Within a few decades those ideas would catch fire and fuel eugenics movements around the globe. By the 1920s large eugenics movements developed in the United States, Britain, throughout Eastern and Western Europe, and in parts of South American, Scandinavia, and Asia. Most of these movements prospered until eugenics was discredited by the genocidal policies of Nazi Germany, which produced the greatest human disaster of the twentieth century.

Just as the technology of super-computing has made possible the decoding of the genome, a new technology of the 19th century - photography - was enlisted by eugenics to provide evidence for new theories. Galton's contribution to this effort was the invention of composite portraiture, for which he would re-photograph individual portraits on a single photographic plate. A group of those photos appear as the frontispiece of his 1883 book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development, which is in the show. It is the first place the word "eugenics" was used in print. Galton believed that both positive and negative characteristics manifested themselves on an individual's face. By photographically blending portraits together, Galton thought that the "typical" characteristics of any group - whether they were pickpockets or TB patients - would emerge and that a sharp-eyed observer would be able to see the traits. Looking at these images today, we may wonder at the naiveté of this idea.

Although eugenics began in Britain, it reached the United States by the 1890s. It gained a receptive audience in the educated, white Anglo-Saxons, some of whom were already worried about both internal and external threats to American bloodlines. Industrialization was promoting rapid urbanization. Immigration was bringing increasing numbers of people from southern and eastern Europe, who were seen as biologically inferior to American's original settlers. Rising levels of poverty and other social problems led to the proliferation of prisons, asylums, and poor relief. Soon, powerful voices were calling for marriage restriction and sterilization of those deemed "unfit" to care for themselves.

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