|
WAR AGAINST THE WEAK: EUGENICS AND AMERICA'S CAMPAIGN TO CREATE A MASTER RACE |
|
CHAPTER 2: Evolutions
Mankind's quest for perfection has always turned
dark. Man has always
existed in perpetual chaos. Continuously catapulted from misery to exhilaration and back, humanity has repeatedly struggled to overcome vulnerability and improve upon its sense of strength. The instinct is to "play God" or at least mediate His providence. Too often, this impulse is not just to improve, but to repress, and even destroy those deemed inferior. Eventually, the Judeo-Christian world codified the principle that all human life should be valued. A measure of our turbulent civilization and even of our humanity has always been how well people have adhered to that precept. Indeed, as societies became more enlightened, they extended respect for life to an ever-widening circle of people, including the less fortunate and the less strong. Racism, group hatred, xenophobia and enmity toward one's neighbors have existed in almost every culture throughout history. But it took millennia for these deeply personal, almost tribal hostilities to migrate into the safe harbor of scientific thought, thus rationalizing destructive actions against the despised or unwanted. Science offers the most potent weapons in man's determination to resist the call of moral restraint. To forge the new science of human oppressiona race science-several completely disconnected threads of history twined. Indeed, it took centuries of development for three disciplines-socioeconomics, philosophy and biology-to come together into a resilient and fastmoving pseudoscience that would change the world forever. Perhaps the story truly begins with the simple concept of charity. Charity is older than the Bible. I Organized refuges for the poor and helpless date to the Roman era and earlier.2 The concept of extending a helping hand was established in the earliest Judeo-Christian doctrine. "There will always be poor people in the land, therefore, I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land," declared Deuteronomy.3 Jesus Christ based his ministry on helping the helpless-the lame, the blind, lepers, the mentally deranged, and social outcasts such as thieves and prostitutes. He proclaimed, "The meek ... shall inherit the earth."4 Mter the Roman Empire adopted Christianity, the Canones Arabici Nicaeni of325 A.D. mandated the expansion of hospitals and other monastic institutions for the sick and needy.5 During medieval times, the church was chiefly responsible for "houses of pity."6 In England, such charitable institutions for the poor were abundantly required. The Black Death killed millions across Europe between 1348 and 1350. Labor shortages motivated bands of itinerant workers and beggars to wander from town to town in search of the highest paying pittance. As they wandered, many resorted to petty thievery, highway robbery, and worse. With their impoverished existence carne the associated afflictions of illiteracy, poor health, rampant disease and physical disability.? During the early and mid-1500s, economic upheavals took their toll on all but the richest of the nobility. Silver from the New World and official coinage debasements caused prices to rise, increasing the suffering of the poor. Tribes of vagrants migrated from the countryside to villages. Later, in response to the booming wool market, England's landowners switched from estate farming to vast sheep breeding enterprises. Consequently, great numbers of farm workers were evicted from their peasant domiciles, bloating the hordes of the unemployed and destitute. This teeming hardship only increased the church's role in tending to a multitude of the wretched and poor.8 Everything changed in the 1530s when Pope Clement VII refused to annul Henry VIII's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. Furious, King Henry seized church property and monasteries in England, and charitable institutions slowly became a governmental responsibility.9 Tending to the poor was expensive but the alternative was food riots. 10 By the early sixteenth century, the first poor laws were enacted in England. Such measures categorized the poor into two groups. The deserving poor were the very young and the very old, the infirm and families who fell on financial difficulties due to a change in circumstances. The undeserving poor were those who had turned to crime-such as highwaymen, pickpockets, and professional beggars-and also included paupers who roamed the country looking for a day's work. The undeserving poor were considered an affliction upon society, and the law laid out harsh punishment. Poverty, or more precisely, vagrancy, was criminalized. Indeed, the concept of criminal vagrancy for those with "no visible means of support" has persisted ever since. II Despite all attempts to contain welfare spending, England's enormous expenditures only escalated. In 1572, compulsory poor law taxes were assessed to each community to pay for poor houses and other institutions that cared for the deranged, diseased and decrepit among them. These taxes created a burden that many resented. 12 Now it was the poor and helpless against the rest of society. Indeed, a distinct pauper class had emerged. These people were perceived by the establishment as both an arrogant lot who assumed an inherited "right to relief," and as seething candidates for riot and revolution. Overcrowded slums and dismal poorhouses caused England to reform its poor laws and poverty policies several times during the subsequent three hundred years. The urbanization of poverty was massively accelerated by the Industrial Revolution, which established grim, sunless sweatshops and factories that in turn demanded-and exploited-cheap labor. Appalling conditions became the norm, inspiring Charles Dickens to rouse the public in novels such as Oliver Twist. Despite progress, by the mid-1800s the state was still spending £1,400 a year (equivalent to about $125,000 in modern money) per 10,000 paupers. The ruling classes increasingly rebelled against "taxing the industrious to support the indolent."13 Soot-smeared and highly reproductive, England's paupers were looked down upon as a human scourge. The establishment's derogatory language began to define these subclasses as subhumans. For example, a popular 1869 book, The Seven Curses of London, deprecated "those male and female pests of every civilized community whose natural complexion is dirt, whose brow would sweat at the bare idea of earning their bread, and whose stockin- trade is rags and impudence."14 England's complex of state-sponsored custodial institutions stretched across a distant horizon. Over time, the proliferation of poor houses, lunacy asylums, orphanages, health clinics, epilepsy colonies, rescue shelters, homes for the feebleminded and prisons inevitably turned basic Christian charity into what began to be viewed as a social plague. While Britain's perceived social plague intensified, a new social philosophy began evolving in Europe. In 1798, English economist Thomas Malthus published a watershed theory on the nature of poverty and the controlling socioeconomic systems at play. Malthus reasoned that a finite food supply would naturally inhibit a geometrically expanding human race. He called for population control by moral restraint. He even argued that in many instances charitable assistance promoted generation-to-generation poverty and simply made no sense in the natural scheme of human progress. Many who rallied behind Malthus's ideas ignored his complaints about an unjust social and economic structure, and instead focused on his rejection of the value of helping the poor. IS In the 1850s, agnostic English philosopher Herbert Spencer published Social Statics, asserting that man and society, in truth, followed the laws of cold science, not the will of a caring, almighty God. Spencer popularized a powerful new term: "survival of the fittest." He declared that man and society were evolving according to their inherited nature. Through evolution, the "fittest" would naturally continue to perfect society. And the "unfit" would naturally become more impoverished, less educated and ultimately die off, as well they should. Indeed, Spencer saw the misery and starvation of the pauper classes as an inevitable decree of a "far-seeing benevolence," that is, the laws of nature. He unambiguously insisted, "The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, and to make room for better .... If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die." Spencer left no room for doubt, declaring, "all imperfection must disappear." As such, he completely denounced charity and instead extolled the purifying elimination of the "unfit." The unfit, he argued, were predestined by their nature to an existence of downwardly spiraling degradation. 16 As social and economic gulfs created greater generation-to-generation disease and dreariness among the increasing poor, and as new philosophies suggested society would only improve when the unwashed classes faded away, a third voice entered the debate. That new voice was the voice of hereditary science. In 1859, some years after Spencer began to use the term "survival of the fittest," the naturalist Charles Darwin summed up years of observation in a lengthy abstract entitled The Origin of Species. Darwin espoused "natural selection" as the survival process governing most living things in a world of limited resources and changing environments. He confirmed that his theory "is the doctrine of Malthus applied with manifold force to the whole animal and vegetable kingdoms; for in this case, there can be no artificial increase of food, and no prudential restraint from marriage."17 Darwin was writing about a "natural world" distinct from man. But it wasn't long before leading thinkers were distilling the ideas of Malthus, Spencer and Darwin into a new concept, bearing a name never used by Darwin himself: social Darwinism. 18 Now social planners were rallying around the notion that in the struggle to survive in a harsh world, many humans were not only less worthy, many were actually destined to wither away as a rite of progress. To preserve the weak and the needy was, in essence, an unnatural act. Since ancient times, man has understood the principles of breeding and the lasting quality of inherited traits. The Old Testament describes Jacob's clever breeding of his and Laban's flocks, as spotted and streaked goats were mated to create spotted and streaked offspring. Centuries later, Jesus sermonized, "A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire."19 Good stock and preferred traits were routinely propagated in the fields and the flocks. Bad stock and unwanted traits were culled. Breeding, whether in grapes or sheep, was considered a skill subject to luck and God's grace. But during the five years between 1863 and 1868, three great men of biology would all promulgate a theory of evolution dependent upon identifiable hereditary "units" within the cells. These units could actually be seen under a microscope. Biology entered a new age when its visionaries proclaimed that good and bad traits were not bestowed by God as an inscrutable divinity, but transmitted from generation to generation according to the laws of science. Spencer, in 1863, published Principles of Biology, which suggested that heredity was under the control of "physiological units."2o Three years later, the obscure Czech monk Gregor Mendel published his experiments with smooth-skinned and wrinkled peas; he constructed a predictable hereditary system dependent on inherited cellular "elements."21 Finally, in 1868, Darwin postulated the notion that "the units throw off minute granules which are dispersed throughout the entire system .... They are collected from all parts of the system to constitute the sexual elements, and their development in the next generation forms a new being; but they are likewise capable of transmission in a dormant state to future generations." Darwin named these minute granules gemmules.22 By any name, science had now pulled away the shroud covering the genetic realities of mankind. Far-flung notions of social planning, philosophy and biology-centuries in the making-now gravitated toward each other, culminating in a fascinating new ideology that sought to improve the human race-not by war or charity, but by the progressive logic of science and mathematics. The driving force behind this revelation was not really a scientist, although his scientific methodology influenced many scientists. He was not really a philosopher, although his ability to weave scientific principles into social philosophy spawned fiery movements of dogma. He was not really a physician, although his analyses of human physiology ultimately governed much of the surgical and medical profession. The man was Francis J. Galton. He was above all a clever and compulsive counter-a counter of things, of phenomena, of traits, of all manner of occurrences, obvious and obscure, real and conjured. If any pattern could be discerned in the cacophony of life, Galton's piercing ratiocination could detect it and just maybe systemize it to the level of predictability. Galton never finished his studies at London's King College Medical School and instead studied math at Cambridge, where he quickly became an aficionado of the emerging field of statistics. 23He joyously applied his arithmetic prowess and razor-like powers of observation to everyday life, seeking correlation. Galton distinguished himself by his ability to recognize patterns, making him an almost unique connoisseur of nature-sampling, tasting and discerning new character in seemingly random flavors of chaos. More than correlation, Galton's greatest quest was prediction. To his mind, what he could predict, he could outwit-even conquer. And so Galton's never-ending impulse was to stand before life and defy its mysteries, one by one, with his indomitable powers of comprehension. Perhaps counting relieved the throbbing of his constant headaches or was an intellectual consequence of his insatiable desire to excel. More than once, he succumbed to palpitations and even a nervous breakdown amidst the fury of his cogitations. Even his visage seemed sculpted to seek and measure. A pair of bushy eyebrows jutted out above his orbits almost like two hands cupped over the brow of a man peering into an unfathomable distance. At the same time, his dense windswept sideburns swerved back dramatically just behind his earlobes, as though his mind was speeding faster than the rest of his head.24 Galton counted the people fidgeting in an audience and tried to relate it to levels of interest. He tried to make sense of waves in his bathtub. He gazed from afar at well-endowed women, using a sextant to record their measurements. "As the ladies turned themselves ... to be admired," wrote Galton, "I surveyed them in every way and subsequently measured the distance of the spot where they stood ... and tabulated the results at my leisure." He even tried to map the concentration of beauty in Britain by noting how many lovely women were located in different regions of the country.25 Galton's favorite adage was, "Whenever you can, count. "26 Much of Galton's quantitative musings amounted to little more than distraction. But some of it became solid science. In 1861, he distributed a questionnaire to the weather stations of Europe, asking the superintendents to record all weather details for the month of December. He found a pattern. Analyzing the data, Galton drew up the world's first weather maps, peppering them with his own idiosyncratic symbols for wind direction, temperature and barometric pressure. His maps, revealing that counterclockwise wind currents marked sudden changes in pressure, eventually made isobaric charts possible. Galton's 1863 publication, Meteoror;raphica: or Methods of Mapping the Weather, greatly advanced the science of meteorology.27 Later, he discovered that the raised ridges on human fingertips were each unique. No two were alike. He devised a system for analyzing and categorizing the distinctive sworls, and inking them into a permanent record. Galton simply called these fingerprints. The new discipline permitted the identification of criminals-this at a time when a wave of crime by unidentifiable felons gripped London and Jack the Ripper prowled the East End. Galton's book, Finger Prints, featured the author's own ten arched across the page as a personallogotype.28 About the time Darwin, Spencer and Mendel began explaining the heredity of lower species, Galton was already looking beyond those theories. He began to discern the patterns of various qualities in human beings. In 1865, Galton authored a two-part series for Macmillan Magazine that he expanded four years later into a book entitled Hereditary Genius. Galton studied the biographical dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as the genealogies of eminent scholars, poets, artists and military men. Many of them were descendants of the same families. The frequency was too impressive to ignore. Galton postulated that heredity not only transmitted physical features, such as hair color and height, but mental, emotional and creative qualities as well. Galton counted himself among the eminent, since he was Darwin's cousin, and both descended from a common grandfather.29 Galton reasoned that talent and quality were more than an accident. They could be calculated, managed and sharpened into a "highly gifted race of men by judicious marriages during several consecutive generations." Far from accepting any of Malthus's notions of inhibited procreation, Galton suggested that bountiful breeding of the best people would evolve mankind into a superlative species of grace and quality. He actually hoped to create a regulated marriage process where members of the finest families were only wed to carefully selected spouses.30 Galton did not worry that inbred negative qualities would multiply. He said there was "no reason to suppose that, in breeding for the higher order of intellect, we should produce ... a feeble race." He explained his own incapacitating physical frailties away as a manifestation of hereditary distinction. "Men who leave their mark on the world," wrote Galton, "are very often those who, being gifted and full of nervous power, are at the same time haunted and driven by a dominant idea, and are therefore within a measurable distance of insanity."3\ Galton struggled to find the pattern, the predictability, the numerical formula that governed the character of progeny. Mathematics would be the key to elevating his beliefs from an observation to a science. He didn't have the answer yet, but Galton was certain that the secret of scientific breeding could be revealed-and that it would forever change humankind. "Could not the undesirables be got rid of and the desirables multiplied?" he asked.32 In 1883, Galton published Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development and created a new term for his discipline. He played with many names for his new science. Finally, he scrawled Greek letters on a hand-sized scrap of paper, and next to them the two English fragments he would join into one. The Greek word for well was abutted to the Greek word for born.33 In a flourish, Galton invented a term that would tantalize his contemporaries, inspire his disciples, obsess his later followers and eventually slash through the twentieth century like a sword. The finest and the fiendish would adopt the new term as their driving mantra. Families would be shattered, generations would be wiped away, whole peoples would be nearly erased-all in the name of Galton's word. The word he wrote on that small piece of paper was eugenics.34
***
Eugenics was a protoscience in search of vindicating data. Galton had described the eugenically well-born man as a trend in science, but he desperately sought to quantifY the biological process. After all, if Galton could advance from merely discovering the scientific mechanism controlling human character to actually predicting the quality of the unborn, his knowledge would become almost divine. In theory, the master of any enforced eugenics program could play God-deciding who would be born and who would not. Indeed, the notion of constructing a brave new world by regimented reproduction has never receded. Numbers were needed. In 1884, Galton opened his Anthropometric Laboratory at London's International Health Exhibition. Using question naires-;ust as he had in quantifying weather-Galton asked families to record their physical characteristics, such as height, weight and even lung power. Later Galton even offered cash rewards for the most comprehensive family history. The data began to accrue. It wasn't long before nine thousand people, including many complete families, offered their physical details for Galton's calculations.35 He began pasting numbers together, sculpting formulas, and was finally able to patch together enough margins of error and coefficients of correlation into a collection of statistical eugenic probabilities. At the same time, German cellular biologist August Weismann, using more powerful microscopes, announced that something called "germ plasm" was the true vehicle of heredity. Weismann observed what he termed a "nucleus." He theorized, "The physical causes of all apparently unimportant hereditary habits ... of hereditary talents, and other mental peculiarities must all be contained in the minute quantity of germ-plasm which is possessed by the nucleus of a germ cell."36 Others would later identify character- conveying threads termed "chromatic loops" or "chromosomes." Superseding Darwinian precepts of descent and Weismann's germ plasm, Galton, in his essays and an 1889 book entitled Natural Inheritance, tried to predict the precise formulaic relationship between ancestors and their descendants. He concluded, "The influence, pure and simple, of the mid-parent may be taken as 1/2, of the mid-grandparent '14, of the midgreat- grandparent lis, and so on. That of the individual parent would therefore be 1/4,of the individual grandparent 1/16,of an individual in the next generation 1/64,and so on." In other words, every person was the measurable and predictable sum of his ancestors' immortal germ plasm. Inheritable traits included not only physical characteristics, such as eye color and height, but subtle qualities, such as intellect, talent and personality. Galton ultimately reduced all notions of heritage, talent and character to a series of complex, albeit fatally flawed, eugenic equations.J7 Above all, Galton concluded that the caliber of progeny always reflected its distant ancestry. Good lineage did not improve bad blood. On the contrary, in any match, undesirable traits would eventually outweigh desirable qualities.38 Hence, when eugenically preferred persons mated with one another, their offspring were even more valuable. But mixing eugenically well-endowed humans with inferior mates would not strengthen succeeding generations. Rather, it would promote a downward biological spiral. What was worse, two people of bad blood would only create progressively more defective offspring. It was all guesswork, ancestral solipsism and mathematical acrobaticssome of it well-founded and some of it preposterous-forged into a selfcongratulatory biology and social science. Scholarly kudos and celebration abounded. Yet Galton himself was forced to admit in 1892, in the preface to the second edition of Hereditary Genius, that his theories and formulae were still completely unprovable. "The great problem of the future betterment of the human race is confessedly, at the present time, hardly advanced beyond the state of academic interest."39 Years later, in a preface to a eugenic tract about gifted families, Galton again warned that musing about "improved breeds" of the human race were still nothing more than "speculations on the theoretical possibility."40 Nonetheless, Galton remained convinced that germ-plasm was the ultimate, elusive governing factor. As such, environment and the quality of existence were by and large irrelevant and actually an impediment to racial improvement. No amount of social progress or intervention could help the unfit, he insisted. Qualifying his sense of charity with a biological imperative, Galton asserted, "I do not, of course, propose to neglect the sick, the feeble or the unfortunate. I would do all ... for their comfort and happiness, but I would exact an equivalent for the charitable assistance they receive, namely, that by means of isolation, or some other drastic yet adequate measure, a stop should be put to the production of families of children likely to include degenerates."41 Galton called for a highly regulated marriage licensing process that society at large would endorse. By prohibiting eugenically flawed unions and promoting well-born partners, Galton believed "what ature does blindly, slowly and ruthlessly, man may do providently, quickly and kindly."42 Galton believed that eugenics was too broad a societal quest to be left to individual whim. He espoused a new definition of eugenics that wed the biology to governmental action. "Eugenics," asserted Galton, "is the study of all agencies under social control which can improve or impair the racial quality of future generations."43 Galton's ideas ultimately became known as "positive eugenics," that is, suggesting, facilitating, predicting and even legally mandating biologically conducive marriages. Every family hopes its offspring will choose wisely, and Galton hoped his scientific, equation-filled epistles would encourage families and government bureaus to require as much. His convictions, even those involving legislation and marriage regimentation, were, within his own utopian context, deemed noninvasive and nondestructive. But a few years later, by the dawn of the twentieth century, Galton's notions of voluntary family planning and positive governmental structures would be transmogrified into an entirely different constellation of negative and coercive thought. The new faithful called it "negative eugenics." Galton died in 1911. With his passing, his positive eugenic principles of marriage regimentation also disappeared from the eugenics main stage. Certainly his name lived on as a rallying call, stamped on the plaques of societies and academic departments. But before long others would come along to chew up his ideas and spit them out as something new and macabre, barely resembling the original. What Galton hoped to inspire in society, others were determined to force upon their fellow man. If Galton was correct-and these new followers were certain he was-why wait for personal choice or flimsy statutory power? In their minds, future generations of the genetically unfit-from the medically infirm to the racially unwanted to the economically impoverished- would have to be wiped away. Only then could genetic destiny be achieved for the human race-or rather, the white race, and more specifically, the ordic race. The new tactics would include segregation, deportation, castration, marriage prohibition, compulsory sterilization, passive euthanasia-and ultimately extermination. As the twentieth century opened for business, the eugenic spotlight would now swing across the ocean from England to the United States. In America, eugenics would become more than an abstract philosophy; it would become an obsession for policymakers. Galton could not have envisioned that his social idealism would degenerate into a ruthless campaign to destroy all those deemed inadequate. But it would become nothing less than a worldwide eugenic crusade to abolish all human inferiority.
|