Marko Elez, a 25-year-old DOGE staff member was recently fired for posting “I just want a eugenic immigration policy, is that too much to ask.” Not only did Marko know what eugenics was, he perceived it as positive. It’s likely he found remnants of the eugenic pseudoscience and it fit his perspective. Additionally, President Trump just discussed the possibility of “White Genocide” in a recent meeting. Unfortunately, both of these remarks speak about race, immigration, and eugenics, resembling the words of Madison Grant and his book Passing of the Great Race. This is not something discussed through modern opinions, but through the story of which eugenics came to be.
To do so, I’m going to have to tell you a story. One that spans for hundreds of years and takes place across two continents. The point of this story is to understand the themes of science, religion, and politics that apply to America today.
How Hate Became Political
In the late 1100’s the Third Crusade brought knights from all over Europe tried to retake the holy land of Jerusalem. During the crusade, in 1198, the Teutonic Order was created. After their failure to retake Jerusalem, the Teutonic order would return to Germany to convert every “pagan” in the region. Over the next 400 years they would create the Ordenstaat, or State of the Teutonic Order. The Teutonic Ordennstaat was a theocratic and military state, and Jewish people were prohibited from living there.
However, this would change in 1525, when Martin Luther would convert Albert, the last Hochmeister, Protestantism. In doing so, He became Duke Albert of the newly secularized state called Prussia, allowing Jewish immigration. The local Prussians were very restrictive with their new Jewish immigrants. They were restricted in how they could own land, worship, work, and live. The oppressed Jewish population was eventually emancipated 300 years later in an edict on March 11th, 1812, from Prussian Chancellor Karl August Von Hardenberg. He granted Jewish people citizenship and rights in Prussia.
Although antisemitism had existed since medieval times, the 1873 financial crash first offered Prussian politicians the “usefulness” of antisemitic propaganda. Antisemitism was used for bureaucratic advantages throughout the financial crash. The first league of antisemites was founded in 1879, but antisemite parties would not take prominence until after Prussia would join with Germany. Bismarck would abdicate in 1918, leaving a war-torn and desperate Germany behind.
Due to the treaty of Versailles after World War One, the Allies demanded the Germans pay back 132 billion gold marks, about 605 billion in today’s money. Germany needed to print more money to meet the demand, hyperinflating the mark and their economy crashed under the weight of reparations. Like the 1873 financial crash, it was an opportune time to utilize antisemitism for political reasons. Only this time, they needed a surefire explanation for eliminating them. That’s when Germany turned to scientific racism, called eugenics.
Origins of Eugenics
Science is just centuries of people’s work inspiring other people. To start, Thomas Malthu (1766-1834) was an English economist who proposed hateful stances towards poverty. Malthu argued that charity only promotes intergenerational poverty, and he rejected the idea of helping the poor. Inspired by his work, another English professor named Herbert Spencer claimed that society should follow the cold nature of science. Spencer coined the phrase “survival of the fittest”. It is an evolutionary approach, but believe it or not, it came before Darwin’s theory.
Charles Darwin would go on to invent the prominent theory of evolution in The Origin of Species, which would set the stage for the next one hundred years. Natural Selection became a hot new topic for scientists, but some intellectuals caught on to its potential abuse. For example, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychology, recognized the danger to free will that Darwinism posed. Additionally, being Jewish himself, he understood the potential misuse of such a concept. Darwin’s work would go on to inspire another scientist, who ironically was his cousin.
Francis Galton was an English Mathematician who coined the term eugenics, meaning “well-born.” He focused primarily on “positive” eugenics, which meant the proper breeding between people for a more perfect next generation. This science would soon clash with emerging American frustration with immigrants and poverty. American sociologist E.A. Ross talked about avoiding a “race suicide” by immigration. That (Croatian, Sicilian, and Armenian) immigrants “lack the ancestral foundations of American character, and even if they catch step with us they and their children will nevertheless impede our progress”. American educator John Franklin Bobbit also stated that schools and churches were supplying “crutches to the weak in mind and morals [and] corrupt the streams of heredity”. Bobbit believed that pure blood could only come from those who “descended from Teutonic forefathers.” If you combine a pseudoscientific measure of humanity, combined with racial prejudice, you get applied eugenics.
American Eugenics Movement
Madison Grant is a pseudoscientist and the author of Passing of the Great Race. He was a trustee of the American Museum of Natural history, staunch eugenicist, massive racist. I mean that literally because his book talked about White/Caucasian/Nordic heredity as the great race, which were being bred out by “swarming, prolific aliens”. Remember this guy, and his book for later. In the meantime, his influence reached the highest echelons of American society. His pseudoscience-backed racism hit almost all the markers of the psychologist, Gordon Allport’s, signs of prejudice:
- Dichotomous thinking (literally White or not at all)
- Moralism (judging the perceived morality of others by race)
- Institutionalism (a strict emphasis on organization and structure)
- Authoritarianism (strict obedience to authority at personal loss)
- Externalization of Conflict (placing one’s own inner conflict into the outside world)
The incredibly wealthy Andrew Carnegie, after his steel industry was sold to J.P Morgan, would turn to philanthropy. Together, with the federal government, they created the “Carnegie institute of Washington” which was devoted to “investigation, research, and discovery…of knowledge to the improvement of mankind.” Essentially, a steel magnate joined with the US government to explore the opposite side of Francis Galton’s work, negative eugenics (the elimination of future progeny). To achieve their task, they hired zoologist, Charles Davenport.
Charles Davenport opened an office in Cold Spring Harbor in 1904, and the Eugenics Records Office (ERO) in 1910. It was an extension of the American Breeders Association, which included plants, animals, and now…people. Eugenics was an opportunity for Davenport to fight against, what he saw, as an immigrant invasion from several countries, wanting to “build a wall” around America. Fully funded by the ultra-wealthy Carnegie institute, they would be further funded by the Harrimans and Rockefellers. Davenport was also in communication with John Harvey Kellogg, who founded the Race Betterment Foundation (RBF). Davenport drew in funding from American figures such as Alexander Graham Bell, YMCA benefactor Cleveland Dodge and support from President Teddy Roosevelt. Teddy Roosevelt wrote a letter to Davenport on January 3rd, 1913 stating:
“I agree with you…what society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind…that we have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type”. Eugenics was a pseudoscience now funded by some of the wealthiest and most influential people in America.
Eugenic Intelligence Test
It was time to classify which citizens were the “wrong type”. Given that eugenics was a cover for prejudice, Cold Spring Harbor turned to what they knew. They targeted a wide range of people such as “tramps” and “wanderers”. They assumed that blindness was hereditary (which was wrong) and marked it as a eugenic target, as well as people with epilepsy, due to their perception that it was tied to “poverty”. Davenport would send researchers to interview families and using questionnaires with designations such as “sexual pervert” or “immoral”. Eventually, there would be ten types of “defectives” marked as “socially unfit” for “elimination”. This included the:
- The “pauper” class”
- “alcoholics”
- “Criminals” including those charged with petty crimes
- “Epileptics”
- “The insane”
- “The constitutionally weak class”
- Those “predisposed to diseases”
- “The deformed”
- People with “defective sensory organs” such as the mute, deaf, and blind
The last group is where psychology was brought in, to identify and eliminate the
- “feebleminded”
The term “feebleminded” was always vague. Eugenicists, such as psychologist Henry Goddard, believed that intelligence was what separated the worthy from the unworthy. He is the psychologist, and father of American Intelligence, who coined the terms “moron”. Henry Goddard would take the first formal intelligence test from France, called the Stanford-Binet Intelligence test. This was an assessment made by two Frenchmen for the explicit purpose of helping French schoolchildren. Using the Stanford-Binet test, and immigrants from Ellis Island, Goddard developed his own assessments.
Goddard’s assessments would inspire eugenics students of Davenport such as Robert Yerkes, who would become the president of the American Psychological Association in 1917. He would develop an intelligence test called the Army Alpha Test. This was used on the mass enlistment of soldiers for World War One. The questions were “measuring intelligence” but here are some sample questions:
Question: Becky Sharp appears in…Vanity Fair, Romola, The Christmas Carol, or Henry IV
Correct response: Vanity Fair
Question: Velvet Joe appears in advertisements for…tooth powder, dry goods, tobacco, soap
Correct response: tobacco.
As you can see, these were ludicrous questions to purposefully exclude rural and low-income people. The Army Alpha Test came back with orchestrated and racist results, where 89% of oppressed Black men scored low. This test was later utilized by another psychologist, Carl Brigham, who wrote A Study of American intelligence. Brigham, inspired by Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race, reconfigured the Army Alpha Test and administered it as a college entry exam, that he then used at Princeton College. Brigham would be asked to formalize the test, calling it the scholastic aptitude test, or SAT.
After the assessments for the “feebleminded” were made, it was time to figure out what happens to those who score poorly. Lewis Terman, an American psychologist and eugenicist, took a term from Germany called “intelligence quotient”, or IQ. Terman determined that people with an IQ score of 70 or less were “morons” or “idiots”. In 1905, Pennsylvania’s congress passed legislature that was vetoed by Governor Samuel Pennypacker, called the act for the prevention of idiots. Now that feeblemindedness was identified through the invention of intelligence testing, it was time to determine what to do with these individuals.
American Eugenic Laws
There were three methods of getting rid of eugenic targets: deportation, marriage restriction, and sterilization. Under Jim Crow laws, marriage restriction between races was already quite common, nonetheless bolstered by eugenics. The last marriage restriction law was repealed in 2000 in Alabama.
As for deportation, eugenics was a pseudoscientific justification for xenophobia. In 1917, there was a proposed statute that barred the immigration of “all idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded, epileptics…those of psychopathic inferiority”. Madison Grant, author of Passing of the Great Race, was the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League and close friend of congressman Albert Johnson. Johnson was a eugenicist and chair for the house committee on immigration and nationalization for twelve years, starting in 1919. Margaret Sanger was also a staunch eugenicist, calling for draconian immigration restrictions and mass incarceration of the “unfit”. Laughlin, a Cold Spring Harbor Eugenicist, published Immigration and Conquest in May of 1939, saying that America would suffer “conquest by settlement and reproduction”. Laughlin was spiteful towards immigrants, saying that “over 6 million aliens, free to vote” would never have been admitted with eugenic immigration laws. He would have influence though, as the National Origins Act in 1952 included quotas suggested by the Eugenics Records Office.
While immigration was supposed to stop most immigrants coming to America, Madison Grant created a specific focus on the Southern border with Mexico. In his book, Passing of the Great Race, Grant expressed his hatred of the mixture of Nordics and natives, just like the “mongrelization” of Mexico. He referenced the European Spanish “breeding” with the native Aztec and Incas, creating what we now know as Mexico and South America. Walter Plecker, another eugenicist, would emphasize this “mongrelization” in Texas, where he called for 500,000 to 750,000 Mexicans to be deported back past the Southern border. Plecker was created the first statewide eugenics registry in Virginia with the “purpose to list degenerates and criminals”. Alabama and Georgia would create their own eugenic registries as well.
As for sterilization, it didn’t take long before it became practice. Indiana was the first state to legalize forced sterilization for the “mentally impaired, poor, and prisoners” in 1907. In 1909, Washington, Connecticut, and California would pass forced sterilization laws. From 1909 to 1911, it would also become law in Nevada, Iowa, and New Jersey, signed by then Governor Woodrow Wilson.
There was pushback from some states, as sterilization laws would fail in Wisconsin, Illinois, and Oregon by Governor Chamberlain who described its potential for “abuse. Even though laws were passed, there were still constitutional issues that presented a problem to enacting them.
Eugenicists planned to enact unconstitutional actions through the police. Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, recognized the use of a secret police to get rid of domestic “undesirables” was a key indicator of an authoritarian regime. Additionally, state eugenics laws included statues where if forced sterilization was called for through vasectomy, then due process was withdrawn.
This was reinforced through a case called Buck v. Bell, which allowed eugenic sterilization to run rampant. Nationalism was ramped up as eugenics became more known, where it was seen as “genealogical tools” to evaluate “modesty and patriotism”. The American Breeders Association (ABA) called it a “long term investment for American patriots”. Even through all the hard work of Davenport to create a eugenic utopia, he did face resistance.
Pushback to Eugenics
American eugenicists didn’t always win. For example, they attacked the United States Census Bureau for years because they wouldn’t allow for eugenic labels in the census. After losing, that’s when Davenport turned to states for their own registries. Registries and forced sterilizations caught the media’s eye. In 1915, American news published a headline “14 Million to Be Sterilized” which Davenport wrote off as “fake news”. Other sources called it a war of the wealthy and elite against the poor. Comical news was also combatting eugenics, as Lampoon author Cheever lambasted eugenics. Davenport expressed a strong desire to have Cheever imprisoned as a result.
This divide was also seen in the church. Dr. Albert Wiggam, author and scientific leader, stated that “Had Jesus been among us, he would have been president of the First Eugenics Congress”. Biblical Scriptures were used as eugenic support, with Genesis 30:38-42 calling for the separation of the strong and weak, and Matthew 7:18-19 where a “bad tree can not bear good fruit.” This was fought against by the British Catholic church and Pope Pius XI when he condemned eugenics in 1930. Ironic however, as Pope Pius XI was forced to rename the Teutonic Order due to the Nazi’s use of their history and doctrine (the German military iron cross was the emblem of the Teutonic knights). Unfortunately, no pushback was able to stop what had started.
Results of American Eugenics
While Galton might have started eugenics, Cold Spring Harbor spread it across the world. The First International Congress of Eugenics was born in 1912, with countries attending from around the world. This would include France, Belgium, Germany, Japan, Canada, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, etc. The first president of this congress was none other than the son of Charles Darwin, Leonard Darwin. The German members included a man named Alfred Ploetz, who would become the father of Germany’s race hygiene and eugenics movement. Years later in 1930, in Davenport’s absence due to ill health, the German committee took over responsibility from the conference. While Eugenics spread across the ocean, it persisted in the United States.
Eugenic legislation would stay in effect for seven decades, along with what it carried out. In that time, nearly 70,000 individuals were forcibly sterilized under these laws across the United States. Henry Osborn, the president of the American museum of natural history called eugenics the “true spirit” of America. The success of American eugenics would spread to Germany, with the opening of the Rockefeller-funded Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. Three sections of this school were opened, (1) psychology (2) Anthropology, human heredity, and eugenics and (3) brain research. By 1944, 44 major American universities, including most ivy schools, taught eugenics. Everything seemed to be going according to Madison Grant’s vision.
Madison Grant sat on a three person eugenics committee with Davenport and said America had been infiltrated by “a large and increasing number of the weak, the broken and the mentally crippled of…human flotsam” and called for a “system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit.” His works inspired Davenport, Laughlin, immigration restriction, IQ testing, and mass sterilization of whoever he saw as feeble or unfit. However, he never got mass euthanasia in America. Henry Goddard, father of American intelligence, recommended that gas chambers (originally used for putting down small pets) could be used to rid of undesirables. While Madison’s work never led to direct American genocide, it did inspire others.
In 1924, there was a German man in prison reading and writing profusely. He stumbled across Madison Grant’s Passing of the Great Race and found himself inspired. This man was viciously antisemitic and called Grant’s book “his Bible”. He wrote a letter back to Grant, thanking him for his work. This man, of course, was Adolf Hitler.
In 1933, The National Socialists took power, and one of their first decrees was Reich statute Part 1 No. 86, Law for the prevention of defective progeny. In 1934, German eugenics and applied race hygiene was in full swing. German biologist Verschuer referred to nationality not as a sign of citizenship, but a “biological entity”. In 1935, The Nuremberg laws stripped away the right of anyone with Jewish ancestry. In 1939, German Interior Minister Frick issued a decree for every biological twin to register themselves to the Reich Statistics Bureau with eugenic terminology. To be clear, American eugenics did not create Hitler. It handed him, and an antisemitic Germany, once Prussia, and once the Ordenstaat, the pseudoscientific tools to justify his master plan.
German-American Eugenics
There would be many connections from American eugenics to the Holocaust in Germany. Rudolf Hess, a Nazi eugenicist and later war criminal, stated that “Nazism is nothing but applied biology”. German racial hygiene and American eugenics would congratulate each other on their achievements. Laughlin would receive an honorary degree from Nazi eugenicists, who would gas thousands shortly after. Davenport would write to the Nazi race hygiene organizations, congratulating them on their achievements, while expressing to his colleagues how proud he was that American laws were the foundation for the German eugenics’ movement. It was true, even to the fact that Cold Spring Harbor developed punch cards with eugenic terminology and columns that were replicated a by the SS. In 1934, a Virginia superintendent said, “the Germans are beating us at our own game”.
The Disappearance of Eugenics
As World War Two raged on, and America became involved, eugenics became less popular. Davenport attempted to convince his colleagues that the news was just anti-German propaganda. However, Rockefeller would continue to fund the Kaiser Wilhem Institute well into the Holocaust. American eugenicists attempted to distance themselves from eugenics, officially closing the Eugenics Record Office on December 31st, 1939, but it was rebranded the “genetics” office.
Religion, politics, and science had all come together to try and eliminate the “weak.” However, consequences only seemed to apply to the Germans. Horrific eugenics experiments were conducted in concentration camps. Operation paperclip saved many Nazi eugenicists, many whom went on to be prominent scientists at NASA. On the other hand, Hofmann and other SS Race officers, who planned the “final solution” were tried at the Nuremberg trials, many under section 4: Sterilization. The scientists knew about forced sterilizations in America, one calling the judges “pharisees”.
Hofmann himself, the Holocaust architect, wrote in his Nuremberg trial report:
“The United States…also provides an example for the racial legislation of the world in another respect. Although it is clearly established in the Declaration of Independence that everyone born in the United States is a citizen of the United States and so acquires all the rights which an American citizen can acquire, impassable lines are drawn between the individual races, especially in the Southern States. Thus in certain states Japanese are excluded from the ownership of land or real estate and they are prevented from cultivating arable land. Marriages between colored persons and whites are forbidden in no less than thirty of the Federal States. Marriages contracted in spite of this ban are declared invalid”
Hofmann continued to cite laws from California, Florida, Arkansas, Alabama, and Arizona. The report would include the 29 states of America that passed sterilization laws since 1907. Hofmann was only sentenced to 25 years in prison. American eugenicists attempted to create registries for those they found unfit to procreate and did so in several states. Over half of the United States legalized the forced sterilization of almost 70,000 of those individuals. The Nazis developed similar registries, using copycat punch cards and methods, leading to the genocide of millions. Even the scientists most responsible for the Holocaust were bewildered as to how America could prosecute them when actively doing a lesser version.
Sources and Reading
Most of the sources for this article came from Edwin Black’s book War Against the Weak. His archival research on eugenics illuminated Cold Spring Harbor’s hand in genocide. Another book used was the Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt, describing the roots of antisemitism that led to totalitarian regimes. A third book used was Gordon Allport’s The Nature of Prejudice, to define early representations of prejudice in a social and psychological lens. The book the Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, describes the use of assessments and pseudoscience to craft eugenics as a scientific racism. Unfortunately, another book used was Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant. If you question anything said in this article, just go read his work.
Reflections 
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