AECY Senior Essays
This entry, by Larissa*, discusses the senior essays written by Dora Guo, Emme Magliato, and Sarah Laufenberg, as heard at the AECY May 1st Symposium.
*Larissa Jimenez Gratereaux (she/her) is a graduate of Yale University.
On May 1, 2023, Professor Daniel HoSang and I gave opening remarks at “It Also Happened Here.” This event, whose name made reference to Yale University as a site for eugenic knowledge production, served to launch the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale in the public eye. In our remarks, Professor HoSang and I made sure to emphasize that students, in particular, have been leading this work. Students joined the Collective primarily because they encountered (whether in the archives or in a class) a small part of this history and together, we have been trying to wrap our heads around something bigger.
I, myself, joined the Collective after enrolling in Professor HoSang’s “Eugenics and its Afterlives” course in the spring of 2022. Drawn to the course after reading Professor Alexandra Stern’s Eugenic Nation, I learned about the role of academic institutions in legitimizing the American Eugenics Movement and the role students have played in demanding a deep reckoning.
In lieu of demanding a response from the university, seniors in the Collective used the senior thesis as an opportunity to spend time in the archives at and beyond Yale to think about how the university once shaped and animated this knowledge production and continues to do so today.
Below are selections from talks on the senior essays at the May 1st symposium, as presented by Dora Guo ‘23, Emme Magliato ‘23, and Sarah Laufenberg ‘23.
Dora Guo ‘23 on her senior essay investigating the Institute of Human Relations at Yale
“Our senior essays build upon this early history to investigate the evolution of eugenics in the 1930s. This is a critical moment in which, under mounting public pressure and scientific pushback, eugenics leaders attempted to conceal and cleanse the ideology of its negative reputation and to reassert its authority and credibility. The three of us focused our research on this building from today’s poster, the Institute of Human Relations at Yale, also known as the IHR.”
“Established in 1929, the IHR pursued, quote on quote, ‘knowledge and control of human nature’ and pioneered interdisciplinary research between Yale College, the Graduate School, the Law School and the School of Medicine. University President James Angell declared to the crowd that Yale ‘had entered upon a new educational procedure which will exercise powerful influence throughout the entire University and upon educational methods the world around.’ Angell’s grandiose claims gave no hint to eugenic agendas and no less to the internal battle within the eugenics movement.”
“As plans for the IHR were well underway, eugenics was under attack. Bold claims of breeding in and breeding out human traits were unsupported by new advancements in genetic research. Philanthropic foundations were moving away from funding projects dedicated to quote-on-quote ‘improving the germplasm.’ The AES urged its members, to proceed with the greatest care until more data are collected. By this, it is hoped that the danger of making eugenics sensational and pseudoscientific may be minimized or avoided. As it is clear here — the lesson eugenicists learned was not that their motives were wrong, but rather their methods. For those who are invested in white supremacy, the possibility that further research might prove the necessity for anti-immigrant and ableist policies would not yet be abandoned.”
“Yale President Angell conceded himself, ‘The eugenics movement in this country has suffered somewhat — at least amongst the well educated — from the suspicion of sentimentality and of scientific superficiality.’ However, ‘be that as it may, no thoughtful person can have the slightest doubt that the problem of selecting the better and suppressing the poorer stocks, must be given exhaustive study.’ Despite the scientific liabilities that eugenics posed — Angell continued to defend eugenics research.”
“And so, eugenics research continued at Yale. This snapshot from IHR’s first research bulletin reveals just some of the eugenics studies being conducted on the quote on quote ‘problem of racial adjustment’ and its applications to ‘the government Indian service, the Negro problem, and immigration regulation.’ Over the next few years, the IHR housed eugenic-oriented projects like these and even considered the appointment of a formal Chair of Eugenics at Yale.”
“Although a Chair was ultimately not created, President Angell consoled a particularly avid alumni and eugenicist, that the potential for eugenics at Yale was not yet lost. In this letter, he wrote, ‘It is of course, obvious to you that, in a sense, large parts of the program of the new Institute are in effect in the field of eugenics, although not carrying this name. It is, perhaps, the case of the rose smelling as sweet under any other title.’ Indeed, even without the explicit name of eugenics, Yale continued to sustain and grant authority to notions of hierarchical biological differences. Emme and Sarah will now give you a better sense of how exactly eugenicists at Yale were both strategically distancing themselves from the overtly racist, xenophobic, settler colonial, classist, and ableist language of their earlier work, and transforming eugenics into new terms.
Emme Magliato ‘23 on her senior essay scrutinizing the Institute of Human Relations’ study of New Haven residents
“My senior research is entitled ‘Within the Walls and Outside the Gates’: Yale’s Lab for Early 20th-Century Knowledge Production in New Haven” and today, I’ll hone in on the Institute of Human Relations’ studies on New Haveners.”
“The IHR was framed to be a direct benefit to the city of New Haven, stating that the city would be ‘the first to benefit from the practical results that come out of this great experiment.’ But, they also knew that they would rely extensively on extracting data and human subjects from New Haven, making it its ‘major laboratory’ for study and knowledge production. I’m now showing an image of the IHR’s initial floor plan which contained three main wards: on the farthest left, the psychiatric clinic, the middle: psychology labs, and the back the child development clinic. Within these clinics, infants, children, and adults from New Haven and surrounding towns were seen for psychiatric evaluations, mental testing, and laboratory research to investigate issues of unemployment, delinquency, mental illness and more. The IHR included in-patient treatment facilities, which brings me to the story of Bernard Wolfe and his father.”
“On this slide, I have a black and white image of a man named Bernard Wolfe with short brown hair and a mustache and wearing a striped suit. Bernard Wolfe and his family grew up in New Haven. For 19 years, Bernard’s father worked at a factory until 1929 when the stock market crash suddenly left him without employment. In an instant, he entered an intense emotional depression. While his family struggled and fell behind on payments, they lost their family home, and Bernard watched as his father was labeled ‘psychotic.’ Wolfe understood that his father’s illness was more than within his mind: ‘if they wanted to get a full picture of his sickness they would have had to look into the sickness of American capitalism too.’ Bernard described his father’s institutionalization, stating that ‘They took him away and locked him up in Yale’s Institute of Human Relations, where they had a psychiatric division devoted to the study of interesting cases. They judged my old man to be an interesting case.’ Bernard Wolfe’s father was not the only person held within the walls of the Institute, as it was designed with residential treatment and laboratory wards for their experimental ‘guests.’
“I’m now showing a slide with a newspaper article from 1929 that reads ‘Court asks Yale to Study Slayers.’ In 1929, the Institute was charged with its first official study of human relations: a murder trial in Milford, Connecticut. The Institute examined two young brothers under the age of 10 who committed homicide to determine their potential to become ‘useful citizens’ rather than ‘confirmed degenerates or criminals.’ Were these children born to be criminals? Or, did they have the ability to conform and become productive? This binary logic resembles the categorization of the ‘fit’ and the ‘unfit’ or ‘criminal’ and ‘normal’ brains that predominated in eugenic fields of study.”
“The next slide I’m now showing is a book entitled ‘New Light on Deliquency and its Treatment: results of research conducted for the IHR at Yale.’ Without a diagnostic test for delinquency, researchers at the IHR studied proxies for delinquency to prevent what they viewed as the societal and economic burdens of delinquents. They studied 133 families in Detroit, New Haven, and Boston, conducting home visits, medical examinations, detailed interviews, and family histories. They studied the differences between two groups: the ‘delinquents’ and the ‘controls.’”
“This next slide depicts a table entitled ‘Certain Statistics Concerning Delinquents and Controls.’ It reveals the numerous examinations that the researchers conducted to try and biologize delinquency. They recorded details of their development, if they were a fussy baby, or had many illnesses as a child. They studied their family history of alcoholism, sex work, mental illness. They measured their IQs, assessed their habits, and personalities. Throughout their report, they emphasized the scientific discovery enabled by their thorough research and reinforced delinquency as a legitimate, observational, categorical term.”
“I’m now transitioning to a slide with a psychiatric examination for fitter family contests and a full examination sheet on the right. The depth and invasiveness of this study directly resembles the Fitter Family Contests that eugenicists organized around the country. “Virtually the same categories that the IHR utilized are represented here, as they detailed every possible abnormality of the body and mind. So, without ever using the word eugenics in their study, it is evident that their work relied extensively on the tools and logics of categorization, biological difference, and positioned deviance within the bodies of children rather than the societies they lived in.
“To wrap up, the knowledge that Yale produced within its walls relied on the study of social inequalities in New Haven. This work created the foundations of numerous fields and had reverberation far outside the gates -- as will be explored by Sarah.”
Sarah Laufenberg ‘23 on her senior essay analyzing the Yale Child Study Center’s eugenic origins
“Along the lines of Dora and Emme’s work, I looked at the way that eugenic logics, masquerading as “objective” and “benevolent” knowledge production, undergirded the clinical study parameters and interventions developed at the Yale Clinic of Child Development.”
“The slide I’m showing reads my thesis title, ‘How Science Studies the Child: Arnold Gesell and The Eugenic Origins of Child Development at Yale, 1911-1948.’ I narrowed in on the Clinic during the era in which it was guided and led by its founder, Arnold Gesell. On the slide, I am showing an image of Gesell, a white man, introducing some kind of stimuli to a baby seated adjacent to him at a table.”
“Gesell was the founder of the Clinic in 1911 and a truly influential figure in the field of child development – one designated the ‘father of child development’ and the namesake of a still-existing professorship of Child Psychiatry at the Yale Child Study Center.”
“At the same time, he was also a figure that held many connections to eugenics and its central figures like Henry Goddard, Lewis Terman, or Robert Yerkes (who were all involved in intelligence testing), as well as structures like the American Eugenics Society or the Institute of Human Relations. What I found through my work investigating Gesell’s publications, letters, and notes demonstrated the ways in which eugenic modes of differentiation get baked into his clinical practice.”
“In this way, creating a ‘deficient’ subject was useful in producing experimental and clinical knowledge central to the nascent field of development and for social services like education.”
“On this next slide, we can see a ‘Eugenic Map of the Village of a Thousand Souls,’ featured in a popular magazine publication in 1913, two years after the clinic began operating. It shows a series of houses, each marked with a variety of symbols- with a key indicating the labels feebleminded, insane, suicidal, alcoholic, epileptic, criminal, eccentric, and tubercular. Social disorder was thus visually classified and positioned in individual communities and bodies.”
“The middle bottom building is actually a schoolhouse that reads ‘2% of pupils are feebleminded.’ Gesell had ‘charitable’ inclinations to provide special education, services, & intervention — which demonstrates how eugenics branded itself as a moral ideology and benevolent set of practices.”
“He also has a chart mapping out the lineage of the one and only Johnathon Edwards, a namesake at one of our residential colleges, for his particularly ‘proper’ genes & characteristics. This slide is meant to show how he goes from these early (more condemnable) visual understandings of eugenics to / now how they were embedded in his clinical practice, logics, & technologies.”
“On this slide, we can see an image of the ‘Photographic dome with Gesell and baby’ from 1947. This photo eerily captures the nature of observation and spectacle in Gesell’s clinic. His precise observational model of studying infants justified their results as being ‘neutral’ and objectively discerned they actively cultivated norms of behavior, social background, and personality that excluded so many people. Technologies like the photographic dome facilitated active processes of observation enacted by child study researchers onto their infant subjects.”
“This slide shows categories of documentation, much like how Emme showed us, of perceived characteristics, qualities, and conditions quote-on-quote observed at the clinic. These categories are not the smoking gun of letters to Hitler from Professor Hosang’s earlier examples. Instead, these categories of differentiation demonstrate eugenics transformation into an embedded ideology that shapes research methodologies and how we conceive of what to do with human difference.”
“Considering how knowledge production in Gesell’s Clinic reflected knowledge production at the IHR and the University at large, it is necessary to interrogate how logics of eugenics are reproduced in tools of clinical observation, intelligence testing, and other aspects of the field of child development. Once you see this framework and these origins, you begin to see how eugenic logics inform and structure ways of seeing people, their value, and their qualities.”
In their closing remarks, Dora, Emme, and Sarah stressed that much of the history they found in the University’s archives has not been written about. Gesell is largely remembered as the Father of Child Development and the IHR within which he worked is praised still for its advancements in social medicine. They showed a Google Street view of the Sterling Hall of Medicine, located at 333 Cedar St. and explained that today, Yale medical school students, undergraduates who work at the labs, and local New Haven residents who are enrolled in clinical trials pass through the former Institute of Human Relations each day. Unbeknownst to nearly everyone who walks by is the significance of the names carved into the sides of the building and molded into its beautiful, iron gateways. “The history of eugenics is everywhere,” they said, “and it’s hidden in plain sight.”
Group of students, educators, collaborators, and community members gathered on May 1st to hear about the senior thesis research of Emme Magliato, Sarah Laufenberg, and Dora Guo.
View the recording of the symposium here. Read Dora, Emme, and Sarah’s theses here.
If you missed the symposium, but want to stay up to date with the work of the AECY, continue checking out this blog and the rest of the pages of our website, which are being updated regularly.