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In the end it just ended. No arguments, no intellectual battles
among faculty, no acknowledgement of racial hygiene programs. At
Washington State College at least, there just weren’t enough
students who wanted to take Zoology 61, Eugenics. By the beginning
of 1950, only six students had pre-enrolled in the course for the
following school year, down from 12 the year before. In a memo to
the faculty on January 17, 1950, the instructor, Professor Ray
Moree, stated, “Enrollment in Zool. 61, Human Heredity and Eugenics
is not sufficiently high to justify its continuation; it is
believed this course can be replaced by a new one which will meet
the needs of a larger number of students.” The staff of the
Department of Zoology met one week later. Item number 2 on the
agenda was Zoology 61. The only record was “Motion Farner, second
McNeil. Discontinue Zool. 61. Carried by staff.” And that was it.
After 30 years, the faculty had dropped course number 61.
Eugenics, the study of improving the human race, was named and
formalized as a science in 1883 England by Francis Galton, a cousin
of Charles Darwin. By the early 1900s the United States had taken
the lead in research, teaching, and funding for the new field.
Germany took over that role in the early 1930s.
The first U.S. scientists to accept eugenics were the plant and
animal breeders at the land-grant universities and in the United
States Department of Agriculture. It seemed only natural to apply
the “science,” which had met so much success in the planned
breeding of farm crops and barn animals, to humans. The result was
one of the most tragic episodes in modern science.
Membership in eugenic societies included university presidents,
congressmen, philanthropists, representatives of research
institutions and insurance companies, clergymen, journalists,
physicians, social workers, and scientists.
American eugenicists were united by the idea that the human
race--or at least the white, northern European, and affluent part
of it—was degenerating because inferior people were breeding more
quickly than those who were “well born,” and that these inferior
types were intermingling with the chosen classes and races.
These beliefs were presented in posters at county and state
agricultural fairs that read, “Some people are born to be a burden
to themselves and to the rest of society. The American Eugenic
Society aims to eliminate hereditary degeneracy from future
generations of the human family by eugenical sterilization,
segregation, and other measures.”
By the 1930s, sterilization, segregation, and “other measures”
were carried out for eugenic purposes in the United States with
complete openness.
Around 60,000 forced eugenic sterilizations had been performed
at U.S. hospitals, asylums, schools, and other institutions by the
1950s. Washington was the second state in the country to legalize
forced sterilizations. More than 700 were sterilized here.
Nationwide, more than 65 percent of those sterilized were women.
The legal test case for these sterilizations was Buck v.
Bell, which was heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1927. Carrie
Buck, age 17, was sent to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and
Feebleminded in Lynchburg, Virginia, in 1924. Her mother, Emma, had
been at the same institution since 1920. Carrie had just delivered
a baby that had resulted from a rape. IQ tests showed her mental
age to be nine, and that of her mother to be eight. Carrie’s
sterilization was ordered soon after her arrival at the colony and
was immediately challenged by her court-appointed guardian. A Red
Cross worker examined Carrie’s eight-month-old baby, Vivian, and
testified that she was below normal intelligence for a child her
age. Experts from the Eugenics Record Office then testified that
the feeblemindedness that they witnessed in the family was
definitely heritable and warranted sterilization.
The state’s case for sterilization was upheld by the Federal
Supreme Court by an 8 to 1 vote. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
summed up the feeling of the court with, “Three generations of
imbeciles are enough.” Carrie Buck and more than 1,000 other
residents of the colony were sterilized in the decade following the
ruling. Stephen J. Gould noted that in the end, contrary to the
opinions of the eugenic experts, there was no feeblemindedness
among the three generations of Bucks. In later years, in fact,
Vivian made the honor roll in high school.
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