The Shocking Ancient Greek Origins of the Eugenics Movement

Stop blaming Hitler! I bet the Chinese are breeding super soldiers with bigger penises.

https://www.ancient-origins.net/history-important-events/eugenics-origins-0016858

[skip greek origins]

Thus, the idea of modern eugenics, first attributed to Galton in his seminal work Inquiries into Human Fertility and Its Development , which disseminated the idea that intelligence was hereditarily acquired and that the ‘higher races’ of humanity were destined to rule, shared very little continuity with the doctrines of the ancient Greeks.

After Galton’s landmark publication, interest around eugenics exploded around the turn of the century, and in 1904 the first eugenics journal, the Archive for Racial and Social Biology would be founded by German biologist Alfred Ploetz, focusing prominently on the superiority of the Nordic and Aryan races and the notion of ‘racial hygiene’. With the establishment of the Society for Racial Hygiene in Germany, the Eugenics Education Society in Britain, and the American Breeders Association, eugenics was becoming a truly global phenomenon in the first decade of the 20th century.

Eugenics was most enthusiastically received in the United States, and in 1910 the Eugenics Record Office was founded by Charles Davenport with funding from noted businessmen John Harvey Kellogg. The institution trained survey workers to collect information on US families, who were judged on such attributes such as ‘feeblemindedness’, ‘criminality’, and ‘alcoholism’. The latest developments in eugenics were compiled in a journal called Eugenical News which was nationally distributed.

In 1927, the case of Buck versus Bell dominated the newspaper headlines in Virginia, as 18-year-old patient Carrie Buck fought against the state’s mandate to have her sterilized. In 1924, Virginia had passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act, which allowed for the forced sterilization of those considered ‘mentally disabled’. This was not a new phenomenon. In 1907, Indiana had passed the first sterilization act in reaction to the intellectual discussions of the late 1800s, which blamed criminality and mental defects on poor genetic inheritance. By the 1930s, 27 states in America would institute similar sterilization laws.

By the 1930s, the Third International Eugenics Congress would attract less than 100 attendees as eugenic ideas fell out of favor with American and European intellectuals. Critics pointed to problematic experimental methods, understudied economic and environmental factors, and overly-simplistic approaches of Mendel’s theories seen through a dubious lens of classist and racist biases.

In addition, the worrying policies of Nazi Germany in the 1930s persuaded many to distance themselves from eugenics. Adolf Hitler and Nazi scientists had been inspired by the Americans to forcibly sterilize Jews and minorities in Germany with the passing of the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring in 1933, a fact that sat uncomfortably with many US proponents of the theory. In 1939, at the eve of World War II, the Eugenics Record Office was finally shut down and funding was cut off. Following the unspeakable horrors of the Holocaust, eugenics became a taboo subject in the second half of the 20th century. Now, America and the West’s flirtation with such a dangerous ideology remains a shameful reminder of the devastating consequences of a bad idea.