Some African American intellectuals, too, supported the theory, arguing we should focus on the “talented tenth” of every race.Įugenics offered Americans in positions of power an authoritative scientific language to substantiate their biases against those they feared as dangerous. “Inferior races,” eugenic theorists concluded, were a drain on the economic, political and moral health of American life. Many of these reformers used inappropriate eugenic explanations for their management of those deemed to be socially undesirable: so-called “mental defectives” (which included those labeled with newly-created clinical terms like “imbeciles,” “idiots,” and “morons”) the blind, deaf, mentally ill and “crippled” orphans, unwed mothers, epileptics, Native Americans, African Americans, foreigners, poor residents from the mountains and hollows of Appalachia and many other “outsider” groups.
Sitting in the audience were Britain’s Prime Minister Lord Balfour, Winston Churchill and Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, along with the ambassadors of Greece, France and (wait for it) Norway.ĭuring the Progressive era (1900-1920), a generation of American reformers sought to fix several social problems of the day, which included urban poverty, assimilating the huge number of immigrants coming to American shores, and public health crises such as epidemics, high infant mortality rates and explosive population growth. For example, in July of 1912, one year after Galton’s death, the threat of inferior races polluting the Western body politic was discussed at the first International Congress of Eugenics in London. Sir Francis’s social theories on who was eugenically worthy spread like wildfire among white intellectuals in almost every developed Western nation.
Galton coined the term in his 1883 book, “Inquiries into the Human Faculty and its Development.” The idea was to propose a way to ‘give to the more suitable races … a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable.” In a 1904 issue of the American Journal of Sociology, Galton defined eugenics more succinctly as “the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” Galton also coined the phrase “nature versus nurture.” The word eugenics is taken from the Greek root, “eugenes,” namely good in stock or hereditarily endowed with noble qualities. We come today not to praise Francis Galton but to bury him along with his faulty and dangerous pseudoscience of eugenics. Galton, the younger, first cousin of Charles Darwin (who played an outsized role in influencing Sir Francis’s education and intellectual life), was born on this day in 1822. Supporting these fears was a theoretical framework called eugenics, first proposed in 1883 by Sir Frances Galton, the British polymath and naturalist, and a pioneer in many other fields such as meteorology, psychology and anthropometrics. It harkens back to an era when race mattered a great deal in terms of one’s status, rights and opportunities - all to our nation’s social detriment.īetween the late 1890s and the late 1930s, “White Anglo-Saxon Protestants” on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean were obsessed with the future of their country’s gene pool and how different immigrants might taint it.
was protecting immigrants from “shithole countries,” he appeared to be privileging the immigration status, if not the biology, of some people from certain lands. When President Donald Trump, frustrated during a bipartisan immigration meeting in the White House, reportedly asked last month why the U.S. Warning: This post contains explicit language.
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