The “Nervous Icon” has mesmerized me for nearly three years (see Parts I, II and III).

I first spotted the image in the early textbooks of George W. Hunter, including A Civic Biology (1914), famous as the central exhibit in the Scopes trial. It stood out because it gave off such a curiously anachronistic aura in Hunter’s otherwise proudly “modern” works. Once struck, I started seeing the thing everywhere. I found variations in at least eight competing twentieth century American high school textbooks. And moving back in time, I uncovered dozens of instances published in the century prior.

The database associated with this article now links to more than 100 instances of the Nervous Icon.

Michael Sappol from the U.S. National Library of Medicine has helped me contextualize this image and track its history. Sappol believed the image was of European origin. But the earliest example I had been able to find was from Calvin Cutter’s 1847 Anatomy and Physiology, a book published in Boston. An identical (or nearly identical) image appeared a few years later in T. S. Lambert’s 1854 Human Anatomy, Physiology and Hygiene, published in Hartford. The earliest example I could find printed outside the United States appeared in Dionysius Lardner’s 1855 The Museum of Science and Art Vol. VIII, published in London.

Finally, after a concentrated weekend of sleuthing, I’ve discovered a European relative. A twin really.

The image at the top-right is from Lecciones de Historia Natural: Zoología, Volume 1 by Agustín Yáñez y Girona, a book published in Barcelona in 1844. What is most exciting about this find is that close examination suggests the image is not a re-engraved variation, typical for illustrations that crossed the Atlantic at the time, but instead an impression made from the same master used to print Calvin Cutter’s 1847 variation. Girona and Cutter’s images were either printed from the same woodcut or were printed from plates that were mechanically or electro-mechanically reproduced from a common original. In other words, printed from stereotyped or electrotyped copies. Very unusual given the dates, and very interesting given the subject, particularly if the plates were electrotyped (so interesting in fact that if I can prove the case I plan to write a journal article about it).

I found Lecciones de Historia Natural by following a path opened by the discovery of another Spanish text, Atlas del Novisimo Manual de Anatomia General y Descriptiva by José de Prada é Irizar and Melchor Sánchez de Toca, printed in Madrid, also in 1844.

Though Girona and Cutter’s Nervous Icon (version 1.0 in the database) does not appear in Atlas del Novisimo Manual de Anatomia General, the volume does include variations that would later appear in U.S. texts. More interesting to me was the armature employed for the illustration of the human muscular system (pictured third from the left above). It matches the silhouette of the Nervous Icon almost exactly. And that brought me back to the source I cited in Part II.

Almost all modern full-body anatomical illustrations are children of Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 masterpiece, De Humani Corporis Fabrica. The Nervous Icon is no exception. But to paraphrase Paul Theerman of the National Library of Medicine, it is not a “direct quotation.” Nonetheless, the Icon’s anonymous engraver most certainly referenced Vesalius’ Fabrica or his Anatomia or one of the many copies produced over the intervening two and a half centuries, like Felix Platter’s 1583 De Corporis Humani Structura (the source of images one and two above). All the pieces are there: the silhouette, the brain, the left hand with its downward pointing index finger. True, some of the parts in the Icon are reversed relative to these sources, but that’s to be expected. As print historian Terry Belanger explained in an email to me, “reversed copies of original cuts are common, and indeed are a tipoff that they are in fact copies.”

Still the question remains, how old is the Nervous Icon proper? Does it pre-date the era of stereotyping, electrotyping and iron presses? Is there an intermediary between Vesalius and Agust’n Y‡–ez y Girona, or was the Nervous Icon a mid-1840s creation; perhaps one of the first anatomical illustrations made available through mechanically copied plates? And if that’s so, what made this image, which Belanger notes would have been relatively easy to copy, worth all the trouble?

The Vesalius illustration of the brain comes from Historical Anatomies, published by the National Library of Medicine.
All other images digitized by Google.

Above are variations of “The Nervous Icon,” an illustration that was copied, retouched, redrawn and reproduced in more than three dozen anatomy, physiology and biology textbooks published between 1845 and 1956. See the Nervous Icon database.
Images 1, 2 and 3 digitized by Google. 4 and 5 scanned from the author’s personal collection.

“The Nervous Icon” is my name for an illustration of the human nervous system that found its way into dozens of anatomy, physiology and biology textbooks published between the mid-1800s and the mid-1900s. I began tracing its history in The Nervous Icon – Part I, where I touched on the issues of artistry, copyright, and mechanical reproduction in science textbooks. I followed up a month later in The Nervous Icon – Part II, where I went “over my head” into the history of encyclopedias and the tension caused by the conflict between the assumption that cultural artifacts were the property of the dominating imperialist power and the imperatives of the emerging global marketplace.

As I said then, “big stuff for a blog.”

I thought I had pinned down the icon’s source, a popular encyclopedia published in London in 1855, The Museum of Science and Art, edited by the “scandal-plagued but well-connected … Dionysius Lardner.”

But though it helped me tell a story, I was too quick to conclude that Lardner likely commissioned the drawing. The modern encyclopedia (or cyclopedia or dictionary) was by Lardner’s day already a 127-year old enterprise (Ephraim Chambers’ 1728 Cyclopaedia being the first) whose managers were well known for mining images rather than creating them. Though I had been unable to find an earlier conveniently scanned version online, I should have suspected one existed.

Of course that has turned out to be true.

An older “Nervous Icon,” mature and perfectly scribed, can be found in Calvin Cutter’s Anatomy and Physiology, published in Boston in 1847 (third stereotype edition). With the exception of the truncated leader lines pointing to key features, Cutter’s illustration is identical in every way to Lardner’s, which was printed in London a decade later.

Not to make the same mistake twice, let me state that it is probable Cutter, like Lardner, did not commission the icon, but rather picked it up from a previously published source. But while the question of the icon’s origin still intrigues me, hours of online searching and two-and-a-half years of additional research have uncovered the trial heads of a few more interesting paths.

First, while it is likely that Cutter’s “Nervous Icon” was lifted from an even earlier source, a bigger story may be the one suggested by the notable divide in style between textbooks published before 1840 and those published after 1845. The earlier ones are mostly text, the later ones are often chock-a-block with illustrations. Why is that? Second, this style change seems to signal a shift in publishing influence, from London to New York. Third, there are the interesting connections between the concepts of profit, partiotism and piracy in eighteenth century America that the history of priting and publishing surface. And finally, there are the many paths of Calvin Cutter, who, in addition to being the author of five very popular standard-setting anatomy and physiology textbooks, was also a physician, a widely-traveled public lecturer, an abolitionist, a gun-runner, a twice-wounded war surgeon, a POW, a husband to two heretical proto-feminists and the father of the first female casualty of the American Civil War.

Where to begin?

Well, starting at the end, and for anyone who might like to get a jump on things, Calvin Cutter’s 1845 book, Anatomy and Physiology: Designed for Academies and Families, is available online (the link leads to an 1847 “third stereotype edition.” I’ll have more on stereotyping and electrotyping in a future post). Biographical sketches of Calvin Cutter can be found here, here and here. The last one includes a brief bio of Cutter’s second wife, Eunice Powers Cutter. A bio of Cutter’s daughter Carrie, a battlefield nurse who died at 19, can be found here. More info is easily found online. There is a 1982 biography, Calvin Cutter: Zealot on the Path of Justice and Reform, 1807-1872, but I’m having trouble tracking down a copy.

To supplement this essay, in all of its parts, I have created a database of instances of “The Nervous Icon” as they appeared in textbooks from 1845 through 1956. The few notes attached to these images hint at stories yet to come. Again, to get a jump on things, interested readers might also want to check out historian Adrian Johns book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. From Johns I have learned that piracy in the United States was once defended on patriotic grounds, framed as “retrofitting the cultural products of monarchies for readers in a republic” (303-04). Seems there is nothing new about our world of MP3s and sampling. In the early 1800s it took only a couple of days for hot titles fresh off the boat from England to be reset, printed, bound, distributed and offered for sale on the streets of New York or Philadelphia.

Finally, a great number of eighteenth century events, including but not limited to the history of popular science, the development of modern education, and maybe even the American Civil War, would have followed quite different trajectories had it not been for advances in printing technology, specifically the invention of electrotyping around 1840. This London text from 1841, The Dictionary of the Art of Printing, introduces the process and includes a couple of early examples. My ignorance of this history, despite a background in graphic arts, plagued Part I and Part II of this essay. Hopefully. Part III is better. Now I guess it is on to Part IV, Part V and probably Part VI.

Damn, this thing keeps opening doors.

It remains striking how unwilling Harvard professor Villee was to give up on eugenics. Moment too, but Villee far more so. In the 1972 edition of Biology the author comes off as downright cranky about having to abandon the term. But though Villee finally dropped eugenics from the index and text, he didn’t abandon the idea entirely. Where the discussion of eugenics had been in his 1967 text, at the close of the chapter titled “Inheritance in Man,” the author simply substituted two modern sounding but not really so modern sub-sections – “Factors Changing Gene Frequencies: Differential Reproduction” and “Evolution: The Failure to Maintain Genetic Equilibrium” (718). Forget isolation or drift, for Villee, evolution, for better or for worse, was driven by that boogeyman of eugenics, “differential reproduction.” His citing of Earnest. A. Hooton, Carleton. S. Coon (786) and Franz Weidenreich (789) betrayed a continued affection for the concept of “racial development.”

For additional discussion on Villee, see The Eugenic Zombie in a Graveyard of Textbooks, specifically the article’s last section.

The magazine had its culturally relevant bits, like Don Martin’s ononmonpidic explosions and Sergio Aragones’ slapstick marginals, but on balance MAD was weighed down by filler of a sensibility that went out with Eisenhower.

Then there was Alfred E. Neuman.

I never much identified with MAD’s jug eared, gap toothed, ur-teenager. Whether dressed as Marharishi Mahesh Yogi, Indiana Jones or Barack Obama, Neuman seemed to be stuck in a parallel universe where there was never a civil rights movement or a sexual revolution. By high school I had turned to B. Kliban and National Lampoon for social commentary and comic kicks. My interest in MAD mouldered.

So it was a real “duh-oh” moment when I read in David Hajdu’s The Ten-Cent Plague that MAD artist Harvey Kurtzman claimed his inspiration for Alfred E. Neuman “was a face from an old high school biology textbook, used as an example of a person who lacked iodine.” With several articles about the connection between popular culture and the “monsters” of biology, how could I have missed such a clear and obvious thing?

Time to dive into another muddy history.

MAD-ologists clog the Internet with origin stories for the Neuman image. Kurtzman himself told several tales, stating elsewhere that he spotted his source on a postcard pinned to an office bulletin board. That story is probably closer to the truth. The big surprise for me was to learn that the image now universally known as Alfred E. Neuman was far from original to MAD. In fact it had appeared throughout the twentieth century, often in association with variations of the phrase “Me worry?”, on postcards, print ads, calendars, business cards, enamel signs, buttons and perhaps even the nose of a World War II-era B-26 bomber.

The modern Neuman is said to descend directly from the image of an Irish “simpleton” used in promotions for painless dentistry as well as in advertisements for soap, baked goods, and other consumer goods and services around the turn of the century (for a complete survey see John Adcock’s excellent article at his blog Yesterday’s Papers). This image in turn was a “made safe” version of the ape-like caricatures of the Irish common a century before (see Jacopo della Quercia’s “Seven Memes …”). This proto-Neuman’s commercial and sociological utility seems to have been similar to that of the “mammy” and “sambo” images still present on our supermarket shelves in the form of Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben, an endorsement that revealed a product’s basic and uncomplicated pleasures while allowing purchasers, at least white not-Irish purchasers, to reinforce a comforting racial hierarchy with every nickel they spent.

However, unlike its black cousins, the proto-Neuman image lost most of its obvious racial characteristics, its Irish-ness, after World War I. This was probably driven in part by the simple fact that red hair required a two color print job. But likely it was also influenced by the fact that the Irish were becoming “white.” Regardless, the proto-Neuman morphed into a more pan-cultural symbol of obliviousness, its physical characteristics more class than racially centered. The narrowing and misalignment of the eyes became much more pronounced and the grin much more clown-like (though the freckles remained). Locked up with the phrase “Me worry?”, the proto-Neuman image, in both male and female forms, appeared on souvenir postcards produced perhaps as early as 1920 and certainly by the 1930s, opaque in meaning but maybe a fad akin to troll dolls. Later, this proto-Neuman image was enlisted to a more obvious end in the campaign to undermine support for Franklin Roosevelt and his administration’s policies.

RIGHT: The “I.M.A.SIMP” button sold at auction in 2010 for slightly more than $2,000. The postcard cost me $20.

Buttons and postcards were produced that dropped “Me worry?” in favor of “Sure! I’m for the New Deal” and “Sure – I’m for Roosevelt,” with the implication that only an “idiot” could support the Democrat and that the recipient better get out and vote because idiots surely would.

So what of Kurtzman’s claim that the face of a person who lacked iodine inspired his rendering of Alfred E. Neuman? It’s unlikely, as the facial features of “cretins,” as they were generally identified, do not map to Neuman’s. However, images of other “deficient” people commonly pictured in old high school biology textbooks could certainly have provided inspiration, if only indirectly.

LEFT: This Neumanesque image was derisively captioned “An Australian feminine beauty” in M. W. de Laubenfels 1949 (1940) biology textbook, Life Science (see related article).

Human anxieties breed monsters, and it is through stories we prepare a defense. But it was not only through comics and horror movies that mid-century Americans practiced confrontation. They also prepared through classroom study. Microcephalics, dwarfs, cavemen, evolutionary throwbacks and genetic degenerates populated the pages of high school and college textbooks. The typical text provided tales of terror every bit as explicit and gruesome as the rags society’s censors were trying to clear off the streets. But the rhetorical goal was far more conservative. Concerns regarding both status and sales meant textbook authors were rather more likely to reinforce the status quo through the claim that existing social relationships reflected relative genetic worth than challenge prejudices as scientifically unsound.

RIGHT: Identified in Curtis, Caldwell and Sherman’s Everyday Biology (1934, 1943) as “Six feeble-minded members of one family.

The more important driver of social change it turns out was not the biology textbook, but the comic hidden behind its open pages.

But how exactly did the Neuman image work?

In post World War II America, with Fascism vanquished, suburbs sprouting and consumer goods rolling off assembly lines at rates never seen before seen in history, the power of society’s winners to set the rules had rarely been more absolute. Somehow, instinctively and subversively, teenagers took to comics for defense, identifying with the ghoul, the psychopath and the half-wit, Alfred E. Neuman most ironically and iconically. A little later they would take to rock and roll. Embracing the ugly and the underclass, 50′s teenagers picked up a thread established a generation before and paced their parents and teachers toward a place where difference doesn’t diverge from normal, it defines it.

But since there is really no finish line, the image lives on.

Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama have been lampooned in Neumanesque caricature, as their political opponents attempt to score points. Meanwhile, the disaffected subvert the claims of both conservatives and progressives through the embrace and celebration of the dress, style and tastes of those the majority call cretins. In any organized society there is a segment who see disorder as the only possible path to liberation. For these subversives, and teenagers everywhere, there will always be an Alfred.

FURTHER READING

Yesterday’s Papers: The Mysteries of Melvin

The Mad Blog Sunday Mailbag, September 25, 2011.

The Al Feldstein Story, Pt. 3: Go Mad,Young Man!

Wikipedia: Alfred E. Neuman

7 Memes That Went Viral Before The Internet Existed

The Quest for Alfred E. Neuman (pdf) by Carl Djerasi

Eugenics, with some forced sterilization laws here, a few anti-miscegenation laws there, was pitched as a kind of a cure-all for society’s ills, a permanent solution to the problems of alcoholism, pauperism, venereal disease, sexual licentiousness and the general problem of numbers. Several well-publicized studies of female college graduates indicated that fertility among upper class whites had fallen below replacement levels. Democracy can be a drag when one is in the minority.

RIGHT: March 30, 1913 announcement of the establishment of a Board of Scientific Directors for the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. ©The New York Times.

In the teens, eugenics proved a smart path to patronage. According to Daniel J. Kevles, author of In the In the Name of Eugenics, “the science of human biological improvement provided an avenue to public standing and usefulness.” Charles Davenport’s success in securing a major donation from Mary Harriman, widow of railroad baron E. H. Harriman, to fund the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor demonstrated to other researchers and academics how they too might cash in.

Given the hot enthusiasm for the topic, particularly in the years leading up to World War I, it is no real surprise that biology textbook authors got in on the action. But the fact that they stayed on board for the next six decades, is, well, kind of scary!

Eugenics made its first appearance in a American biology textbook in 1914 … and then stumbled on in high school textbooks into the 1960s, and in college textbooks into the 1970s!

This fact is a little hard to fathom. After all, as historian Phillip Pauly notes, interest in eugenics among scientists had waned by the 1920s as the topic turned out to be a dry well for research. By the mid-1930s, most of the public began to flee when ideology began to more obvioulsy reek racism and nativism. However, while most accounts say enthusiasm for eugenics evaporated by the 1940s (the Eugenics Record Office closed in 1944), even the horrors of Nazi Germany did not give rise to a mob strong enough to take this zombie from the classroom.

Let’s follow our monster’s march through the graveyard of textbooks and see what we can learn.

It’s Alive!

In 1914, college textbook author James Francis Abbott gave students their first small jolt. In Elementary Principles of General Biology, Abbott wrote, “so far as statistics may be depended upon, it would seem that the proportion of defectives, comprising all sorts of persons who, on account of physical, moral, or mental abnormalities, are a burden to society, is steadily and rapidly increasing” (241). Writing the same year, high school textbook author George W. Hunter was less tentative. In A Civic Biology, also published in 1914 and famous for being the textbook at the center of the Scopes trial, Hunter compared the “sexually immoral,” “drunkards,” “epileptics” and the “feeble-minded” to parasites, and stated in a frequently-quoted passage, “if such people were lower animals, we would probably kill them off to prevent them from spreading” (263).

Other high school texts from the period, particularly other texts which built upon the economic model pioneered by Hunter, like Clifton Hodge’s Civic Biology (1918), were nearly as harsh. Eugenic rhetoric reached it apotheosis in William Atwood’s Civic and Economic Biology (1922). In that high school text, Atwood offered the following: “One of the reasons why Greece, Rome, and other great nations of antiquity perished is that they violated the principles of eugenics” (337).

Though eugenics had its critics, 1914 through 1925 were heady years for the ideology, as socialists, capitalists, social workers, social scientists, “birth controllers” and purity advocates all found political utility in the idea. (See related article.)

The Post-Scopes Divide

A divide began to open between college texts and high school texts in the years after the Scopes trial in 1925. While Hunter continued along his dark deterministic path in New Civic Biology (1926), other high school textbook authors adopted a slightly milder tone. This appears due to two factors: First, high school authors were forced by their publishers to respond to anti-evolution sentiment. And as evolution went in these early texts, so went eugenics. Second, the very anthropocentric economic biology curriculum – which positioned the natural world as a wild thing that needed to be tamed and a set of resources that could be exploited for the benefit of humans – began to lose favor relative to the less human-centric phylogenetic and unity of life textbooks, represented respectively by Turman Moon’s Biology for Beginners (1921) and Alfred Kinsey’s An Introduction to Biology (1926). Naturally, the less anthropocentric a textbook, the less emphasis it placed on eugenics.

But even as high school textbook authors pulled back from the eugenic precipice, many college textbook authors went full Thelma and Louise.

Through the 20s and into the later 30s, many (actually most) college textbook authors pumped eugenics as if the topic was fresh and unproblematic. Leonas Lancelot Burlingame’s 1922 text, General Biology, closed with this claim: “It is clear … that the sooner serious general attention is paid to racial betterment through eugenics the better it will be for mankind, both in the near and long distant future” (554). Burlingame set the stage, and not needing to respond to school boards or squeamish parents, college textbook authors were free to wander wherever they wanted.

In 1933, Grace White seconded Atwood’s worry and exposed her WASP racial anxieties when she wrote in General Biology, “The intellectuality of Greece was maintained by the close inbreeding among its favored classes, as was also the political power of Rome. As soon as foreign marriages were sanctioned, and aliens and slaves were admitted to citizenship, the population became mongrelized, and its intellectually declined” (282). And Frank Covert Jean structured the entire narrative of his 1934 textbook, Man and the Nature of His Biological World, so that it led to a frightening eugenic climax.

Going to Extremes

This is not to say the opinions of biology textbook authors were unanimous. As early as 1922, Lorande Loss Woodruff soft-pedaled eugenics in his very popular college textbook, Foundations of Biology. By the mid-1930s, a few more liberal authors began to channel Franz Boas and question the racial assumptions embedded within eugenic ideology. High school textbook authors Ella Thea Smith in Exploring Biology (1938, see related story) and Elsbeth Krober and Walter Wolff in Adventures with Living Things (also 1938, see related story), directly challenged eugenic conventions. In 1942, Gairdner Moment in General Biology for College pushed hard against eugenic prejudice, and in 1944, Benjamin Gruenberg in Biology and Man became the first author in more than a generation to exclude the topic from a text.

Tellingly, neither Moment’s or Gruenberg’s textbooks made much of a dent in the market. Gruenberg’s disappeared after just one edition while Moment’s saw only two. Still, the trendline pointed downward. The number of words devoted to the topic of eugenics shrunk dramatically in high school textbooks through the 40s. By the later 1950s, most high school textbook authors were erasing it entirely. With the exception of James Otto’s Modern Biology in 1960 and 1963, no high school textbook published after 1957 discussed the topic. (See related article.)

The Thing That Wouldn’t Die

However, college textbook authors had a much harder time giving up on eugenics. Shockingly, unlike their high school counterparts, college textbooks grew more eugenic in the years right after World War II. (See related articles here and here.) However, after a brief post-war bump, by the later 1950s the word ‘eugenics’ began to disappear from college texts too … that is, with the exception of one. Probably the most popular one.

The End?

As late as the fifth edition of Biology (originally, Biology: The Human Approach), published in 1967, Harvard professor Claude A. Villee was still preaching the old, and I mean old, eugenic creed. In 1967, Villee was still claiming, as Abbott had in 1914, that, “the average intelligence of the population is decreasing generation to generation” due to differential reproduction. In 1967, Villee was still echoing Hunter, writing, “the mentally defective contribute little to society and many are burdens as inmates of institutions.” In 1967, Villee was still using “idiot,” “imbecile,” “moron” and “feeble-minded” as clinical terms. And in 1967, during the “Summer of Love,” Villee, of Harvard, still thought it not all that problematic to suggest that the United States should sterilize 2% of its population, or 4,000,000 million people. Click here to read it for yourself.

I’m going to guess that the topic of eugenics finally disappeared from biology textbooks for good in the 1970s. (Was I right? See Database Update: Eugenics in College Textbooks.) But really, isn’t it a bit surprising to learn just how late into the century eugenics stumbled? As a research topic it may have been “moribund” by the 1920s, as Steven Selden states. Yet it walked as a zombie into classrooms for at least a half century more, feasting on the brains of students who are still working today as doctors, psychologists and teachers.

Let us hope that the lessons of the Civil Rights era provided adequate inoculation.

See – Database: Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks
See – Database: Eugenics in High School Biology Textbooks

REFERENCES

Kevles, Daniel J 1985. In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Pauly, Philip J. 2000. Biologists and the Promise of American Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Selden, Steven. 1999. Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. New York: Teachers College Press.

I’d been trying for a couple of months to kick out an article on a curious college biology textbook, The World of Life by Wolfgang F. Pauli (who should not be confused with the more famous physicist, Wolfgang E. Pauli). Published in 1949, The World of Life had long fascinated me, particularly its final unapologetic climax chapter, “Human Genetics and Eugenics” (click image to view). The whole thing just seemed so remarkably wrong; a tortured post-World War II effort to “save” eugenics, as if it were an adorable baby being thrown out with that nasty Nazi bathwater.

But I worried that The World of Life was an exception, a weird one-off a decade or more out of step, not really worth deep examination. Before I could write confidently, I realized I had to know how Pauli’s text fit into the history of college biology education in the twentieth century.

So it was off to AbeBooks (again!), credit card in hand. Before you could say “security code,” I was anticipating the arrival of nearly a dozen book-filled “bubble-lopes.” Fortunately, I didn’t have to wait long to find out I was on to something.

The very first of my new acquisitions, Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind (1949) by A. W. Winchester, told me Pauli’s text was no exception. The subsequent arrival of Biology: The Human Approach (1950 – later titled Biology) by Harvard professor Claude A. Villee, a text which identified feeble-mindedness as “the biggest single eugenic problem” (461), suggested a trend: Contrary to received wisdom, biologists did not drop eugenics like a hot stone after World War II. Instead, as I wrote in a previous article, a few college textbook authors “doubled down and began to defend the ideology with more aggressive rhetoric and moments of near-pornographic spectacle.”

Counter-intuitive. Interesting. Compulsion-triggering.

Now, in addition to 82 American high school biology textbooks, I own or have sourced 38 college-level biology textbooks. Though the college collection is considerably smaller and perhaps not quite as complete and coherent as the high school collection, I am fairly confident it is representative.

I hope to add a couple context bullet points and write a few longer articles referencing this collection soon (perhaps on topics other than eugenics, which I admit has sort of taken over Textbook History lately). But I thought I’d get this draft database out there, including my somewhat subjective “Eugenics 0-5″ rating. I’ve included links to public domain texts, related articles and available biographical information on authors.

See Database: Eugenics in College Biology Textbooks

Also see Eugenics in 20th Century High School Biology Textbooks.

* The chart above reflects a eugenics score of “1″ for the popular Foundations of Biology by Lorande Loss Woodruff (see page 297), published in 7 editions through 1946 (though only the 1922 and 1937 editions have been directly reviewed). A score of “2″ would not substantially alter the shape of the college trendline, but would amplify it through 1946, thereby decreasing the relative drama of the post-war bump.

Biology: And Its Relation to Mankind by Baylor graduate and Stetson University (later Colorado State College/UNC) professor Albert M. Winchester, was published in 1949 – four years after the discovery of Nazi death camps supposedly marked the end of eugenics.

Yet Winchester’s textbook presented one the harshest defenses of eugenics published in the United States during the twentieth century.

And it was no outlier (WARNING: Disturbing photo below the fold).

Winchester’s is one of at least 6 college-level biology textbooks published in the United States between 1940 and 1950 that follow a similar aggressive pattern. Others of the genre include Man and the Living World by E. E. Stanford (1940), Biology and Human Affairs (1941) by John W. Ritchie, Life Science (1941) by M. W. de Laubenfels, The World of Life (1949) by Wolfgang F. Pauli and Biology (1950) by Claude A. Villee.

Images and text that would have been considered smut in an earlier era, or in any other context, were made acceptable within the frame of science. But these pictures and words functioned less as illustrations of scientific points and more as devices designed to stun their audience into silence and acquiescence. The goal, it appears, was to ensure that eugenics, and the broader mandate biologists claimed for managing the “racial qualities of future generations,” could continue to be promoted without argument, defended in these cases as a bulwark against forces that threatened to turn the county into something intolerably soft, social worky and civil rightsy.

I’ve visited this territory before in Adventure! Domination! Biology and Reform Eugenics and the Gender Bomb. But I think I need to dig a bit deeper. The second (1957) and third (1965) edition of Biology: And It Relation to Mankind are in the mail. A new post will follow their arrival … If I can wait that long.

See The Eugenic Zombie in a Graveyard of Textbooks.

But Huntington was worried. He felt he had solid statistical evidence that as his race took on what he thought was its evolutionary obligation to dominate it faced two serious threats: the physically and morally debilitating effects of the tropics and tropical women on WASPs who worked abroad, and the productivity-sapping effects of luxuries like central heating on those who worked at home.

Initially Huntington proposed simple mechanical solutions to these “problems,” like a housing unit that would artificially cycle its internal barometric pressure, and by this action keep his fellow New Englanders charged up wherever they lived. But in the 1920s, with his academic career stalled, Huntington’s ideas began to darken. In 1934 he accepted the presidency of the board of directors of the increasingly nativist American Eugenics Society. By 1935 he was applying his writing talents to the development of that group’s “catechism,” a chilling book titled Tomorrow’s Children.

Huntington was an odd duck, criticized even in his day for possessing an “overheated imagination” that saw patterns in data where none existed and forced facts to fit predetermined conclusions. So why bother studying a man who labored as a lowly Research Associate at an insulting salary at Yale for nearly the entirety of his professional life?

Huntington was a fantasist with little peer support, but his popularity demonstrates how adept he was at framing a folk-science that, to borrow a phrase from Jerome Ravetz, provided America’s ruling class “comfort and reassurance in the face of the crucial uncertainties of the world of experience.” [3] In Huntington we see a metaphor for a nation. Once a jaunty optimist who saw continued cultural domination as a minor engineering challenge, Ellsworth Huntington joined a generation that grew increasingly inclined to promote coercive social policies as it rationalized the rejection of its stumbling personal advances as accumulating proof that the species was in decline.

THE STRENUOUS GEOGRAPHER

In Barbarian Virtues, Mathew Frye Jacobson describes the state of the social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century.

… in the era of ‘armchair anthropology,’ the grand theories of human development encompassed a terrain of human geography far broader than had yet been examined firsthand by the ethnologist … Science thus remained largely at the mercy of travelers’ haphazard impressions. [4]

Ellsworth Huntington was one of these “travelers.” Originally a student of the classics, Huntington took up the study of geology and other sciences at Beloit College after gaining permission from his Congregationalist minister father. For a decade and a half after his graduation in 1897, Huntington engaged in what Theodore Roosevelt called “the strenuous life.” He shot the rapids on the Euphrates while teaching in Turkey in 1901, traveled with Raphael Pumpelly across Asia looking for evidence of a lost Aryan race in 1903 and 1904, traveled back to Asia in the Yale expedition of 1905, to Palestine in 1909, across the arid southwest United States in 1911, and to the ruins on the Yucatan in 1912 during the Mexican revolution. His biographer, Geoffrey Martin, writes of days of “bread and strong tea … weather which burned his face … and the eating of horseflesh,” [5] and nights that were so cold Huntington had to eat his dinner with his plate in the fire and “was obliged to record his daily notes in pencil for his pen had frozen.” [6]

An avid diarist from the time he was a college student, Huntington made sure to record and report every observation and thought he had during his travels, most of which he seems to have regarded as being of great historical and scientific importance.

In Huntington’s mind the landscape offered clear evidence in support of the hypothesis that central Asia had once been warmer and wetter, and that, through a series of climatic “pulsations,” successive waves of people made stronger by the challenges of their environment had been driven out from this cradle of civilization, as a heart pumps oxygenated blood. With 10 years of exploration and more than 20 articles already to his credit, Huntington published his first book in 1907, The Pulse of Asia, to widespread public acclaim and generally positive reviews. But, even as he was enjoying his first popular success, Huntington’s style of “armchair anthropology” was losing favor in academic circles. A new professionalism was taking hold the social sciences as it had in the hard sciences over the previous half-century, a development that would dramatically limit Huntington’s academic career. [7]

HARVARD AND YALE

At the very moment of his greatest public success, the publication of The Pulse of Asia, Huntington, a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard, failed to pass his final exams. Fleming, in Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, writes, “ironically, his examination committee found he was ‘deficient in his knowledge of climatology and showed great weakness in historical geology.’” [8]

Certainly a victim of his own weak scholarship, Huntington was also a victim of a boarder war at Harvard between geography, which had yet to be granted status as a stand-alone discipline, and the other social sciences. [9] Huntington fled to Yale where geography, through “met with great scepticism (sic) by many of the faculty” according to the 1898 President’s Report, was proving popular with students. [10] To satisfy its teaching needs, Yale hired Huntington as an Associate Professor. But even at Yale there was a reluctance to establish a stand-alone Department of Geography. Instead the University established only the equivalent of a minor by assembling a hodge-podge of geology, geography and anthropology courses.

Yale did grant Huntington his Ph.D. in 1909, but it refused him a full professorship in 1914. He left the institution the following year. Huntington’s biographer Geoffrey Martin implies that the reason for this departure may have been simply a matter of budget. But the head of the Department of Geology, under which geography was taught, wrote when he denied Huntington’s promotion request (while recommending that of three other Assistant Professors), “Huntington … has brilliancy but is certainly immature … [and] has the disadvantage of an enormous overestimate of his own importance to the University.” [11] Fortunately for Huntington he had an unidentified champion within the administration, though evidentially not a very strong one. In 1919 Huntington was rehired, but at a mere $200 a year salary (about one-fifth of what Yale paid his secretary), and under the awkward title of Research Associate in Geography, a title Huntington would carry through his nearly 30-year career at the University.

FROM CLIMATIC DETERMINIST TO EUGENICIST AND BACK

Ellsworth Huntington, when he is mentioned in histories of the era at all, is usually labeled a eugenicist, and from at least the mid-1920 through World War II, that appellation is appropriate. From 1934 to 1938 Huntington served as president of the American Eugenics Society (AES). He is credited as the author (though he was more a compiler) of the AES’s 1935 “eugenics catechism” Tomorrow’s Children: The Goal of Eugenics. He contributed to Birth Control Review, Eugenical News, Eugenics, and as Martin writes, “in the thirties alone … exchanged over 5,000 pieces of correspondence on eugenics, euthenics, and cacogenics.” [12] But prior to 1920 Huntington saw eugenics as a challenge to his favored theories.

In World Power and Evolution, Huntington wrote,

When the world realizes that the human race must be bred as carefully as race horses, and that even when people inherit perfect constitutions their health must receive as much care as does that of consumptives, it will be time for a book in which training, heredity, and environment receive exactly equal emphasis. [13]

Huntington’s pandering here is easy to misinterpret. Martin and others have focused on this quote [14]. And out of context, it sure sounds like Huntington was supporting eugenic management. But what Huntington was actually doing was making a case for why he was writing a book that did not focus on eugenics at a time when the idea was reaching its apotheosis.

To understand what Huntington was saying we must read back few sentences. Huntington opened his argument by claiming, “a few generations ago the emphasis was all upon the various agencies which combine to furnish training … these include the Church, the Home, the School, the State and other institutions.” He then stated, “recently tremendous emphasis has justly been given to … heredity.” But Huntington then disparaged the notion, often then stated, “that heredity plays nine parts and training one in determining what a man’s character shall be.” He complained that such a false dichotomy left no room for the “physical environment” as a contributing factor. His argument thusly arranged, Huntington wrote, “training, heredity, and physical environment are like food, drink, and air.” [15] Returning to the point later in the book, Huntington added, “among these factors air is by far the most variable” and “is the first necessity of life.” [16]

Although his argument is laughable – human character is variable, air is variable, and if human character is influenced by anything it probably influenced most by the air – it does show that, at least as of 1919, Huntington had not yet conceded that eugenicists held the key to the development of human character. He still believed he did.

In Mainsprings of Civilization (1945), Ellsworth Huntington reprinted maps from his own textbook purporting to demonstrate the correlation between regions of so-called “climatic efficiency” and regions of “general progress.”

The core of Huntington’s climatic hypothesis as it developed through the 1910s is easy to describe. Already an environmental determinist as evidenced by The Pulse of Asia, Huntington found in a letter sent to him in 1911 by Charles J. Kullmer, a Syracuse University professor of German, the simple motor he believed drove both physical and mental activity, and by extension, individual ambition and cultural progress – variability in temperature and relative humidity. It is a childish notion based on the common sense idea that on days that are too hot or too cold people do not work as efficiently as they do on days that are “just right.” But to show his was no simple “Goldilocks” theory, Huntington added that even on days when the temperature is ideal, people often still do not work at maximum efficiency. Variation, but not too much variation, around a comfortable mean – roughly 65˚ to 70˚ Fahrenheit with a relative humidity of between 60% and 75% – were the climatic conditions that Huntington claimed stimulated both the mind and the body. Fleming labels this idea “meteorological Taylorism,” [17] and for a good reason.

To “prove” his theory that variability in temperature stimulated mental and physical activity, Huntington analyzed piecework records from Connecticut factories. He claimed he found evidence that people worked harder when the barometric pressure varied over the course of day. With charts, graphs and tables (in which he saw patterns and evidence his colleagues often could not), Huntington claimed his factory productivity figures supported the idea that a stimulating climate drove the development of superior “racial character” and the advance of civilization.

Productivity became the scale against which Huntington measured civilizations. He produced a world map (which he reproduced it in every book he wrote on the topic through 1945) which he claimed showed a more than coincidental correlation between regions of ideal climatic variability and civilization, as measured by productivity. He called these areas “regions of cyclonic storms,” and they included Western Europe, the southeast coast of Australia, California and of course his native New England. Huntington’s reasoning was never more clearly circular than it was here.

In his 1915 book, Civilization and Climate, Huntington included an appendix of tables listing the relative “level of civilization” of various regions of the world, but the data upon which it was based was unashamedly cooked. Huntington constructed his tables by polling “civilized men” (and they were all men) … from a list he created and weighted by region. Said more simply, Huntington contacted a number of “experts” from regions he felt were civilized in direct proportion to his preconceived notions of how civilized those regions were (Huntington listed these experts as: 25 Americans, 7 British, 6 Teutons, 7 Latins, and 5 Asiatics). Not surprisingly, the results of his survey matched the prejudices of those surveyed, and Huntington’s, exactly. Massachusetts offered the most stimulating climate, with Rhode Island and Connecticut following closely. [18]

Criticism of Huntington’s overly grand ideas and fast and loose use of facts emerged early. Though he remained popular with the public, [19] and though reviewers would often call his ideas “stimulating and provocative,” in scientific circles his ideas were often considered absurd. Fleming quotes from a critique of Huntington’s two 1920’s books on astrometeorology by William Jackson Humphreys of the Weather Bureau. Humphreys wrote, “its broader conceptions are mere fantasies, while its details show little regard for facts and none for physics … it is as far from being scientific as Alice in Wonderland.” [20]

In the 1920s, his career going nowhere, Huntington relatively optimistic beliefs in engineering solutions to character and productivity issues gave way to an exploitive embrace of eugenics. In The Character of Races published in 1924, Huntington wrote of the need to encourage “large families among the tenth of the population having the soundest combination of physical health, good intellect, strong wills, and fine temperaments,” and of the corollary need to shut down reproduction for the lower tenth entirely. Huntington racialism, which in the 1910s was usually employed only in hypothetical situations to illustrate the long-term effects of climate, was replaced with calls for direct eugenic action. Stoking fears of impending “racial wars,” Huntington wrote, “if open war is not threatened, there is even greater danger that the highest racial values will be irrevocably swamped by those of lower caliber.” [21] And, in what may very well be a first in his writings, Huntington takes note of an exception in his data – in this case the number of “eminent literary persons born” between 1781 and 1850 in Charleston, South Carolina (7) verses the number born in Cincinnati, Ohio (0) – to suggest that climate may not be all, or that the “climatic factor” most responsible for the poor performance of some southern regions may be disease, not the effects of temperature and humidity on “racial character.” [22]

Ellsworth Huntington’s final book, Mainsprings of Civilization, published in 1945 is remarkable, mostly for how it highlights its author’s ability to adjust his language to current social norms, without ever adjusting his original ideas. In Mainsprings, the subject of eugenics (and Huntington was in 1945 still a regular contributor to Eugenical News) is given only glancing mention, demonstrating Huntington’s adroit post-war pivot away from the now Nazi-associated ideology. More striking, on the subject of race, Huntington comes off as positively Boasian in some passages, as when he wrote:

It is methodologically inescapable that the specific linguistic, religious, mental, temperamental, or other behavior forms or emotions of any people have to be considered products of complex historical and social forces – not biological forces. [23]

Huntington’s equivocations regarding eugenics and his newly found benevolence toward the “family of man” positioned the author for another run at popular success. Though he would not live to see it, Huntington’s final work, its environmentalist claims little changed from those first proposed in Civilization and Climate in 1915, would find paperback favor as “A Mentor Book” republished in 1959 and reprinted in 1962 and 1964 alongside On Population by Thomas Malthus, Julian Huxley and Frederick Osborn, Cultural Patterns and Technical Change by Margaret Mead (ed.) and Heredity, Race and Society by L. C. Dunn and Theodosius Dobzhansky, all part of a Cold War promotion of evolutionary ideas in support of claims of authority and theories of social control in a time of rapid cultural change. [24]

REFERENCES

Barkan, Elazar. The Retreat of Scientific Racism: Changing Concepts of Race in Britain and the United States Between the World Wars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.

Blatt, Jessica, “To Bring out the Best that is in Their Blood,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Sept 2004 v27 i5.

Bowler, Peter J. The Non-Darwinian Revolution: Reinterpreting a Historical Myth. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988, 1992.

Fleming, James Rodger, Historical Perspectives on Climate Change, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Huntington, Ellsworth, “Geographical Environment and Japanese Character,”
The Journal of Race Development, Vol. 2 No. 3, January, 1912.

–. “The Adaptability of the White Man to Tropical America” The Journal of Race Development, Vol. 5 No. 2, October, 1914.

–. “A Neglected Factor in Race Development” The Journal of Race Development,
Vol. 6 No. 2, October, 1915.

–. Civilization and Climate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1915.

–. World Power and Evolution. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1919.

–, The Character of Races: As Influenced by Physical Environment, Natural Selection and Historical Development, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1925.

–, Mainsprings of Civilization, New York: Mentor Books, 1945, 1962.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian Virtues: The United States Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917. New York: Hill and Wang, 2000.

Larson, Edward J. Evolution. New York: The Modern Library, 2004.

Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880-1920. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983, 1994.

Martin, Geoffrey J., Ellsworth Huntington: His Life and Thought, Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1973.

Ravetz, Jerome R. Scientific Knowledge and Its Social Problems. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Smith, Neil. “Academic War over the Field of Geography: The Elimination of Geography at Harvard, 1947-1951.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), 155-172.

But conflict had led to contact, and contact had led to fear. Like the physicist’s “gadget,” biology’s “bomb” was conjured to protect the national body from penetration.

Right: Cartoon reprinted in “The Population Bomb: Is Voluntary Human Sterilization the Answer” (c. 1961), a pamphlet published by Dixie Cup magnate Hugh Moore.

The “population bomb” was made as real and scary to school children in the 1960s as the H-bombs that drove them under their desks.

True, from the publication of George W. Hunter’s A Civic Biology in 1914 on, students had been taught that America had a “population problem.” But for the first four decades of the twentieth century, that problem wasn’t runaway growth, it was “differential reproduction.” Pre-war biology textbooks in fact warned that total population would level off by 1970 (see graph below), and when it did, the “quality” of the population would begin to decline if present fertility trends continued. The threat wasn’t one of too many babies. The threat was that too many babies were being born to the ‘wrong’ people – the poor, the criminal, the so-called ‘feeble-minded,’ the swarthy and the black.

As E. E. Stanford fussed in his 1940 biology textbook, Man & the Living World, “Families of professional and business classes of supposedly intellectual rating are not replacing themselves, while those of farmers, laborers, and above all, ‘reliefers’ still maintain increase” (722).

But by the war’s end, Stanford’s worry was decidedly out of fashion, a quaint relic, a Zeppelin in a jet age.

Baker and Mills’ 1943 biology textbook, Dynamic Biology Today, describes the anxieties that bloomed with the airplane and its promise of more fluid mobility. 40 years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, the authors optimistically noted that, “[w]ith rapid expansion in the use of airplanes man will soon obtain a three-dimensional freedom” (484). But this freedom the authors warned would carry a heavy burden. Baker and Mills claimed that the “intelligent people of the world” would have to confront those “slow to accept the benefits of science.” Threats from the “outside” – insects, disease and poverty – could now travel unimpeded through the air, and couldn’t be stopped once in flight. The authors commanded, “we must stamp out disease by eliminating the cause; we must stamp out poverty by eliminating the cause; we must come to recognize the whole world as our immediate environment.”

Before there was a “space age” there was an “air age.” The images above and below-left are from Dynamic Biology Today (1943), by Arthur O. Baker and Lewis H. Mills. The “rapid expansion in the use of airplanes” would, according to the authors, usher in an era of “global living,” where “dissatisfied people living in less productive regions will tend to move to more productive regions.” The authors unselfconsciously identified a few underpopulated and soil rich regions the dissatisfied might move to … in Africa and South America (484).

The post-war realization that the world was intimately interconnected manifested itself in the United States in a call to arms, a get them, or more precisely fix them, before they get us attitude. Suddenly, minor variations between classes seemed trivial relative to the resource sucking threat of the fecund of Africa, India and Puerto Rico. However, any rationalization for a war on reproduction had to address the fact that flippant disparagement of “inferior” classes, races and genders was no longer acceptable among people who had so proximately confronted the sickening consequences of the casual assumptions of Nordic superiority.

Alarmists sought an alternate rationalization.

Barely reconstructed eugenicists like Karl Sax led a new generation of apocalyptic writers who, just a decade away from the depleted soils of the Dust Bowl, reconceived the planet as one small, fragile and easily exhausted ecosystem. In an article titled “Population Problems,” which appeared midway through the volume The Science of Man in the World Crisis (1945), Sax repackaged key eugenic arguments in the flimsiest of “race-neutral” containers, and globalized the concern. Though he avoided the word “eugenics” throughout, Sax built his claim on the principle that had animated eugenicists since the turn of the twentieth century: specifically that natural selection’s power to progressively cleanse the species of its weak had been rendered inoperative by advances in medicine and sanitation. Western industrial societies would have to consciously compensate if they were to prevent civilization from collapsing under the weight of the “morons” who could now survive and breed thanks to the tax dollars devoted to health care and social services.

Right: Graph of exponential population growth from Karl Sax’s pamphlet, The Population Explosion, published by the Foreign Policy Association in 1956.

Sax became heavily involved with population issues in the 1950s. In 1955 he authored the book Standing Room Only, The World’s Exploding Population. It became the basis for a pamphlet published in 1956 by the Foreign Policy Association. Its title would give the world one of two excited phrases that would carry the population control movement through the 1970s – The Population Explosion (see related article).

More influential than the work of Sax were two books published in 1948, William Vogt’s The Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet (see Pierre Desrochers and Christine Hoffbauer’s “The Post War Intellectual Roots of the Population Bomb”). Vogt and Osborn pioneered what later scholars have labeled “neo-Malthusian ecology” (see J. B. Foster’s, “Malthus’ Essay on Population at Age 200: A Marxian View”).

Above: In The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954), Harrison Brown illustrated what he suggested was the “natural” course of evolution. The introduction of a disrupting force (the fox in this case) leads to increasing oscillation in the health and numbers of interdependent species which leads to a spike in growth followed by rapid decline and extinction. This graphic sequence, followed in the text by exponential curves of everything from fossil fuel use to human population growth, illustrated Brown’s theme: if reproduction and resource management were not expertly guided, evolution would soon wipe out humanity.

Despite the best efforts of Sax, Vogt and Osborn, it took some time to completely sever the population control movement’s new ecological frame from its eugenic lineage. In 1954, Harrison Brown, a geochemist who had helped isolate plutonium as part of the Manhattan Project, and who would later edit the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, published a chilling account of resource exhaustion titled The Challenge of Man’s Future.

Rather than conceptualizing natural selection as a perfecting process that had been subverted by bacteriologists and sewer workers, Brown pictured evolution as an unstable force which, left unmanaged, would drive to extinction the species progressives pictured as its crown. Industrial society, wrote Brown, was an accident of history, and the fight against evolution’s pull would “require effort of a magnitude which transcends all previous human effort” (265). In other words, according to Brown, blind nature, not human effort, had thrown up industry and civilization. People were just along for the ride.

Right: From The Challenge of Man’s Future (1954) by Harrison Brown. The most “explosive” (and as it turns out most accurate) prediction of human population growth to the year 2000. See the UN’s World Population to 2030 for the latest guesses on future trends.

What nature had mindlessly created, Brown thought, it would also mindlessly destroy, unless a few very smart people stepped in and started managing the process. For Brown, rapid population growth was the preface to a period of rapid evolutionary oscillation that would soon shake and destroy civilization. The only thing that might slow the process down would be “a broad eugenics program … that would encourage able and healthy persons to have several offspring and discourage the unfit from breeding at excessive rates” (263).

But Brown, writing in 1954, was among the last science popularizers to speak positively of eugenics, or was at least one of the last to use the word ‘eugenics’ when speaking positively of reproductive management. Growing race, class and (later) gender consciousness, along with a surprisingly slow-to-develop association between the holocaust and eugenics, rendered the word generally unacceptable by the end of the decade (see “The Day Eugenics Died”).

Through the 1950s, no one worked harder than the great naturalist Marston Bates to separate reproductive management from its eugenic roots. His 1955 book, The Prevalence of People, explored the same territory as Brown’s. So closely overlapping were the two texts that Bates, upon reading The Challenge of Man’s Future while his manuscript was in its final stages, “had a horrid feeling that Mr. Brown had already written my book for me.” But Bates, with considerable field experience behind him, was less inclined to the rigid “action-reaction” formulas favored by physicists. Though he considered the 2.5 billion people on the planet in 1950 as probably a million too many, he had faith in the “plasticity of culture,” and saw hope in its “unpredictability” (249). But the graphs eventually got to Bates as well. His faith in a “natural” solution soon began to oscillate in a Brownian fashion, and would not survive much into the next decade. By the time he wrote the preface to the 1962 reprint of The Prevalence of People , Bates had begun to look admiringly on the progress Japan had seen since implementing its “law of eugenic protection” in 1948.

Left: Opening spread from the original “The Population Bomb,” a 20-page pamphlet that would see an eventual press run of 1.5 million copies by the mid-1960s.

As stated above, eugenics became a dirty word in the later 1950s. Fortunately for the alarmists, it turned out the word wasn’t required to advance the control theme. Hugh Moore, Dixie Cup magnate and pamphleteer, found he could distill the complex arguments of Sax, Vogt, Osborn and Brown down to a simple battle between good and evil, between fullness and hunger, and between freedom and Communism. The argument played well.

Right: Sax and Moore’s graphs both found a home in the high school textbook New Dynamic Biology, published by Rand McNally in 1959.

Cleansed of its overt racist stench, the exponential curve leapt from the pamphlets of Sax and Moore to the pages of biology textbooks beginning in 1959. Yet all the old tensions remained. People were a cancer, according to Alan Gregg, medical director of the Rockefeller Foundation. And this conceptualization proved popular. But did that mean all people were a cancer? If not, who represented healthy tissue and who the tumor? And who got to decide? Eugenics, a word now unvoiced, remained embedded within the argument over population control.

In the 1960s the exponential curve shot right off the page, climbing faster than the gentle arc of Sax, faster yet than the arc of Moore, to trace almost exactly the rocket-like trajectory illustrated by Brown. An icon of the era, this graph was given its most frightening exposition in Paul Ehrlich’s bestselling 1968 eco-catastrophe, The Population Bomb.

But then something funny happened. The fuel ran out and, as a Google Ngram of the term “population explosion” so clearly shows, the missile began to fall. A reassessment of progressionist assumptions swept across biology, anthropology, economics and the social sciences in general, driven by a strengthening in the feminist critique pioneered by Mirra Komarovsky and Simone de Beauvoir (see related articles here and here).

Left: Graph from the 1968 edition of Biological Science: An Inquiry Into Life, more commonly known as the BSCS ‘Yellow Version’.

In 1994, the Cold War conceptualization of population growth as a crisis that could be managed only by aggressive counterattack, itself came under attack. At that year’s International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, the focus shifted from “bombs” and sterilization to women’s rights and female empowerment. Reintroduced to the debate was the “S-curve,” or the “logistic curve” first advanced by Raymond Pearl in the 1920s (see “A ‘Law of Growth’: The Logistic Curve and Population Control since World War II” by Sabine Hohler). Declining fertility rates suggested a leveling of population growth toward a new normal sometime in the following century. And it was proposed that the motor of that leveling would be increased control by women of their individual wealth and reproductive health.

Today, a few observers worry that the green movement is infected by a neo-eugenic ideology, particularly when it targets the populous poor as a dangerous source of future carbon. They suggest that debate over population control should be erased from the movement’s agenda.

The modern debate is captured no place better than the online journal Climate and Capitalism. Of particular note are the articles and commentary of Betsy Hartmann, director of the Population and Development Program at Hampshire College and author of Reproductive Rights and Wrongs: The Global Politics of Population Control. She and others in the journal class “Populationism” with racism, classism and sexism as conservative prejudices.

The iconography of human population growth has cycled back to its pre-bomb expression. But the numbers have not changed, only how they are displayed. The consensus view is that human population will top out at slightly fewer than 10 billion people, a number that would have scared the pajamas off of Karl Sax, William Vogt, Fairfield Osborn, Marston Bates and Hugh Moore. But by focusing on growth rate rather than gross numbers, the graph suggests not an explosion, but a quieting, and oddly, an almost sad resignation.