The Eugenics Crusade

PBS AMERICA, 9.00PM

The horrors perpetrated by the Nazis have since eclipsed eugenics programmes elsewhere. But this two-part documentary series, full of historians and archival footage, reminds us how the movement to breed out so-called “bad genes” came about. It was originally propounded by Victorian polymath Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin), and it then took hold in America in the early 20th century through a series of brutal state-sponsored programmes of forced sterilisation.