EUGENICS AND POLICY
IN THE U.S.
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Overview | Eugenics and Policy (1900-1983)
As you scroll through this timeline, you will learn about some of the key social, cultural, and policy events in the development of eugenics in the U.S. Eugenics became very much intertwined with the major social issues of the day, reaching its apex during what historians now call the Progressive era (approx. 1897 - 1920). The Progressive Era was characterized by a series of reforms to confront contemporary social and political issues, including public health. As scholars have underscored, the Progressive Era marked the first systematic attempt of the early social science profession to classify the American population and to use those classifications to address “social problems.” Progressive Era reformers, inspired by social theorists in late 19th century Germany, looked to science, including eugenics, to solve the “problems” caused by urbanization, depopulation, environmental damage, poverty, the “masses” of industrial and rural works, and what was viewed as the “perils” of immigration, especially from Asia and Southeastern Europe.
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1900 | Positive vs. Negative Eugenics
Influenced by social Darwinism and eugenicist ideas about the “quantity” and “quality” of the population, sociologists like Edward A. Ross, doctors such as Charles A.L. Reed and especially former President Theodore Roosevelt became concerned about “race suicide.” First introduced in 1900, “race suicide” was the false idea that by allowing immigration to the U.S. from Asia, Eastern Europe and Southeastern Europe, those immigrants and their children would replace the “true” inhabitants of the U.S., “Anglo-Saxons” and “Nordic” Americans, whom had a much lower birth-rate than recent immigrants. Reflecting these ideologies, eugenicists in the U.S. encouraged both positive and negative eugenics. Many believed that by enacting negative eugenics policies, like compulsory sterilization, they could eradicate social problems they perceived like alcoholism, criminality, and promiscuity, as well as diseases like tuberculosis. Others believed it necessary to promote more positive eugenics practices by encouraging “desirable” Nordic races rather than “inferior” immigrants to reproduce. Various eugenics organizations would start in the U.S. to promote and support these aims, with some lasting well past the Second World War.
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1907 | First Sterilization Law Passed in the U.S.
Indiana was the first state in the U.S. to pass a compulsory sterilization law. A few other states, like Michigan and Pennsylvania, had tried previous to 1907 though were unsuccessful. Indiana’s law, signed by Governor Hanly, made sterilization mandatory for those in custody in state institutions who were deemed “idiots” or “imbeciles”, as well as others convicted of crimes such as rape. Many women were sterilized for being deemed “feeble-minded” or too “promiscuous.” The law was in effect from 1907 to 1974 and at least 2500 persons were forcibly sterilized. Many Progressive Era reformers and eugenicists alike believed that society would benefit if the “mentally ill” and “criminals” were prohibited from reproducing. Though Indiana was the first state to pass such a law, it was not the last. Soon other states began adopting similar legislation, including the largest state in the nation, California. By the 1930s, over 30 states had similar sterilization laws on the books resulting in over 60,000 persons being sterilized before such laws were overturned in the states, with some remaining on the books until the 1980s!
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1908 | First Better Baby Contest
By the turn of the century, many Progressive Era reformers were increasingly becoming concerned about higher infant mortality. At the time about 100 out of every 1000 children died before their first birthday. The first Better Baby Contest was organized by a schoolteacher and children’s health advocate, Mary DeGarmo, at the Louisiana State Fair. This event was intended to promote a standard for measuring healthy child development and educate mothers how to raise healthy children. Similar to the agricultural competitions which were commonplace at state fair, children were judged based on physical traits like height and size, as well as their mental and behavioral health. Soon after this first event, similar contests spread to other state fairs and events across the nation. Though the Better Baby Contests were not initially connected to the eugenics movement, these events did emphasize value judgements for human traits, like “race” and “intelligence,” that many eugenicists would similarly emphasize in determining the best human “stock.”
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1918 | Madison Grant publishes "The Passing of the Great Race"
Madison Grant was one of the most important Americans in the eugenicist movement. The Yale and Columbia trained lawyer Grant was close friends with U.S. Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Herbert Hoover, as well as some of the most prominent figures in the U.S. eugenics movement like Charles Davenport, Irving Fisher, and Henry Fairfield Osborn. Grant was an outspoken nativist and Nordicist, a racist belief that the “Nordic,” or northwestern-European “white races,” were superior to the “inferior races” of the Mediterranean and Africa. This idea was the central theme of his book, The Passing of the Great Race, in which he argued that Nordic civilization was being threatened by immigration from non-Nordic European countries. Though his book sold only modestly, it was highly influential in political and eugenical circles in the U.S. Grant’s nativist ideas were central to eugenicist initiatives to attempt to limit immigration to the U.S. in the 1920s.
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1919 | Prescott Hall and the Immigration Restriction League
Founded in 1894 by Prescott Hall and others, the Immigration Restriction League responded to the xenophobia surrounding Chinese, Eastern and Southeastern European immigrants. The League, with numerous chapters across the United States, first purposed a literacy test for admission of immigrants to the United States. The efforts of the League and those like it, culminated in the Immigration Act of 1924 (see below). Hall’s eugenics rhetoric epitomized the connection between eugenics and immigration restriction ideology. In his 1919 “Immigration Restriction and World Eugenics” Hall illustrated all of the obsessions and false anxieties of the age, writing that immigration into a country “tends to sterilize all strata of higher social and economic levels already in that country.” In the case of Americans “the desire to be separated from inferiors is as strong a motive to birth control as the desire for luxury…” Hall then illustrated the fears over the “decline of the Anglo-Saxon” which motivated the work of Ross, Grant and Roosevelt. His immigration restriction and desire to implement eugenics was also driven by a fear of miscegenation where, according to Hall, eventually “the children of such crossbreeding are libel to inherit two souls, two temperaments…” Hall’s vision of America was one which demanded ethnic homogeneity in its pursuit of democracy.
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1920 | First Fitter Family Contest
The Fitter Families for Future Firesides, otherwise known as the Fitter Family Contest, grew out of the Better Baby Contests. The first one was held at the Kansas State Free Fair and was organized by Iowa Parent-Teacher Association member Mary T. Watts and U.S. Children’s Bureau field worker Florence Brown Sherbon. While the Better Baby Contests were not explicitly tied to eugenics, this was not the case for the Fitter Family Contests which were directly tied to eugenics institutions like the Eugenics Record Office, and later the American Eugenics Society (established in 1922). These contests spread to events across the country throughout the 1920s. Participating families were required to submit a record of family traits. Doctors at the events then performed physiological and psychological tests on family members to determine their overall eugenical worth. The winning families of these contests were almost always white and of northern “European” or “Nordic” descent, reflecting the ideals of the larger eugenics movement.
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1924 | U.S. President Calvin Coolidge signs the Johnson-Reed Act
In the early 20th Century, immigration was a key political issue in the U.S. By this time most of the immigrants to the country were coming from non-English speaking countries like Italy and Poland. These new immigrants mostly came to cities, where overcrowding soon becam a major issue straining the urban infrastructure. Eugenicists, like Eugenics Record Office director Harry Laughlin, saw these new “non-Nordic” immigrants as undesirable compared to immigrants from northern Europe. In 1921 he presented his prejudicial and flawed “research” on the inherent criminality of “non-Nordic” immigrants before the U.S. Congress. His testimony was key in the passing of the Johnson-Reed immigration Act in 1924. The Act placed a strict quota on the number of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, as well as barring those from Asian countries. This allowed for more immigration from the more “desirable” northern European countries in keeping with the overall goal of eugenicists like Laughlin and Madison Grant.
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1926 | The American Eugenics Society (AES) Established
The American Eugenics Society (AES) grew out of a committee formed at the Second International Eugenics Congress in New York, 1922. It was formally established in 1926 by several prominent American eugenicists, including Madison Grant, Yale University economist Irving Fisher, and Eugenics Record Office director Harry H. Laughlin. The AES primary function was to educate the wider public about the importance and merits of eugenics. It sponsored events at local and state fairs like Fitter Family Contests and exhibits which illustrated Mendel’s laws of inheritance and showed the economic costs for taxpayers of caring for “mentally ill” children. It distributed several publications including Eugenics, Eugenical News, and Eugenics Quarterly (in publication until 1970). At its height in the 1930s the organization had over 1200 members, including notable names like Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
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1927 | Buck vs. Bell
In 1924, Virginia’s General Assembly passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act. The law was designed around model legislation created by Harry Laughlin of the ERO and allowed for the commonwealth of Virginia to forcibly sterilize those deemed intellectually disabled, or “feebleminded.” That same year the superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded, Albert Priddy, requested the authority to sterilize one of his patients, 18-year-old Carrie Buck. Buck's mother, Emma, had a “history of prostitution,” and Carrie Buck had been raped by a relative and gave birth to a child. She was committed to the State Colony and deemed feebleminded. The legal case to sterilize Buck eventually made it all the way to the Supreme Court. The Court decided by an 8-1 vote that due to the Buck’s family history and their “feeblemindedness,” it was in the Commonwealth's best interest to sterilize Buck. Justice Oliver Wendel Holmes wrote the majority opinion, saying “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” The ruling effectively legitimized the practice of compulsory sterilization nationwide.
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1972 | American Eugenics Society Disbanded
After World War II, the eugenics movement in the U.S. declined significantly in influence. The revelations of Nazi atrocities committed during the war, including their own eugenics program, soured much of the U.S. public on the idea of eugenics. The American Eugenics Society would continue for the next couple of decades, however its membership was greatly reduced. During this time, it shifted its focus more on the study of genetics and human evolution. In 1969, the AES changed the title of the publication Eugenics Quarterly to Social Biology. Three years later, the AES changed its name to The Society for the Study of Social Biology.
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1983 | Oregon Last State to Repeal Sterilization Law
Following the 1927 Buck v. Bell decision in the Supreme Court, more states adopted their own forced sterilization legislation with Georgia being the last in 1937. The pace of sterilizations increased throughout the 1930s. In 1942 another Supreme Court case, Oklahoma v. Skinner, put a limit on the forced sterilization of those convicted of crimes though it said nothing of the mentally defective or “feebleminded.” It was not until after the Second World War and the world learned of Nazi atrocities that the pace of forced sterilizations began to slow. In the following decades, sterilizations continued although a number of states began repealing their laws. Carrie Buck’s home state Virginia repealed its Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1974. California, the state that sterilized the most individuals at over 20,000, repealed its law in 1979. The state of Oregon was the last to do so in 1983, by which time the state had sterilized 2,648 persons prior to the repeal. In 2002, Virginia formally apologized for its history of forced sterilization. A monument to Carrie Buck was constructed in the city of Charlottesville.