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Work in Eugenics

Edward Murray East was a prominent figure in early american genetics and was a strong supporter of the eugenics movement in the united states.E.M.East was strongly influenced by the work of Thomas Malthus especially Malthus' Essay on the Principle of Population (1798).This influence led E.M.East to create many of his ideas concerning birth control and immigration policy. E.M.East applied many of the ideas that he had developed in his research on the applications of genetics to agriculture to his ideas about human society. E.M East wrote two major works on eugenics Mankind at the Crossroads (1923) and Heredity and Human Affairs (1927) in which he went about the task of comparing groups of people based upon the racial categorizations of the time. In his book Heredity and Human Affairs (1927) E.M.East made quit a few pointed comments against interbreeding and miscegenation in the human species stating that ". . .the negro race as a whole is possessed of undesirable transmissible qualities both physical and mental, which seem to justify not only a line but a wide gulf to be fixed permanently between it and the white race". Another principle concern of E.M.East's was the existing social policy and his perception that it favored the "imbecile" over the "genius" and that the continued use of public funds to this end would have negligible value, if not directly causing harm.