Finding The Fittest: 35 Photos From The Heyday Of Eugenics

Though the world has tried to forget it, eugenics was a thriving, mainstream science in the years just before the Nazis made it taboo.

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A child's head is measured to determine his personality and predict his future.

Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. 1932.Ullstein Bild via Getty Images

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A poster warns that breeding among the unfit creates an unwanted burden on the rest of society.

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 1926.Wikimedia Commons

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German Dr. Bruno Beger measures a Tibetan woman's head to demonstrate the ("inferior") characteristics of her race.

Beger would soon work for the Nazi SS to help identify Jews.

Tibet. 1938.Wikimedia Commons

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French researcher Alphonse Bertillon demonstrates how to measure a human skull.

Paris, France. 1894. Adoc-Photos/Corbis via Getty Images

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A map illustration revealing which states in the United States have laws condoning forced sterilization.

New York. 1921.Wikimedia Commons

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A woman wearing a psychograph, a machine designed to determine someone's mental faculties by measuring their skull.

United States. 1931.Library of Congress

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Families compete in the "Fitter Family" contest, meant to find the most eugenically perfect family.

Topeka, Kansas. 1925.Wikimedia Commons

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Babies compete in the "Better Baby Contest," where doctors try to find the perfect infant human specimen.

Washington, DC. 1931.Library of Congress

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A photograph of a child with a cleft lip, taken to demonstrate the type of child that should be kept from breeding.

London, England. 1912.Wikimedia Commons

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Composite photographs, created to show the common faces of criminality and disease.

Taken from Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development. 1883.Internet Archive

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A Eugenics and Health Exhibit teaches the crowd how illiteracy can be controlled through selective breeding.

United States. Date and location unspecified.Wikimedia Commons

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An anthropometry class learns about the different types of human noses.

Paris, France. Circa 1910-1915.Library of Congress

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A phrenologist demonstrates how to measure the mental energy inside of a woman's head.

London, England. 1937.Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images

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A class studies the Bertillon method of criminal identification, based on measuring body parts.

Paris, France. Circa 1910-1915.Library of Congress

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A photograph of a criminal, with the measurements of his various body parts.

Paris, France. 1902.Wikimedia Commons

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A convicted criminal's head is measured.

Netherlands. 1896.Wikimedia Commons

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The New York City Police Department practices taking arm measurements using anthropometric methods.

New York City, New York. 1908.Library of Congress

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A phrenologist demonstrates how to measure a person's head.

United Kingdom. 1937.Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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A demonstration of how to measure a criminal's ear.

Paris, France. 1894.Adoc-Photos/Corbis via Getty Images

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The New York City Police Department demonstrates how to measure a criminal's cranium.

New York City, New York. 1908.Library of Congress

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Photographs of "human races," organized to suggest a common trait shared by "primitive" Australians, Africans, and Neanderthals.

Norway. 1939. Wikimedia Commons

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Bruno Beger measures the facial characteristics of a Tibetan man.

Tibet. 1938.Wikimedia Commons

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A humiliated-looking man with "eunuchism" allows scientists of the Eugenics Society to photograph him in the nude.

1912.Wikimedia Commons

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Children afflicted with rickets, photographed by the Eugenics Society to demonstrate that their condition is hereditary and could be controlled through selective breeding.

1912.Wikimedia Commons

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A family of children born with rickets, as photographed by the Eugenics Society.

1912.Wikimedia Commons

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A photograph from the Eugenics Society showing a family with the "lobster claw" deformity, meant as a demonstration of a hereditary defect.

1912.Wikimedia Commons

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Composite photographs of patients with and without various diseases, created to find the common facial characteristics of people who are resistant to disease.

London, England. 1912.Wellcome Images

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Various types of Indian dwarfs and giants, photographed by the Eugenics Society to demonstrate how humans could be selectively bred to control size.

1912.Wellcome Images

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Photographs of "Indian Dwarfism" from the Eugenics Society.

1912.Wellcome Images

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A woman with achondroplasia (a form of dwarfism), as photographed by the Eugenics Society. The notes point out that her parents and children also have achondroplasia.

1912.Wellcome Images

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Portraits demonstrating the standard head shapes of "criminal types" of various races.

France. 1914.Wikimedia Commons

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Researchers measure the capacity of a human skull by filling it with water.

National Academy of Sciences. 1885.Wikimedia Commons

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A craniologist demonstrates how to measure a human skull.

Sweden. 1915.Wikimedia Commons

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A human skull in a glass display.

National Academy of Sciences. 1885.Wikimedia Commons

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French weightlifter Alexandre Maspoli poses as an ideal human specimen on the cover of La Culture Physique.

France. 1904.Wikimedia Commons

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Finding The Fittest: 35 Photos From The Heyday Of Eugenics

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There was a time when eugenics wasn't generally viewed as dark, racist, or evil. Before the atrocities of World War II, eugenics was something that you could bring up over brunch and expect to elicit nods and smiles of support. We've tried to erase this from our past, but eugenics was once viewed as the height of enlightened scientific thought.

Eugenics – the system of measuring human traits, seeking out the desirable ones, and cutting out the undesirable ones – was once practiced the world over. The idea of controlling human breeding to strengthen the evolutionary process wasn't some dark, fringe theory. On the contrary, it was a popular idea.

These "undesirable" traits were often illnesses and deformities. Conditions like dwarfism, deafness, and even things as simple as a cleft palate were viewed as human defects that needed to be wiped out of the gene pool.

Scientists would measure human skulls in an effort to map the parts of the brain that make criminals violent, in an effort to eradicate criminality. Other eugenics proponents would simply suggest cutting entire groups of people our of the gene pool because of the color of their skin. Eugenics books would boast the superiority of the white race, labeling African and Asian people as Neanderthals and Mongoloids that needed to be kept from diluting the white gene pool.

For some eugenicists, controlling breeding just meant keeping people apart. Alexander Graham Bell, for one, railed against immigration and pushed to separate people with the same "undesirable" conditions to keep them from breeding.

These comparatively gentle approaches, though, were rare. Many more pushed to forcibly sterilize or even kill those deemed "unfit" to breed. In America, by the 1930s, 31 states passed compulsory sterilization laws, forcing the disabled and the mentally ill to destroy their own reproductive organs.

This wasn't a crude minority forcing its will on the majority. A poll in 1937 found that two-thirds of all Americans supported forced sterilization.

Sometimes, however, things went even further. A mental institution in Illinois euthanized its patients by deliberately infecting them with tuberculosis, an act they justified as a mercy killing that cut the weak link in the human race.

After these kinds of ideas took root in Nazi Germany and sparked the horrors of the Holocaust, eugenics turned into a dirty word. With the dark conclusion of its philosophy exposed before the world, it became difficult to justify forced sterilization as a tool for the greater good.

History was then subtly rewritten, with eugenics discussed as something that the Germans did and from which the rest of the world could wash its hands clean.

But, as these photos make clear, for nearly 100 years, eugenics was much more than a German idea. The whole world was complicit.

Next, discover how American eugenics helped inspire the Nazis. Then, for another glance into humanity's dark and troubled relationship with race, view these vintage photos taken inside human zoos. Finally, read up on ten fringe sciences that are as fascinating as they are terrifying.