Exposing The Dark American History Of Eugenics

When the Nazis designed their eugenics program to sterilize and abort those they deemed inferior or undesirable, they looked to one nation as their example: the United States of America.

For decades, the United States was a world leader in applying eugenics to its own population. Politicians passed laws to prevent entire races from entering the country, universities taught their students the benefits of selective human breeding, and activists were hailed as heroes for calling for the sterilization of the poor, sick, and mentally ill.

Today on A Day In History, we’ll look at the rise of the eugenics movement in the US, what it believed, who promoted it, and the consequences that so many innocent people suffered before it was wiped away.

The Ideology of Eugenics

Eugenics, meaning ‘good genes’, was a movement that hoped to improve the genetic health of humanity by promoting the breeding of good or desirable people while limiting or preventing that of undesirables.

It is a scientific fact that genes can influence physical health and that certain conditions can be passed between parent and child. However, genetics was still in its infancy when eugenics emerged, and many false beliefs became embedded in the movement. Behavioral genetics, a field coined by Francis Galton in the 1880s, believed that a range of behaviors including criminality and alcoholism were also genetic, and this became accepted wisdom among eugenicists. A number of other negative traits, such as mental health issues, were also attributed to bad genes.

Galton was actually a cousin of Charles Darwin and the eugenicists were quick to apply Darwin’s evolutionary theory and survival of the fittest idea to humanity. Eugenicists believed that society should ‘weed out’ the sick, ill, poor, and those deemed ‘inferior’ and try to ensure only those with good genes reproduced.

Inevitably, eugenics became deeply associated with racism. From the outset, Galton and early eugenicists assumed the innate superiority of Northern Europeans. Those of Nordic, Germanic, or Anlgo-Saxon heritage were believed to be genetically superior in terms of intelligence, morality, and physical prowess, with other races spread out on a scale far below them. It followed that breeding between the superior races and the inferior ones was to be avoided, that superior races should be encouraged to breed among themselves as much as possible, and that the inferior races have their numbers limited as much as possible.

Not all eugenics was race-based. Black eugenicists rejected the racist conclusion of some eugenicists but still targeted the physically, mentally, and morally unfit within the Black community. This included Thomas Wyatt Turner, the first Black American to receive a PHd, and W. E. B. Du Bois, one of the greatest intellectuals of his day, who famously argued that, quote, “only fit blacks should procreate to eradicate the race's heritage of moral iniquity.”

#history #eugenics #nazi #nazieugenics #americaneugenics #plannedparenthood


Sources:
"Birth Control or Race Control? Sanger and the Negro Project", The Margaret Sanger Papers Project, Fall 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/201411290...

Andrea DenHoed, ‘The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement’, 27th April 2016, https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-...

Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought, (1993)

Julie Rose, ‘A Brutal Chapter In North Carolina's Eugenics Past’, 28th December 2011, https://www.npr.org/2011/12/28/144375...

Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization, (1950)

Margaret Sanger, Women and the New Race, (1920)

Nancy Ordover, American Eugenics, (2003)

Paul Lombardo, ‘Eugenic Laws Against Race Mixing’, http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/html/e...

Stefan Kuhl, The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism, (1994)

Wendy Kline, ‘Eugenics in the United States’, Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, (2010)

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