The Eugenics Record Office had concluded that 10 percent of the population must be sterilized to better the race
The Eugenics Research Association boasted in 1924 that 119 of its 383 members were fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the nation’s most prestigious scientific group. Even the august Encyclopedia Britannica confidently predicted that future progress would include “the organic betterment of the race through wise application of the laws of heredity.”
As early as 1914, Charles Davenport and the Eugenics Record Office had announced a platform for achieving that brighter future. One of the office’s advisory groups, “The Committee to Study and to Report on the Best Practical Means of Cutting Off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the American Population,” calculated that 10 percent of the American population was defective and should be sterilized. It was an agenda that pleased former president Theodore Roosevelt. “At present,” he wrote the committee, “there is no check to the fecundity of those who are subnormal.” During a national eugenics conference that year funded by John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of the flaked cereal, the scope of the needed enterprise was further defined: Over the next forty years, the country needed to sterilize 5.76 million Americans in order to reduce the percentage of defectives in the population to an acceptable level.
References
- Whitaker, Robert. (2002). Mad in America Chapter 3. UNFIT TO BREED (p. 80). New York, NY: Basic Books.