“The effect of a cultural bomb is to annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities, and ultimately in themselves.”
-Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o 3
Eugenics found a home in Nazi Germany in its most extreme explication. The belief system that argued human heredity was fixed and immutable was the foundational framework to justify some of the most violent atrocities in human history. A concerted propaganda campaign made Nazi Germany so successful in their efforts to infect public consciousness with eugenic ideas. Hitler and his followers understood the role of the arts in political terms; outside culture was a threat, and they viewed the arts as an explicit expression of race. Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Chamber of Culture, was an instrumental force in disseminating culturally reactionary and repressive art. Despite the United States being instrumental in promoting eugenics, Goebbels criticized the U.S. for stoking Black or Jewish arts and culture, which he viewed as corrosive to society. Popular during the Weimar Republic, jazz and swing dance were deemed degenerate art forms because they did not promote family, home, and church. However, he also believed that “the Americans know how to take their relatively small store of culture and turn it into something usable in our times, by modernizing techniques of representation.” 4
While American eugenicists did not weaponize the arts in the same way as Nazi Germany, they believed eugenics did have a place in culture. To them, science provided an objective definition of beauty and artistic talent; their methods of quantifying, categorizing, and pathologizing bodies were interwoven into aesthetics. Asserting their ability to define cultural perfection and mistakes, eugenic scholars directly shaped our modern conceptions of civilization and how we choose to visually represent ourselves. This narrative will examine how the eugenics movement in the United States dominated and attempted to define twentieth-century aesthetics in the fields of photography and music.
This inquiry will also highlight some of the groups of people that were excluded from the eugenic metrics of artistic or aesthetic merit and the work they created. Anti-eugenic art is not made explicit in the same way as eugenic theorization, but it can be anything created to actively resist, subvert, or critique the ideologies and aesthetics of eugenics. Art that challenges notions of fitness, genetic “purity,” or conformity to gender, intelligence, race, or beauty, and flies directly in the face of dominant systems. If eugenics endeavored to aesthetically define a life worth living, anti-eugenics asserts that life is not separate from art-creating. Community, visibility, empathy, diverse methods of expression, and engaging with the whole self, mentally, physically, and spiritually, were part of the answer.
While eugenics continues to reproduce in our popular imagination and is made manifest on cell phone screens, in schools, prisons, airports, doctors’ offices, the halls of Congress, and the White House, even on the Broadway stage-examining the roots of these eugenic ideas and their reverberations in modern society is laid bare. The American eugenics movement wasn’t as explicit as the propagandistic machine of Nazi Germany, but it has had long-lasting effects on our cultural psyche. It has transformed our relationship with art and the world around us, and even inhibits us from having authentic relationships with our bodies. However, when examining the counternarratives to eugenic principles, we can imagine another possible way forward.
Photography
In 1878, Francis Galton layered multiple exposures from glass-mounted photo negatives to make composite photographs. To visually highlight the goals of eugenics, Galton used his photos as the basis for ethnographic photography by employing methods of categorizing and stereotyping. Endeavoring to identify the “ideal face,” he asserted that his composite photos captured the average features of any group of men. According to Galton, “a composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind’s eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree.” 5 In the United States, Charles O. Lovell constructed a series of composite photos of Harvard undergraduates in the class of 1887. Like Galton, Lovell aligned dozens of portraits and rephotographed them on a single negative to create a singular, accumulated image. The mass influx of Irish immigrants challenged Anglo-Saxon political power, so Lovell’s photos functioned as a depiction of Boston’s Protestant elite and a way to maintain their Brahmin social status. 7
Figure 1: Galton’s composite photographs attempted to draw scientific conclusions from racial stereotypes.
Francis Galton, "The Jewish Type," The Photographic News, April 17, 1885.
Francis Galton’s and Charles O. Lovell’s composite photography methods illuminate how they used their flawed technique of photo layering as a way to identify visual representations of masculinity, health, or racial degeneracy. Galton also used the photos as an attempt to represent the appearance of people with tuberculosis and consumption, using composites of the British army as a basis of contrast. In his mind, displaying the strength and might of the military provided a hereditary explanation for desirable and undesirable traits. Arguing this method of photography was objective despite cherry-picking his subjects, his claims enhanced the scientific veracity of his stereotypes. 6 Their vision of the ideal face was a white, Anglo male, clean-shaven, well-dressed, with a dignified stance and a soft, agreeable expression. In this way, photography technology became another site to assert political power. Photos dictated a discipline of the body, gesture, posture, and exercise; photos are a way of monitoring and recording data, and eugenics determined the aesthetics of health, beauty, and civility. Conversely, eugenicists framed illness, disease, disability, and deformity as the binary opposite, as “degenerate” bodies.
Another example of eugenic photography is found with the Better Babies and Fitter Family Contests, sponsored by the American Eugenics Society, an organization founded by Yale’s most esteemed professors. Eugenicists utilized the Fitter Family Contests at state fairs to promote their ideas, employing agricultural breeding as a springboard for their line of reasoning. In their logic, farmers displayed their livestock, so what’s the difference if we did the same with people? At most of the contests, participants were required to submit a report detailing their family traits, and doctors conducted physical and psychological exams on the family members. If they won, families received a bronze medal with an inscription that said, “Yea I Have Goodly Heritage.” 8
Figure 2: Fitter Families Contests were used to promote positive eugenics among white populations, especially in the Midwest and the South.
“Winners of Small, Medium, and Large Family Classes, Fitter Families Contest, Kansas Free Fair, 1923,” American Philosophical Society.
Eugenicists were not the only people with access to photographic meaning-making, however. Prominent Black Americans commissioned paintings and photographs to enshrine their identities. The first few decades of the nineteenth century. W.E.B. Du Bois curated a series of photographs, shot by Thomas Askew, and displayed at the 1900 Paris Exposition. These photographs serve as a counter-archive to Galton and Lovell’s work. Du Bois was committed to challenging racist social structures and transformed the middle-class photographic portrait as a site of Black resistance. The photos very much replicate the visual codes found in Galton’s composite photography, the frontal and side profiles, much like mugshots of today. Du Bois held great antipathy for the eugenics movement, but he did believe photos could serve as scientific documents and used methodology to undermine and dispel race-based claims. He stated, “There is, of course, in general, no argument against the intermingling of the world’s races. All the great people of the world are the result of a mixture of races.” 9
Figure 3: W.E.B. Du Bois’s photographic series served as a direct counterargument to eugenic ideas about ability and refinement.
Du Bois, W.E.B., African American Photographs Assembled for 1900 Paris Exposition, Library of Congress.
When examining Du Bois’s subjects, there is a familiarity in their eyes, something about their photos seems personal. This is no surprise, as Du Bois knew some of his subjects personally; many of them were his students at Atlanta University, where he was a professor at the time. Even though the images were meant to be objective and scientific, there is still evidence of personality and individuality, likely because of the relationship between photographer, curator, and subject. With the help of Thomas Askew, Du Bois was able to command a space for Black artists and inscribe his work within the western cultural framework, traditionally gate-kept by white supremacists. One could critique Du Bois for working within the barriers and confines of what the Brahmin elite defined as “civilized,” rather than invoking new parameters. However, Du Bois was successful in pulling the images from the eugenicists’ archive and resituating them within the Black gaze. 10
Music
Yale alumnus Carl Emil Seashore believed musical talent was biologically inheritable and immutable, and was the architect of gifted and talented programs as well as how we teach music in our schools today. Seashore was interested in music-related research, which included aesthetics, vibrato, musical ability, or, as he called it, “capacities.” He believed selective human breeding could produce more talented performers. Julia Eklund Koza argues that Seashore’s ideas about musical ability expanded to education reform more broadly. Eugenics was foundational to his thought process. As Seashore explains his logic, “biology gives a theory and verified facts about nature, extent, and laws of heredity. Musical anthropology gives a history of the evolution of music from primitive times to the present.”11 Seashore believed the mind and body were indivisible and thought psychological frameworks would help explain musical ability. In 1919, he published the book The Psychology of Musical Talent, in which he highlighted the metrics to determine musical talent. These “factors of the musical mind” included action, memory and imagination, intellect, and musical feeling.
Carl Seashore maintained letter correspondence with Yale psychology professor and eugenicist Robert Yerkes for over thirty years. In these letters, Seashore and Yerkes try to identify the psychological connection between music and talent, and the metrics to measure people by. Once they designed their point scale, they based their rating system on intelligence tests and any other accomplishments or accolades they thought would be applicable. Rated by five teachers, applicants: Abstract reasoning, creative imagination, memory, emotional stability, “plainful initiative” (not impulsive), perseverance, intellectual honesty, physical health, a zeal for research, and “moral attitude, solid and wholesome moral standards and ideals.” 12 In the archives at Yale, Yerkes’ files contained an excerpt from Seashore’s 1947 book, In Search of Beauty in Music: A Scientific Approach to Musical Aesthetics, in which Seashore outlines his defense of euthenics education. He defined euthenics as the next iteration of eugenics; if eugenics dealt with the science of being born “well,” euthenics was the science and art of living well. Integrating hygiene, ethics, logic, aesthetics, history, government, and science into one interdisciplinary senior high school course. According to Seashore, euthenics “implements the idea that school life is not only a preparation for living, but is a period of worthy living right here and now. Progressive realization of truth, goodness, and beauty in life is the evidence of euthenic values.” 13
Figure 4: Family trees of the Bach and Kemble lineage, attempting to trace dramatic ability and musical talent pedigree, were presented at the Second International Congress of Eugenics, held at the American Museum of Natural History in 1921.
International Congress of Eugenics, Eugenics and the Family, Volume I, (Baltimore: Williams & Williams, 1923).
Today, the legacy of Seashore’s work continues to reverberate in education. The most pervasive being standardized testing. His support for large-scale test administration was instrumental in making Iowa a site for testing and distribution. To this day, the American College Testing (ACT) headquarters are in Iowa City. Seashore’s eugenic legacy also exists in musical testing as well in the form of the Music Aptitude Profile (MAP), which is considered the world standard in testing musical ability. Ability-segregated educational opportunities are still infused in the United States education system. For example, in music programs, students are ordered and placed according to their ability. In orchestra performance, first-chair players are considered more talented and proficient than second-chair players. 14 In this way, educational spaces helped enforce these perfectionist standards, aligning eugenic logic with pedagogy. Curriculum focuses on the mastery of classical techniques that are deeply racialized, Eurocentric, and exclusionary.
Conversely, the Civil Rights era of the mid-twentieth century opened the floodgates to more experimental music with politically driven messages of anti-war and anti-colonialism. These art forms directly challenge the premise of Seashore’s arguments. Artists like Fela Kuti, Sun Ra, and Nina Simone synthesized different styles of music to create their genres, lyrically weaving together Black identity and asserting Black music as a revolutionary act. Their music challenges Seashore’s eugenic premises and endeavors to use sonic space as a site for resistance. Additionally, in the modern era, culturally responsive pedagogy has emerged to address the inequities in music education to nurture creativity and develop aural skills.
Conclusions:
Through the examination of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century art and cultural production, it is evident how eugenics influenced public life. Composite photography emerged as a method to monitor and surveil bodies, as well as create visual stereotypes. In the field of music, eugenicists like Carl Seashore forged a legacy that has transformed our relationship with aural production. The notion of talent and genius is intertwined with colonial and white supremacist ideologies. Genius is framed as a hereditary trait, one that is only accessible, however, to the educated elite. Using photography, they attempted to document “desirable” and “undesirable” traits, creating a visual archive of dominant ideas about perfection and degeneracy. Non-Western art forms were dismissed as inferior or “primitive.”
Despite this reality, anti-eugenic arts and culture always persisted as a means of subverting the dominant narrative. Scholars like W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as immigrant artisans and craftspeople and musical pioneers alike, transformed artistic space into a position of resistance and forged a more inclusive American cultural fabric. Even still, hierarchical ideas about genius and talent continue to influence a racialized version of American aesthetics, especially in the way students are trained, evaluated, and validated. It is through this work of identifying these legacies with our students that we can begin to undo their influence over culture and society.
