Better for all the world

About this book

"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." "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, t

Appears in these reading paths

Best Books on the History of Eugenics, in Reading Order

Intermediate10books97 hrs5 stages

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