By the 1910s, eugenicists began to define a need for a collective vision for the eugenics movement in the United States. They first focused on a few main issues of negative eugenics: sterilization, marriage regulation, and the development of tools for “assessing inadequacy, such as intelligence testing. These all fall under the general category of “negative eugenics,” wherein they discouraged and actively prevented the reproduction of “desirable” people. By contrast, “positive eugenics” describes tactics and interventions to encourage a higher birth rate in more racially and socioeconomically “fit” families, such as marriage counseling.
In 1912, the Eugenics Education Society of Britain organized the First International Congress on Eugenics in 1912 at the University of London. The first of three international eugenics congresses attracted over 700 attendees and sought to bring together agriculturalists and biologists. At the Congress, Bleecker Van Wagenen, the Chairman of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders’ Association presented a “Report on the Best Practical Means for Cutting off the Defective Germ-Plasm in the Human Population.” He described the rapidly increasing population of “defective classes” and the danger of “normal strains becoming contaminated with anti-social and defective traits.” Van Wagenen also stated that laws and policies must be put in place to eliminate the “feeble-minded,” “pauper,” “criminal,” “epileptic,” “insane,” “constitutionally weak,” “asthenic,” “those predisposed to specific diseases,” and “those having defective sense organs.” He stated that no “females” had been sterilized under any sterilization laws, with the exception of women sterilized in California. However, he advocated for an effective sterilization program to sterilize “socially unfit” women en masse.
While some states had begun to pass eugenic sterilization laws, some people disputed their constitutionality. However, in 1912, the Dean of Yale Law School argued that sterilization laws were constitutional because they were “a reasonable police regulation for the protection of the health, morals and safety of the people.”
During this period, the emergence of anti-eugenics became more pronounced. Franz Boas, an anti-racist anthropologist, believed that eugenic policies were misguided, unscientific, and harmful. He described the eugenic argument of “nature not nurture” as erroneous, particularly because the hereditary nature of many traits was not well understood. Boas, and other anti-eugenicists, argued that “social factors outweigh the biological ones” and that policies that punish the individual rather than improve social conditions will not actually improve society.
Beyond sterilization, intelligence testing emerged as a prominent tool for identifying and quantifying different classes of social inadequacy. While the first intelligence test was created in 1904, Robert Yerkes—a professor of psychology at Yale University—launched a widespread eugenic investigation on intelligence in the military in 1917. This represents one of the first large-scale studies designed to bring a sense of objectivity and reliability to eugenic tools like intelligence testing. He wrote a report on his findings in 1923 that described “the revelation that men of inferior intelligence are burdensome in the military machine, as elsewhere.”
