Eugenics in the United States
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"As early as 1930, Hitler reveals to economic advisor Wagener, “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.” Otto Wagener, Hitler: Memoirs of a Confidant , 1985, Yale University Press.]" |
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Eugenics, the set of beliefs and practices which aims at improving the genetic quality of the human population, played a significant role in the history and culture of the United States prior to its involvement in World War II.
Eugenics was practiced in the United States many years before eugenics programs in Nazi Germany, which were largely inspired by the previous American work. Stefan Kühl has documented the consensus between Nazi race policies and those of eugenicists in other countries, including the United States, and points out that eugenicists understood Nazi policies and measures as the realization of their goals and demands.
During the Progressive Era of the late 19th and early 20th century, eugenics was considered a method of preserving and improving the dominant groups in the population; it is now generally associated with racist and nativist elements, as the movement was to some extent a reaction to a change in emigration from Europe, rather than scientific genetics.
See also
- Eugenics Board of North Carolina
- Eugenics in California
- Franz Boas
- International Federation of Eugenics Organizations
- Nazi human experimentation
- Poe v. Lynchburg Training School & Hospital (1981)
- Racial Integrity Act of 1924
- Racism in the United States
- Skinner v. Oklahoma (1942)
- Society for Biodemography and Social Biology
- Sterilization law in the United States
- Stump v. Sparkman (1978)
- The Kallikak Family
- Tuskegee syphilis experiment
- Unethical human experimentation in the United States
