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116  Beginning in the early 1930s, some of the American professions that supported eugenics and compulsory sterilization, including physicians, social scientists, and biologists, slowly withdrew their support. It took decades before widespread support for coerced sterilizations completely eroded and the word eugenics acquired its current negative connotations. After some early resistance from criminologists , who generally rejected hereditarian explanations for crime but accepted some aspects of the American eugenics movement and certain claims common among compulsory sterilization advocates, there are three identifiable sources for the eventual decline of support for compulsory sterilization in the United States and ultimately for the decline of American support for eugenics: a 1935 report by the Committee for the Investigation of Sterilization of the American Neurological Association, an article published in the Georgetown Law Journal that finally brought the longstanding Catholic opposition to compulsory sterilization laws into the mainstream, and a report by the Legal and Socio-Economic Division of the American Medical Association (AMA).1 All three sources directly addressed the scientific justification for sterilization, the claim that certain undesirable traits were inherited and that compulsory sterilization could substantially reduce the number of people in the next generation with those traits. How we today remember the American eugenics movement is every bit as signi ficant to the declining support for coerced sterilization as was the abandonment of the movement by biologists, medical professionals, and social scientists. In this regard, the American historians and the historians of science who have written and continue to write this history have profoundly influenced our opinion of coerced sterilization. By the 1960s, just as the last professional support for eugenics was about to dissolve, a new generation of historians emerged and challenged longstanding notions about equality and the justifiable power of the state. They were increasingly critical of the progressives’ willingness to restrict individuals’ civil liberties as progressives sought to better society as a whole, and eugenical The Professions Retreat c h a p t e r 5 Chap-05.qxd 6/20/07 10:19 AM Page 116 the professions retreat 117 sterilization represented to late-twentieth-century historians one of the most egregious of governmental interventions. They alluded to parallels between the American eugenics movement and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany and its allies during World War II, a narrative that came to its fullest development in Edwin Black’s 2003 War against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race.2 It would certainly be deeply problematic to deny certain commonalities between American and German eugenics and ignore the fact that American progressives and the Nazis shared many of the same assumptions about the power that ought to be allotted to the state, the“social inadequacies”of certain citizens, and the potential benefits of carving out certain undesirable elements of society.However,imagining that American advocates of coerced sterilization were Nazi-like distorts both their activities and our ability to recognize contemporary authoritarian tendencies and the enduring influence of biological determinism in American culture. It also overlooks the fact that from the end of the World War II through the 1960s, there was no popular recognition of a link between the American eugenics movement and the Holocaust; this connection emerged in the 1970s. Claims that Nazi atrocities and a popular recognition of the link between eugenics and the Holocaust led to the immediate demise of eugenics and the immediate end of compulsory sterilization in the United States after 1945 are inaccurate. The American eugenics movement appeared to be officially dead in the early 1980s—dead at least for the time being. The wave of high school and college textbooks published in the 1970s at first omitted any discussion of eugenics and coerced sterilization; by the end of the decade, they began critically evaluating and openly dismissing eugenics and compulsory sterilization laws as both scientifically and politically untenable. Many of these authors demonized American eugenicists by directly linking them to the Nazis, and they perpetuated the myth that postwar revelations of Nazi atrocities soured American public opinion against eugenics. Actually, when one considers the public uproar over coerced sterilization in states like Kansas, voters’rejection of compulsory sterilization laws via referendum in Oregon, and the dozens of trials to prevent the sterilizations of mental health inmates and prisoners, it could easily be argued that, outside of the 1930s, the majority of the American public never supported compulsory sterilization , but coerced sterilizations nonetheless occurred in...

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