EUGENICS

Eugenics, a term derived from the Greek for well-born, is the science of improved breeding applied to humans. The eugenics movement was one of several initiatives that originated in the late nineteenth century, and which focused on the problem of the urban poor. The new Darwinian biology with its emphasis on evolutionary success and survival of the fittest was seen as providing an alternative ameliorative route to the efforts of the environmentalists, the sanitarians, and the public health movement. Fear of urban degeneration coincided with the beginning of the demographic transition with its sharply lowered fertility, especially marked in the upper socioeconomic classes.

The Early Movement

The eugenics movement began in Britain, but its appeal and its organization was international. It was particularly important in the United States and Germany. Francis Galton (1822–1911), explorer and amateur scientist, and cousin of English naturalist Charles Darwin, produced the founding documents, his Hereditary Genius of 1869 and Natural Inheritance of 1889. It was nature, not nurture, he claimed, that determined that eminent men were usually the sons of eminent fathers. The statistical methods he suggested–the normal curve, correlation, and regression–were developed by his admirer, the statistician Karl Pearson (1857–1936), working at University College, London, to measure the effect of heredity. Their work lent scientific support to the idea that class differentials represented levels of inherited natural ability and of civic worth. In this intellectual climate, the so-called professional model of class structure based on the occupation of male breadwinners, proposed by statistician William Farr (1807–1883) in 1851, reached its fully developed form in the British Census of 1911. It put the professional and intellectual groups in Class I, skilled labor in Class III, and unskilled and casual labor in Class V, with fill-in classes between. This classification scheme encouraged a linear view of society with the professional class as the most highly evolved. If indeed ability was inherited, and if classes corresponded to biological subtypes as Galton supposed, the differential decline in fertility in Class I was a national catastrophe. It was a catastrophe that the eugenists sought to publicize and to remedy.

As primary education became compulsory and the poorest and most deprived began to enter the new elementary schools in the last quarter of the century, children who could not keep up academically came to be seen as a compelling problem. Mary Dendy, secretary of the Lancashire and Cheshire Association for the Permanent Care of the Feebleminded, and Ellen Pinsent, chair of the Special Schools Subcommittee of the Birmingham Education Committee, founded the National Association for Promoting the Welfare of the Feebleminded in 1896. Their "welfare" entailed segregation and control of the children they selected as feebleminded for the rest of their lives starting in 1902 on a farm at Sandlebridge in Cheshire. Seen in Galtonian terms, feeblemindedness was inherited: Segregation would prevent its propagation.

The eugenics movement began in earnest after the turn of the twentieth century, taking additional impetus from the diffusion of Mendelian theory (named after Austrian botanist Gregor Mendel) after 1901. The Eugenics Education Society's (1907) founding drive was started by Sybil Gotto, another Galton admirer, then a young widow interested in social problems. The society took the now elderly Galton as its figurehead. It was mainly a propaganda group rather than a scientific society, but its projects included teaching the science of heredity and research on the inherited nature and relationships of the urban poor–what it called its Pauper Pedigree Project, a pauper being the term for someone receiving relief under the poor law. Its methodology was typically that of the pedigree, an easily understood and convincing demonstration of heredity. It focused on the elevated fecundity of the pauper class, in which, it alleged, every family, in their terms, was studded with paupers, the impoverished, inebriates, criminals, and the feebleminded. The Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feeble Minded of 1909, strongly supported by the Society, led to the segregationist Mental Deficiency Act (1914). Eugenists pointed to this Act as their proudest success.

Eugenics in the United States

In the United States, eugenics was first fostered by the American Breeders' Association (founded in 1903, renamed the American Genetic Association in 1914), in which a subcommittee concerned itself with human heredity, supporting itself scientifically on Mendelism and on the collection of pedigrees. Interestingly, the stockbreeders generally were uninterested in Mendelism; it was impossible to use it in pursuing practical, quantitative objectives, such as enhanced egg production and milk yield, or even improving the racing performance of thoroughbreds. Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944), Harvard Professor of Zoology and Director of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York, preached Galton and eugenics to his Harvard students. In Heredity in Relation to Eugenics (1911), he applied Mendelism to the inheritance of psychological traits such as memory, temperament, general bodily energy, and criminality as well as intelligence. Many of his exemplary pedigrees came from psychologist Henry H. Goddard, superintendent of the Training School for Defectives, Vineland, New Jersey. Low mental acumen was a unit character determined by Davenport to be a recessive condition due to the absence of a factor for intelligence. If the factor was absent in both parents, it would be absent in the children. Davenport's nominee as superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office was Harry H. Laughlin, an agriculturalist from Iowa who trained as a biologist specializing in heredity under Davenport at Cold Spring Harbor. As superintendent, he organized a collection of pedigrees mainly of poor families showing what he claimed to be inherited mental and social problems, and supported the campaign for eugenic sterilization. The first state sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907, and by 1917, 15 other states had legalized the sterilization of a number of different types of people deemed to be "defective." In 1923, an American Eugenics Society was formed, led by the Yale economist Irving Fisher; it soon had 28 state committees. But after World War I, the "vulgar Mendelism" of the early pedigrees was increasingly rejected by scientists. In the 1930s, the Eugenics Record Office began to lose its funding and eventually closed in 1939. Sterilization on eugenic grounds, however, continued. The numbers picked up after 1930 and the practice continued into the 1970s in the United States and Canada, until the laws permitting it were repealed one by one. Approximately 60,000 sterilizations took place under this system, usually of the poor, and often of "wayward girls," deemed "moral imbeciles" because they had given birth to a child out of wedlock. Science, in fact, mainly supplied only the rhetoric for eugenics. It was as much a political as a scientific movement, and its greatest success in the United States had been in persuading Congress in 1924 to limit immigration from the supposedly inferior populations of southern and eastern Europe.

Eugenics in Europe

In Britain, the Eugenics Society, as it was now called, led a campaign to legalize eugenic sterilization, from about 1930. But sterilization, even voluntary sterilization, was never legalized there. The Society's focus on controlling the "disturbing" fertility of the urban poor led to support for birth control clinics, though not for their rather quarrelsome advocate, Marie Stopes, even though she was an enthusiastic eugenist herself. It was also involved in setting up the International Union for the Scientific Investigation of Population Problems (IUSIPP), following a congress organized in Geneva in 1927 by Stopes's American counterpart, birth control leader Margaret Sanger (1879–1966). The congress was attended by leading eugenists from every country in which there was an organized movement. The first president of IUSIPP was American population ecologist and geneticist Raymond Pearl (1879–1940) of Johns Hopkins University, with Sir Bernard Mallet (1859–1932), retired Registrar-General of Britain, of the British Eugenics Society, as vice-president and treasurer. Its British component was the British Population Society, the members of which were all active in the Eugenics Society; IUSIPP's announcements and proceedings appeared in the Society's publication, the Eugenics Re-view. In 1936, another organization, the Population Investigation Committee was set up by the Eugenics Society as an autonomous joint committee, with the stated intention of developing a questionnaire on fertility. The project was interrupted by the outbreak of World War II, but the Committee survived, initially kept going by a series of grants from the Society. Its activities increasingly defined mainstream demography.

The country in which eugenics was both the most highly developed, and the most destructive, was Germany. Its earliest advocate was Wilhelm Schallmeyer (1857–1919), Darwinist, psychiatrist, and author of a thesis on the Pressing Problem of the Physical Degeneration of Civilised Man (1891). Like the British and American eugenists, he pointed to the burden on the state of caring for the "pauper idiot" who could produce nothing for society. Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940), a German physician, started the world's first eugenic society in 1905. Its focus was on what he termed the damage to the Caucasian race done by the protection of its weakest members. From the start it was envisaged as part of an international movement, and in 1912, the first Eugenics Congress met in London to hear papers by a mix of scientists, statisticians, social reformers and political activists. The Permanent International Eugenics Committee was an outcome of the Congress. Interrupted by World War I, there were two further international congresses, both held in United States, in 1921 and 1932.

German eugenicists soon left behind the simplistic pedigree methods of the British and the Americans. The Stuttgart statistician Wilhelm Weinberg took the lead in mathematizing Mendelism, a complex system of calculations taken up first by eugenists such as Fritz Lenz, a geneticist, and by the Munich psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin who applied it to the inheritance of schizophrenia. But, from the early 1920s, Mendelism was abandoned for Rüdin's more politically persuasive method, which he called empirical prognosis. A collection of data on the prevalence of a spectrum of different abnormalities in the families of schizophrenics could be used to point to the need for a sterilization program. The Nazi government in 1933 enacted the sterilization law, planned by Rüdin and modeled on laws in the United States, as soon as it came to power. Sterilization became compulsory for patients and families with several types of mental diseases and disabilities. Roughly 600,000 sterilizations took place. Racism was not at first a necessary part of this hereditarian program, but with state support, it expanded into systematic euthanasia, first for the inhabitants of mental hospitals, then for people with other chronic diseases, and finally for Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, Communists, and Slavs. The Nazis thus managed to justify the extermination of several million of their own citizens. After World War II ended, the Nuremberg tribunal was unable to indict anyone for forced sterilization. The German law, it was pointed out, derived from American laws and the practice of forced sterilization was still legal in the United States.

Post-World War II Eugenics

In the 1930s, the British Eugenics Society endured attacks on its science and its ideology by left-wing geneticists. The attackers, Lancelot Hogben (1895–1975) of the London School of Economics, and J. B. S. Haldane (1892–1964) of University College, London, were offended by the eugenists' conflation of social class and social worth, and their rejection of the influence of environment. Hogben placed his hopes on genetic linkage and on blood groups as a genetic marker: If a trait is linked to a blood group, he felt, it must be truly biological, and not environmentally determined. The psychiatrist Lionel Penrose (1898–1972) attacked the association of feeblemindedness with an inherited pauper class. After World War II, political changes in Britain eroded the class system. Its links to differential fertility and pauperism became less acceptable with the end of the poor law and the coming of the welfare state. The image of eugenics also suffered from its association with Naziism. Under Penrose, Annals of Eugenics became Annals of Human Genetics in 1954. In 1968, the Eugenics Review closed, and the Society turned to third world overpopulation and fertility in the Journal of Biosocial Science. In the United States, the Population Council, founded in 1952, also focused on the third world and its problems. The Council's first executive officer was the Wall Street banker Frederick Osborn (1889–1981), who had been president of the American Eugenics Society from 1946 to 1952; the offices of the Population Council and the Eugenics Society were initially at the same address. During the 1970s, eugenic sterilization of poor young women tailed off. More modern genetic counseling focused not on poverty and fertility, but on genetic disease. Amniocentesis was not expected to identify the social problem group, as the erstwhile pauper class was now called.

In 1989 the British Eugenics Society became the Galton Institute. The Institute has recently been interested in exploring its own past, a history of serious importance since the eugenic problematic has molded present day human genetics and population studies.

EUGENICS

The Early Movement

Eugenics in the United States

Eugenics in Europe

Post-World War II Eugenics

BIBLIOGRAPHY