In addition to the prescribed responsibilities of my position as research faculty in the Department of History and Art History, I have revised my dissertation into a book manuscript, An Image of God: Catholics and American Eugenics, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. During the first half of the twentieth century, supporters of eugenic policies saw hereditary science as the key to transforming American society because it provided a guide for preventing both the physically and mentally “unfit” from reproducing. Their Catholic opponents were much more focused on environmental and religious sources of social improvement and disdained proposals that called for the state to circumscribe an individual’s natural right to marry and have children. They believed that individuals could not be defined solely by their biology. I argue that Catholic clergy, writers, and activists urged their coreligionists to object to eugenics policy initiatives for a number of key reasons. First, they believed that the science that eugenicists used was not rigorous enough to justify their policies. Rather, those scientific claims were simply a guise for more deeply held ethnic, racial, and class prejudices. Second, they rejected the notion that the state and the community that it represented could ever justly assume the power to violate an innocent individual’s bodily integrity, regardless of the supposed biological improvements that would result. Catholics did not disagree with the notion that humans should work to improve the health and welfare of the population, but they did disagree that the goal of biological improvement superceded all other rights, values, and goals. For nearly 40 years, Catholic thinkers and eugenics supporters argued about these ideas and their policy implications, which included a range of measures from immigration restriction, to involuntary sterilization, to health requirements for marriage certifications, to anti-miscegenation legislation. Time and again, however, Catholic priests, physicians, writers, and organized lay men and women spoke out in the press, within their own organizations, and in the legislative arena against the invasive and restrictive measures that members of the eugenics movement advocated at the local, state, and national level. Thus, they comprised the most significant and organized opposition to eugenics policies.
In a book about how and why American Catholics opposed some of the ideas and many of the initiatives of the eugenics movement, one might assume a narrative that rehearses the tired story of the “warfare” between science and religion, but for the most part that trope bears little resemblance to the reality of this interaction. Rather, Catholics addressed eugenics on the grounds that the science was inadequate or poorly done, and that the measures that the movement called for were not the best methods to safeguard the rights of individuals while ensuring the common good. More often than not, Catholic thinkers objected to the social applications of scientific findings and principles, rather than to the science itself. In fact, Catholics made their arguments within the grounds of biology, psychology, sociology, and law, rather than on the basis of religious principles. They recognized that the conditions presented by American religious pluralism demanded that they convince those who did not share their religious convictions that eugenic policies and initiatives were not in the best interests of American society at large. In telling the story of American Catholic responses to eugenic ideas and policies, this book takes up the call issued by Leslie Woodcock Tentler over fifteen years ago. In a 1993 American Quarterly article, Tentler challenged US historians, arguing that Catholics needed “to be integrated, more fully and intelligently than heretofore, into our reconstruction of the past.”[i] The eugenics movement’s successes and failures cannot be fully understood without considering the role of Catholics in publicly debating and often fighting their theories and initiatives. In doing that work, this book contributes both to the history of Catholicism and to the history of eugenics in the United States.
Historians of the American eugenics movement have frequently noted the strength and endurance of Catholic opposition to negative eugenic policies. Like the eugenics activists they study, Daniel Kevles, Diane Paul and others all nod to Catholic resistance to sterilization statutes. Marouf Hasian and Christine Rosen have given Catholics more sustained attention. Both scholars provide narratives in which Catholics were not unequivocally opposed to eugenics, but rather they were opposed to the means that eugenicists employed to achieve racial improvement.[ii] This work affirms those narratives, but also expands and complicates them. Catholic engagement with the eugenics movement was more than simply rhetorical, and there were deep philosophical differences in perspective that led Catholic thinkers and activists to work to oppose eugenics policy initiatives and to resist the racial thinking that undergirded much of the movement. An examination of the ways that Catholics responded to eugenics policies and proposals eventually leads away from the academic discussion of the mechanisms and the disciplinary politics of heredity in the sciences and leads toward the social, political, and cultural implications of eugenics in the public sphere.
The responses of Catholic thinkers, writers, and activists to eugenic ideas and policies were not simply knee-jerk condemnations. Rather, they were far more nuanced, taking into account the traditional teachings of the Church, the social and material conditions of the Catholic population and the greater American community, the quality of the scientific work forming the basis for eugenic claims, and the underlying assumptions of the activists making those claims. All of these factors resulted in the articulation of a complex body of reasoning and work that reveals Catholic struggles to participate in modern American social and political life while maintaining their commitment to the Church’s traditional teachings on race, gender, family, economics, and community. In many cases, more established, often middle-class, laypersons and clergy aimed to protect their more vulnerable coreligionists while at the same time articulating principles and positions that served to protect the poor, infirm, and disadvantaged in the population at large. While providing this bulwark against the invasive policies called for by the eugenics movement, these vocal Catholic activists participated in the effort to adapt Catholicism to American conditions. The questions that eugenics raised about the social order, race, gender roles, and reproductive restrictions were truly modern ones. Catholics rejected the science and the assumptions about the primacy of biology in determining human worth that undergirded eugenics, and the notion that the state could justly hold the power to physically prevent individuals from reproducing. Asserting their rights as citizens to participate in the public debate about such issues, Catholics transformed the public discourse by bringing the philosophical lessons of Catholic moral and social teaching and the concrete lessons of their lives as a diverse community to bear on the ongoing conversation about the balance between individual rights and the interests of the community. In doing so, they transformed themselves from religious outsiders into an integral and increasingly accepted part of the American community.
In addition to completing my book manuscript, I have pursued my analogue research and teaching interests. With regard to research, in 2005, I received the Stanley W. Jackson prize for best article (2002-2005) in the Journal of the History of Science and Allied Medicine. I have published an article in the U.S. Catholic Historian, and four book reviews in key history journals. I am just embarking on a second book project: Peace and Justice after the Council: Social Questions in American Catholic History, 1968-2010. Examining popular and institutional responses to nuclear policy, foreign relations, Liberation Theology, poverty, and immigration policy, the book will explore the question of why Catholic social teaching in the United States became so muted after Vatican II. With respect to teaching, in the fall of 2007, I taught a successful section of History 615 that focused on American Religious History after 1865. Out of that group of students, I went on to closely advise two Masters students who are now pursuing their doctorates at Johns Hopkins University and the Catholic University of America. I have also worked closely with one student from the Mason History PhD program, conducting a set of directed readings on American Women’s Religious History, supervising her minor field statement, and finally, serving on her dissertation committee. Similarly, my day to day work at the Center allows me the opportunity to mentor many graduate students as they learn about digital history.
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[i] Leslie Woodcock Tentler, “On the Margins: The State of American Catholic History,” American Quarterly 45 (March 1993): 104-127.
[ii] Daniel J. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Diane B. Paul, Controlling Human Heredity, 1865 to the Present (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1998); Edward J. Larson, Sex, Race and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Marouf Arif Hasian, Jr., The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1996), 89-111; and Christine Rosen, Preaching Eugenics: Religious Leaders and the American Eugenics Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 139-164.