A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History (4 page)

Darwin, by force of his authority, could put the idea of many human species to rest. Despite his best efforts, he had less success in throttling the political movement called Social Darwinism. This was the proposition that just as in nature the fittest survive and the weak are pushed to the wall, the same rule should prevail in human societies too, lest nations be debilitated by the poor and sick having too many children.

The promoter of this idea was not Darwin but the English philosopher Herbert Spencer. Spencer developed a theory about the evolution of society, which held that ethical progress depended on people adapting to current conditions. The theory was developed independently of Darwin’s and lacked any of the extensive biological research on which Darwin’s was based. Still, it was Spencer who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” which Darwin adopted.

Spencer argued that government aid that would allow the poor and sickly to propagate would impede society’s adaptation. Even government support for education should be cut off, lest it postpone the elimination of those who failed to adapt. Spencer was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the second half of the 19th century, and his ideas, however harsh they may seem today, were widely discussed in both Europe and America.

Darwin’s theory of evolution, at least in its author’s eyes, dealt solely with the natural world. Yet it was as attractive to political theorists as a candle’s flame is to moths. Karl Marx asked if he could dedicate
Das Kapital
to Darwin, an honor the great naturalist declined.
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Darwin’s name was slapped on to Spencer’s political ideas, which would far more accurately have been called Social Spencerism. Darwin himself demolished them in a lapidary reproof.

Yes, vaccination has saved millions whose weaker constitutions
would otherwise have let them succumb to smallpox, Darwin wrote. And yes, the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind, which, to judge from animal breeding, “must be highly injurious to the race of man.” But the aid we feel impelled to give to the helpless is part of our social instincts, Darwin said. “Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature,” he wrote. “If we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”
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Had Darwin’s advice been heeded, a disastrous turn in 20th century history might have been somewhat less inevitable. But for many intellectuals, theoretical benefits often outweigh overwhelming present evils. Airy notions of racial improvement drove the eugenics movement, which over many decades created the mental climate for the mass exterminations conducted by the National Socialists in Germany. Yet this catastrophe started out in such a different place. It started with Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton.

Galton was a Victorian gentleman and polymath who made distinguished contributions to many fields of science. He invented several basic statistical techniques, such as the concepts of correlation, regression and standard deviation. He anticipated human behavior genetics by using twins to sort out the influences of nature and nurture. He devised the classification scheme still used in fingerprint identification. He drew the first weather map. Mischievously wondering how to test if prayers were answered, he noted that the English population had for centuries prayed each week in church for the long life of their sovereign, so that if prayer had any power at all, it should surely result in the greater longevity of English monarchs. His report that sovereigns were the shortest-lived of all rich people and hence that prayer had no positive effect was rejected by an editor as “too terribly conclusive and offensive not to raise a hornet’s nest” and lay unpublished for many years.
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One of Galton’s principal interests was that of whether human abilities are hereditary. He compiled various lists of eminent people and looked for those who were related to one another. Within these families, he found that close relatives of the founder were more likely to be eminent than distant ones, establishing that intellectual distinction had a hereditary basis.

Galton was compelled by contemporary critics to pay more attention to the fact that the children of eminent men had greater educational and other opportunities than others. He conceded that nurture was involved to some extent, even inventing the phrase “nature versus nurture” in doing so. But his interest in the inheritance of outstanding abilities remained. Darwin’s theory of evolution was now widely accepted in England and Galton, with his avidity for measuring human traits, was interested in the effect of natural selection on the English population.

This line of thought now led him down a dangerous path, to the proposal that human populations could be improved by controlled breeding, just like those of domestic animals. His finding that eminence ran in families led him to propose that marriages between such families should be encouraged with monetary incentives so as to improve the race. For this goal, Galton coined another word, eugenics.

In an unpublished novel, “Kantsaywhere,” Galton wrote that those who failed eugenic tests were to be confined to camps where they had to work hard and remain celibate. But this seems to have been mostly a thought experiment or fantasy in Galton’s mind. In his published work, he emphasized public education about eugenics and positive incentives for marriage among the eugenically fit.

There is no particular reason to doubt the assessment of one of Galton’s biographers, Nicholas Gillham, that Galton “would have been horrified had he known that within little more than 20 years of
his death forcible sterilization and murder would be carried out in the name of eugenics.”
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Galton’s ideas seemed reasonable at the time, given the knowledge of the day. Natural selection seemed to have loosened its grip on modern populations. Birth rates at the end of the 19th century were in decline, particularly sharply among the upper and middle classes. It seemed logical enough that the quality of the population would be improved if the upper classes could be encouraged to have more children. Galton’s ideas were favorably received. Honors flowed in. He was awarded the Darwin Medal of the Royal Society, England’s preeminent scientific institution. In 1908, three years before his death, he received a knighthood, a mark of establishment approval. No one then understood that he had unwittingly sown the dragon’s teeth.

The lure of Galton’s eugenics was his belief that society would be better off if the intellectually eminent could be encouraged to have more children. What scholar could disagree with that? More of a good thing must surely be better. In fact it is far from certain that this would be a desirable outcome. Intellectuals as a class are notoriously prone to fine-sounding theoretical schemes that lead to catastrophe, such as Social Darwinism, Marxism or indeed eugenics.

By analogy with animal breeding, people could no doubt be bred, if it were ethically acceptable, so as to enhance specific desired traits. But it is impossible to know what traits would benefit society as a whole. The eugenics program, however reasonable it might seem, was basically incoherent.

And in terms of practicalities, it held a fatal diversion. Galton’s idea of eugenics was to induce the rich and middle class to change their marriage habits and bear more children. But positive eugenics, as such a proposal is known, was a political nonstarter. Negative
eugenics, the segregation or sterilization of those deemed unfit, was much easier to put into practice.

In 1900 Mendel’s laws of genetics, ignored in his lifetime, were rediscovered. Geneticists, by combining his laws with the statistical methods developed by Galton and others, started to develop the powerful subdiscipline known as population genetics. Leading geneticists on both sides of the Atlantic used their newfound authority to promote eugenic ideas. In doing so, they unleashed an idea whose deeply malignant powers they proved unable to control.

The principal organizer of the new eugenics movement was Charles Davenport. He earned a doctorate in biology from Harvard and taught zoology at Harvard, the University of Chicago, and the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences Biological Laboratory at Cold Spring Harbor on Long Island. Davenport’s views on eugenics were motivated by disdain for races other than his own: “Can we build a wall high enough around this country so as to keep out these cheaper races, or will it be a feeble dam . . . leaving it to our descendants to abandon the country to the blacks, browns and yellows and seek an asylum in New Zealand?” he wrote.
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A heavy wave of immigrants arrived in the United States between 1890 and 1920, creating a climate of concern that was favorable for eugenic ideas. Davenport, though he had no special distinction as a scientist, found it easy to raise money for his eugenics program. He secured funds from leading philanthropies, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the recently founded Carnegie Institution. Scouring a list of wealthy families on Long Island, he came across the name of Mary Harriman, daughter of the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman. Mary, as it happened, was so interested in eugenics that her nickname in college had been Eugenia. She provided Davenport funds to set up his Eugenics Record Office, which was intended to register the genetic backgrounds of the American population and distinguish between good and defective lineages.
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The Carnegie and Rockefeller institutions don’t give money to just anyone, but rather to fields of research that their advisers judge promising. These advisers shared the generally favorable view of eugenics that then prevailed among scientists and many intellectuals. The Eugenics Research Association included members from Harvard, Columbia, Yale and Johns Hopkins.
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“In America, the eugenic priesthood included much of the early leadership responsible for the extension of Mendelism,” writes the science historian Daniel Kevles. “Besides Davenport, there were Raymond Pearl and Herbert S. Jennings, both of Johns Hopkins University; Clarence Little, the president of the University of Michigan and later the founder of the Jackson Laboratory in Maine; and the Harvard professors Edward M. East and William E. Castle. . . . The large majority of American colleges and universities—including Harvard, Columbia, Cornell, Brown, Wisconsin, Northwestern, and Berkeley—offered well-attended courses in eugenics, or genetics courses that incorporated eugenic material.”
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The same conclusion is drawn by another historian of the eugenics movement, Edwin Black: “The elite thinkers of American medicine, science and higher education were busy expanding the body of eugenic knowledge and evangelizing its tenets,” he wrote.
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Where so many eminent scientists led, others followed. Former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Davenport in 1913, “We have no business to permit the perpetuation of citizens of the wrong type.”
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The eugenics program reached a pinnacle of acceptance when it received the imprimatur of the U.S. Supreme Court. The court was considering an appeal by Carrie Buck, a woman whom the State of Virginia wished to sterilize on the grounds that she, her mother and her daughter were mentally impaired.

In the 1927 case, known as
Buck v. Bell
, the Supreme Court found for the state, with only one dissent. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, writing for the majority, endorsed without reservation the
eugenicists’ credo that the offspring of the mentally impaired were a menace to society.

“It is better for the world,” he wrote, “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. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Eugenics, having started out as a politically impractical proposal for encouraging matches among the well-bred, had now become an accepted political movement with grim consequences for the poor and defenseless.

The first of these were sterilization programs. At the urging of Davenport and his disciples, state legislatures passed programs for sterilizing the inmates of their prisons and mental asylums. A common criterion for sterilization was feeblemindedness, an ill-defined diagnostic category that was often identified by knowledge-based questions that put the ill educated at particular disadvantage.

Eugenicists perverted intelligence tests into a tool for degrading people. The tests had been first developed by Alfred Binet to recognize children in need of special educational help. The eugenics movement used them to designate people as feebleminded and hence fit for sterilization. Many of the early tests probed knowledge, not native wit. Questions like “The Knight engine is used in the: Packard/Stearns/Lozier/Pierce Arrow” or “Becky Sharp appears in: Vanity Fair/Romola/A Christmas Carol/Henry IV” were heavily loaded against those who had not received a particular kind of education. As Kevles writes, “The tests were biased in favor of scholastic skills, and the outcome was dependent upon the educational and cultural background of the person tested.”
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Yet tests like these were used to destroy people’s hopes of having children or deny them entry into military service.

Up until 1928, fewer than 9,000 people had been sterilized in the United States, even though the eugenicists estimated that up to 400,000 citizens were “feeble minded.”
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After the
Buck v. Bell
decision, the floodgates opened. By 1930, 24 states had sterilization laws on their books, and by 1940, 35,878 Americans had been sterilized or castrated.
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Eugenicists also began to influence the nation’s immigration laws. The 1924 Immigration Act pegged each country’s quota to the proportion of its nationals present in the 1890 census, a reference point later changed to the 1920 census. The intent and effect of the law was to increase immigration from Nordic countries and restrict people from southern and eastern Europe, including Jews fleeing persecution in Poland and Russia. In addition, the act barred all immigration from most East Asian countries. As Congressman Robert Allen of West Virginia explained during the floor debate, “The primary reason for restriction of the alien stream . . . is the necessity for purifying and keeping pure the blood of America.”
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