Poverty, Sterilization, and Eugenics in Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road

Abstract

Two primary manifestations of the eugenics movement in America were the involuntary sterilization of certain classes of people, including the mentally ill and disabled and some types of criminals, and the “family study,” genealogical reports that traced criminal behavior, immorality, and mental problems throughout family trees to determine whether the characteristics are inheritable. Both family studies and sterilization proved to be important fodder for American literary authors, who made significant use of the rhetoric of family and propagation. Erskine Caldwell's Tobacco Road is particularly interesting to read with eugenics in mind, for the 1932 novel is intrinsically bound up with issues of breeding, heredity, and degeneration. Caldwell's text, which he characterized as literary realism, relies not only on the genre of family study in general but more particularly on a study conducted by Caldwell's father in 1928 and published two years later in the journal Eugenics; Ira Caldwell had attempted to rescue a poor white family from what he saw as the conditions of their ongoing degeneracy but was rejected completely by the family, leading to his renunciation of many of his social reform ideals in favor of sterilization programs. Erskine Caldwell drew heavily on his father's failed attempt at reform, and Tobacco Road ultimately argues for the sterilization of Georgia's poor whites, but with the pessimistic caveat that the problems of degeneracy and rural poverty have no final solution. Caldwell's manipulation of his audience, his observation of his father's eugenics experimentation, and his use of extended metaphors, both mechanical and agricultural, for family all create a deeply cynical novel that condemns America's economic modus operandi for the living conditions of the poor but also condemns those poor as being permanently beyond help. In the end, Caldwell argues that the poor – in both money and breeding – will be always with us and that we are doomed to witness the full horror of their degradation without the possibility of either relieving their plight or eradicating them.