Eugenics

Eugenics. Eugenics had its modern roots in Social Darwinism. Its proponents held that the quality of the human population could be improved by manipulating its biological heredity. The eugenics movement flourished in the Americas as well as in Europe and Asia during the early twentieth century. Its backbone in the United States consisted of biologists, physicians, psychologists, and middle‐class, white Protestants of northern European origins. The zoologist Charles B. Davenport, director of a genetics research center at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island, was an important proponent.

Eugenicists, exploiting Gregor Mendel's theory of heredity, which had been rediscovered in 1900, concluded that genes controlled a number of physical diseases and various mental deficiencies that were commonly termed “feeblemindedness.” They further argued that mental deficiency underlay many adverse behavioral tendencies, including criminality, poverty, alcoholism, and prostitution, and they contended that a biological propensity for such deleterious traits was disproportionately present among lower‐income people, especially the “races” of immigrants arriving from eastern and southern Europe.

To the end of “improving” the American population, eugenicists joined other immigration restrictionists in urging that fewer people from eastern and southern Europe be permitted entry to the United States. Many came to advocate contraception, arguing that if it were made available to lower‐income groups, it would reduce the spread of bad genes. A number of eugenicists, contending that mentally deficient people were reproducing at a rate high enough to constitute a menace, called for the enactment of state programs of eugenic sterilization that would apply to the residents of state homes for the feebleminded.

Eugenicists helped obtain passage of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, providing biological reasons for the severe reductions it imposed on the immigration of people from eastern and southern Europe. By the late 1920s, some two dozen American states had enacted eugenic sterilization laws. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of such measures in the case of Buck v. Bell (1927). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, declared “three generations of imbeciles are enough.” By the mid‐1930s, eugenic sterilizations had been performed on about twenty thousand people in the United States.

Few states actually enforced their eugenic laws, the leading exceptions being California and Virginia. The laws were widely regarded as an offense to civil liberties, and during the second quarter of the century the eugenic science that undergirded them steadily lost credibility. Geneticists learned that few physical traits result from single genes and that human behavior is the product of a complex interplay of biology and environment. Social scientists showed that peoples from eastern and southern Europe were not races but ethnic and national groups who differed in culture but not biology. Eugenicists paid far too little attention to cultural, economic, and similar influences in their accounts of mental characteristics and social pathologies. Eugenic doctrine also came to be seen as pervaded by class and race prejudice. Although some eugenicists tried to remove such prejudice from their doctrines and goals, the revelations after World War II of the extreme to which the Nazis had carried biological racism made eugenics anathema. The specter of eugenics has continued to hang over all efforts to manipulate human heredity and formed a touchstone of late‐twentieth‐century debates over the acquisition and use of human genetic information.
See also Anthropology; Birth Control and Family Planning; Boas, Franz; Crime; Cultural Pluralism; Genetics and Genetic Engineering; Human Genome Project; Immigration Law; Intelligence, Concepts of; Progressive Era; Prostitution and Antiprostitution; Race, Concept of; Sexual Morality and Sex Reform; Social Class.

Bibliography

Daniel J. Kevles , In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, 1995.
Edward J. Larson , Sex, Race, and Science: Eugenics in the Deep South, 1995.

Daniel J. Kevles