"America led the way in legalizing and promoting coerced eugenic sterilizations," historian Angela Franks writes.11 Progressives had their first success in 1907 when Indiana passed a law requiring sterilization of "confirmed criminals, idiots, imbeciles and rapists." Over the next thirty years, twenty-six other states passed similar laws. In the early 1930s, when the Nazis came to power, American states were sterilizing 2,000 to 4,000 people a year. In all, around 65,000 people were sterilized against their will as a consequence of progressive eugenic legislation in the United States. Around the same time, progressives persuaded states across the country to pass marriage restriction laws that prohibited whites and blacks from intermarrying."