War Against the Weak

by Edwin Black

  CHAPTER 11

  Britain’s Crusade

  By the time four hundred delegates crowded into an auditorium at the University of London to witness the opening gavel of the First International Congress of Eugenics in 1912, Galton had died and Galtonian eugenics had already been successfully dethroned. America had appropriated the epicenter of the worldwide movement. Eugenic imperialism was vital to the followers of Davenport, as they envisioned not just a better United States, but a totally reshaped human species everywhere on earth.

  Nowhere was American influence more apparent than in the cradle of eugenics itself, England. The same centuries of social consternation that had shaped Galton also shaped the new generation of eugenicists who supplanted him. Several storm fronts of historic population anxieties collided over England at the turn of the century. Urban overcrowding, overflowing immigration, and rampant poverty disrupted the British Empire’s elegant Victorian era. After the Boer War, the obvious demographic effects of Britain’s far-flung imperialism and fears over a declining birth rate and future manpower further inflamed British intellectuals, who were reexamining the inherent quality and quantity of their citizens.1

  English eugenicists did what they did for Britain in a British context, with no instructions or coordination from abroad and precious little organizational assistance from anyone in America. While Britain’s movement possessed its own great thinkers, however, British eugenic science and doctrine were almost completely imported from the United States. With few exceptions, American eugenicists provided the scientific roadmaps and the pseudoscientific data to draw them. During the early years, the few British attempts at family tracing and eugenic research were isolated and unsuccessful. Hence, while the population problems and chronic class conflicts were quite British, the proposed solutions were entirely American.

  Galton died in 1911, more than a year before the First International Congress, but his marginalization had begun when Mendel’s work was rediscovered in the United States. Quaint theories of felicitous marriages among the better classes, yielding incrementally superior offspring, were discarded in favor of wholesale reproductive prohibition for the inferior classes. Eugenic thought may have originated in Britain, but eugenic action began in America.

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, while Galton and his circle were still publishing thin pamphlets, positing revolutionary positions at elite intellectual get-togethers and establishing a modest biometric laboratory, America was busy building a continent-wide political and scientific infrastructure. In that first decade, no government agency in Britain officially supported eugenics as a movement. But in America, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and its network of state college agricultural stations lent its support as early as 1903. Galton in London did not enjoy the backing of billionaires. But on Long Island, the vast fortunes of Carnegie, Rockefeller and Harriman financed unprecedented eugenic research and lobbying organizations that developed international reach. By 1904, when Galton and his colleagues were still moderating their theories, Charles Davenport was already creating the foundations of a movement that he would soon commandeer from his British predecessors. Before 1912, the Eugenics Record Office would begin extensive family-by-family lineage investigations in prisons, hospitals and poor communities. In England the one major attempt at tracing family pedigrees was a lone, protracted effort that took more than a decade to complete and another decade to publish.2

  Americanized eugenics began to take root in England in the twentieth century under the pen of a Liverpool surgeon named Robert Reid Rentoul. In many ways, Rentoul helped lay the philosophical groundwork for British eugenics, and he would become a leading voice in the movement. A distinguished member of the Royal College of Surgeons, Rentoul worked with the feebleminded and had undertaken intense studies of America’s eugenic activities. In 1903, he published a twenty-six-page pamphlet, Proposed Sterilization of Certain Mental and Physical Degenerates: An Appeal to Asylum Managers and Others. He urged both voluntary and compulsory sterilization to prevent reproduction by the unfit. As precedents, Rentoul devoted several pages to the legislative efforts in Minnesota, Colorado, Wisconsin and other U.S. states. The pamphlet’s appendix included an abstract of Minnesota’s early marriage restriction law. Rentoul lobbied for similar legislation in the United Kingdom. In one speech before the influential Medico-Legal Society in London, he proposed that all physicians and lawyers join the call to legalize forced sterilization.3

  Rentoul’s ideas quickly ignited the passions of new eugenic thinkers, including those who gathered at a meeting of the London Sociological Society on the afternoon of May 16, 1904. Galton delivered an important address entitled “Eugenics, its Definition, Scope and Aims,” stressing actuarial progress, marriage preferences and general education. “Over-zeal leading to hasty action,” he cautioned, “would do harm, by holding out expectations of a near golden age, which will certainly be falsified and cause the science to be discredited.” He added, “The first and main point is to secure the general intellectual acceptance of Eugenics as a hopeful and most important study.” But the famous novelist and eugenic extremist H. G. Wells then rose to publicly rebuke Galton, bluntly declaring, “It is in the sterilization of failures, and not in the selection of successes for breeding, that the possibility of an improvement of the human stock lies.” On that afternoon in Britain the lines were clearly drawn-it was positive eugenics versus negative eugenics.4

  Rentoul continued his study of American eugenics throughout 1905, specifically fixing on the emerging notion of “race suicide” as espoused by the likes of American raceologist E. A. Ross and President Theodore Roosevelt. In 1906, Rentoul published his own in-depth eugenic polemic entitled Race Culture; Or, Race Suicide?, which became a veritable blueprint for the British eugenic activism to come. In page after page, Rentoul mounted statistics and percentages to document Great Britain’s mental and physical social deterioration. But as remedies, Rentoul held up America’s marriage restriction laws, advocacy by American physicians for sterilization, and recent state statutes. He explained the fine points of the latest legislative action in New Jersey, Delaware, Minnesota, Ohio, Indiana, North Dakota and other U.S. jurisdictions. “I cannot express too high an appreciation,” Rentoul wrote, “of the many kindnesses of the U.S.A. officials to me in supplying information.”5

  Rentoul declared that he vastly preferred Indiana’s vasectomies and salpingectomies to the castrations performed in Kansas and Massachusetts. But he added that the Kansas physician’s pioneering efforts at asexualization were enough to justify “erecting a memorial to his memory.” In one chapter, Rentoul cited an incident involving Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the father of the future Supreme Court justice. When called to attend to a mentally unstable child, Dr. Holmes complained that to be effective, “the consultation should have been held some fifty years ago!” Rentoul also quoted Alexander Graham Bell’s eugenic denigration of charity: “Philanthropy in this country is doing everything possible to encourage marriage among deaf mutes.” Rentoul urged his countrymen to duplicate American-style surveys of foreigners housed in its mental institutions and other asylums.6

  Rentoul summarized his vision for Britain’s eugenic future with these words: “It is to these States we must look for guidance if we wish to… lessen the chances of children being degenerates.”7

  Of course Rentoul’s scientific treatise also addressed America’s race problem in a eugenic context. In a passage immediately following references to such strictly local curses as Jack the Ripper, Rentoul asserted, “The negro is seldom content with sexual intercourse with the white woman, but culminates his sexual furor by killing the woman, sometimes taking out her womb and eating it. If the United States of America people would cease to prostitute their high mental qualities and recognize this negro as a sexual pervert, it would reflect greater credit upon them; and if they would sterilize this mentally afflicted creature instead of torturing him, they would have a better right to pose as sound think
ers and social reformers.”8

  The next year a few dozen eugenic activists formed a provisional committee, which a year later, in 1908, constituted itself as the Eugenics Education Society. Many of its founders were previously members of the Moral Education League, concerned with alcoholism and the proper application of charity. David Starr Jordan, president of the Eugenics Section of the American Breeders Association, was made a vice president of the Eugenics Education Society. The new group’s biological agenda was to cut off the bloodlines of British degenerates, mainly paupers, employing the techniques pioneered in the United States. The two approved methods were sterilization-both voluntary and compulsory-and forcible detention, a concept euphemized under the umbrella term “segregation.” Sympathetic government and social service officers were intrigued but ultimately unconvinced, because England, although steeped in centuries of class prejudice, was nonetheless not yet ready for American-style coercive eugenics.9

  True, some in government explored eugenic ideas early on. For example, in August of 1906 the Lancashire Asylums Board unanimously resolved: “In view of the alarming increase of the insane portion of our population, immediate steps [should] be taken to inquire into the best means for preventing the propagation of those mentally afflicted…. “ But that resolution only called for an inquiry. Then the office of the secretary of state considered establishing a penal work settlement for convicts, vagrants and the weak-minded on the Island of Lundy, thus setting the stage for segregating defectives. But this proposal floundered as well.10

  It wasn’t that England lacked the legal or sociological precedents for a eugenics program. Pauperism was thought to be hereditary and had long been judged criminal. Class conflict was centuries old. But America’s solutions simply did not translate. Marriage restriction and compulsory segregation were anathema to British notions of liberty and freedom. Even Galton believed that regulated marriages were an unrealistic proposition in a democratic society. He knew that “human nature would never brook interference with the freedom of marriage,” and admitted as much publicly. In his published memoir, he recounted his original error in even suggesting such utopian marriages. “I was too much disposed to think of marriage under some regulation,” he conceded.11

  As for sterilization, officials and physicians alike understood that the use of a surgeon’s knife for either sterilization or castration, even with the consent of the family or a court-appointed guardian, was plainly criminal. This was no abstruse legal interpretation. Reviewers commonly concluded that such actions would be an “unlawful wounding,” in violation of Section Twenty of the 1861 Offense against the Person Act. Thus fears of imprisonment haunted every discussion of the topic. Ministry of Health officials understood that in the event of unexpected death arising from the procedure, guardians or parents and physicians alike could be prosecuted for manslaughter. Such warnings were regularly repeated in the correspondence of the Eugenics Education Society, in memorandums from the Ministry of Health, and in British medical journals. Even the Journal of the American Medical Association and Eugenical News made the point clear.12

  America enjoyed a global monopoly on eugenic sterilization for the first decades of the twentieth century. What was strictly illegal in the United Kingdom was merely extralegal-a gray area-in America. Therefore Indiana prison physician Harry Clay Sharp was able to sterilize scores of inmates long before his state passed enabling legislation in 1907. Moreover, while American states maintained control over their own medical laws, in Britain only Parliament could pass such legislation. British eugenicists understood what they did about sterilization by observing the American experience.

  Nor did organized British eugenics immediately launch any field studies to trace the ancestries of suspected degenerates. Indeed, the whole idea of family investigation caused discomfort to many in Britain, especially members of the peerage, who cherished their lineages and genealogies. Eugenicists believed that the firstborn in any family was more likely to suffer crippling diseases and insanity than later children, and this undermined the inheritance concepts attached to primogeniture, by which the eldest often inherited everything. Essentially, they thought the peerage itself had become unsound. In fact, Galton and his chief disciple, Karl Pearson, described the House of Lords as being occupied by men “who have not taken the pains necessary to found or preserve an able stock.”13

  Only a sea change in British popular sentiment from top to bottom, and an overhaul of legal restraints, would enable eugenical activity in England. Hence the Eugenics Education Society well understood that education would indeed have to be its middle name. That mission never changed. Almost twenty years later, when the organization shortened its name to the Eugenics Society, its chief organizers admitted, “It was believed that the object of the Society being primarily education was so universally established as to make the word education in the title redundant.”14 1n reality, of course, “education” meant little more than constant propagandizing, lobbying, letter writing, pamphleteering, and petitioning from the intellectual and scientific sidelines, where British eugenics dwelled.

  From its inception in 1908, the Eugenics Education Society had adopted American attitudes on negative eugenics. But with a movement devoid of any firsthand research in English society, the newly born EES was reduced to appropriating American theory from Davenport and company, and then trying to force it into the British sociological context. Although an aging Galton agreed to become the society’s first “honorary president,” by 1910 Galton and Pearson both understood that their ideas were not really welcome in the society. The Galton Laboratory and the simple biometric ancestral outlines recorded at various collaborating institutions by Pearson were seen as innocuous vestiges of the current movement. The society’s main function was suasion, not science.15

  Throughout late 1909, parlor lectures were given to inquisitive audiences in Derby, Manchester, Leeds and Birmingham. Groups in Liverpool, Glasgow, Cardiff and London scheduled talks as well. Such propagandizing was repugnant to Galton and Pearson, who saw themselves as scientists. Moreover, while monies were being raised for a Lecture Fund to defray the society’s travel expenses, much of Pearson’s research remained unpublished. In aJanuary 3, 1910, interview with The Standard of London, Pearson complained about “four or five memoirs [scientific reports] on social questions of which the publication is delayed from lack of funds… the problem of funds is becoming so difficult that the question of handing it over to be published outside this country has already arisen.” Almost derisively, he clarified, “The object of the Galton Laboratory is scientific investigation, and as scientific investigators, the staff do not attempt any form of propaganda. That must be left to outside agencies and associations.”16

  By 1912, America’s negative eugenics had been purveyed to like-minded social engineers throughout Europe, especially in Germany and the Scandinavian nations, where theories of Nordic superiority were well received. Hence the First International Congress of Eugenics attracted several hundred delegates and speakers from the United States, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and Norway17

  Major Leonard Darwin, son of Charles Darwin and head of the EES, was appointed congress president. But the working vice presidents included several key Americans, including race theorist David Starr Jordan, ERO scientific director Alexander Graham Bell, and Bleeker van Wagenen, a trustee of New Jersey’s Vmeland Training School for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys and secretary of the ABA’s sterilization committee. Of course Charles Davenport also served as a working vice president.18

  Five days of lectures and research papers were dominated by the U.S. contingent and their theories of racial eugenics and compulsory sterilization. The report from what was dubbed the “American Committee on Sterilization” was heralded as a highlight of the meeting. One prominent British eugenicist, writing in a London newspaper, identified Davenport as an American “to whom all of us in this country are immensely indebted, for the work of his office has far outstr
ipped anything of ours…. “19

  Although Galton had died by this point, a young Scottish physician and eugenic activist by the name of Caleb Saleeby informed his colleagues that if Galton were still alive, he would agree that eugenics was now an American science. If Galton could “read the recent reports of the American Eugenics Record Office,” wrote Saleeby, “which have added more to our knowledge of human heredity in the last three years than all former work on that subject put together, [Galton] would quickly seek to set our own work in this country upon the same sure basis.”20

  By the final gavel of the First International Congress of Eugenics, Galton’s hope of finding the measurable physical qualities of man had become officially passe among British eugenicists. Saleeby cheerfully reported, “‘Biometry’… might have never existed so far as the Congress was concerned.” Indeed, Pearson declined to even attend the congress. In newspaper articles, Saleeby denounced biometrics as a mere “pseudo-science.”21

  The society had by now successfully purveyed the notion that defective individuals needed to be segregated. Whenever social legislation arose, the society’s several dozen members would implore legislators and key decision makers to consider the eugenic agenda. For example, when the Poor Laws were being revised in 1909, a typical form letter went out. “The legislation for the reform of the Poor Law will be prominently before parliament. It is most essential that, when the reforms are made, they should include provisions for the segregation of the most defective portion of the community; it will be the business of the Society, during the coming year, to appeal to the country on this ground…. “22

  But the crusade to mass incarcerate and segregate the unfit did not achieve real impetus until England considered a Mental Deficiency Act in 1913. Like so many freestanding social issues invaded by eugenics, mental illness, feeblemindedness and pauperism had long been the subject of legendary argument in England. From 1886 to 1899, Britain passed an Idiots Act, a Lunacy Act, and a Defective and Epileptic Children Act. With the arrival of the twentieth century, the nation sought an updated approach.23