Articles Bad Habits and Bad Genes - Canadian Bulletin of Medical

Transcription

Articles
Bad Habits and Bad Genes: Early
20th-Century Eugenic Attempts
to Eliminate Syphilis and
Associated "Defects" from
the United States
PHILIP K.WILSON
Abstract. American eugenists in the early 20th century distinguished "degenerates," including syphilitics, prostitutes, alcoholics and criminals, from the "normal"
population by their particular bad habits. From eugenists' viewpoint, these bad
habits were derived from bad character, a flaw that stemmed from an individual's
bad genes. This essay explores how eugenists during this period characterized
syphilitics and those with associated character "defects" in terms of heredity.
Additionally, it exarnines the methods eugenists most frequently advocated to rectify these bad habits. These methods included marriage restriction, immigration
control and reproductive sterilization. Overall, eugenists directed their efforts
not so much at the "degenerate" as at his or her germ line.
I
RCsum6. Au debut du vingtieme siecle, les eugenistes etablissaient une distinction entre les udCg6neres>>,dont faisaient partie les syphilitiques, les
alcooliques, les prostituees et les criminels, et la population mormalev, une distinction fondee sur l'existence - et la reconnaissance - de mauvaises habitudes.
Du point de vue des eugenistes, ces habitudes provenaient d'un mauvais temperament, un defaut dont l'origine se trouvait dans les genes de l'individu.
La presente etude examine comment, durant cette periode, les eugenistes
definissaient les syphilitiqueset ceux qui avaient des defauts de caract&reen termes d'heredite. Elle propose, par ailleurs, une analyse des methodes que les
eugenistes employaientle plus frequemment pour corriger ces mauvaises habitudes. Parrni ces m4thodes, il faut en particulier evoquer des restrictions concernant le mariage, des contr6les d'immigration et la sterilisation.Ainsi peut-on
Philip K. Wilson, Historian of Medicine, Penn State College of Medicine.
C B M H I B C H M / Volume 20:l 2003 /p.11-41
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PHILIP K. WILSON
comprendre que les eugenistes concentraient leurs efforts moins sur le
ccdegen6rew lui-m&meque sur sa lignee.
l
The 19th-century French physician Benedict-Augustin Morel used the
term "degeneracy" to describe the hereditary transformation that
occurred when a "morbid variation" of a trait appeared in offspring that
had not been noticed in the parents. These "degenerates," Morel argued,
tended to impede the "intellectual and moral" progress of s0ciety.l By the
turn of the century, this label was popularly used throughout the United
States as an expression of Social Darwinist thought. "Degenerates1' had
become regarded by many scientists and social scientists as evolutionary
throwbacks; individuals whose very existence reversed the march of
history2 inspiring a number of social reform campaigns.
Other experts were convinced that soaal degeneracy was rooted in
biology. In particular, eugenists argued that a hereditary underpinning
was to be found in all degenerates3 In order to eradicate degeneracy,
they argued, intervention must be directed at the individual rather than
at the societal level. To achieve the desired results, American eugenists
promoted a variety of both "positive" and "negative" measures during
the Progressive era. According to Eugenics Record Office (ERO) superintendent Harry H. Laughlin, positive eugenics involved the encouragement of "those family-stocks which have the sounder physical
makeup, the more superior mental capacities, and the more sterling
qualities" to "reproduce themselves more abundantly." Doing so, he
argued, promoted "racial progress" and ensured "an effective and happy
future" for hdividual families as well as for the nation. Additionally,
negative eugenics tactics were deemed necessary to reduce the number of or, better yet, entirely eliminate the offspring of those "familystocks more poorly endowed.!' It was in such families, Laughlin argued,
that "racial or family-stock degeneracy sets in.I14
Laughhn attempted to advance negative eugenics initiativesby identifylng specific categories of "degenerates" fostered through poor reproductive matings. These included idiots, imbeciles, morons, lunatics,
epileptics, sexual "perverts," syphilitics, consumptives, and other chronically diseased individuals, many of whom were housed in various institutions throughout the nation. More numerous, howeveq were the "inebriates" (and other "drug fiends"), prostitutes and "born criminals" who,
through propagating their own kind, hastened social degeneracy.5
Eugenists were most concerned by how so-called degenerates, through
passing along their polluted "germ plasm," diminished the genetic
strength of the nation. Their very existence, exclaimed Harvard plant
geneticist Edward M. East, represented a "cancerous growth parasitic on
the healthy tissue of society."6
Bad Habits and Bad Genes
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Unlike feeble-minded degenerates, syphilitics, prostitutes, alcoholics,
and criminals were distinguishable from the "normal" population
according to particular "bad habits." Some eugenic spokespersons noted
that these groups constituted a powerfully corrupting influence upon
society due to their combined strength. It was not uncommon, for example, for syphilitic prostitutes also to be inebriates. Likewise, many inebriates turned to prostitution and, in due course, contracted syphilis.
According to eugenists, many contemporary degenerates were the
descendants of practitioners of bad habits. For instance, in one sampling
of 2,000 female prostitutes, 75% claimed to have had at least one
drunken parent. Of the inmates in one state penitentiary, 72% claimed
similar backgrounds, as did 85% of the women in a specific state reformatory.7
Many individuals with "normal" pedigrees also indulged in bad
habits. Yet, according to University of Wisconsin zoologist and eugenist
Michael Guyer, normal individuals were characterized by "the creative
capacity for a rational instead of a purely instinctive behavior."s
Eugenists, however, had been groomed by genetics and typically
thought in terms of statistics and probability. Without dismissing the
possibility of individuals acting according to free will, most eugenists
focused solely upon family lineages of degenerates that suggested a particularly high probability that future generations would inherit bad
habits.
Eugenists shared the conviction that bad habits were derived from
bad character, a flaw that stemmed from an individual's hereditarily
poor disposition, Inheritance transmitted "something which will determine the character in the offspring."g Thus bad habits, or at least bad
character, resulted from the hereditary transmission of bad "determiners." Just as an individual's poor constitution offered him little resistance against disease, it also offered little resistance against inheriting
unfavourable patterns of behaviour.
Evidence that bad habits were propagated through "germ" lines was
most frequently drawn from reference to the Jukes and Kallikak family
pedigreesjo In 1915 the eugenist Arthur H. Estabrook produced a
reassessment of Richard L. Dugdale's 1877 genealogy of the pseudonymous Juke family which popularized the notion that a single degenerate
could help produce several generations of paupers, criminals and
morally suspect, diseased or insane individuals.11 Henry H. Goddard,
pioneer intelligence tester and director of the Vineland, New Jersey
Training School for Feeble-Minded Girls and Boys, offered a similar
chronological account comparing the pseudonymous Martin Kallikak's
two lines of offspring.12 The prevalence of bad habits in the Juke and
Kallikak family pedigrees corroborated Brown University geneticist
Herbert E. Walter's claim that "defectives usually mate with defectives
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PHILIP K. WILSON
Figure 1
Lam A
In five ~ c ? r a t i o n s480 dircct
ts from a
normal father"and a feebleminded mother have bees accounted for as follows:
143 known to be feebleminded.
291 mental status unknown
or dotlbtful.
36 ifktgitimate.
33 sexually immoral, most&
prortituks.
24 coniirmed alcoholics.
3 epitqties.
82 died in infacy.
3 criminals.
8 keepers of disreputable
hausea.
46 only ones known to be
normal,
LrnaB
In five generations 4% descendmts from the same normal father as in Line A and
a narmal mother have the
following record :
All but one of normal mentality.
Two men known to be alwhok
One case of religious mania.
Among the rest have been
found nothing but p o d represenktive citkenshtp, numbe&g doctors, lawyers, educators, jdges, traders, etc.
No epileptics or crhiials.
Only fifteen children died
in infancy,
Summary of two lines of descendants of Martin Kallilak (Michad E Guyer, Being WellBorn: An Introduction to Eugenics [Indianapolis:Bobbs Merrill Co., 19201).
Figure 2
PBDlr[lRBE OF THE W-- FAMILY OF--INDIANA.
Sample pedigree chart distributed by the E R 0 demonstrating the propagation of bad
habits (Special Collections, Pickler Memorial Library, Truman State University, Kirksville,
MO).
,
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for the single reason that normals ordinarily avoid them."l3 Goddard
critically summarized this mating behaviour as "nothing plus nothing
equals nothing."l4
Considerable concern arose at the time of World War I that armed
conflict itself was dysgenicJ5 If the country's best and bravest were the
first to be conscripted into service, then given the likelihood of casualties
amongst these men, the natisn's best germ plasm would be eliminated.
Resonating this theme, University of Pittsburgh sociologist Roswell Hill
Johnson claimed that the US "will be justified in calling up the talent that
is unreplaceable [sic] in various activities [only] after it has exhausted the
number of replaceable men who are equally good as soldiers, but not
before." Individuals whose "trained abilities make them valuable to the
nation" should "not be drafted as long as there is plenty of material pos- !
sessing physique, courage, and the fighting spirit." To place those with
"ability of &.high order" within the ranks would, he concluded,
"unwisely jeopardiz[e] the national interests."l6
Some eugenists argued that America's genetic potential had already
been severely diminished by the effects of previous warfare. According
to Stanford University President David Starr Jordan and University of
Virginia embryologist Harvey Earnest Jordan-both eugenists-the
Civil War had severely depleted the "good stock" of the country. Compounding the problem of that conflict's more visible casualties, "men of
highest character and finest physical quality enlisted flrst, fought the
longest, and had the highest death-rate. The conscripts, who suffered
less, were inferior in both of these qualities. Deserters and draft-dodgers
were the least desirable element of the population, and had the highest
survival rate."l7 Restoring the nation's moral, mental, and physical qualities was proving to be a "long and difficult process."l8 This claim supported Benjamin Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac adage that "Wars are
not paid for in war time; the bill comes later."
Eugenists argued that additional "good stock" had left New England,
beckoned by new beginnings on the Western frontier. Their migration
left pockets of defectives scattered across New England and the MidAtlantic states. Lombard College biologist Wilhelmina Key described
such conditions in Pennsylvania in 1915. One problem was "great sexual
laxity, which leads to various forms of dependency and sometimes to
extreme mental defect. In others alcoholism prevails and the people
show a propensity for deeds of violence."l9 Furthermore, the influx of
"defective immigrants" into the US from the 1860sonwards exacerbated
what eugenists touted as "race suicide," leading some to believe the
nation was facing the greatest social crisis in its history.20 Eugenist
authors led readers to believe that inferior stock threatened the very
fabric of American democracy.
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PHILIP K. WILSON
In order to curb the decline of the nation's genetic strength, eugenists
promoted an array of plans. Before examining several of their proposals,
it is necessary to emphasize that contemporaries did not view "nature" as
the sole recourse toward improving the nation. Social workers, theologians, and philanthropists promoted environmentalist social betterment
programs in opposition to the hereditarian proposals of eugenists. At
times, nature and nurture reformers debated from the same platform.
For example, when social reformer Jacob Riis addressed the First Race
Betterment Conference, held in Battle Creek, Michigan in 1910, he
adamantly opposed the eugenists' arguments that the slum children
were "handicapped by a poor heredity." That word heredity, Riis continued, has "rung in my ear until I am sick of it." There is "just one heredity in all the world that is oars-we are children of God, and there is
nothing in the whole world that we cannot do in His service with it."21
Still other camps took a more hybrid view in merging nature and nurture arguments in their view of the shaping influences of humanity22
As might be expected,, however, eugenists' claims were heavily
weighted toward improving perceived social problems with hereditary
solutions. A favourite message of eugenists was that marriage should be
approached in a more discriminating manner. If young people, "before
picking out their life partners.. .are taught to realize the fact that one
marries not an individual but a family," then "better matings will be
made.If23Eugenists who emphasized a direct link between bad habits
and bad genes were united in &hebelief that children deserved to be
well born.Those unfortunate enough to have inherited bad habits from
unfit parents were "entitled to the very best of care," but, many eugenists
insisted, such children should have "no right to reproduce."" Goucher
College biologist Williarn E. Kellicott offered similar sentiments, claiming
that the "great horde of defectives once in the world have the right to
live and enjoy as best they may whatever freedom is +compatiblewith the
lives and freedom of other members of society," to which his Brown
University counterpart added, "but society has a right to protect itself
against repetitions of hereditary blunders."25
Among the hereditary blunders that eugenists frequently identified
on their pedigree charts were sypl-ditics, alcoholics, prostitutes and those
exhibiting other forms d criminalistic behaviour-all habits that they
attributed to bad genes. Drawing primarily upon the medical and scientific opinions in the periodical literature and textbooks, this essay
explores how self-claimed eugenists framed these characterizations of
bad habits in terms of heredity. Additionally, it examines the methods
eugenists most frequently promoted to rectify bad habits. As will be
shown, their actions were aimed not so much at the "degenerate" as at
his or her germ line.
Figure 3
Tb. Kind of Preparation for Marriage given by the Parents of
the past =enaratioo,
Figurative depiction of expected outcome without eugenic marriage c o u n s e h g (R. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols, Safe Counsel, or Pradicai Eugenics [Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols & Co.,
19221).
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PHILIP K. WILSON
EUGENIC PERCEPTIONS OF "BAD HABITS
l
Victorian ideals permeated American culture in 1900. The rhetoric in
both medical and popular literature frequently centred around sexual
restraint and deferred gratification. As medical historian Allan M. Brandt
notes, many physicians placed their arguments for restraint within the
context of eugenics. Physicians typically advised that sexual moderation was "a responsibility" that all individuals owed to the "future of
the race."26 In the 1910s Frank D. Watson of the New York School of
Philanthropy stressed to his students the "sacredness of the germ
plasm." It was every individual's "obligation and privilege," he argued,
to pass on his or her germ plasm "uncontaminated and unimpaired."27
Consistent with the rhetoric of progress, many within the medical
community urged their peers to alter their perception of syphilis. In particular, doctors should view syphilis according to its pathology, not its
moral connotations. Syphilis must be dealt with "as we deal with smallpox and typhoid fever;" argwd New York City physician, Abram L. Wolbarst-as a "purely scientific problem unfettered by religious andlor
moral traditions and emotion."28 Although syphilis had long been
viewed as arising primarily from sexual transmission, eugenists emphasized the hereditary pathway that had also been associated with its etiology. "Hereditary syphilis" became a common representation of the
disease in many medical writings, including those of the America3 most
vocal syphilologist, Prince A. Morrow. In a paper delivered before the
Child's Welfare Conference in 1910, Morrow pointed to the dysgenic
properties of syphilis. Whereas eugenics worked toward the production of "healthy, wed formed, and vigorous" individuals by "keeping
the springs crf heredity pure and undefiled, and improving the inborn
qualities of o&pring," syphilis produced only "inferior beings by poisoning the sources of life and sapping the vitality and health of the offspring."29
Eugenists, including Morrow, frequently cited the presence of syphilis
in multiple generations of family pedigrees as evidence of its hereditary nature. Wolbarst, among others, opposed such nosology. Instead
of a strict germ-line transmission, Wolbarst attempted to convince readers t h t the syphilis commonly referred to as "hereditary" typically
resulted from an actively syphilitic pregnant mother infecting the fetus
she carried by transmitting "the germ" of syphilis via maternal-fetal circulation. As such, it was distinct from the growing number of "hereditary" diseases that were found to be transmitted in Mendelian fashion.30
He distinguished "hereditary" syphilis from the related but less common form of this disease in the newborn, congenital syphilis. The latter
condition, he argued, resulted from a child becoming inflicted while
passing through the birth canal.31 Many medical authors did not make
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such a clear cut distinction, thereby leaving hereditary syphilis as a classiiicatory conundrum. The inability of many physicians to clearly distinguish between congenital and hereditary syphilis suggests that considerable ambiguity existed over the precise "hereditary" modes of
transmission. Popular literature, such as the 1911edition of Encyclopzdia
Britannica, also concluded that the various views of hereditary syphilis
were "commingled in such a way as not to be readily distinguished."32
Eugenically speaking, however, the distinction between the types was, as
Wolbarst concluded, merely of academic interest. In either case, the
syphilitic child was handicapped-and the "handicap is its hereditytyf'33
Despite disagreement over terminology, eugenists argued that
syphilis both in the newborn and in adults could be hereditarily
acquired. In a newborn described to be a "hereditary" syphilitic,
eugenists claimed that the onset of symptoms was directly related to
the length of uterine exposure to the disease. Such newborns appeared
marasmic, puny, and weak. The infant's wrinkled skin often caused him
to be compared either to an "old wizened individual or "likened to a
monkey," as a contemporary European account suggests:
The child's arms and legs were white, waxlike sticks: only its belly was round.
It had what looked like the white plaster-cast of a monkey's face; the nose, a
broad, blunt feature implanted some distance below the forehead, resembled an
animal's snout. The drooping eyelids, the wrinkles surrounding the mouththe overall impression was of a regression into the animal kingdom.34
l
A syphilitic child, "inexorably handicapped by its pathologic endowment," had a high propensity to be marked with various congenital malformations as well as a high susceptibility to the development of nervous
and mental diseases.35
Syphilis wrought even greater havoc among the adult population,
particularly due to the insanity and blindness associated with longstanding forms of the disease. Public health reformers drew parallels
between the physical suffering of the diseased individual, and the
destruction inflicted upon the health of the nation. Assistant Surgeon
General C. C. Pierce estimated that the care of the venereally inflicted
created an annual economic burden of $575,000,000.36Care of the insane
afflicted by syphilis cost $10,000,000 each year, and $250,000,000 would
have been saved annually had they been working. The care of blind
syphilitics tataled $3,6000,000 per annum and venereal disease treatment programs cost $10,000,000. The 4,000,000 individuals incapacitated
by venereal diseases translated into an estimated $300,000,000 loss from
the economy. Furthermore, $3,000,000 was wasted by the inflicted on
"quack" remedies.37
Given this huge economic drain on society, several groups sought
effective measures to control this disorder during the Progressive era.
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PHILIP K. WILSON
Some of these actions targeted specific sources of disease, most notably
prostitution. Syphilis held a long established reputation of selectively
affecting particular social classes, ethnic groups and subcultures such
as prostitute^.^^ As part of a general reform attack on commercialized
vice, the Mann Act of 1910 had prohibited the transportation of women
across state lines for immoral purposes. John D. Rockefeller Jr., who had
intervened to help abolish the "white slave trade" in New York City,39initiated and privately incorporated the Bureau of Social Hygiene. One
mission of this bureau was the establishment of a Laboratory of Social
Hygiene within a women's reformatory to identify the precise factors
that led to prostitution. Eugenics leader Charles Davenport endorsed
these efforts, and he eagerly awaited the findings.4 In 1912, using evidence from the Bureau, he argued that many syphilitics, including prostitutes, typically showed an inherited predisposition toward an exceptionally active social life.41 In particular, Davenport argued that
prostitutes were inherently different from other women, who favoured
domesticity. The difference, he deemed, stemmed from something
within their genetic makeup. As Mary Spongberg has argued about
prostitution during this era, "[glone were the economic explanations for
prostitution and the image of the helpless seduced woman: biology now
explained the propensity for vice." Many eugenists shared the view that
prostitutes were "not merely vectors" of syphilis because they spread
infection, but, more importantly, because they "bred degeneracy."42
In addition to eugenists' view that war was dysgenic to society, the
threat of war helped to initiate their renewed interest in eradicating
syphilis. Surgeon General Thomas Parran, Jr. claimed that concurrent
with the US entry into World War I, "a change took place in the sentiment" toward syphilis, both among "public officials everywhere and in
Washington in particular." Secretary of War Newton D. Baker was convinced that, "as in previous wars" syphilis would prove a "potent means
of disabling the fighting men."43 In 1918, the Chamberlain-Kahn Act provided for the establishment of the Venereal Disease Control Division of
the US Public Health Service. Many states adopted similar models of
case reporting and founded free venereal disease (VD) treatment clinics.
The federal support required to sustain these measures waned following
the close of the war. According to one medical account, once the "US
Army was demobilized a similar assumption was made regarding the
defeat of the spirochete and the gonococcus, and the VD problem was
forgotten."@
Eugenic sources suggest an alternative reason for the apparent abandonment of anti-syphilis campaigns during the World War I era. Beginning in 1916, many eugenists altered their previously interventionist
stance and began promoting the view that immoral habits underlying
the spread of syphilis ac&ally supported the eugenics cause. Roswell
\
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Johnson, in a presentation before the American Genetic Association in
1916, argued that sexual immorality reduced the rate of marriage, and
that unmarried individuals have a considerably lower birth rate in comparison to their married counterparts. The "traditional view," Roswell
argued, has been to "ignore the selectional aspect" and "to stress the
alleged deterioration of the germ-plasm by the direct actions of the toxins of syphilis." It followed, he concluded, that "sexual immorality is
eugenic in its result and that, if all sexual immorality should cease,
an important means of race progress would be lost."45 H. C. and
M. A. Solomon reached similar conclusions from "extensive investigations into the families of the neurosyphilitic." Syphilis, "in the long run,"
was determined to provide a "selective process, tending to eliminate
the socially and morally unfit."46 Moreover, as University of California
zoologist, Samuel J. Holmes argued, by "reduc[ing] the fecundity of the ,
prostitute class, a large proportion of which has been shown.. .to be of
subnormal or defective intelligence," hereditary syphilis appears to have
"a certain compensating racial advantage in eliminating inferior types of
humanity."47
Alcoholism was also a common bad habit featured in eugenists' pedigree charts of degeneratesP8 Practically speaking, "inebriety means
degeneracy," as G. Frank Lydston argued in Diseases of Society (1904).
Inebriates (or alcoholics) were "primarily defective in [their] nervous
structure and will-power.... [Flamily histories of dipsomaniacs are
largely tinctured with nerve disorders." Lydston concluded that inebriety was "but one of the varying manifestations of bad hereditytyf'49
To
ascertain specific correlations between booze and breeding, scientists
began to investigate the matter experimentally. In the 1910s, Cornell
Medical College anatomist Charles R. Stockard gathered evidence
through experiments with guinea pigs to "convincingly demonstrate
the detrimental effects of alcohol on the parental germ cells and the
developing offspring."50 This work quickly became incorporated into
temperance movement lectures. For example, Richmond l?Hobson, centred "The Great Destroyer," his famous temperance lecture delivered
across the nation, around Stockard's findings and later published this lecture in his Alcohol and the Human Race (1919).51 Stockard's experiments
were of particular interest to eugenists in that they demonstrated how
genetically weak individuals produced a "next generation of offspring
equally weak."52 Successive generational matings of "alcoholic" guinea
pigs drastically reduced the number of viable offspring, thereby offering
experimental evidence of "race" degeneration via alcohol.
Stockard's claims were challenged by the data on the effects of artificially induced "alcoholic" chickens by the geneticist and statistician,Raymond Pearl. Pearl argued that alcohol disabled only the weak sperm
and eggs, thereby naturally selecting for a population of chickens with
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PHILIP K. WILSON
superior zygotes. Pearl concluded his findings in 1916 with the admonition that if Stockard's findings had been true, then "I can see no escape
from the further conclusion that a great majority of the individuals
belonging to the higher intellectual and social classes in the countries of
Western Europe today ought to be blind, dwarfed, and degenerate
wretches, because social history gives definite and uncontrovertible evidence that their parents and their grandparents on the average consumed proportionately as much and probably more alcohol" than do
their descendants today.53
Whether experimental evidence suggested that alcohol was eugenic
or dysgenic remained inconclusive during the early 20th century. Still,
both Stockard and Pearl are to be credited with having demonstrated
that alcohol produced an effect at the germ cell level. Further investigations into any specific hereditary effects were discouraged by developments outside the realm of science. With the adoption of the Eighteenth
Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919, Prohibition effectively"elirnhated drinking as an acknowledged "social problem" in the United
States." Consequently, any previously perceived significance of scientifically investigating the potential heritable effects of alcohol was "dramatically diminished." Political pundits joined the fray in advocating
that alcohol, like morphine in the aftermath of the Harrison Act of 1914,
was to be considered as "a problem of the past."54
Many eugenists, however, were not quite so quick to shelve alcoholism as a bygone source of societal corruption. Contrary to the intentions of Prohibition, the reality, according to one 1922 source, was that
"doctors become bootleggers, every drug store becomes a corner saloon,
and rot gut and moonshine defiantly walk the streets for medicinal and
sacramental purposes."55 Paul Popenoe, who later gained renown as a
leading family relations counselo~although respectful of the temperance
campaign, argued from a eugenic perspective that "the way to solve the
liquor problem would be, not to eliminate drink, but to eliminate the
drinker."56 E. M. East questioned the implementation of Prohibition,
claiming that it appeared to have been enacted "chiefly in order to prevent the feebly inhibited from drinking themselves to death, and to
enable them to raise larger families to maturity."57 Thus, rather than
strengthening the country's germ plasm, by contradicting negative
eugenics principles, Prohibition, at least to East, promoted further race
degeneracy. Although some eugenists focused on the threat of alcoholism, the majority, particularly during Prohibition, pointed repeatedly to the interconnections between alcoholism, prostitution, and
another bad habit, crime.
Medical and popular authors of the 1920s frequently promoted the
concept of a "crime wave" coursing through the US.58 Evidence sup-
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porting this phenomenon ranged from the statistical increases of criminals admitted to state institutions to widespread gangster activity, particular throughout the Midwestern states. Typically, eugenists depicted
crime as a complex mix of delinquents, degenerates, and defectives.
According to the eugenist Guyer, crime presented the "greatest difficulty in separating the effects of hereditary predisposition from the
results of an unfavorable environment."59 Although many people had
"inborn tendencies" or a predisposition towards committing crime,
when a normal moral individual "finds that this desire can only be gratified by injury to others, he inhibits it because of his repugnancy to such
injury."bO The criminal, Guyer continued, exhibited "no such inhibition."bl Sociologist Arthur Fink attributed differences between criminal
and non-criminal constitutions to the pathway by which the criminal
trait was inherited. The child who received the trait in his germ cells
was "destined to become a criminal," whereas the child carrying the
trait in his somatic cells "might be spared a criminal career if environmental conditions were favorable enough to counteract the criminal
inheritance." Either way, criminal behaviour was deemed to be transmitted by a bad biological seed.62
One eugenic approach to diminishing the threat of crime was based
on the premise that "offenders who are congenitally unable to distinguish between what is generally accepted as right and wrong," or "who
if recognizing this are nevertheless uncontrollably impelled toward.. .
anti-social acts," should be "legitimately classified as individuals born
with an aptitude for crime."63 Such a premise conformed with views,
like Guyer's, that varieties of criminals existed. Those with "family
strains" characterized by petty thieving should be distinguished from
those with a hereditary predisposition towards violent or sexually offensive crimes.64 Journalist French Strother, who emphasized a "marked
difference" between "habitual criminals" and "accidental criminals," differed slightly from Guyer. Only habituals, Strother argued, showed an
inherent natural tendency to commit crimes. The accidental offender
who committed an infrequent petty or sexual crime was capable of
expressing remorse for his or her deeds. However, the habitual criminal,
like a feeble-minded individual, was unable to see his or her errors or to
show rernorseP5
Charles Davenport shared the view that both heredity and environment contributed to the production of a variety of criminal types. However, as expected, he fmsed his attention upon the "born" or hereditary
criminal. Upholding Cesare Lombroso's 19th-century classification of
the criminal type, Davenport argued that born criminals had inherited a
deficiency in cultivating any altruistic traits.66 Individuals who inherited a predisposition to commit crime (or perhaps an inability to shut off
,
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PHILIP K. WILSON
criminalisticinstincts)had to be prevented from "disorganizingsociety."
Satisfactory progress would be achieved, he argued, only when "we
understand how those with congenital criminalistic make-up are bred,"
after which the authorities could "try to prevent such breeding."67 Such
tactics underscored Davenport's plan to study each convicted criminal
individually in order to iden* "the particular trait of his character"
responsible for the particular criminal act in order to determine whether
anything could be done eugenically to correct the conditionP8
Davenport received his greatest support for this work through his
collaboration with Chicago Municipal Court judge Harry Olson and
physician William Hickson, a specialist in the developing field of criminal
psychology, Hickson, as director of the Municipal Court's Psychopathic
Laboratory, individually examined over 100,000 individuals convicted of
serious crimes between 1906 and 1936.Based upon a battery of character
assessments, Olson and Hickson concluded that crime was often attributable to particular defects in the brain. Subjects who were incapable of
displaying emotions, they argued, showed no sign of conscience. The
defect in these individuals supposedly was due more to their lack of
behaviour control than to any specific lack of intelligence.@This explanation, which came to be known as the psychopathic theory, challenged
the prevailing theory that hereditary criminals were typically feebleminded.70
Strother popularized Olson and Hixon's psychopathic theory through
a 1924 article published in the periodical World's Work. In it, he discussed
how it was "quite possible" for the brain's upper or intellectual centre to
function "marvelous[ly]," and yet the same brain's lower or emotional
centre to be "so defective" that the individual could "commit a cold
blooded murder." He described the disorder that Olson had identified as
dementia precox, an "organic brain disease" of the basal ganglia, as being
"hereditary in nature." Moreover, the disease became manifest more
due to defects in the "emotional center of the brain than in the intellectual enter."^*
Although initially rejected by many eugenists who attributed hereditary crime to feeblemindedness, the psychopathic theory gained considerable support among eugenists during the aftermath of Chicago's
famed Leopold and Loeb murder trial. Olson publicized his theory,
claiming that convicted murderers, Nathan Leopold, Jr, and Richard
Loeb, both suffered from different varieties of dementia precox. The heritability of their conditions was demonstrable based upon the negative
evidence that both young men were highly intelligent, from affluent
backgrounds, and, apart from their homosexuality, demonstrated "normal" responses to their en~ironrnent.~
,
EUGENIC ATTEMPTS TO ELIMINATE "BAD HABITS"
l
Eugenists promoted various methods to reduce the incidence of syphilis
and the allegedly linked bad habits of alcoholism and prostitution. First
and foremost, they sought to enhance public awareness about genetics. Princeton geneticist and cytologist Edwin Grant Conklin in 1922
noted a "widespread ignorance" regarding heredity. "Any general
reform," he argued, "must rest upon enlightened public opinion.. .the
schools, the churches and the press can do no more important work for
mankind than to educate the people, after they educate themselves, on
this important matter."" Campaigns, many of which distributed EROgenerated literature, centred around educating the public in order to
foster a general "eugenic c0nscience."7~Effort must be expended, one
eugenicist argued, so that the public will gain a sensitivity in favour of
eugenic fitness as they had against incest and miscegenation.75
Many eugenists advocated stricter marriage laws to reduce the future
threat of heritable bad habits. Their arguments for the selection of
healthy marriage partners were based on Darwin. Charles Darwin had
concluded his explanations of evolution by arguing that the greatest
step humans could make in their own history would occur when they
realize that they were not completely guided by instinct. Rather, humans
had the ability to control-at least to a certain degree-their own future
evolution. The "conservation of the best raclial] values, the development of superior family stocks, and raising the individual standard
were, as ER0 superintendent Laughlin later argued, "well within the
range of practical achievement."76 In other words, men and women held
the power of strengthening humanity through their choice of marriage
partners. This choice was central to all positive eugenics campaigns.
Still, marriage laws, in and of themselves, would not guard against the
illegitimate births of degenerates. As ER0 literature warned, unfit marriages would produce antisocial and unproductive offspring. Those with
a lineage of bad habits were not, according to Laughhn, fit to make decisions about the transmission of their genes, and thus society must, for its
own sake, intervene. Such actions were, in the minds of eugenists,
merely applying Herbert Spencer's Darwinian adage-"Survival of the
Fittestrf-to the human species. Those whose pedigrees demonstrated
hereditarily acquired bad habits were not, according to eugenists, fit for
reproduction.
According to the popular sexual hygiene manual Safe Counsel or Practical Eugenics, one of the "simplest and most effective methods of improving the human race" was by requiring a "certificate of freedom from
transmissible disease before a marriage license could be issued."77
Although such laws had been passed in a few states, the authors noted
that they "have never been, and are not now systematically enforced."
'
26
I
PHILIP K. WILSON
For example, nothing prevented persons forbidden to marry in one jurisdiction from doing so in another. Some argued that the marriage laws as
they existed were somewhat contradictory to eugenic aims. For instance,
"sexual offenders" were often "forced" to mariy in order to "legalize the
offense and 'save the woman's honor.'"m Implementing a new "health
certificate plan"' for a "eugenic marriage license" would require a "clean
bill of health, both mental and physical, from every applicant.. .both
male and female-that certificate to be signed by a reputable physician
who would not dare risk his professional reputation without a rigid,
thorough and final examination. And let us make it a felony to go outside
the jurisdiction of the state to evade the letter of the law."79
Many eugenists readily supported the idea of segregating those with
inherited bad habits from the rest of society. Degenerates, it was noted,
frequently resulted from society's failure to segregate unfit breeders.
From a eugenic point of view, the "essential element" of segregation
was "not so much isolation from society" as it was the "separation of
the two sexes."m Doing so restricted the unfit from producing offspring
that "could hardly fail to be undesirable."81The underlying rhetoric supported the notion that segregation "increases the happiness" of the unfit
all the while "working to the advantage of the body politic? Eugenist
Herbert Walter noted that the "[ilnsular or isolated communities, slums
in cities,. ..or hovels in the backwoods, where degenerates of a kind are
kept in intimate association, as well as asylums of various sorts in which
similar defectives are promiscuously housed under the same roof, are all
potent agencies to insure human inbreeding."83 Such awareness suggests that at least some eugenists also envisioned the environment as
contributing to the proliferation of degenerates. Some, including Popenoe and Johnson, advocated enforced segregation of those with bad
habits. Such individuals, they argued, were "unfit to hold their own in
the world/' at least in comparison to "normal people." People "of this
sort" should be "humanely isolated" so that they are "brought into competition only with their own kind.. until death brings them relief from
their misfortunes." Such treatment, they continued, was "the only one
worthy of a Christian nation."s4
The primary objection raised against eugenic segregation was the
cost arising from the life-long care of degenerates in state institutions.
Citing Davenport in 1913, David Starr Jordan estimated that $3,000,000
was annually spent caring for the "new plague" of "produce" from "bad
germ-plasm" in hospitals, $20,000,000 for insane asylums, $20,000,000
for almshouses, $13,000,000 for prisons, and $5,00Q,€I00for the care of the
feeble-minded, deaf and blind.85 Advocates of segregation reminded
opponents of the long-range financial advantages of segregating such
populations in institutions, in order to drastically reduce the number of
future wards of the state. Moreover, as many of those institutionalized
.
27
Figure 4
WHICH WILL YOU CHOOSE?
Choosing a future consistent with either positive or negative eugenics (R. G. Jefferis and
J. L. Nichols, Snfe Counsel, or Practical Eugenics [Naperville, IL: l. L. Nichols & Co., 19221).
28
I
PHILIP K. WILSON
for bad habits were not imbeciles, they could perform "some sort of
work" that would "at least cover the cost of their maintenance."86
Michael Guyer argued that current public expenditures to maintain
"defectives, dependents and criminals" were "far secondary.. .to the
misery involved by failing to do ~0.87 And the misery would increase
multifold, he claimed, each year that restrictive reproductive measures
such as segregation were not enacted.
The chdenge of segregating the unfit was complicated by the large
influx of so-called "undesirable" immigrants throughout the Progressive era. Concurrent with growing xenophobic tension, eugenists argued
that other countries, particularly those of southern and eastern Europe,
were dumping their own defectives upon American soil. As a case in
point, in 1968, "65 idiots, 121 feeble-minded, 184 insane, 3741 paupers,
2900 individuals having contagious diseases, 53 tuberculous individuals,
136 criminals, and 124 prostitutes were caught in the sieve at Ellis Island
and turned back" by immigration offiaals.88 Many commentators argued
that immigration controls were not tight enough. Walters, employing
genetic terminology, pointed to defects in admissions criteria. Immigrants were inspected, he argued, more upon "phenotypic ...than genotypic" qualities. Consequently, "much bad germ plasm comes through
our gates hidden from the view of inspectors" because the "bearers are
heterozygous, wearing a cloak of desirability over undesirable traits."sg
The arguments for more restrictive immigration policies, not aU of
them of a eugenist bent, intensified following World War I. At that time,
the US had gained considerable recognition as a supreme world power.
A concomitant need arose in the minds of many experts that in order to
maintain this power, the nation's genetic strength must remain intact. As
Oxford politics professor Desmond King has documented, the "Americanization movement" heightened racial animosity, particularly in the
eugenists' view of the racial degeneration posed by immigration?O
Should the US population become less pure and "infected" with socially
undesirable traits through the immipation of defectives, then the stability of the US political system would begin to crumble.
Eugenists proclaimed that a "considerable and discriminatory selection of immigrants to this country is necessary."gl Beginning in 1920, a
series of US congressional hearings identified problems supposedly
caused by the "new immigrants" (or "aliens"). At the core of the discussion, a variety of factors were raised including economic, isolationistic
and cultural concerns. Some of these concerns were expressed in eugenic
terms. For example, eugenic arguments helped to transform immigration
policy from "a concern with absolute numbers to one about the suitability and assimilability" of immigrants.92 Supportiveof their concern, ER0
superintendent Laudeveloped strong ties with the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. Recognized as the country's
Figure 5
Eugenicists rhetorically crafted their arguments to convey that the United States government devoted considerably more resources towards the productivity of animals and
plants than it did to humans (B. G. Jefferis and J. L. Nichols, Safe Counsel, or Practical
Eugenics [Naperville, IL: J. L. Nichols & Co., 19221).
30
I
PHILIP K. WILSON
"expert eugenics agent," Laughlin was employed by the House of Representatives beginning in 1920 to develop a eugenic profile of the apparent "social inadequacy of aliens."
Laughlin called for pedigree studies of potential immigrants to be
performed in their respective homelands. In this way, he argued, experts
could "judge the family stock of the immigrant but, if we let him come in
without pedigree study we have to wait until his children and grandchildren come on before we can judge his worth."93 These studies,
Laughlin continued, would allow selection "much more surely than is
done by personal examination alone, whether the individual is sound,
whether he is likely to become a "waster," whether he is of good stock,
and from the soundness, initiative, natural intelligence, respect for law
and order, industry, and the like, of his near kin, whether he would
make a desirable addition to the population of the United States."94
Laughhis findings were shared publicly. A 1923 Saturday Evening Post
article aroused public sentiment, noting that "the cost of supporting
these socially inadequate people of alien stock is so great that nearly 8%
of the total expenditures of all the states must be devoted to their upkeep
in state custodial institutions."95 If "America is to remain American,"
Laughlin argued, the nation needed to perfect the principle of selective
immigration in order to retain a high standard of reproductive potential.
By enforcing eugenic ideals across the nation, "we shall have to correct
the errors of past national policies of immigrants: and through "new
statutes which are sound biologically, we can cause future immigration
to improve our native family stocks."96
Laughlin remained active as a vocal eugenics lobbyist and congressional agent throughout the 1920s. The pinnacle of his success regarding
immigration control came about with the enactment of a new immigration law in 1924 which established a yearly quota of 150,000 immigrants
with each nationality allowed 2% of their numbers to emigrate based
upon 1890 census records.97 Laughlin shrewdly influenced the choice of
this particular census as it was the last one in which immigrants from
northern and western Europe outnumbered those from the south and
east-the countries depicted as contributing the greatest number of
degenerates.
Eugenists raised one additional option, reproductive sterilization, as
a method of preventing future generations of degenerates. One advocate
argued in 1914 that by following the lead of the 11states that had already
enacted sterilization laws, in "less than four generations...nine tenths of
the crime, insanity and sickness of the present generation" would be
eliminated. Furthermore, the need for asylums, prisons and hospitals
would be drastically reduced, and the "hopelessly degenerate" would
"cease to trouble civilization."98 Advocates popularized their message
through many forms of expression, including novels, films, and music.99
31
Louisiana Hospital for the Insane Superintendent John N. Thomasfs
poetical example appeared in the early 1920s:
Oh, why are you men so foolishYou breeders who breed our men
Let the fools, the weaklings and crazy
Keep breeding and breeding again....
This is the law of Mendel,
And often he makes it plain,
Defectives will breed defectives
And the insane will breed insane...
Oh, you wise men take up the burden,
And make this your loudest creed,
Sterilize the misfits promptlyAll not fit to breed!OO
l
Although many states officially supported sterilization of "social
degenerates," some of these only infrequently resorted to its implementationJ01 Educator Elliott Rowland Downing claimed in his church school
guide for youth that public sentiment regarding sterilization had not
been "sufficiently aroused to make.. . [its] enforcement very effective."l"
Other eugenists conditionally supported sterilization, preferring other
initiatives to restrict reproduction. Popenoe, for example, favoured segregation, recommending sterilization only in "states too poor or niggardly to care adequately for their defectives and delinquents."l03Until
better understanding was gained of the extent to which the defects were
due solely to heredity rather than to environment, Conklin likened the
"wholesale sterilization of all sorts of criminals, alcoholics and undesirables" to "burning down a house to get rid of the rats."lM
As many chronic syphilitics were confined to mental asylums, they
were a captive audience for sterilization. Indeed, sterilizing the institutionalized mental patient was, at least in most states, a goal easy to
achieve. Such measures, however, did not eliminate the spreading of
VD between sexually active inmates. Despite measures to segregate asylum inmates by gender, npmerous reports suggest that sterilizationwas
largely ineffective in either prohibiting intercourse between inmates or
curtailing the incidence of new infection. Although eugenists acknowledged that sterilization was not a cure for the inflicted, they remained
adamant that it was an effective way to diminish the hereditary spread
of this scourgeJ05
By the early 1 9 2 0 ~
Laughlin
~
had become the nation's chief proponent of eugenic sterilization. Previously, as secretary of the Animal
Breeder's Association's special Committee to Study and Report on the
Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the
American Population, he had surveyed 10 possible solutions toward cor-
32
l
PHILIP K. WILSON
reding "defective germ plasm." With solutions ranging from segregation
to euthanasia, Laughlin strongly favoured reproductive sterilization as
the "least objectionable" and the "most cost-effective" measure?06 The
"conscious striving for race betterment on the part of the socially inadequate: Laughltn argued, "is impossible. ...Therefore society must control
their reproduction." It ought to be a "eugenic crime," he claimed, to
"turn a possible parent of defectives loose upon the population."
Celebrated for his eugenics expertise as a result of his lobbying for
immigration restriction, Laughlin used this recognition, together with his
significant rhetorical skill, to convince many states to adopt a model law
that he had drafted to involuntarily control the reproduction of their
institutionalized populations. By 1921, the year before the publication of
Laughlin's Eugenical Sterilization in the United States, 3,200 individuals
across the nation were reported to have been sterilized. That number
tripled by 1928, and by the end of 1934, it surpassed 21,500?07
In many states, reproductive sterilization had been implemented to
"protect the race against the reproductive libertinism of the pauper, the
criminaland the idiot: but it never became the method of choice for curtailing syphilis!m As syphilis was commonly thought to be spread primarily by prostitutes, local public health officials endorsed condoms as
the major preventative method blocking its spread. The American Social
Hygiene Association (ASHA), however, overruled this endorsement.
The ASHA, together with support from the religious sectors of society,
denounced prophylactics, arguing that their use encouraged promiscuity, which, in turn, only exacerbated the syphilis problem. Indeed, little
federal support was acquired until Thomas Parran, Jr., a leading crusader against syphilis, gained the influence he needed in his appointment as Surgeon General of the US Public Health Service in 1936J09
Even the proponents of eugenic sterilization admitted that this procedure would neither eliminate the infection itself nor directly block its
spread among the population. Realizing this, most eugenists resorted to
other efforts aimed at eliminating the heritability of this disease. For
instance, H. E. Jordan, chairman of the Eugenics Section of the American
Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, proposed a
three-step plan to achieve the goal of reducing the threat of syphilis.
This plan consisted of implementing registration programs of the
infected, detaining patients until they were pronounced "permanently
cured," and prohibiting marriage where one partner was actively
syphilitic?*OCompared to the reputed burden that syphilis annually created for the American economy, the costs to implement a registration
program, Jordan claimed, were minimal. The third step in this plan, prohibiting marriage of any known syphilitic, was consistent with the
eugenic community's promotion of a general premarital medical exam.
In order to achieve such regulation, eugenists charged physicians to
take a more active role in advocating eugenics.
l
33
Medical and popular literature from the period suggests that physicians were the primary actors fighting the spread of syphilis. Yet, in
order for physicians to be recognhed as an effective arm of the eugenists'
plan to eliminate syphilis and its associated bad habits, they had to first
rid themselves of a bad habit of their own. For decades, many doctors
had reputedly upheld the "medical secret," whereby they refused to
disclose the identity of the disorder to many that they found to be venereally inflicted?llWithholding such information, eugenists argued, actually allowed many individuals to enter into marriage with less than a
clean bill of health. Morrow, the leading anti-syphilis campaigner among
physicians, began to recruit physicians away from their previous silence
through the activities of his American Society for Sanitary and Moral
Prophylaxis. Physicians in this group became strongly encouraged by
their peers and the public health community, as well as by eugenists
outside these areas, to reverse their role in aiding the spread of syphilis.
Rather than acting as a vector contributing to its rampage, practitioners
were being increasingly asked by eugenists to educate patients about the
threat of syphilis, ta prohibit marriages that involved any infectious
patient, and to recommend sterilization as a measure to curb the hereditary transmission of this disease. 112
Some eugenists by the 1930s, however, voiced concern that measures
aimed at isolating defective "germ plasm" would never entirely eliminate
syphilis. Thn-ty years of eugenic campaigns had failed to substantially
reduce the number of syphilitics and associated defectives in the US.
Perhaps eugenics programs for improving the population would take
more time than had been originally estimated. On the other hand, perhaps eugenists realized they had been too utopian in their plans to eliminate the scourge of syphilis by perfecting the genetic makeup of the
population. Perhaps they now realized that eugenics provided only part
of the answer.
Throughout the 1930s, efforts to re-examine potential environmental
contributions resurfaced as partial explanations of the persistence of
syphilis and associated bad habits. For this generation of eugenists, the
naturelnurture pendulum had reached the outermost limit in its swing
towards nature. Slowly, as part of renewed efforts to better educate the
public at schools, churches, Chautauquas, and county fairs, a new era of
eugenists more openly acknowledged that deficiencies in nurture, too,
must be part of the explanation for the persistence of bad habits among
the populace. Consequently, nurture slowly became assimilated into
general eugenic discourse.
In a 1928 assessment of the needs of the "next generation," eugenist
Frances Gulick Jewett drew an analogy between the Three Fates of classical mythology and those controlling the destiny of modern society.
Heredity had taken the place of Clotho in spinning the thread of life.
Environment had assumed the character of Lachesis, shaping our allot-
34
PHILIP K. WILSON
ment of experiences from cradle to grave. Personal choice replaced the
shear-bearing Atropos in that by choosing and propagating particular
habits, individuals directly shortened their own lives."3 Intertwined
with nature, a proper nurturing environment became recognized by
public health advocates as essential toward improving the human
condition.
Figure 6
Frances Gulick lewett uscd this m a r c of thc l1,rcc iatcc, Clotho, Laihc!-ih, ,md Atmpoi as
I
A greater emphasis on nurture also appeared in the rhetoric of
another group-obstetricians-as
they championed other measures as
the major shaping influence of future generations. Obstetricians argued
that improving prenatal care was the best measure by which to offer all
newborns an equal standing. Prenatal injuries to the developing fetus
were being re-examined in the context of direct environmental exposure to blood poisoning, disease, or toxic substances including lead, mercury, or phosphorus. Summarizing a half-century of naturelnurture
research in Prenatal Influences (1962), anthropologist Ashley Montagu
noted an increased interest in potential environmental factors among
medico-scientificwritings from the 1930sJ14 Growing attention focused
upon ways that fetal development was directly affected by a pregnant
woman's nutrition, emotions, impressions, illnesses, medications, and
"bad habits" including smoking and drinkingJl5
Obstetricians sought to advance prenatal care through nurturing the
environment of pregnant women whereas eugenists sought to control
nature by limiting reproduction only to those they deemed "fit" to reproduce. Unlike the aims of eugenists, the obstetricians refined their focus
solely upon women and the alteration of deficiencies in women's health.
Temporarily at least, eugenic-based public health measures to eliminate
syphilis, prostitution and alcoholism appear to have been eclipsed by
more general measures aimed at improving prenatal health care.l16
The long-term implications of prenatal care initiatives, however, beg
further investigation. Similar to how eugenic attempts to impede the
propagation of "bad habits" in society coerced many vulnerable individuals to relinquish control over their reproductive lives, many have
claimed that obstetricians' overreliance upon new technologies aimed at
improving prenatal care ultimately cost many women control over their
reproductive freedorn.ll7 Perhaps changing explanations of the generative influences of "bad habits" are best understood in regard to particular points along the nature/nurture continuum within specific historical
contexts.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
An Andrew M! Mellon Resident Fellowship at the American Philosophical Society (APS) in Philadelphia provided the necessary support for
some of the research upon which this paper was based. The author is
grateful to the expert staff at the APS for their exemplary archival and
library assistance. Additionally, the ever helpful support of the staff in
Special Collections at the Pickler Memorial Library Truman State University, Kirbville, Missouri, and the staff of the George 'E Harrell Library
at Penn State's College of Medicine is truly appreciated. June Watson,
Janice Wilson, and Warren D. M. Reed provided scholarly assistance that
36
PHILIP K. WILSON
has allowed this work to be completed in a timely manner. The helpful
commentary of three anonymous reviewers is also appreciated.
NOTES
I
1 Benedict-Augustin Morel, Traite des degenerescenses physiques intellectuelles et morales de
l'espece humaine (1857), as cited by Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration:
Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in TZoentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hi, N.C.:
University of North Carolina Press, 1995), p. 38, For further contextualization of
degeneration, see J. E. Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman, eds, Degeneration: The
Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Charles R. Henderson applied the label "retrogressive" as synonymouswith "degenerate" in his An
Introduction to the Study of the Dependent, Defective and Delinquent Classes (Boston:
D.C. Heath, 1893).
2 Car1 N. Degler illuminates the importance of Social Darwininsm in the US in his In
Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social
Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991).
3 Eugenists frequently used the terms "degenerate" and "defective" synonymously.
Similarly, a proponent or purveyor of eugenic ideas was referred to as either a
"eugenicist" or a "eugenist."
4 Pickler Memorial Library (PML), Truman State University, Kirksville, Missouri, Special Collections, Harry Laughlin Papers, Differential Fecundity Folder, Box E-1-3,
Harry H. Laughlin, "Differential Fecundity" (paper presented at Long Island Biological Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., 7 July 1931), p. 2.
5 In "The Socially Inadequate: How Shall We Designate and Sort Them?," American
Journal of Sociology, 27 (1921):54-70, Laughlin attempted to introduce a designation
of the "inadequate" within society, namely: the feeble-minded; the insane; the criminalistic; the epileptic; the inebriate; the diseased-including those with tuberculosis, leprosy, and venereal disease; the blind; the deaf; the deformed; and the
dependent-including orphans, old folks, soldiers and sailors in homes, chronic
charity aid recipients, paupers and ne'er-do-wells. For a discussion of this attempt to
expand the range of individuals over whom eugenists gained reproductive control, see Philip K. Wilson, "Eugenicist Harry Laughlin's Crusade to Classify and
Control the 'Socially Inadequate' in Progressive Era America," Patterns of Prejudice,
36 (2002):49-67.
6 Edward M. East, Heredity and Human Affairs (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons,
1929).
7 T W. Shanon, Heredity Explained (Marietta, Ohio: S. A. Mullikin CO,1913), p. 21-22.
Some readers of this journal will be pleased to know that Shannon regarded Canada
to suffer less than the US from the "agents of degeneracy." In his view (p. 81),
Canada had "better social customs, better marriage and better divorce laws" than the
US.
8 Michael E Guyer, Being Well-Born: An Introduction to Eugenics (Indianapolis:BobbsMerrill, 1920), p. 207.
9 Guyer, Being Well-Born, p. 13-14.
10 Although Danish plant geneticist Wilhelm Johannsen had introduced the term
"gene" into the scientific literature literature in 1909 to describe the fundamental
physical and functional Mendelian unit of heredity, scientists and physicians continued to commonly use August Friedrich Leopold Weismann's 1892 term "germ
plasm" to convey similar meanings in their writings well through the interwar
period. For further discussion of Johannsen's influence in eugenics, see Bent Sigurd
Hansen, "Something Rotten in the State of Denmark: Eugenics and the Ascent of the
Welfare State," in Gunnar Broberg and Nils Rolls-Hansen, eds., Eugenics and the Wel-
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
I
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
fare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland (East Lansing,
Midh.: Michigan State University Press, 1996),p. 23-26.
A. H. Estabrook, The Jukes in 1915 (1916),as cited b y Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill
Johnson, Applied Eugenics ( N e w York: MacMillan, 1922), p. 159.
For further discussion o f the Kallikaks as a "eugenic parable," see Leila Zenderland,
Measuring Heads: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American intelligence Testing
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 143-85. See also Goddard's
revealing primary source, The Kallikak Family: A Study of the Heredity of FeebleMindedness (New York: MacMillan, 1912).
Herbert E. Walter, Genetics: An Introduction to the Study of Heredity ( N e w York:
MacMillan, 1914),p. 237.
Walter, Genetics, p. 236.
Paul Crook explored this theme i n his "War as Genetic Disease? The First World
War Debate over the Eugenics o f Warfare," War & Society, 8 (1990):47-70. Some
eugenists explained the "fightinginstinct" as an inherited "bad" character that had,
through natural selection, been gradually depleted b y the 20th century. See, for
example, Paul Popenoe, "Is War Necessary?" Journal of Heredity, 9 (1918):257-62.
Roswell H. Johnson, "Eugenics and Military Exemptions," The Journal of Heredity,
8 (1917):360.
David Starr Jordan and Harvey Ernest Jordan,War's Aftermath: A Preliminay Study
of the Eugenics of War as Illmtrated by the Civil War of the United States and the Late Wars
in the Balkans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), as summarized by East i n Heredity
and Human Affairs, p. 249.
David Starr Jordan, "War and Genetic Values;' The]ournal of Heredity, 10 (1919):225.
Wilhelmina E. Key, Feebleminded Citizens in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Public
Charities Association, 1915),p. 7.
For a recent assessment o f race from a geneticist's viewpoint, see Joseph L. Graves,
Jr., The Emperor's New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium ( N e w
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2001). Historian Gary B. Nash has surveyed the
important eugenical concern o f miscegenation i n the United States i n Forbidden
Love: The Secret History of Mixed-Race America (New York: Henry Holt, 1999).
Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson, Applied Eugenics ( N e w York: MacMillan,
1922), p. 1. This book, according t o William Provine, "Geneticists and the Biology o f
Race Crossing," Science 182 (1973):791, was the most widely used eugenics textbook between 1918 and 1933. Curriculum specialist, Steve Selden, reviewed the
eugenics content o f select high school biology textbooks published b e w e e n 1914
and 1948 i n Inheriting Shame: The Story of Euge~icsand Racism in America (New York:
Teachers College Press, Columbia University, 1999), p. 63-83.
Margit Misangyi Watts and Philip K. Wilson are exploring the extent o f the polarization and interconnectedness o f views i n the great naturehurture debate i n their
current monograph tentatively titled Bio-graphy: A Conversation over Time on the
Nature/Nurture Debate (forthcoming).
Popenoe and Johnson,Applied Eugenics, p. 164.
B. G. Jefferisand J. L. Nichols, Safe Counsel or Practical Eugenics (Naperville, Illinois:
J.L. Nichols, l922), p. 16.
Herbert E. Walter, Genetics: An Introduction to the Study of Heredity ( N e w York:
MacMillan, 1914), p. 253.
Allan M. Brandt, No Magic Bullet: A Social Histoy of Venereal Disease in the United
States Since 1880, expanded edition, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987),p. 27.
Frank D. Watson, "Discussion," ]ournal of the Societyfor Sanitary and Moral Prophylaxis,
5 (1915):111.
Abram L. Wolbarst, "Syphilitic Heredity," Eugenical News, 16 (1931):113.
Prince A. Morrow, "Eugenics and Venereal Disease," The Dietetic and Hygienic Gazette,
27 (1911):11.
38
I
PHILIP K. WILSON
30 For a discussion of diseases claimed to be hereditary during this time, see Alan R.
Rushton, Genetics and Medicine in the United States 1800-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). In order to more fully appreciate the difficulty in using
the appellation "heredity" in describing disease, see Barton Childs, Genetic Medicine:
A Logic of Disease (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).
31 Wolbarst, "Syphilitic Heredity," p. 113.
32 Edmund Owen, "Venereal Disease," The Encyclopedia Britannica, 11th edition,
(Cambridge, England: The University Press, 1911),Vol. 27, p. 985.
34 Annet Mooij cited this early 20th-century vivid and impressionistic Dutch account
in her Out of Otherness: Characters and Narrators in the Dutch Venereal Disease Debates
1850-1990(Amsterdam: Rodopi Press, 1998), p. 96.
36 As reported by Daisy M. 0.Robinson of the US Public Health Service in "Heredity
and Venereal Disease" in Eugenics in Race and State, Scientific Papers of the Second
international Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1923), Vol. 2,
p. 321. All financial estimates listed in this paragraph were also taken from this
source.
37 Robinson, "Heredity and Venereal Disease," p. 321.
38 The other groups included servicemen, blacks, and immigrants. Interestingly,
eugenists also focused their efforts on each of these particular groups at various
times throughout the Progressive era.
39 Brandt, No Magic Bullet, p. 38.
40 The Harvard-trained zoologist Charles B. Davenport became coordinator of the
new Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, New
York in 1904. Under his purview, scientists pursued experimental investigations
designed to add insight into nature's patterns and mechanisms of heredity. In
essence, he coordinated America's first research endeavor to provide valid findings in the newly created scientific field of genetics. Excited over the new possibilities that could arise from applying Mendelian-based genetics to the US human
population, Davenport invited Harry Laughlin to superintend the new Andrew
Carnegie Foundation funded Eugenics Record Office (ERO)at Cold Spring Harbor
in 1910. For an ovapriew of ER0 activities, see Garland E. Allen, "The Eugenics
Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, 1910-1940:An Essay in InstitutionalHistory,"
Osiris, 2nd series, 2 (1986):225-64. Elizabeth L. Watson provides a more visual contextualization in her Housesfor Science:A Pictorial Histoy of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (Cold Spring Harbor: Cold Spring Harbor Press, 1991).
41 Charles B. Davenport, "Some Social Applications of Modern kinciples of Heredity,"
7kansactions of the Fifdeenth International Congress on Hygiene and Demography, 1912
(Washington, D.C., 1913), Vol. 4, p. 661.
42 Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease: The Body of the Prostitute in NineteenthCentury Medical Discourse (Washington Square, New York: New York University
Press, 1997), p. 172,174.
43 Thomas Parran, MD, Shadow on the Land: Syphilis (New York: The American Social
Hygiene Association, 1939), p. 81.
44 R. A. Vonderlehr and J. R. Heller, Jr., The Control of Venereal Disease (New York: Reynal
and Hitchcock, 1946), p. 8.
45 Roswell Hill Johnson, "Eugenic Aspect of Sexual Immorality," Journal of Heredity,
8 (1917): 121-22.
46 "Disease and Natural Selection," Journal of Heredity, 9 (1918): 374.
47 Samuel J. Holmes, A Bibliography of Eugenics (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1924), p. 209.
48 Although recent studies suggest that what we now recognize as Fetal Alcohol Syndrome may have been a major contributing factor to the apparent hereditary transmission of alcoholism, Progressive era reformers focused more directly upon the
naturelnurture arguments. For an important recent analysis, see Robert J. Karp,
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
l
67
68
Qutub H. Qazi, Karen A. Moller, Wendy A. Angelo and Jeffrey M. Davis, "Fetal
Alcohol Syndrome at the f i r n of the 20th Century: An Unexpected Explanation of
the Kallikak Family," Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 149 (1995): 45-48.
G. Frank Lydston, The Diseases of Society (Philadelphia:J.B. Lippincott, 1904), p. 200.
C. R. Stockard, "An Experimental Study of Racial Degeneration in Mammals Treated
with Alcohol," Archives of lnternal Medicine, 10 (1912): 397.
Richmond l? Hobson, Alcoholand the Human Race (New York: Revell, 1919).Philip J.
Pauly cited this example in "How Did the Effects of Alcohol on Reproduction
Become Scientifically Interesting," Journal of the History of Biology, 29 (1996): 10. For
a further general historical review, see Bartlett C. Jones, "Prohibition and Eugenics,
1920-1933," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 18 (1963): 158-72.
C. R. Stockard, "The Effect on the Offspring of Intoxicating the Male Parent and
the Bansmission of the Defects to Subsequent Generations," American Naturalist,
47 (1913): 677.
Raymond Pearl, "On the Effect of Continued Administration of Certain Poisons to
the Domestic Fowl, with Special Reference to the Progeny," Proceedings of the Ametican Philosophical Society, 55 (1916): 258.
Pauly, "Effects of Alcohol on Reproduction," p. 17-18.John Kobler provided a helpful overview of Prohibition in Ardent Spirits: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New
York: G. l?Putnam's Sons, 1973).For further insight into early US federal drug control, see David E Musto, The American Disease: Origins of Narcotic Drug Control (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
Jefferis and Nichols, Safe Counsel, p. 215.
Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics, p. 61.
East, Heredity ardd Human Afairs, p. 309.
See, for example, Jefferis and Nichols, Safe Counsel, p. 211-212, and Popenoe and
Johnson, Applied Eugenics, p. 180-183.
Guyer, Being Well-Born, p. 263.
Arthur E. Fink, Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States 1800-1915
(Philadelphia:University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938), p. 176.
PML, Laughlin papers, "Judge Harry Olson-Crime and Heredity Folder," Box D-24, French Strother, "The Cause of Crime: Mental Defect, The Cure for Crime, Crime
and Heredity, Crime and Educated Emotions," World's Work, July 1924, p. 2.
Charles B. Davenport, "Crime, Heredity and Environment:' Journal of Heredity,
19 (1928): 310. Cesare Lombroso, a proponent of the positivist school of criminal
anthropology, employed scientific methods to identify criminals, rejecting earlier
beliefs that criminal actions resulted from an individual's free will. Many eugenists
adopted Lombroso's view that the "born criminal' exemplified a brute or savage living among human beings who have advanced beyond his stage of development."
As such, criminals were evolutionary degenerates, throw backs, or atavistic beings
whose personhood displayed the "ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and
the inferior animals." See, Samuel J. Holmes, The Rend of the Race (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1921), p. 74. Sociologist Arthur Fink reviewed the biological basis of
crime in Causes of Crime: Biological Theories in the United States, 1800-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1938).For further discussion of Lombroso,
see Stepheh Jay Gould, Mismeasure of Man, revised ed. (New York: Norton, 1996),
p. 151-73. N. H. Rafter's Creating Born Criminals provides an exemplary historical contextualization of the concept "born criminal" drawn from extensive analysis of materials in New York archives.
Davenport, "Crime, Heredity, and Environment,"'p. 313.
Davenport, "Crime, Heredity, and Environment," p. 312.
40
I
PHILIP K. WILSON
69 Harry Olson summarized his findings in this 1924 presidential address before the
Eugenic Research Association, as cited by Jared Swanegan in "Crime afid Heredity:
A Study of Eugenic Criminology in Progressive Era America," The McNair Scholarly
Review of Truman State University, 6 (2000), p. 106.
70 James W. Bent, Jr discusses attempts to causally construct crime within the context
of the feebleminded in Inventing the Feeble Mind: A History of Mental Retardation in
the United States (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 8448,155-85. See
also Henry H. Goddard, "Relation of Feeble-Mindedness to Crime," Bulletin of the
American Academy of Medicine, l 5 (1914): 105-12, and Zenderland, Measuring Minds,
p. 210-21.
71 Strother, "The Cause of Crime."
72 Swanegan, "Crime and Heredity," p. 114.
73 Edwin Grant Conklin, Heredity and Environment in the Development of Men (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1922), p. 308.
74 Walter, Gmetics, p. 251.
75 Walter, Genetics, p. 252.
76 PML, Laughlin Papers, Differential Fecundity Folder, Box E-1-3, "DifferentialFecundity" (paper presented at Long Island Biological Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor,
N.Y., 7 July 1931), p. l, 2,5.
77 Jefferis and Nichols, Safe Counsel, p. 16.
79 Jefferis and Nichols, Safe Counsel, p. 17.
80 Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics, p. 190.
82 Popenoe and Johnson, Applied Eugenics, p. 190-91. Marouf A. Hasian, Jr., expounds
upon the rhetorical construction of eugenists' claims in The Rhetoric of Eugenics in
Anglo-American Thought (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1996).
85 David Starr Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe: A Discussion of the Principles of Eugenics (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1913), p. 81.
87 Guyer, Being Well-Born, p. 319.
89 Walter, Genetics, p. 249-50.
90 Desmond King, Making Americans: Immigration, Race, and the Origins of the Diverse
Democracy (Cabbridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 169.
92 King, Making Americans, p. 171, drawing upon J. Higham's Strangers in the Land,
2nd ed. (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1988), p. 15f-57.
93 PML, Laughlh Papers, Immigration 'hip to Europe-Correspondence, Folder, Box
C-4-1, H. H. Laughlin to Captain John B. Bevor, 18 August 1930.
94 "Europe as an Emigrant-Exporting Continent; the United States as an ImmigrantReceiving Nation," House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization hearing,
8 March 1924, as cited by King,Making Amm'cans, p. 188-89.
95 Kenneth L. Roberts, "Lest We Forget," Saturday Evening Post, 18 April 1923, p. 160.
96 "Europe as Emigrant Exporting Continent," cited by King,Making Americans, p. 18485.
97 Elazar Barkan, "Reevaluating Progressive Eugenics: Herbert Spencer Jennings and
the 1924 Immigration Legislation," Journal of the History of Biology, 24 (1991):91-112.
98 Walter, Genetics, p. 255. By 1914, the following states had enacted reproductive sterilization laws in the respective years: Indiana (1907),Washington (1909), California
(1909), Connecticut (1909), Nevada (1911), Iowa (1911), New Jersey (1911), New
York (1912), North Dakota (1913),Michigan (1913), and Kansas (1913).
I
99 For an elaboration upon eugenics themes i n film,see Martin S. Pernick's The Black
Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective"Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures since 1915 ( N e w York: Oxford University Press, 1996). Eugenics themes were
also prevalent i n literature. Among the most notable writings were Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1889), George Bernard Shaw's Man and Superman (1903),
H. G. Wells' A Modern Utopia (1905), Upton Sinclair's Damaged Goods (c.1911),Paul
E. Bowers' The Way Out of War (1917),and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932).
100 John N. Thomas, "Superintendent's Report," i n Louisiana Hospital for the Insane,
Report of Board of Administrators (Alexandria, Louisiana: Wall, 1922),p. 32-33, as cited
b y Edward J. Larson in Sex, Race, and Science; Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 44-45.
101 Ultimately, more than half o f the states i n the US adopted Laughlin's law endorsing
sterilization. See Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution:A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991),p. 8487.
102 Elliot Rowland Downing, The Third and Fourth Generation:An Introduction to Heredity
(Chicago: University o f Chicago Press, 1918), p. 154.
104 Conklin, Heredity and Environment, p. 303.
105 See, for example, H. E. Jordan,"The Eugencial Aspect of Venereal Disease," American
Breeder's Magazine, 3 (1912):257.
106 Harry H. Laughlin, The Scope of the Committee's Work, Bulletin No. 10A (Cold Spring
Harbor, N e w York: Eugenics Record Office, 1914), p. 12-14.
107 PML, Laughlin Papers, 1.V. "Researches First Published i n 'A Decade o f Progress i n
Eugenics,"' Reports o f Scientific Studies Folder, Box D-5-4, p. 17.
108 Jordan, "The Eugenical Aspect," p. 256.
109 Bonnie Bullough and George Rosen, Preventive Medicine in the United States, 19001990 Rends and Interpretations (New York: Science History Publications, 1992),p. 4647.
110 Jordan, "The Eugenical Aspect," p. 257.
111 Brandt, No Magic Bullet, p. 23-24.
112 Morrow, "Eugenics and Venereal Disease," p. 16; C.I? Wertenbaker, "Eugenics and
Public Health," New York Medical Journal,98 (1913):607-8.
113 Frances Gulick Jewett, The Next Generation:A Study in the Physiology of Inheritance
(Boston: Ginn and Company, 1928), p. ix-xi.
114 [M.F.] Ashley Montagu, Prenatal Influences (Springfield, Ill.: Charles C. Thomas,
1962), p. 5. For further historical insight into the concern about the fetus being
shaped b y the maternal environment, see Philip K. Wilson, "Out o f Sight, Out o f
Mind?: The Daniel Turner-James Blonde1 Dispute over the Power o f the Maternal
Imagination," Annals of Science, 49 (1992): 63-85, and "Eighteenth-Century 'Monsters' and Nineteenth-Century 'Freaks': Reading the Maternally Marked Child,"
Literature and Medicine, 21 (2002):1-25.
115 For further recent discussion o f the history o f children's health, see the special
theme issue o f the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History, 19,l (2002) as well as the
"Literature,Medicine and Children" issue o f Literature and Medicine, 21,1 (2002).
116 A more complete and accurate assessment o f their respective aims and accomplishments lies beyond the scope o f this paper. The author's future historical investigation, however, is directed toward analyzing the polar, yet intersecting, nature1 nurture concerns o f advanced prenatal care within a climate o f eugenic reform.
117 For further discussion, see Philip K. Wilson, ed., The Medicalization of Obstetrics:
Personnel, Practice, and Instruments (New York: Garland, 1996).

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