Reconsidering the streamline style: Evolutionary thought, eugenics, and United States industrial design, 1925--1940

This dissertation posits the streamline style in U.S. architecture and industrial design in the 1930s as the material embodiment of eugenic ideology, arguing that public acceptance of the style stemmed in part from public familiarity with eugenic principles. Little has been written on eugenics in the popular realm in the U.S. during this decade, and many treatments by historians of science actually assert that scientific interest in eugenics declined dramatically after the discovery of the complexity of human genetics in the early 1930s. This study, therefore, draws upon primary research in the archives of eugenicists and multiple industrial designers to argue for the popularity of eugenic thought during this period and its interconnections with the theory and designs of the streamline style. Backed by a middle- to upper-class white intellectual and industrial elite, both eugenics and streamlining were top-down aesthetic reform programs based upon the application of biological principles to design, both social and industrial. By removing the "less evolved," "extraneous," disabling and "diseased" features and people from the "tail end," both eugenicists and streamline designers hoped to reduce the "parasite drag" that hindered forward evolutionary progress, relying in part upon the processes of sterilization and hygiene. Both insisted on pure form, rationality and order as the proper basis and goal of design; both believed in the control and power of the designer to realize "ideal types" and bring about an imminent utopia. In its introductory examination of the evolutionary roots of some of the fundamental tenets of modern architecture, this study recontextualizes eugenical streamlining as a logical outgrowth of early "high modernist" design principles. This correlation of eugenics and streamlining offers the first explanation to theoretically unify the major facets of the style (its concerns for drag reduction and efficiency, hygiene, and the "ideal type") and suggest a cohesive ideological rationale for its rise and popularity at this time.