THE AMERICAN EUGENICS SOCIETY... 100 YEARS LATER

On January 30, 1926, the American Eugenics Society incorporated, solidifying their role as leaders of the most formidable, unified American eugenics organization in the nation.  The AES Board of Directors included Harry H. Laughlin (Superintendent of Eugenics Record Office), Henry Fairfield Osborne (American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University), Henry E. Crampton (American Museum of Natural History and Columbia University, MIT, and Barnard College), Irving Fisher (Yale University), Madison Grant (Lawyer and Bronx Zoo), Henry P. Fairchild (Yale University, NYU, U.S. Department of Labor), Charles B. Davenport (Harvard University, University of Chicago, and Director of the Eugenics Record Office), and Dr. C.C. Little (University of Maine and American Birth Control League).  These men (and a bounty of women supporters) built a prodigious tract of scientific rhetoric to promote the urgent need for eugenics intervention to cull the decline in White births and the increased agency of African American and immigrant populations.  Eugenics and hereditarian thought permeated the nation, with instruction meted out within popular vehicles agriculture societies like 4-H Clubs, high school home economics classes, and family planning guides.  The overarching goal of AES included coordinating the efforts of the smaller, local eugenics groups such as the Galton Society in New York and the Race Betterment Foundation in Battle Creek, Michigan. Grant, a lawyer, poured his fears of Nordic extinction and overpopulation of America by “worthless race types”  into a public treatise, The Passing of a Great Race.  He believed AES efforts in schools, courtrooms, hospitals, and prisons would restore racial balances in a century’s time.  Grant wrote:

“A rigid system of selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit - in other words, social failures—would solve the whole question in one hundred years, as well as enable us to get rid of the undesirables who crowd our jails, hospitals, and insane asylums. The individual himself can be nourished, educated, and protected by the community during his lifetime, but the state through sterilization must see to it that his line stops with him, or else future generations will be cursed with an ever-increasing load of victims of misguided sentimentalism.”