In Better for All the World Harry Bruinius charts the little-known history of eugenics in America—a movement that began in the early twentieth century and resulted in the forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans.

Bruinius tells the stories of Emma and Carrie Buck, two women trapped in poverty and caught up in a new scientific quest for racial purity. Buck v. Bell became a test case brought before the Supreme Court, which voted 8–1 to make sterilization a constitutionally valid way for the state to prevent anyone deemed “unfit” from having children.

The court’s majority opinion was written by Oliver Wendell Holmes: “It is better for all the world,” Holmes wrote, “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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eugenicists believed that the human race must begin to take control not just of human reproduction, but of ethnic intermingling. With the natural and objective methods of science they hoped to breed only the biologically best of the races and prevent the propagation of the worst. The result: marriage restriction, anti-miscegenation, and immigration laws.

In Better for All the World Harry Bruinius shows how reformers across the nation transformed haphazard, locally run systems of charity and welfare—mostly church handouts and town asylums—into government-run systems of welfare that aspired to make America a place where social and moral purity could reign, free from the “hereditary defectives” of the past.

Those who supported the programs included Theodore Roosevelt; Margaret Sanger; Alexander Graham Bell; the heads of the Harriman, Carnegie, and Rockefeller foundations; and scholars from Harvard, Yale, and Stanford.

Bruinius writes how many of the leaders of the eugenics movement were New England Protestants who used an evangelical tone that harked back to their Puritan forebears, and who proclaimed their goal to keep the “American stock” pure by excising the causes of immoral behavior.

Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and documents never before used, the author writes of the three scientists who developed the theories and practices of eugenics: Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin, who coined the word “eugenics” to describe the science of better breeding; Charles Davenport, the first influential eugenic thinker in America, professor at Harvard University and the University of Chicago, direct descendant of Reverend John Davenport, the founder of the city of New Haven; and Harry Laughlin, Davenport’s protégé, the nation’s foremost expert in eugenic sterilization and also a leader in the movement to stop the tide of immigrants coming to this country.

The author makes clear how America’s quest for racial purity influenced Nazi Germany: one of its first laws, the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, followed the work of California’s Human Betterment Foundation and Harry Laughlin’s Model Law. In less than two years, more than 150,000 German citizens were sterilized, preparing the way for the genocide to come. In 1936, the Nazi regime awarded Laughlin an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University for his contributions to “racial hygiene.” During the Nuremberg Trials, the Allied prosecutors were doubtful they could convict Nazi doctors of “crimes against humanity”—since those accused had carried out acts based on theories of eugenics that had been practiced for decades in the United States.

"In the early years of the 20th century, a fixation on eugenics led several states to approve forced sterilization to keep thousands of Americans from producing 'morally inferior' or 'feeble-minded' offspring. Bruinius's greatest accomplishment in his retelling of this blot on our nation's history is forcing readers to recognize the humanity of the victims of these policies. He begins with Carrie Buck, a young Virginia woman used by state medical authorities as a test case to get the courts to legitimize their program. At times, Bruinius's account of the events leading up to her sterilization employs a novelistic level of detail, such as recreating the mental state of participants, a technique also applied to discussing the lives of the scientists whose theories drove the eugenics movement. (These stories have their bittersweet ironies; one leading eugenicist was an epileptic, while another's daughter showed signs of dyslexia.) The tone occasionally slips into excessive moralizing when he underscores the relationship between American eugenics and Nazi Germany, but the connections are certainly there. This history isn't as 'secret' as the title makes it out to be — it's been told most recently by Edwin Black in War Against the Weak — but Bruinius brings compelling drama to the narrative that should give it broad appeal. Photos." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"'Three generations of imbeciles are enough.' With those chilling words, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., one of the great Supreme Court justices, sealed the fate of Carrie Buck. More precisely, the court's ruling led to the sealing of Carrie Buck's fallopian tubes. Buck v. Bell put the ultimate legal stamp of approval on a practice that was already widespread: the sterilization of the supposedly... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) genetically unfit. In 1907, Indiana became the first state to introduce sterilization laws. All told, about 65,000 people were sterilized in 33 states. After World War II, mainly because of the taint caused by similar practices in Nazi Germany, there was a decline in enthusiasm for such practices. A slow decline: The last compulsory sterilization in Oregon was as recent as 1981.

Controlling (or rather preventing) the reproduction of some members of society is called eugenics, a word derived from eugenes, the Greek term for 'well born' or 'good breeding.' In 'Better for All the World,' Harry Bruinius tells the story of the United States' enthusiastic practice of eugenics. His subtitle is 'The Secret History of Forced Sterilization and America's Quest for Racial Purity.' I am not sure how 'secret' things were then or are now. Certainly, compulsory sterilization was a very public issue when in full force, and in the past 20 years, books — notably, Daniel Kevles' 'In the Name of Eugenics' — as well as articles have been published on the topic. In 1994 there was a television drama, 'Against Her Will: The Carrie Buck Story.' But the topic is sufficiently important to tell again and again, and Bruinius' telling is a first-rate read.

The father of the whole movement was the Englishman Francis Galton, half cousin to Charles Darwin (they shared the same grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, the 18th-century doctor and early evolutionist). Galton became convinced that abilities are heritable — some of his most admired studies showed that genius is passed on from generation to generation — and he feared (as did Charles Darwin in 'The Descent of Man') that simply letting the lower classes breed without restraint could only lead to the decline of society. Attempts to direct human breeding through eugenics arose from such fears. Bruinius' frontispiece provides an arresting illustration of the movement's motives. It is a picture of a tree of eugenics with roots in many branches of the biological and social sciences. Text written in the background describes eugenics as 'the self direction of human evolution.'

Eugenics came to America and flourished through the efforts of two men, Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. Davenport, a Harvard-educated biologist, was one of the first in America to embrace and lecture on the new findings in heredity, the theory of genetics that goes back to the findings of the Moravian monk Gregor Mendel. Laughlin was Davenport's assistant and protege. A former teacher from the Midwest, he may, Bruinius suggests, have become obsessed with questions of heritable defects because he himself was epileptic (a fact that he went to some efforts to conceal).

Davenport and Laughlin, working in their research facility at Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., and supported in part by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, were not minor, somewhat socially disreputable, fanatics. Justice Holmes' judgment proves that they had the attention of the most powerful men in the country. Bruinius reprints a letter from the then former president Theodore Roosevelt, who also expressed strong support for their endeavors.

As always with eugenics, one senses that practitioners and supporters had mixed motives. Some wanted to prevent the pollution of the Anglo-Saxon peoples by those whom they judged incompetent. Others were keen to raise the race up to some desired ideal. One certainly senses this ambivalence in the work of the Carnegie-funded group, although sometimes the two aims merge. Davenport, for example, was convinced that racial intermixing leads to degeneration and moves the group away from its desired (white, Protestant, all-American) ideals.

Bruinius suggests, rightly, that compulsory sterilization was horrible and not something of which the nation should be proud. However, because he concentrates on individuals and tries to convey their personalities, hopes and shortcomings, he fails to provide any real understanding of them or the issues that defined them. Teddy Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler had similar ideas about breeding, and evidence shows that the Nazis learned from the Americans. Yet I simply cannot see the two men as moral equivalents. Are my different judgments based simply on the fact that I know what Hitler went on to do in the Holocaust, or is it that I am not sure that sterilization is always a bad thing? After all, Hitler was strongly against smoking; the simple fact that he was for or against something is not the ultimate moral determinant. Consider a case that Bruinius mentions, that of a woman with an IQ of 71 — just about the level that even today's Supreme Court thinks makes a person incompetent — who had eight children out of wedlock. Is it absolutely wrong if the state says, 'Get sterilized or we will keep you out of society until you are past reproductive age'? I keep thinking of all of those kids. Even if they are not genetically inferior, I doubt very much that they are going to have the warm, nurturing upbringing I have tried to give my children.

Judge me a moral monster if you will. I simply do not find these questions easy to answer, and I think a book on the subject of eugenics should at least start to grapple with them seriously. But I do not want to end on a sour note. Harry Bruinius writes well and always engagingly. If you want a good start to a problematic part of America's history, this is the book to read." Reviewed by Michael Ruse, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
(hide most of this review)

Advance praise for

Harry Bruinius’

Better For All the World

“Bruinius’s greatest accomplishment in his retelling of this blot on our nation’s history is forcing readers to recognize the humanity of the victims of these policies . . . [He] employs a novelistic level of detail . . . Bruinius brings compelling drama to the narrative that should give it broad appeal.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Eye-opening . . . Disturbing . . . Highly readable.”

—Kirkus Reviews

Drawing on personal letters, diaries, and documents never before used, Bruinius relates the little-known history of eugenics in America--a movement that began in the early 20th century and resulted in forced sterilization of more than 65,000 Americans. 32 illustrations.

Harry Bruinius was born in Chicago and attended Yale University, where he studied theology, and Columbia University, where he studied journalism. He is a frequent contributor to The Christian Science Monitor, a professor of journalism at Hunter College, and the founder of The Village Quill. He lives in Manhattan.