Eugenics and the United States, 1890s–1945
One of the earliest modern advocates of eugenic ideas (before they were labeled as such) was Alexander Graham Bell. In 1881 Bell investigated the rate of deafness on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. From this he concluded that deafness was hereditary in nature and recommended a marriage prohibition against the deaf ("Memoir upon the formation of a deaf variety of the human Race") even though he was married to a deaf woman. Like many other early eugenicists, he proposed controlling immigration for the purpose of eugenics and warned that boarding schools for the deaf could possibly be considered as breeding places of a deaf human race. In 1907, Indiana became the first of more than thirty states to adopt legislation aimed at compulsory sterilization of certain individuals.[14] Although the law was overturned by the Indiana Supreme Court in 1921,[15] the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a Virginia Law allowing for the compulsory sterilization of patients of state mental institutions in 1927.[16]
"We do not stand alone": Nazi poster from 1936 with flags of other countries with compulsory sterilization legislation.Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler was infamous for eugenics programs which attempted to maintain a "pure" German race through a series of programs that ran under the banner of "racial hygiene". Among other activities, the Nazis performed extensive experimentation on live human beings to test their genetic theories, ranging from simple measurement of physical characteristics to the horrific experiments carried out by Josef Mengele for Otmar von Verschuer on twins in the concentration camps. During the 1930s and 1940s, the Nazi regime forcibly sterilized hundreds of thousands of people whom they viewed as mentally and physically "unfit", an estimated 400,000 between 1934 and 1937. The scale of the Nazi program prompted American eugenics advocates to seek an expansion of their program, with one complaining that "the Germans are beating us at our own game".[Quoted in Selgelid, Michael J. 2000. Neugenics? Monash Bioethics Review 19 (4):9-33 ]