History of Eugenics

In 1798, an English clergyman and economist named Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea of his book is that population increases exponentially and will therefore eventually outstrip food supply. If parents failed to limit the size of their families, then war or famine would kill off the excess. The idea has been remarkably resilient, although the specific predictions that Malthus made were wrong. Malthus argued that the island of Britain could not sustain a population of 20 million, but 150 years later the population was more than triple Malthus' ceiling.

Charles Darwin, the biologist, was immensely impressed by Malthus' ideas, and the Malthusian theories are embedded in Darwin's theory of evolution and natural selection (The Origin of the Species, 1859, and The Descent of Man, 1871) But after Darwin borrowed ideas from economics and inserted them into biology, his cousin reversed the process and discovered ideas in biology that could be applied to humans. This is one of the first tricks that amateur magicians learn, like "finding" a coin in a child's ear. The amazing thing about Galton's stunt is that it has fooled so many people for so long.

At least one contemporary understood what Galton was doing. Friedrich Engels, a collaborator with Karl Marx, was contemptuous of the way Malthus' ideas about economics were inserted into biology and then retrieved as gospel: "The whole Darwinist teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes' doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes and of the bourgeois doctrine of competition together with Malthus' theory of population. When this conjurer's trick has been performed ” the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this proceeding is so obvious that not a word need be said about it."

When it began, eugenics was embraced by conservatives and denounced by Engels. It is noteworthy that over time this ideology of arrogance proved to be appealing on the right (Galton), then the left (British Socialists), then the right (German National Socialists), then the left (American environmentalists and the abortion movement), then the right (see The Bell Curve debate).

Galton's work is still used today. He used statistical methods, including the now-famous "bell curve," to describe the distribution of intelligence within a population. He devised various methods for measuring intelligence, and concluded that Europeans are smarter than Africans, on average. And he suggested systematic studies of twins to distinguish the effects of heredity from the effects of environment.

Galton's work was carried on, especially at the University of London, where he endowed a Chair of Eugenics. According to eugenics scholar J. Philippe Rushton, Galton's work was carried on especially by Karl Pearson and Charles Spearman, then by Cyril Burt, and in our time by Raymond Cattell, Hans Eysenck and Arthur Jensen. The work of these academics is built explicitly on Galton's theories, but the eugenics ideology spread far beyond this core of true believers.

In 1904, Galton endowed a research chair in eugenics at University College, London University. In Germany in 1905, Dr. Alfred Ploetz and Dr. Ernst Rudin founded the Gesellschaft f½r Rassenhygiene or Society of Race-Hygiene. In 1907 in England, the Eugenic Education Society (later the Eugenics Society) was founded. In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) was founded in the United States. The ERO had a different emphasis from the Birth Control League which sought "fewer children for labouring classes"; the ERO felt that "ultimate economic betterment should be sought by breeding better people, not fewer of the existing sort."

The First International Eugenics Congress was held was held at London University in 1912. Representatives came from a number of nations, and the congress demonstrated the growing strength of the movement especially in England, Germany and the United States.

In October 1916, Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States. Several months later, she founded the Birth Control Review. She and her co-workers incorporated the American Birth Control League in 1922. (The organisation was renamed the Birth Control Federation of America in 1939, and in 1942 was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of America.) She wrote: "Birth control is thus the entering wedge for the Eugenic educator ... the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit' is admittedly the greatest present menace to civilisation ... The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."

In 1922, the American Eugenics Society was founded. Founders included: Madison Grant, Henry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Fairfield Osborn, and Henry Crampton. Grant was the author of The Passing of the Great Race (1916) and wrote the preface to The Rising Tide of Colour Against White World Supremacy. Laughlin was the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office from l910 to 1921; he later became President of the Pioneer Fund, a white supremacist organisation that is still functioning today. Fisher, who taught economics and political economy at Yale University for 40 years, said that the purpose of the society was to "stem the tide of threatened race degeneracy" and to protect the United States against "indiscriminate immigration, criminal degenerates, and race suicide." Fairfield Osborn was the president of the American Museum of Natural History from 1908 to 1933; he wrote about evolution in From the Greeks to Darwin. In 1923, during a national debate on restricting immigration, Osborn spoke enthusiastically about the results of intelligence testing carried out by the Army: "I believe those tests were worth what the war [World War I] cost, even in human life, if they served to show clearly to our people the lack of intelligence in our country, and the degrees of intelligence in different races who are coming to us, in a way which no one can say is the result of prejudice. ” We have learned once and for all that the Negro is not like us."

This list of organisations is far from exhaustive. The point here is simply that eugenics in the first part of the 20th century was not an academic exercise. Eugenicists were organising particularly in Germany, England and the United States, to implement policies consistent with their theories.
The work of the eugenicists included: racism and white supremacy, promoting birth control among the dysgenic, restricting immigration, sterilising the handicapped, promoting euthanasia, and seeking ways to increase the number of genetically well-endowed individuals.

Hitler's Embrace

A key program of the eugenicists was cleansing the human race by sterilising the ''unfit.'' By 1931, sterilisation laws had been enacted in 27 states in the United States, and by 1935 sterilisation laws had been enacted in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany. But the efficiency of the German eugenicists caused trouble.

Galton's ideas had been taken up in Germany by Friedrich Nietzsche in the 19th century. Then Ploetz and Rudin laid the foundations of an effective eugenics program in Germany. In 1922, two men--a lawyer and a psychiatrist, Karl Binding, J. D., and Alfred Hoche, M.D.--co-operated on a short book entitled Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (permission to Destroy Life Devoid of Value). The book encouraged Austrian physicians who were beginning to practice euthanasia illegally. And then Adolf Hitler, who had described his own eugenic ideas in Mein Kampf, came to power.

Hitler's determination to establish his "Master Race" was embraced by German eugenicists. And eugenicists elsewhere failed to criticise the Germans. In the United States, the Birth Control Review praised the effectiveness of the Germans, and published articles by Rudin and others.

In the United States today, there is a great deal of confusion about Hitler's view of abortion. Pro-lifers denounce abortionists furiously for imitating Hitler, who legalised abortion, and proponents of abortion denounce pro-lifers furiously for imitating Hitler, who outlawed abortion. In fact, both sides are half right. Hitler was a eugenicist, and for eugenic reasons he outlawed aborting Aryan babies, but encouraged aborting Slavs and Jews -- also for eugenic reasons.
After Hitler had killed millions of people, including one third of the Jews in the world, he lost the war. The name of his political party became and remains one of the most offensive words in the language, and ideas that are tightly associated with him are universally condemned. So the idea of building a master race became extremely unpopular. However, the eugenics movement did not die.

Eugenics After World War II

• The development and promotion of birth control was a major eugenic success.
• The discovery of the population explosion and the hysteria about the need to control it was a major eugenic success.
• The field of genetics grew faster than fruit flies in the 1950s, and although the accumulating knowledge was valuable, the field was dominated by eugenicists, who could use their knowledge for eugenic purposes.
• UNESCO, founded in 1948, was directed by Julian Huxley, a determined eugenicist who used his global platform very effectively.
• The welfare state in Britain was based largely on the work of Richard Titmuss, John Maynard Keynes and William Henry Beveridge, members of the Eugenics Society.

Historians who rely too heavily on the eugenicists themselves will overlook a great deal. Daniel Kevles, for example, makes the post-war eugenics movement sound like a group of dusty academics. But one of their activities in Britain beginning in the 1960's was running a flourishing abortion business. Beginning in the 1960's a few members of the Eugenics Society built and controlled almost the entire private abortion industry. Whether you think abortion is killing a child or exercising a fundamental liberty, this bloody and emotional activity is not the work of dusty academics: at least some of the eugenicists were activists.

The influence of the eugenicists on abortion in America is perhaps best seen by comparing Roe v. Wade and a book by Professor Glanville Williams, The Sanctity of Life and the Criminal Law. The book is cited in the 1973 abortion decision, but the citations alone do not reveal the full extent of the influence. The central ideas in Roe v. Wade are about personhood, and that section is virtually plagiarised from Williams. Justice Blackmun lifted his whole argument from Williams, including the history of abortion, ancient attitudes, the influence of Christianity, common law, Augustine's and Aquinas' teaching, canon law and English statutory law. Williams was a member of the Eugenics Society. Roe v Wade was based on eugenics.

Even in Germany, the eugenics movement did not die out The most offensive example of its resurgence after Hitler was the rehabilitation of Professor Dr. Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer. In 1935, von Verschuer said that he was "responsible for ensuring that the care of genes and race, which Germany is leading world-wide, has such a strong base that it will withstand any attacks from outside." In 1937, he was Director of the Third Reich Institute for Heredity, Biology and Racial Purity. Von Verschuer was Josef Mengele's mentor before the Nazi holocaust, and his collaborator during the holocaust.

Mengele's horrific experiments at Auschwitz have put his name alongside those of Hitler and Eichmann. And yet, a few years after the war, von Verschuer founded the Institute of Human Genetics in Munster, where he worked educating another generation until his death in 1969. He had not turned away from his old ideas: he was a foreign member of the American Eugenics Society.

There can be no pretence that the rehabilitation of Mengele's mentor and collaborator was an accidental oversight due to unfamiliarity with his views. Eugenicists in America were aware of von Verschuer; several stories about him appeared in English in the Eugenical News in the 1930's. The first, a review of his book Erbpathologie, said "Race culture, the selection of proposed cases for sterilisation or marriage advice [i.e., genetic counselling] are impossible without the earnest collaboration of the entire medical profession. ” In this book the author clearly outlines the duties of the physician to the nation. The word 'nation' no longer means a number of citizens living within certain boundaries, but a biological entity. This point of view also changes the obligation of the physician ” Dr von Verschuer has successfully bridged the gap between medical practice and theoretic scientific research"

Another article about von Verschuer appeared in the Eugenical News, May/June 1936, which specifically mentioned that Von Verschuer intended to use twin studies to test a racist idea (Mengele's horrors at Auschwitz were twin studies), and there was a follow-up article in October 1937.

Crypto-Eugenics

That the Society should pursue eugenic ends by less obvious means, that is by a policy of crypto-eugenics which was apparently proving successful in the US Eugenics Society.

In 1960, Blacker's proposal was adopted by the Eugenics Society. A resolution which was accepted, stated (in part):

The Society's activities in crypto-eugenics should be pursued vigorously, and specifically that the Society should increase its monetary support of the FPA [Family Planning Association, the English branch of Planned Parenthood] and the IPPF [International Planned Parenthood Federation] and should make contact with the Society for the Study of Human Biology, which already has a strong and active memberships, to find out if any relevant projects are contemplated with which the Eugenics Society could assist.

Planned Parenthood grew out of the eugenics movement. At the time this resolution was adopted by the Eugenics Society, Blacker was the Administrative Chairman of IPPF. When IPPF was founded in 1952, it was housed in the offices of the Eugenics Society.

The dominant figure in the eugenics movement in the United States, considered by the English to be a model of crypto-eugenics, was Major General Frederick Osborn, a master propagandist. In 1956, he said people "won't accept the idea that they are in general, second rate. We must rely on other motivation." He called the new motivation "a system of voluntary unconscious selection." The way to persuade people to exercise this voluntary unconscious selection was to appeal to the idea of "wanted" children. Osborn said, "Let's base our proposals on the desirability of having children born in homes where they will get affectionate and responsible care." In this way, the eugenics movement "will move at last towards the high goal which Galton set for it."

Osborn stated the public relations problem bluntly: "Eugenic goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics." He pointed to genetic counselling as a prime example: "Heredity clinics are the first eugenic proposals that have been adopted in a practical form and accepted by the public. ” The word eugenics is not associated with them."

Osborn is often credited with reforming the eugenics movement after World War II, and purging its racism. However, during the tine of this "reform," he was President of the Pioneer Fund, holding that office secretly from 1947 to 1956. The Pioneer Fund is a notorious white supremacist organisation. Obviously, a secret racist wouldn't purge racism, he would purge open racism, leaving a policy that critics might call "crypto-racism"
In 1960, a member of the Eugenics Society, Reginald Ruggles Gates, founded a new periodical to advance racist ideas. The Advisory Council of the new journal, Mankind Quarterly, included von Verschuer and a member of the Darwin family, Charles Galton Darwin. One idea advanced in the journal is the belief that anthropology, if it is understood honestly, shows that mankind is divided into four species. The first issue stated that desegregation happened because "American anthropologists were responsible for introducing equalitarianism into anthropology, ignoring the hereditary differences between races, ” until the uninstructed public were gradually misled. Equality of Opportunity, which everyone supports, was replaced by a doctrine of genetic and social equality, which is something quite different".

The Shift To Genetics

Before the war, the American Eugenics Society laid out its research aims, including many investigations in sociology, psychology, anthropology and biology. But they noted especially two important new fields: population study and genetics.

After the war, research in genetics was led by one of the German eugenicists besides von Verschuer who had continued his work, Dr. Franz J. Kallmann. He had been "associated with Dr. Ernst Rudin, investigating in genetic psychiatry."

He was half Jewish, so he was driven out of (Germany in 1936 by Hitler. Nonetheless, he testified on behalf of von Verschuer after the war. Kallmann taught psychiatry at Columbia, and in 1948 he founded the American Society of Human Genetics (ASHG). He became a member of the American Eugenics Society. The ASHG developed hundreds of prenatal tests but did not look for cures, although every test was hyped as a potential lead towards a cure.

Over the next years, at least 124 people were members of both Kallmann's ASHG and the American Eugenics Society. The overwhelming evidence of a commitment to eugenics at the ASHG is especially troubling when you note that members of this society promoted, developed and now lead the billion-dollar Human Genome Project.

Negative eugenics, or ending the over-production of the "unfit," is obviously well underway with widespread contraception, sterilisation and abortion. But positive eugenics, or the increased production or the "fit," can be advanced through artificial insemination, in vitro fertilisation and genetic engineering. The Human Genome Project would certainly help in a scheme of positive eugenics.