The American Eugenics Society, founded in 1926, supported the proposition that the wealth and social position of the upper classes was justified by a superior genetic endowment. American eugenists also supported restrictions on immigration from nations with “inferior” stock, such as Italy, Greece, and countries of eastern Europe, and argued for the sterilization of insane, retarded, and epileptic citizens in the United States. As a result of their efforts, sterilization laws were passed in more than half of the U.S. states, and isolated instances of involuntary sterilization continued into the 1970s.
The center of the American eugenics movement was the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, New York. Biologist Charles Davenport established the ERO, and was joined in his work by Director Harry H. Laughlin. Both men were members of the American Breeders Association. Their view of eugenics, as applied to human populations, drew from the agricultural model of breeding the strongest and most capable members of a species while making certain that the weakest members do not reproduce.
One of the most famous proponents in the United States was President Theodore Roosevelt, who warned that the failure of couples of Anglo-Saxon heritage to produce large families would lead to “race suicide.”
U.S. Supreme Court, Buck v. Bell, 1927
Carrie Buck was an eighteen year old and resident of a Virginia state home for "mental defectives" at the time her case was heard by the Supreme Court. The daughter of a "feeble-minded" mother, she was the mother of an illigitimate "feeble-minded" child herself (who was conceived when she was raped).
The Supreme Court concluded that "It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.... Three generations of imbeciles are enough..." Buck was involuntarily sterilized after being committed to the Virginia Colony for Epileptics and the Feebleminded.
Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court's affirmative decision of this landmark case, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. described Charlottesville native Carrie Buck as the “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring, likewise afflicted” stating that “her welfare and that of society will be promoted by her sterilization.”
Current scholarship shows that Carrie Buck's sterilization relied on a false diagnosis premised on the science of eugenics. It is likely that Carrie's mother, Emma Buck, was committed to a state institution because she was considered sexually promiscuous, that the same diagnosis was made about Carrie when she became an unwed mother at the age of 17 due to being raped, and that her daughter Vivian was diagnosed as “not quite normal” at the age of six months largely in support of the legal effort to sterilize Carrie.
Eugenics today
"When the Human Genome Project is justified by James Watson on the grounds that genetics has replaced astrology in determining the course of our lives, we are obliged to think about the implications of such a blank check for the power of genetics. Of course, no one is arguing for the destruction of the poor on the grounds of their genes, but we hear free speculation about genes for crime, violence, and intelligence -- as if these were principally or even significantly genetic in origin, and thus amenable to gene therapy (which doesn't exist, of course) or the ever-present option of extirpation. History gives today's scientists a responsibility to keep their pronouncements conservative, and to debunk the misuses of genetics, whether by geneticists themselves or by others." (Jonathan Marks, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, UNC-Charlotte)
Sources
Encyclopedia Britannica
University of Virginia