Eugenics - Supporters and Critics

Supporters and Critics

At its peak of popularity eugenics was supported by a wide variety of prominent people, including Winston Churchill, Margaret Sanger, Marie Stopes, H. G. Wells, Theodore Roosevelt, George Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes, John Harvey Kellogg, Linus Pauling and Sidney Webb. Many members of the American Progressive Movement supported eugenics, enticed by its scientific trappings and its promise to cure social ills. Its most infamous proponent and practitioner was, however, Adolf Hitler who praised and incorporated eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf and emulated Eugenic legislation for the sterilization of "defectives" that had been pioneered in the United States.

The American sociologist Lester Frank Ward and the English writer G. K. Chesterton were early critics of the philosophy of eugenics. Ward's 1913 article "Eugenics, Euthenics, and Eudemics" and Chesterton's 1917 book Eugenics and Other Evils were harshly critical of the rapidly growing eugenics movement.