INTRODUCTION TO EUGENICS
By John Cavanaugh-O’Keefe
The principal manifestations of eugenics are racism and
abortion; eugenics is the basis for “scientific racism,” and laid the foundation
for decriminalizing abortion. It is the driving force behind euthanasia, in
vitro fertilization, and embryo and fetal research. It is the driving force in
global population policy, which is a key element in American foreign policy. It
is the force driving much of the environmentalist movement, welfare policy,
welfare reform and health care. It is found in anthropology, sociology,
psychology—all the social sciences. It is reflected in much American literature,
especially science fiction. So it is worth some study.
DEFINITION
Eugenics is the study of methods to improve the human race
by controlling reproduction. The word was coined in 1883 by Francis Galton, a
cousin of Charles Darwin. Galton believed that the proper evolution of the
human race was thwarted by philanthropic outreach to the poor: misguided
charity encouraged the “unfit” to bear more children. This upset the mechanism
of natural selection. Hence, the human race needed a kind of artificial selection,
which he called “eugenics,” from Greek for good birth. Galton wanted eugenics
to develop from a science to a policy and finally into a religion. (1)
A Study . . .
Galton defined eugenics as “the science of improvement of
the human race germ plasm through better breeding.” He also said: “Eugenics is
the study of agencies under social control that may improve or impair the
racial qualities of future generations, whether physically or mentally.” This
definition was used for years on the cover of the Eugenics Review, a journal published by the Eugenics Education
Society (later renamed more simply the Eugenics Society).
A Program . . .
The American Journal
of Eugenics (2) in 1906 called eugenics a “science,” but also noted that
the Century Dictionary defined it as “the doctrine of Progress, or Evolution,
especially in the human race, through improved conditions in the relations of the
sexes.”
In 1970, I. I. Gottesman, an American Eugenics Society
director, defined it actively: “The essence of evolution is natural selection;
the essence of eugenics is the replacement of ‘natural’ selection by conscious,
premeditated, or artificial selection in the hope of speeding up the evolution
of ‘desirable’ characteristics and the elimination of undesirable ones.”
A Religion . . .
Galton’s suggestion that eugenics should function as a
religion was echoed by George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russel and others. (3)
A pungent assertion of the religious character of eugenics comes
from Julian Huxley, the first Director-General of the United Nations
Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization and a member of the Eugenics
Society: “We must face the fact that now, in this year of grace, the great
majority of human beings are substandard: they are undernourished, or ill, or
condemned to a ceaseless struggle for bare existence; they are imprisoned in
ignorance or superstition... We must see to it that life is no longer a hell
paved with unrealized opportunity... In this light, the highest and most sacred
duty of man is seen as the proper utilization of the untapped resources of
human beings.”
“I find myself inevitably driven to use the language of
religion.” Huxley continued, “For the fact is that all this does add up to
something in the nature of a religion: perhaps one might call it Evolutionary
Humanism. The word ‘religion’ is often used restrictively to mean belief in
gods; but I am not using it in this sense... I am using it in a broader sense,
to denote an overall relation between man and his destiny, and one involving
his deepest feelings, including his sense of what is sacred. In this broad
sense, evolutionary humanism, it seems to me, is capable of becoming the germ
of a new religion, not necessarily supplanting existing religions but
supplementing them.”(4)
The Population Council, one of the new eugenics organizations
that emerged after World War II, no longer spoke of eugenics as a religion, but
launched “studies relating to the social, ethical and moral dimensions” of
population studies, recognizing that these questions involved matters “of a
cultural, moral and spiritual nature.” (5)
The new field of bioethics is a response to issues raised by
eugenics. (6)
Bioethics is based on situation ethics, which was developed
largely by Joseph Fletcher, a member of the American Eugenics Society. In 1973,
Daniel Callahan, a prominent Catholic dissenter and a member of the American
Eugenics Society, outlined the new field in the first issue of Hastings Center Studies. (7)
HISTORY OF EUGENICS
In 1798, an English clergyman and economist named Thomas Robert
Malthus published his 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 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 [war of all
against all] 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.” (8)
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. (9) The work of these academics is built explicitly on
Galton’s theories, but the eugenics ideology spread far beyond this core of
true believers.
EUGENICS SOCIETIES
In 1904, Galton endowed a research chair in eugenics at
University College, London University. In Germany in 1905, Dr. Alfred Ploetz
and Dr. Ernst Rüdin founded the Gesellschaft
für 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 was founded in the United States. The ERO had a
different emphasis from the Birth Control League, which sought “fewer children for
laboring classes”; the ERO felt that “ultimate economic betterment should be
sought by breeding better people, not fewer of the existing sort.” (10)
The First International Eugenics Congress 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 coworkers incorporated the American Birth Control
League in 1922. (The organization was renamed the Birth Control Federation of
America in 1939, and in 1942 was renamed the Planned Parenthood Federation of
America. [11]) 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 civilization... The most
urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the overfertility of the
mentally and physically defective.” (12)
In 1922, the American Eugenics Society was founded. Founders
included Madison Grant, Henry H. Laughlin, Irving Fisher, Henry 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 Color Against White World
Supremacy. Laughlin was the Superintendent of the Eugenics Record Office
from 1910 to 1921; he later became president of the Pioneer Fund, a white
supremacist organization 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.” (13)
Henry 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.”
(14)
This list of organizations 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 organizing, 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, sterilizing 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 sterilizing the “unfit.” By 1931, sterilization laws had been enacted
in 27 of the United States, and by 1935 sterilization laws had been enacted in
Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland and Germany. (15)
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. In the early 20th century Ploetz and Rüdin 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.—cooperated 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. A decade later 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, (16) and eugenicists
elsewhere failed to criticize the Germans. In the United States, the Birth Control Review praised the
effectiveness of the Germans, and published articles by Rüdin and others. (17)
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 legalized 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
Most people have never heard of eugenics, and most of those who
have heard of it think it died with Hitler. Among the handful who are aware
that eugenics was still a force after World War II, many believe that its
remnants were reformed. In fact, the eugenics movement continued to thrive,
without reform:
• 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 was running a flourishing abortion business.
Beginning in the 1960s, 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 plagiarized 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. (18) So 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 worldwide, 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. (19) Mengele’s
horrific experiments at Auschwitz have put his name alongside those of Hitler
and Eichmann. Yet, a few years after the war, von Verschuer founded the
Institute of Human Genetics in Münster, 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 pretense 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 1930s. The first,
a review of his book Erbpathologie,
said: “Race culture, the selection of proposed cases for sterilization or
marriage advice [i.e., genetic counseling] 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.” (20)
Another article about von Verschuer appeared in the May/June
1936 Eugenical News, which
specifically mentioned that von Verschuer intended to use studies of twins to
test a racist idea (Mengele’s horrors at Auschwitz were studies of twins), and
there was a follow-up article in October 1937.
CRYPTO-EUGENICS
In 1968, the Eugenics
Review ran an article summarizing some of the activities of the Eugenics
Society. The article quoted a proposal made in the late 1950s by Dr. Carlos
Paton Blacker, who had been an officer in the Eugenics Society since 1931
(secretary, then general secretary, then director, then chairman): 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 U.S.
Eugenics Society. (21)
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 membership, to find out
if any relevant projects are contemplated with which the Eugenics Society could
assist. (22)
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 cryptoeugenics, 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.” (23)
Osborn stated the public relations problem bluntly: “Eugenic
goals are most likely to be attained under a name other than eugenics.” (24) He
pointed to genetic counseling 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.” (25)
Osborn is often credited with reforming the eugenics
movement after World War II, and purging its racism. However, during the time
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
organization. Obviously, a secret racist wouldn’t purge racism; he would purge open
racism, leaving a policy that critics might call “cryptoracism.”
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.” (26)
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. (27)
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 Rüdin, investigating in
genetic psychiatry.” (28) 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. 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. (29)
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, sterilization and
abortion. But positive eugenics, or the increased production of the “fit,” can
be advanced through artificial insemination, in vitro fertilization and genetic
engineering. The Human Genome Project would certainly help in a scheme of
positive eugenics.
SECOND NEW FIELD: POPULATION CONTROL
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 the eugenics movement
to continue its work—more from the fit, fewer from the unfit— with the same
people doing 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—Ford, Mellon, DuPont, 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.” (30) 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 III, and spent $173,621,654 in its first 25 years. (31) 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. For example, during the past 25 years, there have
been over 1.5 billion surgical abortions globally; the figure is simply
unimaginable. 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. (32)
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. (33)
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 both prenatal life and women’s privacy. 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. (34) 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. (35)
The coercive Chinese policy has a great deal of acceptance and
support in the United States, including a defense offered by “pro-choice”
feminist leaders such as Eleanor Smeal and Molly Yard. When the Reagan
administration cut off funds for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA,
formerly United Nations Fund for Population Activities) 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.” (36)
In fact, the United States government is responsible for
much of global population control. In 1976, a formal definition of national security
interests, National Security Study Memorandum 200 (or “NSSM 200”), described
the major threats to the United States. Some of these threats were 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, there is a threat
to American national security interests: population growth. The U.S. Agency for
International Development was given the responsibility of defending America
from this grave threat.
NSSM 200 was classified until 1992; when it was
declassified, 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. (37)
CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS
In late 1994, the publication of The Bell Curve (38) revived the word “eugenics.” The research
quoted in the book is drawn overwhelmingly from members of the American
Eugenics Society and other eugenics groups. Curiously, most commentators
focused on one chapter in the lengthy book, and debated whether it was racist. The
book concludes that all men are not equal, and that the Declaration of
Independence is badly worded. This lengthy restatement of eugenics was on the
best seller list for weeks. The book was generally praised by conservatives
(see The National Review, December 5,
1994, an issue devoted to The Bell Curve)
and attacked by liberals (see The New
Republic, October 31, 1994, which included a lengthy defense of the book by
its authors and 21 critical or hostile responses).
SYSTEMATIC RESPONSE
One excellent way to understand the eugenics movement is to read
a list of the members of the Eugenics Society and its successor, the Society
for the Study of Social Biology. Eugenics is not a conspiracy; it is a movement
and an ideology. But its pieces are often considered in isolation (perhaps
because of the success of the strategy of crypto-eugenics) and reading the list
of members is one efficient way to see the whole picture.
In 1925, John Thomas Scopes was charged with teaching evolution
in a public school in Tennessee, in violation of state law. The trial became a
highly visible confrontation between those with Fundamentalist views of
Scripture and those promoting the theory of evolution. Shaping the debate this
way allowed the proponents of evolution to score a tremendous public relations
victory. Nonetheless, the questions, then and now, are theological and moral,
not just scientific. Darwin and the evolutionists and eugenicists had indeed
precipitated a religious crisis, and were debating the existence of God and the
meaning of human life.
From the beginning, the great obstacle to the eugenics movement
has been the Roman Catholic Church, and the Church’s position has been
repeatedly distorted. A sketch of the Church’s position can be found in:
Gaudium et Spes or
The Church in the Modern World— the
Vatican II document explaining to all people of good will why the Church wants
to be involved in discussions of the problems facing the world and what she can
contribute to solving them;
Humanae Vitae—Pope
Paul VI’s letter on human life, best known for his restatement of the Church’s
unwavering assertion that contraception is objectively wrong and cannot be made
moral, but also containing a sharp warning about the threat of coercive
population control;
Evangelium Vitae—Pope
John Paul II’s treatise on the incomparable worth of the human person, new
threats and our responsibility to protect the right to life;
Populorum Progressio—Pope
Paul VI’s powerful letter on development, urging the wealthy nations to help
the poor generously, and calling development the “new name for peace”;
Laborem Exercens—Pope
John Paul II’s letter on work, offering a radically new approach to the place
of work in the life of an individual and in society;
Familiaris Consortio—Pope
John Paul II’s letter on family life, best known for restating the Church’s
opposition to contraception, but also defending the rights of families,
including the right to migrate in search of a better economic life; and
Sollicitudo Rei
Socialis—one of Pope John Paul II’s letters on the crises facing the modern
world, declaring that the measure of a social program is its impact on the
dignity of the individual, and that the route to freedom from social evil is
solidarity with the victims of the evil.
The social sciences in our time are thoroughly imbued with eugenic
theory. It would be a noble work to rescue them, to work through the basic
texts and theories of each field, identifying the eugenic taint and replacing
it with an unswerving devotion to the dignity of the individual, including the
poor.
FOOTNOTES
1 Francis Galton, “Eugenics, Its Definition, Scope and
Aims,” Sociological Papers (London,
1905)
2 Formerly Lucifer the
Light Bearer
3 Diane B. Paul,
“Eugenics Anxieties, Social Realities and Political Choices,” in Are Genes Us: The Social Consequences of the
New Genetics (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994), p. 149
4 Julian Huxley, Evolution
in Action (New York: Signet, 1957), p. 132. Huxley’s career is
indispensable to understanding eugenics. His grandfather Thomas Henry Huxley
was a champion of Darwin’s theories. Julian Huxley was the founder of the World
Wildlife Fund, a member of the Euthanasia Society, a leader in the Abortion Law
Reform Association. He served in the English Eugenics Society in various
capacities over several decades, including three years as president.
5 The Population
Council: A Chronicle of the First Twenty-Five Years, 1952-1977 (New York:
Population Council, 1978), pp. 16-17
6 The word “eugenics” was first used to refer to questions
about population and environment, in the late 1960s. In the 1970s, it came to
refer to questions including abortion, contraception, euthanasia and artificial
insemination.
7 Daniel J. Callahan, “Bioethics as a Discipline,” Hastings Center Studies 1, No. 1 (1973),
pp. 66-73
8 Letter to P. L. Lavrov, 12-17 November 1875, cited by R.
C. Lewontin, Steven Rose, and Leon Kamin, Not
in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature (New York: Pantheon, 1984),
p. 309
9 J. Philippe Rushton, Race,
Evolution and Behavior (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1995), pp. 9-13
10 Eugenical News, 1917, p. 73
11 Robert G. Marshall and Charles A. Donovan, Blessed Are the Barren (San Francisco:
Ignatius Press, 1991)
12 Margaret Sanger, Birth
Control Review, October 1921, p. 5
13 Barry Mehler, “Sources in the Study of Eugenics,” Mendel Newsletter, Nov. 1978
14 Stephen Jay Gould, The
Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1981), p. 231
15 Frederick Osborn, “Eugenics,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago, London, et al: 1970), Vol. 8, p.
816 ff. Osborn was an officer—treasurer, former president—of the American
Eugenics Society when he wrote this article for the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is impossible to understand the
history of eugenics without grasping the extent to which the eugenicists have
been able to write their own story. Osborn, for example, is frequently considered
to be a key reformer in the eugenics movement, purging it of racism after World
War II. But he was president of the Pioneer Fund, a secretive white supremacist
organization, from 1947 to 1956.
16 Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous
Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988)
17 Stefan Kuhl, The
Nazi Connection, (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). This
is an excellent study of the extent of cooperation between eugenicists inside
and outside Germany.
18 Katharine O’Keefe, “Crypto-Eugenics,” unpublished paper. Williams,
who taught Jurisprudence at Cambridge University, was also president of the
Abortion Law Reform Association and later Vice President of the Voluntary
Euthanasia Society.
19 Benno Müller-Hill, Murderous
Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 18-20
20 Eugenical News,
January/February 1936, pp. 21-22
21 Faith Schenck and A. S. Parkes, “The Activities of the
Eugenics Society,” Eugenics Review,
vol 60 (1968), pp. 154-155
22 Ibid.
23 Frederick Osborn, Galton Lecture, Eugenics Review, 1956-1957, pp. 21-22
24 Frederick Osborn, Future
of Human Heredity (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1968), p. 104 25 Ibid,
p. 91
26 Mankind Quarterly,
Vol. 1, No. 1
27 Eugenics Review,
October 1938, p. 195
28 Eugenical News,
1938, p. 34
29 Katharine O’Keefe, index to list of American Eugenics
Society
30 Germaine Greer, Sex
and Destiny (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), p. 377
31 The Population
Council: A Chronicle of the First Twenty-Five Years, 1952-1977 (New York:
Population Council, 1978), p. 210
32 Kingsley Davis, “Sociological Aspects of Genetic Control”
in Readings in Population, edited by
William Petersen (New York: Macmillan, 1972), p. 379
33 Philip M. Hauser, “Population Control: More Than Family
Planning” in Readings in Population,
edited by William Petersen (New York: Macmillan, 1972), pp. 422-423
34 People, Vol.
16, No. 1, 1989. IPPF’s quarterly, from London, is not the same as the American
magazine about celebrities.
35 William O’Reilly, “USAID’s Agenda of Fear” (Gaithersburg,
Md.: Human Life International, 1987)
36 PAA Affairs,
Fall 1978, p. 2, quoted by John S. Aird in Slaughter
of the Innocents (Washington: AEI Press, 1990), p. 8. Aird, a former
research specialist on China at the U.S. Bureau of the Census, documents the
coercive nature of the Chinese program.
37 “Population Control and National Security” (Washington:
Information Project for Africa, 1991)
38 Richard J. Herrnstein, and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class
Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994). In an excellent
review in the December 1, 1994, New York
Review, Charles Lane showed the extensive influence of the Pioneer Fund and
Mankind Quarterly on the book.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
History of Eugenics
Adams, Mark, ed., The
Wellborn Science: Eugenics in Germany, France, Brazil and Russia (New York
and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990)
Bajema, Carl L., ed., Eugenics,
Then and Now (Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania: Hutchinson & Ross, 1976)
Baker-Benfield, G. J., The
Horrors of the Half-Known Life: Male Attitudes Toward Women and Sexuality in Nineteenth
Century America (New York: Harper Colophon, 1976)
Bigelow, Maurice A., “Brief History of the American Eugenics
Society,” Eugenic News, 31 (1946):
49-51.
Chase, Allen, The
Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
Degler, Carl N., In
Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social
Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)
Haller, Mark H., Eugenics: Hereditarian Attitudes in American Thought (New Brunswick, New
Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1963)
Kevles, Daniel J., In
the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity (Berkeley and
Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986)
Kuhl, Stefan, The Nazi
Connection (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994)
Lifton, Robert, The
Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide (New York:
Basic Books, 1986)
Ludmerer, Kenneth M., Genetics
and American Society (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1972)
Mehler, Barry, “A History of the American Eugenics Society, 1921-1940,”
dissertation, University of Illinois, 1988.
Pernick, Martin S., The
Black Stork: Eugenics and the Death of Defective Babies in American Medicine
and Motion Pictures Since 1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992)
Pickens, Donald K., Eugenics
and the Progressives (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press,
1968)
Rosenberg, Charles E., No
Other Gods: On Science and American Social Thought (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1976)
Shapiro, Thomas M., Population
Control Politics: Women, Sterilization and Reproductive Choice
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985)
Stepan, Nancy, The
Idea of Race in Science: Great Britain 1800-1960 (London: Macmillan, 1982)
Stepan, Nancy, The
Hour of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca, New
York: Cornell University Press, 1991)
Trombley, Stephen, The
Right to Reproduce: A History of Coercive Sterilization (London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1988)
Weinreich, Max, Hitler’s
Professors: The Part of Scholarship in Germany’s Crimes Against the Jewish
People (New York: Yiddish Scientific Institute, 1946)
Weiss, Sheila F., Race Hygiene and National Efficiency: The Eugenics
of Wilhelm Schallmayer (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California
Press, 1987)
Reproductive
Technology
Corea, G., The Mother
Machine (New York: Harper & Row, 1985)
Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, Instruction on Respect for Human Life in Its
Origins and on the Dignity of Procreation (Vatican City: 1987)
De Marco, Don, Biotechnology
and the Assault on Parenthood (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991)
Fletcher, Joseph, Morals
and Medicine (Boston: Bacon Press, 1960)
Frank, Diana, and Vogel, Marta, The Baby Makers (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1988)
Howard, Ted, and Rifkin, Jeremy, Who Should Play God? (New York: Dell Publishing, 1987)
Lejeune, Jerome; Ramsey, Paul; and Wright, Gerard, The Question of In Vitro Fertilization
(London: SPUC Educational Trust, 1984)
McLaughlin, Loretta, The
Pill, John Rock and the Church (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1982)
Rini, Suzanne M., Beyond
Abortion: A Chronicle of Fetal Experimentation (Rockford, Ill.: TAN Books,
1988)
U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Infertility: Medical and Social Choices
(Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1988)
Population Control
Aird, John S., Slaughter
of the Innocents: Coercive Birth Control in China (Washington: AEI Press,
1990)
Greer, Germaine, Sex
and Destiny (New York: Harper & Row, 1984)
Hartmann, Betsy, Reproductive
Rights and Wrongs (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)
Information Project for Africa, Population Control and National Security (Washington, 1991). IPFA
has four other studies that have also been used by opponents of population
imperialism throughout the developing world.
Fiction
H. G. Wells and Isaac Asimov were eugenicists, and much
science fiction follows their lead. It is, therefore, good to know there is
some excellent science fiction that challenges eugenics:
Huxley, Aldous, Brave
New World (New York: Harper & Row, 1932, 1946)
Lewis, C.S., That
Hideous Strength (New York: Macmillan, 1965)
Miller, Walter M., A
Canticle for Liebowitz (New York: Bantam Books, 1969)
Percy, Walker, The
Thanatos Syndrome (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1987)
Recent Eugenics
Theory
Gore, Al, Earth in the
Balance (Boston, New York and London: Houghton Mifflin, 1992)
Herrnstein, Richard J. and Murray, Charles, The Bell Curve (New York: Free Press,
1994)
Odom, Guy R., Mothers,
Leadership and Success (Houston: Polybius Press, 1990)
Rushton, J. Philippe, Race,
Evolution and Behavior (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995)
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