The Great White Way

Imagine yourself in the heart of Kansas, at the annual state fair, in 1928. Past the dunking booth and Ferris wheel, the stands selling corn dogs and cotton candy, farmers from around the state have gathered to show off the year's yields. Amid the horses, cattle, and hogs, a blue-eyed blonde family of four is displayed on an elevated platform. Over their heads is a large banner: fitter families contest.

Not unlike dog shows today, Fitter Family contests pitted American citizens against one another in a battle to determine whose facial characteristics, posture, health, and habits judges deemed the most fit. The winners were usually Aryans who, if not Christian themselves, could pass as models of godly living – which isn't to suggest that the contests were strictly a rural phenomenon. Fitter Family and similar contests were popular throughout the U.S., a visible face of a long-burgeoning movement that was quickly coming to a head: eugenics.

With roots reaching from the mid-1800s, eugenics was an attempt to apply science – in the form of Mendelian genetics – to improve the human race. Using Mendel's pea-plant experiments as a jumping-off point, eugenicists argued that society should consciously work to breed the best genetic traits in its citizens. There were two main approaches: positive eugenics encouraged persons with desirable traits to breed, and negative eugenics barred "undesirables" from breeding.

Though steeped in the kind of racist and anti-immigrant beliefs generally associated with right-wingers, eugenics ideas were at least as likely to be advocated by social radicals and progressive thinkers as by conservatives. Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Woodrow Wilson, H.G. Wells, Emma Goldman, and Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood) were among its fans. Some, like Sanger and the English critic Havelock Ellis, saw eugenics as a way to liberate women through its promotion of birth control. For those with socialist leanings, eugenics reflected a privileging of society's interests over those of the individual.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about eugenics was its widespread popularity among middle- and upper-class Americans. Popular literature from the late 1800s up through the 1930s was littered with eugenics-inspired language about bettering the human race. Although such language squarely fit progressive ideals at the time, some of the underlying mechanics were downright grisly.

Charles Davenport headed the eugenics movement in the U.S. with the Eugenics Record Office, a group funded largely with Rockefeller and Carnegie dollars. Davenport pushed negative eugenics remedies to prevent births among those deemed genetically undesirable (in order of priority): the "feebleminded," paupers, alcoholics, criminals, epileptics, the insane, the constitutionally weak, people predisposed to specific diseases, deformed persons, and those born deaf, blind, or mute.

Few of these problems could be scientifically tied to genes, of course, but Davenport was seldom troubled by such facts. The "feebleminded" diagnosis alone was so vague and elastic – applying to anyone deemed stupid or immoral – as to be meaningless. Nonetheless, Davenport and his cronies called for segregating, incarcerating, sterilizing and castrating all such persons. (Why castration? Some eugenicists argued that, though sterilization prevented people from breeding, the operation would encourage the unfit to have more and more sex, and spread disease, once reproduction was no longer an issue. Castration, needless to say, solved that.)

Such harsh remedies were deemed necessary to prevent the unfit from polluting the gene pool and were surprisingly well-received by government officials. The U.S. Department of Agriculture was closely aligned with the American Breeders Association, a prominent supporter of eugenics. And in 1907, states began sterilizing citizens they considered a problem. Indiana was first, followed by Washington, Connecticut, Virginia, and California. Often surgery was performed without the victims' knowledge. Poor women admitted to a hospital for a minor illness might leave with their tubes tied, only to discover later that they couldn't get pregnant.