Ideas and Individuals
The success of the eugenics movement in the U.S. during the early decades of the 1900s can be traced to the ability of a strong network of individual eugenicists and organizations to influence popular thought and public policy. Countering these eugenicists was a much smaller, less organized group of dissenters who were no less committed to their own ideas, as they attempted to expose those aspects of the eugenics movement that came from a place of bigotry and racism.