Organized Psychology's Role in the Eugenics Movement

Introduction

The eugenics movement that began in the United States during the 1920s reached a brutal extreme with the Nazis' experimentation with improving the racial stock of human beings through controlled breeding, and this movement would have significant implications well into the 21st century (Sutton, 2015). Many practitioners today, however, may be unaware of organized psychology's role in contributing to the eugenics movement during the 20th century (Newhouse, 2016). To gain new insights into this issue, this paper reviews the relevant primary and secondary literature concerning organized psychology's long involvement in the eugenics movement and how this involvement provided the scientific basis for the selective breeding and extermination of human beings. A recapitulation of the main findings and the lessons learned are presented in the conclusion.

Origins and Foundations of the Eugenics Movement

The origins of eugenics can be traced to the late 19th century, when a combination of events facilitated the development of the eugenics movement. As the fin de siècle neared, a wide range of new ideas and events — including Mendelian genetics, innovative concepts in animal breeding, social Darwinism, and racially based ideologies — converged. Early researchers such as Francis Galton and Frederick Osborn propounded the basis for what would become the modern eugenics movement. As early as 1883, Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined the term "eugenics" and introduced the "nature versus nurture" concept into the scientific lexicon (Hartmann, 1999). In a speech delivered at London University's School of Economics on May 16, 1904, Galton reported that "Eugenics is 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" (1904, p. 1).

Similar to other like-minded eugenicists, Galton believed that the number of people who possessed superior traits was far less than a society's "defectives." Indeed, in a speech delivered in 1874, Galton — an English mathematician and statistician (Smith, 2002) — calculated the number of men with superior intellectual traits at one in 10,000 in the English population (Galton, 1874). In 1907, Galton established the Eugenics Society with the mission to "spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals" (as cited in Dorsey, 2002, p. 21).

Derived from the Greek for "good birth," the eugenics movement embraced the scientific concept of selective breeding — mating the best genes available while discouraging reproduction by people considered "defective" — in order to improve the quality of the human race. According to DeBaets (2004), "This led to two separate but complementary tracks of eugenics: positive eugenics, which encouraged mass procreation of the 'best' people, and negative eugenics, which sought to eliminate reproduction among the unfit by means of sterilization, segregation, and similar coercive methods" (p. 57).

These two complementary tracks of eugenics thinking were influential in the United States and Canada (Smith, 2002), as well as in a number of other countries in Western Europe and the Soviet Union, long before the German Nazi party implemented its program incorporating both positive and negative eugenics (Sutton, 2015). Lerner (2006) reports that "Protestant, Jewish, and a limited number of Catholic religious leaders contributed to making American eugenics the foremost eugenics movement in the world by the 1920s and sought the creation of a 'good society' in America" (p. 182). This envisioned "good American society" was to be achieved through strategies the eugenics movement embraced, including intelligence testing, limitations on immigration, sterilization, incarceration, and quantitative analyses of the racial and ethnic characteristics of family backgrounds (Lerner, 2006).

In a 1937 journal article, Osborn enthusiastically promoted both positive and negative eugenics and, like Galton, argued that there are far more undesirables in human society than individuals with superior traits. Based on his analysis, Osborn advocated a program of positive eugenics for the latter and maintained that such a program was more urgently needed than a negative eugenics program for the former. Nevertheless, Osborn also emphasized that in some cases negative eugenics was necessary to prevent reproduction by those regarded as unfit, especially intellectually. According to Osborn, "The actual sterilization of as much as one percent of the population must be justified from a social point of view, as social economy, and the protection to children from the tragedy of being reared by feebleminded parents" (p. 389).

With respect to positive eugenics, Osborn made the spurious argument that intelligent people are most in need of being "restored to a normal condition" because there are far fewer of them than so-called "defectives" who apparently reproduce without restraint. Osborn maintained that:

An increase in births among the limited number of people recognized as carriers of superior genes would not directly affect the trend to any great extent, even if the difficulties of bringing about such an increase could be surmounted. [S]uch an increase would be vastly more important than a corresponding decrease in defectives through sterilization [because] this limited upper group is the one that has suffered most from a decline of the birth rate. (p. 389)

Organized Psychology's Contribution to Eugenics

From a strictly pragmatic perspective, this type of social engineering might appear to be warranted, but the realities behind eugenics thinking were far more insidious — and organized psychology played a major role in promoting this line of thinking in the United States and beyond (Lerner, 2006). The combination of new events and ideas at the turn of the 20th century created a veritable "perfect storm" that made eugenics appear to be a viable solution to many of society's problems. Lerner (2006) emphasizes that "Underlying the assumptions on which American eugenics rested were racism, bigotry, pseudo-science masquerading as science, the assumption that many immigrants and lower socio-economic level Americans could not be assimilated into U.S. society" (p. 183).

With the concept of America as a "shining city upon a hill" as the primary rationale, the mainstream psychological community was inspired by a "quasi-religious zeal to inflict eugenics on the people of the United States and, thereby, create a master race in America" (Lerner, 2006, p. 183). It should also be noted that a number of influential members of Western society during the first half of the 20th century were enthusiastic advocates of eugenics, including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger, and George Bernard Shaw (Smith, 2002). Today, it may be difficult for modern Americans to fully appreciate the impact that the proponents of eugenics thinking — including the mainstream psychology community — had on the national consciousness during this period. In fact, more than 30 states in the United States enacted laws prior to World War II that caused 60,000 Americans to be forcibly sterilized, and the eugenics movement in Germany resulted in physicians killing more than a quarter-million infants, children, and adults with disabilities even before the outbreak of World War II (Smith, 2002).

Under the spell of eugenics, more than 30 states passed laws that resulted in 60,000 innocent Americans being forcibly sterilized. Matters were even worse in Germany: not only did the government sterilize hundreds of thousands of people, but the eugenics movement provided intellectual justification for the euthanasia Holocaust of approximately 1939–1945, during which German doctors murdered more than 250,000 disabled infants, children, and adults.

Conclusion

Coined in 1883 by English statistician and mathematician Francis Galton, the word "eugenics" is derived from the Greek for "good birth." The research by Galton and other eugenicists during the late 19th and early 20th centuries was heavily influenced by stereotypical views about the lower and under classes, racism, bigotry, and the institutionalized discriminatory practices that were commonplace during this period in world history. Even before the brutal eugenics program employed by the Nazis as part of their final solution, the eugenics movement was gaining force in North America, England, and other European countries, and hundreds of thousands of "undesirables" were murdered as a result. The research is consistent in showing that even in its most benign form — positive eugenics — the problems inherent in determining when, how, and why to use genetic information remain a source of concern for many scientists. Nevertheless, there is a growing consensus among geneticists around the world that eliminating undesirable genetic traits from the human gene pool is a worthwhile goal. Based on the most recent trends in genetic technology, it is reasonable to conclude that eugenics thinking is alive and well, and growing stronger every day.