![]() ![]() They believed that these groups endangered the national community and financially burdened society. Eugenicists maintained that such groups were tainted by deficiencies they inherited. Members of the eugenic community in Germany and the US also viewed the racially “inferior” and poor as dangerous. Eugenicists argued that there was a direct link between diminished capacity and depravity, promiscuity, and criminality. They promoted limiting their reproduction through voluntary or compulsory sterilization. Many members of the eugenics community in Germany and the United States promoted strategies to marginalize segments of society with limited mental or social capacity. For instance, there were efforts to redirect economic resources from the “less valuable” in order to provide for the “worthy.” Eugenicists also targeted the mentally ill and cognitively impaired. In doing so, eugenics supporters hoped to encourage “better” families to reproduce.Įfforts to support the “productive” members of society brought negative measures. For example, they sought to provide marital counseling, motherhood training, and social welfare to “deserving” families. They advocated for public policies that aimed to maintain physically, racially, and hereditarily “healthy” individuals. Davenport advocated for the development of eugenics as “a science devoted to the improvement of the human race through better breeding.” Its supporters lobbied for “positive” eugenic efforts. Most supporters in those places endorsed the objectives of American advocate Charles Davenport. In Western Europe and the United States, the movement was embraced in the 1910s and 1920s. ![]() Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eugenic societies sprang up throughout most of the industrialized world. The International Impact of Eugenic TheoriesĮugenics found its most radical interpretation in Germany, but its influence was by no means limited to that nation alone. Finally, eugenicists sought to campaign for public health measures to combat them. Second, they aimed to develop biological solutions to these problems. First, they sought to discover “hereditary” traits that contributed to societal ills. Rather, they advanced the science of eugenics to address what they regarded as a decline in public health and morality.Įugenicists had three primary objectives. Supporters of eugenic theory did not believe that these problems resulted from environmental factors, such as the rapid industrialization and urbanization of the late 19 th century in Europe and North America. Eugenic Theoriesįor eugenicists, the social ills of modern society-criminality, mental illness, alcoholism, and even poverty-stemmed from hereditary factors. At the core of the movement’s belief system was the principle that human heredity was fixed and immutable. The term's German counterpart, “racial hygiene” ( Rassenhygiene), was first employed by German economist Alfred Ploetz in 1895. ![]() The term “eugenics” (from the Greek for “good birth or stock”) was coined in 1883 by the English naturalist Sir Francis Galton. Such theories were prevalent among the international scientific community in the first decades of the twentieth century. A significant number of Nazi persecutory policies stemmed from theories of racial hygiene, or eugenics. ![]()
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