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45 Chapter 3 The Politics of Biology Social and political problems beset North America as it entered the 20th century . These seemingly unresolvable and mounting issues were not novel. Although faith in the progress of America produced a conservative, well-satised nation in the late-19th century, it was clear that progress brought a particular set of problems. As the movement toward urbanization and industrialization accelerated, demographic, political, and social realities shifted. For example, town dwellers formed 28.6% of the population in the United States in 1880; by 1920, they formed 51.4%. The U.S. Census of 1910 found that 84.7% of Irish people lived in towns; only 15.8% in the country (Carr-Saunders, 1926). The United States transited from the small-town values that had previously organized social life to the establishment of a more centralized, impersonal, and bureaucratic social system that could serve an increasingly industrialized and corporate economy (Wiebe, 1966). The rurally based, largely self-sufcient family unit seen at the beginning of the 19th century was supplanted by a reorganized model of the family, with revised roles for family members. New models served to adapt to an increasingly interdependent society that was based on an economy and social order formed around wages and sales rather than one formed around relative autonomy and self-sufciency. Work now meant new modes of production , new roles for workers, new types of labor, and the imposition of new time keeping and schedules. By 1900, the United States was an urbanized, industrialized, heterogeneous society of racially, religiously, politically, linguistically, and ethnically mixed peoples . But the fallout of the emerging capitalist technological expansion included a realm of social ills. The decay engendered by urbanization, industrialization, and immigration was seen in heightened rates of vagabondage, labor unrest, rising divorce rates, suicides, and crime. Statistical scrutiny of the 1870, 1880, and 1890 censuses of the United States showed increases in deviant behavior and growing numbers of those considered to be defective, dependent, and delinquent. The 1880 census showed the rate of “feeble mindedness” as 153.3 per 100,000 compared with 63.6 per 100,000 for the 1870 census. The 1890 census gures, almost identical 46 Chapter 3 to those of 1880, conrmed that the numbers of feebleminded people in society was dangerously high (Gorwitz, 1974). Blame for the perceived decline of society and the social problems in the United States (and Canada) was readily and easily assigned. First, the lax and unrestricted immigration policies that characterized the 19th century evolved into a national concern. By 1900, there was a growing sentiment among the American people that the inux of immigrants threatened the stability of the nation’s institutions and the purity of its racial foundations. Immigrants were a “complication of the social evil” (Social Survey Commission of Toronto, 1915, p. 40); moreover, data from the U.S. Immigration Commission were taken as evidence that some foreign groups showed little capacity to adjust to American life (U.S. Immigration Commission, 1911). Joined to problems with immigration was the entire spectrum of degeneracy—that huge underclass that included virtually all groups with presumed moral, mental, and physical deciencies. Feeblemindedness was posited as the root cause of most of the stresses and strains on American society. Individuals who, because of their innate mental deciencies were unable to cope with the complexities of modern life, threatened the future of the nation (Goddard, 1916a, 1916b). With the movement from a 19th-century system of beliefs rooted in Protestant ideologies to a more modern culture embedded in secular ideologies, many inuential Americans acclaimed science as the new gospel. Of course, North America was a long way from secular in those decades: religion remained important to most people and could be a political mineeld. Still, devotion to science and the expert grew. Medicine emerged as a dominant profession. At the same time, the edgling eld of psychology sought political legitimacy and public acceptance by claiming to have scientic ways of understanding social problems. With tests of mental ability as a bastion, psychology became a biased advisor with an overarching motive. Moral and social judgments, whether good or bad, right or wrong, were overwhelmed by a morass of half-formed ideas from the emerging discipline of psychology. By the time of World War I, Americans were informed as never before about the threats posed to national survival arising from two chief sources—immigration and degeneracy. Over...

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