Alexandra Minna Stern

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Alexandra Minna Stern | "We Cannot Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow's Ear": Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland | Indiana Magazine of History, 103.1 | The History Cooperative

"We Cannot Make a Silk Purse Out of a Sow's Ear": Eugenics in the Hoosier Heartland

In the April 1929 Monthly Bulletin of the Indiana State Board of Health Dr. Thurman B. Rice pondered in a column entitled "If I were Mussolini" how he would run Indiana if granted absolute control.¹ Equal parts folksy and frank, this contribution to the bulletin illustrated Rice's celebrated "ability to write and converse in typical Hoosier jargon."² Having reviewed what he favored but would not require, such as making folks go to church on Sunday and abstain from alcohol ("I am as dry as an Arabian camel"), Rice listed a series of measures that he would enforce, all of them targeting those he deemed "unfit to procreate."³ Specifically, Rice endorsed marital restrictions on and the sterilization of Hoosiers with bad heredity: the feebleminded, inveterate criminals, and parents whose firstborn was a confirmed defective.	1
On paper many of Rice's wishes had already been fulfilled, as Indiana was home to one of the first restrictive marriage laws in the country, passed in 1905 and prohibiting the "mentally deficient, persons with a 'transmissible disease' and habitual drunkards" from marital unions.⁴ In addition, in 1907, and again in 1927, the state legislature had approved statutes authorizing the sterilization of the "insane, feeble-minded, or epileptic persons" in custodial care.⁵ Even so, Rice wanted to ensure the exacting implementation of these laws and extend sterilization outside of the walls of state institutions. A professor in the Department of Public Health at the Indiana University School of Medicine, the longstanding editor of the Monthly Bulletin, and the future state health commissioner, Rice was well positioned to communicate his ideas about the biological and social burden of defective heredity. In numerous entries in the Monthly Bulletin, in his book Racial Hygiene, and in serialized articles on the history of medicine in Indiana, Rice expounded on the need to protect America's good blood and superior stock from bad "germ plasm" through policies ranging from monetary bonuses to augment fit families to prenuptial health certificates, from mothers' pensions to immigration control.⁶ In 1928 the American Eugenics Society, the country's foremost organization devoted to race hygiene, acknowledged Rice by appointing him chairman of the Indiana State Eugenics Committee.⁷ Rice was a high-flying Hoosier eugenicist, but he was not alone. Many distinguished leaders in Indiana public health, education, and welfare gravitated towards eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century.	2
Coined by the British statistician Sir Francis Galton in 1883 to describe a new scientific approach to the improvement of society through the study and control of human heredity, eugenics attracted a wide spectrum of adherents from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.⁸ Ranging from the far left and the far right to the mundane middle, eugenicists included biologists, physicians, industrialists, psychologists, socialists, feminists, and traditionalists, and eugenic societies appeared in nations as diverse as Japan, Italy, Brazil, and Romania. What this heterogeneous group shared was the conviction that social maladies could be addressed through scientific solutions and the application of biological models, especially those derived from the burgeoning field of genetics. By the early 1900s, a eugenics movement was cohering in the United States, propelled by organizations such as the American Breeders' Association and prominent scientists such as Charles B. Davenport, who founded the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor, New York, in 1910.⁹ Concomitantly, states started to pass marriage bans and laws for the segregation and sterilization of the "unfit," and in the 1920s the U.S. Congress approved eugenically inspired immigration quotas.	. . .

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