Morbid Propensities: Suicide, Sympathy, and the Making of American Eugenics
Open AccessThis project analyzes nineteenth-century suicide politics as an essential catalyst in the emergence of American eugenics. It tracks developments in five cultural arenas, or morbid publics, in which acts and idioms of suicide animated early eugenic thought in intricate and flexible ways. It argues that debates within and between these publics authorized eugenics as a prestigious science and remarkably enduring style of humanitarian reform. While historians locate eugenics' popular appeal in new theories of the natural and biological sciences, my focus on suicide reveals instead a fundamental restructuring of humanitarian sensibilities. A remarkable array of actors contributed to this shift: agents of suicide and their families, statists and legal professionals, medical practitioners and actuaries, newspaper editors and popular novelists. Fin de siècle advocates of eugenic science and eugenic legislation drew upon suicide's multiple valances as they debated the methods by which to produce an ideal American race. As a capacious theory, suicidality facilitated eugenic distinctions between "fit" and "unfit" individuals. As an act, suicide offered the means by which to remove the latter from the collective. And as political rhetoric, suicide served as an emotionally charged appeal that ignited a sense of emergency as it flowed between eugenicists, state officials, and the broader public. Eugenic science cannot be understood without attention to eugenic sensibility, which emerged through complex negotiations between local, scientific, and official knowledges about suicide.
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