The Science of Human Worth

The Science of Human Worth Ellen Herman (bio) Edward J. Larson. Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. 252 pp. Notes and index. $35.00. “Everyone knew my family, knew we were trash,” writes Dorothy Allison in a recent essay about her roots in Greenville, South Carolina, also the subject of her intensely moving novel, Bastard Out of Carolina (1992). Shame was the central fact of her young life and Allison encountered early the poisonous notion that her person had no value. “We were not noble, not grateful, not even hopeful,” she recalls of relatives who quit school and spent lives stealing cars, waiting tables, and bearing children they could not always feed and did not always want. “We knew ourselves despised.” 1 Allison was born in 1949, but in the early part of this century, the poverty of southern whites was as crushing, and it was considered at least as contemptible. During that era, eugenicists in the states of the Deep South sought to control the reproductive destinies of poor whites who might easily have been Allison’s kin. Armed with science, puffed up with ego, and fueled by missionary zeal to perfect society, eugenic activists made feeble-mindedness and insanity (what we call mental retardation and mental illness) defining tests of human worth. During the first several decades of the twentieth century, they launched campaigns of education, segregation, and sterilization (usually in that order) and promoted a social vision steeped in blood and biology, hierarchy and heritability. In Buck v. Bell, a 1927 case from Virginia, the U.S. Supreme Court invigorated eugenics by ruling that the movement’s most drastic policy, sterilization, passed constitutional muster. Testimony that Carrie Buck was part of the “shiftless, ignorant and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South” and the “potential parent of socially inadequate offspring” was all that was required to cut her fallopian tubes. 2 The expert who wrote these portentous words never met Carrie Buck. He did not have to; he recognized her kind. Buck was the daughter of a woman thought to be moronic. She was seventeen, unmarried, and pregnant when her foster parents committed her to an institution. Because madness and imbecility were thought to be hereditary, officials decided that only surgery would prevent Buck’s infant [End Page 108] daughter from producing yet another generation of worthless human beings. Carrie Buck and her daughter Doris were social menaces for one simple reason. They were not “normal.” Today, this story of eugenic activism may seem an appalling exercise in bigotry, a relic of an unenlightened era before the civil rights revolution of our own time. This view may comfort, but it should not. American advocates of eugenics at the turn of the century were, for the most part, neither irrational crackpots nor extreme racists. They were public figures located across the political spectrum of Progressive-era reform, and enthusiasm for eugenics usually coexisted with an ambitious array of reform goals — from the elimination of child labor to the regulation of food and drugs — designed to tame the worst abuses of industrial capitalism in the name of humanitarianism and the public good. Jane Addams, Charles Eliot, G. Stanley Hall, Walter Rauschenbusch, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and Woodrow Wilson all marched under the eugenic banner. Behind their activism was the belief that science could objectively rank human beings on a scale of relative value and that society’s managers had an obligation to act on the resulting knowledge. Encouraging the reproduction of individuals located toward the top of the scale would inaugurate an era of progress, but discouraging the reproduction of those at the bottom emerged as a greater imperative since the genetic legacy of mental abnormality was crime, delinquency, illegitimacy, and social disorder, or so they believed. Walter Fernald, superintendent of the Massachusetts School for the Feeble-Minded put it bluntly. “The unrecognized imbecile is a most dangerous element in the community. From a biological standpoint the imbecile is an inferior human being.” 3 Recognizing the elusive dangers of mental abnormality and controlling biological inferiority were the chief goals of eugenics and its champions. Sex, Race, and Science

Eugenics · Shame · Reproductive Health and Technologies

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