Eugenic States

Inheritable Feeblemindedness and Innate Immorality

The wave of sterilization legislation in the 1910s and 1920s mainly addressed what eugenicists termed “inheritable feeblemindedness.” During the first decades of the twentieth century, eugenic theorists thought that feeblemindedness was the result of defective “germ plasm” that carried from generation to generation. As the existence of bad germ plasm could not be diagnosed medically, one could recognize feeblemindedness only by its social symptoms, which included poverty, promiscuity, criminality, alcoholism, and illegitimacy — phenomena that were considered to lie at the root of many social ills. As eugenic scientists considered feeblemindedness, and thus undesirable social behaviors, to be hereditary, sterilization seemed to offer an easy medical solution to complex social problems. An IQ rating of seventy and below allowed health and welfare professionals to quickly identify the feebleminded and move from diagnosis to “treatment.”

Health and welfare authorities not only followed eugenic theory when implementing eugenic policies but had their own interests in the programs. Although they usually lacked formal training in eugenic science, they shared with eugenic scientists a common set of assumptions about the meaning of degeneracy and heredity. Their work in public health and welfare led them to hope that eugenic sterilization could aid in the fight against social ills. State-sponsored sterilizations were thus driven as much by consensus among these professionals as they were by the theories of eugenic scientists. In the case of North Carolina, the passage of the state’s eugenic sterilization law allowed health and welfare officials in charge of implementing the program to bring their own policy goals to the table. Since the directors of mental institutions as well as social workers could submit sterilization petitions, these goals ranged from controlling welfare spending to improving the health of sterilization candidates to easing institutional overcrowding by sterilizing and then releasing inmates of the state’s training schools

While health and welfare professionals had high hopes for eugenic sterilization, the eugenic science that underlay it did not go unchallenged. Starting in the 1920s, geneticists, anthropologists, physicians, and psychologists began to engage in research that eventually undermined eugenic science’s basic assumptions. With the onset of World War II, interest in eugenic sterilization began to decline. The country finally pulled out of the Great Depression, and wartime production led to full employment and a drastic reduction of the welfare rolls. The shortage of surgeons during the war caused a sharp decline in the number of sterilization operations and news of sterilization abuses in Nazi Germany helped to discredit the practice. In 1942, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law that had provided for the sterilization of thrice-convicted felons. Although this decision did not overturn Buck v. Bell, the 1927 Supreme Court decision that had upheld Virginia’s sterilization law, it did set a new precedent for judicial decisions. In most states, state ordered sterilizations had ceased completely by the late 1940s. But this decline was countered by an expansion of sterilization programs in Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Although the secretary of the North Carolina Eugenics Board conceded in 1944 that “we do not know precisely to what extent mental defects and psychopathic conditions are inherited,” the board’s supporters lumped poor heredity and bad environments together and emphasized the devastating influence of both on children. To justify the continued operation of eugenic sterilization programs, officials promoted a loose variation of hereditary theories. While health and welfare professionals had argued earlier that social problems were passed on from generation to generation via genetic transmission, they now held that the same undesirable qualities were passed on through socialization; regardless of the mechanism they believed that the continued use of eugenic policies was warranted.  As Marion Olden generalized in The Survival of the Unfittest (1946), sterilization prevented “the birth of children who would have a bad heredity or a bad environment or both.” While socialization replaced genes as the medium, the inheritance of undesirable qualities remained inevitable. Continuing eugenic sterilization programs became particularly appealing in the postwar period when sex outside of marriage and rising illegitimacy rates seemed to threaten the stability of the American family. The “rediscovery” of poverty in the early 1960s further fueled concerns about the reproductive capacity of poor families and solidified the link between illegitimacy and innate immorality. As welfare rolls grew in the 1950s and 1960s, eugenic sterilization programs in a few states expanded. A focus on the “culture of poverty” replaced hereditary theories as a justification for eugenic sterilization while demanding similar interventions.

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