The Eugenics Movement (1883-2015)

The British statistician Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, introduced the term "eugenics" in his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Galton proposed that humanity could improve its hereditary qualities by encouraging reproduction among the supposedly fit and discouraging it among the unfit, an idea that built on the evolutionary thinking of the age and on Victorian anxieties about urban poverty and falling birth rates among the upper classes.

Location: London, United Kingdom

Indiana became the first jurisdiction in the world to pass a law authorizing the compulsory sterilization of people in state institutions judged "defective". The statute followed eugenicists' argument that society bore the cost of inherited criminality and disability, and although Indiana's early law was legally flawed, it opened a wave of legislation: eventually 33 American states adopted sterilization statutes.

Location: Indiana, United States

The Eugenics Record Office opened at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory under Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin, financed by the Carnegie Institution and the Harriman family. Field workers collected family pedigrees across the country to document supposed hereditary traits, and Laughlin drafted model sterilization laws that state legislatures adapted directly. The office gave the movement its research infrastructure and its legislative reach.

Location: Cold Spring Harbor, New York, United States

The First International Congress of Eugenics opened in London, presenting 58 research papers of which 42 were by American scientists, reflecting the movement's strong transatlantic base. Attended by figures from science, politics, and industry, the congress promoted eugenics as an international scientific discipline at a time when its proposals enjoyed mainstream support from progressive reformers as well as conservatives.

Location: London, United Kingdom

Virginia passed "An Act to Provide for the Sexual Sterilization of Inmates of State Institutions", a statute closely based on Harry Laughlin's model law. Advocates argued that sterilization was more humane and less costly than lifelong institutional care for people they classified as hereditarily unfit. German lawyers and legislators later cited the Virginia statute and other American laws as precedents for their own sterilization legislation.

Location: Virginia, United States

The United States Supreme Court upheld Virginia's sterilization law in Buck v. Bell by an 8-1 majority. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that "three generations of imbeciles are enough", reasoning that the state could compel sterilization "for the protection and health of the state"; Justice Pierce Butler, a Catholic, dissented without a written opinion. The decision authorized the sterilization of Carrie Buck and thousands like her, has never been expressly overturned, and was later weakened by Skinner v. Oklahoma in 1942.

Location: Washington, D.C., United States

The German government enacted the Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring, ordering the forced sterilization of people with conditions ranging from schizophrenia to alcoholism. Around 350,000 to 400,000 people were sterilized under the program, whose drafters openly acknowledged American state laws as models. The statute became the administrative foundation for the far more radical racial policies that followed.

Location: Berlin, Germany

The Nazi regime's Aktion T4 program had by this point murdered more than 70,000 disabled patients through gassing and lethal injection. On 3 August 1941, Bishop Clemens August von Galen denounced the killings from the pulpit, and public protests followed in Muenster and elsewhere; Hitler ordered the formal program halted later that month, though killing of disabled people continued in decentralized form until the war's end. The episode stands as one of the few sustained public protests against Nazi killing policy inside Germany.

Location: Muenster, Germany

UNESCO published the statement "The Race Question", drafted with leading geneticists and anthropologists, affirming that the biological differences between human groups do not support judgments of superiority or inferiority. The statement, and later revisions through the 1960s, marked the repudiation of scientific racism by mainstream science and stripped the eugenics movement of its remaining academic standing.

Location: Paris, France

The last government sterilization programs closed over these years: Alberta repealed its Sexual Sterilization Act in 1972 after sterilizing about 2,800 people, Sweden's program ended in 1975 after some 63,000 sterilizations since 1934, and Virginia repealed its statute in 1979. Sweden's program remained largely unknown until newspaper reporting in 1997 forced a government inquiry, and by then tens of thousands of Americans had been sterilized under the state laws, with the last forced procedures performed in the 1960s and 1970s.

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

Virginia became the first state to issue an official statement of regret for its role in the eugenics movement. North Carolina in 2013 became the first state to compensate living survivors of forced sterilization, with payments of 50,000 US dollars (about 65,000 Canadian dollars at 2013 rates) per person, and Virginia approved compensation of up to 25,000 US dollars (about 33,000 Canadian dollars) per survivor in 2015, by which time only a handful of survivors were still alive.

Location: Virginia, United States