Paul A Lombardo: A Century of Eugenics in America. From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era

Abstract

The year 2007 saw the centenary of America’s, and the world’s, first compulsory sterilisation law, enacted in Indiana and followed later by similar laws in over 30 other American states. A symposium was held to mark the anniversary, together with a public meeting and other events, and this book contains a number of the principal contributions. The book’s title is actually somewhat misleading; the emphasis is almost entirely on the topic of compulsory sterilisation in America, with eugenics itself featuring very little except as a background. The issues discussed revolve mainly around how American society and the establishment treated, and mistreated, its poor, its socially inadequate and its racial minorities. The book’s contributors come almost entirely from a social science and law background, with a single final chapter involving a medical geneticist. So, does it contain anything which the human geneticist, whether scientist or clinician, can learn from? While initially sceptical, my final conclusion is yes, though the parts of value are somewhat scattered among other chapters mainly of interest to historians and social scientists. The editor, Paul Lombardo, has contributed both a thoughtful introduction and a specific chapter. He highlights the shifting meanings of the term ‘Eugenics’, rightly noting that it has changed from being one that a century ago was uncritically regarded as good, whereas today it has, equally uncritically, become a term of abuse; neither situation is helpful to any objective analysis. Lombardo also notes the shifting nature of the ‘problems’ that eugenicists and others claimed to have identified, leading to political pressure to enact laws permitting and promoting compulsory sterilisation, the main hallmark of the American eugenics movement. As Lombardo emphasises here, and as others have before, this produced ‘strange bedfellows’ promoting eugenics, with some supporters being radical and progressive (in the European sense of these terms!) in other areas of policy, co-existing somewhat uneasily with the majority whose views were based largely on bigotry and racism. For many, eugenics seems to have provided a ‘secular religion’. Of the series of individual chapters, only that of Elof Carlson relates the topic of compulsory sterilisation to the wider history of American eugenics, and the role of those scientists involved in this, such as Davenport, East, Loughlin and Popenoe, receives virtually no mention. Yet it was the support and involvement of respected and established American geneticists that was crucial in persuading the various American states to pass the laws, just as their counterparts and contemporaries underpinned eugenics in Nazi Germany. A series of chapters traces the development of compulsory sterilisation laws in a range of American States, notably Indiana (the first) and California (the state that actually performed most). A major factor was the introduction of vasectomy by Indiana surgeon Harry Clay Sharp. Although somewhat repetitive and at times parochial (Europe receives barely a mention despite the close interactions of American and European eugenicists and the strongly international nature of the eugenics movement), some interesting facts emerge from these chapters. Particularly significant perhaps is that most compulsory sterilisations were performed primarily for social reasons, not on eugenic grounds; the reasons were principally poverty and social deprivation, as well as perceived ‘feeble P. S. Harper (&) Institute of Medical Genetics, Cardiff University, Heath Park, Cardiff CF14 4XN, UK e-mail: HarperPS@Cardiff.ac.uk