Strong State, Weak Links: Eugenics and the Southern Politics of Welfare with Anna Krome-Lukens (UNC Press, 2026)

Yeah, I think this is one of the first challenges that people face when they're working on this kind of topic.

The terminology is offensive, but also so many of the images or beliefs or approaches of the history of medicine in the early 20th century also are problematic or strike most people today as problematic.

And I think one challenge there is not letting those problematic depictions drive your own analysis, that you really have to be reading those sources, you know, against the grain, as we say.

And there's another challenge, I think, that maybe is the inverse of what I've just described, that I found myself developing a little bit of a cynical attitude about everything I read.

I was reading so much bad stuff that I sometimes found myself reading.

seeing elements of social control or discriminatory beliefs in reform efforts that were certainly more innocuous than explicitly eugenics efforts.

And I'd have to remind myself that perhaps I was becoming jaded.

So I think for me, Part of the challenge was finding where the right line was between those two ends of the spectrum.

And that also required historicizing the sources, you know, putting them within the context of their own time.

I don't find it particularly helpful to just say that's offensive and wrong.

I think we learn much more when we think about why are people using this terminology? Why did these ideas show up? Why did they have power at the time? And why have they had staying power since then?

Yeah.

And to continue that vein of terminology, the term that you kind of settle on in the book is feeble-minded.

Why did you decide to adopt that particular term?

This is a pretty common choice for scholars who study eugenics.

I say in the introduction to the book that I use the term because it doesn't have a precise modern equivalent.

The term feeble-minded was a construction from a particular moment that captured for the people at the time a whole cluster of symptoms, characteristics that today modern science does not see as related.

And so for people at the time, the term encompassed a range of degrees of intellectual disability, as well as often capturing behaviors that were outside acceptable norms.

So people were more likely to identify somebody who was from a lower social or economic class as feebleminded, as well as someone who transgressed rules of sexual conduct or racial segregation.

And many people at the time saw feeblemindedness as a condition that was transmitted genetically.

So we just don't have a modern term that captures all of those things.

And I think in addition, when you have a source that refers to somebody as feebleminded, it's hard to read more accuracy into that terminology.

So as a reader, a hundred years later, I was often relying on descriptions by people who dumped other people into this big category without a lot of explanation.

So I think it would be inaccurate in many cases to describe them in another way because I don't know what that historical actor saw or heard or experienced that led them to characterize that person in this way.

So that said, I tried very hard to be more specific where I could when I knew something was based in fact about someone's range of physical or mental abilities or when the social workers or welfare officials were more specific about what behaviors or characteristics they were including in their quote-unquote diagnosis of feeble-mindedness.