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

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

With so much support drawn from both academia and the press, it becomes less surprising that state and local government would feel obliged to exploit the pervasive racism in the culture for the cause of eugenics. The fields of medicine, biology, as well as aspects of the burgeoning social science field, were legitimizing white supremacist and imperialist philosophy by giving it the veneer of empiricism, while the press happily promoted these concepts to the general public. The U.S. government did not necessarily need the realm of science and the print media to codify white supremacist laws and policies, but it certainly made the job easier. U.S. policy had already been essentially one of gaining and then preserving dominance for Americans of Anglo and Germanic ancestry. Since this was already part of U.S. procedure, in practice even when not in name, embracing white supremacist eugenic policy more overtly was a sensible move by those operating the levers of power in the United States government at both the state and federal level. “In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers.”[1] As stated earlier, with the help of the eugenics movement, the U.S. was able to establish its history of African American, American Indian, and Asian American subjugation, as well as its newly-embraced imperialist aims, as holding scientific legitimacy. “The racial purity and supremacy doctrines embraced by America’s pioneer eugenicists were not the ramblings of ignorant, unsophisticated men. They were the carefully considered ideals of some of the nation’s most respected and educated figures, each an expert in his scientific or cultural field, each revered for his erudition.”[2]