









































Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201713

The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the 
Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

by Katherine Stolerman

I. Introduction
 As unthinkable as it may seem today, people 
from all walks of life supported the eugenics 
movement in the United States in the late 19th and 
20th centuries. It represented a public policy that 
promised to address the social mores of the time, 
and as such, it was taught in schools, exhibited at 
the World’s Fair, propagated by scientific journals 
and conferences, and condoned by prominent social 
figures, including Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander 
Graham Bell, and John D. Rockefeller Jr. Yet many 
American schoolchildren today either have not 
heard the term or else grow up believing that 
eugenics was exclusively a piece of National Socialist 
ideology in Germany in the 1930s-1940s. This paper 
seeks to examine the largely unrecognized personal 
and ideological connections between American 
eugenics, particularly mass sterilization movements, 
and extremist policies such as racial and ethnic 
extermination in Germany under the Third Reich.
 Much of the literature supports the fact that 
through research, funding, and laws in the early 
20th century, many experts in the United States 
encouraged the scientific improvement of the human 
race. I will argue that millions were murdered in 
Europe under the Nazi regime because they found 
themselves labeled lesser forms of life, a gruesome 
classification that began in the laboratories of 
American institutions and was thereafter verified 
by research grants and financed by special efforts 
in the United States. I will explore the so-called 
“Nazi Connection” as an illustration of the parallels 
between the two movements in the United States and 
in Germany, while also recognizing the questions left 
unanswered. 
 I consider why eugenics was so popular in the 
early 20th century and find that despite evident 
similarities, eugenics was popular in the United 
States and in Germany for different reasons. In the 
United States, eugenics proposed a scientifically-
backed form of social activism that promised to fix 

national problems (Schoenl & Peck, 2010). Under the 
Third Reich in Germany, race was meant to supplant 
class as the primary organizing principle in society. 
To this end, social policies were designed to remodel 
society in accordance with racial criteria (Burleigh & 
Wippermann, 1991). 
 I aim to demonstrate that eugenics in the United 
States was more than a harmless science blown out of 
proportion. The American eugenics movement was 
political from its inception and necessarily a product 
of racialist thinking, particularly white supremacy 
(Quigley, 1995). Both in the United States and 
in Germany, eugenics became an agent of social 
control. It was an instrument designed to be used by 
an economic, social, and racial elite. But in Germany, 
the emphasis on race became a platform for extreme 
anti-Semitism and subsequent systematic killing—a 
feature that was to some degree present in American 
discourse, but absent from policy. This difference 
can be explained in part by the social and political 
environments of the two nations. However, I will 
conclude that the racialized nature of American 
eugenics facilitated the jump to extremist racial 
policies in Nazi Germany. 

II. The American Eugenics Movement
 According to Randall Hansen and Desmond 
King (2013), there are four popular frames of 
reference through which one can analyze American 
eugenics. The first compares the movement to a 
religion, describing eugenics as a comprehensive 
ideological framework that both accounted for 
human differences and proposed social and 
economic policies as solutions. In this view, the 
movement is similar to a religion because it both 
offers an explanation for why things are the way 
they are and also provides a concrete path to change 
the status quo. Another framework sees eugenics 
as an offshoot of National Socialism based on the 
observation that German and American eugenicists 
figured in the same academic associations, attended 



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201714

the same conferences, and exchanged congratulatory 
correspondence on policy victories throughout the 
early 20th century. The third framework understands 
eugenics as anti-feminism, referring to the way 
in which “feeblemindedness”—a trait that would 
qualify someone to be sterilized—became associated 
with women rejecting their purely domestic role 
and, more drastically, with the “illicit sexual 
behavior of women adrift” (Hansen & King, 2013, 
p. 13). The final frame of reference views eugenics 
as a racist policy designed to purge a nation (and to 
some extent the world) of those who did not fit the 
label of upper-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestants 
(Hansen & King, 2013). While I contend that all four 
frames of reference are valid and valuable for gaining 
a thorough understanding of American eugenics, I 
propose that the first three frames can be understood 
as subsets of the racial nature of the movement. 
 In the early 20th century, eugenics was defined 
as “A doctrine that states that the fostering of good 
genes and the elimination of bad ones will serve the 
cause of national racial health by permitting better 
breeding of a nation’s stock of people” (Hansen & 
King, 2013, p. 4). American eugenicists thought 
it was possible to distinguish between inferior and 
superior traits in a society’s people and combined 
this belief with a political agenda geared towards race 
improvement. The resulting eugenic discrimination 
against “inferior” people was an expression of 
racism. While traditional ethnic racism applied 
hierarchical standards to human racial groups based 
on morphological and anthropological differences, 
eugenic racism hinged on the potential of races 
for procreation, preservation, and development. In 
other words, rather than creating a fixed system to 
differentiate people based on qualitative differences, 
eugenicists focused on eliminating “negative” traits 
across all kinds of different people (Kühl, 1994, p. 
70). The movement can be broken up into positive 
eugenics, which promoted eugenic education, 
tax preferences, and support for society’s “fit,” 
and negative eugenics, with included segregation, 
sterilization, restrictive marriage laws, anti-
miscegenation statutes, and restrictive immigration 
policies (Quigley, 1995).
 Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, 
published in 1859, paved the way for racial discourse 
in eugenics. Darwin’s cousin, Sir Francis Galton, 

coined the term eugenics in 1863, twisting Darwin’s 
evolutionary theories to prescribe the ways in which 
humans could potentially take control of their own 
evolutionary processes (Burleigh & Wippermann, 
1991). Combined with Gregor Mendel’s recently 
discovered principles of heredity, this groundwork 
allowed eugenicists to advance that the same concepts 
that determine plant color, for instance, could be 
applied to social and intellectual characteristics in 
people. Galton stressed the inheritability of human 
traits and effectively downplayed the importance 
of environment: “Social classes…are ordained by 
nature; that it is…not the slums which make slum 
people, but slum people who make the slums” 
(as cited in Quigley, 1995). By this token, Galton 
believed that if we were to somehow improve upon 
or otherwise “deal” with the people that lived in 
slums, automatically the slums themselves would 
cease to exist. 
 By ignoring environmental factors, which more 
often than not presented as social constraints, 
eugenicists assumed that people who were 
unsuccessful, monetarily or otherwise, were not able 
to succeed by some fault of their own. And certainly, 
in the early 20th century, such a classification 
applied disproportionately to minority races. 
Galton and likeminded eugenicists believed that the 
successful race needed to be protected from the less 
successful, and in this way, humanity would improve 
overall: “We greatly want…to express the science 
of improving the stock…to give the more suitable 
races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing 
speedily over the less suitable than they otherwise 
would have had” (as cited in Quigley, 1995). 
 Alongside scientists, respected scholars 
subscribed to racial theories. In Blood of a Nation, 
published in 1902, Stanford University President 
David Jordan wrote that qualities such as talent and 
poverty were passed through the blood, and on this 
basis argued that minority races were tainting the 
human blood line (Black, 2003). Others were more 
concerned with the mixing of the races. Harvard 
University Professor Louis Agassiz claimed that “The 
production of half-breeds is as much a sin against 
nature, as incest in a civilized community is a sin 
against purity of character” (as cited in Quigley, 
1995). Agassiz was a proponent of the theory of 
polygenism, under which non-white races such as 



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201715

“Blacks” and “Orientals” were construed as a genus 
of the human line, rather than as members of the 
human species. This was important because the 
scientific definition of a species centers on the ability 
to mate and produce offspring with its members. 
But in the wake of the aforementioned propaganda, 
members of the human species became defined by 
their ability to produce successful offspring, which 
eugenicists argued was impossible for descendants 
of mixed or non-white races (Quigley, 1995). 
 By far the most radical policy of the American 
movement was coerced sterilization. The 
procedure first took hold in mental institutions and 
correctional facilities. In the early 1890s, F. Hoyt 
Pilcher, superintendent of the Asylum for Idiotic and 
Imbecile Youth in Kansas, sought to stop his patients 
from masturbating, which at the time was thought 
to be associated with blindness, insanity, early death, 
and a cursed afterlife. In a drastic move, Pilcher 
castrated 44 boys and 14 girls, and later extended 
the procedure to homosexuals, “over-sexual” women 
and the mentally ill (Hansen & King, 2013, pp. 
73-74).  There is no evidence to suggest that this 
treatment had any intended results. It is more likely 
that it never caught on because the operation was too 
brutal and lengthy. Eugenicists would look for and 
quickly find other, simpler alternatives. 
 In 1899, Albert John Ochsner, a surgeon at St. 
Mary’s Hospital in Chicago performed vasectomies 
on patients with various psychological conditions, 
and thereafter published a report in the Journal of 
the American Medical Association recommending 
vasectomies to address social problems: “It has 
been demonstrated beyond a doubt that a very large 
proportion of all criminals, degenerates, and perverts 
come from parents similarly affected….[I]f it were 
possible to eliminate all habitual criminals from the 
possibility of having children, there would soon be 
a very marked decrease in this class” (Hansen & 
King, 2013, p. 74). Harry S. Sharp, an administrator 
at Indiana State Reformatory, implemented 
Ochsner’s procedure. Sharp sterilized 223 inmates 
and presented his findings at the Mississippi Valley 
Medical Association meeting in 1901. He also 
published his results in the New York Medical Journal 
in 1902 and addressed an annual meeting of the 
National Prison Association in 1908, describing the 
applicability of his procedure to the justice system 

(Hansen & King, 2013). Sterilization was welcomed 
by eugenicists in the criminal justice system and in 
the medical community as a simple and relatively 
painless approach for controlling select populations.
 The majority of official sterilizations during these 
years occurred within mental health institutions. 
These centers functioned within a strict hierarchy, 
bestowing the superintendent, who was almost always 
male at this time, with the unchecked power to regulate 
staff, spending allocations, medical treatments, and 
decisions about who would be sterilized (Hansen & 
King, 2013). This setup was particularly dangerous 
because these superintendents were often also state 
officials. They drafted sterilization bills and lobbied 
for state legislators, who then guided bills friendly to 
the eugenic cause through the law-making process. 
Also, since the targets of coerced sterilization were 
overwhelmingly poor, powerless, and denied voting 
rights, there was little political resistance to approval 
of the bills (Hansen & King, 2013). Up until this 
point, coerced sterilization was inseparable from 
the mass institutionalization of the mentally ill. But 
legalization opened the possibility to a much greater 
population of “unfit” people in society. 
 Since the United States operates as a decentralized 
system of government, individual states enjoy wide 
policy-making autonomy. As a result, lawmakers 
are more susceptible to interest group pressure 
(Hansen and King, 2013). Ideas are most powerful 
when they fall in line with social trends; accordingly, 
eugenic ideas defined a particular social problem 
as “feeblemindedness” and promised a solution via 
sterilization. On the basis of his medical results, Harry 
S. Sharp convinced legislators in the Indiana state 
government to write, and the governor to approve, 
Indiana’s first sterilization law in 1907 (Hansen and 
King, 2013). Indiana was the first state to enact such 
a law, and 28 more would follow suit. Sterilization 
laws would culminate in the coerced sterilization 
of over 60,000 people in the United States—a figure 
that consisted almost entirely of people who could 
be categorized as non-white, lower class, mentally ill, 
and criminals (Black, 2003). 
 The greatest legal victory for coerced sterilization 
was the Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell in 
1927. The case centered around Carrie Buck, a 
17-year-old from Charlottesville, Virginia, who 
was selected as the first person to be sterilized in 



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201716

the state under Virginia’s 1924 Eugenic Sterilization 
Act. Carrie’s mother, Emma, was a resident at a local 
asylum, and Carrie’s daughter, Vivian, was said to 
be “not quite a normal baby” at a mere 9 months 
(Hansen & King, 2013, p. 111). Officials at the 
asylum argued that Carrie inherited her mother’s 
traits of feeblemindedness and sexual promiscuity. 
In his famous opinion, Chief Justice Oliver Wendell 
Holmes wrote: “It is better for all the world, if 
instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring 
for crime, or let them starve for their imbecility, 
society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit 
from continuing their kind….[T]hree generations 
of imbeciles are enough” (Hansen & King, 2013, p. 
106). The strength of this decision for eugenics was 
that Holmes had inadvertently extended the practice 
beyond the mentally ill. He based his opinion on the 
premise that sterilization did not violate the 14th 
Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause. Thereafter, 
sterilization could legally stretch beyond mental 
institutions. 
 Politicians, various wealthy individuals, and 
corporations also swayed public opinion in favor of 
eugenics and sterilization. The Carnegie Foundation 
supported a 1911 report in which 18 solutions were 
proposed as the “Best Means for Cutting off the 
Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.” 
The 8th point in this list was euthanasia for the “unfit,” 
which the report suggested could be implemented 
through public, locally operated gas chambers. The 
Harriman railroad fortune paid local charities like 
the New York Bureau of Industries and Immigration 
to seek out Jewish, Italian, and other immigrants 
and deport, confine, or sterilize them. Additionally, 
California—the state that singlehandedly sterilized 
half of all the people in the U.S. who underwent 
the procedure before WWII—republished Nazi 
propaganda and arranged for Nazi scientific exhibits 
to support American eugenics in the late 1930s 
(Black, 2003). 
 In the realm of “positive” eugenics, family 
studies became politically important. They provided 
a scientific basis for claiming that society was being 
overrun by the menace of the “feebleminded” and 
thus heading down a path of “white racial suicide” 
(as cited in Quigley, 1995). These studies traced 
the lineages of ancestors of the mentally ill to show 
that a single person could lead to generations of 

poverty-stricken and degenerate offspring (Quigley, 
1995). Published in newspapers and distributed in 
pamphlets nationwide, these studies assured average 
Americans that the weakening of the healthy white 
race was an imminent concern. 
 It was possible to implement sterilization and 
similar policies in part because they made use of 
privately supported research and lobbying and were 
framed around 20th century concerns, including 
public health, demographic decline, and social 
engineering. Additionally, racialist thinking and 
white supremacy were not challenged because 
academics were primarily white at this time, allowing 
upper-class Anglo-Saxon Protestants to continue 
to propagate social and political domination. The 
movement was also not monolithic in that the 
ideas were flexible enough to be supported by both 
conservatives and progressives (Quigley, 1995). 
The backbone of the ideology was consistently 
national salvation and scientific ideas about innate 
inequalities. In this light, it was highly beneficial 
for the movement to hinge on existing immigration 
concerns. 
 Charles M. Goethe, a land developer, 
entrepreneur, and conservationist, founded the 
Eugenics Society of Northern California and played 
an active role in campaigning against Mexican 
immigrants in the 1920s, to which end he established 
the Immigration Study Commission to determine 
the alleged threat they posed to American people. 
As a conservationist, he attempted to compare the 
disappearance of oak and sequoia trees (which he 
held were superior) to the “trend toward extinction 
of the talented in the American population mass”—
referring to Nordic and pioneer Americans (Shoenl 
& Peck, 2010, p. 75). In 1924, Goethe proposed 
legislation called the Restrictive Immigration Bill, 
which succeeded in establishing entry quotas for 
Jews, Slavs, and Southern Europeans—the exact 
people who later would try to seek refuge in the U.S. 
from Germany during WWII. Goethe also travelled 
across Europe in 1925, and upon his return, used 
mass media to circulate the theory that WWI had 
resulted in the slaughter of the best European stock 
(Shoenl & Peck, 2010). 
 The first anti-immigrant group was founded 
in Boston in 1894 by Harvard University-educated 
lawyers and academics, who wrote, “The question 



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201717

[of immigration] is a race question, pure and 
simple…It is fundamentally a question as to what 
kind of babies shall be born; it is a question as 
to what races shall dominate in this country” (as 
cited in Quigley, 1995). One strand of nativism 
purported that immigrants were political and social 
radicals espousing communist and anarchist ideas, 
while other eugenicists claimed that immigrants 
previously thought of as white were actually 
members of many different races. In this way, by 
combining the decreased birthrates of “better” races 
with immigration waves and rising birthrates of the 
“weak,” the concept of race suicide took hold in the 
first decade of the 20th century. On this basis, even 
though the United States had already enacted the 
1924 Immigration Restriction Act, eugenicists in 
1927 continued to urge Congress and the President 
to extend “the quota system to all countries of North 
and South America…in which the population is not 
predominately of the white race” (as cited in Quigley, 
1995). Eugenicists had thus succeeded in turning 
ethnic concerns into racial propaganda (Quigley, 
1995). All too soon, this racialized discourse 
would make its way to Germany and morph into 
unprecedented extremism.

III. German Eugenics and the American 
Connection
 In Germany, the Age of Romanticism and social 
Darwinism facilitated the transfer of scientific ideas 
as applied to plants and animals in the 18th century 
to human beings. Romantics believed that external 
qualities of mankind should be seen as a reflection 
of inner nature. Early eugenicists interpreted this 
to mean that the whole physical structure of a 
person indicated his race. A fundamental aspect 
of German theory was the perspective on life as 
an eternal struggle for survival and domination 
among people—specifically races. The Nordic race 
was believed to be the best suited for survival, with 
its chief representative being the German people 
(Holborn, 1964). 
 The first complete racial theory was presented 
by the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau in an 
1853 essay, in which he argued that races were the 
functional agents of history. According to Gobineau, 
the purity of a race indicated survival, while 
intermingling resulted in rapid decline in culture 

and national strength. He noted that the purest 
contemporary race was the Aryan race and that 
racial mixing must be prevented at all costs (Mosse, 
1966). Gobineau’s writings were adopted by the Pan-
German group in the early 20th century, which was 
largely made up of teachers in a position to distribute 
his ideas. German eugenicists in the 20th century 
contributed to Gobineau’s work with the theory 
that Nordic or Aryan ideals of beauty were proof 
of superior racial qualities, working off Gobineau’s 
presumption that outer qualities like human body 
proportions and facial composition were marks of 
inner character (Mosse, 1966). The zoologist Ernst 
Haeckel (1834-1919) turned Darwin’s teachings and 
early racial theories into a humanist philosophy, 
claiming that “The indogermanic race is superior 
to the hamosemetic peoples. By virtue of their more 
highly developed brains, they would triumph over 
all other races, and in the struggle of existence, cast 
the net of their dominion over the entire world” 
(Burleigh & Wippermann, 1991, p. 30). 
 Germany would veer off from the American 
movement when racial-hygienic and social- 
Darwinist ideas were fused with anti-Semitism. 
The early jump can be credited to Houston Stewart 
Chamberlain (1855-1927), who claimed that 
the intellectual abilities and superiority of the 
Germanic peoples were being threatened by the 
Jews. Chamberlain was an American scholar, but 
Germany was in a much better position to latch 
onto his ideas. Jews had achieved legal equality 
in Germany relatively late, in the period 1869-
1871, which coincided with rapid industrialization 
and modernization. Therefore, Jews became the 
scapegoats for the economic crisis in the early 1870s, 
and even more so after the loss of WWI (Burleigh 
& Wippermann, 1991). The rise of the National 
Socialist Party would ingrain these academic and 
scientific ideas into German politics and social policy. 
The National Socialist Party, a branch of fascism, 
attempted to escape from bourgeois materialism and 
find new meaning and belonging. In Germany, this 
flight from reality was popularized by the Nazi Party, 
who derided existing social and economic systems 
in favor of modern progression and a nationwide 
glorification of ideology. Whereas other fascist 
movements, including those occurring in France, 
Belgium, the Netherlands, and Italy, were primarily 



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  201718

anti-capitalist, the German movement was unique in 
that anti-Semitism was a primary consideration of a 
subsequent program of action (Mosse, 1966). 
 Adolf Hitler’s autobiography and manual Mein 
Kampf became one of the most important sources 
for Nazi ideology. He stressed activist racialism 
and totalitarian authoritarianism alongside distinct 
political principles and specific policies. Hitler’s 
breed of anti-Semitism expressed his personal belief 
that Jews were subhuman, but he also extended this 
to say that there were other “low” human races like 
“Slavs” and “Blacks.” The loss of WWI confirmed 
Hitler’s belief that his ideology contained the right 
principles for rebuilding German supremacy. To 
this end, he sought to destroy liberalism, socialism, 
and communism in Germany in favor of a common 
ideology immune to foreign propaganda and with 
a determination for race superiority (Holborn, 
1964). Hitler’s racism, however, was hardly unique. 
He relied on familiar concepts, such as assigning 
value to different races in his ideological framework, 
claiming that Aryans were the most valuable race 
and that interbreeding would cause extinction. It 
was not an unthinkable step to then support policies 
to protect the purity and health of the Aryans from 
the absolute enemy of the race—the Jews (Burleigh 
& Wippermann, 1991). 
 Although anti-Semitism had been around in 
Germany for over 50 years, Hitler turned it into 
a political tactic to personify the “enemy” in the 
fight for Germany’s lost glory. He demanded the 
eradication of a race that had already been set up 
as incompatible with Aryans and as exhibiting 
anthropological differences (Mosse, 1966). The 
Nazi Party was able to formalize and objectify their 
ideology in a way that moved masses. Stringent 
values of discipline and organization allowed the 
totalitarian leader to completely control the content 
of the “faith” and channel a political framework 
toward very definite goals (Mosse, 1966, p. 317). The 
Party would work towards these goals by latching 
onto existing American policy.
 As early as 1925, the National Socialist Party 
publicly declared itself in favor of sterilization. 
Even so, Germany was a latecomer to coerced 
sterilization. A 1925 meeting of the German 
Psychiatric Association quoted American policy 
and called for legislation on sterilizing the mentally 

ill (Hansen & King, 2013).  German policy makers 
praised American immigration laws for the ways in 
which they combined eugenic and ethnic selection. 
Otto Wagner, head of the Nazi Party’s Economic 
Policy Office (1931-1933), cited Hitler as saying, 
“I have studied with great interest the laws of 
several American states concerning prevention 
of reproduction by people whose progeny would, 
in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to 
the racial stock” (Kühl, 1994, pp. 37-39). In turn, 
Charles Goethe, president of the Eugenics Research 
Association in California, wrote: 

“The Reich today has her social inadequacies 
more thoroughly listed than any other nation...
[T]o a land whose population approaches the 
saturation point, elimination by sterilization 
of those unfit means room for higher power. It 
is well known…that Germany’s leaders in the 
sterilization movement depended largely upon 
the material collected by the California data 
foundation upon which to rear their present 
remarkable structure” (Hansen & King, 2013, p. 
154). 

 Backed by the German People’s Freedom 
Party, the Nazis pressed for legal sterilization of 
“hereditarily burdened criminals.” Soon after in 1929, 
the Federation of National Socialist Doctors declared 
its support of sterilization of “inferiors” (Hansen 
& King, 2013, p. 143). The National Socialists gave 
power to German eugenicists by creating an Expert 
Committee on Questions of Population and Racial 
Policy in 1933, made up of doctors, professors, 
and ministry representatives active in the field of 
eugenics. The committee recommended eugenic 
population surveys, the training of doctors in racial 
hygiene, sterilization, and reimbursing large “fit” 
families. They published their recommendations 
alongside research claiming that 500,000 hereditary 
defectives and another 500,000 with milder illnesses 
currently posed a threat to German racial purity. 
They also added that Jews from Eastern Europe were 
immigrating at concerning rates, citing that 4,000 
Jewish immigrants came to Berlin in 1930 alone. The 
committee drafted a bill, drawing heavily on language 
of existing laws in California and Virginia. The bill 
was signed by Hitler on January 1st, 1943 as the Law 
for Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring. 
To promote the law, the Nazi Party launched a far-



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  2017

reaching propaganda media campaign to convince 
the public that the “unchecked breeding of the unfit” 
was a matter of “victory or death” (Hansen & King, 
2013, pp. 147-149). 
 The National Socialists set up 205 genetic health 
courts and 26 appellate courts across Germany 
to rule on sterilization and to specify institutions 
where operations would take place. Since judges 
and doctors had close political and economic ties 
to the Nazi Party, it was not surprising that of the 
64,500 rulings issued in 1934, 56,000 were in favor 
of sterilization. Overall, the courts ruled in favor of 
about 360,000 sterilizations, and around 5,000 people 
died as a result of surgical complications. Hitler 
used this success as a springboard for his euthanasia 
program. He signed an order on September 1st, 
1939 ordering the gassing of mentally handicapped 
patients in portions of Poland annexed by Germany 
(as a test run), based on the (American) Carnegie 
Foundation’s 1911 report suggesting euthanasia. 
After the killing of 80,000 mentally ill people across 
the Reich, the program, called Aktion T4, moved 
to concentration camps for the systematic killing of 
the “racially inferior.” In fact, to gain support for the 
1936 implementation of the euthanasia program, 
the German government created a poster with the 
message “We do not stand alone!” with an American 
flag displayed in the background (Hansen & King, 
2013, p. 150-152). 

IV. Discussion
 The American eugenics movement created a 
consistent social program that combined eugenic 
sterilization, anti-immigration advocacy, and 
anti-miscegenation activism to advance social 
control (Quigley, 1995). Nazi policy drew heavily 
on American theory and enjoyed the support and 
funding of influential American academics and 
institutions throughout the 1930s. The ideology 
of race improvement was a prerequisite for the 
systematic killing of millions in Europe, and it was 
an idea that started in the United States. American 
eugenicists were able to sterilize thousands by 
dispelling ideas of heredity, differential fertility 
concerns, female licentiousness, and the economic 
cost of the “unfit.” Moreover, the broad power 
granted to mental institution superintendents and 
a government heavily susceptible to interest group 

pressure allowed the United States to enact a number 
of eugenic policies in the early 20th century (Hansen 
& King, 2013). 
 The Nazi regime shook an entire social order, 
something that was never possible in the United 
States. Luckily, due to political and military priorities 
during WWII, as well as the short twelve-year reign 
of the Third Reich, these ideas failed to supersede 
the post-war depression and arise again. After the 
war, Germany ended coerced sterilization in 1945 
as part of a coordinated effort to purge the medical 
establishment and scientific research institutions of 
eugenics-based practices (Hansen & King, 2013). 
 In the United States by the 1940s, the days of 19th 
and early 20th century eugenics were numbered. Pro-
sterilization advocates found themselves up against 
scientific challenges to their hereditary arguments as 
well as the beginning of a new civil rights culture. 
However, coerced sterilization in the United States 
did not end at the same time as in Germany. The 
Supreme Court decision in Buck v. Bell was never 
overturned, and as a result, more than 50% of the 
total sterilizations would be performed after the 
end of WWII (Hansen & King, 2013). After the 
war, welfare programs under New Deal legislation 
were extended to African Americans, which led to 
an uptick in sterilizations in the South. Moreover, 
a federal decision in 1970 to privatize federal funds 
for sterilization led to the sterilization of hundreds 
of thousands of African Americans (Hansen & King, 
2013). 
 Eugenic ideas were (and are) malleable. It 
is difficult to shake the human inclination to 
improve society, and so it is hardly surprising 
that certain fields retain the principles of human 
engineering. One offshoot of this is present in 
movements concerned with population growth, 
welfare abuse, and criminality. While the language 
of race improvement is no longer used, sociologists, 
anthropologists, psychiatrists, and others expend a 
great deal of effort brainstorming ways to do away 
with crime, greed, addiction, and other undesirable 
afflictions. Scientific research, in turn, explores how 
these traits may be linked to particular cognitive 
processes, presumably with the goal of developing 
more targeted interventions. 
 The other offshoot can be seen in obstetric care 
and genetics research. Eugenics programs relied 
on the logic that negative traits and behaviors were 

19



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  2017

biologically transmitted through generations. Today, 
pregnant women view prenatal diagnostic testing as 
an essential part of obstetric care, “designed to save 
parents from the ‘tragedy’ of having a handicapped 
child” (Browner & Press, 1995, p. 308). This 
mainstreamed procedure provides potential parents 
with information that can be used to abort fetuses 
with abnormalities. Many women feel social pressure 
to receive comprehensive prenatal care without a 
clear understanding of why they are consenting to 
various tests. In other cases, tests are implemented 
because of clinical standards, with little regard for 
bioethical issues (Kelly & Farrimond, 2012). For 
example, California has a state-mandated program 
for prenatal screening for defects, arguing for the 
interests of the state in diagnosing conditions that 
will require “the public to underwrite a lifetime of 
social services” (Browner & Press, 1995, p. 319). 
 Meanwhile, researchers are making strides in 
locating genetic markers for certain character traits. 
The science of genetic engineering sees DNA “as a 
code that can be read and rewritten” (Lemke, 2002, 
p. 284). Decoding the human genome has already 
allowed for the isolation of genes associated with 
diseases such as cancer or heart disease. If other genetic 
“risks” can be calculated, they too can theoretically 
be minimized. This implicates not only medical 
interventions, but also reproductive decisions. Sperm 
and egg banks, for example, list certain requirements 
for donors, and potential recipients additionally 
control for their own preferences by reviewing 
donor profiles. This idea of individual planning with 
regards to reproduction is sometimes referred to as 
“neoeugenics” and, as such, is a practice that applies 
to all people, not just criminals or the mentally ill. 
It is possible that with biotechnological advances, 
genetic testing after birth—postnatal diagnostics—
will also become routine practice (Lemke, 2002, 
pp. 287-288). Unlike the early eugenics movement, 
which stressed the collective purification of the gene 
pool, neoeugenics advocates that we should take 
individual responsibility for genetic risk. 

V. Conclusion
 The legacy of the American eugenics movement 
is twofold. First, the movement played a significant 
role in transmitting ideas to Germany, where racial 
biases and racial-hygienic thinking led to mass 

extermination on a scale the world had never seen 
before. Second, core eugenic principles were able 
to persist to some degree in American scientific 
discourse and also in cutting-edge fields of research 
such as genetic testing. Now, as before, eugenic 
ideas are laced with civic purposes: to eradicate 
poverty, to curb alcoholism and drug abuse, or to 
reduce the number of families suffering because of 
children with hereditary diseases. And so, the spirit 
of eugenics persists. We are still in the business of 
making normative judgements about human traits, 
and we continue to engage in selective population 
control, citing various economic and communal 
forces as important considerations in these decisions 
(Kelly & Farrimond, 2012). 
 Removing the term eugenics from American 
discourse, perhaps to separate policies enacted in 
the United States from the legacy of the Holocaust, 
helped eugenic ideas to persist far past the reign 
of the Third Reich. As a case in point, sterilization 
procedures were first implemented on the mentally 
ill, and today, a prenatal diagnosis of Down 
Syndrome results in a 90% chance of a fetus being 
aborted (Browner & Press, 1995, p. 309). Yet is it 
unclear whether a world without people with Down 
Syndrome is an objectively better world. Genetic 
testing, prenatal care, and research into the cognitive 
bases of criminality undoubtedly have positive 
clinical applications. I do not argue that any of these 
programs are overt expressions of eugenic ideology, 
nor do they stem from any animus on the part of 
medical professionals and researchers. Yet there is 
something very similar going on. I worry that once 
again, we are on the brink of reducing human beings 
to some streamlined standard of worth and that a 
sincere desire to help people may morph into a new 
search for perfection.

20



The American Eugenics Movement: A Study of the Dispersal and Application of Racial Ideologies

Aisthesis      Volume 8,  2017

References
Black, E. (Sept. 2003). The horrifying American roots 

of Nazi eugenics.  History News Network. 
Retrieved from  www.historynewsnetwork.org/
article/1796.

Browner, C. H., & Press, N. A. (1995). The 
normalization of prenatal diagnostic 
screening. In F. D. Ginsburg and R. Rapp (Eds.), 
Conceiving the new world order: The global 
politics of reproduction (pp. 307-322). Oakland, 
CA: U of California P.

Burleigh, M., & Wippermann, W.  (1991). The 
racial state: Germany, 1933-1945. New York, NY: 
Cambridge UP.

Hansen, R., & King, D. S.  (2013). Sterilized by the 
state: Eugenics, race, and the population scare in 
twentieth-century North America. New York, NY: 
Cambridge UP.

Holborn, H. (1964). Origins and political character 
of Nazi ideology.  Political Science Quarterly, 
79(4), 542-554. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/
stable/2146698.

Kelly, S. E., & Farrimond, H. R. (2012). Non-
invasive prenatal genetic testing: A study of 
public attitudes.” Public Health Genomics, 15(2), 
73-81.

Kühl, S.  (1994). The Nazi connection: Eugenics, 
American racism, and German National 
Socialism. Oxford: Oxford UP.

Lemke, T. (2002). Genetic testing, eugenics and 
risk. Critical Public Health, 12(3), 283-290.

Mosse, G. L.  (1966). The crisis of German ideology: 
Intellectual origins of the Third Reich. London: 
Weidenfeld and Nicholson.

Quigley, M. (13 Oct. 1995). The roots of the I.Q. 
debate: Eugenics and social control.  The Public 
Eye. Retrieved from www.publiceye.org/
magazine/v09n1/eugenics.html.

Schoenl, W., & Peck, D. (2010). Advertising 
eugenics: Charles M. Goethe’s campaign 
to improve the race.  Endeavour, 34(2), 75-
80.  Retrieved from  www.sciencedirect.com/
science/article/pii/S016093271000025.

21


