Eugenics

Eugenics in the United States

As a result of Galton's influences—and those of his followers, who believed that behaviors and conditions such as criminality, insanity, and poverty are genetically inherited—the eugenics movement gained popularity in the United States between 1870 and World War I. During this time, eugenicists worked hard to look for ways to resolve what they believed were inherited abnormal behaviors. Among the solutions eugenicists felt would resolve the problems they felt were destroying America were the institutionalization and segregation of people whom they identified as having cognitive impairments, the prohibition of such people from marrying so they would not reproduce what eugenicists feared would be unfit children, and involuntary sterilization laws.

By 1924, 24 states had passed involuntary sterilization laws, and the 1924 Immigration Act was enacted, a law that limited the number of immigrants admitted from any country to 2 percent. As a result of these laws, eugenics reached its height of popularity in the United States. Eugenicists believed that immigrants were contributing to a national degeneration, and they pushed to keep what they saw the unfit or degenerate from reproducing, marrying, and entering the country.

Professors, industrialists, educators, social scientists, government officials, and other professionals were among eugenicists who believed that the vast majority of the population were imbeciles and not worthy of survival because of their heredity. In particular, they believed if certain ethnic groups did not have the perceived intelligence level, strength, or physical features of the superior Nordic race, they were inferior. As a result, hundreds of thousands of immigrants and Americans were denied the right to have children and sterilized against their will. In 1927, Virginia's sterilization statute was challenged in the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell. The court ruled that Virginia's sterilization statute did not violate the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and could not be considered cruel and unusual punishment because it was not punishment but rather a means to provide an opportunity for the plaintiff to “do good” for the community and society. The decision was a victory for eugenicists and resulted in other states passing similar sterilization laws. Eugenicists believed that government control of reproduction, directed specifically at hereditary defects, was a necessity for racial improvement and to save America.

Nazi Germany to Genetic Technology

Overseas, Buck v. Bell was followed closely and influenced the adoption of the 1933 eugenics sterilization law in Nazi Germany. Shortly after, the policy targeted Jews and other people deemed “unfit,” resulting in genocide and the Holocaust. Not until the atrocities of Nazi Germany entered the public consciousness did eugenics begin to curry disfavor. Beginning in the 1940s and extending into the 1950s, the term eugenics was avoided. However, from the mid-1950s until the 1960s, efforts to improve race in America reappeared with sperm banks and genetic counseling. The development of reproductive technologies like human gene therapy and in vitro fertilization in the 1970s led to the resurgence of eugenics in the United States. Additionally, the publication of psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray's The Bell Curve in 1994 renewed debate over the relationship between intelligence, ethnicity, and social class reminiscent of the eugenics movement in the 1920s.

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