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Eugenics had British and U.S. roots and was popularized by Americans in the first two decades of the Twentieth Century, despite various scientists pointing out the lack of evidence for its claims. It took until the 1930s for most scientists to finally reject it, but much longer for the public and governments to catch on. Eugenics was so American that one of its big promoters was John Harvey Kellogg, the same guy who invented corn flakes. Eugenics was so loony that its proponents developed intelligence tests no more scientific than any eugenic claims, and those tests were used to classify half of U.S. draftees in World War I as “morons.”⁹⁰ A moron was someone smarter than an “idiot” or an “imbecile” but not smart enough for morality.

Eugenics was so American that Margaret Sanger promoted birth control by describing it as a tool for eugenics. The latter was acceptable, the former scandalous. During the 1920s and right up through WWII, at state fairs in the United States, families competed in “Better Babies” and “Fitter Families” contests (sometimes limited to whites only), exhibiting humans in competitions analogous to those for various farm animals. African American author and brilliant opponent of racism WEB Dubois even suggested that the talented tenth Negroes should breed for a better race. That’s how saturated the society was with eugenics. Even those opposing bigotry thought in its terms. The NAACP held better babies contests to fund campaigns against lynching.⁹¹

Eugenics was funded by the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune. Members of the American Breeders’ Association (still around but renamed the American Genetic Association) included Alexander Graham Bell. The League of Women Voters promoted eugenic public policies. Witnesses on the evolution side of the Scopes Monkey Trial were eugenicists.

U.S. eugenicist Charles Davenport wrote a letter to U.S. eugenicist and white supremacist Madison Grant arguing for the need to “build a wall” to “keep out the cheaper races.”⁹² Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, invented a race called The Nordic Race that had a lot in common with the race later promoted by the Nazis.⁹³ Edwin Black writes:

“[T]he concept of a white, blond-haired, blue-eyed master Nordic race didn't originate with Hitler. The idea was created in the United States, and cultivated in California, decades before Hitler came to power.”⁹⁴

U.S. eugenicist Harry Laughlin shaped U.S. immigration policy with pseudo-science about the inferiority of races, in particular Jews. Various people -- non-morons, I guess you’d call them -- including various Jews, pointed out at the time that Laughlin had fixed the facts around the policy and not pursued actual scientific findings.⁹⁵ The U.S. Congress didn’t have to ignore those wiser voices.

Most eugenicists supported strict and racist immigration laws, as well as sterilization and the prevention of reproduction through the segregation of “feeble-minded” men and women into separate asylums. Eugenics was also used to support anti-miscegenation laws. Some eugenicists also promoted the idea of extermination. A report by the Carnegie Institute in 1911 proposed euthanasia.⁹⁶ While eugenicide never gained mainstream popularity, it was practiced. According to Edwin Black:

“The most commonly suggested method of eugenicide in the United States was a ‘lethal chamber’ or public, locally operated gas chambers. In 1918, [Paul] Popenoe, the Army venereal disease specialist during World War I, co-wrote the widely used textbook, ‘Applied Eugenics,’ which argued, ‘From an historical point of view, the first method which presents itself is execution . . . Its value in keeping up the standard of the race should not be underestimated.’ . . . Eugenic breeders believed American society was not ready to implement an organized lethal solution. But many mental institutions and doctors practiced improvised medical lethality and passive euthanasia on their own. One institution in Lincoln, Ill., fed its incoming patients milk from tubercular cows believing a eugenically strong individual would be immune. Thirty to 40 percent annual death rates resulted at Lincoln. Some doctors practiced passive eugenicide one newborn infant at a time. Others doctors at mental institutions engaged in lethal neglect.”⁹⁷

Straying for a moment from eugenics to gas chambers, here’s a passage from a long article about Hitler in The New Yorker in 2018:

“In 1924, the first execution by gas chamber took place, in Nevada. In a history of the American gas chamber, Scott Christianson states that the fumigating agent Zyklon-B, which was licensed to American Cyanamid by the German company I. G. Farben, was considered as a lethal agent but found to be impractical. Zyklon-B was, however, used to disinfect immigrants as they crossed the border at El Paso—a practice that did not go unnoticed by Gerhard Peters, the chemist who supplied a modified version of Zyklon-B to Auschwitz. Later, American gas chambers were outfitted with a chute down which poison pellets were dropped. Earl Liston, the inventor of the device, explained, ‘Pulling a lever to kill a man is hard work. Pouring acid down a tube is easier on the nerves, more like watering flowers.’ Much the same method was introduced at Auschwitz, to relieve stress on S.S. guards.”⁹⁸

When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1927, in the case of Buck v. Bell (which has yet to be overturned), that a healthy and intelligent rape victim abused by her society could be forcibly sterilized, the ruling was reported in the press as a step toward “a super race.”⁹⁹

When Hitler came to power, he put in place a sterilization law based on a model law written by Harry Laughlin and the laws that 27 U.S. states had put in place. Hitler had read Madison Grant and written him a fan letter, and referred to his book as “my Bible.” Hitler had written in Mein Kampf that Germany must follow the United States in immigration and segregation:

“At present there exists one State which manifests at least some modest attempts that show a better appreciation of how things ought to be done in this matter. It is not, however, in our model German Republic but in the U.S.A. that efforts are made to conform at least partly to the counsels of commonsense. By refusing immigrants to enter there if they are in a bad state of health, and by excluding certain races from the right to become naturalized as citizens, they have begun to introduce principles similar to those on which we wish to ground the People's State.”¹⁰⁰

"I have studied with great interest," Hitler told a fellow Nazi, "the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock."¹⁰¹

Laughlin bragged about his role in creating the 1935 Nuremberg racial hygiene laws, and in 1936 was given an award by the Nazis.¹⁰²

U.S. eugenicist Paul Popenoe published a report on forced sterilizations in California that was widely cited by the Nazis.¹⁰³ Many eugenicists in California promoted their work in Germany. The Rockefeller Foundation, as well as Carnegie, funded and helped develop German eugenics programs, including the one that Josef Mengele worked in before he worked at Auschwitz gassing people to death and experimenting on them, as well as the German Psychiatric Institute where Ernst Rüdin worked before he became the architect of Hitler’s eugenics program. Edwin Black recounts that:

“In 1934, as Germany's sterilizations were accelerating beyond 5,000 per month, the California eugenics leader C. M. Goethe, upon returning from Germany, ebulliently bragged to a colleague, ‘You will be interested to know that your work has played a powerful part in shaping the opinions of the group of intellectuals who are behind Hitler in this epoch-making program. Everywhere I sensed that their opinions have been tremendously stimulated by American thought . . . I want you, my dear friend, to carry this thought with you for the rest of your life, that you have really jolted into action a great government of 60 million people.’"¹⁰⁴

Winston Churchill was an honorary vice president of the British Eugenics Society and a true believer in its power to solve “race deterioration.” In 1910, he proposed sterilizing 100,000 “mental degenerates,” and confining tens of thousands more to state-run labor camps.¹⁰⁵

It took Nazism to give eugenics a bad name in the United States, but neither Nazism nor the prosecution of its members for crimes including forced sterilization ended such practices in the United States, where over 60,000 people were forcibly sterilized up through 1963, a third of them in California. In fact, eugenics saw something of a revival in the United States after WWII under the banner of “neo-eugenics,” targeted at the poor and minorities, with possibly 80,000 people forcibly sterilized in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s (up through 1981 in Oregon), and many more sterilized without consent up to the current day.¹⁰⁶ From the 1930s to 1970s a third of the female population in Puerto Rico was sterilized.¹⁰⁷ In the 1970s, 40% of Native American women and 10% of Native American men were sterilized.¹⁰⁸ Even in recent years, such as 2013 in California, scandals pop up revealing the sterilization of prisoners without proper consent.¹⁰⁹

After WWII, eugenics organizations and associations in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere were renamed using the term “genetics.” Nazi scientists resumed respectable careers and international collegiality. But the dark sides of the work, and the reliance on dubious science, never disappeared. Humans have only about one-fifth as many DNA sequences as wheat, and 90 percent of them identical to those of mice. Claims that DNA determines your future are extremely weak but extremely widespread, especially among those seeking to use “genetics” -- rather than, say, the distribution of money -- to solve such problems as poverty.¹¹⁰

Human experimentation, like eugenics, and often connected to it, also had a home in the United States before, during, and after WWII. Non-consensual experimentation on institutionalized children and adults was common in the United States before, during, and even more so after the U.S. and its allies prosecuted Nazis for the practice in 1947, sentencing many to prison and seven to be hanged. The tribunal created the Nuremberg Code, standards for medical practice that were immediately ignored back home. Some American doctors considered it “a good code for barbarians.”¹¹¹

The code begins: “Required is the voluntary, well-informed, understanding consent of the human subject in a full legal capacity.” A similar requirement is included in the CIA’s rules, but has not been followed, even as doctors have assisted with such torture techniques as waterboarding. Thus far, the United States has never really accepted the Nuremberg Code. While the code was being created, the U.S. was giving people syphilis in Guatemala.¹¹² It did the same at Tuskegee. Also during the Nuremberg trial, children at the Pennhurst school in southeastern Pennsylvania were given hepatitis-laced feces to eat.¹¹³

Other sites of experimentation scandals have included the Jewish Chronic Disease Hospital in Brooklyn, the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island, and Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia. And, of course, the CIA’s Project MKUltra (1953-1973) was a smorgasbord of human experimentation. The United States military, during WWII, experimented on its own troops with gas chambers, segregating the troops, as always, by race, and pursuing pseudo-scientific racial ideas.¹¹⁴

Robert Jackson, Chief U.S. Prosecutor at the trials of Nazis for war and related crimes held in Nuremberg, Germany, following WWII, set a standard for the world: "If certain acts of violation of treaties are crimes, they are crimes whether the United States does them or whether Germany does them, and we are not prepared to lay down a rule of criminal conduct against others which we would not be willing to have invoked against us."¹¹⁵

Among the trials held in Nuremberg was one of Nazi doctors accused of human experimentation and mass murder. This trial lasted from December 9, 1946, to August 20, 1947. An important witness provided by the American Medical Association was Dr. Andrew C. Ivy. He explained that Nazi doctors' actions "were crimes because they were performed on prisoners without their consent and in complete disregard for their human rights. They were not conducted so as to avoid unnecessary pain and suffering."¹¹⁶

In the April 27, 1947, New York Times, that newspaper's science editor Waldemar Kaempffert wrote that human experiments with syphilis would be valuable but "ethically impossible."¹¹⁷ Dr. John C. Cutler read the short article. He was at the time engaged in giving syphilis to unsuspecting victims in Guatemala. He was doing this with the funding, knowledge, and support of his superiors at the U.S. Public Health Service. He called the Times article to the attention of Dr. John F. Mahoney, his director at the Venereal Diseases Research Laboratory of the Public Health Service. Cutler wrote to Mahoney that in light of the Times article, Cutler's work in Guatemala should be guarded with increased secrecy.

Cutler had gone to Guatemala because he believed it was a place where he could get away with intentionally infecting people with syphilis in order to experiment with possible cures and placebos. He did not believe he could get away with such actions in the United States. In February 1947, Cutler had begun infecting female prostitutes with syphilis and using them to infect numerous men. In April he began infecting men directly.¹¹⁸

For more information about eugenics, I recommend the PBS film “American Experience: The Eugenics Crusade.”¹¹⁹

The eugenics of the Nazis was far more murderous than that of other nations, and -- as responsibility is not a finite quantity -- any blame given to others diminishes the responsibility of the Nazis for their actions not a speck. But without the development of eugenics by the Americans, Nazism would not have resembled what Nazism was. The United States provided the pseudo-scientific rationale for mass-expulsion of the Jews, and then refused to accept the Jews, leading to mass eugenicide.