Biopolitics
Page 12
These sentences are not put by some Hollywood movie into the mouth of a cartoon SS officer, but are taken from a statement in 1913 by the twenty-sixth president of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt![219]
Besides, according to Kenneth Ludmerer,[220] in the United States, a country that, from the point of view of its own historical roots, was further away from the new ideas than most of contemporary Europe, almost half the geneticists were, from the end of the 19th century until the Depression, involved in some way or other in the eugenicist movement. According to Rifkin, this is easily explained by the convergence of, on the one hand, the WASP élite’s preoccupations to find “ideological” justifications for their own power as well as recipes to perpetuate it; and on the other hand with attempts by academics and politicians to find explanations for the failure of their own projects of social reform.
Many, Rifkin notes, were alarmed at the time by what they considered to be “a decline of the hereditary quality of the American people,” and scientists assumed leading roles in the genetic cause in the hope that they could “help reversing the trend.” Michael F. Guaire went as far as to contend that, “the destiny of our civilisation depends on this problem”[221] (this leaves undecided the question of which “civilisation” he is referring to, and what his opinion of it might be).
The well-known geneticist Edward G. Conklin, quoted by Rifkin, observed that, “although our human stock includes some of the most intelligent, moral and progressive people in the world, it includes a disproportionately large number of the worst human types.”[222]
Professor Herbert S. Jennings of John Hopkins University did also voice his view to the American public that “the troubles of the world and the remedy of these troubles lie fundamentally in the diverse constitutions of human beings. Laws, customs, education, material surroundings are the creations of men and reflect their fundamental nature. To attempt to correct these things is merely to treat specific symptoms. To go to the root of the troubles, a better breed of men must be produced, one that shall not contain the inferior types. When a better breed has taken over the business of the world, laws, customs, education, material conditions will take care of themselves.”[223]
In 1910, Charles B. Davenport of the Department of Genetics of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York, incited the wife of a well-known industrialist to provide the funds to establish the first Eugenics Record Office in America. According to Davenport, the financing lady’s enthusiasm for the program was due to the “the fact that she was brought up among well-bred race horses [which] helped her to appreciate the importance of a project to study heredity and good breeding in man.”[224]
From this year onward eugenicist societies spread in cities throughout the United States. Among the most influential, writes Rifkin, were the Galton Society of New York and the Eugenic Educations Societies of Chicago; St Louis; Madison, Wisconsin; Battle Creek, Michigan; and San Francisco. In 1913 the Eugenics Association was established and in 1922 the Eugenics Committee of the United States (later known as the American Eugenics Society).
Actually, as both Jacquard and Rifkin emphasise, this movement occasionally questioned some fundamental postulates of American society; for example William McDougall, a British scholar later to become the director of the Psychology Department at Harvard University, concerned that traditional political democracy represents a factor of affirmation of the “inferior races” with respect to the “superior,” openly preached for the establishment of a caste system in the United States founded on measurable biological differences, where political rights would depend upon the caste one belonged to, and for the promulgation “of laws that would limit the reproduction of the inferior casts and marriage between different casts.”[225]
In the United States, however, the eugenicist concern remained clearly tainted by moralistic, classist, reductionist and universalistic canons: if Good and Evil are absolutes, guaranteed by the God of the Bible, or by one or other of his secular avatars like Progress, if there exists a unique human model with respect to which the plurality of cultures and races is but an accident (or even a divine punishment, as in the myth of the Tower of Babel), then there are indeed traits, individuals, and ethnic groups that are “superior” or “inferior” in absolute terms, so that the “earthly paradise” coincides with the elimination of the latter, and the good citizen, ready to become the docile instrument of history and to work for future happiness, should lend himself to the genocide not just of the different ethnic groups (“primitive” or “pagan”), but as well of the “sinners” of his community, or of the “inferior classes” within it.[226]
The state of the knowledge of the times and the traditionally prevailing positivism of American culture will do the rest.
Hence, with typical presumption, Charles R. Van Hise, at the time President of the University of Wisconsin, wrote in 1914: “We know enough about eugenics, so that if the knowledge were applied, the defective classes would disappear within a generation.”[227]
By the way such positions abundantly traversed the traditional ideological and professional subdivisions of American society of the beginning of last century.
If Irving Fisher, the well-known Yale economist, writes in the same year that, “eugenics is incomparably the greatest concern of the human race,”[228] in 1928 more than three-fourths of colleges and universities in America offer courses specialised in eugenics, where eugenicist positions were obviously predominant. Among the teachers was Ernest A. Hooton, who preached that “crime is the result of the impact of the environment upon low-grade human organisms” and that “the solution to the crime problem is the extirpation of the physically, mentally and morally unfit or (if that seems too harsh) their complete segregation in a socially aseptic environment.”[229]
As Rifkin remarks, the world of media and popular culture was very much on the same wavelength:
It might interest today’s subscribers to the prestigious left/liberal magazines The Nation and The New Republic that the founders of both publications were crusaders for the eugenics reform. Edwin Laurence Godkin, founder of The Nation, believed that only those of superior biological stock should run the affairs of the country, and Herbert David Croly of The New Republic was convinced that blacks “were a race possessed of moral and intellectual qualities inferior to those of the white man.” Imagine, if you will, a future president of the United States quoted in Good Housekeeping magazine to the effect that ‘there are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons’. According to President Coolidge, biological laws tell us that certain divergent peoples will not mix or blend. Coolidge concludes that the Nordics propagate themselves successfully, “while with other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.”[230]
Other famous Americans expressed rather similar opinions. Alexander Bell, who contends with Meucci the praise for the invention of the telephone and whose name is the origin of the Bell Company, speaking before the American Breeders Association in 1918, said: “We have learned to apply the laws of heredity so as to modify and improve our breed of domestic animals. Can the knowledge and experience so gained be available to man, so as to enable him to improve the species to which he himself belongs?” Bell thus believed that “students of genetics possess the knowledge […] to improve the race” and “that education of the public was necessary to gain acceptance for eugenics policies.”[231]
Not even the then fledgling Boy Scouts movement remained insensitive to these ideas. David Star Jordan, who was its vice-president during its first few years, expressed whenever given the opportunity his conviction that the Scout program could assist in rearing the “eugenic new man.”[232]
Rifkin adds:
Many modern-day feminists would be chagrined to learn that Margaret Sanger, a leader in the fight for birth-control programs, was a true believer in the biological superiority and inferiority of different groups. In some of the strongest words ever to come out of the eugenics movement, Sanger remar
ked that, “It is a curious but neglected fact that the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated from the human stock, have been permitted to reproduce themselves and to perpetuate their group, succored by the policy of indiscriminate charity of warm hearts uncontrolled by cool heads.” Sanger had her own ideas about how to rid society of the problem of human biological contamination and promote better breeding. She wrote, “There is only one reply to a request for a higher birth rate among the intelligent and that is to ask the government to first take the burden of the insane and the feeble-minded from your back…Sterilisation is the solution.” (Birth Control, Facts and Responsibilities, Williams & Williams Co, Baltimore, 1925).
In fact, if fascisms betted above all on the differentiation of reproductive success via education about new values and the establishing of new social hierarchies, and the British and French racists and social Darwinists on the rigid separation of the classes and ethnic groups, as Rifkin notes, looked on sterilisation as a major tool in their efforts to weed out biologically inferior stock from the American population.”
In a 1914 report to the American Breeders Association – in which, really surprisingly for an American scholar, he expresses the truly fascist idea that “society must look upon germ plasm as belonging to society and not solely to the individual who carries it” – Harry H. Laughlin concluded that at least 10% of the population consists in “socially inadequate biological varieties” that ought to have been segregated from the population of the United States and sterilised.”[233]
Such positions would by the way translate into quite concrete measures. In the beginning of the 20th century tens of thousands of American citizens were sterilised against their will thanks to a series of laws enacted by several States. In 1907 Indiana was the first to impose mandatory sterilisation inside state institutions for recidivist criminals, idiots, imbeciles and others, and was later used as model under the name of “the idea of Indiana.”[234]
In the period between 1907 and World War I, fifteen more states enacted laws of this kind. The extent of this “sterilisation mania” is a reflected in an odd legislature introduced in Missouri and that called for the sterilisation of all those “convicted of murder, rape, highway robbery, chicken stealing, bombing or theft of automobiles.” [235] (!)
It is easy for people like Rifkin, for the sake of morally condemning any human intervention on its own biological identity, to make fun of the idea, rather bizarre even at the time, that there might exist something like…a gene for stealing cars. The fact remains that, within the framework of a system of humanist values, today one does not even discuss the goals that gave rise to these legislations – the assertion, both moralistic and cultural, universal and particular, of an ideal “American civilisation” to which is given the role of redeeming the world.[236]
The constitutional validity of these laws was not examined until 1927, the year in which the Supreme Court decided, in a case originating in Virginia, that sterilisation was definitely part of police powers pertaining to individual states.
One of the greatest names of American jurisprudence, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., wrote: “we have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the state for these lesser sacrifices, often felt to be such for those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for the world, if instead of waiting for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”[237]
In 1931 thirty States had promulgated laws on mandatory sterilisation.
In 1925, German civil servants had in the meantime been in touch with the administration of several American States precisely in order to gain information about their laws in matters of sterilisation. Thus one of the supporters of eugenism in Germany at the time is said to have remarked: “What has been promoted by the racial hygienists is nothing new or unheard of. In a cultivated and first order nation like the United States of America, which we strive to resemble, this concept was introduced a long time ago. It is all very clear and simple.”[238] If this is true, it ought to be food for thought regarding the true origins of certain influences in European thought at the time!
That this kind of ideas, although its intentions were inspired by the most authentic American values, ended up short-circuiting the ideological system that had given rise to it[239], is however demonstrated by subsequent history, and in particular by the debate centreed on the federal law on immigration, which, promulgated in 1924, will remain in force until 1965; and this even in aspects of the debate on eugenics that it is legitimate to consider caricatural, and even more so than analogous writing of fascist inspiration.
Besides, genetics discoveries and the rising awareness of the “third man” raise issues across the entire spectrum of traditional ideologies also in Europe. Speaking of the literal illegality of this kind of ideas nowadays, Eric Delcroix remarks:
In Austria, the most intransigent of eugenic partisans was no doubt Karl Kautsky (1854-1938), who was also an orthodox Marxist. Before him, the German Woltmann (1871-1907)[240] had tried to reconcile Marxism, Darwinism and Aryan racism. In Germany, still many years after World War I, a large number of eugenicists were Jewish and so hardly susceptible to be labeled as “Nazis,” like Kallmann (who wanted to sterilise 10% of the German people), the geneticist Goldschmidt, or the physician Löwenstein (see Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism).[241]
It is not by chance that in the American context the liberal sociologist Edward A. Ross published, after a six-months long investigation, a report[242] in which he claimed, among other things, that the Mediterranean peoples “are prone to sex and violence and were irrational by nature; the Slavs are a passive people imbued with ignorance and superstition, the men wife-beaters and alcoholics; and the Jews are clannish, tricky and underhanded in business.”
Another eugenicist, Madison Grant, after whom Americans still name schools, added to this analysis the Hindus, who “have been for ages in contact with the highest civilisations, but have failed to benefit by such a contact either physically, intellectually or morally,” and the Negroes, “who are the Nordics’ willing followers and who ask only to obey and to further the ideals and wishes of the master race.”[243] (!)
Moreover, it was the secretary of labour of the Coolidge administration, James J. Davis, who “summed up” the discussion in these terms: “America has always prided itself upon having for its basic stock the so-called Nordic race…we should ban from our shores all races which are not naturalizable under the law of the land and all individuals of all races who are physically, mentally, morally and spiritually undesirable and who constitute a menace to our civilisation.”[244]
The House Committee on Immigration and Naturalisation in turn nominated Laughlin as its expert on eugenic questions, and he handed them these conclusions: “Making all allowances for environmental conditions…the recent immigration as a whole presents a higher percentage of inborn socially inadequate qualities than do the older stocks” (that is the one, basically, of the ancestors of Laughlin himself, and of his co-citizens of third or fourth generation or beyond).[245]
This lead to legislation on ethnic quotes for immigration, which remained in force as already mentioned until 1965.
If this order of ideas could not last, lest doubt be cast on the foundation myths and very reason to be of the United States, arisen from the challenge to and refusal of sovereignty and collective identity, and of the ultimate self-determination of the peoples that this would imply, the fact remains that the United States, including after the decline of the WASP attempt to defend its own privileged role in the country, continues to allow themselves, in their quality of “capital of the empire,” a control of the (im)migratory flow and its ethnic composition that goes well beyond what the System allo
ws other Western countries (with the obvious exception of Israel).
According to Rifkin, the 1929 crisis on the one hand, and the rise of fascism in Europe on the other, were the factors that would contribute to “polarise” the positions and throw the American “eugenicist movement” into a deep crisis of identity.[246]
On the other hand, Mark Adams, in his comparative study on eugenism in different parts of the world, justly picks on that which defines the “four myths” of eugenism:
The first consists in considering it a homogenous movement, coherent as such and amenable exclusively to the German or Anglo-Saxon model; the second lies in the belief that it only took form where Mendelian genetics grew, whereas in reality countries like France, Russia or Brazil, where Lamarckism dominated, had their own eugenicist movements, and strong they were too; the third myth is that eugenics was taken to be a pseudo-science, while in reality at least until the end of the twenties it was on the contrary indistinguishable from genetics; the fourth myth consisted in thinking of eugenics as a reactionary science, while it was on the contrary a very well structured historical phenomenon, conjoined in addition to politics regarded as “progressive” or “reformist.”[247]
In any event, the specifically ideological and biopolitical connotation of one’s position with respect to eugenics is highlighted by the increasing erosion, with technical progress, of the individual cost of eugenic practices, which has been steadily decreasing; especially from the moment when chemical or surgical sterilisation of the very retarded and controlled reproduction take over from the exposure of newborns and from a strict parental or social control of mating; and the former is in turn taken over by premarital study of the family medical records from a Mendelian perspective; and this in turn is replaced by prenatal diagnosis and genetic screening; and these finally by artificial fecundation and the direct and properly speaking therapeutic manipulation of the germ lines; so that the natural empathy for the individuals involved increasingly supports the acceptance of eugenic measures, to the point of making their rejection somewhat embarrassing even for strict humanist views.[248]