Eugenic hereditarian theory drove the anti-vice campaign’s scientific rationale

Evidence

There was also a strong belief that as human beings advanced toward civilization, they needed to control and suppress the animal side of their nature. Crime, vice, perversion, and pauperism ran in families; they were inherited traits. The eugenics movement flourished in the early part of the twentieth century. New studies strengthened the point. Henry Goddard studied the “Kallikak” family in the 1920s. In the age of the American Revolution, one of the ancestors of the “Kallikaks” was married to a Quaker woman, but he also had a brief affair with a low-​class woman. The descendants of his respectable marriage were all good people; from the misunion the opposite happened: generation after generation of paupers, feeble-​minded people, and other lowlifes. — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 4282

Categorization

• XREF: The Kallikak-family story is a classic debunked-eugenics case study, resonant with the later Buck v. Bell reversal — a good pairing for the sacrifice/cruel-injustice reading.