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Eugenics (the study of how to arrange reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable) evolved from Darwin’s theories of natural selection. If nature “chooses” the most beneficial aspects of the inherited characteristics of a population to increase that population’s chance of survival, why shouldn’t humans mimic nature more consciously by breeding for those characteristics—intelligence, kindness, sturdiness, strength, etc. –that would improve the human species and help it evolve into a better humanity? After all, that is what is done with horses, cows and chickens. Why not people?
That was the idea that motivated Francis Dalton to create the new field of eugenics. The publication by his cousin Charles Darwin of The Origin of Species in 1859 was an event that changed Galton’s life. He came to be gripped by the work, especially the first chapter on “Variation under Domestication”, concerning animal breeding. Galton invented the term “eugenics” in 1883 and set down many of his observations and conclusions in a book, Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. Dalton was a scientist, but he lived in a very class-conscious society. Before genetics, the idea that one’s situation was created by both environment and heredity was not well-understood. The British upper classes found it easy to believe that “pauperism” and “criminality” were primarily a question of breeding, not sociology.
When eugenics came to “classless” America it took on a more invidious hue. According to the web-site Genetics Generation, “unlike in Britain, eugenicists in the U.S. focused on efforts to stop the transmission of negative or ‘undesirable’ traits from generation to generation.” The eugenics movement took root in the United States in the early 1900‘s, led by Charles Davenport (1866-1944), a prominent biologist, and Harry Laughlin, a former teacher and principal interested in breeding. In 1910, Davenport founded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island “to improve the natural, physical, mental, and temperamental qualities of the human family.” Field workers for the ERO collected many different forms of “data”, including family pedigrees depicting the inheritance of physical, mental, and moral traits. They were particularly interested in the inheritance of “undesirable” traits, such as pauperism, mental disability, dwarfism, promiscuity, and criminality.
Francis Dalton and Harry Laughlin are pictured above.
Eugenics was not limited to academic study, and it became a popular social movement that peaked in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, the American Eugenics Society was founded. Members competed in “fitter family” and “better baby” competitions at fairs and exhibitions. Movies and books promoting eugenic principles were popular. A film called The Black Stork (1917), based on a true story, depicted as heroic a doctor that allowed a syphilitic infant to die after convincing the child’s parents that it was better to spare society one more outcast.
The first state to enact a sterilization law was Indiana in 1907, quickly followed by California and 28 other states by 1931. These laws resulted in the forced sterilization of over 64,000 people in the United States At first, sterilization efforts focused on the disabled but later grew to include people whose only “crime” was poverty. These sterilization programs found legal support in the Supreme Court. In Buck v. Bell (1927), the state of Virginia sought to sterilize Carrie Buck for promiscuity as evidenced by her giving birth to a baby out of wedlock (some suggest she was raped). In ruling against Buck, Supreme Court Justice Wendell Holmes (a popular figure with Progressives) opined, “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles is enough.
This decision legitimized the various sterilization laws in the United States. In particular, California’s program was so robust that the Nazis turned to California for advice in perfecting their own efforts. Hitler proudly admitted to following the laws of several American states that allowed for the prevention of reproduction of the “unfit.”
The pervasiveness of support for eugenics can be seen in the following quotes by widely admired people of the early twentieth century assembled by the National Catholic Register and Flashbak.com..
Teddy Roosevelt (a hero of mine). “I agree with you if you mean, as I suppose you do, that society has no business to permit degenerates to reproduce their kind. It is really extraordinary that our people refuse to apply to human beings such elementary knowledge as every successful farmer is obliged to apply to his own stock breeding. Any group of farmers who permitted their best stock not to breed, and let all the increase come from the worst stock, would be treated as fit inmates for an asylum.”
Helen Keller. (celebrated for her ability to overcome incredible disabilities) “It is the possibility of happiness, intelligence and power that give life its sanctity, and they are absent in the case of a poor, misshapen, paralyzed, unthinking creature,” Keller said, adding that allowing a “defective” child to die was simply a “weeding of the human garden that shows a sincere love of true life.”
H.G. Wells. (Fabian Socialist, whose work laid the foundations for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights) “The way of nature has always been to slay the hindmost, and there is still no other way, unless we can prevent those who would become the hindmost being born,” he wrote. “It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.”
George Bernard Shaw (author of Pygmalion in which he demonstrates that the lower classes are separated from the upper classes by their accents). “We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill,” he wrote. “A part of eugenic politics would finally land us in an extensive use of the lethal chamber. A great many people would have to be put out of existence simply because it wastes other people’s time to look after them.”
Winston Churchill (the indefatigable opponent of the Nazis). “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the Feeble-Minded and Insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate. I am convinced that the multiplication of the Feeble-Minded, which is proceeding now at an artificial rate, unchecked by any of the old restraints of nature, and actually fostered by civilized conditions, is a terrible danger to the race.”
Francis Crick (the co-discoverer of the genetic code). “The main difficulty is that people have to start thinking out eugenics in a different way. The Nazis gave it a bad name and I think it is time something was done to make it respectable again. My other suggestion is in an attempt to solve the problem of irresponsible people and especially those who are poorly endowed genetically having large numbers of unnecessary children. Because of their irresponsibility, it seems to me that for them, sterilization is the only answer and I would do this by bribery. It would probably pay society to offer such individuals something like £l,000 down and a pension of £5 a week over the age of 60.
John Maynard Keynes (the greatest economist of the 20th century).
In 1946, and not long before he died, Keynes wrote that eugenics is “the most important, significant and, I would add, genuine branch of sociology which exists”. By then, he must have known exactly what Hitler had been up to in the preceding 15 years, but then he did write this:
[Jews] have in them deep-rooted instincts that are antagonistic and therefore repulsive to the European, and their presence among us is a living example of the insurmountable difficulties that exist in merging race characteristics, in making cats love dogs …
It is not agreeable to see civilization so under the ugly thumbs of its impure Jews who have all the money and the power and brains.
Jacques Cousteau (noted oceanographer). “Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer… Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species…In order to stabilize world population, we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it’s just as bad not to say it.”
What are we to make of this? Some of most admired and best educated men and women favored sterilization, and in some cases, the execution of the poor and the undesirables. Many of these quotes were written or spoken in a post-WWII world when the stench of Nazism was fresh in our nostrils. These evils were promulgated by statesmen and writers, scientists and lay people, conservatives and progressives. But they were, by and large, not Bible-believing Christians. Both Teddy Roosevelt and Winston Churchill were religious in the conventional way; all the others were professing atheists (Keynes, Wells and Crick), skeptics (Shaw), mystics (Helen Keller) or vague pantheists (Jacques Cousteau).
Has the Church of Christ been immune to the siren call of eugenics? That will be the subject of the next post.