In theory, eugenics was the way to create a utopia. In just a couple of generations, the unintelligent, the sickly, and the weak could be eradicated from the earth, resulting in a better society. Eugenics wouldn’t be difficult either. For the eugenically favored person, all that was required of them was to marry and have children, which was no more than what was required of the average person anyway. Additionally, eugenics promised a society free of the feebleminded, the criminals, and the sickly, which gave helped to popularize eugenic programs. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, immigration into the United States increased which lead to an increase in the population of cities. People were found living on the streets, begging for money and draining the city’s resources. “Statistics revealed… that afflictions such as “mental defectiveness” and criminality were worsening every year.” Soon, the average taxpayer was worried about the amount of money required to take care of the ‘defective’ populations of United States citizens. There was also concern about the ethnicity and race of those that were entering the United States. During an increasingly nationalistic time period in American history, the Italians, Germans, and Chinese …show more content…
Wiggam claimed that God had given man the ability to learn more about genetics so that man could then learn more about God’s will. Eugenics was “simply the projection of the Golden Rule down the protoplasm.” By placing God behind eugenics, Wiggam called on the religious nature of the public and asked them to “do His biological will.” The religion of science was becoming popular by the 1920s, and if the religion of science claimed that one had the moral responsibility to have a eugenically favored life, the devout