Organized Psychology’s Involvement in the Eugenics Movement

The eugenics movement that began in the United States during the 1920s reached a brutal extreme with the Nazis’ experimentation with improving the racial stock of human beings through controlled breeding, and this movement would have significant implications well into the 21st century (Sutton, 2015). Many practitioners today, though, may be unaware of organized psychology’s role in contributing to the eugenics movement during the 20th century (Newhouse, 2016). To gain some new insights into this issue, this paper reviews the relevant primary and secondary literature concerning organized psychology’s long involvement in the eugenics movement and how this involvement provided the scientific basis for the selective breeding and extermination of human beings. Finally, a recapitulation of the main findings from the primary and secondary literature concerning these issues and the lessons learned are presented in the conclusion.

Review and Analysis

The origins of eugenics can be traced to the late 19th century when a combination of events served to facilitate the development of the eugenics movement. As the fin de siècle neared, a wide range of new ideas and events such as Mendelian genetics, innovative concepts in animal breeding, social Darwinism and racially based ideologies converged, with early researchers such as Francis Galton and Frederick Osborn propounding the basis for what would become the modern eugenics movement. In fact, as early as 1883, Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, had coined the term “eugenics” and introduced the “nature versus nurture” concept into the scientific lexicon (Hartmann, 1999). In a speech delivered at London University’s School of Economies on May 16, 1904, Galton reported that, “Eugenics is the science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage” (1904, p. 1). Similar to other like-minded eugenicsts, Galton believed that the number of people who possessed superior traits was far less than a society’s “defectives. Indeed, in a speech delivered in 1874, Galton, a English mathematician and statistician (Smith, 2002), actually calculated the number of men with superior intellectual traits at one in 10,000 in the English population (Galton, 1874).  In 1907, Galton established the Eugenics Society with the mission to “spread eugenic teaching and bring human parenthood under the domination of eugenic ideals” (as cited in Dorsey, 2002, p. 21).

Derived from the Greek for “good birth,” the eugenics movement embraced the scientific concept of selective breeding by mating the best genes available while discouraging reproduction by people considered to be “defective” in order to improve the quality of the human race. For instance, according to DeBaets (2004), “This led to two separate but complementary tracks of eugenics: positive eugenics, which encouraged mass procreation of the ‘best’ people, and negative eugenics, which sought to eliminate reproduction among the unfit by means of sterilization, segregation, and similar coercive methods” (p. 57). 

These two separate but complementary tracks of eugenics thinking were influential in the United States and Canada (Smith, 2002), as well as a number of other countries in Western Europe and the Soviet Union long before the German Nazi party implemented their program that included both positive and negative eugenics (Sutton, 2015). For instance, Lerner (2006) reports that, “Protestant, Jewish, and a limited number of Catholic religious leaders contributed to making American eugenics the foremost eugenics movement in the world by the 1920s and sought the creation of a ‘good society’ in America” (p. 182). This envisioned “good American society” would be achieved by using the various strategies the eugenics movement embraced, including testing for intelligence, limitations on immigration, sterilization, incarceration and quantitative analyses of various racial and ethnic characteristics of family backgrounds (Lerner, 2006).

In a 1937 journal article, Osborn also enthusiastically promoted both positive and negative eugenics, and like Galton, argued that there are far more undesirables in human society than there are individuals with superior traits and based on his analysis, Osborn advocated a program of positive eugenics for the latter was needed more than a negative eugenics program for the former. Nevertheless, Osborn also emphasized that in some cases, negative eugenics was needed to prevent reproduction by those regarded as being unfit, especially intellectually. For instance, according to Osborn, “The actual sterilization of as much as one percent of the population must be justified from a social point of view, as social economy, and the protection to children from the tragedy of being reared by feebleminded parents” (p. 389). 

Conversely,... For instance, Osborne maintains that:
An increase in births among the limited number of people recognized as carriers of superior genes would not directly affect the trend to any great extent, even if the difficulties of bringing about such an increase could be surmounted. [S]uch an increase would be vastly more important than a corresponding decrease in defectives through sterilization [because] this limited upper group is the one that has suffered most from a decline of the birth rate. (p. 389)

From a strictly pragmatic perspective, this type of social engineering might appear to be warranted (after all, no one wants “feebleminded parents”), but the realities behind eugenics thinking were far more insidious – and organized psychology played a major role in promoting this line of thinking in the United States and beyond (Lerner, 2006). As noted above, the combination of new events and ideas at the turn of the 20th century created a veritable “perfect storm” that made eugenics appear to be a viable solution to many of society’s problems. For example, Lerner (2006) emphasizes that, “Underlying the assumptions on which American eugenics rested were racism, bigotry, pseudo-science masquerading as science, the assumption that many immigrants and lower socio-economic level Americans could not be assimilated into U.S. society” (p. 183). 

With the concept of America as a “shining city upon a hill” as the primary rationale in support, the mainstream psychological community was inspired by a “quasi-religious zeal to inflict eugenics on the people of the United States and, thereby, create a master race in America” (Lerner, 2006, p. 183). It should also be noted that a number of influential members of Western society during the first half of the 20th century were enthusiastic advocates of eugenics, including Winston Churchill, Theodore Roosevelt, Margaret Sanger and George Bernard Shaw (Smith, 2002). Today, it may be difficult for modern Americans to fully appreciate the impact that the proponents of eugenics thinking, including the mainstream psychology community, had on the national consciousness in this effort during this period in history. In fact, more than 30 states in the U.S. enacted laws prior to World War II that caused 60,000 Americans to be sterilized forcibly, and the eugenics movement in Germany resulted in physicians killing more than a quarter-million infants, children and adults with disabilities even before the outbreak of World War II (Smith, 2002).

Under the spell of eugenics, more than 30 states passed laws that resulted in 60,000 innocent Americans being forcibly sterilized. Matters were even worse in Germany: not only did the government sterilize hundreds of thousands of people, but the eugenics movement provided intellectual justification for the euthanasia Holocaust circa 1939-1945, during which German doctors murdered more than 250,000 disabled infants, children, and adults.

One of the more interesting aspects of eugenics thinking is the manner in which real human beings are pigeonholed according to various physical and intellectual attributes, with those who fail to measure up to arbitrary standards being regarded as “abnormal.” Indeed, until 1840 the word “normal” meant “perpendicular” rather than the current meaning of “the common type or standard” and it was not until 1855 that the modern definition of “norm” emerged, and the words “normality” and “normalcy” did not emerge until 1849 and 1857, respectively (Moddelmog, 2010). When these terms entered the psychological lexicon, there was also growing interest in applying new analytical models such as IQ tests, the mean and bell curve which were seized upon by the psychological community as being legitimate strategies for identifying normal and abnormal people. For instance, according to Moddelmog (2010), “Significantly, such mathematical tools helped to promote pseudo-sciences such as eugenics and sexology with their views that populations can be normed” (2010, p. 142).

Indeed, some of the giants’ shoulders upon which future psychologists would stand were among the most enthusiastic proponents of these new analytical methods. As Moddelmog explains, even Sigmund Freud together with other researchers such as Edward Carpenter, Magnus Hirchfield and Havelock Ellis used these analytical methods to develop a better understanding concerning sexual normality and abnormality, even going to far as assigning quantifiable metrics for various body parts as well as the physiological and psychological attributes of different categories of humans, including hetero- and homosexuals, sadists, masochists, sexual inverts, and those with fetishes (Moddelmog, 2010). In…