Eugenics

A term coined in 1883 by the British scientist of heredity, Sir Francis Galton, eugenics was a movement devoted to “race improvement.” Fueled by late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century scientific advances in the identification and measurement of “defective mentality” (Mendelian genetics, human pedigree charts, intelligence testing), the eugenics movement sought to link social ills such as crime, prostitution, poverty, juvenile delinquency, and promiscuity to people with cognitive disabilities. To diminish instances of social “vice” and the prevalence of mental “defects,” eugenicists extolled a wide range of restrictive social policies including marriage laws prohibiting unions of those diagnosed as feebleminded, epileptic, and insane; an expansion of lifelong incarceration in institutions for the feebleminded; laws that legalized state-sponsored sterilization programs; immigration restrictions on people with disabilities; widespread intelligence testing in public schools aimed at identifying feeblemindedness at the earliest possible age; and segregation of “backward” students in special or ungraded classrooms.

The eugenics invention of the category “feeblemindedness” moved from a general classification of “inferior” intellect to a tiered model of “defective” types: idiots referred to individuals with a mental age of two years or less, imbeciles represented those with an arrested mentality of three to seven years, and morons referred to those attaining a mental age of no more than 12 years of age. There were also classifications of varying degrees of backwardness for people occupying the intellectual cusp between “normal” and “feebleminded.” Whereas the European construction of feeblemindedness tended to emphasize intellectual capacity, the U.S. definition recognized physical and sensory disabilities as visible bodily expressions of a feeblemindedness residing within.

Eugenics can be broken down into four specific historical stages: the early-nineteenth-century transition from familial and community responsibility for people with cognitive disabilities to a social and state problem, post–Civil War rhetoric that characterized feeblemindedness as a social burden to be alleviated through custodial institutional care, the promulgation during the first two decades of the twentieth century of an extreme version of feeblemindedness as a menace to society, and the post-1920 psychiatry-based mental hygiene movement that began to supplant eugenics with an emphasis on adaptation and adjustment through services that perpetuated segregation and that could be based in the institution or the community.

As an ideological practice cloaked in the empiricism of scientific research, eugenics was widely practiced in Europe, the United States, and Canada. Culminating in the systematic murder of more than 260,000 disabled people by the Nazis between 1939 and 1945, the eugenics movement gave birth to the contemporary forms of nearly every social and therapeutic discipline [Page 625]that attempts to treat and manage disabled people today: physical therapy, occupational therapy, social work, genetics, genetic counseling, special education, and community and applied psychology.

Beyond Europe and North America, eugenics also achieved global influence by exporting its practices to countries as varied as Africa, Mexico, India, Australia, Japan, Russia, and Israel. In many of these countries, eugenics was implemented with respect to distinct national and cultural contexts; for instance, Bolshevik eugenicists used family pedigree charts to demonstrate the degeneracy of czarist lines, Israel imported eugenics models to bolster arguments for a more robust Jewish citizenry, colonial Africa used eugenics as a rationale to solidify arguments about African inferiority and violent tribal practices such as female circumcision, and Japan sequestered its sensory feebleminded (deaf and blind) populations on islands.

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