Prominent figures

A large part of the explanation for the integration of eugenics in society is the fact that prominent figures and politicians were heavily involved in eugenics. Those involved ranged from presidents to biologists to the inventor of the telephone.

Professors at universities like Harvard, Columbia and Cornell taught more than 375 separate eugenics courses. Biology textbooks included chapters on eugenics, complete with diagrams showing how "defects" passed from one generation to the next. Fairs hosted "Fitter Family" exhibits, giving awards to those who had "strong family trees."

"liberals, left-wing ideologues, social reformers, people of good intentions, scholars, and totally innocent scientists all contributed to the eugenics movement"

Theodore Roosevelt

• Accused the upper/middle classes of committing "race suicide"
  • Felt that female selfishness was contributing to the depletion of the race

• Held conversation and worked with Charles Davenport and other prominent eugenicists
  • The following is from a conversation with Davenport: “I agree with you...that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind...Some day, we will realize that the prime duty, the inescapeable duty, of the citizen of the right type, is to leave his or her blood behind him in the world; and that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”

Woodrow Wilson

• Served as governor of New Jersey in 1911 when prominent eugenics legislation was passed
  • The Board of Examiners of Feebleminded, Epileptics, and Other Defectives were in charge of the legislation
    • The board would systematically identify and decide when procreation was "inadvisable"
    • The people in question would only be allowed access to an attorney five days before the sterilization decision was finalized
    • Wilson signed the bill into law on April 21, 1911; he was elected president of the United States one year later using his "New Freedoms" plan to promote individual rights for all

Calvin Coolidge

• As President, signed the Immigration Act of 1924 into law
  • Drastically reduced non-Nordic immigration; as an example, the number of Italians allowed in per annum would be cut from 42,000 to 4,000

Alexander Graham Bell

• Inventor of the telephone

• Worked actively with and researched the deaf

• Ardent sheep breeder

• Acted as president of the Eugenics Records Office
  • Became less active in the board because he did not agree with all of Charles Davenport's radical actions
    • Wanted to look at all sorts of traits, not just negative ones

• As part of the American Breeders' Association, worked with Davenport to circulate a "Family Record" questionnaire to high schools and colleges
  • While Davenport only wanted to trace familial defects, especially in other races, Bell also wanted to research positive traits

• Believed that sign language to be a foreign language, and he felt that only English should be spoken in America
  • Wanted special schools with hearing teachers to be created that would outlaw sign language
  • Believed that it was a “great calamity” for deaf people to form clubs and organize socially because it would create a “deaf race”
  • His tactic was to determine the causes of marriages between the deaf and remove them
  • Advocated marriages between the deaf and the non-deaf in the hopes that the trait would eventually be entirely weeded out

• Rejected the use of charity
  • "Philanthropy in this country is doing everything possible to encourage marriage among deaf mutes"

• Worked with other eugenics leaders to try to get both father's name and mother's maiden name added to the data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau

Margaret Sanger

• A nurse and the founder of Planned Parenthood
  • Promoted both contraception and negative eugenics
    • Was motivated by her relationship with Sadie Sachs, a patient of hers who died as the result of a self-induced abortion

• Her activism began as activism for improved women's rights
  • Wanted women to have a role in the world besides child bearing/raising (she was the sixth of 11 children)

• Self-confessed eugenicist
  • Used her, otherwise upstanding, birth control organization for the promotion of eugenics to sterilize the "defectives"
  • Like other eugenicists, opposed charitable efforts to help the lower classes or "human waste"
  • Through her publication of the Birth Control Review, she helped legitimize and publicize the science of eugenics
  • Believed in the Malthusian notion that if the world was running out of food supplies, charitable works would stop and the weak would die off

Henry Goddard

• American psychologist who became a leading fighter against the feebleminded

• Authored The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeblemindedness, a popular book in the eugenics community
  • In the book, Goddard claimed to trace the ancestry of a family he called the Kallikaks (Greek for beauty and bad) as a warning of what can happen when people breed with the feebleminded
    • It tells the story of a man who engaged in an illicit affair with a feebleminded woman which created a "race of defective degenerates"
    • Because he believed that intelligence levels were hereditary, Goddard told a story in which the "bad Kallikaks" were feebleminded and no amount of education or good environment would be able to change that fact
    • Goddard doctored the photographs that he used by distorting the facial features to make the Kallikaks look like "mental and social defectives"

• Believed that mass sterilization was only the first step in eliminating the feebleminded
  • Sterilization only eliminated reproductive capabilities, it did not diminish sexual function
    • Therefore, the best solution would be mass incarceration in special feebleminded colonies

• Obtained funding from the Eugenics Records Office to hold tests on immigrants on Ellis Island
  • American eugenicists tended to believe that a majority of immigrants (especially Irish, Eastern European Jews, and southern Italians) were genetically defective
  • Originally, 20 Italians and 19 Russians were chosen for testing because they "appeared to be feebleminded"
    • Goddard bragged that "a glance sufficed" to determine feeblemindedness
    • Eventually, 148 Jews, Hungarians, Italians, and Russians were chosen for the experiments
  • Goddard used a form of the Binet test to determine that 40 percent of the subjects were feebleminded
    • Coined the term moron in his writings on the immigrants, moron began to be used as a valid term in psychological, educational, and other sciences

• More complicated versions of Goddard's test began to surface in subsequent years