Eugenics

Medicine is constantly changing.  As more is learned, the practice of medicine need to change and adapt.  Therefore, when we look back at medicine through time, we see practices that seem entirely foreign and ignorant.  Occasionally the treatments are more detrimental than helpful.  Sometimes physicians have made a terrible mistake.  That is the case with eugenics.

Eugenics was a field of medicine that was popular in the early 1900s that attempted to breed better people by encouraging those with good genes to breed and discouraging those with bad genes.  Enventually this practice led to involuntary sterilization of those with bad genes.  To understand how this situation arose it is useful to examine the social and economic context. 

In the early 1900s there was a steady influx of immigrants especially from Europe.  The job market was chaotic with frequent episodes of economic depression.  Society was looking for ways to stop both the economic downward spiral and the increase in societal problems such as alcoholism, prostitution, criminality and pauperism.  They found answers in science.  Science could apply structure to industrialization and improve the economy through tighter control.  Unfortunately, this attitude extended to the control of humans resulting in the emergence of eugenics. 

The eugenic argument was that those that depended on society for their care further burdened society, which was already suffering economically.  Eugenicists said that sterilization of those who were defective could save thousands of dollars.  It was also thought that degenerates were more likely to be dependent on society for an existence and cause a drain on the welfare system.  Wealthy, “pure” members of society saw this as a way to further their agenda.  Their finances were in jeopardy, and they blamed the wave of immigrants as a direct cause of the rise in socialism and the decay of their money-making, capitalistic society.  They claimed that the genetic differences of the immigrants were to blame.  Eugenics was the cure.  Weeding out the “defective” immigrants could solve the economic ills and the decay of society.  Those in power saw this as a way to permanently do away with social problems rather then temporary ameliorate them with welfare and charity.

This provides a social basis for its rise, but this would have not been possible without the scientific data to back up their arguments.  Francis Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883.  He stated that those with good upbringing and strong physical characteristics should be encouraged to breed.  This is known as positive eugenics.  This unfortunately translated into negative eugenics, which is weeding out of the least fit.  Some of the strongest supporters were affiliated with agriculture, and, like their manipulations of fields of grain, they hoped to get rid of the least productive crops of humans.  Some physicians embraced this as preventative medicine at a time when the medical field had little ability to help those who were psychotic or retarded.  Through admission into asylums and compulsory sterilization, with tubal ligation and vasectomies, eugenicists would prevent breeding among these populations.

The identification of degenerates was added by the new theories presented by Mendel in 1865 which showed the inheritance of traits through families.  By obtaining family histories from families with undesirable traits geneticists could more accurately describe the inheritance patterns of certain diseases or physical findings.  The problem arose in identifying the trait especially if it was complex such as intelligence, alcoholism or depression.  Eugenicists were typically less rigorous in their methods and looked for easy ways for those they deemed degenerate to fit into the Mendelian principles.  Organizations were formed which helped eugenicists to identify traits and interview subjects.  In fact, lay people could submit questionnaires to the Eugenics Record Office for analysis on appropriateness of marriage and eugenical fitness.

Eugenicists would travel to asylums, prisons, and orphanages and create eugenic records detailing family history, ethnic background and medical history.  These records would then be used to calculate the cost of maintaining social outcasts in institutions.  Concurrently, when World War I started a test was developed for testing the intelligence of the recruits.  Now there was data on thousands of people.  Unfortunately the tests were skewed against foreigners because of the emphasis in the test on popular American culture.  The director of the Eugenics Record Office then used the data from the institutions, census records, and the army and argued that eastern and southern Europe (in contrast to northern and western Europe where many of the early settlers of America were from) were exporting their most genetically defective citizens, and that this contributed to the high rate of social problems and monetary dependency of degenerates.  For example, eugenicists found that in general Germans were thrifty, intelligent and honest while Italians were violent.  At the opposite end of the spectrum were the studies that showed that those in positions of aristocracy were of a disproportionately high intelligence.  Eugenicists were able to provide a link between degenerate traits and specific ethnic groups.  The conclusion was that America could no longer financially and socially afford to allow just any immigrant into the country.  Continuing to do this would ultimately lead to the dilution of pure “American” genes.

What the eugenicists failed to realize was that not every trait is inherited and that certain traits may be more complex than simple Mendelian inheritance.  This is especially true for the mental illnesses that many of these so-called degenerates suffered from. Mendelian analysis discounts the social and environmental influences that have an effect on who we are.  Another error was the assumption that a test that resulted in a number had validity.  One example is in the case of an IQ score in measuring intelligence.  These tests were not free of culturally-based knowledge and therefore those who had been in the United States longer would know popular culture better and score better on the tests.  The tests clearly favored the early immigrants from northern and western Europe, while putting the recent immigrants from southern and eastern Europe at a disadvantage.   One report said that approximately 80% of immigrants from Hungary, Italy and Russia were feebleminded.  This resulted in large numbers of immigrants from these countries being committed to institutions and being sterilized for the good of America’s future.  In addition the data that they used to base their analyses was manipulated.  The institutional and World War I data was collected at a time when there was peak immigration from southern and eastern Europe.  The general population data taken from those who were presumed to be normal, with fewer “adverse traits”, was taken from the 1910 census when there was a much smaller population from these areas and a larger proportion of people from northern and western Europe.  The ultimate result was a severe restriction on new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe through the 1924 Immigration Restriction Act.  The act was an attempt to decrease the number of Jewish and Italian immigrants specifically.  The act stated that the number of immigrants from each country would be proportional to the percentage in the US during the 1890 census when most of the population was from northern and western Europe.  The percentage of southern and eastern Europeans admitted into the US decreased from 45% to 15%.  The 1924 Act stood until it was repealed in 1965.

Eugenics permeated into the popular culture of the time.  Movies, such as “The Black Stork,” were shown supporting sterilization.  Children could win medals for having a good family background at Fitter Families Contests.  State fairs had exhibits on eugenics where phrases such as “some Americans are born to be a burden on the rest” were used.  Biology textbooks had chapters on eugenics and presented it as a legitimate science.  Colleges such as Harvard, Columbia and Cornell offered courses in eugenics.  By 1928, 376 separate college courses were being offered on eugenics.  J. H. Kellogg, of cereal fame, who founded an institution supporting hydrotherapy and mechanotherapy (see Quackery), created the Race Betterment Foundation and sponsored conferences on eugenics at his institution.  Scientists warned against racial and ethnic mixture as this will cause a decline in the stronger race.  Support went as high as President Calvin Coolidge who stated that “Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend.”  In 1915, laws were in place in 28 states forbidding marriages between blacks and whites.  This brought into questions what was meant by white. The Racial Integrity Act of 1924 in Virginia deemed that only those persons with 1/16 or less American Indian blood and no other non-Caucasian blood could be considered white.  This was upheld in 1958 when a married couple consisting of a black woman and a white man moved from Washington to Virginia.  They were sentenced to a year in jail for violating the Act.  This sentence was later suspended on the condition that they leave Virginia and do not return for 25 years.  It was not until 1963 that the Act was overturned in the US Supreme Court.

Harry Sharp, a prison physician in Indiana in 1899, in an attempt to stop the progression of degeneracy (as negative eugenics was called), performed vasectomies on the prisoners.  This spiraled to the point where a law was enacted in 1907 in Indiana requiring sterilization of all degenerates.  By 1914, 12 states had sterilization laws and by 1924, 3000 people had been sterilized involuntarily (2500 of them in California).  Those who were subjected to sterilization were the: feebleminded, insane, criminal, epileptic, alcoholic, blind, deaf, physically deformed, orphans and homeless.  One famous case is that of Buck v. Bell.  Carrie Buck was a 17 year old girl from Virginia.  Her mother was a resident of an asylum and claims were made that Carrie shared the same traits as her mother.  Carrie had a baby girl and professionals testified that the child was just like her mother and grandmother.  The courts of Virginia agreed that Carrie should be sterilized.  The case made it to the US Supreme Court where Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote the opinion of the court.  His opinion said that, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”  Unfortunately, false evidence had been presented in the case against Carrie.  She was not in fact feebleminded.  She was on the honor roll.  Her pregnancy was not the result of promiscuity as had been argued.  A relative of her foster parents had raped her.  Her court case resulted in the sterilization of about 8300 Virginians.  The law eventually provided the model for the rational used by the Nazis to sterilize more than 350,000 people during World War II.  Until sterilization fell out of favor in the mid-1970s, more than 60,000 Americans would be sterilized involuntarily in 33 states.  The original Buck v. Bell law has never been overturned.

A little bit of knowledge in the form of the new Mendelian science of genetic inheritance paired with the selfish capitalism of wealthy profiteers propelled society down a slippery slope leading to eugenics.  The idea died slowly and ultimately reached the extreme of involuntary sterilization.  Now, a better understanding of inheritance patterns and genes allows us to counsel parents about the risks of procreation.  Although, with the success of the Human Genome Project, we need to be sure we do not slide back down the slope we have tried so hard to climb up.

I am indebted to http://www.eugenicsarchive.org/eugenics/ for an excellent review of the subject in preparation for this paper.