American Gothic

To explore that development, the program has recently launched a new initiative focusing on the eugenics movement, an attempt in the early 20th century to solve social problems by "eliminating inferior racial traits." The project’s centerpiece is the resource book Race and Membership in American History: the Eugenics Movement, compiled by Phyliss Goldstein and Alan Stoskopf, with assistance from Murphy.

An online instructional module and hands-on training workshops help middle and high school teachers weave the eugenics theme into existing history, literature and science curriculum.

Last summer at Bard College, which overlooks the Hudson River 90 miles north of Manhattan, Facing History conducted a five-day institute to discuss the movement’s impact on immigration laws and educational testing in the U.S. and Nazi racial policies in Germany.

Sandy Simpson drove in from Boston, where she teaches social studies at Dorchester High School. Christina Peterson flew in from Cleveland, where she teaches English at Euclid High School. Sarah Goodman rode the train up from Manhattan, where she teaches biology at the New York City Museum School.

A total of 23 teachers made the trip, eager to resume the challenging dialogues they had shared at some of Facing History’s introductory institutes on the Holocaust and human behavior.

At Bard they spent the better part of a week familiarizing themselves with the eugenics movement and exploring ways to discuss it with their students. As Murphy explained at one of the first sessions, the term "eugenics" (from the Greek for "good in birth") was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, an English mathematician and a cousin of Charles Darwin.

Galton hoped to redeem the theory of Social Darwinism, an appropriation of Darwin’s work that had mistakenly predicted that the peasant class, lacking the wealth and intelligence to survive, would dwindle over time.

Noting instead the rapid population growth among the poor, Galton saw measures to promote "breeding the best with the best" — in the manner of animal husbandry — as a civic duty.

He wrote:

Eugenics cooperates with the workings of nature by ensuring that humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.

Galton’s notions were slow to catch on in most of Europe. In the United States, however, the onset of the Progressive Era in 1890 created a more receptive climate, as leading activists and intellectuals introduced a broad range of ideas about human betterment.

Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Jacob Riis, Jane Addams, Walter Lippmann and many others resisted the eugenics argument in their work to end lynching, improve urban housing, eliminate sweatshops, curb child labor and promote women’s suffrage. But some — including Alexander Graham Bell, Theodore Roosevelt and birth control advocate Margaret Sanger — embraced various aspects of the movement.

Mark Swaim-Fox, who led the Facing History institute on eugenics with Murphy, evoked the spirit of the times with a modest representation of the 1904 World’s Fair, which drew 20 million visitors to St. Louis in seven months.

Wearing a boater hat trimmed in red, white and blue, he beckoned the 23 curious teachers into a classroom festooned with images of the event. Photocopies taped to one wall showed the Great Corn Palace and the Palace of Machinery, monuments to the nation’s agricultural and industrial prowess.

Another wall held images contrasting "primitive" Igorot people with other Filipinos who had come under the "civilizing" influence of the American military after U.S. occupation of the Philippines in 1898 during the Spanish-American War.

Still more images showed scenes from the Pike, a mile-long carnival where visitors could buy a new-fangled ice cream cone, watch a belly dancer or witness a reenactment of the Boer War. (Swaim-Fox, a former social studies teacher who works in Facing History’s Cleveland office, found most of the images at a Web site about the history of imperialism.)

The festive atmosphere of the display extended to real popcorn and lemonade. When the teachers sat down to critique the images, many noted that the event, while billed as a World’s Fair, plainly celebrated American culture at the expense of all others.

And they marveled at how readily people in the United States and Europe took up the "White man’s burden," the self-serving notion that it was their moral duty to conquer and "civilize" people with darker skin.

These notions of cultural hierarchy, Murphy said, were legitimized by the dubious science of eugenics. In America, she noted, Galton’s ideas about regulating human reproduction were taken up by Charles Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist who founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910.

He and his staff compiled hundreds of pedigree charts in an effort to prove that alcoholism, criminality, insanity, poverty and prostitution were inherited tendencies. To eliminate these traits, he called on immigration officials to screen newcomers at the nation’s ports and proposed that "agents in Europe" study the family histories of each applicant for naturalization.

Despite its flawed assumptions, Davenport’s work struck many as common sense. It became standard fare in high school and college textbooks and inspired a series of tests to measure intelligence and identify "the unfit," who were often institutionalized and sometimes sterilized.

Meanwhile, at state fairs, households competed against one another in "Fitter Family Contests," with prizes going to those who came closest to the popular, northern European ideal. In many states, anti-miscegenation laws still barred Blacks and Whites from marrying one another.

And placards urged, as late as 1930, that "Only healthy seed must be sown!" The federal government did little to temper the mood of superiority and exclusion.

In fact, with the Immigration Act of 1924, Congress set quotas for each country of origin based on population figures from 1890 — just before a wave of newcomers, including many Jews, began arriving from Eastern Europe. (The Chinese had it worse; between 1882 and 1943 they were barred altogether from entering the United States.)

President Coolidge set further restrictions the following year. Even the Supreme Court bought into the idea of weeding out the unfit in its 8-1 Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, which upheld a Virginia law allowing the sterilization of individuals thought to be genetically defective.

The court did not reverse its decision until 1972, after the sterilization of more than 65,000 people nationwide. Even then, U.S. policymakers continued to promote the practice through population control programs in India, China and many other countries, as well as in some American territories.

At Bard, Murphy showed La Operación, a 1982 documentary about how these policies led to the sterilization of one of every three women — all of them American citizens — in Puerto Rico. Now it is China, with its coercive one-child policy, that most clearly manifests the legacy of the early eugenicists.

Catastrophically, the American eugenics movement helped pave the way to the Holocaust by conferring scientific legitimacy on claims of racial superiority and thereby vindicating the rise of the Nazi Party. As Murphy and Swaim-Fox explained, German scientists and policymakers paid close attention to the work of Charles Davenport and his colleagues at the Eugenics Record Office.

After Germany’s defeat in World War I, German scholars such as Fritz Lenz, Eugen Fischer and Erwin Bauer became increasingly intent on putting their theory of "racial hygiene" into practice by building a "racial state."

To that end, they and their like-minded peers translated books by American eugenicists into German, engaged in joint research with their American counterparts, and awarded honorary degrees to Americans like Harry Laughlin, one of Davenport’s colleagues.

Moreover, Lenz, Fischer and Bauer drew heavily from their American peers in writing their Outline of Human Genetics and Racial Hygiene, a 1921 tract that in turn shaped many aspects of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

All of these events and more are covered in Race and Membership in American History, which includes excerpts from personal letters, public speeches, newspaper articles, court rulings and other sources, with commentary and discussion questions. The book also quotes from biology textbooks, showing what high school students learned about eugenics in the first half of the 20th century.

Alan Stoskopf’s foreword urges teachers to approach these readings with a critical eye. "While barely remembered today, the eugenics movement represents a moral fault line in our history," he writes.

"It was a movement that defined differences in terms of racially superior and inferior human traits. Because these ideas were promoted in the name of science and education, they had a dramatic impact on public policies and the lives of ordinary people at the time and, in turn, created legacies that are still with us today.

"The eugenics movement is not a historical footnote. It is a fundamental chapter in our history that ought to be examined in our classrooms."

Facing History’s Web site offers many practical ways to explore this material. Teachers and students can view timelines of the eugenics movement in America and its influence in Nazi Germany.

They can read about key players and even take the "Beta test," a series of images shown to Army recruits who could not read or write English in an attempt to measure intelligence. The site also directs users to helpful print, video and Web resources.

For instance, a link to the Image Archive on the American Eugenics Movement opens a trove of primary texts and images about Davenport’s research, marriage laws, immigration restrictions and the popularization of the eugenics movement.

At Bard, the teachers periodically broke into small groups to devise classroom projects. On one occasion Christina Peterson, who teaches at Euclid High School just east of Cleveland, teamed up with Christine Gonet, who teaches social studies at Magnificat High School, a Catholic school for girls in a leafy suburb just west of the city.

They began batting around different ways to ask students to envision an ideal community, a topic that was on the minds of many people during the Progressive Era — and led some to espouse eugenics.

Soon the conversation turned to the differences between Euclid, a large public school where students pass through metal detectors each morning to ensure safety, and Magnificat, where the girls wear uniforms to keep the focus on schoolwork.

Then Peterson and Gonet hit upon the idea of a student exchange. After having their students review the rules governing each school, Peterson son would bring her class to Magnificat and Gonet would bring hers to Euclid. Together the students could discuss the different visions their schools aspire to.

By posing a historical question — what is the ideal community? — in a contemporary context, the teachers hope to forge a dialogue that might span racial and socioeconomic divides.

"I want our students to ask whether Cleveland is the ideal community," said Peterson. "I want them to ask how it’s divided racially, and how we can make it better."

While the Cleveland contingent was busy hatching its plan, Sarah Goodman, the Manhattan biology teacher, paired off with Javier Bastos, who teaches science at New Mission High School in Boston. Together they sketched out a timeline showing how definitions of race have shifted over time.

They began in 1758 with Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish naturalist who divided humans into four distinct groups: Africans, American Indians, Asians and Europeans.

They added any entry for Petrus Camper, the German artist-turned-anatomist who argued that beauty (which he defined according to the facial angles found in classical Greek statues) went hand in hand with moral and intellectual worth.

They penciled in Johann Blumenbach, the German anthropologist who classified people as Caucasians or members of one of four "degenerate" groups: Negro, Mongolian, Malay and American Indian.

And they entered the names of Samuel Morton, the Philadelphia physician who tried to correlate skull size and intelligence; Franz Boas, the German-born anthropologist who tried to separate race from notions of inferiority and superiority; and Francis Galton.

Moving on through the 20th century, they finally came to the Human Genome Project, which recently found that all people share 99.9 percent of the same DNA and that genetic differences are greater within each race than between races.

Then Goodman did something quite clever, extending the timeline a few inches to the right and marking a point at the year 2020.

Bastos fleshed out the idea: "We ask our kids, ‘If we define race today as a purely social construct with no grounding in science, how will we define it in 2020? Will it continue to hold such social significance, long after its scientific value has been disproved?’"

Goodman, who teaches a genetics unit with her 6th and 7th grade biology classes, smiled with satisfaction. "I’m definitely going to use this," she said. "I’ll have the kids fill in the definitions. I could ask them to show how much scientific evidence it was based on and what arguments these people made. I could even say, ‘If you were alive at that time and had to debate someone like Linnaeus or Galton, what counter-arguments would you make?’"

When she and Bastos presented their timeline to the entire group, Goodman spoke about the use and misuse of science. "This material can help students see the difference between what science is supposed to be and what it became," she said.

"It’s supposed to be about theories that are based on evidence. We can challenge them, and they change over time as we learn more about them. But in the eugenics movement, you see science becoming dogma."

It was not an idle thought for Goodman, whose students spent 14 days last year exploring an exhibit on "The Genomic Revolution" at the American Museum of Natural History. Indeed, despite the scant attention it receives in most schools, the eugenics movement grows more topical each day.

Recent developments in genetic research already make it possible for many couples to take steps to ensure that they have healthy babies, and who can blame them? But before long, affluent families may be able to select individual genes and produce a class of "designer babies" born for success.

What’s more, like the dystopian society in Minority Report, we may soon wrestle with the power to eliminate people who, although innocent, appear to be genetically predisposed to crime, disease and other social ills.

That’s where Facing History might help. By encouraging students to explore the moral dilemmas of the past, the program underscores the need for civic participation and responsible decision-making.

"Our goal with this curriculum is not just for students to learn history," says Karen Murphy. "It’s to give them a way to connect it to themselves and the choices we make today."