History Of Eugenics Research Articles

Eugenics and Historical Memory in America

How is the history of eugenics in America remembered, and forgotten? In this article, I explore the recent gubernatorial apologies for forced sterilizations, which were carried out under the authority of state eugenics laws from 1907 until the 1970s. I situate the apologies in the global context of movements for reparations and restitution, examine the discursive architecture of apologies that seek to address the contravention of medical ethics and trust, and suggest that the apologies have the potential to elide important aspects of the history of eugenics in America.

Was Nazi eugenics created in the US?

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create A Master Race by Edwin Black Four Walls Eight Windows, New York, NY, USA 550 pages, $27/£15 ISBN 1568582587 ![][1] Edwin Black's War Against the Weak was well known before the book ever hit the bookstores. Not only did it receive a large amount of advance publicity from the publisher and the author, but it had already become a cause celebre among historians of science working in the field of the history of eugenics, many of whom had been contacted by Black during the course of the book's preparation. It was billed as a far‐reaching revision of our understanding of eugenics that would “tear away the thickets of mystery surrounding the eugenics movement around the world.” The author's central thesis is that Nazi racial hygiene and its ultimate manifestations in the Holocaust were imported lock, stock and barrel from the USA, and that, indeed, it was US ruling elites who hatched the idea of creating a master Aryan race by selective breeding and then passed it along to the Nazis. More specifically, Black argues that the Rockefeller Foundation … [1]: /embed/graphic-1.gif

Cronenberg, Greenaway and the Ideologies of Twinship

This article deals with the representation of identical twins in the films Zed and Two Noughts by Peter Greenaway and Dead Ringers by David Cronenberg. It situates the films in a cultural and political context of the 20th-century controversies surrounding the issues of evolution, reproduction and cloning. The article claims that twinship represents the corporeal economy of the Same, whose ideological meanings have been shaped by the history of eugenics and social Darwinism. Identical twinship inscribes a utopia of the perfect, unchanging and self-identical body, opposed to the unpredictability, confusion and contingency of sexual reproduction and evolutionary history. The films under discussion critique the utopian ideology of twinship and its imaginary cancellation of difference as narcissistic and deadly.

BOOK REVIEW: Mark Jackson.THE BORDERLAND OF IMBECILITY: MEDICINE, SOCIETY AND THE FABRICATION OF THE FEEBLE MIND IN LATE VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN ENGLAND. pp. x + 273. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2000.

In Edwardian England eugenics was very topical. Guests at polite London dinner parties discussed the threat of the "unfit" and the virtues of the "lethal chamber." In Whitehall, Home Secretaries pondered the merits of sterilisation of "mental defectives" and by 1908 the massive Royal Commission into the Feeble-Minded, designed to answer questions about the nature of defectiveness and how to deal with this "threat," was under way. Given the volume of debate, and the important social policies that resulted from these deliberations, the relative lack of attention to the history of eugenics in Britain is surprising. There is a rich corpus of good articles, theses and chapters, and pioneering work by historians such as G. R. Searle, but in comparison to North America, where the historiography on eugenics is extensive, the volume of British work looks remarkably thin. Perhaps this state of affairs reflects the difference between a culture where sterilisation laws were enacted, and one where the campaign for sterilisation largely failed. Nevertheless why Britain preferred segregation to sterilisation is an important question, one that stands to tell us much about the nature of British culture and politics.

The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (review)

In Edwardian England eugenics was very topical. Guests at polite London dinner parties discussed the threat of the "unfit" and the virtues of the "lethal chamber." In Whitehall, Home Secretaries pondered the merits of sterilisation of "mental defectives" and by 1908 the massive Royal Commission into the Feeble-Minded, designed to answer questions about the nature of defectiveness and how to deal with this "threat," was under way. Given the volume of debate, and the important social policies that resulted from these deliberations, the relative lack of attention to the history of eugenics in Britain is surprising. There is a rich corpus of good articles, theses and chapters, and pioneering work by historians such as G. R. Searle, but in comparison to North America, where the historiography on eugenics is extensive, the volume of British work looks remarkably thin. Perhaps this state of affairs reflects the difference between a culture where sterilisation laws were enacted, and one where the campaign for sterilisation largely failed. Nevertheless why Britain preferred segregation to sterilisation is an important question, one that stands to tell us much about the nature of British culture and politics.

The strongman of eugenics, eugen Sandow

Recent debate on the history of eugenics in Australia has focused on the inter‐war years as a time when social reform eugenics came to the fore. The 1902–3 tour of Australasia by international strongman and eugenicist, Eugen Sandow, suggests that many of the characteristics of inter‐war eugenics were present in the earlier period. Sandow, the father of modern bodybuilding, was a passionate advocate of a healthy mind in a healthy body. While his visit was brief, he left behind a eugenic legacy.

A Black Student's Primer on the History of Eugenics

A Black Student's Primer on the History of Eugenics

Pedigrees, propaganda, and paranoia: family studies in a historical context.

This article reviews the uses of family studies carried out in the early 20th century under the banner of eugenics, a companion discipline to early genetics. It explores how, in an attempt to analyze and quantify purportedly biologic bases of social problems, the eugenicists constructed pedigree charts of notoriously "defective" families. Investigation of individuals with suspect traits formed the basis for instruction of field workers who linked those traits to larger groups. The resulting eugenic family studies provided a "scientific" face for a popular hereditarian mythology that claimed to explain all social failure in systematic terms. The eugenicists were successful in fueling public fear about the growing "army of idiots and imbeciles" graphically depicted in their pedigree charts. Their success was the result of a finely crafted educational program--propaganda that reduced science to simplistic terms. The tendency to oversimplify concepts of genetic causation and the rush to amplify the significance of research findings through the popular media is also apparent today. What begins as publicity has the potential to be transformed into propaganda. Although many in the scientific community are understandably reluctant to revisit the abuses of the past, that community must confront the history of eugenics as a necessary antidote to the genetic hype that surrounds us.

Essays in the History of Eugenics (review)

Essays in the History of Eugenics (review)

Robert A Peel (ed.), Essays in the history of eugenics, Proceedings of a conference organized by the Galton Institute, London, 1997, London, Galton Institute, 1998, pp. xv, 233, £5.00 (0-9504066-3-5).

Robert A Peel (ed.), Essays in the history of eugenics, Proceedings of a conference organized by the Galton Institute, London, 1997, London, Galton Institute, 1998, pp. xv, 233, £5.00 (0-9504066-3-5).

Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics

Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics Frank Dikötter Frank Dikötter senior lecturer and Wellcome Research Fellow School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 103, Issue 2, April 1998, Pages 467–478, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/103.2.467 Published: 01 April 1998

Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics

Race Culture: Recent Perspectives on the History of Eugenics

Francis Galton: and eugenics today.

Eugenics can be defined as the use of science applied to the qualitative and quantitative improvement of the human genome. The subject was initiated by Francis Galton with considerable support...

Eugenics, Orientalism and Classical Education: The Darker Side of the Western Tradition

The history of philosophical systems of thought is more often than not a history of political opportunism and ideological manipulation. The history of eugenics and its impact upon the nineteenth—and twentieth—centuries is very much a history of ideas in action, of dangers covert and overt. Eugenics was not the peculiar outcome of the course of events over the last two and one-half centuries. This paper will explore the origins of the ‘eugenic ideal’ which can be located in an Hellenic cultural value system and its intellectually combative connection with Plato and Aristotle. This paper will also consider the peculiar relationship of Western classical ideals to the emergence of eugenics in the nineteenth—and early twentieth—centuries.Distant prejudices reinforced by culture, tradition and the propagation of myths and values which promoted the preferred self-images of social elites were potent forces in antiquity. The emergence of eugenics in Western and Eastern European societies is a continuing case-in-point. In the end, whether we are inquiring into the worlds of the Greek city-states (poleis) or nineteenth—and twentieth—century modern and contemporary historical experiences, we are dealing with a volatile mix of ideas.Social engineering within the imagined nation-state, polis or ‘tribal community’ is inherently perilous. The idea of a preferred, more perfect and superior group, class, tribe or state of people (these are not mutually exclusive notions) is historically antique and contemporaneously vicious. Whilst such ideas are time-worn, they nonetheless remain historically potent. It is this historical and trans-historical character of the potency of eugenic ideas which should be addressed.

Eugenics and Roman Catholicism An Encyclical Letter in Context:Casti connubii, December 31, 1930

The ArgumentLittle has been written about religion vis à vis eugenics and, even less on Roman Catholicism and eugenics. A 1930 papal encyclical,Casti connubii, is usually held by historians to have been the official condemnatory view of the Catholic Church on eugenics, and the document is further supposed to have induced the only organized opposition to eugenic legislative efforts in several countries (especially France). In fact, the encyclical was not directly about eugenics but a general statement of the Catholic doctrine on marriage.This article attempts to clarify the issue of a Catholic position on eugenics by re-examining the encyclical itself as well as its contemporaneous reception in Germany and France, where there was a strong Catholic presence.Casti connubiiintroduced a change in the prescribed hierarchy of the aims of marriage when, for the first time, relations between spouses took precedence over procreation. While condemning the means (abortion, sterilization, etc.), the encyclical did not condemn positive eugenics. In the broader context of the history of eugenics, the reception of the encyclical emphasizes the family as the third entity between the individual and society. Eugenics, as a “religious Utopia” of modernity, developed a hegemonic discourse over the family realm. As such it entered into competition with more traditional religious institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church.

Coming to Grips with the Limitations of Science: Infertility and Heredity in American History

Coming to Grips with the Limitations of Science: Infertility and Heredity in American History Regina Morantz-Sanchez (bio) Margaret Marsh and Wanda Ronner. The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiii + 326 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $29.95. Diane B. Paul. Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1995. xi + 158 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.95 (cloth); $12.50 (paper). The editors regret that when this review was printed in the June issue of Reviews in American History, Margaret Marsh, coauthor of The Empty Cradle: Infertility in America from Colonial Times to the Present, was incorrectly referred to as Walsh throughout the review. The conceptual link between these two books is their social constructionist view of science. “Scientific facts do not speak for themselves,” Diane Paul concludes near the end of her brief overview of the history of eugenics, in what might serve as a succinct summary of her own work. “They must always be interpreted in light of social assumptions and goals” (p. 114). Her synopsis of current scholarship on the subject is tendered as a contribution in an edited series on scientific subjects whose purpose is to offer synthetic studies directed at lay audiences, written in nontechnical language, and intended to emphasize the social and political milieu in which each particular scientific field or topic developed. Paul, a political scientist, presents us with a clear, economical, and competent narrative of the emergence of eugenical thinking in tandem with the science of genetics, covering, not only their fascinating and often uneasy relationship with each other, but the social and political influence of the two in the United States. The authors of The Empty Cradle, a book on the history of infertility, which joins Elaine May’s “Barren in The Promised Land” (1995) as only the second published historical work on a [End Page 445] virtually unexplored topic, are sisters, one an established historian and the other an accomplished gynecologist. This unusual combination has resulted in a book that manages to treat sensitively both culture and medicine. We learn that the use of medical technology to cope with involuntary childlessness has been occurring for almost 150 years. What has altered over time is technique, knowledge, and social context. Ronner and Marsh emphasize that changing attitudes toward the family, marriage, sexuality, sex roles and gender, the social and private dimension of reproduction, emotional life, and religion all contributed to how couples perceived and responded to the nature and causes of their own infertility. In the colonial period, barrenness was viewed as an act of God. Although folk remedies existed and were sought out, in appealing to a physician for advice one always risked the possibility of being perceived as defying divine will. All men were assumed to be potential fathers, as long as they could achieve an erection, and an adequate understanding of male sterility has come about slowly, partly because of cultural resistance to the idea. A modern analogue to premodern assumptions about male potency has been physicians’ reluctance to investigate the possibility of a husband’s incapacity, often with the complicity of wives who feared undermining male pride. In coping with infertility, women have been overwhelmingly the more inclined to express dismay. Moreover, the default assumption was always that women’s bodies were defective, a theme that has persisted well into the present day. Until recently, though male disorders account for a significant percentage of couples’ inability to conceive, it was difficult to get husbands to agree to be tested, let alone treated. Only a smattering of mostly female gynecologists routinely insisted on testing husbands. Childless colonials were compensated in part by a culture that had not yet come to value offspring with the same sentimental force that gradually emerged at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition, they were offered numerous outlets for informal adoption, so that barren couples were not necessarily condemned to life without children. Those who wished could raise neighbors’ or relatives’ excess or orphaned offspring, with relatively little fanfare and a great deal of community sanction. The nineteenth century saw such conditions...

Beyondism: Raymond B. Cattell and the new eugenics

A significant confusion has arisen out of the mass of work done on the history of eugenics in the last two decades. Early scholars of the subject treated eugenics as a marginalized or obsolete movement of the radical right. Subsequent research has shown that eugenic ideas were adopted in diverse national settings by very different groups, including--among others--liberals, communists and Catholics, as well as radical rightists. This complexity is sometimes taken to mean that eugenic has no special ideological associations, that it is historically and potentially a beast of a thousand heads. It is not. Although people of varied ideological commitments have been attracted to eugenics, ideologues of the radical right, and above all interwar fascists, have been uniquely and centrally involved in its development. Fascism and the radical right are also complex entities, but for all the heterogeneity of both eugenics and fascism, the special historical relationship between the two cannot be ignored. This relationship is exemplified in the work of the influential psychologist, Raymond B. Cattell. Cattell was an early supporter of German national socialism and his work should be understood in the context of interwar fascism. The new religious movement that he founded, 'Beyondism', is a neo-fascist contrivance. Cattell now promulgates ideas that he formulated within a demimonde of radical eugenists and neo-fascists that includes such as associates as Revilo Oliver, Roger Pearson, Wilmot Robertson and Robert K. Graham. These ideas and Cattell's role in the history of eugenics deserve deeper analysis than they have hitherto received. Far from being of merely antiquarian interest, his work currently encourages the propagation of radical eugenist ideology. It is unconscionable for scholars to permit these ideas to go unchallenged, and indeed honored and emulated by a new generation of ideologues and academicians whose work helps to dignify the most destructive political ideas of the twentieth century.

Coming to Grips with the Limitations of Science: Infertility and Heredity in American History

The conceptual link between these two books is their social constructionist view of science. Scientific facts do not speak for themselves, Diane Paul concludes near the end of her brief overview of the history of eugenics, in what might serve as a succinct summary of her own work. They must always be interpreted in light of social assumptions and goals (p. 114). Her synopsis of current scholarship on the subject is tendered as a contribution in an edited series on scientific subjects whose purpose is to offer synthetic studies directed at lay audiences, written in nontechnical language, and intended to emphasize the social and political milieu in which each particular scientific field or topic developed. Paul, a political scientist, presents us with a clear, economical, and competent narrative of the emergence of eugenical thinking in tandem with the science of genetics, covering, not only their fascinating and often uneasy relationship with each other, but the social and political influence of the two in the United States. The authors of The Empty Cradle, a book on the history of infertility, which joins Elaine May's Barren in The Promised Land (1995) as only the second published historical work on a virtually unexplored topic, are sisters, one an established historian and the other an accomplished gynecologist. This unusual combination has resulted in a book that manages to treat sensitively both culture and medicine. We learn that the use of medical technology to cope with involuntary childlessness has been occurring for almost 150 years. What has altered over time is technique, knowledge, and social context. Ronner and Walsh emphasize that changing attitudes toward the family, marriage, sexuality, sex roles

DNA and destiny: nature and nurture in human behavior

Genes and Human Behavior The Old Nature versus Nurture Debate The Dark History of Eugenics The Nature of Nurture: Defining Environmental Influences New Tools for an Old Problem New Improvements in the Old Tools The Inheritance of Disease: A Paradigm for the Inheritance of Behavior? Intelligence Mental Disorders Personality Traits Sexual Orientation Alcoholism and Addictive Behavior Crime and Violence Sex, Genes, and Testosterone Biology and Social Responsibility Epilogue References Index

The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism and German National Socialism (review)

Reviewed by: The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism Sheila Faith Weiss Stefan Kühl. The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. xviii + 166 pp. $22.00. Scholars preoccupied with the history of eugenics have frequently noted, if often only perfunctorily, that the contours of the various national eugenics movements cannot be understood without examining the international network of eugenic practitioners. Stefan Kühl’s slim volume admirably documents an important segment of this international network: the professional ties between American and German eugenicists, primarily during the 1930s. The author argues that the continued support given by American eugenicists to their German colleagues prior to the United States’ entry into World War II, and (more specifically) their endorsement of most aspects of Nazi racial policy, constituted a critical source of scientific legitimation for Hitler’s “racial state.” In advancing his thesis, the German historian and sociologist Kühl takes issue with much of the historiography of American eugenics. He is also at pains to point out that, contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not merely a small handful of extremist and marginalized American eugenicists who were initially impressed by the rhetorical initiatives of Nazi race hygienists, and that this substantial (in Kühl’s opinion) group of American eugenicists did not dampen their enthusiasm for German race hygiene once the Nazis began turning rhetoric into reality. Kühl is at his best in exploring the changing reciprocal relationship between the American and German eugenics communities between the two world wars. Before 1933, he argues, American eugenics served as a model for its German counterpart. He does a good job in discussing the various means by which German race hygienists kept abreast of developments in the United States, and in particular, of the success American eugenicists had in getting sterilization laws enacted. During the troubled Weimar years, when public health officials, social workers, and others were concerned with lowering burgeoning welfare costs, German race hygienists paid particular attention to American sterilization practices as a means of curtailing state expenditures for the “defective.” Yet the teacher-pupil relationship existing between the two eugenics communities would soon experience an about-face. If, before the Nazi seizure of power, eugenics in the United States served as a model for German race hygienists, with Hitler at the helm American eugenicists relinquished their role as intellectual tutors to their [End Page 333] German brethren as they watched, with a combination of admiration and amazement, the “Germans . . . beating us [Americans] at our own game” (p. 37). The largest portion of the book is devoted to an examination of the means by which American eugenicists legitimized Nazi racial policies, as well as an analysis of the set of shared intellectual assumptions held by both American and German eugenic enthusiasts that account for this support. Throughout the text, Kühl alternates between a sense of shock that so many American eugenicists supported the Nazi eugenics program and the view that, given the German and American eugenicists’ shared community of interests, the latter’s support of race hygiene under the swastika is not surprising. There is an assumption made, although Kühl undermines it at various points in his text, that American eugenicists supported all racial policies initiated by the Nazis. The author’s own evidence, however, suggests that the only initiative that received anything like widespread approval by American eugenicists (and even here the documentation is ambiguous) was the German sterilization law. American eugenicists appear not to have been especially enamored with overtly anti-Semitic Nazi racial policies such as the infamous Nuremberg Laws, although they refrained from openly condemning them. My contention that American eugenicists’ support of Nazi racial policies was largely limited to Nazi Germany’s draconian sterilization law is not, of course, intended to excuse them, or to suggest that their actions were not morally reprehensible. For me, it raises the larger question of what was specifically “Nazi” about Nazi racial policies. As Kühl himself points out, the German Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring may have been milder than the sterilization laws on the books in some of the American states...