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American Literary History 16.3 (2004) 520-535



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The Long Arm of Eugenics

Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890-1925. By Katrina Irving. University of Illinois Press, 2000
Mothering the Race: Women's Narratives of Reproduction, 1890-1930. By Allison Berg. University of Illinois Press, 2002
Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom. By Wendy Kline. University of California Press, 2001
American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. By Nancy Ordover University of Minnesota Press, 2003

Are you fit? A fit parent? A fit body? A fit citizen? And what does it mean if you are not? If the language of "fitness" seems colloquial, if this sequence of questions feels predictable, if a "no" answer seems socially unacceptable, you are feeling the reach of eugenics.

And, if this connection seems doubtful, I recommend the experience of reading, side by side, Katrina Irving's Immigrant Mothers: Narratives of Race and Maternity, 1890-1925; Allison Berg's Mothering the Race: Women's Narratives of Reproduction, 1890- 1930; Wendy Kline's Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom; and Nancy Ordover's American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Together, these four books make visible the ubiquity of eugenic assumptions in the US. Although they do not say it in so many words, the authors show how eugenics may after all have succeeded in the US, where it was first applied institutionally, better than it did in Nazi Germany—better in the sense of longer and perhaps also in the sense of deeper, insofar as eugenics happened to emerge and to enter the fabric of American culture earlier in the country's history and therefore more formatively (a mere hundred years after its constitutional founding). Such a perspective suggests that American cultural historians might pay more attention to the formative role of eugenics in the US throughout the twentieth century and into the present, especially its embeddedness in our economic language. When we read Margaret Sanger's comment that "[t]he American public is taxed—and heavily taxed—to maintain an increasing race of morons which threatens the very foundations of our civilization," we might find the language of morons alien but the image of a recklessly "increasing," money-draining underclass is certainly familiar (qtd. in Ordover 148). The persistence of such assumptions gives a glimpse of eugenics's unspent currents.

In Immigrant Mothers, Katrina Irving focuses on the three main positions within early-twentieth-century immigrant debates— nativist, assimilationist, and progressive. She argues that they share a common eugenic framework in which white races are assumed to [End Page 520] be more advanced and in which immigrant women play a special role. Given the belief that "[r]acial qualities . . . are contributed to the race primarily by woman" (qtd. in Irving 40), the nativists imagined that "the displacement of the American" was "a quiet conquest . . . made by child-bearing women" who "tend to exhibit the older, more generalized and primitive traits of the past of the race" (qtd. in Irving 41). Although "in the past the rate of increase of the native stock has kept pace with foreign stock only because of the disproportionate number of males [immigrating]," now the entry of so many women presented "the principal danger," as the influential Dr. Paul Popenoe concluded (qtd. in Irving 41). Not only did these immigrants and their abundant children threaten to "elbow out" the Anglo-Protestant Americans, but, many nativists feared, the "intrusive blood strain" (qtd. in Irving 41) of the "swarthy white types will gradually creep into the higher stocks" (42). Indeed, these eugenicists claimed (against the evidence) that "the whole trade [of prostitution] is fundamentally an affair of our foreign population" (qtd. in Irving 42).

Most alarmingly, the disease immigrant women were spreading in the body politic was economic, for nativists argued that these women were constitutionally unable to take up their modern role as domestic spenders. In this period, as...

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