Eugenics

Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement focuses on a time in the early 1900s when many people believed that some "races," classes, and individuals were superior to others. They used a new branch of scientific inquiry known as eugenics to justify their prejudices and advocate programs and policies aimed at solving the nation's problems by ridding society of "inferior racial traits."

Even as Wallace Wallin and others were questioning the validity of the Goddard- Binet test, Lewis Terman, a professor of education at Stanford University, was creating a new version that would be later known as the Stanford-Binet test. It offered eugenicists a more reliable, less costly, and more efficient way of measuring the mental abilities of large groups of people.

In his textbook, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics, Charles Davenport argued, “It is just as sensible to imprison a person for feeble-mindedness or insanity as it is to imprison criminals belonging to such strains. The question of whether a given person is a case for the penitentiary or the hospital is not primarily a legal question but one for a physician with the aid of studies of heredity and family histories.” Throughout the early 1900s, Davenport and other eugenicists repeatedly warned the nation of the threat posed by the “unfit”—the so-called “menace of the feebleminded.”

Just six months after Adolf Hitler took office, Germany enacted its first eugenic measure—the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring.” The Eugenical News, which was published by the Eugenics Record Office, proudly printed a translation of the law. It states in part: