THE MOTHER OF TOMORROW: AMERICAN EUGENICS AND THE PANAMAPACIFIC INTERNATIONAL EXPOSITION 1915
A thesis submitted to the faculty of San Francisco State University In partial fulfillment of The requirements for The degree
Master of Arts In Women Studies
by Elisabeth Nicole Arruda San Francisco, California May, 2004
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Copyright by Elisabeth Nicole Arruda 2004
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CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL
I certify that I have read The Mother of Tomorrow by Elisabeth Nicole Arruda, and that in my opinion this work meets the criteria for approving a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree: Master of Arts in Women Studies at San Francisco State University.
______________________________________________ Deborah Cohler Assistant Professor of Women Studies
______________________________________________ Amy Sueyoshi Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies and Human Sexuality Studies
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THE MOTHER OF TOMORROW: AMERICAN EUGENICS AND THE PANAMAPACIFIC EXPOSITION
Elisabeth Nicole Arruda San Francisco State University 2004
The Mother of Tomorrow reveals how eugenicists created the ideal of the “eugenic mother,” and the gendered responses to this construction in the early twentieth century. Anglo-American women actively participated in constructing and altering eugenic motherhood discourses at the Panama-Pacific International in San Francisco in 1915. Furthermore,
some
Anglo-Americans
and
Native
Americans resisted these discourses to eugenics in 1915.
I certify that the Abstract is a correct representation of the content of this thesis. ___________________________________________________ Chair, Thesis Committee
________ Date
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to my advisors and professors, Deborah Cohler and Amy Sueyoshi, for inspiring and guiding my work. I could not have completed my thesis if it were not for my parents, James and Theresa Arruda, my sisters Kellie and Jennifer, and my grandparents, Emidio and Marianna Raposa, who have always been supportive of my academic goals. I am especially grateful to Michael Stoll, who helped me clarify my ideas and whose careful editing I sorely needed.
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CONTENTS
List of Illustrations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . viii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1 History of Eugenics and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition . . . . . . . . . 3 Literature Review . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Theoretical Framework. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 Findings. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .14 “The Mother of Tomorrow” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 1. A Nation’s Work . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .18 World’s Fairs, Eugenics and the Enlightenment Progress Narrative . . . . . . . . . .25 Gendered Representations of Nationalism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Eugenics in the United States . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .38 Second National Conference on Race Betterment, 1915. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .45 Fears of “Race Suicide” and “Fecund Immigrant Women” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .51 2.Women’s Work: Women of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition . . . . . . . . . 60 New Women. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 “Problems Women Solved:” Hostesses at Home . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Motherhood Monument . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
vii Racial Hygiene and Euthenics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .73 Women Participants in the Race Betterment Conference. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Redemption: A Masque of Race Betterment. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .80 Eugenic Motherhood Constructed and Imperiled . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .83 Eugenic Infanticide. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88 White Women and Red Men. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Conflicting Images of the Japanese: “Teach Your children American Games . . 93 3. Locating Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .98 Conformity/Resistance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 The Birds and the Bees: “Love vs. Eugenics” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100 “The Life of a Vanishing Race” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117 References . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120
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ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure
Page
1. The Nations of the West, The Mother of Tomorrow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .22 2. PPIE Gold Medal Certificate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34 3. The 13th Labor of Hercules . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .35 4. Race Betterment Exhibit. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 5. End of the Trail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .56 6. “Pioneer Mother” Monument. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .67 7. First Eugenic Baby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .85
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INTRODUCTION
In 1915, white supremacists from across the country massed in San Francisco. Early that August, eugenicists met at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to present papers, share information and publicize their so-called science of “race betterment.” According to the movement officials, “The Race Betterment movement aims to create a new and superior race through euthenics, or personal and public hygiene, and eugenics, or race hygiene.” 1 Morally and physically healthy Anglo-Saxon elites constituted the so-called “race of thoroughbreds” in eugenicists’ utopian vision. Eugenic women had a racial and patriotic duty to uphold motherhood and the maintenance of their families’ health. In this thesis, I explore the ways in which eugenicists created the ideal of the “eugenic mother,” and the gendered responses to this construction. Anglo-American women actively participated in constructing and altering eugenic motherhood discourses. In the construction of the eugenic mother, eugenicist narratives illustrate the complex interweaving and social construction of race, gender, sexuality and the nation. Although the term “eugenics” is most often associated with Nazi Germany, the movement to build a “superior race” was strong in the United States in the early 1900’s. Eugenicists promoted the Anglo-Saxon race to produce “fit families” while preventing
1
Official Proceedings of the Second National Conference on Race Betterment, August 4-8, 1915 (Battle Creek: Race Betterment Foundation, 1915), 148.
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the “unfit” races from reproducing. In the United States, eugenicists helped to pass the 1924 immigration law to restrict the entry of Southern and Eastern Europeans in favor of Northern and Western Europeans, based on the former’s inherent “criminialistic” and “feeble-minded” racial characteristics. Eugenicists’ promoted the segregation and forced sterilizations of the mentally, morally, physically and racially “unfit.” Most of the “unfit” sterilized in the United States were poor women. Although most states had eugenic sterilization laws, California forcibly sterilized more people than any other state. In fact, Nazi Germany looked to California’s 1909 law as a role model for its legislation. 2 This thesis is an effort in part to understand how California became the nation’s leader in sterilizations of the “unfit.” Historically and culturally how did the eugenic narrative of racial progress intertwine with the narrative of the Anglo-expansion into the western frontier? I believe the symbols of “The Mother of Tomorrow” and the “pioneer mother” uniquely embodied these threads of racial and national progress through the construction of a particular race, sexuality and gender identities to create a eugenic utopia. The symbol of the “Pioneer Mother” resonated uniquely with Anglo-women of the West in constructing the eugenic mother.
2
Ed Fletcher, “Californians discuss a dark part of history — forced sterilization of 20,000,” Sacramento Bee, 17 July 2003; and Tom Abate, “State’s little-known history of shameful science — California’s role in Nazis’ goal of ‘purification,” San Francisco Chronicle, 10 March 2003.
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Brief History of Eugenics and the Panama-Pacific International Exposition San Francisco hosted its world’s fair just nine years after the 1906 earthquake. The fair displayed the world’s greatest achievements in technology, education and science, from the first transcontinental telephone call, made by Alexander Graham Bell, to the first indoor airplane flight, by Lincoln Beachy. Henry Ford’s Model T assembly line in the Palace of Transportation manufactured 4,400 cars. 3 In addition, advancements in health and science were popular exhibits. In the Palace of Education a visitor could read about infant care, the work of the Red Cross and “methods of race betterment.” The Race Betterment Foundation set up a large booth, held their conference in August, and presented a eugenic play. The white supremacy organization aimed to build a superior race through “better breeding” as well as through environmental improvements. Although this publicity campaign may seem small in the face of thousands of others exhibits and conferences, these race-betterment activities stimulated one of the first public debates about what was called “positive” eugenics — promoting selective intermarriage of the well bred. This thesis explores the race, gender, and nationalist components that facilitated the exposure of the ideology of white supremacy through this movement. Eugenicists used biological and racial arguments to promote Anglo-American motherhood. By focusing on educating women to become mothers, however, eugenicists highlighted the social construction of motherhood even as they protected essentialized 3
Donna Ewald, and Peter Clute, San Francisco Invites the World (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1991), 98.
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ideas of motherhood. Many popular eugenic texts written for home use advised mothers in the proper feeding, bathing, and care of infants. According to eugenicists, heredity determined not just physical factors, but personality and morality. In addition, Eugenicists relied upon biological definitions of race. “From a modern point of view all hereditary characters are racial.” 4 According to eugenicists, the “white race” of the United States in 1915 included people of Germanic and English descent but not those of Italians or Portuguese descent. “(W)hile Germans as a rule were “thrifty, intelligent and honest,” Italians had a “tendency to personal violence.” 5 “Native born of native stock” specifically referred to Americans born in the United States of parents born in the United States who were of Northern and Western European descent. The definition of “whiteness” in the United States has changed over time. The story of eugenics is also the history of genetics in the United States. Scientists after World War II renamed their study of “eugenics” to “genetics.” Charles Benedict Davenport, director of the Department of Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, was among one of the first scientists to study inherited traits in the United States. A member of the American Breeders Association, Davenport published books such as, “Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-White Crosses” (1913), “The Feebly Inhibited:
4
Charles B. Davenport, The Feebly Inhibited: Nomadism, or The Wandering Impulse, with Special Reference to Heredity (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1915), 7. 5
Jan Witkowski, Traits Studied By Eugenicists, The Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, American Philosophical Society, and Truman State University. http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/; Internet.
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Nomadism, or the Wandering Impulse, with Special Reference to Heredity”(1915), and “Heredity in Relation to Eugenics” (1911). Genetics is historically rooted in a quest to create a superior white race. This disturbing history reveals how politics influences “scientific” definitions of race, gender, and sexuality to serve a particular aim. 6 Focusing on the exposition, this thesis attempts to answer larger questions of how eugenics used narratives of motherhood to popularize “positive” eugenics. Many historians argue that the eugenics movement in the United States focused on negative means. This aspect of eugenics involved segregation, sterilization, and immigration restrictions to exclude the “unfit.” Early in the movement, however, eugenicists looked to both positive and negative eugenics to further their goals of racial purification. 7 Newspaper attention to the race-betterment conference aired the public debate on positive eugenics before the movement changed its focus to negative eugenics. Eugenicists such as Alexander Graham Bell left the movement once it turned away from promoting positive eugenics. Newspaper accounts from the fair reveal the debate over negative vs. positive eugenics. The public responses to the debate were primarily gendered. Male writers rejected positive eugenics because it limited their choices of
6
Technological advancements in the 21st century such as The Human Genome Project, genetic embryonic screening, etc. raise similar ethical concerns over the quest for the “perfect baby.” 7
Elof Carlson, “Scientific Origins of Eugenics,” The Archive on the American Eugenics Movement Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, American Philosophical Society, and Truman State University. http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/ 1999. and Edwin Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race. (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2003).
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marriage partners. Some women, on the other hand, reveled in the lofty position in which positive eugenics placed women and motherhood. “The Mother of Tomorrow” engages in the debate over the historical classification of eugenics in the United States. Although many scholars argue that the movement is defined by negative eugenics, 8 my research supports the theory that positive eugenics was quite strong in the United States in the early stages of the movement. Wendy Kline argues in Building a Better Race, that the movement relied upon positive eugenics. Kline argues that positive eugenics propaganda continued into the 1950’s and my work neither defends nor rejects her theory. Instead, it looks at a crucial historical moment, when the debate between positive and negative eugenics was aired publicly, and analyzes the gendered consequences to that debate. I argue that this tension between positive and negative eugenics produced complicated gendered responses. Many Anglo-American women at the exposition reveled in the positive eugenic role of the “eugenic” mother. The Woman’s Board of the exposition erected a monument to motherhood, the “Pioneer Mother,” mirroring the utopian national and racial construction of the eugenic mother. Many newspaper accounts reveal Anglo-American men rejecting positive in favor of negative eugenics. 9 My intent is not to divide responses to eugenics into a purely “sexed” divide but rather to look at the
8
9
Ibid.
This should not be misunderstood, however, as a simple sexed divide in the debate between positive and negative eugenics. Alexander Graham Bell and Margaret Sanger complicate simple divisions across gendered lines.
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gendered consequences of positive vs. negative eugenics. Many Anglo-American men resented the restrictions upon marriage that positive eugenics entailed but welcomed the negative eugenic method of sterilization the “unfit,” which predominately affected women. 10 Many Anglo-American women embraced positive eugenics and the singular role it gave women as saving the nation and the race. “The Mother of Tomorrow” contributes a gendered analysis to the literature on positive eugenics in the United States. It looks at the gendered construction of a national, racial and sexualized “mother,” illustrating the unique role of women as central in the nature-vs.-nurture debate of the white supremacy movement. The Race Betterment Foundation placed equal weight upon euthenics (improving “the race” by improving the environment) and eugenics (improving the heredity of the race.) Women held unique roles in the Race Betterment movement as both the physical vessels for eugenics and as the environmental protectors for euthenics. Women’s domestic duties of bearing and raising children thus became national and racial duties, which only they could perform. The Race Betterment Foundation uniquely embraced the nature and nurture methods of “improving the human stock.”
Literature Review 10
Read more about sterilization from Black, War Against the Weak, Wendy Kline, Building a Better Race: Gender, Sexuality, and Eugenics from the Turn of the Century to the Baby Boom(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), Elof Axel Carlson, The Unfit: A History of A Bad Idea. (Cold Spring Harbor, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2001) and Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics: Race, Queer Anatomy, and the Science of Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
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Some contemporary books, movies and expositions about the Panama-Pacific International Exposition perpetuate “the official historian” Frank Morton Todd’s original interpretation of the fair as simply the last of the Victorian optimistic fairs. Donna Ewald and Peter Clute’s 1991 book, San Francisco Invites the World, makes no mention of race. Ewald and Clute put the book together with photographs and memorabilia from their personal collection. Ewald’s grandparents courted at the fair. The book re-inscribes a romantic notion of the fair as a “magical place.” Ewald describes its scope: “This book is a lovingly lingering tour of sights chosen from a collection of photographs taken at the time of the Exposition.” 11 Clearly, the authors chose a romanticized narrative of the exposition devoid of any complicated issues of race, empire, gender, or sexuality. In doing so, Ewald can recreate her grandparents’ “love story” as well as an innocent view of the history of San Francisco. Ewald and Clute’s book erases issues of race and furthers San Francisco’s seamless Anglo-Saxon historical narrative. Ewald’s extensive collection of PPIE memorabilia was on exhibit from February 20 – May 2, 2004. San Francisco’s Presidio Trust exhibit, “Panoramic Spectacle: Celebrating the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition of 1915” maintains rather than evaluates an Anglo-American perspective of the fair. 12 Only one placard in the exhibit, “Cultural Representations,” acknowledges that indigenous peoples had little control over how they were being represented. Although the Presidio Trust references the “cultural
11
Ewald, 9.
12
Curated by Ms. Hallie Brignall, San Francisco State Master’s student in Museum Studies.
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insensitivity” in the brochure describing the fair, it is quickly dismissed as merely notions of the day. “Many of the cultural perspectives presented by the nations, states, and corporations that exhibited at the fair would be seen today as insensitive to indigenous peoples and women. This was not surprising: the fair was a celebration of the prevailing notions of the day, not an examination of them.” 13 What is missing from the brochure and the exhibit, is a thorough examination of how the “prevailing notions of the day” served to further national and racial imperatives that were an integral part of the fair as well as resistant voices to these discourses. Movies such as “The Innocent Fair” 14 and “1915: The Panama-Pacific International Exhibition” 15 also do not address issues of race and gender in their analysis. The former film, simply describes the fair as Frank Morton Todd had, a fair of world progress. The latter film, “1915,” brings up race and theories of social Darwinism in an “add on approach” to their project rather than as categories of analysis. This approach puts issues of race and colonialism in a limited way to explain only one aspect of the fair rather than to examine these categories of analysis as overarching ideologies permeating the entire fair. Burton Benedict et. al discuss social Darwinism and colonial exhibits but do not alter their overall interpretation of the fair. Benedict interprets the fair as part of
13
“The 1915 World’s Fair” Brochure printed by the National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior for the Presidio of San Francisco, Golden Gate National Recreation Area. 14
15
The Innocent Fair, Motion picture, (KPIX Television: Monaco Labs, Inc., 1962).
Film based on Burton Benedict’s book. 1915: Panama-Pacific Fair (University of California, Berkeley, 1984).
10
anthropological potlatch analogous to the “potlatch of the Indians of the northwest coast of North America.” 16 This anthropological approach erases great power differences between cultures and peoples in an effort to show an overall analogous “human” culture. Although most contemporary scholars use Benedict’s work as the foundation for their interpretation of the fair, my thesis attempts to recognize power differentials between cultures in the fair as central to my project. Robert Rydell argues that “World’s fairs performed a hegemonic function precisely because they propagated the ideas and values of the country’s political, financial, corporate, and intellectual leaders and offered these ideas as the proper interpretation of social and political reality.” 17 Furthermore Rydell claims that U.S. fairs helped “reaffirm their collective national identity in an updated synthesis of progress and white supremacy.” 18 Rydell’s work integrates an analysis of race and empire into writings about the exposition. Missing from his work, however, is an analysis of gender.
Theoretical Framework Using feminist theory, “The Mother of Tomorrow” examines the gendered aspects of eugenic propaganda. This thesis uses a social constructivist perspective to
16
Burton Benedict, The Anthropology of World Fairs (London: Scholar Press, 1983), 7.
17
Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Exposition, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 3. 18
Ibid, 4.
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examine race, gender, nationalism, and sexuality. Carole Vance articulates this position: “Social construction approaches call attention to the paradox between the historically variable ways in which culture and society construct seemingly stable reality and experience ...” 19 Social constructivists examine the ways in which “fixed” racial, sexual and gender identities change over time and among cultures. “The Mother of Tomorrow” uses a Foucauldian post-structuralist approach to power. Michel Foucault’s term “discourse” proves a useful tool. Discourse generally describes “passages of connected writing or speech.” Foucault redefined “discourse” to describe the process where language produces knowledge and meanings. In fact, Foucault would argue that objects have no meanings outside of discourse. These meanings are not fixed: objects take on different meanings within a specific historical context. Furthermore Foucault’s work on sexuality explains that the turn of the twentieth century was host to multiple sexual discourses. In Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, he controversially asserts that the 19th century was not a time of sexual repression. On the contrary, during this period a multiplicity of sexual discourses were produced. Foucault writes, “... the discourse on sex has been multiplied rather than rarefied.” 20 Foucault argues that new sexualities are in fact formed by discourses. Degeneracy theory, eugenics, Darwinism, sexology and Freudian psychoanalysis each affected and helped
19
Carole Vance, “Social Construction Theory: Problems in the History of Sexuality,” in An Introduction to Women’s Studies: Gender in a Transnational World, ed. Grewal and Kaplan (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002) 29. 20
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1(New York: Random House, 1990), 53.
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produce sexualities in their attempts to classify them. During this period there was an attempt “to formulate the truth of sex. 21 ” It was precisely in the endeavor to sanction some types of sexual acts and prohibit others that the discourses surrounding sex were formulated and multiplied. Ultimately, according to Foucault, sexuality is socially constructed. Speaking specifically to the eugenic and degenerative discourses of this period, Foucault argues, “Through the themes of health, progeny, race, the future of the species, the vitality of the social body, power spoke of sexuality and to sexuality; the latter was not a mark or a symbol, it was an object and a target.” 22 His argument suggests that eugenic discourses created and shaped sexual identities rather than merely reacting to them. Foucault posits a radically new way of looking at power formations. He does not subscribe to the Marxist top-down model of power relations. He argues instead that there are “multiple and mobile power relations.” 23 It is not just the “scientists” at the turn of the twentieth century who circulated power, but also the culture and people of the time. Foucault argues that power is relational and lies within all of us. In looking at sexual discourses in the early twentieth century, I stress the intersections of power relations rather than a unidirectional approach. Early twentieth century culture both
21
Ibid., 69.
22
Ibid., 147.
23
Ibid., 98.
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influenced and was influenced by sexual discourses. From this perspective, eugenic discourses helped to shape the American ideal of women’s sexuality: middle to upper class, heterosexual, white, native-born and morally “pure.” This thesis additionally models itself after transnational feminist frameworks, which analyzes concepts of gender within a larger structure, stressing the interconnections between gender, race, sexuality and nationalism. As Alarcon, Kaplan, and Moallem argue, “(I)t is through racialization, sexualization, and genderization that the nation is able to transcend modernities and become a timeless and homogenized entity.” 24 “Transnational feminist cultural studies recognize that practices are always negotiated in both a connected and specific field of conflict and contradiction and that feminist agendas must be viewed as a formulation and reformulation that is contingent on historically specific conditions.” 25 Eugenicists constructed a historically specific, nationally, racially, gendered and sexualized subject of motherhood. Examining the construction of the Anglo-American heterosexual mother reveals a greater discourse of who is nationally significant. Furthermore, the “eugenic mother” simultaneously defines who is not an ideal national subject: sexual “deviants,” people of color, people of Southern or Eastern European descent, recent immigrants, and people with physical or mental impairments.
24
Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem, ed., Between Woman and Nation: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms, and the State (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 7. 25
Ibid., 358.
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Sources The San Francisco Public Library’s history center proved invaluable for my research. The Panama-Pacific International Exposition documents, special newspaper inserts, daily printed fair-goers’ guides, internal memos among fair executives, fair press releases, advertising pamphlets, postcards and photographs provided an immense resource for this thesis. Although I reviewed the research of contemporary scholars on the fair and eugenics, I relied upon the primary sources of newspapers, books and documents of the era to formulate my conclusions. Digitized online primary sources from the Library of Congress and the American Eugenics Archive also provided me with historical documents on which I based my arguments.
Findings My research into the Second National Race Betterment Conference at the San Francisco P.P.I.E. uncovered multiple discourses previously unexplored in a transnational feminist framework. First, the success of the race-betterment exhibit, conference and morality masque with Anglo-Saxon women’s groups depended on the emphasis placed on motherhood as a woman’s supreme national and racial duty. Second, Anglo-American women involved in the race-betterment conference found their moral and health hygiene campaigns unified and validated in the “racial hygiene” movement. Women’s groups working in “progressive” social movements of health and hygiene echoed this discourse. Anglo-American women contributed to the
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white supremacy movement, creating the science of “euthenics” and participating in the construction of white women’s roles as biological and environmental mothers. Third, Anglo-Saxon resistance to the race-betterment conference centered on opposition to forced marriages of the Anglo-Saxon “fit,” but favored eliminating the “bad stock of the unfit.” My research revealed that San Francisco newspapers articulated complicated discourses, both in favor of and against eugenics. Newspapers, such as the San Francisco Examiner, printed articles pronouncing the arrival of the “First Eugenic Baby.” The Examiner also printed articles such as “Love vs. Eugenics,” which argued against eugenics. Newspapers coving eugenics and the race betterment conference, did not merely narrate events, rather they produced discourses on eugenics and motherhood.
“The Mother of Tomorrow” “The Mother of Tomorrow” reveals how eugenicists in the United States constructed fixed identities of race, gender and sexuality. The first chapter, “A Nation’s Work,” places the exposition and the eugenics movement in their larger historical context, concentrating on how racial and gendered ideologies of nationalism shaped both. White women became symbolic of national and racial progress in the early twentieth century. The second chapter, “Women’s Work,” looks at depictions of eugenic motherhood in various forms. Focusing on women’s groups, it analyzes how the new woman influenced eugenic discourse. The movement utilized a discourse of eugenic
16
motherhood to produce the “race of thoroughbreds” needed for their Anglo-Saxon utopia. Women fulfilled the role of white eugenic mother (genetic) and mother-protector (environment). The race-betterment movement, in cooperation with women’s groups, elevated women’s domestic roles as mother and caretaker into the public realm’s most important role: national and racial heroines. White women actively participated in constructing these roles and influencing the race betterment movement through the science of “euthenics” or race betterment through environment. The third and final chapter looks at discourses of Anglo-American resistance to eugenics in newspapers and other published accounts. Furthermore, this chapter reveals Native American resistant discourses to eugenics. Anglo-Americans created symbols to illustrate and re-enforce American conquest of the West as racial progress. In the early twentieth century, Anglo-Americans constructed the Native American “relic” in opposition to civilized whites. These constructions relied upon “biological” and cultural markers of progress. Native Americans resisted these categories. Native American subjugated knowledges 26 reveal that “resistance” may lie hidden in Anglo-American texts. Anglo-American women occupied a unique position in the construction of the nation. Eugenicists, as well as exposition leaders, utilized white women as the racial
26
Foucault describes two types of subjugated knowledges in “Two Lectures,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Random House, 1980). One meaning: “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation...the ruptural effects of conflict and struggle that the order imposed by functionalist or systematising thought it designed to mask.” 81.
17
markers of civilization and progress. Although the “Mother of Tomorrow” focuses in on a white supremacy movement’s actions in 1915, it reveals how the categories of race, gender, sexuality and nationalism are constructed and maintained for political aims. Anglo-American women aided in the construction of their roles as mothers of the nation.
18
CHAPTER I: A NATION’S WORK 27
Both the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the American eugenics movement used race to construct a U.S. national identity. In the nationalist discourse, white womanhood represented progress. Anglo-American fears of “race-suicide,” that white women were not reproducing enough, combined with fears of fecund immigrant women overtaking the nation. Eugenicists depicted these two groups of women as competing breeding forces in populating the United States. Eugenic discourses relied upon Anglo-Saxon women as the “biological reproducers” for building a utopian nation. Therefore, white women played a central role in the nationalist project in the early twentieth century. Nowhere was this more dramatically displayed than in the art and political events at the exposition. Nira Yuval-Davis argues in “Women and the Biological Reproduction of ‘The Nation,’” that “women reproduce biologically culturally, and symbolically their ethnic and national collectivities as well as the workforce, their families or the citizenry of their states.” 28 Anglo-American women had to be encouraged to reproduce in order to maintain the nation’s white identity. Non-white immigrant women had to be excluded
27
Original chapter heading from Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition, Vol. 1 (New York: Knickerbocker Press, 1921), 20. 28
Nira Yuval-Davis, “Women and the Biological Reproduction of ‘The Nation,’” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol.19 nos ½, 1996. 17-24.
19
from entering the nation. Eugenicists successfully lobbied congress to pass restrictive legislation to keep out the “degenerates.” The exposition promoted the Anglo-American woman as the idealized symbol of national progress and civilization in statues, medals, certificates, awards and postcards. Just as eugenicists relied upon a “scientific” hierarchy of races to promote their agenda, early world’s fairs depended upon an analogous hierarchy justifying colonial power and expansion. They claimed to produce the “truth” about cultures. As Foucault argues, we cannot separate out the production of “knowledge” without looking at power formations. Power produces truth. “We are subjected to the production of truth through power and we cannot exercise power except through the production of truth.” 29 Institutional power, as in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, produced truths about the cultures they represented. Although many nations represented themselves and their culture at the fair, other cultures had little say in how they were to be represented. Part of the production of knowledge about the world is to have power over how it will be represented. As Edward Said argues, “To have knowledge of such a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it.” 30 The Exposition’s production of cultural knowledge is embedded in the power structure of the United States. As a budding world power, the U.S. economically and politically wanted to influence the world. As a cultural power, the
29
Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 93.
30
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Random House, 1978), 32.
20
U.S. defined “otherness” as part of an ideological discourse of the progressive West in relation to the world. Alongside its narrative of progress, the exposition assumed a system of hierarchy. The Western, “civilized” world was seen as a step above the nonWesternized in the “human progress narrative.” White womanhood was the exposition’s symbol of enlightenment. Heeding Lisa Lowe’s warning to scholars of the pitfalls of a singular “metanarrative,” this chapter seeks to explore some of the dominant narratives that the exposition and eugenicists’ present. Lowe explains in her book “Critical Terrains” that both the Orientalist discourses and the discourses of the “other” are never static or singular. “(A)lthough it may be possible to identify a variety of different models in which otherness is a structuring trope, these differences demonstrate that to discuss a discourse of otherness is to attempt to isolate and arrest an operation that is actually diverse, uneven, and complicated.” 31 The exposition and eugenicist narratives reveal multiple U.S. imperialist discourses. The exposition and eugenics present a “structuring trope” of non-Western cultures in opposition to Western. Exposition leaders chose Walt Whitman’s poetry to represent the “sprit of the American people.” Part of Whitman’s poem, “Facing West from California’s Shores,” was inscribed in the massive architectural structure “the Arch of the Setting Sun” representing the West. The inscription read: “Facing West from California’s shores— inquiring tireless seeking what is yet unfound—I a child very old over waves towards the 31
Lisa Lowe, Critical Terrains: French and British Orientalisms (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 10.
21
house of maternity the land of migration look afar—look off the shores of my western sea the circle almost circled.” 32 In the Inscriptions at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (1915), Porter Garnett interprets the poem for his readers: We may see in these lines the poet speaking as the personification and representative of the Aryan race—the race which, having its origin in Asia, has, by virtue of the spirit of conquest, the desire to be forever “seeking what is yet unfound,” finally reached the western edge of the American continent, whence, “facing west from California’s shores,” Aryan civilization looks “towards the house of maternity, the land of migrations from which it originally sprang. 33 Porter constructs America as an Aryan nation. Porter’s interpretation represents the dominant Anglo-American belief in Aryan racial evolution and superiority. American progresses racially in tandem with the overland progress West. Eugenicists similarly utilized this discourse of Aryans as racially superior and symbolizing a social Darwinian progress of civilization. On the top of the “Arch of the Setting Sun” stood a large sculptural group representing the “Nations of the West” (figure 1) which presided over the exposition grounds. This group stood opposite the “Nations of the East.” In the “Nations of the West” loomed the: “French trapper, the Alaskan, Latin American, the German, the Hopes of the Future, represented by two boys on the wagon, Enterprise, the Mother of Tomorrow, the Italian, Anglo-American, Squaw and American Indian.” As Robert Reid explains in the official souvenir book, the Blue Book, “The types selected were of those
32
Porter Garnet. Inscriptions at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: The Wahlgreen Co., 1915), 12. 33 Ibid.
22
colonizing nations that have at one time or place left their stamp on our country. The following lines from Emerson’s “The Young American” are inscribed on the arch beneath the group: There is a sublime and friendly destiny by which the human race is guided—the race never dying, the individual never spared—to results affecting masses and ages.” 34 Placing the words “The Young American” beneath the figures, the sculptors and planners placed Anglo-Americans as the center of the West.
Figure 1. “The Nations of the West.” The central figure in front of the wagon is the “Mother of Tomorrow.”
34
Robert Reid, The Blue Book: the Official Souvenir and View Book of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition( San Francisco: Panama-Pacific International Exposition Company, 1915), 49.
23
The “Mother of Tomorrow” an Anglo-American “Pioneer Mother” figure occupied the center of the sculptural group. The “Mother of Tomorrow,” “marches ahead of the types of the Occident. It has taken all these types striving with common purpose to produce the future, therefore they form the Mother of Tomorrow, the matrix from which the future generations are to come.” 35 The Anglo-American woman is the vehicle of racial and social progress, she literally bears the future Anglo-American generations. Within the discourse of eugenics and “Race Betterment,” the “Mother of Tomorrow” becomes a powerful symbol of eugenic motherhood. Stella G.S. Perry’s Book, The Sculpture and Mural Decoration of the Exposition, displays a reproduction of the Mother of Tomorrow as its first image. A. Stirling Calder created the figure, the “Mother of Tomorrow.” In the forward to Perry’s book, Calder remarks on the inspiration of the sculpture and murals of the exposition, “Its many sources of inspiration—all European, like the sources of our racial origin—are clothed in outward resemblances of the styles and tinged with the thought of the masters, old and new, who constitute Precedent.” 36 Calder phrase, “our racial origin,” reveals his intended audience as Anglo-Americans. Calder connects art influences with racial influences, conflating (like eugenicists) racial heredity with cultural influences.
35
Juliet James, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1915), 6. 36
Stella G.S. Perry, The Sculptures and Decoration of the Exposition: A Pictorial Survey of the Art of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915), 4.
24
Wendy Kline in Building A Better Race argues that the mother of tomorrow places women in a subordinate position to male dominance in the public sphere. I propose the opposite argument, that Anglo-American women extended the discourse of the domestic sphere into the public in order to intervene and exert influence in the public sphere. The “Mother of Tomorrow” “symbolizes the eugenic ideal.” 37 Kline argues that the mother of tomorrow works to “save civilization” by “keeping the American family intact as well as reaffirm male dominance in the public sphere” in addition to being biological reproducers of the white race. Although I agree with Kline’s interpretation that the mother of tomorrow symbolizes the white eugenic ideal mother, I argue that AngloAmerican women asserted themselves as central to project eugenics/euthenics. The mother of tomorrow placed women into the public sphere with newfound national and racial importance . As Juliet James interprets, “With upturned face, with steady onward gaze, the stalwart Mother of Tomorrow moves ahead. Hers is the firm, determined purpose, the will to do – to accomplish that for which she has started.” The mother of tomorrow, a “Pioneer Mother,” does not stand behind the men in a subordinate position, rather she stands center stage dominating the national eugenic discourse.
37
Kline,16.
25
World’s Fairs, Eugenics and the Enlightenment Progress Narrative World’s fairs facilitated cultural, educational and consumer exchanges for masses of people. London held the first world’s fair in 1851 at the Crystal Palace. Burton Benedict argues that world’s fairs informed society’s tastes and wants, creating the first consumer culture. 38 Although world’s fairs promote themselves to be a celebration of “humankind,” they are an opportunity for the host countries (or cities) to promote themselves militarily and economically. World’s fairs depicted scientific and educational advancements, which reflected national pride and progress. Some symbols from fairs still stand in as city markers. French officials built the Eiffel Tower to symbolize the Paris Exposition of 1867, and the Seattle Space Needle was built for its fair of 1962. Victorian-era world fairs created utopian micro-cities. “At world’s fairs man is totally in control and synthetic nature is preferred to the real thing.” 39 In San Francisco, exposition leaders building the fair filled in the bay with 184 acres of dirt to create the Marina district and parts of the Presidio. According to the official fair historian, “It was a common enough operation, in an engineering way; and yet, to those that delight in human achievement there is something of almost epic quality about this man-handling of the old Earth, and re-making of the land and sea even on so limited a scale—and something peculiarly appropriate to the end in view: an exposition of Man’s ways with his
38
Benedict, 2.
39
Ibid, 5.
26
environment.” 40 In light of the devastating earthquake of 1906, San Franciscans uniquely prided themselves on overcoming the environment to create a new city. The fair commemorated U.S. completion of the Panama Canal, another example of “man’s ways with his environment.” These examples mark the utopian vision of the times, that humans had control over the environment and could manipulate it at will with the aid of technology and science. Open for a little under 10 months, the exposition had 19 million people walk through its gates. Burton Benedict argues that the 1915 exposition was the last Victorian-era fair, filled with “naive optimism.” 41 In fact, the race-betterment movement exhibited ideals similar to those proposed by world’s fairs. The movement supported a utopian vision that both nature and nurture could be manipulated by humans. Through science and technology, the “native-stock” Anglo-American race could overcome environmental obstacles to health. Through “better breeding,” Anglo-Americans could “Create a New and Superior Race.” 42 The labeling of this time in U.S. history as the Progressive Era denotes a time of progress through Enlightenment principles. Many historians categorized this period under various social and legal markers: antitrust legislation, labor laws protecting children, and multiple health reforms. Labor unrest, extreme urban poverty and massive immigration from non-English speaking countries, however, caused middle- and upper-class Anglo-
40
Todd, Vol.1: 300
41
Benedict, 60.
42
Race Betterment Table, “The Race Betterment Movement Aims,” Official Proceedings, 147.
27
Saxon panic. Complicating many of the “progressive” movements is a narrative of Anglo-Saxon supremacy and eugenics. Many of the progressive movements in the early twentieth century aimed to better and promote the Anglo-Saxon population. From the “better babies” movement to the “pure food” movement, a racial-progress narrative entwined with national progress to drive a U.S. health agenda. War further complicated the enlightenment progress narrative. The 1915 exposition opened during a unique historical and cultural moment. Europe was at war and the outward theme of the world fair was peaceful international relations. Exposition planners decided not to delay the fair, despite the war. Some changes had to be made: “A grand celebration of “One Hundred Years of Peace Among the English Speaking Peoples,” had to be given up.” 43 According to the exposition president, the event took on new meanings during war. Charles C. Moore argued, “tragic as the situation was it opened new possibilities and set a new purpose for the Exposition: to help keep the torch of civilization burning...” 44 Victorian-era fairs built themselves around Enlightenment narrative of progress and civilization. Competing narratives of peace and war preparedness permeated the fair. The United States did not get involved in World War I until 1917. Speeches, newspaper articles and events at the fair revealed the debate over U.S. involvement. Theodore Roosevelt’s fiery speech “Peace and War” advocated military preparedness and action
43
Todd, Vol. 2: 136.
44
Todd, Vol. 2: 134.
28
based upon fixed notions of gender: “That abject pacifist song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,’. . .should have a companion piece entitled ‘I Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.’” 45 Despite the war in Europe, the exposition leaders promoted a narrative of AngloSaxon-led progress. Exposition leaders promoted the United States as singularly heroic in completing the Panama canal. The building of the exposition and the re-building of San Francisco marked San Franciscans as the epitome of Western progress. Specifically exposition leaders, artists and historians marked Anglo-American progress as the ultimate narrative of Western progress. San Francisco’s exposition planners imagined their city to be much like the Phoenix, rising from the ashes of the 1906 fire into the glory of the “Jewel City,” welcoming visitors from around the globe. The phoenix stood as symbolic of the city’s ability to re-create itself through massive reconstruction, not just the city itself but a city within a city, the exposition. The central idea, of rebuilding a utopian vision out of destruction and chaos, became a symbol of national resilience and achievement. Much like the completion of the Panama canal, San Francisco’s writers described the building of the exposition a unique expression of America’s strength and vision. “The greatest
45
Teddy Roosevelt speech “Peace and War.” “The average Chinaman took the view that China was ‘too proud to fight’ and in practice made evident his hearty approval of the sentiments of that abject pacifist song ‘I Didn’t Raise My Boy to Be a Soldier,’ a song which should have a companion piece entitled ‘I Didn’t Raise My Girl to Be a Mother.’ The professional pacificists, the peace-at-any-price, nonresistance universal arbitration people, are seeking to Chinafy this country.” Todd, Vol. 3:96.
29
physical work of any nation is the cutting of the Panama Canal; but the greatest physical achievement of any city in history has been the rehabilitation of San Francisco.” 46 Exposition literature reveals multiple narratives of Californian’s unique ability to create civilization out of primitive conditions and disorder. Racialized discourses of San Francisco’s progress mirrored eugenic discourses of “racial progress.” Through science and technology, “mankind” can overcome the forces of nature to better “mankind,” whether the task is national, (to cut continents for canals), local, (overcome earthquakes), or racial, (eliminate “racial weeds”). In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the nation is defined by social as well as physical boundaries. The nation is an “imagined political community.” 47 In effect, communities construct nations through culture. Nations have a shared public past and future. World’s fairs represented and constructed national identities. San Francisco exposition’s exhibits and art constructed American nationalism through discourses of American progress. Planners emphasized and focused exhibits on American landmarks and contributions to industry, science and art. 48 Examples of this were abundant. The exposition displayed: a miniature Grand Canyon, Yellowstone Park, a working miniature Panama Canal as well as displays of the military prowess of the United States. 46
Todd, Vol.1: 54. Gavin McNab’s address in 1909 during the first mass meeting about
exposition. 47
48
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso Press, 1983), 6. Eugenicists’ carried this discourse of “American progress” to their project of “race betterment.”
30
At the same time, exhibition planners displayed “primitive” pueblo villages and other exhibits that constructed and maintained racial difference based on a hierarchy of progress. The simulated Indian “working” reservations at the exposition confirmed Anglo visitors’ assumptions about the primitivism of the Native Americans. This exhibition of difference constructed Anglo civilization and progress in comparison to Native American “savagery.” In addition, planners displayed America’s territories and colonies as places benefiting from American paternalism. Under the guise of “human progress” the United States justified its colonization of the Philippines. The exposition constructed the United States as a “step-uncle” of the Philippines. The Philippines Educational Exhibit displayed “what had been going on to elevate life in the islands since the United States took control.” 49 Planners displayed the Philippines as benefiting under U.S. colonialism. Todd explains, “English had become the language of the schools, yet the object was not to Americanize or Anglicize the population, but to give it access to a mighty literature embodying the world’s best strength.” 50 Todd’s writings reveal a narrative of Anglo superiority and domination under the guise of “philanthropic” colonialism. The United States constructs a paternalistic identity; colonizing the Filipinos “for their own good.” In this way, the United States depicted itself as a cultural benefactor rather than cultural violator.
49
50
Todd, Vol. 4:49 Todd, Vol. 4:50
31
The important racial marker in Todd’s quote is the recognition that the Philippines would never be “Anglicized.” The inferred meaning behind Todd’s words is that the U.S. was bringing “human betterment” not “race betterment.” Philippine education under U.S. colonialism taught the colonized to admire Anglo achievements under the assumption that they could never match them. Anglo-American leaders never intended for Filipinos to become United States citizens. The United States used the Exposition to assert its position as a world player. Planners named the exhibition halls after royal residences, “The Palace of Education” and “The Palace of Machinery,” etc. Using the word “palace” rather than exhibition halls reflected continuity with past expositions. The word palace harkens back to a predemocratic era. The United States evoked an image of power and empire that they wanted to present to the world. With the closing of the Western frontier, the colonization of the Philippines and the construction of the Panama Canal, the United States asserted itself as world power. Eric Foner argues “America’s triumphant entry onto the world stage as an imperial power in the Spanish-American War of 1898 tied nationalism more closely to notion of AngloSaxon superiority...” 51 The United States’ success in building empire was attributed to the nation’s constructed racial character, the “good stock” of the Anglo-Saxon. As the nation expanded, and immigration levels rose, national anxieties about “racial mixing” elevated. 51
Eric Foner, “Who is an American?” In Race, Class and Gender in the U.S., Paula S. Rothenberg, 4th edition. (NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 89.
32
The fair commemorated the opening of the Panama Canal. “The Canal is, in a very large sense, the gift of the United States to the world, America’s contribution to world harmony, peace, tranquility, and the wealth of nations.” 52 Todd’s words are countered two pages later by Major General G.W. Goethals, “Our primary purpose in building the Canal was not commercial but military: to make sure that no battleship of ours would have to sail around South America, as the “Oregon” did, in time of war.” 53 Although Todd carefully articulated the Panama Canal to be a work of “peace” General Goethals quote contradicts and refutes this statement. Todd attempted to “fix” the narrative of the exposition and the building of the canal to match his utopian vision of Enlightenment based progress. The text, however, reveals the contradictory narrative of Anglo-American empire. In Todd’s chapter, “A Nation’s Work,” he compares the achievement of the Canal as something that defines American progress. In fact, he compares the American achievement of the Panama Canal with the accomplishments of the Chinese and the Italians and finds them lacking. “The Chinese, with all their thousands of years of canal experience, never accomplished it.” The Italians gave the world “Mona Lisa, The Last Supper, and the wheel-barrow.” 54 In Todd’s description the Chinese and the Italian achievements pale in comparison to the Panama Canal. Exhibits as well as interpretations
52
Todd, Vol. 1:18.
53
Todd, Vol. 1:20.
54
Todd, Vol. 1:21.
33
of exhibits reveal a discourse of Anglo-American superiority that legitimized exclusion of non-Anglo immigrants and domination over Native Americans.
Gendered Representations of Nationalism Other scholars have noted how world’s fairs promoted imperialism and nationalism through racial markers of progress. Not fully developed, however, is how this racialized nationalism was specifically gendered. Anne McClintock argues in ’No Longer in a Future Heaven: Gender, Race and Nationalism,” that “(a)ll nationalisms are gendered.” 55 McClintock argues that women are “active transmitters and producers of the national culture,” and are “symbolic signifiers of national difference.” 56
55
Anne McClintock, "'No Longer in a Future Heaven: Gender, Race, and Nationalism," in Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives. Ed. Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 1997), 89. 56
Ibid., 90.
34
Figure 2. Panama-Pacific International Exposition Gold Medal Certificate
Centered on the official stamps, coins, postcards, and gold medal certificates (figure 2) usually stood an image of a white woman. Exposition leaders used a white woman to stand in for the city of San Francisco and for California. “But California’s motive was not to enter into rivalry with her guests and struggle to outdo them in fields where her superiority was universally admitted. Her impulse was to play the hostess, and to honor her visitors by putting on her finest gown. And she did it.” 57 California was
57
Todd, Vol. 2:91.
35
represented as a woman, welcoming her guests into her home, while the United States was depicted as a man of Herculean strength.
Figure 3. Perham Nahl’s “The 13th Labor of Hercules”
The official poster for the event, “The 13th Labor of Hercules,” (figure 3) depicted a man representing the United States, while the official seal of the PPIE depicted a white woman. Of course, these representations are complicated. California was not systematically and uniformly only depicted as a woman. While it was a naked white
36
muscular man depicted as the United States forcing open the canal, exposition leaders alternatively used the figure of a white woman in flowing robes holding the torch of enlightenment to depict the United States as well. As the physical labor of canal building was coded masculine, the ideals of the nation were depicted as feminine. The exposition, held to celebrate “America’s gift to the world,” the Panama Canal, was heralded as a specifically American achievement. “The 13th Labor of Hercules” depicts a white man pushing apart the Panama canal. Perham Nahl’s poster illustrates the gender and racial markings of American achievement. Nahl’s poster of the Herculean American was a symbolic re-imagining of American progress as masculine, individualistic, and Anglo-American. Although the Panama Canal was primarily built with Panamanian laborers under U.S. military and engineering oversight, the completion of the canal was depicted as a singularly American accomplishment. According to an official exposition booklet with information about the construction of the Panama Canal, “The highest number employed at one time was 45,000, of which 5000 were Americans.” 58 The poster’s image presents a romanticization of the laborer and of masculinity at a time of increasing mechanization and urbanization. Many scholars argue that during this time there was a “masculinity crisis.” 59 The poster depicts the naked strength of the
58
San Francisco Main Library History Collection, PPIE official booklet “Universal Exposition San Francisco By Authority of the United States Government 1915 February 20 To December 4 Celebrating the Opening of the Panama Canal,” (San Francisco: Panama-Pacific International Exposition Company, 1915) 5.
37
male figure forcing open the Panama Canal. What is not depicted in the poster is the massive machinery and mechanisms that makes the canal work, its multiple locks, and its Panamanian laborers. The poster depicts the rosy San Francisco exposition city at the other end of the canal. Clearly symbolic, it represents Enlightenment ideals of progress through a masculinized Anglo-American narrative. By using “Hercules,” the exposition leaders symbolically represent the U.S. with “god-like” powers able to move change the face of continents and connect the Orient with the Occident. More importantly to exposition leaders, the canal opened up new commercial passage ways for visitors to the fair. “The 13th Labor of Hercules” reveals the gendered construction of an individualistic masculine representation United States’ power. The powerful AngloAmerican man in Nahl’s poster illustrates the interweaving of constructed racial and gender categories to define national progress. Anglo-American women inserted a narrative of “motherhood” into the construction of the Panama-Canal. The preface to Elizabeth Gordon’s, What We Saw at Madame World’s Fair 1915, uses the image of a mother to personfiy the world. In Gordon’s narrative of the construction of the canal, “Madame World gave her son permission to go to work, and in a short time the work was finished, and Uncle Sam
59
See Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
38
presented his lady mother with the Panama Canal.” 60 Here the story of the nation’s achievements are presented in a reversal of the gendered narrative told by exposition leaders. The mother of all the nations, “Madame World,” takes center stage to the narrative, illustrating that some Anglo-American women positioned motherhood as ultimately responsible for the accomplishments of her “son.”
Eugenics in the United States Racial theories of degeneracy and eugenics circulated in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Degeneracy theory arose out of the 18th century but its ideas held resonance until the end of the 19th. Elof Carlson’s essay, “Scientific Origins of Eugenics,” describes how degeneracy theorists argued that negative environmental factors would affect heredity. Masturbation, or as it was called then, “onanism,” was considered one of these environmental effects degenerative to “the race.” During this time, onanism was feared to cause mental illness and birth defects. Degeneracy theory and eugenics were closely, if not in some ways contradictorily, linked. 61 Eugenics was in part a competing theory and a continuation of the degeneracy theory. While both
60
Elizabeth Gordon, What We Saw at Madame World's fair: Being a Series of Letters from the Twins at the Panama Pacific International Exposition to their Cousins at Home (San Francisco: Levinson, 1915), vi. 61
Carlson’s explains the historical overlap between the two: “Fear of degeneracy through masturbation led Harry Clay Sharp, a prison physician in Jeffersonville, Indiana, to carry out vasectomies on prisoners beginning in 1899. The advocacy of Sharp and his medical colleagues, culminated in an Indiana law mandating compulsory sterilization of ‘degenerates.’ Enacted in 1907, this was the first eugenic sterilization law in the United States. Carlson, Scientific Origins.
39
movements concerned themselves with the purity of humankind, eugenics focused not on environmental factors affecting heredity, but rather on “germ plasm”, the emerging theory of genetics. Eugenics helped define who was to become an American in the early twentieth century. Eugenics literally means “well-born.” 62 Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin, created the term and began the movement in Britain in the early 1880’s. The eugenicist movement aimed to improve the human race through sexual selection. Although eugenics began in England, it quickly spread to the United States where it gained greater popularity. Eugenicists in the United States believed that they had found the answer to all the ills of society. They believed that poverty, “feeble-mindedness,” crime, prostitution, and disease were inherited and could be eradicated through selective breeding. They envisioned a utopia of the “fittest” people living in harmony and progress. In order to realize their dream, however, American eugenicists needed to encourage the “fit” to breed and the “unfit” not to breed. Historians categorize these two strategies as “positive” eugenics and “negative” eugenics. Eugenicists in the United States spent most of their efforts on programs of “negative” eugenics. In the United States, the first eugenic organization was part of the American Breeders Association. Following suit were organizations such as the Eugenics Record Office, the J. H. Kellogg’s Race Betterment Foundation, the Galton Society, and the
62
Galton derived the term by combining the Greek words for “well” and “born.”
40
American Eugenics Society. All groups advocated for the improvement of the AngloAmerican “stock” through “better breeding.” In the United States, most eugenicists adopted a “negative” approach to reach their goal. Eugenicists believed in an extremely narrow definition of “fitness.” A eugenic family was intelligent, healthy, Anglo-Saxon, and prolific breeders. Eugenic discourses in America were especially popular during a time of mass immigration, labor unrest and racial mixing. Under the guise of science, eugenicists marked certain people as unfit for breeding. Eugenicists believed miscegenation would lead to “inferior stock.” Immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, people of color in the United States and “feeble-minded” whites were considered particularly unfit or “dsygenic.” American eugenicists forcibly sterilized the “unfit” and shaped immigration laws. 63 Eugenicists, such as the Englishman Havelock Ellis, concerned themselves with the health of the human race. Ellis wrote numerous essays concerning women’s sexual health, marriage, and eugenics, including “The Problem of Race Regeneration.” In Ellis’ book, “Sex and Marriage,” he argues that sterilization, abortion, birth control, divorce, and infanticide are justifiable in producing a fitter society. Ellis is an essential figure during this period; as one of the first “sexologists” he exemplifies the intersections between the “scientific” study of sexuality, eugenicists and the project of nation-building. Siobhan Somerville argues in “Scientific Racism and the 63
Elof Carlson. “Scientific Origins of Eugenics.”
41
Homosexual Body” that eugenics strongly influenced the development of sexology. “The beginnings of sexology, then, were related to and perhaps even dependent on a pervasive climate of eugenicist and anti-miscegenation sentiment and legislation.” 64 Women’s bodies were the site of scientific inquiry in an attempt to develop a theory of sexuality that ranked bodies on a hierarchy of health and degeneracy. Jeffery Weeks’s essay, “The Population Question in the Early Twentieth Century,” articulates the extent of eugenic discourses: “Social purity, sex reform, racial hygiene, and scientific advance could all find a home with eugenics.” 65 Nationalism and eugenics were inextricably linked. Jeffrey Weeks explains that extreme eugenicists believed “sexual intercourse was a racial duty.” Women’s bodies were the all-important bearers of future generations. Weeks notes that “Havelock Ellis believed that every healthy woman should at least once in her lifetime exercise the vocation of motherhood.” “Eugenically fit” women needed to reproduce to “better the human race” and the nation. 66 Many women embraced the eugenic project as reproducers. Lucy Bland’s work Banishing the Beasts: Sexuality and the Early Feminists describes the eugenic feminist movements in England at the turn of the twentieth century: “Eugenics offered fit women 64
Siobhan B. Somerville, “Scientific Racism and the Invention of the Homosexual Body” in Sexology in Culture: Labeling Bodies and Desires. Eds. Lucy Bland and Laura Doan. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 68. 65
Jeffery Weeks, “The Population Question in the Early Twentieth Century” in Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (New York: Longman, 1981),129. 66
Ibid., 128.
42
great social esteem as mothers of the ‘nation’ and the ‘race.’ ” Bland explains the “purity” part of the feminist project: When feminists adopted the eugenic terms which spoke of women as reproducers of ‘fit’ offspring and moral saviours who would thus ‘purify’ the ‘race,’ they were drawing on criteria of ‘fitness’ and ‘purity’ which although usually more explicitly about class than race, assumed the ‘whiteness’ of purity. English women did their duty to their “race” and to Britain through legitimized heterosexual sex with white men which produced white, morally fit offspring. 67 Somerville, Weeks and Bland’s work illuminate Anglo-American women’s responsibilities in the early twentieth century. Similar to the English feminists, AngloAmerican women’s responsibility to the race and nation was motherhood and purity. Sexuality, nationalism and race were inextricably linked. White women’s identities were predicated upon heterosexuality and motherhood. Anglo-American women, like their English counterparts, fulfilled their national obligation through reproducing the white race. The Eugenics Record Office was the center of the eugenics movement in the United States. Charles Benedict Davenport, a biologist working at the Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y, became fascinated with Gregor Mendel’s work on inheritance. In 1902, Davenport met Sir Francis Galton and Karl Pearson in London who helped him envision a scientific center for human betterment. With funding from the Carnegie fortune, he set up the Carnegie Institution Department of Genetics. In 1910, 67
Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885-1914 (London: Penguin, 1995), 231.
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Davenport solicited funds from railroad fortune inheritor, Mrs. E. H. Harriman, to start what would become the “most powerful research center in the nation,” 68 the Eugenics Record Office. Davenport published such research books as, Heredity of Skin Color in NegroWhite Crosses (1913) in which he attempted to make biological definitions of race. Because the definition of “black” varied, Davenport made a chart of what defined skin color as “pure black” with color card ratings as well as hair skin descriptions, “thick lips, flat broad nose, woolly kinky hair.” 69 Davenport’s 1910 book, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, described the political aims of the movement: And, finally, when public spirit is aroused, its will must be crystallized in appropriate legislation. Since the weak and the criminal will not be guided in their matings by patriotism or family pride, more powerful influence or restraints must be exerted as the case requires. And as for the idiots, low imbeciles, incurable and dangerous criminals they may under appropriate restrictions be prevented from procreation - either by segregation during the reproductive period or even by sterilization. Society must protect itself; as it claims the right to deprive the murderer of his life so also it may annihilate the hideous serpent of hopelessly vicious protoplasm. Here is where appropriate legislation will aid in eugenics and in creating a healthier, saner society in the future. 70 Eugenicists in the United States debated various measures. In a lantern slide from Davenport entitled, “Means Proposed for Cutting off the Supply of Human Defectives and Degenerates,” he listed: life segregation, sterilization, restrictive marriage, eugenic 68
Charles B. Davenport Papers, American Philosophical Society.
69
Charles B. Davenport, Heredity of Skin Color in Negro-white Crosses (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1913), 9. 70
Charles B. Davenport, Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding, Cold Spring Harbor, Eugenics Records Office (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), 32-33.
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education, system of matings, general environmental, polygamy, euthanasia, neoMalthusian doctrine, and laissez-faire as methods. Although these methods were debated in eugenic circles, segregation, sterilization and immigration restriction ultimately prevailed. Davenport argued, “(A)ll men are created bound by their protoplasmic makeup and unequal in their powers and responsibilities. 71 If Davenport was the scientist behind the movement, Harry H. Laughlin was the spokesman. Laughlin, superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office, publicized eugenicists’ findings and attempted to carry out its political aims. Laughlin effectively testified before Congress to change existing immigration laws to “weed out the unfit.” He argues, “In the long run, military conquest by a superior people would be highly preferable to a conquest by immigration by peoples with inferior stock endowments.” Laughlin’s testimony reveals fears of “race suicide” in addition to “conquest by immigration:” The Chairman. What happens when the oriental and western races meet? Doctor Laughlin. In the matter of maintenance of national stock in a given territory, immigration and differential fecundity are the greatest controlling factors. 72 Eugenics pitted immigrant women and “native” white women in a race to populate the nation. White women who did not bear children were committing “race suicide.”
71
72
Emphasis original. Davenport, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, iv.
Question using the context of Hawaii. Europe as an Immigrant-Exporting Continent and the United States as an Immigrant-Receiving Nation in Hearings Before The Committee on Immigration and Naturalization House of Representatives Sixty-Eighth Congress, First Session, March 8, 1924. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1924),1305.
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Immigrant women (non-white) reproduced faster and had more children than white women, causing a “tide of color.” Eugenicists, amongst many other whites, feared that the nation would soon be “flooded” or “overtaken” by immigrants who supposedly filled up the nation’s slums, almshouses, prisons, and insane asylums. Margaret Sanger’s work for birth control for women of all classes and races, however, illustrates the break between some American feminists and eugenicists. Although Sanger declared herself a eugenicist, her work was discredited and rejected by Laughlin and Davenport. While Laughlin and Davenport advocated for sterilization of the “unfit,” Sanger advocated for birth control for both the eugenic and the dysgenic. Sanger rejected “positive eugenics” in favor of “negative eugenics.” 73 Sanger’s work illustrates that not all feminists heeded the call for eugenic motherhood. The American Eugenics Society rejected Sanger’s call for a merger with her American Birth Control League on the grounds that the fittest women should bear as many children as possible.
Second National Conference on Race Betterment, 1915 San Francisco’s Panama-Pacific International Exposition hosted the Second National conference on Race Betterment. John Harvey Kellogg was a member of both the National Purity Congress and the American Eugenics Society. He started the “Race Betterment Foundation,” and was superintendent of the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan. Kellogg’s family made a fortune with their tasty cornflakes. The Race 73
More about Sanger and disagreements with eugenicists from Black, 135.
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Betterment Foundation hosted three conferences in 1914, 1915, and 1928. At the Second National Race Betterment Conference in 1915, Kellogg proposed the creation of a eugenics registry in order to record family genealogies for future eugenic uses. 74 Kellogg’s essay, “Chastity and Health,” written for the National Purity Congress, explains the functions of the sexual organs to be twofold: “first … they supply the body with a needed vital stimulus and regulator; secondly, they furnish the only means by which the physical immortality of the individual in the perpetuation of the race may be accomplished.” 75 During the first conference (1914) in a talk titled, “Race Betterment and Our Immigration Laws,” Robert DeCourcy Ward feared a “watering down of the nation’s blood.” He argued it “results from their (immigrants) reproducing their own kind after admission” and urged “proper eugenic selection of the incoming alien millions.” 76 The majority of European immigrants from 1880 to 1914 were from Great Britain, the German Empire, Italy, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Citizens from Great Britain emigrated the most, about 6.1 million of them to the United States. The Race Betterment Foundation held its second conference (1915) in coordination with the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition. In fact,
74
Official Proceedings,76.
75
Rachel Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 266. 76
Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999), 8.
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exposition leaders declared the week of the conference “Race Betterment Week.” The Race Betterment Foundation displayed its “life saving knowledge” at the Palace of Education. The context of the exhibit was of scientific improvement of health. Planners placed the exhibit amongst information about homogenized milk and tapeworms. Its presence in the Palace of Education legitimated the movement as one of scientific advancement.
Figure 4. Race Betterment Exhibit According to Frank Morton Todd, “One of the exhibits that caught the eye of every visitor to the Palace of Education was the Race Betterment booth (figure 4),
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representing the eugenics movement in the thought of the time.” 77 The exhibit depicted various charts and diagrams about how to improve the human race. Todd restates the movements’ agenda: “The Race Betterment movement aims to create a new and superior race through euthenics, or personal and public hygiene, and eugenics, or race hygiene.” 78 Todd had innumerable exhibits to choose from the Palace of Education, and yet he chose the Race Betterment Exhibit as worthy to represent in his book, even publishing a photo of the exhibit. 79 The Race Betterment Foundation differed from other eugenic organizations in its insistence upon the importance of environmental factors in tandem with genetic factors on the health of the race. It advocated both for “euethenics” and “eugenics.” Most eugenic organizations dismissed movements to better the environment as less effective and in some cases even a detriment to their cause. The Race Betterment Exhibit and conference of 1915 began the public campaign for a popularization of eugenics that ultimately would lead to the forced sterilization of the “unfit” and legislation to prohibit “dysgenic” immigrants. This social construction of whiteness legitimated the exclusion, repression and colonization of others. The exhibition had a special role in producing a sense of the United States. It helped shape an “imagined
77
Todd, Vol. 4: 38.
78
Todd, Vol. 4: 39.
79
According to Todd, “You can’t write history without advertising somebody.” Todd, Vol. 2:92.
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community” 80 of an Anglo-Saxon America through geographic and cultural knowledge of itself in contrast to “others.” In addition, the symbolic representations of nationalism were gendered. Eugenics and the exposition utilized the image of the white woman as the ideal symbol of racial and national progress. Conference topics ranged widely. Stanford University President David Starr Jordan presented his paper, “Eugenics and War.” Jordan argues that in war the “best ones that are slaughtered, and then the Nation breeds from the second best, and so every warlike Nation becomes in time a decadent one, because a continual killing off at the upper end and a continual breeding from the lower end, lets a Nation down.” 81 Jordan argues that the “superior strains” are the first to be sacrificed in war. Those who were ineligible for war, men with disabilities or “feeble-mindedness” are the only ones left to breed the next generation. Jordan argues that war was the downfall of the Romans, Egyptians and Greeks. Jordan’s argument held particular resonance as the war in Europe had begun only months before. Other conference paper topics included: “Longevity vs. Life Expectancy,” “Alcohol Prohibition,” “Care of the Mouth” and “Typhoid Fever—Its Causation and Prevention.” Kellogg defined what specifically “eugenically fit” meant. According to Kellogg eugenic people were: examples of the highest degree of physical fitness, who posses perfect health, are symmetrically developed, above average height, and show evidence of superior 80
Anderson, Imagined Communities.
81
David Starr Jordan, “Eugenics and War,” Official Proceedings, 13.
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mental abilities and whose physical history is devoid of clearly inheritable taint of an undesirable sort, whose family history shows no gross mental defect, form of feeble-mindedness, epilepsy or functional insanity and whose family history shows no clear evidence of lack of emotional control so placed in the pedigrees as to make it probable that the parents themselves will have emotionally uncontrolled offspring. 82 The Race Betterment Conference depicted competing narratives of environmental influence and genetic predisposition. Some in the conference, such as California botanist Luther Burbank, argued that heredity was of greater importance that environment. Others at the conference, such as Kellogg, argued that “racial poisons” such as alcohol, bad nutrition, and unhealthy school systems creates racial degeneracy in those predisposed genetically to fall ill. Preventative measures, Kellogg argues, can “balance and neutralize their ancestral traits and tendencies and thus prevent any development of disease.” 83 Campaigns for “Fresh Air Schools” sought to prevent degeneracy in native born schoolchildren. 84 Exposition official Calvin B. Brown presented the Race Betterment Foundation a bronze commemorative medal and made direct connections between the movement and the exposition’s goals. “Representing, as you do, a movement in race betterment, it seems to me that you represent the very spirit, the very ideal of this great exposition that we have created here.” Furthermore Brown argues, “we may be, here upon these 82
John Harvey Kellogg, “Eugenics Registry” Official Proceedings, 77-78.
83
Ibid., 82.
84
Kellogg also appeared to be obsessed with bowl movements. He argued, “It is more important for the individual child that the teacher should know that his bowels move properly three times a day, than that he should obtain high standing because of his knowledge of the three R’s.” Ibid., 82.
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exposition grounds, on the eve of a movement that will make for better men and women and better humanity.” 85 Brown’s choice of words, “ideal” and “spirit” reveal the underlying Anglo-Saxon nationalism of the exposition. By declaring the white supremacy movement as representing the “very spirit” of the exposition, Brown highlights the racial utopian fantasy the movements shared in common. 86
Fears of “Race Suicide” and “Fecund Immigrant Women” In the essay “No Longer in a Future Heaven,” Anne McClintock examines the symbolic meanings given to women as “bearers of the nation” symbolizing the “traditional” in the “national family.” She stresses that women are seen as “biological reproducers” of nation and as “reproducers of the boundaries of national groups.” 87 Materially, women’s bodies produce the nation’s citizens through childbirth. Nationalist discourses, therefore, often center on women’s sexuality. Furthermore, Anna Davin’s historical and theoretical work, “Imperialism and Motherhood” proved useful for this chapter. Davin describes how the British government encouraged women in England to reproduce in order to maintain and expand the empire. “Motherhood was to be given new dignity: it was the duty and destiny of women to be 85
Ibid, 6.
86
What exactly was the medal for? And why a bronze medal? If the conference exhibited the ideals of the exposition, why not the gold? What were the criteria for judging? I am curious as to what qualities the exposition judges found lacking in the conference. I have found no historical data to answer my questions thus far. 87
McClintock, 90.
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the “mothers of the race,” but also their great reward.” 88 Davin argues that this new ideology of motherhood in Britain in the early twentieth century developed out of imperial policies, military and industrial fears that low population would result in a decline of the empire. In the United States, Laughlin appeared before Congress with statistics to prove that the immigrants were breeding faster than the native-born. Fears of “race suicide” in the early 1900’s were fueled by the eugenicists’ claims that those of degenerative stock would weaken the Anglo-American stock. Charts, such as the “Approximate FecundityIndices of American Women by Nativity Group for the Decade 1910-1920” illustrate that the “foreign-born white population” bore more children than the “native born white population.” The chart also depicts that although the “negro population” was about a tenth of the “native-born white population” their fecundity rates were similar. These concerns of “race suicide” led to the most restrictive immigration laws in United States history. Laughlin testified before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization in 1920: If the prospective immigrant is a potential parent, that is, a sexually fertile person, then his or her admission should be dependent not merely upon present illiteracy, social qualifications and economic status, but also upon the possession in the prospective immigrant and in his family stock of such physical, mental, and moral qualities as the American people desire to be possessed inherently by its future citizenry. 89
88
89
Anna Davin, “Imperialism and Motherhood,” Introduction to Women Studies, 66.
Harry H. Laughlin, "Biological aspects of immigration," Harry H. Laughlin Archives, Truman State University, papers, C-2-6,6. Testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and
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Laughlin wanted to go further than current restrictions on illiterate and poor immigrants. Laughlin asserted, “[I]mmigrant women are more prolific than our American women.” 90 To eugenicists, Immigrant “blood” threatened to “weaken the stock” of Americans. Immigrant women threatened the “health” and “purity” of the nation from inside its own borders. Ultimately, Laughlin argued that, “The lesson is that immigrants should be examined, and the family stock should be investigated, lest we admit more degenerate “blood.”” 91 Laughlin’s work culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924 which restricted the “dysgenic” Italians and Eastern European Jews. The act installed a quota, proportionate to their percentage of the U.S. population in the 1890 Census. This was the time when Northern and Western Europeans (the eugenically “superior” stock) were the dominant immigrants to the United States. The act reduced the quota of Southern and Eastern Europeans from forty-five percent to fifteen percent. 92 Anglo-Californians feared they were being outnumbered by other racial groups. The United States census data recorded the “percent distribution of native white” in
Naturalization Date, 1920. The Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, American Philosophical Society, and Truman State University. http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/; Internet. 90
Ibid., 5.
91
Ibid.
92
Paul Lombardo, “Eugenic Laws Restricting Immigration,” The Archive on the American Eugenics Movement, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, American Philosophical Society, and Truman State University. http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/; Internet.
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California in 1910 as 50.1 percent but down to 47.1 percent in 1920. This decline led many eugenicists to believe that whites could not reproduce as fast as non-native whites or other racial groups. The San Francisco population in 1910 and 1920 shifted similarly. The census statistics gathered from the San Francisco Public Library Government Information Center reveals a large number of “Foreign Born Whites” in San Francisco in 1920. Interestingly, the category “native white” and “foreign born white” was created with the 1920 census. In 1910, no distinction was among whites. War broke out between England and Germany in 1914 and massive numbers of immigrants came to the United States. In 1920, “foreign born white” was a separate category to demarcate apparently important differences between “nativists” and recent immigrants. This change in the census reveals the ways in which identity and racial categories are constructed by the nation. When World War I broke out a few months before the exposition, immigration reached one of its highest recorded levels: 1,218,480 in 1914. The massive numbers of Southern and Eastern Europeans immigrants met a backlash of nativist criticism in their new country. Newspapers and magazines condemned the “flood” of immigrants and argued to “stem the tide” before they caused the downfall of the country. 93 Although war was a concern for the planners of the exposition, they decided to follow through with it, and used the war as a marketing tool. Silent films advertising the
93
Stephenson, George. A History of American Immigration 1820-1924. (Boston: Ginn and Company, 1926), 256.
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exposition depicted an angelic white girl in San Francisco magically transporting a little boy from a war-torn region to spend a few days at the fair to make him happy. 94 The film highlights the “civilization” and progress of the exposition in contrast to the war and destruction of Europe. The film advertises the fair for European visitors, as if they too could be magically transported through chaos and into the pristine order of the exposition grounds. Although the fair encouraged white visitors, the census reveals that “foreign born whites” are separate categories from “native whites.” Census data and eugenicists distinguished between American born white and foreign born whites. An Anglo-American editor sums up the anti-immigrant white supremacist sentiment: “The Pacific coast is the frontier of the white man’s world, the culmination of the westward immigration which is the white man’s whole history. It will remain the frontier so long as we guard it as such; no longer.” 95 Alongside the construction of the fecund degenerative immigrants, eugenicists constructed the Native American relic. Anglo-Americans utilized racial discourses to emphasize that Native Americans inevitably lost their land to a superior white race.
94
The Innocent Fair
95
Newspaper editors quote in Stephenson, 256.
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Figure 5. “The End of the Trail” Depictions of Native Americans in sculpture at the exposition furthered the Anglo-American attempts to “fix” Native Americans as a “vanishing race.” James Earl Fraser’s 96 sculpture of a Native American on a horse won the exposition’s first prize for sculpture. In contrast to the glorified statues of Anglo pioneers, this statue depicted a defeated Native American slumped on the exhausted horse. The Blue Book, or souvenir guide to the exposition, included a photograph of the sculpture. Reid’s caption is as follows: “The drooping, storm-beaten figure of the Indian on the spent pony symbolizes
96
Fraser is famous for making the buffalo-head nickel.
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the end of the race which was once a mighty people.” 97 This sculpture depicting Iroquois Chief-American-Big-Tree slumped over a defeated horse was the most photographed, popular, and reproduced sculpture at the exposition. Fraser described his inspiration: “I remembered an old Dakota trapper saying, ‘The Indians will someday be pushed in to the Pacific Ocean.’ I began making the model shortly afterwards and finished it as far as I could. I called it, ‘The End of the Trail.’”98 Anglo-Americans presented a colossal statue of their defeated enemy in the center of the exposition. Anglo-American women as well as men constructed the Native American relic. Juliet James describes the statue in her book, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts 1915: One of the strongest works of the Exposition in its intense pathos is this conception of the end of the Indian race. Over the country the Indian has ridden for many a weary day, following the long trail that leads across a continent. A blizzard is on. He has peered to right and left, but alas! the trail is gone and only despair is his. So has it been with the Indian. His trail is now lost and on the edge of the continent he finds himself almost annihilated. 99
97
Robert Reid, 50. The caption continues, “Chief American-Big-Tree, a tall and stately young full blooded Iroquois Indian now at the Exposition was the model who posed for the sculpture. For six months in 1913 American-Big-Tree posed for Fraser in the latter’s New York studio. Until he saw it at the Exposition the Indian had no idea of the destined setting for the group.” If I could find out more about Chief-Big-Tree’s interpretation of the statue this could be a site of resistance. 98
99
Dean Krakel, The End of the Trail (Norman: University of Okalahoma Press, 1973) 3.
Juliet James, Sculpture of the Exposition Palaces and Courts; Descriptive Notes on the Art of the Statuary at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco. (San Francisco: H. S. Crocker Co., 1915).The Project Gutenberg E Book ftp://ftp.archive.org/pub/etext/etext04/sclpt10.txt. Internet.
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Many San Franciscans petitioned, unsuccessfully, for the sculpture to have a permanent location at the edge of the Pacific Ocean fulfilling Fraser’s vision. Juliet James exemplifies this sentiment: Take as an example James Earle Fraser's "End of the Trail." Imagine the effect of that fine work silhouetted against the sky out near Fort Point, on a western headland, with the animal's head toward the sea, so that it would be evident to the onlooker that the Indian had reached the very end of the trail. It would play a wonderful part in the beauty of the landscape. 100 Depictions of Native Americans as “vanishing” or “defeated” served Anglo-American interests by justifying Western expansion and the horrendous treatment of “Indians.” Anglo-American women actively participated in creating and maintaining a national racial identity dependent in part upon the “annihilation” of the “Indian race.” AngloAmerican women such as James, argued for the statue to remain as a permanent marker of the conquest of the West. Furthermore, Eugenicists and the exposition used images of Native Americans to contrast their “primitiveness” with Anglo-Saxon “progress.” Other Anglo-American women writers supported this view. Elizabeth Gordon’s book, What We Saw At Madame World’s Fair, 1915 describes the exposition as seen through the eyes of twin girls, Jane and Ellen. According to Gordon who uses the narrative voice of the girls, “The End of the Trail” “is intended to represent the redman, and denotes that the race is vanishing, and is supposed to be studied in connection with the “Pioneer” . . . That is
100
Ibid.
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meant to say that the white race will take up the work of progress and carry it on.” 101 Anglo-American women aided in the construction of racial and national discourses of progress.
Conclusion Exposition leaders mirrored eugenicists’ use of white woman to symbolize the ideals of the nation. These discourses formed a particular identity in the United States: a native-born white citizen from Northern or Western European descent. The exposition solidified this identity through discourses of racial progress in opposition to racial threats and “relics.” The exposition naturalized existing power relations over its territories; the exclusion of immigrants, and legitimated the extermination of Native Americans under the guise of Anglo-Saxon racial superiority. The exposition and eugenicists used white women to present “civilization” and racial progress. Anglo-American women actively participated in these discourses. The following chapter illustrates how women’s groups took on and altered the role of the “Mother of Tomorrow.”
101
Gorden, Elizabeth. What We Saw at Madame World's fair: Being a Series of Letters from the Twins at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition to their Cousins at Home. (San Francisco: Levinson, 1915), 44.
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II: Women’s Work: Women of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition
Eugenics elevated the Anglo-American mother to the lofty position of savior of the race and nation. In this chapter, I argue that bourgeois women actively participated in and influenced these eugenic discourses. They expanded discourses of the domestic sphere—to navigate their entry into the public, city and national spheres. Focusing on two groups at the exposition, the Woman’s Board and the women participants at the Race Betterment Conference, this chapter examines the ways that Anglo-American women were not merely acted upon as symbols, but actively participated in creating the “eugenic mother,” and attempted to insert themselves into the shared history and the future of the nation. While scholars such as Cynthia Enloe have described how men construct ideologies of women in discourse, many of the bourgeois so-called New Women asserted themselves in the eugenics and euthenics movements in the early twentieth-century United States as well. 102 Illustrated in this chapter are three ways in which women
102
Cynthia Enloe argues that in the context of nationalist movements, men construct various ideologies about women: 1) The community’s—or the nation’s—most valuable possessions; 2) the principal vehicles for transmitting the whole nation’s values from one generation to the next; 3) bearers of the community’s future generations—crudely nationalist wombs; 4) the members of the community most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers; and 5) most susceptible to assimilation and co-option by insidious outsiders. Enloe uses these five categories to describe struggling future nationstates, as well as established nations that have more than one nationalist community within their borders. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politic.( Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 53.
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contributed to the discourse of eugenics at the exposition. The first illustration is the expansion of Anglo-American motherhood from a domestic symbol into a national and racial ideology. For example, the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition asserted Anglo-American women’s roles as racial and national benefactors when they erected the “Pioneer Mother” monument. The statue reinforced the board’s eugenic campaign. The monument altered the traditionally coded masculine history of the West. The Woman’s Board portrayed pioneer women as equally important —if not more important—to the settling of the West as pioneer men, based on their status as Anglo mothers. This monument, like the Mother of Tomorrow statue and the birth of the first eugenic baby, demonstrates the heightened symbolic importance of women’s roles as mothers and “nationalist wombs.” The second illustration demonstrates how women’s progressive groups directly influenced the Race Betterment Foundation through the integration of a woman-led emphasis on “euthenics.” Women in progressive movements defended Anglo-Saxon motherhood to eugenicists, saying that genetic and environmental effects were equally important. Anglo women reformers successfully altered the discourse of eugenics by insisting that “domestic science” was equally as important as “heredity science.” The Race Betterment Foundation was the only group to utilize “euthenics” in tandem with “eugenics” as part of its program of race betterment. Anglo-American women asserted the dual and equal importance of their work in eugenics through heredity (literally bearing children) and environmental (domestic and municipal housekeeping).
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Finally this chapter argues that newspapers reflected and constructed eugenic discourses by circulating stories of imperiled Anglo-Saxon motherhood by presenting Native Americans, Chinese and Japanese as racial threats to the nation. 103 Newspapers depicted Anglo-women in opposition to and in threat from dangerous racialized others.
New Women The Anglo-American women reformers at the exposition simultaneously promoted domesticity and campaigned in the public sphere. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that some U.S. women in the Victorian era used morality campaigns to extend themselves outside of the domestic sphere. Smith-Rosenberg asserts: I would like to suggest that some nineteenth-century women channeled their frustration with women’s restricted roles combined with a sense of superior righteousness legitimized by the cult of the True Womanhood into the reform movements of the first half of the nineteenth century; and in the controversial moral-reform crusade such motivations seem particularly apparent.104 Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis fits the description of the women targeted by eugenicists. Similarly, the upper-class women of the exposition present an example of how some women found within eugenics the ability to balance the respectability of domestic
103
Enloe argues that men position women in nationalist movements as the “most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers.” Substituting “oppressive alien rulers” with “dangerous insiders of alien national communities,” Enloe’s insight reflects a similar project in San Francisco. 104
Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985), 109. According to Rosenberg, “(T)he new bourgeois men of the 1820s, 1830s, and 1840s formulated the Cult of True Womanhood, which prescribed a female role bounded by kitchen and nursery, overlaid with piety and purity, and crowned with subservience”13.
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motherhood and the public face of morality crusades. While the women’s morality campaigns may have been concerned with many issues deemed a part of the domestic sphere, their activism necessitated their presence in the public sphere.
“Problems Women Solved:” Hostesses at Home California’s elite Anglo women promoted discourses of motherhood to assert themselves publicly as women of great racial and national importance. Although none of the members of the Woman’s Board of the Panama Pacific International Exposition registered at the Race Betterment Conference, in fact the Woman’s Board’s work overlapped with the aims of eugenic propaganda. One result was the construction of the “Pioneer Mother” monument. The monument symbolizes the construction of Anglo women’s destiny to save and civilize the West (U.S. frontier), the nation, the occident, and especially the Anglo-Saxon race. “Pioneer Mother” serves as an example of connection between eugenics and women’s groups. Both proposed Anglo-American motherhood as vital to national and racial progress. Eugenics made motherhood both a national duty and a privilege of the “genetically superior” Anglo-Saxon woman. The women of the board highlighted Pioneer Motherhood as central to the advancement of Western expansion. The Woman’s Board heralded its progress in Anna Pratt Simpson’s Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition; What vision enthusiasm, work and co-operation accomplished
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1915. The book chronicles the formation of the organization (modeled after the all male official organization) and details the organizers’ contribution to the exposition. The book’s title asserts women as confident and logical agents able to make decisions. Members of the Woman’s Board served as the “official hostesses of the exposition.” 105 The board accomplished many things: it assisted each of the male directors of the exhibits, formed the Traveler’s Aid Society, promoted educational fair “lecturettes” for schoolchildren and created the “Pioneer Mother.” The Woman’s Board functioned independently from the official exposition board and financed its own work. The Woman’s Board did not receive national funds that previous woman’s boards received. 106 In 1915, California women had the right to vote in statewide but not national elections. The book’s foreword describes how the Woman’s Board’s achievements were “the first fruits of woman’s emancipation in a state newly made politically free a practical thank-offering of woman’s pride and woman’s patriotism.” 107 By writing a separate book, the Woman’s Board highlights the importance of work recorded into history by women. The book, complete with portraits of each of the women, insists on public awareness of Anglo-American women’s contributions. 105
Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. What Vision, Enthusiasm, Work and Co-operation accomplished. (San Francisco: Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915), xi. 106
Much of the funding came from the board themselves and from Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst. “From a material standpoint, Mrs. Hearst’s generosity seemed boundless.” Ibid, 8. 107
Ibid., x.
65
Although some scholars argue that the 1915 Woman’s Board illustrates a retreat to the domestic sphere after feminist gains in Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893 108 , in fact the San Francisco’s Woman’s Board expanded the role of women, symbolically, to national and racial levels. Historian Susan Wels argues, “The fair’s Woman’s Board was local, not national or international, in character, and it restricted its activities to the woman’s traditional sphere instead of using its leverage to expand the role of women.” 109 Although Wels argues the Woman’s Board to be only local in character, I argue that its accomplishments illustrate the expansion of domestic roles into public and national roles. The Woman’s Board’s proudest accomplishments, establishing a Traveler’s Aid Society and commissioning the “Pioneer Mother,” situates their work as negotiating their domestic duties as moral protectors while navigating and altering the definition of the public sphere. The Woman’s Board of the PPIE were “hostesses at home.” As “hostesses,” members of the Women’s Board fulfilled their domestic roles. Once the “city” stood in for the “home,” women became part of an expanded domestic sphere. The Woman’s Board, as described by Simpson and Moore, justified its public involvement under the symbolism of the city as “home,” and the women as the official hostesses of their home.
108
Wels argues that women at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 fought for women’s labor rights and effectively organized across the nation. 109
Susan Wels, “Spheres of Influence: The Role of Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915” [Journal OnLine] Ex Post Facto, Journal of San Francisco State History Students 1999, Volume VIII, 6. http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1999/wels.html; Internet.
66
In this way, the analogy of the city as a domestic sphere granted their actions respectability. Every Thursday afternoon the Woman’s Board, entertained in the California Building. As Simpson describes, “That they had become sponsors for a most comprehensive obligation they knew, but to them it could be fulfilled by simply being ‘at home.’” 110 The women of the board viewed their work for the city as if they were opening up their homes to guests. Just as white women were the moral protectors of the home, the white women of the exposition were to protect morality in the city and the exposition. “The work for moral protection became quite normally the concern for the Woman’s Board.” 111 The word “normally” reflects the dominant ideology of women as the moral and civilizing force to temper vice in men and society. With the Traveler’s Aid Society, the board organized many “faithful worker(s) at her post, ready to help a bewildered traveler of any age, but particularly on the lookout for the girl alone who might be coming into the city at that difficult hour.” According to Simpson, “In this way, many a young woman was put in touch with the right kind of companions or institutions.” 112 The Traveler’s Aid Society, while organized to help all, especially sought to protect white women’s morality
110
Simpson, 101.
111
Ibid., 65.
112
Ibid.,77-78.
67
through a mother or chaperone role. The society in San Francisco illustrated the rising political presence of the new bourgeois woman across the nation. 113
Motherhood Monument
Figure 6. “Pioneer Mother” Monument
113
As Smith-Rosenberg asserts, “Thus by the 1870’s the new bourgeois woman had emerged. Confident and independent a self-created urban expert, she spearheaded bourgeois efforts to respond creatively to the new city and the new economy.” Smith-Rosenberg, 175.
68
The Woman’s Board organized the funding and creation of a “monument to all motherhood dedicated to the Pioneer Mothers.” 114 Eugenic discourses urging the AngloSaxon “fit” woman to reproduce circulated during this period. Discourses concerning “race suicide” had been circulating for years. The Woman’s Board’s insistence on building a monument to pioneer motherhood reveals an overlapping emphasis on the importance of white motherhood for the survival and success of Anglo-Americans. As demonstrated in the statue, The “Pioneer Mother,” (figure 6) the woman’s board created the representation of an Anglo-American woman modestly and plainly dressed with her two nude children, a boy and a girl, at her side. Charles Grafly, sculptured the monument in bronze after making changes suggested by the Woman’s Board, “In his original sketch Mr. Grafly modeled what may be termed a primitive mother.” 115 The Woman’s Board wanted Grafly to depict the romantic “spirit of the West,” not a realistic depiction of it. Grafly complied with the changes proposed by the Woman’s Board to create the mother figure. Eugenicists placed great emphasis on motherhood. The 1914 book, “Safe Counsel; Eugenics” illustrates this point. In the chapter subtitled: “Home, Mother’s Empire,” Professor Shannon exalts motherhood: “The queen that sits upon the throne of
114
Simpson, 148.
115
Ibid, 150.
69
home, crowned and sceptered as none other ever can be, is mother. ...the moral issues of her empire are eternal.” 116 Eugenicists put Anglo-motherhood literally on a pedestal. Similar to eugenicists, the Woman’s Board cast Anglo-American motherhood into an honored and exalted position. According to Simpson, Anglo motherhood previously was not recognized in a monumental way. “The Woman’s Board had a vision of the significance of a monument to Motherhood. As far as it knew this tribute would be the first concrete expression in bronze and marble of this world-devotion.” 117 Simpson remarks, “Pioneer women somehow, had been taken from granted.” 118 San Francisco’s circle of elite, wealthy and powerful Anglo women asserted their racial and gender roles in the historical importance of the settling of the West. Many of the women organizing the monument were “native daughters,” indeed honoring their own literal pioneer mothers. The monument concretized the pioneer stock of San Francisco’s society women. University of California President Benjamin Ide Wheeler wrote the dedication on the monument: Over rude paths, beset with hunger and risk, she pressed on toward the vision of a better country. To an assemblage of men busied with the perishable rewards of today, she brought the threefold leaven of enduring society—faith, gentleness, hope, with the nurture of children. 119
116
T.W. Shannon, Safe Counsel; Nature’s Secrets Revealed; Eugenics, (Ohio: Mullikin Company,
1914), 35. 117
Simpson, 147.
118
Ibid., 148
119
Ibid., 160.
70
“Pioneer Mother” is a romanticization of the tribulations of the woman of “pioneer stock.” Pioneer Mothers are the symbolic and literal way in which the Anglo-Saxon race succeeded in the expansion and conquest of the West. In addition, the board succeeds in altering the traditional masculinist history of the West through this symbolic reconstruction of “Pioneer Mother.” The monument rewrites previous discourses of how the West was won. Gail Bederman describes this “manly Western” narrative through Roosevelt’s writing of frontier history in “The Winning of the West.” “Roosevelt depicts the American West as a crucible in which the white American race was forged through masculine racial conflict.” 120 Although “the hero of Roosevelt’s story was a race whose gender was implicitly male,” 121 in contrast, the Woman’s Board promoted a feminized vision of frontier history. Represented by a coarsely dressed woman, the “Pioneer Mother” symbolizes a primal mother, without any Victorian luxuries, performing the most important womanly duty—motherhood for the survival of the race. She reared the new Anglo-American children who were to inherit and populate the utopian vision of the West. The children are depicted as nude, exhibiting their purity and innocence. The mother dictates a “survival of the fittest” narrative in the mode of Social Darwinism, in which those who survived the trek were stronger than others, forging a pioneer community and bringing civilization with them into the land formerly inhabited
120
Bederman, 178.
121
Ibid.
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by “savages.” The “Pioneer Mother” confirms the narrative of white settlers’ advancing civilization and human evolution that permeated Roosevelt and other eugenicists’ work. The “Mother of Tomorrow” (figure 1) similarly represents a pioneer “mother,” which utilizes a eugenic narrative of racial progress through breeding. The Mother of Tomorrow, however, differs from the “Pioneer Mother” in meaningful ways. While the “Mother of Tomorrow” is one central figure, surrounded by multiple figures, most of them men representing the various “nations of the West,” the “Pioneer Mother” stands alone with her children, devoid of a male father figure. The Woman’s Board composed a monument to highlight woman’s achievements alone. Molly Ladd-Taylor’s book Mother-Work, (1994) illustrates how motherhood took on powerful political and symbolic meanings of women’s independence from men. LaddTaylor asserts that mother-work in the United States was “central to the development of the American political and economic system.” 122 She argues that feminists such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman believed “the feminist ideology of motherhood bound women together not as helpmates or dependents of men, but as their makers. ..Motherhood did not signify subordination to men; indeed, there were no men at all in Gilman’s utopia!
122
Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare and the State, 1890-1930. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 2.
72
Instead, it signified creativity, power, and autonomy.” 123 Gilman’s novel Herland published in 1915. “Mother-love in Herland was ‘National, Racial, Human.’” 124 Whereas the “Mother of Tomorrow” statue was financed by the sculptural funds of the exposition, the Woman’s Board financed, commissioned and approved the “Pioneer Mother” independently from men. The “Mother of Tomorrow,” along with almost all of the sculpture built for the exposition, was made of travertine, an impermanent material. The “Pioneer Mother” is one of the few sculptures made for the exposition that is still in existence, presently standing beside the “Pioneer Log Cabin” in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. 125 The Woman’s Board drew parallels between the pioneer women’s task of building a new society, their own work after the 1906 earthquake and fire, and their current work on the exposition. As Simpson explains, In the ‘calamity days,’ women used to comforts always and conveniences at every hand worked without a murmur to aid the men upon whom rested the responsibilities of reconstruction. It was then that they learned something not expressible in words that made them ready to help to carry some of the burdens that must come with the building of an exposition city while the gigantic construction of the enduring city was still taxing every physical and financial resource. 126
123
Ibid, 112.
124
Ibid, 111.
125
The “Pioneer Mother” statue inspired(?) a series of “Pioneer Mother” monuments entitled “Madonna of the Trail” statues in twelve states sponsored by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1928 to mark the “National Old Trails Road” of the pioneer trek West. In this statue the “Pioneer Mother” clutches a rifle and two small children. 126
Simpson, 3.
73
San Francisco’s Anglo-Saxon women were of “pioneer stock” and were able to face the hardships of the earthquake and fire much like their mothers had faced the dangers of the “wild West.” These hearty women, like the city itself, rose from the ashes of the great earthquake to create a new society. The “Pioneer Mother” statue helps distinguish the women in California as belonging to the land, as founding families. This sets them apart as they “belong” more than the newer immigrants and migrants coming to California. The statue and reminder of the “pioneer” mother and “native” daughters set the elite families apart from the newer families as their pioneer heritage distinguished themselves as the “founding” people. 127
Racial Hygiene and Euthenics The Women’s Board and women eugenicists took up narratives of health and hygiene as moral causes. Moral hygiene, public health, and racial hygiene became entwined under eugenics. Women’s groups working for moral and health hygiene found a allies in eugenicists advocating “racial hygiene.” Eugenics allowed moral and health hygiene to become subsumed under the overarching aim of racial betterment.
127
Not all women appreciated the “Pioneer Mother” monument. Katherine Delmar Burke denounced “the prosaic figure of the “Pioneer Mother”.” Burke asserts, “(t)here are no words to describe the “Pioneer Mother”. She must be seen as the final note that goes far to spoil the noble simplicity of those arches giving out on the lagoon.” Katherine Delmar Burke, Storied Walls of the Exposition 1915, 48.
74
Nayan Shah argues that Anglo-American women associated whiteness with civilization and hygiene, in opposition to their association of the Chinese with disease and savagery. 128 In 1900, an outbreak of the bubonic plague in San Francisco’s Chinatown furthered the Anglo-American project of racially mapping the Chinese as diseased and un-American. The Board of Health led efforts to fumigate and quarantine the Chinese in a detention camp. Anna Pratt Simpson, author of the board’s Problems Women Solved, illustrates the conflation of moral, health, and racial hygiene. Simpson’s writings illustrate how Anglo-American women created eugenic discourses of “racial disease.” Simpson uses the analogy of the plague in San Francisco to make her point about protecting people from moral disease as well as diseases of the body. The time was when an unwise loyalty made some San Franciscans unwilling to say that plague had found its way into their beloved city. Steadily and quietly and slowly it spread during a few blind years, until its horrors were menacing. The condition was then publicly admitted, and every measure known to science was employed to eradicate the disease, with the result that in a few months San Francisco had a clean bill of health from the United States Government. And so it was that the Woman’s Board wanted from the world a clean bill of moral health for its Exposition. 129 Simpson’s “germs” are “immorality” and “vice” which threatens the “moral health” of the city, and especially white women. In her narrative, white women’s duties included cleaning up the sinfulness of the city. Simpson’s testimony of physical and moral health align with the Anglo-Saxon obsession with racial categories, conflating racial, moral, and
128
Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001),115.
129
Simpson, 69.
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physical hygiene. Similarly, eugenicists constructed categories of “racial hygiene,” which conflated contagion along moral, racial, and health dimensions. Women’s moral and hygienic experience in the domestic realm became their knowledge base for “municipal housekeeping.” The history of “home economics” in the Untied States is a part of the history of the white supremacy movement. Anglo-American women’s groups in the early twentieth century associated their work for social and city hygiene with race hygiene. Within the movement for “race betterment” was the push for hereditary hygiene or eugenics as well as environmental hygiene or euthenics. Euthenics gave white women a calling card to visit the city. Women could apply their “expertise” as moral and sanitary experts in the home to that of the larger “home” the city and the nation. In this way, women practicing “euthenics” fulfilled their duty to the nation and the Anglo-American race. Ellen H. Richards created the term “euthenics” and published a book of the same name to describe the environmental influences upon “race betterment.” Richards, the first woman to attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1873, advocated for Anglo-American women’s access to education in the sciences and helped found the home economics movement. First president of the American Home Economics Association, she started the association’s Journal of Home Economics in 1910. Richards died in 1910 and other members of the home economics movement continued the cause of euthenics in her name. At the first Race Betterment Conference in 1914 and again in San Francisco in 1915, women positioned euthenics as equally important as eugenics for “race
76
betterment.” Richards argued, “Education of all women in the principles of sanitary science is the key to race progress in the twentieth century.” 130 Richards describes the differences between eugenics and euthenics: Eugenics deals with race improvement through heredity. Euthenics deals with race improvement through environment. Eugenics is hygiene for the future generations. Euthenics is hygiene for the present generation. Eugenics must await careful investigation. Euthenics has immediate opportunity. Euthenics precedes eugenics, developing better men now, and thus inevitably creating a better race of men in the future. Euthenics is the term proposed for the preliminary science on which Eugenics must be based. 131 Richards’ insistence that eugenics “must be based” on euthenics positions female-defined “domestic science” as the foundation for male-defined “heredity science.” Richards inserts herself and her theory into the budding eugenics movement. In doing so, Richards opens up a space for women in the movement, wider than eugenic motherhood, as active participants and domestic scientists. Furthermore, Richards makes a plea for women to take on their national duty: “To the women of America has come an opportunity to put their education, their power of detailed work, and any initiative they may possess at the service of the State.” Richards connects “sanitary science” with Anglo-American women’s racial and national duty. “Faith, Hope, and Courage may be taken as the three potent watchwords of the New
130
Ellen Richards, Euthenics The Science of controllable Environment a Plea for Better Living Conditions as a First Step Toward Higher Human Efficiency [Book Online] (Boston : Thomas Todd Co. ,1910), 146. Albert R. Mann Library. 2004. Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH). Ithaca, NY: Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University. http://hearth.library.cornell.edu (Version January 2004). 131
Richards, viii.
77
Crusade. There is a real contagion of ideas as well as of disease germs.” 132 Although Ellen Richards died prior to the Race Betterment Conferences, her work altered the movement. Richards’ work was carried out in her name by other women, at the San Francisco Panama-Pacific International Exposition.
Women Participants in the Race Betterment Conference Women’s involvement with eugenicists’ “racial hygiene” dovetailed with established women’s roles as family and societal guides of morality, purity, and hygiene. The Anglo-American women who participated in the 1915 Race Betterment Conference were active women already participating in organizations for morality, purity, health, schools, and children’s rights. Representatives of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and Committees for Open Air Schools, etc., attended the conference. Women’s groups’ work was justified and subsumed under the umbrella of “race betterment” at the conference. “Three Days at the Exposition,” a fair guide for women distributed “(c)ompliments of the National Young Women Christian Association,” highlights the race-betterment exhibit. Under the first day of a three-day tour, “Exhibits of Special Interest,” listed “Social and Sex Hygiene, Race Betterment.” Alongside a list of the U.S. Children’s Bureau and the various Hygiene Exhibits, the YWCA promotion of the race betterment exhibit reveals the connections between women’s groups and eugenics. “Both 132
Richards, 11.
78
the American School Hygiene Association and the Race Betterment Foundation have compiled directories of public health and social welfare exhibits.” 133 The YWCA listed the exhibit as part of white women’s duty to educate herself. As an “exhibit of special interest,” the race betterment exhibit reached a wider audience through the YMCA’s promotion. Women working for “race betterment” concurrently worked in “progressive” social movements of suffrage, peace, and health movements. The women working for “race betterment” highlight the eugenic underpinnings of progressive movements. (This is not to argue that all progressive movements held eugenic positions.) Women’s groups against war, campaigning for suffrage, and fighting for public health found their work validated by eugenicists and unified under a national campaign for race betterment. 134 The women who participated in the Race Betterment Conference were publicly active women: teachers, home-economics professors, child-labor activists, as well as publichealth and -hygiene crusaders. Eugenicists relied upon the consent and participation of Anglo women to carry out Kellogg’s “proposed scheme for race betterment.” Part of his
133
Y.W.C.A. “Three Days at the Exposition” at the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library. 134
Discourses about suffrage reflected the notion of Anglo-Saxon and Western superiority as well. The article, “Suffragists Put Faith in Aid of West,” San Francisco Examiner, 15 September 1915, 6, articulates this discourse. At the first Congressional Union for Women’s Suffrage meeting, suffragettes from China and Persia met with Anglo-American women. The article quotes what appears to be Dr. Yamei Kin of China saying: “We look to the West to lead us into a civilization of women.” Newspapers chose to highlight Kin articulating a civilization discourse, which confirms the West, and in particular the United States, as leading the world in the evolutionary project.
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scheme entailed health surveys, medical examinations of adults and schoolchildren, health education, and reform of marriage laws. The concerns of the race betterment movement overlapped with issues in which women’s groups had already been involved. Women participants, like Mrs. Melvil Dewey of the American Home Economics Association, worked with other activists for “politicized domesticity by urging women to use their skills in that larger household in the city.” 135 Home economics intersected with notions of “municipal housekeeping.” Another conference participant, Rev. Caroline Bartlett Crane argued, “We certainly should keep our city—that is to say, our common house—clean. The floor should be clean. The air should be clean...” 136 These discourses of municipal cleanliness intersected with racial cleanliness in social hygiene. 137 Dewey, who had attended the first Race Betterment Conference in Battle Creek, Michigan, lectured at that conference in 1914: Euthenics is the name proposed by Mrs. Ellen H. Richards for the preliminary science on which eugenics must be based; it seeks to emphasize the immediate duty of man to better his conditions by availing himself of knowledge already at hand which shall tend to increase health and happiness. He must apply this knowledge under conditions which he can either create or modify. Euthenics is to be developed through sanitary science, through education, and through relating science and education to life. 138 135
Stage, S. and V. B. Vincenti ed., Rethinking Home Economics Women and the History of a Profession (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 3. http://www.human.cornell.edu/centennial/; Internet. 136
Bill Kovarik, “Ellen Swallow Richards and the Progressive Women's Reform Movement,” [Article on-line] Environmental History Timeline, Radford University. http://www.radford.edu/~wkovarik/hist1/richards.html 137
Participant Jessica Peixotto, the first woman to become professor at UC Berkeley in 1918, started a new School of Social Welfare in 1940. http://emlab.berkeley.edu/econ/centennial/history.html
80
Dewey carried on Ellen Richards’ work in promoting euthenics as the “sister” science to eugenics. According to Race Betterment Conference speaker Thomas Eliot, social hygiene is “the accepted descriptive title for such activities as have for their central conscious purpose the protection, realization and conservation of the normal human family as the vehicle of racial integrity and progress.” 139 Eliot, of the American Social Hygiene Association, was primarily concerned with sex education to fight venereal disease. The definition of social hygiene, of “racial integrity” resounds with the discourse of “racial hygiene.” 140
Redemption: A Masque of Race Betterment Seldon Cheney’s “Morality Masque,” performed at Oakland’s new Civic Auditorium on August 8, presented “A Dramatic Representation of the Great Truths for Which the National Conference on Race Betterment Stands.” Performed for an audience of more than 5,000 people, the play served as the grand finale for the weeklong Race Betterment Conference. Most of the two hundred-member cast consisted of University of 138
“News from the Field” The Journal of Home Economics [Journal On-line]. Vol. VI, No. 2. (April 1914). Albert R. Mann Library, 2004. Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition and History (HEARTH). Ithaca, NY: Albert R. Mann Library, Cornell University. http://hearth.library.cornell.edu (Version January 2004). 139
Thomas D. Eliot “Some Practical Methods in the Social Hygiene Movement in the United Sates” Official Proceedings, 96. 140
Keeping Anglo San Franciscans free from venereal disease justified the legislation to quarantine the so-called “syphilitic Chinese.” See Shah, Contagious Divides.
81
California, Berkeley, summer-school students. 141 UC Berkeley students may have been more receptive to eugenics because of Dr. Holmes’ sociology course on eugenics in 1914. 142 The Official Proceedings of the Second National Race Betterment Conference detailed events in the morality masque: Act I shows forth how Mankind, boastful as conqueror of the forces of Nature, disregarding the warning of the great Unseen Spirit, persists in his course of pleasure until neglected Child through lack of attention is sorely stricken by Disease. Mankind and Womankind feel remorse, but they call Art, Science and Religion to aid them too late, and Neglected Child dies. But the act ends with a hopeful note when Hope brings their other child, Fortunate, and they consecrate their lives to rearing him properly. In Act II Mankind, Womankind and their companions celebrate Fortunate’s arrival at physically perfect manhood. But the Unseen Spirit warns of the coming War, who takes the best of the race, and leaves disease, crime and destruction in his path. There follows a procession of the sacrifice to War. Fortunate, despite his physical endowment, is killed, and even Mankind himself is seriously wounded. But Womankind, armed by Faith and aided by Enlightenment and Love, rouses from her age-long passivity and brings about the collapse of War. Mankind and Womankind, enlisting Science, Faith, Enlightenment and their companions, begin to build anew, upon the solid foundation of physical perfection and mental enlightenment. 143
Act I illustrates how the Race Betterment Foundation insisted on the importance of environment and upbringing as well as heredity. Neglected Child dies through parental negligence. In Act II, War strikes down their second child. This scene illustrates Stanford
141
Official Proceedings, 138.
142
“By 1914, some forty-four major institutions offered eugenic instruction.” Black, 75.
143
Official Proceedings, 139.
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University President David Starr Jordan’s speech, “Eugenics and War.” Jordan argued that war kills of the best of society, leaving behind only the weak. “(I)n every army the strongest and most vigorous men have been chosen...and when they actually go to war it is these best ones that are slaughtered, and then the Nation breeds from the second best...War is a mollycoddle factory.” 144 Womankind saves the day, because she “rouses from her age-long passivity.” This proactive womankind is the heroine. This play evokes a discourse of progressivism aligned with feminism to build a utopia with Mankind. She brings an end to war, armed with Faith, Enlightenment and Love. Noticeably absent until Mankind joins her is Science. Womankind alone does not acquire Science. The morality masque illustrates the ways in which eugenics placed the survival of the race in the hands of women. “With the assistance of Faith, Enlightenment and Love,” “Womankind” “brandishes the sword” to slay “War.” 145 Eugenics gave Anglo-Saxon women the highest responsibilities of the race. This scene illustrates the connection between Eugenicists and women’s groups for peace. Both groups vocally expressed opposition to the war in Europe. The San Francisco Examiner wrote more about the morality masque than the other major newspapers of the day. An August 4th article, “Perfect Men and Women Are
144
Jordan, “War and Eugenics,” Official Proceedings, 13.
145
Official Proceedings, 142.
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Wanted,” describes eugenicists’ search at UC Berkeley for a few “eugenes” and “eugenias” to typify the perfect race. The Examiner printed eugenicists’ measurements of the “Perfect Woman and Perfect Man.” The ideal female: “Height 5 feet 4 inches, Sitting height, 33 1/4 inches, Length of arms 64 inches, Chest circumference, 32 inches, Waist 30 1/2 inches. Chest capacity, 233 cubic inches, Weight, 134 pounds.” 146 The Examiner’s printing of the eugenicists’ measurements marks a public-awareness campaign on the ideals of the racebetterment movement. Women and men reading The Examiner could then compare themselves and work toward the eugenic ideal. The Examiner did not print the race of the ideal man and woman, but Anglo-readers assumed it to be Anglo-Saxon. If, however, readers had any doubt, The Examiner printed photographs of white women in their follow-up morality masque articles.
Eugenic Motherhood Constructed and Imperiled San Francisco daily newspaper articles published during “Race Betterment Week”—August 4-8—elaborated discourses of race: the Anglo-American eugenic mother, the “degenerate” Native American and the civilized yet threatening Japanese. Although scholars argue these racial discourses were based on the supposed superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race, in fact these discourses additionally reflect complicated notions of race based upon on Anglo-Saxon economic interests. 146
“Perfect Men and Women Are Wanted” San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1915, p. 9.
84
Clearly, people of color were depicted in opposition to Anglo-Saxon “progress” and “superiority,” but these representations were not simple. Representations of race depended upon economic and political factors. This next section’s focus is on three narratives in the San Francisco Examiner that reveal three distinct racial constructions. First, newspapers promoted the Anglo-American eugenic mother’s duty to produce a nation of “thoroughbreds.” Second, the stories reveal a narrative of the Native American “relic” to justify Anglo-American Western expansion. Third, newspapers depictions of the Japanese reveal a tension between Anglo-Americans’ desire for trade and their fears of racial degeneracy. Narratives placed Anglo-Saxon women in the center of this discourse. “Eugenic” women had a racial and patriotic duty to uphold white motherhood. Anglo-Americans constructed the narrative of the Native American “savage” and the Japanese “yellow peril” as threats to the eugenic mother and family. Eugenicists used the exposition as a site for public education. The newspapers reported extensively on the Race Betterment Conference. “In all, the newspaper publicity amounted to more than a million lines, appearing in the leading newspapers of the United States.” 147 Eugenicists succeeded in getting their message out to the public. In addition to reporting on the Race Betterment Conference, newspaper stories reveal an internalized narrative of Anglo-Saxon superiority and eugenic motherhood.
147
Official Proceedings, 5.
85
Figure 7. “First Eugenic Baby”
86
“First Eugenic Baby is Perfect, Five Weeks Old and Thriving,” 148 declared the bold Examiner headline. The article constructs the new eugenic ideal: a healthy AngloSaxon baby born of genetically fit parents. A picture of a smiling Anglo-American mother and baby, both dressed in white, dominates the page and complements the article. The accompanying caption reads, “Eugenic Mother and Baby, Mrs. Benjamin R. Bell and her child, who is pronounced a perfect specimen.”149 The child was declared, “America’s first eugenic baby.” 150 Her doctor, Dr. H. M. Fine, pronounced “Helen Elizabeth perfect from every standpoint, viewpoint and angle of babyhood.” 151 This article constructs the first eugenic mother as it simultaneously constructs the first eugenic baby. The Examiner printed the article during Race Betterment Week. 152 This article is eugenic propaganda to encourage the “fit” to reproduce—a strategy of “positive eugenics.” The picture provides evidence of baby Helen’s and her mother’s
148
“First Eugenic Baby is Perfect,” San Francisco Examiner, 5 August, 1915, p. 3.
149
Ibid.
150
Ibid.
151
Ibid.
152
William Randolph Hearst, Phoebe Apperton Hearst’s son, owned and ran The Examiner. The Examiner had exhibited its printing press and printed special issues of the newspaper from inside the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. According to Todd, “The wealthiest citizens of San Francisco gave the financial foundation on which to make the exposition.” The list included William Randolph Hearst, Ghiradelli Co. etc. (Vol.1: 67). Hearst vowed to dedicate his media empire (local, national and international news service) to the exposition. “I am a native son, my father was a pioneer, my mother is an active citizen in your liberal laws,” (Todd, Vol.1:379) Hearst’s statement illustrates interconnection between loyalty to the city and his race.
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moral and racial “purity” through their white dresses and smiling faces. The mother, Laura, holds her baby close to her face, showing their similar facial features. The photo confirms the mother and child’s whiteness, purity and domesticity. The “eugenic mother” is predicated upon heterosexuality. The photograph and the accompanying article confirmed the association between eugenics and the Anglo-Saxon race. Helen’s eugenic parents both held certificates proving they were “healthy examples” of manhood and womanhood. Baby Helen’s parents procured medical documents proving their “eugenic” status prior to their marriage. This “first eugenic baby” article serves as a popularizing tool for the eugenicists, encouraging other families to be next, to produce eugenically fit children. At a time of world war, massive immigration, and labor unrest, eugenicists proposed “scientific” solutions to the social ills of the United States: race betterment and eugenic families. Eugenicists feared and documented “race suicide” 153 and a “diminished birth rate” among Anglo-Saxons. The public push for “eugenic babies” was in part to compensate for the rapid birth rate of “non-native whites,” “feeble-minded immigrants,” 154 and people of color.
153
T. Roosevelt, who supported eugenics, is famous for this phrase. Posters and Charts from the PPIE Race Betterment Exhibit depicted that “In Twenty Years the birthrate has declined...20% in the United States.” Official Proceedings, 148. 154
Eugenicists charted the fecundity of the native-born population in contrast with the fecundity of the foreign-born white population. Harry Laughlin, a leading eugenicist, appeared before Congress with statistics to prove that the immigrants were breeding faster than the native-born. “Approximate FecundityIndices of American Women by Nativity Group for the Decade 1910-1920” American Philosophical
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Eugenic Infanticide The construction of eugenic motherhood relies upon the prevention of the dysgenic mother. Dysgenic mothers are Anglo-American women who are not morally and physically fit; Anglo-American mothers who are “fit” but have babies who are not; and all non-Anglo, non-“native-born,” non-“fit” mothers. Discourses of eugenic infanticide are the inverse to eugenic motherhood. Following are three examples of the influence of the “eugenic infanticide” argument. (1) The Second National Race Betterment Conference, (2) a Chicago doctor who could have saved a baby but did not for “eugenic” reasons, and (3) Frank Morton Todd’s writings, illustrate the construction of another type of Anglo mother: one who gives up her child for the greater good of a eugenic society. Here, it is her duty to nation and race to grant the doctor permission to let her baby die. At the first race betterment conference in 1914, Laughlin argued that dysgenic mothers were a menace to society and should be put in “a place comparable to that of the females of mongrel strains of domestic animals.” 155 Just as the eugenic mother constructs a eugenic baby, the dysgenic baby is paired with the dysgenic mother. Paul Popenoe argued at the 1915 Race Betterment Conference, in a speech called “Natural Selection in
Society. The Archive on the American Eugenics Movement. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/ 1999. 155
Black, 89.
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Man,” that “infant mortality does effect a ‘weeding out’ of the unfit.” 156 A leading California eugenicist, Paul Popenoe later became director of the “Human Betterment Foundation,” formed in 1926 in Pasadena, California. Popenoe’s speech reflects how some eugenicists utilized social Darwinian narratives in their arguments. Discourses about eugenic infanticide rippled through the nation. In November of 1915, a Chicago doctor decided to let a “defective” infant die. The Chicago Daily Tribune ran the front-page story, “Baby Dies; Physician Upheld.” 157 Although the child could have been saved by an operation, the doctor decided the best thing for society was to allow it to die based upon eugenic reasoning that the deformed child would have grown up to be a state dependant and/or a criminal. What is interesting about this case is not just that it happened, but that the doctor publicly justified his actions and that a jury cleared him of wrongdoing. Two years later the eugenic film “The Black Stork” turned this story into a moral tale promoting eugenic infanticide. Curiously enough, exposition historian Frank Morton Todd used the analogy of eugenic infanticide to describe the work of architects: They ruthlessly sacrificed to the Moloch of economy some of the fairest-looking architectural babies ever born. Yet this particular Moloch was a rather benign idol, who was “cruel only to be kind,” for the babies threatened to develop Pantagruellian appetites which the family could not afford. Artistic infanticide was a necessity. The victims were not missed; and the many difficulties that might be expected to arise and that inevitably will arise, out of the commendable zeal to
156
Paul Popenoe, “Natural Selection in Man,” Official Proceedings, 57.
157
“Baby Dies; Physician Upheld,” Chicago Daily Tribune, 18 November 1915.
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accomplish superlatives could be, and in this way were, met and disposed of before they made any serious confusion. 158 Todd’s symbolic use of “babies” to stand in for “building” reflects the popularization of the eugenic infanticide discourse. His statement concerning the “inevitable” “difficulties” of the babies/building, reflect the eugenic infanticide argument that “unfit” babies can only grow up to be degenerate. Eugenic infanticide narratives contrasted sharply with the anti-eugenic “Infant Incubators” exhibit at the exposition. Dr. Martin A. Couney, the “Incubator Doctor,” exhibited live preemies in incubators, and fairgoers paid admission to see them. He first publicly showed preemies in Berlin in 1896. In contrast to Popenoe’s eugenic argument that infant mortality is nature’s way of weeding out the unfit, Couney’s work advocated the preservation of these infants. Eugenicists argued that the “unfit” infants would grow up to be invalids, paupers, and criminals. Couney reputes these fears in an article written during the fair. “They are good, normal, respectable people, all of them, I bet...I get letters every year from people who their parents told them they were raised in my incubators. I never yet got a letter from a jail.”159 Dr. Couney’s work reflects a resistant discourse to eugenic infanticide. By saving the preemies, Couney refutes the eugenic proposition that nature intended for weak babies to die. Couney’s use of technology,
158
159
Todd, Vol. 2: 10-11.
“Patron of the Preemies.” Article in the “Incubator Babies” file at the San Francisco Main Library PPIE files. The article’s author inserts his or her own opinion on the matter, commenting, “There isn’t a genius in the lot.”
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however, reflects the same discourse used by eugenicists that science and enlightenment can save the race. The following section continues with a more in-depth analysis of the complicated discourses of Anglo resistance to eugenic measures. Articles in The Examiner, reveal latent resistant discourses to eugenics.
White Women and Red Men The San Francisco Examiner constructed and maintained Anglo-Saxon superiority as “civilized,” in opposition to the construction of “savage” Native Americans, as a way to naturalize Anglo-American domination and expansion in the West. Newspaper stories constructed a narrative of Anglo-Saxon women threatened by Native American men. One San Francisco Examiner story in particular highlighted an old threat to Anglo-American expansion, in effect creating a contemporary “threat” to Anglo womanhood and domesticity. “Custer’s Widow Comes to Fair and To-Day Comes Indian Chief Whose Charge Killed General Custer.” 160 The article constructs opposing identities based upon race, and as old enemies of war. The unnamed reporter describes the chief as a “redman” in opposition to the “white woman,” highlighting their skin-tone differences and marking them as separate and distinct races. The description of their dress marks them in opposition: “Mrs. Custer came from New York gowned in simple black. Chief Two Moons, who led the charge when
160
“Widow Comes to Fair And To-Day Comes Indian Chief Whose Charge Killed General Custer,” The San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1915, p. 3.
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General Custer made his last stand, is coming from the Cheyenne reservation, clothed in leather, paint and feathers.” 161 The reporter depicts Mrs. Custer, dressed in simple black as the proper widow, still bereaving forty-six years after her husband died, in 1871. The reporter used differences in Indian dress to highlight the “savage” nature of the man who made a widower of the civilized white woman. The reporter constructs the identity of Chief Two Moons as the stereotypical “primitive” in leather, paint and feathers who remains a “threat” to white women, their families, and civilization. Anglo-American women, central to the eugenicists’ project, had to be protected from “savage” Native Americans. 162 The reporter, however, uses the present progressive verb tense with each of the actions of Chief Two Moons. Chief Two Moons “is coming” to the fair, “to-day.” This suggests that the reporter had not actually seen Chief Two Moons; rather the reporter had assumed that Chief Two Moons would be coming in paint and feathers. The Examiner’s article the following day admitted that the Native Americans “wore no feathers. No paint concealed the bronze of their skins.”163 The reporter describes the Native Americans (although not Chief Two Moons in particular) as appearing in civilian dress rather than leather and paint. The Anglo-American fascination and reporting on Native American
161
Ibid.
162
Fairgoers could witness Custer’s last stand in a dramatic representation, “The Fall of Custer.” Todd, Vol. 3. 163
p. 1.
“Indians Visit Fair; Zone is Chief Magnet,” San Francisco Examiner, 5 August, 1915. Sec. 2,
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dress highlights the Anglo-American construction of “difference” to maintain racial hierarchies and to justify the unequal balance of power. The Native Americans’ appearance in civilian dress countered, confronted, and disputed the Anglo-American expectations of what an “authentic” Indian would look like.
Conflicting images of the Japanese: “Teach Your Children American Games” 164 Anglo-American depictions of the Japanese reflected an ambivalence surrounding two competing narratives: the benefits of Asian trade and the supposed “yellow peril.” The opening of the Panama Canal allowed for increased trade between the nations of the Pacific and the United States. San Francisco became an important shipping stopover port between Asia and the eastern United States. Increased trade, although welcomed by merchants, heightened Anglo-Saxon fears of moral and racial “degeneracy.” As Chandra Mohanty argues, “National (and perhaps racial and imperial) borders are reconstituted at the same time as economic borders dissolve...” 165 As the United States opened up new trade routes with nations of the Pacific, cultural and racial symbols became markers of important national difference. Newspaper articles reflected an ambivalence toward trade
164
"Teach Your Children American Games,” The San Francisco Examiner, American Magazine Section, 14 March, 1915, p. 5. 165
Although this phrase is taken out of its’ historical and situational context, it seems to apply here as well. Mohanty’s original context is in describing a trip she made in 1993 as an Indian citizen and permanent U.S. resident visiting the Netherlands for a women’s studies conference. This experience highlighted for her the “dilemmas of citizenship, (im)migration, work, and economic privilege that underlie the concept and power of the European Union.” Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003)187.
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with Japan. The Examiner published articles separately praising and condemning trade with Japanese and the “Japanese race.” Bederman argues that Japanese men were considered more of a threat to AngloAmericans than African Americans, because the Japanese were “civilized.” “To allow natural selection to work—to allow Japanese men to compete, as men, with white American men—would be dangerous to the white American race’s supremacy.” 166 An article from August 5, 1915, depicted the Japanese as worthy trade partners with the United States. The article, entitled “Japanese Sea King Extolled,”167 was subtitled “Chamber of Commerce Gives Luncheon for Asano and Praises Enterprise of His Race.” 168 In this article, Anglo-American businessmen praise the Japanese race for its progress from a “hermit nation to a world power.” 169 The article highlights the potential for trade between the two nations, and describes the Japanese “growing fleet of merchant vessels” that would sail through the Panama Canal to trade with the East Coast. Anglo-American merchants honored the “Japanese race” in this luncheon, and then publicly through this newspaper article in an effort to maintain and create positive trading relations. 170
166
Bederman, 200.
167
“Japanese Sea King Extolled, The San Francisco Examiner, 5 August 1915, p. 3.
168
Ibid.
169
Ibid.
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Alternatively, other Examiner articles depicted the dangers of trade with Japan. One such article, “Teach Your Children AMERICAN GAMES,” 171 was in the “New Discoveries All Over the Earth” section of the Examiner. Located in the “science” section, the newspaper legitimized a racial degenerative discourse. The article argues that Japanese-made toys maliciously influence children during their formative years. The writer argues: If it is thought wise to deluge the boy or girl with a horde of Japanese articles with the stamp of an alien civilization upon them, it should be done knowingly not heedlessly. Such a course is equivalent to giving the child later in life a large proportion of Japanese ideas. To those who look upon “the little brown genius” as a true Yellow Peril, there is no more insidious influence at work than the toys with which our American children play. 172 This article, printed inside the exposition’s Palace of Machinery, reveals that degenerative discourses were still circulating widely in the Anglo-American public. The intended audience is clearly Anglo-American parents and especially “eugenic” mothers wishing to keep their children safe from “disease.” The article maps disease onto the Japanese. The “yellow peril” in the article refers to the Anglo-American fear that all people of Asian descent threatened America. San Francisco’s Anglo-Americans feared and associated Asians with the plague, syphilis,
170
Another notable expression of Anglo-Saxon attempts to maintain good relations with the Japanese for economic benefits: “The Alien Land Bill was ‘forgotten,’ as it was offensive to the Japanese government.” Todd, Vol. 1:269. 171
"Teach Your Children American Games,” p. 5.
172
Ibid.
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trachoma, and hookworms. 173 The newspaper article argues that the Anglo-American child could be infected with Japanese ideas, much like one could be infected with disease. Anglo-Americans excluded Japanese from white schools for “pernicious” moral influence upon the children. This discourse reinforces the Anglo mother’s need to preserve Anglo heritage and maintain Anglo civilization in every way possible. The “American Games” article reflects the fears that Asian labor and commerce threatened Anglo-American economy. The article’s implication is that trading with the East would lead to the downfall of the West. 174 Congressman E.A. Hayes wrote to the Japanese and Korean Exclusion League of San Francisco about the progress they were making in their case to keep the Japanese out: “(If) we continue to bring the attention of the Japanese competition and the dire evil influence upon our civilization of their residence among us, we are bound to succeed.” 175 The Japanese were an economic and racial threat to the United States. Discourses of racial degeneracy, depicted in the article above, present a threat Anglo-American motherhood. The Anglo-American mother had to keep watch over which games her children played with lest they infected with “Japanese ideas.”
173
See Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides.
174
In the late 1800’s California’s labor leaders and nativists denounced Japanese immigration. California legislature asked Congress to extend the Chinese Exclusion Act to the Japanese and other Asians. Stephenson, 269. 175
E.A. Hayes Letter to Mr. A.E. Yoell, Secretary Japanese and Korean Exclusion League, San Francisco. May 1, 1906. California. Museum of the City of San Francisco http://www.sfmuseum.org/1906.2/invasion.html; Internet.
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Conclusion San Francisco newspapers revealed complicated racial narratives dependent in part upon economic factors. Anglo-Americans promoted the eugenic woman in contrast to depictions of the “immoral” Native Americans and the “diseased” Japanese. AngloAmerican women, as preserves of the race, had to keep vigilant over the threats of “savage” Native Americans and dangerous Japanese toys. These depictions served to fortify the power, wealth and “blood” of the Anglo-Saxon race in eugenic discourses predicated upon white purity and superiority. Women’s groups, those who served in the Women’s Board as well as those directly involved in the Race Betterment Conference, inserted themselves into national and racial discourses highlighting the extension of woman’s roles—from the domestic to the public sphere—through eugenic motherhood and euthenic “municipal housekeeping.” Although some white women’s groups, such as the Woman’s Board or the Race Betterment Conference participants, reveled in their role of “eugenic motherhood,” other groups rejected. The following chapter investigates such sites of resistance.
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III: Locating Resistance As discussed in previous chapters, theories of degeneracy, racial hygiene, and social Darwinism manifested themselves in sculpture, art, and exhibits at the at the San Francisco exposition in 1915. Eugenics helped shape a nationalist American identity based on the Anglo-Saxon race. This social construction of whiteness with Anglo-Saxon purity legitimated the exclusion, repression and colonization of others. Eugenic motherhood became Anglo-Saxon women’s racial and patriotic duty. Although the discourses of degeneracy and social Darwinism were also prevalent at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, eugenic discourses in the public were relatively new. The Anglo-American public resisted these discourses in complicated ways. In addition, the “dysgenic” or “eugenic” resisted eugenic discourses. This chapter looks at various modes of “resistance” to eugenics. The aim is to look at traditional “resistance,” that of written records against eugenics, and analyze their limitations. Additionally this chapter recognizes a subtext of resistance in documents that do not explicitly “resist.” This second alternative reading, highlights that although resistance may be latent in texts, it is especially important to highlight “subjugated knowledges.”
Conformity/Resistance Locating latent evidence for this resistance is problematic. Erica Rand argues that the conformity/resistance model is inadequate to describe the complex and often
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contradictory narratives within a hegemonic discourse. 176 Although Rand analyzes hegemonic/counter-hegemonic discourses in her work, her task is not to categorize actions as conformity or resistance but to see what cultural work they do. Furthermore, Rand argues, “[W]e need to be very humble about our own ability to inscribe meaning in objects, to discern the meanings that others attribute to them, or to transfer conclusions about resistance, subversion and hegemony from person to person, object to object, context to context.” 177 Rand asserts that scholars cannot adequately judge subversive acts as indicators of future subversion. Furthermore, subversive acts, intentional or not, can also be sites of conformity. With Rand’s critique in mind, discourses against eugenics are not easily classifiable as simply subversive or conforming. I believe that the task of locating resistance, although fraught with complications, is worth undertaking. The alternative, of ignoring the issues of “resistance,” would only reinforce the construction of a seamless eugenic discourse and Anglo-American genealogy of San Francisco. Looking at the multiple discourses embedded in the Panama-Pacific International Exposition and the Race Betterment Conference, I propose that the statues, newspaper articles etc. are an “effect of power” in a cultural form. As sites of power, they are also
176
Erica Rand, Barbie’s Queer Accessories (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995) 131.
177
Ibid, 195.
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sites of resistance. Alternate readings from a feminist perspective subvert the cultural hegemony implicit in these productions. 178 This chapter examines various sources for resistance. First, this chapter evaluates a section in Frank Morton Todd’s The Story of the Exposition. Todd’s description of the Race Betterment Exhibit has been quoted in various scholars’ work. What scholars have overlooked, however, is the ways Todd ultimately resists positive eugenics. Secondly, this chapter locates Anglo-American resistance to positive eugenics in newspaper stories. The newspaper accounts utilize an oppositional discourse of “Love vs. Eugenics” which reveals that most Anglo-American men rejected limitations on their choice of marriage partners while they welcomed restrictions on the “unfit.” Finally, this chapter reveals latent narratives that Native Americans asserted agency and identity as they rejected the exposition and eugenicist narratives of an Anglo-American superior race.
The Birds and the Bees: “Love vs. Eugenics” Todd, the official exposition historian, wrote The Story of the Exposition, a hefty five-volume work detailing the entire event published in 1921. 179 Todd trumpeted the
178
Power, from a Foucauldian perspective, is within everyone. Foucault argues, “multiple and mobile power relations”178 exist. In this framework, power is diffuse and within and upon everyone. The eugenic as well as the dysgenic hold strings in the web of power, although some of the eugenic may hold more strings than the dysgenic. In The History of Sexuality Vol.1, Foucault claims that “(D)iscourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and an starting point for an opposing strategy,” 101. 179
Todd wrote a few other books as well, Eradicating plague from San Francisco (1909), How to see San Francisco by trolley and cable (1912), Romance of Insurance, Being a History of the Fireman's Fund Insurance Company of San Francisco.
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exposition as progress for humankind. The advertisement that announced Todd’s book proclaimed, “The Exposition at San Francisco is presented as one of a series of such phenomena, to which men are driven periodically by the universal urge toward progress.” Furthermore Todd asserts: “The Story of the Exposition will not be published as a moneymaking enterprise, but as a contribution to art, civilization, and progress.” 180 Todd aligns himself with the Enlightenment ideals of the exposition to contribute to the progress of “mankind.” Although purportedly for progress of all of humankind the exposition clearly depicted Anglo-American “progress.” As the fair’s official historian, Todd had to choose which events, exhibits, and photographs to cut from the book due to size constraints. The exposition lasted 288 days, and each day was heralded as a special event: “Portuguese-American Day,” etc. Todd chronicles the events he deemed important to “mankind.” Todd devotes two pages and a photograph to the “Race Betterment Exhibit.” Todd describes the exhibit as, “so admirably arranged with placards and charts that you didn’t have to ask many questions; all you had to do was just to look, to see the necessity for its work.” 181 Todd commends the director, Dr. A. J. Read, who was available for questions and comments. Todd extensively quotes the charts and photographs of the exhibit allowing the Race Betterment exhibit to speak for itself.
180
PPIE file on advertisements at the San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Main Library.
181
Todd, Vol. 4: 39.
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Ultimately, Todd challenges eugenics, directly following his description of the Race Betterment exhibit with a curious metaphor about bees: A horrible example of what the race might become if its development is not tempered by common sense was offered by a small exhibit in an obscure corner of the Palace, where a swarm of bees devoted every waking hour to toil, without the least notion why ... They worked incessantly ... the flowers they plundered were, to them, merely repositories of glucose; and so they formed a most impressive warning against the deadening effects of intemperate industry, and its fixation as a racial vice. The Race Betterment movement aimed “to create a new and superior race through personal and public hygiene.” The bees showed it wasn’t going to be worth doing if that superior race was to abandon itself to excessive indulgence in work. 182 The busy bees are the racial metaphor for the hard working Anglo-Saxon race. Todd argued against eugenic sex on the basis that too much industry, work etc., was an AngloSaxon vice. This narrative perhaps echoes the perceived threat of Anglo “overcivilization” to masculinity and health.183 The bee metaphor here stands in for eugenic sexual selection. The “plundered” flowers are gendered female and the bees are male with their “glucose” (read: sperm). The agents of his metaphor are the male bees. The bees symbolize a deadening conformity to industry. “Common sense,” according to Todd, is pleasure, individuality, and temperance for Anglo-Saxon men. Todd’s argument was based on an Anglo-Saxon male desire for choice, pleasure, and temperance. Todd rejects “positive eugenic” insistence on eugenic matches for marriage and childrearing. If
182
183
Ibid, Vol. 4:40.
See Gail Bederman. Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1995).
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eugenic flowers are “mere repositories of glucose,” rather than partners chosen for love, Todd seem to ask, why mate at all? Similar to Todd’s critique, San Francisco newspapers reveal a discourse that pits “Love vs. Eugenics.” San Francisco newspapers reported extensively on the Race Betterment Conference. According to the Official Proceedings of the Second National Race Betterment Conference, there were sixty-five other conferences during the week of August fourth to the eighth. “The press of San Francisco” however “gave greater attention to the Conference than to all the other sixty-five conventions combined.” 184 Articles about eugenics and the pseudo-science of “race betterment” sold newspapers. Many articles reported on the conference without comment, simply re-stating conference speakers speeches. Articles in the San Francisco Examiner dutifully followed the Race Betterment Conference proceeding with articles such as: “Regulation of Births Is Urged by Eugenicists,” 185 “Burbank Views Race Culture,” 186 and “Perfect Men and Women Wanted.” 187 The Examiner, in comparison to The Call and The Bulletin, advertised heavily for the eugenic play that concluded the race betterment conference: “Morality Masque Picturns the Triumph of Eugenics.” 188
184
Official Proceedings, 5.
185
“Regulation of Births Is Urged by Eugenicist” San Francisco Examiner, 8 August 1915, p. 59.
186
“Burbank Views Race Culture,” San Francisco Examiner, 8 August 1915, p. 59.
187
“Perfect Men and Women Wanted,” p. 9.
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However, newspapers, including The Examiner, published articles resisting part of the eugenic agenda. The majority of these resistance articles centered their rejection of positive eugenics based on a discourse of “love” but advocated for “negative eugenics” to regulate the unfit. The Examiner published articles such as “Love Ahead of Eugenics, Says Doctor.” 189 These resistant discourses defended the right of white men’s choice of sexual partner. The Bulletin in particular published articles that described the eugenic conferences complete with dissenters opinions. Articles such as, “Hands Off of Cupid,” 190 “Eugenics? Not for the Artist?” 191 and “Kill All Weak Babies Before Birth; Race Congress in Ferment,” 192 articulate multiple challenges to eugenics. In effect, the main critique was not to do away with eugenics, but rather to argue against forced eugenic marriages amongst whites. The eugenically “fit” protested the idea of being forced into marriages based on pedigree. Their critiques centered on the methods of “positive” eugenics: encouraging the eugenically fit to reproduce. Many newspaper articles chronicled dissenters within the eugenics movement who preferred the method of “negative” eugenics, or prohibiting the unfit from reproducing.
188
“Morality Masque Picturns the Triumph of Eugenics,” San Francisco Examiner, 8 August
1915, p. 59. 189
“Love Ahead of Eugenics, Says Doctor” San Francisco Examiner, 8 August 1915, p. 59.
190
“Hands Off Of Cupid, Is Scientists’ Message at Berkeley Gathering,” The Bulletin, 4 August, 1915. Sec. 2 p1. 191
“Eugenics? Not for the Artist,” The Bulletin, 9 August 1915, p. 7.
192
““Kill All Weak Babies Before Birth;” Race Congress in Ferment,” The Bulletin, 7 August,
1915. p. 1.
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The article, “Scientists Set a Limit on Eugenicists’ Powers,” exemplifies the main arguments of the aforementioned articles. Not all scholars at the Eugenic research Association or American Genetic Association believed a eugenic program in the United States should place limits on the “general society.” A worker at the Chicago House of Correction, Samuel C. Kohs, argued: “The role of eugenic laws should be to hasten the eliminating of bad stock rather than to interfere with the free choice of the average young man.” 193 Kohs asserts Anglo male’s rights to choose the Anglo women of their preference. The words “free choice” do not pertain to Anglo women, or to people of color. Kohs assumes that he is “good stock” and should be immune to eugenically based restrictions. The argument here, as elsewhere in the love-vs.-eugenics arguments, is that restrictions are welcomed for “others,” the “dysgenic,” but not for the eugenic. The “eugenes” and “eugenias” 194 should be free to choose their mates as a privilege of being “fit.” As Wilhelmina E. Key argues, “Nature is wiser than the eugenicists.” Although it is not clear exactly what Key meant by the following it deserves to be noted because of its apparent strain of anti-eugenic resistance: “Too great stress on ideal fitness gives us the ingrowing eugenic conscience. It is here that feminism shows its baleful effect.” 195
193
“Scientists Set a Limit on Eugenicists’ Powers,” The San Francisco Examiner, 4 August 1915,
194
“Perfect Men and Women Are Wanted,” p. 9.
195
“Scientists Set a Limit on Eugenicists’ Powers,” p.4.
p.4.
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Key seems to be associating feminism with eugenics. Key believes that this feminist “ingrowing eugenic conscience” is malicious and that nature knows best. By “nature” Key perhaps means an evolutionary approach without human interference. The San Francisco Call published an editorial against eugenics based on the potential loss of male leaders and thinkers. “A Perfect Race—Ah—They Will Fix It for Us! The Genealogical Society Is to Get to Work—Lucky It Didn’t Start Sooner.” 196 The author uses historically prominent white males as examples of the kinds of people who might never had been born if society followed eugenic laws. The writer argues: (John Stuart Mill) was a victim of melancholia himself, and probably ought never to have been born at all. The world would have missed something in some ways if Mill had never lived but think of the gain to eugenics and the Development of the Race! ... A hundred years from now, when all the world is eugenic, what shall we have—a race of mediocrities, with no giants and no dwarfs, and no fools and no men of genius? 197 This rejection of eugenics is primarily based upon the fear that brilliant white men will be never be born because of eugenics. The article mentions “Mohamet” among many white males such as Mill, Washington, etc., as a long list of male leaders who would not have been born. The writer argues against positive and negative eugenics, but on the premise that geniuses are not born of perfect parents. The argument, although primarily concerned with potential unborn Anglo leaders, makes the persuasive case that heredity does not determine who you will become in life.
196
“A Perfect Race—Ah—They Will Fix It for Us!” The San Francisco Call, 7 August 1915, Editorial Page. 197
Ibid.
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Eugenic prescriptions were too limiting for Anglo men used to having relatively unregulated choices in sexual partners. This “resistance” is imbued with dominant AngloSaxon racial power and is a complicated “resistance” to eugenics. The majority of writers in San Francisco daily newspapers in 1915 were Anglo-American men. These testimonies reveal the debate within dominant cultural leaders of eugenics.
“The Life of a Vanishing Race 198 ” Newspaper stories about the exposition attempted to fix meanings of Anglo progress in opposition to Native American “primitivism.” Meaning, however, is slippery and notoriously difficult to pin down. Stuart Hall argues that “meanings “’float.’” 199 He asserts that meanings are multiple and fluid. Representation, according to Hall, is the attempt to anchor meaning with words. If we think of the newspaper stories as “text,” however, rather than as an author’s “work” multiple meanings are available. As Barthes explains, “It is language which speaks, not the author.” 200 With this in mind, readers can find room for Native American resistance within the hegemonic Anglo-American discourse of progress. The following newspaper story illustrates a journalist’s attempt to fix meaning and the potential readings that allow for resistance.
198
Caption title to picture of Zuni and Hopi people in Reid’s The Blue Book, 313.
199
Stuart Hall, ed. Representation:. Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (London and California: Sage Publications, 1997) 228. 200
143.
Roland Barthes. “Death of the Author.” Image, Music, Text (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977),
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The Santa Fe Railroad brought twenty Zuni and Hopi families from their reservations near Isletta to the artificial “Pueblo Village” at the reconstructed “Grand Canyon” exhibit at the fair. On display for the Anglo visitors, the Zuni and Hopi families were “living exhibits” of “primitive” people and industry in contrast to the AngloAmerican exhibits of civilization and modernity. Robert Reid’s The Blue Book, the official souvenir book of the exposition, displays a picture of the “Pueblo Village.” The accompanying caption: “The Life of a Vanishing Race,” attempts to fix the meaning of the image. Reid interprets, constructs, and maintains the Anglo-Saxon need for the Zuni and Hopi families to be going extinct. These Anglo-American written narratives naturalized the conquest of the West as inevitable. Anglo-Americans naturalized their superiority over Native American through discourses of Native American “primitivism.” Stuart Hall in “The Spectacle of the Other” articulates this practice: “’Naturalization’ is therefore a representational strategy designed to fix ‘difference,’ and thus secure it forever.” 201 Exhibits of Native Americans, as well as the colonial exhibits, solidified the construction of an Anglo-American nationalism that was founded on notions of “civilization” and “progress” in contrast to “primitivism.” The underlying attempt of the both the newspaper article and the photograph caption is to construct “extinction” as the natural consequence of an inferior race, one with no interest in art, education, or science.
201
Hall, 245.
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During the Race Betterment Week at the exposition, the San Francisco Examiner published an article about Native Americans at the fair that reveals a complicated discourse. The newspaper article functions to “fix” Native Americans as “uncivilized” “others.” Latent in the text of the article, however, is a subtext of Native American resistance to the exposition and Anglo-nationalism. The headline of the local section read, “Indians Visit Fair; Zone Is Chief Magnet.” 202 It was subtitled, “Red Men Look in Wonderment at Great Palaces, but Speeches Fail to Hold Their Attention,” and “Lost in Great Buildings.” Presumably, the audience is the white, literate class of San Francisco. The article confirms and maintains the “civilization” of the white audience as it circumscribes the “Indian” as the primitive “other.” The unnamed reporter highlighted the difference in skin color to demarcate race, referencing “Red Men” in contrast to the “white men.” The title, “Indians Visit Fair; Zone Is Chief Magnet” subsumes all Native American people into “Indian” without taking into account that “Indians” are not a homogenous, singular group. 203 The second part of the headline, “Zone is Chief Magnet,” works to place “Indians” as uneducated pleasure seekers, ignorant of the educational aspects of the palaces and drawn into the less respectable amusement section of the fair, the “Zone.”
202
“Indians Visit Fair,” p.1.
203
I have attempted not to do the same and am using the name of the tribes when they are
available.
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The opening paragraph is as follows: “The tragedy of a vanishing race was epitomized at the Exposition yesterday. Representative relics of the noble red men went to the Exposition and viewed the achievements of the white men to whom they were forced to surrender their great domains.” 204 Using phrases such as “vanishing race” and “representative relics” attempts to fix Indians as invisible relics. The obvious paradox of naming the Indians the “vanishing” race is in the context of their visibility and presence at the fair. The writer simultaneously makes Native Americans visible at the fair as he attempts to fix them as “vanishing.” Foucault argued that people are shaped by power and that people have power. “The individual which power has constituted is at the same time its vehicle.” 205 Although the hegemonic discourses constitute the Native American “subject,” the Native American subject contains power. Clearly, the newspaper article articulates that the presence of Native Americans at the exposition, as agents, unsettled local Anglos-Americans. Native Americans were already visible at the fair in statues such as Fraser’s “The End of the Trail” and as part of the “living exhibits.” Native American visitors at the exposition threatened the Anglo sanctity as the only “subject.” Zuni and Hopi families were displayed as “objects” not “subjects.” Anglo-Americans created the “Pueblo Village” and contained the Zuni and Hopi families in enclosed and segregated areas designated for them. Anglo-Americans at the exposition were accustomed to the Native
204
“Indians Visit Fair,” p.1.
205
Foucault, History of Sexuality Vol.1, 98.
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American as “object” of their gaze. Native Americans who viewed the Exposition were visitors, viewers, “subjects,” and agents as tourists rather than “exhibits” or “objects.” Their position as subjects asserted their visibility and challenged the Anglo-American definition of Anglo-American defined subjectivity and superiority. The article “Indians Visit Fair” constructs Native Americans as out of place at the exposition. The image of the exposition, touted as a “world university” and heralded as the epitome of human civilization and progress clashed with the image of the “savage” “Indian.” In this context, the Anglos saw Native Americans as the antithesis of the “modern” United States. This newspaper account constructed a discourse of Anglo “modernity” in contrast to the Native American “relics.” The third subheading of the article, “Too Little of Nature, Too Much of Machinery, Says Chief Shy Down in Address at Fair,” 206 can be read in different ways. One interpretation reflects the hegemonic discourse of “white-man”/civilized, “redman”/savage. The latent and alternative reading, I would argue, is that Native Americans asserted their agency and identity as they criticized the Anglos “dream city.” “Too Much of Machinery,” is an apt Native American critique of the AngloSaxon fair. San Francisco prior to the Spaniards, Mexicans and Anglo-Americans, had been Native American land. The critique “Too Little of Nature” is a rejection of Anglo conquest and development of Native American land.
206
“Indians Visit Fair,” p.1.
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The article depicts the “red men” as not being able to appreciate the “achievements of the white men to whom they were forced to surrender.” 207 An alternative reading argues: Native Americans rejected the Anglo-Saxon fair and its “white achievements” on stolen Native American land. These “white achievements” were contingent on the extermination of the Native Americans who originally inhabited the land. 208 One of the subheadings to the “Indians Visit Fair” article read: “Women in Gaudy Dress.” 209 The article constructs the “otherness” of Native Americans through their women. The Native American women are constructed as gaudy, highlighting that they are not part of Anglo “civilization” or culture, they are not fashionable. In fact they stand out. Women’s dress stands in for “symbolic signifiers of national difference.” 210 The newspaper reporter used women’s dress to signify cultural difference at the exposition. Women’s dress, or lack of thereof, symbolized a culture’s modernity or backwardness and position in the hierarchy of human progress. While The Examiner denigrated Native Americans for their traditional dress, these women in fact symbolized resistance by disrupting the exposition’s Victorian propriety through dress.
207
Ibid.
208
I do not yet have an account of how Native Americans viewed the exposition. My interpretation is simply that – a possibly problematic interpretation of events from a 21st-century viewpoint. I do not intend to “speak for” Native Americans in this section. My aim is to attempt an alternative reading of an Anglo-American narrative. 209
210
“Indians Visit Fair,”p.1. Women are “active transmitters and producers of the national culture,” McClintock, 90.
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Depictions of Native Americans in sculpture at the exposition furthered the Anglo-American attempts to “fix” Native Americans as a “vanishing race.” Native Americans, over time, have resisted this interpretation. Some Native Americans have reappropriated the image of Frasher’s “The End of the Trail,” (figure 5) and made a profit from it. This re-appropriation marks a site of contemporary resistance to historical discourses. This resistance alters contemporary meanings attributed to the symbol “The End of the Trail.” Although Fraser attempted to maintain legal rights over the use and reproduction of his statue, the exposition denied copyright to all the artists. Vendors at the fair sold little replicas of the sculpture in the thousands. 211 Although Fraser attempted to control the consumption of his own art, the sculpture took on cultural meanings beyond the fair. The sculpture’s meaning is altered by its context. In the context of the exposition, within its location in San Francisco, the statue re-enforced Anglo progress and “wining of the West.” From the Anglo-American perspective, the end of the Native American race was seen as an inevitable consequence of the advancement of “civilization.” AngloAmericans had only recently gained control over the West, and the statue symbolized the defeat of Native Americans that enabled the Anglos to settle safely all of California. The sculpture, however, has taken on new meanings. Native Americans have reappropriated the image in various ways. Lakota youth have used the symbol on tribal
211
See Krakel, End of the Trail.
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flags. 212 Stuart Hall calls this “trans-coding: taking an existing meaning and reappropriating it for new meanings. 213 Additionally, people have reproduced the image of “The End of the Trail” on everything from posters to coffee mugs. Native Americans and others have made a profit selling the image. Fraser never saw any of the profits from the statue’s success. In fact for some time, no one knew the whereabouts of Fraser’s statue after the exposition. 214 The earlier meanings of the sculpture, however, cannot be erased. Hall argues, “The palimpsest provides a useful metaphor for this process, where new layers of meaning are superimposed on old ones, or re-articulated, once the object is placed in a different context.” 215 Although the Lakotas have re-appropriated the image, the original meaning of the statue, signaling Anglo advancement, still exist. In the sixties, the Cowboy Hall of Fame petitioned to have Fraser’s sculpture moved to their headquarters and into a permanent building for exhibition. The directors of the museum exhibited the sculpture of a defeated Native American among busts of famous cowboys. The Cowboy Hall of Fame attempted to permanently re-fix the meaning of the sculpture in the context of a museum dedicated, “to preserve and interpret
212
Powers, William K. “The American Flag in Lakota Art: An Ecology of Signs” Whispering Wind V.28 N.2 (August 31,1996):5. “Increasingly, Lakota dancers are wearing entire flags, full-size or miniature, as an integral part of their dance costumes. Moreover, new flags manufactured commercially sport not only the correct number of stars and stripes in patriotic colors but the faces of Red Cloud, Sitting Bull, Rain-in-the Face, Gall, Spotted Tail, and even James Earle Fraser's ‘End of the Trail’ emblazoned in the center.” 213
Hall, 270.
214
Krakel, 11.
215
Hall, 167.
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the heritage of the American West for the enrichment of the public.” 216 Permanently housed in the Cowboy Hall of Fame, “The End of the Trail” works to authenticate the identity of both the “defeated” Native Americans and the “victorious” cowboys. Representations and meanings are inherently unstable. The “End of the Trail” illustrates how meanings created in the context of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition are altered, resisted and re-surfaced in contemporary times. Native Americans’ persistence on maintaining their culture, identity, and community resists the “end of the trail” discourse. The re-appropriation of symbols articulates resistance.
Conclusion Native Americans resisted and rejected the exposition and the Palace of Education, the location of the Race Betterment Exhibit. Native American rejected Anglo-Saxon discourses of racial superiority. But scant evidence of this exists in the Anglo-press or history texts. Most Anglo-American discourses against eugenics focused on a critique of “positive” eugenics and welcomed the “negative” eugenic program to prohibit the “unfit” from breeding. Anglo-American resistance to eugenics centered on
216
The Cowboy Hall of Fame changed its name to National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum. National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum Website: http://www.nationalcowboymuseum.org/m_index.html. “The American Cowboy Gallery, comprising 8,000 square feet, interprets the cowboy’s history and culture from Spanish colonial times to the twentieth century. The gallery represents the most extensive exhibition on the working cowboy in the United States. Within the environment of a rough-hewn ranch building, in-depth presentations reveal how various elements of equipment, such as saddles, bits, and spurs, changed over time. Regional styles of equipment are discussed and displayed. Visitors believe this is a ‘mecca’ for those interested in the real history of the ‘cowpuncher’ and his authentic clothing and equipment.”
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the applications they feared would limit their choices of marriageable mates. Many Anglo-American men resisted any restrictions placed upon their privilege. Many AngloAmerican women, on the other hand, negotiated the role that positive eugenics, or eugenic “motherhood,” offered them to their advantage.
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Thesis Conclusion Eugenicists, the exposition and women’s groups helped construct the first “eugenic mother” in the United States. This thesis analyses the complicated intersections of sexuality, gender, race and nationalism in eugenic motherhood. As exhibited at the exposition and the national race betterment conference, white women actively produced eugenic narratives of motherhood. The racialized narrative of Anglo-American western expansion facilitated the eugenic narrative of racial progress. The image of the Anglo-American “Pioneer Mother” became a powerful symbol of a white supremacist vision of utopian society. The exposition and the eugenics movement promoted visions of Anglo-American utopias based upon an Enlightenment narrative. White women engaged in the creation of these symbols, promoting themselves as the saviors of the white race. Anglo-American women created and promoted the idea of “euthenics,” effectively altering the race betterment movement. Euthenics altered white women’s work in the domestic sphere to national and racial importance. The exposition reveals a pivotal moment in the history of American eugenics. Debates over “positive” vs. “negative” eugenics, environment vs. heredity, and eugenic infanticide aired publicly for the first time on a world stage. There is much more to be written about California and eugenics. California eugenicists influenced the construction of Nazi policies. Much more needs to examined about this relationship.
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Newspapers constructed the first “eugenic mother” during the fair alongside the birth of the “first eugenic baby.” Anglo-American women navigated the roles of motherhood and domesticity creating and supporting their positions as national and racial heroes. Women are not just symbols in the nationalist project, they are agents. Not enough work has been done elaborating the connections between feminist discourses and eugenics in the United States. Progressive women reformers participated in eugenics. More research needs to be done with the progressive movements, euthenics, and the history of domestic science. How did the “pure food movement” amongst other progressive reforms utilize eugenic discourses? Both eugenicists and women’s groups marched for peace during World War I, yet there is nothing written on the matter. Were there pacifist links forged between women groups and eugenicists? What kind of alliances formed between groups that have not examined? As explained in the previous chapter, resistance to eugenics is also in the subtexts of writings that scholars formerly interpreted as supportive of eugenics. Alternative readings suggest that dormant in historical documents are subversive meanings which alter the meanings of texts. How does the analysis of a text alter the meanings of a text? The historical record is altered when scholars take into account subtext and latent meanings. In addition, the “End of the Trail” statue exemplifies how the context of an image and the re-appropriation of an image in contemporary times articulated resistance to lingering historical discourses.
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The exposition and the “first eugenic baby” were born in 1915. These national, gendered, and racialized narratives persist past the fair and into the present day. Policies on current day family planning and immigration utilize discourses of race and nationalism that echo eugenic discourses.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. “Nations of the West.” Robert Reid, The Blue Book: the Official Souvenir and View Book of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. San Francisco: Panama-Pacific International Exposition Company, 1915, p. 49. Figure 2. Gold Certificate, San Francisco Memories, [on-line] http://www.sanfranciscomemories.com/ppie/medals.html Figure 3. Pernham Nahl’s 13th Labor of Hercules, Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco. [on-line] http://www.sfmuseum.net/hist9/ppietxt1.html Figure 4. Race Betterment Exhibit, San Francisco History Center, Photo Collection. Folder: S.F. Fairs-P.P.I.E.-Exhibits-Health. Figure 5. End of the Trail, San Francisco History Center, Photo Collection. Folder: S.F. Fairs-P.P.I.E.-Art Works-End of the Trail. Figure 6. Pioneer Mother Monument, The Project Gutenberg Etext Barry, John D. The City of Domes; a Walk with an Architect about the Courts and Palaces of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, with a Discussion of its Architecture, its Sculpture, its Mural Decorations, its Coloring and its Lighting, Preceded by a History of its Growth. San Francisco: J.J. Newbegin, The BlairMurdock Company Printers, 1915. http://www.books-about california.com/Pages/The_City_of_Domes/The_City_of_Domes_main.html Figure 7. “First Eugenic Baby is Perfect,” San Francisco Examiner, 5 August, 1915, p. 3.
