Eugenics

Eugenics involves efforts to improve either the human race or a specific national, racial, or ethnic group through genetic or biological manipulation. Eugenic ideas have been associated with a wide range of social and political agendas, the most infamous being the racist and patriarchal discourses of Nazism in the first half of the twentieth century. In the United States, where the popularity and influence of eugenics peaked between the early 1910s and the late 1930s, it led to immigration restrictions and the sterilization and institutionalization of a range of persons who, for various reasons, were classed as “unfit.” Although such policies were partly inspired by a Progressive Era faith in the power of science to improve society, many eugenicists in the United States used arguments about enhancing the hereditary “fitness” of the national population. These arguments supported a conservative and elitist view of power relations that privileged the white, Anglo-Saxon males of the middle and professional classes.

The importance of eugenics to social planning achieved greatest prominence following Charles Darwin's work on evolutionary biology and contributed to the application of his ideas to theories of social Darwinism, which sought to explain economic, racial, and gender inequities in U.S. society. By the 1890s, rising budgets for institutional care and correction in the United States, mass immigration from eastern and southern Europe, and perceptions of a declining fertility rate among the middle classes led to widespread fears about the degeneration of the American population. The fear of being demographically “swamped” by the fecundity of racial and class “others” was particularly troubling to Anglo-Saxon middle-class men, who believed that their authority rested on their position at the acme of evolutionary development. These men worried that they might lose their grip on power in a nation and world they understood as a perpetual struggle among races and nations for supremacy. Eugenics seemed to offer these men a utopian schema for the “perfection” of the American race and for the invigoration of white American middle-class masculinity.

Methods for redressing this perceived national genetic degeneration have been broadly classified as either “positive” or “negative” eugenics. Positive eugenics encouraged voluntary decisions about reproduction, including eugenic marriages [Page 154]between fit individuals and large families for the professional and middle classes. Negative eugenics—the version that most influenced American social policy in the early twentieth century—proposed state intervention to prevent the reproduction of “undesirable” persons. By 1917, sixteen states had enacted sterilization laws, most allowing for the sterilization of repeat-offender criminals, epileptics, the “feebleminded,” and the mentally ill—all of whom were perceived as a threat to the genetic integrity of American manhood. After years of legal challenges, the Supreme Court ruled involuntary sterilization constitutional in 1926. In 1937, a survey found that 66 percent of the American population supported involuntary sterilization of “mental defectives,” and 63 percent supported similar measures for criminals. Over 60,000 people were sterilized in these programs by 1958, 20,000 of them in California.

This popular acceptance of eugenic principles was also evident in the immigration restriction bills of 1921 and 1924, which ended the Open Door era of U.S. immigration policy and were based in part on data compiled by the Eugenic Record Office. Support for the racist assumptions of the bills was garnered from the recently-developed IQ test administered to America's draftees for World War I. Although the cultural bias of this test is obvious to the present-day reader, the data suggested that African-American men and recent immigrants, especially from southern and eastern Europe, were mentally inferior to “Nordic” American men. Partly as a result of this test, each nation was assigned a quota for immigration to the United States based on the population of people from that nation living in the United States at the time of the 1890 census, a move that sharply reduced immigration from southern and eastern Europe and almost entirely stopped immigration from the “Asiatic Barred Zone,” which comprised China, Japan, Indochina, Afghanistan, Arabia, and the East Indies. The high (and rarely filled) immigration quotas for northern European countries indicated political leaders' belief that “true” American manhood was associated with this ethnic descent. Elsewhere in American life, eugenic societies sponsored publicity drives such as “fit family” contests at state fairs, while eugenicist articles regularly appeared in such popular publications as the Saturday Evening Post. In 1928, eugenics was endorsed by 90 percent of the biology texts used in American high schools.

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