Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s (review)

In this provocative study, art historian Christina Cogdell links eugenic ideology with streamline industrial design in twentieth-century America. As she explains, "streamline designers approached products the same way that eugenicists approached bodies" (4). An interest in efficiency, hygiene, and progress shaped the views of both designers and eugenicists. Though there was little overlap in membership (few architects identified themselves as eugenicists), similar ideas about progress, evolution, and control allow for interesting comparisons. For example, both eugenicists and industrial designers frequently used the word "stream" as a metaphor for evolution, suggesting the importance of purity and progress. Twentieth-century bodies, like products, could be managed and manipulated to create a more perfect race.

As Cogdell herself acknowledges, providing documentation of this link between streamlining and eugenics proved challenging. Scouring the archives of seventeen designers and eugenicists, she found few references of one group to the other. "This anomaly—to write a historical book based upon an idea that cannot be literally documented in the archives," she writes, "presented a challenge" (4). Nonetheless, she is able to piece together evidence to suggest a "broad cultural pattern"—frequently difficult to prove—in which ideas about modernity became inextricably linked to ideas about race and evolution.

Readers will enjoy the fascinating images in Eugenic Design, which include oddities such as the "Criterion" toilet designed to enforce the hygienically correct posture during evacuation ("the sloped seat angled backward, achieving the natural position every time," in a chapter that links concern for biological efficiency with streamlining (141). Advertisements, comic strips, industrial design plans, and photographs from eugenic exhibits contribute to her analysis by suggesting the myriad ways in which Americans were exposed to ideas about streamlining, eugenics, and progress.

Though the book is engaging, thoughtfully researched, and well written, some might disagree with her analysis, and in particular, the claim that eugenic ideology heavily influenced industrial design despite very little (or no) acknowledgement of that claim on the part of the designers themselves. The fact that professionals in both camps shared a similar language or borrowed metaphors from one another does not necessarily justify comparison or prove that they shared an ideology. This is always, of course, a challenge for those who document the past: would those we describe recognize themselves in our depictions, and if not, is it historically accurate to characterize them that way? Or was this perhaps an unconscious, or not fully articulated, world view, one which can only be seen in retrospect? And if the only similarity between designers and eugenicists is part of a much larger trend in modern thinking that included artists, social scientists and others, does it make sense to compare only these two groups? What makes this particular partnership unique? Though the book raises questions, it also provides a fascinating look at the previously unexplored intersection of two worlds in modern America.