Eugenics in the United States

Based on Wikipedia: Eugenics in the United States

When America Tried to Breed a Better Human

In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the government could forcibly sterilize citizens it deemed unfit to reproduce. The vote was eight to one.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., widely regarded as one of the greatest legal minds in American history, wrote the majority opinion. His conclusion was chilling in its brevity: "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

The case was Buck v. Bell, and the woman at its center was Carrie Buck, a seventeen-year-old from Virginia. She had been committed to a state institution after becoming pregnant from a rape. The state labeled her "feebleminded" and sought to sterilize her. The Supreme Court agreed this was constitutional. Carrie Buck was sterilized against her will. So was her mother. So, later, would be her sister.

This was not some fringe movement operating in the shadows. This was American law, American science, American respectability at its most confident. The eugenics movement—the belief that humanity could be improved through selective breeding—captured the imagination of the nation's intellectual and political elite for half a century.

What Eugenics Actually Meant

The word itself comes from the Greek for "well-born." Francis Galton, a British scientist and cousin of Charles Darwin, coined the term in 1883. His idea was straightforward: if you could breed better horses and dogs, why not better humans?

Galton studied wealthy British families and concluded that their success was primarily genetic. Their money, their education, their social standing—all of this, he believed, flowed from superior hereditary material. The poor were poor because they carried inferior genes. The intelligent were intelligent because intelligence ran in their blood.

This was biological determinism in its purest form. Your life outcomes were written in your cells before you were born.

American eugenicists took Galton's ideas and ran with them. They believed that people of Nordic, Germanic, and Anglo-Saxon descent carried superior genetic material. Everyone else—Southern and Eastern Europeans, Asians, Africans, the disabled, the poor—carried defective genes that threatened to contaminate the American bloodline.

The solution? Control who could have children.

The Money Behind the Movement

Eugenics was not cheap. It required research institutions, training programs, legislative campaigns, and public relations efforts. Fortunately for its proponents, some of America's wealthiest families were eager to invest.

The Carnegie Institution, founded by the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, provided substantial funding. So did the Rockefeller Foundation, built on oil money. The Harriman railroad fortune contributed as well. These were not marginal donors; they were the foundations of American capitalism.

In 1906, John Harvey Kellogg—yes, the cereal magnate—founded the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. Kellogg believed that improving the human race was just as important as improving breakfast.

Five years later, the biologist Charles Davenport established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. This became the movement's nerve center. The office collected family pedigrees, trained field workers to assess individuals in mental hospitals and orphanages, and lobbied for eugenic legislation across the country.

By 1910, eugenics had become a vast network of scientists, reformers, and professionals. The American Breeder's Association formed a eugenics committee whose stated purpose was to "investigate and report on heredity in the human race, and emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood."

Its members included Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, and David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University. These were not cranks. These were the establishment.

The Methods: From Marriage Laws to Forced Sterilization

Eugenicists pursued their goals through multiple channels, and they were remarkably successful at embedding their ideas into American law.

The gentlest approach was "positive eugenics"—encouraging the "fit" to have more children. Middle-class white women were urged to be more "family minded" and to produce larger broods for the good of the race. Eugenicists sometimes denied these women access to birth control and sterilization, believing their genetic material was too valuable to waste.

But positive eugenics was not enough. The real energy went into "negative eugenics"—preventing the "unfit" from reproducing.

Marriage laws came first. Connecticut passed a eugenic marriage statute in 1896, prohibiting anyone who was "epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded" from marrying. Other states followed. By the early twentieth century, marriage had become a matter of genetic screening.

Then came sterilization. Michigan introduced a compulsory sterilization bill in 1897. It failed, but the idea had been planted. Indiana succeeded in 1907, becoming the first state to legally mandate the sterilization of certain citizens. Washington, California, and Connecticut followed within two years.

California embraced sterilization with particular enthusiasm. Before the Supreme Court even weighed in, California had sterilized more people than all other states combined.

After Buck v. Bell in 1927, the floodgates opened. The Supreme Court had declared forced sterilization constitutional. States across the country expanded their programs. By the time the movement finally wound down in the mid-twentieth century, more than sixty thousand Americans had been sterilized against their will.

Who Were the Targets?

On paper, eugenics was about improving genetic quality. In practice, it was about something else entirely.

The targets were people already marginalized by society: the poor, the disabled, the mentally ill. But the patterns went deeper. A disproportionate number of those sterilized were women. And among women, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans faced sterilization at far higher rates than their white counterparts.

This was not coincidental. The eugenics movement was inextricable from the racism and nativism of its era. Its proponents believed that non-white races were genetically inferior. Sterilization was a tool for maintaining the demographic dominance of white Americans.

The poor were particularly vulnerable. Eugenicists believed poverty itself was a genetic trait—that people were poor because they carried defective genes, not because of economic systems or lack of opportunity. This made poor women doubly suspect. Poverty plus femaleness plus minority status created a perfect target for the state's scalpel.

"Feeblemindedness" became a catch-all diagnosis. It could mean actual intellectual disability, but it could also mean illiteracy, poverty, sexual promiscuity, or simply behavior that middle-class observers found unacceptable. The label was applied loosely, and once applied, it was nearly impossible to escape.

Immigration and the Closing of the Golden Door

If you couldn't sterilize undesirable genes out of existence, you could at least prevent them from entering the country.

The Immigration Restriction League was founded in 1894 by three Harvard graduates who worried that immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were diluting the "superior American racial stock." They lobbied for literacy tests, believing—correctly—that immigrants from these regions would fail at higher rates than those from Northern Europe.

Presidents vetoed literacy test bills in 1897, 1913, and 1915. But Congress overrode President Wilson's second veto in 1917, and the tests became law.

Then came the Immigration Act of 1924. Eugenicists testified before Congress as expert witnesses, warning of the genetic threat posed by immigrants from undesirable regions. The resulting law drastically reduced immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe while all but banning immigration from Asia.

Jewish immigrants, in particular, were viewed with suspicion. Harry Laughlin, one of the movement's leading figures and an expert witness for the House Committee on Immigration, considered Jews—a diasporic people with Middle Eastern origins—to be genetically inferior. The 1924 act would later have devastating consequences when Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany found America's doors closed to them.

The Women's Movement and Eugenics

One of the more uncomfortable aspects of this history is the overlap between eugenics and early feminism.

Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that would become Planned Parenthood, incorporated eugenic language into her advocacy for birth control. She believed contraception could prevent unwanted children from being born into poverty and disadvantage. She also supported sterilization for people with hereditary mental illness or serious physical disabilities.

Sanger's position was complicated. She believed that individual women—not the state—should control their own reproduction. But she also supported legislation that would have forced sterilization on African Americans. Her legacy remains contested precisely because of these contradictions.

She was not alone. The National Federation of Women's Clubs, the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, and the National League of Women Voters all lobbied for eugenic reforms at various points. In the Deep South, women's associations played a crucial role in establishing eugenic institutions—facilities designed to separate men and women with intellectual disabilities to prevent them from having children.

These were reformers who believed they were improving society. They were wrong about almost everything, but they were sincere.

Anti-Miscegenation: Policing the Bedroom

If eugenics was about maintaining racial purity, then interracial marriage was its ultimate threat.

Virginia passed the first anti-miscegenation law in 1661—not just prohibiting marriage between people of different races, but making it illegal for ministers to perform such ceremonies. Over the next three centuries, more states followed. By the early twentieth century, at least twenty-eight states had anti-miscegenation legislation on the books.

The "one-drop rule" emerged during this period. Under this principle, anyone with any African ancestry—even a single ancestor generations back—was legally classified as Black. The purpose was to draw the sharpest possible line between races and to prevent any blurring of boundaries.

Virginia's Racial Integrity Act of 1924 defined a white person as having "no trace whatever of any blood other than Caucasian." There was one exception: people with up to one-sixteenth Native American ancestry could still be considered white. This was reportedly included to accommodate prominent Virginia families who traced their lineage to Pocahontas.

These laws remained in effect until 1967, when the Supreme Court finally struck them down in Loving v. Virginia. Richard Loving, a white man, and Mildred Jeter, a Black woman, had been arrested in Virginia for the crime of being married. They had wed in Washington, D.C., where their union was legal, then returned home to Virginia, where it was not.

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that anti-miscegenation laws violated the Constitution. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the freedom to marry was "one of the vital personal rights essential to the orderly pursuit of happiness."

It had taken the nation more than three hundred years to reach that conclusion.

The Nazi Connection

When Nazi Germany developed its racial laws in the 1930s, its legal scholars looked to America for inspiration.

This is not speculation. It is documented history. The Nazis explicitly studied American race laws and practices when crafting the Nuremberg Laws, which stripped Jewish citizens of their citizenship and laid the groundwork for the Holocaust.

American eugenicists, for their part, admired what the Nazis were accomplishing. Some corresponded with their German counterparts and praised Germany's commitment to racial hygiene. The admiration was mutual.

This connection would later prove deeply embarrassing. After World War II, as the full horror of the Holocaust became clear, American eugenics began its long retreat from public respectability. The word itself became toxic. Organizations renamed themselves. Researchers pivoted to new fields.

But the laws remained on the books. Forced sterilizations continued into the 1970s. North Carolina's eugenics program was not officially closed until 1977. The last anti-miscegenation law was not repealed until 2000, when Alabama removed a defunct provision from its state constitution.

The Long Shadow

Eugenics was not a brief aberration. It was American policy for decades, supported by the nation's leading scientists, funded by its wealthiest families, upheld by its highest court.

The movement's most extreme proposals—euthanasia, for instance—never became law. A 1911 Carnegie Institute report explored eighteen methods for "removing defective genetic attributes," and the eighth method was killing people. The most commonly suggested approach was local gas chambers. Even committed eugenicists recognized that Americans were not ready for such measures, though some doctors found subtler ways to let "defective" patients die.

But sterilization was not subtle. It was systematic. Tens of thousands of Americans were operated on against their will, their reproductive futures decided by the state.

The scientific premises underlying eugenics were wrong. Intelligence is not a simple inherited trait. Poverty is not genetic. The categories of "fit" and "unfit" reflected social prejudices, not biological reality. The elaborate family pedigrees collected by the Eugenics Record Office were based on faulty methodology and circular reasoning.

None of this was obvious at the time—or rather, it was obvious to some, but those voices were marginalized. The prestige of the movement's supporters made criticism difficult. Who were you to question Charles Davenport, Alexander Graham Bell, or the Supreme Court of the United States?

Echoes in the Present

The eugenics movement officially ended, but its echoes persist.

Genetic testing raises new questions about who should be born. Debates over immigration still invoke the language of national identity and cultural preservation. The disabled community continues to fight for recognition of their full humanity.

When a Sydney Sweeney advertisement evokes accusations of "eugenics-coded" imagery, it suggests that the movement's aesthetics—its celebration of a particular kind of physical perfection, its implicit hierarchy of human worth—have not entirely disappeared from American culture.

The word "eugenics" is discredited. The underlying assumptions—that some people are inherently more valuable than others, that society would be better if certain kinds of people did not exist—are harder to extinguish. They resurface in new vocabularies, attached to new technologies, advanced by people who would be horrified to be associated with the movement's historical crimes.

Understanding this history is not merely academic. It is a reminder that respectable institutions can embrace terrible ideas, that science can be bent to serve prejudice, and that the line between improvement and elimination is thinner than we would like to believe.

The eugenicists thought they were building a better world. They had the backing of major foundations, prestigious universities, and the federal government. They were certain they were right.

They were catastrophically wrong. And the people who paid the price for their certainty were the most vulnerable members of society—the poor, the disabled, the marginalized, the different. The people who could not fight back.

That is the lesson. Power combined with certainty is dangerous. The vulnerable need protection not from criminals in the shadows, but from reformers in the light.