Search results for " Thomas N"
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Eugenics and American Economics in the Interwar Years: The Case of Thomas Nixon Carver
2017
The aim of this paper is to explore in some detail Carver’s eugenic ideas with a main, albeit non-exclusive, focus on the interwar years. Although his major contributions had all appeared prior to 1918, Carver remained particularly productive throughout the 1920s and 1930s, publishing several articles and eight books, which include The Principles of National Economy (1921), and The Essential Factors of Social Evolution (1935)—two works which contain significant traces of eugenic reasoning. Just as important, Carver’s interwar activities were not limited to academia. After his retirement from Harvard in 1932 he became involved in the activities of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, while i…
SOCIAL STRATIFICATION, HEREDITARIANISM, AND EUGENICS. A HARVARD TALE
2019
This chapter documents how eugenics, scientific racism, and hereditarianism survived at Harvard well into the interwar years. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Thomas Nixon Carver and Frank W. Taussig published works in which they established a close nexus between an individual’s economic position and his biological fitness. Carver, writing in 1929, argued that social class rigidities are attributable to the inheritance of superior and inferior abilities on the respective social class levels and proposed an “economic test of fitness” as a eugenic criterion to distinguish worthy from unworthy individuals. In 1932, Taussig, together with Carl Smith Joslyn, published American Business Leaders…