Hereditarianism, Eugenics and American Social Science in the Interwar Years: Meet the Carverians

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to document Carver’s influence as a teacher and to shed further light on Harvard’s role as the “brain trust” of American eugenics (Fiorito 2019). On the same time, in more general terms, what follow adds to our general understanding of the extent to which biological considerations continued to permeate American social science well after the first two decades of the last century, the period which marked the "golden age" of eugenics (Leonard 2016).