Passage 4

Questions 16 to 20 are based on the following passage.

Eugenics (优生学) could be found everywhere in the U.S. in the 1920s. It influenced American politics, social sciences and medicine. It shaped public policy, aesthetic theory and literature, and affected popular culture. Eugenic thinking was so popular in the modem era that it attained the status of common sense. From the beginning of eugenics in the late -nineteenth-century England to its peak in the U.S. during the postwar years of the late 1910s and 1920s, few challenged the notion that modem nations, especially those troubled by immigration, must improve their population in order to remain competitive in the modem world.

Scholars have recently begun to acknowledge the profound influence of eugenic thought on modern white American and British writers, yet it remains unknown to most of them that some versions of eugenics also appeared in the writings of modern African American intellectuals, including not only Du Bois and Dunbar-Nelson but also Jean Toomer, George Schuyler, and E. Franklin Frazier. In the end, there were not nearly as many refutations of eugenics in modern U.S. as there were competing versions of it. As Zygmunt Bauman has argued, the ideal of weeding out defective individuals and races deeply affected the U.S. and remained arguably the most outstanding feature of its collective spirit.

Eugenics in some form shows up in various writings between 1890 and 1940. It was so widespread that it serves as an ideal perspective for examining often ignored aspects in American public policy, class politics, racial politics, literature, and even Harlem Renaissance. Indeed, in the U.S. of the 1910s and 1920s, eugenics became so widely accepted that it might be considered the guiding principle of modem American discourse (话语).

There were a number of reasons for this particular success of eugenics in the U.S. First, it was a combination of scientism and progress that appealed to a wide variety of modern American intellectuals. Second, the U.S.'s particular historical circumstances in the early twentieth century including widespread immigration, a shift to an urban industrial economy, and the country's emergence as a dominant global power -help further explain the rise of an ideology that promised to increase national competitiveness and efficiency. Finally, Americans accepted eugenics because it provided them with a theory that supported racism around the tum of the twentieth century.

In the en dominated by eugenics, most Americans believed that______