History Rebranded: America’s Concealed Eugenic Past

Sydney Sweeney, New York subway ads and World War II. At first, what are seemingly disjunct topics are all examples of how history gets filtered, whitewashed and erased.

Revisionism is a term frequently used when historians revisit accepted narratives in light of new evidence, or when institutions launder facts — which would be opposed to their interests — into a more palatable and abraded interpretation. 

The first case is a matter of scholarly review; the second case, however, is a form of historical obnubilation which, through small omissions, softening language and selective emphasis, corrodes a facet from the scope of history. 

Revisionism makes old ideologies appear novel again, and the price is a public which forgets what those ideas have already done.

When historical amnesia takes hold of the collective consciousness, American society is made susceptible to repeating earlier societies’ mistakes. When World War II is taught as an American morality tale with the United States as the purely righteous victors, young Americans become less cognizant of the full scope of the government at the time, including the similarities between the U.S. government and the authoritarian governments they fought. 

World War II concluded with the surrender of Germany to the Allied forces in 1945, though over the decades since, the credit for this momentous victory has shifted. 

When polled, in the aftermath of the war, 57% of the French public considered the Soviet Union as having done the most to defeat Nazi Germany. But in 2024, the number dwindled down to just 17%. Conversely, the credit allocated to the United States swung from 20% to 47%.

This isn’t an argument for one national mythos over another, but a demonstration that collective memory doesn’t function as a historical ledger, let alone an archive.

On the battlefield, the Eastern Front was anything but the footnote American education now treats it as. For most of the war, 75-80% of the Wehrmacht — the Nazi German military — were deployed in the East, and about 80% of the German deaths occurred here. The scale of the losses across participating countries tells a similar story.

The National World War II Museum lists Soviet deaths in the tens of millions, while U.S. deaths sit in the hundreds of thousands.

The seemingly cleaner the World War II narrative becomes — with American troops treated as the savior of democracy against the evils of tyranny — the easier it is to regard fascism as a foreign defect which has been solved. 

The American exceptionalist outlook allows people to peer into the past, stare straight into the unvarnished machinery of fascism and have the gall to say “it couldn’t happen here” because they were on the right side then. 

But it can and did happen here. The eugenic scaffolding, which held up the ethnosupremacist mythology of fascism, was cultivated first in the United States. 

Eugenics was an early 20th-century movement aiming to improve the human population through selective breeding, segregation and sterilization, and was widely accepted as a legitimate science. 

America was the first country to put this pseudoscientific theory into praxis, beginning with Indiana’s forced sterilization laws passed in 1907. Then, in 1927, SCOTUS upheld compulsory sterilization with Justice Holmes delivering the line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” 

Additionally, a Yale study, which reviewed the medical editorials from 1930-45, argues U.S. sterilization campaigns were more closely aligned with Nazi policy than one might think. Specifically, the study notes the pre-Nazi German admiration for American leadership’s implementation of sterilization programs and reports more than 40,000 eugenic sterilizations by 1944. 

The practice of eugenics didn’t end with the war, either. Between 1973 and 1976, federal investigations found Indian Health Service regions was sterilizing thousands of Native American women. 

When everyday Americans are only taught the triumph of democracy over fascism, they become less prepared to recognize how democratic societies can incubate coercive public health projects while still calling themselves free. They shift their collective attention outward, missing the domestic roots of the ideologies they claim to have defeated. 

Today, the consequences of revisionism must be faced. 

To most, the modern rebranding of genetic determinism doesn’t feel like Nazi-adjacent pseudoscience, even though some companies are invoking the same dogma held by the Nazis. 

A recent example comes from an IVF startup company, Nucleus Genomics, and its ad campaign slogan featured in New York City subways, which says, “IQ is 50% genetic.” 

Even setting aside ethics, this phrasing is scientifically inaccurate seeing as heritability is a statistic about variation within a population in a particular environment, which doesn’t mean half of any individual’s intelligence necessarily comes from genes, nor does it mean the other half is choice. 

Even if genetics did account for more, it would change nothing about anyone’s humanity, dignity or right to live free from coercion. The invocation of eugenic propaganda only further feeds into the cycle of revisionism and palliates these concepts to the masses. 

Of course, it doesn’t help when the cultural turf is already primed to hear “genes” and think about determinism. This is why Sydney Sweeney’s controversial ad campaign for American Eagle jeans, where she touts her “good genes,” can ignite completely different responses within American culture. 

Looking towards Chicago — an ever-changing city built back from its own ashes — finds a constant in its tendency towards revisionism.  

Now hailed for its cultural diversity, many residents forget Chicago’s less-than-admirable past. The city was racially segregated long before federal redlining existed, including the buried history of the roadway defined by its congestion — The Eisenhower Expressway. 

The roadway’s construction scattered ethnic communities and reshaped the lives of thousands with displacement through the use of eminent domain. Today, it’s remembered as essential infrastructure, not as a project considering certain communities disposable. 

American society can’t become immune to its eugenic past by refusing to acknowledge it, but rather, becomes vulnerable to its repetition and resurgence. 

What begins as omission can accumulate into danger. Eugenic language can adapt, rebrand and slip back into discourse through the guise of innovation, efficiency and even progress.