|
| |
Eugenics Before the Nazis
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Allen BuchananDan W. BrockNorman DanielsDaniel Wikler |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The revolution in genetics insofar as it impinges on human life has proved profoundly unsettling to some people. Yet, the idea that the human species could and should be improved through science is not a new one. Prior to the Second World War, support for eugenics was widespread, as is demonstrated by this extract from the Cambridge University Press book From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice. |
 lthough the literature of eugenics extends back to Plato, its modern impetus was the work of one man. Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, was impressed by the frequency with which genius seemed to be manifested in some lineages more than others. He sought to investigate the possibility that talents and virtues of character were inherited along with other traits, offering their bearers advantages in natural selection. His research, enhanced by statistical methods developed as he needed them, convinced him that society's stock of talent could be greatly enlarged if members of favored families were to increase their rate of childbearing. The balance should be further improved, he believed, by discouraging from reproducing those who had less to offer. Galton coined the term "eugenics" in 1883 (15 years after publishing his first proposals), defining it as the "science of improving stock--not only by judicious mating, but whatever tends to give the more suitable races or strains of blood a better chance of prevailing over the less suitable than they otherwise would have had." |
Galton's influence was nearly immediate. Darwin declared himself persuaded by his cousin's eugenic arguments, and Galton attracted a number of distinguished disciples. In Germany, the Racial Hygiene Society was formed in Berlin by 1905 (P. Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism, 1870-1945, 1989); the English Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907, with Galton elected honorary president the next year (D. Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 1985, p. 59). In the United Kingdom and the United States, the movement drew on the middle and upper middle classes, including many professionals and academics (N. H. Rafter, White Trash, 1988). By 1923, when the American Eugenics Society was formed, it boasted 28 state branches (Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics). During the decades 1890-1920, eugenic ideas were advanced also in numerous non-English-speaking countries as diverse as Norway, Brazil, and the Soviet Union. |
Theory and practice
Eugenics in the United Kingdom and the United States was both a research program and a popular movement. Galton's work on heredity and statistics was continued by his successor Karl Pearson, and their coworkers in what became the Galton Laboratory, with an endowed Galton Eugenics Professorship. In the United States, the Carnegie-supported Eugenics Record Office, under sociologist Charles Davenport, employed a team of interviewers to collect information for its store of family pedigrees, which it also solicited from the public (G. E. Allen, "The Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor," Osiris 2nd series, 2, 1986, pp. 225-34; D. Paul, "Culpability and Compassion," Politics and the Life Sciences 15 (1), 1996, p. 99). Eugenics was taught at leading universities and received attention in standard biology textbooks. |
The popular eugenics movements, meanwhile, succeeded in rapidly introducing eugenic ideas into public discourse. Accounts of generations of misfits in such "white trash" family lines as the "Jukes" and the "Kallikaks" were widely publicized, warning that an unwise reproductive act could wreak havoc for generations (Rafter, White Trash). Following British successes at health exhibitions before the turn of the century, American eugenic organizations took a particular interest in maintaining exhibits and events at state fairs and public expositions. The Race Betterment Foundation, under John Kellogg, attracted 10,000 visitors and boasted a million lines of newspaper publicity for its contribution to the Panama-Pacific exposition of 1915 (R. W. Rydell, World of Fairs, 1993). |
Eugenicists took over the American Museum of Natural History in New York for a month in 1915, and a similar exhibit there in 1932 drew 15,000 visitors. "Fitter Families" competitions were mounted at state fairs, from Massachusetts to Oklahoma, with governors and senators handing out awards (Rydell, World of Fairs, p. 46). By wedding eugenics to the ideal of the "average American" at these fairs and exhibitions, its elite supporters sought out a mass audience--although this populist turn took the movement in a direction quite different from that envisioned by Galton, whose inspiration had been the phenomenon of scientific genius. |
Varieties of eugenics
The content of the eugenic program varied considerably from country to country and within each nation's movement. There were differences, for example, in beliefs about the mechanism of transmission of inherited traits. The French and Brazilian eugenics movements were at least as concerned about neonatal care as with heredity, and their hereditarian thinking was Lamarckian--that is, they believed that parents passed on to their children characteristics acquired during their lives (W. Schneider, Quality and Quantity, 1990; N. L. Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics, 1991). If the notion of a Lamarckian eugenics seems an oxymoron since eugenics is remembered as a movement that emphasized nature over nurture as both cause and remedy of human failings, a thesis Lamarckians rejected, this is perhaps because our own experience (in English-speaking countries) has defined eugenics narrowly. If we look beyond the Anglo-Saxon experience, William Schneider states, we will understand eugenics as "less a pseudoscientific, failed branch of applied human genetics than a biologically based movement for social reform." Most eugenicists elsewhere accepted Galton's view, buttressed by the "germ plasm" hypothesis of August Weismann, that selection rather than environment determined heredity. Eugenicists tended to draw from this account the implication that medical care frustrated evolution by permitting the unfit to survive and reproduce (although Darwin and a number of others who held this view nonetheless continued to support humanitarian measures). |
Eugenicists differed also in their practical proposals and legislative aims. Some favored "positive eugenics" (encouraging the most fit to have larger families), others accented "negative eugenics" (curbing the fertility of those judged least fit), and many wanted both. While action on behalf of positive eugenics was limited to such mild measures as family allowances, some eugenicists (particularly in the United States and, later, Germany) did not hesitate to call for coercive measures, either sexual segregation or, later, involuntary sterilization, to prevent those imagined to have undesirable genes from propagating. |
National experiences varied widely. Involuntary sterilization remained rare in England, but was permitted by statutes enacted between 1910 and 1930 in northern Europe, including Denmark and Germany, and in the United States. Involuntary sterilization was practiced on large numbers of people in the United States, where tens of thousands were affected during the Depression, and in Germany, where the greatly stepped-up program following the Nazi rise to power rendered several hundred thousand incapable of bearing children. |
In both the United States and Germany, a number of leading figures combined eugenic interests with a focus on race (N. Roll-Hansen, "The progress of eugenics," History of Science 26, 1988, pp. 295-331); eugenicists in South America did this less (Stepan, The Hour of Eugenics; E. J. Larson, Sex, Race and Science, 1995). Eugenicists in the United States supported restrictions on immigration, maintaining that the immigrants arriving after the turn of the century from southern and eastern Europe suffered by comparison with "old American stock" in intelligence and other virtues. They pressed also for laws forbidding interracial marriages. |
In Germany, eugenics became an integral element of medical thinking, which envisioned a three-way division of health care involving medical care for the individual, public health for the community, and eugenics for the race (S. F. Weiss, "The race hygiene movement in Germany, 1904-1945," in K. Benson et al. (eds), The Expansion of American Biology, 1990; R. Proctor, Racial Hygiene, 1988). Eugenics, for some, was an extension of a tradition of a social orientation in German medicine that had produced Rudolf Virchow and other pioneers of public health. In the United States, however, medical schools were slow to include any instruction in eugenics or genetics. |
Eugenicists differed among themselves wherever the movement attracted a large following. Historians have generally followed Daniel Kevles's (1986) classification of eugenicists, at least in England and the United States, as either "mainline" or "reform." In the United States and Britain, mainline eugenics was largely (but not exclusively) conservative in political orientation. Galton was but the first of a long line of eugenicists who believed that those who achieved (at least in fields such as science and literature, where social position was insufficient for advancement) were distinguished from others in their possession of great natural, inherited talent. Indeed, the mainline eugenicists tended to believe that a person's station in life reflected his or her capabilities and could thus be used as an indication of the genes likely to be passed down to subsequent generations. |
Class distinctions
The preoccupation of mainline eugenicists was the social havoc being wrought by the lower classes. Indeed, one historian of the English movement defined eugenics bluntly as "a middle-class activism focused upon the pauper class, with a biological view of human failings" (P. M. H. Mazumdar, Eugenics, Human Genetics and Human Failings, 1992, p. 258). In both the United Kingdom and the United States, a long list of social ills, including poverty, prostitution, drunkenness, and crime, were attributed to the "unfit." |
In the United States (as in Germany), this class bias was joined by a virulent racism, which warned of the effects both of miscegenation and of high birthrates among "inferior" races. These attitudes helped to win support for the drastic curbs on immigration enacted after the First World War. Theodore Roosevelt warned that a "war of the cradle" was being waged between the better and inferior social groups. To be sure, mainline eugenicists, when speaking with care, took pains to distinguish the working classes from the degenerate "social residuum," but these fine distinctions were often blurred, and they did not lessen the offense taken by their socialist opponents. |
Nationalism was a third characteristic concern. Mainstream eugenicists were often prone to interpreting the degeneracy thesis in national terms, identifying nationality with "blood" and fearing that England (or Germany, or wherever) would lose in competition with nations that did a better job maintaining the quality of their germ plasm. |
The "reform" contingent, often socialists, and including many of the leading figures in the science of human genetics, accepted eugenic goals, but were unsparingly critical of the mainline eugenicists' research, biases, and proposals. Hermann Muller, an American geneticist who later won a Nobel prize for demonstrating the effect of radiation on chromosomes, insisted that natural talent could not be assessed in a society such as the United States, which did not offer equal opportunities for advancement to its citizens; only under socialism could the fit be identified as such and then encouraged to multiply. |
Eugenics was often found in the political platforms of left-of-center political parties. A key proponent in Denmark, for example, was Karl Steincke, a father of the Danish welfare state, and several of the leading Norwegian eugenicists were also Social Democrats (N. Roll-Hansen, "Eugenics before World War II: The case of Norway," History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 2 (2), 1980, pp. 269-98). Eugenics was adopted with enthusiasm by Tommy Douglas, later the pioneer of Canadian social democracy in Manitoba; by Fabian Socialists in the United Kingdom; and by the Progressives in the United States, all of whom favored social programs that, with the help of science, applied resources available to the state to building a more humane society. Many of these same figures, however, were indistinguishable from their conservative counterparts in class and racial bias. |
Sweden's eugenics programs are an instructive case study, since, as Gunnar Broberg and Mattias Tydén have shown ("Eugenics in Sweden," in G. Broberg and N. Roll-Hansen (eds), Eugenics and the Welfare State, 1996), they show the compatibility of eugenic thinking to varied political viewpoints. Until the 1930s, the movement was centered in the Institute for Race Biology in Uppsala, under the direction of a traditional eugenicist who would later profess Nazism. The work of the institute focused on physical anthropology and was much concerned with alleged threats to the "Nordic type." After a five-year dispute, a Social Democratic scientist took control, disavowed racism, and emphasized laboratory studies in medical genetics. But the ascendancy of the socialists proved to give eugenics a second wind. The planners of the Swedish welfare state, concerned with the "quality" as well as the quantity of Sweden's then-dwindling population, were eager for the government to use natural and social science for the common good. The modernization and rational ordering of society left little room for the inferior and the deficient, and the government sought to identify and sterilize these citizens. Indeed, Social Democratic intellectuals maintained that these sterilizations were necessary if Sweden were to be able to afford the cradle-to-grave security they championed. Eugenics, in effect, was an instrument for reducing need. Tens of thousands of Swedes, mostly women, fell victim during the next three decades. The contrast between "progressive" and "reactionary" eugenics should not be overemphasized--Swedish eugenics targeted a population of itinerants (Tattare, or tinkers), who were imagined to be racially different, and the eugenicists who made a point of disavowing racism and class bias tended to be academics rather than government officials. As in other countries, those who actually bore the brunt of state coercion in the name of the eugenic common good were usually the marginal, the stigmatized, and the vulnerable. But the Swedish eugenicists strenuously denied any commonality with Nazi policies of the same era, and our current tendency to equate eugenics with Nazism distorts this historical record. |
Opposing viewpoints
While eugenics was supported by most geneticists of the era, a number of the scientists were harshly critical of mainline eugenics. Like his Swedish counterparts, Hermann Muller recognized the movement's racism and class bias, and the worthlessness of the studies of family pedigrees that constituted its source of data. But he, too, was concerned that civilization was interfering with natural selection, and was intrigued by the possibility that humanity might sever the age-old link between biological and social parenthood in favor of "germinal choice" of superior genetic material. |
A "Geneticists' Manifesto" signed by Muller and other leading scientists in 1939 insisted that encouragement of eugenic-minded reproduction be part of a wider social program that would provide economic security to parents, equal opportunities to women, public education in biology, and a "socialized organization" that ensures that "social motives predominate in society." The first goal of eugenics, in their view, was health, followed by intelligence and "those temperamental qualities which favor fellow-feeling and social behavior rather than those (today most esteemed by many) which make for personal 'success,' as success is usually understood at present." The goal of eugenics, they held, was "much more than the prevention of genetic deterioration"; they looked to the day, only a few generations distant, when "everyone might look upon 'genius'... as his birthright. And... this would represent no final stage at all." |
The labels "mainline" and "reform" do not do justice to the great variety of viewpoints and goals associated with the eugenics movements. Indeed, as Diane Paul has observed, one sign of the ubiquity of eugenic thinking was the attempt by parties on all sides of particular social disputes to further their cause by demonstrating that their recommendations would have the strongest eugenic effect. Leading figures in the American and British eugenics organizations were political reactionaries. But eugenics, seen as an avenue for the application of science to social problems, was attractive also to some of the architects of the modern welfare state, such as the Progressives in the United States and the Scandinavian Social Democratic parties. |
Much of the opposition to eugenics during that era, at least in Europe, came from the right. The eugenicists' legislative successes in Germany and Scandinavia were not matched in such countries as Poland and Czechoslovakia, even though measures had been proposed there, largely because of the conservative influence in these countries of the Catholic Church (N. Roll-Hansen, "The progress of eugenics," History of Science 26, 1988, pp. 295-331). The Church opposed eugenics in principle (and it was virtually the only institution to do so), but this was of a piece with its opposition to abortion and contraception: Then, as now, the Church was opposed to limitations on fertility, and its opponents were often on the left. To be sure, early eugenicists were also opponents of birth control, since they believed that its use by the upper classes exacerbated the degeneration of the gene pool. But not all eugenicists took this position. The eugenic banner was seized also by feminists who argued that control over fertility, along with emancipation generally, permitted women to improve the race through sexual selection. |
Today, few people other than historians of science appreciate the range of political viewpoints and causes that were once proudly associated with eugenic doctrine. Historical memory of the movement is colored, perhaps permanently, by the appropriation of eugenics by the Nazi Party. |
This is an extract from pages 30-37 of From Chance to Choice: Genetics and Justice, by Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Allen Buchanan, Dan W. Brock, Norman Daniels and Daniel Wikler, 2000. |
|
| |
