SPECIAL FEATURE: HISTORY OF EUGENICS
The History of Eugenics: A Primer BY ERIN STEWART AND KATHERINE GLADHART-HAYES Eugenics provides a case study in historical amnesia, or the simplification, alteration, or complete erasure of past events in the public consciousness. For many, the term “eugenics” brings to mind Nazi Germany and the mass genocide of the Holocaust. Yet this narrative obscures the fact that the United States had begun implementing eugenics policies in the early 1900s, and that these policies heavily influenced Germany’s own eugenics programs. And while the Holocaust was arguably the most horrific manifestation of eugenic ideologies, the spatial, temporal, and sociopolitical scope of eugenics was—and still is—much larger.
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to social norms or standards of economic productivity “backwards” and “feeble-minded,” and appropriate candidates for sterilization (5). Two potential policy routes emerged from eugenic thinking, termed “positive” and “negative” eugenics by Galton. Negative eugenics, at its most extreme, focused on preventing “unfit matings” and involved forced sterilizations and ultimately, in Nazi Germany, euthanasia. In the United States, for example, approximately 60,000 state-sanctioned compulsory sterilizations were carried out from 1907 through the 1970s, one third of which were in California (1). Occurring throughout the early 20th century, these policies influenced eugenic thought in Germany. Forced sterilization continued to be practiced for decades following World War II in many of the 32 U.S. states that had implemented sterilization laws (6). Negative eugenics also included anti-miscegenation (“racemixing”) laws, immigration restrictions, and the targeted promotion of birth control to specific populations. In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws remained in place in 16 states until judged to be unconstitutional in the 1967 Supreme Court case Loving v. Virginia; in South Africa, an act banning marriage between white people and any other racial group wasn’t repealed until 1985 (7, 8).
Coined in 1883 by Sir Francis Galton in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, the term “eugenics” comes from the Greek for “good in birth” (1). A British scientist and explorer, Galton was heavily influenced by the theory of evolution through natural selection laid out by his first cousin Charles Darwin (2). Applying his knowledge of plant and animal breeding Positive eugenics, in contrast, focused on using various and his belief that physical, means to encourage certain groups of people to marry and have mental, and moral features children. In Nazi Germany, for example, the state dispensed were largely heritable, ABOVE: Sir Francis Galton subsidies to “racially meritorious couples” in proportion to Galton defined eugenics as the science of improving human the number of children they had, while in the United States society by giving “more suitable races or strains of blood state fairs staged “fitter family” and “better baby” contests in a better chance of prevailing over the which families and infants were judged “Positive eugenics less suitable than they otherwise would much like livestock based on “health and have had” (2, 3). In other words, eugenics inherently reinforced, heredity” (2, 9). Positive eugenics also meant promoting the reproduction of “fit” took the form of educational programs, and in some ways individuals while restricting that of those public health campaigns, and restrictions institutionalized, considered “unfit.” in birth control and abortion access (1).
ideas of hierarchy and
Positive eugenics inherently reinforced, Exactly how different eugenics superiority, targeting and in some ways institutionalized, ideas programs defined relative fitness of hierarchy and superiority, targeting and and disadvantaging depended on the prevailing social norms of the time. For example, in Mexican historically marginalized disadvantaging historically marginalized populations. eugenics programs, mestizos (mixed-race populations.” individuals with European and indigenous Many different groups were the target ancestry) were elevated as the superior race (4). In the U.S., of negative eugenics. In Germany, Nazi programs targeted supporters of eugenics considered those who did not conform Jews, gay people, communists, Roma people, and people with
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