War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race, Expanded Edition (41 page)

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 Norway
¹⁷

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 outstripped 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

From 1904 to 1908, a Royal Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded had deliberated the question of segregating and sterilizing the mentally unfit. The commission’s ranks included several British eugenicists who had formed other private associations ostensibly devoted to the welfare of the feebleminded, but which were actually devoted to promoting eugenic-style confinement and surgical measures. The associations sounded charitable and benevolent. But such groups as The National Association for the Care and Protection of the Feebleminded and The Lancashire and Cheshire Association for the Permanent Care of the Feebleminded really wanted to ensure that the “feebleminded”-whatever that meant-did not reproduce more of their kind.
²⁴

The ambitious British eugenic plans encompassed not just those who seemed mentally inferior, but also criminals, debtors, paupers, alcoholics, recipients of charity and “other parasites.” Despite passionate protestations from British eugenicists, however, the commission declined to recommend either widespread segregation or any form of sterilization.
²⁵

But eugenicists continued their crusade. In 1909 and 1910, other so-called welfare societies for the feebleminded, such as the Cambridge Association for the Care of the Feebleminded, contacted the Eugenics Education Society to urge more joint lobbying of the government to sanction forced sterilization. Mass letter-writing campaigns began. Every candidate for Parliament was sent a letter demanding they “support measures … that tend to discourage parenthood on the part of the feebleminded and other degenerate types.” As in America, sterilization advocacy focused first and foremost on the most obviously impaired, in this case, the feeble-minded, but then escalated to include “other degenerate types.” Seeking support for the Mental Deficiency Act, society members mailed letters to every sitting member of Parliament, long lists of social welfare officials, and virtually every education committee in England. When preliminary governmental committees shrank from support, the society simply redoubled its letter-writing campaign.
²⁶

Finally the government agreed to consider the legislation. Home Secretary Winston Churchill, an enthusiastic supporter of eugenics, reassured one group of eugenicists that Britain’s 120,000 feebleminded persons “should, if possible, be segregated under proper conditions so that their curse died with them and was not transmitted to future generations.” The plan called for the creation of vast colonies. Thousands of Britain’s unfit would be moved into these colonies to live out their days.
²⁷

But while on its surface the proposed Mental Deficiency Act seemed confined to the feebleminded, many of whom already resided in institutions, the bill was actually a stalking-horse for more draconian measures. The society planned to slip in language that could snare millions of unwanted, pauperized and other eugenically unsound families. EES president Major Leonard Darwin revealed his true feelings in a speech to the adjunct Cambridge University Eugenics Society.

“The first step to be taken,” he explained, “ought to be to establish some system by which all children at school reported by their instructors to be specially stupid, all juvenile offenders awaiting trial, all ins-and-outs at workhouses, and all convicted prisoners should be examined by trained experts in mental defects in order to place on a register the names of all those thus ascertained to be definitely abnormal.” Like his colleagues in America, Darwin wanted to identify not just the so-called unfit, but their entire families as well.
²⁸

Darwin emphasized, “From the Eugenic standpoint this method would no doubt be insufficient, for the defects of relatives are only second in importance to the defects of the individuals themselves-indeed, in some cases [the defects of relatives] are of far greater importance.” British eugenicists were convinced that just seeming normal was not enough-the unfit were ancestrally flawed. Even if an individual appeared normal and begat normal children, he or she could still be a “carrier” who needed to be sterilized. One society leader, Lord Riddell, explained, “Mendelian theory has disclosed that human characteristics are transmitted through carriers in a weird fashion. Mental-deficients may have one normal child who procreates normal children; another deficient child who procreates deficients and another apparently normal child who procreates some deficients and some normals. Mathematically, this description may not be quite accurate, but it will serve the purpose.”
²⁹

More than a decade after Rentoul first proposed mimicking U.S. laws, British eugenicists now lobbied to install American-style marriage restrictions. Once again, it was the seemingly “normal” people that British eugenicists feared. Saleeby explained, “The importance … will become apparent when we consider the real meaning of the American demonstration that many serious defects are Mendelian recessives. It is that there are many persons in the community, personally normal, who are nevertheless ‘impure dominants’ in the Mendelian sense, and half of whose germ cells accordingly carry a defect. According to a recent calculation, made in one of the bulletins of the Eugenics Record Office, about one-third of the population in the United States is thus capable of conveying mental deficiency, the ‘insane tendency,’ epilepsy, or some other defect…. Their number would be increased … [unless] Dr. Davenport’s advice as to the mating of defectives with normal persons were followed, for all their offspring would then belong to this category.”
³⁰

Leonard Darwin and his colleagues hoped “a system will also be established for the examination of the family history of all those placed on the register as being unquestionably mentally abnormal, especially as regards the criminality, insanity, ill-health and pauperism of their relatives, and not omitting to note cases of marked ability.” Their near kin were to be shipped off to facilities, and marriages would be prohibited or annulled.
³¹