EUGENICS

EUGENICS, like "pragmatism," was a new name coined in the late nineteenth century for some old ways of thinking. But while philosophers worked hard to explain what "pragmatism" meant, believers in "eugenics" were satisfied merely to use the new word to advance their varied concerns. Both parents and intellectuals had nearly always expressed hopes and anxieties about reproduction and about the health and quality of the next generation. Marriage guides, medical writings, and social reform literature in nineteenth-century America emphasized the polar terms "amelioration" and "degeneration." They anticipated that healthy, caring parents of European Protestant descent were likely to produce better children than those who were diseased, licentious, or from a less "developed" ethnoreligious group.

The English biosocial scientist Francis Galton coined the word "eugenics" to describe "the cultivation of the race" in 1883, but the term only came into general use in both England and the United States after 1900. For the first third of the twentieth century American eugenicists (also called "eugenists") promoted a variety of causes, including the encouragement of fecundity among educated women; birth control for both rich and poor; earlier marriage; easier divorce; breast-feeding; the sterilization of criminal, retarded, epileptic, insane, and sexually promiscuous people; tests for intelligence; tests for syphilis; abstinence from alcohol; the positive value of unrestricted

drinking; country roads; urban parks; pacifism; military preparedness; immigration restriction; segregation of the "feeble-minded" from the general population; segregation of black Americans from white Americans; imperial expansion; and the dangers of tropical climates for European Americans.

In the 1910s the biologist Charles B. Davenport, supported by the philanthropist Mary Harriman, argued that a scientifically authoritative eugenics should be grounded in the new Mendelian genetics and in a sharp distinction between influences of heredity and environment. Davenport's views, however, were inconsistent—for instance, he supported the environmental reform of alcohol prohibition as a eugenic measure—and they were never dominant. The famous 1927 opinion of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in Buck v. Bell, that "three generations of imbeciles are enough," owed more to the views taught by his physician father in the 1860s than to the new genetics of the Jazz Age.

Between 1925 and 1940 the tenuous cooperation among biologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, psychologists, and reformers under the big eugenics tent broke down, and the many campaigns that had for a time stood together went separate ways. After 1940 the association of the word "eugenics" with Nazi mass murder made it a term of insult. Promoters of population control, medical genetics, and reproductive therapies sought to distance themselves as much as possible from the recent past. Yet pragmatic efforts to prevent malformations and to improve the biological quality of humans have continued. It is a reasonably coherent realm of expert activity but one that remains, understandably, nameless.

EUGENICS

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