The History of Eugenics: A Primer

BY ERIN STEWART AND KATHERINE GLADHART-HAYES

Images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

8 | ELEMENTS

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. 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 and his belief that physical, mental, and moral features were largely heritable, Galton defined eugenics as the science of improving human society by giving “more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had” (2, 3). In other words, eugenics meant promoting the reproduction of “fit” individuals while restricting that of those considered “unfit.”

Exactly how different eugenics programs defined relative fitness depended on the prevailing social norms of the time. For example, in Mexican eugenics programs, mestizos (mixed-race individuals with European and indigenous ancestry) were elevated as the superior race (4). In the U.S., supporters of eugenics considered those who did not conform 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).

Positive eugenics, in contrast, focused on using various means to encourage certain groups of people to marry and have children. In Nazi Germany, for example, the state dispensed subsidies to “racially meritorious couples” in proportion to the number of children they had, while in the United States state fairs staged “fitter family” and “better baby” contests in which families and infants were judged much like livestock based on “health and heredity” (2, 9). Positive eugenics also took the form of educational programs, public health campaigns, and restrictions in birth control and abortion access (1). Positive eugenics inherently reinforced, and in some ways institutionalized, ideas of hierarchy and superiority, targeting and disadvantaging historically marginalized populations.

Many different groups were the target of negative eugenics. In Germany, Nazi programs targeted Jews, gay people, communists, Roma people, and people with

“Positive eugenics inherently reinforced, and in some ways institutionalized, ideas of hierarchy and superiority, targeting and disadvantaging historically marginalized populations.” ABOVE: Sir Francis Galton

disabilities (1). In the United States, compulsory sterilization policies targeted the “feeble-minded,” which nominally referred to those who were “mentally deficient,” but in actuality served as a catch-all term for anyone who did not conform to social expectations (5). This included people with schizophrenia, manic depression, psychosis, and epilepsy; prostitutes and women who had children out of wedlock; criminals; and the impoverished (10). In addition, a disproportionate number of sterilizations in the United States were conducted on African Americans, Mexicans, and immigrants from Britain, Scandinavia, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Russia (10). Public health programs in California targeted criminals, prostitutes, alcoholics, and Mexican people meanwhile, in Canada, birth control campaigns focused on indigenous women in the north (4, 11). Both eugenics and related public health policies played a key role in shaping social and political constructions of the U.S.-Mexico border between 1910 and 1930, as concerns about diseases like typhus and eugenic fears of miscegenation influenced immigration policy and the practices of sanitation and quarantine facilities (12).

ABOVE: Karyotype of trisomy 21

Underlying all of these policies was the notion that markers of “biological inferiority” were heritable or otherwise transmissible from parents to children. However, while some traits do show clear patterns of inheritance, many of the traits that were commonly the target of eugenic policies, such as mental illness, either do not have a clear genetic basis, are influenced by both genes and the environment, or are polygenic, making it difficult or impossible to determine whether they will appear in offspring (13). Additionally,

ABOVE: United States sterilization legalization as of 1929

eugenic policies were based on the assumption that different groups of people are of more value than others. Many of the groups targeted by these different practices were oppressed socially, politically, and economically. Once certain traits were defined as both heritable and harmful, people and institutions argued that eugenics was morally justified on the grounds that it benefited the good of society. While in retrospect eugenics seems an obvious example of political misuse of science and biased thinking, it is important to note that most biologists working between 1900 and 1950 believed in the importance of bettering future generations via eugenics, though they often defined what that meant differently. For example, though the anthropologist Franz Boas and geneticist T.H. Morgan criticized the classist and racist versions of eugenics that were influencing immigration and marriage laws, both thought that the prevention of breeding among those with “congenital defects” was an appropriate use of eugenics within a medical context (14, 15). Yet it should be noted that even when such “defects” show clear patterns of inheritance, it is still society, and not science, that defined these as defects. There is also a general tendency to assume that eugenic policies were only carried out in a few places. As scholar Alexandra Minna Stern writes, “before the 1990s, it was difficult to find any publications on eugenics that did not focus exclusively on the United States, Germany, or England” (4). Despite this geographical bias, the eugenics movement was extremely widespread. The Eugenic Archive lists over 55 countries and former colonies—on every continent except Antarctica—that were in some way impacted or influenced by eugenics (6). These countries didn’t necessarily apply eugenic

principles in the same way as the United States or Germany. For example, Latin American countries, Spain, France, Italy, and Romania practiced a form of eugenics heavily influenced by Catholicism and “neo-Lamarckian theories of the inheritance of acquired traits overshadowed Mendelian tenets of strict heredity” (4). In China, eugenic thought was incorporated into birth control campaigns during the 1930s and ’40s. After 1949, Mao’s government publicly denounced eugenics as classist, but eugenic thinking continued to influence their pronatalist policies, and later formed the rationale for the explicitly antinatalist One Child Policy in 1979 (6). In Australia, mixedrace Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their parents with the goal of promoting “racial purity” from 1909 into the 1970s (6). As recently as the 2000s, HIV-positive women in Kenya were both pressured to undergo sterilization and sterilized without consent (6). As the case of Kenya demonstrates, eugenic thought remains an issue today. Many argue that “top-down” stateorchestrated eugenics programs are being replaced by a “bottom-up” form of eugenics in which reproductive technologies enable some individuals to control the genetic makeup of their offspring. Specifically, technologies such as in-vitro fertilization, preimplantation genetic diagnosis, and prenatal screening for chromosomal abnormalities like Down syndrome have raised questions regarding the implications of selective implantation and abortion. The recent advent of CRISPR technology, which allows for the direct editing of genes, has stoked these concerns. One scholar has suggested that, as CRISPR technology removes the logistical barriers to germline editing, “what seemed like a moral or technical issue in the past is—in this society—very likely to become a consumer question of who can afford it” (2). Yet modern-day eugenics isn’t only an issue of emerging reproductive technologies and individual choice; indeed, “the vast majority of present-day eugenics strategies are bureaucratic and mundane, just as they were in the past” (16). Of particular relevance to Tacoma, it has been suggested that mass incarceration in prisons and detention centers can function as a tool of eugenics control. A stark example of this comes from California prisons, where almost 150 women were illegally sterilized from 2006 to 2010 (16). However, according to historian of eugenics Molly Ladd-Taylor, even without actual forced sterilization these institutions still “break up troublesome families, reduce the number of babies born to the ‘defective, dependent, and delinquent’ classes, and promise to protect society from danger by keeping people considered dark, oversexed, and menacing ‘out of sight and out of mind’” (16). Therefore, the outcome of mass incarceration is arguably similar to that of past eugenic strategies, but because it is

ABOVE: Poster promoting China’s One Child Policy, 2005

predicated on different grounds it is easier for justice systems and the public to reconcile and disregard such imprisonment. The contemporary COVID-19 pandemic has also raised concerns regarding the differential valuation of human lives. As New York Times writer Ian Buruma notes, in debates on the extent and duration to which quarantine measures should be implemented “there is a tendency, not least in the White House, to speak in Darwinian terms about sacrificing the old and sick in the current crisis for the sake of the economy” (17). In addition, various U.S. states are developing triage plans in the likely event that the number of COVID-19 patients requiring intensive care exceeds the number of available intensive care units. These triage plans include guidelines on how to prioritize patients for care based on factors including the presence of pre-existing medical conditions and age (18). The plans have prompted many to speak out online with the hashtags #noICUgenics and #NoBodyIsDisposable, expressing worries that people who are disabled, high-BMI, elderly, HIV+, and chronically ill will be passed over for care. These statements and hashtags, which implicitly and explicitly connect triage plans to eugenics, illustrate how important issues of eugenics remain today. The articles that follow explore various facets of the history of eugenics, including the role of eugenics in biology curricula and at Puget Sound, and how this history continues to shape the present.