by Philipp Blom
American eugenicists put heavy emphasis on scientific proof and evaluation scales, most importantly those developed by Henry Goddard (1866-1957), the director of an institution for mentally retarded children in Vineland, New Jersey. Goddard had standardized the measurement of intelligence by proposing a scale entitled Intelligence Quotient (IQ) and designed by a German colleague, mapping a progression from idiot to imbecile and moron and from there on to more favourable adjectives. Putting his work into practice, Goddard analysed the family tree of one of the young women in his charge, ‘Debora Kallikak’, whose feeble-mindedness he traced back to a male ancestor’s dalliance with ‘the nameless feeble-minded girl’ who, according to the doctor, was the cause of generations of mental trouble within the family. The Kallikak Family: A Study in the Heredity of Feeble Mindedness (1910) was received as a sensation by fellow scientists, as was Goddard’s revelation that according to research performed by him at the Ellis Island immigration station, 83 per cent of Jewish, 80 per cent of Hungarian, 79 per cent of Italian, and 87 per cent of Russian immigrants were ‘feeble-minded’. Severe cases, Goddard believed, admitted of only one rational course of action: sterilization. Only like this could a ‘pure, American, superior’ race be created.
Pressure from scientists and acquiescence from high-placed politicians such as Theodore Roosevelt (who was himself convinced that African Americans were ‘as a race and in the mass...altogether inferior to whites’), as well as lobbying by wealthy businessmen such as the health-food manufacturer and eugenics enthusiast John Harvey Kellogg, created a public climate for Goddard’s ideas to find their way into legislation. There had been repeated attempts to introduce compulsory sterilization laws in several states (Michigan 1897; Pennsylvania 1905), but the first of thirty-three successful state laws was passed in Indiana in 1907 and applied to ‘confirmed criminals, idiots, rapists and imbeciles’ held in public institutions. Several sterilization laws remained on the statute books for many decades, resulting in an estimated 65,000 forced or surreptitious sterilizations (the latter often during the course of other surgical procedures) in the United States. The last forced sterilization was performed in Oregon, in 1983.
The intellectual climate and preoccupations in Russia were very different from those in Western Europe and the USA. While in Western Europe the bourgeoisie saw itself threatened by an ever-growing army of the working poor, the main problem of Russian bourgeois thinkers was that they were excluded from power by an autocratic regime whose legitimacy was built on the Orthodox Church. In this situation, a different strategy emerged: instead of arguing against the rise of the lower classes and for an increased measure of control over them and their procreation, the Tsar’s subjects had more interest in proving that all creatures were evolved from the same original slime, that there was a rational explanation to creation, and that consequently no group of persons could claim to have a divine right to power, as the sociologist Nicolai Mikhailovskii argued:
The folk tradition of all peoples ascribes a more or less high origin to man. Darwin is perfectly correct in asserting that the folklore imputation of a divine or semidivine descent of man is only an illusion that does not flatter the human species; what flatters man immensely more is the idea that he has risen from lower spheres - from the depths of nature. In fact, this is the only viewpoint that allows for the advancement of man; all other views assume that man has fallen and disgraced his ancestors.
In pre-revolutionary Russia, Darwinism offered more argumentative scope than eugenicism. This would change only after 1917, when the demand from those in power was to create a new man. Russian intellectuals and scientists had accepted Darwin with huge enthusiasm. Research scientists in laboratories throughout the empire set about supporting Darwin’s hypothesis, producing not only a forest worth of scientific papers, but also what was perhaps Europe’s largest Darwinist scientific community, whose research and methods were often ahead of those of their Western colleagues, notably in research laboratories. One such laboratory was led by Professor Ivan Pavlov (1859-1936), who was to attain international fame with his experiments on the behavioural conditioning of dogs.
If behaviourism was a central focus of research in Russia, social Darwinism was hotly contested. Darwin’s most remarkable Russian critic was the anarchist philosopher Prince Petr Aleksandrovich Kropotkin (1841-1921), who was then living in exile in London, but was being avidly read and discussed in his homeland, and was certainly one of the great intellects of his generation. Kropotkin’s eventful life had taken him from an elite cadet school and a post as cadet de chambre to Tsar Alexander II into the steppes of Siberia, where he had joined a Cossack regiment in order to escape the stifling life at court. It was there, during long days spent at leisure and on excursions into the surrounding wilderness, that the young man observed something which apparently contradicted Darwin’s idea of the struggle for existence:
I recollect myself the impression produced upon me by the animal world of Siberia... We saw plenty of adaptations for struggling, very often in common, against the adverse circumstances of climate, or against various enemies... ; we witnessed numbers of facts of mutual support, especially during migrations of birds and ruminants, but even in the Amur and Usuri regions, where animal life swarms in abundance, facts of real competition and the struggle between higher animals of the same species came very seldom under my notice, though I eagerly searched for them.
The idea of mutual support, of interested altruism in nature and in society, became a central tenet of Kropotkin’s social philosophy, which he finally published under the title Mutual Aid in 1902. Far from teaching the relentless, Hobbesian battle of all against all, the princely anarchist concluded, nature teaches that animals are most successful if they organize themselves around common interests:
The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.
Kropotkin raised his voice at the First International Eugenics Congress in London. Who was more valuable to the species, he asked: proletarian women who bore and nursed children as best they could, or society ladies who went to great lengths not to produce children? His interventions were not appreciated by delegates who were still reeling from an unpleasant incident at the grand inaugural banquet of the congress, hosted by Her Grace, the Duchess of Marlborough, the lord mayor of London, and the American ambassador Whitelaw Read. The speaker at this occasion had been Arthur Balfour, one of the most eminent men in the kingdom, a former prime minister and according to Austen Chamberlain, ‘the finest brain that has been applied to politics in our time’. As the 500 invited guests were mellowing over a glass of after-dinner port, the great man had given an address that made many of them sit up in astonishment. Having applied his brain for once not to politics but to science, he presented the eugenicists with some unexpected conclusions. ‘We say that the fit survive. But all that means is that those who survive are fit,’ Balfour had launched at his audience, and then: ‘The idea that you can get a society of the most perfect kind merely by considering certain questions about the strain and ancestry and the health and the physical vigour of various components of that society - that I believe is a most shallow view of a most difficult question.’
There were other critics of eugenic thought. The British doctor and sexologist Havelock Ellis raised a troubling question of the future the eugenicists wanted to create: ‘Animals are bred for specific purposes by a superior race of animals not by themselves... It is important to breed, let us say, good sociologists; that, indeed, goes wit
hout saying. But can we be sure that, when bred, they will rise up to bless us?’ Max Nordau, who had made a career as a cultural sceptic looking forward to a brighter future peopled by superior men and women, also thought that eugenicists fell at the conceptual hurdle towards improvement:
It is clear that we cannot apply the principle of artificial breeding to man ... There is no recognized standard of physical, intellectual perfection. Do you want inches? In that case you would have to exclude Frederick the Great and Napoleon I who were undersized; [former French President Aldolphe] Thiers, who was almost a dwarf; and the Japanese as a nation …
Few of these objections cut much ice, needless to say, amid the excitement of founding an international movement courted by men of state and great aristocrats. The Eugenics Conference ran its course, closed with grand speeches and declarations, and brought forth, after a gestation of only a few months, a litter of eugenics societies throughout Europe. The time was ripe for action, it seemed, not for cautious argument.
New Men, New Women
Galton’s approach was very Anglo-Saxon in its emphasis on utilitarianism and level-headed statistical analysis, and eugenicists like Davenport and Goddard worked at experiments and theoretical models. But many followers of the eugenic idea looked at Galton’s ideas from a different horizon - a mountain range, to be precise: the dwelling place of Zarathustra. Here, intellectuals (including some British and American ones) huddled up, exposed to the cold winds of uncertainty, but glorying in their courage and their daring. They had found their teacher, they believed, and they had found eugenics.
Wherever we have turned until now, at some point we have encountered the legacy of Friedrich Nietzsche. It was the protagonist of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883-85, of course, who received such grand ovations on his mountain top. ‘For my generation he was the earthquake of the age,’ wrote the German expressionist poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956). Nietzsche’s rebellious stance towards authority and Christian morality had already exerted a tremendous pull on the generation of the 1890s, and his dangerous appeal had lost nothing of its magnetism by 1910. This was in part due to the very obscurity that so annoyed some of his British readers like Bertrand Russell, who quipped: ‘Nietzsche’s superman is very like [Wagner’s] Siegfried, except that he knows Greek.’
Others were attracted by the very mixture of the classical and the mythical which so disgusted the logician Russell. With almost prophetic sensitivity Nietzsche had sensed and given shape to many of the concerns his contemporaries and their children found particularly pressing in the pre-War years: the slave morality of the Church and of its capitalist heirs; the destabilizing changes in the relations between men and women; the will or need to overcome the spiritual smallness of consumer life in industrialized societies and to create something altogether more magnificent, based on self-knowledge and the renunciation of the inessential.
It was this sensitivity that gave Nietzsche’s works such a ring of truth, and it was perhaps little more than desperate overcompensation that gave them their bravado. At his best, though, Nietzsche put his finger right into the wounds of his time, a ringing voice, by turn angry, funny and apocalyptic, hurling curses into the faces of the plaster busts admired by the sages of official culture. His rhetorical gesture was more that of a poet than a philosopher. Nietzsche, in other words, could be seen to contradict himself, and imposing a system on his thought was no more possible than it would be to deduce a single and coherent vision of life from the plays of Shakespeare or the works of Shelley or Rabelais. To his followers, this was all part of his appeal. Not for them the sterile intellectual exercises of Kant and Hegel, Augustine and Aquinas.
The son of a Lutheran pastor, Nietzsche rejoiced in the idea of a future in the sign of Dionysus, the god of ecstasy and the irrepressible force of life and death, dance and destruction, a savage vivacity to sweep away all pietist oppressiveness and the cowering morality of the Protestant pulpit. True life and human value, Nietzsche claimed, expressed itself not in submission to a man-hating god of suffering, but in the will to power: ‘Life is appropriation, injury, conquest of the strange and weak, suppression, severity, obtrusion of its own forms, incorporation, and at least, putting it mildest, exploitation.’
Nietzsche appeared an ideal prophet for eugenics and, later, for all forms of totalitarianism. He claimed that the coming century would be dominated by ‘that new party of life, which will take into its hands the greatest of all tasks, breeding humanity to a higher level [Höherzüchtung der Menschheit], including the merciless destruction of everything that is degenerate and parasitical’ - but in the passage in question he is actually writing about music after Wagner, about artistic renewal and a new Dionysian culture, not about politics and populations. Nowhere in his works does he show any admiration for eugenicists, and he generally treated the rationalist optimism of men like Galton with contempt. Only the bile he poured over antisemites and racists could turn his sentences even more bitterly sarcastic. Antisemites, he wrote, were ‘moral masturbators’, little ‘men of resentment, physiologically unfortunate and worm-eaten,’ whose outbursts sickened him. Describing himself as the ‘anti-antisemite’, he laconically ended one of his last letters ‘I am just having all antisemites shot.’
The attainment of a ‘highest level’ brings us straight to the infamous Übermensch who was to be reinterpreted as a terrifying parody of himself, one of the master race. Nietzsche’s concept has neither racial nor brutal traits. It simply takes an individual who has overcome the banal self-destructive narcissism of the ‘herd people’ of the plains and has discovered, on his spiritual mountain, that values are there to be revalued, that the pure life force must be pursued beyond dogmatic thinking. Superman is not a ruler but a seeker, whose greatest challenge is to overcome himself.
Such niceties of interpretation paled before the idea of Nietzsche as the walrus-mustachioed prophet of a new and brutal kind of vitalism - dressed up, according to ideological requirements, in Nordic furs, Aryan robes, or the white coat of the scientist. The poet-philosopher was kidnapped a hundred times over, a victim of overly literal readings and of the very Will to Power he had enjoined his readers to discover.
Racists and Mystics
We have already seen how porous were the walls between biology and ideology in the scientific writings of this period. As soon as the argument moved out of the academy, however, these walls simply collapsed.
Prophets, philosophers and sages of all descriptions and nationalities despoiled science of isolated facts and theories and manipulated ideas like Nietzsche’s to suit their various needs. While some of these utopians of race and heredity, such as Galton, Haeckel, Davenport, were part of the establishment and wrote from a scientific consensus, others sought more radical and darker truths which they claimed they could discern in the runes of ancient civilizations, in the stars, or in mystical documents. Most of the mystic authors, Madame Blavatsky and Rudolf Steiner among them, were racists who camouflaged their disdain for darker hues of skin under incense and initiation. Steiner particularly made it his sacred task to spread the gospel of race during his hundreds of lectures throughout Germany. According to his teaching of what is essentially a spiritual variant of evolutionism, Africans were at the very bottom of the scale while Europeans (Germans to be precise) stood at the pinnacle. The very comparison was absurd, he thought, between ‘an uncompleted snail or amoeba to a perfect lion’. The ‘negro race’, in any case, ‘does not belong to Europe’, and Steiner declared himself shocked by the ‘terrible cultural banality of implanting black people into Europe, a dreadful thing the French are doing to others [other Europeans]. It will have a worse effect on France herself. It has an incredibly strong influence on the blood, on the race. That will further French decadence. The French people as a race is thrown back [in evolution].’
Regarding the ‘strong sexual drive’ of ‘negroes’, the mystic explained that it was due to the sun, to light and warmth, which changed the metabolism
of Africans, boiling them from the inside and heating up their affective lives, an effect that also explained their appearance. ‘This is because mercurial forces are boiling and simmering within the lymphatic system … This [appearance] is caused by their boiling over [auskochen], which converts the general, similar human form [to that of a European] into the special one of the Ethiopian race, with black skin, woolly hair, and so on.’ Seen in this context, the Jews could count themselves fortunate that the doctor claimed only that: ‘Judaism as such has long outlived itself, has no justification in the community of peoples, and if it has survived nevertheless, it is a mistake of world history whose consequences followed by necessity. We are not speaking about the Jewish religion alone, but particularly about the mind of Jewry, about the Jewish way of thinking.’
Utopian visions often had a political and racial tinge in central Europe. Constantly buffeted by nationalist controversies between the German, Czech and Hungarian populations (to say nothing of the Jews and of smaller minorities), the self-anointed seers of the Habsburg empire were not content with free love and nut cutlets. A grander, more radical solution to the world’s problems was needed, and amid the cacophony of voices and cultural traditions, racial purity seemed to provide an answer, and heredity the necessary instrument. Race had been a wide term, commonly used by people of all political persuasions and capable of denoting anything from breeding or class, to family background or biological predetermination and descent. It was about to acquire a narrower meaning that made it a weapon in the arsenal of the revolutionary right.