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From Nation to Family: Two Careers in the Recasting of Eugenics

Susquehanna University

By examining the professional lives of two popularizers of eugenic thought from the 1910s to the 1940s, this study illustrates the broader change from "mainline" to "reform" eugenics in the United States. Roswell Hill Johnson's university teaching, laboratory research, and later marriage counseling work contrasted greatly with George Seibel's forays into eugenic theater, moral reform, and mass physical fitness movements. Yet both men shifted from a strict position of mandating other people's behavior in the name of national health and racial integrity to a more therapeutic stance that cast individual decisions in the context of managed family life. This study shows that for some, the transformation of eugenics in the 1930s meant adapting the traditional focus on superiority, inferiority, and reproduction by design to the language of a commercial marketplace.

Key Words: eugenics • marriage counseling • American Turners • Roswell Hill Johnson • George Seibel • Pittsburgh

Journal of Family History, Vol. 34, No. 1, 89-115 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0363199008327643


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