by Philipp Blom
The 1912 First International Congress of Eugenics was held from 24 to 30 July and it received blessings from high places. Its president was Major Leonard Darwin, chairman of the British Eugenics Society and son of the founder of the theory of evolution. Among the honorary vice presidents were the first lord of the Admiralty, Mr Winston Churchill; Sir Thomas Barlow, president of the Royal College of Physicians; Lord Alverstone, the lord chief justice; Charles Gore, the lord bishop of Oxford; the eminent German biologist Friedrich Weismann; the famous Swiss pathologist Auguste Forel; Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone; the Munich professor Max von Gruber and the German eugenicist and prophet of Nordic racial superiority Dr Alfred Ploetz, president of the International Society for Race Hygiene; David Starr Jordan, the chancellor of Stanford University; and Charles W. Eliot, president emeritus of Harvard.
Formerly the reserve of cranks and eccentrics, eugenics had risen to the highest scientific honours. It was discussed at universities and in learned journals, in bestselling books and parliamentary debates. Laws enacting eugenic measures such as forced sterilization were passed, political leaders across the ideological spectrum espoused its goals, and scientists everywhere thought of it as the salvation of the human race, while philosophers and writers sang its praises. None of this would have been possible without two scientific discoveries that would prove seminal to all biological thinking and research in the twentieth century and beyond.
The first of these breakthroughs had occurred decades earlier without attracting any notice. It was the fruit of the experiments of a reclusive Austrian monk, Gregor Mendel (1822-84), who had followed the distribution of inherited traits throughout several generations of common peas. A particularity like the yellow husk of one of the parent plants would reappear only two generations down the line, and then only in 25 per cent of the cases. Mendel concluded that the inherited information must be passed on in two strands of information, a dominant and a recessive one, so that recessive characteristics would be expressed only if two recessive strands came together, while otherwise the dominant strand would be expressed.
In 1866 Mendel had published his findings in a scientific journal and sent his article to prominent scientists, among them Charles Darwin, but his findings had been ignored - an intellectual tragedy, not only for the monk but also for Darwin himself. His theory of natural selection demonstrated that organisms could adapt to their surroundings, but the mechanism was a mystery even to Darwin. Here, Mendel held the secret, and the British scholar had the solution right under his nose: a copy of Mendel’s article lay, unopened, on his desk for years. The findings of the Austrian monk received wider attention only after their rediscovery by the Cambridge biologist William Bateson (1861-1926), who finally understood their implications. Bateson published his findings in Mendel’s Principles of Heredity (1909). A later book by him, published in 1913, bears a word that he coined to describe the nature of Mendel’s discovery: Problems of Genetics.
Another crucial discovery had been made by one of the vice presidents of the First Eugenics Congress, the Freiburg zoologist Friedrich Leopold August Weismann (1834-1914). The son of a provincial high-school teacher in Germany, Weismann had worked hard and had become not only a professor at the prestigious university of Freiburg but also a central figure in the debate about how organisms could adapt to their environment. Until now, many scientists had followed the theory put forward by the French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829), who had claimed that characteristics were learned or imposed by an environment, and would then be transmitted to following generations. Thus the giraffe had a long neck because every generation tried to reach ever higher branches in the savanna and thus, by implication, generations of human refinement and intellectual endeavour would create people specifically adapted to ruling over other, more brutish ones.
Weismann had little time for Lamarck’s theory and proposed a very different scenario. He had identified the ‘germ plasm’ of individual cells (roughly what we today would understand by DNA) and postulated that this innermost core of every individual was passed on to the next generation without being affected by the parent’s experiences or acquired characteristics. Weismann argued that only this could explain otherwise inexplicable facts like the existence of infertile animals such as worker or soldier ants, whose parents could not have passed on their specialization to them. This idea elegantly and easily solved many discrepancies between theory and observation in nature, but it created a new problem, namely how to answer Lamarck: if acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, then how do organisms adapt to their environment and how does evolution bring forth new and better-adapted species?
The grand theory of evolution has been carried by humble vehicles. Mendel made his discoveries with peas, Weismann loved to work with sea urchins, and the missing piece of the evolutionary adaptation puzzle (the greatest discovery in genetics until the unveiling of the double helix in 1953) was contributed by a single white-eyed fly, or rather by an American researcher who himself had eyes sharp enough to spot the tiny creature. The Columbia University biologist Thomas Hunt Morgan (1866-1945) advanced science by a giant leap by looking at fruit flies, Drosophila melanogaster, beloved or hated by biology students to this day. Drosophila’s life cycle (egg to adult) of little over a week made it an ideal candidate for research spanning many generations. The significance of the white-eyed fruit fly which Morgan discovered in 1910 was that it came from two pure lines of red-eyed ancestors. And therefore could not have inherited the trait. The animal’s genetic code must therefore have changed spontaneously; it had mutated. If mutation was not only possible, as had been advanced by several scientists, but could actually be observed, it held the explanation for adaptation without a transmission of acquired traits from one generation to the other. In an infinite number of random changes, some would provide evolutionary advantages while others would condemn their carriers. Evolution was occurring as scientists looked on.
Published under the title The Mechanism of Mendelian Inheritance in 1915, Morgan’s observation and its theoretical framework provided the basis of a modern understanding of evolution - as well as a comprehensive refutation of eugenics, a theory built on the belief of the possibility of inherited traits and an otherwise unchanging inheritance. If some populations actually had been improved and others enfeebled or ruined throughout history, it might indeed have been sensible to accept the eugenics theory, but if random mutations intervened in both populations, and if genetic change was exclusively due to random change and not to acquired characteristics, then the whole edifice of eugenics was nonsense. Mutation is at once the great creator and the great leveller of the organic world.
Scientific debates only ever seem clear in retrospect. For those who sought the truth about heredity and evolution, the issue was clouded in a thick fog of competing ideas and flawed theories and experiments. Science has the charm of operating with models, and it is always possible to find a defect in a theoretical construct, or to reject either its premises or the interpretation of its outcome. Indeed, when following the debates about eugenics around 1910 it is important to remember that the mechanism of mutation and the recombination of individual genes had not yet been understood, that the structure of genetic material - Watson and Crick’s double helix - was not yet known. It was therefore both rational and scientific to keep an open mind about questions such as the possibility of inheriting acquired characteristics. Its role in such features as intelligence or alcoholism had still not been settled, and it was quite possible to argue that the genetic material of entire populations did indeed degrade or improve over the generations. This was still regarded as good science, and, with the best of intentions, those who subscribed to it proposed solutions based on this idea.
While all elements of a fully fledged theory of genetic inheritance and mutation were in place around 1910 there was a lively and often acrimonious debate among scientists as to which theory was the most valid. Before the discovery of a genetic cod
e, the mechanism of inheritance remained obscure. Were traits developed by an individual, such as intelligence or brutality, manual dexterity, moral refinement, alcoholism or tuberculosis, inheritable by a next generation? Here, science had made few advances since the followers of Carl von Linné and the comte de Buffon had clashed during the eighteenth century. Traits could be observed, but it was almost impossible to distinguish nature from nurture, physical inheritance from environmental effects.
Superior Stock
The most august of all researchers into hereditary traits was Francis Galton (1822-1911), one of the great polymaths of Victorian science in Britain. Galton was the author of more than 300 scientific papers and the discoverer of, among other things, fingerprinting, meteorological high-pressure areas and their effect on weather, and statistical psychology (as well as the scientific principles of brewing a perfect cup of tea, a publication in which the question of whether milk should be added before or after the tea is poured into the cup was settled once and for all - in favour of the latter).
Using the Dictionary of Men of the Time, Galton had done some of his early research on the prevalence of men of ability - scientists, artists, high civil servants, politicians, military men and princes of the Church - among Britain’s prominent families. As most of them were related to one another (fittingly, Galton himself was a nephew of Charles Darwin), he concluded that their inherent qualities must be better than those of the rest of the population. But if the first families of the land produced more eminent men because they were of superior stock, then it was important to protect and foster this potential and not allow it to be swamped by the lesser genetic qualities of the lower classes, whose higher birth rates threatened the power of their betters.
This classic case of post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning seems comical today, but it became the foundation of Galton’s career. From the ancient Greek for ‘well-born’ he formed the word ‘eugenic’ and he publicized his findings with energy only a Victorian could muster (as Virginia Woolf recognized when comparing Lord Macaulay and Lytton Strachey). In innumerable lectures and publications, Galton propagated the idea that humanity could attain a higher level of civilization only if valuable individuals were given precedence over weak, degenerate or diseased ones. Eugenicism was born.
Galton published his research in a book with the simple title Hereditary Genius (1869, republished 1892), in which he proposed a method for creating a race of supermen:
it is easy...to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations. I shall show that social agencies of an ordinary character, whose influences are little suspected, are at this moment working towards the degradation of human nature, and that others are working towards its improvement. I conclude that each generation has enormous power over the natural gifts of those that follow, and maintain that it is a duty we owe to humanity to investigate the range of that power, and to exercise it in a way that, without being unwise towards ourselves, shall be most advantageous to future inhabitants of the earth.
In choosing the English upper class as the focus of his work, Galton had only acted pragmatically, he claimed: ‘I should have especially liked to investigate the biographies of Italians and Jews, both of whom appear to be rich in families of high intellectual breeds. Germany and America are also full of interest. It is a little less so with respect to France, where the Revolution and the guillotine made sad havoc among the progeny of her abler races.’ In writing this, Galton demonstrated one of the central political implications of eugenics: it led to the creation of a new and stronger kind of aristocracy. Not all eugenicists believed that the European noble houses did hold a superior genetic reservoir - many prominent eugenicists were socialists - but the idea of a ruling class of any description naturally entailed political fault lines, along which the debates of the following years would be fought.
Supported by painstaking statistical research and endless tables and graphs illustrating Britain’s genetic decline, Galton’s vision was luminous, and attracted more and more followers. ‘If a twentieth part of the cost and pains were spent in measures for the improvement of the human race that is spent on the improvement of the breed of horses and cattle, what a galaxy of genius might we not create!’ he wrote in Macmillan’s Magazine in 1865. ‘We might introduce prophets and high priests of civilization into the world, as surely as we can propagate idiots by mating cretins. Men and women of the present day are, to those we might hope to bring into existence, what the pariah dogs of the streets of an Eastern town are to our own highly-bred varieties.’
These thoroughbred supermen would assume the world leadership as of right:
The feeble nations of the world are necessarily giving way before the nobler varieties of mankind; and even the best of these, so far as we know them, seem unequal to their work...We want abler commanders, statesmen, thinkers, inventors, and artists. The natural qualifications of our race are no greater than they used to be in semi-barbarous times, though the conditions amid which we are born are vastly more complex than of old. The foremost minds of the present day seem to stagger and halt under an intellectual load too heavy for their powers.
The fear was that Britain herself was turning into a feeble nation, a spectre that seemed especially threatening after the Boer War, during which the world’s greatest army did not only appear to have found its match in a handful of farmers with rifles, but which had also shown that in industrial centres like Manchester, 403 out of every 1,000 recruits were unfit for medical service on account of their bad health. The national anxiety had been amplified by researchers who had ventured into the slums of London and had come back to paint a disturbing picture. One of these intrepid explorers was the American novelist and journalist Jack London, who had published an account of his own experiences in 1902 after having disguised himself as a homeless man and visited the East End (he had first approached Thomas Cook, who had refused to organize a tour there, claiming never to have heard of the place). In London’s ringing prose, the condition of the poorest of the poor seemed worse than even Victorian missionaries would admit:
The unfit and the unneeded! the miserable and despised and forgotten dying in the social shambles. The progeny of prostitution - of the prostitution of men and women and children, of flesh and blood, and sparkle and spirit, in brief, the prostitution of labour. If this is the best that civilization can do for the human, then give us howling and naked savagery. Far better to be a people of the wilderness and the desert, of the cave and the squatting place, than to be a people of the machine and the abyss.
London’s picture was corroborated by the philanthropist Charles Booth, who, after a tour of the slums, had written about their inhabitants: ‘Their life is the life of savages...From them come the battered figures who slouch through the streets and play the beggar or bully. They render no useful service, they create no wealth; more often they destroy it.’
What, then, could be more natural than to end this misery by limiting its reproduction? Eugenics, Galton told an adoring audience during one of his many lectures, would be ‘introduced into the national consciences like a new religion’, ensuring that ‘humanity shall be represented by the fittest races. What nature does blindly, slowly, and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly, and kindly.’ To arrange for this providential hand to create a better society, Galton unleashed a plethora of activities, writing scholarly publications and even a novel to promote his ideas (it was rejected by his publisher and later burned by his niece, who was shocked at the ‘indecent’ nature of the work). He was the éminence grise behind the Eugenics Education Society (founded in 1907), which counted among its ranks men as brilliant as the economist John Maynard Keynes, whose friend, the young Virginia Woolf, would herself note in her diary on 9 January 1915: ‘On the towpath we met & had to pass a long line of
imbeciles. The first was a very tall young man, just queer enough to look at twice, but no more; the second shuffled, & looked aside; & then one realised that every one in that long line was a miserable ineffective shuffling idiotic creature, with no forehead, or no chin, & an imbecile grin, or a wild suspicious stare. It was perfectly horrible. They should certainly be killed.’ Another admirer of Galton’s teachings was the dramatist George Bernard Shaw, who wrote: ‘There is now no reasonable excuse for refusing to face the fact that nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization from the fate that has overtaken all previous civilizations.’
Not only intellectuals were convinced of the movement’s merits. Karl Pearson, Galton’s assistant and general amanuensis, cheerfully wrote in a letter to the master that his ideas were beginning to be regarded as common sense: ‘I hear most respectable middle class matrons saying, if their children are weakly, “Ah, it was not a eugenic marriage!”’ On his appointment as home secretary in 1910, Winston Churchill secretly proposed the sterilization of 100,000 of Her Majesty’s loyal but less fortunate subjects. The eugenics movement was now a real social and intellectual force, and Galton could congratulate himself on being the father of a rapidly growing movement, dedicated to good breeding. With the air of a benevolent visionary, his profile gleamed on every participant’s badge of the First International Eugenics Convention.