Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy
Garland E Allen, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO, USA
Marius Turda, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK
Ó 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
This article is a revision of the previous edition article by G.E. Allen, pp. 4889–4896, Ó 2001, Elsevier Ltd.
Abstract
This article considers the eugenic basis of population policy by reviewing national and international developments during the
twentieth century. Examples from the history of eugenics are invoked in order to contextualize this topic both diachronically
and conceptually.
Population policy refers to control of human population by
legislation or other official means. It involves setting goals for
such population parameters as total size, the maintenance of
demographic stability, and birth and mortality rates. Pop-
ulation policy includes both privately funded programs, such
as the contraception campaign promoted in India in the 1950s
by the Rockefeller Foundation, and publicly funded programs
such as those promoted throughout the Third World by the
United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
There are also state-controlled population policies, such as the
natalist programs in Ceausescu’s Romania, the sterilization of
Roma women in Czechoslovakia and, more recently, of
indigenous women in Fujimori’s Peru as well as China’s current
restrictive family planning. Often, there are religious aspects
involved in certain population policies such as the Catholic
Church’s traditional opposition to contraception and abortion.
Finally, there are social and economic factors that shape pop-
ulation policy, most notably voluntary sterilization in Brazil.
In the twentieth century, population policy has often been
associated with eugenics. The term ‘Eugenics,’ derived from the
Greek εygεnh’ 2, or eugenes, and was first coined by English
statistician Francis Galton (1822–1911) in his book Inquiries
into Human Faculty and Its Development to refer to one born
‘good in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities’
(Galton, 1883). As an intellectual and social movement,
eugenics came to mean, in the words of one of its strongest
American supporters Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944),
“the science of human improvement by better breeding”
(Davenport, 1910). For both Galton and Davenport, better
breeding implied improving the biological quality of the
human species by the scientific principles of heredity.
Eugenicists wanted to develop policies that dealt not only
with the quality of the population but also its growth. In this
sense they sought to increase the reproductive rate of that
segment of the population deemed to be biologically
(meaning genetically) well-endowed (positive eugenics), and
limit or prevent the reproduction of that segment of the pop-
ulation deemed to be biologically inferior or degenerate
(negative eugenics).
Eugenics was essentially based on biological, or genetic
determinism (the idea that genes determine more of what
a person is like, both in personality and in physical traits, than
environment; eugenics took the side of ‘nature’ in the long-
standing nature–nurture debate). The largely ignored model
of heredity Gregor Mendel (1882–1884), the Moravian monk,
218 International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2nd edition, Volume 8
had published as early as 1866 – subsequently known as the
system of Mendelian inheritance – challenged the theory of
blending inheritance (namely that an offspring’s makeup
constituted a blend of his or her parents’ traits). Mendel’s
research on the nature of inheritance proved that an offspring’s
genetic structure was not simply a synthesis of that of the
parents, but that particular genetic traits could be either
dominant or recessive, and that these were passed on in
accordance with statistical laws.
By the time of World War I the Mendelian principles of
heredity were being applied with great success to the breeding
of many varieties of animals and plants; it also revolutionized
theories of human genetics and evolution. It was in this
atmosphere that eugenics flourished. It was hailed as a scientific
solution to recurrent social and biological problems. If alco-
holism, criminality, pauperism, and feeblemindedness were all
determined by genes, then the way to eliminate these problems
would be to prevent the reproduction of those individuals
thought to carry those genes. While eugenicists were concerned
with the inheritance of physical abnormalities such as hemo-
philia, color blindness, brachydactyly (shortened digits), and
debilitating diseases such as Huntington’s chorea (all recog-
nized to be genetic prior to 1910), they were ultimately more
interested in human behavioral and personality traits –
including mental ability, mental illness, ‘moral degeneracy,’
and criminality, to list only a few – all of which they claimed
were genetically determined to a significant degree.
Encouraged by the reception to Galton’s ideas in Britain, the
Eugenics Education Society was established in 1907 in London.
Other countries followed this example and in Scandinavia, for
instance, a Swedish Society for Race Hygiene was formed in
Stockholm in 1909. American eugenicists had established the
Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Spring Harbor as
early as 1904, followed by the Eugenics Record Office in 1910.
The French Eugenics Society was established in 1912. In
Central Europe, Czech, Austrian and Hungarian societies were
established in 1913 and 1914. Also in 1914, an Italian Eugenics
Committee convened at the Roman Society of Anthropology.
By then, the German Society for Racial Hygiene and the
German League for National Regeneration and Heredity, both
established in 1905, were intensely involved in disseminating
eugenics to the general public, both at home and abroad, as
illustrated by the Hygiene Exhibition organized in Dresden in
1911. However, it was in the United States, Britain, the Scan-
dinavian countries, and Germany where eugenics as an
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intellectual and social movement reached its greatest strides
and from eugenicists’ point of view, greatest ideological and
political results (Adams, 1990).
Eugenic Research: Its Aims and Problems
Following Galton’s research into the genealogy of illustrious
British individuals, the family pedigree chart became the main
analytical means for displaying and analyzing data on the
inheritance of one or another trait. Information was collected
from among a group of relatives, and it was displayed as
a family pedigree chart, emphasizing that traits ran in families
and thus how heredity influenced many behavioral, person-
ality, and mental traits. The American eugenicist Charles
Davenport claimed, for example, that thalassophilia, or ‘love of
the sea,’ was a sex-linked Mendelian recessive appearing in the
families of prominent US naval officers (Davenport, 1919).
That the condition must be sex-linked was clear to Daven-
port, since in pedigree after pedigree only males in the various
families he studied became naval officers. Such simplistic
Mendelian arguments were then extended from individuals to
large groups as a way of explaining the differences between
racial, ethnic, and national groups.
Because of their concern with the apparent rise in
‘feeblemindedness,’ eugenicists embraced the nascent psycho-
metric movement (intelligence testing) starting as early as
1912. In that year, Henry H. Goddard (1866–1957) adminis-
tered a version of the French Binet–Simon test to immigrants
arriving at New York’s Ellis Island (Zenderland, 1998).
Although the Binet–Simon test was intended to measure only
an individual’s mental functioning at a given point in time,
Goddard and a host of psychometricians in the United States
and Europe considered that it also measured innate, or genet-
ically determined intelligence. Goddard coined the term
‘feeblemindedness’ (which he claimed was genetic) to refer to
those people who scored below a given level (70) on his tests,
and claimed that it was transmitted from generation to gener-
ation. It was also Goddard who carried out the famous study of
the Kallikak family, showing what was presumed to be the
hereditary effects of feeblemindedness and degeneracy
(Goddard, 1912). For American eugenicists, the new mental
tests seemed as a precise, quantitative tool for measuring an
otherwise elusive, but fundamental human trait. Eugenically
inclined psychometricians felt that the scientifically trained
expert could at last solve with rational and scientific methods
the social problems that muddle-headed politicians and
social workers had been unable to solve during the preceding
century.
A major problem with eugenic research was that it quickly
fell behind the work being done by geneticists in laboratories
throughout the world. By the 1920s many geneticists had come
to recognize that genes (collectively, known as the organism’s
genotype) interact with one another (a phenomenon known as
epistasis) and with the environment to produce any given trait
(the organism’s phenotype). The interaction of genes with one
another and environmental factors (for example, temperature,
drugs, diet) was found to alter the gene’s expression in
profound ways, yielding a variety of alternative phenotypes
from the same genotype. Even the position of a gene along the
Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy 219
length of its chromosome turned out to affect the way that gene
is expressed. This malleability, or plasticity, of the genotype–
phenotype relationship meant that even knowing the geno-
type of the offspring at conception did not provide a certain
means of predicting the phenotype. While they adopted much
of the exciting new work in genetics in the 1920s and 1930s, it
is apparent that many eugenicists did not really understand it
fully, or take to heart its implications for their social programs.
Eugenics and the Control of Reproduction
One of the aims eugenicists across the world shared was the
desire to allegedly improve the population’s quality by
controlling its reproduction. Eugenic sterilization is one of
methods used toward achieving this goal. In the United States,
Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943) was particularly active in
lobbying for the passage of a number of state eugenic sterili-
zation laws in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, Laughlin drew up
a ‘Model Sterilization Law’ that served as a prototype from
which each state could derive its own modified version
(Laughlin, 1922). Although the earliest such laws had been
passed before World War I, the majority was established
during the interwar period (Reilly, 1992). Eugenic
sterilization was aimed specifically at those individuals in
mental or penal institutions who, from family pedigree
analysis, were considered likely to give birth to ‘socially
defective’ offspring. Sterilization could be ordered only after
a patient had been examined by a eugenics committee,
usually composed of a lawyer or family member representing
the individual, a judge, and a doctor or other eugenic ‘expert’
(Reilly, 1992). Between 1907 (when the first such law was
put into effect in Indiana) and 1941, over 38 000 eugenic
sterilizations were performed in the United States, with
California leading all other states (Reilly, 1992). By the early
1960s, the number had risen to some 60 000. The most
famous of the sterilization cases in the United States was that
of Carrie Buck in Virginia. When Virginia passed its eugenic
sterilization law in 1924, a test case was arranged the next year
to determine if the law was constitutional. Buck vs. Bell was
tried in 1925 in the Virginia Circuit Court (Lombardo, 1985).
When the lower court ruled in favor of the law, an appeal was
sent to the Supreme Court of the United States, where Justice
Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the majority report. In
upholding the lower court ruling, Holmes made his oft-
repeated assertion: “ Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
In Europe, the debate on eugenic sterilization focused on
two aspects: what social and medical categories would be
subjected to sterilization, and what legislative forms such
policies would require, namely, whether they would be
voluntary or compulsory? In 1928, the Canton of Vaud in
Switzerland authorized the sterilization of those suffering from
hereditary mental diseases and those deemed feebleminded.
A year later, the Danish Sterilization Law was introduced.
Sterilization was contingent upon the medical diagnosis
provided by a physician and upon the consent of the indi-
vidual, the family or the legal guardian. A Committee for
Legalizing Eugenic Sterilization was formed in Britain in 1929,
and a bill for voluntary sterilization of mental defectives was
introduced to Parliament in 1931. The campaign was, however,
220 Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy
unsuccessful as British eugenicists were divided over which
preventive methods was most efficient, sterilization or institu-
tional segregation. Amidst the growing acceptance of negative
eugenics amongst Christian states in Europe and beyond, Pope
Pius XI’s issued the Encyclical on Christian Marriage, Casti
Connubii in 1930. The encyclical castigated the prevention of
‘unworthy’ life advocated by eugenicists both as an expression
of excessive secularization and of the state’s interference in the
individual and family’s private sphere. The opposition of the
Catholic Church notwithstanding, eugenic sterilization
remained a popular method of population control during the
1930s: it was also adopted by the Baltic states and was dis-
cussed in Eastern Europe in countries like Hungary, Romania,
and Poland (Turda and Weindling, 2007).
It was, however, in Nazi Germany after 1933 that eugenics
served as the main basis of population policies (Weiss, 1990).
The Law for the Prevention of Progeny with Hereditary
Diseases was officially announced on 14 July 1933, and
became effective on 1 January 1934. In theory, it stipulated
that “anyone with hereditary diseases may be rendered
sterile by surgical means, when, according to medical
experience, it is highly probable that the offspring of such
person will suffer from severe inherited mental or bodily
disorders.” In practice, however, several medical categories
were outlined, namely: (1) hereditary feeblemindedness; (2)
schizophrenia; (3) manic-depressive insanity; (4) hereditary
epilepsy; (5) Huntington’s chorea; (6) blindness; (7) deaf-
ness; and (8) severe hereditary malformation (Gütt et al.,
1934). Chronic alcoholics were also subjected to the law.
Hereditary Health Courts were established in 1934 to
supervise the implementation of sterilization.
Other countries, such as Sweden, emulated the German
sterilization model and introduced compulsory sterilization of
persons suffering from insanity, feeblemindedness, and other
mental disorders in 1934. Similar legislation followed in
Norway (1934), Finland (1935), and Estonia (1936), allowing
for compulsory sterilizations on medical, social, and eugenic
grounds. In other countries, like France, for example, the Nazi
model of compulsory sterilization was viewed with suspicion
due to its totalitarian and racial aims. Akin to some Italian and
Romanian eugenicists, French eugenicists also distinguished
between a ‘Latin eugenics’ understood to focus more on
improving the social environment and education, and an
‘Anglo-Saxon eugenics’ seemingly preoccupied with negative
prevention, selective breeding, and racial protectionism.
The empowerment of the state to enact population and
eugenic policies was not restricted to the United States, Nazi
Germany, or Fascist Italy. Demand for a eugenically predis-
posed state was vast and extensive, coloring the outlook of
eugenicists of various political orientations, such as anar-
chists in Spain, socialists in Britain, feminists and Social
Democrats in Germany and Sweden, and health educators in
Turkey. A number of Fabians, including luminaries such as
G.B. Shaw (1856–1950) and H.G. Wells (1866–1946)
argued that an effective and comprehensive eugenic program
could best be pursued in a socialist state. This was also an
idea entertained by the American eugenicist Herman J.
Muller (1890–1967), who believed that Stalin would be the
architect of a new humanity, one in which eugenic rationality
would reign supreme.
Eugenics as Population Policy
A qualitative population policy, able to accompany quantita-
tive measures, was vital for the success of eugenics; moreover,
this task was a national duty for both the state and the
eugenicists, especially during the interwar period. It was World
War I that brought population policy (known as Bevölker-
ungspolitik in the German-speaking countries) and eugenics
together. Examples include the German and the Austrian
Societies for Population Policy and the Hungarian Society of
Racial Hygiene and Population Policy. In the wake of the
dramatic demographic changes brought about by the war,
population experts reviewed the relationship between marriage
and illegitimate children, the importance of nutrition and the
distribution of arable land and unemployment. All these
guidelines and suggestions for practical measures in the field of
eugenics and population policy were supposed to provide
Europe’s much-needed demographic growth. In many respects,
Italy’s fascist welfare program served as the model. The
National Organisation for the Protection of Motherhood and
Infancy, established in 1925, emphasized positive incentives to
increase the quantity and quality of the population. Fascist
demographers and eugenicists attempted to unify maternal and
child welfare with rural development schemes, offering in fact
a nationwide program of social and biological engineering.
These programs gradually took over during the 1920s and
1930s, placing natalist ideas of demographic growth and large
families at the center of eugenic thinking. In each European
country, eugenic population policies assumed various overtones
according to national circumstances. In the United States, the
biologist Raymond Pearl (1879–1940) claimed that eugenicists
had focused too much attention on the quality of offspring from
particular (usually ‘degenerate’) families, and had lost sight of the
equally important issue of the rapid birth rate of the biologically
‘degenerate’ at home and abroad. In a series of scientific and
popular articles he began to articulate the ideology of population
control. While critical of much of the current eugenic propaganda,
Pearl did not disavow basic eugenic principles. He simply
emphasized the importance of quantitative as well as qualitative
considerations. In Central and Eastern Europe, for instance, it was
the state that was particularly dedicated to population policies,
such as those of resettlement, meant to strengthen the racial
character of those regions perceived to be either depopulated or
under threat by other ethnic groups.
By the year 1940, eugenic population policies became the
norm in Europe, as exemplified by the Bulgarian Law for the
Protection of the Nation, the National Fund for the Protection
of Family and Population in Hungary, the Law for the Protec-
tion of the Race adopted by the regime of Widkun Quilsing in
Norway, or the French Law for the Protection of Mothers and
Children. Undeniably, these laws advocated the same political
protectionism of the dominant racial group and the exclusion
of ethnic minorities, especially Jews, but they also, like in the
Bulgarian and French cases, introduced sanitary screening and
mandatory premarital examination, aiming at a general bio-
typological investigation of the nation. Facing World War II,
the eugenic rhetoric of the 1940s intensified in its racial tone.
Eugenicists in Hungary and in France, for instance, profited
from this ideologically favorable environment to establish
racial institutes, like the Hungarian Institute for National

Biology (established in 1940) and the French Foundation for
the Study of Human Problems (created in 1941).
Maintaining the nation’s demographic potential thus became
of prime political importance alongside instruments for elimi-
nating the ‘dysgenic groups,’ be they defined socially or ethnically.
By investing the state with the powers for protection of the family
and the nation, a new eugenic ethos was devised, whereby ideas of
social and biological improvement were combined in innovative
ways. On the one hand, social hygiene, public health, and family
welfare were based on the broad concept of eugenics; on the
other, political reform and economic development became
coterminous with the preservation of the race.
In the aftermath of World War II, the United States emerged
as a contender for global power, inheriting the mantle of
international economic and political involvement that had
previously been carried by the British and, to a lesser extent, the
French. In 1952, President Dwight D. Eisenhower formed
a blue-ribbon panel, headed by David Rockefeller of the Chase
National (later Chase-Manhattan) Bank, to evaluate the future
prospects for US industrial and commercial expansion around
the world. In the same year, the Rockefeller Foundation orga-
nized a conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, under the direc-
tion of John D. Rockefeller III, to study what Pearl had
highlighted as the ‘population problem.’
The blue-ribbon panel concluded that the single greatest
obstacle to US industrial expansion (meaning access to cheap
raw materials, labor, and ultimately markets) was the rapid
population growth occurring in most Third World countries.
Such population increases not only required the retention of
more of countries’ raw materials (including agricultural prod-
ucts) at home, but also fueled local revolutionary movements
aimed at eliminating foreign control. Not surprisingly, the
Williamsburg conference called for the formation of an orga-
nization to look into methods for controlling population
growth. Out of this meeting came the proposal for establishing
the Population Council, with Rockefeller funds and John D. III
himself as President. Frederick Osborn (1889–1981), still
Secretary of the American Eugenics Society at that time, soon
took over as Council President, running both organizations out
of his office in Rockefeller Center in New York.
One of the first major projects of the Council was the funding
of investigations of various forms of birth control, including the
intrauterine device (IUD), and eventually, to the first birth-
control pill (Watkins, 1998). Initial trials in Puerto Rico
beginning in April 1956, led to field studies in other Third
World countries such as India and Pakistan. One of the major
incentives used to promote these studies was the economic
benefits that would accrue to families that had fewer children.
That such pilot population control movements encountered
considerable resistance in the countries where they were
introduced, suggested that local people saw the matter quite
differently. The programs provided a lesson in the cultural and
social components of reproductive life. For many in
agricultural, Third World countries, large families were the
only way to insure some manner of economic survival.
Children worked on farms at an early age, and thus more than
earned their ‘keep,’ while large families often provided the
only form of old-age insurance in countries that lacked
programs for the elderly. This lesson is still one to be learned by
leading political and many environmental and conservation
Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy 221
groups, who continue to advocate population control as the
major agenda for Third World countries. Today, for example, the
USAID, a branch of the State Department, devotes a significant
portion of its budget to its Population Office. Programs
emerging from USAID support population control programs in
over 20 Third World countries.
Criticism of Eugenics, 1925–50
Almost from the beginning, many of the basic premises of
eugenics were brought under critical scrutiny by scientists and
the general public alike. Among the first and most important
critics from the biological side was Thomas Hunt Morgan
(1866–1945), the Drosophila geneticist at Columbia, in 1933
the first recipient of the Nobel Prize for work done in genetics,
and one of the earliest members of the Committee on Animal
Breeding of the American Breeders’ Association (a Committee
that had taken on itself organizing the first eugenic activities in
the United States). In a personal letter sent to his close friend
Davenport in 1915, Morgan resigned from the Committee,
explaining that the claims being made on behalf of eugenics
were exaggerated beyond what any scientific evidence could
support (Allen, 1978). Although Morgan did not criticize
eugenics in print at that time, from 1925 on, starting with his
book Evolution and Genetics (Morgan, 1925) he publicly
chastised eugenicists for lumping many mental/behavioral
conditions together under a rubric like ‘feeblemindedness’
and treating them as if it had a single underlying cause.
Especially critical, he noted, was the fact that personality and
social traits were the most malleable of our characteristics,
and hence the most difficult in which to tease apart the
relative contributions of heredity and environment:
The important point is that mental traits in man are those that are
most often the product of the environment which obscures to a large
extent their inheritance, or at least makes very difficult their study.
(Morgan, 1925)
The pedigree charts on which Mendelian analyses were
based, were also strongly criticized by Morgan and others as
giving the impression of tracing genetically determined trans-
mission when, of course, they equally well could be interpreted
as showing culturally determined effects:
The pedigrees that have been published showing a long history
of social misconduct, crime, alcoholism, debauchery and vene-
real disease are open to the same criticism from a genetic point
of view; for it is obvious that these groups of individuals have
lived under demoralizing social conditions that might swamp
a family of average persons. It is not surprising that, once begun
from whatever cause, the effects may be to a large extent
communicated [socially] rather than inherited [genetically].
(Morgan, 1925)
In other words, pedigree charts do not separate ‘nature’
from ‘nurture.’
Other geneticists followed suit. Raymond Pearl also voiced
public criticism of eugenicists’ claims, especially those
222 Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy
regarding the supposed biological inferiority of various racial
and ethnic groups (Pearl, 1927). Along with his colleague
Herbert S. Jennings (1868–1947) at Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity, Pearl felt that propagandists like Laughlin, Madison Grant,
and others made claims that went far beyond any reasonable
evidence (Barkan, 1992). Jennings devoted the better part of
the ensuing decade (after 1924) to lecturing all over the
United States about the dangers of oversimplified version of
eugenics. Muller, a student of Morgan’s, and subsequently
himself to become a Nobel laureate in genetics, also
delivered a searing attack on ‘old style’ eugenics at the Third
International Eugenics Congress in New York City in 1932.
Muller, who still harbored strong eugenic beliefs, argued that
until the economic and social environment could be
equalized it would be impossible to know how much of any
individual’s ‘social inadequacy’ was due to heredity and
how much to environment (Muller, 1933). Much of
feeblemindedness might be due to poor maternal diet during
pregnancy or during the early years of childhood, or to
maternal drug and alcohol use; although these effects might
appear at a superficial glance to be genetic, they had nothing
to do with defective germplasm. English mathematician and
sometime eugenics critic Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975)
made one of the clearest statements at that point of time about
the oversimplified concept of genetics that informed much of
the eugenics movement: “No statement about a genetic
difference has any scientific meaning unless it includes or
implies a specification of the environment in which it manifests
itself in a particular manner” (Hogben, 1933: p. 14).
In 1934, a special blue-ribbon committee of the British
government published the Brock Report (named for its
chairman, Laurence B. Brock, head of the Joint Committee
on Mental Deficiency), outlining difficulties in determining
the relative contribution of genetics to mental deficiency.
Among others, the Committee included Ronald A. Fisher,
himself a staunch eugenicist but also one of the world’s
foremost statisticians and population geneticists. The Brock
Report agreed with the criticisms of eugenics put forward
a few years earlier by Lionel Penrose, who had demon-
strated that the category of ‘feeblemindedness’ was ill-
defined; was used carelessly and indiscriminately to cover
a host of mental problems that were caused in many cases
by disease and social deprivation; and for the most part
little was known of the genetic cause of mental disability
(Kevles, 1985).
An even more comprehensive and devastating critique of
the whole range of eugenic claims was published by the Amer-
ican Neurological Association in the mid-1930s, just a few years
after the appearance of the Brock Report (Committee of the
American Neurological Association, 1936). Work for the book
was funded by the Carnegie Foundation through the New
York Academy of Sciences. Like the Brock Report, the findings
of the Committee found that by the mid-1930s abundant
evidence threw into doubt such well-accepted eugenic beliefs
as: (1) The vast number of mental and moral/personality traits
are genetically determined, (2) Environment (upbringing) plays
a relatively minor role in the development of mental and
personality traits, and (3) Sterilization is the most effective
means of reducing the frequency of socially inadequate behavior
in future generations.
The Committee of the American Neurological Association
supported many of the general conclusions of the Brock Report.
Citing the work of Morgan, Jennings, and others in the United
States, and that of J.B.S. Haldane in England, the authors
argued that we do not know ‘enough about the mental diseases
and the effects of the social structure to manipulate in
a successful way the procreation of the race’ (Committee of the
American Neurological Association, 1936). The level of genetic
knowledge was too slight to formulate any social policies or
carry out any specific manipulations guaranteed to alter the
genetic basis of future generations. More specifically, it was
found that eugenicists consistently downplayed the role of
the environment in the development of mental and
behavioral problems, even when it seemed obvious that
social and economic conditions must be playing a highly
significant role. Herbert S. Jennings made the same point,
emphasizing that ‘environment’ included the internal,
cellular, as well as external environment in affecting how
genes were expressed. Even if a person is clearly shown to
have a genetic defect, as in hereditary thyroid deficiencies,
Jennings argued, the condition can be treated with dietary
and/or drug supplements, which can restore normal function.
A whole host of human anatomical and physiological
conditions that were clearly genetic did not need to be
debilitating or limiting to the individual, according to
Jennings, because in many cases we possess the technological
means to restore, or at least compensate for, the genetic
defect. Genetics, according to Jennings, was not destiny
(Jennings, 1927). For eugenicists, however, it was, and this
remained one of the underlying assumptions of hereditarian
thinking from the past to the present.
On the eve of World War II (literally 1 week before),
another strong criticism of eugenics emerged as the ‘Geneticists’
Manifesto,’ a document signed in early August 1939, by
a group of geneticists assembled in Edinburgh at the VIIth
International Congress of Genetics. Among the major initiators
were J.B.S. Haldane (1892–1964) and Lancelot Hogben, and
H.J. Muller. The Manifesto put forth Muller’s argument that
from a genetics point of view, as long as vast disparities in
wealth and access to resources continued to exist in western
societies, no claims could be made about the relative contri-
bution of heredity over environment to human mental capacity
and social behavior (Chase, 1977). They condemned racialist
thinking, especially the attempt to rank races with respect to
one another on the basis of genetic worth. The geneticists
who initiated and signed the Manifesto were among the most
well known and respected workers in the field during the
twentieth century.
Despite these severe criticisms, eugenics continued to thrive
in the Scandinavian countries and especially in Nazi Germany
(between 1933 and 1945). After passage of the sterilization
laws in 1934, the Nazi government enacted the infamous
Nüremberg Laws in 1935, prohibiting marriage between
Aryans and Jews and other ‘non-Nordic’ groups. Doctors were
required to report to the Ministry of Health cases of what they
deemed to be hereditary diseases among their patients, and
after the large-scale deportation to concentration camps,
became involved in a variety of genetic experiments on twins.
All in all, German population experts carried out eugenic
principles further than in any other country of Western Europe

or North America, notwithstanding the condemnation from
other European eugenicists.
In the period after World War II overt criticisms of eugenics
as the basis for population policy became more widespread.
Revelation of Nazi atrocities committed in the name of
eugenics played an important role in this change of attitude. In
addition, hard-line eugenicists such as Davenport, Laughlin,
Grant, and others on the American scene were retired or
deceased by the end of the war, and were replaced by what
historian Daniel J. Kevles has dubbed moderate, or reform
eugenicists.’ Although it might be questioned how really
‘reformed’ these eugenicists were, it is clear they were more
knowledgeable about the nuances of what traits genes might
and might not control, less overtly racist, and more modest in
their claims for what eugenics might accomplish. Partly
because of the criticism, it was difficult for the field of human
genetics to get a fresh start after the war, and many geneticists
shied away from dealing with human heredity (Kevles, 1985:
193ff; Ludmerer, 1972). Textbooks and other writings on
human genetics were careful to distance themselves from old
style eugenic thinking (Ludmerer, 1972). Laurence H.
Snyder’s Human Genetics (1951), for example, stated clearly
that “[w]e should hesitate at accepting without careful
analysis the claims and recommendations that are present in
a large portion of the eugenics literature.” An understanding
of the historical development of the eugenics movement,
Snyder went on to say, would suggest, “why professionally
trained geneticists, on the whole, have given relatively little
support to eugenic theories and programs” (quoted in
Ludmerer, 1972). Anthropologist and prolific popular writer
Ashley Montague echoed the same feeling in his 1959 Human
Heredity when he wrote that much unfortunate public
policy – by which he meant immigration restriction and state
sterilization laws – had been based on “the ill-considered,
prejudiced, and unscientific judgments of the late Harry
Laughlin . Madison Grant . and Charles Benedict Daven-
port” (Montagu, 1959: pp. 25–26). And, in 1960, the American
Medical Association came out with a report, ‘A Reappraisal of
Eugenic Sterilization Laws,’ that called into question virtually
all the assumptions of the old eugenic movement. In the
decisive debates over the excesses and disastrous effects of
eugenic dreams of perfectibility (particularly since the 1950s),
the problematic connotations of population policy for the
individuals and communities involved are ever-present.
Understanding the eugenic basis for population policy is,
therefore, essential in both its historical and comparative
perspective.
See also: Bioethics: Philosophical Aspects; Darwinism;
Eugenics as an International Movement; Eugenics in Asia;
Eugenics as a Basis of Population Policy 223
Eugenics in Europe; Eugenics, History of; Genetics and Society;
Genetics: The New Genetics; Genomics, Ethical Issues In;
Nazi Law; New Genetics and Race; Race: Genetic Aspects;
Reproductive and Sexual Rights: Transnational Trends from
a Global South Perspective.
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