In 1935, as the Nazis’ state-of-the art eugenics exhibition from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum was concluding its American tour, a decision had to be made about whether to return the displays to Germany or to house them in an American museum. After the American Academy of Medicine decided against the display because of its political implications, the director of the Buffalo Museum of Science, Carlos Cummings, himself a physician, offered his institution as the exhibition's permanent home. “What is the astounding eugenics program upon which Chancellor Hitler has launched the German people?” Cummings wondered aloud. “As a matter of public interest, without endorsement,” he added, “the Museum will display in the Central Hall throughout this final quarter of 1935, a set of fifty-one posters and charts . . . which gives Americans a graphic explanation of Germany's campaign to rear in posterity ‘a new race nobility.’” Seven years later, with war raging, the museum received permission from the company that had insured the exhibition, to dismantle it from its permanent home in the museum's Hall of Heredity.Footnote ¹ An exhibition about eugenics, Nazi eugenics no less, that had been enthusiastically received as it had traveled the United States in the mid-1930s, had seemingly fallen victim to the war against eugenics launched by cultural anthropologists and geneticists. In light of the broad scholarship on eugenics, this certainly would be a plausible reading of the deinstallation of the Nazi eugenics exhibition. But the three books under review here suggest a more complex reading, one that suggests that eugenics and racism, considered as ideological systems, were less easily dislodged from American culture than from Buffalo's Museum of Science.

From pathbreaking scholarship by Mark Haller, Daniel Kevles, and Charles Rosenberg, among others, we know a great deal about the rise of eugenics and scientific racism.Footnote ² In the context of the Darwinian Revolution and efforts to think about the implications of Charles Darwin's theories for human beings, Francis Galton, Darwin's cousin, coined the word “eugenics” in his Inquiries into Human Faculties and Development (1883) and described his new word in the following terms. Eugenics, he explained, addressed

Galton and his followers not only struggled with the vocabulary of eugenics; they struggled over strategies for applying the “science of race betterment,” as eugenics came to be called, to human beings. Some, like English socialist Harold Laski, urged “positive” eugenics (encouraging the racially fit to become more prolific); others, like birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger, urged sterilization of the unfit, or “negative” eugenics. By the First World War, eugenicists of both stripes were gaining a broad following in the American public and credibility in political circles. Then, in 1924, American eugenicists achieved what was arguably their supreme achievement, passage by Congress, with the help of their expert testimony, of 1924 Johnson-Reed (National Origins) Act, which placed racially based quotas on immigration to the United States that would last until the 1960s.

The books under review here underscore what recent historians have been saying about the depth and breadth of support eugenics had in the United States before the Second World War.Footnote ⁴ By treating eugenics less as an intellectual system and more as a system of beliefs and values, these authors pose an interesting challenge to understanding the decline of eugenics. The standard argument goes something like this: as eugenics became more politically powerful, as evidenced by the National Origins Act, eugenicists encountered stiff crosswinds from cultural anthropologists and geneticists that by the end of the Second World War, if not before, derailed the scientific legitimacy of the eugenics train. True, some eugenicists could and did claim an affinity with Hitler's scientists, but not without opposition as anthropologist Franz Boas and his students and geneticist Thomas Henry Morgan led the charge and forced what Elazar Barkan has called “the retreat of scientific racism” that, in the aftermath of revelations about the Nazi eugenics experiments, turned into something of a rout. By 1952, when UNESCO generated The Race Concept: The Race Question in Modern Science, eugenics and scientific racism had lost much of whatever credibility they had left. But the books under consideration here suggest a less sanguine conclusion, one that may lead one to believe that Faulker had it right when he said in Requiem for a Nun (1951), “The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.”

For Spiro, Wolff, and Pascoe, eugenics and racism are about ideology—ideas and culture enmeshed in a system of beliefs, values, and practices—that could not be easily displaced by either new scientific knowledge or by the discovery of hideous practices by the Nazis. What once seemed like a rather abrupt change in both intellectual and popular attitudes towards eugenics and race now seems far more gradual and even incomplete. The authors agree with Edwin Black's point in War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race that the victory declared by the social and biological sciences over eugenics was never as total as it seemed. Indeed, by exploring the scientific, artistic, and legal contexts for eugenics, the authors have identified cultural aquifers of eugenics thought and feeling that are not so far removed from the surface of American political culture at the start of the twenty-first century.

In Defending the Master Race, Jonathan Spiro builds on the insights of Ronald Rainger's An Agenda for Antiquity: Henry Fairfield Osborn and Vertebrate Paleontology at the the American Museum of Natural History, 1890–1935,Footnote ⁵ and sets his sights on big game, Madison Grant, one of America's preeminent white supremacists and eugenicists. Grant's major publications, including Passing of the Great Race (1916), are relatively well known, but his life story has never received much attention. Born in 1865, in New York City, with an ancestral pedigree that pegged his own gene pool to the founding of the Puritan Colony, Grant was educated by private tutors at home and through extensive travel in Europe. On one of his trips as an adolescent, he became perplexed by the realization that European deer antlers were getting smaller over time—a real puzzle that seemed contrary to his understanding that the natural world was evolving stronger types of mammals. After graduating from Yale, he returned to Manhattan where he joined other members of his class in heritage-worshiping clubs and worrying about the impact of immigrants on American society and their own dwindling numbers. Through his social contacts, he joined the Boone and Crockett Club, where he struck up friendships with George Bird Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt and shared their deep concerns about the dwindling number of “trophy” game animals. Grant, however, was not just a worrier; like Roosevelt he was a doer. With his wealth and contacts, Grant became one of the prime movers behind founding the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium, and multiple other projects tied to big-game preservation, including bison refuges that saved the American bison from extinction. By the turn of the century, Grant had a commanding reputation as one of America's foremost conservationists—indeed, any history of the American conservation movement that omits his seminal role would likely be one that Spiro would regard as badly flawed.

The hub of Spiro's argument turns on this point: Just as American elites worried themselves sick about the degeneration and ultimate extinction of iconic, rare, and trophy mammals and the loss of their natural habitat, so they worried about the fate of best-of-breed humans. And, just as elites, like Grant, provided the organizational and funding bases for the new discipline of wildlife management, so they provided the organizational and funding impetus for the American eugenics movement to end alleged racial degeneracy through both “positive” and “negative” means. The point of connection between thinking of humans in the same terms as animals, Spiro speculated, was made by MIT economist William Z. Ripley in a 1908 lecture at one of Grant's many clubs. “Is it any wonder,” Ripley asked with respect to the immigration of Jews to America, “that the serious students contemplate the racial future of Anglo-Saxon America with the same concern? They have witnessed the passing of the American Indian and the buffalo. And now they query as to how long the Anglo-Saxon may be able to survive” (96). By 1910, as Spiro explains, Grant came up with a solution. He

Or, as Spiro puts it elsewhere: while “he [Grant] was embracing John Muir with one arm, he was embracing fascism with the other” (59).

This dual embrace was anything but a private affair. In fact, it took place in a very public setting, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), which, by the early 1920s, had gained an international reputation for its mastery and promotion of eugenics doctrine. The centrality of the AMNH for eugenics became clear in the Second International Congress of Eugenics, organized and hosted by the museum in 1921 with funding arranged by Grant; Henry Fairfield Osborn, the museum's director; and Charles Davenport, who ran the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Springs Harbor (which was underwritten by Mary Harriman, widow of railroad builder E. H. Harriman, and John D. Rockefeller Jr). The conference drew hundreds of attendees and papers by many authoritative scientists, including geneticist Sewall Wright and physiologist Hermann J. Muller, a future Nobel laureate. No less compelling were book displays featuring, of course, Grant's The Passing of the Great Race and Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920). Equally important were the museum exhibits organized by Henry Laughlin, one of Davenport's protégés, about the dangers of immigration. Seen by thousands of New York City schoolchildren, the exhibits would travel to Congress, where they became visual aids offered in support of winning passage of the National Origins Act.

Grant did not stop with his efforts to end immigration of “undesirables.” Erecting barriers against immigration was only the first step towards addressing the problems for racial purity that Grant believed were caused by sexual relations between people of allegedly different races already in the United States. On this count, Grant found an ally in Dr Walter Plecker, Virginia's Registrar of Vital Statistics, a passionate racist who was bent on revising and enforcing Virginia's antimiscegenation laws. After consulting with Grant, Plecker wrote the Bill to Preserve Racial Integrity that prohibited marriage between whites and blacks and became law on the same day as Virginia's Sterilization Law, just weeks before the National Origins Act became the law of the land.

As powerful and authoritative as the eugenics movement became, it also had its critics, like Franz Boaz, who, by the mid-1930s, were chiseling away at the intellectual foundations of eugenics and paving the way for the full-scale assault by intellectuals on eugenics after the Second World War. What is most interesting in Spiro's account, however, has less to do with his treatment of eugenics’ foes than with his documentation of its allies. Many prominent figures in American life joined the movement. Birth-control advocate Margaret Sanger and popular illustrator N. C. Wyeth fell under Grant's spell. So did Sanger's second husband, J. Noah Slee, whose 3-in-One Oil Company smuggled vaginal diaphragms into the US in 3-in-One Oil cans. Black nationalist Marcus Garvey and Madison Grant, Spiro argues, were “mirror images” (260), with Grant going so far as to encourage his closest associates to spur on Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement and Conservation Association (Spiro's italics) and its plans to deport African Americans back to Africa.

If the relationship between Garvey and Grant is disquieting, the hand-in-glove relationship between Grant—and all that he stood for with respect to racism and sterilization—and the Save-the-Redwoods movement in California is positively jarring. In 1931, the California State Park Commission honored Grant for all of his work in saving California's redwood forests by dedicating the Founders Tree, “the world's tallest known tree,” to Grant, Osborn, and John C. Merriam, a member of the Eugenics Records Office and head of the National Research Council. These men, all eugenicists, pooled their financial resources and their social and financial networks to make possible the purchase of acres of old-growth redwoods by the state in order to save them from certain destruction. Some have been offended by the plaque at Founders Tree honoring Grant and his fellow racists and have demanded that it be removed. But as Donald Murphy, an African American and director of the California Department of Parks and Recreation, told one critic in 1991,

The potentially explosive issue of whether there should be a separate plaque identifying Grant and his cofounders and their interest in promoting both racism and conservation is left unsaid both by the park official and by Spiro.

Far from being on the margins of American intellectual history during the Progressive Era, Madison Grant emerges from the pages of Spiro's book as cosmopolitan, eclectic thinker who influenced many fields of thought. Considering Grant as a public intellectual, determined to institutionalize his ideas in both public policy and cultural institutions, may be unsettling, but Spiro provides abundant evidence for evaluating him in this light.

Peggy Pascoe's What Comes Naturally shifts the context of race betterment ideology to the overlay between ideas about racial categorization and law. To be clear, Pascoe's book is less about eugenics per se than about miscegenation, a term coined in 1863 by Democratic opponents of Abraham Lincoln's reelection who tried to paint Lincoln as a proponent of interracial sex. Drawing on David Roediger's insight that the term “miscegenation” derives from “miseg,” signifying the mixture of race or family with “nation,” Pascoe shows how preoccupations with race, gender, and sexuality structured the reconstruction of the nation after the Civil War. Much of her analysis turns on her assessment of an evolving body of legal theory and practice that, by 1939, banned all of the following groups from marrying whites: “Negroes, Mulattoes, Quadroons, Octoroons, Blacks, Persons of African Descent, Ethiopians, Persons of Color, Indians, Mestizos, Half-breeds, Mongolians, Chinese, Japanese, Malays, Kanakas, Coreans, Asiatic Indians, West Indians, and Hindus” (119).

Why, within a generation of the end of the Civil War, could American thinking about national destiny become so fixated on “race mixture”? In part, Pascoe suggests, postwar thinking was an outgrowth of laws passed during the antebellum period that banned sexual relations between blacks and whites in both the North and the South. But, most interestingly, she shows how state courts, which became increasingly committed to expanding white male privilege, ruled in favor of legalizing marriages between white men and black women. There existed, Pascoe suggests, “a moment when it might have been possible to remove racial dividing lines from American marriage law” (45). But, and this point is crucial to her argument, southern states before the end of Reconstruction began making interracial sex synonymous with illicit sex and, in almost the same breath, began defining interracial sex as a greater “offense” than fornication between sexes of the same race. This line of thinking culminated in the 1883 Supreme Court decision Pace v. Alabama that effectively criminalized interracial sex until 1964, when McLaughlin v. Florida overturned Pace's precedent-setting stature.

Interestingly, in the same year that the Supreme Court was writing its unanimous decision in Pace, Galton was writing his brief for eugenics. With their imaginations fired by the doctrine of racial purity, white supremacists looked to the institution of marriage as the centerpiece for securing the nation's racial destiny. Not surprisingly, given Galton's reputation as a statistician, his American disciples began turning to “vital statistics”—birth, death, and marriage records—to enforce racial purity laws. Walter Plecker's role in this movement to limit marriage to “white persons” has already been discussed, but Pascoe makes two points that are worth remembering. First, Plecker's influence came “not from lobbying for laws but from designing the administrative procedures to carry them out” (144). More precisely, Pascoe explains, “Plecker developed a fiendishly bureaucratic solution to the perennial problem of proving race” (141) by insisting that bureaucrats under his supervision gather massive amounts of data about the racial ancestry of persons whose statistics were deemed “vital” by the state. Second, Virginia's Racial Integrity Act, with its “one-drop” rule, would remain on the books until the Supreme Court's 1967 ruling in Loving v. Virginia. Eugenically based legislation and its bureaucratic infrastructure, in other words, would last for decades in the United States, making the appearance of Franz Boas on the 11 May 1936 cover of Time magazine (Spiro, 326), seem less a turning point than an exception that tested the rule of eugenics and eugenics-based legislation in the United States into the late twentieth century (not until the year 2000 did Alabama voters end their state's constitutional ban on interracial marriage).

Pascoe ends her book on a cautionary note, emphasizing that it is just

Pascoe is surely right in this judgment, but the “hegemonic power of the racial state” was more even pervasive than she suggests, especially in the world of state-sponsored educational testing, as Leila Zenderland has demonstrated in Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. By the 1930s, social scientists and geneticists may have been hard at work eroding the theoretical basis of racism and eugenics, but the broader institutional structures engendered by these ideologies sheltered and enabled public policies that would persist to the end of the twentieth century.

Another source of support for eugenics and so much racist thinking also came from the arts. It is interesting to note how, in much of the standard literature on eugenics, artists receive so little attention. Canonical studies in scholarship about eugenics were driven by a passion for understanding how the social sciences could have gotten so much so wrong about race. But social scientists, as Tamsen Wolff makes clear in Mendel's Theatre, had plenty of company in some of the world's great playwrights. George Bernard Shaw, she writes, “was an ardent eugenicist” (41) who drew sustenance from some of England's most established race-betterment figures and corresponded regularly with Karl Pearson, one of Galton's chief adherents. In the United States, Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill came under the spell of eugenics in The Verge and Strange Interlude respectively as they explored the intricacies of heredity, bloodlines, and fate. Broadway also got into the eugenics act with Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern's Show Boat, which, Wolff argues, “possesses a trajectory in which ideas of familial heritage, reproduction, national identity, and progress are tied to the inexorable displacement of African American bodies and history” (176). At issue in Show Boat was the gradual erasure of the “hard-to-identify mulatto” (182) character, Julie, whose very presence seemed to reflect the warnings by eugenicists that what made people of mixed racial ancestry so dangerous was their ability to “pass” in white society and debase whites through their alluring sexual qualities. By the end of the show, Julie has faded from view—indeed, her exit, according to Wolff, is tantamount to a suicide, an ending perfectly in keeping with the prevailing views about how “race mixture” would lead inevitably to “feeblemindedness.”

The value of theatre for advancing eugenics ideology was not lost on eugenically minded social scientists. In 1913, Victor Branford, who along with Patrick Geddes founded the Sociological Review and heaped praise on the University of London for establishing a chair in eugenics, wrote a piece, “The Eugenic Theatre,” urging eugenicists to “cultivate the dramatic mood” (111) to convey their message more effectively. In fact, eugenicists had anticipated Branford's encouragement. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Eugenics Records Office crafted “Mendel's Theater,” a miniaturized stage contained within a neoclassically designed white box, which utilized dolls and pictures to educate eugenics field workers about how skin and hair color are inherited. What Wolff underscores in her assessment of eugenics stagecraft is how eugenicists “repeatedly turned attention toward the spectator and away from the actor, except as a body to be read” (61). In other words, eugenics productions were not about audience reaction so much as about audience participation. And this is exactly what occurred in the “fitter families contests” that travelled the nation's fairs in the 1910s and 1920s. Each of these eugenic reality shows centered on families exhibiting themselves—and their ancestry—to judges who awarded the winners with trophies sometimes bearing the names of leading politicians.

Equally important were propaganda plays produced by various eugenics organizations. ERO educator Harry Laughlin wrote a 1912 play, Acquired or Inherited, complete with a character named “Eugenie Traveller,” a eugenics fieldworker who gives advice to an indecisive man about whether to marry a woman who is more “fit” than another. But this was only the warm-up act. In 1914, to promote the eugenics exhibits at the upcoming Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, the Race Betterment Foundation of Battle Creek, Michigan produced Redemption: A Dramatic Representation of the Great Truths for Which the National Conference on Race Betterment Stands. With over two hundred performers, Redemption played to around six thousand people during its run in the Civic Center Auditorium in Oakland, California. Three years later, Hollywood got into the act with The Black Stork, a widely circulated film that, according to one advertisement, took as its mantra “Kill Defectives, Save the Nation.” If the Black Stork, which extolled the virtues of sterilization, was a paean to negative eugenics, Cheaper by the Dozen, written in 1948 to extol the virtues of efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their dozen children, and made into a film in 1950, promoted the message of positive eugenics, especially the need for racially fit, modern women, to reproduce in greater numbers and to put their trust in scientific management principles to run their families.

Wolff does not spend much time on film and this will likely trouble some reviewers. But her book is centered on theatre for a reason. Over the past couple of decades, a significant body of scholarship has developed in performance studies dedicated to showing how subaltern groups, through performance and ritual, have made meanings for themselves that have challenged dominant ideologies. “I look at this side of the theatre–eugenics connection,” Wolff writes, “in part to rethink the tendencies in performance studies, one of the newer offshoots of cultural studies, to romanticize theatre as primarily a site of subversion.” In performance studies, she adds, “Contemporary accounts of theatre and performance are dominated by narratives of resistance in which theatre triumphs over the social evils of conservatism and conformity” (7–8). Indeed, for Wolff, the birth of modern theatre is inseparable from its role in staging plays laden with eugenic ideology. Yet Wolff does not reduce playwrights like O'Neill to mindless propagandists. Strange Interlude, she argues, “helped to contribute to the circulation and recognition of various eugenic ideas, but also, significantly, emphasized the contradictions within those ideas” (165). How omnipotent are genetic traits? What exactly do bloodlines determine? O'Neill's answers may have been ambivalent, but his willingness to raise these questions in terms framed by eugenics underscored the degree to which he rightly believed his audiences were similarly conversant with them.

Each of these books expands our knowledge of the widespread circulation of racism and eugenics ideology in American culture. For Wolff, it is clear that eugenics permeated modern theatre. For Spiro, eugenics saturated the birthing room of the modern conservation movement. For Pascoe, eugenics ideology is never far removed from the bureaucratized state's efforts to gain control over marriage for much of the twentieth century. Taken together, these studies offer important insights into how ideas about race functioned authoritatively in American culture both before and after the Second World War. Equally important, these studies raise interesting questions about how historians come to terms with what is more or less unseen in a nation's culture.

What Eugene O'Neill understood was how much cultural—and imaginative—space had been seized by eugenics. For instance, as Wendy Kline and Gray Brechin have shown, much of the sculptural arrangements at the 1915 San Francisco fair were guided by race-betterment beliefs.Footnote ⁶ And these beliefs were carried forward into the 1930s, as Christina Cogdell has argued in Eugenics by Design, by America's foremost industrial designers, including Raymond Loewy, who believed “[e]ugenic selection may bring generations so aesthetically correct” that human bodies could be designed to accommodate clothes produced by fashion designers.Footnote ⁷

It is precisely the durability of eugenics in the currents of American thought and culture—what Daylanne English terms “paradigmatic modern American discourse”Footnote ⁸—that should give pause today in a world where new scientific discoveries and technologies offer scientists—and states—enormous potential to manipulate genes and brains in ways of which Francis Galton and Madison Grant could only have dreamed. With world population soaring, with frightening anti-immigration screeds again saturating the American political landscape, and with angry debates polarizing the public about the definition of marriage, one might do well to reflect on the proximity of the past and how, not so long ago, doctrines of “race betterment,” sometimes embedded in programs seemingly intended to improve women's and children's health, threatened the foundations of American pluralism.

Historians are accustomed, especially since Michel-Rolph Trouillot's work, to working with silences.Footnote ⁹ Invisibility, however, is another matter. Interestingly, invisibility is a problem that constantly disquieted eugenicists. For all of their science and pseudoscience, eugenicists could never be completely at ease because there was no sure way to ferret out “defectives” lurking among “normal” people. As Wolff points out, eugenicists flattered themselves that “the trained eye does not stop at instantaneous detection of the visible traits of living, present people, but can also ‘see’ the traits of the dead or absent” (82). But how could one “see” these traits? The same held true for race. How could one be sure about race simply by looks? For a bureaucrat, like Plecker, as Pascoe explains, the fact that alleged racial differences “were not always visible” (141) was particularly vexing and led to his preoccupation with gathering racial data as part of the state's vital statistics.

Eugenicists may have had problems making racial “traits” visible. But they had no trouble making themselves visible, gaining allies within and beyond the sciences, and skewing public policy on immigration and marriage for generations. With the help of these marvelous books, we are getting closer to understanding the centrality of eugenics for twentieth-century American culture and to understanding why, with the rapid medicalization of life in the twenty-first century, scientists, policy-makers, and the public need to be reminded of the not-so-distant past.