The emphasis on nation and national fitness obviously plays into the metaphor of the body. If individual citizens are not fit, if they do not fit into the nation, then the national body will not be fit. Of course, such arguments are based on a false notion of the body politic—as if a hunchbacked citizenry would make a hunchbacked nation. Nevertheless, the eugenic notion that individual variations would accumulate into a composite national identity was a powerful one. This belief combined with an industrial mentality that saw workers as interchangeable and therefore sought to create a universal worker whose physical characteristics would be uniform, as would the result of their labors—a uniform product. One of the central foci of eugenics was what was broadly called “feeble-mindedness.” 5 This term included low intelligence, mental illness, and even “pauperism,” since low income was equated with “relative inefficiency” (ibid., 46).6 Likewise, certain ethnic groups were associated with feeblemindedness and pauperism. Charles Davenport, an American eugenicist, thought that the influx of European immigrants would make the American population “darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature . . . more given to crimes of larceny, assault, murder, rape, and sex-immorality” (cited in ibid., 48). In his research, Davenport scrutinized the records of “prisons, hospitals, almshouses, and institutions for the mentally deficient, the deaf, the blind, and the insane” (ibid., 55).

L.J. Davis

It is instructive to think of the ways in which psychoanalysis produced a eugenics of the mind—creating the concepts of normal function, and then contrasting them with the abnormal, pathological, and even criminal.

L.J. Davis