By Tabitha Evans Moore | EDITOR & PUBLISHER
OPINION | Every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, we say Never Again. But remembrance is not just about mourning the dead. It is about understanding how something so catastrophic became possible — and recognizing how close those dangerous ideas once were to us here at home.
In recent days, a social media post has circulated claiming that “the Holocaust started in Appalachia as a eugenics program.” That statement is not historically accurate. But it points toward a more uncomfortable truth worth examining, especially in Tennessee: while the Holocaust did not begin here, the United States — including the South — failed to reject the dehumanizing pseudoscience of eugenics early enough.
The Holocaust — the state-sponsored, systematic murder of six million Jews and millions of other targeted people — began in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler’s regime in the 1930s and during World War II. It was carried out across Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe through ghettos, mass shootings, forced labor camps, and extermination camps. Eugenic ideas — about who was “fit” and who was a “burden” — helped fuel that genocide.
While Tennessee did not enact a compulsory sterilization law like some U.S. states did in the early 20th century, it existed within a broader American culture where eugenics — the belief that society could be “improved” by controlling who was allowed to reproduce — was widely discussed, taught, and, in some cases, embraced.
Tennessee was included in early eugenics surveys. In the 1910s and 1920s, the National Committee for Mental Hygiene conducted studies across the Southern United States, including Tennessee, to assess so-called “feeble-mindedness” in the population. These surveys were designed to support eugenic policies and reflected what many institutions at the time considered mainstream science. Their presence shows that eugenic ideas circulated in Tennessee’s public-health and medical communities, even if the state never adopted sterilization laws.
Tennessee physicians also participated in regional professional discussions where eugenic theories were debated. Records show that medical professionals from the state attended meetings of the Southern Medical Association, where topics related to heredity, social fitness, and public health — including eugenic thinking — were commonly discussed. Tennessee was not isolated from these national scientific networks.
Although Tennessee never passed a compulsory sterilization law, eugenic ideas still appeared in policy discussions and institutional practices. Legislative proposals touching on sterilization and mental fitness emerged decades later, reflecting how long this way of thinking lingered in American life — even after it had been discredited scientifically.
At its core, eugenics appealed to a kind of dangerous common sense: fewer “bad traits” being passed down would mean a better society. But that idea was never proven.
Eugenics is now classified as a pseudoscience because it borrowed the language and authority of science without following the scientific method. Real science tests ideas and discards them when evidence fails to support them. Eugenics did the opposite. It started with social prejudice — about poverty, disability, race, criminality, and morality — and worked backward to claim those traits were genetic.
It treated poverty, limited education, illness, and even personal behavior as biological destiny instead of recognizing the roles of environment, nutrition, trauma, discrimination, and access to opportunity. Modern genetics has shown that complex human traits are shaped by many factors — not single, inherited defects.
Eugenics research relied on biased observations, hearsay-based family trees, and institutional records already shaped by discrimination. There were no genetic tests, no proper controls, and no real statistical rigor.
And perhaps most tellingly, the list of so-called “undesirable traits” included things like learning disabilities, alcohol use, poverty, homelessness, sexual behavior, defiance of social norms, physical disability, and children deemed “unmanageable.” These were not markers of genetic failure. They were judgments about who made others uncomfortable.
Eugenics was not dangerous because it was loud or extreme. It was dangerous because it sounded reasonable, practical, and scientific in its time.
The Holocaust did not begin with death camps. It began with classification. With deciding who belonged and who did not. With convincing people that some lives were worth collective investment, while others were not.
The lesson of eugenics is not that history repeats itself, but that it follows familiar patterns. In the early 1900s, ideas about who mattered and who did not were presented as science and backed by law. Holocaust remembrance asks us to stay alert today — especially when human worth is reduced to productivity, cost, or obedience — to not let those ideas creep back in today. •
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