Popular Eugenics National Efficiency and American Mass Culture in the 1930s 1st Edition by Susan Currell, Christina Cogdell ISBN 082141691X 9780821416914

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Product details:

ISBN 10: 082141691X

ISBN 13: 9780821416914

Author:  Susan Currell, Christina Cogdell 

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.

Table of contents:

Part One: Popular Writing and Eugenics
Chapter 1: A New Deal for the Child: Ann Cooper Hewitt and Sterilization in the 1930s
Chapter 2: Eugenic Decline and Recovery in Self-Improvement Literature of the Thirties
Chapter 3: “Drilling Eugenics into People’s Minds”: Expertise, Public Opinion, and Biopolitics in Alexis Carrel’s Man, the Unknown
Chapter 4: “Explaining Sexual Life to Your Daughter”: Gender and Eugenic Education in the United States during the 1930s
Chapter 5: Defending Jeeter: Conservative Arguments against Eugenics in the Depression Era South
Chapter 6: Poor Whites and the Federal Writers’ Project: The Rhetoric of Eugenics in the Southern Life Histories
Chapter 7: The Descent of Yoknapatawpha: Eugenics and the Origins of Faulkner’s World

Part Two: Visual Culture and Eugenics
Chapter 8: The American Adonis: A Natural History of the “Average American” (Man), 1921/32
Chapter 9: Smooth Flow: Biological Efficiency and Streamline Design
Chapter 10: Apes, Men, and Teeth: Earnest A. Hooton and Eugenic Decay
Chapter 11: Classical Bodies versus the Criminal Carnival: Eugenics Ideology in 1930s Popular Art
Chapter 12: Scientific Selection on the Silver Screen: Madcap Eugenics in College Holiday
Chapter 13: Monsters in the Bed: The Horror-Film Eugenics of Dracula and Frankenstein
Chapter 14: The Nazi Eugenics Exhibit in the United States, 1934/43

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Tags: Susan Currell, Christina Cogdell, Popular Eugenics, National Efficiency, American Mass Culture, 1930s