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In 1920, the first year that eugenics was taught at WSC, you
could enter a “Fitter Family” contest at local and state fairs.
Based on your pedigree, appearance, race, family size,
intelligence, and lack of “defects,” eugenic judges, many of them
college faculty and extension agents, might have awarded you a
blue, red, or white ribbon, or even a medal proclaiming, “Yea I
Have a Goodly Heritage.” And new on the shelves for 1920 was New
York eugenicist Lothrop Stoddard’s book, The Rising Tide of
Color Against White Supremacy. Adolph Hitler called the book
his “bible.”
In The Right to Be Well Born: Horse Breeding in its Relation
to Eugenics, W.E.D. Stokes addressed an important branch of
eugenics, economics. Eugenicists felt that too much time and money
was spent on caring for the poor and “defective.” They also fought
against unions, because they felt that men were not created equal
and thus should not be paid equally for the same work. The rich
should get richer so they could have bigger families, and the
“poorly born,” if they must be around (and can’t be sterilized),
should at least be paid less so that they could only support
smaller families.
Eugenics was firmly rooted in academia. The University of Idaho,
for example, had been teaching it since 1913. In a 1920 survey
response to the Carnegie Institution’s Eugenics Record Office, UI
professor of zoology J. E. Wodsedalek wrote, “Heredity &
Eugenics and Social Hygiene are the two most popular courses in the
University.” The UI dropped eugenics in 1947.
In the late 1920s, at the peak of its popularity, eugenics was
taught as a science in nearly 400 colleges and universities in the
United States, including Harvard, University of California,
Berkeley, and Columbia.
In 1920 WSC’s department of zoology split its heredity course
into two separate courses, Genetics and Eugenics. The course
description in the college catalog for that first year read, “A
study of the hereditary traits and characters of man.” In 1929
department chair R.L. Webster, who taught the class, changed the
ending of the course description to read, “….and mental characters
in man.” By 1946 the description had been updated to include, again
at the end, the words, “…and their relation to eugenic problems.”
These changes may seem subtle; they are not. The American Eugenic
Society, of which Professor Webster was a member, defined “eugenic
problems” very clearly. A partial list of eugenic problems included
feeblemindedness, criminality, epilepsy, prostitution,
rebelliousness, manic depression, nomadism, ethnicity, inferior
races, birth defects, moral perversion, schizophrenia, racial
hygiene, homosexuality, immigration, poverty, and feminism. Eugenic
problems, it was felt, had simple genetic causes and thus simple
eugenic solutions. It was nature rather than nurture that
determined if you as a person were adequate or inadequate.
Various levels of segregation, by color, status, and perceived
deficiency, were already in place in much of the country in the
1920s, but eugenicists were worried about new immigrants as well,
and began to focus on immigration reform. They considered
immigration from anywhere other than northern Europe to be a
problem. One of their greatest victories was The Immigration
Restriction Act, or Johnson Act, of 1924, which was designed to
reduce southern and eastern European immigration by over 80
percent. Albert Johnson, congressman from Washington State’s third
district, chaired the House Committee on Immigration and
Naturalization. He was an American Eugenic Society member and
president of the Eugenics Research Association. According to Mark
Haller’s book, Eugenics, Johnson was elected to Congress in
1912 “as a conservative with a record of strong action against
foreign radicals and strikers and a crude hatred for oriental
immigrants.” Testifying to Congress in favor of the immigration law
was expert eugenic witness and friend of Johnson’s, Harry H.
Laughlin, who read from 106 pages of testimony that he titled,
“Analysis of the metal and dross in America’s modern melting pot.”
Laughlin was a founding member of the American Eugenic Society and
the author of the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law that was used
as a template for the 30 states that adopted such laws.
The Nazi party was very interested in the American eugenic
movement and used Laughlin’s model to come up with its 1933 Law for
the Prevention of Progeny from Hereditary Diseases. At least
225,000 Germans had already been sterilized by 1936 under the
guidance of this law when Heidelberg University, which by this time
was controlled by the Nazi party, gave Laughlin an honorary M.D.
for being a “successful pioneer of practical eugenics and the
far-seeing representative of racial policy in America.” By all
accounts, he was honored to accept the degree.
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