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In his In the Name of Eugenics (1985), an invaluable source for everyone interested in this strange movement, historian Daniel J. Kevles notes, somewhat dryly, that "eugenicists identified human worth with the qualities they presumed themselves to possess--the sort that facilitated passage through schools, universities and professional training." Kevles' insight helps explain the almost messianic fervor that eugenicists on both sides of the Atlantic displayed during the early years of this century. These were people who felt themselves and the future of their children threatened. In Britain members of the upper middle class feared they would be swamped and taxed to extinction by the profligate overbreeding of the lower orders. In the U.S., members of the Wasp ascendancy looked with dismay at the flood of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Italians! Poles! What was the country coming to?
Much of this public fervor looks comically ill informed in hindsight. In the U.S. and Britain, fairs and exhibitions regularly featured exhibits illustrating Mendelian laws of inheritance, often in the form of black-and-white guinea pigs stuffed and mounted to demonstrate the heritability of fur color. Kevles quotes from a chart accompanying such a display: "Unfit human traits such as feeblemindedness, epilepsy, criminality, insanity, alcoholism, pauperism and many others run in families and are inherited in exactly the same way as color in guinea pigs."
Less amusing is the number of intellectuals, businessmen and political leaders who gave eugenics their blessing or fervid support. The list begins with Darwin, who in The Descent of Man praised his cousin Galton and decreed that genius "tends to be inherited." Other champions included the young Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, Alexander Graham Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Theodore Roosevelt and the usually taciturn Calvin Coolidge, who declared during his vice presidency that "Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
Eugenics was not just gassy theories. Impressed by the pseudo science, many U.S. states enacted laws requiring the sterilization of those held in custody who were deemed to suffer from hereditary defects. In 1927 the U.S. Supreme Court heard an appeal of Virginia's decision in Buck v. Bell to sterilize Carrie Buck, an institutionalized 17-year-old whom the state had decreed a "moral imbecile," the daughter of a "feebleminded" mother and the mother herself of a daughter who was found to be, at age seven months, subnormal in intelligence. The court, by an 8-to-1 vote, rejected Buck's appeal. In his majority opinion, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, "The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes," and concluded, "Three generations of imbeciles are enough."