The document discusses the history and ideas of the eugenics movement from the 19th century through the early 20th century. It traces the origins of eugenics from Darwin and Galton, through its spread internationally via groups like the American Eugenics Society. Key figures like Davenport and Laughlin advocated for both positive and negative eugenics policies including sterilization laws and restrictive immigration policies. The eugenics movement aimed to improve human heredity by controlling reproduction but had racist, classist, and ableist assumptions.

1. Eugenics
“science of the well-born”

2. Evolution
Implications Philosophy
}
Mechanism
Pathway Science
Fact

3. Darwin - Descent
“Man scans with scrupulous care the character and
pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he
matches them; but when he comes to his own
marriage he rarely, or never, takes any such care. …
Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they
are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind;
but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even
partially realised until the laws of inheritance are
thoroughly known. Everyone does good service,
who aids towards this end.”

5. The “science” of breeding
“better” humans.
Take decisions about
reproduction out of the
hands of individuals
Positive and negative
eugenics

6. Assumptions
“Inferior” and “superior” can be objectively
ascertained
Differences are genetic rather than
environmental
Stockbreeding and human reproduction are
analogous

13. Background
Pauperization of urban workers
Differential birth rate
Weakness of Whig laissez-faire policies
Concern with degeneration among the
intelligentsia

14. Cesare Lombroso

17. Francis Galton
Coined “eugenics” (1883)
Emphasis on positive
measures.
Hereditary Genius (1869)
British National Eugenics
Laboratory (1904)

25. International
German Race Hygiene Society (1905)
Eugenics Education Society (1907)
American Eugenics Society (1910)
French Eugenics Society (1912)
First International Eugenics Congress (1912)

38. Charles Davenport
PhD (Harvard, biology)
Believed that virtually all human traits were
heritable
Formed Eugenics section of American
Breeders Association (1906)
Station for Experimental Genetics (Cold
Spring Harbor, Long Island)
Eugenics Record Office (1910 - 1939)

39. Charles Davenport
PhD (Harvard, biology)
Believed that virtually all human traits were
heritable
Formed Eugenics section of American
Breeders Association (1906)
Station for Experimental Genetics (Cold
Spring Harbor, Long Island)
Eugenics Record Office (1910 - 1939)

48. The Poor White
Rural, poor, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant
descendants of the colonial settlers
“It is impossible to calculate what even one
feeble-minded woman may cost the public,
when her endless line of descendants in
considered”

56. David Starr Jordan
“The social classes,
therefore, that you seek to
abolish by law, are ordained
by nature; that it is … not
the slums which make slum
people, but slum people
which make the slums …
godly people are born and
not made.”

57. Positive
Tax preferences
Education
Negative
Restrictive marriage laws
Anti-miscegenation laws
Compulsory sterilization

61. Buck v. Bell 1927
Members of the Buck family “belong to the shiftless,
ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of
the South” and “three generations of imbeciles are
enough.”
The Supreme Court concurred “that Carrie Buck is
the probable potential parent of socially inadequate
offspring, likewise afflicted, that she may be sexually
sterilized without detriment to her general health and
that her welfare and that of society will be promoted
by her sterilization”

70. Chinese Exclusion Act (1882)
“Gentleman's Agreement” vs Japanese (1906)

71. Committee on Eugenics
1910
“The time is ripe for a strong public movement
to stem the tide of threatened racial
degeneracy … America needs to protect
herself against indiscriminate immigration,
criminal degenerates, and … race suicide
[which will result in the] complete destruction
of the white race.”

72. Justifications
Urbanization & Industrialization
Worker organization and unrest
Haymarket Square Riot (1886)
Nativism

79. Charles Davenport
“The population of the United
States will, on account of the
great influx of blood from
South-eastern Europe, rapidly
become darker in pigmentation,
smaller in stature, more
mercurial, more attached to
music and art [and] more given
to crimes of larceny, kidnapping,
assault, murder, rape, and sex-
immorality.”

80. Harry Laughlin
Appointed “Expert Eugenics
Agent” to the “House
Committee on Immigration
and Naturalization”
Immigration Restriction Act
(1924) put entry quotas at
1880 population level.

82. MS St Louis (1939)

83. Harry Laughlin
“Our ancestors drove
Baptists from Massachusetts
Bay into Rhode Island but we
have no place to drive the
Jews to. Also, they burned
the witches but it seems to
be against the mores to burn
any considerable part of our
population.”

96. “Darwinism explains so little. It doesn’t
explain how life began. It doesn’t
explain how gravity works to keep the
planets in their orbits. It doesn’t explain
how thermodynamics works. It doesn’t
explain how physics or the laws of
motion work.”

97. “Love of God and compassion and
empathy leads you to a very glorious
place, and science leads you to killing
people.”

98. “Anyway, I don’t give a [profanity]
whether a person calls himself a
scientist. It doesn’t earn any extra
respect from me, because it’s not as if
science had covered itself with glory,
morally, in my time. Scientists were the
people in Germany telling Hitler that it
was a good idea to kill all the Jews.”

99. “If you’re a purely materialistic
naturalist you would have no objection
[to the Holocaust] because no human
life has any meaning.”
“Darwinism led – in a pretty much
straight line – to Nazism and the
Holocaust.”

104. Quoting Darwin
“With savages, the weak in body or mind are
soon eliminated. We civilized men, on the other
hand, do our utmost to check the process of
elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile,
the maimed and the sick. Thus the weak
members of civilized societies propagate their
kind. No one who has attended to the breeding
of domestic animals will doubt that this must be
highly injurious to the race of man. Hardly
anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst
animals to breed.”

105. Darwin
With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and
those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We
civilized men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the
process of elimination. We build asylums for the imbecile, the
maimed and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men
exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last
moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved
thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have
succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilized
societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the
breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly
injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of
care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a
domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly
anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

106. Darwin
The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly
an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was
originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but
subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated,
more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check
our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without
deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon
may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he
knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we
were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could
only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present
evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly
bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind.

108. “Hence today I believe that I am
acting in accordance with the will of
the Almighty Creator: by defending
myself against the Jew, I am fighting
for the work of the Lord.” (MK)

109. Sparta!
“Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State.
The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children,
in short, their destruction, was more decent and in
truth a thousand times more humane than the
wretched insanity of our day which preserves the
most pathological subject, and indeed at any price,
and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy
children in consequence of birth control or through
abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of
degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

110. Sparta!
“Sparta must be regarded as the first Völkisch State.
The exposure of the sick, weak, deformed children,
in short, their destruction, was more decent and in
truth a thousand times more humane than the
wretched insanity of our day which preserves the
most pathological subject, and indeed at any price,
and yet takes the life of a hundred thousand healthy
children in consequence of birth control or through
abortions, in order subsequently to breed a race of
degenerates burdened with illnesses.”

118. Darwin Haeckel Hitler