Eugenics studies began to proliferate within U.S. academia in the early 1900s
Charles Davenport received funding from various wealthy Americans in the early 1900s to establish the Eugenics Record Office, and increasingly, academics at top schools were conducting eugenics studies as well. Many of their articles were published in the Journal of Heredity, the house organ for the American Genetics Association. Their research typically focused on showing that the unfit were that way because of inferior genes, that they were multiplying rapidly, and that it was extremely expensive for “normals” to provide care to such “defectives.” In one Journal of Heredity article, immigrants were likened to a “bacterial invasion.” Another writer, in an article titled “The Menace of the Half Man,” calculated that if the country could get rid of its defectives, then “human misery, in a well-ordered country like America, will be more than cut in half.”
At the same time, scholars wrung their hands over the poor job that the rich and well-born were doing at spreading their superior genes. A number of studies found that the scions of alumni of Harvard, Yale, and other Ivy League schools were a dying breed, their low birthrate a type of “race suicide.” Mayflower descendants were reported, with breathless alarm, to be on their way to “extinction.” And WASP women who attended elite liberal arts colleges like Wellesley were particularly deficient at having large families, leading one Ivy League academic, John Phillips, to lament that “the birth rate of college women is quite the most pathetic spectacle of all.”
The stream of articles signaled eugenics’ arrival as an academic discipline. By 1914, forty-four colleges in America had introduced eugenics into their curriculums, with the subject taught as a science, much like engineering or mathematics, at such schools as MIT, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, and Brown. By 1924, more than 9,000 papers on eugenics had been published, and in 1928, Eugenical News—a monthly newsletter published by the Eugenics Record Office—could count 1,322 eugenics papers that it had reviewed over the previous twelve months.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 79). New York, NY: Basic Books.