1923
In the early 1920s, Charles Fremont Dight, a physician in Minneapolis, launched a crusade to bring the eugenics movement to Minnesota. He combined the moral philosophy of eugenics with socialism and espoused that the state should administer reproduction of mentally handicapped individuals. His main lines of approach included eugenics education, changes in marriage laws, and the segregation and sterilization of what he called “defective” individuals. Dight organized the Minnesota Eugenics Society in 1923 and began campaigning for a sterilization law.

England was the birthplace of eugenics, and Charles Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, the movement’s father. The term became the name of a progressive project of improving the human species by controlling genetic selection. He aimed to apply the creed of “survival of the fittest” to the human race. Think of it, perhaps, as an attempt to create human thoroughbreds.

American progressives founded or led many organizations like Dight’s during…