Mocking Eugenics

American Culture against Scientific Hatred

Ewa Barbara Luczak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000416244
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

Mocking Eugenics explores the opposition to eugenic discourse mounted by twentieth-century American artists seeking to challenge and destabilize what they viewed as a dangerous body of thought. Focusing on their wielding of humor to attack the contemporaneous science of heredity and the totalitarian impulse informing it, this book confronts the conflict between eugenic theories presented as grounded in scientific and metaphysical truth and the satirical treatment of eugenics as not only absurdly illogical but also antithetical to democratic ideals and inimical to humanistic values. Through analyses of the films of Charlie Chaplin and the fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Anita Loos, and Wallace Thurman, Mocking Eugenics examines their use of laughter to dismantle the rhetoric of perfectionism, white supremacy, and nativism that shaped mainstream expressions of American patriotism and normative white masculinity. As such, it will appeal to scholars of cultural studies, literature, cinema, sociology, humor, and American studies.

1 “I am for the little man”

Charlie Chaplin’s comedies and the eugenic American

DOI: 10.4324/9781003172680-2

In 1915 Arthur Collins and Byron G. Garland released a record “Those Chaplin Feet” that captured the phenomenon of a new popular craze – “Chaplinitis.” Only two years after Charles Chaplin’s film debut in motion pictures in Keystone, Americans were feting the Little Tramp and joining Collins and Garland in their eulogy:

Those Charlie Chaplin feet
Those Funny Chaplin feet.
When he comes down the street
He makes a cop flop.
They chase him ‘round the town.
An auto knocks him down.
Poor Charlie!
Twenty times a day they spill him,
But they never kill him!

The song exemplifies Chaplin’s enormous popularity as “the Mob-God”¹ in the early 20^th-century U.S. Enduring hardships in their own lives, the public – mostly working class – connected with the image of an insignificant poor little man, both on and off the screen. Just like them, he had to struggle against adverse circumstances, the rapid changes of American modernity, and the capricious nature of American capitalism. Yet unlike many of them, he always managed to emerge victorious by the end of the next adventure. His little feet with “the usual recuperative flip of his heels”² became a symbol of the endurance and perspicacity of an average person and his/her capacity to survive and out-smart the powers stronger than him/her, symbolized by the new forces of modernity such as industrial capitalism and its legal system. When working-class Americans were singing that “they never kill him,” they were expressing their admiration for “the little fellow” and their trust in the fact that, being one of them, he would forever remain loyal to their class.

Indeed, Chaplin the artist, just like the Little Tramp, remained faithful to the poor and the oppressed, even though he “did not espouse a consistent political position,”³ hiding behind the mask of a comedian as well as artistic and liberal individualism.⁴ Throughout his career he cultivated a class-consciousness largely shaped by his own experience of living a truly Dickensian life of poverty and destitution in London’s Kennington. And thus, identifying himself with the “popular” culture and in opposition to the “genteel tradition,” the artist battled social discourses that were harmful to those who, by a stroke of bad luck, found themselves on the margins of society. Lewis Jacob, in his classic The Rise of American Film, called Chaplin “the symbol of the human struggle against regimentation and, now more than ever, for the rights of the individual.”⁵ With the growth of his artistic persona and his maturation as an intellectual, it was becoming ever more obvious that Chaplin was not satisfied with the role of a popular comedian of banal slapstick comedies – a fact dutifully recorded not only by Chaplin himself in his earliest interviews, but also by the popular public, both film critics contemporary with Chaplin and those writing after the passing of his fame. Over time, his films were acquiring both depth and social texture as well as a satirical dimension, through which Chaplin exposed the abuses of the American economic system and the shortages accompanying urban modernity, and lashed out at those in power. He drew attention to the pervasive poverty of the American lower class, mistreatment of the poor, maladjusted and unemployed, and the glaring discrepancy between the “perfect” rich and the “degenerate” poor. Quickly becoming the darling and soul of social and political elites in private life, in his films he castigated those in power for their narcissism and social apathy, as well as poked fun at their hypocrisy and bigotry.

Casting his critical eye on the vices of American democracy, Chaplin could not lose sight of the discourse of eugenics. The eugenic language of a hereditarian elite, including concepts such as selective breeding, economic efficiency, and class degeneration, was antithetical to Chaplin’s personal, artistic, and social sensibility. His numerous film comedies document his confrontation with and interrogation of a set of ideas clustered around the science of eugenics. The first signs of Chaplin’s engagement with the discourse of eugenics can be noted as early as his productions for the Mutual Film Corporation – the second studio after Essanay that signed a contract with Chaplin for the unheard of salary of $10,000 a week.⁶ Of the seven films he made in the years 1917–18, The Cure, The Immigrant, and Dog’s Life stand out due to their social message of anti-nativism, their critique of the rhetoric of physical perfection – with its celebration of a powerful Anglo-Saxon male body – and their exposure of the dangers of hereditarian thinking. Chaplin’s voicing of anxieties over the growth of eugenic discourse as early as 1917 prepared him for The Great Dictator – his magnum opus filmed in 1940. The Great Dictator is not only a satire on Hitler after his rise to power in Germany and his invasion of Poland, but also a major stab at the eugenic rhetoric of racial perfectionism as well as at solidification of the discourse of Nordic supremacy worldwide. It is worth noting that Chaplin’s criticism of the eugenic discourse – a criticism which began as early as the late 1910s – was certainly one of the earliest and probably one of the most powerful and effective anti-eugenic artistic protests at the times of modernity and silent cinema, not to be surpassed by any other satirical production of the time.

From the Karno troupe to the subversion of the Little Tramp

Chaplin’s interest in social issues at both the personal and artistic levels manifested itself early in his life in the United States and was marked by his independent search for knowledge. Due to his erratic childhood – which was overshadowed by his mother’s institutionalization in psychiatric facilities and the rejection and premature death of his alcoholic father, a vaudeville artist, as well as his stay in orphanages and his early career as a clog dancer – the young comedian was deprived of a solid school education in England. He thus came to the United States with plenty of street education but little structured knowledge.⁷

In My Autobiography, Chaplin recalls that during his second trip to the States in 1912 – when he toured the country as a comedian with the Karno troupe and made up his mind to stay in the country, convinced that in England he was “up against that social barrier that so impedes advancement and achievement”⁸ – he acutely felt his lack of schooling and searched for books to advance his intellectual and social growth. He recalls how in a Philadelphia bookstore he made an “exciting discovery” of Robert Ingersoll’s Essays and Lectures, Emerson’s essays, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea,⁹ as well as of the authors who provided the foundations for an American literary identity as well as theory of humor: Twain, Whitman, Poe, Hawthorne, Irving, and Hazlitt.¹⁰ Chaplin’s reading list demonstrates his artistic and intellectual trajectory as well as his desperate search to consciously create himself in his newly adopted country. As an artist, he was torn between a fascination with the spirit of artistic freedom and optimism of the American Renaissance, and a skepticism against a hasty and unqualified exaltation. The latter, uncomfortably close to social naivety, was in Chaplin’s eyes encapsulated by the poetry of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass made the poet “too much the bursting heart of love, too much a national mystic.”¹¹ The fiction of Twain, which was given a second life thanks to the serialization of some never-before-published later stories such as “The Mysterious Stranger,” as well Hazlitt’s work on humor, may have seemed to Chaplin to be a perfect antidote to the romantic indulgence of Whitman. Twain, with his bitter satirical bite, proved how humor could be one of the most effective ways to shatter fundamental beliefs, whereas Hazlitt demonstrated that “[t]o understand or define the ludicrous, we must first know what the serious is”¹² – a thesis that confirmed Chaplin’s belief that the comic and the tragic are intertwined.

Chaplin was thus simultaneously growing as an artist and developing as an intellectual. The influence that Emerson, Schopenhauer, and Ingersoll had on the auto-didactic Chaplin helps explain his social development throughout his career. Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” with its rhetoric of uncompromising intellectual independence and the individual’s right to question social mores even if they are in conflict with one’s “giant,” felt to Chaplin like “a golden birthright” which rendered his own biological pedigree irrelevant. Here was an author who sweepingly argued that “[n]o law can be sacred to me but that of my nature.”¹³ Schopenhauer, with his eulogy on the power of human will, provided the young artist with the philosophy to boost his burgeoning individualism even further. Ingersoll, on the other hand, sanctioned Chaplin’s instinctive religious skepticism and “confirmed [his] own belief that the horrific cruelty of the Old Testament was degrading to the human spirit.”¹⁴

Of the three thinkers, it was Ingersoll who was the closest to the spirit of Chaplin’s times. His thought – with its assault on religious dogmatism – threw Chaplin right into the midst of the current and fierce intellectual debates and provided the comedian with the most contemporary discussion of the role of the individual and science in the rapidly changing world of American modernity. Ingersoll’s Essays and Letters are an ambitious multi-volume enterprise that redefines the role of the human mind, science, and metaphysics at the beginning of the 20^th century. Openly defining himself as an agnostic – a brave thing to do nearly three decades before the famous Scopes “Monkey” trial in 1925 – Ingersoll privileges the rational mind and is enthusiastic about its capacity to question religious thinking and challenge Christian as well as Puritan sentiments. Ingersoll’s defense of the rational man, free from the clutches of superstition and metaphysics, is spurred by a belief in the coming of “a new man” – able to make full use of his intellectual potential. The tenor of his argument dovetails with the spirit of scientific positivism of the time and is congruent with the rapid rise of the new sciences of anthropology, economy, sociology, and nomen est omen, eugenics. And even though Ingersoll does not use the term “eugenics” in his essays, he invokes the science of heredity and its language of degeneration in Volume 4, where he poses the question of the possibility of controlling the reproduction of criminals. Therefore, composed as a response to the arrival of modernity, and being the closest to Chaplin’s times, Ingersoll’s essays more than any other work provided Chaplin with background knowledge sufficient to give him access to the world of American contemporary ideas, which he later interpreted in his art. Some of these topics, such as modernity and atheism, have been thoroughly discussed by critics, and some – like Chaplin’s independent and brave interpretation of the role of eugenics in his time – have yet to be adequately discussed.

Interestingly, it was not only the scholarly essays perused by Chaplin in “[his] dressing room”¹⁵ that gave him exposure to the discourse of eugenics. The budding film industry also saw artistic potential in the new science of heredity, and especially focused on the notion of selective breeding. As Pernick points out, as early as the second decade of the 20th century there were films made with a mission to promote the gospel of eugenics and to warn against careless reproductive choices. The titles of films such as Heredity (Biograph, 1912; Broadway Star 1913), The Power of Heredity (Rex 1913), Inherited Sin (Universal 1915) leave little doubt as to the character of their message. They are driven by the conviction of the hereditary nature of “a taint” – one that, if not controlled by selective breeding, eventually leads to the spreading of criminality, disability, and prostitution – all of which are grouped together under the umbrella terms of “defectiveness” or “degeneration.” The topic of eugenics was so appealing to the scientifically-minded film makers in the second decade of the 20^th century that in 1914 D.W. Griffith himself made an explicitly eugenic film The Escape (Reliance-Majestic), in which “for nearly two hours, audiences witnessed a parade of horrors, such as a drunken father crushing his own baby and a lunatic strangling a cat.”¹⁶ Griffith’s Escape was followed by other educational eugenic films: Birth (The Eugenic Film Company 1917), Married in Name Only (1917), and Louis Weber’s productions opposing birth control on eugenic grounds: Where are My Children (Universal 1916) and The Hand that Rocks the Cradle (Universal 1917).¹⁷ However the eugenically-inspired film that received the most attention and publicity was undoubtedly Black Stork (1917). The film was based on the controversial case of Doctor Haiselden, who refused treatment to a newly born baby with severe infirmities and, remaining staunch in his beliefs and decision about euthanasia, decided to star in the film as himself.

The spate of films promoting the science of heredity was countered by the production of anti-eugenic film comedies. Examples of films lampooning the science of eugenics and the notion of marriage only among those that are “fit” by eugenic standards included a four-minute long The Strenuous Life: Anti-Race Suicide (1904 Edison). This was a short farce that rid...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. “I am for the little man” Charlie Chaplin’s comedies and the eugenic American
• 2. Is the “strenuous life” a pleasant life? Euthenic efficiency, racial duty, and the phenomenon of Anita Loos
• 3. Eugenic marriages and psychometrics in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Fie! Fie! Fi-Fi! and The Vegetable
• 4. Cosmopolitanism vs. eugenic racial nationalism: Ernest Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring and Madison Grant’s The Passing of the Great Race
• 5. For “the betterment of the human family”? California sterilizations, Wallace Thurman, and Tomorrow’s Children
• Conclusions Could it have happened here? The borderline existence of anti-eugenic satire
• Bibliography
• Index