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This article traces the chronological development of the eugenics movement in the United States, from its intellectual origins in late 19th-century Britain through its institutionalization in American law, science, and policy, to its decline and the long process of legal and political reckoning that followed. For the underlying topic, see Eugenics. For analysis of how historians and commentators have interpreted the movement's causes and legacy, see eugenics-united-states-consensus. For present-day debates over related questions of genetics, heredity, and public policy, see eugenics-modern-policy-debate.

The intellectual foundation for eugenics in the United States traces to Britain. In *Hereditary Genius* (1869), Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, argued from genealogical data that intelligence and other abilities were substantially inherited.¹⁾ Galton, drawing on Darwin's theory of natural selection, coined the term “eugenics” in his 1883 work *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development*, defining it as the study of agencies under social control that could improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations.²⁾ Galton proposed “positive eugenics” - encouraging reproduction among those judged to have superior traits - though American eugenics would come to emphasize restrictive, or “negative,” measures aimed at preventing reproduction among those judged unfit. See eugenics-galton-darwin-viewpoint for differing assessments of how directly Darwin's own work bears on the eugenics that followed.

In the United States, parallel currents developed independently of direct British influence. Indianapolis minister Oscar C. McCulloch began a study in the late 1870s of an extended poor family network he termed the “Tribe of Ishmael,” presenting his findings to the Social Science Association of Indiana and arguing that pauperism and degeneracy were transmitted hereditarily and could not be cured by charity alone.³⁾ McCulloch's research influenced both local charity policy and the later work of eugenic researchers, who cited the Tribe of Ishmael studies as evidence for compulsory sterilization and restrictive immigration policy. Indiana State Reformatory physician Harry C. Sharp began performing vasectomies on inmates beginning around 1899, several years before any state law authorized the practice, and later promoted the procedure nationally as the “Indiana Plan.”⁴⁾

Eugenics gained scientific institutional backing in the United States in 1904, when biologist Charles B. Davenport established a research station at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, under the Carnegie Institution of Washington. In 1910, with funding from railroad heiress Mary Harriman and cereal manufacturer John Harvey Kellogg, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at the same site, redirecting the station's work from general heredity studies toward human eugenics specifically.⁵⁾ Davenport appointed Harry H. Laughlin as superintendent; Laughlin would become the most influential eugenicist in shaping American sterilization and immigration law over the following two decades.

Connecticut had already enacted a marriage law in 1896 restricting marriage by persons described as “epileptic, imbecile or feeble-minded,” and other states followed with similar marriage statutes.⁶⁾ Michigan's legislature considered the first compulsory sterilization bill in 1897, which failed to pass, and Pennsylvania's legislature passed a sterilization bill in 1905 that was vetoed by the governor.

On April 9, 1907, Indiana Governor J. Frank Hanly signed into law the first compulsory sterilization statute enacted anywhere in the world, authorizing the sterilization of “confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists” held in state institutions.⁷⁾ The law authorized superintendents of state institutions to appoint two physicians to evaluate candidates for the procedure. In 1909, Governor Thomas R. Marshall halted the program and threatened to withhold funding from institutions that continued sterilizations, and in 1921 the Indiana Supreme Court struck the law down on due-process grounds under the Fourteenth Amendment.⁸⁾ By 1913, twelve states had enacted similar sterilization statutes, and by the mid-1930s more than thirty states had done so.

The Progressive Era's reform energy, oriented toward applying scientific and administrative expertise to social problems, provided fertile ground for eugenic ideas across the political spectrum. Birth control advocate Margaret Sanger, founder of the organization that became Planned Parenthood, argued for restricting reproduction among those she considered “unfit” and was, at various points, associated with eugenic organizations and rhetoric, though historians differ on how central eugenic reasoning was to her broader advocacy for contraceptive access. See eugenics-sanger-viewpoint and eugenics-sanger-viewpoint-debate. The American Eugenics Society, founded in the 1920s, grew to more than 1,200 members at its height in the 1930s and sponsored “Fitter Family” contests at state and county fairs alongside “Better Baby” contests, the first of which was organized by Mary deGarmo at the 1908 Louisiana State Fair.⁹⁾

Virginia's General Assembly passed the Eugenical Sterilization Act in 1924, modeled on draft legislation Laughlin had prepared for the ERO.¹⁰⁾ Albert S. Priddy, superintendent of the Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feeble-Minded, sought a sterilization order for Carrie Buck, an 18-year-old resident committed to the institution after giving birth to a daughter, Vivian. Priddy arranged for the case to be challenged in court as a deliberate test of the new law's constitutionality, with Buck represented by an attorney who supported the sterilization program.¹¹⁾ ERO staff Harry Laughlin and Arthur Estabrook provided testimony characterizing Buck, her mother Emma, and infant daughter Vivian as feebleminded across three generations.

The case, *Buck v. Bell*, reached the United States Supreme Court, which ruled 8-1 on May 2, 1927, upholding the Virginia statute. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., writing for the majority, held that the law did not violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, reasoning by analogy to the Court's earlier upholding of compulsory vaccination in *Jacobson v. Massachusetts* (1905), and concluded: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”¹²⁾ Justice Pierce Butler dissented without a written opinion. Carrie Buck was sterilized by salpingectomy on October 19, 1927. Some historians argue that the factual record before the Court substantially misrepresented Buck's and her daughter's actual capacities, see eugenics-buck-v-bell-record-controversy.

*Buck v. Bell* has never been explicitly overturned and removed the principal legal obstacle to compulsory sterilization nationwide. Sterilization rates climbed sharply after 1927; of the more than 60,000 to 70,000 sterilizations eventually performed under American eugenic statutes during the twentieth century, the majority occurred in the years following the decision.¹³⁾ California performed more sterilizations than any other state, and its law remained in effect until 1979.

Eugenic theory was applied to federal immigration policy in the same period. Harry Laughlin was appointed “Expert Eugenics Agent” to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, chaired by Congressman Albert Johnson, and testified before Congress on multiple occasions beginning around 1920 that immigrants from southern and eastern Europe showed disproportionately high rates of “insanity,” “feeblemindedness,” and other forms of “social inadequacy.”¹⁴⁾ Geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings publicly disputed Laughlin's statistical methodology, arguing that his comparisons between recent and earlier-arriving immigrant populations were invalid.

The resulting Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) set national-origin quotas at two percent of each nationality's recorded population in the 1890 census - a year chosen, at the urging of a Congressional eugenics subcommittee chaired by Madison Grant, specifically because it preceded the large wave of immigration from southern and eastern Europe.¹⁵⁾ The law effectively ended most immigration from Asia. Laughlin later described the act as a milestone in applying eugenic and racial criteria to immigration policy. The quota system established in 1924 remained the basic framework of American immigration law until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. Some historians describe the 1924 act as primarily a eugenic and racial measure; others emphasize competing motives including labor-market protection and postwar isolationism, see eugenics-immigration-act-1924-causation-controversy.

Even as sterilization rates climbed through the 1930s, eugenics faced increasing scientific and political criticism. Reports of Nazi Germany's sterilization program, enacted in 1933 and modeled in part on American statutes, began reaching the American press during the 1930s; Germany sterilized an estimated 400,000 people under the law by the early 1940s.¹⁶⁾ Wider American public awareness of Nazi atrocities during and after World War II contributed to a shift in public attitudes toward eugenics generally.

In 1942, the Supreme Court decided *Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson*, a case brought by Jack Skinner, an inmate sterilized under Oklahoma's Habitual Criminal Sterilization Act after repeated convictions for offenses including chicken theft.¹⁷⁾ Justice William O. Douglas, writing for a unanimous Court, held the Oklahoma statute unconstitutional under the Equal Protection Clause because it exempted certain white-collar offenses such as embezzlement from its sterilization provisions while applying to comparable property crimes such as larceny. The decision described the right to procreate as one of the basic civil rights of man, but it did not address or overturn *Buck v. Bell*, and the underlying rational-basis framework for sterilizing those deemed “feebleminded” remained intact. Sterilization rates declined after 1942 but did not stop; more than 22,000 further sterilizations were performed under eugenic statutes in the United States after the decision.¹⁸⁾ At the subsequent Nuremberg trials, defense counsel for SS official Otto Hofmann cited *Buck v. Bell* in Hofmann's defense.

Most states reduced or ended sterilization programs after World War II, but North Carolina's program expanded during this period, eventually sterilizing more than 7,600 people between 1929 and 1974 - more than any state program operating chiefly through county welfare departments rather than institutions.¹⁹⁾ The demographic composition of those sterilized in North Carolina shifted markedly after 1950: while the majority sterilized before that decade were white women, by the late 1960s roughly 60 percent of those sterilized were Black women, even though Black residents made up a minority of the state's population.²⁰⁾ Of the more than 7,600 total sterilizations performed under the North Carolina program between 1929 and 1974, a substantial share were of Black residents, a proportion that rose markedly over the life of the program.²¹⁾ County welfare departments in North Carolina were empowered to petition the state Eugenics Board directly to sterilize welfare recipients, a structure distinct from most other states' institution-based programs. Some historians attribute this shift to specific welfare-cost concerns among postwar administrators; others frame it within a broader account of racial control following desegregation, see eugenics-north-carolina-racial-motive-controversy.

Indiana repealed its remaining sterilization statutes in 1974, with related restrictive marriage laws following in 1977.²²⁾ North Carolina's Eugenics Board was abolished in 1977, though the underlying sterilization statute was not formally repealed until 2003. California's sterilization law remained in effect until 1979, the latest repeal date among major-program states; Virginia's program continued under statute until 1974, and Oregon's until the 1980s.

In December 2002, the *Winston-Salem Journal* published a five-part investigative series, “Against Their Will,” documenting North Carolina's sterilization program in detail, drawing substantially on research by historian Johanna Schoen.²³⁾ Governor Mike Easley issued a formal apology to victims that same month and later established a Eugenics Study Committee. Virginia, Oregon, South Carolina, California, and Georgia issued similar apologies during the 2000s. In 2013, North Carolina's General Assembly approved $10 million in compensation, paid out at $50,000 per verified living victim beginning in 2014 - the first compensation program of its kind among American states with eugenics programs.

*Buck v. Bell* remains, as a matter of formal doctrine, unreversed by the Supreme Court, although legal scholars including Holmes biographer G. Edward White have argued that subsequent decisions have left the case without practical legal force.²⁴⁾ Carrie Buck was released from institutional custody in 1927, married twice, and died in 1983; later research, including interviews conducted by Lombardo, found no contemporary evidence supporting the original findings that she or her daughter Vivian were intellectually disabled.

• Some historians argue Margaret Sanger's contraceptive advocacy was substantially intertwined with eugenic goals, while others argue eugenic rhetoric was a strategic accommodation distinct from her central aims, see eugenics-sanger-viewpoint-debate.
• Some historians attribute the racial shift in postwar southern sterilization programs primarily to welfare-cost administration, while others frame it as a continuation of racial control following desegregation, see eugenics-north-carolina-racial-motive-controversy.
• Some scholars characterize the Immigration Act of 1924 as primarily driven by eugenic and racial theory, while others emphasize competing economic and isolationist motives, see eugenics-immigration-act-1924-causation-controversy.
• Some historians question the accuracy of the factual findings underlying *Buck v. Bell* itself, see eugenics-buck-v-bell-record-controversy.
• Some commentators dispute how directly Galton's and Darwin's original work bears moral or causal responsibility for the policies that followed, see eugenics-galton-darwin-viewpoint.

Eugenics | eugenics-united-states-consensus | eugenics-nazi-germany-history | Buck v Bell | Immigration Act 1924 | Progressive Era

1. Francis Galton, *Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences* (London: Macmillan, 1869).
2. Francis Galton, *Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development* (London: Macmillan, 1883).
3. Oscar C. McCulloch, “The Tribe of Ishmael: A Study in Social Degradation,” in *Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction* (Boston, 1888).
4. H. C. Sharp, *Vasectomy: A Means of Preventing Defective Procreation* (Indianapolis, 1909).
5. Charles B. Davenport, *Heredity in Relation to Eugenics* (New York: Henry Holt, 1911).
6. “Eugenics in the United States,” Wikipedia, accessed 2026.
7. Acts 1907, *Laws of the State of Indiana, Passed at the Sixty-Fifth Regular Session of the General Assembly* (Indianapolis: William B. Burford, 1907), 377-378.
8. *Williams v. Smith*, 190 Ind. 526 (1921).
9. Genome.gov, “Eugenics: Its Origin and Development (1883-Present),” accessed 2026.
10. Paul A. Lombardo, *Three Generations, No Imbeciles: Eugenics, the Supreme Court, and Buck v. Bell* (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
11. Adam Cohen, *Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, and the Sterilization of Carrie Buck* (New York: Penguin Press, 2016).
12. *Buck v. Bell*, 274 U.S. 200 (1927).
13. Eugenics Archive, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, accessed 2026.
14. Harry H. Laughlin, testimony before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, 1922-1924.
15. Immigration Act of 1924, 43 Stat. 153.
16. Stefan Kühl, *The Nazi Connection: Eugenics, American Racism, and German National Socialism* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
17. *Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel. Williamson*, 316 U.S. 535 (1942).
18. Wikipedia, “Skinner v. Oklahoma,” accessed 2026.
19. Johanna Schoen, *Choice and Coercion: Birth Control, Sterilization, and Abortion in Public Health and Welfare* (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
20. North Carolina State Library, statistical reports of the Eugenics Board of North Carolina.
21. Eugenics Board of North Carolina, Wikipedia, accessed 2026.
22. Indiana Historical Bureau, “1907 Indiana Eugenics Law,” accessed 2026.
23. Kevin Begos et al., *Against Their Will: North Carolina's Sterilization Program and the Campaign for Reparations* (Apalachicola, FL: Gray Oak Books, 2012).
24. G. Edward White, *Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law and the Inner Self* (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).