Xenophobia, nativism, and eugenics

SIGNIFICANCE: Eugenics refers to the theory that the human race can be improved through controlled or selective breeding. Xenophobia and nativism both gave birth to the eugenics movement and influenced theories about which human characteristics are desirable or undesirable.

Members of premodern (traditional) societies often exhibit distrust and fear of any persons not immediately known to them. Social scientists call this unreasonable and seemingly instinctual fear of strangers “xenophobia.” Xenophobia manifests itself in modern societies among members of subcultures, religious sects, ethnic groups, and political movements. Because people of similar beliefs and cultural backgrounds often tend to associate largely with one another, they develop little understanding of people with different beliefs and cultural backgrounds. As a result, in a pluralistic society such as the United States, xenophobia develops between Jews and Christians, between African Americans and European Americans, and between the members of many other groups that have limited interaction with people with backgrounds different from theirs.

Often xenophobia leads directly to ethnocentrism, a conviction that one’s own group and its culture are superior to all other groups and their cultures. Xenophobia and ethnocentrism form essential elements of “nativism.” Sociologists include nativist movements as part of a larger category called “revitalization movements.” Revitalization movements usually occur within societies or groups that have suffered stress and whose cultures have suffered disorganization. Such movements aim to better the lives of their members, often at the expense of the members of other groups. Modern examples include the African American separatist movement in the United States, the Nazi movement in Germany during the period between the world wars, the Branch Davidian religious sect of the late twentieth century, the Indian Ghost Dance movement in the western United States during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many others. Several nativist movements, fueled by xenophobia, have actively advocated the use of eugenics to revitalize their own culture by eliminating foreign traits from their memberships.

Eugenics

Eugenics is a branch of science that deals with the improvement of the hereditary qualities of human beings through controlled or selective breeding. Eugenicists argue that many undesirable human characteristics (for example, inherited diseases such as hemophilia and Down syndrome) can be eliminated through careful genetic screening of couples planning to marry. Moderate eugenicists advocate the creation of a central data bank of genetic records for entire populations. A person contemplating marriage would be able to investigate the genetic endowment of his or her chosen partner to ascertain whether that person had a genetic weakness.

More radical eugenicists argue that governments should take a direct hand in racial improvement by passing laws forbidding genetically flawed individuals from reproducing. Others hold that genetically flawed individuals should be medically sterilized. Eugenicists justify their positions on economic and scientific grounds: They maintain that the human race cannot spare scarce resources to tend to those born with genetic handicaps and that people must somehow compensate for the retrogressive evolutionary effects of modern technology.

According to many eugenicists, the cost of keeping genetic defectives alive through the use of modern medical technology will eventually bankrupt world society. These eugenicists also believe that if genetically unsound men and women are allowed to breed uncontrollably, all of humanity will eventually inherit their debilitating characteristics. Before the rise of modern industrial society and the development of medical science, genetically defective individuals rarely lived long enough to reproduce, which controlled their negative influences on the human gene pool. Today, society not only expends increasingly scarce medical care on these people but also allows them to perpetuate and to spread their genes. The only way to reverse this retrogressive evolution, say the eugenicists, is to control or prevent the reproduction of that part of the world’s population that carries dysfunctional genes.

The debate concerning eugenics has taken on a greater urgency with the recent strides that have been made in genetic engineering, particularly cloning. This new technology may make possible not only the medical elimination of genetic defects but also the “engineering” of desirable characteristics. It is apparently possible that genetic engineers may in a few decades be able to increase the intelligence of future generations (or decrease it). They may also be able to ensure that progeny will be tall (or short) or fair complected (or dark), to determine their hair color, and even to determine their sex. For some people, these possibilities presage a brilliant future. For others, they conjure up frightening images of an Orwellian nightmare. In either case, ethical questions are profound and complex.

Consequences

The instances in which governments or societies have implemented eugenics principles have not inspired confidence that eugenics goals will ever be achieved. They have not only failed to eliminate undesirable characteristics in the populations on which they were tested but also, in virtually every instance, have resulted in abuses that are indefensible in any moral court. Those who have controlled eugenics programs have been influenced in the passage and implementation of eugenic laws by xenophobia, nativism, and outright racism, rather than by sound scientific principles.

The leading spokesperson for the eugenics movement in the United States for many years was Charles B. Davenport. Davenport taught zoology and biology at Harvard University and the University of Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like many scientists of his era, Davenport assumed that each “race” had its own characteristics.

Davenport led a grassroots nativist movement in the United States that eventually succeeded in passing eugenics laws at both the national and state levels. The Immigration Act passed by large majorities in both houses of the US Congress in 1924 governed who could immigrate to the United States from abroad. Its language made immigration from northern Europe relatively easy, while residents of Africa and Asia found themselves virtually excluded. As several of its supporters (including future president Calvin Coolidge) acknowledged, the Immigration Act was designed to prevent the decline of the “Nordic” race by limiting the influx of members of “inferior” races.

Scientists in Germany, especially anthropologists and psychiatrists, began advocating eugenics legislation before the beginning of the twentieth century. Eugenics seemed to offer scientific validation for the racial theories of Adolf Hitler and other Nazi leaders (theories based not on scientific evidence but on xenophobia and nativism).

Shortly after the outbreak of World War II, German doctors and directors of medical institutions—apparently authorized by Hitler—began the so-called euthanasia program. In mental institutions, hospitals, and institutions for the chronically ill, doctors began to kill (by neglect, by lethal injection, and by poisonous gas) those persons judged to be “useless eaters.” Although the program was supposedly terminated after 1941, it resulted in the deaths of many thousands of people. Some of the personnel involved in the euthanasia program formed the nucleus of the units that carried out the legalized murder of enormous numbers of people in Nazi concentration camps in Poland from 1942 to 1945. Most of the victims were members of races deemed “inferior” by Nazi ideologists: Jewish people, Roma people ("gypsies"), and Slavic people. It is little wonder that many people are fearful of the policies advocated by contemporary eugenicists.

Beginning in the 1930s, the affinity between Nazi racial theories and eugenics caused most biological and medical scientists around the world to renounce eugenics policies and experiments. The information about the concentration camps that became known at the many war-crimes trials held after 1945 seemed to have dealt a death blow to eugenicist dreams of a perfected human race. By the mid-1950s, eugenics societies around the world were seemingly bereft of members and influence. Nevertheless, an increasing number of physicians began to recognize the many possible benefits of continued genetic research.

By the 1970s, genetic researchers had shown conclusively that some ethnic and racial groups were especially susceptible to certain genetic disorders. African Americans are particularly prone to the single-gene disorder called sickle-cell anemia, Ashkenazic Jewish people are prone to Tay-Sachs disease, and people of Mediterranean descent are prone to Cooley’s anemia. The new eugenics/genetics societies in the United States led a movement that resulted in the National Genetic Diseases Act, which funded research into the detection and treatment of genetic disorders. A number of states extended their postnatal screening programs to include many single-gene disorders. Doctors developed a medical procedure known as amniocentesis, which allowed them to identify genetic and chromosomal disorders during the early stages of pregnancy. If an unborn fetus was identified as genetically flawed, parents could elect abortion.

In the 1970s, eugenicists also turned their attention to the population explosion. They found increasing cause for alarm because most of the human population increase was occurring in the developing world (Africa, Asia, and Latin America) and among the bottom socioeconomic strata of industrialized nations. Fearing for the quality of the human gene pool, many eugenics groups began to advocate and finance “family planning” programs among domestic and international disadvantaged populations. These new programs clearly indicate that the nativism and xenophobia that influenced earlier generations of eugenicists are still operative.

Bibliography

Daar, Judith. The New Eugenics: Selective Breeding in an Era of Reproductive Technologies. Yale University Press, 2017.

Kaplan, Sheila. “The Legacy of Eugenics.” Berkeley Public Health, 20 June 2024, publichealth.berkeley.edu/news-media/research-highlights/the-legacy-of-eugenics. Accessed 13 Dec. 2024.

Lombardo, Paul A., ed. A Century of Eugentics in America: From the Indiana Experiment to the Human Genome Era. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2011.

MacKellar, Callum and Christopher Bechtel, eds. The Ethics of the New Eugenics. New York: Berghahn, 2014.

Spektorowski, Alberto, and Liza Ireni-Saban. Politics of Eugenics: Productionism, Population, and National Welfare. New York: Routledge, 2013.