The Dark History of Eugenics in America

When most people hear about eugenics, they think of Nazi Germany. The Nazis did pursue eugenic policies with industrial efficiency and murderous results. What the standard history tends to underplay is that the Nazis learned many of their ideas from the United States, which had been running a large-scale eugenics program for decades before Hitler came to power.

American eugenics was not a fringe movement. It was funded by the Carnegie Institution and the Rockefeller Foundation. It was taught at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. It was championed by presidents, Supreme Court justices, and respected scientists. It was written into law in 32 states. It resulted in the forced sterilization of tens of thousands of Americans. And it is largely absent from the way Americans learn their own history.

The Origins: Galton and the Science of Better Breeding

The intellectual foundation of eugenics was laid by Francis Galton, a British polymath and cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton coined the term "eugenics" in 1883, from Greek roots meaning "well-born." He was interested in the question of whether human intelligence and other traits were heritable and, if so, whether society could improve the human stock by encouraging reproduction among the "fitter" and discouraging it among the "unfit."

Galton's core methodology was fatally flawed. He equated social success with genetic fitness, meaning that wealthy, educated, upper-class people were defined as the desirable stock and poor, immigrant, or otherwise marginalized people were defined as the undesirable stock. The social conditions that produced poverty and limited opportunity were excluded from the analysis. The result was a scientific-sounding framework that naturalized class hierarchy and provided a biological justification for social inequality.

The American version of eugenics arrived in the early 20th century with a specifically American flavor. Charles Davenport, a biologist trained at Harvard, established the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York in 1910, funded by the Carnegie Institution and later by the Harriman railroad fortune. The ERO became the central institution of American eugenics research, training fieldworkers to go into communities and document family histories, cataloging what it called "defective" traits.

The Laws

Indiana passed the first compulsory sterilization law in the United States in 1907, targeting "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles, and rapists." By 1931, 30 states had passed similar legislation. The laws varied in their specifics but shared a core logic: that people deemed unfit, defined variously as mentally ill, mentally deficient, epileptic, criminal, or sometimes simply poor, should be prevented from reproducing.

The Supreme Court case that validated these laws was Buck v. Bell, decided in 1927. Carrie Buck was a young woman in Virginia who had been committed to the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded after being raped by a relative of her foster family and becoming pregnant. The state of Virginia wanted to sterilize her as a "moral imbecile," the third generation of "feebleminded" women in her family, following her mother and her infant daughter.

The Supreme Court ruled 8-1 in favor of forced sterilization. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one of the most celebrated legal minds in American history, wrote the majority opinion. It contains a sentence that remains one of the most chilling ever written by an American court: "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. Three generations of imbeciles are enough."

Carrie Buck was sterilized. Her daughter Vivian, the supposed third-generation imbecile, later attended school, made the honor roll, and died at age 8 of an intestinal disease. There is no evidence that either Carrie or her mother were mentally deficient. The case was effectively a fraud designed to produce a favorable legal precedent.

The Scale of Forced Sterilization

Buck v. Bell opened the legal door to state sterilization programs. By the time the programs were eventually wound down, an estimated 60,000 to 65,000 Americans had been forcibly sterilized under state law. The real number may be higher; record-keeping was inconsistent and many victims were never told what had been done to them.

California sterilized more people than any other state, approximately 20,000. The targets were disproportionately women, disproportionately immigrants, disproportionately people of color, and disproportionately poor. In practice, the programs often targeted anyone who was considered a social burden: people in state institutions, people receiving welfare, people who were considered promiscuous or unruly.

Some women were sterilized during childbirth, when they were unconscious or immediately postpartum and unable to give meaningful consent. Some were told the procedure they were receiving was something else. Some were threatened with loss of welfare benefits or continued institutionalization if they refused.

The program continued into the 1970s in some states. California's law was not repealed until 1979. North Carolina's eugenic sterilization program continued into the early 1970s, by which time it was disproportionately targeting Black women. A state compensation fund for North Carolina victims was established in 2013, 85 years after the program began.

The Connections to Nazi Germany

American eugenicists were explicitly aware that they were developing a model that other countries might follow. Madison Grant, whose 1916 book The Passing of the Great Race was a bestselling eugenics text in the United States, received a letter from Adolf Hitler who called the book "my bible." Grant's work argued for Nordic racial superiority and the need to prevent racial "pollution" through immigration restriction and eugenic breeding.

German eugenicists visited the United States to study its programs. The Rockefeller Foundation funded eugenics research in Germany, including work at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, where Josef Mengele later trained. The Nazi Racial Hygiene Law of 1933, which mandated sterilization of people with various conditions, was explicitly modeled on American state laws, particularly the Model Eugenical Sterilization Law developed by Harry Laughlin at the Eugenics Record Office.

When the Nuremberg Trials charged Nazi doctors with crimes against humanity for their sterilization programs, American eugenicists' work was cited in the defense. The defense argument, that these practices were simply following standards established in democratic countries, was rejected by the tribunal, but the factual premise was largely accurate. The Americans had done it first.

Immigration Restriction

Forced sterilization was not the only policy instrument of American eugenics. The Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, also known as the Johnson-Reed Act, was explicitly shaped by eugenic thinking. It established national origin quotas that severely limited immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa while preserving relatively open immigration from Northern and Western Europe.

The act was presented in Congress with testimony from Harry Laughlin of the Eugenics Record Office, who was appointed "Expert Eugenics Agent" of the House Committee on Immigration. He argued, based on data from state institutions, that immigrants from certain countries contributed disproportionately to the "socially inadequate" population. The data was selective and methodologically dubious, but it was accepted by Congress.

The 1924 Act's quotas were in effect when Jewish refugees were trying to flee Nazi Germany in the 1930s. The strict limits on immigration from Germany and Eastern Europe, set by a law designed to keep out people like those same refugees, contributed to the United States accepting far fewer Jewish refugees than it might otherwise have. The connection between eugenics and immigration policy had consequences that extended well beyond the laboratory.

The Collapse of the Movement

American eugenics began to collapse as an intellectual movement in the 1930s and 1940s, partly because the Nazi application of eugenic ideas made the implications impossible to ignore, and partly because genetics as a science was advancing in ways that undermined the movement's core claims. The genetic basis for complex behavioral traits like intelligence or criminality turned out to be far more complex than early eugenicists had assumed. The simple Mendelian inheritance patterns they had applied to human behavior were not adequate to the reality.

Scientific organizations that had supported eugenics began to distance themselves. The American Anthropological Association formally rejected scientific racism in 1938. Geneticists who had once lent their names to the movement began to criticize it publicly. By the late 1940s, eugenics as an organized scientific and political movement was in retreat.

But the laws stayed on the books, and the sterilizations continued. The legal framework the movement had created outlasted the intellectual respectability it once enjoyed. People were being sterilized under laws that the scientific community had largely repudiated, in state institutions that continued to operate on the old assumptions.

The Long Shadow

Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. It remains technically valid precedent in American law. No federal court has struck it down. It is cited rarely and carefully, but it has never been explicitly reversed by the Supreme Court that issued it.

The institutions that funded and promoted American eugenics, Carnegie, Rockefeller, the major universities, have in many cases acknowledged their history. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where the Eugenics Record Office was located, has done so formally. But acknowledgment is not the same as full reckoning.

The victims of forced sterilization were mostly poor, mostly women, disproportionately nonwhite, and largely voiceless within the institutions that processed them. Many went to their graves not knowing what had been done to them. Those who did know often had no legal recourse and no public platform.

The history of American eugenics is a case study in what happens when bad science meets political power and institutional prestige. The ideas were wrong. The science was fraudulent. The outcomes were a human catastrophe. And the respectability of the institutions involved meant that no one in a position to stop it felt sufficient urgency to do so until the Nazi comparison made the implications undeniable.