Theodore Roosevelt Eugenics

Eugenics Research
The word "eugenics" was coined in 1883 by British mathematician Francis Galton, who defined it as "the science of improving the stock." The eugenics movement, he said, would be dedicated to allowing "the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing speedily over the less suitable." The movement had its heyday from the 1890s to the 1940s, when eugenicists argued that southern Europeans, Jews, people of color, homosexuals, and people with disabilities were inferior to white, heterosexual, able-bodied Protestants of northern European descent. Eugenics made somewhat of a comeback in the 1990s with the advent of genetic in-utero testing, which some see as a new phase in the effort to "purify" society.
It was an idea that mixed personal history with political vision. Roosevelt extolled the virtue of the ranching life out west in the Dakotas, hunting, and other excursions into the wilderness. His enunciation of the strenuous ideal sometimes referred to as part of the era’s “cult of masculinity” or even “cult of the strenuous life” expressed a common notion of the time. Simply put: modern life was making men weak. Upper class males, in particular were losing their grip on health and power, and giving in to lassitude and nervous disorders; yet middle class men with clerical duties and working class men with bad diets, trapped in repetitive industrial jobs with little autonomy, also longed for a romanticized pre-industrial past. The call to the strenuous life then, had two components: the personal notion of transformation from sickliness and weakness to strength, and a political notion of an invigorated public and public servants actively making emphatic changes in the world.

Regarded as one of the era’s leading progressives, Roosevelt was among those young reformers in both parties who rejected decades of laissez-faire capitalism and corrupt machine politics. Their new strenuous program included breaking the power of corrupt political machines and to offer real services to the urban poor whose votes the machines depended
The founder of genetics, Gregor Mendel, showed that parents passed genes to offspring. Genes code for traits. For example, Mendel demonstrated that a single gene codes for the color green in peas. A single gene also codes for the color yellow in peas. The geneticists who followed Mendel had no difficulty extrapolating his findings to the rest of life. Of particular interest was the role of heredity in humans. In a casual way, people had long appreciated the importance of heredity, noting for example that a child looked strikingly like his or her mother. Geneticists sought to formalize observations of this kind, tracing, for example, the transmission of the gene for brown eyes through several generations of a family. In the course of this work it was natural for geneticists to wonder whether intelligence and traits of character were inherited with the lawlike regularity that Mendel had observed with simple traits in