eugenics

eugenics The founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, identified it as ‘the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the racial qualities of future generations either physically or mentally’. Galton was Charles Darwin's cousin and believed that human evolution could be consciously directed, by using biometry to explain the mechanisms of inheritance that would prescribe new rules for human reproduction. Eugenics, therefore, was both a theoretical system and a social cause, which aimed to bring about social and biological improvement of the human race through the application of the study of heredity to human affairs.

Galton developed probabilistic statistics by inventing the correlation coefficient to analyse heredity — his main interest in the 1870s to 1890s. The idea that heredity could be understood through statistical analysis alone, however, was challenged when the works of the Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel, were discovered at the end of the nineteenth century. In the 1860s Mendel had outlined the ‘law’ of biological inheritance of positive and recessive characteristics. Something of an intellectual rift subsequently developed between biometric and Mendelian research into heredity, symbolized above all by the hostility of Galton's disciple, Karl Pearson, to Mendelianism. Pearson, who held the first Galtonian Chair of Biometry at University College London, refused to join the Eugenics Education Society, founded in Britain in 1907 (and later known as the Eugenics Society), because he believed that they remained too sympathetic to Mendelian research into heredity. In fact the Eugenics Society tried to turn Galton's creed of human racial improvement into a reality by supporting both Mendelian and biometric research into heredity and helping others to develop a method which synthesized both theories, ‘pedigree analysis’ — and it was renamed the Galton Society after World War II.

Following the establishment of the Eugenics Education Society, enthusiasm for eugenics crossed national boundaries and it promoted an international discourse on the relationship between the quality and quantity of population.

Eugenists believed that modern economies encouraged undesirable — ‘dysgenic’ — differential birth rates by facilitating the survival of ‘unfit’ mental and moral defectives, the chronic sick, residual idlers, recidivist criminals, and the unemployable. The productive had to bear ever greater tax burdens in order to support the growing numbers of degenerates, and higher fiscal exactions naturally persuaded the prudent middle classes to go in for practices of family limitation. Declining fertility amongst the professional and middle classes, rising birth rates amongst the working classes, and massive reproductive surges amongst the ‘lumpenproletariat’ — the unemployed and unemployable — had to be corrected in order to avoid race suicide.

The self-appointed mission of eugenics was to protect ‘the unborn’ through a programme of selective breeding. Positive eugenics aimed to achieve racial improvement by encouraging the fit to breed, while the goal of negative eugenics was to prevent breeding amongst the unfit. In Britain, Europe, and the US, eugenic reformers advocated marriage regulation, sequestration of the mentally deficient, and sterilization — voluntary or compulsory — of the unfit. Methods for controlling human reproduction and directing demographic change were applied, however, in different ways in different national contexts.

Before World War I eugenists in Britain concentrated on obtaining the sequestration of the ‘feebleminded’, which included the mentally retarded, alcoholics, and women who had more than one illegitimate pregnancy. British eugenists also advocated voluntary and compulsory sterilization for various social categories, and some flirted with the idea of the ‘lethal chamber’ for ridding society of its unwanted; this idea had its most profound expression in Germany in the inter-war period. In Germany and elsewhere, however, negative eugenics can be seen to have accommodated rather than invented a set of political goals whose origins had a much broader cultural base.

Eugenism combined with other ideological cults in Germany during the 1930s and 40s to produce a murderous science which legitimated the ‘final solution’ implemented under the Third Reich. When Hitler held a meeting, on August 20 1942, to appoint Otto–Georg Thierack as Reich Justice Minister and Roland Freisler as President of the ‘People's Court’, he raged about the need to reconstruct the criminal justice system. He vented a tirade about the dysgenic effects of war which left only the poorest stock to breed for the future. The justice system had to be used to re-balance the equation by killing off the ‘negative’ elements of the population. Punishment was subsequently used to cleanse the ‘body of the race’ of its undesirable members. Criminals — who, according to the Führer, included the frivolous and the irritable — were not, of course, the only undesirables who were being referred to. Cleansing meant targeting Jews, Gypsies, the mentally ill, and political dissenters for elimination. The relationship between eugenics, social Darwinism, racial hygiene, and the Nazi policies of elimination is highly complex and fiercely debated by historians. Nazi population policy could be seen as a mixture of science and pseudo-science which informed but did not solely determine the murderous ideology of Fascism. However, although eugenics may not have led directly to the construction of the Final Solution, it played a significant role in providing it with a rationalist authority. It provided similar legitimate authority to the debate about population quality elsewhere.

Eugenics won enthusiastic disciples during the Progressive Era in the US, appealing to both the conservationist and the technocratic ideas of the movement. Eugenics was embraced by a number of reform movements, which espoused the ideas of Progressivism. Sex educationalists in the social hygiene movement believed that ‘eugenics will destroy that sentimentalism which leads a woman deliberately to marry a man who is absolutely unworthy of her and can only bring disease, degradation and death.’ Margaret Sanger supported her leadership of the birth control movement with eugenic arguments about stemming the tide of the reproduction of the unfit. In the US and elsewhere, however, other eugenists were extremely cautious about the question of birth control. Some were concerned that those whom they wanted to breed actually used contraception most — the middle class and the economically prudent. In Britain the Eugenics Education Society were hostile to the activities of the Neo-Malthusian League because they feared that the widespread availability of contraception would simply enhance the decline of the middle-class birth rate, which was already fearfully low.

In the US eugenics successfully influenced three other policy areas: marriage regulation, sterilization of the unfit, and immigration restriction. By 1914 thirty states passed laws preventing marriage of the mentally handicapped and the insane, together with laws restricting marriage between people suffering a venereal disease, or between those from various categories of ‘feebleminded’. The first state sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907, and by 1917 fifteen other states had followed suit. Sterilization was legal for habitual criminals plus various categories of the insane, mentally handicapped, and epileptic. Eugenics in the US also provided ideological justifications for immigration restriction and the development of IQ testing.

By the inter-war years eugenics in Britain focused on the declining birth rate, the changing demographic structure of the population, family allowances and family tax relief, voluntary sterilization, popularizing the idea of the eugenic marriage, and raising a eugenic consciousness throughout society. The British biologist, Julian Huxley, and the long-serving secretary of the Eugenics Education Society in the 1920s and 30s, C. P. Blacker, suggested that eugenics should become a form of social consciousness, which elevated the needs of the community above those of the individual, thereby facilitating the creation of a planned Utopian society.

‘Reform’ eugenics in Britain and Europe in the inter-war period claimed that social systems and philosophies based upon individualism, such as capitalism and nationalism, were dysgenic because rigid social stratification failed to maximize the reproduction of hereditary talents, which were distributed throughout all social divisions. Capitalism, for example, failed to provide favourable conditions for the most able amongst the labouring classes to rise to higher social and economic status and reproduce their hereditary endowments. Equally, the least able in all classes were not prevented from reproducing their inadequacies in their offspring. In place of the class system, a eugenic utopia would provide an equalized environment maximizing the possibility for the expression of desirable genetic qualities. Improvement of the social environment was crucial if a eugenically sound society was to be achieved.

While concern over the differential birth rate remained central amongst eugenic thinkers, the demographic debate broadened to include discussions of the changing age structure of the population. The transformation of the demographic structure of modern industrial societies, with smaller productive populations supporting expanding numbers of ageing, chronically sick, and unproductive dependants, led eugenists in Britain and Europe to advocate the introduction of family allowances and tax relief to encourage large families amongst both the working and the middle classes in order to check these trends. The broadening of the demographic debate was accompanied by the modernization of discussions about sterilization. The eugenic campaign for voluntary sterilization in Britain and elsewhere in Europe now suggested that the people most likely to be enthusiastic about legal voluntary sterilization would be working-class mothers with no other access to reliable birth control.

Eugenism in this period became a loose synthesis of widely divergent ideologies. The Eugenics Review reflected the broad cross-section of eugenic interpretations of demography and degeneration. British eugenists were enthusiastic about the first sterilization laws set up in Germany in 1933, admired the Nazi policy of family allowance and tax relief, which assisted ‘Aryan’ early marriage and large families, and approved of the courage of the new regime in introducing compulsory sterilization of the mentally defective. However, British eugenists were at pains to point out the differences between German and British proposals for legal sterilization. The British Eugenics Society wanted a law based on consent, with legal protection for the ‘liberty of the individual’. Blacker, in particular, perceived the need, early on, publicly to separate the identity of British from German eugenics, although he was privately aware of the members of the Society who wholeheartedly approved of the German measures.

In Britain, Europe, and the US, the popular appeal and intellectual legitimacy of eugenics declined after World War II following revelations of the mass murder perpetrated by the Third Reich. Nevertheless, eugenic ideology did continue to influence post-war ideas about the social applications of medicine. Enthusiastic supporters of social medicine, for example, believed that a form of whole-person clinical practice should mix prevention and cure by synthesizing an understanding of the effects of environment and endowment upon physiological variability. In this context doctors could use knowledge of susceptibilities to advise a pattern of life and a policy of reproduction for their patients which would prevent the onset of disease either in themselves or their offspring. Such ideas eventually provided a blueprint for genetic counselling.

The development of molecular biology and embryology since World War II have greatly enhanced the possibilities of genetically engineering future populations. While genetic counselling has currently been limited to providing prospective parents with advice about known hereditary diseases, such as Huntington's Chorea and Cystic Fibrosis, there has been popular speculation about the possibility of ‘designing’ the babies of the future. Tests for fetal gender have already resulted in controversial abortion practices amongst communities throughout the world who place a higher cultural value on a male than a female life.

For the first three decades after World War II, genetics limited its investigations largely to the hereditary nature of physiological diseases and characteristics. By contrast, contemporary molecular biology is once again beginning to cross into the social and psychological realm by claiming to be able to identify the genetic source of various forms of behaviour. The determinants of human behaviour, however, continue to be highly disputed amongst social, psychological, and biological scientists, and what has been identified in the Western media as the ‘New Eugenics’ is once again at the forefront of public debate. Some public commentators from both the scientific and lay communities have speculated that this debate is likely to become one of the most urgent in the post-industrial societies of the twenty-first century.

Dorothy Porter

Bibliography

Evans, R. (1997). In Search of Social Darwinism. The histiography of the concept. In Medicine and modernity. Public health and medical care in nineteenth and twentieth century Germany, (ed. M. Berg and G. Cocks). Cambridge University Press.
Kevles, D. (1985). In the name of Eugenics. Genetics and the uses of human heredity. Knopf, New York.
Mazumdar, P. M. H. (1992). Eugenics, genetics and human failings. Routledge, London.
Soloway, R. (1990). Demography and degeneration. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill.

See also genocide; heredity; sterilization.