses mostly on what’s going on in California. This led me to wonder how white supremacy varies across regions. A lot of scholarship has tried to make racism about an overflow of Southern problems into the rest of the country. For instance, the second iteration of the Ku Klux Klan in 1920s was very popular in Indiana. Some argued that’s because a lot of Confederates settled in Indiana. This goes all the way up to the 1980s, when some scholars were saying the high rate of resettlement from the Confederacy to Idaho explained the Aryan Nation. I find all of that unpersuasive. Studies show that even during the time of legal segregation in the Jim Crow South, we saw a ton of de facto segregation and inequality in the North. White supremacy takes different forms, but it’s with us in every region of this country and still saturates our systems."