Popular eugenics : national efficiency and American mass culture in the 1930s
Susan Currell (Editor), Christina Cogdell (Editor)
The motto Eugenics is the self-direction of human evolution was part of the logo of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held in 1921. However, by the 1930s, the disturbing legacy of this motto had started to reveal itself in the construction of national identities in countries throughout the world. Popular Eugenics is a fascinating look at how such tendencies emerged within the rhetoric, ideology, and visual aesthetics of U.S. mass culture during the 1930s, offering detailed analysis of the way that eugenics appeared within popular culture and images of modernity, particularly during the Depression era. The essays in this generously illustrated collection demonstrate how, after the scientific foundations of the eugenics movement had been weakened in the 1930s, eugenic beliefs spread into the popular media, including newspapers, movies, museum exhibits, plays, and novels, and even fashion shows and comic strips. Popular Eugenics shows that eugenic thought persisted in science and culture as well as in social policy and goes a long way toward explaining the durability of eugenic thinking and its effects on social policy in the United States. Popular Eugenics will be of interest to scholars and students in a broad range of disciplines, especially American literature and history, popular culture, media studies, and the history of science. --Publisher
History
x, 406 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
9780821416914, 9780821416921, 082141691X, 0821416928
69680041
Introduction / Susan Currell
A new deal for the child : Ann Cooper Hewitt and sterilization in the 1930s / Wendy Kline
Eugenic decline and recovery in self-improvement literature of the thirties / Susan Currell
"Drilling eugenics into people's minds" : expertise, public opinion, and biopolitics in Alexis Carrel's Man, the unknown / Andrés H. Reggiani
"Explaining sexual life to your daughter" : gender and eugenic education in the United States during the 1930s / Michael A. Rembis
Defending Jeeter : conservative arguments against eugenics in the Depression era South / Betsy L. Nies
Poor whites and the Federal Writers' Project : the rhetoric of eugenics in the southern life histories / Stephen Fender
The descent of Yoknapatawpha : eugenics and the origins of Faulkner's world / Barbara E. Ladner
The American Adonis : a natural history of the "average American" (man), 1921-32 / Mary K. Coffey
Smooth flow : biological efficiency and streamline design / Christina Cogdell
Apes, men, and teeth : Earnest A. Hooton and eugenic decay / Nicole Rafter
Classical bodies versus the criminal carnival : eugenics ideology in 1930s popular art / Kerry Soper
Scientific selection on the silver screen : madcap eugenics in College holiday / Karen A. Keely
Monsters in the bed : the horror-film eugenics of Dracula and Frankenstein / Angela Marie Smith
The Nazi eugenics exhibit in the United States, 1934-43 / Robert Rydell, Christina Cogdell, and Mark Largent