eugenics summary

eugenics, Study of human improvement by genetic means. The first thorough exposition of eugenics was made by Francis Galton, who in Hereditary Genius (1869) proposed that a system of arranged marriages between men of distinction and women of wealth would eventually produce a gifted race. Galton coined the term eugenics in 1883. The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1926, supported Galton’s theories. Eugenicists in the United States supported restrictions on the immigration of people from Italy, Greece, and countries of eastern Europe, among other places, which they claimed would dilute American “good stock.” They also argued for the sterilization of the “feebleminded,” a term often applied to institutionalized populations. Sterilization laws were passed in more than half the U.S. states, and eugenics found considerable popular support. The assumptions of eugenicists also came under intensifying criticism beginning in the 1930s, and they were discredited after Nazi Germany used eugenics to support the extermination of Jews and other populations deemed “socially inferior,” although instances of lawful involuntary sterilization continued in the U.S. into the 1970s. Today, the ethical, legal, and social implications of genetics technologies such as gene editing are monitored much more closely than were early 20th-century eugenics programs.