Long before eugenics had a name, humans were already applying selective breeding to plants and animals. Farmers bred crops for higher yields and livestock for faster growth. These practices were efficient, measurable, and widely accepted. Then, in the late 19th century, scientists began asking a dangerous question: what if the same logic could be applied to people?
The idea was to reduce human suffering by eliminating what eugenicists called ‘undesirable’ traits — disability, mental illness, poverty, and crime. They believed these traits were inherited and could be bred out of the population over generations. The term ‘Eugenics’ was coined in 1883 by British scholar Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton envisioned a superior society built by encouraging reproduction among the educated and healthy while discouraging it among lower classes. He proposed specific mating rules to achieve this goal.
Galton’s ideas found little traction in Britain, but in the United States they were embraced with enthusiasm. In 1896, Connecticut passed a law banning people with epilepsy or those deemed ‘feeble-minded’ from marrying. In 1903, the American Breeders’ Association was created specifically to study eugenics. Government agencies, scientists, and social reformers established Eugenics Record Offices across the country. These offices tracked family histories and genetic traits, and they held the authority to declare individuals unfit for reproduction.
One of the key tools used by eugenicists was anthropometry — the scientific measurement of the human body. Researchers measured skulls, noses, ears, and limbs, believing these physical dimensions could reveal a person’s intelligence, character, and racial worth. Laboratories and classrooms across Europe and North America trained students in these methods, lending the movement an air of scientific credibility.
Alphonse Bertillon, a French police officer, developed one of the most widely adopted systems of body measurement. His ‘Bertillon method’ was used to identify criminals by cataloguing their physical features — height, arm span, ear shape, and skull size. Law enforcement agencies in France, the Netherlands, and the United States adopted the system. It reflected a core belief of the era: that criminality was a biological trait, visible in the body.
Police departments across the United States also adopted anthropometric methods. The New York City Police Department used these techniques to measure suspects and build criminal profiles. The measurements were recorded, filed, and used to argue that certain physical types were inherently prone to criminal behavior.
Skull measurement was central to eugenics research. Craniology — the study of skull shape and size — was used to rank racial groups and predict intelligence. Researchers filled skulls with water to measure their capacity, believing larger skulls housed superior minds. Institutions like the National Academy of Sciences housed collections of human skulls for this purpose.
Phrenology, a related practice, claimed that the bumps and contours of a person’s skull revealed their mental faculties and personality. Devices like the psychograph were built to automate this process, scanning a person’s head and producing a printed readout of their supposed mental traits. These machines were marketed to the public and used at fairs and exhibitions, giving eugenics ideas a foothold in everyday life.
Eugenics wasn’t just practiced in laboratories. It was taken to state fairs and public exhibitions. ‘Fitter Family’ contests judged families on their supposed genetic superiority, awarding trophies to those deemed the best human specimens. ‘Better Baby’ contests evaluated infants between 6 and 48 months old on health metrics, with doctors attempting to establish standards for the ideal child. These events made eugenics feel normal and even celebratory.
Public education campaigns pushed eugenics further into mainstream thinking. Posters warned that allowing ‘unfit’ people to reproduce would burden society. Exhibits traveled the country, claiming that illiteracy and poverty could be eliminated through selective breeding. These campaigns were not fringe activities — they were funded and endorsed by respected institutions.
The Eugenics Society in Britain went a step further by photographing people with disabilities and medical conditions to argue that their traits were hereditary and should be prevented from being passed on. Children with rickets, cleft lips, and limb deformities were photographed and presented as evidence for why certain people should not reproduce. These photographs were used in scientific publications and policy arguments.
Eugenics took its most brutal legislative form in California, which passed a forced sterilization law in 1909. Between 1909 and 1979, approximately 20,000 sterilization operations were performed in state mental institutions. The stated justification was protecting society from the offspring of people with mental illness. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of forced sterilization in its 1927 ruling in Buck v. Bell. A 1976 Government Accountability Office investigation found that between 25 and 50 percent of Native American women were sterilized between 1970 and 1976.
American eugenics laws drew direct admiration from Adolf Hitler. In his 1925 book Mein Kampf, he praised the United States as the only country showing progress toward better racial policies, writing: ‘There is today one state in which at least weak beginnings toward a better conception are noticeable. Of course, it is not our model German Republic, but the American Union.’ When the Nazi regime came to power, it applied eugenics on a massive, state-sanctioned scale.
Nazi scientists conducted race measurement campaigns across Europe and beyond. Dr. Bruno Beger, working under the SS’s Ahnenerbe project — a Nazi organization dedicated to researching Aryan racial history — traveled to Tibet in 1938 to measure the heads and facial features of Tibetan people. His goal was to find evidence of Aryan ancestry in remote populations. The measurements were intended to build a racial hierarchy with Germans at the top.
Nazi racial ideology extended to photographs and visual propaganda that arranged images of people from different parts of the world alongside Neanderthal reconstructions to suggest shared ‘primitive’ traits. These images were published in scientific and educational materials. Criminal ‘types’ were similarly catalogued by race, with portrait studies claiming to identify the facial features of criminality across different ethnic groups.
The Nazi regime’s Lebensborn program was another direct application of eugenic thinking. It was designed to increase the population of children considered racially ‘Aryan.’ Women were selected for their physical characteristics and encouraged to bear children for the state. Children from occupied territories who were deemed racially desirable were taken from their families and placed with German households, where they were raised under Nazi ideology.
The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics in Berlin was a central hub of Nazi race science. Researchers there studied twins to understand hereditary traits. After the war, American forces discovered the institute’s cellars contained hundreds of Jewish Torah scrolls stolen from across occupied Europe — stored alongside the scientific instruments of racial classification.
Harvard anthropologist Earnest Albert Hooton was one of the most prominent American academics to support racial classification through skull research. He maintained large collections of skulls at Harvard and used them to argue for biological differences between racial groups. His work gave academic legitimacy to ideas that were already fueling discriminatory laws and policies.
At the 1932 Eugenics Congress held at New York’s Natural History Museum, a statue was unveiled representing the ‘average American.’ It was constructed using measurements taken from approximately 100,000 military veterans. The exhibit presented a physical ideal and framed deviation from it as a problem to be corrected. Eugenics had by then permeated museums, universities, government offices, and courtrooms across the Western world.
After World War II, eugenics lost its public respectability, but forced sterilizations continued in several countries for decades. As genetic science advanced in the latter half of the 20th century, a new form of the debate emerged around human genetic engineering. Modern genetic testing allows couples to screen embryos for hereditary diseases, and prenatal testing can detect certain conditions in the womb. In 1972, protesters in Tokyo marched against a proposed eugenics amendment bill, demonstrating that the fight against state-mandated reproductive control was far from over.
