International Eugenics Movement Research Paper

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The term eugenics, derived from the Greek ευγενεσ (eugenes) was first coined by English mathematician and geographer Francis Galton (1822–1911). In his book Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development eugenics refers to one born ‘good’ in stock, hereditarily endowed with noble qualities (Galton 1883, p. 24). Eugenics was the human counterpart of scientific animal and plant breeding.

In his book, Galton lays out all the dimensions that came to characterize eugenics as an ideology and social political movement during the first half of the twentieth century. These were as follows. (a) Adherence to the methods of selective breeding as applied to the improvement of the human species. (b) A strong belief in the power of heredity in determining physical, physiological, and mental (including personality) traits. (c) An inherent ethnocentrism and racism that included belief in the inferiority of some races or groups and superiority of others (a view extended to ethnic groups and social classes as well). (d) Belief in the power of science, rationally employed, to solve social problems, including ones so seemingly intractable as pauperism, crime, violence, urban decay, prostitution, alcoholism, and various forms of mental disease, including manic depression and ‘feeblemindedness’ (retardation).

It took some time after Galton first propounded idea of eugenics for eugenics organizations and activities to emerge around the world, but by the time of World War I (1914) eugenics had become a truly international movement. Thus, the standard historical view of eugenics as a largely British, American, and German phenomenon is inaccurate. Eugenics developed in a variety of national contexts with a wide range of ideological and political programs (Adams 1990, pp. 4–6 and 217–31). The earliest eugenics movements were founded in Germany in 1904, in Britain in 1907, and in the United States in 1908–1910. Other eugenics movements appeared around the world shortly thereafter: in Western Europe between 1910 and 1920: France, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, Finland, Russia, Latin America (Cuba, Brazil, Mexico), in Canada, Africa ( particularly South Africa), and Asia (China and Japan). While eugenics clearly originated in its modern form, that is, viewed as a branch of genetics, in the west, its spread around the globe gave it an international flavor that retained some common core of scientific and political beliefs, while developing considerable local differences. Eugenicists themselves were consciously internationalists, arguing that like all science, eugenics knew no national boundaries. Despite this international profile, however, it was in western countries such as the United Sates and, of course, Germany under the Nazi regime (1933–1945), that eugenics as an intellectual and social movement reached its greatest strides and from eugenicists’ point of view, enjoyed its greatest ideological and political success.

The international character of eugenics is reflected in the three major international congresses, at which eugenics enthusiasts gathered literally from around the world. The first was held in London in 1912, while the second and third were held in New York (the third congress was held at the American Museum of Natural History) just following the sixth International Congress of Genetics, in 1932). Papers and photographs of exhibits from the second and third congresses fill several impressive volumes.

Although eugenics is often thought of as a politically conservative movement, globally its supporters came from widely divergent political backgrounds. Some, like Charles B. Davenport, Harry H. Laughlin, and Madison Grant in the US, and Eugen Fischer in Germany, were reactionary, while others, such as Britain’s J. B. vs. Haldane, the United States’s H. J. Muller, or Russia’s Alexander Serebrovsby, were influential left-wing eugenicists who held socialist or even communist views (Paul 1984, p. 567). Left-wing eugenicists were not necessarily egalitarians, however, and few envisioned a society in which all people were truly ‘equal.’ Their model was a meritocracy based on inherited biological worth.

1. Background: Degeneration Theories And The Rise Of Eugenics (1890–1914)

In both the west and east the late nineteenth century saw, for different reasons, a widespread belief that the human species was in various phases of deterioration and decline (Paul 1995). Much of this pervasive pessimism came from observations in the social and political arenas. British eugenicists were particularly concerned with the high fecundity and presumed inherited mental degeneracy of the urban working class, particularly those labeled as ‘paupers’ or (in Britain) the ‘residuum.’ By contrast, American eugenicists were more concerned with the number of feebleminded who appeared to be filling the prisons and insane asylums in the wake of urbanization and industrialization after 1865 (the US Civil War) and with the genetic deficiencies of the ‘new immigrants’ around the turn of the century. In Germany various racial and ethnic groups were thought to harbor an undue proportion of mentally ill, psychotic, psychopathic, and psychiatric members. In France and Brazil where ideas of the inheritance of acquired characteristics held more sway than in most other countries, public health measures, rather than reliance on selective breeding, were seen as the most effective means to combat degeneracy. In Asia, general theories of degeneration spread with the encroaching influence of western imperialism from the 1860s onward. The inability of the Asian populations to ward off imperial penetration or intra-Asian rivalries was seen as partly a result of scientific and technological backwardness and of physical and cultural weakness in the face of the western onslaught.

2. Eugenics And Scientism

Eugenics throughout the world was viewed as the application of rational, and ‘modern’ scientific principles to the solution of age-old social problems. Eugenicists and many of their supporters had a high regard for science and technology, symbols in the western countries of the triumph of enlightenment and rationality, and of modern capitalist control over and exploitation of, nature for human gain. The goal of science was to predict and control, an ideology extended to society at large. The period in which eugenics developed was globally one of great economic, social, and political instability: two major world wars, the dissolution of the great empires of Europe in the wake of rebellions abroad, rapid industrialization in the west, especially the growth of heavy industry, and urbanization, all of which contributed to the rise in such problems as alcoholism, prostitution, crime, mental illness, and social unrest. In the major western countries organized labor gained great strength, leading to increased and bloody conflicts in the period 1890–1940. Communism made major gains during the period, with the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, the organization of Workers’ Councils that took over several cities in Germany after the Armistice in 1918; and with the expansion of such groups in the United States as the International Workers of the World (the IWW, or ‘Wobblies’) who carried out a successful general strike in Seattle and the northwest in 1919.

Outside of Europe, similar, sometimes related, historical events led to similar responses. Latin America underwent convulsive economic and social change in the wake of the decline of Spanish and rise of North American colonialism. In Asia, the struggle in China and Japan toward ‘modernization,’ interimperial rivalries culminating in the Sino–Japanese War of 1894–95 and the Russo–Japanese war of 1905, all stemmed from growing expansionism related to trade, and control of raw materials and markets between east and west and within rising industrial powers, like Japan, in Asia itself. As in the west, science and technology in Asia were associated with modernism and economic advancement.

As a supposed new ‘science,’ eugenics meshed well with modernist ideology. Eugenics was based on what was thought to be the cutting edge research in a new science (genetics), was mathematical, experimental, rigorous, and predictive, and purported to apply the principles of science to the solution of previously intractable social problems. Worldwide, it provided an incentive for academically-trained practioners (geneticists) to join the new managerial class that was beginning to apply highly-trained expertise to everything from organizing factory production lines, offices, and schools, to ‘scientific’ agriculture and not least, human reproduction. Applied to society, eugenics became part of the ideology of ‘social engineering’ that was replacing the older notion of laissez-faire associated with social Darwinism. It was not enough to let nature take its course: scientifically-trained social engineers had to step in and direct that change along national lines. Eugenically, this change involved the guidance of human reproduction to ensure that only those with good heredity passed on their genes to future generations. Eugenics was viewed as the ‘control of human evolution.’ Eugenicists argued that to control heredity at the source was to be efficient—to prevent problems before they occurred, rather than let them happen and then deal with the consequences. In various forms—either as proposed breeding and sterilization programs, or maternal and other public health proposals, the efficiency argument dominated much of eugenic social rhetoric. In the United States this collage of views and ideas was swept up into a somewhat heterogeneous movement known as Progressivism. Progressives advocated the use of science to solve social problems, and embraced the efficiency movement of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856–1915), which had been developed in the United States initially in an industrial context. Similar strains and arguments appeared in different forms in eugenics movements around the world.

Since other articles focus on details of various eugenics movements around the world this research paper will focus on the general nature and extent of international eugenics activities, comparing the similarities and differences among the various national movements.

3. British And American Eugenics, 1880–1940

British and American eugenics shared a number of intellectual and social concerns, as well as personal contacts. The major importer of eugenics to the United States, Charles B. Davenport (1866–1944), spent part of the year 1899–1900 with Galton and his protege, Karl Pearson (1857–1935) at University College, London, learning statistics and biometrics and gaining initiation into Galton’s ‘secular religion of eugenics.’ American eugenics thus grew directly out of the vision that Galton, and later Pearson, developed. At the same time, American eugenics developed its own particular twists, especially its early acceptance of particulate, discontinuous and Mendelian concepts of heredity, a relationship not shared by their British counterparts until the later 1920s.

Mendelism notwithstanding, American and British eugenicists shared the basic assumption that such traits as alcoholism, criminality, physical and mental ‘defects,’ and intelligence, were all biologically inherited, with the worse forms concentrated in the lower classes and among certain races. Horrified by the significantly higher birth-rate of the lower classes, eugenicists in the United States and Britain argued that the observed decline in productivity and ‘national efficiency’ was due to the increasing number of lessproductive social defectives that were being born and were having to be cared for by the state. Eugenics was a scientific approach to improving social efficiency. In Britain, Pearson’s largely theoretical orientation to eugenics led him to warn eugenicists to avoid politics. Partly as a result, British eugenicists had much less legislative success than their counterparts in the United States.

In several ways the American movement followed a different trajectory from the movement in Britain: (a) American eugenicists became strong advocates of psychometrics, the burgeoning new school of I.Q. testing, which took it for granted such tests measured an innate, unchanging mental function. While British eugenicists also assumed that mental ability was inherited, they did not employ the I.Q. (or other similar) tests to the same extent as in the United States; (b) Leaders of American eugenics were from the start anxious to play a role in the public arena—in what today would be called formation of public policy. Eugenicists such as Harry H. Laughlin (1880–1943), Superintendent of the Eugenics Research Office at Cold Spring Harbor, NY translated eugenic principles into social action. Eugenicists lobbied for passage of the Johnson–Reed Act (Immigration Restriction Act) in the United Sates congress in 1924, while Laughlin designed a ‘Model Sterilization Law’ and eugenicists lobbied for the passage of eugenical sterilization laws in a number of states during the 1920s and 1930s. The first eugenical sterilization laws were passed in the United States (the first was Indiana, 1907) though by the mid-1930s such laws were in place in a number of western countries (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Germany, and Canada). Between 1907 and 1965, some 60,000 people in the United States—mostly in state institutions for the feeble-minded, psychiatric hospitals, and prisons—were sterilized. Like their British counterparts, American eugenicists were highly motivated by the ideas of national efficiency and rational planning (Vecoli 1960, Allen 1986, pp. 255–60).

4. Eugenics On The Continent: Germany, Scandinavia, And France

On the continent, eugenics in Germany and Scandinavia shared many features in common, while that in France took its own, unique direction. The German and Scandinavian movements were based strongly on what has been termed notions of ‘hard heredity’ (i.e., that most mental and moral attributes are rigidly determined by genes at conception), and employed basic concepts of Mendelian genetics. While the ideology of Nordic and Aryan superiority was present in both movements, it represented only one strand, and were not even the most prominent strand prior to the ascendancy of the National Socialists in Germany in 1933. Ideologues of the German movement, such as Fritz Lenz (1887–1976) and Eugen Fischer (1874– 1967) were racial purists, but during the Weimar years kept a ‘subdued’ profile on overtly racial issues. Because racial purity was a cornerstone of the Nazi regime, however, eugenics after 1933 became openly racist and pro-Nordic.

A number of common ideological convictions characterized German eugenics from its pre-1900 days, right down through the ‘final solution.’ (a) The conviction that laissez-faire capitalism was at heart dysgenic because it allowed individuals to reproduce at will, with no concern for the future well-being of society. (b) The belief that Germany’s population was degenerating, as evidenced by the debacle of World War I, increases in labor unrest, and social problems such as alcoholism, criminality, prostitution, mental illness, and retardation. (c) A strong belief in the value of a managed society based on scientific expertise. At the same time several features distinguish German eugenics from its counterparts elsewhere. (a) More German eugenicists were drawn from the medical profession than in either England/or the United States (Proctor 1988). (b) During the Weimar Republic and later the Nazi regime, eugenics received far more government funding than in most other countries. German geneticists and eugenicists all held posts on important government advisory councils dealing with matters of eugenics and national health ( Weindling 1985, pp. 308–9). (c) A major feature of German eugenics, of course, was the subsequent role it came to play in the National Socialist government and the Holocaust, between 1933 and 1945.

Some historians have argued, cogently, that eugenics became so prominent and virulent in Germany because of the humiliation of defeat in World War I and the exacerbating terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Among the factors leading to military defeat, eugenicists argued, was the nation’s national degeneracy, the influences of racial impurity, declining birthrates among the intelligentsia, and economically prosperous, and the antieugenic policies associated with socialist egalitarianism (Mosse 1964, pp. 237–40, Meineke 1963, pp. 30–4). Worsening economic conditions due to reparations payments and loss of the mineral-rich Ruhr Valley, gave, among average Germans, added weight to arguments for improving national efficiency by eliminating what the Nazis termed ‘useless eaters’ or ‘lives not worth living.’ Eugenics became the scientific rationale for euthanasia and genocide.

All three Scandinavian countries, including Finland, had well-entrenched eugenics movements by the 1920s, those in Norway and Sweden being the largest and most politically successful. Scandinavian eugenics shows much of the character of the other western movements: an emphasis on efficiency, commitment to legislative action, and a strong pro-Aryan and Nordic stance (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996). In the period between 1910 and 1925, Scandinavian eugenics was characterized by a strong belief in the superiority of the Nordic races, and thus displayed a nationalist and racist undertone. These took the form of social legislation, particularly the passage of eugenical sterilization laws (Denmark’s law was passed in 1919, Norway’s in 1934, and Sweden’s and Finland’s in 1935). The rates of sterilization varied considerably: between 1935 and 1960s Sweden sterilized over 62,000 people—an astonishing figure for a country whose total population at the time was less than 7 million (Roll-Hanson 1996, p. 263). Eugenics achieved its greatest political success in Sweden, though the most vocal international voice from Scandinavia was Jon Alfred Mjøen (1860–1939), a pharmacist turned eugenic activist. Although shunned by many in his own country for his racist views, Mjøen was viewed as a major theoretician by eugenicists in Sweden and Denmark. Nonetheless, Scandinavian eugenics as a whole never adopted the virulent Nordic racism found among Nazi elements in Germany. As advanced welfare states, the Scandinavian countries also couched their eugenics proposals in terms of ‘national efficiency.’ Hit hard by the same economic problems faced by other countries during the interwar period, and especially after 1929, the Scandinavian countries were seeking to reduce state expenditures wherever possible, and the supposedly hereditarily defective were a likely target.

5. Eugenics In France

The French, as other Europeans, harbored a growing concern about what was perceived as the degeneration of society, in France’s case associated with a declining birth rate and loss of military hegemony on the continent after the Franco–Prussian war of 1870. French eugenics also embraced as strongly as elsewhere the idea of rational management by scientifically trained experts, especially in areas of social policy. Like other countries during the same period, France was beset with a variety of economic, social, and political problems that called for sweeping changes in both public attitudes and government policy (Thomson 1960, pp. 173–86). Before, but especially after, World War I, class struggle accelerated, in such publicly visible forms as large-scale strikes (Tilly et al. 1975, pp. 71–6). Like Germany, eugenics in France was strongly supported by members of the medical, including public health, professions. French eugenics differed from that in England, the United States, and Germany, however, in three very important ways. (a) The presence of a strong Enlightenment tradition of radical social theory and practice laid greater emphasis than elsewhere on environmental, as opposed to biological, determinants of human behavior. (b) Concomitant with their emphasis on the environment, though not directly deriving from it, French biologists maintained a strong commitment to neo-Lamarckian concepts of heredity, that is, the direct inheritance of environmentally induced variations. Consequently, eugenicists in France did not emphasize Mendelian genetics and other more strictly biological factors such as Darwinian natural selection. (c) The strong influence of the Catholic church, especially with regard to matters of reproduction, caused French eugenicists for the most part to avoid advocating measures such as contraception, sterilization, or abortion to deal with actual or potential defectives (especially after the Papal Bull, Casti connubi in 1930, which condemned eugenical sterilization). The effect of the church position was to widen an already-existing division within the eugenicists’ ranks: between liberal and conservative and between pro and antisterilization forces. Thus, French eugenicists never attained the unity necessary to lobby effectively for specific eugenic measures at the legislative levels.

6. Eugenics In Russia

The development of a distinct eugenics movement in Russia was apparent in the period just before the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917). Russian eugenicists drew more of their inspiration and direction from the movements in the United States and Germany than elsewhere. Although eugenics, along with what might be called more strictly human genetics, was widely discussed in the Soviet Union, the eugenics movement there was confined almost wholly to the decade between 1920 and 1930 (Graham 1977, p. 1145). Increasingly viewed as racist and elitist in the political sphere, eugenics was disbanded even before the rise of neo-Lamarckism and the Lysenkoist movement in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet many enthusiastic and committed Bolsheviks saw no conflict between eugenical principles and socialism (Graham 1977, p. 1146). Indeed, many younger communists found eugenic ideals completely compatible with Marxism, providing a rational and materialist base to their visionary hopes for the scientific reconstruction of society.

Like the movements in England, the United States, and Germany, Russian eugenics at first was closely allied with Mendelian genetics. Although Russian eugenicists eventually moved away from negative toward more positive programs, as in Europe and the United States, they began with the deep forebodings of racial degeneration. As in other countries, in Russia after the revolution, eugenicists propounded a technocratic vision of social engineering by scientifically trained experts. It was only because of a strong Marxist opposition to technocracy that such a vision did not persist as long in Russian eugenics as it did elsewhere. Like their counterparts elsewhere, soviet eugenicists hoped to apply both positive and negative eugenic measures to improvement of the human species. Based on a survey of the state sterilization laws in the United States, Russian eugenicists such as Nikolai Kol’stsov (1872–1940) argued for large-scale sterilizations of the unfit to improve the genetic character of the Russian people. Since birth control or sterilization were viewed as both morally questionable as well as dysgenic, negative eugenics, especially sterilization, never developed a wide following in the USSR.

A more viable option for pursuit of eugenic goals after 1917 was emphasis on the widespread belief in neo-Lamarckian inheritance. Like biologists and eugenicists in France, many Soviet geneticists and eugenicists adhered to some form of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. At the time, neo-Lamarckian views were accepted by many biologists around the world. Pioneer student of human genetics, Solom G. Levit (1894–c.1938), argued that neo-Lamarckism alone allowed for the rapid improvement in human health and social behavior that eugenics called for. If the gene was as fixed an entity as classical Mendelian genetics suggested, there was little chance of creating the new soviet human being by eugenical means. Moreover, eugenicists were accused of propounding a hard-line concept of heredity to the total neglect of social and economic factors (Graham 1977, p. 1150). Eugenicists seemed to be reducing human beings to genetic machines whose consciousness was determined by their biology, not by their socioeconomic circumstances. As a result of these growing doubts, and the advent of the debate between Lysenkoists and Mendelians, by 1930 eugenics in the Soviet Union had been labeled reactionary and technocratic, and the major journal, The Russian Journal of Eugenics, was disbanded. More clearly than perhaps in other countries the fate of eugenics in Russia was uniquely tied to the turbulent period of history in which it rose and fell.

7. Eugenics In Latin America

The existence of significant eugenics movements in non-European and non-Anglo-Saxon contexts has been ignored by historians of science until quite recently (Stepan 1991). Eugenics movements in Latin America rose to prominence between the world wars and commanded considerable attention within the worldwide eugenics community. Interest in eugenics stimulated some of the first genetics courses in Latin American universities, and was often an important factor in child welfare, maternal health, infectious disease, and immigration legislation in the various countries (Stepan 1990, p. 110). Eugenics was also discussed vigorously at various Latin American scientific and public health conferences, as well as being the focus of two specific Pan-American conferences of its own (Cuba in 1927 and Argentina in 1934). A special eugenics society, the Federation International Latine des Societes d’Eugenique, was founded in 1936 under the leadership of Corrado Gini, a well-known Italian eugenicist and president of the Italian society of Genetics and Eugenics. The Federation held one international congress, in Paris in 1937. Moreover, leaders of eugenics movements in other countries expressed keen interest in the developments in Latin America. Not only Gini in Italy, but also Davenport and Laughlin in the United States, offered considerable encouragement to fledgling societies in Cuba and Mexico.

One of the most important differences between Latin American and western eugenics was the political economy of neocolonial ‘underdevelopment’ in which most Latin American countries existed in the first decades of the twentieth century. Although just beginning to experience industrialization and urbanization after World War I, Brazil, for example, was still largely an agricultural country with an impoverished rural population that was illiterate and dominated by the Catholic church. Much of the land was held as plantations by local family oligarchies and foreign investors who produced more for export than local consumption. The country was ruled by a tiny elite largely educated abroad. Biology, such as existed, was housed only in medical schools and agricultural stations. Historian Nancy Stepan has pointed to the highly mixed racial composition of most South American countries as a factor differentiating the Brazilian eugenics movement from that in Europe or the United States (Stepan 1990, p. 11).

Four specific factors helped to make eugenics attractive in the period after 1920 in countries such as Brazil (Stepan 1990, pp. 112–4). (a) A rising new nationalism and sense of independence gained from the war experience. The collapse of Germany, whose science and culture had been so much admired in Brazil and other Latin American countries before the war, generated a new sense of independence about what Latin Americans could accomplish on their own. (b) There was increased recognition of ‘the social question,’ that is, the appalling poverty and poor health of the working and peasant classes. After 1915 the combination of poverty, massive migrations, and immigration from abroad ( particularly Italy) produced a radicalization of politics. A large-scale strike in 1917 was met with brutal repression by the government and industry leaders. Under these circumstances, eugenics began to play the same role as it had in the United States and Britain: a means of breeding out the biological defectives who were claimed to be the cause of such disruptions. (c) Growing enthusiasm for science, and particularly biological science, as a means of economic and social progress, especially in the area of public health, had been imported into Latin America from Europe and the United States. As in both France and Germany, eugenics in Latin America was easily incorporated by an expanding medical profession eager to assert its own power and expertise in generating new or reformed public health policy. (d) Finally, the widespread racial intermixing (between Indian, African, and European) that characterized most Latin American countries raised the specter of race suicide and impending degeneracy.

After starting from a more anthropological and public health perspective, by the mid-1920s a new generation of eugenicists had begun to apply Mendelian genetics to formulate Latin American eugenics policies. Greatly stimulated by the visit of American geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky (1900– 1975) to Brazil in 1943, eugenicists in Latin America, unlike their US or German counterparts, used genetics to argue that miscegenation, like crossing different strains of animals and plants, could produce superior, not inferior or ‘mongrel,’ lines. With such divisions in their ranks, however, eugenicists in Latin America could not speak with one voice. Yet, despite strong antiracist views advocated by Mendelian eugenicists, racism, and marginalization of the continent’s black and Indian populations continued with full force in the face of largely foreign-dominated economic, political, and social expansion.

The Latin American experience illustrates the quite different path that eugenics could take in an environment far removed from the centers of scientific advancement, one in which scientific ideas were derived largely from outside. The strong orientation of most Latin American eugenics to personal and public hygiene, as well as to nutrition and medical care, clearly reflects the existence of widespread poverty, malnutrition, and disease (hookworm, malaria, yellow fever) among the vast and largely rural populations. With economic and health problems of such magnitude, issues of race and race-mixture were less central among Latin American eugenicists than among their counterparts in the industrialized world.

8. Eugenics In Asia

Scholars studying the history of modern Asian science have pointed out that eugenics had a role to play in many of those societies. Moreover, it was not merely western eugenics imported and imposed on Asian society carte blanche. In both China and Japan, eugenics fitted well with movements for the increased promotion of science and technology associated with the ‘modernization.’ Mendelian genetics was introduced to both China and Japan in the early decades of the twentieth century through Western scientists who traveled to Asia, as well as by Asian scientists who came to work in laboratories in the West. Unlike their Western counterparts, eugenicists in both China and Japan relied less on a formal, organized set of genetic theories, promoting eugenics primarily as a ‘modern’ way of dealing with traditional problems.

For Chinese ‘progressives,’ eugenics became a way of grounding the calls for social and economic reform in science, and thus in the principle of rational, social control. Eugenics promoted a naturalistic view of society, based on human biology. Chinese adopted the ‘soft’ approach to heredity, one in which biological inheritance could be significantly molded by environmental factors. Not exactly relying on Lamarckian notions of inheritance of acquired characteristics, during the 1920s and 1930s, Chinese eugenicists emphasized the importance of education, public health, and other social measures, along with reproductive control. There was relatively little in the way of statistical or genetic research carried out by eugenicists in Republican China. As elsewhere, eugenics in China was particularly supported by the rising professional middle classes.

In Japan, during the early decades of the twentieth century, eugenics was linked closely with movements for birth control, sex education, and public health. In this context, conditions such as venereal disease, tuberculosis, alcoholism, and leprosy were all considered inherited and eugenicists argued they should fall under the same regulations as those governing public health matters. Here too, as in the West, eugenics was seen as a scientific means of combating social and moral degeneracy. Japanese eugenicists were successful in 1935 in getting the Imperial Diet to pass a Racial Eugenics Protection bill which favored the sterilization of hereditarily mental defectives. A sterilization law based on the German 1933 law (in turn based on model laws in the United States) was drafted in 1936, but a fully comprehensive eugenics law was not adopted until 1940.

Ironically, although eugenics was on the wane in the West after World War II, it became more prominent in China and Japan during that same period. Various laws and regulations in China focused on limiting family size, culminating in the 1978 ‘One Child’ law that has raised considerable controversy both inside and outside of China. In Japan, a full-scale Eugenical Protection Law was passed in 1948, allowing for involuntary sterilization (by 1996 over 16,000 such operations had been carried out).

9. Conclusion

Although the term eugenics was used worldwide, eugenic movements in various countries were shaped by local economic, social, political, and cultural factors, and thus differed from one another in substantial ways. It has become clear that, as a movement, eugenics was not monolithic. Although tied to rigidly hereditarian Mendelian genetics in the United States, Scandinavia, and somewhat later in England and Germany, eugenics was more aligned with neo-Lamarckian views of inheritance in France, Latin America, and the Soviet Union. In their orientation toward various social issues and proposed solutions, eugenicists also varied considerably from country to country. In some, such as the United States and Germany, concern with racial issues played a prominent role especially in Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933. In the United States and Germany, concern with the ill-effects of race-crossing was widespread while in countries such as Brazil, race mixture was considered by some eugenicists to be a source of biological improvement. For British eugenicists, the supposed degeneration apparent among the lower classes was the counterpart of the supposed inferiority of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. In all three cases, it was the economically dispossessed who formed the focal point of eugenicists’ fears, and the targets of their programs.

Eugenics movements also differed widely in the social policies that were brought forward. In those countries such as France, Brazil, and to some extent the Soviet Union, where a more neo-Lamarckian view prevailed and where the medical profession was more actively involved in eugenics, proposals tended to focus on environmental reforms, particularly with regard to public health. In those countries such as the United States and Britain, and especially Germany after 1933, where more strictly Mendelian views were predominant, segregation and/or sterilization of supposed ‘defectives,’ as well as immigration restriction, were more commonly proposed solutions.

It should be pointed out that the scientific basis for eugenical claims—that complex behavioral, personality, and mental traits are inherited in a ‘hard-wired’ fashion, and particularly that they follow Mendelian patterns of inheritance—has never found strong empirical support. Most eugenicists had a simplistic understanding of Mendelian genetics, and persistently ignored environmental inputs into determining social traits. Various geneticists in the West, such as Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866–1945) or Herbert Spencer Jennings (1868–1947) strongly criticized the genetic claims on which eugenics was based, but their public critiques came late in the movement and appear to have done little to stop it.

Underlying all the differences, eugenics movements worldwide shared a concern for efficiency, the ideology of scientific management, the role of middle-class experts in establishing social and political policy, and a strong faith in science. Underlying all of this, however, in almost all eugenics movements, was a powerful undercurrent of apprehension about the supposed degenerating biological quality of the human species. Eugenics programs, from California to the Baltic Sea, were aimed at increasing the biological worth of the human species by applying the latest biological and medical knowledge. That such knowledge was often incomplete or flawed ultimately brought the eugenic tree to bear a bitter fruit.

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