The American Eugenics Movement

Eugenics — from the Greek for "good birth" — was coined by Francis Galton in 1883, a cousin of Charles Darwin who misread evolutionary theory to argue that human societies could and should direct their own genetic future by encouraging reproduction among the "fit" and discouraging or preventing it among the "unfit." In Britain, this remained largely theoretical. In America, it became policy.

The American eugenics movement drew on a specific convergence: the anxieties of white elites about immigration, urbanization, and Black emancipation; the prestige of newly professionalized social science; and the administrative capacity of the Progressive Era state. By 1910, major research institutions — including Harvard, Stanford, and the Carnegie Institution — were funding eugenics research. The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, became the movement's data center, cataloguing tens of thousands of family pedigrees and lobbying state legislatures.

The central claim — that traits like "feeblemindedness," criminality, pauperism, and sexual immorality were single-gene heritable characteristics running in inferior racial lines — was scientifically false. Geneticists knew this almost immediately. But the political utility of the claim outlasted the science by decades.

The eugenics movement was never race-neutral. Its architects were explicit: the goal was to preserve Anglo-Saxon and Nordic racial "stock" against dilution by Southern and Eastern European immigrants, Black Americans, Native peoples, and the poor. Black Americans faced sterilization through multiple interlocking channels — state programs, prison systems, psychiatric institutions, and later, federally-funded family planning programs that operated under coercive conditions.

In the South, Black women in particular were targeted. "Mississippi appendectomies" — slang for hysterectomies performed on Black women without consent, often during unrelated procedures — were so common that civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer underwent one in 1961 at age 44 when she sought treatment for a small uterine tumor. She never knew until after the procedure was complete.

Native American women were sterilized at extraordinary rates through the Indian Health Service. Studies conducted in the 1970s found that between 25% and 50% of Native women had been sterilized — many while under general anesthesia for other procedures, many without informed consent, and some while minors. The IHS sterilized approximately 25,000 Native women between 1970 and 1976 alone.

Disabled people — regardless of race — were the movement's first and most consistent target. State institutions for the "feebleminded" and "insane" became sterilization pipelines. Poor white women in Appalachia and the rural South were sterilized in large numbers under welfare-coercive conditions: social workers would offer sterilization as a condition of continued benefits.

In 1927, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled 8–1 in Buck v. Bell that forced sterilization of people deemed "unfit" by the state was constitutional. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes — one of the Court's most celebrated progressive intellectuals — wrote the opinion. It contains one of the most cited sentences in American jurisprudence:

Carrie Buck, the plaintiff, was an 18-year-old Virginia woman whose mother was in a state institution and whose daughter Vivian had been declared "defective." The framing was fraudulent: Carrie had been raped by a nephew of her foster family, committed to the institution to conceal the crime, and her daughter Vivian — later tested by a school principal — was described as "bright." The case for hereditary deficiency was fabricated.

Buck v. Bell has never been overturned. It was cited by courts as recently as 2001. After the Nuremberg trials, Nazi officials noted that their sterilization programs had been modeled on American law — the American Eugenics Society had corresponded with and influenced German eugenicists throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Eugenics did not end with the Holocaust's exposure of where racial science leads. It rebranded. In the 1960s and 1970s, federally-funded family planning programs — operating through hospitals that disproportionately served Black, Indigenous, and poor communities — applied pressure, coercion, or deception to reduce fertility among "undesirable" populations. The language changed from "unfit" to "welfare dependency." The mechanism — controlling reproduction of targeted groups through state power — remained.

The lasting damage is threefold. First, the direct harm to the hundreds of thousands of people who were sterilized, denied children, and denied the choice. Second, the legal precedent: Buck v. Bell remains good law. Third, the epistemic damage: eugenics was accepted, funded, and promoted by the most prestigious institutions in American science, law, and government. Understanding how a scientific consensus can be weaponized for racial harm is essential to understanding how American institutions work.