ABSTRACT
Christa Holm Vogelius reads reformer Jacob Riis’s Children of the Poor (1892) in relation to botanist Luther Burbank’s parenting manual The Training of the Human Plant (1907), attending to their theories of heredity and species evolution. She argues that both thinkers believed that changing the environments in which children developed could change populations across generations, but they did not extend this belief to all child bodies. Vogelius coins the term “multiculturalist eugenics” to describe their biopolitical agenda to create a stronger national population by reforming and incorporating immigrant children of diverse ethnic origins. Significantly, Vogelius points out that children with disabilities were excluded from their reform, because they were perceived to be “outside of the purview of ‘training’ or adaptability.” She explains that their “omission as a category—or even, arguably, a race—was part of what allowed for the apparently progressive vision of a multiethnic nation.” Riis’s and Burbank’s promotion of the particular biological advantages of different ethnicities along with their exclusion of disabled children from their reform efforts prefigured and contributed to early twentieth century programs and policies aimed at eliminating certain bodies from the national population altogether.
