The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon

2. The Eugenic Gene

The fugenic Gene n 1907 the "plant wizard" Luther Burbank wrote that "stored within heredity are all joys, sorrows, loves, hates, music, art, temples, palaces, pyramids, hovels, kings, queens, paupers, bards, prophets and philosophers. . . and all the mysteries of the universe."! In his popular 1934 eugenics primer Like Begets Like, Harry H. Cook told his readers that "within the nucleus of the germ cell lie the most important things in the whole world, the chromosomes, which are the determiners of character and in reality responsible for our natural individuality."2 And in their popular 1920 text, California eugenicists Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson announced that "immortality" was a "real possibility," for the 19 TH[ DNA MYSTIQU[ germplasm, carrying the "very soul" of the individual, lived on in children and grandchildren.3 Appearing in texts written for a popular audience during the heyday of the American eugenics movement, these images of the germplasm (the term then used for the hereditary material) are strikingly parallel to images of the gene in the popular literature of the 1990s.4 The germplasm, like the gene, was the determiner of character and personality, the source of social order, and the locus of immortality. Like the gene, the germplasm was not only a scientific concept but also a cultural resource, invested with spiritual and moral meaning. The germplasm was used to explore social problems and guide solutions to them. Among the woes attributed to the germplasm were criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, and poverty. Among the solutions favored by popular writers was the regulation of human reproduction. The popular literature on eugenics from 1900 to 1935 was vast.5 Our informal survey of this period has turned up at least 500 American titles written by nonscientists and apparently intended for a general audience.6 Yet our numbers may be far too low. A 1924 bibliography of eugenics literature listed more than 4000 publications, approximately 1600 of which were popular texts or articles published in the United States between 1890 and 1924. The editor complained that much of this material was "uncritical; and comparatively little of it is written with the competence of the highly trained specialist."7 It is precisely this "uncritical" material, however, that provides a way to understand popular constructions of the powers of the germplasm.8 Eugenics was not a single idea but a thousand ideas, not a simple, coherent doctrine but a messy public discussion that served many agendas. The volume and diversity of the texts suggest that eugenics interested many people and that it was taken seriously-by Midwestern housewives, Baptist ministers, labor unionists, elementary-school teachers, and pig breeders. Popular publications included Felicia Folger's privately printed Great Mothers, Max Reichler's Jewish Eugenics , physician Lawrence F. Flick's Eugenics (a lecture delivered in a Catholic summer school extension course), Scott Nearing's The Super Race: An American Problem, and the 20 TH[ [UG[NIC G[N[ writings of animal breeders such as Harvey Ernest Jordan (Eugenics: The Rearing of the Human Thoroughbred) and William Earl Dodge Stokes (The Right to Be Well-Born, or, Horse-Breeding in its Relation to Eugenics).9 Several famous figures promoted eugenics: plant breeder Luther Burbank, inventor Alexander Graham Bell, Stanford University president David Starr Jordan, and industrialist John Kellogg, among others.1o And a 1928 survey of 499 colleges and universities found that 343 offered courses in genetics and eugenics.11 Any attempt to assess the American eugenics movement historically must take this broad popular interest into consideration,12 for amateur productions shed light on the meaning of the gene in the early part of the century, just as contemporary television programming and advertising campaigns reveal the symbolic meaning of the gene today. The similarity between the powers ascribed to the germplasm in this early literature and the powers ascribed to the contemporary gene is intriguing. But the modern gene is not simply a revised and updated germplasm. Their shared powers rather reflect enduring Western ideas about self, social order, bodily difference, and family relationships. Both the germplasm and the gene have been used to address questions about the origins of social problems, the essence of the human condition, and lithe nature of the very soul." By exploring the popular eugenics literature, we document the powers of the germplasm, closing with an examination of the persistence of biological ideas in American popular culture in the twentieth century. We suggest that the...