Stepan. the Hour of Eugenics

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ~ 5

tween the fascist and prefascist periods.7 Second, it tempts historiansto avoid discussing the involvement of many other nations in theeugenic experiment. Intellectual practice further aids such avoidance.Historians of science, especially, have a strong tendency to dismissideas that later seem obviously biased or hopelessly out of date as“pseudoscientific” Calling eugenics pseudoscientific is a convenientway to set aside the involvement of many prominent scientists in itsmaking and to ignore difficult questions about the political nature ofmuch of the biological and human sciences.

In fact, one of the puzzles about eugenics is that, far from viewingit as a bizarre notion of extremists at the fringes of respectable sci-ence and social reform, many well-placed scientists, medical doc-tors, and social activists endorsed it as an appropriate outcome ofdevelopments in the science of human heredity. The success of theFirst International Eugenics Congress, held in London in 1912, sug-gested the potentially wide appeal of eugenics, with some 750 par-ticipants from several European countries as well as the UnitedStates. Two further international eugenics congresses followed in1921 and 1932 (both in New York). An International Federation ofEugenic Societies was founded in 1921 to coordinate the activities ofthe numerous national organizations and the various legal initiativesdeveloped since 1912. Eugenics had become so much a part of healthreform by the 19205 that a whole discursive field had been, in effect,“eugenicized” Eugenics had its critics, and many of its more ex-treme social goals and legislative ambitions failed to be met; yet thenotion that human individuals and groups varied in their hereditaryvalue and that one day, if not immediately, social policies should bebased on these differences was widely accepted in many countries asfundamentally correct.

In recent years, an appreciation of the ubiquity and even the “nor-mality” of eugenic themes and practices between the two world

7. Recent works on German eugenics, before and during the Nazi period, in-clude Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unyicationand Nazism, 1870-1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Robert N.Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 1988); Sheila Faith Weiss, “The Race Hygiene Movement in Germany, ” Osiris2d ser. 3 (1987): 193-236, and Race Hygiene and National Ejiciency: The Eugenics ofWilhelm Srhallmayer (Berkeley: University of Califomia Press, 1987); and PeterWeingart, “The Rationalization of Sexual Behavior: The Institutionalization of Eu-genics in Germany," journal ofthe History ofBiology 20 (1987): 159-93, and his “Ger-man Eugenics between Science and Politics,” Osiris 2d ser. 5 (1989): 260-82.

6 ~ “The Hour of Eugenics”

wars has led historians to reevaluate eugenics as a social and scien-tific movement. We are beginning to write the history of eugenicsprospectively rather than retrospectively, from the beginning for-ward, rather than from the end backward. In some respects it maybe more important to study eugenics in its non-Nazi forms, becauseNazi eugenics was so brutal, so excessive, and so terrifying that it istempting to view it as a historical aberration. We need to recapture“ordinary” eugenics and its social meanings. What made scientistsgive their support to ideas and practices that later would seem notonly scientifically unsupportable but immoral? Why were over sev-enty thousand individuals in the United States sterilized involun-tarily for eugenic purposes? How did the ordinary eugenics of the19208 and early 19308 become the extraordinary eugenics of NaziGermany?8

As a topic of study, eugenics offers the historian an opportunityto examine the relationships between science and social life-howsocial life structures or influences actulal developments in heredi-tarian science, and the uses to which hereditarian science may beput. Eugenics has the further advantage of being contemporary andyet historical: contemporary in that the problems of erecting socialpolicies on the basis of new knowledge in the field of human ge-netics and reproductive technology are especially pressing today, yethistorical in the sense that the eugenics ofthe pre-1945 period can beviewed as a relatively closed phenomenon of the past on which wecan gain some perspective.”

Here the study of Latin American eugenics acquires its signifi-cance. As I have already stated, even our best studies make no men-tion of Latin America.‘° This omission Would matter little if We

8. Recent works on American and/or British eugenics include ,Kevles, In theName of Eugenics [note 2]; G. R. Searle, Eugenics and Politics in Britain (Leyden:Woordhofi 1976); Donald A. McKenzie, Statistics in Britain, 1865-1930: The SocialConstruction of Scientific Knowledge (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1981);Greta jones, Social Hygiene in Twentieth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm,1986).

9. Some people argue that current reproductive technologies and knowledgeabout genetics involve implicit eugenic issues and decisions that link the present tothe past; others maintain that social and policy issues are difficult but not related toeugenics-that is, they do not involve differential breeding ofhuman populations toimprove overall genetic fitness.

IO. Other Latin countries whose eugenics movements show a family likeness tothe Latin American are France, Spain, and Italy. French eugenics, which has animportant bearing on Latin American eugenics, has been analyzed recently by Wil-liam H. Schneider in Quality and Quantity: The Quest jinr Biological Regeneration in

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ° 7

were assured that eugenics always had the same meaning whereverit was found. But meaning, in science as in any other facet of intel-lectual and cultural life, is never stable. Instead of using priof defini-tions to exclude novel examples from eugenics, we should extendour historical accounts and, in so doing, probe more deeply the sig-nificance of eugenics to modern history. As a region, Latin Americais especially rewarding for the analysis of the kinds of themes I haveoutlined. It was Western in outlook and orientation, yet not merelyan imitation of Europe; American, but not North American; “thirdworld” in its poverty, inequality, and dependency but not uniformlypoor and similarly dependent across the spectrum of Latin Americancountries; ethnically and culturally complex, and the site of troub-ling racist ideologies; culturally Catholic and deeply shaped by tradi-tional gender ideologies, yet not immune to the pull of secularismand modernity. Then, too, the region was involved in nationalistself-making, in which the setting of boundaries between self andother and the creation of identities were increasingly carried out byand through scientific and medical discourses."

Twentieth-Century France (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990); see alsohis chapter in The Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia,ed. Mark B. Adams (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 69-109. TheFrench historian jacques Léonard has contributed some useful articles: see “Le Pre-mier Congres Intemational d’Eugénique (Londres, 1912) et ses conséquences fran-caises,” Histoire de Sciences Médicales I7 (1983): 141-46, and “Eugénisme et Darwin-isme: Espoirs et perplexités chez des médecins francais du XIXe siecle et du début duXXe siecle,” in De Darwin au Dam/inisme: Science et idéologie, ed. Y. Conry (Paris:Vrin, 1983), pp. 187-207. On Spanish eugenics, see Raquel Alverez Palaez, “Intro-duccién al estudio de la eugenesia espanola (1900-1936),” Quipu: Revista Latino-americana de Historia de las Ciencias y la Tecnologia 2 (198 5); 95-122; “El Instituto deMedicina Social: Primeros intentos de institucionalizar la eugenesia,” Asclepio: Re-vista de Historia de la Medicina y de la Ciencia, xl, I (1988): 343-58; and “Eugenesia ycontrol social,” Asclepio, xl, 2 (1988): 29-69. See also Mary Nash, “Ordenamientojuridico y realidad social del aborto en Espana: Una aproximacion histérica," inOrdenamiento juridico y realidad social de las mujeres: Siglos XVI a XX (Madrid: Semi-nario de Estudios de Ia Mujer, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 1986), pp. 223-39. One of the few accounts of Italian eugenics I have come across is Claudio Po-gliano, “Scienza e stirpe: Eugenica in Italia (1912-I939),” Passato e Presente 5 (1984):61-97.

II. I have analyzedaspects of the Latin American medical tradition in severalpublications: Beginnings of Brazilian Science: Oswaldo Cruz, Medical Research and Pol-icy, 1890-1920 (New York: Science History Publications, 1976); “Initiation and Sur-vival of Biomedical Research in a Developing Country: The Oswaldo Cruz Instituteof Brazil, IQOO-I920,” _joumal ofthe History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 30 (1975):303-25; and “The Interplay between Socio-Economic Factors and Medical Science:Yellow Fever Research, Cuba, and the United States,” Social Studies of Science 8

(1978): 397-423_

8 - “The Hour of Eugenics”

Latin American eugenics is of further comparative interest becauseLatin Americans were, to most eugenists situated outside the region,regarded as “tropical,” “backward,” and racially “degenerate” Noteugenic, in short. And yet Latin Americans had their own eugenicmovements and activities. How then was eugenics defined? Whotook it up and why? What social meanings got embedded in thescience of heredity between the two world wars? What did “race”mean in a movement for racial improvement? All these questions aretied to the larger issue of how a sector of the intelligentsia in LatinAmerica used the supposedly universal discourse of science to inter-pret modernity and progress.I originally began my investigation with eugenics in Brazil. Ifound that there was much about eugenics, in its science and in itssocial style, that seemed unusual. First, the eugenists based their eu-genics not on Mendelian conceptions of genetics, the dominantframework in Britain, the United States, and Germany, but on analternative stream of Lamarckian hereditary notions. This style ofeugenics reflected long-standing scientific connections with France

as well as more local factors of political culture; it also helped struc-ture debates about degeneration and determined how the new ge-netics and the sanitation sciences would interact in novel fashion in“eugenics ” If Brazilian eugenics was distinctive in its scientific base,it was also distinctive in its application to the critical areas of repro-duction and sexuality. In this first study I also began to explore howracial ideology in Brazil affected the way eugenics entered scientificdiscourse and social debate, and how eugenics became a source ofinterpretetive contention between various groups seeking to use eu-genics for their different political projects. Since that first explora-tion of eugenics in Latin America, I have widened my net to includeeugenics in several other parts of the region.”In the last decades of the nineteenth century, eugenics emerged asan idea in many areas of Latin America as part of the debates aboutevolution, degeneration, progress, and civilization. But its moresystematic development came after World War I, with the establish-ment of specific eugenics societies and organizations. Thereafter, eu-

12. Nancy Leys Stepan, “Eugenesia, genética y salud publica: El movimiento eu-genésico brasileno y mundial,” Quipu: Revista Latinoamericuna de Historia de las Cien-rias y la Tecnologia 2 (1985): 351-84; and “Eugenics in Brazil, 1917-1940, ” in Well-born Scienre [note IO], pp. IIO-52.

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ' 9

genics touched or influenced the history of medicine, the family,maternity, population, criminology, public health, and social wel-fare. Many legislative efforts concerning human reproduction, thecontrol of disease, and the regulation of immigration in Latin Amer-ica can be fully understood only by taking into account eugenic con-cepts, which at the very least gave them their rhetorical structureand their medical-moral rationale. Eugenics was significant becauseit occupied the cultural space in which social interpretation tookplace, and because it articulated new and compelling images ofhealth as a matter of heredity and race.

To enter the world of Latin American eugenics is to enter an un-explored area of human activity and political pressure and to dis-cover forgotten languages of science. Strange fields of knowledge,with such curious and now discarded names as “puericulture,” “ma-ternology,” “euphrenics,” and “nipology,” are brought back intoview and a semiological terrain is reconstructed and surveyed." Eu-genics was a discursive project that provided a framework for cul-tural prescription and medical-moral investigation. It is this projectthat my book seeks to elucidate.

Science, Race, and Gender

Before outlining the plan of the book, however, I need to intro-duce some major concepts and related theoretical orientations thatinform my empirical research. The concepts concern science, race,and gender, and my orientation to them is, broadly speaking, “con-structivist.” By drawing attention to these concepts and approaches,I believe We can rethink the meaning of eugenics as a social-medicalmovement of modern times.

First, I assume, along with many historians of science today, thatscience is a highly social activity and is not sealed off from the valuesof the society in which it is practiced. From the more traditionalconcern with the reconstruction of the internal coherence of major

I 3. Two contemporary accounts in French were M. T. Nisot, La question eugé-nique dans divers pays (Brussels: Librairie Faile, 1927), and Henri-jean Marchaud,L'é1/olution de l’ideé eugénique (Bordeaux: Imprimerie-Librairie de l’Université, 1933).A somewhat rare secondary (and late) account in Spanish by a Latin American is Ro-berto Mac-Lean y Estenos, La eugenesia en América (Mexico City: Instituto de Inves-tigaciones Sociales, Cuadernos de Sociologia, Imprenta Universitaria, 1952).

IO ° “The Hour of Eugenics”

theories in science, historians have shifted their attention towardmore sociological and/ or naturalistic views of science as a product ofculture and social life. Although interest in science as an internallyconsistent and internally driven kind of empirical knowledge has notdisappeared, many historians have begun to explore science contex-tually and to examine the way elements of society conventionallyconsidered external and only indirectly connected to science becomeconstituent parts of scientific theories themselves, as well as of theirassociated scientific practices.” As a result, science reveals itself asmuch more contingent and culturally specific than it has beenthought to be. This issue raises complex interpretive issues that can-not be gone into in detail here, but its application to an area of thehuman sciences like eugenics is clear.” Since eugenics was both ascience and a social movement, it lends itself to a constructivist ap-proach in which political and other factors surrounding the develop-ment and endorsement of particular genetic theories, and the socialpolicies derived from them, can be explored. The study of eugenicsallows historians to move from abstract notions about the poss-ible social generation of` scientific knowledge to more historicallynuanced, locally specific studies of science in culture. This is the wayI have examined eugenics in Latin America-first, as a science ofheredity that was shaped by political, institutional, and cultural fac-tors particular to the historical moment and place in which it ap-peared; and, second, as a social movement with an explicit set ofpolicy proposals that appeared to their proponents to be suggestedby, or be logically derived from, hereditarian science itself

14. A convenient way of dating the “new” history of science is from the appear-ance in 1962 of Thomas S. Kuhn’s book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 2d ed. 1972). Although Kuhn’s work was pri-marily intellectualist in emphasis rather than sociological, it did raise new questionsabout the sociology of knowledge. For a review of the new sociology of science,with bibliography, see Michael Mulkay, “Sociology of Science in the West,” CurrentSociology 28(3) (1981): 1-184; for an account ofthe new social history of science seeSteven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” History ofScience 20 (1982): 157-211; realist, constructivist, and contextualist approaches toscientific knowledge are reviewed and analyzed by Karin D. Knorr-Cetina in herbook The Manufzcture ofKnowledge: An Essay on the Constructivist and Contextual Na-ture of Science (London: Pergamon Press, 1981).

15. Some of the most interesting work in the sociology and social history ofscientific theory, however, has been done in the physical sciences; an example isAndrew Pickering, Constructing Quarles: A Sociological History ofParticle Physics (Chi-cago: University of Chicago Press, 1984).

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge - II

A corollary of the new constructivist history of science is thathistorians no longer conceptualize science as depicting “reality” inany straightforward or transparent fashion but rather as constructingor creating the objects it studies and giving them their empiricalweight and meaning. Genetics and eugenics, for example, createdand gave scientific and social meaning to new objects of study, suchas the supposed hereditarily unfit or “dysgenic” individuals orgroups that constituted particular human populations. In this sense,science is seen as a productive force, generating knowledge andpractices that shape the world in which we live. In this book, I ex-plore how, through the science and social movement associated withthe new field of genetics (a word coined in 1905), cultural meaningwas encoded within and by science. Science carries immense socialauthority in the modern world-an authority based on its claim tofacticity, neutrality, and universality. I hope to show how eugenics,perceived as a science, produced perceptions and techniques thatshaped cultural interpretations and led to the development of socialstrategies.

Closely connected to these issues of scientific interpretation is theissue of race. As a science of “race improvement,” some concept ofrace was of course built into eugenics from the start. At times “raceimprovement” meant merely the genetic improvement of “the hu-man race” or “our people”; more often, however, eugenists wereconcerned with particular portions of the human population, whichthey perceived as being divided into distinct and unequal “races.”Although no other eugenics movements went so far as the Nazis inexterminating races in the name of eugenics, most employed racistdiscourse as defined by Pierre-André Taguieff Groups self-identi-fied as dominant marked off other groups as inferior, through a lan-guage that asserted differences and created boundaries. These differ-ences were presupposed to be fixed and natural (e.g_, biological) andto limit each individual member to a fundamental “type.” As amovement derived from ideas about biological heredity, eugenicsprovided a new set of conceptions and political principles withwhich to express and constitute differences within the social body.”

I6. See Pierre-André Taguieff “Racisme et antiracisme: Modéles et paradoxes,”in Racismes, antiracismes, ed. André Béjin and julien Freund (Paris: Librairie des Mé-ridiens, 1986), pp. 253-302, and his book La jbrre du preyugé: Essai sur le rarisme et sesdoubles (Paris: Editions la Découverte, 1988), esp. chaps. 8 and 9.

I2 “The Hour of Eugenics”

Eugenics was connected to another set of differences, those of sexand gender. Histories often mention that eugenics was related towomen, but usually more in passing than as a central theme. Thisomission is surprising, since the novelty of eugenics as a scientific-social movement lay in its concentrated focus on human reproduc-tion as the arena for the play of science and social policies. It aimedto identify the supposedly “dysgenic” features of the body or behav-ior caused by heredity in individuals and groups and to find socialmeans to prevent bad heredity from continuing. Eugenists were es-pecially concerned With Women because they took reproduction todefine women’s social role far more than it did that of men; Womenwere also more socially vulnerable and dependent than men, makingmanagement of their reproductive-hereditary lives seem more ur-gent and more possible. Eugenic prescriptions and proscriptionstherefore fell differentially on men and Women. In this book, I ex-amine how eugenics defined biological and cultural distinctions ofgender and how race and gender intertwined to construct new im-ages and social practices of the “fit” nation.

In keeping with the social constructivist approach outlined earlier,I assume that racial and gender definitions are not “given” by naturebut are historically constituted in different ways in different histori-cal periods. In the case of gender, this assumption is based on theinsight developed over the last several years by many scholars, nota-bly feminist ones, that many of the things we think of as natural,“essential,” or timeless facts of sexual difference are not the resultsof anatomy and physiology understood unproblematically and ob-jectively by the inquiring mind of the neutral observer, but insteadcomplicated and essentially social constructions connected to largerpractices and institutions in society. Feminist scholars have intro-duced the word “gender” in English-language discussions preciselyto indicate that our understanding of sexual differences, or the socialand political roles taken to be appropriate to those differences, arenot, as they have often been taken to be, obvious or based in simpleWays on well-known differences of sexual physiology and anatomy.Sexual differences in reproduction are not enough to explain WhyWomen in the past have been denied the vote, excluded from certainkinds of Work, and treated as legal minors. These aspects ofWomen’s lives are instead related to gender and are essentially politi-cal and normative, not biological and anatomical. Some feministswould go further to argue that even the seemingly most obvious

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ~ I3

facts of biology differentiating the sexes (e.g., hormone differences)are also socially constituted, so that gender assumptions are alwayspart of our understanding of biological sex and vice versa." I haveused gender in this book to indicate that sexual differences are con-structed most powerfully around naturalized social categories andthat in this process of naturalization science has played a cruciallyimportant role.

No equivalent word to “gender” exists to indicate the sociallyconstituted character of the “races” represented in European scienceand politics. Yet the argument for their politically and historicallyconstructed character is compelling. Scientists’ many disputes overracial classifications, and the inability to find a classification thatwould satisfy once and for all the requirement for authoritative waysto divide the human species into fixed types, are powerful indicatorsthat racial categories are not representations of preexisting biologicalgroups transparently understood but distinctions based on complexpolitical-scientific and other kinds of conventions and discriminatorypractices. Racial distinctions are not timeless but have constantlybeen renegotiated and experienced in different ways in different his-torical periods. We should think, then, of the races that constitutedthe objects of the movement of race improvement as “artifactual”aspects of the human sciences. I take this term to refer to an objectof knowledge that is constructed as a biological and social “fact”grounded in what is taken to be empirical nature. At the same time,the term indicates that we do not experience human variation orhuman difference “as it really is, out there in nature,” but by andthrough a system of representations which in essence creates the ob-jects of difference. This book asks what part eugenics played in theconstruction of race and gender differences, and how gender and

17. These insights are the work of many authors. For a succinct summary of thefeminist understanding of gender, see _]oan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics ofHistory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), esp. chap. 2. For a tellingcritique of the biological “facts” of sex difference, see especially Evelyn Fox Keller,“Women Scientists and Feminist Critics of Science,” Daedalus 4 (Fall 1987): 77-92,and her “The Gender/Science System; or, Is Sex to Gender as Nature Is to Science?"Hypatia 2 (Fall 1987): 37-49. Along rather different lines, there is Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York: BasicBooks, 1985). See also Nelly Oudshoon, “On Measuring Sex Hormones: The Roleof Biological Assays in Sexualizing Chemical Substances,” Bulletin of the History ofMedicine 64 (1990): 243-61, and my own article “Race and Gender: The Role ofAnalogy in Science,” Isis 77 (1986): 261-77.

I4 - “The Hour of Eugenics"

race discursively intertwined in the debates about identity and fit-ness.”

The Scope and Plan ofthe Book

I have made two choices about the scope of this book. First, Ihave viewed eugenics primarily through the prism of the movementitself This book is a history, therefore, of the individuals, publica-tions, and institutions of eugenics, in their prescriptive and proscrip-tive aspects. This choice was dictated by practical considerations,especially the novelty of my topic in Latin American studies and thelack of secondary materials on even closely related themes. By andlarge, histories of Latin American intellectual life and institutions,the professions, public health, and women-all matters having abearing on my theme-are tasks for the next generation of scholars.I am especially sorry to have to leave for another book, or anotherhistorian, the study of the reactions of the people, most of thempoor and many of them illiterate, who were the targets of the euge-nists’ ill-considered plans and policies. But by concentrating on theindividuals and groups who self-consciously promoted scientific eu-genics, I have been able to emphasize the political significance of theknowledge-claims of the eugenists in the areas of human heredityand health. I have been able, that is, to keep at the center of myanalysis the problem of eugenics as a movement based on science orclaiming legitimacy because of its connections to science. Through-out the book, in fact, issues relating to science and social action arekept in the foreground, to a degree perhaps not common in otherhistorical studies of eugenics.

My second choice has been to focus on three Latin Americancountries as exemplary of eugenics in the region. The three are Bra-

18. The historical literature on race and race difference is large. An excellent start-ing point is Stephen jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure ofMan (New York: Norton,1981), where he explores the variety of ways “race” was created through scientifictheory and practice in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I also discussraces as historical-social constructions within science in The Idea of Race in Science:Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982). In the introduction to thatbook, I discuss how “lowland Scots, " “Celts,” and “Mediterraneans” (to take only afew examples) were counted as biological races at various times in the nineteenthcentury. See also the analysis in my article “Biological Degeneration: Races andProper Places,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progresx, ed. Edward Chamberlinand Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 97-I2O. Ifirst heard the term “artifactual” from Donna Haraway.

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ~ 15

zil, Argentina, and Mexico. This selection has allowed me to ex-plore enough Latin American examples to see Whether a Latin fam-ily likeness in eugenics existed and to sort out some of the factorsthat might be connected to such a family. The analysis, then, isexplicitly and implicitly comparative-explicitly within LatinAmerica itself; and implicitly with Europe and the United States.The three countries chosen were the most populous in Latin Amer-ica. Each had an organized interest in eugenics and all were suffi-ciently involved in the world of science to be selective users of he-reditarian ideas and to adapt them to local interests and necessities.”At the same time, these countries differed sufficiently~in socialstructure, racial makeup and ideology, economic development andpolitics-to provide interesting comparisons within the Latin Amer-ican setting.

Brazil was a leader in Latin America in the biomedical and sanita-tion sciences in the first two decades of the twentieth century, andthe first to establish formally a eugenics society. Brazil`s populationwas racially mixed, illiterate, and poor, and the country’s small,largely European, intelligentsia had long been preoccupied with theracial identity and health of the nation when eugenics appeared onthe scene. The notion that racial improvement could be achievedscientifically therefore had considerable appeal to medical doctorsand social reformers. In these circumstances, the potential existedfor an extreme race-hygiene movement; but so did political spacefor less extreme definitions of the meaning of eugenics for the na-tion.

Argentina, with Brazil, was the most advanced scientifically ofthe Latin American countries. It was also by far the wealthiest in theIQZOS and 19305. Racially, however, Argentina took its identity tobe white, not mulatto or black; the Indian population of the countryhad been drastically reduced by violent campaigns of conquest andcontrol; large-scale European immigration, mainly from Italy andSpain, had led to the idea that Argentina was a potential Europe inthe Americas. In the circumstances, eugenic debate revolved mainlyaround which of the European “races” and which social classes bestrepresented Argentine nationality and what could be done to make

19. The three are historically and currently the largest contributors to sciencefrom Latin America. See Patricia McLauchlan de Arregui, Indiciadores comparativos delos resultados de la investigarién dentgita y ternolégiaz en América Latina (Lima, Peru:GRADE, 1988).


that nationality fit. Given the strong personal and institutional con-nections between Argentina and Mussolini’s Italy in the 19305, Ar-gentina provides an important example of the ties between fascismand eugenics in Latin America.

Mexico stands out as the only country in Latin America to haveundergone a profound social and political upheaval in the earlytwentieth century. The Mexican Revolution that began in 1910 shat-tered the old political arrangements, altered the ideological land-scape, and transformed the national state. The revolutionary andsecular setting of eugenics in Mexico was therefore very differentfrom the setting in Brazil and Argentina. Yet if eugenics was associ-ated with radicalism (and so revealed as not a monopoly of theright), Mexicans shared with other Latin Americans a deep concernwith the health and racial makeup of their country. The country’ssemiofficial, revolutionary view of its population as biologicallyunited in a superior, mestizo or “cosmic” race, in which merged allthe different racial elements of the country, was undercut by the realpolitical and social marginalization of the unacculturated Indians.Again a question is raised about what form eugenics would take insuch circumstances.

The histories of eugenics in these three countries are organizedthematically. Chapter I briefly introduces the scientific and politicalmeaning of eugenics as it has normally been understood in Europeand North America and prepares the way for a different interpreta-tion of eugenics in Latin America. In Chapter 2, I turn to LatinAmerica as a setting for eugenics in the IQZOS. With Brazil as mystarting point, I analyze the political, social, and other factors thatset the stage for eugenics ideologies and policies after World War I. I

identify which individuals and groups embraced eugenics, wherethey were located professionally and socially, what kinds of institu-tions they established.

In Chapter 3, I explore in some detail how eugenics was first in-terpreted in the 19205 as a new kind of social hygiene. All threecountries I examine were “postcolonial” and politically independent,yet they were bound up in the networks of the informal empires ofEurope and the United States.” Long-standing cultural ties to France

20. The use of eugenics in colonial settings in the I92OS and [9305 is just begin-ning to be studied. A particularly interesting analysis is by Ann Laura Stoler, “Mak-ing the Empire Respectable: Race and Sexual Morality in Twentieth-Century Colo-nial Cultures,” American Ethnologist 16 (1989): 634-60.

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ~ I7

were especially important in suggesting a “soft” style of eugenicswhich was distinct from the “hard” Mendelian eugenics familiar tous from Britain and the United States. Genetics was not, in the pe-riod between 1900 and 1940, a monolithic or homogeneous body ofknowledge; different approaches competed for scientific attentionand political appropriation. Early on, eugenics in Latin America wasassociated theoretically with flexible neo-Lamarckian notions of he-redity (in which no sharp boundaries between nature and nurturewere drawn) and practically with public-health interventionism.

The outcome was a “preventive” eugenics directed to improvingthe nation by cleansing from the milieu those factors considered tobe damaging to people’s hereditary health. As a style, preventiveeugenics extended the tradition of medical environmentalism intothe new era of genetics and thereby did much to give eugenics itsinitial appeal to medical experts. Nonetheless, preventive eugenicsdid less to improve public health in Latin America (most of the eu-genists’ social-welfare recommendations were never implemented)than to promote new, biologically governed norms of social behav-ior which were justified in the name of hereditarian science-some-thing new, modern, and in keeping with the scientific standards ofEurope.

In Chapter 4, I turn to eugenics in the area of human reproduc-tion. I explore what I call, borrowing from the Latin Americansthemselves, “matrimonial eugenics.” The germ plasm the eugenistsbelieved to be altered for the worse by acquired heredity was trans-mitted to future generations in sexual reproduction. Some kind ofcontrol over the quality of that reproduction therefore became thegoal of most eugenics movements. Here I am interested not just inthe kinds of proposals the eugenists made but in the ways theseproposals constructed gender, both female and male, in new terms.The issue of policies is additionally important because many of theradical and negative techniques suggested or legislated in eugenics inEuropean countries and in the United States, notably human steriliz-ation, were for religious and other reasons not publicly acceptable inthe region. With some very significant and historically telling excep-tions, they did not come to define the movement. At the same time,Latin American doctors and scientists wanted to develop new pro-cedures, based on their understanding of heredity and health, forensuring the hygiene of the reproductive cells of heredity and forcreating fertile and fit populations to fill the empty spaces of theircountries. Eugenics was a normalizing program concerned with ra-

I8 - “The Hour of Eugenics”

tionalizing and purifying sexuality; how this program worked toshape the reproductive roles of men and women in the nation is thetheme that concerns me here.

In Chapter 5, I examine the part eugenics played in Brazil, Argen-tina, and Mexico in structuring notions of inclusion and exclusion ofvarious populations in the national body and in giving that body itsethnic identity. Gender helped articulate the notion of race and viceversa, since through reproduction the “racial types” supposedlymaking up the body politic were created. Although Europeans ten-ded to lump the Latin American countries together as generally dys-genic and disagreeable places of biocultural degeneration, the coun-tries actually varied considerably in the articulation of their racialideologies and therefore in the racial inflections of their eugenicsmovements. Yet the movements were also united by a commonconcern, how to create out of their heterogeneous populations a newand purified homogeneity on which a true “nationhood” could beerected. Eugenics in Latin America developed coincidentally withthe resurgence of various nationalisms, first in the aftermath ofWorld War I, and again in the I93OS, in the wake of the worldwidedepression and the ensuing severe dislocations and political muta-tions. In a time of worries about the racial foundations of their na-tional identities, about the dangers to or possibilities for a perfectednationality provided by new immigrants, and about the negative ef-fects caused by migrations of “inferior” types from the countrysideinto the cities, eugenists in Latin America found a role for scientificprescriptions and policy making.”

In Chapter 6, I consider Latin American eugenics in its interna-tional dimensions and connections. More specifically, I ask how eu-genics became part of the political relations between nations, espe-cially in debates about national identity and the flow of peoplesacross boundaries. I look closely at the Pan American experiment ineugenics, which brought eugenists from the United States into con-

2I. Like many others, I have found Benedict Anderson’s discussion of national-ism in his Imagined Communities: Rfjlertions on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism(London: Verso, 1986) useful for my work. Anderson conceptualizes the nation as arelatively recent cultural artifact, which he associates with the appearance of modernnationalisms. Interestingly, however, Anderson denies that racism is connected todreams of nationality (see chap. 8). I obviously disagree with him on this point. jeanFranco has also incorporated Anderson’s ideas into her analysis of gender andwomen’s writing in Mexico; see her Plotting Women: Gender and Representation inMexico (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

Introduction: Science and Social Knowledge ' IQ

tact with their Latin American counterparts and was intended to en-sure Pan American cooperation in the field. The story of Pan Amer-ican eugenics is a story of failure; rather than creating a powerfulCode of Eugenics for the region, as some eugenists had hoped, onlywatered-down, compromise resolutions emerged from the two PanAmerican eugenics conferences held in the IQZOS and 19305. Thestory of this venture is interesting, however, because it made clearsome of the differences separating U.S. and Latin American euge-nists-in the definition of eugenics, its proper scope, and its politicalvaluations. The story allows us to identify some of the special char-acteristics of the “family” of eugenics to which the Latin Americansbelieved they belonged. It also helps explain why the Latin Interna-tional Federation of Eugenics Societies, founded in the I93OS,seemed to promise an attractive venue for Latin Americans becauseit was at once somewhat international-in that it established connec-tions to Italy, France, and other European countries with whom theLatin Americans believed they shared a supposedly Latin culture-and yet not wholly international-in that it excluded the eugenics of“Anglo-Saxon” nations, which many Latin Americans opposed.The debate between supposed Anglo-Saxon practicality, materiality,and extremity and Latin humanity and sensibility was hardly new inLatin American history; but the story of Latin Americans’ efforts toboth participate in a modern scientific movement and resist particu-lars of its ideology unfavorable to themselves adds an interestingtwist to the debate and to our understanding of eugenics. The fate ofthe Latin Federation-and indeed, the fate of eugenics generally inthe late IQ3OS and 19405 as a movement with significant scientificand social weight-provides the coda to this chapter.

Chapter 7 reflects generally on eugenics as a powerful movementof biopolitics between the two world wars. I do not attempt to sortout the complicated history of human genetics after the war, whenthe field tried to reconstitute itself in a form uncontaminated by pasteugenic ideas; this history is only now being taken up, and LatinAmerican contributions to it are in any case marginal.” Nor do I tryto compare the eugenics of the pre-1945 period with the social andethical choices that face us today in the field of modern genetics.

22. The most detailed account of developments in human genetics after WorldWar II, and of the emergence of the “new eugenics,” is Kevles’s in his In the Name ofEugenia [note 2], esp. chap. 17.


Rather, I pull together some of the conclusions that emerge from thehistory of eugenics in Latin America and use them as a springboardfor some reflections on the relations between science and politics indifferent social and political settings. In particular, I examine thelessons of eugenics for what I call a “politics of scientific interpreta-tion,” a major theme of my book.

I

The New Genetics andthe Beginnings ofEugenics

Eugenics was hardly a new idea in 1883, despite the new namecoined for it that year. In some ways the weeding out of unfit indi-viduals went back to the Greeks, as British eugenists were fond ofpointing out, perhaps because the association gave classical authorityto the otherwise shocking notion that since not all individuals areequally endowed in nature not all should necessarily be allowed toreproduce themselves.

Nevertheless, “our” eugenics, properly speaking, belongs to thelate nineteenth century and to the era of modern hereditarian sci-ence. The eventual enthusiasm for eugenics expressed by scientists,physicians, legal experts, and mental hygienists must be seen as theculmination of a long process of intellectual and social transforma-tion in the nineteenth century, in which human life was increasinglyinterpreted as being the result of natural biological laws. Early in thecentury, for instance, Thomas Malthus, whose works on the “laws”of the biological inevitability of human overpopulation hauntednineteenth-century political economy, remarked that it did not byany means seem impossible that by selective breeding “a certain de-gree of improvement, similar to that amongst animals, might takeplace among men.” He added, however, “As the human race couldnot be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad speci-


mens to celibacy, it is not probable that an attention to breed shouldever become general.”

The moral objections to the deliberate control of human breedingto improve the species seemed unanswerable, especially in the lightof the inadequacy of knowledge of the matter or of the pattern ofhereditary transmission. But as hereditarian explanations of bothpathological and normal traits in human beings gained in popularityin mid-century, so protoeugenic speculations and proposals in-creased. For example, in 1850 the French scientist Prosper Lucas, inone of the most widely read studies of heredity of the period, drewup genealogical tables of the mental and moral characteristics of con-demned criminals and urged the French government to discouragethe perpetuation of such lineages, on the understanding that crimi-nality would thereby be checked and French society improved per-manently.2 This example serves to remind us that negative eugenicsdid not depend on a specific theory of heredity, such as Mendelism,even though eugenic ideas became more acceptable as the consensusgrew that the laws of heredity were actually understood.

New Theories ofHeredity and Evolution

The new evolutionism of the I86OS was of great importance to therise of eugenics in giving it a new scientific rationale and its indis-pensible terminology. The first assays into the dangerous territoryof human hereditary and social policy by the “father” of eugenicshimself the scientist, traveler, geographer, and statistician FrancisGalton, occurred in 1865 shortly after his reading of The Origin ofSpecies. Evolution gave Galton ideas that, clustered together in anew fashion, formed the kernel of eugenics: the significance of he-reditary variation in domestic breeding, the survival of the fittest inthe struggle for life, and the analogy between domestic breeding andnatural selection. The implications of natural and domestic selectionfor human society were worked out in more substantial, if substan-tially flawed, fashion in 1869 in Hereditary Genius, a book that stillstands as the founding text of eugenics.

I. As quoted in Dupaquier et al., Malthus Post and Present (London: AcademicPress, 1983), p. 268.

2. Example given by Frederick B. Churchill, in “Hereditary Theory to Verer-bung: The Transmission Problem, 1850-191 5,” Isis 78 (1987): 34.2.

The New Genetics and Eugenics 23

In this book, Galton took it upon himself to prove by simplegenealogical and statistical methods that human ability was a func-tion of heredity and not of education. From the demonstration ofthe part played by heredity in human talent, it seemed a relativelyeasy move from this knowledge to its social possibilities: “I proposeto show in this book, ” said Galton in the very first sentence of hisintroduction, “that a man’s natural abilities are derived by inheri-tance.... Consequently, as it is easy . _ _ to obtain by carefulselection a permanent breed of dogs or horses, gifted with the pecu-liar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would bequite practicable to produce a highly gifted race of men by judiciousmarriages during several consecutive generations.”

Nevertheless, the path from hereditarianism in biosocial thoughtto the deliberate manipulation of the hereditary fitness of humanpopulations was far from straight and narrow. Until the end of thenineteenth century moral and political distaste for interfering in hu-man reproduction continued to prevent the translation of eugenicarguments into action. Galton’s deductions from evolutionary biol-ogy intrigued but troubled Charles Darwin, for instance; Darwincited Galton several times in his Descent of Man, but though heseemed at times to be on the brink of accepting the necessity forsome kind of eugenic control over human reproduction in the nameof evolutionary advancement, Darwin was reluctant about so radicala notionf For most of his contemporaries, moral caution overrodethe apparent logic of Galton’s argument that, as civilization im-proved so that the weak and unfit were cared for, thereby diminish-ing the power of natural selection to eliminate the unfit, societyshould contemplate a deliberate social selection to protect future gen-erations from biological unfitness.

By the end of the nineteenth century, however, attitudes began tochange, The reasons for this were as much social as scientific. Thelast three decades of the nineteenth century saw growing eco-nomic competition among nations and the rise of new demandsfrom previously marginalized groups. Working-class and feministpolitics challenged the status quo. Socially, the optimism of the

3. Francis Galton, Hereditary Genius (1869; London: julyan Friedmann, 1979),p. 1.

4. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man and Selertion in Relation to Sex, 2 vols.(London: john Murray, 1871), vol. 1, esp. pp. 167-84.


mid-Victorian period began to give way to widespread pessimismabout modern life and its ills. Anxiety about the future progress ofsociety was reinforced by unease about modernity itself This anxi-ety provided the context in which a scientific movement of reformcould develop. “Degeneration” replaced evolution as the major met-aphor of the d,ay, with vice, crime, immigration, women’s work,and the urban environment variously blamed as its cause.5 The beliefthat many of the diseases rife among the poor-tuberculosis, syph-ilis, alcoholism, mental illness-were hereditary merely fueled thefear of social decay. Many writers believed the “rapid multiplicationof the unfit” to be a further threatf Events seemed to be bearing outGalton’s belief that the modern race was “over-weighted, and . _ .

likely to be drudged into degeneracy by demands that exceed its

powers.” Meanwhile, the mysteries surrounding heredity seemedabout to be solved by new conceptual and technical developments inscience. From evolution, whose essence was the natural selection ofinherited variations in animals and plants, Galton had concluded thatsociety could do quickly what nature in the past had done moreslowly, that is, improve the human stock by the deliberate selectionof the fit over the unfit.8 What was required to give such an ideaweight in scientific circles was concrete knowledge of how heredityworked, a knowledge that was lacking when Galton first ap-proached the subject of eugenics.

Then, in the I8QOS, the German biologist August Weismann putforward his theory of the continuity of the “germ plasm,” whichindicated that there were theoretical and experimental grounds forthinking that only a portion of each cell carried hereditary material;moreover, Weismann proposed that the germ plasm was completelyindependent of the rest of the cell (the somaplasm) and that the germplasm was inherited continuously by one generation from anotherwithout alteration from outside influences. Weismann’s ideas chal-lenged the long-standing notion of the inheritance of acquired char-acters associated with the French biologist Lamarck and his theory

5. For an analysis of the growth of the idea of degeneration, see Degeneration:The Dark Side of Progress, ed. Edward Chamberlin and Sander L. Gilman (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 1985).

6. This was the title of a book written by Victoria Woodhull in 1891.7. Galton, as quoted in Dupaquier, Malthus Past and Prexent [note 1], p. 345.8. R, Halliday calls the eugenists true Darwinians “in assimilating the biolog-

ical problem of survival to the social problem of reproduction.” See his “SocialDarwinism: A Definition,” Victorian Studies I4 (1971): 389-405.

The New Genetics and Eugenics - 25

of transmutation. In the Lamarckian tradition it was assumed thatexternal influences on an individual life could permanently alter thegerm plasm, so that the distinction between germ plasm and soma-plasm was blurred. As a theory of inheritance, the inheritance ofacquired characters had long been commonplace in biology-it wasin fact the standard explanation of how heredity workedf’

Galton had been convinced since the 1860s that Lamarckian ideaswere wrong, in part because of his socially based conviction that the“genius” or intellectual success enjoyed .by people like himself wasunconnected to the educational and other social opportunities he en-joyed. He preferred to believe that social eminence was due to aninherited fitness that no amount of social engineering could affectand that was passed on from generation to generation by biologicalinheritance. His own genealogy, which linked him to the Darwinsand the Wedgwoods, successful families of Victorian Britain, gavepersonal satisfaction and inner conviction of the correctness of hisview that ability and success were primarily matters of biologicalhistory.

Several historians have analyzed the complicated social roots ofGalton’s eugenic argument; what is significant to our story is theway the language of “disinterested” science disguised those roots.‘°It is in fact only one of many examples in the history of the naturalsciences in which issues that are social and political in character get“scientized” (to use an ugly neologism) so that they may claim anapolitical identity from which are later drawn highly political con-clusions that have considerable authority precisely because they arebased on apparently neutral knowledge." The result was not a pseu-doscience in any simple sense, since Galton stood squarely in a rec-ognized scientific tradition and was a fully paid-up member, as it

9. On this point see Peter Bowler, The Eclipse ofDarwinism: Anti-Darwinian Evo-lution Theories in the Decades around 1900 (Baltimore: The johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1983), chap. 4.

IO. See especially Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “Nature and Nurture: The Interplay ofBiology and Politics in the Work of Francis Galton,” Studies in the History of Biology1 (1977): 133-207; and Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses ofHuman Heredity (New York: Knopf; 1985), chap. 1.

II. The historical creation of our modem scientific epistemology of neutrality,objectivity, and universality, and the ideological functions of this epistemology areprofoundly important topics in the history of science which are rarely explored.Aspects ofthe story in the case of Britain are analyzzed in an excellent book by jackMorrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science: Early Years zy' the British Associa-tion jiir the Advancement if Science (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); see especiallychap. 5.

.- l

L}>»2f‘»f’*~~ sat.

26 ° “The Hour of Eugenics”

were, of the scientific establishment. In many respects the way socialvalues constructed a language of human variation and selection wastypical, rather than otherwise, of the human social and biologicalsciences of the period.

What is also important to the history of eugenics is thatWeismann’s work, which was based on careful consideration of theproblems of evolution and heredity, tended to confirm the move-ment toward the rejection of Lamarckian beliefs. Many biologistsadopted his ideas with enthusiasm for this reason, thus strengthen-ing the hereditarian strain in biological and social thought.

A few years after Weismann’s work appeared, there followed therediscovery in 1900 of Gregor Mendel’s laws of the independent as-sortment and recombination of hereditary characters in plants_ Thestability of the Mendelian characters during genetic crosses and theirreappearance in the next several generations unchanged, in definitenumerical ratios, seemed to confirm Weismann’s notion of the au-tonomy and inviolability of the germ plasm in which the hereditarymaterial was carried. Mendelism offered the possibility that the sim-ple numerical ratios discovered in plants would be found in animalsand, by extension, in the human species.” Within a few years, thenew science of “genetics” was defined and developed rapidly withthe chromosome theory, the idea of the gene, and the use of statisti-cal and biometric studies to become the foundation stone of moderngenetics and evolutionary biology as we know them.” Mendelismthus represented a landmark in the development of modern biology,

Eugenics Movements in Europe and the United States

Eugenics as a social movement was shaped decisively by thesedevelopments. Even before 1900, scientists had begun to advance theidea that society should recognize the power of heredity in its sociallaws, in such a way as to favor reproduction of the physically and

12. Among the first demonstrations of Mendelian ratios in inheritance was Archi-bald Garrod’s work on the recessive condition of alcaptonuria; see Alexander G.Beam and Elizabeth D. Miller, “Archibald Garrod and the Development of theConcept of Inborn Errors of Metabolism,” Bulletin ofthe History ofMedicine 53 (FallI979)3 315-27_

13. For these developments, see chapter 5 of my book The Idea of Race in Science:Great Britain, 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982), pp. III-39.

The New Genetics and Eugenics ° 27

morally eugenical over the noneugenical." Now that a science ofhuman heredity seemed at hand, moral objections to the social con-trol of human reproduction received less weight. Nonetheless, thecorrect social conclusions to be drawn from Weismann’s theory ofheredity were not immediately obvious. Because science is neverunambiguous in its social messages, the meaning of this theory forsocial policy was a matter of interpretation and was open to severalpossibilities. If Weismann’s ideas about the continuity of the germplasm were right, then the effects of education and improved sur-roundings would not be assimilated genetically over successive gen-erations. Each new generation would have to start over, in heredi-tary terms, de novo. This result in turn could be read in two ways:good genetic qualities could be found in all elements of the humanpopulation, including the lower classes; or those found at the top ofthe social pile were, in effect, the naturally best endowed genet-ically. Weismann could be read, that is, either optimistically orpessimistically, radically or conservatively, positively or negatively.All these kinds of readings are found in the literature of the period.

The fear in Europe and the United States about social degenera-tion, about the alterations brought about by industrialization, urban-ization, migration, immigration, about changing sexual mores andwomen’s work, gradually led the more negative social interpretationof Weismannism to predominate. Socially successful individuals andgroups were taken to be genetically and innately well endowed; thepoor and unsuccessful were viewed as products of poor heredity. Inmost countries where Weismannism and Mendelism thrived, alter-native interpretations were eventually marginalized in social-eugenicdebate. Henry Fairfield Osborn, the director of the American Mu-seum of Natural History, spoke of the need to select “the fittestchains of race plasma”; he was typical in moving in the 1890s froman initially sanguine view of Weismannism to a pessimistic and con-servative eugenic interpretation of human heredity.” When Mendel

14. Kevles, In the Name oflfugenics [note IO], chap. 4.15. Henry Fairfield Osborn,“The Present Problem in Heredity," Atlantic Monthly

67 (March 1891): 354. Michael Freeden, in his book The New Liberalism: An IdeologyofSocial Refirm (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), pp. 88-89, gives examples of pro-gressive interpretations of Weismann’s new theory, in which people emphasized thatgood “nature” could be found at the bottom of the social scale as well as the top andthat with good environments and education such natures could have a chance todevelop fully.

28 “The Hour of Eugenics”

was rediscovered in 1900, his ideas on inheritance were easily assim-ilated into the eugenic outlook. Since Mendelism, when combinedwith Weismann’s theory of the autonomy of the germ plasm, wasassociated with the idea of the complete separation of hereditaryunits from environmental influences, to many scientists it seemedthat ho amount of tinkering with the social environment would re-sult in long-lasting improvement of hereditary traits. Ancestry,rather than social life, was taken to determine character; hereditywas now all. Indeed, simply calling a trait, condition, or behavior“hereditary” rather than “social” in origin seemed to imply a host ofspecific conclusions-that the condition was somehow “in” the indi-vidual in a way that something socially caused was not, that it was“fixed” in a peculiarly damaging manner, that there was nothingmuch that could be done about it short of trying to prevent thecondition from being handed on through reproduction to futuregenerations. Karl Pearson, the British scientist who became the firstrecipient of the new Galton eugenics professorship at UniversityCollege, London University, put it with characteristic bluntness:“No degenerate and feebleminded stock will ever be converted intohealthy and sound stock by the accumulated effects of education,good laws and sanitary surroundings. We have placed our money onenvironment when heredity wins by a canter.”“’

As confidence grew in many places that heredity was a fixedquantity at birth which determined a large range of human behav-iors, eugenics societies began to be formed, some with the goal ofpursuing scientific investigations of genetics in a scholarly and scien-tific fashion, others to discuss and promote new policies and evenlegislation in support of eugenic ideas. The first was the GermanSociety for Race Hygiene, founded in Berlin in 1905; then came theEugenics Education Society in England in 1907-1908, the EugenicsRecord Office in the United States in 1910, and the French EugenicsSociety in Paris in 1912. Outside specifically eugenics organizations,eugenic themes found their Way into scientific areas such as anthro-pology, psychiatry, and sociology; eugenics sections were estab-lished in many of the organizations representing these disciplines.

Some biologists recognized the dangers of erecting social policieson incomplete knowledge.” Eugenics was on the whole a minority,

16. Quoted in B. Semmel, Imperialism and Social Rejiirm (London: Allen and Un-win, 1960), p. 48.

17. See for instance the cautionary note sounded by the geneticist R. C. Punnett

The New Genetics and Eugenics - 29

professional and specialized point of view. Some of the legislationproposed by eugenists was radical enough to be actively resisted,especially in those countries where the public-health tradition wasstrong and public-health officials had a vested interest in defendingtheir environmentalist approach against the new biological view ofhealth.” On the other hand, the notion that the state had an interestin regulating the health and fitness of populations was well estab-lished in Europe and the United States, while Darwinian and agri-cultural approaches to improving stocks prepared the ground forextending the farming metaphors and practices to human popula-tions."

Eugenists were therefore not deterred from putting forward ideasabout the control of human reproduction which would have strucksuch luminaries of biology as Thomas Henry Huxley and AlfredRussel Wallace as intolerable only a few decades before. Many euge-nists believed the evidence that differences between individuals orgroups depended on organic inheritance was sufficient to concludethat selective breeding was the key to human improvement. As theBritish eugenist Wicksteed Armstrong put it in his book The Sur-vival of the Unfittest in 1930: “to diminish the dangerous fertility ofthe unfit there are three methods: the lethal chamber, segregationand sterilization.”2"

Actually, eugenists recommended a host of social policies as ap-parently logical deductions from hereditarian science, most of themnot nearly as extreme as involuntary sterilization or euthanasia; theirsuggestions ranged from child and family allowances for the eu-genically fit, to segregation of the unfit, to eugenic selection of im-

in 1912 in “Genetics and Eugenics,” his paper at the first International EugenicsCongress; in Problems in Eugenics (London: Eugenics Education Society, 1912), p.138.

18. Several historians have commented on the resistance of medical-health officersworking in schools and similar institutions in Britain, where there was by the earlytwentieth century a strong public-health tradition; see especially G. R. Searle, “Eu-genics and Class,” in Biology, Medicine, and Society, 1840-1940, ed. C. Webster(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 217-42; and Dorothy Porter,“Enemies of the Race’: Biologism, Environmentalisms, and Public Health in Ed-wardian England,” Victorian Studies 34 (Winter 1991): 159-178.

19. The agricultural-eugenic connection was especially important in the UnitedStates; see Barbara A. Kimmelman, “The American Breeders’ Association: Geneticsand Eugenics in an Agricultural Context, 1903-IQI3,” Social Studies of Science I3(1983): 163-204.

20. Quoted in Margaret Canovan, G. K. Chesterton: Radical Populist (New York:Harcourt Brace jovanovich, 1977), p. 66.


migrants. But by the late IQZOS many eugenists had shifted theirattention from the “positive” eugenics imagined by Galton, whichfavored incentives for the reproduction of the fit, to a “negative”eugenics that aimed to prevent reproduction of the unfit.” Thelower classes breeding in the slums, the permanently unemployed,the poor alcoholics, the mentally ill sequestered in insane asylums-and their supposed hereditary unfitnesses-were now targets of eu-genists’ agitation. Daniel Kevles says, moreover, that by 1930 hu-man sterilization had become for many eugenists the “paramountprogrammatic interest.” The introduction of the idea of com-pulsory sterilization ofthe unfit was also, of course, by far the mostdramatic alteration in the traditional norms governing the Westernfamily and individual rights to reproduction. Although regulation ofsexuality and reproduction by the state already had a long history by

the end of the nineteenth century (e.g., in the medical regulation ofprostitution), this new proposal was a radical departure for publicpolicy.

It is important to stress that the deliberate sterilization of humanbeings was put forward as a logical conclusion derived from geneticslong before the Nazi eugenic program came into effect and that it

was not always a proposal of the political right. The first eugenicsterilization laws in Europe were introduced in the canton of Vaudin Switzerland in 1928 and in Denmark in 1929 and were viewed as

moderate, scientific, and progressive methods of implementing ge-netic hygiene. Although the Danish doctors rejected the racist ideaof “Nordic” superiority which had become associated with much ofGerman eugenics, according to the geneticist Tage Kemp the 1929law was _justified by the belief that “society must make living condi-tions tolerable for everybody, and this has necessitated the employ-ment of certain eugenic measures.” According to a recent analysis,over eight and a half thousand Danes were sterilized for sexual andpsychic abnormality between 1930 and 1949. In Sweden, where the

21. Galton had recommended competitive examinations to determine ability, en-couragement of marriage within the selected group to ensure that offspring of theable reached full potential, and a system of grants for the fit. He advocated that theunfit be placed in monasteries and convents.

22. Kevles, In the Name ofEugenics [note 10], p. 393.23. Tage Kemp, “Danish Experiments in Negative Eugenies, 1929-I945,"

Eugenics Review 38 (1945-1947): 182; see also Soren Hansen, “Eugenics Abroad II-In Denmark,” Eugenirs Review 23 (1931-1932): 234.

The New Genetics and Eugenics ' 31

state-supported Institute for Race Biology was established in 1921 inconnection with the University of Uppsala, at least fifteen thousandmental patients were eventually sterilized for eugenic reasons underthe law passed in 1934 and put into effect the next year, the practiceending only after the war. Alva Myrdal, remembered as a pioneer ofmodern population policies, called in 193 5 for a strengthening of thesterilization laws, which she regarded not as a method of preservingSwedish “racial quality” (since she believed that the fertility of the“social substratum” was not high) but as a means of protectingagainst individual suffering caused by bad heredity.” Technically,sterilization under the bill was voluntary; in practical terms, how-ever, it was more or less involuntary.

But if any one country led the way in eugenic legislation beforethe I93OS it was the United States. The first U.S. state sterilizationlaws dated back to the first decade of the twentieth century. By thelate IQZOS, twenty-four states had passed involuntary sterilizationlaws, which were used to sterilize mainly the poor (and often black)inmates of institutions for the feeble-minded.” Even though the ap-plication of these laws was at times resisted and challenged, by themid-IQ3OS at least thirty thousand individuals had been sterilized un-der them; new sterilization laws were added in the late I93OS, andthe number of sterilizations increased. Altogether, some seventythousand individuals were sterilized in the United States between1907 and the end of World War Il.”

The most comprehensive sterilization law was of course that ofNazi Germany. Passed on july 14, 1933, following the dismissalfrom official posts of many of the jewish and/or left-wing individ-uals who had been involved in eugenics and radical sexual reformissues in the Weimar Republic, the new legislation took eugenicsterilization in the Western world further by a whole order ofmagnitude (it had been forbidden in Germany until this date). Theconditions labeled as hereditary and therefore covered by the termsof the ‘Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Cffspring’

24. See Alva Myrdal, Nation and Family (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Tubner,1945), passim. Figures for the Danish sterilizations given by Stephen Trombley, TheRight to Reproduce: A History of Coerciue Sterilization (London: Weidenfeld andNicolson, 1988), p. 159.

25. Kevles, In the Name ofEugenics [note IO], p. III.26. Ibid., p. 116; and Barry Mehler, “The New Eugenics,” Science jar the People

15 (May/june 1983): 18-23.


included “hereditary feeblemindedness,” schizophrenia, manic de-pressive insanity, “hereditary epilepsy,” Huntington’s chorea, he-reditary blindness and deafness, serious bodily deformity, and alco-holism. In his recent study of “racial hygiene” under the Nazis,Robert Proctor points out that all of these conditions were assumedeither to be caused by single Mendelian characters or to be clearenough in their behavioral or physical manifestations to be treatedby the law as though they Were. Later, mixed-race offspring wereadded to the list of those to be sterilized. The law called for involun-tary sterilization, and though appeal against sterilization was theo-retically possible, very few appeals (3 percent) were actuallygranted. Proctor estimates that by I945 the special genetic healthcourts established by the Nazis had ordered and supervised the in-voluntary sterilization of one percent of the entire German popula-tion.”

The Selective Appropriation ofScience

This short survey encapsulates eugenics as generally understood-a scientific movement associated with social Darwinism and Men-delism, and a social program favoring the direct control of humanreproduction over the more indirect methods of human improve-ment through reform of the environment. Although its proponentsspanned the political spectrum from the left to the right, on theWhole eugenics has been studied as a conservative movement ofWhite, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon Protestants who believed them-selves, and were seen by others, to be the most “fit” for procreation,individually and racially.

Given its espousal by Well-known scientific and medical figures inEurope, eugenics appeared to have sound credentials, and the ideaquickly made its Way into the scientific reform agendas of manycountries, including those in Latin America. The spread of science,from an originating point in Europe to areas beyond its boundaries,has long interested scholars concerned With the role of science andtechnology in creating empires or in stimulating industrial develop-

27. Robert N. Proctor, Racial Hygiene: Medicine under the Nazis (Cambridge: Har-vard University Press, 1988), chap. 4.

The New Genetics and Eugenics ~ 3 3

ment in poor nations.” Underlying the notion of “spread,” how-ever, is an implicitly diffusionist model that rests on assumptionsabout “time lags” and “catching up” in science, as though the stagesof science were already mapped out in advance by countries “furtherahead” in the march of science. Diffusionism (or imperialism, an-other analytic framework that is more attentive to agency andpower) tends to deflect attention from local sources of adaptationand the processes of selection involved when groups incorporate sci-entific theories and outlooks into their own traditions and institu-tions. As I remarked in the Introduction, ideas do not keep fixedidentities as they travel through space and time; nor do they occupypreviously empty social or intellectual spaces. They are rather com-plex parts of social life, generated within that social life, reflective ofit, and capable of affecting it. Evolution meant different things inEngland than in France; Einstein’s relativity acquired a different sig-nification in Italy than in the United States. Ideas, even scientificones, are always selectively reconfigured across cultural frontiersand the result is a science subtly shaped by local traditions-cultural,political, and scientific. We need, then, to study eugenics in placeslike Latin America not as a pale reflection of eugenics elsewhere,something perhaps “misunderstood” or “misinterpreted,” but assomething rooted in the region’s own cultural experience and his-tory.” Studied this way, Latin American eugenics can throw consid-erable light on the scientific foundations of social thought and thesocial construction of science.

“Defamiliarizing” eugenics in this way has the further advantageof highlighting for us a generic problem in the study of science andsocial life, namely, how scientific theories get connected to policyoutcomes. Although a scientific theory may provide a social andcognitive basis for many social policies, the theory itself leaves manypolicy conclusions unspecified. The story of genetics in Latin Amer-ica indicates that at any one time a scientific theory opens up severalsocial possibilities while closing off others. Contestations about theproper meaning of a theory for social life are the norm, 'contesta-

28. George Basalla, in a pioneering article written many years ago, proposed ageneral model for understanding the diffusion of Western science: “The Spread ofWestern Science,” Science 156 (1967): 611-22.

29. On these points, see especially Thomas F. Glick, “Cultural Issues in the Re-ception of Relativity,” in The Comparative Reception of Relativity, ed. Thomas F.Glick (Leiden: D. Reidel, 1987), pp. 38]-400.


always) signified graduation from either medical or law school. Infact, almost all the members were physicians.” The society had noWomen members, and only eighteen members from outside thestate. In addition, the Argentine doctor Victor Delfino, who was onthe brink of starting a eugenics society in Buenos Aires, and CarlosEnrique Paz Soldan, the Peruvian pioneer of “social medicine” (andlater a prolific medical activist), were named as corresponding mem-bers.

The society sought to project itself beyond the boundaries of thestate of Sao Paulo by asking Belisario Penna, a well-known advocateof sanitation based in Rio de janeiro, to serve as one of three honor-ary vice presidents. The actual president was the physician ArnaldoVieira de Carvalho, director of Sao Paulo’s new medical school,which had been founded in IQI 3 and stood for all that was advancedin medical education at that time in Brazil. Among the society’smore important members were Vital Brasil, the bacteriologist anddirector of the Butanta Institute (the Well-known snake-serum re-search institute); Artur Neiva, a microbiologist from the OswaldoCruz Institute in Rio who had come to Sao Paulo to head and re-model the state’s sanitation services; Luis Pereira Barreto, the Paul-ista medical Writer and positivist; Antonio Austregesilo, psychiatristand professor at the Rio Medical School; and the young Fernando deAzevedo, who would later go on to a distinguished career in educa-tion at the University of Sao Paulo, founded in the 19305. _IulianoMoreira, the most important mental hygienist in Brazil and the di-rector of Brazil’s National Mental Asylum in Rio de Janeiro, sent a

letter of congratulation to the society and advised it of his own eu-genical efforts in the field of mental hygiene.”

The Sao Paulo Eugenics Society had an initial success, holdingregular meetings in the hall of the Santa Casa de Misericordia, thetraditional meetingplace of the state’s most important scientificgroup, the Medical and Surgical Society. From the beginning thesociety defined itself as a learned, scientific, professional organiza-tion from which would flow scientific studies, conferences, and pro-

27. Although “DL” was also used as a courtesy title for prominent individualswho were not actually graduates of medicine or law, in the professional medicalcontext in which eugenics appeared the title “Dr.” in fact signified professional qual-ifications; nondoctors were indicated as “Senhor” (Mr.).

28. Details about the scientific careers of many of these individuals can be foundin Stepan, Beginnings ofBrazilian Science [note 6), passim.


ported in the medical press and daily newspapers. By 1947 Kehl hadpublished no fewer than twenty-six books, many of which the pressreviewed favorably. In addition to Kehl’s writings, Belisario Penna’sThe Army and Sanitation (1920) was part of the early eugenics effort,as was B. Monteiro Lobat0’s The Vital Problem (1918), which was‘published _jointly by the Sao Paulo Eugenics Society and the Pro-Sanitation League (Liga Pro-Saneamento do Brasil). In his multi-volume study of Brazilian writing, Wilson Martins refers to a verita-ble stream of works on eugenics and related themes in the IQZOS and19305, expressing a nostalgia for hygiene and “purification.”32 As theeugenic creed won new converts, the language of eugenics began toinfuse scientific discussions of health. Improvement was now dis-cussed in terms of “eugenic” and “dysgenic” factors, fitness and un-fitness, and hereditary “taras” (defects). Penna’s 1918 book, TheSanitation of Brazil, had been devoid of eugenic language; his newbook of 1920, based on a series of lectures to the Military Club ofRio and published as The Army and Sanitation, had the same theme-the disgraceful state of sanitation in Brazil-but now the problemwas presented as that of the hereditary degeneration of the Brazilianpeople and the need for a eugenic solution.

Although initally Kehl was unable to organize a new society de-voted specifically to eugenics in the federal capital, eugenics found a

place for itself within the field of mental hygiene-an associationbetween eugenics and psychiatry repeated in several other LatinAmerican countries.” Through this association, eugenics becamelinked to the problems of criminality, juvenile delinquency, andprostitution-to the social “pathologies” of the poor, and, in thecase of Brazil, of the racially mixed and dark population. Mentalhygiene was defined as a preventive form of psychiatric medicinewhich of necessity extended the scope of the doctor beyond the

32. Martins, Historia da inteligéncia hrasileira [note 18], 6:263. According to a bibli-ography of eugenics prepared by Kehl, in Aparas eugénicas: Sexo e ciuilizagzio (Rio deJaneiro: Francisco Alves, 193 3), pp. 261-71, between 1897 and 1933 seventy-fourimportant publications on eugenics appeared in Brazil; these included twenty-fourundergraduate medical theses from the Faculty of Medicine in Rio de Janeiro. lnfact, Kehl underrepresented the production of eugenics literature in Brazil by omit-ting many books, pamphlets, and articles that did not fit his own definition of eu-genics-for instance, some of the writings of his critic Dr. Octavio Domingues. SeeChapter 3 of this book for an explanation.

33. In Peru, for example, a eugenics section was created within the League ofMental Hygiene in the 19305.

Eugenics in Latin America - SI

walls of the asylum and into everyday life in the home, the streets,and the schools. Mental hygiene, though representing itself as amodern and innovative approach to insanity and crime, was, in theLatin American context, deeply tinged with hereditarianism, espe-cially the extreme hereditarianism of the Italian criminologist CesareLombroso.” Eugenically oriented mental hygiene can be seen as afurther elaboration and “modernization” of Lombroso’s teachingthat criminal traits are inherited.

The psychiatrist Gustavo Reidel founded the new League of Men-tal Hygiene (Liga de Higiene Mental) in 1922 in Rio in order torealize a practical program of mental prophylaxis, with a focus onthe mentally “deficient,” disturbed, and delinquent individuals who,the doctors believed, were hereditarily prone to commit crimes andtherefore needed to be identified, diagnosed, and, if necessary, seg-regated from the rest of the population for purposes of “restraint”and treatment. Like the U.S. psychiatrists whom the mental hygie-nists wished to emulate, the league’s members considered them-selves progressives in the sense of being oriented toward individualpsychiatric treatment and, in the case of the criminally insane, to-ward the treatment of the criminal person rather than the crime.”The League of Mental Hygiene represented itself, therefore, as aprofessional and scientific organization associated with advancedpsychiatry in the rest of the world.”

34. On Lombroso, see Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in ModernFrance: The Medical Concept ofNational Decline (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 1984), chap. 4, and Daniel Pick, “The Faces of Anarchy: Lombroso andthe Politics of Criminal Science in Post-Unification Italy,” History Workshop 21(Spring 1986): 60-86. Lombroso’s influence, and more generally that of the Italianschool of criminology, is apparent in the many references to Lombroso in LatinAmerican anthropological and criminological writing. To my knowledge, however,this influence has yet to be studied.

35. For a history of the mental-hygiene movement in the United States, see Ger-ald N. Grob, Mental Illness and American Society, 1875-1940 (Princeton, NJ.: Prince-ton University Press, 198 3), chap. 6. Grob describes in some detail the involvementof the mental-hygiene movement with eugenics, especially eugenic sterilization.

36. David Rothman, in Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alterna-tives in Progressive America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1980), esp. pp. 5-6, discusses theconfused motives and the often sad consequences of “progressive” thought on thementally ill in the early twentieth century in the United States. The Brazilians con-sciously modeled themselves on their North American counterparts. A short ac-count of psychiatry in Brazil in the I930S is found in jurandir Freire Costa, Historiade psychiatric: no Brasil: Urn corto ideologia (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Documentario,1976). A history of the most important mental asylum in Sao Paulo and its connec-


The league quickly established itself in the city, with more than120 members drawn from the staffs of the state and municipal men-tal asylums and reformatories. The league organized ten permanentcommittees and held regular monthly meetings. Although its sub-ventions from the municipality of Rio and the federal governmentwere not always adequate or secure, the league enjoyed considerablesuccess as one of the more prominent of the scientifically orientedsocieties of the federal capital." Eugenics was part of the league’sprogram from the start; its statutes declared its purpose was to “real-ize a program of mental hygiene and eugenics in individual, school,professional and social life. ”“8 But the league’s emphasis on eugenicsintensified over the years as a new generation of psychiatrists, led byErnani Lopes (Who became president in 1929), took over the organi-zation. The league also managed to get official sanction for its activ-ities; for instance, in 1927 a new law of assistance to the mentally illwas introduced which was sponsored by Afranio Peixoto, a memberof the league; this law gave to psychiatrists and mental hygieniststhe power to commit the mentally ill to asylums and also expandeddispensaries and local consulting services in the cities. To signify themental improvement of the race, the psychiatrists coined a newterm, “euphrenia_”“"

Kehl became active in the league by 1925. By 1929 the league’smembership included many of the more prominent medical scien-tists of the city, such as _luliano Moreira, director of the NationalMental Asylum; Miguel Couto, president of the National Academyof Medicine and Rio’s leading clinician; Fernando Magalhaes, pro-fessor of gynecology and obstetrics at the Rio Medical School;Carlos Chagas, discoverer of “Chagas” disease (Trypanosomiasisamericana) and director of both the Oswaldo Cruz Institute and thefederal Department of Public Health; Edgar Roquette-Pinto, direc-tor of the National Museum in Rio; the hygienist and pioneer oflegal medicine Afranio Peixoto; and the psychiatrists Henrique Roxo

tions to the Sao Paulo League of Mental Hygiene is Maria Clementina Pereira Cu-nha’s O espelho do mundo:]uquery, a histéria de um asilo (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra,1986).

37. Details of the league’s history can be traced in its journal, the Aichi:/osBfasileiros de Hygiene Mental (hereafter ABHM).

38- ABHM 2(2) (1929): 39-47, and 13(1) (1941): 91-9S~39. ABHM 5(2) (1932):3; on the law, see Pereira Cunha, O espelho do mundo [note

36], p. 170.

Eugenics in Latin America- S3

and Antonio Austregesilo. In 1929 the league resumed publication ofits journal, the Brazilian Archives ofMental Hygiene, which had beeninterrupted after its first issue in 1925. It intensified its agitationagainst alcoholism, clarifying in the media its connection to “racialdegeneration. ”

Another venue for eugenics in Brazil was legal medicine, a grow-ing Latin American specialization seeking to find institutional solid-ity and a clearly defined role. By the second decade of the twentiethcentury, several professorial chairs and institutes in legal medicinehad been established, usually within existing medical faculties (manyof the professors were in fact jurists rather than doctors). In legalmedicine the problems of crime and responsibility became closelylinked in the minds of doctors to the racial issue and eugenics.Afranio Peixoto wrote widely on eugenic themes, promoting theuse of eugenics in police work and in reducing hereditary crimi-nality, and generally advocating cooperation between the legal andmedical professions.” Meanwhile, eugenics also made its appearancein discussions at the National Academy of Medicine, where MiguelCouto made eugenics and immigration his special topic.” At theNational Museum, Roquette-Pinto produced a book in 1927 with along chapter on the “laws of eugenics” and their anthropologicalsignificance for Brazil."

These various strands of eugenics came together in july 1929 inthe most important public manifestation of Brazilian eugenics of theIQZOS, the First Brazilian Eugenics Congress. The occasion for thecongress was the centennial celebration of the founding of the Na-tional Academy of Medicine. With Roquette-Pinto presiding, theweek-long congress was attended by some two hundred profes-sionals, including medical clinicians, officials from the state psychi-atric and sanitation institutions and services, journalists, and severalfederal deputies representing various political viewpoints. Delegatesfrom Argentina, Peru, Chile, and Paraguay were also present, in-cluding Paz Soldan, whose 1916 pamphlet A National Program ofSanitary Politifs had long been claimed by the Brazilians as a funda-mental eugenics text.”

40. See, e.g., Afrinio Peixoto’s Criminologia (Sao Paulo: Editora Nacional, 1933).41. Boletim da Arademia Nacional de Medicina 96(2) (1923): 33-34.42. Edgar Roquette-Pinto, Seixos rolados (Estados brasileiros) (Rio de janeiro: n.p.,I927)~43. Braxil-Médico 43 (1929): 842-45 gives a good account of the congress.


The congress’s themes were broad indeed_marriage and eu-genics, eugenic education, the protection of “nationality,” racialtypes and eugenics, the importance of genealogical archives, japa-nese immigration, antivenereal campaigns, intoxicants and eugenics,the treatment of the mentally ill, sex education, and the protectionof infants and mothers. The participants passed several resolutions,the most controversial being a call for a national immigration law torestrict entry into Brazil to those individuals deemed eugenically“sound” on the basis of some kind of medical test.

The success of the congress and the publicity it received in thedaily and medical press suggested that eugenics was about to enter anew phase of activity. Already in january 1929, Kehl had begunpublishing a monthly journal, the Bulletin of Eugenia.” Two yearslater, in the so-called Revolution of 1930, the foundations of theFirst Republic were thrown in question. A period of political dis-turbance and agitation ensued which, in conjunction with the eco-nomic hardships caused by the world depression, helped to expandthe political and ideological space for eugenic propaganda. The eu-genic ideal of a rationally managed, medically purified society tran-scending class conflicts was shared by other nationalistic, anti-democratic, and organic statist ideologies that flourished in theperiod. The ever energetic Kehl seized the political opportunity tocreate the Central Brazilian Commission of Eugenics to promoteeugenics at the national level and raise the issue of immigration as apressing national-medical issue. In 193 3, the eugenists turned theirattention to lobbying the newly elected members of the ConstituentAssembly, which had a wide mandate to reexamine aspects of Bra-zilian politics. The eugenists were remarkably successful in insertingeugenics into the new immigration-restriction law and legislationconcerning marriage.” The League of Mental Hygiene also revivedits Archives and intensified its eugenics work, as can be seen from itsnumerous editorials calling for an officially endorsed antialcoholcampaign and immigration selection, and in the creation of its firstInfants Euphrenic Clinic/‘6

44. The journal Boletim de Eugenia appeared as a separate section within the medi-cal journal Medicamenta but carried its own title and editorial board. I refer to it inthis book under its own name.

45. For a discussion, see Chapters 3 and 4.46. ABHM 7(1) (1934): 65.

Eugenics in Latin America - 5 5

Eugenics in Spanish America

The feeling that the moment was ripe for eugenics was confirmedby the emergence of eugenics in other countries. Hardly a singlearea in Latin America had in fact remained completely untouched byeugenics by the I930S. Obviously, the social and political conditionsof Latin American nations varied greatly. Nevertheless, their eu-genics societies and activities followed in most respects the patternalready described for Brazil-they were led by medical doctors inobstetrics, child health, and mental hygiene, and their goals were topropagandize, and apply, the new science of eugenics rather than tocarry out research in heredity and health. Two of the most impor-tant eugenics associations in the hemisphere were founded in thisperiod: the Mexican Eugenics Society for the Improvement of Race(Sociedad Eugénica Mexicana para el Mejoramiento de la Raza) andthe Argentine Association of Biotypology, Eugenics, and SocialMedicine (Associacion Argentina de Biotipologia, Eugenesia y Medi-cina Social). Both enjoyed the membership of some of the well-known medical scientists of the times, regular meetings (weekly atfirst in the Mexican case), their own journals, the confidence of theirprofessional peers, and on occasion political prominence.Mexican eugenics was one of the most interesting of our casesbecause of its revolutionary setting. The revolution in Mexico be-tween IQIO and IQZO was the first of the profound social and politi-cal upheavals that marked the twentieth century; it was devastatingin the scale of its violence. The deaths and dislocations caused by thewar and the staggering problems of poverty and sickness, combinedwith the growing nationalism of the revolutionary state, providedthe setting for the appeal to eugenics. Ideologically, the revolution’ssocialism, anticlericism, and materialism made Mexico receptive tonew developments in science and social thought. Darwinian ideaswere familiar, and many Mexican biologists, such as Alfonso L.Herrera, were convinced evolutionists and materialists who believeddeeply in the power of science to improve the human lot.” Mexicowas not an immigrant society but an “Indian” and mestizo one; dec-ades of debate about how the Indian population would become inte-grated into the national whole and how the health of the poor could

47. For a study of the reception of Darwin in Mexico, see Moreno, “Mexic0,"and Beltran, “Alfredo Dugés y el transformismo" [note II].


be improved now converged on eugenics. A pamphlet on “stirpicul-ture” by a Mexican, Fortuno Hernandez, appeared in 1910. Accord-ing to one account, the first public notice of eugenics occurred thenext year, when the work of the British eugenist Caleb Saleeby onwhat he called “eugenical feminism” attracted attention.” In 1921

Herrera predicted that laboratory science would one day produce a

race of supermen who would “populate the earth with a new andperfect humanity.” Left-wing, radical, and socialist strands in eu-genics existed in several European countries (e.g., Russia and Ger-many in the IQZOS), so the adoption of eugenics by socialist circles inMexico was therefore not unique; socialists’ endorsement preventedeugenics from becoming a preserve of the right.

By the IQZOS eugenics had been incorporated into Mexican med-ico-social debates. As the phrase “eugenical feminism” suggests,some of these debates involved women and reproductive health.Women, some of them feminists, were actively involved in eugenicsin Germany and elsewhere in the IQZOS because of their concernwith healthy motherhood and healthy babies and their worries abouthigh rates of infant and maternal morbidity. In most Latin Americancountries, as we shall see, feminism as an idea and a movement wasslow to develop. Where it did it was severely attacked as unnatural;in the circumstances, a feminist eugenics was very much a minorityposition.” In Mexico in 1921, however, the Mexican Congress ofthe Child raised eugenic and sexual issues; it even voted in favor ofsterilization of criminals-a harbinger of the more extreme eugenicsthat would eventually surface in Mexico.” By 1929 the new Mexi-

48. Fortuno Hernandez, Higiene de la espefie: Breves cansidemtiones sobre la stir-picultura humana (Mexico City: Bouligny e Schmidt, 1910). Alfredo Saavedra in “Lo‘eugénico’ anunciado por primera vez en México," Accién Médita (September 1956):16-17, refers to an article in El Diario in 1911 on Saleeby`s idea that a eugenicsprogram would protect women from venereal and other damaging factors that couldaffect the health of their offspring; Saleeby believed such a program would be “femi-n1st. ”

49. The quotation is found in Herrera`s footnote to Israel Castellanos`s Plas-rnogenia (Havana: Rambla, Bouza, 1921), p. 124. “Plasmogenesis” was Herrera’sword for the experimental, materialist science of the phenomena associated withprotoplasm and therefore life.

50. I take up the themes of reproduction, gender, and eugenics in Chapter 4.51, The first congress [Congreso del Nino] was followed by a second in IQ23. On

eugenics at the congresses, see the references in Alfredo Saavedra M., “Lo que Mé-xico ha publicado acerca de eugenesia,” in Ateneo Nacional de Ciencias y Artes,Primer Congreso Bibliognijico Mexirano (Mexico City: DAPP, 1937), pp. 103-25.

Eugenics in Latin America - 57

can Society of Puericulture (Sociedad Mexicana de Puericultura) thatformed in Mexico City had created a eugenics section, where issuesof heredity, disease, infantile sexuality, sex education, and birth con-trol-radical ideas for their time and place-were discussed in rela-tion to the care of the child.The lack of more solid institutional development of eugenics be-fore the IQ3OS in Mexico was due in part to the political and socialuncertainties caused by the revolution itself, the consequent diffi-culties experienced by scientists, and ideological clashes over reli-gion.” It was not until the early 19305, in a moment of relative con-servatism within the revolution and institutional consolidation of therevolution’s political and state structures, that eugenics made an in-dependent appearance in Mexico. In the autumn of I93I a group ofdoctors and scientifically minded reformers, many of whom hadbeen active in public health and puericulture, organized the MexicanEugenics Society in the federal capital. Quickly making up for losttime, the 130-odd members held some thirty-one sessions by Gcto-ber of that year alone. The society was connected to several of thestate governments of the Mexican Republic, with representativesfrom state public-health departments as well as the federal Depart-ment of Public Health.” Several well-known biologists were associ-ated with the society in the I93OS, including Fernando Ocaranza,who played an active role, and José Rulfo, who is credited withbeing the first Mexican scientist to introduce modern experimentalMendelian genetics in Mexico in the late 19308 and early 19405.By May 1932 the society had set up a permanent technical com-mission to respond to requests for information and advice, and byAugust its Bulletin began publication (later to change its name toEugenics). In February the following year, the permanent secretaryand dominating figure in the eugenics movement, Alfredo Saavedra,drew up a Mexican Code of Eugenics. By this time the national

52. Herrera describes some of these difficulties in his short history of biology inMexico, La biologia en Méxiro durante un sxglo (Mexico City: El Democrata, IQZI).The history of health policies in the 19205 and I93OS and their connection to othersocial and political agendas of the revolution sorely need analysis.53. A brief history of the society appeared in an editorial in the journal Eugenesianew ser. 1 (March 1940): I-6. This journal started as the Boletin de la Sociedad Eu-génica Mexicana and changed its name to Eugenesia in December 1931. Further detailsabout the Mexican Eugenics Society are drawn from Alfredo Saavedra, Méxiro en Iaeducurién sexual (de 1860 a 1959) (Mexico City: Costa-Amic, 1967), and from hisarticle “Lo que México ha publicado acerca de eugenesia” [note 51].


press had given eugenics wide, if stormy, publicity by announcingthe extensive program of eugenically oriented sex education the so-ciety had proposed to the national government, following a requestfrom the National Block of Revolutionary Women.5‘

The Argentine Association of Biotypology, Eugenics, and Social

Medicine in Buenos Aires was founded in 1932 in very differentpolitical circumstances. On a per capita basis, Argentina was a richcountry, a fact that drew to its shores millions of immigrants look-ing to improve their lot in life. It also had a large medical profes-sion, which performed very creditably in controlling epidemic andendemic diseases at a time of a huge influx of very poor people fromEurope; the improvement in mortality and morbidity rates madeBuenos Aires if anything ahead of New York in health statistics.

As in Brazil and Mexico, eugenic ideas were picked up early, longbefore the Great War. In Argentina, eugenics was first associatedwith the secular and modern left-wing and anarchist groups whichplayed such an important part in Argentine cultural and political life

in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In 1909, for exam-ple, Argentina’s Emilio Coni, the socialist physician who publishedwidely on sanitation, attended a medical congress in Chile in 1909

and embarrassed his fellow Argentinian physicians by discussingbirth control and eugenic sterilization. Like many socialists, Coniviewed eugenic legislation on procreation as a progressive and nec-essary part of medical sanitation.” Eugenics was also a feature ofpsychiatric and criminological societies and progressive reform cir-cles.

The first move toward the concretization of a eugenics societyoccurred in 1912, when the physician Victor Delfino attended theFirst International Congress of Eugenics in London (the only LatinAmerican to do so, as far as I have been able to establish) and re-

ported back on the results of the debates about eugenics then takingplace in the advanced centers of science. Delfino founded the Argen-

54. See Saavedra, México en la educacién sexual [note 53], p. 34.

55. Emilio Coni, “Frecuencia y profilaxis de las enfermedades venéreas en la

América Latina, ” in Trabajos del Cuafto Congreso Cientgico (I Panamericana) (San-tiago: Imprenta Barcelona, 1909), I:391-433, References to eugenics can also be

found in the anarchist journal La Protesta in the same period, as well as in variousjournals of psychiatry and criminology. Another interesting anarchist and eugenistwas Georg Friedrich Nicolai, a German who came to Argentina after his oppositionto World War I had led to his explusion from his country; see Wolf Zuelzer, The

Nicolai Case: A Biography (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1982).

Eugenics in Latin America - S9

tine Eugenics Society in 1918. His activities reflected a reorientationof eugenics in much more conservative and racist directions; thisshift intensified during the economic crisis that spanned the waryears, a crisis that tested the faith of the secular and professionalclasses in the inevitability of Argentinian progress. Growing worriesabout national identity and the disturbances to national culture andmores caused by “foreign” customs and peoples made immigrationand race salient issues. In his pronouncements, Delfino connectedeugenics to the need for national purification and above all to immi-gration controls. But the eugenics committee and society Delfinofounded, in 1914 and 1918 respectively, and the Argentine League ofSocial Prophylaxis led by Alfredo Verano in the IQZOS, though im-portant indicators of the direction eugenics was taking in Argentina,were only preludes to the more fully developed eugenic efforts inthe 19305, yet another period of economic crisis.”

The Argentine Association of Biotypology, Eugenics, and SocialMedicine, established in 1932 in Buenos Aires, came into existencein a very conservative, even reactionary moment of Argentinian his-tory; its founding signaled a definitive shift in the ideology of eu-genics in the country from the left to the right. Already in the IQZOS,as new cultural mores, democratic demands, and labor unrest chal-lenged the traditional political system, the elites had hardened theirattitudes toward immigration. They expressed cultural nostalgia fortheir “hispanic” past and resisted various classes of immigrants asputative carriers of strange cultural mores and unfamiliar diseases.Politically, the long period of dominance by the Radical party,which in the IQZOS had led to the opening up of society and politicsto some of the demands of the middle class and immigrant groups,came to an end in a military coup in 1930. The events signaled thebeginning of an era of conservatism that lasted until I943, the yearJuan Perén appeared on the political scene. The I93OS were markedby weak political parties, fraudulent elections, antiforeign sentiment,and hostility to “alien” peoples and cultural practices. Old and newnationalisms came together in a shared dislike of liberalism, democ-racy, and foreign capital. The church, whose influence in educationand in its traditional sphere of marriage had been limited by the

56. These early initiatives are analyzed in Chapters 3 and 5. On the early uses ofeugenic ideas and language, see Eduardo Zimmerman, “Racial Ideas and Social Re-form in Argentina” (Oxford: unpublished paper, 1989).


secular legislation introduced in the second half of the nineteenthcentury, began to stage a comeback, seeking to extend its roleamong the new urban masses and among the elite. The ArgentineCatholic Action (founded in 1928) had by the mid-19305 become a

vehicle for expressing antidemocratic, even profascist sentiment.”The Association of Biotypology, founded in this moment of reac-

tion, was unusual in being linked directly to a peculiar Italian sci-ence, “biotypology.” This was perhaps the most significant of allthe new eugenics societies in Latin America in the scale of its ambi-tion and in its distinctive scientific character. The cultural influenceof Italy was much greater in Argentina than in Brazil (where Italiansalso settled in large numbers), owing to the larger size of the middleclass in Argentina and the more open political and educational sys-tem.

The direct inspiration for the association was the visit to the coun-try of the Genoese scientist and originator of the word “biotypol-ogy,” Nicola Pende (called Nicolas in Spanish) in 1930. The centralidea of biotypology was that human populations could be dividedinto distinct types withtheir own characteristic illnesses and psycho-logical makeup. Biotypology was concerned not only with the clas-sification of individuals into their correct types but with the controlof development-physical, psychic, and sexual-so that “nor-mality” could be ensured and abnormalities be prevented. Pende be-lieved that by means of an inventory of human biotypes in a popula-tion the biological resources of a nation could be harnessedefficiently to the goals of the state. Such an endeavor, said Pende,was of vital concern to the fascists and the Work of Mussolini.

In Argentina, biotypology was explicitly linked to eugenics, a linkthat provided an opportunity to bring together a variety of physi-cians long interested in maternity, child health, and heredity andthat directed their attention to the steps that could be taken to im-prove the “biotypes” of the Argentinian population by the studyand control of its “orthogenetic” development. Gender and racialconsiderations figured prominently in this eugenics. The Argentineassociation quickly became one of the largest medical associations inthe country, incorporating into its organization many figures from

57. Nestor T. Azua, Los catélicos argentinos: Su experiencia politica y social (BuenosAires: Editorial Clarentiana, 1984).

Eugenics in Latin America- 61

past eugenic efforts as well as new recruits.” Of all the eugenicsorganizations in the region it had the most substantial institutionalrepresentation, with its own school for training experts in the diag-nostic methods of biotypology and a polyclinic for evaluation andtreatment. The latter opened ceremoniously in 1933 in the presenceof the president of the republic, General Agustin P. justo.In addition to the growth of eugenics nationally, eugenics wasbecoming a Pan American affair. The first Pan American Confer-ence of Eugenics and Homiculture, held in 1927, was the occasionfor a debate on a proposed Pan American Code of Eugenics; a sec-ond conference followed in Buenos Aires in 1934. In the followingyear the Latin International Federation of Eugenics Societies was or-ganized in Mexico City, with representation not only from LatinAmerica but also from several European countries.” The two mostsignificant Peruvian celebrations of eugenics were held even later, in1939 and I943.w Legislatively, the period also witnessed the passageof a variety of eugenic laws regulating race and marriage, as weshall see.” An Argentine physician commented in I94 3 that every-thing seemed to point to the “present hour” as the “hour of eu-genics.”‘2The renewed energy in Brazilian eugenics in the 193os, the forma-tion of new eugenics institutions in Argentina, Mexico, and else-where, and the persistence of eugenics into the I94OS and even laterraise some interesting questions concerning the continuities and dis-continuities in the history of eugenics and the meanings attached to

58. Victor Delfino’s Argentine Eugenics Society [Sociedad Eugénica Argentina]apparently came to an end sometime in the 19205. An explanation of the meaning ofbiotypology and its connection to eugenics was given by one of the leading lights ofthe new organization, Dr. Artur R. Rossi, in his “Curso sintético de medicina con-stitucional y biotipologia: Herencia y constitucion,” Anales de Biotipologia, Eugenesiay Medicina Social (hereafter ABEMS) I (May I, 1933): I2-I4; see also Dr. ArturoLeon Lépez, “Eugenesia,” ABEMS 1 (May 15, 1933): 17-18. Further discussion ofbiotypology and eugenics is found in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.59. A discussion and analysis of the Pan American and Latin federations is foundin Chapter 6.60. Dr. Guillermo Femandez Davila, “La obra eugenésica en el Peru,” Primera_jomada Peruana de Eugenexia (Lima: n.p., 1940), pp. 46-52, and Carlos A. Banbarén,“La eugenesia en América,” Eugenesia new ser. 1 (March 1940): 7-10.61. Dr. Enrique Diaz de Gunarro, “La eugenesia y la reciente legislacion del ma-trimonio en América Latina, ” Crénica Médica 61 (1944): 230-36, 282-94. See Chap-ter 4.

62. juan Pou Orfila, “Reflexiones sobre la eugenesia en América Latina, ” Obstetri-cia y Cinecologia Latino-Americana (Buenos Aires) 1(1) (1943): 50-65.


the term. It is often said that by the 193qs eugenics was a pseudo-science already contradicted by modern genetic discoveries and dis-credited for political reasons, not the least of them being the emer-gence of extreme racist eugenics in Nazi Germany in 1933. What,then, are we to make of the fact that in Latin America eugenic activ-ity intensified in the period?“ The I93OS were, after all, as turbulenta period for Latin America as they were for Europe. Many countriesexperienced authoritarian, antidemocratic, even semifascist govern-ments. I have already mentioned the right-wing military coup thatremoved Argentina’s democratically elected government in 1930.

The corporatist dictatorship that resulted was short-lived, but underthe following conservative regimes of the 19305, antidemocratic, ex-treme nationalist, and anti-Semitic ideologies flourishedf” Brazil inthe late 19305 saw the termination of all political parties, the suspen-sion of democratic politics, and the development of a dictatorshipwith semifascist overtones in Getulio Vargas’s “Nevv State” (EstadoNovo), a regime that lasted until the end of World War II. Of thethree countries discussed here, only Mexico remained ideologicallyand publicly committed to progressive goals. Yet Mexico’s national-ism, state-building, and antiforeign sentiment linked the country toother, ideologically very different nations of the region. Is the re-surgence of eugenics in the IQ3OS, then, to be understood as a prod-uct of an authoritarian moment in Latin America, perhaps influ-enced by the development of fascist eugenics in Germany? Orshould a different interpretation be put on eugenics in Latin Amer-ica? What, in short, was Latin American eugenics? The next threechapters examine in some detail its preventive, sexual, and racialaspects.

63. Some historians have commented on the surprising resurgence of eugenics in

the 19305 in “mainline” eugenic countries. On Britain, see G. R. Searle, “Eugenicsand Politics in the I93OS,” Annals ofScience 36 (1979): 159-69.

64. David Rock, Argentina, 1516-1982: From Spanish Colonization to the FalklandsWar (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), p. 214.

Stepan. the Hour of Eugenics

Documents

Transcript of Stepan. the Hour of Eugenics