At its heart every State Fair is a celebration of mankind’s
control of nature. Proud farmers from across the state come to Indianapolis
with the best of their hybrid crops and selectively bread flocks, judges tally
up pluses and minuses based on how well each conforms to established breed
standards, and ribbons and prizes are awarded for the best representatives in
each category from cabbage to cattle. It’s a tradition that’s nearly as old as
agriculture itself – pride and competitiveness paired with a festival on the
downhill side of the growing season and I enjoy digging through the records of
the past to bring up little quirks and interesting tidbits. Unfortunately, not
every aspect of the Indiana State Fair’s history is quaint, bright, and
nostalgic. Our American past is troubled and murky, and as a people we've
stumbled in the darkness of ignorance as often as we've stood tall in the
sunlight. I end this year’s fair season with a post about a shadowy facet of
the Indiana State Fair, one that combines advances in healthcare with the
ignorance of bigotry and pseudoscience.
In the early 20th century a growing awareness of
the importance of the health of mothers and babies swept across Indiana and in
1920 this new wave of awareness manifested in the form of a new competition at the
Indiana State Fair. I’ll admit, when I first saw pictures of the Better Baby Contest I thought that’d I’d
be writing a comic piece. Frankly, the thought of mothers and fathers
displaying their offspring for a panel of judges in an attempt to win a blue
ribbon and cash prize sounded like fodder for a mocumentary or maybe one of
those child beauty contests that plague reality television.
But the Better Baby
Contest was a symptom of something more sinister. Yes, it marked a shift in
the understanding of the nature of childhood and motherhood, but it also embodied
an attempt legislate the sort of selective breeding that had to that point only
been seen in raising livestock on the human population. Eugenics sought to “strengthen” humanity by restricting and
controlling procreation. It sorted people based on measures of genetic
worthiness and desirability. The poor, mentally ill, blind, deaf,
developmentally challenged were deemed “defective” and a danger to the strength
and purity of mankind. Likewise women deemed promiscuous, homosexuals, and
non-whites were identified as “degenerate” and, therefore potentially dangerous
to the health of the nation’s population as a whole. Under the guise of racial
improvement governments put in place policies of segregation, institutionalization,
sterilization, and even euthanasia.
In Indiana the eugenics movement took the guise of a drive
for better Hoosier children and a direct outgrowth of this was the Better Babies Contest held at the
Indiana State Fair from 1920 through its discontinuation in 1932. Parents from every
county in the state brought their children to the Better Baby Pavilion located
on what is now the western end of the Fairground’s Main Street where they would
be would be weighed, measured, and tested by physicians and psychologists
affiliated with the State Board of Health's Division of Infant and Child
Hygiene.
At the forefront of Indiana’s better babies program was Dr.
Ada E. Schweitzer, a rare feminine presence in the medical profession who
worked tirelessly and in the course of just over a decade constructed a nationally
recognized health agency which promoted the application scientific methods and
modern medicine to motherhood and child rearing. By 1907 Indiana enacted its
own Pure Food and Drug act as well as a Vital Statistics act requiring accurate
birth and death records. The dark side of the movement showed through and that
same year Indiana put in place the country's first eugenic sterilization law. By
1915 The American Medical Association (AMA) ranked the Indiana State Board of Health
sixth in the nation and it seemed there would be no stopping her Division of
Infant and Child Hygiene.
The Better Babies
Contest acquainted Hoosiers with the current opinions of child specialists,
reinforced pediatric norms, and gave university-trained experts a sort of
unquestionable authority in all matters pertaining to the biology, physiology,
and psychology of children. The introduction of sponsorship into the contest
helped connect consumerism with motherhood and childhood and Indiana businesses
such as the Hoosier Fence Company and the Weber Milk Company became Better Babies Contest sponsors. The
contest excluded African American children, reinforcing segregation in Indiana
and promoting the idea only white babies could achieve perfection. Schweitzer herself
declared the contest “a school of education in eugenics”, promoting racial intolerance
and prejudice while purportedly seeking the betterment of Hoosier children.
It’s important to state that though immensely popular; the Better Babies Contest isn't a product of
Indiana. The first contest was held at the Iowa State Fair in 1911 with Mary T. Watts’ question to Iowans, “You are raising better cattle, better
horses, and better hogs, why don't you raise better babies?” Watts used the
model applied to livestock to judge superior infants, developing scorecards which
tallied physical health, anthropometric traits, and mental development. Soon after
Woman's Home Companion magazine embarked
a better baby campaign of its own, sending an editor to promote the contests in
Colorado. By 1914 the contests had become a fad and Woman's Home Companion proudly proclaimed that the existence of
contests in every state (except West Virginia, New Hampshire, and Utah) and the
examination of more than 100,000 children a laudable mark of progress.
In Indiana Children’s Bureau workers took part in
organizing, officiating, and facilitating the Better Babies Contest joining with the AMA to standardize a scoring
system acceptable to the pediatric establishment. This collaboration led to alternative
children's health conferences, which conformed to the credo and flawed
assumptions of the contest but lacked the competitiveness. Still, by the
mid-1920's, Schweitzer went on the radio airwaves and in magazine articles
promoting Better Babies Contests as a
means for establishing a yardstick for childhood heath standards against which
parents could compare their own children. She promoted the eugenic theme that
race betterment (referring to the white race only, of course) depended on
restricting the right to bear children to only the fittest and “protecting”
genetic health through marriage and sterilization laws. Chillingly she stated, “You
cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, neither can we make a citizen out
of an idiot or any person who is not well born.”
I’d love to say that this contest met its end when its inherent
racism and classism were recognized for what they were and that the good and
honest people of Indiana rejected the tenants of eugenics, but I can’t. To be
honest, the last Better Babies Contest held
in 1932 was wildly popular. Its end came at the hands of the sexism of a
medical establishment which could not tolerate the predominately female Indiana
Children’s Bureau and the financial strictures of the Great Depression. The
bureau ultimately was disbanded and its chief architects run out of healthcare.
Indiana’s eugenic-driven sterilization laws would remain in place until 1974 when it was struck down by Governor Otis Bowen. The last concrete legacy of
the contest is the two pavilions constructed to accommodate judging and a plaque
on the statehouse lawn commemorating the end of the Sterilization Act.
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