Just when you thought eugenics couldn’t get any worse
White America’s 20th century obsession with racial perfectionism involved rulers, scales, and Westminster-style “Better Babies” contests
“How healthy are the babies in your town?” asked a 1913 advertisement in The American magazine. The text sits above an image of a tiny speck of a toddler in a cowboy hat. The little fella is Oregonian Jasper M. Bellinger, astride a massive cow. Bellinger, according to the photo’s label, is a Better Babies prizewinner. Below, it reads, “If all the little tots between six months and three years were weighed and measured and tested, would their average score be above standard — or below?”
The question may sound bizarre, but at the time, the better babies movement — an initiative that blended science with moralizing, sinister messages about “race betterment” — was at its height, and fantasies of engineering a fit, genetically superior population had captured the white imagination. Parents who wanted to assess their offspring’s health and proximity to perfection brought their young children to be prodded and measured in contests at state and county fairs.
Primers on the movement’s aims were printed in a number of periodicals, particularly in the popular Woman’s Home Companion, which also founded the Better Babies Bureau. One such article from 1913 claims the movement is “sweeping the whole country:” “The earnest enthusiasm of physicians, of men and women interested in social questions, of fathers and mothers who place their children before everything else, gives the movement…the quality of majesty.”
The “social questions” to which men and women were turning their attention did concern the maintenance of physical health, but they also reflected broader anxieties about immigration and racial mixing. The first Better Babies contest was held in 1908 at the Louisiana State Fair. Within a few years, the events were taking place in 40 states.
The Better Babies Bureau, along with physicians and scientists, devised metrics for the assessment of health: height and weight, but also other markers of vigor or good breeding, such as the width between a baby’s eyes or the condition of their tonsils. Using scales and rulers, doctors measured the symmetry of babies’ features, and engaged with them to judge their temperament. With the scrutiny typically brought to the evaluation of Standard Poodles and livestock (they even used the same scorecards), judges sought one baby to beat them all. Of course, it wasn’t the first time humans had assessed other humans using random metrics and criteria thought to be scientific; such practices were common in the US slave trade, and would later be employed by the Nazis to determine who lived or died.
Among health workers, the contests were seen as a great education tool. They used the better babies criteria as a jumping off point for the dissemination of information about the proper care of babies and children — information that wasn’t then widely available, particularly in rural areas. As with animals, went the thinking, better babies would in turn influence better breeding and better general stock. In 1912, the year of its creation, the federal Children’s Bureau rolled out a “better babies week,” encouraging mothers all around the country to have their babies weighed and measured in order to better understand where they fit into the hierarchy of health.
The roots of the better babies movement can be traced to Frederick Osborn, the father of modern eugenics. Osborn, a military leader and philanthropist, argued in his 1937 paper “Development of a Eugenic Philosophy” that the pursuits of the field of eugenics could be divided into positive and negative. Positive eugenics referred to practices in support of reproduction among members of the population with “desirable” traits, and negative referred to practices that discouraged reproduction among members of the population with “undesirable” traits, including sterilization.
According to Osborn’s original philosophy, the better babies initiative was a form of positive eugenics. Woman’s Home Companion seemed to concur. “Everywhere the most intelligent mothers are most enthusiastic about the Better Babies Contests, and,” it said, “…the most well-to-do are as eager to enter their children as those mothers to whom the prizes have the most appeal.”
With language about parenthood (particularly motherhood) as the highest, most noble purpose, the contests sought to create a warm, fuzzy glow around reproduction. They also cast health as meritocratic, a joyful competition that the perfect mother and father could win no matter their class background. Much of the coverage of the movement was careful to point out that the criteria were purely objective and not designed in any way to favor one type of baby over another. For “the objective,” according to Woman’s Home Companion, “is not merely to determine that certain babies are worthy of prizes, but to show how all babies can be developed into possible prize-winners.”
At first, the better babies initiative appeared relatively benign, but it soon attracted the interest of leading eugenicists and took a decidedly darker turn. As Eliot Hosman writes in Psychology Today, one of the founders of the Better Babies Bureau, Mary T. Watts, was contacted more than once by Charles Davenport, one of the most prominent leaders of the eugenics movement. At first, Davenport sent a postcard containing only one line: “You should give 50 per cent to heredity before you begin to score a baby.” He got in touch with Watts again, sowing enough doubt that she and her cofounder began thinking of ways to adapt the contests in order to take heredity into better account.
Inspired by Davenport and the larger, increasingly mainstream eugenics rhetoric, Watts and her colleague, Dr. Florence Sherbon, began to develop the Fitter Families contest, which would take into account the physical, mental, and moral “fitness” of a group of relatives. According to the Eugenics Archive, families submitted an “Abridged Record of Family Traits” to the judges, while medical doctors examined the families and scored them on physical and psychological tests. The winners in each of three categories (those with one child; two to four children; and five or more children) were awarded a silver trophy. Unsurprisingly, all winning families were white and from northern European backgrounds. The runners up were given a bronze trophy bearing the image of a mother, father, and child who look like something out of classical Rome. On the bronze medal was the inscription, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.”
