Wretched Neighborhoods and National Vitality: Framing Infant Mortality in the Early 20th Century

In the first decade of the twentieth century myriad medical and philanthropic groups began agitating for the government to address the frighteningly high infant mortality rate. In 1912 the federal organization, the U.S. Children’s Bureau, was formed and quickly got to work, focusing on infant mortality as their first area of study. Within the first year, Bureau agents went to work, combing through vital statistics records and tracking down thousands of mothers and their children in multiple parts of the country. Their hopes were to gather enough data to ascertain why infants died and how public health groups and programs could decrease those deaths.

At the same time a group of Progressive Era club women, physicians, statisticians, and sociologists banded together to create the American Association for the Prevention and Study of Infant Mortality (AASPIM). One of the key figures in the early days of AASPIM was Irving Fisher, Yale professor and founder of the American Eugenics Society. In 1910 Fisher gave an address at the first meeting of AASPIM, a year after he had presented a report to the U.S. Senate: “National Vitality: Its Wastes and Conservation.” Fisher stressed the connections between prenatal care and eugenics and the organization spent the next twenty years investigating how infant mortality affected the strength of the nation.

This paper will explore the infant mortality studies published by the U.S. Children’s Bureau alongside publications from AASPIM to explore how each group framed the problem of infant death and how these conversations provide insight into the changing meaning, and regulation, of pregnancy in the early twentieth century. Given current racial disparities of infant mortality and the simultaneous policing and neglect of pregnant Americans, scrutinizing the rise of governmental discussions of infant mortality can provide new insight into our present-day crises.