Eugenics began to be sold to the public and the government after the Second International Congress on Eugenics in 1921
The selling of eugenics in America began in earnest in 1921, when the American Museum of Natural History hosted the Second International Congress on Eugenics, a meeting financed in large part by the Carnegie Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation. Note that John D. Rockefeller was also involved in the genesis of modern medicine: The successful pharmaceutical industry esblished by Auschwitz nerve gas creator IG Farben motivated John D. Rockefeller to fund the restructuring of American medical school. Museum president Henry Fairfield Osborn—a nephew of J. P. Morgan—opened the session by declaring that it was time for science to “enlighten government in the prevention of the spread and multiplication of worthless members of society.” Over the next few days, speakers from Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, MIT, and NYU, as well as other top universities, tried to do just that. They presented papers on the financial costs societies incurred by caring for defectives, the inheritability of insanity and other disorders, and the low birth rates of the elite in America. They gave talks on “The Jewish Problem,” the dangers of “Negro-White Intermixture,” and the “Pedigrees of Pauper Stocks.” After the conference, many of the scientists’ charts and exhibits were put on display in the U.S. Capitol, where they remained for three months.
The meeting stirred the New York Times to editorialize that life, indeed, was becoming ever more unfair for the well-to-do:
“Civilization, as now organized, does not leave Nature as fresh as she has been in the past to procure the survival of the fit. Modern philanthropy, working hand in hand with modern medical science, is preserving many strains which in all preceding ages would have been inexorably eliminated… . While life has become easier in the lower ranges, it has become more difficult for the well born and the educated, who pay for modern philanthropy in an ever lessening ability to afford children of their own. There is a very serious question whether the twentieth century will be able to maintain and pass onward the infinitely intricate and specialized structure of civilization created by the nineteenth century.”
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 86). New York, NY: Basic Books.