American Eugenics Trinity: Academia, the Press, and the State (Part One)

Elitist figures in higher ed., media, and government pushed sweeping policies of eugenics in the early 20th Century

The notorious pseudoscience of eugenics, which helped to define the progressive era of the early twentieth century in the United States, utilized a combination of academic and intellectual experts with white supremacist ideology to rationalize its race-based claims of scientific proof of the genetic weakness of nonwhites. Simply put, the eugenics movement in the United States would not have been able to gain the influence and credibility it did without the shared racism within its three largest institutions: academia, the press, and the state. All three were complicit in the movement’s influence and share responsibility legitimizing the worst tendencies of the eugenics movement. Each acted to forward the inevitability and veracity of the dominance of whites, physically and intellectually. Universities sponsored and facilitated eugenic research and seminars. The press advertised the validity of race purity, and the American government—at both the state and federal level—used the data of the universities and popularity of eugenics pushed by the media to further rationalize its already long history of ill treatment of nonwhites, including Asian Americans, African Americans, and American Indians. These three entities, taken together, this work will come back to time and again and will refer to as the American eugenics trinity. This three-pronged assault of a racial and genetic purity agenda had wide and far-reaching influence.