Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were
the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the
mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family
study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality,
and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the
characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved
to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made
significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine
Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in
mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding,
heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as
literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but
more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and
published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had
attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the
conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by
the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals
in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his
father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for
the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat
that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution.
Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's
eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both
mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel
that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions
of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond
help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and
breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the
full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving
their plight or eradicating them.
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