Dight, Charles Fremont (1856–1938)

Charles Fremont Dight grew up believing in the power of medicine to ascertain and correct natural or social problems. After a series of disappointments in politics in the 1910s, he turned to the burgeoning field of eugenics in the 1920s to realize his dream of a centrally planned economy and population.

Dight was born on July 6, 1856, in Mercer, Pennsylvania, where he grew up on a farm with his six siblings. At the age of thirteen, he decided to become a doctor after discovering he had a passionate interest in phrenology and heredity. Dight pursued this goal with singular purpose and drive, obtaining a degree in medicine in just three years from the University of Michigan in 1879 and immediately taking up practice as a health officer in Holton, Michigan. After a brief stint as an assistant back at the university, he left the United States in 1883 for Beirut, Syria (now Lebanon), where he worked as a professor of anatomy and physiology at the American Medical college.

Dight returned to the United States in 1889 and settled in Minnesota to accept the position of resident physician at Shattuck School in Faribault. From 1899 on, he taught physiology at Hamline University in St. Paul; lectured on (mental) hygiene and sanitation (1910); and taught pharmacology at the University of Minnesota (1908–1913). Between 1901 and 1933, he was employed part-time as the medical director of the Ministers Life and Casualty Union.

Compared to his medical and political pursuits, Dight dedicated only a small portion of his time to personal relationships and hobbies. He married Dr. Mary A. Crawford in 1892, but their union lasted only seven years. He solidified his reputation as a local eccentric after building a house on iron stilts at 39th Avenue South and 48th Street in Minneapolis in 1911.

In 1914, Dight made his first forays into politics when he was elected as one of four aldermen on the Socialist Party ticket representing the twelfth ward in Minneapolis. He retired from the Socialist Party in 1917, however, because he disagreed with its increasing radicalism.

Some of Dight’s successes were purely symbolic. In 1917, his motion to congratulate Russians on their “recent great advance towards democracy” passed in the city council, and Minneapolis subsequently sent an official commendation to the Minister of Justice, Alexander Kerensky, in Petrograd. Other municipal work was of lasting practical import. Dight had the small “Railway Avenue” (just west of Hiawatha Avenue) renamed in his honor by the Committee on Roads and Bridges after he successfully lobbied to pave Minnehaha Avenue. His most significant early success in public health, and the one that made him the most proud, was the passing of a 1914 ordinance to pasteurize milk for urban consumption.

Throughout his life, Dight had tried to combine his then unshakeable conviction that the economic productivity and consumption of populations shaped, and was shaped by, their biological health with his faith in the state. He found the clearest expression of these dogmas in the growing field of eugenics, the scientific doctrine of "racial improvement" through the control of human reproduction.

Dight enthusiastically signed onto the eugenicist program and was elected as one of twenty-five new members at the tenth annual business meeting of the Eugenics Research Association at Cold Spring Harbor in 1922. Later that year, he published and distributed his first pamphlet on eugenics (“Human Thoroughbreds—Why Not?”) to get the Minnesota legislature to pass a sterilization law. He achieved this goal with the 1925 bill authorizing sterilization of the “feeble-minded, epileptic, and insane” to prevent their reproduction. In 1933, he gave a series of twelve radio talks on the topic over WRHM and wrote to Adolf Hitler commending him on his more far-reaching eugenics laws. Hitler wrote back extending his thanks and an invitation to a conference in Munich.

By the end of his life, Dight identified his work in eugenics as the most significant legacy of his life. Accordingly, after setting aside small sums for family members, he stipulated in his will that his manuscripts and writings on eugenics be left to the Minnesota Historical Society along with $2000, while the rest of his property should be invested in the founding of educational groups and resources “to promote biological race betterment.” He requested that these funds go primarily to the University of Minnesota, which accordingly founded the Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics and the Minnesota Human Genetics League.