Yale and Eugenics

Yale Elite Series

The Power of Privilege by Joseph Soares, 2007, Excerpts

In the 1880s, Sumner was one of Yale’s most popular professors. His survival-of-the-fittest social doctrines, called eugenics, was to be a science of genetic selection to ensure the upward evolution of the race. The socially unfit, congregated in “inferior” ethnic groups, were to be restricted and discouraged from reproduction, by sterilization if necessary, and the superior race, frequently referred to in America as the “Nordic race,” were to be given the laws and schools that would allow them to flourish.

In the United States, the eugenic message the well received by many members of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant [WASP] establishment. It harmonized with their sense of social and cultural superiority and fit so perfectly with anti-Black and anti-immigrant prejudice that prominent American scientists and politicians took up the cause with religious-like fervor.

Eugenicists scored some important victories in the 1920s. The 1924 immigration bill that excluded Jews and Japanese, and cut to a trickle the flow Mediterranean and Eastern European families, passed in the House by a vote of 326-71 and in the Senate by 62-6: it was signed into law by President Coolidge with the words, ‘America must be kept American.” In 1927, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of compulsory sterilization for the unfit.