Life, Political Community, and the Construction of Citizenship, 1877-1927

Abstract

In the wake of the Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, the United States found itself presented with a critical task: the reconstruction of the nation. Taking place from 1865 to 1877, Reconstruction constituted nothing less than a radical remaking of the nation. As historians have noted, however, the post-Reconstruction Era was marked by a massive reactionary wave against the gains of the non-white populations in the United States. The same period saw the proliferation of the life sciences (medicine, public health, and biology) as meaningful institutions in the United States and the emergence of scientific projects dedicated to the exploration of “difference”, such as race science and eugenics. While historians of Reconstruction and historians of science have noted the connections between the projects of race science and eugenics and the justification of reactionary white supremacist movements, few have attempted to explicitly connect the two movements. In this dissertation, I attempt such a connection, by exploring how one major frontier in the remaking of the nation—the understanding of the category of “national citizen”—increasingly depended on the language of the life sciences. I term this the “biologization of citizenship”, which refers to the processes through which the everyday understandings of citizenship prevalent in multiple dimensions of American life increasingly relied on ideas of biological difference, genealogy, and blood to establish a basis for determining access to rights and for establishing the ideological foundation of who “counted” as American. I explore the transforming understanding of the category of citizen via an exploration of American culture—focusing on different spaces of American culture and tracing the articulation of senses of self and community prevalent in them. Ultimately, I argue that the life sciences proved critical to the making of a national culture of citizenship in the United States, and that this deep entanglement has continually haunted the animations for freedom and equity that have unfolded in the wake of the Civil War. In doing so, it integrates the history of reconstruction more thoroughly with the history of eugenics and offers a new methodology for analyzing the presence of science in everyday life.