Dight, Charles Fremont, 1856-1938

C. F. Dight was born in Mercer, Pennsylvania in 1856. He graduated with a medical degree from the University of Michigan in 1879. After serving as a health officer in Holton, Michigan, from 1879 to 1881 he returned to the university to assist pathology professor Alonzo B. Palmer. From 1883 to 1889 he was professor of anatomy and physiology at the American University of Beirut, Syria (now Lebanon). From about 1890 to 1892 Dight served as resident physician and teacher of physiology and hygiene at Shattuck School, Faribault, Minnesota.

Dight married Dr. Mary A. Crawford in 1892, but was divorced in 1899 without children. During this period he practiced medicine for a year in Portsmouth, New Hampshire; taught for two years as professor at the medical school of New Orleans University; and spent four years in travel and study in New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, and the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1899 Dight returned to Minnesota and began teaching at Hamline University's medical school. In 1901 he also became medical director of the Ministers Casualty Union, a Minneapolis insurance company. When the University of Minnesota assimilated Hamline's medical school program in 1907 Dight stayed on, lecturing on pharmacology at the university until 1913.

From 1914 to 1918 Dight served as Minneapolis alderman from the 12th ward. He was a staunch socialist.

In the early 1920s Dight launched a crusade to bring the eugenics movement to Minnesota. He believed that many of society's evils could be eliminated through selective breeding. His main lines of approach included eugenics education, changes in marriage laws, and the segregation and sterilization of "defectives." He organized the Minnesota Eugenics Council in 1923 and began campaigning for a sterilization law. In 1925 the Minnesota legislature passed a law allowing the sterilization of the "feeble-minded" and insane who were resident in the state's institutions. For the next several legislative sessions Dight fought unsuccessfully for expansion of the law to include sterilization of the unfit outside of institutions. The Minnesota Eugenics Society became moribund by the early 1930s, but Dight continued his legislative efforts as late as 1935 and also continued to speak and write on the subject of eugenics. In 1935 he published History of the Early Stages of the Organized Eugenics Movement for Human Betterment in Minnesota, a 69-page pamphlet. In 1936 he published Call for a New Social Order, a 181-page book comprising three parts: memoirs of his years as a socialist Minneapolis alderman, 1914-1918; published versions of his radio talk on eugenics; and essays on "mental faculties" and other subjects.

Dight died in Minneapolis in 1938. One biographer has noted that "Although he never made much more than $1500 a year, his spartan habits, astute investments, and calculated failure to file income tax returns helped him build a $200,000 estate" (Medelman, p. 12, full citation below). He left the estate to the University of Minnesota to found what became the Dight Institute for the Promotion of Human Genetics.

This sketch was taken from the Dight Papers and from Gary Phelps, "The Eugenics Crusade of Charles Fremont Dight," Minnesota History, 49:99-108 (Fall 1984); from John Medelman, "The Incredible Dr. Dight," Twin Citian, July 1962, 10-13; and from three items by Evadene Burris Swanson: "A Biographical Sketch of Charles Fremont Dight, M.D.," Dight Institute of the University of Minnesota, Bulletin (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press), No. 1, 1943, 8-22 (which includes a chronology of Dight's life, p. 8, and a bibliography of his published writings, p. 20-22; "The Story of Charles F. Dight," unpublished typescript, [194-?], 71 p., including footnotes; and "Some Sources for Northwest History: the Dight Papers," Minnesota History, 25:62-64 (1944). All of the published sources referred to in this biographical sketch are available in the Minnesota Historical Society book and serials collections.