 Lana Hogarth is Associate Professor of History at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on the medical and scientific constructions of race during the era of slavery and beyond. Her first book, Medicalizing Blackness, Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World was published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2017. Her lecture, Measuring Miscegenation, Eugenics and the Legacy of Slavery, shows how myths about mixed-race people, which originated in the slave societies of the United States and the Atlantic world, continually fueled the work of Charles Davenport and other eugenicists. Professor Hogarth's lecture is part of a wider project explaining how mixed-race people with black and white ancestry became targeted by eugenicists for study in the early decades of the 20th century. Any thanks for inviting me to share my work with you today. Before I get started, I would like to offer a content warning for the audience. In my presentation, the terms Negro, racial hybrid, miscegenation and mulatto will appear. And I use these terms to stay in keeping with the terminology of the historical context that I study. I do not assume that anyone whom eugenicists categorize as a Negro or mulatto person or hybrid exists today. And my use of these terms is in no way an endorsement. So today I'd like to talk to you a little bit about miscegenation and eugenics. Mixed-race people of white and African descent elicited a shared discomfort in white American commentators who saw them as an unnatural product of an unspoken, but much carried on transgression, namely interracial sex. In the United States, were legal and social prescriptions against black and white sexual and marital relations were the norm, the persistence of so-called mulattos, that is people who had one black parent and one white parent, implied that interracial sex was a feature and not an aberration of American society. And this is particularly true if we consider how slavery created the material conditions that led to sex between these two races. And this concern over race mixing obviously did not escape the gaze of eugenicists. So if we think a little bit about racial intermissure, we might turn to the work of Peggy Pascoe, who astutely observed about the politics of interracial relationship in the United States, quote, white men could and did debauch women with little or no fear of prosecution because laws against interracial marriage merely helped them hide their abuse of black women and escape economic responsibility for the children they fathered, end quote. So mixed-race people with black and white ancestry, the group to which I'm confining my research were not really unique. And from the era of slavery onward, we can see that their bodies endured scrutiny and speculation. They indeed became objectified and discussed and described with curiosity, desire, and repulsion by those concerned about the future of racial fitness and purity across the Americas. And this was most certainly the case of eugenics. That said, most histories of eugenics actually don't discuss mulattoes, these other kinds of racial hybrids, even though they became held up as symbols of racial unfitness, both mentally and physically speaking. And while there is no shortage of scholarly work on mixed-race people with black and white ancestry, few of those works have been explicitly dedicated to examining how their bodies became socially constructed in the name of eugenics. So this lack of historical engagement with how eugenicists viewed in mulatto is arresting considering that there was a eugenic obsession with things like fitness. We see in popular scientific lay writings obsessions with how mixed-race people might appear, their physical capabilities. And in many cases, these groups of people were often referred to as problems or factual nuisances. So I wondered as doing sort of research on race-crossing studies on the nation, why there is this lack of engagement. And I wonder if it has much to do with how we think about eugenics. So in the popular imagination, eugenics is often talked about as this sort of outdated, terrible pseudoscience is often clearly associated with anti-immigrant sentiments and associations with the Nazis. But I think as many of the other panelists that part of this symposium would argue that what eugenics represents is something far more complex. And today I'd like to actually argue for a perhaps more expansive view of eugenics, one that actually includes sort of early ideas about identifying and measuring humans' capabilities and racial fitness. And I'm thinking here of methods that are more aligned with anthropology and anthropometric study rather than necessarily just Mendelian genetics. So if we think to the work of Daniel Kevles, a historian and a leading scholar of eugenics, he's actually pointed out that roughly 20 years before appointing the term eugenics, Francis Galton actually dabbled in ideas to improve human stock. So for example, we can think about hereditary genius, which is pictured here. I would actually go as far as saying that Galton had a clear understanding of racial fitness before he formally coined the term eugenics in 1883. And he thought about racial fitness and unfitness as the case may be. And he actually relied on negative assumptions about black people in sort of these early understandings of racial fitness. So for example, some of these musings that appear in hereditary genius terms is the 1869 edition. We see Galton grappling with ideas of the origin of natural ability. And Galton contemplated the intellectual capabilities of non-whites. So he actually theorized that, quote, Negro intelligence was on average two grades below that of the English and evidently not a sign of, quote, good stock. This meant reveals where Galton drew his information. He writes, quote, the number among the Negroes of whom we shall call half-wooded men is very large, quote, Galton. Every book alluding to Negro servants in America is whole of instances. I was myself much impressed by this fact during my travels in Africa, end quote. So here we see this ineptitude of the race being sort of a foregone conclusion for Galton and something that he ascertains through data that he amassed from the distinction that people resided. And I would also say that we see in Galton a figure, at least in his writings, someone who's willing to collapse this idea of fitness, mental and physical, and just a feature of somebody's race. And I believe that Galton is talking about race in terms of an element of one's biology. And we think to what historian, Maria Serta, who again is another scholar I imagine you'll be hearing from during this symposium. Serta has noted that of Galton's writings, he didn't necessarily define the word race, but he didn't use the word race quite frequently. And it seems that Galton understood that to be sort of something biological. As Serta notes, quote, as a community of people sharing similar physiological and psychological characteristics transmitted from generation to generation, end quote. So essentially Galton is someone who sees fitness or unfitness something that takes place along racial lines. So employing a very broad view of eugenics, as I mentioned earlier, means that we can start to think about how non white people, and in my case, mixed race people with black and white ancestry became targeted by those who have this interest in racial fitness. And beyond that, we can consider how this group of people were subject to comments about mental capabilities well before the advent of eugenics. And I think we might want to consider the long history of medical and scientific assessments of mixed race people, and particularly think about written commentary on mixed race people that emerged in the era of slavery, which kind of shows this very long preoccupation of ideas about their bodies and what they can do and cannot do. And thus I want us to think about how slavery and its aftermath actually shaped eugenic era research questions, some of the assumptions and expectations and approaches to assessing racial fitness that we see in the early decades of the 20th century. And we see a lot of this actually in the work of Charles Davenport and the figures who I will talk about in just a moment. But I also think as we reframe eugenics and think about the targets of the eugenic gaze, we want to really look deep into the history, like sort of going into maybe the middle of the 19th century, if you will. So I offer you this image here, which is the U.S. Sanitary Commission Study of Black and White Soldiers. This is Investigations of the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers published in 1869. And here we see a very concrete example of a study that relies on anthropometry to sort of gauge the fitness, the strength, the endurance, the vitality of troops. And because this is taking place with the Civil War era and the aftermath, there is access to black, white, and mixed race men's bodies. Well, what we find is that this study actually ends up being a kind of clearinghouse on data on the fitness of some of these men. And so I should say here that anthropometry is a way of sort of measuring physical human variation. And this actually becomes quite essential for assessing racial fitness. It's used by anthropologists, and it's most certainly used by eugenicists. And this effort I should add, at least for the U.S. Sanitary Commission, is actually led by Benjamin A. Gould, who perhaps people know of as a well-known astronomer. But I should say that historians, such as Margaret Humphrey's, Lundy Braun and Leslie Schwann and others, have also shown how this particular study solidified views about black and mulatto inferiority. And I would also say that Gould's approach, so his process for studying and standardizing measurement of men actually ends up being quite influential. So you can see here in the early paper from Charles Davenport, he, again, is leading American eugenicists. He sort of notes the utility of what Gould does in sort of measuring soldiers at the end of the Civil War. And he sort of says that this is one of, you know, the first really well-done large-scale efforts of measuring variation in men from across sort of the United States. So here we can think about the Civil War, right? Of writings emerging out of the Civil War that helped to solidify anthropometry and anthropology as means of assessing racial fitness and sort of reading fitness through the body's proportions. So I would like to go just a little step further, if you will. And I wanna say that, okay, this was sort of Civil War era. I think we could step back even further and think about the era of slavery and its legacies in laying the foundations for the kind of research questions and assumptions eugenicists employed. So as I mentioned, Charles Davenport is gonna feature pretty heavily. He has a number of attempts at trying to measure and assess so-called new autos. And much of his attempts really bear this sort of influence of slavery. They were mixed race people are sort of front and center in some of his most well-known race crossing studies. So namely, there's the 1913 study, heredity of skin color in negro white crosses and his 1929 follow-up study, race crossing in Jamaica. Now, Davenport was not the only figure interested in mixed race people. And I should also add here that African-Americans in the early decades of the 20th century were also interested in eugenics and embraced some elements of it with respect to racial uplift. And I would also add that there are cases of African-Americans who did participate or conduct their own studies on mixed race people. So for example, Carolyn Bond today, who is perhaps maybe less well-known was a Harvard-trained anthropologist. So she trained at Harvard Justice Charles Davenport did. She actually studied under Ernest Hooten and she published a study of some negro white families in the United States. Her study comes out in 1932 after Davenport's race crossing in Jamaica. But I think if we were to read these two studies together, we would actually see sort of putting them in conversation that some of what Carolyn Bonday writes is a direct challenge to Charles Davenport's assessment of mixed race people. Indeed, I would argue that rather than showing mixed race people to be intellectually stunted, which is what Davenport claims, Day actually works to underscore the great civic and intellectual accomplishments of mixed race people. So I wanna sort of think a little bit about Davenport and what he wanted to investigate in some of his studies, right? The hearsay, the ideas putting around those that emerged in the era of slavery that he decided to study. So he does indeed tackle the question of mulatto infertility, which we might say, well, that clearly isn't true, but Davenport felt that he needed to sort of clearly and explicitly sort of put that mythology to rest. We can see that how he collects data, some of the expectations he has, some of the claims that he goes after, so again, to this point of infertility, those are things that had their origins in the era of slavery. And so based on some of the evidence that I've acquired so far, it seems to me that Davenport wanted to kind of correct and challenge, but also reformulate some of the widely held lay and scientific beliefs about the physical and mental capabilities of mixed race people. So there's really no shortage of data when we think about what were people writing about mixed race people. And so I hope to kind of summarize a little bit here of what Davenport concluded about mixed race people. And then I would sort of go through and walk you through some of the particular myths and hearsay he was interested in. So an article that really stands out that I think encapsulates some of what Davenport feels towards mixed race people comes to us in a 1917 article where he declares that mulattoes are simply, quote, a nuisance to others, end quote. He says that these hybridized people were, quote, badly put together and ineffective, end quote. And this article I should say actually appears in the proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. And this is just one of several publications where Davenport kind of really takes up the issue of mixed race people with mulattoes in particular. He continues, quote, mulattoes combine something of a white man's intelligence and ambition with an insufficient intelligence to realize that ambition, end quote. So it's pretty clear that Davenport has very strong feelings against race crossing, against mulattoes in particular. And we clearly see that there is sort of this clear undercurrent of anti-black racism that's behind much of his assessment. So I wanna just turn to some of the myths that Davenport was preoccupied with when thinking about mixed race people. So if we look back going all the way into sort of the 1850s, we might find pro-slavery writings that specifically reference the weakness of mixed race people. So if we look at an example from the Memphis Medical Corp. AP Merrill was a physician, pro-slavery physician, who loudly complained that the mulatto was, quote, less curable than white persons on account of his greater feebleness of constitution, end quote. And I should add that even those who were opposed to slavery saw the mulatto as a problem. So I mentioned before Benjamin A. Gould, who sort of worked for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. He was clearly a supporter of the union cause, but he remarked on the, quote, well-known phenomenon of mulattoes inferior vitality, end quote. So I'm gonna say a little bit about some of the sentiments, these beliefs and the in-interparent flaws of the mulatto body that I think were very palpable in Davenport's later research. And I would actually argue for Davenport to even bother to dig into questions of mixed race peoples, like endurance or strength, their vitality, for me is a way of him actually participating, being a part of these projects of sort of objectifying and assessing mixed race peoples' bodies that had been going on for quite some time. So in some of his lectures and published studies on race crossing, he addressed mythologies about mulattoes that had been propagated by two well-known slavery era commentators. So he actually picks on two commentators from the 18th and 19th century, respectively. Anglo-Jamaican planter Edward Long and Southern physician Josiah Nott. And you'll see here on the image in front of you, this is sort of an excerpt from Josiah Nott's 1843 article on mixed race people. But I'll start with Edward Long. So writing in 1774, Edward Long complained that it was sort of extraordinary that two mulattoes should be unable to continue their species. The women either proving barren or they're offspring if they have any, not a chaining maturity. The subject deserves a further and very attentive inquiry. So you'll see here, here's some further and attentive inquiry. Long probably would have been pleased to note that pro-slavery physician Josiah Nott heeded this call for more inquiry into the mulatto but then actually cited Edward Long as a high authority on the subject. So if you'll see here in this 1843 article which is entitled the mulatto, a hybrid, probable extermination of the two races if whites and blacks are allowed to intermarry. Not excuse me says, Eastwick and Long who are high authorities in their histories of Jamaica both assert unhesitatingly that the male and female mulatto do not produce so many children together end quote. So here is sort of, I like to think of this as sort of that citation that paper trail where we have somebody like Edward Long complaining in the 18th century about mulattoes and then you have in the 1840s an American pro-slavery physician looking into the matter of mulattoes. Obviously these are very politically charged but they're sort of citing, you see this trail of citation and not complained about a host of issues with the mulatto. Their shorter lifespans in comparison whites or blacks women played by physical delicacy and an inability to conceive children. Now it's clear that not and long are writing for very specific historical context. And during an era of slavery they're writing from the perspectives of white men living in societies where slavery is deeply entrenched and race mixing is a very clear and open secret. So it seems to me that their way of constructing the mulatto is very heavily contingent on context. When we start to move into the 20th century we start to see a change in this notion that mulattoes are going to suddenly be extinct. For Davenport, mulattoes were subpar as far as he was concerned but not because of any kind of inherent infertility or weakness per se. In the heredity of skin color of Negro white crosses Davenport observed that there was vote no support in our data for the notion of a lack of fecundity between Negro white crosses nor of their deficient viability, end quote. And actually in talking about this fallacy of mulatto infertility, Davenport goes right ahead and just singles out both Edward Long and Josiah Nott saying these are people who kind of are responsible for this mythology, they are incorrect. But I would say that Davenport adds some nuance to these claims about mulatto weakness. So he says, okay, they don't have deficient viability but there are other problems that Davenport outlines. So at first in a lecture on race crossing Davenport says that mulattoes inherit some physical robustness from their black parent. He says, quote, the Negro has many advantages in physical quality over the white. He is less apt to suffer from goiter, obesity, deaf mutism and deafness. The mulatto show much of these excellent physical qualities end quote. But I wanna be clear that by Davenport sort of suggesting that there are some positive elements that's not him trying to rehabilitate mixed race people or suggest that they are on the same level as whites. Instead Davenport is just swapping out one claim for another. So he says in this undated lecture that mulattoes show an extraordinarily high rate of tuberculosis and the venereal disease rate is several times higher in them than among the whites. So here it's not so much that mixed race people are going to go extinct or that they are somehow deficient. He actually kind of paints them as vectors of disease possibly being public health menaces. And he's not again, trying to uplift the mulatto as should be very clear. So what he's doing I think is really repackaging this old kind of hair say and relying on his data or his assessment to say that was incorrect. Here's the real issue with mixed race people in terms of their health. And if you'll notice that reference to tuberculosis and venereal disease, those are sort of longstanding associations with people for kind of dissent. You might think of Frederick Hoffman, right? Who suggests that black people will go extinct and he mentions high rates of tuberculosis. Hoffman writes in 1896, excuse me, that's when that's published. Here we're into the 27th century and Davenport isn't really focused or worried about any kind of extinction. So I would also kind of want to turn our attention to some of the physical characteristics that Davenport decides to interrogate. What he does in his studies is he actually spends time measuring sort of the nose, lips, high shoulders, hair. And so I want to say just a little bit about what Davenport does with these quises. And again, kind of remarking that Davenport is picking up a thread of thought that comes from slavery era ideas. So we could look back to Edward Long, for example, who spends quite a bit of time detailing the physical features of mulattoes. So Long writes, quote, they seem to partake more of the white than the black. Their hair has a natural curl. In some cases it resembles the negro fleece, but in general it is of a tolerable length, end quote. And you might say, okay, that seems like a trivial characteristic. That's something that, you know, maybe that's Long paying attention to minutiae. But what you'll actually find is that Davenport did not really think that that was trivial at all. He spent quite some time actually talking about mulatto hair. So we can think about family pedigree analyses that he conducts in his 1913 study. He notes the color, the length and the texture of mixed-race hair. And indeed in the Eugenics Record Office or the ERO founded by Davenport in 1910 actually has data collected from families like empires and pedigrees, but it also has human hair specimens. So this is an image of hair specimens that came from a McDonald family. This is a family that lived in Jamaica. They were a mulatto family on the Lopes, say Negro white cross. And there are hair samples here from the mother, the father, their daughters and two other family members. I have to say as a researcher, I'm still trying to figure out how or why these hair samples, which were actually sent from Jamaica, like made their way to the ERO if the McDonald family wanted to send this information. It's still not necessarily clear to me, but Davenport certainly had this data. And so I will say that in his 1913 publication, he discusses sort of the different kinds of traits and hair and what to expect. And so he writes, quote, in how far is the absence or presence of Negro skin pigment associated with the absence or presence of other Negro characteristics? There are two traits that are associated with dark pigmentation of the skin in the Negro, which we can trace the association and offspring of hybrids, namely color of the hair and form of the hair, degree of curving and point. And so Davenport would make assumptions or associate black skin and so-called, quote, woolly hair as being so-called Negro traits, but he seems to think that this is actually just accidental. He actually describes subjects, for example, as of having, quote, typical Negro features, flat nose, big lips, woolly kinky hair. So he sort of understands what a so-called Negro trait is and sees a certain kind of hair texture as being a so-called Negro trait, but he doesn't necessarily think that dark skin and very curly, curly kinky hair necessarily go together all the time. Now I do wanna just kind of add a little bit of a sort of more context is that Davenport is not alone in collecting hair. Carolyn Bonday, who I mentioned earlier, also collects hair samples from the mixed race families that she studies. So this seems to be quite a convention of sort of collecting data, including physical specimens from mixed race people. So I wanna focus our attention to other, that Davenport collects on mixed race people. So we've kind of looked at notions of their vitality or fricundity. We've talked a little bit about physical features and I'm gonna talk a little bit about intelligence. Now Davenport was very interested in this idea of intermediate intelligence between whites and blacks. Davenport seemed very determined to overturn any idea that mulattoes were somehow slightly in the middle or smarter than blacks in sort of a positive way. And that is again, a belief that emerges from the era of slavery. If we look at an 1852 publication on agriculture from the South, we'll find this belief really deeply embedded. So here's just the quotation. It appears in all events certain that the mixed race exhibits powers more susceptible to cultivation than the pure African. They are selected at the South for the performance of duties requiring high capacities and are possessed by the near field negro. And at the North, every day's observation shows the mulatto is endowed with mental gifts superior to his black brother, end quote. So the idea that there's mulatto is more intelligent than the darker skinned negro is something that's quite common in the era of slavery. It's common in the United States. I would actually also add that it's actually quite common outside of the United States. So if we look to the West Indies, to the British West Indies, there is ample data to suggest that planters and estate managers tended to have a higher opinion of mulattoes or mixed race enslaved people. And I would also say that this notion, as I mentioned comes from the era of slavery, but it still lingers into the 20th century. So we can think about the work of E.B. Reuter, who is a University of Chicago trained sociologist who publishes an article called The Superiority of the Mulatto in 1917. And he actually says, quote, in all times in the history of the American negro and in all fields of human effort in which the negroes have entered, the successful individuals with very few exceptions have been mulattoes, end quote. So this idea really, it has longevity. But again, Davenport is not convinced of this. And in fact, in his race crossing in Jamaica study, he goes out of his way to prove that mixed race people are not more intelligent. What he says is that mixed race people are actually prone to having individuals of unusually low intelligence in their group in relation to whites and blacks. So he sums up the performance of mixed race people on mental tests in a 1929 lecture that's associated with race crossing in Jamaica. He writes, quote, the white scored higher than the blacks while the browns, mixed race people, secured an intermediate score. But a study of the distribution of grades showed in many cases this remarkable fact that about 5% of the browns receive lower scores than any of the blacks or whites. In the different tests, it's not always the same individual who thus scores extraordinarily low. Thus, the result is not due merely to the chance inclusion amongst the browns of some individuals of low intelligence. Rather, amongst the various browns are some individuals who find themselves quite unable to even make a beginning at certain mental tests. There are fewer full-blooded blacks who show such complete incapacity. It seems reasonable to ascribe this idiosyncrasy of the browns to their hybrid nature, end quote. So Davenport is referencing for those mental tests what was called at the time the Knox moron test or the Knox imitation cube test and Army alpha tests. And so what Davenport is doing here is taking hard data that he collects and not slavery era hearsay, not listening to what is sort of widely circulating and saying, I have done the data collection. I have proof that mixed race people, mulattoes are not of intermediate intelligence. And they're actually kind of much worse. So this is sort of what I mean when I say Davenport is interested in debunking or sort of following up some of these slavery era claims. So I just want to conclude with just a few remarks about sort of what this all means in terms of linking eugenics, race crossing and slavery. So what I would say is that this idea of identifying specific characteristics in groups of people and then comparing them to other groups for the purposes of understanding resilience or weakness was clearly something shared both in the era of slavery and the era of eugenics. Eugenicists invested time into making legible the strengths and weaknesses of different types of people via their traits. And I would say that one of the lasting consequences of slavery was this idea of blackness being a legible physiological and phenotypic trait that eugenicists actually seized upon. So in the era of slavery, one might see blackness as something that was positive for performing strenuous labor in inhospitable climates. But when slavery ends, this trade is no longer desirable and blackness seems to be morphed into this sign of arrested intellectual development, childlike behavior and a lack of an ability for self-government. Davenport sort of seizes on this logic of blackness being a problem of being a problematic trait in his assessment of mixed race people. And so what I would say is that Davenport's race crossing studies share with slavery era discourse a desire to objectify and in some way kind of pathologize or otherize black people's bodies by harping on these peculiarities or traits. And it shouldn't really come as a surprise to us, I guess, that he chooses to do this with mulatto bodies, right? The bodies that have this black trait, this black ancestry. So what I find here is that Davenport is really just refining and repackaging white supremacist ideas about the inferiority of black people by focusing on disharmonious crosses or disharmonious results that occurred when black and white people reproduced together. So in some cases, he may have corrected misperceptions about mulattos, but that was not out of a desire to right past wrongs. Rather, Davenport transformed the mulatto from an allegedly barren accident of nature into a dangerous and mentally inferior hybrid. Thank you.