The American Eugenics Record Office

Abstract

In the first decades of the twentieth century, American researchers at the Eugenics Record Office utilized a theoretical framework that combined humoral and Mendelian principles of inheritance to measure, trace, and predict the intergenerational transmission of an expansive net of morally charged heritable traits. Their reductive understanding of Mendelian principles—guided by class- and race-based prejudices—allowed them to paint a portrait of a nation that was bifurcated by ‘good’ and ‘bad’ strains of the population and threatened by the presence of ‘degenerate families’. This article examines the theoretical and methodological strategies and the technologies of display and ‘scientific’ legitimization that brought into being the category of ‘degenerate families’ and provided the justification for social policies that controlled marriage, limited immigration, and sterilized tens of thousands of Americans.