Franklin H. Giddings on Race and Eugenics: A Note

"There is one aspect, however, where Giddings found himself aligned with many leading progressives of his time, and this is what most concerns us here. With people like Richard T. Ely, John R. Commons, Henry R. Seager, William Z. Ripley, just to name a few, Giddings shared a firm commitment to eugenics, scientific racism, and race-conscious imperialism—a biologically rooted impetus which Thomas Leonard (2016) has placed at the core of Progressive Era reform agenda, and which was particularly strong among the most sociologically inclined figures of the period. In the Principles of Sociology, for instance, Giddings described and classified races, physically and mentally, into natural hierarchies, combining biological “evidence” of racial inferiority with a focus on upward social mobility. Giddings’s support of eugenics and hereditarianism was equally explicit. In this connection, suffice it to say that from 1923 to 1930 he served as a charter member of the advisory council for the American Eugenics Society. These biologically deterministic elements in Giddings’s thought have received only passing attention in the literature (see for instance Williams 1989; Degler 1991; Wallace 1992; and Bonilla-Silva and Baiocchi 2007), and even Leonard, in his acclaimed analysis of the eugenic foundations of progressivism, mentions the name of Giddings only once. The aim of this note is to fill this gap and to present a more systematic discussion of Giddings views on race, immigration, eugenics, and American imperialism, and how these views evolved over time. What follows adds to our general understanding of the extent to which racial and eugenic considerations permeated American social thought during the first decades of the last century and how, in the specific case of Giddings, this influence found expression in an inherently ambiguous and often contradictory fashion."