Eugenics
The American Dream
and
The Great Gatsby
“There is today one state, in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception [of citizenship] are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the United States.”
(Adolf Hitler quoted from The L.A. Times)
Stirpiculture & Eugenics:
Eugenics in the 1800s
Stirpiculture - a term that predates eugenics, was likely used due to its association with the controversial Oneida Community, a utopian sect that practiced free love and reputedly only permitted its "superior" members to become parents. Popularized in 1888 by Victoria Woodhull's book: Stirpiculture: or the Scientific Propagation of the Human Race."
Eugenics -
a term coined in 1883 by Francis Galton simply meaning "well-born."
Anti
Immigrant
The views of Charles William Eliot and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. (whose images follow) aided the descendants of immigrants in keeping out new immigrants, as depicted in Joseph Keppler’s 1893 “Looking Backward,” from Puck.
Puck, January 11, 1893
Eugenics Laws
Indiana, 1907
Connecticut, 1911
Nazi Germany, 1933
Tom Buchanan in Gatsby, 1925
“‘Civilization’s going to pieces,’ broke out Tom violently. ‘I’ve gotten to be a terrible pessimist about things. Have you read ‘The Rise of the Colored Empires’ by this man Goddard?…Well, it’s a fine book, and everybody ought to read it. The idea is if we don’t look out the white race will be – will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved…This fellow has worked out the whole thing. It’s up to us, who are the dominant race, to watch out or those other races will have control of things…The idea is that we’re Nordics. I am, and you are, and we’ve produced all the things that go to make civilization—oh, science and art, and all that. Do you see?’“
Yale University
Speaking of Tom Buchanan:
“Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven — a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax.”
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
Oyster Bay, Long Island
The laboratory was:
1. THE center for studying and researching eugenics; specifically human heredity.
2. Located very near to the fictional areas of East Egg and West Egg
American and German eugenicists were in close contact with each other, especially after World War I: they were working together in international organizations, following and even reporting on developments in eugenics in each other's countries. The Germans did, in fact, borrow much of their 1933 Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Defective Offspring (the so-called 'sterilization law') from the model sterilization law drawn up for the various states by Harry H. Laughlin, Superintendent of the ERO, and a number of American eugenicists were impressed with the Nazi eugenics laws after 1933. But all of this has long been known and written about. So, despite the hype claiming that the book would unleash a bombshell of previously unknown findings, there is little that is new in Black's connections between US and German eugenics.
Popular Science Magazine, 1923
Eugenics is "Science"
The Eugenics Record Office (ERO) (1910-1939) was created as a department of of the Carnegie Institute of Washington Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor New York. It was founded by biologist and eugenicists, Charles Davenport (1866-1944) and was under the directorship of Harry Laughlin (1880-1943). The institute was funded by Mrs. Mary Harriman, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Carnegie Institution of Washington.
The ERO was an important centre for research of eugenics, human heredity, and a repository for genetic data. It had two goals: to study human heredity, and to educate Americans on the importance of eugenics and eugenic policy.
Buck v. Bell 1927
Buck v. Bell, 274 U.S. 200 is the United States Supreme Court ruling which upheld a Virginia law for sterilizing persons assessed as “socially inadequate” (Lombardo, 2008, p. 5). The case revolved around Carrie Buck, 18 at the time of the trial, who had been ordered sterilized after becoming pregnant illegitimately and institutionalized.
The court based its decision on expert testimony from Arthur Estabrook, a physician with experience at the eugenics records office in Cold Harbor Spring, New York. Estabrook did not re-apply the IQ test that Carrie had been given in the state home, stating instead that he had “talked to Carrie sufficiently” to arrive at his decision that she was "feebleminded."