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Spartan Desires: Eugenics and the Sculptural Program of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition

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Editor's Note
 
by Brian Edward Hack
 
 

References:

1. See F.W. Ruckstull, Great Works of Art and What Makes Them Great (Garden City: Garden City Publishing Company, 1925); Lorado Taft, Modern Tendencies in Sculpture (Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1970 [1921]). Both Ruckstull and Taft viewed Auguste Rodin as the primary force behind the degeneration of Art; while Ruckstull believed the French sculptor to be mentally deranged, and provided an appendix written by a physician to prove it, Taft's text features a doctored illustration of Rodin's Man with the Broken Nose that appears as if the sculpture is leeringly ogling a bust (also by Rodin) of a Young Girl (Figures 1, 2). Elsewhere Taft laments that Matisse's "primitive" figures "do love and propagate", citing works by Brancusi and Archipenko as their degenerate offspring (27).

2. Ruckstull, 369.

3. For a more thorough examination of eugenics, see: Steven Selden, Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999); Carl N. Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Robert J. Richards; Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1965 [1944]). Primary sources on eugenics are considerable, ranging from medical and marriage counseling texts to more philosophical studies. See: W. Grant Hague, The Eugenic Marriage: A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies in Four Volumes (New York: The Review of Reviews Company, 1914); T.W. Shannon, Nature's Secrets Revealed: Scientific Knowledge of the Laws of Sex Life and Heredity, or Eugenics (Marietta (OH): S.A. Mullikin Company, 1916); Robert L. Leslie, Ed., The Science of Eugenics and Sex Life, Love, Marriage, Maternity: The Regeneration of the Human Race (New York: Martin & Murray Company, 1917); Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race, or The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 1916); William J. Robinson, Birth Control, or The Limitation of Offspring by Prevenception (New York: Eugenics Publishing Company, 1929 [1916]); and David Starr Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe: A Discussion of the Principles of Eugenics (Boston: The Beacon Press, 1911).

4. Martin S. Pernick, The Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of "Defective" Babies in American Medicine and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

5. Degler, 47.

6. One notable exception to the taboo on discussing sculpture done for the National Socialist cause is Peter Adam's copiously illustrated Art of the Third Reich (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1992).

7. For a discussion of the role of eugenics in the Panama-Pacific and other expositions, see: Robert W. Rydell, World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); and Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly D. Pelle, Fair America: World's Fairs in the United States (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000).

8. French Strother, "The Panama-Pacific International Exposition", Scribners [?], detached article, 1915. Collection of the author.

9. Rydell, World of Fairs, 40-42.

10. Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition [Vol. IV] (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), 38.

11. Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition [Vo. I ] (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1921), 354.

12. Stella G.S. Perry, The Sculpture and Murals of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: The Walgreen Company, 1915), 1.

13. ibid, 3-4.

14. Stella G.S. Perry, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition: A Pictorial Survey of the Art of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, with an Introduction by A. Stirling Calder (San Francisco: Paul Elder and Company, 1915).

15. David Starr Jordan, The Call of the Twentieth Century: An Address to Young Men (Cambridge: University Press, 1903), pp. 4, 11.

16. Perry, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition, 72-78.

17. David Starr Jordan, The Days of a Man [Vol. 2] (Yonkers-on-Hudson: World Book Company, 1922), 460. See also: King Hendricks and Irving Shepard, Eds., The Letters of Jack London (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1965). Although London disagreed with Jordan's idea that war was eugenically evil as left the country bereft of its best breeding stock, he maintained that "He [Jordan] is, to a certain extent, a hero of mine. He is so clean, and broad, and wholesome"(p. 47).

18. Jonathan Gottshall is currently doing thesis research on this subject. His article based on these findings, "The Cutting Edge: Sterilization and Eugenics in California, 1909-1945", can be read online at http://www.gottshall.com/thesis/article.htm.

19. The Eugenic Family (1914), a four-volume guide to the production of better babies, used Lorado Taft's Mother and Child as the frontispiece for the third volume; The Story of Eugenics cited Raphael's Madonna of the Chair as the finest work of art ever created, one which pregnant women should contemplate if they wish their children to be culturally-enriched by the time they left the womb.

20. Hague, 53.

21. See: David Starr Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe, 71. "[The mother's] part in heredity is not less than that of the father. Her part in the higher heredity, the character each man works out for himself, is even greater. In spite of the facts of race-suicide, and the numbers of foolish wives and broken families, motherhood was never so highly esteemed in civilized races as it is today. Never were women so well fitted for their obligations for duties which do not cease with child-bearing, but continue through the noble degrees of child-rearing and lifelong sympathy and friendship."

22. For a discussion of the sculptures of children at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, see: Edith Kinney Stellmann, The Exposition Babies: An Idyl of the Fine Arts Colonnade (San Francisco: H.S. Crocker Company, 1915).

23. Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe, 120. "Love of our country is just as genuine in Norwegian or German dialects as it is in English or Irish."

24. Perry, The Sculpture and Mural Decorations of the Exposition, 100.

25. Strother, 356.

26. For a lively and thorough discussion of cereal and its smooth passage through the body, see: J.H. Kellogg, The Itinerary Of A Breakfast: A Popular Account of the Travels of a Breakfast through the Food Tube and of the Ten Gates and Several Stations through Which It Passes, also of the Obstacles Which It Sometimes Meets (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1920).

27. Jordan, The Heredity of Richard Roe, 140.

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