White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

by Nancy Isenberg

As in animal breeding, advocates pushed for legislation that allowed doctors and other professionals to segregate and quarantine the unfit from the general population, or they called for the castration of criminals and the sterilization of diseased and degenerate classes. If that seems a gross violation of human rights in any age, a Michigan legislator went a step further in 1903 when he proposed that the state should simply kill off the unfit. Another eugenics advocate came up with a particularly ludicrous plan to deal with a convicted murderer: execute his grandfather. Such proposals were not merely fringe ideas. By 1931, twenty-seven states had sterilization laws on the books, along with an unwieldy thirty-four categories delineating the kinds of people who might be subject to the surgical procedure. Eugenicists used a broad brush to create an underclass of the unfit, calling for the unemployable to be “stamped out,” as Harvard professor Frank William Taussig wrote in Principles of Economics (1921). If society refused to subject hereditary misfits (“irretrievable criminals and tramps”) to “chloroform once and for all,” then, the professor fumed, they could at least be prevented from “propagating their kind.”