Eugenics and the Clergy in the Early Twentieth‐Century United States

Introduction When I tell people that I have spent a considerable amount of time doing work in the disciplines of both religion and biology, they almost always ask, "What do you think of evolution?" They are, of course, referring to the controversy that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between the disciples of Darwinian evolution and those advocating Biblical literalism (Marsden 184-95). Yet during roughly this same period, an analogous (if less well remembered) encounter took place between the liberal churches of the day and the science of evolutionary biology. This was the encounter of liberal Christianity and eugenics. In this article, I examine the following questions: How did American churchmen and the eugenicists view each other? What role, if any, did the clergy play in the American eugenics movement? Finally, what caused the eventual termination of this relationship? Some background is called for first. The word "eugenics" was coined by English scientist Francis Galton in 1883. Galton defined the term as the science of improving racial stock through giving "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable" (Kevles ix). However, eugenic notions had existed in America even before Galton's definition; as early as 1863, Horace Bushnell had made hereditarian references in his bestselling Christian Nurture (Bushnell 195-96, 202-03). Eugenic theory and practice also occurred in John' Humphrey Noyes's perfectionist Oneida commune. As early as 1848, Noyes had written that "amativeness" should "have its proper gratification without drawing after it procreation as a necessary consequence"; he further argued that men and women should be able to control their fertility until "science takes charge of the business." Noyes later read both Darwin and Galton; finally, between 1869 and 1880, he presided over a eugenic breeding program that he called "stirpiculture" (Oneida Community 52; Parker 254-55). By the turn of the century, eugenics began moving out of avant-garde reform circles and into the realm of both professional and popular science. In 1903, for example, the American Breeders Association formed for professional breeders and university biologists. By 1906, the group had a eugenics committee, with membership including such notables as biologist and Stanford University Chancellor David Stair Jordan, inventor and audiologist Alexander Graham Bell, University of Chicago sociologist Charles R. Henderson, plant breeder Luther Burbank, eugenicist Roswell Johnson, Stanford biologist Vernon Kellogg, and zoologist and eugenicist Charles B. Davenport. Popular articles on eugenics also began appearing in magazines such as Good Housekeeping and Popular Science Monthly. Books aimed at popular audiences bore titles such as The Task of Social Hygiene (1913), The Right to Be Well Born (1917), and Racial Hygiene (1929).1 What one may ask, what was the goal of eugenics? What was it about eugenics that caught the attention of Americans during this period? If we examine the literature produced during the period from roughly 1910 to 1930, we find that the eugenics movement was concerned with more than simply breeding better physical specimens of humanity. Instead, eugenics provided a worldview in which the value of anything-be it a physical object, a social structure, a philosophy, or an individual-could be determined according to the degree to which it furthered the cause of the race, primarily through enhancement of the society's gene pool. Eugenics thus served as a catch-all philosophy for many different social reforms, both conservative and liberal. Most eugenics sympathizers appear to have favored immigration restriction on the grounds that it diluted good puritan racial stock, or that it made America a dumping ground for dysgenic (that is, eugenically unfit) rejects from other countries (Popenoe and Johnson 298-317; Geothe 6-9). …