Echoes of a Dangerous Idea
What eugenics, the 1920s, and my grandmother’s speakeasy stories can still teach us today
There’s so much information flooding in each hour that it can be hard to know what to focus on. But one question keeps resurfacing:
“Why is the president doing this?”
It’s not always clear. Many of Donald Trump’s policies seem counterintuitive. He has enjoyed strong support from working-class voters who believe he can return the country to a more industrial, job-secure era. Yet, he promotes tariffs that burden small businesses and farmers, many of whom are his most loyal supporters. He weakens institutions that disproportionately serve rural communities, including public education, healthcare, and disaster relief.
The prevailing explanation from commentators is often either greed, incompetence, or both. But I wonder if there’s a deeper, more unsettling thread we’ve been reluctant to name—one tied not just to economics or strategy, but to ideology.
Looking Backward to Look Closer
President Trump has openly expressed admiration for the 1920s. In some ways, I understand the allure. That decade holds deep meaning in my own family. My grandmother came of age in the early 20th century—she worked for the U.S. Employment Bureau during World War I, supported women’s suffrage, and enjoyed a good Manhattan. She frequented speakeasies and believed in the promise of modernity. I cherish her stories—how my great-uncle fell off a Navy ship in New York Harbor, how she and my grandfather dressed to the nines for an evening on the town.
But those years, which my family recalled with affection, were also marked by profound cultural anxiety. The Roaring Twenties weren’t just jazz and flappers—they were also a time of intense resistance to change, racial resentment, and a pseudoscientific movement that left a brutal legacy: eugenics.
The Lingering Legacy of Eugenics
Eugenics was a theory aimed at improving the human race by encouraging the reproduction of people with “desirable” traits and discouraging—or forcibly preventing—those deemed “undesirable” from having children. It cloaked racism, ableism, and classism in the guise of science.
The belief that certain ethnic groups—particularly white Europeans—were genetically superior didn’t linger in the shadows. It was mainstream. Presidents from Theodore Roosevelt to Woodrow Wilson expressed support. Colleges taught it. Immigration policies were shaped by it. Thousands were sterilized against their will. And in the 1930s, the Nazis would point to the American eugenics movement as part of their inspiration.
Modern science has thoroughly discredited eugenics. But ideas rarely disappear; they evolve. The premise—that intelligence, morality, and success are fixed, inheritable traits concentrated in a privileged few—still lingers in our culture and politics. The influence of eugenics even plays a role in my political thriller series, Alex and Cassidy.
Each time I hear Donald Trump say he has “very good genes,” I cringe. Not only because of the hubris but also because of what that phrasing echoes. Whether consciously or not, it draws on a long history of pseudoscientific elitism—one that viewed poverty, disability, and even dissent as signs of inferiority.
How It Shows Up Now
This legacy doesn’t only live in overt language; it also whispers through policy choices and social narratives.
You can hear its echo in the prosperity gospel preached from pulpits: wealth as proof of divine favor, poverty as a moral failing. You can see it in the rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives—programs that seek to correct generational imbalance, now reframed as “unfair advantage.” You can trace it in the idea that some people are “built” for leadership, while others are burdens on the system.
At its core, eugenics was about who belongs, who deserves to thrive, and who does not. When we strip resources from public institutions that serve the most vulnerable, normalize rhetoric about “low-IQ” individuals, or attack the very concept of leveling the playing field, we flirt with the same worldview—one that values hierarchy over humanity.
Learning the Hard Way
The 1920s weren’t just the heyday of eugenics and inequality. During this period, we received warning signs we failed to heed in time. Restrictive immigration laws, anti-labor sentiment, and aggressive tariff policies helped pave the way to the Great Depression. The United States entered the 1930s deep in economic despair, burdened by policies shaped more by fear than foresight.
Globally, that same fear—of outsiders, of change, of perceived “weakness”—gave rise to fascism. The eugenic theories popularized in the U.S. were weaponized in Nazi Germany to justify genocide. As a nation and a world, we were forced to confront what happens when pseudoscience and nationalism run unchecked.
But out of that catastrophe came a reckoning. The lessons of the Great Depression and World War II reshaped our worldview. We invested in international alliances, built public infrastructure, and expanded access to education and healthcare. The path was far from perfect, but those decades of recommitment to equity and inclusion helped foster one of modern history's most stable and prosperous periods.
For nearly a century, we’ve avoided another global war. We've endured recessions, conflicts, and upheaval, but we've repeatedly pulled back from the brink. I believe that's partly because the memory of what came before was still close enough to guide our course corrections.
A Choice We Still Have to Make
That memory, however, is fading. The last survivors of those pivotal decades are leaving us. With them goes firsthand testimony of what happens when we abandon pluralism, scapegoat the vulnerable, or decide that “some lives matter more.”
We must be careful not to revive the assumptions we once dismantled: the belief that the strong should inherit the earth, that poverty equals failure, and that intellectual or genetic “fitness” determines worth. These ideas are not just relics of the past. They are ideas that, left unchallenged, resurface in new clothes.
History isn’t just what happened—it’s what we choose to remember.
And what we choose to repeat.
Terrifyingly true and written beautifully with such insight.