| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nancy Ordover. American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2003. Pp. xxviii, 297. $18.95.

In this original and provocative study, Nancy Ordover traces the history of eugenics in the United States, from its emergence in the late nineteenth century when anti-immigrant hysteria was reaching a peak to its admittedly obscure role in contemporary debates over the so-called gay gene. Most accounts of American eugenics end with the late 1940s, when the scientific racism animating the movement was supposedly discredited once and for all by the discovery of the Holocaust. But Ordover tells a more complicated story, one in which eugenicist thought continued to shape social policy well into the 1990s. She shows, for example, how scientific racism entered into the debates over the passage of the 1965 Immigration Act, which abolished the national origins quota system established in the 1920s. Although their views ultimately did not prevail, the officers of the Pioneer Fund, an organization with deep roots in the eugenics movement, testified before Congress that ending the quota system would lead to a national decline and irreparably damage the nation's struggle against communism. Ordover also shows that eugenicist views resurfaced in the 1990s when Proposition 187 was being debated in California. Some anti-immigrant activists invoked the work of sociobiologists Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein, who claimed in The Bell Curve (1999) that Latinos and other immigrant groups tended to score lower than whites on IQ tests for genetic reasons. In the process of telling this story of the persistence of eugenicist, thought Ordover uncovers important connections between eugenics and American immigration policy, scientific racism and sexology, women's struggle for reproductive rights, and racist projects to control population growth. Although other scholars have noted these connections, they have not explored them in as much detail or with as much insight as Ordover does.

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