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.

C.

The United States

Eugenics won enthusiastic disciples during the Progressive Era in the US, responding to the appeal of both the conservationist and technocratic ideas of the movement. It was embraced by a number of reform movements that espoused the ideas of Progressivism. Sex educationalists in the social hygiene movement believed that “eugenics will destroy that sentimentalism which leads a woman deliberately to marry a man who is absolutely unworthy of her and can only bring disease, degradation, and death”. By 1914, 30 states had passed laws preventing the marriage of both those with cognitive disabilities and the insane, together with laws restricting marriage between people suffering from venereal disease or those from various categories classed as “feebleminded”. The first state sterilization law was passed in Indiana in 1907. By 1917, 15 other states had followed suit. Sterilization was legalized for habitual criminals as well as various categories of the insane, those with cognitive disabilities, and those with epilepsy. Additionally, eugenics in the US provided ideological justifications for restricting immigration and for the development of IQ testing.

The French psychologist Alfred Binet, another Galton devotee, was employed in 1904 by the French government to devise a method for detecting mental deficiency in children. He drew up a series of tests that assessed memory, articulation, and other mental activities and in collaboration with a colleague, Theodore Simon, he developed a method for assessing “mental age”. An American psychologist, Henry H. Goddard, took the Binet-Simon tests to the US in 1908 and completed research on measuring grades of feeblemindedness. A comparative psychologist, Robert Yerkes, developed a new IQ test and was employed by the military in 1917 to head a team to design an army testing programme to classify men in order to place them in their most effective role as soldiers. The methods of testing developed within the military became the central tool for restricting immigration at the Ellis Island clearing house.

Eugenics played an increasingly prominent role in restricting immigration, largely as the result of the efforts of Harry H. Laughlin who, in 1910, was appointed by Charles Davenport as superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office at Cold Spring Harbor. Davenport, a Harvard-trained biologist, was Galton’s greatest disciple in the US. He set up a station for the experimental study of evolution at Cold Spring Harbor, with a US$10 million endowment from the Andrew Carnegie Foundation, that helped make Cold Spring Harbor the centre of eugenics research in the US. Although Davenport did not believe that the research should be incorporated into policy, he supported Laughlin’s participation in the creation of new legislation on the restriction of immigration. In 1920, when it was set up to develop emergency restriction legislation, Laughlin presented the results of various eugenic research projects and a collection of petitions by eugenicists to the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. In 1922 he reported to the Committee, inaccurately, that immigrants constituted the largest proportion of asylum inmates and, therefore, Ellis Island should be used to discriminate against those who would become “carriers of the germ plasm of the future American population”. The American Eugenics Society made a report to the Committee in 1923 endorsing extensive new restrictions on immigration through the use of intelligence testing and physical examination. After a new immigration law was passed in 1924 intelligence testing became a crucial tool of restriction.

D.

Sweden

While the laws on marriage and restriction on immigration were not reproduced in exactly the same way elsewhere, the US was not the only nation to adopt compulsory sterilization laws. In Sweden compulsory sterilization was a feature of the demographic focus of its 20th-century politics. From the late 19th century, the Swedish state struggled with the rapid transformation of its society into an industrial economy. The population question was perceived as central to the capacity of the Swedes to adapt to a modern industrial society. In a famous treatise on the situation, The Population Problem in Crisis, two sociologists, Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, pointed out that the dwindling demographic numbers were a major obstacle to economic growth and success and that there were elements of the population who were simply incapable of meeting the challenges presented by an industrial society. A substratum of incapables existed within all social classes but since they were unable to participate in “the great sociological process of adjustment” to modern society then the question of their welfare and reproduction became a pressing issue for the state. The Myrdals were keen to use the incapable as further legitimization of the necessity of creating a comprehensive welfare state but they also believed that sterilization could contribute to efficient social management. The Myrdals’ views of the population question resonated with the interwar social democratic philosophy of placing the needs of society above those of individual groups for the benefit of social progress. Thus when the first sterilization law was passed in 1935 it was promoted as a measure of welfare efficiency within the social management of the modern state. However, as the discourse on social adjustment broadened, various social criteria began to be included among the perceived undesirable population traits. When a bill was introduced into the Swedish parliament in 1941 it now included the possibility of imposing compulsory sterilization on antisocial individuals.

The broad democratic consensus on population needs left those opposing the measure, because it undermined civil liberties, at the political margins. Once it was passed the 1941 law recommended voluntary sterilization for all categories but permitted compulsion in cases where an individual’s mental state prevented legal competence. Because sterilization in Sweden was voluntary for all except for the legally incompetent the Swedish state claimed that its sterilization law differed from the compulsory sterilization laws passed in Germany under the Third Reich, which imposed sterilization on competent individuals. Under the system created in 1935 over 60,000 sterilizations were performed in Sweden up to the repeal of the law in 1975—the vast majority of which, over 90 per cent, were on women. Some feminist historians have interpreted the history of Swedish sterilization as resulting from misogynist totalitarianism contained within Swedish social democratic politics. This interpretation does not evaluate Swedish practices of eugenic welfare efficiency within a comparative international context.

In each of these national contexts, eugenics played a legitimizing rather than a determining role. In England, legislation concerning the feebleminded had been initiated by poor law authorities concerned to segregate destitute retarded children from other workhouse inmates who exploited them. In the US, eugenism was moulded by racist concerns regarding immigration restriction. In Scandinavia, population growth had been a feature of social policy from the 18th century, and eugenics was adopted in early 20th-century Sweden as part of a new experiment in the social management of a modern society. Within Germany, biologism was embraced within a complex mixture of nationalistic and romantic traditions of thought that eventually produced National Socialism.

IV.

Responses to Eugenics After World War II

While the diffuse discursive influence of eugenics in industrial societies before World War II was substantial, its political success depended upon its incorporation into broader ideological hegemonies existing within nationalist and imperialist cultures. Widely varying ideologies of political reform in this period embraced the idea that national and economic success and social progress was linked to the control of human evolution through biological and racial engineering. A hegemonic revulsion against eugenism, however, followed the revelation of its murderous potential when the results of the Nazi “final solution” were discovered after Germany’s defeat in World War II. Social planning philosophies subsequently sought to expunge biological explanations from their discourses and evolutionary science. Equally, the biological sciences of inheritance sought to detach themselves from eugenic racial and social planning. That detachment, however, was to be short-lived.

Immediately following World War II genetic science moved away from topics related to human subjects concentrating instead on life forms at the opposite end of the organic spectrum. Following the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953, however, molecular genetics began to re-address the subject of human diseases. New technologies of splicing and sequencing DNA developed in the 1970s during the course of investigating the genetic basis of disease facilitated the possibility of mapping the human genome. Subsequently, the human genome project became the largest funded, single scientific project of the late 20th century. However, its goal was not simply to identify disease but, as the 1988 US Office of Technology Assessment report states, to identify “the eugenics of normalcy” in order that genetic information could be used to “ensure that… each individual has at least a modicum of normal genes”.

Pre-war eugenicists had wanted to “protect the unborn” and endow each child with the gift of health by making sure the unfit were never conceived. Molecular biologists in the 1960s wanted to ensure genetic normalcy through technological manipulation. In 1969 the US molecular biologist Robert Sinsheimer called this “a new eugenics” aimed at freeing humanity from the bonds of deviant DNA. Sinsheimer claimed that where old eugenics relied on massive social programmes to cull the unfit, the new eugenics had technologies that could allow the conversion of all individuals to the highest genetic level—whatever that meant. The first director of the human genome project, James Watson, argued that genetic normalcy could be defined as the inalienable right of each individual to “health”. The completion of the human genome project has intensified the debate concerning the implications of the ability to analyse rapidly an individual’s genetic makeup and raised new anxieties about the potential for genetic discrimination and the ethics of germ-line genetic manipulation. In this context, some have argued that the growing analysis of human behaviour in evolutionary terms could fuel a tendency towards a biologically determinist view of humanity which could give rise to new eugenic pressures.