Galton painstakingly developed statistical methods to analyze heredity. His studies of the distributions of traits in populations among succeeding generations led him to formulate mathematical methods (the so-called coefficients of regression and correlation) that decades later became widely used—not just in genetics, but also in medicine, economics, sociology, anthropology, and more.7
In 1883, Galton applied the name eugenics, meaning “in good birth,” to the study of planned breeding to improve human inheritance.8 Eugenics is an aspect of the history of biology which biology teachers generally avoid. Most science teachers, if they discuss history of science at all, deal mainly with its heroic and positive aspects. They avoid “wasting time” on erroneous old science, stuff that was later denounced as non-science. Among such embarrassing failures, eugenics stands out. It was a greater shame than the worst aspects of astrology and alchemy.
Yet eugenics was fueled by the noble hope to cure society of its ills. After all, if we can make better tomatoes, why not make better humans? Galton urged that the British government should measure people's abilities and rank them accordingly. Couples having higher ranks would then be encouraged to have plenty of children, while couples with lower ranks would be discouraged from having as many children. Moreover, Galton hoped that the lowest-ranked individuals would be segregated from society to prevent them from having any children. Galton did not believe that people are naturally equal.
Moreover, rising indices of crime, poverty, and disease seemed to suggest that the British peoples were degenerating. One of Galton's followers, the statistician Karl Pearson, argued: “How is the next generation of Englishmen to be mentally and physically equal to the past generation which has provided us with the great Victorian statesmen, writers, and men of science?”9 The eugenicists aimed to make the science of inheritance a moving force in politics and social customs. Their urge to measure and quantify human traits led to the collection of disturbing evidence that humans are not equal in any traits—not in height, or skin color, or in their performance on written exams. It seemed that different races scored differently in physical and mental skills. Against that urge to quantify and proclaim inequity, there stood, across the Atlantic, the ideology of equality. The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America asserted: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”10 Simultaneously, the nation of immigrants itself did not entirely believe in equality, as various rights were denied to women and to the descendants of slaves.
Interest in eugenics grew as biologists came to accept “Mendel's laws.” I use quotation marks because contrary to what is stated in many books on genetics, the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel actually did not discover such laws; that is, he did not claim to have found laws of heredity valid for all species. Instead, Mendel had struggled to find whether there was a general law for the development of plant hybrids.11 In the early 1900s, Mendel's results on hybrids were fairly construed as evidence that certain physical traits are transmitted as pairs of units. Biologists spoke of “laws of heredity.”
Accordingly, Charles Davenport, a biologist in the United States, showed that certain human traits, such as eye color, are transmitted in accord with such laws. Consequently, Davenport came to believe that important human traits were also transmitted in their entirety, even if sometimes they were not manifest. It seemed to him that traits such as alcoholism or stupidity could not be cured by simply treating the ailing individual, because that individual would pass that trait onto his children. While effective techniques for healthy breeding were used in horses, for example, it seemed outrageous that they were not used also in humans. Hence Davenport began to advocate eugenics.
In 1904, thanks to funding from the Carnegie Institution, Davenport established a center for the study of human inheritance and evolution, located in Cold Spring Harbor, New York. The center began to widely solicit replies to questionnaires on the physical and mental traits of individuals and their families. Davenport analyzed such family histories to find numerical patterns in the incidence of: stump-fingers, polydactyly (having more than five fingers per hand), albinism, hemophilia, insanity, alcoholism, criminality, and especially “feeblemindedness.” He tried to fit many of these traits into the simple mathematical patterns of inheritance laws.
Davenport recognized that social environment was an important factor in determining how a person develops. Yet he also argued that some inborn traits cannot be curbed, no matter how good the environment be—just as some “bad seeds” cannot grow well even in good soil.12 Davenport attributed social deviance to a lack of self-restraint, the result of a supposedly defective nervous system caused by hypothetical bad genes. Yet his evidence was anecdotal, lacking systematic measurements.13
Thus, American eugenicists claimed that just one or two pairs of genes determined bad traits: feeblemindedness, violent temper, epilepsy, criminality, manic depression, and even poverty. Eugenics seemed to promise techniques to fight epidemics and enact social reforms. Eugenicists sought to reduce degeneracy and racial mixtures by somehow restoring humans to a former condition. Instead of bothering with historical research, some freely imagined a glorious age long gone: “Thus in primal days was the blood of the race kept high and pure, like mountain streams. One may not admire the harsh conditions of the savage life of our German forefathers in their Teuton forests; but one must admit the high purity of their blood, their high average sanity, soundness, and strength. They were a well-born, well-weeded race.”14 Moreover, American eugenicists conjectured that certain “races” had inborn troublesome tendencies. Supposedly Italians were violent, Jews were prone to thieving, and so forth. Davenport therefore called for laws to oppose the influx of “inferior blood” into the Nordic population. He argued: “The biological basis for such laws is doubtless an appreciation of the fact that negroes and other races carry traits that do not go well with our social organization.”15
Politicians advanced restrictive immigration policies, along with sterilization laws supported by President Theodore Roosevelt. Alarmed by decreasing birth rates, Roosevelt also led a crusade against “race suicide.” By 1907, more than four hundred prisoners had been sterilized in the state of Indiana, and then Indiana approved a sterilization law for “degenerates.” By 1916, the American Eugenics Society explained that just one troublesome family, the “Jukes,” had cost the state of New York more than $2,000,000 in criminal and institutional expenses, whereas segregation of the original Jukes couple from society would have cost only $25,000; further, their sterilization would have cost a mere $150 instead.16 By 1917, sixteen states had sterilization laws.
Eugenic concerns also impelled intelligence testing. Building on the contributions of various psychologists, in 1916 Lewis Terman published The Measurement of Intelligence, in which he argued that no amount of instruction could work to qualify certain people as voters and leaders in society. Terman called for intelligence tests to determine whether, as was apparent to him, workers and servants who were “Indians, Mexicans, and negroes” had distinct mental traits or limitations.17 Intelligence tests became a means for segregating students according to their supposed inborn abilities. Terman advocated IQ tests, ascribing a single number to a person's intelligence.18 He and others also advocated that immigrants be tested.
Eugenics enthusiasts increasingly denounced the American declaration of equality as a myth. A book by Alfred Schultz, Race or Mongrel, complained: “The principle that ‘all men are created equal’ is still considered the chief pillar of strength of the United States…. Only one objection can be raised against it, that it does not contain one iota of truth.”19 Likewise, the president of the American Museum of Natural History proclaimed: “The true spirit of American democracy that all men are born with equal rights and duties has been confused with the political sophistry that all men are born with equal character and ability to govern themselves.”20
In 1921, Vice President Calvin Coolidge complained that the United Stat
es was seen as a “dumping ground” for unwanted foreigners. He noted that biological laws showed that while “Nordics” propagate successfully, certain “other races,” when mixed, lead to deterioration, and therefore, that “Quality of mind and body suggests that observance of ethnic law is as great a necessity to a nation as immigration law.”21
In 1924, the state of Virginia approved its “Racial Purity Law,” which outlawed interracial marriage. Several other states copied that law. Meanwhile, Harry Laughlin carried out IQ tests on immigrants. He found that Italians and Africans scored less than Nordics, and so he inferred that they lacked equal mental abilities. Laughlin's subsequent testimony about his conclusions before the federal government helped to pass the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, signed by Coolidge, who had become president. The act established quotas to restrict the influx of people from certain countries and ethnicities.22
Furthermore, the public increasingly embraced eugenic ideals. Several state fairs came to feature eugenic exhibits and “Fitter Families” contests. The governor of Kansas, for example, awarded trophies and medals to the healthiest exemplar families. Medals bragged: “Yea, I have a Goodly Heritage.” In Philadelphia, the Eugenics Society displayed exhibits on the slow birthrate of “high grade” people compared to the alarmingly fast birthrates of “deficient” and “abnormal” people. The exhibit asked, “How long are we Americans to be so careful for the pedigree of our pigs and chickens and cattle—and then leave the ancestry of our children to chance or to ‘blind’ sentiment?”23
In 1926, Leta Hollingworth, a professor of education at Columbia University, authored a study of “gifted children.” She ascribed students' abilities to their inborn predispositions. She also claimed that, in the United States, children of Africans and Italians had a lower than average intelligence. She also claimed: “Modern biology has shown that human beings cannot improve the qualities of their species, nor permanently reduce its miseries, by education, philanthropy, surgery, or legislation. Such attempts are palliative merely and leave a worse condition for the next generation to face. A philanthropy that succeeds in relieving the chronic pauperism of a thousand individuals of this generation, bequeaths at least two thousand paupers to be relieved by generations immediately following, for it has enabled a thousand organisms of pauper quality to live and breed.” Like stupidity, poverty was cast as an unfortunate inherited trait. To solve social problems, Hollingworth too advocated eugenics: “It would ultimately reduce misery if the stupid, the criminal, and other mentally, physically, and morally deficient would refrain from reproduction.”24 Other eugenicists argued further that procreation should be legislated, not left to choice.
Not everyone was pleased with eugenic laws. Numerous biologists and lawyers criticized especially the punitive sterilization laws. Hence, a sterilization case reached the Supreme Court in 1926. The state of Virginia had ordered that Carrie Buck be sterilized because she, her mother, and her infant daughter were allegedly feebleminded. Without having met Carrie Buck, Harry Laughlin declared in an expert deposition that her feeblemindedness was indeed hereditary and that she belonged to the “shiftless, ignorant, and worthless class of anti-social whites of the South.”25 The court ruled that just as the best citizens sometimes sacrifice themselves for the public welfare, so too the leeches of society should sacrifice to protect the state from being flooded with incompetence. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared: “It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind…. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”26
It was a great victory for eugenicists, so they kept pushing their social programs. By 1928, nearly four hundred universities in the United States offered courses on eugenics.27 By 1929, twenty-four states had sterilization laws, and by January 1935, more than 21,500 individuals had been involuntarily sterilized by law.28
Still, a growing coalition of scientists and critics denounced eugenics as nonsense. They complained that it reeked of prejudices disguised as science. Reform activists argued that the apparent problems of racial degeneracy were really just problems of social disorder. Even for diseases that were indeed inherited, it became clear that eugenic policies could hardly cure them.
For example, Charles Davenport had shown that Huntington's chorea was inherited, so it seemed that this disease could be wiped out by sterilizing every person who exhibited it. But that would rid only one generation of all offspring who carried two genes for the disease. Others who carried only one such gene, which did not manifest itself, would continue to transmit the disease. Society would still need to sterilize people in the next generation, and so on. Geneticist Reginald Punnett calculated how many generations it would take to reduce the frequency of a supposedly simple trait such as “feeblemindedness.” Punnett found that to diminish its incidence from 1 in 100 persons, for example, to 1 in 10,000, it would actually take 90 generations of sterilizations.29 So, more than two thousand years of eugenics would still fail to wipe out feeblemindedness. Moreover, there was a greater problem: that there was no reliable evidence that traits such as “idiocy,” violence, and criminality really depended on single pairs of genes. Instead, such behavioral traits were hardly definable genetically, and would seem more likely to depend on countless many genes.
Nevertheless, eugenics gained popularity in other countries. In Germany, in particular, it met a receptive audience. Albert Einstein, like many people, became fascinated by genetic inheritance. Having first loved his wife Mileva Marić as an equal, he came to despise her as “a physically and morally inferior person.”30 She had a congenital hip displacement and suffered depression and nervous breakdowns, which he attributed to her genes. Her sister was insane and catatonic. Likewise, Einstein and Marić's second son, Eduard, became mentally and emotionally unstable, and Einstein ascribed that to “the severe hereditary flaw” in Marić's bloodline.31 Einstein privately approved of the ancient Spartans' practice of abandoning their weakest children to die, to strengthen society. In 1917, he wrote to an intimate friend, “To keep something alive that is not viable beyond the years of fertility is undermining civilized humanity…. So it would be urgently necessary that physicians conducted a kind of inquisition for us,” to sterilize “without leniency in order to sanitize the future.”32
Those were the grotesque prejudices of a private individual. Yet more awful opinions were more publicly voiced. Adolf Hitler advocated the natural superiority of the German peoples. For him, inequality among races was a permanent and unchangeable aspect of the natural order. Hitler argued that “anyone who wants to cure this era that is inwardly sick and rotten, must first summon the courage to expose the causes of this disease.” He believed that racial mixing was poisoning the most valuable and natural German resource—the pure Aryan blood—and claimed that only the healthy German people, beautiful and spiritually superior, could produce the highest works of culture and creativity. Above all, he despised Jews as intrinsically evil and degenerate and as guilty for Germany's woes. He blamed them and the Marxists for supposedly undermining the natural superiority of the German blood by their “theory of the equality of men.”33
Hitler proposed that people who were physically degenerate and mentally sick should be prevented from procreating for at least six hundred years to help cleanse society of its ills. He claimed that it was the sacred racial mission of the Germans to protect “the most valuable stocks of racially primal elements” and to raise them to a dominant position. Hitler ranted that the State “has to take care that only the healthy beget children,” acting as “the guardian of a thousand years' future, in the face of which the wish and the egoism of the individual appears as nothing and has to submit. It must put the most modern medical means at the service of this knowledge. It must declare unfit for propagation everybody who is visibly ill and has inherited a disease, and must carry this out in practice.”34
Some German theorists saw human societies as living organisms, such that individuals with defects or ailments appeared as dangerous imperfections. To keep society healthy as a whole, the “racial scientist” Adolf Jost had advocated “the right to death” in his book of 1895. Hitler similarly argued, “If the power to fight for one's own health is no longer present, the right to life in this world of struggle ends.”35
For Hitler, German nationality was founded on race: “the purity of blood.” His National Socialist Party was impressed by the American laws for sterilization and against immigration and interracial marriage. The Nazis developed the Race Purification Program through which they sought a sort of racial hygiene to cure the state of expensive and “unproductive lives.” For Hitler, the aim of the state was to promote “a community of physically and mentally equal living beings.”36
In 1933, the Nazi government approved the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Future Generations. They announced that 400,000 Germans would be promptly sterilized beginning on January 1, 1934.37 It became essentially criminal to suffer from mental retardation, schizophrenia, epilepsy, blindness, deformations, alcoholism, and other conditions. Physicians were required to report any such individual to Hereditary Courts, which in turn would judge whether any such individual should be segregated or sterilized to be deterred from procreating. The goal was to sterilize “lives not worth living.” The deputy leader of the Nazi Party, Rudolf Hess, proclaimed that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.”38
The Nazis sterilized thousands of Germans in just months. In 1934, an American eugenicist in Virginia complained, “The Germans are beating us at our own game.”39 By 1937, roughly 225,000 people had been sterilized in Germany, about ten times more than in the United States. Furthermore, the Nazis enacted a medical program to kill disabled individuals. Hitler was seen as “The Physician” of the German peoples, one who would implement coercive corrective procedures to cure the health of the social organism. One of his followers exclaimed: “Our characteristics are deeply rooted in our race. Therefore, we must cherish them like a holy shrine, which we will—and must—keep pure. We have the deepest trust in our Physician and will follow his instructions in blind faith, because we know that he will lead our people to a great future. Hail to our German people and der Fürher!”40
Science Secrets Page 25