Throughout the first six decades of the 20th century, hundreds of thousands of Americans,

and untold numbers of others, were not permitted to continue their families by reproducing.

Selected because of their ancestry, national origin, race, or religion, they were forcibly sterilized,

wrongly committed to mental institutions,

where they died in great numbers, prohibited from marrying, and sometimes even unmarried,

by state bureaucrats. In America, this battle to wipe out whole ethnic groups was fought,

not by armies with guns, nor by hate sex at the margins.

Rather, this pernicious white-gloved war was prosecuted by esteemed professors, elite universities, wealthy industrialists, and government officials, colluding in a racist, pseudo-scientific movement called eugenics.

Edwin Black, War Against the Week, Eugenics, and America's campaign to create a master race.

In 1911, Governor Woodrow Wilson signed New Jersey's forcible sterilization legislation, which targeted the, hopelessly defective in criminal classes.

Inspired by the slogan, sterilization or racial disaster, Wisconsin passed its forcible sterilization law in 1913.

With the support of the University of Wisconsin's

most influential scholars. Among them, University President Charles Van Heiss and progressive sociologist

Edward A. Ross. When Charles McCarthy of the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library queried Ross on the merits

of forcible sterilization, Ross pulled no punches.

I am entirely in favor of it, Ross said, and the objections to it are essentially sentimental

and will bear no inspection.

Ross assured McCarthy that involuntary sterilization was not nearly so terrible as

hanging a man, and the chances of sterilizing the fit were not nearly so great, as are the

chances of hanging the innocent.

In the first three decades of the 20th century, eugenic ideas were politically influential,

culturally fashionable, and scientifically mainstream.

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