History Of Eugenics Research Paper

1. Eugenics Before Galton

Abandonment or outright killing of deformed infants was practiced in the ancient world, although both the rationale for and the extent of infanticide are matters of controversy (Roper 1913, Riddle 1992, pp. 10–15). Infanticide of defective infants was approved by both Plato and Aristotle; indeed, the latter thought it should be mandated by law.

Eugenics is central to Plato’s Republic. Written in the fifth century BC, it describes a utopia in which the family is replaced by a community of wives and children. Mating within the Guardian class is tightly controlled. According to Socrates, the Rulers would never allow unregulated unions. Such a practice would be ‘a profanation in a state whose citizens lead the good life’ (Cornford 1941, p. 157). In a dialogue whose theme will be often reprised, Socrates constructs an analogy between human and animal breeding. Just as we breed from the best of our sporting dogs and game birds, he argues, we should ensure that among our own flock, there be as many unions of the best, and as few of the inferior, as possible. Plato’s analogy, which was further elaborated in the Laws, influenced the seventeenth-century Dominican Monk, Tomasso Campanella. His City of the Sun (1623) describes a utopia where children are bred for the good of the commonwealth, and whose inhabitants are scornful of those who neglect the breeding of their own kind.

2. From Galton To The 1930s

2.1 Charles Darwin And Evolutionary Thought

Campanella notwithstanding, proposals to control human heredity faded with the advent of Christianity. They re-emerged following publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859). Darwin argued that evolution occurred through a process of fierce competition in which organisms with advantageous traits would tend to survive and reproduce their kind, while the illadapted would leave few if any progeny. He and his contemporaries viewed this process as a progressive force that tended toward the constant physical and mental improvement of organic beings. But many Victorians worried that natural selection was no longer at work in their own species since modern medicine, charity, and other humanitarian measures prevented the culling of the physically and mentally weak. Moreover, it seemed as though the worst elements of society now were breeding at a much faster rate than the best. Darwin expressed a common middle-class anxiety about the ‘differential birthrate’ when he remarked in The Descent of Man (1871) that if various checks ‘do not prevent the reckless, the vicious, and the otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has occurred too often in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule.’ Darwin himself did not advocate any practical measures to counter the antiselective forces of modern society. But in 1865, his cousin Galton published the first modern eugenics manifesto, ‘Hereditary talent and character.’

2.2 Galton’s Argument

Galton aimed to prove that human mental, moral, and temperamental traits, and not just physical ones, were transmitted from parents to offspring. These traits included a gregarious personality, a truthful or courageous character, a liking for alcohol or drugs or gambling, a tendency to pauperism or crimes of violence or fraud. He was particularly concerned to prove the heritability of traits making for success.

His method was simple, if from a contemporary perspective naive. Consulting biographical dictionaries, he established that fathers who had achieved eminence in various fields were much more likely than members of the public at large to have had fathers who were themselves eminent; in short, that distinction ran in families. Of course Galton knew that individuals also inherit social advantages, and he conceded that this might explain success in certain fields. No admirer of the landed aristocracy, which still dominated parliament, the army, and civil service, Galton noted that ‘many men who have succeeded as statesmen would have been nobodies had they been born into a lower rank of life’ (quoted in Jones 1998, p. 7). But in the ‘open fields’ of science, literature, and the law, individuals without talent would surely fail, no matter how distinguished their families, while conversely, the talented would succeed, no matter how unfavorable their background. Unfortunately, it seemed that those with the most talent were the least prolific. Galton argued that there was an urgent need to reverse this trend. However, he offered no specific measures to accomplish this end, only the conviction that if everyone could be made to see the importance of breeding, ‘some way or other’ would be found to get the job done.

2.3 Changing Views Of Heredity

Galton believed that the hereditary material was transmitted intact from one generation to another. However, his contemporaries were ‘Lamarckians,’ who assumed that characteristics acquired by organisms during their lifetime (primarily through the use and disuse of particular organs) could be transmitted to their offspring.

The ‘Lamarckian’ or ‘soft’ view of heredity blurs the distinction between nature and nurture, since it assumes that inherited traits can be suppressed or redirected by changing the conditions of life. Thus, even if social problems such as criminality, promiscuity, or pauperism resulted from poor heredity, the solution could reside in improved nutrition, education, or other social reforms. But if heredity is impervious to environmental changes, the only way to eliminate the problems it caused would be through selective breeding.

Galton lacked experimental evidence for his assumption that heredity was fixed. But in 1883, the German cytologist August Weismann (1834–1914) was able to distinguish germ cells, which are present in the gonads and give rise to sperm and ova, from somatic cells, which are present in all the other tissues of the body. Weismann argued that only the somatic cells could be affected by the environment, whereas the germ cells would be transmitted intact from generation to generation. Thus, no matter how hard individual parents worked to improve their minds or bodies, or whatever social reforms might be instituted, no child would be born healthier, or more equable, virtuous, musical, athletic, or smarter as a result.

2.4 Eugenics Becomes Popular

Galton’s work initially received a lukewarm reception, especially in the popular press. But after the turn of the century, eugenics caught on. Between 1890 and 1930, eugenics movements of some form developed in over 30 countries, encompassing Central and South as well as North America, and Asia as well as Europe (Adams 1990). The greatest impact, however, was felt in the United States, Canada, Britain, Germany, and Scandinavia—predominantly Protestant countries in which Weismann’s ‘hard’ view of heredity prevailed.

Eugenics societies drew most of their members from the professional middle classes: doctors, lawyers, teachers, social workers, ministers. Numerous demographic studies seemed to demonstrate that workers and agricultural laborers had more children than the middle and upper-middle classes, with those living in the worst conditions producing the largest families (actual patterns of fertility are a matter of dispute; see Szreter 1996).

Of particular concern was the ostensibly rapid increase in the number of ‘feebleminded.’ In 1910, the psychologist Henry H. Goddard proposed a three tiered grading system for mental deficiency. Those with a mental age of one or two he termed ‘idiots,’ those with a mental age of three to seven ‘imbeciles,’ and those with a mental age between nine and 12 ‘morons’ (Zenderland 1999). Members of the ‘high-grade feebleminded’ or ‘moron’ class posed the greatest threat to society since they could not easily be differentiated from normal persons. Unlike idiots and imbeciles, they were often physically fit and attractive, and thus had no trouble either finding mates or producing children. But lacking foresight and self-restraint, and unable to distinguish right from wrong, they easily fell into lives of pauperism, alcoholism, sexual promiscuity, and crime. Exhibits at museums, expositions, and state fairs described the disastrous consequences of allowing reproduction by these defectives to go unchecked.

On the basis of pedigree studies demonstrating the passage of traits in several generations of the same family (such as Goddard’s ‘Kallikaks’) feeblemindedness was judged to be heritable. According to the best science of the day, feeblemindedness resulted from a single recessive gene. It thus initially seemed that the trait could be eliminated if its possessors were prevented from breeding. By the 1920s, that optimistic assessment was shown to be wrong, since most of the offending genes would be hidden in apparently normal carriers. Policies such as eugenic segregation or sterilization, which targeted only those affected, would thus work much more slowly than had been thought. But most eugenicists reasoned that even a small reduction was better than none (Paul and Spencer 1995).

Modern scholarship has challenged the once conventional identification of eugenics with political conservatism and support of the social status quo. Many eugenicists were indeed reactionary. But eugenics was also deployed in support of a variety of progressive causes. In China, eugenics flourished during the Republican Era, where it was invoked by modernizers in their efforts to counter tradition (Dikotter 1998). In Europe and North America, pacifists claimed that war destroyed the strongest and bravest of men, thus weakening the race (Crook 1994). Although many Fabian and even some Marxian socialists worried that the worst were outbreeding the best, they turned this concern into a case for social and economic change, arguing that only in a society that abolished economic inequality would it be possible to distinguish genetic value from environmental good fortune (see Kevles 1995, Paul 1998, Grossmann 1995). These Left eugenicists criticized the racial and class bias that informed the ‘mainstream’ eugenics movements. In their view, the real problem was the high reproductive rates among the least prudent and foresighted of every class.

While many eugenicists were socially conservative, sex reformers invoked eugenics in support of access to birth control, legalization of divorce and abortion, and radical changes in gender roles, including expansion of educational and employment opportunities for women (who were often drawn to the eugenics cause; for example, nearly half the members of the British Eugenics Education Society were female: see Soloway 1990, p. 1280, Hall 1998; on Weimar Germany see Grossmann 1995; on Spain see Cleminson 1994). Birth-control advocates argued that access to contraception would allow poor women, of inferior heredity, to voluntarily limit their births. According to Margaret Sanger, ‘funds that should be used to raise the standard of our civilization are diverted to maintenance of those who should never have been born.’ (Opponents countered that contraception would be used disproportionately by the middle-class.) Even ‘free love’ or abolition of marriage was promoted on the grounds that marriage was often based on class or other genetically-irrelevant factors (see Paul 1995, pp. 91–2, Hansen 1996).

2.5 Eugenic Measures

Until recently, studies of eugenics focused almost exclusively on Britain and the US. Since the 1980s, however, the focus has greatly broadened to include Canada, Latin America, Germany, Russia, France, Spain, Scandinavia, Australia, China, and Japan, among other countries and regions. As a result, historians now understand that eugenics took quite different forms in different places. In the Latin countries, where Lamarckianism was strong, racemixing common, and Catholicism the dominant religion, concern with biological degeneration did not result in calls for sterilization of defectives. In France, the ‘puericulture’ movement, spearheaded by Adolphe Pinard, stressed the value of breast feeding and of improved diet and more rest for pregnant women, as well as a premarital examination law to prevent dysgenic unions among those individuals with hereditary defects. In these countries, environmental and hereditary improvement were generally thought to be mutually reinforcing, rather than at odds (on France, see Schneider 1990; on Latin America, see Stepan 1991).

Even in North America and the Protestant countries of Europe, eugenics encompassed a wide range of activities. In Britain, where the modern movement originated, there was no effort to pass coercive legislation (which would have been politically impractical, in part due to the strength of the Labour Party, which viewed eugenics as hostile to workers). Following Galton’s lead, the Eugenics Educatio Society emphasized the need to convince their com- patriots of the value of controlling reproduction. Thus, eugenics consisted primarily of education and propaganda, such as the Pauper Pedigree Project, which compiled family trees of typical degenerate families (Mazumdar 1992).

Coercive measures were adopted elsewhere. Be- ginning in 1907, when Indiana authorized the compulsory sterilization of ‘criminals, idiots, rapists, and imbeciles,’ sterilization laws were passed in over 30 American states, two Canadian provinces, all the Scandinavian countries, Estonia, Germany, and Japan. In the US, opposition from the Catholic Church, concern that the procedure (vasectomy in men, tubal ligation in women) would promote sexual promiscuity and venereal disease, and especially legal challenges to the constitutionality of state laws, originally limited the number of sterilizations (Reilly 1991). To address the legal issues, Harry Laughlin, Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor, New York (the center of the organized eugenics movement in the US), drafted a model law. Its use by the state of Virginia was tested in the 1927 case of Buck . Bell. In his famous decision in that case, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote: ‘It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for their crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind … . Three generations of imbeciles is enough.’ In the aftermath of the case, a dozen states revised existing laws or enacted new ones. (However, more than half the 60,000 legal sterilizations were performed in California.)

In the US, concerns about deterioration had been heightened by the results of the mental testing program initiated by the army during World War I. Psychologists tested more than 1.75 million recruits and concluded that nearly half the white draft was feebleminded, with blacks and recent immigrants scoring worst. The testing program thus exacerbated anxiety about the quality of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, whose numbers increased dramatically beginning in the 1880s. The newcomers from Russia, Poland, Italy, and the Balkans were anyway resented for their cultural and linguistic differences, support for big-city political machines, and willingness to work for low wages. Eugenicists added that they were also of poor stock, and that mixing with older stock Americans would produce biological degeneration. In the first decade of the century, Theodore Roosevelt had warned repeatedly that old-stock Americans were losing a desperate ‘war of the cradle’ with lesser breeds, a theme that recurred frequently in both academic and popular literature. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Immigration Restriction Act, which restricted entrants from any European country to two percent of the foreign-born of the same national origin recorded in the 1890 census, that is, before the massive influx of new immigrants.

American developments were noted in Germany, where a draft law permitting sterilization with the consent of the person involved or their guardian had been drafted at the end of the Weimar Republic. In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler had characterized National Socialism as ‘applied biology.’ The Nazi government quickly passed a compulsory law, which extended to a wide range of ostensibly genetic conditions. The law was often praised by non-German commentators for its procedural safeguards (although these were often disregarded in practice). Approximately 400,000 Germans were eventually sterilized under the Nazi regime (Bock 1986, pp. 230–46).

In 1939, the Nazis instituted a euthanasia program aimed at eliminating the ‘useless eaters’ in mental hospitals. Neither the sterilization nor euthanasia policies were racially-oriented. But soon after the Nazis came to power, they enacted the first of the Nuremberg laws, which forbade Germans to marry Jews and others of ‘inferior blood.’ Other actions targeting Jews, Gypsies, the offspring of German mothers and black French soldiers, and other reviled groups followed, culminating in the Holocaust. The Nazis also instituted a number of ‘positive’ eugenics measures, including the Lebensborn program, which allowed single and married women who passed a racial test to give birth in special SS maternity homes.

Events in Germany were watched closely in Scandinavia, where many eugenicists were critical of Nazi racism, but impressed by the sterilization law. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Iceland passed laws of their own, virtually without dissent (Broberg and Roll-Hansen 1996). Support for sterilization reflected fears about degeneration that were shared by elites elsewhere in Europe and in America. It also reflected the Social Democratic emphasis on communal responsibilities, as well as the view that a state that has taken on the responsibility of caring for its citizens must limit the numbers of those who will burden it.

Opposition to compulsory sterilization did not necessarily imply wholesale opposition to eugenics. In fact, most critics took for granted that mentally deficient individuals should be persuaded or prevented from breeding. The issue was how best to achieve this end. Skeptics variously charged that the laws promoted promiscuity, were ineffective, were based on unfounded assumptions about the heredity of mental defect or criminality, and were inevitably biased in their application. A common concern was that sterilization would provide a cheap substitute for the more desirable policies of segregation, training, and community supervision.

Even the Catholic Church—the most powerful foe of sterilization—was not opposed to eugenics tout court (much less committed to the view that procreation is a private matter). In his 1930 encyclical Casti Connubi, Pope Pius XI conceded that eugenics must ‘be accepted, provided lawful and upright methods are employed within the proper limits,’ although he denounced sterilization as an illegitimate usurping by the state of power over the bodies of its subjects. In the same encyclical, the Pope condemned contraception and abortion, and noted that private individuals are also barred from tampering with their bodies in order to prevent procreation.

3. The Decline Of Eugenics

In the aftermath of World War II, eugenics fell from favor. Historians once attributed its decline in large part to the progress of genetics. In the conventional view, which still informs much popular writing on the subject, it became increasingly clear that traits were usually the product not of one but of several genes, that these genes acted in complex ways with each other and with the environment, and that selection against undesirable traits could not in fact eliminate them. As a result, support for programs of selective breeding inevitably waned. From this standpoint, eugenics was unable to withstand its encounter with scientific fact. However, most recent historiography emphasizes that the scientific developments said to have eroded support for eugenics occurred in the 1910s, long before it became disreputable, and that the researchers responsible for these discoveries were themselves eugenics enthusiasts.

Eugenics’ decline seems to be linked most closely to a shift in the social climate resulting from revelations of Nazi atrocities—crimes that had been justified by the ostensible biological need to protect and purify the German race. The result was a backlash against eugenics, including its underlying hereditarianism. In the 1950s, genetic explanations of individual and group differences fell from favor. Although the reign of ‘cultural determinism’ was short-lived (Nelkin and Lindee 1995, pp. 34–7), eugenics’ reputation never recovered. It was now equated with its most barbarous manifestations, viewed as inherently racist and reactionary, as well as scientifically shoddy.

In fact, not all eugenics was racist. Even in Germany, the movement originally had been dominated by technocratic elitists, not racial purists, and some prominent eugenicists were Jewish (Weiss 1988, Weingart et al. 1988, Weindling 1989). In the US, the subjects of the pedigree studies, such as Goddard’s ‘Kallikaks,’ were all white and Anglo-Saxon (Rafter 1988). Nor was eugenics invariably supportive of the status quo, as its popularity among Fabian socialists, architects of the Scandinavian Social Democratic welfare states, and a host of sex reformers indicates. Moreover, many eugenicists, especially in Britain, opposed coercion. Following Galton’s lead, they instead supported educational and propagandistic measures. Thus racism, class-bias, social conservatism, and violations of individual liberty—while prominent aspects of the history of eugenics—were not constitutive of it (Wikler 1998). However, the new historiography, which stresses eugenics’ complexity and diversity, has so far had little impact on popular perceptions of the subject.

Bibliography:

1. Adams M B (ed.) 1990 The Well-Born Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil, and Russia. Oxford University Press, New York
2. Bock G 1986 Zwangsterilization im Nationalsozialismus. Westdeutscher, Opladen, Germany
3. Broberg G, Roll-Hansen N (eds.) 1996 Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI
4. Cleminson R 1994 Eugenics by name or nature? The Spanish anarchist sex reform of the 1930s. History of European Ideas. 18: 729–40
5. Cornford F M 1941 The Republic of Plato. Oxford University Press, London
6. Crook P 1994 Darwinism, War, and History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
7. Dikotter F 1998 Imperfect Conceptions: Medical Knowledge, Birth Defects and Eugenics in China. Columbia University Press, New York
8. Grossmann A 1995 Reforming Sex: The German Movement for Birth Control and Abortion Reform, 1920–1950. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
9. Hall L 1998 Women, feminism, and eugenics. In: Peel R A (ed.) Essays in the History of Eugenics. Galton Institute, London
10. Hansen B F 1996 Something rotten in the state of Denmark: Eugenics and the ascent of the welfare state. In: Broberg G, Roll-Hansen N (eds.) Eugenics and the Welfare State: Sterilization Policy in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland. Michigan State University Press, East Lansing, MI
11. Jones G 1998 Theoretical foundations of eugenics. In: Peel R A (ed.) Essays in the History of Eugenics. Galton Institute, London
12. Kevles D J 1995 In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
13. Mazumdar P M H 1992 Eugenics, Human Genetics, and Human Failings: The Eugenics Society, Its Sources and Its Critics in Britain. Routledge, London
14. Nelkin D, Lindee M S 1995 The DNA Mystique: The Gene as Cultural Icon. Freeman, New York
15. Paul D P 1984/1998 Eugenics and the left. In: The Politics of Heredity: Essays on Eugenics, Biomedicine, and the Nature– Nurture Debate. SUNY, Albany, NY
16. Paul D B 1995 Controlling Human Heredity: 1865 to the Present. Humanity Press, Amherst, NY
17. Paul D P, Spencer H G 1995 The hidden science of eugenics. Nature 374: 302–4
18. Rafter N H (ed.) 1988 White Trash: The Eugenic Family Studies, 1877–1919. Northeastern University Press, Boston
19. Reilly P R 1991 The Surgical Solution: A History of Involuntary Sterilization in the United States. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
20. Riddle J M 1992 Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA
21. Roper A G 1913 Ancient Eugenics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK
22. Schneider W 1990 Quality and Quantity: The Quest for Biological Regeneration in Twentieth-century France. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
23. Soloway R 1990 Demography and Degeneration: Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth Century Britain. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC
24. Stepan N L 1991 The Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY
25. Szreter S 1996 Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–1940. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
26. Weindling P 1989 Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
27. Weingart P, Kroll J, Bayertz K 1988 Rasse, Blut und Gene. Zur Geschichte der Eugenik und Rassenhygiene in Deutschland. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt, Germany
28. Weiss S F 1988 Race, Hygiene, and National Efficiency: The Eugenics of Wilhelm Schallmayer. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA
29. Wikler D 1998 Eugenic values. Science in Context 11: 455–70
30. Zenderland L 1999 Measuring Minds: Henry Herbert Goddard and the Origins of American Intelligence Testing. Cambridge University Press, New York