EUGENICS

Eugenics was defined in 1904 by Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), who coined the word, as "the science which deals with all the influences that improve and develop the inborn qualities for a race" (Nature [1904] 70:82). From this innocuous beginning, the eugenics movement gave support to some of the twentieth century's most frightening decisions about population, including many thousands of forced sterilizations in the United States and Nazi Germany, and the deaths of thousands of persons deemed too inferior to be allowed to live. At the height of its influence in the period between the two world wars, it had few enemies: official Catholicism and the extreme left were almost alone in their opposition. The movement lost its political support after World War II; sterilization legislation was repealed in the 1960s and 1970s. However, a shadow of the old eugenics still persists in the early twenty-first century in the form of genetic counseling of individuals at risk and also in efforts at population control in underdeveloped countries.

The eugenics movement proper began in the early twentieth century with the founding of eugenics societies in various countries. But for decades before that, there had been a pervasive feeling that humanity and human society were degenerating. In art and literature as well as science, degeneration was the focus of discussion. In Germany Max Nordau (1849–1923) argued that all modern art was a product of disease, and in Italy Cesare Lombroso (1835–1909) claimed to recognize criminal types by their degenerate physiognomy. From the mid-nineteenth century on, "meliorist" groups seeking to improve society—in Britain, the Social Science Association (1857), Charity Organisation Society (1869), the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety (1884), The National Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded (1896), and the Moral Education League (1898)—concerned themselves with the minds and bodies of the urban poor and the influence of poisons such as city life, syphilis, and alcoholism. All but the Society for the Study and Cure of Inebriety had many women members.

In the last decades of the century, birthrates began to fall: steeply among the upper classes, but far less steeply among the so-called residuum, the slum-dwellers of the industrial cities. As early as 1865 Sir Francis Galton (1822–1911), a cousin of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), had suggested that talent and character were hereditary; in 1869 his Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences appeared. If talent was hereditary, and the talented were failing to reproduce, society was doomed. The addition of Mendelian theory around 1900 gave scientific support to the fears of the upper classes that social value was hereditary and could die out.

The first eugenics society, the German Racial Hygiene Society, was founded in 1905, and the Eugenics Education Society of Britain in 1907. In the United States, legislation to permit sterilization of "undesirables" antedated the eugenics movement. The American Breeders Association began in 1903 and included a section on eugenics. The Eugenics Record Office was founded the same year. The French Eugenics Society was set up in 1912. These four represent a cross-section of the early movement, with a basic program in common, and each with some national elements. Other groups came to be set up later, but these formed the backbone of the movement. All looked to Galton as their inspiration, used his new word eugenics, and subscribed to his definition.

The German Racial Hygiene Society incorporated Aryanism, with its racist mythology, and social hygiene, in the persons of Wilhelm Ploetz (1860–1940), a physician and journalist, the organizer of the group, and his friends Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952), a psychiatrist; Richard Thurnwald (1869–1954), an anthropologist; and Anastasius Nordenholz (1862–1953), a social scientist. The original Berlin group sponsored subgroups in Munich, Freiburg, Dresden, and Stuttgart. By 1913 there were 425 members: physicians, university teachers, and biologists, very few of them women. The German attitude to genetic theory was very sophisticated: Wilhelm Weinberg's (1862–1937) mathematical Mendelism was available by 1908, and he himself was a member of the Stuttgart chapter. Mendelism explained the inheritance of such conditions as schizophrenia, as Rüdin claimed to have demonstrated in 1916, but in 1920 he and his colleagues in Munich abandoned Mendelism for "empirical prognosis," a theory-less collection of family data that accorded better with the group's plans for sterilization of mental patients and the "socially worthless."

The Eugenics Education Society in London, with Galton as its figurehead, had 1,047 members by the outbreak of World War I, at least a third of them women, many of them also members of the activist social societies out of which it was formed. Its original organizer was Sybil Gotto (later Sybil Neville-Rolfe), a youthful social activist inspired by Galton's books, and a lawyer friend of Galton's named Montague Crackanthorpe (1832–1913), its second president, later succeeded by Leonard Darwin (1850–1943), a son of Charles Darwin. Local groups formed elsewhere, for example in Cambridge. Most of the membership belonged to the educated middle class: they spoke on its behalf, with an aggressively outspoken class-consciousness. The Society's focus was particularly on the defective heredity of the "pauper class," those who were dependent on relief. Pauperism was seen as having many causes—inebrity, venereal disease, and feeblemindedness—but the Society's project of collecting pedigrees of pauper families underlined its insistence that the root of social failure was bad heredity. Pedigrees linking several families showing an interbreeding pauper class, studded with alcoholics, syphilitics, and the feebleminded, were prepared for the Society by Eric J. Lidbetter, a Poor Law Relieving Officer. The differential fertility of classes suggested that soon most of society would be replaced by descendents of the prolific paupers. Proposed remedies mirrored those of the Association for the Care of the Feeble-Minded, with its segregated farm schools and institutions, where the feebleminded could be interned for life. The Society began a campaign to legalize voluntary sterilization in 1930; it was unsuccessful.

Not all eugenists belonged to the Society: the statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), an admirer of Galton, despised the amateurishness of the Society's science and its reliance on drawing-room talks. His group was actively hostile to Mendelism and preferred Galtonian statistics—the new techniques of frequency and standard deviation, the socalled bell curve, regression, and correlation. The Society itself used simple pedigrees, with no emphasis on any particular scientific method.

The American eugenists were Mendelian to the core. The American Breeders' Association was mainly concerned with the breeding of animals and plants for agriculture, but it had a section devoted to eugenics. In 1910 its Secretary was the biologist Charles Davenport (1866–1944), head of the Carnegie Institute's Station for Experimental Evolution at Cold Stream Harbor, set up in 1904. The Association's journal published articles explaining Mendelism to agricultural breeders, who were rather unreceptive. The eugenics committee, however, was very active, and keenly interested in racial degeneration under the chairmanship of David Starr Jordan (1851–1931) of Stanford University. Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943), who was doing breeding experiments with poultry at the Experiment Station, made contact with Davenport, and in 1910, joined him in setting up the Eugenics Record Office, also at Cold Stream Harbor. It was funded by a private donor, Mary Williamson Averell Harriman (1851–1932), who was interested in horse breeding.

Laughlin and Davenport worked together to train teams of field workers who would go out, armed with a "Trait Book," and collect human pedigrees. Their standardized pedigree diagrams were soon adopted by other eugenists. Beginning with brachydactyly (a harmless condition producing very short fingers and toes) and albinism, clear examples of Mendelian inheritance, they went on to include pedigrees showing insanity, alcoholism, criminality, and feeblemindedness. The workers visited state institutions, hospitals, and inbred rural communities in search of material. Davenport showed the way in Eugenics: The Science of Human Improvement by Better Breeding (1910). The Eugenics Records Office's pedigrees appeared in his Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), but thousands more were archived at the Eugenics Record Office. Laughlin wrote on the legal aspects of sterilization. Speaking to the First National Conference on Race Betterment in 1914, he estimated that about 10 percent of the population was defective, and that their numbers would increase to a level that would destroy society. Therefore, he thought, these individuals must be institutionalized and sterilized. Laughlin was later to concern himself actively with immigration control on racial grounds.

Legislation enabling involuntary sterilization on hereditarian grounds of the insane, feeble minded, and "moral imbeciles"—often single mothers—was already being enacted in the United States before this work appeared. The Indiana law of 1907, a model law often copied elsewhere, authorized the sterilization of inmates of state institutions. The California Act came in 1909. Between 1905 and 1918 seventeen states voted on sterilization bills, and by 1920, 3,233 persons had been sterilized in the United States. When the laws were repealed in the 1960s, 63,678 had been sterilized, many after 1930, mainly of the feebleminded and mentally ill. These laws provided a template for the Nazi sterilization law of 1933.

The First International Congress of Eugenics was held in London in 1912. The seven hundred participants represented a progressive elite, optimistically advocating a mixture of new science, politics, and social reform, their movement dedicated to the raising of the human race to new levels of beauty and productivity, while weeding out its supposed defectives. Women supported it as a scientific validation of their authority in the reproductive sphere. The French sent a delegation to the Congress; after the meeting, they went home to start their own society. The differential birthrate was not a focus in France. The famous pediatrician Adolphe Pinard (1844–1934) led the way with pronatalism, a drive to reverse the fall of the French birthrate, and his puériculture, a new insistence on careful management and feeding of both infants and pregnant mothers. These two elements formed the core of French eugenics. Neither had anything to do with heredity, although the discussion of genetic defect more usual in other countries was later to appear in France as well.

By 1914 the founding societies were well established. The series of International Congresses, continued in the United States after World War I, bound the movement together and enabled concepts produced in one country to take root in others. The eugenics movement swept up some of the most influential thinkers of the time; so far, there had been very little opposition.

See alsoDarwin, Charles; Degeneration; Galton, Francis; Lombroso, Cesare; Marriage and Family; Mendel, Gregor; Population, Control of; Race and Racism; Science and Technology.

bibliography

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Pauline M. H. Mazumdar