10 widely admired individuals have left indelible marks on history, yet many of them harbored disturbing beliefs about eugenics. While Adolf Hitler is rightfully condemned for turning eugenics into a murderous ideology, a surprising roster of celebrated personalities also endorsed the notion of cleansing society of those they deemed “undesirable.” Most stopped short of advocating gas chambers, but their recommendations were far from humane.
1 Clarence Darrow
The eloquent defense attorney Clarence Darrow was famous for his poetic pleas for compassion, urging society to abandon hatred and cruelty. He declared, “I am pleading for the future… when all life is worth saving and mercy is the highest attribute of man.” By the early 1900s, Darrow had earned the nickname “Attorney for the Damned,” a nod to his reputation as a champion of society’s outcasts.
Darrow’s most controversial moment came during the infamous Leopold‑Loeb case. He argued that the murder of 14‑year‑old Bobby Franks was not driven by personal animus but by the defendants’ privileged upbringing, wealth, and fascination with detective novels. In a 1926 piece for The American Mercury, Darrow vehemently opposed sterilization and bans on intermarriage, insisting that “morons, idiots, and imbeciles” were essential for manual labor.
Paradoxically, Darrow also endorsed a cold mercy for disabled infants. He echoed surgeon Harry Haiselden’s sentiment, stating, “Chloroform unfit children… Show them the same mercy that is shown beasts that are no longer fit to live.” This contradictory stance highlights the complexity of his legacy.
2 Woodrow Wilson
For more than half a century, Woodrow Wilson has been celebrated as one of America’s top ten presidents. Franklin D. Roosevelt once praised him, saying, “All our great presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” Wilson’s leadership during World War I earned him a Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Treaty of Versailles and championing the League of Nations.
Domestically, Wilson spearheaded the creation of the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve, advanced child‑labor reforms, and supported women’s suffrage. He famously asserted, “I do not believe that any man can lead who does not act… under the impulse of a profound sympathy with those whom he leads.” Yet, as governor of New Jersey in 1911, Wilson signed a sterilization bill that mandated the forced sterilization of “feeble‑minded” individuals, epileptics, rapists, certain criminals, and other “defectives,” citing heredity as the primary cause of these conditions.
Wilson’s own health declined dramatically after a massive stroke in 1919, leaving him partially paralyzed and visually impaired for 17 months. His wife and physician concealed his condition, leading some historians to refer to her as the nation’s first female president. One wonders whether Wilson himself would have been a target of the very eugenic policies he helped enact.
3 William Edward Burghardt Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois, a towering intellect in African‑American history, often clashed with other black leaders yet left an indelible mark on civil‑rights activism. Born in 1868, he earned the first African‑American doctorate in history from Harvard and soon after began publishing groundbreaking studies on black life in the United States.
Du Bois co‑founded the NAACP and edited its influential magazine, The Crisis. However, his vision of racial uplift diverged sharply from the NAACP’s integrationist stance. He advocated for a form of eugenics within the black community, dividing it into the “Talented Tenth” – educated leaders – and the “submerged tenth,” which he described as criminals, prostitutes, and loafers. In the Birth Control Review, he warned that “the mass of ignorant Negroes still breed carelessly and disastrously,” urging the promotion of marriage and reproduction among the “Talented Tenth” while discouraging it among the “submerged tenth.”
Du Bois’s eugenic ideas were rooted in a belief that the “best” Black individuals should reproduce, thereby improving the race, while the “undesirable” should be curtailed. This stance starkly contrasted with his broader fight for equality, revealing a troubling paradox in his legacy.
4 Edward Franklin Frazier
Edward Franklin Frazier rose to prominence as the pre‑eminent African‑American sociologist of the early twentieth century, eventually chairing Howard University’s sociology department. He argued that Black Americans had become culturally American, shedding their African heritage, and criticized middle‑class Black individuals for materialism and cultural elitism.
Although Frazier rejected the white‑centric Nordic eugenics model, he adopted a class‑ and geography‑based eugenic framework for Black Americans. In his work Eugenics and the Race Problem, he warned that “colored feebleminded” individuals in the South were breeding unchecked, while “colored feebleminded” in the North received less scrutiny. He contended that the “best mentally endowed Negroes” would not dilute their inheritance by intermarrying with the feebleminded, suggesting institutional controls were necessary to curb the reproduction of the latter.
Frazier’s perspective framed the North as a meritocratic environment where natural selection favored the “brightest” Black individuals, whereas the South was depicted as a breeding ground for “undesirable” traits. His rhetoric mirrors classic eugenic language, emphasizing control over reproduction to “improve” the race.
5 John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes emerged in the early 1900s as one of the world’s leading economists, reshaping macroeconomic thought with his seminal work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. His ideas championed government deficits during economic downturns to sustain employment, a radical departure from the era’s prevailing balanced‑budget orthodoxy.
Keynes’s theories guided President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal policies, which aimed to revive the American economy during the Great Depression. While some scholars debate the efficacy of those measures, Keynes’s influence persisted in U.S. fiscal policy until the 1980s, when Reagan’s monetarist approach took hold.
Beyond economics, Keynes was an avid eugenicist. In The Essential Keynes, he argued that nations must devise policies concerning not only population size but also “innate quality.” As director of the Eugenics Society for seven years, he advocated for contraception to curb the growth of “drunken and ignorant” lower‑class populations, whom he deemed incapable of self‑regulation.
6 Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., an associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court for three decades, remains celebrated as one of America’s most brilliant jurists. Appointed by Theodore Roosevelt in 1902, he earned the moniker “The Great Dissenter” for his incisive dissenting opinions that continue to shape legal thought.
Holmes’s legacy, however, is tainted by his 1927 majority opinion in Buck v. Bell, which upheld Virginia’s forced‑sterilization law. The case involved Carrie Buck, a young woman labeled “feeble‑minded” after an unwed pregnancy. Holmes argued that sterilizing her would protect “society and her welfare,” famously declaring, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” This decision provided legal cover for thousands of forced sterilizations across the United States.
Internationally, the Nazis seized upon Holmes’s language to justify their own atrocities, citing his opinion as evidence that “the world” could prevent the propagation of “degenerate” offspring. Holmes’s influence thus extended far beyond the courtroom, leaving a chilling imprint on eugenic policy worldwide.
7 Linus Pauling
Linus Pauling, a double Nobel laureate in Chemistry and Peace, is revered for his scientific brilliance and tireless advocacy against nuclear weapons testing. His discovery that sickle‑cell anemia stemmed from a single genetic mutation marked the first identification of a “molecular disease.”
Pauling soon intertwined his scientific insights with eugenic thinking. He argued that to alleviate human suffering, societies should legally mandate testing for genetic diseases such as sickle‑cell anemia, especially among African‑American populations. He proposed restricting marriage and reproduction for carriers, suggesting that the state intervene to prevent the transmission of hereditary ailments.
Later, Pauling advocated even more extreme measures: tattooing or otherwise marking carriers on their bodies—potentially on the forehead—to signal their status and discourage intermarriage. He also supported abortion for pregnancies involving two carriers, asserting that ending such lives would spare future suffering. Notably, Pauling stopped short of endorsing forced sterilization or the killing of already‑born children.
8 Sir Winston Churchill
In 2002, Sir Winston Churchill was voted the greatest Briton of all time, celebrated for his steadfast leadership during World War II and his literary achievements, including a Nobel Prize in Literature. He famously warned that “the unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble‑minded and insane classes” posed a grave national danger.
Churchill’s correspondence with Prime Minister Herbert Asquith in 1910 revealed his belief that preserving a “superior” race required curbing the reproduction of “feeble‑minded” individuals. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act, which he supported, defined categories such as “idiots,” “imbeciles,” “feeble‑minded,” and “moral defectives,” authorizing their indefinite confinement and, in some cases, sterilization.
While Churchill never advocated the use of gas chambers, he endorsed segregation, confinement, and sterilization of those he deemed “inferior.” His eugenic stance, juxtaposed with his wartime heroics, underscores a paradoxical aspect of his legacy.
9 Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt, the beloved “trust‑buster” president, remains a towering figure in American history. He championed the Square Deal, spearheaded conservation efforts that birthed the U.S. Forest Service and the National Wildlife Refuge System, and earned the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
Roosevelt also famously inspired the teddy bear after refusing to shoot a bound bear, deeming such an act unsportsmanlike. Yet, his views on eugenics were far less compassionate. In a January 3, 1913 letter to Charles Davenport of the Eugenics Record Office, he likened human reproduction to livestock breeding, insisting that society should prevent “degenerates” from reproducing. He argued that just as farmers apply selective breeding to improve stock, citizens must leave only “good blood” behind.
Ironically, despite promoting an image of robust physical vigor, Roosevelt suffered from severe asthma, myopia, heart issues, blindness in one eye from a boxing match, and hearing loss in one ear—all ailments he nonetheless dismissed in his public persona.
10 Helen Keller
Helen Keller, famed for overcoming blindness and deafness after a childhood illness, became an iconic advocate for the blind and deaf. With the unwavering support of her teacher Anne Sullivan, Keller avoided institutionalization and went on to champion women’s rights, birth control, the NAACP, and co‑found the ACLU. Her legacy lives on through the Helen Keller Services for the Blind, which empowers individuals with disabilities to secure education and employment.
Beyond her activism, Keller harbored eugenic convictions concerning mental disabilities. In 1915, surgeon Harry Haiselden refused to operate on infant John Bollinger, labeling the child “defective” and urging the parents to let him die, claiming he would become an “idiot” and potential criminal. Keller echoed Haiselden’s stance in a letter to The New Republic, arguing that cases of severe mental deformity should be judged by a “jury of expert physicians” rather than lay juries, asserting that such individuals would never become productive members of society and posed a criminal risk.
Keller’s correspondence framed the debate as a clash between “fine humanity” represented by physicians and “cowardly sentimentalism” of the public. Her endorsement of eugenic policies illustrates a lesser‑known, unsettling facet of her remarkable life.
10 Widely Admired Figures and Their Eugenics Views
The ten individuals highlighted above demonstrate that admiration for public achievements does not preclude the endorsement of troubling ideologies. Their eugenic beliefs, ranging from support for forced sterilization to advocating selective marriage policies, reveal a complex tapestry of historical attitudes that continue to inform contemporary discussions about ethics, science, and social policy.