Eugenics Movement

I

Introduction

Eugenics Movement, reform movement of the early 20th century that aimed to achieve social and biological evolution through selective human breeding.

II

Origins of the Movement

The eugenics movement originated with the theories of heredity proposed by Francis Galton. Galton, who was a cousin of Charles Darwin, was born in the same year as the Augustinian monk from Moravia, Johann Gregor Mendel, who produced the famous study of the inheritance of biological characteristics in sweet peas that founded the science of genetics (see also Mendel’s Laws). Mendel first read a paper on his study of sweet peas before the Brünn Society for the Study of the Natural Sciences in 1865 but his work was not acknowledged until after his death, when in 1900 this paper was simultaneously rediscovered by William Bateson from England, Hugo de Vries from the Netherlands, Carl Correns from Germany, and Eric von Tschermak from Austria. Galton attempted to develop a method of analysing the effects of inherited characteristics long before Mendelian theories were made public. When developing evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin had been inspired by observing the way in which animal and plant breeders cross-fertilized different breeds to obtain various physiological characteristics. Galton posited that the human species could also be improved by selective breeding and take charge of its own evolution. He developed a new tool of statistical analysis, the correlation coefficient, to investigate human ancestry in order to demonstrate that not only physical characteristics but also talent and character, or personality, were inheritable and not the result of social conditioning. Galton argued that selective human breeding, or eugenics, could “do providentially, quickly and kindly” what nature did “blindly, slowly and ruthlessly”. If eugenics could become “a new religion” then the “general tone of domestic, social and political life would be higher”.

From the time that Darwin published The Origin of Species in 1859, various scientific and social philosophers cited the dictates of evolution as the route to social progress and harmony. Even before Darwin had identified natural selection as the basis of biological evolution, Herbert Spencer had used Malthusian logic (see Thomas Malthus) to identify what he believed were the basic mechanisms of progressive social evolution. His philosophy was elevated into a fashionable ideology in the last quarter of the 19th century called social Darwinism. Social Darwinists claimed that attempts to ameliorate conditions of social disadvantage had interfered in this natural self-regulation of society and had given rise to conditions that allowed artificial selection to flourish.

III

The Establishment and Spread of Eugenist Ideas

A

Britain

The British Eugenics Education Society, founded in 1907, attempted to translate these ideals into legislative measures for controlling marriage and the reproduction of the “unfit”. Unfitness included many different categories of deviant behaviour such as alcoholism, promiscuity, and criminality, and also what eugenicists termed “the feebleminded”, by whom they meant the “mentally retarded”, and “moral imbeciles”, such as single women who had children. Subsequently, eugenicists in Europe and the United States hoped to introduce birth control and voluntary sterilization to prevent evolution’s losers from expanding their number, which would threaten the survival of the “civilized races”.

Enthusiasm for eugenics crossed national boundaries. It became an international ideology that highlighted the significance of demographic change in modern societies and created a new discourse on the relationship between quality and quantity of population. Eugenicists believed that modern economies encouraged dysgenic (that is, genetically harmful) differential birth rates because the productive had to bear ever-greater tax burdens in order to support growing numbers of “degenerates” and prudently practised family limitation. As eugenism spread beyond Britain from the late 19th century, new population policies developed in Europe, North America, and the colonized world aimed at restricting the reproduction of the feebleminded. In Scandinavia and the US, compulsory sterilization of the mentally retarded and various criminal categories was established before World War I.

Before World War I, British eugenicists concentrated their greatest efforts in a campaign to influence social policy regarding the care of the mentally deficient but their success was minimal, failing even to have the prohibition of marriage between or with the retarded included in the 1913 Mental Deficiency Act. Yet despite the limited legislative success of pre-war eugenism, the influence of eugenic rhetoric on the classification and management of the feebleminded was more significant. Nevertheless, the question of the mentally deficient as a eugenic threat was overtaken in Britain by dilemmas over the issue of rights and responsibilities regarding citizenship. The 1913 Act was passed by a political majority who agreed that the mentally deficient needed some sort of specialized care and that because the mentally deficient lay outside the parameters of responsible citizenship their welfare and control had to be undertaken by the state. The terms under which the rights of citizenship were suspended for the mentally deficient continued to dominate interwar debates surrounding the most appropriate form of their welfare provision.

By this time eugenics in Britain was focusing on the declining birth rate, the changing demographic structure of the population, family allowances and family tax relief, and voluntary sterilization, popularizing the idea of the eugenic marriage, and raising a eugenic consciousness throughout society. Eugenism won support among the political left in Britain as it fitted into the philosophy of social planning to reduce social inequality. The British biologist, Julian Huxley, and the long-serving secretary of the Eugenics Education Society in the 1920s and 1930s, Carlos Paton Blacker, suggested that eugenics should become a form of social consciousness that elevated the needs of the community above those of the individual, thereby facilitating the creation of a planned Utopian society.

The ideological malleability of eugenics was reflected in its influence on social welfare politics in the interwar years. “Reform” eugenics in Britain and Europe in this period claimed that social systems and philosophies based on individualism, such as capitalism, or that gave privilege to one section of society, such as nationalism, were dysgenic because rigid social stratification failed to maximize the reproduction of hereditary talents which were distributed throughout all social divisions. Capitalism, for example, failed to provide favourable conditions for the most able among the labouring classes to rise to higher social and economic status and reproduce their hereditary endowments. Equally, the least able in all classes were not prevented from reproducing their inadequacies in their offspring. In place of the class system, a eugenic utopia would be a unidimensional society that would provide an equalized environment maximizing the possibility for the expression of desirable genetic qualities. Improvement of the social environment was crucial if a eugenically sound society was to be achieved.

While concern over the differential birth rate remained central among eugenic thinkers the demographic debate broadened to include discussions of the changing age structure of the population. The transformation of the demographic structure of modern industrial societies with smaller productive populations supporting expanding numbers of ageing, chronically sick, and unproductive dependants led eugenicists in Britain and Europe to advocate the introduction of family allowances and tax relief to encourage large families among both the working and the middle classes in order combat the declining birth rate. The broadening of the demographic debate was accompanied by the modernization of discussions about sterilization. The eugenic campaign for voluntary sterilization in Britain and elsewhere in Europe now suggested that the people most likely to be enthusiastic about legal voluntary sterilization would be working-class mothers with no other access to reliable birth control. Eugenism in this period became a loose synthesis of widely divergent ideologies. The Eugenics Review reflected the broad cross-section of eugenic interpretations of demography and degeneration.

B

Germany

Social welfare under the Weimar Republic at the end of World War I had developed within the context of an organicist philosophy of social integration through biological improvement. From 1933 eugenism combined with other ideological cults in Germany during the period to produce a murderous science that legitimized the “final solution” implemented under the Third Reich (see Holocaust). When Adolf Hitler held a meeting on August 20, 1942, to appoint Otto-Georg Thierack as Reich justice minister and Roland Freisler as president of the “Peoples’ Court” he raged about the dysgenic effects of World War I, which left only the poorest stock to breed for the future. The justice system had to be used to re-balance the equation by killing off the “negative” elements of the population. Punishment was subsequently used to cleanse the “body of the race” of its undesirable members. Cleansing meant targeting Jews, Roma (Gypsies), the mentally ill, and political dissenters for elimination. The entire asylum population in Germany was eradicated under Nazi “euthanasia” programmes. Although eugenics may not have led directly to the construction of the “final solution”, it played a significant role in providing it with a rational authority. It provided similar legitimate authority to the debate about population quality elsewhere.