1. There is a growing body of first-rate scholarship on the history of the eugenics movement in the United States. See Chase, Legacy of Malthus; Degler, In Search of Human Nature; Lisa Lindquist Dorr, “Arm in Arm”; Duffy, Sanitarians; Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics; Gould, Mismeasure of Man; Gugliotta, “ ‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife’”; Haller, Eugenics; Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics; Kline, Building a Better Race; Kühl, Nazi Connection; Larson, Sex, Race, and Science; Paul, “Genes and Contagious Disease”; Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives; Rafter, “Claims-Making and Socio-Cultural Context”; Rafter, White Trash; Reilly, Surgical Solution; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; Selden, Inheriting Shame; J. David Smith, Minds Made Feeble; Stepan, “Hour of Eugenics”; Stepan, Idea of Race in Science; Thomson, The Problem of Mental Deficiency; Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind; Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society; Zenderland, Measuring Minds.
2. See Childs, Modernism and Eugenics; Doyle, Bordering on the Body; Kadlec, “Marianne Moore, Immigration, and Eugenics”; León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides’”; Richardson, “Eugenization of Love”; and Seitler, “Unnatural Selection.”
3. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 36.
4. This is not to say that eugenics can, in either theory or practice, represent politically, socially, or morally neutral ground. Eugenics emerges from a model of human normativity designed to exclude, even to eliminate, those designated biologically inferior or genetically flawed on the basis of inevitably contingent, historically specific criteria.
5. Malthus, Essay on the Principle of Population, 2; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
6. Historian Carl Degler points out that Darwin “later accepted the phrase [survival of the fittest] as a kind of shorthand for natural selection.” Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 11.
7. Spencer, Social Statics, 262.
8. Ibid., 147–48. In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag objects to such troping of social problems as literal, physical ailments. She pursues “liberation” from these “lurid metaphors,” because they stigmatize both the truly physically ill and the group pigeonholed by the metaphor (“Illness as Metaphor,” 4). She argues, for example, that TB first had to assume a sufficiently malevolent aura before Hitler could accuse “Jews of ‘producing a racial tuberculosis among nations’ ” in an early rhetorical step (in 1919) toward genocide (82–83). Although Sontag is certainly right to challenge the figurative equation of human beings with disease, she does not fully address the antecedent trope of the “body politic.” To envision the nation as a body is to fantasize that it can and should work as a synchronous system. The socially inferior or deviant—the object of negative eugenics—becomes then the “monkey wrench” (to adopt Slavoj Žižek’s phrase) that proves the system already exists as a working unit with expected and fixable glitches—for Hitler, that would mean Jews, among others. As Žižek explains, “By transposing onto the Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces into the social organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is rendered possible” (Enjoy Your Symptom!, 90). The very phrase “body politic” automatically suggests that some body parts will be subject to Spencerian excision or excretion; thus, the trope can never be innocent. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, “The truth is that race-thinking entered the scene of active politics at the very moment when the European peoples had prepared, and to a certain extent had realized, the new body politic of the nation” (“Race-Thinking before Racism,” 41).
9. Darwin, Origin of Species, 68; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
10. In The Origin of Species, Darwin veered away from any overt consideration of humans, yet he concluded the book with the remark that his “theory of descent with modification through natural selection” (342) might eventually mean that “light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history” (458). But even in Origin, Darwin had ventured some speculation about human evolution, and he almost always did so in racial terms, speaking of “the differences in races of man, which are so strongly marked” (227) and describing “negroes [sic] of the interior of Africa” as “the lowest savages” (92–93). Darwin here violated his own potentially egalitarian injunction, stated early on in Origin, against using “the words higher and lower” when comparing forms of life (33).
11. Darwin, Descent of Man, 108; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
12. In Descent, Darwin does not even commit himself to a monogenetic theory of the origins of humankind. The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a controversy in Britain and the United States over polygenesis, the theory that human races constituted different species with distinct origins, versus monogenesis, the theory that the human races shared a common ancestral origin. Polygenesis bolstered the views of the proslavery South in the United States, even if it implied deviation from the biblical version of the Adamic origin of all humankind. Some slaveholders speculated that to identify African Americans as a distinct, lesser species would justify the continued practice of slavery. Abolitionists generally insisted on the potentially more egalitarian, monogenetic origin of all human beings.
13. Galton, Hereditary Genius, v; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
14. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 75–77.
15. Indeed, as Stephen Jay Gould observed, not until the advent of the IQ test in the early 1900s did the measurement of inherent, hierarchical race and class differences receive another such boost. When French psychologist Alfred Binet published his original intelligence quotient test in 1905, he intended it to provide one technique for the identification of what we would now term learning-disabled children (Mismeasure of Man, 149). Lawrence Terman, a professor at Stanford, published his revised version of the test, the Stanford-Binet, in 1916, with much broader applications in mind (ibid., 175–76). Terman, along with a colleague, Harvard professor Robert Yerkes, initiated the testing of 1.75 million U.S. Army recruits in 1917–18. They found that recent immigrants (especially those from central, southern, and eastern Europe) and African Americans achieved, on average, lower scores. These results were later used as propaganda in the campaign for immigration restriction. See Gould for a definitive analysis of the flaws and biases of the army IQ test, its administration, and the interpretation of test data.
16. Other eugenic thinkers followed this authorial convention of self-genealogy. Havelock Ellis continued the tradition in his 1904 A Study of British Genius. So did W. E. B. Du Bois, who, on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday in 1918, delineated his genetic and racial inheritance for the Crisis: “So, with some circumstance, having finally gotten myself born, with a flood of Negro blood, a strain of French, a bit of Dutch, and thank God! no ‘Anglo-Saxon,’ I come to the days of my childhood.” In the same passage, Du Bois compares his grandfather to “a thoroughbred” (“The Shadow of Years,” 168). Eugenics popularizer A. E. Wiggam offered a particularly transparent version of the authorial self as eugenic exemplar: “The present writer is descended quite directly from Nordic Vikings” (Fruit of the Family Tree, 82).
17. Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty, 24; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
18. I am grateful to a reader for the University of North Carolina Press for suggesting “unnatural selections” as a part of the title and as a uniting concept for this book.
19. Spencer, Principles of Biology, 532.
20. Spencer, Social Statics, 146. Spencer also helped establish a crucial, long-lived distinction between the “unfortunate worthy” and the “innately unworthy,” the “deserving” and the “undeserving poor,” the “vicious poor” and the “virtuous poor” (ibid., 354–55, 361, 363). The vicious poor do not merit even voluntary charity; they are “good-for-nothings” (298) who should, rightly, be culled. The virtuous poor, on the other hand, might deserve “a lift into some self-supporting position” (144). Spencer’s distinction resonates throughout the century and into current social policy debates. Even Marx’s distinction between the lumpen proletariat and the proletariat arguably has something in common with Spencer’s binary classification of the poor. See also Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 316.
21. Spencer, Social Statics, 147.
22. Spencer, Principles of Biology, 510.
23. See Innes, Devil’s Own Mirror, and Lott, Love and Theft for more on the nineteenth-century equating of Africans with the Irish.
24. Spencer, Principles of Biology, 521.
25. Ibid., 512.
26. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 28.
27. Spencer, Social Statics, 359. Galton, like Spencer, was aware of and appreciated Dugdale’s contribution to the project of improving human breeding. In his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, Galton opines that “fairly distinct types of criminals” have been permitted to “breed true to their kind” in what is, for him, one of “the saddest disfigurements of modern civilisation” (15). Galton supports his cultural diagnosis of modernity—criminal overbreeding—by citing “the history of the infamous Jukes family in America” (63).
28. In 1809, the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had published Philosophie zoologique, wherein he proposed that species evolve as a result of the hereditary transmission to offspring of traits acquired by the parents during their lifetimes. Until and even after Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, Lamarckian inheritance was widely accepted as the most reasonable explanation for the evolution of species and their adaptation to changing environmental conditions.
29. Obviously, Lamarckianism provides no assurance of egalitarian or progressive social policy, as both Dugdale’s policies and Spencer’s social philosophy show. In fact, a belief in Lamarckian inheritance was what made monogenesis palatable to some racists and slavery advocates: if acquired traits are hereditary, then even given a common origin of all races, those races will promptly evolve in very different ways. Proslavery factions could then argue that Africans had evolved to be slaves and whites to be masters. Unfortunately, as I will discuss in chapter 1, the rediscovery of Mendel’s work in 1900 did not necessarily advance egalitarian racial or class politics. See Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 24.
30. Dugdale, Jukes, 66; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
31. There were, as well, hundreds of unpublished eugenic family studies in the United States, as I will discuss at length in chapter 5.
32. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 97.
33. Finlayson, “Dack Family,” 251.
34. Sessions, “Happy Hickories,” 294.
35. Goddard, Kallikak Family, 101, 115.
36. Rafter, White Trash, 2.
37. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 1–5.
38. Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 28; Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 30; Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 16; Reilly, Surgical Solution, xiii.
39. Eugenics emerged with such force in the early-twentieth-century United States that it must be seen as an “over-determined product,” to use Robert Young’s words, much like its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century antecedent, European scientific racism. According to Young, French and English scientific racism emerged out of “a loss of belief in Biblical explanation and its replacement by apparently authoritative scientific laws, a sense of European cultural and technological pre-eminence accompanied by working-class unrest at home, revolution and colonial rebellion abroad, and a Civil War in the U.S. focused on the issue of slavery” (Colonial Desire, 120).
40. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 1–5.
41. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 195.
42. For further discussion of the post–World War I rise of eugenics in the United States, see Nies, Eugenic Fantasies, 23–26.
43. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 201.
44. As Matthew Guterl points out, 1920s eugenic anxiety also stemmed from the widespread perception that the Great War had been distinctly dysgenic because not only was it a conflict wherein “‘Nordics were killing Nordics’” (quoting Henry Fairfield Osborne) but it also was “‘destructive of the best strains, spiritually, morally, and physically’” (quoting Madison Grant). See Guterl, The Color of Race, 35; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
45. John F. Kennedy Library and Museum. “Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address.” Further quotations of Coolidge’s address are from this source.
46. Biggs, Rational Factory, 105.
47. See JoAnne Brown, Definition of a Profession, for a fine analysis of the concept and the term “efficiency” in relationship to new forms of labor control, industrial organization, and intelligence testing in the context of World War I (110–13).
48. Rogers and Merrill, Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem, 346.
49. Holmes’s opinion: “We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices . . . in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. . . . The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Novick, Honorable Justice, 352.
50. Granted, eugenics is not the only context in which to understand Coolidge’s remarks. He is also certainly referring to organized crime and to Prohibition Era liquor bootlegging and marketing. Even so, Prohibition itself speaks to the link between morality and nationality that eugenics also addresses. In fact, eugenicists generally viewed alcoholism as both an inherited-biological and an immoral-behavioral condition.
51. Quoted in Reilly, Surgical Solution, 60.
52. See Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 304. Also see Morawska, “Sociology and Historiography of Immigration,” 187–88.
53. See Reilly, Surgical Solution, 18.
54. The act permitted immigration by nationality in numbers correlated to the proportions of nationalities already present in the U.S. population as reflected by the 1890 (not the 1920) census. As a result, the 1924 act cut by over 80 percent the numbers of immigrants coming from central, southern, and eastern European countries. See Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 300; and Kadlec, “Marianne Moore, Immigration, and Eugenics,” 25. In other words, the act discriminated on the basis of national origin in order to ensure a much higher proportion of immigrants from northern Europe; it sought thereby to exclude the “duller and lower immigrant breeds” (Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree, 176–77), that is, immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, who had represented the bulk of immigration between 1890 and the passage of the act. By excluding most southern, central, and eastern European immigrants, the act also effectively excluded the majority of Jewish immigrants.
55. Michaels, Our America, 6; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
56. See Modernism/Modernity 3, no. 3 (1996), for discussions of Walter Benn Michaels’s Our America. Marjorie Perloff, in “Modernism without the Modernists” observes, rightly, that only a highly selective and partial view of modernism, in particular one that excludes Pound and Eliot, permits Michaels to apply a model of “nativism” to American modernism. Both Perloff and Charles Altieri, in “Whose America Is Our America,” point out that Michaels omits not only a great deal of literature but also a lot of history and economics in his discussion of the dynamics of modern American citizenship. Altieri argues persuasively that one cannot reduce all of American modernism, with its undeniable ambiguities and tensions (especially around race) to “a single dominant set of beliefs” (107).
57. This is not to say that awareness always led to enforcement of these differences. There were, for example, socialist eugenicists like Havelock Ellis who promoted the erasure of class difference.
58. Historian Wendy Kline has recently made a compelling case for continued strong influence of eugenics in the United States throughout the 1930s (Building a Better Race, 93–101, 107) and beyond, even into the 1950s (156), and perhaps even up to the present (164). Kline argues persuasively that 1930s eugenicists sustained their agenda by shrewdly avoiding the potentially racist, purely biological connotations of 1920s eugenics; they combined notions of nature and nurture, advocating sterilization of the feebleminded not so much because they might pass on mental deficiency but because they would not make good parents. As a result, the number of compulsory sterilizations during the 1930s was “nearly triple” the number in the 1920s (107). Certainly the ideology and practice of eugenics persisted well past the 1920s and the 1930s. Historian Gregory Dorr has shown that eugenics was being taught in the 1950s at the University of Virginia; see his “Assuring America’s Place in the Sun.” Likewise, historian Johanna Schoen has found that North Carolina performed sterilizations, approved through its Eugenics Board, until 1975. See Schoen, “Between Choice and Coercion.” But Schoen also notes North Carolina’s exceptional eugenics history, observing that the state “greatly expanded its sterilization program in the 1950s and 1960s when most states ceased eugenic sterilizations” (135). Overall, in most states and in terms of original legislation and jurisprudence (though not necessarily in the sheer number of eugenic sterilizations performed), the 1920s must still be seen as “mainline” (that is, purely hereditarian) eugenics’s most successful American decade.
59. Leef Smith, “Lynchburg,” B1.
60. Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality, 87 (hereafter, title shortened to Fight for Equality).
61. Wiggam, New Decalogue, 35.
62. Model, “Work and Family,” 138; Lewis, Fight for Equality, 164.
63. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 45, 7.
64. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (August 1922): 152–53.
65. Dunbar-Nelson, “Woman’s Most Serious Problem,” 73.
66. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 174.
67. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 32 (October 1926): 283.
68. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives, 188; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
69. Conversely, there were, as well, black eugenics sympathizers (such as Marcus Garvey) who advocated racial purity. I discuss Garvey at greater length in chapter 1.
70. See Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult,” for a discussion of the eugenic underpinnings of Pauline Hopkins’s late-nineteenth-century version of racial uplift.
71. Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter, 270.
72. Talalay, Composition in Black and White, 50.
73. Diana Williams, “Building the New Race,” 190; further citations will be parenthetical in the text. Matthew Guterl likewise observes that Toomer believed that “he represented a new ‘type’ of American—new and decidedly superior” (The Color of Race, 168).
74. Von Hallberg, “Literature and History,” 116.
75. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 88, 90, 106, 114, 169.
76. “Fitter Families for Future Firesides,” 9.
77. Von Hallberg, “Literature and History,” 116.
78. Eliot, Letters, 573.
79. León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides,’” and Childs, Modernism and Eugenics.
80. Michael Levenson observes that “vague terms still signify”: the term “modernism” is “at once vague and unavoidable.” See Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, vii. Marianne DeKoven simply quotes Levenson, while observing that “most discussions of modernism acknowledge both the indefinability of the term and also the desirability of giving it a working definition, or at least periodization.” See DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” 5. Raymond Williams at first tries to identify modernism’s beginnings with “the extraordinary innovations in social realism” of Dickens, Gogol, and Flaubert in the mid-nineteenth century. But he, too, ends up relying on more conventional periodizations as a result of what he calls “a series of breaks in all arts in the late nineteenth century.” See Raymond Williams, Politics of Modernism, 32–33.
81. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 12–13. Thus, although most critics of modernism acknowledge that “modernity” in its loosest sense could be taken to signify merely the postfeudal, they usually deploy more familiar (and generally more useful) periodizations—say, 1890–1930—to designate “modernism.”
82. There were just a few articles written by whites about birth control and population issues among “Negroes” in the Crisis during the 1920s, and there were two “Negro numbers” of Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Review (one in 1919 and one in 1932). Ironically, the period’s intensively enforced segregation largely protected African Americans from the compulsory eugenic practices enacted on poor whites; sterilization and institutionalization generally took place in whites-only institutions. This dynamic would change in the postsegregation era, with African Americans increasingly and eventually disproportionately being sterilized. See Schoen, “Between Choice and Coercion,” and Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
83. Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, vii.
84. In the second volume of his towering Du Bois biography, David Levering Lewis associates the beginning of the New Negro Renaissance with the return of black World War I veterans and with Du Bois’s July 1918 Crisis editorial: “‘Returning Soldiers’ spoke to all of them in their new, self-proclaimed, exhilarating incarnation: The New Negro” (Lewis, Fight for Equality, 2). For further debate on the dates and significance of the Harlem Renaissance, see Gates, “Harlem on Our Minds,” 2; English, “Selecting the Harlem Renaissance,” 811–12; Gates et al., Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 932; Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, xviii; and Huggins, Harlem Renaissance, 53–58.
85. Du Bois, “Winter Pilgrimage,” 15.
86. Of course, there were other shared contexts as well, World War I, especially. But many of the other common contexts—eugenics, Prohibition, and so on—can be seen as part of a general spirit of reform.
87. North, Political Aesthetic, 6.
88. Lewis uses the term to describe Du Bois up until the time of his resignation as editor of the Crisis in June 1934. See Lewis, Fight for Equality, 347–50.
89. Eliot, Letters, 573.
90. Dunbar-Nelson, “Woman’s Most Serious Problem,” 73.
91. Angelina Weld Grimké Papers, box 38–13, folder 223, Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
92. Rachel, 49.
93. Ibid., 73.
94. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 17.
95. See Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 45–76, on lynching protest, particularly by Ida B. Wells, that relied on a discourse of “civilization.”
96. Dugdale, Jukes, 114.
97. As Dana Seitler cogently argues, modern scientific discourses such as eugenics “helped bring about narrative innovation,” while “new narrative forms,” in turn, served as “a central device for the production and publicization of scientific rhetoric” (“Unnatural Selection,” 64).
98. Lott, Love and Theft, 9.
99. I borrow the term “rigorous historicization” from Gambrell, “Serious Fun,” 244.
100. “Fitter Families for Future Firesides,” 9.
101. Ibid.
102. Whittier-Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 116; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
103. Francis Collins quoted in Weiss, “Genome Project Completed,” A6.
104. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 14.
105. Kühl, Nazi Connection. Zygmunt Bauman also reminds us of the “non-Nazi and pre-Nazi, ‘scientific’ roots of genocide” (Modernity and Ambivalence, 41).
1. Wheatley, “To the University of Cambridge.”
2. Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” Critics have occasionally—and anachronistically, I would argue—charged Wheatley with failure to challenge the dominant racialist discourse of her day. Not surprisingly perhaps, Wheatley did not entirely dismantle the eighteenth century’s prevailing racial hierarchies; but, in this poem at least, she rather subversively places (converted) Africans alongside “angelic” white men in the “Great Chain of Being.”
3. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xiv.
4. Ibid.
5. Carby, Race Men, 9–10.
6. Ibid., 11.
7. See, for example, Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy. Authors like Harper and Pauline Hopkins took their authority seriously and viewed their works, in Hazel Carby’s words, as “cultural interventions.” See Carby, introduction to Iola Leroy, xvi. Harper concludes her novel with the explicit desire that Iola Leroy (like the title character herself) “inspire” the folk to “embrace every opportunity, develop every faculty, and use every power God has given them to rise in the scale of character and condition, and to add their quota of good citizenship to the best welfare of the nation” (282). Carby argues that here Harper is not promoting material so much as moral uplift. See also Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood, 92–94. On the other hand, Charles Chesnutt offers an interesting exception to this late-nineteenth-century, generally intraracial, definition of uplift. Chesnutt stated in his journal that his goal as a writer was “not so much the elevation of the colored people as the elevation of the whites.” See Chesnutt, Journals, 139. I am indebted to Mason Stokes for calling this reference to my attention.
8. Doyle, Bordering on the Body, 10.
9. Ibid., 12.
10. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives, 183; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
11. Michele Mitchell’s dissertation, “Adjusting the Race,” offers a rare exception to the scholarly tendency to exclude African American intellectuals and activists from eugenic thinking; see especially her chapter on “sexuality, reproduction, and African-American vitality” (144–226); further citations of Mitchell’s dissertation will be parenthetical in the text. The handful of other scholars who acknowledge any degree of African American participation in eugenic thinking include Marouf Arif Hasian Jr., who in The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought notes a class-inflected black version of eugenics, though without mention of Du Bois (69–70); and Matthew Guterl, who in The Color of Race in America argues that Du Bois “shared” with Lothrop Stoddard “an aristocrat’s faith in the power of birth and heredity: in eugenics” (144). But even a quite recent book on U.S. eugenics, Nies’s Eugenic Fantasies, considers eugenics solely in the context of “whiteness studies” (xi–xii).
12. This is not to say that Du Bois embraced reactionary racist eugenics as it was constructed and promoted by white supremacists such as Lothrop Stoddard and Madison Grant. As Laura Doyle points out, in the twenties and thirties, Du Bois tirelessly worked to refute white supremacist and reactionary eugenic thinking (Bordering on the Body, 12). In the pages of the Crisis, he more than once referred to Stoddard as a fool. Werner Sollors has recently observed (regarding Du Bois’s reportage of his 1936 trip to Nazi Germany) that Du Bois “had an exceptional ability to understand and analyze the paradoxes of Nazi Germany—and the courage to speak out about them. At the same time, he did not idealize race relations in the United States, and was able to make fascinating comparisons between racial systems in the two nations that were informed by his own experience as a black American.” See Sollors, “W. E. B. Du Bois in Germany,” B4. For a thorough discussion of Du Bois’s Germany trip, see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Fight for Equality, 397–403 (hereafter cited as Fight for Equality). Lewis notes that “once out of the country, Du Bois would vent his bottled-up consternation” at the Nazi persecution of Jews (400); however, also according to Lewis, Du Bois’s understanding was not completely clear regarding Nazi treatment of Jews, which he considered “legal” in contrast to the “unconstitutional” American treatment of Negroes (420), while his “abiding affection for the Germans . . . conduced to a surreal indulgence of Hitler and Nazism” in the early 1940s (467).
13. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xvi.
14. A revisionary trend within recent African Americanist literary and philosophical scholarship challenges past assumptions that African American writers were isolated from the scientific, philosophical, and cultural currents of their day. I, with W. Lawrence Hogue, am “assuming that people of color in the United States are not outside (Western) history and rationality.” See Hogue, Race, Modernity, Postmodernity, x. See also Adell, Double Consciousness/ Double Bind; Gaines, Uplifting the Race; Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White; West, The American Evasion of Philosophy; and Zamir, Dark Voices.
15. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 209.
16. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn.
17. Du Bois, Autobiography, 154–55.
18. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (August 1922): 152–53.
19. Activist-writers Mary Burrill and Angelina Weld Grimké, for example, were birth control advocates oriented more toward women’s rights than eugenics, although they were not completely without eugenic sympathies. See chapter 4 of this book. Also see the two special “Negro numbers” of Birth Control Review: September 1919 and June 1932.
20. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 98. Margaret Sanger incisively analyzed New Women’s resistance to male eugenicists’ calls for prolific breeding among the “well-to-do”: “If women in fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine ‘race-suicide’ fantasies they could within a few years be down to the condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that motherhood upon the number of children.” Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 68.
21. Du Bois, “Opinion,” Crisis 24 (October 1922): 248.
22. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 205.
23. Up to that time, and even for a bit after, belief in Lamarckian transmission persisted.
24. See Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 24–25.
25. See Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 304. Also see Morawska, “Sociology and Historiography of Immigration,” 187–88.
26. See Model, “Work and Family,” 138.
27. See Reilly, Surgical Solution, 18.
28. These tracts included (among many others) Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color (1920), Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race (1916), and Wiggam’s The New Decalogue of Science (1923) and The Fruit of the Family Tree (1924).
29. See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 61–62; Chesler, Woman of Valor, 215.
30. See International Eugenics Congress, Report of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, 26.
31. See Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 28; see also Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 30; Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 16; and Reilly, Surgical Solution, xiii.
32. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 170–75. Kevles’s book remains a landmark study of the history of eugenics, but it does present a somewhat oversimplified assessment of the U.S. movement. Kevles astutely analyzes the two politically distinct branches of the eugenic movement; however, perhaps as a result of this solely political reading, he tends to elide race in favor of class (347 n. 21) and fails to consider any nonwhite adherents of socially progressive eugenic thinking.
33. Ellis, Problem of Race-Regeneration, 23, 25, 34.
34. Sanger, “Function of Sterilization,” 299. For a discussion of Sanger’s eugenic sympathies, see Chesler, Woman of Valor. As Chesler points out, Sanger’s alliances with eugenicists were at times more strategic than ideological; nevertheless, Sanger consistently supported “‘negative eugenics,’ or the weeding out of the unfit,” even while she “disdained the idea of promoting fertility [among the fit], or ‘positive eugenics’” (195).
35. Chesler, Woman of Valor, 193.
36. Ibid.
37. Degler, In Search of Human Nature, 42.
38. At least theoretically, this bridge between individual and collective subjectivity remains a corollary even of our contemporary understanding of human “breeding”: the double helix of DNA (rather than a Mendelian chi square) now seems to represent, accurately, our individual (biogenetic) relationship to our families and to our ethnic groups—indeed, to the entire human family. For example, the human genome project aspires to map a kind of collective identity within which each individual is, paradoxically enough, uniquely represented.
39. North, Political Aesthetic, 156.
40. Ibid.
41. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” 95–96.
42. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” (1903), 17.
43. Kristeva, “Word, Dialogue and Novel,” 37.
44. Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument,” 34.
45. Quoted in Moon, Emerging Thought of W. E. B. Du Bois, 152. Granted, Appiah’s argument explicitly takes Du Bois’s unstable construction of race almost as a “pretext,” as he puts it, for discrediting a continued, contemporary (particularly academic) reliance on notions of racial difference.
46. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 122. Interestingly, some more recent theorizing on race, including that in Gilroy’s Black Atlantic and in Appiah’s In My Father’s House, while still anti-essentialist, nevertheless deemphasizes the utter fictionality of race in favor of an affirmation of common black, especially black diasporic, experience. This communal-minded approach serves to advance a transnational political goal—what Gilroy calls the “global project of black advancement” (35). Suggestively (and a bit ironically, given Appiah’s careful prior dismantling of Du Bois’s concept of “race”), both Appiah and Gilroy adopt such classic Du Boisian paradigms as “double consciousness” (Gilroy) and “Pan-Africanism” (Appiah) without subjecting those notions to much more than a de rigueur anti-essentialist, postnationalist update.
47. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 28; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
48. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 10; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
49. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth” (1948), 85–86.
50. Ibid., 88.
51. Ibid., 86. Here I depart from Joy James, who argues that, in his 1948 Wilberforce address, Du Bois “recanted his race leadership dogma” and “disbanded the old club.” I do agree, however, with her argument that Du Bois’s 1948 model of leadership is grounded far more surely in internationalist and socialist thinking; however, as we have seen, even Du Bois’s internationalism was tinged in the 1920s with notions of improved biological reproduction. See James, Transcending the Talented Tenth, 23–24. Overall, James offers incisive political and historical analyses of the remarkably persistent notion of uplift via the leadership of an intraracial intellectual elite.
52. Lewis, Fight for Equality, 2.
53. Du Bois, “Editorial,” 4 (October 1912): 287.
54. Du Bois, “Immediate Program,” 312.
55. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 32 (October 1926): 283.
56. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 310–11. Just four years later, in The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois again applied this notion of a “lowest class” of African Americans, this time in the context of his analysis of the post-Reconstruction rural South, noting the “‘submerged tenth’ of croppers, with a few paupers” (315).
57. Frazier, Negro Family in Chicago, 152; further citations will be parenthetical in the text. Even Frazier’s apparently “objective” sectioning of Chicago into seven concentric sociogeographic “zones” (the “poorer migrants from the South” settle in the “first zone,” 137) owes much to Du Bois’s grading system of three decades earlier.
58. Frazier did not sustain his faith in the “leavening power” of middle-and upper-middle-class African Americans. In his 1965 Black Bourgeoisie, he in fact demonizes middle-class African Americans for having adopted “white values” (15) and for having “broken with the traditional background of the Negro and rejected [their] social heritage” (96). Frazier even explicitly condemns Du Bois (whom he had, in his earliest works, claimed as a forefather) for what he terms educational “compensation” for a “deep-seated inferiority complex” (148, 188). Here Frazier is, of course, both participating in and helping to construct the agenda of the Black Power Movement which aimed, in part, to reclaim and celebrate African American folk culture, often at the expense of “inauthentic” middle-class African Americans. Frazier had begun distancing himself from Du Bois as early as the mid-1930s, however. See Martin, Race First, 298, 310.
59. Frazier, “Eugenics and the Race Problem,” 92.
60. Robert E. Park taught sociology at the University of Chicago from 1914 to 1933. His influential research was focused on human ecology and on race and culture.
61. James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan, 152; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
62. “Men of the Month,” 12 (October 1916): 278.
63. Ibid.
64. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (August 1922): 153.
65. See Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives, 157–86, for a discussion of the significance of photographs of African Americans included in the Paris Exposition of 1900. Smith rightly argues that the photographs, assembled by W. E. B. Du Bois and Frances Benjamin Johnston, helped construct a “racially codified identity,” one that represented “national belonging” for African Americans (158). But Smith also suggests that the photographs “challenged the essentialized discourses of race and national identity dominant during this period” (158) by asserting the Americanness of their black subjects. She is right that to include African Americans fully in the nation is also to challenge white nativist notions of American identity; however, her suggestion that the photographs challenge essential racial identity is less persuasive. The photos certainly challenge the white supremacy–interracial hierarchy—but they do not as a result challenge racial essentialism or race itself. As Du Bois’s 1897 “The Conservation of Races” shows, as of the turn of the century, he seemed to very much still believe in the reality of “race.” See also Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument.”
66. “The Horizon,” 167.
67. The Crisis did not confine itself to reporting “good news” about the racial family. Although the journal never published lists of black-committed crimes (as white NAACP chair Oswald Villard requested in 1913; see Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 471), it did cover crimes against African Americans. Reports on lynching, for example, were frequent, graphic, and grisly, and they often included photographs of victims. In the context of my argument, however, such coverage was not only permissible but in fact necessary, as it served both to document an external threat to the Negro race–family (indeed a dysgenic threat) and to mobilize race activism. See chapter 4 for a consideration of modern African American women’s antilynching plays in the context of eugenic and psychoanalytic discourses.
68. See Mitchell, “Adjusting the Race,” for a discussion of “‘better babies’ contests among African Americans after 1910,” 204–14.
69. “One of Manhattan’s ‘Finest’” appeared in Crisis 8 (October 1914): 269; “A Great Grandfather’s Great Grandson” appeared in Crisis 8 (October 1914): 296. Another characteristic picture, “A Perfect Baby,” appeared in the “Men of the Month” feature in Crisis 10 (May 1915): 14.
70. Du Bois, “Our Baby Pictures,” 298.
71. Archibald Grimké, “Editorial,” 288.
72. Du Bois, “Editorial,” 12 (October 1916): 268.
73. “Five Exceptional Negro Children” appeared in Crisis 34 (October 1927): 258.
74. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 20 (May 1920): 8.
75. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 20 (June 1920): 72.
76. Michele Mitchell makes a similar point: “Uplift activists virtually ranked race households: some were presented as showcases where the nation could ostensibly witness Afro-American improvement, other homes were deemed spare but salubrious, still other domiciles were singled out and subjected to thoroughgoing evaluations which, at times, resulted in calls for their very elimination” (“Adjusting the Race,” 228).
77. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 26 (October 1923), 249.
78. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 28 (September 1924), 199.
79. “Pictures of Distinguished Negroes” appeared in Crisis 34 (December 1927): 358.
80. This celebration of the (often male) “top of the race” in the Crisis stands in stark contrast to the preoccupations of the white eugenicists of the day, who sought primarily to crop from their intraracial family picture immigrants and “poor white trash.” White eugenics of the 1910s and 1920s focused on the dysgenic (rather than the eugenic) within its own race-family. Du Bois, while he does worry about the propagation of lower-class Negroes (especially in his earlier work), seeks primarily in the Crisis to promote conception among the Negro middle class. White eugenicists, on the other hand, were more likely to advocate limiting the number of children born to (white) families of the underclass. Thus eugenics among whites was also intraracial. These contrasting modes of diagnosing and envisioning one’s racial family represent the modern racial-cultural divide. Whereas the modern American white middle class imagines itself embattled, threatened by a “rising tide of color,” the black middle class needs just to make itself felt, to write and picture itself into being. Logically, Du Bois for the most part pursues positive propaganda and eugenics by countering negative representation of African Americans and promoting breeding “in [Negro] families of the better class” (“Opinion” 32 [October 1926]: 283). Both eugenic methods are aimed at refining and restricting notions of “normal” intraracial subjectivity, but in the process they picture their perfect races differently. For example, the elegant photographs in Crisis stand in stark contrast to the visual record of the white family studies. See chapter 5, which is on the family studies and eugenics field workers.
81. In the review, Larsen stands as a dutiful daughter of the Harlem Renaissance (and so of Du Bois); McKay is its prodigal son. See Du Bois, “Two Novels,” 202.
82. Du Bois, “So the Girl Marries,” 192–93, 207–9; further references will be cited parenthetically in the text.
83. See Lewis, Fight for Equality, 107–8, on Du Bois’s interference in Yolande’s first engagement to jazz musician Jimmie Lunceford (whom he found unsuitable); see 159 and 222 on his oversight of Yolande’s later relationship with and marriage to Cullen. Lewis concurs that the Du Bois’s view of the Du Bois–Cullen wedding carried distinct eugenic overtones; see 223. Lewis also suggests that Du Bois’s eugenics was confined to “his own flesh and blood” (223); I am arguing, by contrast, that his eugenic ideals were not only familial, but intraracial and international.
84. Eric Garber, in his essay reconstructing the history of “the lesbian and gay subculture” during the Harlem Renaissance, notes that “Cullen was homosexual and maintained a lifelong relationship with Harlem schoolteacher Harold Jackman,” whom Garber describes as an “elegant homosexual” (318, 327, 322). Garber, “Spectacle in Color,” 318–31.
85. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (October 1922): 247–48.
86. It is tempting to read, anachronistically, Du Bois’s strange wording in this passage (written in 1922) through the lens of Yolande and Countée’s failed 1928 marriage. And, indeed, Du Bois’s “diagnosis” of the “petted” New Negro son does sound very much like one classic, homophobic “explanation” of the gay man: namely, that he was produced by a domineering mother. At the very least, Du Bois does seem here to be falling prey, rather uncharacteristically, to an anti-intellectualism that links academicism with a lack of virility and productivity. In other words, the passage reflects his—and others’—anxiety over differential birth rate within the race and thereby sets the stage for his discussion of “birth control as science” for “Negroes.” He is worried that the New Negro will not be sufficiently (re)productive.
87. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 203.
88. Stokes, “Strange Fruits,” 63. Stokes’s article offers a brilliant reading of the Harlem Renaissance as perhaps “the queerest avant-garde in history” (60).
89. Lewis, Fight for Equality, 226. Stokes, “Strange Fruits,” 66.
90. Quoted in Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 203.
91. Quoted in Stokes, “Strange Fruits,” 66.
92. Du Bois was not alone in the 1920s and 1930s in his attempt to create a member of a master Negro race within his own family, and Yolande Du Bois was not the only example of “failed” breeding during the Harlem Renaissance. In her book, Composition in Black and White, Kathryn Talalay exposes the extraordinary and explicitly eugenic project that was Philippa Schuyler (1931–67). The daughter of George Schuyler, black satirist and journalist, and white Texan heiress Josephine Cogdell, Philippa Schuyler was conceived, at least partly, to carry out a kind of breeding experiment in which she was to become the product of “hybrid genetics, proper education, and intensive education” (50). Alienated and isolated as an adult, Philippa Schuyler died (childless) tragically after having repeatedly reinvented herself in various professional guises in order to circumvent the strictures that her upbringing, gender, and racial identity imposed. The Schuylers’ experiment demonstrates clearly an alternative, relatively progressive brand of eugenic thinking that associated “vigor,” not with racial purity, but with “hybridity” (see the discussion of this “hybrid vigor” version of eugenics in my introduction). Moreover, like Du Bois, the parents rejected purely hereditarian thinking, as their emphasis on nutrition and education indicates.
93. Claudia Tate offers a biographical analysis of the production of a messianic male child of color in Dark Princess, arguing that the final scene points to Du Bois’s “wistful yearning for his infant son Burghardt” (Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 63). Mason Stokes makes a similar argument (“Strange Fruits,” 72). Again, perhaps less compelling than the personal dimension of the fantasy is the wider, political vision it represents: Du Bois was linking the advancement of peoples of color with a particular kind of literary production and with literal reproduction.
94. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 1.
95. Susan Gillman has argued persuasively for a partly biological (and nascently eugenic) underpinning for Pauline Hopkins’s late-nineteenth-century version of racial uplift. See Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult,” 57–82. Also see Gaines, Uplifting the Race, for a discussion of evolutionary theory in racial uplift discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (189, 205).
96. Edwards, “Racial Purity,” 122.
97. Quoted in Martin, Race First, 22. The creed was originally printed as “What We Believe” in Negro World, January 5, 1924. See Mitchell, “Adjusting the Race,” for a discussion of pre-Garvey, late-nineteenth-century black antimiscegenationist and eugenic thought (169–80).
98. Garvey, of course, rejected the white supremacy of Stoddard and other mainline white eugenicists, yet he also advocated racial separatism (including not only a rejection of miscegenation but also the promotion of New World blacks’ return to Africa) to such a degree that white racial extremists often found his message quite congenial. In 1924, Madison Grant (author of the popular 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race), wrote to a fellow white supremacist about Garvey’s planned Black Star Line: “I think if I were you I should get in touch with Garvey as it might be worthwhile to back his proposition” (quoted in Edwards, “Racial Purity,” 125). For his part, Garvey viewed white separatists as, in a way, kindred spirits holding world views compatible with his own, while his contacts with the Klan, including a “summit conference” in 1922, became one of his critics’ rallying cries (see Martin, Race First, 344). William Edwards likewise notes Garvey’s “meeting with the Imperial Wizard of the KKK in July 1922” (“Racial Purity,” 127).
99. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 626.
100. Du Bois, “Miscegenation,” 90–102; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
101. Ibid., 93, 100, 95.
102. Du Bois, “Marcus Garvey,” 977.
103. Quoted in Martin, Race First, 273.
104. See Lewis, Fight for Equality, 60–84, 149–53.
105. Randolph and Owen, “Who’s Who,” 26 (my emphasis).
106. Ibid., 27.
107. Michael North succinctly describes this dialectic in his discussion of aesthetic modernism, citing its “attempt to rejoin subject and object, individual and community, fact and value.” North, Political Aesthetic, 15.
108. Du Bois, “Winter Pilgrimage,” 15.
109. Gaines, Uplifting the Race, xv.
110. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 23 (November 1921): 5.
111. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 148.
112. Ibid., xxiii–xxiv, 148, 306–7; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 23.
113. North, Political Aesthetic, 6.
114. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 323–24; Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 5, 78–80.
115. Brooks, introduction to Understanding Poetry, 15; Eliot, “Music of Poetry,” 113.
116. Ellmann, Poetics of Impersonality, 50.
117. North, Political Aesthetic, 20.
118. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 130.
119. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” 296.
120. Ibid., 291, 293, 295.
1. Winston, “Life on the Color Line,” X1.
2. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 49.
3. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (October 1922): 247–48.
4. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 311.
5. See especially Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, and León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides.’”
6. See Bender, “‘His Mind Aglow’”; Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 12–13, and Nies, Eugenic Fantasies. Nies does acknowledge that Fitzgerald and Hemingway parodied eugenic thinking at times; she concludes that Hemingway ultimately sided with the eugenic “Nordic body” (64) but that Fitzgerald, while he remained committed to the notion of “the body” as a source for “identity,” tried to expand social “hierarchies” to include bodies and types other than the Nordic (107).
7. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark.
8. For discussion of the antifeminist elements of modernism, see Clark, Sentimental Modernism; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 7–8, 92; Felski, Gender of Modernity, 27; Rado, Modernism, Gender, and Culture; and Scott, Gender of Modernism. On antiromanticism in modernism, see Nelson, Repression and Recovery, 21.
9. Lamos, Deviant Modernism, 7.
10. Eliot, Letters, 94.
11. Letter dated March 28, 1935, in Pound, Letters, 272.
12. Lyndall Gordon, T. S. Eliot, 312, 422.
13. Ibid., 367; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
14. Lamos, Deviant Modernism, 16.
15. In his 1928 preface to For Lancelot Andrewes, Eliot proclaimed himself to be “classicist in literature, royalist in politics, and anglo-catholic in religion” (ix).
16. León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides’”; further citations will be parenthetical in the text. Also see León’s dissertation, “A Literary History of Eugenic Terror.”
17. Eliot, Collected Poems, 35.
18. Stoddard, Revolt against Civilization, 91; further citations will be parenthetical in the text, referred to as Revolt.
19. Levenson, Genealogy of Modernism, 206; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
20. Eliot, “Idea of a Christian Society,” 14–15; further citations will be parenthetical in the text, referred to as “Idea.”
21. John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, “Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address.”
22. Michaels, Our America; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
23. North, Political Aesthetic, 6.
24. Wiggam, New Decalogue, 19, 22.
25. Ibid.
26. Hasian, Rhetoric of Eugenics, 89–111.
27. Fitzgerald, Great Gatsby, 14; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
28. Eliot, “Marie Lloyd,” 407; further citations will be parenthetical in the text. Barry Faulk has argued that Eliot’s view of the middle class, including even this quite stark quotation, is more complicated than it appears, suggesting that “Eliot’s polemic cannot be taken at face value.” See Faulk’s “Modernism and the Popular,” 604. But I see no reason not to take Eliot “at face value” here; for him, the lower, not the middle, classes produce culture that is viable for reuse by the upper class.
29. Fitzgerald, FIE! FIE! Fi-Fi!, 66–68.
30. Quoted in Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 174.
31. Stoddard argued that “real Bolsheviks, real social rebels,” “should be carefully watched, strictly punished whenever they offend, and where anything like real revolution is attempted—hunted down and extirpated” (Revolt against Civilization, 232–33).
32. For discussions of Eliot’s assessment of mass and popular culture, see Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology; Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence; Chinitz, “T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide”; Faulk, “Modernism and the Popular”; Jay, “Postmodernism in The Waste Land”; Marsh, Money and Modernity; Paul Morrison, Poetics of Fascism; Nelson, Repression and Recovery; Rainey, Institutions of Modernism; Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Spurr, Conflicts in Consciousness.
33. Faulk, “Modernism and the Popular,” 605.
34. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” 183–84; further citations will be parenthetical in the text, referred to as “Notes.”
35. Eliot, Waste Land, line 146.
36. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 217.
37. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 20–21.
38. Eliot, “Function of Criticism,” 68; further citations will be parenthetical in the text as “Function.”
39. Eliot, After Strange Gods, 15; further citations will be parenthetical in the text as ASG.
40. Craig Raine, in his book In Defence of T. S. Eliot, argues for a more generous reading of this passage because, though “the wording is unfortunate,” it “allows for limited numbers of free-thinking Jews” (338). Raine continues: “As for restrictions on immigration, both major political parties now accept the necessity” (338). Raine’s argument clearly hurts Eliot more than it helps him; it shows that contemporary visions of national stability founded on homogeneity bear more resemblance to some of the worst modern politics of population and nation than we might like to believe.
41. For discussion of Eliot’s anti-Semitism, see Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form; Ricks, introduction to Inventions of the March Hare; Ricks, T. S. Eliot and Prejudice; Dutta, “Ideology into Criticism”; León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides’”; North, Dialect of Modernism; Ricks, “Eliot’s Uglier Touches”; Spurr, Conflicts in Consciousness; and Wilk, Jewish Presence. For a refutation, particularly of Anthony Julius’s views, see Raine, In Defence of T. S. Eliot, 320–32. Raine argues that there is indeed anti-Semitism in Eliot’s verse, but that it belongs to the characters, such as the speakers in Eliot’s “dramatic monologues” “Burbank” and “Gerontion” (326–27). Regarding “Burbank,” Raine concludes: “In other words, we have not an anti-Semitic poem, but a poem about anti-Semitism” (328).
42. Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence, 35–36.
43. I thank a reader for the University of North Carolina Press for providing this insight.
44. Keeping people in their place either literally or figuratively could be seen as precisely what the New Negro movement opposed most clearly and fundamentally.
45. Wiggam, New Decalogue, 227–28.
46. Wiggam, Fruit of the Family Tree, 330.
47. Wiggam, New Decalogue, 171.
48. Doyle, “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein,” 250.
49. On Eliot’s relationship to the culture and language of the working class, popular culture, and mass culture, see Rainey, Institutions of Modernism; Chinitz, “T. S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide,” 237; Tratner, Modernism and Mass Politics, 2; Asher, T. S. Eliot and Ideology, 2–3.
50. Julius, T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form, 92.
51. Stoddard, Clashing Tides, 78.
52. Ibid., 76, 368.
53. North, “Dialect in/of Modernism,” 57.
54. Ibid., 70.
55. Ibid., 71.
56. The blackface correspondence between Eliot and Aiken and between Eliot and Pound can be seen as a racial version of the well-known Sedgwickian triangle, wherein black bodies, both male and female (here, King Bolo and his “kween”) supplant the white female body as the vehicle through which white men express their homosocial desires.
57. Eliot, “Notes towards the Definition of Culture,” 95–96.
58. Lott, Love and Theft, 6.
59. Eliot, Letters, 431.
60. Read, “T. S. E.—A Memoir,” 15.
61. North, “Dialect in/of Modernism,” 65. Michael Tratner, too, argues that Eliot had a “lifelong fear that he was himself a product of mixed immigration, that he had ‘mixed blood’ in him and could not then be a cultural producer, an artist” (Modernism and Mass Politics, 100).
62. Eliot, Letters, 86.
63. North, “Dialect in/of Modernism,” 56.
64. Eliot, Letters, 455.
65. North, “Dialect in/of Modernism,” 57.
66. I am grateful to a reader for the University of North Carolina Press for pointing out this similarity.
67. Joyce, Ulysses, 508.
68. In Our America, Walter Benn Michaels takes the novel far too seriously, using it as evidence in support of his model of nativist literary modernism, when the novel is actually poking fun at both the writerly and racial mistakes that such a model invites (94–95). Betsy Nies makes an argument similar to Michaels’s, suggesting that Hemingway’s novel, “while a satire, also is inseparable from its modernist target, Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter” (Eugenic Fantasies, 480). Both Michaels and Nies largely ignore Hemingway’s pointed parody of modernist literary form in its reliance on racialism.
69. Hemingway, Torrents of Spring, 74–75.
70. Interestingly, both Hemingway (directly) and Eliot (indirectly) were involved in the prolonged project of getting Stein’s The Making of Americans into print. In 1924, Hemingway convinced Ford Madox Ford to publish installments of the book in the Transatlantic and later, when the review seemed to be foundering, began trying to get the Criterion to publish them. When the publication of installments in the Transatlantic got back on track, Hemingway wrote to Stein: “At any rate there will be regular and continuous publication [in the Transatlantic] and after all that is better than embalmed in the heavy, uncut pages of Eliot’s quarterly.” Quoted in Katz, introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, 190.
71. Eliot, Letters, 544.
72. Ibid., 573.
73. Eliot, “Music of Poetry,” 113.
74. Ibid.
75. Childs, Modernism and Eugenics, 99.
76. Eliot quoted in Harding, The “Criterion,” 209.
77. León, “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides,’” 174.
78. Pound quoted in Harding, The “Criterion,” 186.
1. Stein, Making of Americans, 34; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
2. Stein, Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, 4; further citations of Fern-hurst and Q.E.D. are to this edition and will be parenthetical in the text.
3. Quoted in Meyer, introduction to The Making of Americans, xiv.
4. Sanger, Woman and the New Race, 68.
5. Du Bois, “Damnation of Women,” 953.
6. Katz, introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, xxxvii.
7. It is not clear exactly what Stein means here by the term “race.” I take it to mean explicitly the human race, but implicitly white, middle-class Americans.
8. For discussion of Stein’s racial-sexual-literary politics, see Cohen, “Black Brutes and Mulatto Saints”; Cooley, “White Writers and the Harlem Renaissance”; Cope, “‘Moral Deviancy’ and Contemporary Feminism”; DeKoven, Rich and Strange; Doyle, “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein”; English, “Gertrude Stein and the Politics of Literary-Medical Experimentation”; Hovey, “Sapphic Primitivism”; Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark; Nielsen, Reading Race; Saldívar-Hull, “Wrestling Your Ally”; and Smedman, “‘Cousin to Cooning.’”
9. Katz, introduction, xxxvii.
10. Stimpson, “The Mind, the Body, and Gertrude Stein”; and Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 84.
11. Marianne DeKoven, who rightly acknowledges the inconsistencies and problematics of modernist politics in general and of Stein’s politics in particular, nevertheless seems to find comfort in what she calls Stein’s move “beyond or outside modernism.” DeKoven argues that Stein “exceeded” the “limits of what we think of as modernist innovation” (“Half In and Half Out of Doors,” 81). See also DeKoven, Rich and Strange, 68; and DeKoven, “Gertrude Stein and the Modernist Canon,” 15. Similarly, Ellen Berry argues that, as a result of her radical aesthetic practices, Stein can be distinguished from Eliot and Pound and identified as a postmodernist feminist (Curved Thought, 8–9).
12. Whittier-Ferguson, “Stein in Time,” 117–18. An important exception to the many recent oversimplified—and overly progressive—analyses of Stein, Whittier-Ferguson’s essay challenges and complicates in effective and necessary ways the historicizing and politicizing turn in Stein scholarship of the past decade as well as in literary criticism in general.
13. Hovey, “Sapphic Primitivism,” 548, 549, 563; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
14. Smedman, “‘Cousin to Cooning,’” 571–72.
15. Doyle, “The Flat, the Round, and Gertrude Stein,” 250. Doyle also argues that the “insidious racism” of Three Lives is manufactured for a white audience and that, while it exposes Stein’s own “attachment” to that racism and helps create her authority as author, it also works to “expose” her audience’s “investment” in racism (262). I am less sanguine than Doyle that Stein’s aim in “Melanctha” is “calling her audience out of its ideological closets” (262).
16. Here I am adopting Juan León’s term “eugenic anxiety,” which he coined to describe T. S. Eliot’s participation in the modern period’s eugenic discourse. See “‘Meeting Mr. Eugenides.’”
17. Brinnin, Third Rose, 49.
18. Mellow, introduction to Three Lives, xi.
19. Stein, Three Lives, 3, 5; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
20. William Carlos Williams, “Work of Gertrude Stein,” 23.
21. Geller and Harris, eds., Women of the Asylum, 179.
22. As Jayne Walker has noted, Stein’s original title was probably also intended as an acknowledgment of the literary influence of Flaubert and his Trois Contes. See Making of a Modernist, 19.
23. Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” 457.
24. The modern medical chart emerged out of physicians’ need for efficient, standardized assessment and diagnosis of ever-increasing numbers (and types) of patients. But, as of 1909, the publication date of Three Lives, the chart itself was still in an experimental stage; it represented a new genre highly susceptible to Stein’s narrative innovations. Three Lives experiments with the chart’s conventional categories of subjective information (supplied by the patient), objective information (observed by the clinician), assessment (diagnosis), and plan (prescription). By charting her characters via the medical gaze of a narrator-diagnostician, Stein at first appears to participate in a literary version of the epistemological hierarchy implied by the conventions of medical charting. However, her narrative technique also challenges such categorical assignment of authoritative knowledge by blurring the boundaries between “subjective” (patient) and “objective” (physician).
25. Foucault, Birth of the Clinic, 15.
26. Chessman, Public Is Invited to Dance, 28.
27. Critics have frequently observed that Jeff Campbell functions as a fictional stand-in for Stein herself, in a more veiled (by race and gender) version of the real-life love affair she had rendered earlier in Q.E.D. See Katz, introduction to Fernhurst, Q.E.D., and Other Early Writings, and Walker, Making of a Modernist. Lisa Ruddick, in Reading Gertrude Stein, persuasively argues that the “two lovers in the story, Melanctha and Jeff, are the products of Stein’s imaginative self-splitting” (13). Ruddick goes on to suggest that Melanctha is “the locus of ambiguity in the story” (13). But Jeff Campbell represents an equally powerful site of narrative ambiguity. He clearly serves as another racialized locus of ambivalence around medical-literary authority.
28. DeKoven, Rich and Strange, 67.
29. Doane, Silence and Narrative, 54.
30. I am referring here to Wordsworth’s well-known description of poetry as originating “from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (Preface to Lyrical Ballads).
31. As Toni Morrison has pointed out in Playing in the Dark, “For American writers generally, this Africanist other became the means of thinking about the body, mind, chaos, kindness, and love; provided the occasion for exercises in the absence of restraint [and] the presence of restraint” (47).
32. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 90; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
33. All the mulatto characters in “Melanctha” are “sick”: “Melanctha’s pale yellow mother was very sick and in this year she died” (106). Jane Harden, “who was so white that hardly anyone would guess it” (100), was “very sick almost all day” (140).
34. The combination of anxiety over working-class fecundity and insistence on white, middle-class genetic superiority represents the central eugenic paradox. Only through an ideologically tailored (fractured) Darwinism could the eugenicists simultaneously insist on their own greater fitness while fretting about what the Reverend James Marchant termed, in his introduction to C. W. Saleeby’s The Methods of Race Regeneration (1911), “the uncontrolled multiplication of the degenerate, who threatened to swamp in a few generations the purer elements of our race” (4). According to “pure” Darwinian logic, the more reproductively successful species is, in fact, the “fitter” species. The upper class will shrink, therefore, only if selected against. Of course, the underlying flaw in the eugenicists’ twisted Darwinism lies in their application of species theory to class and race—neither of which has any biological or genetic reality.
35. Laughlin, Bulletin No. 10A, 59.
36. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 304.
37. Model, “Work and Family,” 138, 141.
38. Stein entered the medical profession at a particularly significant historical moment—and at an equally significant institution. Johns Hopkins was, as public health historian John Duffy notes in The Sanitarians, at the fore-front of the professionalization of medicine at the turn of the century and opened the first permanent U.S. school of public health in 1918. Duffy observes that Johns Hopkins “established the formula for public health schools” and was a leading force in the institutionalization of public health in the United States (253). The establishment of the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health and Hygiene stands as a symbolic culmination of a public health movement with roots in the mid-nineteenth century.
39. Rafter, White Trash, 15.
40. Crawford, Modernism, Medicine, 110.
41. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
42. Kobrin, “American Midwife Controversy,” 197.
43. Bailey, “Control of Midwives,” and Ziegler, “Elimination of the Midwife.” Ziegler declared himself “unalterably and uncompromisingly opposed to any plan which seeks to give [the midwife] a permanent place in the practice of medicine” (32). One of his primary arguments for obstetricians’ elimination of midwifery baldly discloses the contest’s economic underpinnings: he cites the “$5,000,000 which it is estimated is collected [annually] by midwives in this country and which should be paid to physicians and nurses for doing the work properly” (34). By contrast, for examples of physician support for midwives during the period, see S. Josephine Baker, “Schools for Midwives,” and Noyes, “Training of Midwives.”
44. Baldy, “Midwife.” Likewise, pioneering Boston obstetrician J. B. Huntington observed, in a 1912 issue of the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, that “as soon as the immigrant is assimilated, then the midwife is no longer a factor in his home” (quoted in Kobrin, “American Midwife Controversy,” 200). One obstetrician frankly assessed the situation in 1907, declaring that midwives “are un-American”: see Mabbott, “Regulation of Midwives,” 526.
45. Wertz and Wertz, Lying-In, 211, 215–17.
46. Kobrin, “American Midwife Controversy,” 197.
47. Ibid., and Leavitt, “‘Science’ Enters the Birthing Room,” 97. Leavitt notes in Brought to Bed that by 1930 midwife-attended births had dropped to 15 percent of the total number (268).
48. In 1920 Lothrop Stoddard described the “negro” as the “quickest of the breeders” (Rising Tide, 90), while Harry Laughlin (probably the foremost U.S. eugenicist during the 1910s and 1920s) cautioned in 1914 that the “Federal Government” must undertake the task of “preventing the landing of inferior breeding stock” (Bulletin No. 10A, 62). At the same time (but not coincidentally), medical discourse was perfecting what Foucault termed the “thorough medicalization” of white, middle-class women’s bodies and sexuality, a process “carried out in the name of the responsibility they owed to the health of their children, the solidity of the family institution, and the safeguarding of society” (History of Sexuality, 146–47). As C. W. Saleeby, a leading eugenicist of the day, put it, in “all times and places, women’s primal and supreme function is or should be that of choosing the fathers of the future” (Methods of Race Regeneration, 36).
49. Kevles argues, correctly, for the existence of two strains of eugenics in the United States and Britain—one espoused by “social-radical eugenicists” such as George Bernard Shaw and Havelock Ellis, the other by eugenicists “of a conservative bent” such as Lothrop Stoddard and Karl Pearson (In the Name of Eugenics, 86–88).
50. Leavitt, “‘Science’ Enters the Birthing Room,” 91.
51. Antler and Fox, “Movement toward a Safe Maternity,” 492. For period defenses by physicians of the safety of midwifery, see Levy, “Maternal and Infant Mortality in Midwifery Practice,” and Zinke and Humiston, “Discussion on the Papers of Drs. Harrar and Levy.” In “‘Science’ Enters the Birthing Room,” Leavitt explains the failure of early-twentieth-century obstetricians to improve on rates of maternal mortality as being a result of their readiness to intervene in the birth process. She argues that “when physician-directed obstetrics finally became master of the birthing room” (89), a “direct relationship existed between anesthesia and forceps” (91). Overuse and lack of skilled use of such interventions actually “increased the number of maternal deaths” (91).
52. Stein’s allegorical rendition of the displacement of the female medical expert may also serve as an early critique of the emerging gender politics of modernism. In other words, she is anxious to maintain her own status as the central figure of the modernist literary avant-garde, the expert of the experimental.
53. Stoddard, Rising Tide, 164–65.
54. Walker, Making of a Modernist, 27.
55. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 28.
56. Quoted in Gallup, “Making of The Making of Americans,” 176.
57. Hemingway, Torrents of Spring, 86.
58. Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 209 (emphasis in the original).
1. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 272; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
2. Jacobs, Incidents, 42; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
3. An echo of Jacobs’s analysis can be heard in Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s later forthright and fearless analysis of the sexual dimensions of lynching (On Lynchings, 4–5).
4. Douglass, Narrative, 23.
5. Ibid., 61.
6. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood.
7. Gourdine, “Drama of Lynching,” 538.
8. This is not to say that such acts never occurred in reality. In addition to Margaret Garner’s infanticide, there were several other documented cases of slave women who killed their own children. See Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 48–49. But substantive proof that slave women used infanticide and abortion as means of resistance may be impossible to obtain. It seems that slave women not infrequently tried to control their fertility by means of contraception and abortion, if not infanticide (which seems to have been relatively rare). See Giddings, Where and When I Enter, 46; Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 46–49; Bettina Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy, 135. Here, I am concerned more with the political and literary usefulness of infanticide as a trope rather than as an actual act—that is, it offers a literary-figurative means to explore the modern politics of race and reproduction.
9. Goldsby,“High and Low Tech of It,” 246.
10. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances,” 6, 29.
11. Both Claudia Tate and Ann duCille have explored the different meanings that marriage and “coupling” could have for black women. Marriage and conventional civil and legal forms of bourgeois domestic life could in fact function as socially progressive and politically emancipatory for those historically denied access to such. See Tate, Domestic Allegories, and duCille, Coupling Convention.
12. Terrell, “Lynching from a Negro’s Point of View,” 862.
13. Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 18.
14. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 217.
15. See Wells-Barnett, On Lynching; Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness; Stephens, “Racial Violence and Representation”; Hall, “‘The Mind That Burns’”; and Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching. Mason Stokes has recently added a convincing consideration of white men’s sexuality in his analysis of lynching; see Stokes, Color of Sex, 133–34, 148–50. Robyn Wiegman, too, while considering “the double registers of sexuality and gender” nevertheless focuses primarily on “the black male rapist ethos” in her analysis of lynching, an analysis that foregrounds “interracial male contestations.” See Wiegman, “Anatomy of Lynching,” 467. By contrast, Bettina Aptheker has argued persuasively that the black women’s antilynching movement “was also a movement—a Black women’s movement—against rape” (54) and that Ida B. Wells-Barnett, among other antilynching activists, was defending black womanhood as much as she was protecting black manhood (Woman’s Legacy, 62–63). Similarly, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall has offered an important analysis of the raping of black women as being inseparable from the lynching of black men in “‘The Mind That Burns in Each Body.’” As Hall argues, both depend on “racial subordination”; rape, like lynching, was used “as a political weapon” after the Civil War (331–32). My analysis considers not rape but voluntary heterosexual relations and fertility of African American women as necessary components in any analysis of the psychodynamics and history of lynching.
16. On lynching protest, see Aptheker, Woman’s Legacy; Hall, Revolt against Chivalry; Gere, Intimate Practices; Giddings, Where and When I Enter; White, “Cost of Club Work”; White, Too Heavy a Load; Thompson, Ida B. Wells-Barnett. On lynching itself, see Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness; Gene L. Howard, Death at Cross Plains; Ayers, Vengeance and Justice; Brundage, Under Sentence of Death; Brundage, Lynching in the New South; Downey and Hyser, No Crooked Death; Walter Howard, Lynchings; McGovern, Anatomy of a Lynching; Rolph, “To Shoot, Burn, and Hang”; Tolnay and Beck, Festival of Violence; Wright, Racial Violence in Kentucky; Ginzburg, 100 Years of Lynchings.
17. For recent scholarship on the antilynching plays, see Gourdine, “Drama of Lynching.” Gourdine offers an insightful analysis of Angelina Weld Grimké’s Rachel as a play that “establishes a relationship between the lived experiences of lynching and the textual manifestations of lynching” (535). Also see Schroeder, “Remembering the Disremembered.” Schroeder emphasizes the mimetic and propagandistic elements of Rachel, They That Sit in Darkness, Safe, and several other plays. For a useful discussion of the literary-historical context and conventions of modern lynching dramas, see Stephens, “Racial Violence and Representation.” Also see Stephens, introduction to Strange Fruit, and Krasner, “Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play.” For other critical treatments of antilynching plays, see Tate, Storm, Herron, and Hull (all cited below).
18. Angelina Weld Grimké Papers, box 38-13, folder 223; Manuscript Division, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University (hereafter Grimké Papers).
19. Du Bois, “Damnation of Women,” 953.
20. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 32 (October 1926): 283.
21. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 272.
22. Mitchell, “Adjusting the Race,” 152; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
23. The history of black women’s participation in the birth control movement is elusive. In part because they were working against racist representations of black women as highly sexualized, African American club women, social workers, and nurses seem rarely to have documented birth control advocacy or practices. See Tone, Devices and Desires; Elsa Barkley Brown, “To Catch the Vision of Freedom”; Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare”; and Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
24. This is not to say that every African American woman activist of the modern era was utterly opposed to eugenic thinking. As White, Linda Gordon, and Weiss, among other historians, have demonstrated, quite a few believed that middle-class and sometimes light-skinned Negroes should have more children. See Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 220.
25. Tate, Domestic Allegories, 22.
26. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood.
27. James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 497; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
28. Stephens, “Racial Violence and Representation,” 2. For analyses of lynching as performance and ritual, also see Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness, x–xi; White, Too Heavy a Load, 25; and especially Fuoss, “Lynching Performances.”
29. See Herron, introduction to Selected Works of Grimké, 6–7, 17–18.
30. As David Krasner suggests, “Allegory”—because of its excessive, historical, and collective dimensions—“is the artistic device appropriate for representing the response to the incomprehensibility of mass violence” (71), the “abundance of brutality” that is lynching (72). See Krasner, “Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play.”
31. Angelina Weld Grimké, Rachel, 33; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
32. Note that the lynch mob’s motivation in this instance is not an accusation of rape of a white woman but rather the political assertiveness and courage of Mr. Loving. Her analysis of lynching from the perspective of the victimized black family rather than from the perspective of the lynch mob permits Grimké to supplant the normative representation of lynching as a defense of white womanhood, reassigning it its primary role as racial-political terrorism.
33. This representation of lynching as eliminating the best black men directly contradicts white supremacist justifications for lynching. Note, for example, several white southern newspapers’ representations of Emmett Till in 1955, as described by Jacqueline Goldsby: “The documents insinuated that the criminal links between father and son were biological: Emmett Till was following in the footsteps of his lascivious and murderous father” (“High and Low Tech of It,” 253).
34. This is not to say that only black men were lynched. As many historians have shown, there were black female as well as white female and white male victims of lynching. Furthermore, even at the representational level, there are other African American–authored versions of lynching and its victims. In Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, for example, James Weldon Johnson’s narrator describes the victim of the lynching he witnesses as “a man only in form and stature, every sign of degeneracy stamped upon his countenance” (497). E. Franklin Frazier also associated black lynching victims with inferiority, offering a regional and intraracial eugenic analysis: “In the South where little notice is taken of the colored feebleminded, unless to lynch them when they commit crimes, they are permitted to breed at a rapid rate” (“Eugenics and the Race Problem,” 92). But the idea that it is the strongest, most resistant black men who are most at risk of being lynched has dominated and persisted in writings by African American women and men (e.g., The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Black Boy, Beloved).
35. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances,” 30 n. 9.
36. Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels, 18.
37. Fuoss, “Lynching Performances,” 23.
38. As David Krasner puts this, in Rachel’s renunciation of childbearing, “there is no catharsis, no closure as such, but only an epiphany of endless, temporal mourning” (“Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play,” 73).
39. A number of critics have pointed to Grimké’s envisioning a white audience for Rachel. See for example, Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 120; and Tate, Domestic Allegories, 210. And many have taken Grimké at her word in her 1920 defense against charges that the play was advocating genocide for blacks: “Since I have been given to understand that ‘Rachel’ preaches race suicide, I should like to state at the start, that that was not my intention. To the contrary, the appeal is not primarily to the colored people, but to the whites” (Angelina Weld Grimké, “Synopsis and Purpose”). But the play was in fact predominantly performed by and for African Americans. As Hull remarks, “Even though [Grimké] aimed her appeal at white women, not many of them could have seen the play” (120). Despite Grimké’s assertion of an intended message for whites, then, given the play’s performance history, considerations of black audience seem more pertinent and valuable. Furthermore, to accept Grimké’s explanation is to leave unchallenged the original accusations about the play’s advocacy of genocide. As Margaret Sanger concisely puts it, in decidedly feminist (if also elitist) terms: “If women in fortunate circumstances gave ear to the demand of masculine “race-suicide” fantasies they could within a few years be down to the condition of their sisters who lack time to cultivate their talents and intellects. A vigorous, intelligent, fruitfully cultured motherhood is all but impossible if no restriction is placed by that motherhood upon the number of children” (Woman and the New Race, 68). Not only do the genocide accusations emerge as antifeminist, but they also replicate the shortsighted, often masculinist, representational literary politics brought to the surface and analyzed by Deborah E. McDowell in her classic essay, “Reading Family Matters.” As McDowell argues with regard to The Color Purple, Grimké’s Rachel cannot and should not be read or viewed as either a cultural mirror or as a blunt social prescription.
40. Ford, “Katharsis,” 113.
41. Barbara Freedman rightly notes “the long-standing debt of psychoanalysis to classical drama” (“Frame-up,” 56).
42. Caruth, “Traumatic Awakenings,” 89; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
43. Storm, “Reactions of a ‘Highly-Strung Girl,’” 462. Judith Stephens and Kathy Perkins have made the same observation; see Perkins and Stephens, Strange Fruit, and Stephens, “Racial Violence and Representation.”
44. Livingston, “For Unborn Children,” 122.
45. Georgia Douglas Johnson, Safe, 113.
46. Diamond, “Shudder of Catharsis,” 158.
47. Cheng, Melancholy of Race, x.
48. Barbara Freedman, “Frame-up,” 60; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
49. A number of scholars have pointed out that Grimké repeatedly revised and retitled Rachel. Prior titles included The Pervert, The Daughter, and Blessed Are the Barren. See Hull, Color, Sex, and Poetry, 118–19; Herron, introduction to Selected Works by Grimké, 17; Tate, Domestic Allegories, 215. Each of the prior titles supports the dramatic and political reading of inversion, reproduction, and race that I am developing here. Also see Grimké Papers, boxes 38-13 and 38-14.
50. Grimké Papers, box 38-13, folder 222.
51. Larsen, Quicksand, 108; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
52. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 32 (October 1926): 283.
53. Frazier, “Eugenics and the Race Problem,” 92.
54. Historian Linda Gordon notes that of sixty-nine black women who were “national leaders in welfare reform” (“Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 217) between 1890 and 1945, 43 percent had no children (219). As Gordon puts it, the women’s “fertility pattern was probably related to their independence” (219). She notes further: “In the black population in general, 7 percent of all married women born between 1840 and 1859 were childless, and 28 percent of those born between 1900 and 1919 were childless” (237 n. 28).
55. Mitchell, “Adjusting the Race,” 190–91.
56. Burrill, “They That Sit in Darkness,” 5–8; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
57. Miss Shaw represents a very real type of figure in the rural South of the 1920s. Bettina Aptheker shows that “Black nurses worked to improve . . . public health conditions in the South. Unlike many of their colleagues, however, the Black public health nurses and midwives worked outside of institutional settings, with little income and few supplies and medicines. They provided care within the daily grind of poverty” (Woman’s Legacy, 106).
58. Mrs. Jasper’s desire for some form of fertility control supports Johanna Schoen’s argument (in “Between Choice and Coercion”) that, while many sterilizations were certainly coerced, significant numbers of poor women (in the 1960s, especially poor African American women) actively sought sterilization (137). Ironically, in the 1920s, African American women were both largely protected from compulsory sterilization and precluded from voluntary sterilization because of legalized institutional segregation; they simply were not permitted in most hospitals and asylums where sterilizations were being performed.
59. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 215–16.
60. This picture of the poor as wholly ignorant of and without access to birth control has been challenged by a number of contemporary historians. Although relatively few women, regardless of class, had direct access to the clinics and devices provided by Margaret Sanger, working-class women, both black and white, seemed to have been aware of and used a wide variety of contraceptive devices and methods. Fertility rates of the period lend substantial support to this revised view of modern women’s contraceptive practices. See Linda Gordon, “Professionalization of Birth-Control”; Roberts, Killing the Black Body; and Tone, Devices and Desires. Also see Schoen, “Between Choice and Coercion,” for discussion of women who sought sterilization in North Carolina between 1929 and 1975.
61. Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 86.
62. Linda Gordon, “Black and White Visions of Welfare,” 220.
63. Jacqueline Goldsby has pointed out, in her compelling 1999 analysis of the Emmett Till lynching, that Till’s mother was violently forced to abandon any notion of northern identity as a protective contingency: “Mamie Bradley’s dream state—her transplanted identity as a ‘Northern Negro’ safe from segregated harm—was shattered by the sight of her son’s battered body in a box” (“High and Low Tech of It,” 245).
64. Burrill, Aftermath, 82–93; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
65. Holloway, “Body Politic,” 489.
66. I began this chapter by making distinctions between nineteenth-century slave narrators’ representations of infanticide and modern African American women writers’ representations of lynching, infanticide, and barrenness. I do not wish to suggest now that the images of racial violence and infanticide in the works of these contemporary writers are identical to those images as they appeared in the works of modern African American women writers. As Deborah McDowell has argued, critics and historians of African American literature and culture must be cognizant of the distinct contemporary “material realities” along with “ever-worsening socioenvironmental factors that place black women’s health at great risk” (“Afterword: Recovery Missions,” 312). Images of assaulted black motherhood and fertility—and of violated and burnt black male bodies—in contemporary African American fiction and drama must be understood within their particular social, political, and scientific contexts, contexts that include Depo-Provera, Norplant, welfare caps, racial profiling, incarceration rates of black males, differential HIV infection and mortality rates, racially biased death penalty sentencing, and so on. See also Roberts, Killing the Black Body, and Louis, “Body Language.”
1. The term “new woman” seems to have been coined in 1894. See Richardson, “Eugenization of Love,” 227; Felski, Gender of Modernity, 146. The image of a new kind of woman, struggling against Victorian sexual and social constraints, emerged as part of the turn-of-the-century zeitgeist. And indeed, first-wave feminism was well under way at the time, with its multiple women’s (or at least primarily women’s) movements, including suffragism, the campaign for birth control and reproductive rights led by Margaret Sanger (1883–1966) in the United States, influential white and African American women’s clubs, and temperance activism. By the 1910s, with the “woman question” grown familiar, suffragist activity at its peak, and Sanger’s birth control program well under way, many upper- and middle-class women had actively and, to a degree successfully, challenged Victorian gender restrictions; some had indeed seemed to become “new” sorts of women.
2. See Linda Gordon, “Professionalization of Birth-Control,” 148–50; Rafter, “Claims-Making,” 24–25; and Richardson, “Eugenization of Love,” 228.
3. Richardson, “Eugenization of Love,” 228.
4. Bederman, Manliness and Civilization, 122.
5. Seitler, “Unnatural Selection,” 63.
6. Sklar, “Historical Foundation of Women’s Power,” 72.
7. The actual degree of progressiveness, by today’s standards, within the agenda of self-identified progressive women reformers (1890–1930) remains a contested issue among contemporary women’s studies scholars. For some scholars, the reform movement’s recurrent maternalist rhetoric—along with the class divide between the middle-class activists and the frequent objects of their reform activism (poor and working-class women)—render the reformers’ efforts, to a degree, socially and politically suspect, if not downright reactionary. Other scholars view the reformers’ maternalist rhetoric as a shrewd means to cloak radical reform with superficially acceptable ideologies of motherhood; they therefore interpret the reformers’ interest in protective labor legislation as authentic progressiveness. Overall, questions remain regarding the progressive reformers’ degree of personal agency as well as the political valence of their motivations in relationship to the period’s institutional and social limitations for women.
Several historians have suggested that the era’s progressive women may sometimes have ended up satisfying personal ambition at the expense of others, particularly other women. Robyn Muncy points to the “special tragedy” in the creation, in large part by professional women, of a welfare state that effectively served to confine other women. But Muncy does not seek, in her words, “to castigate” such women reformers. See Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion, xiv–xv. See also Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade; Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers; and Michel, “Limits of Maternalism.”
On the other hand, many scholars, including Muncy, Fitzpatrick, and Michel, also emphasize the extraordinary commitment to public service and the hard work of the progressive women reformers, as well as their very real, if limited, successes in improving the lives of immigrants and the urban poor and working class. See Boris, “Power of Motherhood”; Kathleen A. Brown, “‘Savagely Fathered and Un-mothered World’”; Dilberto, A Useful Woman; Estelle Freedman, Maternal Justice; Ladd-Taylor, “‘My Work Came Out of Agony and Grief’”; and Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work.
8. One graduate of Vassar, class of 1882, said in her contribution to History of the Class of 1882, Vassar College: “[Lucy Stone’s] reasoning was, ‘Why shouldn’t I, an intelligent woman, vote when every ignorant ditch-digger may do so?’ It was a stage of mind I had been in myself, but by the time I graduated from Vassar it had begun to seem to me a puerile view to take of the question, as I had arrived at a very firm belief that to grant women the vote would be a grave mistake” (“Wyman, Anne Southworth,” 154). Wyman also tells of leaving law school after two years, in part because “one of my classmates and myself had become rather interested in each other personally” (158). She decides to abandon her legal studies and settles down to a life of domesticity. The History of the Class of 1882 was reviewed in the March–April 1933 issue of Eugenical News; the reviewer, Mrs. Lucien Howe, a Eugenics Record Office field worker, notes: “Eugenically it is clear that the class of ’82 were made out of good hereditary stuff. It is also clear that as a class they have not perpetuated their own numbers or talents” (“Vassar ’82,” 38).
9. See Rafter, “Claims-Making,” for a case-study of one such woman, Josephine Shaw Lowell, the “first female commissioner of New York’s State Board of Charities in 1876,” who successfully campaigned, on eugenic grounds, for a custodial asylum for feebleminded women in New York State (20). Also see Ellen Fitzpatrick’s discussion of Katharine Bement Davis, superintendent of the Bedford Hills, New York, Reformatory for Women from 1901 to 1913, in Endless Crusade, 92–129. According to Fitzpatrick, Davis’s corrections program for women had both eugenic and anti-eugenic aspects; Davis rejected “nativist and racist explanations of criminal behavior” (97–98) even as she argued for the segregation and colonization of women “‘who are dangerous to the community who are moral imbeciles, just as we have colonized the mental imbeciles’” (99). Like the family studies authors and field workers, Davis focused on lower-class white women as hereditary delinquents (99–100). Finally, see Kline, Building a Better Race, for a discussion of women’s reform organizations’ embrace of eugenic solutions to the problem of feebleminded (and so likely also promiscuous) women (27–29).
10. A 1997 article by Amy Sue Bix represents an important exception to the general scholarly neglect of the field workers, whom she treats as crucial for a full understanding of the U.S. eugenics movement. See Bix, “Experiences and Voices.” However, I believe Bix is overgenerous in her analysis of both the workers’ degree of resistance to eugenic thinking and the quality of their research methods.
Other than Bix, only a few scholars have even mentioned—and virtually none have treated in any detail—the women eugenics field workers of the reform era. See Zenderland, Measuring Minds, for a consideration of Elizabeth Kite, the field worker best known for her central role in the production of The Kallikak Family (1912); see especially 159–63, 173–77, 322–23. Also see Rafter, White Trash, 3, 20–23.
11. The first sterilization law, permitting sterilization of the mentally handicapped, was enacted in Indiana in 1907 (Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 100; Kühl, Nazi Connection, 17; and Reilly, Surgical Solution, 33). Between 1907 and 1930, twenty-four states enacted compulsory sterilization statutes. At least 60,000 people in the United States were compulsorily sterilized for eugenic reasons under those laws between 1907 and 1964 (Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 28; Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 30; Chase, Legacy of Malthus, 16; and Reilly, Surgical Solution, xiii).
12. I thank Derek Nystrom for making this point and for contributing the idea of taxonomy in relation to varieties of New Womanhood.
13. Historian Molly Ladd-Taylor has already provided invaluable work toward such a taxonomy. As she argues, not all women reformers of the Progressive Era can be considered maternalists, and she rightly makes distinctions among three groups of women reformers: “sentimental maternalists, or club mothers,” who embraced both maternalism and traditionalism; “progressive maternalists,” who worked for broad social and labor reform only partly on the grounds of maternalist thinking and rhetoric; and “feminists,” who largely rejected maternalist rhetoric in favor of “creating equal opportunities for women outside the home.” See Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 7–9. However, Ladd-Taylor neglects activists like the field workers, whose politics and reform agenda work are clearly not simply traditional but reactionary.
14. See especially Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion. Despite their progressive beliefs, Muncy argues, these professional women reformers “could succeed in satisfying their needs for respect, autonomy, and effectiveness only at the expense of other women” (xv). Further citations of Muncy are noted parenthetically in the text. Also see Fitzpatrick, Endless Crusade; Estelle Freedman, Their Sisters’ Keepers; Kunzel, Fallen Women, Problem Girls; Odem, Delinquent Daughters; and Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind.
15. In Mother-Work, Ladd-Taylor succinctly and effectively defines “maternalism” as: “a specific ideology whose adherents hold (1) that there is a uniquely feminine value system based on care and nurturance; (2) that mothers perform a service to the state by raising citizen-workers; (3) that mothers are united across class, race, and nation by their common capacity for motherhood and therefore share a responsibility for all the world’s children; and (4) that ideally men should earn a family wage to support their ‘dependent’ wives at home” (3). For more on “maternalism” in women’s reform, 1890–1930, see (though this is by no means an exhaustive list): Goodwin, Gender and the Politics of Welfare Reform; Linda Gordon, “Putting Children First”; Sklar, “Historical Foundation of Women’s Power”; Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers; and Weiner, “Maternalism as Paradigm.” For challenges to the historical paradigm of maternalism, see Boris, “What about the Working of the Working Mother?”; and Cott, “What’s in a Name?” For an excellent overview of the maternalist debate among historians, see Wilkinson, “The Selfless and the Helpless.”
16. Mary Odem, in Delinquent Daughters, examines carefully and insightfully the role of women reformers in the regulation of “delinquent” girls’ sexuality: “They [reformers] did aim to shield teenage girls from sexual exploitation, unfit homes, and dangerous forms of work and recreation, but the protective work they advocated had a coercive side. It entailed using the state for the purposes of surveillance, legal prosecution, detention, and institutionalization of young women and girls who engaged in suspect behavior” (109). Although she discusses women judges, social workers, and parole officers, Odem does not consider the less sympathetic figure of the eugenics field worker, who seeks to “shield” the environment of the nation from the girls rather than the girls from their environment.
17. As I will argue later in this chapter, the field workers still had to contend, as did the progressive women reformers, with the conflict between their own status as workers and the period’s dominant construction of women’s gender roles: that women should still function primarily in a domestic role, while intelligent, middle-class women in particular should become mothers of multiple children (itself a eugenic concept).
18. In Creating a Female Dominion, Muncy takes care to point out, however, that professionalization and reform were not always and everywhere “in necessary opposition to each other during the Progressive era” (160). As she points out, for some women, professional activities and relationships served to support and sustain their reform commitments and often enabled them to achieve real reform successes (160–62).
19. Indeed, the many volunteer field workers further challenge the model of professionalization.
20. As eugenics historian Daniel Kevles has shown, there were two distinct “strains” of eugenic thinking in the modern United States: one was espoused by progressive social reformers and the other, what he terms “mainline” eugenics, by social conservatives. The progressive eugenicists, Like Havelock Ellis and Margaret Sanger, were far less likely to promote racialist versions of eugenics and insisted on increased social equality as an accompaniment to the better breeding of humans. The conservative eugenics of figures like Lothrop Stoddard and Harry Laughlin was racist, elitist, and strongly hereditarian in its orientation, with little or no concern for improving the environment of the poor and feebleminded. See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 170–75. In general, both white and black eugenics can be seen as intraracial movements, at least in the 1910s and 1920s.
21. One eugenics field worker documented the quality of her college graduating class: “So we were preponderantly a Scotch-English group, harking back to pioneer days. To your historian this seems significant” (Elizabeth Howe, History of the Class of 1882, 4).
22. Rafter, White Trash, 3; Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 178.
23. The depression of 1893 seemed to render the notions of class competition and social Darwinism even more plausible. The depression that began in 1929, on the other hand, worked in a limited fashion to mitigate, though certainly not to stall, eugenics in the United States. During the years of the Great Depression, the American Eugenics Society soft-pedaled its “negative” eugenics platform—sterilization and institutionalization—in favor of “positive” eugenic measures—public health protection policies, health education, and so on. See Reilly, Surgical Solution, 78. As Donald Pickens points out, the Depression forced many eugenics advocates to realize that unemployment did not necessarily signify “individual weakness or lack of ability to compete successfully in the marketplace.” See Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives, 205. Environment simply had to enter into the explanation of such widespread financial failure. First, the Depression was clearly an external force; second, many middle- and even upper-class people were adversely affected. In general, eugenicists readily turned to environment/nurture to explain middle- and upper-class inadequacies and failures; heredity/nature explained them sufficiently in the working class.
The Great Depression cannot be viewed as wholly disruptive to eugenics, however. Skyrocketing unemployment also indicated a need for a smaller working class. Especially as technologies and techniques of production became more sophisticated, a mature capitalist economy required fewer working bodies. The minutes of a June 4, 1932, joint session of the American Eugenics Society and the Eugenics Research Association suggest that U.S. eugenicists hoped that the Depression would eventually redound to their benefit: “The activity of the Society in this time of depression was discussed. Dr. Little set forward the suggestion that the public was getting more and more of a grievance against the defective. He felt that this question, which was clearer now than at any other time, would force the public to come to eugenicists for a remedy” (“American Eugenics Society Minutes”).
In fact, according to Edward Larson, the late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed a dramatic increase in the annual average number of compulsory eugenic sterilizations in the United States. See Larson, Sex, Race, and Science, 28. On the other hand, U.S. eugenics institutions did suffer setbacks during the Depression, as the above minutes also suggest. Both the American Eugenics Society and the ERO scaled back their staff, salaries, and activism.
24. For scholarly use of a “professionalization” paradigm to describe the U.S. eugenics movement, see especially Rafter, “Claims-Making” and White Trash. For a combined feminist and professionalization approach, see Bix, “Experiences and Voices,” 633–37. For further elaboration of eugenics and professionalization, see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 64, 77; and Haller, Eugenics, 76–77.
25. Rafter, White Trash, 21. As I argued above, such a model of “advancement” along with “segregation” of professional women has been applied to the era’s more progressive reformers as well.
26. Ibid., 13.
27. Shawn Michelle Smith, American Archives, 124.
28. Haller, Eugenics, 138–39. The relative ease and lower risk of vasectomy (versus tubal ligation) may well be one reason for the frequency of male eugenic sterilization in the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the other hand, most of the early state sterilization statutes were written in distinctly gendered (male) rhetoric, often explicitly permitting sterilization of “confirmed criminals” and “rapists,” as well as “idiots” and “imbeciles.” Ibid., 50.
29. See Gugliotta,“ ‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife.’”
30. See JoAnne Brown, Definition of a Profession, 97–105, for a fine analysis of “efficiency” as a central term and value in human, industrial, and mechanical engineering in the Progressive Era.
31. As prominent eugenics propagandist C. W. Saleeby put it, “Positive eugenics must largely take the form, at present, of removing such disabilities [impeding child rearing] as now weigh upon the desirable members of the community.” He offers as an example of these disabilities the “tax which the propertied middle classes have to pay on marriage” (here he was quoting an article from the Morning Post). See Saleeby, Parenthood and Race Culture, 19. Recent debates in the U.S. Congress on the “marriage penalty” tax clearly echo this 1915 instance of eugenic thinking.
32. Eugenics historians report that the earliest targets of eugenic and punitive sterilization in the United States were institutionalized boys and men. In 1889, a number of feebleminded boys were castrated at the Pennsylvania Training School for Feebleminded Children; between 1894 and 1895, at least eleven boys and men were castrated at the Kansas State Asylum for Idiotic and Imbecile Youth. Throughout the 1890s, hundreds of feebleminded and delinquent males and females residing in state institutions were desexualized or unsexed (to use the jargon of the period) by castration, vasectomy, oopherectomy, or tubal ligation. See Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 93; Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 192–202; Haller, Eugenics, 48–50. See also Mathew Thomson, Problem of Mental Deficiency, 181, 194–97.
See Gugliotta, “‘Dr. Sharp with His Little Knife,’” for a first-rate discussion of the punitive and therapeutic, as well as eugenic, contexts for late-nineteenth-century use of vasectomy and castration on incarcerated and institutionalized males. Gugliotta argues persuasively that such “therapeutic (and punitive) understandings of sterilization were present from the beginning” (375). Castration, especially, was perceived and used in Indiana in the 1890s as a treatment of excessive masturbation (particularly among the institutionalized feebleminded) and as a means to punish and prevent sexual crime (particularly among incarcerated black men). Vasectomy was also perceived and used as a means to punish and prevent homosexual activity among prison inmates (377–78, 394).
33. Rafter, White Trash, 341. Patrick Ryan makes an argument similar to mine in his analysis of recent histories of mental retardation and intelligence testing. He suggests that the “concept of self-interest” has led some scholars to miss the “broader historical significance” as well as the public policy effects of the “‘myth of the menace of the feeble-minded’” (“Unnatural Selection,” 669).
34. A 1920s recruitment form letter sent to social workers by the American Eugenics Society said: “Without doubt you know that the application of Eugenics is a charity to lessen charity” (“Letter to Social Workers”).
35. Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society, 132.
36. For a description of the class collaboration involved in the founding of the ERO, see Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 54–55; and Haller, Eugenics, 65–66.
37. The fitter family contests took place at state and county fairs throughout the 1910s and 1920s. Administered by eugenics field workers and public health nurses, the contests involved the examination and evaluation of volunteer families for their health and overall genetic value. Winners received medals and ribbons. The fitter family evaluation form included the following categories for medical/eugenic findings and prescriptions: “Social and other history, psychometric [e.g., IQ scores], psychiatric, structural, medical, laboratory, teeth, special senses, health habits, summary and advice, Individual score, and Family score.” Examples of “summary and advice” from fitter family contests conducted in Kansas in 1925 included:
“Outdoor exercise very important at your age.”—8 years old
“Watch condition of pelvic organs”—age 39
“Clitoris adhered”—age 4
“Needs circumcision”—age 18 months
“Very fine child. Watch tonsils and adenoids and see about circumcision.”
“Come back and take medal next year”
“You ought to take a medal next time!”
The evaluations show a clear preoccupation with the state of the families’ genitalia (“Fitter Families Examinations”).
38. Davenport, letter to Eugenics Record Office Board of Scientific Directors, December 13, 1913.
39. In a 1916 circular distributed to state institutions, the ERO explicitly outlined this policy, under the heading “Duration of Agreement”: “The joint employment continues for one year from October 1st, after which the support of the Eugenics Record Office is withdrawn in order that it may send workers elsewhere to establish new centers of interest in eugenical study. The cooperative institution is then at liberty to discontinue the work or to continue it independently; in the latter case either taking over the jointly employed worker or employing another person. Most of the institutions have continued the joint worker, either for the family history studies exclusively or in connection with after-care work” (Eugenics Record Office, Basis for the Joint Employment of Field Workers, 2–3).
40. Ibid., 2.
41. The volunteer family studies were designed more for the eugenic than the dysgenic. The ERO encouraged potentially eugenic families to note their own genetic value, but to do so honestly. The voluntary family study kits from the 1920s included “Individual Analysis Cards” that noted, “If the study is to be of value, all statements—concerning both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ traits—must be frank and fair” (“Individual Analysis Cards”). The eugenic family studies, though fewer in number, represent a fascinating counterpart to the dysgenic family studies. The voluntary eugenic family studies often include photographs of individual subjects/family members posed standing while holding a mirror at an angle in front of him- or herself, in order to represent both a frontal and profile view (presumably to disclose the presence or absence of a weak or Hapsburgian chin). Dysgenic families, however, were not on the family study honor system. In such cases, field workers, along with their courtesy and tact, were assumed to be necessary for getting the unvarnished genetic truth.
42. Mellen, letter to Mr. H. H. Laughlin, August 11, 1912.
43. “Alumni Roster.”
44. “Volunteer Collaborators.”
45. Reed, letter to Dr. C. B. Davenport, March 31, 1916.
46. Reed, “The Trix Family”; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
47. Reed, letter to Dr. C. B. Davenport, September 11, 1916.
48. Davenport, letter to Bernice Reed, September 13, 1916.
49. Laughlin even authored a “Memorandum on Eugenical Work as an Occupation for College Women.” For more on the gender breakdown of field workers, see Bix, “Experiences and Voices,” 627.
50. “Numbers of Eugenics Record Office Field Workers,” 1–3.
51. Davenport, “Directions for the Guidance of Field Workers,” 3.
52. Laughlin, “Qualities Desired in a Eugenical Field Worker.”
53. Minutes of Cold Spring Harbor Meeting of the Field Workers, 12.
54. “Myers, Sadie,” unpaginated.
55. As producers of a new and explicitly diagnostic form of discourse, the field workers expanded and revised their assigned role so as to create revised, more liberatory forms of professional subjectivity. Indeed, subjectivity (as opposed to objectivity) was central for their reportage, as their field notes attest. Most often taking narrative form, the notes disclose not only the workers’ readiness to diagnose but also their active, even authorial role in the creation of what Rafter rightly terms the “distinctive form of discourse” that constitutes the family studies. That “discourse” partakes of a number of both social scientific and literary conventions; overall, the studies exist in a rather unstable space between fiction and nonfiction, with highly subjective and descriptive narration placed literally alongside genealogical charts. Here again, I differ from Bix, who acknowledges, but downplays, the “use of rumour in field-workers’ reports” (“Experiences and Voices,” 641). Bix implies that Charles Davenport’s policies, advice, and pressure “led to” workers’ occasional reliance on rumor (641). I found many examples of hearsay, rumor, gossip, and speculation in the field workers’ notes; and, although the workers were undoubtedly pressured by Davenport to use any possible data, there seems to be little evidence that they themselves resisted incorporating neighbors’ reports, physicians’ judgments, and so on, in their study notes. Of course, one could argue that the diagnosis is in place before the data have even been gathered—the field workers are to identify and document the feebleminded; they must, therefore, be diagnosing from the outset. This is perhaps the fundamental flaw in the family studies’ purported science.
56. Devitt, “Timber Rats,” 2–4, 16.
57. “Myers, Sadie,” unpaginated.
58. Charles Davenport, “E.R.O. Budget for 1916–1917.” In 1916, however, $600 a year was a reasonably good salary, especially for a woman. Working-class women, by contrast, “rarely earned a ‘living wage,’ estimated to be $9.00 or $10.00 a week in 1910,” according to Kathy Peiss (“‘Charity Girls’ and City Pleasures,” 94).
59. Transcript of 1913 Field Workers Conference, 45–46; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
60. Here again, I depart from Bix, who foregrounds the field workers who “voiced doubts about the validity and ethics of eugenic research, drawing on their field experiences and scientific ideals” (“Experiences and Voices,” 626). Further citations of Bix will be parenthetical in the text. I found little evidence of widespread ethical or professional doubt among the field workers, although there were a few other scattered remarks (which Bix also notes) in the proceedings of the summer conferences that indicate some workers’ misgivings about the way the studies were being conducted.
61. Gardner, “Case History,” cover page.
62. The policing of women’s sexual behaviors began in their youth in the reform era. As Mary Odem explains: “Juvenile court statistics from this period indicate that girls were, in fact, more likely to be institutionalized and less likely to receive probation than boys. . . . Between 1910 and 1920, twenty-three new reformatories [for delinquent and feebleminded U.S. girls] were founded,” as compared to fewer than five between 1850 and 1910. Odem adds that “the vast majority (81 percent) of charges filed against girls [in the 1910s and 1920s] were for moral offenses” (155). See Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 115–16, 155. Ellen Fitzpatrick confirms the presence of “this double standard”: “While many more boys appeared before the juvenile court than girls, young female offenders received harsher punishments” (Endless Crusade, 185).
63. Danielson and Davenport, “Hill Folk,” 135.
64. Sessions, “Happy Hickories,” 320.
65. Estabrook and McDougle, Mongrel Virginians, 8.
66. Goddard, Kallikak Family, 33; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
67. “Field Workers’ Returns.”
68. “Personals.”
69. “Fecundity of Collegians.”
70. Laughlin, letter to Miss Kathryn F. Stein.
71. Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 158.
72. The photographs of Deborah included in The Kallikak Family emphasize her domesticity and her apparently healthy and happy adjustment to her lifelong institutionalization. The photographs of at-large Kallikaks, by contrast, emphasize their slovenliness. Moreover, as Stephen Jay Gould has pointed out, the photographs of the uninstitutionalized Kallikaks have been retouched, with heavy dark lines around eyes and mouths lending them an almost demonic appearance. See Gould, Mismeasure of Man, 170–72. There has been controversy regarding both the source and purpose of this retouching; Gould suggested that Goddard was responsible, whereas other scholars have argued that the publisher was probably to blame. See Fancher, “Goddard and the Kallikak Family Photographs,” 588. Diane Paul has argued more recently that the retouched photographs would have undercut Goddard’s own status as expert tester and detector of even the subtly, indeed invisibly feebleminded and therefore he was not likely to have done the retouching. See Paul, “Genes and Contagious Disease,” 158. Granted, to render the feebleminded visually obvious does seem to contradict Goddard’s goal of widespread testing of apparently normal people by experts in the field of human intelligence. But the photographs do support a second plank in his eugenic platform: that the uninstitutionalized feebleminded constitute a menace to society. Although we may never know who actually altered the photographs, we must acknowledge that Goddard had as much to gain ideologically as he had to lose by representing the institutionalized Deborah Kallikak as attractive and docile but the at-large Kallikaks as conspicuously feebleminded and threatening.
73. Lisa Lindquist Dorr makes a similar connection in her article “Arm in Arm.” Dorr suggests that fear of “passing” by both “‘high grade morons’” and light-skinned African Americans worried “Northern and Southern eugenicists” (148). Dorr also argues persuasively that “fears about women’s new freedoms and changing roles converged with eugenic concerns about racial order” and points out that it is no “coincidence that laws promoting immigration restrictions and sterilization of the ‘feebleminded’ were enacted contemporaneously” with Virginia’s notorious 1924 Racial Integrity Act (149–50). But Dorr focuses almost exclusively on white male eugenicists and southern white male legislators as enactors of eugenic legislation in the 1920s and on their desire to curtail white women’s newfound sexual and social freedoms. I wish to complicate this picture by focusing on ways that some white women benefited substantially and directly from the period’s conservative eugenic activism.
74. This reliance on female intuition also rendered the family studies vulnerable to attack for lack of scientific rigor. One contemporary, Abraham Myerson, in 1925 offered a powerful and effective challenge to the field workers’ methodology, attacking in particular The Kallikak Family and Goddard, who, in Myerson’s words, “acting on this superior female intuition, founds an important theory of feeblemindedness, and draws sweeping generalizations, with a fine moral undertone, from [the field workers’] work” (quoted in Zenderland, Measuring Minds, 322).
75. “Work of a Field Worker.” Letchworth Village, opened in 1910, was a New York state asylum for the feebleminded. See Trent, Inventing the Feeble Mind, 102, 227–30, for a history of Letchworth.
76. Kathleen Brown has recently made a similar point about the labor activist Ella Reeve Bloor, known as “Mother Bloor.” See Brown, “‘Savagely Fathered and Un-mothered World.’” Brown argues that the “rubric ‘Mother’ provided a shield against accusations of ‘free-love’” (562). I am suggesting that conservative women, too, often needed such a “shield” in order to function effectively as activist reformers.
77. See Tickner, Spectacle of Women, for a first-rate analysis of the fears and accusations of “masculinisation” of women associated with reform activism and suffragism. See 188–95, especially, for a consideration of the biological and eugenic aspects of the matter.
78. Wendy Kline, in Building a Better Race, rightly links the “‘menace of the feebleminded’” with the “‘girl problem’” (38). However, what might be termed a “man problem” was also very much on the minds of eugenicists in the 1910s and 1920s. Kline argues: “While social-purity reformers of the late nineteenth century sought to protect what they believed to be innocent women from moral ruin by male predators, twentieth-century social workers and eugenicists targeted working-class female sexuality as the source of moral ruin and racial degeneracy” (46). I wish to complicate this model of eugenic thinking by adding working-class and poor men’s sexuality and fertility as an equally clear target of eugenicist reformers. As Kline herself notes, between 1918 and 1934, “women represented only a slight majority of sterilized patients” at California’s Sonoma State Home for the Feeble-Minded (53).
79. For example, although at times as many as a third of the residents at Hull House were male, Kathryn Kish Sklar argues that, “as a community of women, Hull House provided its members with a lifelong substitute for family life. In that sense it resembled a religious order, supplying women with a radical degree of independence from the claims of family life and inviting them to commit their energies elsewhere” (“Hull House in the 1890s,” 56).
80. Reed, “Trix Family,” 3, 14–15.
81. Kostir, “Family of Sam Sixty,” 194. Kostir named the family “Sixty” because of the father Sam’s IQ, which was “exactly sixty percent of the average adult”; see Rafter, White Trash, 185, 187.
82. Dugdale, Jukes, 26; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
83. Knapp, Literary Modernism, 4.
84. Biggs, Rational Factory, 105.
85. See JoAnne Brown’s discussion of “efficiency” as a national value in the 1910s, in Definition of a Profession, 110–13.
86. Ehrenreich and Ehrenreich, “Professional-Managerial Class”; Banta, Taylored Lives, 27. Banta’s brilliant analysis of the many modern narratives that engaged the “one true theory” (39) of scientific management overlooks the family studies, which must be considered quintessential stories of human inefficiency and backwardness (waste) eliminated by means of social, scientific, and narratological intervention.
87. Taylor, Principles of Scientific Management, 43; further citations will be parenthetical in the text.
88. Historians Nancy Cott and Molly Ladd-Taylor point out that the period’s “maternalists” were also “wedded to an ideology rooted in the nineteenth-century doctrine of separate spheres” (Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work, 3; and Cott, “What’s in a Name?” 821). They conclude that maternalist women reformers therefore cannot be considered feminists.
89. This emphasis on male work and female domesticity distinguishes the family studies’ gender politics from those of the feminist, socially progressive reformers like Jane Addams and Frances Kellor, who readily acknowledged women’s place in the work force. But it also establishes common ground between the eugenicists and the “sentimental maternalists” in Ladd-Taylor’s analysis (Mother-Work, 7).
90. Rafter, White Trash, 17.
91. John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, “Calvin Coolidge’s Inaugural Address.”
92. Frederick Taylor’s scientific management can be considered both eugenic and anti-eugenic. On the one hand, Taylor emphasized not only the possibility but also the necessity of training workers for the modern industrial workplace. Moreover, Taylor was not a nativist or a white supremacist; he felt that the success of so many immigrants in the United States effectively proved his training hypothesis. On the other hand, the vocabulary of “making” workers also merges with notions of human engineering and a kind of Wellsian (and Spencerian) picture of labor as essentially and even biologically distinct from management. Banta points out that it was not “applied science and the social sciences” that had to “accommodate the presence of” women, children, blacks, and immigrants” in the nation and in the workplace, but rather the women, children, blacks, and immigrants themselves who “were expected to do the adjusting” (Taylored Lives, 28).
93. Rogers and Merrill, Dwellers in the Vale of Siddem, 346.
94. Winship, Jukes-Edwards, 13.
95. Danielson and Davenport, “Hill Folk,” 132.
96. Sessions, “Happy Hickories,” 256.
97. This modern construction of social and genetic standards ever more tailored to the cultural and economic moment finds a postmodern parallel in the current commonplace that those lacking computer literacy will necessarily be left behind in this, the “information” age. We are now, as then, concerned with identifying the economically and socially fit.
98. See Odem, Delinquent Daughters, 124–25, for a discussion of repressive measures put in place during World War I for the detention of “delinquent girls” perceived as disease-carrying threats to the purity and well-being of American soldiers stationed in the United States.
1. Branigin, “Warner Apologizes”; Associated Press, “Research Shows”; Schoen, “Between Choice and Coercion.”
2. See, for example, D. S. King, “Preimplantation Diagnosis and the ‘New’ Eugenics.”
3. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, “CSHL History.”
4. Perry, foreword to Eugenics and Other Evils, 5.
5. Du Bois, “Opinion,” 24 (October 1922): 248.
6. Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography, 92.
7. Eliot, Letters, 573.
8. Angelina Weld Grimké, “Notes.”
9. Houston Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, xv.
10. Moglen, “Modernism in the Black Diaspora,” 1189–90.
11. Hutchinson, Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, 31; Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 79. Hutchinson and Douglas rely heavily on the demography and geography of Manhattan to make their case for the interracial aspects of modernist cultural work. That reliance is itself telling, because once we expand our view of the New Negro movement (as opposed to the “Harlem Renaissance”), we must acknowledge that many other sites that produced the movement were more dispersed and less integrated than Manhattan.
12. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 744.
13. “V. P. Robinson.”
14. Ibid.
15. Kostir, “Family of Sam Sixty,” 187.
16. Shapiro, Population Control Politics, 18.
17. See Thomas, “Race, Gender, and Welfare Reform”; and Roberts, Killing the Black Body.
18. See King and Meyer, “Politics of Reproductive Benefits.” King and Meyer point out that “employees of the state of Illinois have broad insurance coverage of infertility treatments but no coverage of contraceptives; yet Illinois women insured by Medicaid receive benefits in just the opposite configuration” (8–9). They add that Illinois’s requirement of “employer coverage of infertility treatments” resulted quite directly from the activism of “a very small group of professional, well-educated women and men” (18). Many states, they conclude, have similar policies in place: “The effect is a de facto [national] fertility policy that discourages births among poor women and encourages births among working- and middle-class women” (26).
19. Ehrenreich, “Maid to Order.” Also see Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed. In her going “under cover” as a waitress and as a maid in the last several years, Ehrenreich can be compared with reform-era feminist and labor-reform activist Frances Kellor, whose 1902–3 investigative work Ellen Fitzpatrick describes in Endless Crusade: “Along with eight of her assistants, [Kellor] disguised herself as both employer and employee, personally visiting several agencies and even assuming a job as a domestic in a private home” (132).
20. Wray and Newitz, White Trash, 2.