Eugenics Visualized: The Exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, 1932

Abstract

This article investigates the exhibit of the Third International Congress of Eugenics, which was organized by Harry Hamilton Laughlin and showcased at the American Museum of Natural History in 1932. It argues that the exhibit's displays shaped popular eugenic ideology by connecting particular eugenic principles to specific visual representations that were experienced in relation to binaries such as the artistically traditional and the modern, the classical and the grotesque, and the scientific and the spectacle (or the "freak" and the medical specimen). These dichotomies were, in turn, experienced within the context of the exhibit's overall theme of eugenics as anchored in the past and the future and concern over the differential birthrate. The exhibit to the Third Congress provides insight into growing tensions within the eugenics movement of the 1930s, the importance of positive eugenics, the aesthetics of heredity, and how the "scientific truths" of a given era are publicized and perpetuated.

The Power of Racial Mapping: Ellsworth Huntington, Immigration, and Eugenics in the Progressive Era

“…98 And because the public understanding of eugenic principles was an enduring aim of the American Eugenics Society, a similar exhibit formed part of the Third International Congress in 1932. 99 Daniel Kevles rightly observes that American eugenicists believed that the public would have to be "eugenic-minded" if eugenics was to gain widespread political traction. 100 The effectiveness of these maps at popularizing a particular idea rested on the fact that racial maps rearrange and simplify otherwise complicated geographical and political realities.…”