The 2016 election of a self-declared eugenicist to the most powerful political role in the world signified a widespread and worrying forgetting of America’s eugenic past. This essay shows how America’s current president employs similar rhetorical and fictive devices to those employed by eugenicists and politicians in the 1920s and 1930s, strategies that he now uses to fuel his supremacist fantasies. By linking up Trump’s lifelong belief in his genetic superiority (and thereby the apparent “truth” of eugenics more broadly) with earlier eugenic beliefs of the 1920s and 1930s, this paper explores how, despite being scientifically discredited, eugenics steadfastly remained a popular ideological staple of American meritocratic and supremacist belief.
This essay explores the relationship between welfare, eugenics and documentary photography during the New Deal in order to explain how a set of government photographs taken by Arthur Rothstein in the Shenandoah became entwined in the rhetorical structure of eugenic ideology. The photographs discussed portray victims of forced sterilization before their incarceration, yet there is no evidence to show that the photographer was aware of, or complicit with, this fact. This essay responds to the questions this raises about the images: what historical and social contingencies were behind their production? What is the relationship between the photographer, the photographs, the New Deal and the subjects depicted? How did efforts to help America's poorest lead to their incarceration and sterilization? Why is the full picture impossible to see? And how do we read and understand them today?
Asserting that the Wall Street Crash was a drama staged in the public arena of the early 1930s, this essay examines the context and performance history of the poet Archibald MacLeish’s verse-drama about the suicide of a banker, Panic: A Drama of Industrial Crisis (1935). The play is one of very few representations on stage of the banking crash of 1933 and marks a turning point in the politics of both the writer and his audience. Looking through the prism of contemporary reviews, letters and memoirs from the era, this essay pieces together historical fragments about this play and its performances to explain how a liberal pro-capitalist writer, such as MacLeish, came together with the Marxist critics of New Masses magazine, to create a historic final-night performance of his now-forgotten play.
Examines in detail the Federal Writers' Project Life Histories of the southern country poor in the 1930s, showing how they were influenced by the lingering rhetoric of eugenics, despite the progressive sympathies of managers and writers.
In a society that breathlessly awaits 'the new' in every medium, what happens to last year's new? Ample critical energy has gone into the study of new media, genres, and communities. But what becomes of discarded media? In what manner do the products of technological change reappear as environmental problems, as 'the new' in another part of the world, as collectibles, as memories, and as art?
Review of: Brown, B., 1996. 'The Material Unconscious: American Amusement, Stephen Crane and the Economies of Play'. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.
The normal man is an individual who lives in society and whose mode of life is so adapted that society derives a certain advantage from his work.From a psychological point of view he has enough energy and courage to meet the problems and difficulties as come along. (Adler 1929:103) A style of life is built up through the striving for a particular goal of superiority. (Adler 1929:117). The production and maintenance of a 'normal' life style, as pointed out by the American psychologist Alfred Adler in 1929, continues as a mainstream pursuit in lifestyle guides to this day. As Adler indicates above, embedded within this striving for `normality' is another goal that problematizes the first; that is, the goal of also achieving superiority by adjustments in lifestyle. Self-help guides and mass-market success literature proliferated in the twentieth century precisely because they could appeal in this protean way to readers insecurities and their pride. Yet these books relied on fixed definitions of normality, where the measurement of self-esteem, sanity, and social usefulness appeared possible because of the scientific application of social and psychological statistics that had been generated in the first few decades of the emerging social and psychological sciences. These statistics made it appear possible to categorize and define `normality' for the first time in history and made vagaries, such as `keeping ahead of the crowd' and meeting problems with correct amounts of `energy and courage,' appear scientific and measurable. These sentiments and attitudes now appear to hold less meaning with the break down of such rigid certainties in postmodern, multicultural, society. Despite this, self-help has continued to thrive. There are now vast offerings for those who seek lifestyle guidance. In a large book store there is an abundance of self-help books devoted to improving relationships, health, fitness, diet, beauty, family, children and fertility. According to these, self-help and self-improvement should begin before conception. Then there are others devoted to mental and educational improvements and accelerated learning techniques; a pseudo-scientific literature that treats the human as an underutilized machine with titles such as A User's Guide to the Brain, The Owner's Manual to the Brain, How Intelligent Are You? Brain Building in Just 12 Weeks, Speed Reading, Quantum Learning. These books offer strategies to `unlock' the vast potential that appears to be trapped inside the individual. The genre has become so successful in recent years that there is even a how-to guide for how-to guides titled Writing Successful Self-Help and How-To Books: Strategies for Developing a Bestselling Book, a title which suggests that the true success from success literature is for the best-selling author. In response to the proliferation of success guides the anti-self-help book has emerged to denounce the crassness of the formula in mirror-image satires of self-help: How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, Yoga for People who Cant Be Bothered to Do it, How to Be Idle. Again, the success of these titles relies on a broad understanding and general acceptance of what they pitch themselves against.
Review of: Dickstein, M., 2009. 'Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression'. New York: W.W. Norton.
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.
Review of: Deutsch, N., 'Inventing America's "Worst" Family: Eugenics, Islam, and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael'. Berkeley: University of California Press.
In her essay on popular self-improvement literature from the 1930s, particularly the writings of Walter B. Pitkin, Susan Currell points to the rhetorical overlaps between the personal and the political in the arenas of decline and recovery. She intertwines three narratives in her argument: Franklin Delano Roosevelt's personal struggle with polio, so resolutely overcome to establish his fitness for the presidency; the lessons Roosevelt and many other Americans learned from physical fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden, lessons that strongly pushed eugenic principles; and Pitkins personal eugenic beliefs and the ways that these infused his highly popular writings on self-improvement. In each of these narratives, the heavy emphasis on exterior environmental actions that one could perform for self-improvement seemed to overturn mainline eugenic emphases on the Mendelian genetics that was so prevalent in the 1920s, to the extent that traditional eugenic principles of controlling heredity became hidden. Yet as Currell, Kline, and others throughout this volume argue, eugenic assumptions still ran deep, serving as the foundation on which environmental contexts were built. Each of these three men, in their respective areas, assumed an inherent genetic potential 'for themselves, for middle-class individuals, for the nation as a whole' that could only be brought forth through hard work and willpower. Currell's essay thus illuminates how fundamental eugenic beliefs became infused with and perhaps overshadowed by a heightened emphasis in the 1930s on environmental influences as the means to stem decline and spur recovery and a return to overall personal and national eugenic fitness.
Showing how `modernist cosmopolitanism¿ coexisted with an anti-cosmopolitan municipal control this essay looks at the way utopian ideals about breeding better humans entered into new town and city planning in the early twentieth century. An experiment in eugenic garden city planning which took place in Strasbourg, France, in the 1920s provided a model for modern planning that was keenly observed by the international eugenics movement as well as city planners. The comparative approach taken in this essay shows that while core beliefs about degeneration and the importance of eugenics to improve the national `body¿ were often transnational and cosmopolitan, attempts to implement eugenic beliefs on a practical level were shaped by national and regional circumstances that were on many levels anti-cosmopolitan. As a way of assuaging the tensions between the local and the global, as well as the traditional with the modern, this unique and now forgotten experiment in eugenic city planning aimed to show that both preservation and progress could succeed at the same time
Review of: Cross, G.S., and Walton, J.K., 2005. 'The Playful Crowd: Pleasure Places in the Twentieth Century'. New York: Columbia University Press.
Review of: Welky, D., 2008. 'Everything was better in America: print culture in the Great Depression'. (The History of Communication.) Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
In The March of Spare Time, Susan Currell explores how and why leisure became an object of such intense interest, concern, and surveillance during the Great Depression. As Americans experienced record high levels of unemployment, leisure was thought by reformers, policy makers, social scientists, medical doctors, labor unions, and even artists to be both a cause of and a solution to society's most entrenched ills. Of all the problems that faced America in the 1930s, only leisure seemed to offer a panacea for the rest. The problem centered on divided opinions over what constituted proper versus improper use of leisure time. On the one hand, sociologists and reformers excoriated as improper such leisure activities as gambling, loafing, and drinking. On the other, the Works Progress Administration and the newly professionalized recreation experts promoted proper leisure activities such as reading, sports, and arts and crafts. Such attention gave rise to new ideas about how Americans should spend their free time to better themselves and their nation. These ideas were propagated in social science publications and proliferated into the wider cultural sphere. Films, fiction, and radio also engaged with new ideas about leisure more extensively than has previously been recognized. In examining this wide spectrum of opinion, Currell offers the first full-scale account of the fears and hopes surrounding leisure in the 1930s, one that will be an important addition to the cultural history of the period.
This chapter examines work published on modernism in 2007 and 2008 and looks at the social, institutional, historical and gendered formations of modernism in books which offer historiographical reconsiderations of the field through new definitions, arguments about origins or new matrices. It discusses books which address the appearance of the networks and maps of modernism as they emerge in geo-spatial, socio-historical and psychological arenas. The chapter is divided into two sections: 1. Modernism, War and Gender, which looks at ideas around origins, the Great War and gender in modernism; 2. Mind and Body: Mapping Modernism, examines books that map the way in which the matrices of modernity emerge in concepts concerning the body and racial identity, as well as within modernisms¿ psychological aesthetics.
Case study.
Book review