The Social Context Of The American Eugenics Movement

Human curiosity has led the search for scientific explanations for natural phenomena, including the question of what makes a person who they are. The ideas of racial thinkers of the 18th and 19th century provided theories for how differences between people came about. Johann Blumenbach, a German professor of medicine, categorized humans into five races, with environmental differences resulting in degeneration from the Caucasian race into the other races. In endeavoring to classify humans and provide an explanation for their differences, Blumenbach inadvertently engaged in creating a rank-order hierarchy, which Garland E. Allen, an American historian, describes as a hierarchy that is greatly influenced by the social context of the time and puts
Social Darwinism developed as a way to apply natural selection to humans, which gave voice to the idea that only the fittest should survive. In this context, the American eugenics movement was born. The movement was largely influenced by the racial and socio-economic biases of the time, which were influenced by events such as progressivism, industrialism, and an influx in immigration. American eugenics advocates were greatly swayed by these biases, but hid them with the semblance of scientific objectivity. The eugenics movement in America was ultimately successful because it upheld preexisting biases of majority of the population and was portrayed with scientific objectivity to give the movement
Based on the earlier validation of Mendelian inheritance for simple traits, eugenicists aimed to extrapolate those findings to more complex traits like “feeblemindedness.” Such traits could not be measured quantitatively, but rather relied on interpretation of an individual’s behavior, which came from subjective diagnoses or second- and third-hand accounts or even speculation (Allen, “The Ideology…” 114-115). In this way, researchers constructed pedigrees laden with biases resulting from how people interpreted individuals’ behavior in the context of race and socio-economic standing. IQ tests present another example of the unscientific nature of eugenic research. While IQ tests have been debunked as measures of intelligence, at the time of the eugenics movement they appeared to be a useable method for categorizing the population. Because the resultant data from different racial groups fit into preconceived hierarchies, the validity of the IQ test was not questioned, and it was established as an accurate way to gauge intelligence (Allen, “The Ideology…” 114). Thus, American eugenics acquired a semblance of scientific validity through the research eugenicists performed, which was actually laden with preconceptions that influenced the interpretation of the collected