In 1932, the Third International Congress of Eugenics was held at the American Museum of Natural History in New York to celebrate “a decade of progress” in the field. While the exhibits and talks attracted more than fifteen thousand attendees in total, the Congress received a lot of criticism in major publications, including a piece in the New York Times that describes eugenics as a “disguise for race prejudice, ancestor worship, and caste snobbery” when juxtaposed with the emerging genetic science that discredited it. Another New York Timesarticle described how eugenicists have been “losing ground” ever since the discovery of genes. The article states that no one should have the right to restrict marriages or reproduction, with the exception of cases that involve the “hereditary insane,” who “should never be permitted to have children.”
Despite emerging critiques, eugenicists continued onwards. In 1934, the American Eugenics Society created a list of suggestions for future policies, which focused on the absence of organized positive eugenics campaigns, ones that encouraged the birth rate of the “more desirable types of families.” To date, they focused on negative eugenic measures such as birth control, segregation, and sterilization of “persons whose reproduction appears to be a menace to society.” Importantly, these negative eugenic measures did not disappear. In fact, in Connecticut, the largest peak of sterilizations occurred from 1930-1932.
In the 1930s, eugenicists also sought to build a statewide data collection process to legitimate their large-scale eugenic interventions. For example, the state of Connecticut commissioned a Human Resources Survey in 1938 designed to assess the “socially adequate” and “socially inadequate” stocks across the state. The Director of the Survey, Harry Laughlin, determined that nearly 10% of the state’s population could be targeted for sterilization, deportation, or segregation due to their “inadequacy.”
The rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s further damaged the public image of eugenics. However, some eugenicists believed that this could be an unprecedented scale for eugenics. In 1936, Yale professor Ellsworth Huntington wrote a letter to Dr. Marie E. Kopp, an American eugenicist, in avid support of Nazi Germany’s eugenic campaign. In his letter, Huntington wrote that “Germany is doubtless[ly] doing some good work for eugenics, even though she is also making, as I see it, a very grave mistake in her attitude toward the Jews and toward race in general.”
To build a broader base for their movement, the American Eugenics Society turned toward college students. As President of the AES, Ellsworth Huntington wrote Tomorrow’s Children in 1935, which he designed as a textbook for students to learn the logic and practice of eugenics. In the same year, he launched a survey called “Eugenics Questions for College Students” which he distributed to elite collegiate newspapers such as The Yale Daily News and The Daily Princetonian. He sought to poll college students about how many siblings they have, how many children they hope to have, whether they believed in the sterilization of “hereditary defectives,” and whether they plan to consider “hereditary background in the choice of a mate.” In 1938, he also created an essay contest for undergraduates to submit eugenics-themed papers for a prize. These efforts were designed to bring a broader base of support for eugenics and recruit a younger generation so that they could invest in the movement’s mission.
