Harnessing heredity in Gilded Age America: middle class mores and industrial breeding in a cultural context

By investigating the practices and beliefs of Gilded Age trotting horse breeders, this article demonstrates the relationship between industrial economic development and the growth of genetic reasoning in the United States. As most historians of biology already know, E. H. Harriman, Leland Stanford, and John D. Rockefeller not only transformed American business practice, they donated heavily to institutions that promoted eugenic research programs. What is not widely known, however, is that these same industrialists were accomplished trotting horse breeders with well-developed theories of inheritance. The article that follows uses these theories to place the rise of eugenic and genetic research into the context of the rapid development of industry in post Civil War America. Specifically, the study identifies how functional utility as defined through the narrow concerns of industrial practices were privileged over form and pedigree in American horse breeding. Even more importantly, this article suggests that the continuity established between the practices of the industrial philanthropists and the scientific research institutions that they established occurred at two levels: through the values privileged by the development of the dynamics of a mass society and through the tools used to process the large amounts of information necessary to understand breeding patterns in slow breeding organisms.