During World War II, much attention and organizing around eugenics shifted over to concerns about wartime preparedness. In 1943, the President of the American Eugenics Society, Maurice Bigelow, sent frequent letters to the Board of Directors as their funding, membership, and publication began to dwindle. While the American Eugenics Society struggled financially and socially, they remained determined to press onward. Board members like Ellsworth Huntington remained steadfast in their belief that after the war it would be “very easy for the Society to resume operations” and hoped that it would be on an even larger scale than in the past.
As news about Nazism in Germany and the devastation of the Holocaust reached the United States, the word “eugenics” quickly became attributed to it. While some American eugenicists applauded Nazism, most tried to distance themselves from its explicit genocide of Jewish people, disabled people, people of color, and other marginalized people. To salvage the eugenic mission in a post-war era, members of the American Eugenics Society offered new names such as “human-relations” or “social-relations” to disguise and rebrand their work, but they ultimately decided to keep their name. Frederick Osborn, then President of the American Eugenics Society, published an article in Eugenical News stating that “the available evidence, however insufficient it may be, points to the necessity of making eugenics a part of all programs of human life on earth.”
In 1946, the Governor of Connecticut commissioned a continuation of the 1938 survey that sought to assess the quality of human “stock” across the state. This new study, entitled “The Social Adjustment of Morons in a Connecticut City” focused on the differences between non-institutionalized “morons” and “nonmorons” in Millport, Connecticut. They describe how their study was more reliable given that it followed a more standard scientific method, such as including a control population of “nonmorons” for comparison.