Daniel Goldberg International Eugenics, Racial Hygiene, and Public Health

OK,

so we'll be talking today about international eugenics, racial hygiene and public health, with a focus on thinking about eugenics as a global movement. A lot of people, when we think about histories of eugenics and their connection to the Third Reich and the Holocaust, we tend to think about it either in an American context or in a German context, right, as part of the Third Reich. But eugenics is really a global movement, and that's most important.

And

tomorrow morning,

we

will focus a little bit more on the American manifestations of that. But for this talk in particular, for these sort of 10 to 15 minutes, what we're really going to be talking about is sort of the modern history of eugenics as a global phenomenon, basically. Right. So next slide, please.

So. The

most important thing to understand about eugenics is that by the 1920s, centers and institutions were devoted to eugenics and they had been established all over the world. Right. So eugenics has its roots in early to mid 19th century. Right. So really in the back half of the 19th century, between 1850 and 1900, in particular, is where we really start to see eugenics rise.

It reaches a zenith, probably in the first quarter of the 20th century, right, and then extending into the 1930s and in part because as we get further into the 1930s, in part because of its increasing association with the Third Reich, it starts to taint the field of eugenics a little bit so that by the time we exit World War Two, 1945, 1960, eugenics has this sort of irredeemable taint because of its association with the Third Reich. But that's really important to understand that that's the tale. That's not really the beginning of it. Right. Even well into the 1930s. Right.

It

was actually quite popular. In fact, this famous image is known as the eugenic tree. Right. And this was actually used in international congresses of eugenics that were held in New York in I think it was 1921 and I think maybe 1934 as well. Right. So so actually still pretty popular in the US well into the 1930s and really was only later in the 1930s that it starts to become a little bit tainted. Right. So it's this global phenomenon. It's a movement. Right. And historians of eugenics are pretty clear about that. It's not one thing. It's almost like an international, a transnational movement.

And

so sometimes historians who study histories of eugenics, particularly in a Western context, they will refer to transatlantic eugenics

in

particular.

Right.

Thinking about the crossings and the flows. Right. As opposed to just thinking about it particularly as an American phenomenon or as an English phenomenon. Right. Or as a German phenomenon is actually all of those things. And of course, it was other places. Eugenics was very popular in Australasia. It was popular in Japan. It was actually quite popular in Latin America. There's actually some recent work that's been done on eugenics in Latin America. It looked a little different than eugenics did in the way we think about it now. But it was really a global phenomenon and it had support and money and resources being poured into it sort of all over the planet.

Make

sense. OK. So

thinking

about the connections between racism and biological essentialism and eugenics. Next slide, please. Right. So one of the things that I teach when we're sort of trying to unpack these connections between sort of racial hygiene movements and biological essentialism in particular is understanding the role that medical and scientific concepts actually played. Right. And so one of the things to understand is there's this really wonderful phrase and it comes from a woman named Dorothy Roberts.

So Dorothy Roberts is a black woman law professor and she's an expert on the history of racism in medicine, in particular, with a focus, at least originally on black reproductive health and black birthing people. And she has this really evocative phrase where she says racism came before race. Racism came before race. And what does that mean? Most of us would think intuitively we need these sort of stable categories of race. Right. And then we can start to judge people of different races as divergent or inferior on the basis of their racial categorization and their belonging. But Dorothy Roberts is actually picking up on something that historians of racism have actually shown us. Right.

Which is that racism in particular actually came first. Right. And we can trace it. There's a history of racism in particular. Right. And so I'm a historian of ideas. I'm really interested in how ideas sort of manifest and

what

what actual material effects they have on the world. These ideas of racism have a history. They didn't just sort of pop out. It's not like on the eighth day there was a racism. Right. People have treated people differently. That's not new. That's pretty much part of the universal human condition. Right. But sort of the modern history of racism has its own particular history. And what happens is we can really sort of start to trace these concepts to the beginning of the age of explorations, although Europeans, of course, it's a myth to say that they never had contact with black and brown peoples. That's always been false.

There's always been black and brown peoples who've had contact with Westerners and Europeans. Right. The sort of the numbers and the variety of the different kinds of peoples that Iberian, Spanish and Portuguese explorers in particular were finding had not really been seen in living memory before. And so what happened was the historians are very clear on this. These these people and the machinery and the enterprises that really backed them really needed a way to sort of justify what they were doing, the deprivation, the depredations that were going on in the age of exploration. They needed a way to justify it.

And so they look to develop these ideas, these sort of racialized ideas as a way of justifying the behaviors, the politics, the depredations that they were already engaging in. So actually, we get racism before we even really get stable categories of race. And the key for us in understanding this is that medical and scientific projects are core to the entire project. It's not just a limb on the tree of eugenics, the idea of racism and sort of stigma and discrimination that are connected to these bodies is really sort of fundamental to the whole thing. Medicine and science played a part in it.

And the key that most scholars who study this really sort of talk about is this idea of biological essentialism. That's really what you start to get with the sort of birth of it. So biological essentialism is just the idea that there is some embodied difference between different groups of people that can explain key differences between people, especially ideas of disease in particular. Right. So biological essentialism is something we'll probably be talking about most of the rest of our time here today and into tomorrow, because most scholars who study this think that biological essentialism is both very important and one of the sort of

stickiest

parts

when

we think about eugenics and racism in particular. Right. That we still have when we think about the health professions today, which is why we talk about it, but its core and it's fundamentally rooted in medical and scientific concepts. So most people would say, you know, how do we biologically essentialize people today? Well, sometimes we talk about genes, for example. Right. Well, they didn't have genes in the 1500s. What did they have? And what they had was blood.

Right.

And so the the original ideas, the Western ideas of biological essentialism that's being applied, particularly to black, brown, indigenous peoples on the planet is really sort of emphasizing this idea of blood as different kinds of blood, different properties of blood, different composition of blood, as a way of sort of differentiating between groups of people and judging sort of one group of people as inferior to another. Next slide, please. Right. And so

as

we sort of accelerate and you can see that book comes from a historian, named Suman Seth. So Suman Seth is really sort of tracing these ideas of difference and disease in an imperial context. So he's looking at the seventeen hundreds. He's pushing forward a little bit from the timing that we've talked about. But if you're interested in this idea of biological essentialism and the way it sort of operates, particularly with chattel slavery and empire in particular, Suman Seth's book is a good place to start.

And there's some other books I can recommend as well, that push us forward into our modern context, right, into the sort of eighteen hundreds and then late eighteen hundreds, early 20th century, where we really start to focus on the rise of the Third Reich and the international eugenics movement in particular. OK, so the other key point, and I'm guessing you all have sort of talked about this today when thinking about international eugenics. Next slide, please. Right. Is is that it is really connected to the emergence of nationalism in particular. Right. And so what I mean by that is eugenics is really a fundamental creature of the idea of the state. Right.

And so there's a really good book on this by probably the leading historian of eugenics in the country. Her name is Alexandra minister.

And

it's not an accident that the title of her book is eugenic nation.

Not

an accident. Right. So the key to understanding international eugenics. Right. Is that what it really did is it dissolved aspects of the private sphere.

It

dissolved aspects of the private sphere. So like family life. Right. Would be in a sort of early modern context, which is sort of pre eighteen hundred when we're talking about it. Right. It would be seen as

a

domestic sphere, at least parts of which rights are shielded from the machinery of the state. At least they're supposed to be. There's this private sphere and public sphere. And there's all sorts of interesting histories, for example, on how disease was thought of in a private context. And it would depend on your class, of course, if you were private lower class, that would be different than if you were private bourgeois middle class or private upper class. That would obviously be quite different. Right.

Right.

But international eugenics, it actually dissolved aspects of the private sphere. Right. So we get the rise of eugenics that coheres with the rise of nationalism in the 19th century, in particular, the real rise of the nation state in particular. And it's not an accident that we see these two sort of movements and ideas converging on an international scale. Right. Yes, it was true in the US. It was true in Germany, but it was true in lots of other places at the same time. And that the idea behind eugenics is that private families now have biological responsibility for national and racial betterment. Right.

So sort of breaking down those private public distinctions that people had always sort of been used to and had entertained for a long time. The international eugenics movement actually helped to sort of grade those lines, to actually dissolve them and to encourage families.

And

by the way, when I say families, everybody should know I'm disproportionately talking about mothers, right, in particular. Right. It is families. But of course, the burdens for this overwhelmingly fallen mothers here, you can probably start to see the beginnings of the connections between reproduction and reproductive health and the international eugenics movement. Again, not an accident. But all of that was really connected in important ways to the sort of coherence of the state and the national body. Right. And so this gave rise to what, if you've read Robert J.

Lifton's important work on the Holocaust, the idea of the bureaucracy, that's the ultimate culmination of this in the Third Reich. But the roots of it are actually much, much older. Right. At least 60, 70, 80 years older. And they're not peculiar to the Third Reich. That's the point.

Right.

This is an international phenomenon.

We

can see the same kinds of sort of national building, sort of nation building, a national self building being connected to these ideas of eugenics. It's rooted in the family and therefore the family becomes an instrument for protecting the nation from what Marius Torda, who's a leading scholar of international eugenics, Marius Torda has called biological and social deterioration. So a way of sort of building the nation and protecting the nation state becomes the responsibility of private families, disproportionately women, of course. And this is happening all over the planet. Right. So that's one of the key sort of phenomena that the eugenics movement really allowed people to do

is

to sort of think differently about the relationships between private and public. And the fact that this is a transnational movement and it's happening everywhere, all over the planet, despite wildly different conceptions of private and public is really testament to the power of eugenicist thought and eugenicist thinking that endured for a while. Right. I mean, we're talking about at least 120 years at this point. Right.

So I

think we're two slides ahead, by the way. Right. So one of the keys to understand is that eugenics actually crossed all boundaries. Eugenics crossed all boundaries. Right. And so what do I mean by that? So so Marius Torda refers to it this way, that eugenics was an instrumental part of global modernity. We cannot tell the story of how we became modern. And again, if you're looking for dates, the very crude date we can work with is eighteen hundred. Right. That's crude. It's obviously much more complicated than that.

But we really start to see, you know, if you think back to your high school history courses, your high school civics courses, you know, the rises of industrialization and urbanization that happened over the 19th century. You know, we can see that transition from the early modern to the modern state happening, you

know,

sort of the late seventeen hundreds into the early eighteen hundreds in particular. And eugenics is an instrumental part of this march to sort of modernity across the globe. Right. It had everything to do with nationalism. It affected family relationships. It affected labor relationships. It obviously affected medicine and therapeutics. It affected science, how science was done. So really this global phenomenon that cut across geographies.

It

cuts across boundaries. It cuts across cultures. It cuts across religions.

Right.

So there's a wonderful scholar who's at Princeton now named Ayah Nureddin and Ayah Nureddin is a black Muslim woman. She's fabulous. And one of the things she's been working on is the history of eugenics within black freedom movements in particular. Right. And I mean, because for a lot of people, given what we think about eugenics and its association with the Third Reich, they're like, wait, what? There were black eugenicists. Right. And the answer is, yes, of course there were. There were Jewish eugenicists and black eugenicists. Right.

Eugenics was a global phenomenon that cut across all of these different kinds of things, which is really important for us thinking about it today, because we're so used to associating eugenics with right wing politics in particular, partly because of the Third Reich and Nazism. For good reason. We sometimes forget that there was a very prominent strain of left wing eugenics in particular. This was very powerful, especially in the U.S. And in particular, if you're interested in this, this is often the dark history of American progressivism in particular. Right.

And so history, the history of progressivism shows beyond a shadow of a doubt that there was a strain, a powerful strain of eugenics in American progressive movements. For

instance,

if you look at histories of birth control, which we are all talking about a lot right now in the U.S. for good reasons, histories of birth control are really left wing in many ways. It's about social reform. Right. Progressivism is about the use of science to sort of create a more just society. And eugenics was considered a key part of the science that would be used by people who would we would absolutely in every conceivable stretch of the word identify as leftist in their politics in both their time and ours. Right. So not even really judging it by our own standards in their own time.

They would have been judged as leftists, as socialists, as Marxists, basically, in particular as class and social reformers. We know that eugenics was a really big part of this. There's some really interesting work that's looked at eugenics as a social movement. Right. We tend to associate social movements with leftist politics today. And eugenics was its own form of social movement. And there's some interesting work that looks at social movement theory and it actually uses

eugenics

in early 20th century in particular as one of those social movements where you can trace the framework of social movement theory. It's sort of an unfortunate case study that shows how accurate some of these kinds of things can be. So really important to understand eugenics as a global phenomenon, one that crosses all boundaries. So one of the key things to understand, and Marius Turner talks about that, is I sort of think about it as we looked at the eugenics tree.

I

think the best way to understand international eugenics and epidemiology and its connection to genetics and public health is really thinking about it as the roots. Like you can cut off the tree and just have a stump if you want. But the roots of eugenics are powerful. Right. And so Marius Turner puts it this way. Eugenics is actually a floating signifier. That's the term you use. It's a bit of a Rorschach.

Right.

It means many and it meant many different things to many different people. Sometimes in its context, it was very clearly defined. Sometimes it was left unclear on purpose. Right. It was intentionally used as a signifier that could have meaning to many different kinds of people, which is not uncommon, by the way, for powerful ideas. When an idea becomes powerful and a movement, especially an international movement, builds around it. Right. People sometimes will purposely leave it unclear just as a way of harnessing the enterprise and the energy behind it as well. They will use it for whatever purposes they want. Right. And so that's, I think, critical to understanding sort of eugenics.

It's almost a polymorph right in its international context. OK, so I think that that is our presentation and we will stop sharing and stop recording. So I hope that was interesting for everyone.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.