W. Jake Newsome
after a devastating world war and the evidence of the extreme degree to which eugenic ideology could be taken (namely state-sponsored genocide) did the American eugenics movement allow itself to fade from the public mind. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that eugenic thought ceased to exist or that it found no further supporters. Eugenic thought continued to exist in the scientific community, though images of Auschwitz seemed to put a check on how far the philosophy’s ideas could be actually applied. Some scholars argue that eugenics did little more than change names, that the study of the improvement of humanity through heredity and the control of inherent characteristics simply became known as genetics. Regardless of the path that eugenics did or did not take after the 1940’s, the historical study of the movement raises many important questions. What is “legitimate” science? Statistics and neatly kept records? Are we able to make judgments (of morality or of legitimacy) on a movement that, at the time, by using the best available knowledge, was actually on the cutting edge of science? If so, how? Such questions are relevant today as scientists have mapped the human genome and have begun prenatal screening for inborn diseases with the hopes of weeding out genetic defects. Furthermore, the study of the American eugenics movement, and the history of science in a general, raises concerns about the continued relationship between science and social policy. All of these are significant, relevant, and pressing topics for further scholarship.
VIII: Conclusion The twentieth century will forever be scarred by the images of stacked corpses, burning furnaces, and walking skeletons. Since the revelation of such horrors, the reaction of the world has been to designate master race theories and eugenic ideology as exclusively Nazi notions, something far removed and foreign to the rest of Western culture. Yet, as recent research has shown, the basis for such social, moral, and scientific ideologies had also taken root in other Western societies, decades before the first vote was ever cast for the Nazi Party in Germany. However, recognition of the connections between American eugenics and German race hygiene does not, and should not, detract from the particular path that the racial hygiene movement in Germany eventually took under Nazi rule, nor does it imply that the same path would have eventually been taken in the United States. Certain historical conditions existed in Germany (namely the presence of a totalitarian regime dedicated to racial anti-Semitism) which allowed eugenic practices to be pushed to new, extreme measures. While similarities in ideologies existed, the differences in the manifestations of these ideologies into policy are significant. Whereas eugenicists in the United States sought to terminate the
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