Eugenics provided the wealthy with a explanation to and solution for the influx of immigrants filling U.S. asylums in the late 1800s
The eugenics movement first took hold in the United States in the late 1800s when immigration began to increase and immigrants filled asylums. To the affluent, eugenics offered an explanation for what had gone wrong and a solution to the problem. In nature, the clutch of patients in the state mental asylumsâalong with the mentally handicapped and other misfitsâwould have been swiftly eliminated. But American society, with its asylums, poorhouses, and other charitable services for the weak, hadâjust like Englandâgone against nature and supported a âbad-seedâ strain of humans. Any society that wanted to remain strong would do well to avoid spending on its âdefectivesâ and would seek to keep them from breeding as well.
When Andrew Carnegie read the writings of English eugenicist Herbert Spencer, who railed against social programs for the unfit, the light bulb went on for him. It was, he said, as though he had finally âfound the truth of evolution.â As early as 1891, American feminist Victoria Woodhull, in her book The Rapid Multiplication of the Unfit, argued that the âbest mindsâ of the day agreed that âimbeciles, criminals, paupers and [the] otherwise unfit ⌠must not be bred.â For that to occur, the unfit would have to be prohibited from marrying, segregated into asylums, and forcibly sterilized. However, that was an agenda at radical odds with democratic principles, but eugenics had dismissed the democratic ideal that all people are of equal value. It could only be seriously advanced if wrapped in the gauze of âneutralâ science, but what the Thinker thinks, the Prover proves.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 73). New York, NY: Basic Books.