Norman Edwin Himes’s “Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action” (1939). The Eugenic Manifesto of a Devoted Carverian

Abstract

This note presents an unpublished 1939 address given by the American sociologist and population specialist Norman Edwin Himes on “Eugenics and Democracy: A Call to Action.” Himes’s discussion of eugenics and democracy has a twofold relevance. First, it provides further evidence that among population studies specialists a generalized commitment to eugenics persisted well beyond the era of the socalled Progressive Era and continued throughout the 1930s. Second, Himes’s approach reveals an attempt to reformulate a eugenic agenda along “liberal” lines, which was intended to distance him from the coercive and racialist approach of his progressive predecessors. Yet, it will be shown, even though Himes seemed to temper the extremism of the earlier movement with sociological and voluntaristic language, there was little actual change in the ultimate goals of his agenda regardless of the apparent switch to democratic eugenics.