February 6, 2025: Includes index of related articles
Rosetta Stone. (2025, February 6). In Wikipedia.
Eugenics has come out of the conservative closet. In retreat for nearly 60 years (though never so far away as to be out of shouting distance), the ideology is roaring back. Today, arguably, eugenic thinking propels many of the right’s current obsessions, from DEI, to the dismantling of USAID, to vaccine skepticism, to immigration restriction, to pronatalism.
As Omar Wasow wrote on BlueSky, “eugenics is the Rosetta Stone for so much of Trump’s agenda.”
The embrace of eugenics goes a good distance toward explaining all kinds of otherwise crazy-sounding ideas, like those of Sean Duffy, President Trump’s recently appointed Secretary of Transportation, a father of nine, who is proposing that federal investment in road construction be linked to a region’s relative fertility.
Though associated in most minds with the Nazis, eugenics is the long-lived industrial-era idea that “natural” human hierarchies and social relations, whether created by God or by evolution, are being disturbed through the “unnatural” intervention of tax policies and educational and social services that seek to challenge racial, class, and gender prejudices and dilute concentrations of wealth and power through enforced redistribution.
Across the last 150 years, many of the most wealthy and privileged have fought those who would challenge their status by promoting and funding the development and spread of ideas upon which they could defend their claims. Unsurprisingly, there has also always been a large and eager pool of second-level power seekers ready to invent fundable foundation programs, government agencies, and media platforms to promote and instrumentalize their patrons’ paranoia for profit.
Eugenics in a nutshell
Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s cousin and coiner of the term, called eugenics “the science of being well born.” Traditionally, this science, so-called, has been divided into two categories: negative eugenics, which seeks to suppress births among the “unfit,” and positive eugenics, which seeks to increase births among the “fit.” The common claim made by both negative and positive eugenicists, whether they define the problem as too many unfit being born (and surviving!) or too few fit being born relative to the unfit, is that modern industrial democracies, with their antibiotics and poverty-relief programs, are weakening “the race.” Nature is no longer allowed to cull the sick and disabled, empathy has run amok, and conscious intervention by clear-eyed social engineers is necessary. Eugenic prescriptions include everything from textbook instructions on how to select a meritorious mate, to coercive sterilization programs, to policies that literally kill the so-called unfit, either through active measures, like gas chambers, or rationalized neglect, like dismantling vaccination programs, welfare programs, or foreign aid efforts.
Textbook History Index: Eugenics
Textbook History was founded to publish research articles related to general topics associated with nineteenth and twentieth century American high school and college biology textbooks and nineteenth century American History textbooks. But of the 60 or so articles published here over its first 17 years, more than 40 have focused on eugenics. That wasn’t by intent. It is simply a reflection of how dominant eugenic ideas are in American life. For readers interested in the topic, as either history or current events, we offer the list below:
Mark Andreessen’s Dangerous Dorm Room Eugenics (2025)
Eugenics is 20th Century High School Biology Textbooks (2010)
The Aggressive Mutation of Post-War Eugenics (2011)
Purity, Pornography and Eugenics in the 1930s (2016)
Reform Eugenics and the Gender Bomb (2009)
The Day Eugenics Died (2009)
To Conserve Man (2021)
How Are We Going to Control These Kids” Biology Textbooks in the 1940s (2019)
The Racist Legacy of Henry Fairfield Osborn and Piltdown Man (2018)
The Eugenic Zombie in a Graveyard of Textbooks (2011)
Samuel J. Holmes’ Library (2012)
Biology’s Bomb: Graphing “Explosive” Population Growth in Cold War Textbooks (2011)