Good breeding: the eugenics temptation

Christian Century, Nov 2, 2004 by Amy Laura Hall

Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement.

By Christine Rosen. Oxford University Press, 286 pp., $35.00.

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race.

By Edwin Black. Four Walls Eight Windows, 550 pp., $18.00.

IN THE EARLY 1920S progressive high schools and YMCAs took part in the Keeping Fit Campaign. The caption on one Keeping Fit poster asked: "What Kind of Children?" and went on to explain: "Children get their basic qualities by inheritance. If they are to be strong, keen, efficient and great, there must be good blood back of them." Youth were to consider not only the "good blood" of a future mate but also that of his or her extended family. This propaganda was meant to correct what Margaret Sanger in 1922 termed "unthinking and indiscriminate fecundity."

How many children people should have, and how parents (and society) can ensure that only genetically fit children are born, have been enduring questions in American culture. Both quantity and quality count when attempting to form the kind of children who will contribute to a more perfect union. The quest for "strong, keen, efficient and great" offspring came to the fore during the past century, when the dominant classes became concerned with making fecundity discriminating.

Christine Rosen examines the role of religion in the pursuit of efficient reproduction. Her book's cover features a photograph of the winner of the Fitter Family Contest, sponsored by the Eastern States Exposition of 1925. The two oldest boys stand together with winsome smiles. The daughter, sporting a modern bob and practical spectacles, sits next to the father, who gazes at his youngest child, a little boy in a sailor suit. The serenely smiling mother is substantially built.

This progressive New- England family is headed by Kenneth C. MacArthur, pastor of the Federated Church in Sterling Massachusetts, lecturer at Andover Newton Seminary, advocate for the Social Gospel, and spokesman for the American Eugenics Society. The MacArthur family portrait personifies wholesomeness and modernly. In an award-winning sermon on eugenics, MacArthur asserts that decent Christians have a responsibility, to use "every help which science affords" to prevent the "feebleminded and wrong-willed" from "pouring their corrupt currents into the race stream."

MacArthur's enthusiasm for eugenics was no anomaly. It was shared by Harry F. Ward, professor of Christian ethics tit Union Theological Seminary from 1918 to 1941 and founder of the Methodist Federation for Social Service (1907), who in his article "Is Christian Morality Harmful, Over-Charitable to the Unfit?" (1928) encouraged Christians to help remove "the causes that produce the weak." Walter Taylor Summer, dean of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Chicago from 1906 to 1915, instituted in 1912 his own system of inspection for prospective couples to ensure that they were "normal physically and mentally." John Haynes Holmes, Unitarian minister of New York's Church of the Messiah, concurred (in 1913), encouraging his fellow members of the Liberal Ministers" Association of New York "to perform nothing but health marriages."

The best and the brightest of progressive Protestantism in the first half of the 20th century were zealous allies in the effort to encourage fitter families and to discourage the birth of those who would be a burden on the rest. Charitable Christian organizations, facing large numbers of poor, immigrant families and increasing crime rates in the nation's cities, turned to the new science of heredity, to craft a more manageable, wholesome future.

Church leaders' efforts to attack the scourge of degeneracy, feeblemindedness and poverty ran parallel to and often joined forces with the work of the American Eugenics Society. Led by Charles Davenport (son of a New York Congregationalist minister) and funded by Andrew Carnegie, the AES sponsored contests for sermons on "better breeding," held Fitter Family competitions, and encouraged local efforts to sterilize the unfit. The movement promulgated a distinction between "grade A" individuals, who should be encouraged to procreate, and variously unfit people, who should be actively discouraged or disabled from passing on their genetic heritage. It promoted eugenic responsibility as a personal, religious and civic matter, something to be addressed in the home, parish and courthouse. A customary sign at rural fairs across the country asked, "How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle--and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance, or to 'blind' sentiment?" This propaganda collapsed physical, mental and social signs of "deviance." Illiteracy, extraneous toes, childbirth out of wedlock and a record of theft all went into the mix to determine whether an individual, couple or family group were genetically fit.

WHY DID MAINLINE Protestants find this movement so compelling? A charitable interpretation is that they simply wanted to reduce human suffering. Perceiving a stark and growing contrast between respectable middle-class families and the "teeming broods" of new immigrants in the urban centers, progressive leaders turned to eugenic science to control what seemed the otherwise uncontrollable plight of the poor.