HISTORY OF EUGENICS

HISTORY OF EUGENICS
In The Republic, Plato described selective breeding of
the ruling caste of a utopian state, a passage often
cited as the first endorsement of eugenics. However,
the term eugenics was not coined until 1869, when Sir
Francis Galton published “Hereditary Genius,” a
study of traits in eminent families. An early statisti-
cian, Galton is generally credited as originator of the
modern eugenics movement. After adopting his
cousin Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theories, Galton
used basic correlation to examine inherited abilities
and postulated the hereditary determination of traits.
He proposed that human evolution could be acceler-
ated by arranged marriages to produce gifted children.
Galton wrote extensively on racial concepts, particu-
larly “distinct racial character.” Although Galton gen-
erally propounded positive eugenics, critics have
noted that his advocacy provided a rationale for “race
hygiene” (maintaining racial purity by eliminating
undesirables), the ideology of genocide. Galton also
initiated the anthropometric intelligence testing move-
ment, superseded in the early 1900s by Alfred Binet
and Theodor Simon’s test to improve the French edu-
cational system (they were not eugenicists). This test,
later known as an intelligence test, was exported to
Stanford University, where it was revised in 1916 as
Eugenics———207the Stanford-Binet test by psychologist Lewis M.
Terman, a eugenics proponent. Intelligence quotient
(IQ) testing was widely adopted as a dependent mea-
sure in tests of mental ability to distinguish the fit
from the unfit (although data collection methodolo-
gies were often suspect, as in the case of Sir Cyril
Burt, a 20th-century British researcher who fabricated
IQ data).
Other leading scientists of the American eugenics
movement included Harvard-trained Charles B.
Davenport, founder of the Eugenics Record Office in
1910; William McDougall, student of William James
and 1920s chair of Harvard’s Psychology Department;
Raymond B. Cattell, a developer of factor analysis and
personality trait theory; and Henry H. Goddard, who
famously administered intelligence tests to immigrants at
Ellis Island. Many prominent members of society joined
the American Eugenics Society, formed in 1921. The
society popularized eugenics through exhibitions at state
fairs and other venues. Miscegenation (intermixing with
Blacks and eastern/southern Europeans) was by now a
major concern, and eugenicists’ political agitation
resulted in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.
Sterilization laws represented another political initiative,
the first a 1907 Indiana law requiring mandatory steril-
ization of the institutionalized mentally ill. By 1930, 24
states had adopted sterilization laws; in 1927, the
Supreme Court upheld forced sterilization in  Buck v.
Bell, in which a “feeble-minded” European American
woman, Carry Buck, failed to prevent her state-coerced
sterilization. These political successes were noted inter-
nationally, and sterilization laws were passed in several
northern European countries. Germany’s Third Reich
admired these initiatives and incorporated American
eugenics thought in its race hygiene policies, which led
to the Holocaust, a program of Jewish extermination
resulting in the deaths of more than six million Jewish
people as well as Catholics, homosexuals, the disabled,
people diagnosed with mental illness, and others viewed
as unfit by Nazi standards.