Eugenics is both a theory of human heredity and selective reproduction and the social and intellectual movement that sought population policies aimed at improving the human race through selective breeding. Eugenics advances the theory that all human traits are inherited and that the quality and character of offspring reflects the quality of their ancestors’ genes and environment. As a scientific movement, eugenics began in Europe during the last third of the 19th century. British anthropologist Sir Frances Gal-ton, building on Gregor Mendel’s agricultural breeding research, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, and the emerging science of genetics, coined the term eugenics. He presented it as a medical science with the goal of improving the human race. Galton was an admirer of Malthusian population control and concluded that eugenics could help society encourage selective breeding of the superior Anglo-Saxon race while discouraging the breeding of the lesser races. This, according to Galton, would improve “the general tone of domestic, social and political life” within a nation.
The eugenics movement in the United States evolved from Galton’s research but differed greatly in its application. Galton’s “positive eugenics” approach of encouraging “fit” people to reproduce lost its appeal as American scientists began to focus their research toward “negative eugenics,” which emphasized a perceived link between the inheritance of unfit traits and social decay. Eugenics in the United States embraced a creed that stressed the need to control the unfit and their effect on society.
In 1910 with the establishment of the Eugenics Records Office, American eugenicists such as Charles Benedict Davenport, Harry Laughlin, Alexander Graham Bell, and Henry Goddard advanced eugenics as a way to build a racially superior society. They focused their research on identifying negative human traits and the effects of bad environments on heredity. The establishment of eugenics associations, committees, medical panels, laboratories, and departments at respected universities helped to give the American eugenics movement credibility as a field of SCIENCE during the first two decades of the 20th century.
The emergence of the eugenics movement in the United States coincided with the rapid growth of cities, the influx of immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, and the migration of African Americans from the South to northern cities. By the early 20th century, American social reformers were preoccupied with urban crime and individuals living at the margins of society. Many progressive reformers linked the new IMMIGRATION with the decaying urban ghettos and poverty. They suggested that the unfit immigrant masses caused most city problems. They concluded that if the unfit classes in the urban slums were allowed to breed unchecked, they would soon outnumber the middle and upper classes, who were having few children. Eugenicist Robert Reid described this unchecked population imbalance as “race suicide.” In 1916, lawyer and eugenicist Madison Grant published his influential book, The Passing of the Great Race, which advocated the separation and eventual elimination, through selective breeding, of what Grant viewed as “inferior races.” Grant’s book employed a racial and racist understanding of history and anthropology to advocate for the separation and eventual elimination, through selective breeding, of what he saw as “inferior races.”
The widespread acceptance of eugenics also surfaced in the 1920s in the BIRTH CONTROL movement. Its leader, Margaret Sanger, began to promote contraception not only as a means to women’s health and well-being but also as a way to control the poor population of cities. Through her journal, Birth Control Review, Sanger promoted voluntary motherhood, family planning, and contraception for immigrants and the poor. While she had earlier fought for contraception as a means of improving the lives of working-class and poor women, by the 1920s she argued that birth control could be used to stop the feebleminded, defective, and dangerous population from reproducing. Sanger supported her birth control program by pointing out the cost to society of prisons, insane asylums, and medical care of the unfit. She also argued that charity only encouraged the poor to continue their dangerous ways. As eugenics propaganda raised fears that the nation’s promise was threatened and that the poor and unfit would outnumber the fit and drive society into ruin, eugenics became more popular among a broad spectrum of Americans.
Eugenics embraced a creed of the natural struggle between the fit and unfit. As a creed, it became less concerned with the accuracy of scientific research and more concerned with advancing a social agenda of ridding American society of the weak, dangerous, and unfit. Eugenics supporters in the 1920s adopted a social agenda based on naturalism and the determinism of heredity. They began to use questionable scientific evidence to persuade legislators that society was increasingly at risk from “feeblemindedness.” During the Progressive Era, “feeblemindedness” became a vague legal term that encompassed most forms of mental or physical defect, illicit behavior, or social dependence. Fueled by culturally biased intelligence tests that ranked immigrants based on their degree of inherited feeblemindedness, eugenics became the “science” of white supremacists, Social Darwinists, and Progressives who believed American society was engaged in a competition for “the survival of the fittest.”
Eugenicists such as Albert Johnson manipulated and falsified data before Congress to push for immigration reform that would restrict the inferior non-Nordic immigrants from flocking into America’s industrial centers. The National Origins Act of 1924 reduced annual immigration to the total in 1890, approximately 165,000. It also set quotas for different ethnic immigrants.
To engineer a racially superior society and control the unfit that were living in the United States, eugenics-minded reformers lobbied for new standards of marriage that forbade interracial marriage. By 1931, 27 states required the feebleminded to be sterilized before they could marry. In the 1920s, sterilization began to be applied more broadly to the feebleminded in institutions. The most infamous case regarding sterilization and hereditary determinism was
Buck v. Bell in 1927. This decision gave states the authority to implement forced sterilization laws against those deemed “unfit.”
See also MEDICINE; nativism; race and racial
CONfLICT.
Further reading: Edwin Black, War against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003); Harry Bruinius, Better for All the World: The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity (New York: Random House, 2006); Mark H. Haller, Eugenics: Heredi-tarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1984); Donald K. Pickens, Eugenics and the Progressives (Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968).
—Jeffrey Powell
Evolution See Scopes Trial.
World History
