Description
Book SynopsisIn Eugenic Design, Christina Cogdell charts new territory in the history of industrial design, popular science, and American culture in the 1930s by uncovering the links between streamline design and eugenics, the pseudoscientific belief that the best human traits could-and should-be cultivated through selective breeding.
Trade Review"Engaging, thoughtfully researched, and well written." *
Journal of Social History *
"Cogdell does much to advance our understanding of an anomalous 1930s aesthetic that has befuddled several generations of the best design historians. Her thesis is provocative, her writing is well paced, and her argument is convincing." *
Journal of American History *
"An ambitious attempt to link the professionalization of industrial design with the popular eugenics movement of the 1930s. . . . A bold and truly original thesis." *
Technology and Culture *
"This highly original, well written, carefully crafted, and vigorously argued volume is a notable addition to American intellectual and cultural history." *
Enterprise and Society *
"A significant contribution to the field of cultural history broadly defined. Cogdell's argument is compelling, and the evidence makes a strong case for linking an important modernist artistic movement with an important-and nefarious-scientific doctrine. This book will be widely read and discussed." * Robert W. Rydell, author of
World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions *
"Christina Cogdell provocatively locates the ideology of streamlining in the popular eugenics movement of the 1930s. Tracing complex connections between personal philosophies of industrial designers and the visual rhetoric of their public design work, her cultural reading of design situates it dramatically at the intersection of science, technology, and popular culture. This book could well revolutionize the field of design history." * Jeffrey Meikle, author of
Twentieth-Century Limited: Industrial Design in America, 1925-1939 *
Table of Contents1. Introduction: Controlling evolution
2. Products or bodies? Streamline design and eugenics as applied biology
3. Progenitors of the future: Popularizing streamlining and eugenics during the 1930s
4. "Flow is the word": Biological efficiency and streamline design
5. Race hygiene, product hygiene: Curing disease through sterilization
6. Future perfect? The elusive "ideal type"
7. Conclusion: Pseudoscience? Pseudostyle?
