1935 Eugenics Exhibit Popular, Press Talked around its Origin

Completely unrelated research turned up this dismaying episode of enthusiasm for eugenics right here in Salem in the late winter and early spring of 1935. Even though sterilization laws remained on the books and active for decades, it had seemed like general interest had diminished some after the 19-teens and twenties, with Bethenia Owens-Adair's death in 1926, but this was not in fact the case.

February 12th, 1935

The Marion County Health Officer had arranged for a German exhibit on eugenics to be displayed at the YMCA.

February 10th, 1935

The early press says the exhibit was "famous," and only that it was from Dresden, from the Deutsches Hygiene Museum.

Willamette Professor S. B. Laughlin and the Rector of St. Paul's Episcopal, Rev. George Swift, endorsed it.

February 24th, 1935

After a couple of weeks it was so popular that it was moved to the Capitol. 

The morning paper said

The Germans are showing the way to racial improvement through the recognition of hereditary defects from one generation to another...within a short time there will be racial improvement and fewer defectives to be cared for at public expense.

March 1st, 1935

It wasn't until the fourth week that anyone at either paper bothered to mention who was in power in Germany at that time, though they were careful to deny a significant connection, saying the exhibit was "not pro-nazi propaganda."

March 5th, 1935

This is not possible to believe. It totally was Nazi propaganda!

Scholars agree. After finding most of the clips for this post, a secondary source turned up and its authors had already reviewed and commented on most of the material in the newspapers. The paper's title is quite clear: "The Nazi Eugenics Exhibit." (They also located it in Republican politics of resistance to the New Deal.)

Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency
and American Mass Culture in the 1930s

A library at Case Western has photos of the same exhibit from a show in Pasadena in 1934. "The Nazi Eugenics Exhibit" suggests some panels/posters/models may have been lost and some cities may have shown a subset only. So the Pasadena show is very similar, with many of the same materials, but is not likely wholly identical. In particular, the "celluloid models" do not seem present in the Pasadena photos. Nevertheless, the Pasadena slides show typical Nazi themes in a cheerful and polite frame. It's propaganda.

It is reasonable to expect the press in Salem to have been more critical of the exhibit. In 1934 and very early 1935, leading up to and at the same time as the exhibit, there is clear talk about the Nazis. Significantly, the afternoon paper was more critical than the morning paper.

January 12th, 1934

The afternoon paper in particular editorialized on home-grown fascism and Nazi propaganda.

July 30th, 1934 and February 15th, 1935

And they reported on Antisemitism.

January 12th, 1935

It was a failure in our local press not to question the exhibit more.

A Salem headline a couple of days after the denial of "pro-nazi" bias shifted the frame from the pseudo-scientific "hygiene" to race outright.

March 7th, 1935

It was still popular and part of it was shown in the High School. At that time they estimated 6000 people had viewed it.

March 12th, 1935

A year later, the Willamette Prof S. B. Laughlin quoted in several of the pieces caused a ruckus with a controversial eugenics proposal and we'll return to that sequel in another post.

The exhibit was a big deal, and we've scrubbed it right out of our history. The erasure may have started immediately, as later in 1935 and in 1936 there does not seem to be lingering discussion of or reference to the exhibit. The Laughlin controversy of 1936 does not reference the exhibit, for example. Still, any afterlife of the exhibit is worth a closer look and perhaps that also will furnish another post.

In any case, there's a real pattern here, both by the press and by the citizenry, of avoiding the elephant in the room, the questions posed by the Nazi origins of the exhibit. Salemites didn't seem troubled or even just interested enough to ask.