The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn’t What You Think

I ll admit Having grown addicted to the treats of literary nonfiction I don t make it through too a multitude of academic histories these days If I m going to there d better at least be a decent lede and the Marxian opening to a new history of the eugenics movement in Texas fits the bill Monsters haunted the imaginations of several of the majority of educated white Texans from the s to the dawn of World War II tees off The Purifying Knife The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas a -page endnotes included work by husband-wife historians Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf Philips who not long ago retired from a teaching position at the University of North Texas in Denton previously authored White Metropolis a well-regarded history of race in Dallas The new book out June from University of Oklahoma Press unearths a cast of unsavory Texas characters who pushed eugenics the discredited pseudoscientific belief that the human species should be improved through practices such as forced sterilization from the mid- th century through the s In the latter decades of that period the majority of U S states enacted forced-sterilization laws that targeted the non-white and the disabled leading to more than coerced operations But Texas perhaps surprisingly never passed such a law Although a violent and white supremacist place Texas remained on the sideline during this particular American carnage the authors write The reasons why are the book s preponderance intriguing subject Advertisement Though the Lone Star State ultimately resisted eugenics it was home to early pioneers A Georgia-Texas transplant Gideon Lincecum was a botanist and surgeon who one day in the s took it upon himself to castrate an alcohol-dependent person in Texas an assault he announced cured his involuntary test subject s addiction Lincecum did so before the term eugenics had even been coined and he became one of the earliest advocates of treating humans more like a breeder treats horses or dogs Lincecum managed to get the nation s first forced-sterilization bill put before the Texas Legislature in But Lincecum much too far ahead of his time saw the bill fizzle amid copious mockery F E Daniel another physician and editor of the Texas Diagnostic Journal from the s until the s pushed for forced vasectomy and hysterectomy to assure Anglo-Saxon dominance the book s authors account Daniel embodied the values of the southern Progressive movement a particular turn-of-the-century brew that mixed scientific rationalism with rank racism Eugenicists also made inroads at Texas universities particularly UT-Austin and Rice But Progressives and egghead professors were poor messengers in a state where politicians like Pa and Ma Ferguson stoked right-wing populist prejudice against regime and academic elites and where religious fundamentalism was a rising political power Eugenicist proposals whether focused on sterilization or restricting who could marry continued to fail Attacks on colleges and universities therefore provided the unintentional benefit of shielding the poor and politically powerless in Texas from a horrifying widely shared elite agenda that prevailed elsewhere the authors write In fact liberal California was the nation s eugenic epicenter where deference to academic expertise helped fuel the largest number of forced sterilizations among states a practice continued through Further frustrating the Texas eugenicists a large portion of the state s capitalists depended on cheap Mexican labor and weren t going to forsake their bottom lines over abstract concerns about race-mixing John Box an East Texas Congressman attempted to overcome these employers when federal lawmakers passed the deeply racist Immigration Act of which sought to halt immigration from Asia and Eastern and Southern Europe Box pushed for a cap on Mexican immigration too but the Western Hemisphere was ultimately exempted To the wealthy landowners exploiting migrant labor the threat of paying higher wages proved far more frightening than any dysgenic nightmare that Box and his allies could conjure the authors write The Purifying Knife The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas by Michael Phillips and Betsy Friauf University of Oklahoma Press June Courtesy Publisher Ultimately the combination of greedy capitalists right-wing anti-intellectualism and solidifying religious opposition Catholics grew rapidly in Texas during these decades and the Vatican explicitly opposed forced sterilization in doomed eugenicist bill that was considered in Austin between the s and the s In an email to the Observer Philips called this a unique alignment that led one set of bad ideas to defeat another malign worldview Soon the eugenics movement began its fall from grace nationwide as the discovery of Hitler s concentration camps generally tarnished proposals for racial engineering The history laid out in this book could tempt one to reassess in the present day s right-wing populist attacks on academia Perhaps these too could end up being right for the wrong reasons But Philips doesn t think so He attributes universities erstwhile embrace of eugenics to higher guidance s status as almost universally white straight American-born male and wealthy More diverse scholarly bodies would have likely eschewed such ideas a Jewish anthropologist Franz Boas eventually did help puncture the movement s pseudoscience for example That s why the attacks in contemporary times on diversity equity and inclusion nowadays are so dangerous Philips wrote the Observer It threatens to make universities more like they were at the time eugenics became widely accepted wisdom The book takes a pass through more contemporary figures trying to revive race science in America like Charles Murray and Richard Spencer and the authors also highlight the eugenics-adjacent rhetoric of at present s rabidly xenophobic politicians namely the U S president and the governor of Texas A bit more provocatively they tie threads between eugenics and the current fight over abortion While certain on the right make hay of the historic ties between eugenics and early advocates for reproductive rights the authors take another tack by focusing on the power allowed or disallowed to the state The battle over the right of the state to control reproduction once centered on preventing children labeled as dysgenic from being born By the state decided it could force women to give birth even when the child had no chance of survival they write The two great battles in Texas over regime power and bodily integrity since the s eugenics and abortion had very dif ferent outcomes The post The History of Eugenics in Texas Isn t What You Think appeared first on The Texas Observer