Higher education
The University of Virginia, a prestigious and widely respected institution of higher learning which had been founded by Thomas Jefferson and once claimed James Madison as its rector became a major seat of eugenics thought and teaching. It was by no means alone. In New York, the Eugenics Record Office was established in Cold Spring Harbor, funded through the Carnegie Institution and from the fortunes of railroad tycoons. The Eugenics Record Office amassed family records to establish racial purity and the possibility of hereditary unfitness. At the time, it was a widespread belief that criminal behavior was hereditary.
Leading black intellectuals embraced the theory of eugenics as well, espousing the idea that the best of the black race were equivalent to the best of whites. W.E.B. DuBois was a proponent of eugenics and controlled breeding of his race. In his opinion, only “…fit blacks should procreate…” duBois was of the opinion that selective breeding would eliminate what he saw as the “…race’s heritage of moral iniquity.” Eugenics programs were studied at Howard University and the Tuskegee Institute, where a theory was taught that the top ten percent of whites and blacks were acceptable to reproduce.
Less than one year after the decision rendered by the Supreme Court in Buck v. Bell, more than 20,000 students across the United States were enrolled in university or college courses which covered eugenics. More than 350 such schools offered courses describing and encouraging the practice. Among the leading figures espousing eugenics in the United States were Alexander Graham Bell, Henry Ford, Margaret Sanger and Luther Burbank.
In North Carolina, a law established that an IQ score of 70 or less was grounds for enforced sterilization beginning in 1933. North Carolina allowed sterilization based on the recommendations of social workers, rather than the requirement as in Virginia of a finding from a state institution. By 1937, Fortune magazine published a nationwide poll which found that a mere 15% of Americans disapproved of the sterilization of criminals and “mental defectives.” American eugenics programs were studied and in several instances imitated by German authorities beginning in the 1930s.
The Rockefeller Foundation provided the funding for several German eugenics programs and leading eugenicists in California shared information regarding enforced sterilization and its benefits to the state and the human race with professional colleagues in Germany. Harry Laughlin, self-designated as America’s leading authority on the subject of eugenics, was the recipient of an honorary doctorate from Heidelberg University for his studies and work to implement laws contributing to racial cleansing in the United States. Leading American universities taught eugenics as applicable to the improvement of all races, as opposed to the German model, which advocated the improvement of the Aryans by subjugating or eliminating all others.