In How To Understand the Resurgence of Eugenics, Sidney Perkowitz notes:

In 1883, the English statistician and social scientist Francis Galton coined the word “eugenics” (“well-born,” from Greek). The term referred to his idea of selectively breeding people to enhance “desirable” and eliminate “undesirable” properties. Seen as following Darwin’s theory of evolution, in the 1920s and ’30s eugenics gained important backing in England and the United States. Scientists and physicians spoke and wrote in its support. It influenced U.S. immigration policy, and states like Virginia used it to justify the forcible sterilization of the intellectually disabled.

Crucial institutional funding and support for the eugenics movement in the United States and Germany came from the Rockefeller Foundation, allied with other elite foundations. The two essential background books on this important topic are War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master Race, by Edwin Black; and Illiberal Reformers: Race, Eugenics, and American Economics in the Progressive Era, by Thomas C. Leonard.

Scholars as divergent as Murray N. Rothbard and G. William Domhoff have documented the impact of thousands of key academics such as Richard Ely, Herbert Baxter Adams, and John W. Burgess who received their graduate training in Germany during the late 19th century, dominated by the rise of Bismarck’s welfare-warfare state. They returned home imbued with these ideas, which their apt pupils such as Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson transformed into hard reality. This worship of the newly-discovered wonders of statism, combined with the influx of Darwinian evolutionary naturalism, “social imperialism” and Fabian socialism imported from Great Britain, the increasing secularization of postmillennial evangelical pietism, provided the satanic breeding ground for the incubus that emerged as Progressivism — complete with its elite notions of centralized political/economic planning, aggressive nationalism, and eugenics and the idea of “race suicide.”

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