Periodic economic recessions created further social unrest. Labor unions, civil rights groups, and the woman's suffrage movement pressed for greater equity. At the same time nativist and racist groups like the Ku Klux Klan pulled in the opposite direction. It was out of this cauldron of social upheaval that the American eugenics movement emerged. It promised prosperity and progress, not through strikes or ugly race riots, but through a new science that would combine advances in the field of genetics with the efficiency of the assembly line.
Eugenicists used a flawed and crude interpretation of Gregor Mendel's laws on heredity to argue that criminality, intelligence, and pauperism were passed down in families as simple dominant or recessive hereditary traits. Mainline eugenicists (those eugenicists who were explicitly preoccupied with issues of race), believed that some individuals and entire groups of people (such as Southern Europeans, Jews, Africans, and Latinos) were more predisposed to the "defective genes." Charles Davenport, a leader in American eugenics, argued for laws to control the spread of "inferior blood" into the general population. He told an international gathering of scholars "that the biological basis for such laws is doubtless an appreciation of the fact that negroes and other races carry traits that do not go well with our social organization."
Davenport's wishes were partly realized. Eugenic advocates convinced 30 state legislatures to pass involuntary sterilization laws that targeted "defective strains" within the general population, such as the blind, deaf, epileptic, feebleminded, and paupers. On the national level, eugenic supporters played a decisive role in the Congressional passage of the draconian Immigration and Restriction Act of 1924, which established blatantly racist quotas. President Calvin Coolidge embraced the eugenic assumptions behind the law when he declared, "America must be kept American. Biological laws show É that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races."
From Introduction to Eugenics :
In 1798, an English clergyman and economist named Thomas Robert Malthus published the Essay on the Principle of Population. The central idea of the 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 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."
It is noteworthy that 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), 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. However, these academics were carrying on work that was built specifically on Galton's theories. The eugenics ideology spread far beyond this core of true believers.
[ ... ]
After World War II, the eugenics movement discovered (or invented) the population explosion, and whipped up global hysteria about it. From 1952 on, a major part of the eugenics movement was the population control movement. The population explosion made it possible for eugenics movement to continue its work more from the fit, less from the unfit with the same people to do the same things, but with a new public rationale.
The transformation from open eugenics to population planning is described well by Germaine Greer: "It now seems strange that men who had been conspicuous in the eugenics movement were able to move quite painlessly into the population establishment at the highest level, but if we reflect that the paymasters were the same Ford, Mellon, Du Pont, Standard Oil, Rockefeller and Shell are still the same, we can only assume that people like Kingsley Davis, Frank W. Notestein, C. C. Little, E. A. Ross, the Osborns Frederick and Fairfield, Philip M. Hauser, Alan Guttmacher and Sheldon Segal were being rewarded for past services." That is, the population control movement was the same money, the same leaders, the same activities with a new excuse.
One of the organizations that promoted eugenics under the new population rubric was the Population Council. It was founded in 1952 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, and spent $173,621,654 in its first 25 years. That is not a bad budget for one of the organizations in a dead movement! Clearly, the people who think the eugenics movement died in the rubble in Berlin do not understand crypto-eugenics, genetics or population control!
The extent of the population control movement is hard to imagine, and harder to exaggerate. During the past 25 years, there have been approximately 1.5 billion surgical abortions globally. The United Nations Population Fund has sponsored three meetings bringing together the heads of state from most of the world to develop a global population strategy, in Bucharest in 1974, Mexico City in 1984, and in Cairo in 1994. No other global problem has been the occasion for meetings comparable to these three. The World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and governmental agencies from nearly all the industrialized nations have contributed billions of dollars to campaigns designed to decrease population growth.
The population control movement has not been noted for respect for human rights. In 1972, for example, essays by members of the American Eugenics Society appeared in Readings in Population. Kingsley Davis explained the need for genetic control, and examined the obstacles, including a widespread attachment to the ideal of family life. But he saw some hope of developing a more effective program of improving the human race, although improvement would be slow:
"Under the circumstances, we shall probably struggle along with small measures at a time, with the remote possibility that these may eventually evolve into a genetic control system. ... The morality of specific techniques of applied genetics artificial insemination, selective sterilization, ovular transplantation, eugenic abortion, genetic record keeping, genetic testing will be thunderously debated in theological and Marxian terms dating from ages past. Possibly, within half a century or so, this may add up to a comprehensive program."
What he wanted, though was "the deliberate alteration of the species for sociological purposes," which would be "a more fateful step than any previously taken by mankind. ... When man has conquered his own biological evolution he will have laid the basis for conquering everything else. The universe will be his, at last."
In the same book, Philip M. Hauser, also a member of the American Eugenics Society, explained the difference between family planning, which relies on the voluntary decisions of individuals or couples, and population control, which would include abortion, a commitment to zero population growth, coercion, euthanasia and restrictions on international migration.
Perhaps the clearest example of the power of the eugenics movement today is in China, with its one-child-only family policy. This policy is an assault on prenatal life and on women's privacy, both. The program was described and praised in 16 articles in a remarkable issue of IPPF's quarterly journal, People, in 1989, on the eve of the massacre in Tiananmen Square. But this anti-life, anti-choice policy is not unique to China; most of the nations of Asia have some coercive elements in their population policies.
The coercive Chinese policy has a great deal of acceptance and support in the United States, including from feminist leaders like Eleanor Smeal and Molly Yard. When the Reagan administration cut off funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) because of its support for the Chinese population program, two American organizations sued to restore funds: Rockefeller's Population Council and the Population Institute in Washington. A 1978 survey of members of the Population Association of America found that 34 percent of members agreed that "coercive birth control programs should be initiated in at least some countries immediately."
In fact, the United States government is responsible for much of the global population control. In 1976, a formal definition of national security interests, NSSM 200, described the major threats to the United States. Some of these are obvious. The first, of course, was Communism in Europe, with the military charged with principal responsibility for defending American national security from this threat. In the Pacific, the threat was the possibility of losing bases; the military was charged with the principal responsibility for defending this national interest. In Latin America, there was the threat of incipient Communism; the CIA had principal responsibility for our defense. In Africa, according to the American government in 1976 and ever since, the threat to American national security interests is population growth. The Agency for International Development was given the responsibility of defending America from this grave threat. This document was classified until 1992; when it was de-classified, the Information project for Africa distributed it, and the covert depopulation policy tucked into the American foreign aid program caused a great deal of resentment.
From The Eugenics Survey in Vermont: Law & Public Policy :
Sexual Sterilization in Vermont
"The committee has recently received letters from the Governors of Vermont and Kentucky asking for information regarding legislation, and strongly endorsing the proposition that defectives, degenerates, and confirmed criminals should be sterilized. Both hope soon to secure legislation in their respective states legalizing the operation."
Report of the Committee of the Eugenics Section
of the American Breeders' Association to Study and Report
on the Best Practical Means for Cutting Off the Defective Germ-plasm in the Human Population, 1912
"It appears that Vermont is fearful of the legal consequences of a compulsory human sterilization law in spite of legal precedents to the contrary. It expressly provides for voluntary sterilization only and hence is really a retrogressive step in light of the present status of the eugenic sterilization movement in the country."
Jacob Landman,
Human Sterilization in the United States, 1932
Vermont's history of eugenic sterilization predated the Eugenics Survey by at least twelve years and continued long after the Survey closed. Yet Harry Perkins attibuted the final passage of Vermont's sterilization law of 1931 to the Eugenics Survey's public education campaigns. The current law governing sexual sterilization of mentally retarded persons has been stripped of all eugenic intent and provides a detailed procedure to protect the rights of the individual.
Vermont records documenting the implementation of sterilization laws are not open to the public. The Eugenics Survey records do not contain sterilization records, as the Survey was not authorized to act as a "state eugenics board," as other states had established. Hence, our understanding of the degree to which "voluntary sterilization" of Vermonters was either "informed" or "consensual," as the law required, awaits access to patient records that are currently protected by privacy and confidentiality statutes. Government documents, manuscripts, and press coverage of the legislative debates over sterilization, however, dramatize the political landscape in which the sterilization bill was made law and document the central role the Eugenics Survey played in the campaign for sterilization.
Vermont's first sterilization bill, passed in 1912, was vetoed by the governor as unconstitutional.
Professor Harry Perkins renewed the quest for a eugenic sterilization law in 1925 at the first meeting of the Eugenics Survey advisory committee. Using legal precedents in other states and promotional literature from the American Eugenics Society to bolster their case, the Eugenics Survey and the Department of Public Welfare reconceived eugenic sterilization as part of a comprehensive state program of supervision and social control of mental deficiency.
In January,1927, Professor Perkins briefed the Vermont legislature on the need for a sterilization law using his Survey's studies Poor Vermont families (published as First Annual Report, Lessons from a Eugenical Survey of Vermont). The 1927 bill, "An Act Relating to Eugenic Sterilization," passed the Senate by a vote of 21 to 6, but failed in the House by a vote of 126 to 54. Perkins retreated from the sterilization issue in the next legislative session of 1929 in order to protect the Vermont Commission of Country Life from political controversy. In 1931, Professor Perkins, Dr. E. A. Stanley, Dr. Truman Allen, and Public Welfare Commissioner William Dyer reactivated the sterilization campaign, this time with the authority of the U. S. Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell. While based on the presumption that physicians could diagnose "hereditary feeblemindedness" or inherited mental illness, the 1931 campaign for a eugenic sterilization law was waged on economic and social grounds.
From Eugenics -- Breeding a Better Citizenry Through Science :
Thus, the first edition of Principles of Genetics can talk very casually about people whose stock ought to be eliminated on the basis of their contributions to society. The senior author, Edward Sinnott, became a professor at Columbia, and later, dean of the Yale Graduate School. The junior author, Leslie C. Dunn, also became a professor at Columbia, and became an outspoken critic of racist biology after the Nazis came to power. This passage (and the entire chapter it is from) does not appear in the editions that followed the stock market crash and the Depression, when it suddenly became clear to geneticists that wealth wasn't necessarily a good indicator of genotype.
Geneticists were slow to get it. Many, of course, believed it; they came from the privileged classes and shared the cultural prejudices of the era. Others may not have agreed with Madison Grant or Charles Davenport, but didn't disagree with them publicly. In fact, during the heyday of the eugenics movement, virtually every geneticist of note served below Grant and Davenport on the Advisory Board of the American Eugenics Society. One notable exception was Thomas Hunt Morgan, the great geneticist from Columbia University, who worked in the same building as anthropologist Franz Boas, a tireless critic of eugenics. Morgan published some polite reservations about eugenics in the mid-1920s, but not enough either to piss anyone off or to allow people to invoke his prestige to repudiate the movement. In the mid-1920s the only critics of eugenics were non-scientists or soft scientists, like Boas and Clarence Darrow, a great defender of civil liberties. Darrow evolved from biology's champion at the Scopes trial in 1925 to biology's basher in 1926.
The other exception was bacterial geneticist Herbert Spencer Jennings of Johns Hopkins. Jennings was asked to take a critical look at Harry Laughlin's data, presented to Congress, showing that there was a gradient in criminality when you looked at the country of origin of American immigrants, extending from northwest Europe to southeast Europe. Germans were law-abiding, and Italians were not. Jennings saw that Laughlin's analysis treated the Irish unfairly -- the data showed that they should have been with the Italians (not very law-abiding), but they weren't shown that way, ostensibly because they were tucked away in far northwestern Europe (from which people were supposed to be law-abiding), and showed the whole analysis to be bogus. And that is what Jennings said to Yale economist Irving Fisher, sitting President of the American Eugenics Society in 1925: Laughlin had simply mapped early versus later immigrants to America. The people coming in recently from southeast Europe were poor and therefore criminalistic, and the recent immigrant Irish proved it. Jennings quietly resigned from the AES Advisory Board.
His colleague Raymond Pearl, however, became the first biologist to take a public stand critical of eugenics. Pearl had long been a supporter of the field, but felt it was out of hand. In his friend H. L. Mencken's magazine, The American Mercury, Pearl published "The biology of superiority," the first biological critique of eugenics, which was sufficiently newsworthy as to make national headlines, and earned him the enmity of many biologists. That was 1927, after immigration restriction had already been passed, and Buck vs. Bell had been upheld by the Supreme Court.
When L. C. Dunn wrote a history of genetics in 1965, however, he gave the reader no discussion of the eugenics movement. Maybe he was right, for maybe geneticists had really learned the lessons of the eugenics era, and they could be safely put behind: that wisdom does not necessarily accompany technological achievement; that geneticists (like other citizens) carry the prejudices of their culture, class, and era; and that consequently their pronouncements about human issues should be very cautious.
On the other hand, maybe not. When the Human Genome Project is justified by James Watson on the grounds that genetics has replaced astrology in determining the course of our lives, we are obliged to think about the implications of such a blank check for the power of genetics. Of course, no one is arguing for the destruction of the poor on the grounds of their genes, but we hear free speculation about genes for crime, violence, and intelligence -- as if these were principally or even significantly genetic in origin, and thus amenable to gene therapy (which doesn't exist, of course) or the ever-present option of extirpation. History gives today's scientists a responsibility to keep their pronouncements conservative, and to debunk the misuses of genetics, whether by geneticists themselves or by others.
We hear a lot these days about how all citizens need to know genetics, and that science education must be a high priority. Indeed, that's true. But perhaps the opposite is even truer. Perhaps the highest priority should be educating scientists about the humanistic aspects of genetics.
Perhaps the most interesting paradox in the history of eugenics is that the American human genetics community, faced with the embarrassment of the Nazi enthusiasm for eugenics, set out to reinvent itself after World War II. It did so by burying its ancestor, Charles Davenport, and finding a new ancestor, Archibald Garrod, who had published some obscure work in medical genetics in the early part of the 20th century. Nobody in human genetics had cited his work for decades, but he was resurrected by L. C. Dunn, G. W. Beadle, and J. V. Neel in the 1950s, as they sought to legitimize the discredited field, and to reinvent it -- not as social theory any more, but as clinical practice. Then they redefined the term "eugenics", so that it no longer meant "eliminating the stock" -- and what that might imply -- of the poor and marginalized, but rather it now meant genetic screening for clinical syndromes and family counseling.
And it worked, for a while. There was one book on eugenics published in the 1960s (by Mark Haller) and one in the 1970s (by Kenneth Ludmerer). Modern scholarship on the subject, however, is directly descended from Daniel Kevles' (1985) book, serialized first in The New Yorker, at the time of the initial interest in the Human Genome Project.
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