An Interesting Experiment in Eugenics

This chapter examines the formation and early years of Denishawn, the first American modern dance company and school. It argues that the newlywed Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn harnessed the cultural fascination with eugenics—the science of race betterment—to catapult their unique brand of theatrical dancing into public renown. A cultural phenomenon, Denishawn appeared in magazines from National Geographic to Vogue, fast becoming a sensation among Hollywood directors, vaudeville producers, and high society elites. Denishawn’s meteoric rise was curtailed by World War I and Shawn’s enlistment in the army as well as the interpersonal conflicts between St. Denis and Shawn, which led the couple to seek marriage counseling from Havelock Ellis, a pioneer of the British eugenics movement, while in London in 1922 with their company.

Eugenics in the United States

This article provides an understanding of the history of the nature/nurture debate that was initially of great interest to both intellectual and social historians. It presents in-depth studies of influential organization and individuals and discusses two approaches introduced by the history of science to the study of eugenics. It links eugenic concerns about race betterment with concerns about Mexican immigration, arguing that in the early twentieth century, the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) and the Border Patrol shaped the complicated process of racialization on the U.S.-Mexican borderlands. This article argues that disability is a category of analysis as important as race, class, or gender in understanding the past. Eugenics is no longer a forgotten relic of the past, but a vibrant field that addresses controversial issues from a variety of fields and standpoints.

Governing Mentalities: The Deportation of ‘Insane’ and ‘Feebleminded’ Immigrants Out of British Columbia From Confederation To World War II

This paper chronicles the role of British Columbian provincial authorities and medical practitioners in engineering the deportation of psychiatrically disordered and cognitively disabled immigrants out of the province between Confederation and 1939. Approximately 750 mental patients were removed from BC during the 1920s and 1930s alone, and more than 5000 had been deported from the country as a whole by the outbreak of World War II. With the use of provincial and federal government records and correspondence, institutional documents, print media clippings and patient files, I probe the professional practices and discourses that fuelled this movement to banish asylum inmates. Across these seven decades, medical authorities, in alliance with bureaucrats and various anti-immigration forces, succeeded in assembling a powerful and efficient system for screening out and expelling those new Canadians who ostensibly failed to meet the mental standards for Canadian citizenship. Bolstered by theories of eugenics and race betterment, and drawing on public fears about the unregulated influx of aliens and the associated scourge of madness, officials turned to deportation as an expedient means for ridding hospitals of their least desirable denizens. I argue more generally that the deportation of ‘insane’ and other ‘unfit’ immigrants was nourished by the flood ofnativist, rac(ial)ist, exclusionist, eugenist, and mental hygienist thinking that dominated British Columbian and Canadian political and public culture throughout this ‘golden age’ of deportation.