A Brief History of American Eugenics

An ongoing problem.

In 1921, a movement in the state of New York tried to ban anyone who wore eyeglasses from getting married. They believed the marriage could result in children who became a burden to taxpayers.

The bill never passed, but it got support from doctors, lawyers, professors, judges, and at least one state senator.

In the wake of a pandemic and a world war, Warren Harding won a landslide presidential victory in 1920 by campaigning on, in his own words, "normalcy." He promised a return to normal. It's not a coincidence that in their obsession with normal, Americans turned to eugenics, giving birth to the bad science that ultimately inspired genocide. And if you look around now, it's clear that Americans never learned their lesson.

Eugenics didn't start in Germany.

It started over here.

The idea itself originated with Charles Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, who invented the term in 1883. He argued that governments should play a more direct role in "improving" the human race through a range of policies. By the early 20th century, eugenics had become a widely accepted idea in western culture, endorsed by everyone from Winston Churchill to Woodrow Wilson and taught in hundreds of universities from Northwestern to Harvard. British eugenicists ultimately rejected the American spin on the idea, finding it completely horrifying.

You'll see why in a minute.

Americans added a distinct layer of hate to existing eugenic science. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association endorsed eugenics in their coverage of The International Eugenics Congress in 1912, bemoaning how "The unfit among men were no longer killed by hunger and disease but were cherished and enabled to reproduce their kind."

Darwin's cousin created the word, but it only gave Americans a term to articulate ideas that were circulating for decades, all rooted in a national obsession with racial and spiritual purity.

The history matters because eugenics has returned stronger than ever in American culture, resting on the tip of every complacent tongue as Americans ignore genocide abroad while committing social murder at home, casually mocking anyone who still wears a mask and framing anyone in favor of public health as fringe, anxious, or just plain weird.

What you see in America's history is a desire to rid society of the "undesirable" going back to the late 19th century and leading to the peak of the eugenics movement in the 1930s.

Most Americans don't understand just how much support the eugenics movement had and how deep it went. As Steven Farber writes, "these ideas were not fringe but widely held and taught in universities." Major organizations, including the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation, funded and organized research in eugenics.

You know John Harvey Kellogg, the cereal guy? In 1910, he helped found the Eugenics Record Office, along with Stanford President David Starr Jordan. That led to the establishment of the Eugenics Research Association, and the American Eugenics Society. They operated "with the expressed support of the mainstream scientific establishment," including the American Association of the Advancement of Science, who published the journal Science.

Like many eugenicists, Kellogg paradoxically endorsed progressive social reform and public health for the first half of his life. Then something inside him snapped, and he spent the next thirty years promoting eugenics and segregation.

Maybe all the success went to his head?

Who knows...

These rich, powerful organizations ultimately wanted to sterilize a tenth of the U.S. population, considered "unfit." By unfit, they often meant: poor, disabled, mentally ill, and not white. By 1920s standards, it wasn't hard to fall into the "unfit" category. You just had to cause a little too much trouble.

The eugenicists got down to business in the 1920s, riding on the public's deep desire for normal in the wake of a pandemic and a global war that left large portions of the population with deep trauma and lingering chronic illness. States from California to Virginia booted up sterilization programs, upheld by the Supreme Court in the 1927 case Buck v Bell, which declared that the state of Virginia had the right to sterilize a young woman named Carrie Buck.

Here's an excerpt from the majority decision:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from breeding their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting Fallopian tubes... Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

American eugenics research and laws targeted anyone with a chronic medical condition, as well as criminals and runaways. If you developed a reputation for being shy or introverted, your friends and family could refer you to a eugenics counselor, for a lack of better terms. They would give you an array of tests, including an IQ test. If you didn't pass it with flying colors, you got sterilized.

These programs are most notorious for their sterilization campaigns, but they presided over a vast network of institutions that didn't just try to stop the "weak" or "feebleminded" from procreating but sought to separate them from society altogether. They either locked them up in asylums, sent them to "colonies," or sentenced them to forced labor for the rest of their lives, where they worked the worst jobs for 25 cents a week.

It wasn't a big jump from mass sterilization to mass incarceration. In fact, eugenicist publications frequently wondered what they would do with "a group of people who are free to gratify their instincts without fear of consequences in the form of children." They started to worry about the spread of "debauchery and disease." These fears often led them to recommend "incarceration in special colonies."

Those aren't the words of a German Nazi.

Those are the words of Henry Goddard, the head of the Vineland Training School for Feebleminded Girls and Boys.

In New Jersey.

Goddard wrote those words in a 1913 book called The Kalikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness. To emphasize, a New Jersey school principal and amateur biologist recommended the mass sterilization and incarceration of the feebleminded decades before Hitler became a political force. And those ideas were widely celebrated in American culture. It's demoralizing to think about all the bright, talented young people who would qualify as introverted, autistic, or neurodivergent today who were simply labeled as "degenerate" and medicated into oblivion under these laws, to the applause of America's elite.

These programs and the laws they inspired were so hateful, they even tried to label entire extended families of a single epileptic patient as "feebleminded" and have them sterilized. As Edwin Black writes in War Against The Weak, their dragnet became "so sweeping that it covered not only people plagued by seizures, but also those suffering from migraine headaches and even brief fainting spells due to exhaustion, heat stroke or other causes."

Eugenics programs ultimately identified 10 classes of "unfit" people who should be "sterilized" if not "eliminated."

1. The feebleminded

2. The poor

3. Alcoholics

4. All criminals

5. Epileptics

6. The "insane"

7. The "weak"

8. The "deformed"

9. The deaf and blind

10. The chronically ill

Sometimes, the definitions were so broad they included anyone who had outstanding fines or couldn't pay their bills on time.

The deeper you delve into Americans' love affair with eugenics, you find that it wasn't simply a brutal effort to apply genetics to social institutions. It provided the affluent with a strong reason to do what they'd always wanted, to declare war on those they already considered inferior.

That's what happened.

One of the leading eugenics proponents, Madison Grant, often came dangerously close to advocating outright for the extermination of the unfit, and words like "elimination" pepper eugenicist publications. Sometimes more prominent public figures like Alexander Graham Bell (a eugenicist) asked them to walk it back a little. They were worried about bad press.

Madison Grant wasn't exactly a pariah. He served on boards of scientific societies and museums across the country. In 1916, Grant published The Passing of The Great Race, a book that declared the superiority of "The Nordic race" in unequivocal terms and panicked over their looming extinction in the face of an industrialized society that catered to "weaklings." He also wanted to add Congolese tribes to the ape display at the Bronx Zoo.

Grant's ideas inspired Theodore Roosevelt, who maintained regular correspondence with eugenicists. In one letter, Roosevelt wrote that "society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind" or "the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type."

Woodrow Wilson also subscribed to eugenicist ideas and even passed sterilization laws when he was governor of New Jersey, after vocally advocating for them in Indiana. He presided over one of 32 states that passed laws directly allowing physicians in state facilities to sterilize patients without their knowledge or consent, and that's not even touching the laws that put various restrictions on the freedoms of anyone considered unfit. When Woodrow Wilson ignored the 1918 flu, he wasn't just incompetent. He was practicing eugenics.

On top of the tens of thousands of official sterilizations, experts like Edwin Black estimate hundreds of thousands more. Eugenics programs did far more damage than most state, county, and city offices will ever want to admit.

You can see why.

American eugenics programs inspired the Nazis.

They looked up to us.

Hitler wrote a letter to Madison Grant saying, "The book is my Bible."

While British scientists rejected and excoriated American eugenics, Germany took these American ideas and scaled them up considerably, even using computers and data systems engineered by IBM to run their mass sterilization programs. As Edwin Black explains, American eugenicists in the 1930s began to complain very publicly, "The Germans are beating us at our own game."

They weren't taken aback.

They were... jealous.

Americans only began to back away from eugenics when Germany showed them the full realization of their goals. The whole time, a handful of real journalists and progressive newspapers did call American eugenics out for what it was, "a war of the wealthy against the poor."

So, that's American history.

A deep desire for normal after global upheaval drove Americans back into their racist, puritanical heritage and led their elites to design an entire system not just to exclude the vulnerable from society but to erase them from the future altogether. If they didn't advocate for genocide, it was only because genocide felt like too much trouble. When you're the one living in exile, the parallels really stand out.

Here's the worst part:

Everyone who believes their natural fitness will protect them from the threats we're facing now is simply setting themselves up for a rude awakening when they or someone they truly care about comes undone.

Nobody really wants to live by the law of the jungle.

Like so many other things, eugenics thrives in the U.S., even today, because it offers a comforting fairy tale. It's one of the purest forms of wishful thinking, the idea that somehow you're magically better than everyone else. And like so many other distinctly American ideas, eugenics ultimately hurts everyone, including those who think they're perfect.

We don't need it.