American Eugenics Movement Research Articles

“What Is a Man?”: Disability, Domesticity, and Imperialism in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”

ABSTRACT Following the mode of cultural studies, this essay focuses on Flannery O’Connor’s “The Life You Save May Be Your Own”, a story that has been understudied, for her delineation of masculinity in the post-war United States. Reading the male protagonist’s question “what is a man?” as the American symptom after the global war, this essay reveals the complexity of the key trope of masculinity and its intersections with the unfair power structures in three aspects, namely ableism, sexism, and imperialism. It first examines the dialectic between the individual definition and the public opinion concerning the masculinity of a physically disabled man and unravels the hostility hidden under the veil of hospitality. Then it shows the historical reasons for the seemingly perpetual tension between the male and domesticity in this story, mainly including the American eugenics movement and conventional gender roles. Finally, situating the story in the tradition of women’s writing, in which discourses of domesticity relate to politics frequently, it argues the male’s misplaced obligation for the boy allegorises the United States’ encounter with the global world, in which it tries to play a responsible part as a masculine adult.

Direct Sterilization of Students at the Laconia State School in New Hampshire

Sterilizations sponsored and coerced by the state occurred at the Laconia State School in New Hampshire for decades as part of the American eugenics movement in the early twentieth century. The context of that movement is summarized, the case of the Laconia State School is presented, and arguments are offered to explain the immorality of the affair.

HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS

You have accessJournal of UrologyCME1 Apr 2023HF01-04 THE VIRGINIA STERILIZATION ACT: A CATALYST FOR AMERICAN EUGENICS Davis Moore, Theodore Cisu, and Adam Klausner Davis MooreDavis Moore More articles by this author , Theodore CisuTheodore Cisu More articles by this author , and Adam KlausnerAdam Klausner More articles by this author View All Author Informationhttps://doi.org/10.1097/JU.0000000000003243.04AboutPDF ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints ShareFacebookLinked InTwitterEmail Abstract INTRODUCTION AND OBJECTIVE: The origins of the American eugenics movement are rooted in the Virginia Eugenical Sterilization Act of 1924. This set a historic precedent that led to the Supreme Court ruling in Buck v. Bell (1927), which legitimized sterilization to prevent the birth of more “defective” individuals. More than 3,000 men underwent forced sterilization via vasectomy in Virginia alone. METHODS: A review of historical and medical literature was undertaken, as well as analysis of academic texts on American sterilization and eugenics. RESULTS: In the early 20th century, an increasing number of physicians promoted forced sterilization of “feebleminded” men and women to prevent the propagation of undesirable character traits in American society. One notable early proponent of eugenics was Harvey E. Jordan, dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Virginia and president of the American Genetic Association. The movement gained support from other prominent physicians including acclaimed urologist and birth control advocate William J. Robinson who wrote the early seminal books on contraception, including Eugenics, Marriage, and Birth Control in 1917. Although the first eugenic sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907, it was not until the Virginia Sterilization Act of 1924 that the practice of eugenic sterilization was codified as a legitimate medical practice. In its historic Buck v. Bell decision of 1927, the Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization did not violate the 14th Amendment. The case centered around Carrie Buck in Charlottesville, VA who was deemed “defective” and “feebleminded” after being raped by the nephew of her foster parents. She was institutionalized after giving birth, and later sterilized in October 1927 as a result of the Supreme Court decision. Over the next four decades, the rate of eugenic sterilization soared nationwide. Estimates of the number of men and women undergoing forced vasectomies and salpingectomies in Virginia range from 7,300 to 8,300 between 1924 and 1979, with historical estimates of more than 60,000 sterilizations across the US. The American eugenics movement has been credited with lending inspiration to Adolf Hitler and the architects of the Holocaust. CONCLUSIONS: Virginia remained the last state to practice eugenic sterilization, repealing the statute in 1974. More than 3,000 forced vasectomies were performed in the state, and tens of thousands others across the country. The now infamous Buck v. Bell decision has yet to be overturned. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner issued a formal apology in 2002 for Virginia’s embrace of eugenics for more than five decades. Source of Funding: N/A © 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.FiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 209Issue Supplement 4April 2023Page: e257 Advertisement Copyright & Permissions© 2023 by American Urological Association Education and Research, Inc.MetricsAuthor Information Davis Moore More articles by this author Theodore Cisu More articles by this author Adam Klausner More articles by this author Expand All Advertisement PDF downloadLoading ...

The Kindness of Strangers: Eugenics and Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire

This article argues that Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire offers a broad critique of eugenic ideology, epitomized in Williams’s choice to end the play with Blanche DuBois’s forced institutionalization. By comparing the published 1947 play with eight distinct draft Streetcar scenes archived at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, I recover Williams’s dramatic critiques of the cruelty of twentieth-century American eugenic social policy. Over the course of Streetcar’s drafts, Williams accentuates Blanche’s increasing loss of reproductive and bodily control, emphasizes the stigmatization of her mental health, exposes pervasive eugenic assumptions articulated by Blanche herself, and explores the eugenic potential of a DuBois-Kowalski child born to either Blanche or her sister Stella. This article thus proposes a feminist, anti-eugenic reading of Streetcar attuned to the impact of the sexist, ableist, racist, and classist rhetoric of the American eugenics movement on the play and then-contemporary US social policy.

Social Impact of the American Eugenics Movement

This paper explores the American eugenics movement and the manifestation of its ideas in society. Americaneugenics thought is mainly characterized by its strong focus on the elimination of socially undesirable individuals. The two main targets of American eugenics, the feebleminded and new immigrants, are discussed in this text, with the main focus legally implemented measures such as forced sterilization and restrictions on immigration, along with the legacy of these actions. This examination of American eugenics points out a clear continuity with Nazi ideology, an association which in the end also contributed to the fall of the official American eugenics movement. To explore the theoretical framework of the movement, works by Charles Davenport and Madison Grant are examined.

“From The Kallikaks to The Kallikaks: <i>Hillbilly Elegy</i> and the Legacy of Eugenics”

Ron Howard’s popular adaptation of JD Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy treated the New York Times bestselling book as an answer to the politics of Appalachia, offering insight into understanding Trump’s popularity. Yet with Trump’s recent endorsement of Vance for a Senate run, this reading of Vance’s text requires an update. One that looks to the larger context of hillbilly-themed representations. American eugenics offers such a view. For over 100 years the American eugenics movement used the hillbilly stereotype to justify its surveillance, categorization, institutionalization, and sterilization of what they called “defectives” in promoting its image of “whiteness.” Popular media was an integral part of these efforts. The foundational narrative of the American eugenics movement, Goddard’s 1912 text The Kallikaks is also the name of a hillbilly-themed sitcom produced in 1977. Utilizing Lisa Cartwright’s Screening the Body, Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, this article argues that the narrative of the hillbilly stereotype in American eugenics has been an integral part of cinema and television history, extending back to the motion studies. A history that finds its extension in Howard’s adaptation of JD Vance’s book, Hillbilly Elegy.

The ruse of impurity: Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and the politics of hybridity

ABSTRACT Placing Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (1993) within a larger historical and transnational context, this essay interrogates Gilroy’s uncritical deployment of mestizaje and hybridity to theorize Black subject formation and Black cultural productions. In doing so, it shows that the exclusion of Afro-Latin America and the Hispanophone Caribbean has crucial consequences for the work’s conceptualization of the Black Atlantic and its broader racial politics. While Gilroy seeks to repudiate what he calls ‘the dangerous obsessions with ‘racial’ purity which are circulating inside and outside black politics,’ I argue that the obsession with hybridity that animates Gilroy’s work is no less dangerous. Contrary to Gilroy’s assumption, ‘creolisation, métissage, mestizaje, and hybridity’ do not ‘exceed racial discourse,’ but are rather embedded in the history and logics of the Latin American eugenics movement. As it fails to contend with the material histories of racial mixture as a white supremacist technology, The Black Atlantic echoes some of these eugenicist logics, colluding with the anti-Black agenda that it seeks to contest. In the process, the book prefigures the racial disavowal of Gilroy's later work and leaves us with inadequate tools for understanding the workings of racial power.

Future Promise—: History as a Guide to Navigate Contemporary Policy

Future Promise—History as a Guide to Navigate Contemporary Policy María T. Colompos-Tohtsonie (bio) As we celebrate the eighty-fifth anniversary of the Black History Bulletin, the critical knowledge project of Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, it is salient to link historical trauma to future promise by contextualizing contemporary policies. History has grounded our understanding of our beginnings and has allowed us to move forward toward who our ancestors dreamed of us becoming. In light of reflecting on the sociohistorical and sociocultural aspects of historical trauma, there have been collective efforts in the realm of knowledge building and citizenry constructs through policy implementation. [1] Therefore, the goal of policy production is to recognize how the past has influenced the present and how the present can be used to shape future policies from the traumatic nexus where race, trauma, violence, and white supremacy intersect. Click for larger view View full resolution Dr. Carter G. Woodson and Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune [End Page 31] History as a Guide The history of the United States outlines systemic racial trauma and white supremacy, which has held as the main policy design for federal and state policies. An extensive societal shift within the United States that streamlined racial trauma and white supremacy was the American Eugenics Movement. The policies that emerged from the American Eugenics Movement throughout the 1900s delineated the relationship between race matters and societal policies that still lingers throughout the United States. The external effects of the American Eugenics Movement shaped the public consciousness concerning white supremacy. This was the common belief of people who lived through the American Eugenics Movement, especially in the eyes of white Americans who were keen on establishing policies to hinder the growth of the Black population. For instance, from 1931 to 1968, the majority of Black people in the state of California were subjected to wrongful treatment from landlords. The Rumford Fair Housing Act, a law passed in 1963, helped ease racial discrimination by property owners and landlords who refused to rent or sell their property to Black customers. [2] Although the law was passed, numerous interest groups collaborated with local and state government officials to ensure that policies were created to avoid compliance with the law. As a result, an increased concentration in utilizing history as a facilitator for change is vital in fortifying future promises within the policy realm. Navigating Contemporary Policy The synergetic relationship between the public and public administrators relies on the implementation of public policies that are not narrowly defined, ambiguous, or radically subjective. “It takes time, effort, mobilization of many actors, and the expenditure of political resources to keep an item prominent on the agenda.” [3] The main determinant that influences positive race relations for Blacks is challenging the prevailing dominant attitudes by highlighting racial undertones in legacy existing policies. By initiating research projects into legacy policies, civic action campaigns become linked to political agendas of the three levels of government. [4] Moreover, the distinction of a policy actor and political actor within different enclaves sheds light on how policy implementation requires technical and citizenry knowledge. Future Promise Symbolic public policies are instrumental in evaluating the efforts made in fulfilling a political agenda and reinforcing attention to race-relation problems, which are enacted by political and legal agents found in public administration. By understanding the social constructs of meanings and values within [End Page 32] social intergovernmental institutions, adaptive sociocultural leaders will be able to effectively articulate acculturated policy initiatives for policy practitioners. The future promise of minimizing the polarization of Black policy agents within intergovernmental matters can be alleviated by cultivating knowledge networks from historical perspectives. María T. Colompos-Tohtsonie María T. Colompos-Tohtsonie, MPPA, is a doctoral candidate studying Educational Leadership Policy at Texas Tech University. Her book Borders, Bras, and Battles: A Practical Guide to Mentor Undergraduate Women to Achieve Career Success earned a 2016 Society of Professors of Education Book Award. María’s research and publications include mentoring students who are culturally and/or linguistically diverse, education policy, historical and contemporary legal procedures, culturally-responsive leadership, and public policy. https://www.amazon.com/Borders-Bras-Battles-Practical...

The American Eugenics Movement and Sterilization in the Early 20th Century:

The American Eugenics Movement and Sterilization in the Early 20^th Century:

The Face of Medicine Is Not My Face…But, It Should Be

The "face of medicine" is a term commonly used to describe the leaders and decision-makers of medicine. Medical ethics often discuss past historical atrocities committed by the "face of medicine," such as the American eugenics movement and medical experimentation. However, a great irony persists: the "faces of medicine" do not resemble the faces of the oppressed populations. Nevertheless, the discussion of white supremacy and systemic racism, structures which fueled historical medical atrocities, is often omitted. This reflection discusses the need for education, conversation, and action surrounding these topics to adequately combat racial and ethnic health disparities. We also argue that the decision-makers of medicine should be a diverse group of stakeholders, thereby representative of and personally invested in a diverse group of populations.

Rethinking Trans History and Gay History in Early Twentieth-Century New York

AbstractThis article examines two cases that have previously been prominent in the gay and lesbian histories of early twentieth century New York, those of Loop-the-loop and Murray Hall. Utilizing Clare Sear’s critical approach of trans-ing analysis to reframe these cases and to reexamine them anew, this essay departs from existing scholarship while yet acknowledging the complex interaction between gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century. Reframing these two cases within transgender history, I examined their transgression of gender boundaries to analyze how these two individuals’ non-normative gender practices were central to how others understood and framed them, as well as to how they presented themselves. When reexamined, Hall’s case suggests a complex reaction to non-normative gender in relation to the racialized performance of gender as well as a connection between non-normative gender and criminality. Loop-the-loop’s case points to a connection between sexology, the American eugenics movement, and scientific racism, while also shows the resistance by those who transgressed gender boundaries. The examination of these two cases aims to challenge existing explanations for individuals who transgress gender boundaries and to expand historians’ understanding of transgender history.

El movimiento eugenésico estadounidense como clave del éxito de la eugenesia en el siglo XX y la posibilidad de su retorno en el siglo XXI

Fundamentada en la milenaria idea del perfeccionamiento humano, la ideología eugenésica británica emergente a finales del siglo XIX tuvo en el movimiento eugenésico norteamericano el apoyo necesario para materializar una serie de políticas de carácter racial con el objetivo de perfeccionar la especie humana. El movimiento eugenésico estadounidense se constituyó como un paso clave en la extensión de una ideología que triunfó en numerosos Estados latinoamericanos y europeos, y que perdió todo su apoyo científico, político y social debido a su radicalización en Alemania durante el Holocausto nazi. En la actualidad, el debate en torno al pensamiento eugenésico y la posibilidad de su retorno ha crecido de forma exponencial con motivo del desarrollo biotecnológico, y de la posibilidad de una mejora humana biotecnológica que provoque graves daños al ser humano.

Weston A Price and the American Eugenics Movement

Weston A Price and the American Eugenics Movement

Let Me Heal: An Instant Classic.

Every now and then, a nonfiction book comes along that everyone who is interested in or involved with its subject matter should read—and re-read. In this issue, I review such a book—Let Me Heal: The Opportunity to Preserve Excellence in American Medicine. Its author is Kenneth M. Ludmerer, Professor of Medicine, Professor of History, and the Mabel Dorn Reeder Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. As a graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude) and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine (Alpha Omega Alpha), Ludmerer is a board-certified internist who has devoted his entire professional career of more than 40 years to medical education and healthcare policy. In the eyes of many, including my own, he stands as the leading authority on American medical education, past and present. Although he has received a host of prestigious awards and honors and has been the principal or a member of numerous editorial boards and scientific societies, his books alone will earn him a front-row seat in the pantheon of medical educators. His first book,1 in 1972, was a study of the American eugenics movement. Saturday Review named it one of the outstanding science books of the year. His second book2 focused on the creation of America's system of medical education. It was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a Bancroft Prize. His third book3 examined the evolution of American medical education from the turn of the 20th century to the advent of managed care. Reviewers called it “a masterpiece of great national importance” and “the most important work in medical education since the Flexner report.” Ludmerer's latest book4—the one that prompted this editorial and associated review—is the first-ever account of the residency training system in the United States and its relation to the quality of medical care in this country. Of his substantial contributions to the medical literature, this one is my favorite. Other reviewers have called it “a tour de force,” “a thoughtful scholarly treatise,” and “a ‘must read now’ for everyone who cares about how we train our future doctors.” When considering the ongoing changes in our healthcare delivery system and the uncertainty of medical education and practice, Let Me Heal offers the following: “. . . the medical profession has little to fear in the changes ahead as long as it remembers that it exists to serve, that the needs of patients come before its own, and that it always must be thinking of improving the future as well as caring for the present.”4 Amen.

“A DEAF VARIETY OF THE HUMAN RACE”: HISTORICAL MEMORY, ALEXANDER GRAHAM BELL, AND EUGENICS

AbstractAlexander Graham Bell stood at the intersection of two late nineteenth-century American social developments. First, a nascent deaf community, threaded by residential schools and the use of a shared visual language, began to form by the 1850s, drawing deaf people into regular interaction and intermarriage. Second, the American eugenics movement, determined to eliminate perceived social problems through reproductive restrictions, came to prominence as the century neared its end. Bell's role in publicly connecting these two historical threads has earned him the approbation of the American deaf community and historians of disability.This article examines Bell's words and actions closely over thirty years to argue that a combination of Bell's own hubris and historians' tendency to conflate two aspects of his complex attitude toward disability has distorted historical memory. Bell feared that difference alone led to inequality, and he hoped that society could be improved through informed reproductive decisions. Ultimately, Bell found himself entangled in an alarming eugenic environment and sought to thwart eugenicists who would interfere with deaf reproductive rights.

An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon (review)

Reviewed by: An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics by Sharon M. Leon Paul A. Lombardo An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics. By Sharon M. Leon. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. Pp. ix, 226. $45.00. ISBN 978-0-226-0388-8.) When Pope Pius XI issued his encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930, he specifically addressed “some who are over solicitous for the cause of eugenics” and seek to employ “medical action” in the form of surgical sterilization. Historians reference the encyclical as the most authoritative Roman Catholic opposition to eugenic sterilization laws passed in the first third of the twentieth century. But relatively little historical attention has been paid to how American Catholics engaged the eugenics movement before Rome spoke. Thanks to Sharon Leon’s An Image of God: The Catholic Struggle with Eugenics, we now have a much more nuanced picture of when Catholic opposition to sterilization took shape, and the motives and arguments that gave it form. Leon’s book opens three new doors in the history of eugenics. First, she provides a detailed roadmap to politics among the faithful, noting how during the early years of the American eugenics movement, the pro-natalist thrust of so-called “positive eugenics” echoed traditional church thinking that Pius would summarize in Casti Connubii as “salutary counsel for more certainly procuring the strength and health of the future child.” This feature of the growing eugenics movement provided an attraction to some important American Catholic thinkers. Second, Leon explains that Catholic critics of eugenic sterilization went beyond doctrinal arguments to focus strategically—and as history would later conclude, accurately—on the scientific weakness of eugenic theory. Third, both before and after Buck v. Bell, the watershed Supreme Court case that validated the constitutionality of state laws mandating eugenic sterilization, Catholic critics of the practice highlighted individual human dignity and the moral significance of bodily integrity as counterweights that trumped statist assertions about the common good. The strength of Leon’s study lies in the painstaking research she conducted, not only in the well-known records of the American Eugenics Society and other eugenic advocacy groups, but also in the records of organizations such as the National Catholic Welfare Conference and the National Council of Catholic Men (NCCM). She found evidence that the men’s group first inadvertently overlooked the pending litigation in Buck v. Bell. Then, aware of the danger of awakening all too common 1920s anti-Catholic sentiments, NCCM quietly orchestrated the filing of a petition for rehearing after the decision in the case had been announced. Although its efforts to overturn the Supreme Court’s decision were ultimately unsuccessful, the petition contained the best and most thorough arguments made against the sterilization law. Despite decades of research on the Buck case by other scholars, Leon was first to discover the provenance of this final chapter of the litigation. Leon dedicates a full chapter to address one of the persistent questions in American sterilization history—although two thirds of the states had sterilization laws, why did similar legislation fail in the remainder of the states? Leon focuses on Ohio, telling the story of Catholic opposition to sterilization proposals there in the early 1930s. Her fine-grained analysis of behind-the-scenes lobbying by a prominent [End Page 179] Catholic bishop, Joseph Schrembs of Cleveland, in opposition to a sterilization bill is a masterful exercise in political and legislative history. Popular commentary on the history of eugenics in America often operates at the level of cartoon, with anti-Darwinian religionists of many stripes posed against the forces of scientific materialism. Leon’s book provides an antidote to that kind of ahistorical polemic by showing in textured detail how the Catholic hierarchy as well as the laity struggled with the many-faceted seductions of eugenics. Paul A. Lombardo Georgia State University Copyright © 2014 The Catholic University of America Press

2013 Academy Proceedings

2013 Academy Proceedings

Evangelizing Eugenics: A Brief Historiography of Popular and Formal American Eugenics Education (1908-1948)

This article examines the history of the American Eugenics movement’s penetration into the formal and popular educational milieu during the first half of the 20th Century, and includes a review of some recent scholarly research on eugenic themes in education and popular culture. Apologists have dismissed the American Eugenics movement as a shortlived, racist, reactionary, and pseudoscientific aberration that was already dying long before the collapse of the Third Reich. Many official histories of biology and various social science disciplines including education were sanitized to expunge or trivialize the involvement of a host of important prophets, disciples, and evangelists in the eugenics movement. It was also common to divorce the research and statistical methods developed in the service of eugenics from their inspiration and original application to Galton’s secular religion of human betterment. In the last few decades, however, a new generation of scholars began to re-examine and illuminate the breadth and depth of the eugenics movement: its devotees and devotees’ actions and influence on their professions or academic disciplines and on society. These scholars also looked into how eugenics penetrated educational thought, curriculum, courses, and texts; thereby, revealing a panoply of overlapping interests, academic programs, organizations, and influential individuals that fatefully intersected and synergistically recombined into a powerful social movement throughout the first half of the 1900s.

Segregating the Chickenheads: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Post/humanism of the American Eugenics Movement

This essay reads Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a critique of the American eugenics movement. Replete with historical allusions and satiric wordplay, Dick's novel condemns the eugenics movement as eliminating disability, diminishing human diversity, discouraging empathy, and ushering in harmful posthuman ideas before their time. Keywords:Eugenics; Philip K. Dick; America; Science fiction; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

Can Psychiatry be Misused Again?

The Human Genome Project was completed in 2003. While the medical community is still digesting the results, some questions are already emerging: Are psychiatrists prepared to discuss with patients and families the genetic aspect of mental illness (1)? Since genetic testing reflects probabilities and risk factors for mental illness, are patients and families able to understand that genes do not cause diseases or symptoms, but rather “conspire” with the environment to bias the individual toward a syndrome or symptom? Is the data relevant enough to be communicated even in the absence of adequate treatments? Do the offspring of mentally ill patients have the right to know the results of their genetic testing? What about the right not to know if they choose so? Can insurers or employers misuse genetic information? Are we headed toward a twenty-first century neo-eugenics? Historic View of Psychiatry Historically, psychiatry was frequently misused for political or economic gain. Science of eugenics emerged at the beginning of last century (2). It stated that the genetic pool of the population could be improved by limiting the reproductive rights and even survival of the “unfit” individuals. Psychiatrists played a crucial role in the eugenic movement in Nazi Germany. In September 1939, Hitler signed a document called “The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases.” This law specified three actions to prevent the perpetuation of hereditary diseases in the German population: mental retardation, schizophrenia, and alcoholism. These actions were: Forced sterilization of “unfit” population. Children with deformities and other hereditary disorders were reported to a central registry from where a committee of academics decided who would be killed. “Action T4” was a program that targeted adult psychiatric patients for extermination (3). This euthanasia program entailed killing of patients by gas in special hospitals in the years 1939–1941, and in psychiatric hospitals in the years 1942–1945. In this latter period, patients were killed with lethal injections and through the introduction of a starvation diet. It is interesting that the elite of German psychiatry such as university professors and hospital directors decided whether a given patient would meet the criteria for the euthanasia program (3, 4). These criteria were met by individuals who: Had specific mental disorders and were unable to work, or Could carry out purely mechanical tasks, or Had continuously spent at least 5 years in an asylum, or Were kept under custody as criminally insane, or did not possess German citizenship, or Were not of the German or similar races (5, 6). American eugenics Prior to World War I eugenics was widely accepted in the U.S. academic community. The American eugenics movement was rooted in the biological determinist ideas of Sir Francis Galton. Galton coined the term “eugenics” in 1883. The essence of the concept was described in his book “Hereditary Genius,” published in 1869. Galton believed that through selective breeding human species should direct its own evolution. Others who followed Galton in principle pursued a difference approach, advocating involuntary sterilization and restrictive laws for marriage and immigration, a program often labeled “negative eugenics.” Focusing first on the mentally ill and mentally handicapped, negative eugenics expanded to embrace notions of racial inferiority (7). In 1927, the U.S. Supreme Court had empowered the states to determine who should and should not be permitted to reproduce. From this point on eugenics was enforced by state laws. These family laws prohibited the marriage of “lunatics,” “imbeciles,” “epileptics,” the “insane,” and the “weak minded.” Some of these laws lingered in different states of the union in one way or another until 1980s (8, 9). Between 1907 and 1940 a total of 18,552 insane individuals were sterilized in the United States. Half of the procedures were done in California where the superintendent of the Stockton State hospital believed that marriage licenses in the general population should not be given to anyone with “a taint of insanity in his or her family” unless the person had first undergone sterilization (10). Psychiatry's desire for greater respectability in the medical profession made eugenic “science” attractive. Nathan Hale wrote in “Freud and the Americans”: “Logically, only eugenics programs could halt the apparently mounting incidence of insanity.” Barbara Sicherman, in “The Quest for Mental Health in America: 1880–1917” similarly observed that “most psychiatrists were greatly interested in the scientific study of eugenics” (10).