In Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, Alexandra Minna Stern “seeks to explore continuities, permutations, and ramifications of better breeding in the United States that have been obscured; in so doing, [she] proposes a revised chronology, decenters the vantage point from which the story is often told, and excavates a set of topics that have rarely received more than a passing nod” (pg. 2-3). Stern continues, “As feminist scholars have shown, placing gender and sexuality at the center of the analysis reconfigures the history of eugenics, demanding substantial temporal and thematic revisions, and delineating a story that is at once more ordinary and more complex” (pg. 7). Stern “seeks to push the bounds of what has been considered eugenics, not to vilify but to raise questions about the extent to which medicine, biology, and the hereditarian impulse have shaped modern society” (pg. 18).
Beginning with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition’s focus on tropical medicine, Stern argues, “The formation and implementation of tropical medicine in the colonies bolstered the confidence of the Americans, who attributed their new-found vigor and mobility to their resilient racial makeup and the recalcitrance of certain ailments to the unhygienic customs of ‘primitive’ peoples lower down on the evolutionary ladder who did little or nothing to control pathogens” (pg. 41). Turning to Immigration and Naturalization Services’ quarantine procedures, Stern argues, “To a great extent, the pathologization of Mexicans represented an extension of the association of immigrants with disease into new racial and metaphorical terrain…By the early twentieth century, this xenophobic logic was being applied to Eastern European, Jewish, and Middle Eastern immigrants, all of whom were explicitly targeted by nativists in the 1920s” (pg. 67).
Examining California, Stern argues, “Eugenicists shaped modern California – its geography, inhabitants, and institutions – through agricultural experimentation, nature and wildlife preservation, medical intervention, psychological surveys, municipal and state legislation, and infant and maternal welfare” (pg. 84). She continues, “Nativism was no stranger to California, having migrated westward with many of the European Americans who colonized the Pacific Slope. At best, California nativism was a paradoxical brand of racial discrimination, applied by recent East Coast and Midwest transplants to peoples with generations-long connections to the region” (pg. 86). Further, “Eugenicists and restrictionists who wished to exclude Mexicans from the United States and sought to enact exceedingly low quotas against them constantly invoked the magic numbers of IQ and referred to psychometric surveys” (pg. 98). Stern writes, “The state’s aggressive attempts to control the procreation of committed person deemed insane, feebleminded, or otherwise unfit, as well as the clinical and ideological contributions of several ardent medical superintendents to sterilization procedures and policies, makes California stand out when compared to the rest of the country” (pg. 100). Looking at the connection to environmentalism, specifically through Charles M. Goethe’s work, Stern writes, “Fears of race suicide could simultaneously pertain to redwoods and Anglo-Saxon pioneers: both needed shielding and safeguarding and awaited biological regeneration based on the principles of scientific and hereditarian management…There is no denying that the apparition of eugenics sits restlessly at the heart of American environmentalism, revisiting periodically during debates over urban sprawl, immigration, and overpopulation” (pg. 148).
Turning to ideas of the family and the Johnson Temperament Analysis Test (JTA), Stern writes, “It was one of a burgeoning battery of tests that stretched psychometrics beyond intelligence into the domains of aptitude, personality, and vocation. Its underlying logic reflected and fostered the postwar revision of eugenics, as the door of strict hereditarianism opened up enough to let in various psychogenic and psychoanalytic explanations of human development and deviance” (pg. 152). In this way, “guided more by Malthus than Mendel, many eugenicists tended to blame racialized population subdivisions, principally those in the Third World, for resource depletion, skyrocketing fertility, and environmental degradation; more and more, the advocacy of sterilization was linked to the goal of population reduction, rather than to a recessive carrier rationale” (pg. 153).
In terms of pushback, Stern links much of the 1960s activism to ideas of eugenics. She writes, “Although this complex historical period should certainly not be reduced to a eugenic firestorm, it is nearly impossible to traverse the fraught intersections of race, reproduction, sexuality, and gender – all of which were flashpoints of the 1960s – without reckoning with eugenics, whether as residual scientific racism or as reconceived in the postwar era” (pg. 185). Finally, “uncovering further aspects of hereditarianism can enhance our understanding of subjects and processes as varied as the family, the state, sexuality, and race relations, especially in the period after 1940, when eugenic trajectories receded, continued forward, and splintered in competing directions” (pg. 210). ( )