Photograph Source: Xuthoria – CC BY-SA 4.0
Nearing the end of his first term, on September 18, 2020, Pres. Donald Trump invoked the “racehorse theory” at a campaign rally in Bemidji, MN, to claim that he and his followers had genetically superior bloodlines. “You have good genes, you know that, right? You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it? Don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
The “racehorse theory” is an idea adapted from horse breeding that believes that good bloodlines produce superior offspring. It is also based on the early 20th century American eugenicists movement and the later by the German Nazis notion that selective breeding for racial purity can improve a country’s performance.
Joseph A. Stramondo, a philosophy professor at San Diego State University, insists, “Trump uses eugenic rhetoric and plays on stereotypes around disability, race, and gender for political gain.”
Two examples of how Trump has used notions of “blood” and “race” to score political points are very revealing. During the 2024 presidential campaign he denounced Pres. Joe Biden and Vice Pres. Kamala Harris: “Joe Biden became mentally impaired. Kamala was born that way … If you think about it, only a mentally disabled person could have allowed this to happen to our country.” But most provocatively, in December 2023 he raged, immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country,”
Most disturbing, in its 2024 annual “American Vales Survey,” the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found that one-third (34%) of Americans agreed with Trump’s statement that immigrants entering the country illegally were “poisoning the blood of our country.” Looking deeper, it noted that six in 10 Republicans (61%), almost one-third (30%) of independents and even 13 percent of Democrats agreed with the statement.
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Trump’s invocation of the notion of “genes” and “blood” recalls the earlier American eugenics movement and Nazi Germany. However, the theory of race improvement was originally put forth in 1893 by the noted British scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, as the science of “eugenics.” Galton argued: “Eugenics is the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally.”
In the U.S., eugenics is an ideology of the first Gilded Age and its aftermath. This was a period when the American elite championed a belief in Social Darwinism, a self-serving misreading of Darwin’s biological “survival of the fittest” hypothesis onto hierarchical social relations. They believed that biology was destiny and that the white race sat atop the thrown of human evolution, of civilization itself.
Not surprisingly, many of the Gilded Age elite also believed that those least “developed” were doomed by heredity to be not merely biological inferior but socially unfit. Eugenics was espoused as the science of breeding, of race improvement for the betterment of civilization. Galton wanted it to be a religion.
An estimated 60,000 people were sterilized as biologically inferior humans in the seven decades that eugenics was in vogue in the U.S. Stephen Jay Gould noted: “Sterilization could be imposed upon those judged insane, idiotic, imbecilic, or moronic, and upon convicted rapists or criminals when recommended by a board of experts.” He fails to include the “feeble-minded,” promiscuous women and homosexuals. Sterilization was most often imposed on youths, the poor, women and African Americans.
Prenatal testing and genetic engineering were often used to allow doctors, insurance companies and prospective parents to determine whether the fetus in the womb was likely to be born as so-called “normal and healthy,” and which baby was likely to be born with a disability like Down syndrome or Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Now, as America succumbs to a second Gilded Age, the call for new forms of eugenics can be heard. Some racist and anti-immigrant groups raise the specter of the end of “white America.” Between 1990 and 2023, the nation’s non-white population nearly doubled, from about 24.4 percent to 41.6 percent. And the U.S. is expected to become a “minority majority” country around 2045.
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The first legal state-sanctioned sterilization took place in Indiana in 1907 and by 1925 Utah was the 23rd state to legalize sterilization. In 1924, Virginia passed its sterilization law and, in 1927, Carrie Buck, a 17-year-old, became the state’s first person to be sterilized. She was judged to be feeble-mined by a state-appointed authority that determined who was an imbecile or an epileptic.
In 1927, the Supreme Court decided in Buck v. Bell that state-sanctioned sterilization was legal. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes ruled against Carrie Buck, writing most memorably: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. … Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
The new law of the land led to the increased use of sterilization throughout the country. Obviously, the definitions of imbecile and feeble-minded were essentially arbitrary, thus meaningless.
The increased use of sterilization is illustrated in Utah. Between 1930 and 1935, the rate of sterilization was 6 per year. However, the annual rate grew significantly after the opening of the Utah State Training School in 1935. Between 1935 and the early-50s, about 33 persons were sterilized annually. Sterilization ended in Utah in 1974, and a total of 830 people were sterilized, more than half of them (54%) women.
The “science” of eugenics was founded on the shared belief among the white socially elite that human evolution culminated in the Anglo-Saxon “race.” All other races lacked the spiritual, mental and physical capabilities of the white man! This belief system and worldview was shared by the “leading” people of the day, whether politician, industrialist, minister, college professor, scientist, journalist, doctor or social activist.
An often-stated corollary assumption that was equally shared by these esteemed citizens was that more “primitive” races were inferior mentally, physically and socially. Most remarkable, both church and science concurred. Many Protestant adherents of the Social Gospel saw the eugenics movement as a scientific method that would help usher in the Kingdom of God on earth.
To appreciate just how deformed was the mindset of those advocating eugenics a century ago, it’s useful to cite one of their leading theorists on race purification. In 1911, Dr. Charles Benedict Davenport authored the then-influential book, Heredity in Relation to Eugenics. Shocked by the massive influx of Eastern and Southern Europeans to U.S. cities, Davenport warned: “[T]he population of the United States will, on account of the great influx of blood from South-eastern Europe, rapidly become darker in pigmentation, smaller in stature, more mercurial, more attached to music and art, [and] more given to crimes of larceny, kidnapping, assault, murder, rape and sex-immorality.”
Most telling, he predicted, “the ratio of insanity in the population will rapidly increase.” His analysis did not include the African Americans, Jews, Asians, Middle Easterners and Native-Americans who likely only further polluted the race pool.
Eugenics was an ideology backed most enthusiastically by both the local and national gentry. As the The New York Times points out, the North Carolina campaign was led by such notables as James Hanes, the hosiery magnet, and Dr. Charles Gamble, heir to the P&G fortune. It also notes the strong support among notable progressives like Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Margaret Sanger; Sanger had opened America’s first birth control clinic for Brooklyn immigrants in October 1916. With backing from the Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman fortunes, eugenics was legitimized and used to justify the draconian Immigration Restriction Acts of 1921 and 1924. Their efforts culminated in the 1927 Supreme Court decision approving forced sterilization.
Often forgotten, as Paul Lombardo, law professor, Georgia State University, notes, “Many U.S. Presidents signed laws that were aligned with the eugenics movement or endorsed the movement. Teddy Roosevelt was one of the biggest proponents of eugenics.” He adds, “the public health movement was initially infused with eugenic thinking.”
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The eugenics movement was as much a symptom of the first Gilded Age’s ruling-class arrogance as the real threats they perceived from a nation undergoing profound change.
Between 1890 and 1920, America was transformed. The population nearly doubled, jumping to 106 million from 62 million, reshaping the nation’s demographic character. Some 23 million European immigrants, many of them Catholics and Jews, joined 2 million migrating southern African Americans and whites to recast the cities of the North and West.
Black migration culminated in the legendary Harlem Renaissance. However, migration was driven, in part, by punitive Jim Crow laws, the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and a series of lynchings, race riots and other violence that swept the nation in the years preceding and following the Great War. This was also the era of “Scopes monkey trial” immortalized in Stanley Kramer’s classic 1960 movie, Inherit the Wind, and the rise of the “new woman” who earned a wage, wore a shorter skirt, put on lipstick and, with the passage of 19th Amendment in 1921, secured the vote.
Today, the U.S. is again in the midst of a great transformation. Globalization is restructuring the national economy; immigration is recasting the nation’s demographic makeup; and the widespread, popular demands for abortion rights, gay marriage, trans gender citizens and sex education are fueling yet another round of the four-centuries old culture wars.
As the political climate heats up under Trump 2.0, Americans need to guard against the emergence of a new eugenics movement. This one may likely seek new justifications for anti-immigrant policies, basing them on Trump-inspired notions of genes and race. And Robert Kennedy, Jr., the new secretary of health, may discover new “scientific proof” of the collective inferiority of immigrants. The administration-wide assault against “diversity, equality and inclusion” (DEI) seems to be providing a vehicle for white rage and a rationale for the regained tyranny by white men.
Similarly, the policing of sex “predators” may involve the discovery of a new predator gene that both expands the category of those classified as predators and increases the number of those suffering indeterminate prison sentences. And who knows, perhaps other, more old-fashioned, Social Darwinian efforts will be proposed by the Republican administration to control sexual excess; why not the forceful sterilization of teen girls who get pregnant? Moral rectitude knows no limit.
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This content originally appeared on CounterPunch.org and was authored by David Rosen.