A Century of Eugenics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era (review)

As the title of this collection of essays implies, eugenics did not evaporate after the Second World War. In 2007—the centennial of the Indiana state sterilization law, the first in the country—the Eugenics Legacy Project culminated in a series of events intended to stimulate and showcase historical work on eugenics. The highlight was a public symposium, of which this intelligent, compassionate volume is the proceedings. The book demonstrates, first, that scholarship on eugenics is vigorous, probing, and increasingly subtle. And second, that anniversary volumes—even those that are commemorative rather than celebratory—powerfully color our valuation of historical themes and eras.

The first two essays explore the 1907 Indiana law and its legacy. Elof Carlson provides a typically crisp, readable history of sterilization in Indiana, setting it within the context of Progressive Era degeneracy theory. He focuses on Harry Sharp, a physician whom Carlson calls “sterilization’s first nationally successful advocate” (p. 20). Carlson points out that a cocktail of degeneracy theory and biological determinism combined with improved surgical techniques created a hereditary public health, which viewed eugenic sterilization as an instrument of preventive medicine. He does not, however, make the link from preventive eugenics to twenty-first-century preventive genetic medicine, which, one could argue, applies more precise technology toward similar, if more individualized, ends. Jason Lantzer contributes a well-documented legal history of the Indiana law that fills in a number of gaps in our juridical understanding of sterilization.

Editor Paul Lombardo’s chapter takes a literary approach, setting Tobacco Road, Ira Caldwell’s scandalous account of life in rural Georgia, in a eugenic context. It’s a neat way to explore the popular meanings of eugenics—of which, he argues, there was no consensus definition: “the term encompassed everything from proud pedigrees to healthy births” (p. 45). Over time, he says, the invocation of “eugenics” became clichéd, an emblem of goodness itself. The cliché persists in our own era, of course—but as an emblem of evil. How we leaped from one pole to the other remains to be explored, as does the broad spectrum between those extremes.

Gregory Michael Dorr and Angela Logan tap a rich new vein of eugenic history: black eugenics. Focusing on what they call the assimilationist eugenics of the black leader W. E. B. Du Bois, they describe the eugenic foundations of the Talented Tenth, the “fittest” fraction of Negro men whom Du Bois believed would save the black race. They bent over backward to keep the black community separate from the racist Progressive eugenicists who despised them—to the point of suggesting, bizarrely, that black eugenics was anti-hereditarian. More work on black eugenics, including, for example, the ideas of Booker T. Washington, could make the crucial point that hereditarian thought is ecumenical, not limited to the ruling class.

With notable exceptions such as the 1924 Johnson Immigration Act and the Buck v. Bell case of 1927, American eugenics was mainly carried out at the state level. A suite of four case studies adds considerable texture to our understanding of American eugenics in the states. Alexandra Stern compares California and Indiana; Molly Ladd-Taylor examines Minnesota, home of Charles F. Dight and the Dight Institute of Human Genetics; Johanna Schoen digs deeper still into the North Carolina eugenic scene, which she explores movingly in her book, Choice and Coercion; and Dorr pushes eugenic scholarship into the 1970s, with his study of a eugenic case from Alabama. Collectively, these chapters show that American eugenics was highly diverse and strongly colored by local culture and politics—in particular, issues of race and gender, as well as the local economy. Any concept of “American eugenics” must take this shading into account.

The final two chapters bravely consider eugenics in the human genome era. The pediatric geneticists Ed and Linda McCabe reflect thoughtfully on eugenics from...