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Book Review
| Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America. By Alexandra Minna Stern. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xiv + 347 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $24.95, paper.)
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Eugenic Nation traces the networks American eugenicists forged in Progressive Era California and maintained into the 1970s. Alexandra Minna Stern begins with the eugenic reforms advocated at the Pan-Pacific International Exposition in 1915 and ends with Madrigal v. Quilligan's challenge to forced sterilization at Los Angeles County Hospital, quietly underlining the prominence of the American West in American eugenics. Eugenic Nation provides a wider geographic sweep, a more inclusive cultural lens, and a more fractious interplay of forces than previous accounts regarding the rise and incomplete transformation of better breeding in the United States. |
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Stern effectively connects medical and public culture. Eugenics advocates at the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition sought to use the Panama Canal, the reconstruction of San Francisco, and the anti-plague campaign for the benefits of eugenic science to the American race. However, local pundits used eugenic diets to mock race betterment and eugenic intervention through cultural transformation. In response, advocates—C. C. Pierce, Lewis Terman, Charles M. Goethe, and Paul Popenoe—called for more concrete demonstrations of eugenic science, such as sterilization laws, marriage reforms, immigration restriction, and more elaborate ways of counting the fit and unfit. |
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Stern then examines the way concrete eugenic demonstrations were put into practice on the Mexican border, in California's public agencies, and in the nature conservation movement. Through a particularly violent U. S. Public Health Service quarantine against typhus in El Paso, eugenicists and the Border Patrol linked Mexican bodies to disease and disorder in the United States. Paul Popenoe dramatized the ways Mexican domestics moved through the intimate spaces of white American couples. The Department of Institutions' reports referred to imaginary financial and eugenic benefits after they deported residents "back" to Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines. Using terms like "gifted," "normal" and "moron" to chart numerical distribution in the Stanford Binet IQ test and clumping the results by "nationality," Lewis Terman helped justify school segregation, deportation and state-mandated sterilization—to ward off the costly wave of "morons" in California. Real estate developer Charles M. Goethe fought to preserve California's "pioneer stock," and sponsored the "Pioneer Fund," national park service educational tours, botanical laboratories, and the "Save the Redwoods League." Stern closely links negative eugenics (sterilization and deportation) and positive eugenics (education and nature conservation) through the shaping of California's public landscape. |
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The incomplete transformation of eugenics is the conceptual heart of Eugenic Nation. Once practices like sterilization and deportation went unmarked in public policies, Stern analyzes eugenicists' move into a softer discussion of biotypes, personality profiles, and population control. Domestically, self assessment tests and marriage counseling in the segregated suburbs of postwar America became the leading edge of eugenic science. Stern uses Paul Popenoe and the American Institute of Family Research (AIFR) to model this dramatic growth in influence, because many people sought scientific answers to the tensions they saw in their domestic ideals. |
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Stern argues that increased access to reproductive technology along with 1960s freedom movements transformed the culture of eugenics. As American clinics and hospitals provided more sterilizations, both consenting and compulsory, more people mounted challenges to forced sterilization. Eugenic Nation dramatically highlights how the re-emergence of feminist cultural politics, and the growth of political advocacy by people of color helped challenge key principles behind eugenics: miscegenation laws, legal segregation, sterilization statutes, and immigration restrictions. Yet, Eugenic Nation stunningly traces the cultural continuities in "better breeding" that refuse to stay in the past. |
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| John McKiernan-González
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| University of Texas at Austin |
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ISSN 1939-8603
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