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Randall Hansen, Thomas C. Leonard. Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era., The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 241–243, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.241
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Eugenics—the practice of encouraging the breeding of the “fit” while discouraging the breeding of the “unfit”—has attracted extensive scholarly interest in the last thirty years. As Thomas C. Leonard argues in his fine book Illiberal Reformers, eugenics was not, as many continue to insist on believing, marginal pseudo-science. It was science, and not only its basic precepts (that “feeblemindedness” was hereditary and that feebleminded persons’ higher birth rates would lead to race suicide) but also its policy recommendations (excluding the eugenically unfit via migration control, birth control, and forced sterilization) were widely shared and endorsed by the scientists, university presidents, journal editors, constitutional court justices, and upper-middle-class activists (among others) who defined American public debate. At least one U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, had once been a strong supporter of eugenics and might well have tempered his support once in the Oval Office only out of political expediency (xii–xiii). Indeed, until the 1920s, critics of eugenics were the marginal ones, and they often founded their opposition to eugenics in nonscientific doctrines such as Roman Catholicism.
