Mitch Addison, 28
Eugenics is the study of the process of preventing “impure” or “undesirable” traits from spreading throughout a population. As everyone knows, eugenics and sterilization is one of the many things that the Nazis supported and carried out during their time in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Eugenics is most known for its involvement in Nazism and Adolf Hitler’s desire for a German “master race”. However, the United States was involved in eugenics before the Nazis were.
Eugenics in the United States began when the Eugenics Record Office, or ERO for short, was founded on Long Island, New York, in 1910. The ERO had a variety of missions, such as serving as the national center for eugenics information, obtaining data about the traits of families, advising marriages so eugenic fitness could be maintained, and more. In order to accomplish their goals, the ERO needed funding. Many people including John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company, and many other organizations funded the ERO and its variety of missions. The ERO and its representatives, specifically their superintendent Henry Laughlin, had a lot of power in the U.S. government. For example, Henry Laughlin was the eugenics expert for the country. His duties included advising Congress, giving him influence over their power of making bills. An example of this includes data he had gathered about immigrants from Europe, showing that most people from Italy and Greece were prominent groups in prisons and mental institutions. This led to Laughlin providing testimony that further led to a new immigration law in 1924, restricting immigration from countries in Eastern Europe, Italy, and Greece. Laughlin also had a sterilization law passed, with states like California, Virginia, and Michigan leading the campaign for sterilization, which is a surgery that prevents people from having children.
The ERO seemed unstoppable, especially after the Supreme Court ruled that sterilization was legal. This was decided after a case known as Buck v. Bell was brought to the Supreme Court, where Carrie Buck was to be sterilized, because she was considered “feeble-minded”. The question brought up was the right of due process of the law when it came to forced sterilizations. The Supreme Court ruled that sterilization did not violate the Constitution. Since the ruling, the ERO and eugenics supporters would grow the number of people that were sterilized into the tens of thousands. Qualities that were rooted out and purged included feeble-mindedness, insanity, criminals, the blind, the deaf, the deformed, the dependent, and much more. Publications would also continue to be released, such as the ERO’s very own newspaper called the Eugenical News, and Laughlin’s book titled Eugenical Sterilization in the United States. Local fairs were also held, where there would be places one could see things like public presentations and other similar activities. However, this did not prevent people from trying. Since the 1910’s, there had been anti-eugenics sentiment brewing, and it only started to boil in the 1930’s. Most people who opposed eugenics were primarily religious and wanted to improve both the physical and moral sides of humanity. Support for eugenics also began to fade away as the Nazis came to power in Germany, where they adopted American methods of eugenics. Once they started to exterminate Jewish people and other “inferior” races, the U.S. became increasingly concerned over its own eugenics organizations and practices. This further led to many of the former patrons of the ERO to denounce their work. Finally, the Carnegie Institution of Washington closed the ERO in the last months of 1939, although the last of the sterilization camps would not close until the 70’s and 80’s.
Many thousands of people were sterilized under programs supported by the federal government. Following World War II, eugenics carried a stigma whenever it was mentioned, leading most former pro-eugenics institutions and organizations to adopt new names and practices such as the American Eugenics Society changing its name to the Society for the Study of Social Biology, or the Eugenics Quarterly changing its name to Social Biology. Eugenics still carries this stigma, and it shows that the betterment of society not only lies in the physical or mental aspects, but the moral aspects as well.