Conceiving the Future: Pronatalism, Reproduction, and the Family in the United States, 1890-1938

6. Fitter Families for Future Firesides: Florence Sherbon and Popular Eugenics

6 FITTER FAMILIES FOR FUTURE FIRESIDES FLORENCE SHERBON AND POPULAR EUGENICS Yea, I have a goodly heritage. Psalms 16:6 132 Fitter Families for Future Firesides The 1911 ‘‘Million Dollar Parade’’ of prize livestock and other agricultural products at the Iowa State Fair concluded with an automobile filled with preschool children. A runner on the side of the car proclaimed them to be ‘‘Iowa’s Best Crop.’’ A later report on the event noted that these children had participated in a preschool health examination competition in which the examiners followed the only criterion available to them at the time: the methods of observing used by stock judges for determining prize livestock.∞ Charles Davenport, head of the Eugenics Record O≈ce, wrote a post card to the Iowa contest-organizers stating that stock judges always took inheritance into account, warning, ‘‘You should score 50 percent for heredity before you begin to examine a baby.’’ The next year, Davenport admonished even more dramatically, ‘‘A prize winner at two may be an epileptic at ten.’’≤ The Iowa administrators took note of this caution but did not change the way they thought of their better baby contests until they observed for themselves how calves were sometimes judged. At Iowa county fairs, a calf would be examined on its own and then carefully compared to each of its parents. To contest organizer Dr. Florence Sherbon, this comparison suggested that perhaps they needed to judge entire families instead of just individual children.≥ Over the course of the next decade Sherbon and Mary T. Watts transformed their Iowa better baby contest into Kansas’s fitter family contests. In Watts’s words, ‘‘It remained for the Kansas Free Fair to give the Better Baby a Pedigree. It is now demanded that the Better Baby be supported by a Family, fit both in their inheritance and in the development of their mental, moral, and physical traits.’’∂ Where better baby contests had been developed as part of the U.S. Children’s Bureau campaign against infant mortality, fitter family contests were developed as part of the popular education campaigns of the American eugenics movement.∑ Eugenicists’ concern with heredity certainly broadened the scope of these contests from ‘‘healthy’’ children to ‘‘fitter families,’’ but the infusion of hereditarian thinking did not displace earlier concerns with diet, exercise, and home environment. The fitter family contests merged eugenics with expansive and intrusive public health campaigns and practices. The result was a much more expansive type of eugenic reform encompassing heredity and environment within an ideal of the family and the home.∏ Florence Sherbon, Mary Watts, and Leon Whitney in front of the Eugenics Building at the Kansas Free Fair in 1924. (American Eugenics Society Papers, American Philosophical Society Archives, Philadelphia, Pa.) 134 Fitter Families for Future Firesides Watts and Sherbon deliberately chose to hold these contests at agricultural fairs. Fitter family contests appealed to a deeply rooted sense of nostalgia for the rural family at a time when the nation was becoming increasingly urban, when rural children were choosing not to stay on the farm, and when the culture of the Roaring Twenties challenged ‘‘traditional values.’’ Introducing fitter family contests as human livestock competitions encouraged families to reimagine their histories as pedigrees subject to scientific analysis and control. As such, these contests fused nostalgia for the farm family with a modernist promise of scientific control.π better babies and the children’s bureau The Children’s Bureau was initiated as a government clearinghouse for information on child hygiene and rearing.∫ The legend of the founding of the Children’s Bureau holds that over breakfast one morning in 1903 settlement leaders Lillian Wald and Florence Kelley were reading their mail and the morning newspaper when Kelley read a letter asking her for information on the high summer death rates among children. Neither Kelley nor Wald had an answer. After reading a newspaper article on the secretary of agriculture’s trip to the South to survey damage to the cotton crop from the boll weevil, Wald is said to have remarked: ‘‘If the government can have a department to take such an interest in what is happening to the cotton crop, why can’t it have a bureau to look after the nation’s child crop?’’Ω Ten years later the Children’s Bureau was o≈cially established through the e√orts of settlement house workers and residents, a vast network of club women...