The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an Unscientific Idea

by Robert Wald Sussman

By 1912, Davenport’s textbook Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911) and a few others such as those of Nott and Glidden and Gobineau had become widely used in biology, psychology, and social science departments in American and European universities. Eugenics courses appeared in both the most prestigious and the smallest universities in the United States and in high schools. Black (2003, 75) states that “eugenics rocketed through academia, becoming an institution virtually overnight.” By 1914, some forty-four colleges and universities offered eugenics instruction. By 1928, that number had grown to 376, reaching some 20,000 students annually (Cravens 1978). Eugenics became a top-down model of “education reform” for these educators (Stoskepf 1999). A more recent analysis of forty-one high school biology textbooks used through the 1940s revealed that nearly 90 percent of them had sections on eugenics (Selden 1999).