Boxes of old family photos, letters, and other memorabilia have been sitting in my attic for the past 40 years. I retired recently, and I decided it was finally time to sort through them all. I count everyone from farmers to financiers to physicists and more than one ne’er-do-well among my ancestors, who date back to the early 18th century in America. My sorting has acquainted me with many of them, including a grandfather who wrote a series of letters to his wife, Ruby, in the early 20th century.
He was a professor of animal husbandry at the University of Illinois, but I learned that he had supplemented his meager faculty salary by judging livestock at state fairs across the Midwest. But in one letter I came across something very strange: Animals weren’t the only creatures my grandfather judged.
Advertisement
In a letter to Ruby in 1916, he wrote, “Over 90 babies entered the contest. . . . The best baby was the finest youngster I ever saw — she scored 100! Wish I could have kept her.” Baby contests, it turns out, were common fare at state and county fairs in the 1920s.
Of course, pageants to judge the beauty of children are still alive and well today, though they have come under fire for everything from racism to the hypersexualization of children. What is less well known is that the predecessors of such pageants were the so-called “better baby contests” my grandfather judged and, after 1920, what became the movement for “fitter families.”
Ostensibly, these better baby contests, which involved parents parading their children in front of judges, weren’t just beauty pageants but were designed to evaluate children’s health and educate parents about improving their offspring’s welfare. Babies were carefully examined for height, weight, mental capacity, and blemishes or defects, and scored on how closely they conformed to the “average” for children of their own age — averages that had been arrived at by life insurance companies. This is what my grandfather was referring to when he reported that his favorite had “scored 100.”
Advertisement
By 1913, the widely circulated Women’s Home Companion magazine was sponsoring such competitions at fairs throughout the country with high concentration in farming communities. Women’s Home Companion felt entirely comfortable assuring parents that their children would be examined and scored “in precisely the same way as a judge of experience in livestock scores cattle, horses and hogs,” using “a system of scoring which has been reduced to a science — that of livestock.” Who then could be more qualified to serve as a judge of babies’ health and appeal than my grandfather, a professor of animal husbandry at a noted Midwestern university?
But whether my grandfather knew it or not, there was a less salubrious motivation for better baby contests. Between 1880 and 1920 the number of foreign-born residents doubled in the United States. By 1920, recent immigrants made up nearly 40 percent of the workforce. Farming communities were considered bulwarks for preserving white Anglo-Saxon American-born stock. As historian Alexandria Minna Stern observed in her study of baby contests in Indiana, “by excluding African American children, the contests . . . promoted the idea that only White babies could achieve perfection.”
In fact, these contests were often aligned with, if not sponsored by, organizations such as the American Eugenics Society and the Ku Klux Klan. The contests’ connections to the preservation of a “pure race” became even more explicit with the evolution of better baby tournaments into “Fitter Family for Future Firesides” contests, the first of which was held in 1920 at the Kansas state Free Fair in Topeka. Organized by two child specialists, Mary Watts and Florence Sherbon, both eugenicists, the fitter family contests’ mission was “the stimulation of a feeling of family and racial consciousness and responsibility.” It is self-evident which race they were thinking of.
Advertisement
Like the better baby contests, fitter family competitions were unapologetic in analogizing their work to all things agricultural. As the Kansas Bureau of Child Research put it, “The Fitter Families Project . . . is the application of the principles of scientific plant and animal husbandry to the next higher order of creation, the human family, and contemplates the development of a science of practical human husbandry.” Much of the statistical information gathered in the project’s competitions was forwarded to the research arm of the American Eugenics Society. By the late 1920s, Sherbon was collaborating with John Harvey Kellogg of cereal fame to hold fitter family contests in Battle Creek, Mich., and elsewhere, funded by his Race Betterment Foundation, a vehicle for promoting “racial hygiene” and discouraging “race degeneracy.”
Gradually, baby contests grew less popular, but in their time they revealed how much Americans idealized the rural family, an obsession that hasn’t entirely faded with modernity. More important, they reflected an ugly strain of xenophobia and racism that still echoes uncomfortably today.
Advertisement
William F. Schulz is the former executive director of Amnesty International USA and author of “Reversing the Rivers: A Memoir of Hope, History and Human Rights.”