Better Babies, Bitter Legacy
Fairground eugenics meets MAGA’s “Make Fertility Great Again” playbook
Meet William Charles Flynn: three-year-old, hands on hips, radiating “model child” confidence. He was a pint-sized poster boy for America’s ‘perfect baby’ craze.
But he wasn’t just cute—he was a eugenic trophy.
Behind Flynn’s portrait lies a darker story. He was a winner of a Better Baby Contest, a popular event sweeping America in the early 1900s, ostensibly aimed at improving child health but deeply entangled with the rising eugenics movement.
Scorecards & Skull Calipers
Flynn, described as one of the “100-point children,” was matched romantically - by eager parents hoping to cultivate what they termed a “eugenic marriage” - with Alene Houck, another high-scoring contest winner.
The matchmaking wasn’t parental whimsy; it was a public demonstration that the nation’s next generation could (and should) be selectively bred.
Beginning in 1908, “Better Baby” booths popped up at state fairs from Louisiana to Nebraska. Cheerful banners promised healthier children; behind the bunting, doctors weighed, measured, and ranked infants like prize cattle.
The flyers were all cherub cheeks and pastel bunting - pure state fair charm. But the real prize wasn’t a blue ribbon; it was a purified and whiter America
In contests like these, babies were meticulously measured with calipers, weighed, and examined by doctors and community leaders. Standardized scorecards determined each infant’s worth, reducing kids to scores and rankings.
Companies quickly capitalized on the craze, aligning their products with idealized perfection.
Borden’s Eagle Brand Milk vowed to produce contest-ready offspring, turning grocery aisles into genetic upgrade aisles.
Marketing became intertwined with pseudo-science, embedding eugenic principles into consumer culture.
Woman’s Home Companion (picture Good Housekeeping with a measuring tape) ran glowing spreads on how to raise a “100-point baby.” Skull circumference? Check. Reflex test? Check. Mail in your toddler’s stats and discover your family’s spot on the social ladder.
Then came the Better Babies Bureau, birthed by the lady-mag empire, draped in white coat authority. It packaged eugenics as wholesome parenting: “For healthier communities, improve the gene pool—starting in your nursery.” Suddenly, clipping coupons for condensed milk felt like civic duty.
By the next county fair, public health pep talk and racial hygiene shared the same pavilion. The contests hard wired the notion that America could curate its citizens like prize livestock … only cuter.
Designer Babies, 1910 Edition
At first glance, Better Baby Contests looked like wholesome county-fair fun: ribbons, lullabies, and chubby-cheeked trophies. Under the bunting, though, lurked a harsh scoreboard: America’s future was to be “managed” in the cradle, sorting families into fit and unfit like prime stock and culls.
One chilling infographic from the era (think marriage advice meets cattle registry) pair Pure with Pure and you get “healthy stock,” mix in a “tainted line” and expect “degenerate offspring.” Translation: society’s patriotic duty was to lock certain unions out of the gene pool.
Eugenic boosters even asked why farmers tracked pedigrees for hogs yet let humans breed “blindly.” Better Baby contests became their gateway showroom with slick, “scientific,” and perfectly packaged to sell selective breeding as common sense.
The Race Betterment Pavilion, a lavish exhibit from the Panama-Pacific International Exposition of 1915, further illustrates how widely eugenics was embraced. Here, visitors encountered displays that framed eugenics as a “non-sectarian,” scientifically rigorous means to improve humanity.
Staged amid the World’s-Fair glitz, the pavilion sold gene-policing as everyday civic housekeeping—chlorinate the water, pasteurize the milk, purify the bloodline.
Eugenic pitchmen claimed every social headache - poverty, “feeblemindedness,” crime, your uncle’s drinking problem - was encoded in DNA. Weed out the “inferior” lines, pair off only “approved” stock, and the nation would soon be blemish free.
Better Baby booths put that fantasy on parade. Weigh a toddler, click a caliper, hand Mom a scorecard, and hint that the nation’s grand upgrade starts right there in her stroller.
Their showpiece diagram—the sprawling “Eugenics Tree”—rooted itself in biology, medicine, psychology, even civics, then crowed “self-directed human evolution” across the branches.
Slather enough Latin on the bark and the whole scam looked peer-reviewed.
Those county-fair weigh-ins weren’t harmless sideshows; they were Trojan horses. By framing selective breeding as everyday childcare, eugenicists snuck a lab-built caste system into American living rooms and called it common sense.
From Fairgrounds to Forced Sterilization
The Better Baby Contests of the early 1900s laid the groundwork for broader public acceptance of eugenics - shaping societal attitudes that directly influenced two particularly grim chapters in American history: forced sterilization and immigration restrictions.
By the 1920s the baby pageant had rebranded itself as the “Fitter Family” contest. Fairgoers crowded around carnival bright dashboards where blinking bulbs tallied society’s “genetic deficits” in real time. Think of a Times Square ticker, but for “human liabilities.”
Exhibits declared exactly how many tax dollars and asylum beds an “imbecile” would drain over a lifetime, pitching forced sterility as fiscal prudence.
Wrapped in these numbers bigotry now posed as sensible bookkeeping.
The eugenic crusade hit its high-water mark in 1927 when the Supreme Court blessed compulsory sterilization in Buck v. Bell. Carrie Buck—an orphaned teenager and rape survivor—was branded “feebleminded” by dime-store IQ tests and paraded as Exhibit A for snipping “defective” bloodlines. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes sealed her fate …
“Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” ~ Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (Buck v. Bell)
That verdict leaned on a tidy pedigree chart - part family tree, part biohazard symbol - that stamped Carrie, her mother Emma, and baby Vivian with big, black Fs for “feebleminded.” With that graphic “proof,” the state framed her sterilization as routine civic housekeeping.
The assembly lines of forced surgery slowed by the late 1970s, yet the logic never went extinct. Coerced sterilizations have resurfaced in ICE detention centers, women’s prisons, and other dark corners of the 21st century.
Eugenics didn’t clock out when the nursery lights dimmed. Congress simply packed its calipers and headed for the docks. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act took the same purity math that weighed baby skulls and applied it to passports, red-lining the arrivals hall so America’s complexion could be “restored.”
Polite committee reports called the targets “southern and eastern Europeans.” Translated into modern Trump-speak: the original “shithole countries.”
Sidebar — Timing Is Everything: All four of my Greek grandparents hustled through Ellis Island in the 1910s - when Uncle Sam was still rubber stamping visas for about 15,000 Greeks a year.
Come 1924, Johnson-Reed slammed that door to a stingy 100 Greeks per year. Good thing Papou and Yiayia didn’t wait.
“The Only Way to Handle It,” shows a desperate Uncle Sam closing a floodgate against a tidal wave of newcomers - immigrants rendered as an unruly deluge, equal parts menace and muck. The message is blunt: throttle the flow, protect the “reservoir.”
That mindset bled straight into the Johnson-Reed quotas, where eugenic math turned visas into selective breeding slips. National purity, the lawmakers argued, was just good plumbing: keep the gene pool clean by filtering out the “undesirable stock.”
Eugenic boosters didn’t have to invent new fears; they just re-labeled the old ones. Immigrants were sketched as walking petri dishes, like ragged anarchists lugging poverty, disease, and “degenerate morals” in their steamer trunks. Call them bio-hazards and slashing visas becomes “public hygiene,” not naked xenophobia.
The county-fair Better Baby sideshows greased the gears. By teaching Americans to grade toddlers like prize calves, the contests made body ranking feel wholesome. Once the public swallowed that, Congress could swap “baby contests” for quotas and sterilization statutes.
Contemporary Echoes – Population Engineering Reborn
Eugenics didn’t pack up with the county-fair tents; it just swapped the midway for think tank whitepapers and primetime talking points. The core mission is unchanged: massage the birth ledger so tomorrow’s electorate looks, prays, and votes the “right” way.
Yesterday it was skull calipers and pedigree charts; today it’s baby-bonus tax credits for “traditional” families, dragnet deportations, and bills that police wombs while banning gender affirming care.
Different tools, same blueprint: shape the nation by deciding who gets to multiply and who gets marched to the margins.
In the 1920s midway, eugenic exhibits warned fair-goers that “undesirable stock” would swamp the nation’s bloodline. A century later, the same fear, rebranded as “Great Replacement,” scrolls across cable news chyrons and campaign emails. The script hasn’t changed: falling White Christian birthrates are cast as an existential emergency, while immigrants and minorities become the looming “demographic threat.”
To “fix” that phantom peril, today’s MAGA toolbox looks eerily familiar. Baby bonus tax credits and “motherhood medals” reward the preferred crowd, while dragnet deportations and voter purge drives blunt the influence of everyone else.
Model bills in statehouses and Project 2025 spreadsheets dangle property tax holidays and cash stipends for big, “traditional” broods, even as the same lawmakers push abortion bans and muzzle classroom talk on race or gender.
Same blueprint as the old midway: engineer the population: one subsidized crib and one barred ballot at a time.
These blue-ribbon family contests didn’t vanish with the midway lights; they sketched the blueprint for today’s politics that canonize one “proper” household (white, straight, church-going) and cast every other family form as social clutter. Elevating that narrow mold lets would-be authoritarians preach demographic unity and racial homogeneity without ever saying the word purity.
Fast-forward a century: the fairground stage is now a curated Instagram feed.
The MAGA movement’s new pronatalist streak springs vividly to life in the saga of (former MTV reality star) turned Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, whose Insta-ready clan of nine children is marketed as proof that “making fertility great again” is both patriotic and personally fulfilling.
Duffy and his #FoxNewHost wife showcase pancake breakfasts and camp photos on television and podcasts while preaching that true success and national renewal come from large, traditional families.
From White House photos captioned “Making Fertility Great Again” to a department memo that steers transportation dollars toward regions with higher marriage and birthrates, the Duffys translate Trump-era culture-war rhetoric into concrete policy and lifestyle coaching, even floating baby-bonus payments and urging women to “snatch up” a husband rather than chase careers.
In this worldview, the left’s latte-sipping “childless cat ladies” are cast as unhappy, while conservative parents become the saviors of America in an image driven, state sanctioned call to repopulate the republic.
MAGA repackages an old idea: control who’s born, who belongs, and identify who contaminates the national cradle.
Demography: The Strongman’s Secret Weapon
Better Baby Contests taught America to cheer selective breeding; Buck v. Bell proved the state would wield the scalpel. Today’s pro-baby slogans and anti-immigrant crusades parrot the old message - but with slicker branding. History’s quiet warning: the distance between measuring a toddler and policing a migrant is shorter than you think.
Posters once trumpeted “healthy nations” by picturing who didn’t make the cut - Jews, Roma, Catholics, the whole “unfit” roll call. Today’s euphemism is “demographic preservation,” but the math is the same: keep the gene pool pure by draining out anyone stamped genetically, culturally, or religiously off-brand.
Authoritarian copywriters haven’t updated their playbook in a century. Strongmen still preach that immigrants, non-Christians, and LGBTQ+ folks pose an existential threat to the homeland. Now mass deportations and reproductive crackdowns become “patriotic hygiene.”
Government prizes for extra Aryan babies then; tax credits and campus fertility drives for “approved” parents now. Meanwhile, hard-right parties flirt with “re-migration” schemes. That’s code for bussing the wrong bodies to the border and revoking their paperwork on the way out. Same demographic engineering, new branding, identical threat to democracy.
Pulling the Plug on Purity Politics
Toddlers once queued like prize hogs while judges crowned the “best breed.” Pinning blue ribbons on bloodlines was a sprint toward America’s darker chapters.
The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act followed that logic, choking immigration from “undesirable” nations to restore a whiter, “Nordic” mix. Swap scorecards for spreadsheets and you get today’s sequel: Project 2025 raids, school zone sweeps, and deportation buses. All pitched as “making America safe” by scrubbing the cradle.
Zero tolerance family separations drove the point home: brown toddlers as contraband, borders as bio filters.
Yesterday’s purity patrol wielded tape measures; today’s brandishes policy memos. Name the project for what it is: state-sponsored bloodline management. Shut it down before citizenship itself becomes an inherited privilege.
This entire history with contemporary upgrade is stomach-churning. Thank you for this.
"part family tree, part biohazard symbol"
OOF.
Thanks for this, Peter. Can you tell me where the photo of the "Race Betterment" pavilion was taken? The link to the American Experience program has the photo but no caption.
What a revolting/fascinating thing. Would love to see the place it it still exists, even without any trace of the subject.