American Eugenics Society Analysis
The American Eugenics Society (AES) was first incorporated in the US in 1926 by Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Henry Crampton, Henry F. Osborn and Irving Fisher with the primary aim of promoting eugenics education programs to the public. Eugenics as defined by the new society is the “study of improving the genetic composition of humans through controlled reproduction of different races and classes of people” (Gur-Arie, 2014). The society shot a good start with 928 members in 45 states, and gained support even from numerous outside countries of which the Philippine Islands was a part of the list (Mehler, 1988).
Even before the onset of this new society, eugenic organizations were already roaming and operating in the US that have helped create the new society. These include the Carnegie Institution of Washington in 1904 which created the Experimental Evolution Station at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory led by geneticists Blakeslee and Davenport which then later recruited connection to the Eugenics Records Office (ERO), and the Galton Society founded by Francis Galton, cousin of Charles Darwin that focused on racial anthropology and
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AES’s works were greatly presented at state and local affairs. ‘Better Babies and Fitter Families’ contests, travelling exhibits entitled “Some People Are Born as a Burden on the Rest”, passage of different immigration restriction acts, convincing legislators to label crimes as of bad human hereditary origin, and even clergymen to transform eugenic theory to eugenic theology were continuously done by the new society. With this intended effort of bringing and solidifying bordered lines between classes, the AES has successfully altered then the human thinking and behavior, and concretely imposed an unquestioned distinction between “high grade people” and people of low origin called
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