By examining the professional lives of two popularizers of eugenic thought from the 1910s to the 1940s, this study illustrates the broader change from “mainline” to “reform” eugenics in the United States. Roswell Hill Johnson's university teaching, laboratory research, and later marriage counseling work contrasted greatly with George Seibel's forays into eugenic theater, moral reform, and mass physical fitness movements. Yet both men shifted from a strict position of mandating other people's behavior in the name of national health and racial integrity to a more therapeutic stance that cast individual decisions in the context of managed family life. This study shows that for some, the transformation of eugenics in the 1930s meant adapting the traditional focus on superiority, inferiority, and reproduction by design to the language of a commercial marketplace.
Michael Mezzano , "The Progressive Origins of Eugenics Critics: Raymond Pearl, Herbert S. Jennings, and the Defense of Scientific Inquiry ," Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era4 (January 2005): 96; Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell, eds., Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s ( Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006 ), 3; Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and
2.
the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 40; Erica Bicchieri Boudreau, " `Yea, I Have a Goodly Heritage': Health versus Heredity in the Fitter Family Contests, 1920-1928," Journal of Family History30 (October 2005): 385. See also Sarah C. Holmes, "Re-examining the Political Left: Erskine Caldwell and the Doctrine of Eugenics," in Evolution and Eugenics in American Literature and Culture, 1880-1940: Essays on Ideological Conflict and Complicity, ed. Lois A. Cuddy and Claire M. Roche (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2003 ), 240-58; Edmund Ramsden, "Social Demography and Eugenics in the Interwar United States," Population and Development Review29 (December 2003), 551-52. For an example of a historical study that argues for eugenics' demise in the 1930s, see Leland L. Glenna, Margaret A. Gollnick, and Stephen S. Jones, "Eugenic Opportunity Structures: Teaching Genetic Engineering at U.S. Land-Grant Universities since 1911," Social Studies of Science37 (April 2007): 281-96.
3.
Thomas M. Shapiro , Population Control Politics: Women, Sterilization, and Reproductive Choice (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985), 34-36. See also Molly Ladd-Taylor, "Saving Babies and Sterilizing Mothers: Eugenics and Welfare Politics in the Interwar United States," Social Politics4 (Spring 1997): 142-43; Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press , 2005), 155; Roswell Hill Johnson [hereafter RHJ], "The Evolution of Man and Its Control," Popular Science Monthly76 (1910 ): 56.
4.
Molly Ladd-Taylor , "Eugenics, Sterilization, and Modern Marriage in the USA: The Strange Career of Paul Popenoe," Gender & History13 (August 2001): 299. Ladd-Taylor makes a similar case for Paul Popenoe's work as a continual effort from the 1910s through the 1970s, without a drastic change of heart in the 1930s. The fact that Popenoe was Johnson's friend, colleague, and ultimately, employer underscores the way in which like-minded eugenics promoters collaborated on popularizing techniques during the period.
5.
Academy of Science and Art of Pittsburgh, By-Laws (1903), in Science and Technology Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; Academy of Science and Art of Pittsburgh, Bulletin, December 1911, January 1912, April 1912. On the national eugenics movement in the United States in the early twentieth century, see William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana : University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Philip R. Reilly, The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 12-70.
6.
Carnegie Institution of Washington Yearbook ( 1906), 89.
7.
RHJ and Jessie McIntire Gregg, "Three New Psychometric Tests," Pedagogical Seminary19 (June 1912): 201-3; Ordover , American Eugenics, 11; RHJ, "Evolution of Man ," 53; Pittsburgh Sun, March 6, 1922. Johnson's work in both oil geology and eugenics was not unusual for those publishing in eugenics journals. The first issue of the American Eugenics Society's journal Eugenics (October 1928) featured work by gynecologists, psychologists, a geologist, a professor of child care, a climatologist, a zoologist, a clergyman, and a sociologist .
8.
Report of the Chancellor to the Board of Trustees of the University of Pittsburgh, 1912-1913; University of Pittsburgh, "Courses in Eugenics, 1913 ," B:D27, Ser. 2, Charles B.Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society. Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement ( New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 74, notes that the 1912-1913 academic year was the first in the United States to feature a core group of eugenicists delivering lectures on eugenics. Most "hoped to educate their audiences about the need for eugenic standards in marriage." By the late 1920s, more than 350 American colleges offered courses in eugenics, mostly taught by biology, sociology, or home economics faculty. See Christina Cogdell, Eugenic Design: Streamlining America in the 1930s ( Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 104.
9.
RHJ, " The University of Pittsburgh," Eugenics2 (August 1929): 20; RHJ, "A Technique for College Teaching," School and Society39 (June 16, 1934): 767; Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 8, 1913.
10.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 12, 1913; Three Plays by Brieux ( New York: Brentano's, 1911).
11.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Dispatch, September 28, 1913, October 5, 1913. Theater historian Katie Johnson argues that Damaged Goods touched such a nerve in the United States in 1913 because it tapped into the social purity campaigns alive in many cities and also elevated the prostitute fatale into a new and alarming prominence. Suddenly, the poor streetwalker had the ability to devastate a man's body, his family's purity, and his nation's health. Katie Johnson, "Damaged Goods: Sex Hysteria and the Prostitute Fatale," Theatre Survey44 (May 2003): 45-46.
12.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 12, 1913 , October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Dispatch, September 28, 1913.
13.
Ethel Watts Mumford, "The Woman of It," Harper's Weekly, October 25, 1913, 18; Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 5, 1913. The men in the audience, wrote Mumford, were "lean, blond, nervous, and small."
14.
Pittsburgh Post, September 28, 1913, October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, September 28, 1913; Pittsburgh Dispatch, September 28, 1913. Bregg further instructed readers of the Gazette-Times that the subject of venereal disease had factored into respectable drama before the twentieth century, in Henrik Ibsen's Ghosts and the plays of Shakespeare . See Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 12, 1913, October 14, 1913.
15.
"Report and Recommendations of Morals Efficiency Commission ," (Pittsburgh, 1913) 27; Rudolph I. Coffee, "Pittsburgh Clergy and the Social Evil," Survey29 (March 8, 1913): 815. Seibel's career before the 1910s had revolved around local cultural affairs. At the age of twenty-two, he edited the Youth Journal, a current affairs magazine distributed in Pittsburgh public schools. From 1896 to 1911, Seibel worked as the literary and Sunday editor of the Pittsburgh Gazette-Times . See Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 12, 1913.
16.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 5, 1913 , October 9, 1913, October 12, 1913, October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Post, October 19, 1913.
17.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 12, 1913 , October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Post, October 12, 1913; Academy of Science and Art of Pittsburgh , Bulletin (December 1912).
18.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 14, 1913 , October 19, 1913, October 22, 1913; Pittsburgh Post, October 12, 1913.
19.
Pittsburgh Gazette-Times, October 14, 1913 , October 19, 1913, October 21, 1913. When Bregg reviewed the play in its second week, he politely suggested that "the public interested in eugenics will find in it support put forward under the thoroughly inoffensive guise of play acting." His criticism earned him the ire of Seibel's supporters. At the midpoint of the play's run, Bregg reported that he was "not going to quarrel with [Seibel] or give any of his friends an opportunity to quarrel with me." See Pittsburgh Gazette-Times , October 19, 1913.
20.
Pittsburgh Dispatch, October 19, 1913; Pittsburgh Post, October 12, 1913.
21.
This exchange is found in Johnson to McCormick, December 15, 1916; McCormick to Johnson, December 18, 1916; Johnson to McCormick, December 21, 1916; McCormick to Johnson, December 26, 1916 ; and Johnson to McCormick, January 4, 1917 ; Box 4, Folder 31, Correspondence, 1915-1918, Papers of Samuel Black McCormick, UA RG 2/10, 1904-1920, Archives Service Center, University of Pittsburgh [hereafter McCormick papers].
22.
Johnson had written, three years earlier, "The appeal for large families is of use only when directed especially to persons of superior ability, as from the innately inferior the fewer children the better." See RHJ, "Evolution of Man," 66.
23.
Johnson's eagerness to engage with the public is also demonstrated by his professional memberships, which ran the gamut from national scientific associations to local clubs. Most of them revealed his drive to reach a lay audience and influence the world beyond the academy. His charter membership in the Authors' Club of Pittsburgh, for example, emphasized his status as an author with a readership, as opposed to a scientist with peers. The club's constitution, which Johnson co-drafted in May of 1918, stressed the establishment of "helpful relations with the Community and the General Public." He served as the founding president of the Pittsburgh section of the American Statistical Association in 1921. See "First Informal Meeting of the Authors' Club of Pittsburgh, 16 March 1918" and May 1918 Constitution, Authors' Club of Pittsburgh Records, Miscellaneous Materials, MFF# 385, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; and "Miscellaneous Notes," Quarterly Publications of the American Statistical Association 17 (March 1921): 654.
24.
Thomas C. Leonard , "Protecting Family and Race: The Progressive Case for Regulating Women's Work," American Journal of Economics and Sociology64 (July 2005): 759; RHJ to Samuel Black McCormick, June 4, 1918, McCormick Papers.
25.
RHJ, " The Malthusian Principle and Natural Selection," The American Naturalist46 (June 1912): 372; Report of the Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, 1917; Report of the Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh, 1919 ; Ordover, American Eugenics, 8.
26.
RHJ, " To Urge the Good to Marry," Literary Digest48 (March 28, 1914): 693-94; RHJ , "Mate Selection," manuscript dated January 1923 , Science and Technology Department, Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh; RHJ, "Eugenics and Mormonism," Eugenics1 (November 1928): 6; RHJ, "The Use of the Median as a Minimum Requirement for International Migration," Scientific Monthly20 (March 1925 ): 255; RHJ , "Marriage and Birth Rates at Bryn Mawr," Eugenics2 (September 1929): 30.
27.
RHJ, " The Distribution of Wealth as a Eugenicist Sees It," Social Hygiene7 (July 1921): 256; RHJ , "Mate Selection." Johnson used this framework to consider World War I. He recommended an end to exemptions for men with curable diseases and defects and those who were "merely dull-minded." These men, "whose loss would be less felt," served the nation by keeping their superiors out of immediate danger. Furthermore, Johnson suggested that men trained in any kind of craft or profession should not be drafted into service "as long as there [was] plenty of material possessing physique, courage, and the fighting spirit." By the 1930s, he suggested that Phi Beta Kappa membership should constitute an automatic exemption from the most dangerous segments of military service. RHJ, "The Eugenic Aspect of Selective Conscription ," Scientific Monthly9 (July 1919): 15-17; RHJ , "Eugenics and Military Exemptions," Journal of Heredity8 (August 1917): 360; RHJ, "Well-Born Children ," The Survey66 (April 1, 1931): 36.
28.
RHJ, " The Distribution of Wealth as a Eugenicist Sees It," Social Hygiene7 (July 1921): 258-59; RHJ , "Is Eugenics Racial Snobbery? Does It Condemn Whole Peoples?" Eugenics2 (February 1929): 21.
29.
RHJ, " Sterilization: Its Legality, Need," Eugenics: A Journal of Race Betterment3 (May 1930): 180; Edward A. Ross, The Old World Is the New (New York: Century, 1914), 134, cited in William H. Tucker , The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 60; Paul Popenoe and RHJ, Applied Eugenics (New York: MacMillan , 1918), 138-39; RHJ , "The Distribution of Wealth as a Eugenicist Sees It," Social Hygiene7 (July 1921): 262. Popenoe, one of the most prominent popularizers of eugenics in the first half of the twentieth century, founded the American Institute of Family Relations and edited the Journal of Heredity .
30.
RHJ, " Marriage Selection," Journal of Heredity5 (March 1914): 104, 110; Birth Control Conference resolution cited in Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003), 137; RHJ , "Eugenics and `Chaste Wedlock,' " People1 (April 1931): 9.
31.
RHJ, " Eugenics and Mental Variations" (speech at the American Association for Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality, October 3, 1912); Ian Robert Dowbiggin, Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 203; Ordover, American Eugenics, 12; Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell , Cultural Locations of Disability ( Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 78. See also Nicole Hahn Rafter, ed., White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1977-1919 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988), 10.
32.
Under Pennsylvania's Lunatic Asylum Act of 1883, legal guardians, relatives, or friends could place the insane, "unteachable idiots, epileptics, paralytics," or those "otherwise so disabled or deformed as to be incapable of labor or service" within state-run institutions. For the Pittsburgh district, the Dixmont Hospital for the Insane (renamed the Western Pennsylvania Hospital in July 1907) housed those committed for less than a year, while the State Asylum for the Chronic Insane in Wernersville held people deemed insane for a period longer than a year. The Wernersville complex featured workshops built to put inmates to work as a means of partially paying for their "maintenance." As the specter of mentally impaired women became a leading issue in the state, the legislature acted further. In 1913, Pennsylvania law-makers earmarked $40,000 for the construction of a mental hospital designed for women from sixteen to forty-five years of age. The Pennsylvania Village for Feeble-Minded Women was erected on state reserve land, removed from the congestion and influences of urban areas. Ward Bonsall, ed., Social Laws of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Associated Charities of Pittsburgh, Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity , 1914), 44-52. Johnson agreed with a combination of incarceration and regular labor as a means of removing such figures from the mating pool while also contributing nominally toward their sustenance. He even noted that visits to such prisons would make ideal field trips for undergraduate sociology students. See RHJ , "A Technique for College Teaching," School and Society39 (June 16, 1934): 766.
33.
RHJ, " The Use of the Median as a Minimum Requirement for International Migration ," Scientific Monthly20 (March 1925): 255; A.F. Tredgold, "The Feeble-Minded- A Social Danger," The Eugenics Review1 (July 1909): 101; RHJ , "The Inheritance of Personality," Education61 (June 1941): 597; Thomas C. Leonard, " `More Merciful and Not Less Effective': Eugenics and American Economics in the Progressive Era," History of Political Economy35 (November 2003): 693-94; Popenoe and Johnson, 139; RHJ , "Evolution of Man ," 66; RHJ , "The Malthusian Principle and Natural Selection ," The American Naturalist46 (June 1912): 375-76. Johnson claimed that the working class viewed children as "a means of profit within ten or fifteen years."
34.
"Commercialized Vice in Pittsburgh," Survey36 (May 27, 1916): 215-16; Theodore MacFarlane Knappen, " Tempering Justice with Common Sense: Pittsburgh's Experiment with a `Morals Court,' " Harper's141 (July 1920): 211; "Pittsburgh's Court of Morals," Literary Digest70 (September 3, 1921): 33; "New Morals Court in Pittsburgh," Survey (September 7, 1918): 640.
35.
Bulletin [Pittsburgh], October 4, 1913 ; Annual Catalogues of the University of Pittsburgh, 1908 and 1910; Civic Club of Allegheny Country Monthly Bulletin, October 1932, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Bulletin Index [ Pittsburgh], January 18, 1947.
36.
Annette R. Hofmann, "Lady Turners in the United States: German American Identity, Gender Concerns, and Turnerism," Journal of Sport History27 (Fall 2000): 384-86; "Changing the Vorot," Turner Topics1 (March 1937): 4. Turner membership nationwide was 20,845 in May 1937. See Turner Topics1 (May 1937): 4.
37.
Eric L. Pumroy and Katja Rampelmann, Research Guide to the Turner Movement in the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1996), xix ; Turner Topics2 (September 1937): 3; George Seibel, "A City That Might Have Been," The American Mercury28 (March 1933): 329; George Seibel, "Going Back-And Why ," The Nation109 (October 11, 1919): 493. Dolores Hoyt notes that Turner libraries featured strong collections in "popular, rationalistic science" that reflected the group's secular view. Lynn Couturier has shown that other physical fitness organizations, such as the American Association for the Advancement of Physical Education, were leading promoters of race betterment in the first quarter of the twentieth century. The association considered physical education techniques as means of broaching such topics as mind-body symbiosis, sex hygiene, mate selection, resistance to disease, and degeneracy. See Dolores J. Hoyt, A Strong Mind in a Strong Body: Libraries in the German-American Turner Movement (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 64, 99; Lynn Couturier, "The Influence of the Eugenics Movement on Physical Education in the United States," Sports History Review36 (2005): 28-30.
38.
Turner Topics1 (August 1936): 4; Annette R. Hofmann, "Transformation and Americanization: The American Turners and Their New Identity," International Journal of the History of Sport19 (March 2002): 109-10; Turner Topics1 (July 1937): 1-2.
39.
Adolf Varrelmann , "Turners Have an Advantage over Sport Fans ," Turner Topics1 (March 1937): 7.
40.
Turner Topics1 (October 1936): 4; Turner Topics1 (December 1936): 6; Turner Topics1 (October 1936): 6; George Seibel, "The New Duty of Parents and Teachers," Turner Topics1 (April 1937): 1.
41.
Turner Topics1 (April 1937): 8; Turner Topics2 (September 1937 ): 6; "Changing the Vorot," 4. Although Turner chapters were more than mere social clubs, their monthly activities in the 1920s and 1930s emphasized alcohol consumption. It is important to distinguish the Turner project from earlier bodily reform movements that emphasized strict dietary regimes, abstention, and rigorous physical culture. For examples of the social lives of Turner chapters in the Pittsburgh area, see Meeting Minutes, 1920-1940, Records of the Monongahela Turners, 1894-1945, MSS #232, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania.
42.
Turner Topics1 (April 1937): 8; Turner Topics2 (September 1937 ): 6; "Changing the Vorot," 4; Bulletin Index [ Pittsburgh], January 18, 1947: 21; Turner Topics1 (July 1937): 1-2.
43.
"News and Notes," The American Journal of Sociology39 (May 1934): 854; Pittsburgh Record, December 1934, 27; American Journal of Sociology (December 1934): 517; Philip S. Platt, "Honolulu's Hull House," Hygeia19 (December 1941): 969; " Child Hygiene, Palama Settlement," American Journal of Public Health (1932): 768; Warren S. Nishimoto, "The Progressive Era and Hawaii: The Early History of Palama Settlement, 1896-1929," The Hawaiian Journal of History34 (2000): 181.
44.
RHJ, " Eugenics and `Chaste Wedlock' " 7.
45.
Ordover, American Eugenics, 14; Leonard Darwin, review of Applied Eugenics by Paul Popenoe and RHJ, Eugenics Review9 (July 1919): 76; Gregory Michael Dorr, "Assuring America's Place in the Sun: Ivey Foreman Lewis and the Teaching of Eugenics at the University of Virginia, 1915-1953," Journal of Southern History66 (May 2000 ): 277.
46.
RHJ, " Eugenics and So-called Eugenics," American Journal of Sociology20 (July 1914): 102; Sharon L. Snyder and David T. Mitchell, Cultural Locations of Disability (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 85; Wendy Kline, "A New Deal for the Child: Ann Cooper Hewitt and Sterilization in the 1930s," in Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s, ed. Susan Currell and Christina Cogdell (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 19; RHJ, "The Inheritance of Personality," Education61 (June 1941): 593. Kline explains the shift as an attempt to gain scientific legitimacy by acknowledging the popularity of the social work framework.
47.
RHJ, " The Eugenic Aspect of Population Theory," Eugenics3 (September 1930): 331; RHJ to Samuel Black McCormick, January 15, 1917, McCormick papers; RHJ , "An Experiment to Determine the Relative Roles of Heredity and Environment in Human Behavior," School and Society35 (June 4, 1932 ): 764.
48.
Ernest R. Groves, "The Family," The American Journal of Sociology36 (May 1931 ): 994; American Institute of Family Relations, "Preparing for Marriage" ( Los Angeles, 1938); Paul Popenoe, quoted in Ralph P. Bridgman, "Guidance for Marriage and Family Life," Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science160 (March 1932): 159. Johnson taught occasionally at Occidental College and the University of Southern California (a course on the biology of family relations) while working for the AIFR. "News and Notes," Marriage and Family Living4 (August 1942): 65.
49.
RHJHelenRandolph, , and Erma Pixley, Looking toward Marriage ( Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1948), 43-51.
50.
RHJ, " Divorce, from the Racial View: What Is the Eugenical Ideal?" Eugenics3 (October 1930): 385; Stern, Eugenic Nation, 154.
51.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, December 3, 1929. For biographical material on Seibel and Johnson, see Bulletin Index [Pittsburgh], January 18, 1947: 23; Minutes of the 79th Convention of the Pittsburgh District of the American Turners, May 16, 1943, Box 2, Records of the Rochester Turners (Pa.), 1895-1990, MSS #233, Historical Society of Western Pennsylvania; Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph , April 25, 1947; New York Times, July 27, 1958.
52.
Steven Selden , "Transforming Better Babies into Fitter Families: Archival Resources and the History of the American Eugenics Movement, 1908-1930 ," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society149 (June 2005): 212.
