In March, for the second time, Austin was the center of a movement known as “natalism” when the NatalCon conference chose the city as its host.
The presenters at this conference, where a standard ticket was $10,000, have some varying views, but the big idea they share is that the human population is declining and people need to have more babies.
There is some overlap with natalism and eugenics – the idea that the babies that people should be having should be those of the best genetic quality. That opens up a conversation that can quickly get into racism, ableism and more.
Michael Phillips has taught history at UT-Austin and the University of North Texas, among others. He also the co-author of the new book, “The Purifying Knife: The Troubling History of Eugenics in Texas.”
He joined Texas Standard for a discussion. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Well, I’d like to start with your interest in this topic. It began, as I understand, when you were working on your dissertation. What did you find that got you going down this path?
Michael Phillips: Well, I was writing my dissertation at the University of Texas at Austin, and it became my first book, “White Metropolis,” which is about racism in the history of Dallas. And while I was researching that book, I came across a reference in the Dallas Morning News to a “better baby” contest being held at the State Fair of Texas in 1914.
You know, these better baby contests apparently were a yearly event for a while at the state fair along with a “fitter family” contest. People would bring their offspring, they would enter the whole family and their skulls would be measured, the angle of their skull would be measured.
They’d be subjected to all kinds of intrusive tests like a Wassermann test for syphilis and so on. And the aim was to encourage those who were supposedly biologically superior to have large families.
Now this seemed like a curious topic. I was aware of the history of eugenics, which was a global phenomena that reached its most nightmarish conclusion with Nazi Germany. The literature on the history of eugenics really exploded starting in the 1990s and through the early 20th century. And I began to notice something. The state of Texas was missing in these stories.
So that’s where I explored, and this ended up being a 10-year project.
So Texas didn’t exactly lead the pack on eugenics. In fact, you mentioned it was barely mentioned in broader American histories of the subject. So why did you think it was worth adding to our understanding of what happened?
In the 1850s – 30 years before a cousin of Charles Darwin’s coined the term “eugenics,” which is from the Greek meaning “good in birth” – we had a doctor in Texas who was saying if we began to castrate criminals, if we begin to castrate what he saw as sexual deviance, meaning gay men, if start to castate people who have antisocial behavior, in about 10- or 15,000 years, we’ll have a super race of humans, and that super race will look upon modern contemporary humans as we look upon ants today.
And he actually got the state of Texas, the Legislature, to twice debate proposals that would have allowed doctors in Texas to castrate men they saw as biologically inferior or as having antisocial behavior. Both those laws were rejected. This is 30 years before the term “eugenics” is coined, and it’s more than a half century before Indiana passes the very first sterilization bill in the United States in 1907.
Their view was this: that the truly superior, the intelligent, have busy lives creating jobs, making inventions, etc. And they tend to be more disciplined, so they have smaller families. The inferior go on animal instincts and they have unrestrained sexual appetites so they’re having these giant families and basically the inferior are going to outnumber the superior and eventually human society collapses.
And that was what we were curious about. Why did this movement, that had some really prominent elite support, not translate into law in Texas, where it did [in] 36 in the 48 states in the country by 1937.
Well, that’s exactly where I wanted to go next. Texas did not pass a law allowing forced sterilization of what they call the supposed “unfit.” California and most other states did.
So what did you find? Why didn’t Texas?
One thing that characterized California is they invested deeply in higher education. And the professors there had a lot of esteem. Texas did not do one bad thing, which is pass coerced sterilization laws, but for one of the worst possible reasons – which was the suspicion of higher education.
Another big thing thwarting the eugenics movement is that the eugenicists were strongly anti-immigration. One University of Texas psychologist actually helped design the Army IQ test. And these tests supposedly demonstrated that the millions of Eastern, Southern European immigrants who had been flooding into the United States late 19th and early 20th century had low IQs.
And they played a big part in 1924 getting the most restrictive anti-immigration law passed in the United States history. One exemption to that bill was Mexico. And one reason is because the cotton growers wanted abundant Mexican immigration because they wanted to exploit those workers as a low wage labor in the cotton fields and the factories, etc.
Two other factors real quickly. Number one: By 1930, the Catholic Church had finally definitively weighed in against eugenics, and Catholics were an increasingly large and vocal part of the political dialog in Texas.
And then finally, Protestant fundamentalism really became a political force. These fundamentalists were critics of Darwin, and of course, all the eugenicists were evolutionists.
Fast forward to today, I mentioned the natalism conference in Austin. Elon Musk has very much been associated with the movement. What are you watching for as people like Musk potentially influence future politics here in Texas?
I think the popular misconception is that after the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps, that that would have killed the eugenics movement, but it didn’t.
Elon Musk has proposed that the most fit, the most intelligent have large families. He thinks there’s a crisis where the West, as he puts it, is not keeping up in terms of numbers with other parts of the world and if that happens, there’s a disaster.
The idea of eugenics never completely died. It has sometimes transformed. It sometimes has hidden behind euphemisms, but it has always been there.
