The term eugenics originated with English scientist Francis Galton. In Hereditary Genius (1869), Galton advocated a selective breeding programme among humans, to ensure that upper class characteristics eg high intelligence, were passed down.
Galton’s theories significantly shaped American policies. His ideas inspired Charles Davenport, a prominent American biologist, to establish the Eugenics Record Office/ERO NY in 1910. Davenport appointed eugenics researcher Harry Laughlin as the first director, and the two men then hired field workers to collect defective family traits from the public eg poverty, intellectual disability and criminal behaviour. ERO campaigned for stringent immigration controls; the pre-WW1 law denied entry to anyone judged ‘mentally or physically defective, if it may affect the ability to earn a living.’ The first sterilisation law, in Indiana, stopped some disabled people from having children. Then they helped to pass legislation in 28 other U.S states, allowing sterilisation of the unfit.
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Fitter families competition
Eugenics Buildings
Topeka Kansas 1925
The 1920s was the era when eugenic science was thrust into popular American culture; later The Great Depression years became the American era of maximum eugenic sterilisation.
But it wasn’t until Hitler read and admired the writings of American Harry Laughlin that the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws copied the American experience. The Nazi party encouraged scientists to implement a formal sterilisation programme; in this German society, national health could take precedence over individual health.
At first, leading U.S eugenicists were thrilled to see what the Nazis had accomplished using an American model. But the Americans eventually realised that Hitler’s persecution of Germans and neighbours could seriously undermine support for sterilisation back in the USA. While the full horror of Hitler’s plans had not yet been made known to the world, the dictator had already become unpopular among Americans. For the first time, U.S eugenicists retracted their racial integrity and race betterment language, needing to describe the noble work of their movement differently.
Eugenics in the Depression were driven by a philosophy of social engineering that had been warmly backed by Pres Woodrow Wilson, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood founder.
Young women’s apparent capacity for motherhood was the critical issue when it came to the right to ever have babies. The requirement to demonstrate a woman’s unfitness for motherhood was even lower than it had been when defective genes had been the focus. Previously eugenicists had to produce evidence of degeneracy based on the family tree or on intelligence tests. Now they only needed to establish that a young woman’s own mother was negligent. It was a shift in emphasis from heredity to maternal care, separating the American programme from Germany’s horror. Yet California’s Human Betterment Foundation (1928-42) focused on minorities.
Physicians usually recorded the procedures as voluntary, that patients were motivated by a sense of responsibility. They no longer saw parenthood as a individual’s right, but instead as a “responsibility to be exercised by a certain few and avoided by others”. And the community agreed. A 1937 survey found that 66% of citizens favoured compulsory sterilisation; only 15% opposed the practice.
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By 1936, eugenics science was uncertain - genetic researchers were realising that the inheritance of traits extended well beyond one generation. Even if all of the feebleminded persons in the country were sterilised, it could take many generations to decrease the proportion of those traits in the population. This was because normal people could be carriers of the trait. And environment was ignored.
Of the many cases in the literature, here is one. When inventor and entrepreneur Peter Cooper Hewitt, he left two-thirds of his estate to his young daughter Ann and one-third to his wife Maryon. But his will stated that Ann’s share would revert back to her mother if Ann died childless. Knowing this, and fearing that her daughter was imbecilic, mother paid two doctors $9,000 each to remove the teen’s fallopian tubes, without Ann’s knowledge. Shortly after Ann filed her civil suit in 1936, the San Francisco prosecutor charged Maryon Cooper Hewitt and the two doctors responsible for Ann’s sterilisation with a felony. The physicians were arrested and released on bail.
In the San Francisco court, Ann claimed her mother paid doctors to sterilise her during an appendectomy, to deprive her of her rich father’s estate. Maryon claimed that her daughter was actually morally degenerate, addicted to sex; that she was merely protecting her feeble minded daughter, and society, from Ann’s pregnancies. But Ann wrote fluently in French and Italian. She had read books on Shakespeare, French history, Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Antoinette. A nurse who cared for Ann post-operation explained that she’d been hired to look after a mental case but found a totally bright girl! Ann was just suffering from maternal abuse.
The doctors’ lawyer had negotiated with the Human Betterment Foundation and the American Eugenics Society. Once he understood eugenic arguments in favour of sterilisation, his experts insisted that it didn’t matter whether Ann’s abnormalities were genetic; she WOULD make an unfit mother. They also discounted her nurse’s testimony as only physicians were qualified to detect feeble mindedness. The judge, convinced of Ann’s promiscuity and the wisdom of her doctors, dismissed the doctors’ charges.
Ann was being tried as Unqualified For Motherhood; she was sterilised because of environmental rather than genetic defects; she was the product of bad parenting, rather than bad genes. And the involuntary procedure occurred in a private practice, not in an institutional setting. So she decided to settle the civil suit for $150,000 in an out-of-court settlement in June 1936.
Despite widespread coverage of the Cooper Hewitt case, there was no public uproar. The Great Depression had convinced Americans to create a citizenry with discipline and industry, virtues to be cultivated in a good home. And the Cooper Hewitt trial set a legal precedent that it was a woman’s moral responsibility to surrender her biological capacities for the public good.
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina operated from 1933-77 as an experiment in genetic engineering; back then it was a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool. 31 other states had eugenics programmes, but no programme was more aggressive than North Carolina who gave social workers the power to select the victims… via IQ tests!
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The doctor signing this card guaranteed a perfect physical and mental balance, and strong eugenic love possibilities, in his patient.. but was the card serious?
By the time most of the programmes were closed down, 64,000+ people nationwide had been sterilised by state order. Even so, it took decades before California (1979) and North Carolina (2003) formally repealed laws authorising sterilisation.
Galton’s theories significantly shaped American policies. His ideas inspired Charles Davenport, a prominent American biologist, to establish the Eugenics Record Office/ERO NY in 1910. Davenport appointed eugenics researcher Harry Laughlin as the first director, and the two men then hired field workers to collect defective family traits from the public eg poverty, intellectual disability and criminal behaviour. ERO campaigned for stringent immigration controls; the pre-WW1 law denied entry to anyone judged ‘mentally or physically defective, if it may affect the ability to earn a living.’ The first sterilisation law, in Indiana, stopped some disabled people from having children. Then they helped to pass legislation in 28 other U.S states, allowing sterilisation of the unfit.
Eugenics Buildings
Topeka Kansas 1925
The 1920s was the era when eugenic science was thrust into popular American culture; later The Great Depression years became the American era of maximum eugenic sterilisation.
But it wasn’t until Hitler read and admired the writings of American Harry Laughlin that the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws copied the American experience. The Nazi party encouraged scientists to implement a formal sterilisation programme; in this German society, national health could take precedence over individual health.
At first, leading U.S eugenicists were thrilled to see what the Nazis had accomplished using an American model. But the Americans eventually realised that Hitler’s persecution of Germans and neighbours could seriously undermine support for sterilisation back in the USA. While the full horror of Hitler’s plans had not yet been made known to the world, the dictator had already become unpopular among Americans. For the first time, U.S eugenicists retracted their racial integrity and race betterment language, needing to describe the noble work of their movement differently.
Eugenics in the Depression were driven by a philosophy of social engineering that had been warmly backed by Pres Woodrow Wilson, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood founder.
Young women’s apparent capacity for motherhood was the critical issue when it came to the right to ever have babies. The requirement to demonstrate a woman’s unfitness for motherhood was even lower than it had been when defective genes had been the focus. Previously eugenicists had to produce evidence of degeneracy based on the family tree or on intelligence tests. Now they only needed to establish that a young woman’s own mother was negligent. It was a shift in emphasis from heredity to maternal care, separating the American programme from Germany’s horror. Yet California’s Human Betterment Foundation (1928-42) focused on minorities.
Physicians usually recorded the procedures as voluntary, that patients were motivated by a sense of responsibility. They no longer saw parenthood as a individual’s right, but instead as a “responsibility to be exercised by a certain few and avoided by others”. And the community agreed. A 1937 survey found that 66% of citizens favoured compulsory sterilisation; only 15% opposed the practice.
Better Babies Contest
Judged by doctors from the American Eugenics Society State Fair in Washington DC, 1931
By 1936, eugenics science was uncertain - genetic researchers were realising that the inheritance of traits extended well beyond one generation. Even if all of the feebleminded persons in the country were sterilised, it could take many generations to decrease the proportion of those traits in the population. This was because normal people could be carriers of the trait. And environment was ignored.
Of the many cases in the literature, here is one. When inventor and entrepreneur Peter Cooper Hewitt, he left two-thirds of his estate to his young daughter Ann and one-third to his wife Maryon. But his will stated that Ann’s share would revert back to her mother if Ann died childless. Knowing this, and fearing that her daughter was imbecilic, mother paid two doctors $9,000 each to remove the teen’s fallopian tubes, without Ann’s knowledge. Shortly after Ann filed her civil suit in 1936, the San Francisco prosecutor charged Maryon Cooper Hewitt and the two doctors responsible for Ann’s sterilisation with a felony. The physicians were arrested and released on bail.
In the San Francisco court, Ann claimed her mother paid doctors to sterilise her during an appendectomy, to deprive her of her rich father’s estate. Maryon claimed that her daughter was actually morally degenerate, addicted to sex; that she was merely protecting her feeble minded daughter, and society, from Ann’s pregnancies. But Ann wrote fluently in French and Italian. She had read books on Shakespeare, French history, Napoleon Bonaparte and Marie Antoinette. A nurse who cared for Ann post-operation explained that she’d been hired to look after a mental case but found a totally bright girl! Ann was just suffering from maternal abuse.
The doctors’ lawyer had negotiated with the Human Betterment Foundation and the American Eugenics Society. Once he understood eugenic arguments in favour of sterilisation, his experts insisted that it didn’t matter whether Ann’s abnormalities were genetic; she WOULD make an unfit mother. They also discounted her nurse’s testimony as only physicians were qualified to detect feeble mindedness. The judge, convinced of Ann’s promiscuity and the wisdom of her doctors, dismissed the doctors’ charges.
Ann was being tried as Unqualified For Motherhood; she was sterilised because of environmental rather than genetic defects; she was the product of bad parenting, rather than bad genes. And the involuntary procedure occurred in a private practice, not in an institutional setting. So she decided to settle the civil suit for $150,000 in an out-of-court settlement in June 1936.
Despite widespread coverage of the Cooper Hewitt case, there was no public uproar. The Great Depression had convinced Americans to create a citizenry with discipline and industry, virtues to be cultivated in a good home. And the Cooper Hewitt trial set a legal precedent that it was a woman’s moral responsibility to surrender her biological capacities for the public good.
The Eugenics Board of North Carolina operated from 1933-77 as an experiment in genetic engineering; back then it was a legitimate way to keep welfare rolls small, stop poverty and improve the gene pool. 31 other states had eugenics programmes, but no programme was more aggressive than North Carolina who gave social workers the power to select the victims… via IQ tests!
By the time most of the programmes were closed down, 64,000+ people nationwide had been sterilised by state order. Even so, it took decades before California (1979) and North Carolina (2003) formally repealed laws authorising sterilisation.